Chow tonight was rice and fish parts. Mark’s messmates bitched considerably about the fare. It tasted just fine to Mark.

After dinner jokers wearing red armbands chased everybody out into the red mud of the parade ground for political education. “Goddamn,” he heard a joker say whose head was covered with skin folds like a Shar Pei’s. “It ain’t enough we have to dig in the rain. But then the storm goes away the minute we knock off and we have to haul our sorry asses out here to get lectured at.”

Instantly two large and menacing young jokers appeared to either side of the complainer. “Showin’ signs of antisocial tendencies, are we, bud?”

“Bourgeois tendencies,” the older of the pair said.

“Whatever. Sounds like you’re in need of a few good self-criticism sessions, help get your mind right.”

Mark moved away quickly, feeling cowardly for doing so. He thought the man was being unfair, complaining like that – they’d all volunteered, after all, and Mark reckoned it was standard Midnight Mission rules: you want to eat the soup, you got to hear the sermon. All the same, he wasn’t eager to find out just what self-criticism sessions were all about.

For once, you’re acting sensibly, Mark, Traveler’s voice said in his skull. My, those two were quick off the mark, weren’t they?

Mark’s spirits sank into his muddy boots. The Traveler approved his actions. Now he knew he was chicken-shit.

The clouds still clustered thickly overhead, blotting most of the stars. Mark had come to terms with the night and the stars, back on that Aegean island where he’d had no choice but to confront them. Sort of. He still was not heartbroken when overcast hid the stars.

They assembled in ranks facing the podium, several hundred strong – Mark had never been good at estimating crowd numbers. Mark thought he could make out a substantial split in the social structure. About a third of the crowd had at least a foot on the lower rungs of middle age, or were right up on the ladder, like Mark himself The rest were young and intense, though in a lot of them the intensity showed in the way they joked and grab-assed with each other.

Then there was Mark. Here and there a man who’d pulled extreme height out of the wild card deck stood above the rest, one nearly ten feet tall and covered with what looked suspiciously like rough bark, and green leaves instead of hair; another, seven feet tall and even skinnier than mark, his skin covered in giraffe dapples, but dark purple on mauve. Mostly though, Mark towered above this mob as he towered above most. Which made him a conspicuous minority of one, the only nat in sight.

Until Colonel Charles Sobel appeared, marching from between the tents as if he were headed to shake hands with Black Eagle himself, trailing a retinue like the late, great Emperor Bokassa’s cape. He mounted the podium and took his place behind the lectern. Brew and Luce, Luce in his customary T-shirt with the extra armholes and Brew dressed as if he were headed out nightclubbing after the camp meeting was done, took positions flanking him on the dais.

“Be seated, comrades – and I’m proud to use the term.” Sobel’s voice rolled out of the speakers like warm motor oil. “Don’t worry, you don’t have to sit at attention.”

That provoked a ripple of laughter, probably from guys in armbands, the cynical J. J. Flash facet within Mark thought. From somewhere in the audience a voice rang out, “How about sittin’ in chairs?”

Luce thrust his round face forward. “The revolution isn’t about your personal comfort, buddy,” he snarled. “That’s bogus. If you can’t stand a little inconvenience, maybe you better start walking back to your white-bread world to be a doormat for the nats again -”

Sobel held up a hand. “Here, Lucius, I’ve got it. I understand a lot of you men – and you are men, more so than the nats who look down upon you – are new among us. You maybe aren’t sure what you’re doing here. What’s expected of you, what you can expect.

“I can answer both questions simply enough. What’s expected of you? Everything you’ve got. To give less than maximum effort is to sell out to the oppressor.

“As to what to expect, one word will suffice: victory.”

The applause was fuller-bodied this time, and at least some of it was sincere. Mark still heard scattered catcalls, saw guys making jack-off gestures.

The Colonel stood with his hands resting on the podium, smiling over his jutted chin, waiting for the noise to dwindle. “I look out this evening and see many new faces, many recent recruits to our cause. I know my words strike some of you as empty rhetoric. All your lives you’ve been bombarded with empty promises from politicians and glossy Wall Street come-ons. You’ve earned your right to skepticism, no doubt about it.

“Now, I’m a pretty fair country speaker” – the armband boys laughed dutifully, though Mark wasn’t sure what the joke was – “but I also know how closely I fit the profile of the Oppressor: a white, a nat, a man. An authority figure. But there is one among us – one of you – whose gift it is to show you the truths which underlie my words.

“Comrades, it is with pride I present to you – Eric Bell!”

Much of the crowd erupted in cheers – the watchful old-timers, Mark saw. His recent ride-mates just stood there with oh, please expressions on.

A person stepped up onto the platform from behind. Smiling grandly, Sobel stepped back and nodded him to center stage, out front of the podium. He was slender, dressed in a Bruce Springsteen T-shirt and jeans, and by the way he moved, he was way young. But his face was horribly disfigured, a brutal animal jut of muzzle and brows.

He held out his hands. The crowd fell quiet, even the cynical new arrivals, leaving the Wurlitzer automatic accompaniment of the little generator that powered the P.A. thump-thumpa-ing along in the background.

It was as if somebody had dropped a movie screen just behind Mark’s eyes. He saw an island by night. On that island was a fantasy castle, a wonderland of towers and domes and battlemented walls. But a giant had come to fairyland and stomped it proper; the towers were fallen, the glittering domes crushed.

Then Mark took in the surroundings, the dark cliff-like shapes on the land surrounding, sprayed with myriad lights. The skyline of Manhattan. My God, that’s the Rox! Mark thought. But it’s so changed.

It was about to change again. Gleaming white in the moonlight, a mobile cliff of water rushed down the Hudson. Straight for Ellis Island.

Floating above the wave was Turtle’s unmistakable battleship-plate shell. A moan rose from the crowd as the tsunami struck the Rox like God’s own bulldozer. Upon the face of the waters lay chaos. Below them, nothing could still live.

“Look,” the young man said in a voice that didn’t need an amplifier. “See. As I saw. Bloat sent me away from the Rox, away from my comrades, my fellow jokers, though I begged to be allowed to stay and share their fate. He sent me away so that I could see this thing done – and so that, through me, you could see it too.”

The crowd was raging, screaming, shaking fists and less conventional appendages in the air. Mark hunched his head between his shoulders and wanted to vomit. All he could think of was the half-remembered words from the radio cast of the Hindenburg disaster – “Oh, my God, the humanity, the humanity!”

– That wasn’t true. For all his horror and shame there was room in his guts for the realization that his unaltered human appearance marked him in this crowd, as if three sixes glowed upon his forehead.

“But that was not all Bloat wished for me to show you. My friends, I do not come to ask your pity,” the young man said. “I don’t even come to ask for your anger. I ask of you just one thing. In the word of the immortal John Lennon – imagine.”

“A better world,” Sobel intoned. And Mark saw – a better world.