But Sprout was full of love and mischief this bright afternoon, and so she decided to act the way she'd seen grownups do, on TV and sometimes in person. She grabbed Belew by the head and planted a kiss full on his lips.
"Belew!"
Belew's hands froze to claws on the girl's biceps. He had never heard that rage-choked voice before. All the same, he knew it belonged to Mark Meadows.
Sprout was still giggling and trying to kiss him. For all her near-adult weight, he picked her up by the arms and set her to the side. She saw her father standing in the arcade with Ganesha, ran happily to them.
"Take her," Mark snapped to two of the armed jokers who accompanied him. "Take her someplace ... someplace safe."
"Daddy?" she called as she was hustled away. "Daddy, what's the matter? Daddy, I'm scared!"
"Don't worry, honey," Mark said darkly. "You'll be all right now."
He turned a look of perfect loathing on Belew. "I should have known," he said. "What they said about you right-wing military types - it was true all along."
Ganesha laid a hand on his arm. "Do not judge him too harshly, my son," he said. "Sometimes the lust of older men for innocence comes to overpower their judgment. So it can be, when one has not learned to live without desire."
The six remaining jokers leveled their Kalashnikovs at Belew. He raised his hands.
"Just shoot me now," he suggested.
"Maybe later," Mark said, and turned away.
♥ ♦ ♣ ♠
"Unca Neesha," Sprout asked, "where are we going?"
The elephant head swiveled left and right as the guru checked the hall. "Out to play, my child. Do not be afraid."
"But it's after dark. And Daddy told me to stay in my room."
He smiled at her. "He meditates. But he decided you could go with me. It's all right." The trunk tip chucked her beneath the chin. "You trust your Uncle Neesha, don't you?"
She nodded solemnly.
"Then let us go. It will be such a marvelous adventure."
♥ ♦ ♣ ♠
"There is something damned well wrong with this picture," Mark's mouth said; and then his voice said, "Dammit, JJ, I resent you taking over control like that."
Somebody's got to get us back on track. We're all in this together, buddy. You can't just throw us aside, shave your head, and forget about us.
"I - JJ, I'm sorry. But this is driving me insane. I don't know who I am anymore."
We're always going to be here, came the waspish thought from the Traveler. You can't get rid of us so easily.
You already tried, back when you were trying to be clean and sober to get custody of Sprout, JJ Flash thought. One worked about as well as the other.
Mark sat on his bed, stork legs pulled up. He held his head in both hands.
"What happens if my mind just snaps?" he asked.
How would any of us tell the difference? Trav shot back.
Be honest with yourselves, JJ, Traveler, Moonchild said. Have you never resented your imprisonment? Have you never wished you could be free of the confines of another's skull?
You know it, baby, JJ Flash said.
Then why do you resist? Perhaps Guru can find a way to liberate us to pursue our own karma.
What if we don't have our own karma? JJ asked. Remember how you couldn't understand Korean? The language you supposedly grew up speaking? What happens if we're just fantasy figments, or symptoms of the world's best-realized multiple personality disorder? What happens to us then?
Perhaps we can be reintegrated into one whole again, Moonchild said. Perhaps we can know peace.
Yeah, JJ said with a sneer, Nirvana. Smells like personal extinction to me, babe. That's what the Big Goal is, after all - flipping off the wheel of birth and death and getting to be nothing. Me, I'd feel cheated. I'd at least like to give the wheel a spin or two in my own improper person.
"JJ," Mark said, "I'd switch places with you if I could. Really, I would. The stress, inside and out - I can't take it any more."
He beat his hands lightly on the bedclothes. "I'd accept nonbeing," he whispered, "in a minute."
What about the Radical? Flash asked.
"That was a long time ago. The human body replaces all its cells on a seven-year cycle; what was that, three bodies ago? And who knows how many lifetimes. Starshine's, for one. Maybe it's time to give up on that. I've never known if I even was the Radical, man. Maybe it's time to quit pretending."
Mark - Moonchild said.
"Yeah. I know. It's sad when dreams die." He stood up, paced around his small, bare room. "Or maybe I'll find the purity I've been lacking so long; maybe Guru can help me get the Radical back, and he'll be ... greater than the sum of his parts."
The sound of half a mind thinking, JJ said, is rationalization.
"Call it what you Will. Naming a thing doesn't change it." He shook his head. "I'm gonna check on my little girl. Then I'm going to get some sleep. And tomorrow - "
He paused with one bony hand on the door. "Tomorrow, my life begins anew."
He knew it sounded tacky. But he'd live with it.
♥ ♦ ♣ ♠
Because he wasn't sure exactly what extremities he might need this night, he bit off the tip of his left little finger to take control of the door lock of the room he'd been imprisoned in.
His cell was on the third floor, in front. The window could not be locked from the outside, obviously, but there was no ready way down to the ground but surrender to gravity. Belew was confident in his abilities to say the least, but he knew he wasn't a movie hero, to scramble down the rain gutters, or whatever, three stories to the front courtyard, without falling and busting his fool neck. Besides, one of the sentries out front would likely spot him - and they were jokers, which meant their loyalty was to Mark first.
Like all machines, though, the lock was his to take. From listening at the door he knew that there was a bored pair of guards on watch. Piece of cake.
He opened the door and walked out. The guards were slouched against the walls, weapons slung, smoking illicit cigarettes. They gaped at him.
While they waited for their synapses to snap, he busted the nose of the right-hand guard with a backfist, then grabbed his sling and spun him around in a semicircle in front of him to slam into the other guard, who had actually come to life sufficiently to begin fumbling with his own weapon. The second guard sat down hard, losing his rifle in the process.
By the simple expedient of clinging to the sling as the first guard crumpled in a moaning face-clutching heap, Belew availed himself of an assault rifle. He proceeded to aim it at the pair.
The room had curtains. The guards had bootlaces, belts, a handkerchief, and socks. Of such things are rapid and wonderfully efficient field-expedient bonds and gags made. Belew was occupied less than a minute in securing the pair.
Sprout's room was a flight down, next to Mark's. Neither was guarded. Belew felt a terrible suspicion that certain trunk-overhung lips had dropped in Mark's ear a suggestion that most of the Palace guards should be elsewhere that night, like out front, or guarding the audience room, or keeping watch on Belew the putative child molester.
Belew's still bleeding pinky opened Sprout's locked door. The room was empty but for the immense stuffed panda keeping blind and futile vigil over the bed. Just as he feared.