A city loomed in the distance, across a techno-horror landscape of dead cars glistening like chrome beetles in the sun, with tall stacks violating the sky in the background, dark smoke for come.

He was aware of Sobel’s words blowing through his brain like the finest Thai stick, but they left no mark. As he watched, the jumbled car bodies faded, vanished, leaving a field of purple and yellow wildflowers that rippled like a flag. Then the stacks disappeared, and redwoods stretched sunward in their place. At last the steel-and-glass towers of the city shimmered and were gone, leaving a small thatched-hut village on a hill. Healthy tan-cheeked people worked in gardens and carried water up the hill in wooden buckets. Looking closer, you could see they all were jokers, happy, free, and unafraid. It was so beautiful, he could barely breathe. He felt his eyes fill with tears.

Rain struck his cheek, warm as spittle. He blinked, and once again he was seeing the close-packed ranks of jokers and a sky beginning to congeal again with night and storm.

“That’s the true legacy of the Rox,” Eric said. His voice seemed a whisper, but it carried to the roots of the distant mountains.

“You’ve seen the vision now that we’re all striving for,” Sobel was saying. “All the people in harmony, with the Earth and with each other, striving shoulder to shoulder for the common good, not selfish gain.”

Sobel had more words to say, but they were anticlimax. When the session was over, Mark thrust himself forward, risking the wrath of jokers aroused by the vision of the Rox’s destruction in his fever to speak to the boy they called the Dreamer. Fortunately the audience was still sluggish, coming out of its dream-state.

He reached the podium as Eric came off it and started to walk away, surrounded by admirers. “Wait!” he shouted desperately. “Wait, I’ve got to talk to you!”

Eric turned. “It’s a fucking nat,” somebody said in disbelief and disgust.

Mark bulled through to the boy. “That vision you-you showed us,” he said. “Was it real? Did it happen that way? Was Turtle -”

The contempt in the young joker’s eyes hit him like a blow. “You think I’d use my gift to lie to the people?” Eric asked.

“No – I mean, I’m not saying it isn’t true, I just can’t believe that Turtle would do anything like that.”

“Who cares what a nat believes?” Eric asked, and turned away.

Mark tried to keep after him. A kid reared up in his path. He had a Mohawk of white spines like porcupine quills. His mouth was a gape that stretched almost back to the hinge of his jaw, barred with four vertical strips of flesh. A ragged vest left his skinny chest bare. I LOVE THE TASTE OF NAT BLOOD was burn-scarred across it as if by a soldering iron.

“Give it a rest, you old nat fuck,” he snarled. Hands held helplessly out to the sides, Mark fell back. Eric and his retinue disappeared into the night.

“My, my,” a voice behind him said. “The attitude these kids show.”

Mark turned to find himself staring at a man-sized gold lizard. It blinked huge and beautiful topaz eyes.

“Impressionable bunch too,” the lizard said, taking a cigar from its mouth and extending a hand with three pad-tipped fingers. “Mark Meadows. Small world. How the hell are you?”

“Yeah, man, it’s true, as far as it goes. Happened about the way you say Eric showed it – don’t get his mental sound-and-light shows, myself – Turtle wasted the Rox with a tidal wave.” Croyd Crenson poured himself a cup of tea from the chipped green enamel pot in his bunker. The light of the single kerosene lamp made his fine scales shimmer like Elvis’ coat. “Of course the Feds shelled the place pretty well in advance. But yeah, Turtle did it.”

Sandbags piled on the bunker roof absorbed most of the fury of the rain, dulling its noise to a white-noise background murmur. Seated on a splintery wood crate, Mark sat with his head between his knees and just tried to breathe without throwing up.

“Lose some friends?” Croyd asked.

“Not many.” He looked up. “I wasn’t real popular on the Rox. Bloat, though – he was a good man. He and his people deserved better. But Turtle” – he shook his head – “I can’t see him committing genocide.”

“He had his reasons. The jumpers were way out of hand. Things were getting pretty scaly toward the end, if you’ll pardon the figure of speech.”

“Yeah,” Mark said. And there seemed no more to say. He was still shocked to the core by what Tommy had done. But Tommy had made the decision, and would have to live with it the rest of his life. Mark would not condemn him until he knew his side of the story.

Croyd’s apparent detachment bothered him a little. But that was Croyd. You didn’t live the way Croyd did without being wrenched somewhat loose from the world around you. “So,” he said, casting about for conversation, “what are you doing here in Vietnam, anyway?”

“’Bout the same thing you are, I guess: traveling for my health,” Croyd winked a big topaz eye and puffed on his cigar. “I made some bad career calls, and then things started getting generally interesting in the Big Apple – interesting in the Chinese curse sense, what with the War for the Rox and all.”

He leaned back, using his tail as a prop – his reptilian hindquarters were ill suited for sitting in a chair. Mark looked at him holding his saucer with one hand and the cup with another, third and last finger daintily extended, and had to cough to keep from going into a giggling fit. Things are happening too fast in your life.

Croyd regarded him from beneath lowered horny lids, “I’m surprised you don’t know all this about Turtle and the Rox and everything already. It’s not as if it wasn’t plastered all over the newspapers and TV and everything. They even had one of those one-week-wonder paperbacks by General Zappa, called Triumph Over Terror. Kind of hard to miss. Then again, you did kind of drop off the face of the Earth for a while, there, friend.”

“Literally. I was on another planet.”

“I thought you gave that shit up.”

“No, no. You don’t understand, man. I was on Takis.”

He told him the story, leaving out certain details, such as Starshine’s death. He didn’t trust himself to talk about that, and somehow it seemed too personal to share. Croyd and he were friends of long standing, but the fabric of both their lives was so woven that they never had gotten exactly close.

“So Tach got his body back, and he’s gonna get a new hand, and got to be king of the Alakazams or whatever you call ’em.” Croyd shook his head in wonder. “Regular fairy tale.”

He froze, stared down. A huge horned black beetle was making its way across the wooden shipping-pallet floor of his bunker.

“Excuse me a minute,” he said, setting aside his cup. “You might want to look the other way, here, pal.”

Mark shrugged him off. Croyd got down on all fours, peering intently at the bug. Then his lipless mouth opened and a pale tongue whipped out and back, and there was no more bug.

“Mmm,” Croyd said, resuming his tail-rest seat and picking up his cup. “Breakfast of champions. I tell you, man, I must be working out my insect-eating karma – you’re an old hippie, you’re into that karma shit, right? I was a bug-eater last year, too, during my giant-pink-bat phase.”

He shook his head. “On the other hand, if you have to do a turn as an insectivore, this is definitely the primo place on Earth to do it in. Bugs everywhere, huge fuckers like that one, and fine – man, are they fine!”

He looked at Mark. “Say, that didn’t gross you out at all, did it?”

Mark shook his head.

“Shoot, that’s rare. My gustatory habits are a big reason I have this lovely bunker all to my lizard lonesome. Great word, gustatory. Picked it up ten, eleven years ago, and damned if I don’t think this is the first time I ever found a way to slip it into a sentence.”