"The Republic has made great strides economically in the past two years," Moonchild said. "Much of the ground has been rained with the assistance of wild card refugees, a fact which many of the Vietnamese people fail to appreciate. Nonetheless, this is a poor country, facing long recovery from decades of abuse. We try to help those who truly need it. But the able-bodied must shift for themselves."
They stared at her incredulously. "But we're Americans!" the black man burst out.
The room filled up with a gold glow and tinkling music, the scent of sandalwood. The delegates spun.
Ganesha stood in the doorway. The glow did not seem to originate from him. It simply surrounded him.
"I hope very much that I do not intrude - "
"As a matter of fact - " the beaked woman began pugnaciously.
"- my guests were on the verge of departure," Moonchild finished, in a voice like silk rustling over an ancient Korean sulsa knight's swordblade.
Croyd scrabbled the tips of his right fingers on the tabletop. "Want I should show you people out?" he asked.
The delegates could find their own way. Beaming, Ganesha stood aside to let them leave, and blessed them as they hurried past. Croyd went back to playing his game with his fingers.
Feeling an inexplicable tension at the pit of her belly, Moonchild said, "How may I help you, guru?" That cynical canker in her soul - or was it just JJ, bleeding through the increasingly porous barriers between personae? - answered, money. Power. The usual.
The guru tittered. "Already you have, by extending shelter to the wild cards, among whom is numbered my humble self. Now, it is I who must ask, may I help you?"
Moonchild studied him. He appeared harmless enough, pale, fat, and jolly, like an Asian Santa Claus with a trunk. She had learned to put small stock in appearance. Maya, the Hindus called it.
"What manner of help, guru?"
"To bring peace to one who knows no peace, child."
Something about the way he said one made her look at him narrowly. Does he know?
She smiled weakly. "The Free Republic has many enemies, guru, some near, some far. If you can win us peace from them, you would do us a very great service."
"I will happily do what I can, my child," Ganesha said. "But the peace I am speaking of can only exist, or not exist - "
He extended his trunk and touched its tip between Moonchild's small breasts.
"- here."
The touch was so confident yet pure that she did not attempt to ward it off, and took no offense. She felt her eyes fill with tears. She lowered her head.
"If you can provide such peace," she whispered, "you are a miracle worker indeed."
"I - uh, I guess I'm intruding here, huh?" Croyd said. "Heh-heh."
Neither paid him any attention. He twitched his antennae and sidled out, chuckling to himself.
Moonchild felt the guru's warmth, smelled the perfumed oils with which his roly-poly person was anointed. "The gift is mine to give, my child," he said. "I am a sat-guru, a teacher of reality. Do you wish to learn?"
She jackknifed. The foreshocks of transition were upon her. It never used to be this way.
She jumped up, away from his outstretched hand. "I - I must beg permission to leave you, guru," she choked out, and bolted.
♥ ♦ ♣ ♠
Mark came to himself in the bathroom off the parlor behind the audience hall, what he referred to internally as his changing-room. Moonchild had already gone to her knees on the cool tile, which saved him the risk of damaging them as he fell. He vomited into the chipped-enamel toilet.
When it was done and he felt a measure of strength return to his legs, he rose, went to the sink, splashed water in his face and rinsed his mouth. Then he raised his eyes to the mirror. He felt a visible resistance to looking, like a membrane stretched before his face. He made himself push through, and see.
The face was his own ... at least, it was the temporary face. The face he most often wore. Lined and haggard: the face of a tired specter.
"It's getting worse," he husked, his throat raw from puking. At least the voice that emerged was his own. He was getting regular aftershocks from the Moonchild persona now, talking in her voice even after the change, feeling her personality and thoughts swirling in confusion among his own for minutes, keeping him dizzy and unsure of his identity. It was the consequence of calling her too often.
But he had no choice. She was the President of Free Vietnam, probably the first who could be said to have been freely elected ever. He was merely her Chancellor.
She was an ace. And still, to most Central and South Vietnamese, a heroine. He was just a nat, whose own role in the Liberation was respected, but far overshadowed by Moonchild's.
He was her anointed spokesman. But in Asia appearance counted for much. For Moonchild to rule, to maintain a semblance of harmony among the tendentious and generally well-armed factions who formed her support base, she had to be seen.
What that was doing to Mark's mind and body ... He shook his head. He wanted to lie down and sleep forever.
In the audience chamber, serene, alone, and glowing, waited the guru. Mark felt a great longing well up within him, as great as the longings he had felt for his daughter during the years of enforced separation. Yet he could not bear to face Ganesha and his terrible calm.
Someone - French colonial official, American proconsul, Communist bureaucrat - had installed a phone in the bathroom. Mark picked it up, spoke in a frog voice to give instructions for the guru to be escorted from the hall and offered lodging for the night, and then lowered the toilet seat barely in time to collapse onto it.
♥ ♦ ♣ ♠
Bent over a notebook computer held by a young joker in a colorful dashiki, Mark Meadows glanced up to see a man rolling through the bands of white sunlight sprayed onto the corridor walls by the windows at a purposeful amble that missed being a swagger by that much. He was much shorter than Mark, and a ways older, with a flamboyant seal-colored moustache with waxed tips, which showed far less gray than the hair cropped close to his squarish head. He wore a photojournalist's jacket over a pale yellow shirt, and baggy khaki trousers.
Mark smiled at the joker, sent him on his way with a thanks and a quick recommendation, then turned to meet the newcomer. "J. Bob," he said smiling almost despite himself.
The man grinned beneath his moustache. "Guilty as charged. The minister without portfolio returns."
They shook hands. Because that gesture was inadequate for what existed between them, each man clasped the other quickly on the shoulder. Neither was comfortable with New Age touchy-feely rituals, though Mark felt somewhat guilty about the fact.
The two began to walk in the direction the moustached man had been headed, in the general direction of Mark's office.
"Have you heard the news?" Mark asked, his long face growing grave.
"Hartmann's revelations?" Major J. Robert Belew, United States Army Special Forces, retired nodded. "JAL had it on the big screen as we were on final approach. Plane was packed with joker refugees out of Seattle, and there was much weeping and gnashing of teeth."
Mark looked at the smaller man. In many ways he represented everything Mark, the Last Hippie, had stood against since his stumbling into a kind of fitful political consciousness at the tag-end of the radical Sixties. This man - a palpable Green Beret Nam vet, conservative, authoritarian, militaristic, and self-describedly ruthless - was the most valued advisor to Vietnam's President, and her Chamberlain.
He was also Mark's best friend on Earth. Literally, with Tisianne - Tachyon - home ruling Takis.
"It's like you said all along, man. There is a conspiracy against us wild cards, and it reaches way up into the government."