He pushed a cabinet on casters away from the wall, untoggled the fiberboard rear panel. The compartment hidden inside contained racks of vials of various colored powders: blue, orange, yellow, gray, black, and silver that swirled together without mixing. He stared at them, ran a finger along them like a stick along a picket fence.
A long time ago a skinny kid with a crew cut and highwater pants, who had just dropped LSD for the first time ever, had stumbled into an alleyway in horror, fleeing a People's Park confrontation between National Guardsmen and students in the dark angry days that followed Kent State. Moments later a glowing beautiful youth emerged: an ace for the Revolution. Together with Tom Douglas, the Lizard King and doomed lead singer for Destiny, he had stood off the Guard and the Establishment ace Hardhat, and saved the day. Then he partied the night away, with help from the kids, Tom Douglas, and a beautiful young activist called Sunflower. He called himself the Radical.
In the morning the Radical disappeared. He was never seen again. And a certain nerd biochem student stumbled back out of the alley with a head full of the strangest memory fragments.
Becoming the Radical again-if he'd ever really been the Radical-had become Mark's Holy Grail. He had failed in that quest. The brightly colored powders were what he had found instead. Not what he was looking for-but a means to acceptance all the same. To having, at least for one hour, a dose, what a long-dead Egyptian scribe once prayed for as "effective personality."
He felt stirrings down around the back of his skull, like the voices of children on a distant playground. He pushed them back down, away. From below the racks he took a bong with a cracked, smoke-stained stack. Right now he needed chemical sanctuary of a more conventional kind.
He soared upward from the roof, upward from the smog and squalor into blue morning sky that darkened around him as he rose. The Village dwindled, was subsumed into the cement scab of Manhattan, became a finger poking a blue ribbon between Long Island and the Jersey shore, was lost in swirls of cloud. Clouds hid the shitbrown garbage bloom from the bay into the Atlantic: a blessing in his present mood.
He rose higher, feeling the air chill and attenuate around him until it was gone, and he floated in blackness, with nothing between him and the hot healing eye of the sun.
He stretched, feeling his body fill with the wild energy of the sun, the lifegiver He was Starshine; he needed no air, no food. Only sunlight. It hit him like a drug-though he knew the rush of cocaine and sizzle of crystal meth only at one remove and unwillingly, through the experiences of Mark Meadows.
From the Olympian height of orbit you could barely see what a splendid job man was doing of fouling his own nest. He ached to spread the word, the warning, to help the world to its senses with his poems and songs. But the moments of freedom were too few, too few…
He felt the pressure of other voices within, dragging him back to Earth, in thought if not yet in body. Meadows had a problem, and he knew that this brief liberation was Mark's way of consulting him. As he would the others.
Changes are due in your life, Mark Meadows, he thought. But what might those changes be? If he himself could do no more, he wished Meadows at least would involve himself more in the world, take a stand. He wished Mark would give up his habits of drug abusethough he couldn't escape irony there, since if Mark went completely straight, it would be in effect the end of him, of Starshine in his golden body stocking, floating up above the world so high.
He gazed off around the molten-silver limb of the world. A gigantic oil spill was fouling the coast of Alaska; for all his powers, what could he do? What could he do to halt acid rain, or the destruction of the Amazon rain forest?
That last he'd even tried, had flown to Brazil on wings of light, begun destroying bulldozers and work camps with his energy beams, putting the workmen to flight, burning the rotor off a Gazelle gunship that had tried to drive him away-though begrudgingly he had caught it before it crashed, and eased it to a soft landing on a sandbar. Unworthy as they were, he didn't want the crew's deaths weighing down his soul.
He had gotten so engrossed in his mission, in fact, that he'd overstayed his hour, stranding Mark in a smoldering patch of devastation in the middle of the Amazon basin with a whole regiment of the Brazilian army closing in and mightily pissed off. Even with his other friends to call on, Mark had some bad moments getting back to the States. He'd been so miffed he hadn't summoned Starshine for six months afterward.
It did no good, of course. The Brazilian government borrowed more money from the World Bank and bought more and bigger earth-raping machines. The destruction went on with barely a hiccup.
The truth is, the world doesn't need more aces, he thought. It doesn't need us at all. We can't do anything real.
He looked into the sun. Its roaring song of life and light blinded him, suffused him. But for all his exaltation, he was a mote-a spark, quickly consumed.
And he knew that he had come to his truth.
Dr. Pretorius leaned back in his swivel chair and crossed hands over his hard paunch. His suit was white today. He looked like a hip Colonel Sanders.
"So, Dr. Meadows, do you have a decision for me?" Mark nodded, started to speak. A door opened behind Pretorius and the words stuck tight in Mark's throat. A woman had slipped silently into the room-a girl, maybe; she looked more like a special effect than a human. She was five and a half feet tall, inhumanly slim, and blue-blue green, actually, gleaming in the same shade as the dyes used in blue ice. The room temperature, already cool, had dropped perceptibly.
"You haven't met my ward, have you? Dr. Meadows, let me present Ice Blue Sibyl."
She looked at him. At least she turned her face toward him. Whatever she was made of looked hard as glass, but seemed constantly, subtly to be shifting. Her features seemed high-cheekboned and forward thrusting, though it was hard to be sure. Her body was attenuated as a mannequin's and almost as sexless; though she appeared to be nude, the tiny breasts showed no nipples, nor did she display genitalia. Still, there was some alien, elflike quality to her, something that caused a stirring in Mark's crotch as she looked at him with her blue-glass stare.
She turned her face to Pretorius, tipped it attentively. Mark got the impression that some communication passed between them. The lawyer nodded. Sibyl turned and walked to the door with sinuous inhuman grace. She stopped, gave Mark a last glance, vanished.
Pretorius was looking at him. "You've decided?" Mark reached out and hugged his daughter to him. "Yeah, man. There's only one thing I can do."
"Hello? Is anyone here?" Dr. Tachyon stepped cautiously through the open door. Today he wore an eighteenthcentury peach coat over a pale pink shirt with lace spraying out the front of a mauve waistcoat. His breeches were deep purple satin, caught at the knee with gold rosettes. His stockings were lilac, his shoes gold. Instead of an artificial hand, he wore a lace cozy on his stump, with a red rose sprouting from it.
Amazement stopped him cold. The Pumpkin was gutted. Tables were overturned, the counter torn up, the magazine racks lying on their backs, the psychedelic-era posters gone from the walls. Somewhere music played.
"Burning Sky! What's happened here? Markl Mark!" Through a doorway at the back that looked curiously naked without the beaded curtain that had always hung there stepped a remarkable figure. It wore torn khaki pants, a black Queensrykche T-shirt stretched to the bursting point across a disproportionately huge chest. With a narrow head and finely sculpted, almost elfin features set on an inhumanly squat body, the newcomer looked the way pretty-boy movie martial-artist Jean Claude Van Damme would if they put him in a hydraulic press and mashed him down him a foot or so.
He stopped and turned a cool smile on Tachyon. "So. The little prince." His English had a curious, almost Eastern European accent. Just like Tachyon's.