“Dr. Meadows.”
Mark sighed and turned. At least he had convinced the coalition’s Vietnamese rank-and-file to quit calling him “your Excellency.”
It was one of Bui Bam Dinh’s Annamese peasant guerrillas, a tiny brown man in black pajamas, a conical straw hat that overwhelmed the rest of him, Ho Chi Minh slippers, and an AK-47 with black electrician’s tape wrapped around a cracked fore-grip slung over one shoulder. He was the classic Time magazine portrait of a VC, circa 1966.
“Yes, Bui?” The man was also one of the leader’s cousins, or in any event part of his extended family. As far as Mark could tell, there were about twenty family names in common use in Vietnam. Telling everybody apart was not simplified by the Western media’s habit of calling Vietnamese by their last names, which happened to be personal names, not family names, as in most Asian cultures. Thus “Uncle Ho” for the late northern leader, used with jocular familiarity by people who thought “Ho” was a first name, like Frank or Ed; and thus Ho’s foremost general, Vo, was universally known as “Giap.”
This Bui was actually a blood relation of the rebel leader, in any event. He bobbed his head and smiled. He modestly kept a hand before his mouth, but Mark could see it was full of steel Soviet teeth.
“There is someone,” he said. “Perhaps you would wish to come and see.”
“Xin vui long,” Mark replied. As always he was surprised at how rapidly he was picking up Vietnamese. Moonchild handled the rising, fallen, and “broken” tones far more gracefully than any of the other personalities — another mystery, since Korean was not a tonal language. “Thanks. I’m coming.”
He glanced back at his friend. Croyd was staring at the derelict Ural. He had his right arm stretched out straight, palm down, fingers extended. He waggled his fingers slightly.
Obediently the truck was hovering about four inches off the ground.
Mark swallowed. “Later,” he said.
The newcomer sat on the hootch’s mat floor in a sprawl of complete collapse. He was gaunt. His clothes were shreds, scorched, torn, rotting from his frame, revealing fading yellow bruises and oozing sores. The tip of the gigantic lobster claw that was his right hand had been broken off. His eyes, sunken deep below what had been a domineering brow and was now a jut, stared through the bamboo wall of the hootch, outward toward infinity.
Evan Brewer wasn’t looking so dapper and self-assured today.
“They fragged us,” he said in a voice that made it sound as if each word tore away the lining of his throat in sheets. “I wasn’t in the bunker, but I think they were going for both of us. They didn’t want to hear about socialism anymore; all they wanted to talk about was how good nat blood tasted when you drank it, how it felt when you rubbed it on your skin.”
Mark glanced at Belew, who shrugged. Mark had ordered the best medical care to be made available — several Medicins sans Frontières doctors had joined the rebels’ permanent floating headquarters. In fact medical care per se wasn’t much of an issue, though supplies were low: the professional classes were deserting the regime en masse North and South, and physicians were leading the way.
If only Mark’s special pharmaceutical needs were as well tended to. The doubt about purity of his powders was one more constant strain. There was nothing to do about it but roll the bones, roll the bones.
Brewer had waved away medical attention. He needed to try to force the memories out of his mind in the form of words before his body was dealt with.
At one time Mark would have been kneeling at his former tormentor’s side in a frenzy of codependency. Now he sat, watching, listening, withholding evaluation. Maybe my conscience died with Starshine, he thought. Maybe that’s why I’m so heartless. Except, of course, gentle warrior Moonchild had always been his voice of compassion; Starshine was righteous indignation.
“I was in the latrine. It was just luck. Lucius was sacked out on his cot. They rolled a white phosphorus grenade right under him.” He broke off in a shuddering fit. Mark felt an urge to put his arms around him and try to comfort him. The impulse died without moving him to action.
“The blast blew off two of his arms. I got the fire put out by beating it with a blanket, rolling him in it. Mostly.”
He shook his head and shifted his unseeing gaze from horizon to Earth’s core. “It took an hour and a half for the chopper to get there. The base is ten minutes’ flight time from Venceremos. It took ninety minutes.
“We’d given him the last of the morphine — people’ve pretty much looted out the pharmacy, but the Colonel still had a private stash in a safe in his office. Nobody messes with the Colonel — yet. The way some of the young bloods are talking”
He shook that off. That was information, incidental, not the poison he needed to purge. “So he wasn’t screaming when the Hip came in, just thrashing around, moaning some, starting to come out of it. When they carried him aboard the chopper, you could still see those little flecks of white phosphorus where they’d eaten into him, glowing like little stars. Like little radioactive cancers, just eating away at him.” Mark shuddered.
“So after the Viets dusted him off for medical attention, what did you” Belew began.
Brewer turned his eyes to Belew, and for the first time they focused on something close at hand. They were practically black, and it was the kind of black something would turn if it could be heated so hot it emitted light in the ultraviolet, light too hot to see.
“He never got medical attention. Colonel Sobel went out himself to check on him the next day. He never arrived. Don’t you see, man? They got him up one, two thousand feet, and they rolled him out of the helicopter.”
There was a time when that would have sent Mark out the door with puke spilling from his mouth. It shook him badly, but the fish heads and rice he’d had for lunch stayed where they were. In fact he couldn’t help thinking how long ago they’d gotten there.
“The Colonel called them on it. Said they had to’ve murdered him; he was on the chopper when it left Venceremos, and he was fucking nowhere when it landed. And do you know what they told him? Do you know what?”
“What?” Belew asked gently.
“They said there’s a war on. They said there’s an emergency shortage of medical supplies. They said, ‘If your pet monsters want to murder each other that’s not our concern’!”
Mark found himself standing in the door of the hootch, taking in air in giant gulps. The monsoon had pretty well petered out, but the rebels had come low enough down that the air was thick and sticky. Eventually he came back to his place.
Brewer was looking off to nowhere again. He sat as if he was never going to move. “What happened then?” Mark asked.
Brewer’s chest and shoulders heaved in something that was half sigh, half sob. “Things were crazy. Too crazy. The young bloods were telling me, telling me to my face, that they were sorry they’d missed me, that they were going to do the job right real soon.” He shook his head. ’All the Colonel is doing is talking about how these new aces he’s bringing in are going to turn the tide. It’s as if he’s in his own private world.”
Belew shot a significant look at Mark. I know you think the Colonel’s crazy, man, Mark thought, but he’s under stress, he’s watching his dream unravel
And we are pulling at the threads, Moonchild concluded with infinite sadness. I worst of all. Oh, Eric.
“What aces?” Belew asked softly.
Brewer shook his head. “They hadn’t actually showed. They were all a big secret. Somehow I wasn’t interested in hanging around to see who they were. I went over the wire that night.”