"Given my experiences, it wasn't that hard to figure out: 'By their fruits shall ye know them,' to stay with Matthew." He shook his head. "At least the evil now has a name."
"Card Sharks."
Belew's moustache quirked to grin. "Got a ring to it, no? Ahh, I never thought I'd hate to be proved right. And by that limp liberal Hartmann, to boot."
"Gregg's a great man - " Mark began by reflex. Then he caught himself, rewound. "Well, he's a good man. The stress just got to be too much for him - "
"A man with good intentions, I'll grant," Belew said, "and recall what the road to Hell is paved with? Hartmann's a typical liberal politician. He looked to increase his own power by identifying himself with an ethnic minority, promoting its difference from mainstream America and its identity as a special interest group. That group happened to be us. And maybe he did the wild cards some good - but in the long run, the programs he helped push through gave Mr. Hardworking American Nat Taxpayer the impression that he was being bled to support a surly and uncontrollable super-race and an underclass of resentful monsters.
"That fractionalization of our society, which Hartmann so ably promoted and exploited, is one of the big reasons we're strangers in a strange land now, with planeloads more arriving each day. When you turn a nation into a collection of competing ethnicities, as the Welfare State has so ably accomplished, you generate losers. And we wild cards have duly lost."
Mark chewed on his lower lip. Reflex denials rose to the top of his throat and stayed there. He could take a look at Vietnam, before Liberation or after, and see the sick truth, that once a group became hipped on ethnic pride and ethnic awareness, it found it all too easy to slide on down the road to ethnic cleansing. Gregg Hartmann had made much of the common humanity of nats and wild cards; but the bulk of his actions had gone to emphasizing the difference.
He gave his head a small quick shake, like shedding water after a shower. See what he does to you, man? Belew liked to compare himself to Lucifer, and Mark could see the point; the master intriguer and shadow-operator could so easily lead Mark to stand his own most cherished beliefs on their head. It was why Mark could never entirely trust the man, for all that had passed between them.
"Unca Bob!" With a rainsquall patter of rubber soles on tile, a slim figure came flying down the hall to wrap Belew in a tangle of bare arms and legs and flying blond hair.
Belew was not a big man, but he was solidly built, thick through the chest, though he carried just the beginning of a paunch. The person who'd enwrapped him was several inches taller than he, and not light despite adolescent skinniness just beginning to fill out into adulthood. But he managed to absorb the happy impact without backing up more than two steps.
Mark looked on with a trace of wry envy. It was everything he could do not to go ass-over-teakettle when his daughter hit him like that. Sprout Meadows' mind was that of a four-year-old, perpetually, but her appearance was that of the fit and healthy seventeen year old she otherwise was.
With great gentleness Belew unwound the girl, who was smothering his face with kisses. She wore a white T-shirt with teddy bears on it, and cut-off shorts. "I'm happy to see you, too, Leaf. But let an old man breathe."
She laughed musically and stepped away from him. Leaf was his pet nickname for her. Sometimes it exasperated her, but she was happy now, and loved it.
"Where have you been?" she asked.
"'Going to and fro in the earth, and walking up and down in it,'" he paraphrased. "Doing your Dad's bidding."
"Did you bring me something?" she asked.
He rubbed his chin, made a mouth, rolled his eyes as if at the effort of searching his memory. Sprout put her hands behind her back and tried not to writhe with impatience. Just when she was about to burst, Belew made a Groucho waggle of the eyebrows and stuck a hand into a pocket of his photojournalist's vest.
"I happened to run into this one day," he said, coming up with a palm-sized pink Gund polar bear arranged so that it appeared to be holding a box of Callard & Bowser's butterscotch in its lap. "She told me she belonged with Sprout Meadows, and would I please give her a ride to where you were. She had to twist my arm, but she talked me into it."
Sprout took the bear, hugged it to herself, kissed its forehead. Then she caught Belew's neck in a hug that would have choked a lesser man, and kissed his receding hairline. "Oh, Unca Bob! Thank you, thank you!"
Cradling the bear carefully between her breasts, she tore open the package. She offered it to her father, Belew, and the bear; politely refused by all three, she unwrapped a candy, popped it into her mouth, and began to suck on it with a blissful expression as she rocked her new toy.
"I wish you wouldn't give her sweets, man," Mark said. They set off again, Sprout swinging nonchalantly between them, cheeks concave. The whitewashed corridor had a hushed, cathedral quality to it, despite the maroon-tiled floors and a fair degree of traffic. A tiny wizened Nung woman with a scarf with penguins on it tied around her head looked up from her old-fashioned wringer-mounted mop bucket, nodded at Mark and smiled toothlessly as he passed. He smiled and nodded back. "I don't want her turning into a sugar junkie.
"Stuff. And nonsense. It's not as if she's getting loaded down with calories - she's almost as skinny as you are. Let the kid live a little."
Mark pouted. "Well - "
"And spare me the food-faddist 'ills of processed sugar' rap. You're a biochemist. You know perfectly well that sugar is sugar, just as a rose is a rose is a rose."
Despite himself, Mark chuckled. Had he truly objected to Belew giving his daughter candy, Belew would have cut it out in an instant. But chaffering like this was a standing routine, a way of bleeding existential tension from between two such unlikely friends and allies: the Last Hippie and the Last Cold Warrior.
"What did you find out?" Mark asked.
"Much of a muchness. The Canadians resent the Americans, but they buy into the 'aces, guns, drugs - scourge of our cities' rap almost as wholly as Barnett does. They'll vote against us at the UN, and try their best to honor the embargo if it goes through. The Japanese, on the other hand think we're grotesque monsters, but that's not really all that far off how they feel about American nats. In any event, Japanese culture is to a large extent based on swallowing personal preference in pursuit of the bottom line, and naming that duty."
Mark started to frown, then grinned. Belew loved to make outrageous and sweeping generalizations, the more insensitive the better. At one time Mark would have responded with reflex liberal outrage. He wasn't so easily caught any more. Besides, Belew had a point.
"So the Japanese are smiling and nodding and making bland noises about how they have to 'consider the problem from every angle,' and stonewalling on the vote in the UN. Meanwhile, they're more than happy to trade with us - and that's unlikely to change if the embargo goes through."
"What about the Chinese?"
"The Dragon likes us, because we make Hanoi unhappy. As long as the Northerners are willing to bleed their populace to keep a million men under arms, the Chinese will do anything they can to keep a good percentage of those bad boys peering South. And they want the hard currency our economy's starting to generate, and they're big enough that they flat don't care what the rest of the world thinks. So there's a nice fat veto waiting for the embargo, whenever it hits the Security Council."
He raised his big, square hands. "The situation is far from ideal, I grant, but - "
They fetched up against a zone of humid heat like a force field trying to hold them back. The wall fell away to their right, opening into a courtyard garden ten yards square, with water singing down a pile of boulders into a mossy pool, and great-leaved plants crowded together amid a pervasive green smell. On a bench beside the pool sat Ganesha. He rose.