Busted Flush Read online

  “But when first you burst upon the scene, twelve years ago, you looked to be a man of twenty. In the interim you’d appeared to have aged quite normally.”

  “Yeah. Shit happens.”

  Lilith drew back slightly. Hei-lian allowed herself the ghost of a smile. Lilith clearly wasn’t used to men talking to her like that.

  “Speaking of your daughter,” Hei-lian said. Not to let her rival off the hook. She had her own agenda. Or, she amended quickly, her country’s. “I’m concerned by her, Tom.” Appalled would be a better word, but she’d never dare say that. It was absurd to indulge a real child as he did Sprout. To so indulge an adult—and for an adult to act so utterly like a child—made Hei-lian’s flesh crawl.

  “She’s happy here,” Tom said.

  Lilith seemed not to resent Hei-lian speaking. If anything she seemed mildly hopeful Hei-lian, as a lover of some standing, could winkle out of Tom some scrap that a mere one-night stand, however spectacular, could not. Neither did Lilith show jealousy of her. She wouldn’t, Hei-lian thought, any more than Tom would feel jealous of the world’s strongest nat.

  Any more than she herself would feel jealous of an ant. Although she envied them, sometimes, the mindless simplicity of their drudge work.

  “But wouldn’t Sprout be better off in a proper institution?” Hei-lian said. Locked away where real humans wouldn’t have to endure her? she didn’t say. As Sprout surely would be in the People’s Republic. “Wouldn’t she be safer?”

  “Hey, she followed me from camp to camp for eight years,” he said. His tone stayed light. It didn’t deceive Hei-lian. “We had some narrow escapes, sure. But I kept her with me. I kept her safe. People asked lots of times why I exposed her to that. The answer was: I’d never turn her over to the Man. Never.”

  Intelligence agencies had long speculated that their relationship was not decently that of father and daughter. Weathers was a notorious womanizer, a male chauvinist as unapologetic as the 1960s revolutionaries he aped. But no one had turned up a whiff of incest. Even before Sprout’s interruption of their ménage à trois, Hei-lian had known the relationship was not incestuous. Tom was fanatically protective of Sprout. He was capable of many things—some, Hei-lian knew, quite dreadful. Harming his daughter in any way was simply not among them.

  That vulnerability appealed to the yin in Hei-lian, her feminine side. But the yang knew it was a vulnerability.

  “Living is obviously easier in a palace than in the bush,” she said. “But doesn’t it make her a more visible target?”

  His smile was ugly. “Anybody makes a move on her gets to find out how they like orbit. Without a spacesuit.”

  “But you can’t be always around. Especially with the war to liberate the Oil Rivers heating up.”

  “She stays,” he said, like a door shutting.

  Hei-lian felt the pressure of Lilith’s eyes. Don’t you dare pity me! she thought.

  She made herself smile. “Whatever you say, lover.”

  She lay back beside him. Tom stayed tense, staring at the ceiling.

  Lilith leaned in to kiss his lips. She swept her hair back to give Hei-lian a clear view. Was it gloating? An invitation? Beneath a pang of resentment Hei-lian felt arousal stir. She almost resented that more than Lilith’s casually proprietary way with Hei-lian’s lover—and asset.

  “I’m sure your life story is fascinating,” Lilith breathed. “I’d love for you to share it with me. I’d find that . . . exciting.”

  Tom responded. Not the way either woman expected. He got up abruptly off the bed.

  “I wanna show you something,” he said.

  He went to a chest of drawers and opened the bottom one. The two women knelt naked at the edge of the bed to watch. The drawer was full of clean socks and underwear, neatly folded and placed by the palace staff. Great egalitarian Tom Weathers saw nothing incongruous in being waited on hand and foot by people of color like a colonialist of old, it seemed. Then again, neither did the president, nor his sister, nor for that matter any “revolutionary” leader Hei-lian knew of. And she knew them all.

  Tom brought out what looked like nothing more than a roll of athletic socks. When he unrolled it a big peace medallion fell into his palm.

  “Here.” He handed it to Lilith.

  Her eyes went wide. By its obvious weight in the other woman’s palm Hei-lian guessed it was solid gold. At today’s prices Weathers had a young fortune stashed in his sock drawer.

  “Your old medallion!” Lilith said. “I’ve read about it. You used it a lot in your early career. People theorized it served as a sort of focus for your powers. I’ve wondered what became of it.”

  Tom shrugged. “I guess I just stopped needing it.”

  “Didn’t it used to glow?” she asked, handing the golden peace sign back.

  His face shut down briefly. “Used to,” he said. He rerolled the medallion in the sock.

  “It just got dimmer and dimmer,” he said, putting it back. “Then it went out.”

  He shut the drawer with a bang.

  Wearing only an outsized Grateful Dead T-shirt of Tom’s, Sun Hei-lian padded into the suite’s darkened living room. He had wakened her, moaning in his sleep. Another of his nightmares. They seemed to be coming more often.

  Nshombo and his retinue temporarily occupied a palace built by Mobutu Sese Seko, the longest-lasting Congolese dictator, who had named the country Zaire. A colossal new People’s Palace was being built in the heart of the former Kinshasa. Dr. Nshombo had no known vices. A vegan, he ate sparingly. He neither smoked nor drank. His personal quarters were ascetic in the extreme: a pallet, a lamp, a well-stocked bookshelf.

  Yet while Alicia Nshombo enjoyed power’s perquisites quite visibly, even her extravagant tastes couldn’t account for the new palace’s sheer scale.

  Hei-lian understood. The colonialists, like their feudal ancestors, had built their residences and administrative buildings in order to cow their subjects. Kitengi Nshombo built to cow the colonialists back.

  Sitting on a sofa with legs tucked beneath her she switched on satellite TV. The first thing she saw was . . . herself, reporting from the Niger Delta swamp with the pale grass blowing about her legs and the pipeline on its scaffolding gleaming like bone in the background. Her face pleased her: quite well preserved. She could even see beauty of an austere kind. She might stay before the cameras for years yet, if her masters so decreed.

  Again she wondered at her appeal to Tom, her ju nior by at least a decade, if appearance didn’t lie. Wondered if it could last.

  He’d been interested enough after the odd interlude with the amulet, when Lilith, laughing, had led them through one last intricate three-way erotic ballet. Then, the jumpsuit rolled beneath one arm, Lilith had swirled her black cloak around her nakedness and vanished.

  Hei-lian lit a cigarette and laughed at her own foolishness. Her life’s trade was that of a moth testing how close it could fly to flame. Everything was ephemeral. Humans most of all.

  Tom’s unease concerned her, though. Only because he’s vital to our plans, she hastened to think. Things were about to come to resolution, to triumph or calamity. And he was acting strangely.

  She recalled an incident at dinner that night. The Lama excused himself to go to the lavatory. Brave Hawk made some contemptuous comment about him.

  “Yeah, he seems pretty useless,” the American with the curious lump in his head, John Fortune, had said. Hei-lian marveled at the UN’s idiocy, sending a mere youth in charge of such an important mission. “When I was a kid, my mom, Peregrine, used to take me to Aces High. Sometimes there’d be like this weird guy, this old hippie who wore a purple and green Uncle Sam suit. Called himself Cap’n Trips. Nobody seemed to know what he did, or what he was doing there. Maybe he was just buds with Tachyon. Anyway, this Lama dude kind of reminds me of him, for some reason.”

  And Tom paled and went still. As if he had seen a ghost.

  Hei-lian shook her head, as colorful electric shad
ows washed unseen over her face. Who knew the mind of a gweilo? Tom Weathers’s mind was disordered and undisciplined even for an American.

  Is that why he appeals to you? a voice in her head asked. She shook it off.

  If she had learned one thing, it was that worry never helped. The People’s Republic had won. She had won. For now. The future would bring what it would bring. She would adjust. Or fail and die.

  She stubbed her cigarette and lay down. Smiling, replete almost despite herself, Hei-lian fell into the deepest sleep she had known for years.

  On the television the images of horror her own team had captured endlessly replayed themselves.

  Tom Weathers slept, too. Not well: but this sleep, it seemed, was a pit he couldn’t escape no matter how he tried.

  He was coming. Tom could sense it. His nemesis. The one being on all the earth—as a good Marxist he disbelieved in heaven, and as a rebel laughed at hell—whom Tom feared.

  He sauntered, long-legged, loose, scarecrow gaunt. With his shoulder-length hair, silvered blond, and his beard and mustache, he looked like the WASPiest Midwest Baptist Jesus portrait ever. His shirt was a tie-dyed tee; his pants were elephant bells.

  Just an old hippie. To anybody else he’d be a figure of fun. Almost a clown.

  Some people dreaded clowns. That was irrational phobia. This was anything but.

  “I know what you really did,” the newcomer said, smiling sadly. “I know what you really are.”

  His words filled Tom with terror. “You don’t know anything!” he screamed. “You don’t know shit!”

  “I created you.” He shook his head. “To think I tried to bring you out again for so long. I wanted to be you. And for the last dozen years I’ve been you. Watching helplessly while you trashed everything I stood for: peace, love, justice.”

  “Don’t talk to me about justice!” Tom shouted. “You’re just another bourgeois poser, man!”

  “Maybe,” he said. “But I’m still a man.”

  “You’re nothing! You don’t even fucking exist.”

  The man looked at him. The eyes were the same eyes that looked at Tom in the mirror every day: light hazel. Even though the other’s were magnified by Coke-bottle lenses. Round and rimless, of course.

  “I’m sorry I ever created you,” Mark Meadows said. “But I feel even sorrier for you. You’re losing it, Radical. You can feel it slipping away. And when you lose it—well, I’m waiting, man. Right here. I never go away.”

  He flashed a peace sign and faded into mist.

  Tom Weathers woke screaming.

  Double Helix

  FOR NATION SHALL

  RISE AGAINST NATION

  Melinda M. Snodgrass

  SIRAJ AND THE CALIPH stand at the window of his office gazing into the sky. The Caliph was short to begin with and age has bent his shoulders. I can easily see over his head. The plane is a small spot of darkness against the intense blue of the sky. It’s rapidly gaining altitude.

  “Kill him!” says the Caliph. “Send the sword. They will see we are not to be treated as children to take their discipline!” Even through the old man’s quaver I can hear the snap of command, the charismatic presence that could send a hundred thousand of the faithful into the streets in reaction to a slight, real or imagined, against Islam.

  I keep very still, wishing for invisibility, but Siraj looks back over his shoulder at me. I can see the slow burning anger in his eyes, and I wish that Jayewardene had taken a different tack. What the secretary-general had perceived as sweet reason Siraj had read as condescension.

  “Could you teleport to it?” Siraj asks, nodding toward the plane. He is formally attired in a snowy white thobe with a gold-trimmed bisht thrown over top. A gold signet ring glitters on his little finger as he holds the cloak closed.

  “No.” I keep it a short lie. You always get into trouble when you try to explain things. And a lie is necessary. All I need is to be ordered to kill the secretary-general of the United Nations.

  Now the Caliph is frowning at me. “Why not?”

  “I can’t calculate the speed and adjust for distance. And if I miscalculate . . .” I shrug. “I cannot fly, sir.”

  “You are afraid?” It’s more of an accusation than a question. The Caliph is staring at me. His eyes are like dark coals held in a cobweb of lines that gouge the skin that’s not covered by his luxurious beard. “You will not act for the faith? For your people?”

  I nod at Siraj. “The president has not commanded me to act.”

  “You could just teleport somewhere else . . .” A sudden smile softens the lines in Siraj’s face. “While you’re plummeting toward the ground.”

  “And that might be a problem, sir.” I offer him a quick smile.

  “Why will you not take action?” the Caliph demands of Siraj.

  “Because my predecessor made that mistake, and it’s one of the factors that brought down disaster upon us in Egypt.”

  The old man throws his hands in the air and stalks toward the office door. Siraj watches closely until it closes behind him.

  He sighs and moves to a table of elaborately inlaid wood and mother-of-pearl. A chess set is off to one side. A couple of decks of playing cards and a score pad rest on one corner. Siraj is an obsessive bridge player. We had spent many hours with Kenneth and Chris playing rubber after rubber in our house in Cambridge. I find myself wondering what became of Chris. Kenneth is a bond trader—

  I pull back my wandering thoughts when Siraj says, “I think Jayewardene would like to have found a solution.”

  “So, why didn’t you agree, sir?”

  “Because I’ll lower prices on my timetable, not theirs.” Siraj’s expression has hardened again. He picks up a deck of cards, and begins to shuffle it absently.

  It’s a risk, but I have to speak up. Partly for the oil, but partly for these people I’ve lived among. “The UN, NATO, and the Americans are massing troops in Israel, Lebanon, Turkey, Upper Egypt, on aircraft carriers. Our army is shattered. We left its bones along the Nile. And they have aces. Loh . . .” I turn it into a cough and, I hope, cover the mistake. “The Crusader is with them, and the Iron Man.”

  “They will not invade.” Siraj hands me the deck and I automatically take it. “The West has covertly stolen our oil for decades. They will be too squeamish to openly steal it.”

  “But, sir, your speciality is bridge. This is poker. Are you sure they are only bluffing?” And I’m betrayed by my nervous hands and tired mind.

  I, too, riffle the cards, but it turns into a bridge of cards flowing like bird wings between my palms. I quickly stiffen the muscles in my fingers, sending cards spurting in all directions.

  I drop down and feel my thobe tug at the back of my neck as I kneel on the soft black material. I’m scrabbling for the cards, not daring a single glance at Siraj. Fear and tension form an aching knot in my belly. I can’t keep doing this. I’ve got to get a night’s sleep. Spend a day in Cambridge.

  Flint, Weathers, Fortune, Siraj, Jayewardene. Oh, yes, I’ve got quite a little list.

  And none of them would be missed.

  Dirge in a

  Major Key: Part I

  S. L. Farrell

  “DB, WHEN ARE YOU getting back? It’s been damn near a goddamn month now. S’Live wrote a new song he wants us to get on the album. Yeah, it’s last minute but KA says he can get it done. We’re using this crappy sequenced track right now, but it ain’t making it. We need you to really lay it down. And the engineer thinks we need to retake a couple tracks while we still have the studio reserved, and there are all your dubs we’ve been waiting on for fucking forever . . . .”

  Michael was lying on his bed, in the room he and Rusty shared on the aircraft carrier USS Tomlin, currently sailing with its escort cruisers in the middle of the Persian Gulf. Michael thought he could feel the slow roll of the ship in the swells, but that was almost certainly an illusion. They’d been on the ship for almost three weeks now. The initial adrenaline rush at
the thought of going into action had long ago vanished, to be replaced by simple boredom.

  Here, it was two in the morning and the lights were off except for sleeping lamps. Michael stared up at the shadowed gunmetal gray ceiling with its lacework of piping. He’d snagged a pizza from the mess as a late-night snack an hour ago; it felt like a brick sitting in his stomach. Rusty snored on the bunk below him—both of their beds specially widened and reinforced to accommodate them—as Michael listened to The Voice talking half a world away. In the background, he could hear Bottom and Shivers discussing music: “Y’know, I wonder how would it sound if you played a low G under that Cm chord rather than the tonic . . . ?”

  Once, hearing that, he would have wanted nothing more than to be back there in the studio with them. Once, it would have been him driving the band to get the tracks down, to get the final mix in the can, to get a tour together since that’s where the money was in the music business now, to get all the reviews and interviews they could. Now, it all just felt . . . distant.

  He felt disconnected from everything. From everyone.

  “Soon,” he told The Voice. “I gotta do this thing.”

  “For the fucking Committee.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So where the fuck are you?”

  “I can’t tell you. All that secrecy and security shit, y’know.”

  The Voice gave a huff of exasperation. “Ain’t it enough they’ve damn near killed you a couple times over? Ain’t it enough that you’ve been doing publicity crap for them and campaigning for Kennedy and getting sent to every damn third world dustup more than you’re gigging with us?” The Voice’s scorn was flint on steel, sparking anger. “DB,” The Voice continued, “KA and the rest of the suits are fucking screaming. They expected us to get this CD wrapped up a month ago. And our fans are screaming, too—all those dates we canceled in the last year because of your ‘work’ with the Committee. That’s great for you, but we gotta make a living, too.”