He smiled and bobbed his head foolishly at them, grabbed his shovel, and bent to work. He made himself ignore the pain in his shoulders and back and knees. The voices in his brain he just tuned down.

Fort Venceremos didn’t look much like a fort to Mark. It looked like a movie set. It consisted mainly of ranks of olive-drab tents and sandbagged bunkers that were, he gathered, slowly spreading outward from the parade ground in the middle, with its podium and its flagpole flying the yellow-star-on-red-ground flag of the Socialist Republic. Paddy land surrounded the fort’s wire-tangle perimeter, pool-table flat and well-drowned with the monsoon. Hills several hundred meters high, perfectly conical and an almost painfully intense green, stuck up seemingly at random from the midst of them. When the truck clattered in through the wire, the clouds had broken briefly to let some orange sunset beacons flash through the ramparts of the Giai Truong Son, the Central Mountains to the west, and set the sides of the hills alight.

Off to the north, according to the conversation Mark overheard – none was directed toward him during the entire day and a half they’d spent grinding up the coast on Highway One – lay Da Nang, its giant American-built airbase still intact and still jointly occupied, despite the general collapse of the USSR’s overseas empire, by Soviet Frontal Aviation as well as by the Vietnamese. A few Hicks behind them lay the coastal town of Tam Ky.

The ride up from Ho Chi Minh City had been frequently punctuated by bouts of waiting in the red laterite that sided the paved highway, while military convoys rumbled past in the rain and the deuce-and-a-half sank to its hubs again. Mark’s dozen joker fellow passengers were all Americans – with the possible exception of a pair who said nothing and, by the look of them, might not have been able to – and none of them was familiar, from Rick’s or elsewhere. The ones who could bitched mightily at the delays, at the way their hosts failed to appreciate the sacrifices they were willing to make on their behalf, and especially when it came time to push the truck out of the mud and onto the cracked blacktop yet again.

Mark willingly if ineffectually took his place at the bumper and heaved. Of his remaining friends the only one strong enough to be a lot of help probably wouldn’t, so Mark figured their identities as well as his should all better just be kept quiet for the moment.

After allowing the weary mud-caked passengers a brief and unpromising look at their new home, darkness and the rain descended pretty much simultaneously. Mark was processed with the rest, assigned temporary quarters, and sent off to the mess tent, without a single friendly or even neutral word or glance – except from the quartermaster clerk, a bespectacled black with a cone-shaped body and no perceptible legs, who pushed himself around the raised-plank floor of the Q.M. tent on a cable-spool end mounted on casters, and was almost tearily grateful that Mark would not require any alterations to his issue fatigues.

Fashionably attired in American O.D. trousers and blouse of unguessable age, which left his ankles and wrists well bare but, of course, bagged substantially at belly and butt, Mark sloshed off toward the mess tent. The meal was tough boiled pork and rice, dished up by jokers who were sullen even to their fellows and who seemed to have been chosen for their unappetizing appearance. Mark didn’t exactly think it was a balanced meal, but he didn’t complain. He sat by himself and ate with good appetite, as befit a man who’d done his time in the chow lines of innumerable midnight missions, and then went off to the flooded tent he shared with a joker who glared wordlessly at him from a face like a giant bristlecone as he came in.

On the whole, he decided, squishing around on his cot trying to get less uncomfortable, being in the New Joker Brigade was a lot like being on the Rox. Bad accommodations, bad food, and nobody around who didn’t hate him on sight: perfect. There was even the lingering feeling of being under siege, though all those tanks they’d passed on Highway One – that had passed them, really – riding on the beds of semi-trailers with their long guns trailed and covered, were ostensibly on their side this time.

At least there were no roving bands of psychopathic kids who could flip you out of your body and into God knows what on a whim. And there was no Blaise.

Blaise… The sun had probably gone down long since, but here with the monsoon sweeping inland off the South China Sea it was still hot. The thought of Tachyon’s grandson did what the night and rain could not: cooled him to the marrow.

Blaise the beautiful boy, Blaise the prodigy of mental power. Blaise the sociopath, murderer, and rapist, who had committed crimes unimagined on Earth or even on Takis, where they had even more practice at that sort of thing. Blaise the Hitler wannabe, who had come within an ace – two aces and a Takisian prince trapped in an Earth woman’s body, to be more precise – of conquering Takis. Not with his unprecedented mind powers, but with a handful of political clichйs so threadbare they didn’t even try them on at Berkeley anymore. Psi-power giants Takis had known and dealt with before, but its ancient culture lacked any antibodies to everyday Earth demagoguery.

He thought of K. C. Strange, and he thought of Roxalana. Women who, God knew why, had found something in him worth loving and nurturing amid alien surroundings – on the whole, he thought, it was pretty much a tossup between Takis and the Rox for alienness.

He thought of Sprout, his lost daughter. He wondered what she was doing. It was morning in California, probably – he was doing well if he knew what the time was where he was at any given moment. She would be getting up and dressing herself with her persnickety little-girl care, and combing her golden hair – long when he’d seen it last – and getting ready to go off to the special school Mark’s father was sending her to.

Will I ever see her again? he wondered. And then, much worse: Should I?

For all their differences Mark’s father was a man of ironclad character, with both the advantages and disadvantages that entailed. He had promised Mark that Sprout would receive the best of care, and Mark knew that this would happen.

Mark had always spurned materialism and the pursuit of gain. Of course that was before spending weeks on skid row and months on the lam. It was easy to sneer at comfort when you weren’t lying on a soaking-wet cot with the monsoon pounding on the canvas over your head and dead bugs and lumps of Christ-knew-what bobbing around in the ankle-deep water.

Maybe Kimberly Anne, his former wife, his lost beloved Sunflower, had been right all along. He had always given Sprout all the love in the world, no one could say otherwise. But Beatles songs notwithstanding, love ain’t all you need.

General Meadows could provide the child material security and comfort greater than anything her father had ever been able to offer her. But he would also see that she did not lack love, and the knowledge that she was wanted.

She’s better off where she is, Mark thought, and shifted miserably. On the other cot his tent-mate grumbled and blew like a surfacing walrus. She probably doesn’t even think about me anymore…

He wandered away into sleep. In the morning they blew him out of bed with a tape-recorded bugle and handed him a shovel.

The rains fell back to regroup in late afternoon – not their usual pattern, Mark gathered. To his surprise the joker Brigaders turned dark looks to the semi-clear skies. He himself would’ve felt like singing from the sight of open sky and the sun just falling down into clouds that seemed to have been poured across the western mountains like cement, except that he barely had the energy left to hold up his head.