Busted Flush

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 shadows 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.