“Happy to be of service, man.”

“And you tell me the good Doctor had a baby. I’ll be Goddamned. I don’t envy a kid growing up with her mom and great-something grandpa being one and the same.” He sipped his tea and smacked his lack of lips. “Then again, I don’t envy anybody having Blaise for a dad either. What happened to the sleazy little psycho, anyway?”

“Tach’s cousin Zabb killed him, during the final fight for House Vayawand.”

Mark was lying like a dog. He knew perfectly well what had happened to Blaise Andrieux – had seen it happen in reality, and saw it again in rerun about every third night, when he woke up sweating and pale. The story of Tach’s return to the planet that gave him and the wild card virus birth was also like a fairy tale in that its ending held a twist of grotesque horror.

For the first time in all the years he and Tachyon had known each other, Blaise’s fate had really struck Mark in the face with the truth of what his best pal had told him all along: genes notwithstanding, Prince Tisianne brant Ts’ara of House Ilkazam was not a human being.

“So why is it that you didn’t see Eric’s visions?” Mark was desperate for a change of subject. Croyd shrugged, which almost pitched mark headfirst into the giggles. “Lizards don’t dream – something about the reptile brain. I never see anything when old Eric does his thing. I don’t think I’m missing much.”

Mark shook his head. “It was beautiful. I saw -”

Yeah. You saw fields and forests and birds, oh my. Strawberry fields forever Banal City. It sounded a lot like J. J. Flash.

Mark shook his head. “Words can’t describe it. But it was beautiful – as beautiful as anything I’ve ever seen in my life.”

“Yeah, all the faithful sit there with that pole-axed look, drooling gently in their laps. I’m glad my most recent draw from the wild card deck spared me that. Never been much of the True Believer type.” He gazed at Mark over the rim of his cup. “Ever read the Hoffer book?”

“Yes,” said Mark, feeling pissed-off and chagrined at the same time. Part of him said Croyd was a cynic, the kind of scoffer who made the world what it was. Another part said Mark was a mark. If only Starshine wasn’t dead, I wouldn’t have all this trouble believing in the perfectibility of humankind.

Croyd was staring down at his cup as if there were a bug in it. Or rather, as if there weren’t. “Trouble with this stuff is, it starts tasting like boiled weeds after a while. Maybe because it is.”

He tossed cup and saucer over his shoulder. They bounced off the rough planks with a clatter and fell into the mud-red water that had accrued beneath the pallets. He went to a neon-green-and-white Coleman cooler by one wall, opened it, took out a couple of bottles.

“Time for a little of that good old Giai Phong beer, The beer that made Ho Chi Minh City famous.”

Mark made a face. “It tastes like formaldehyde.”

“That’s what its famous for.” He stuck both tops into his horny mouth and popped the caps off.

Mark accepted his beer without qualm. Maybe life on the Rox and in the back of a mujahidin arms-smuggling van and other interesting places had wrung the squeamishness out of him. Or maybe that was another hole where Starshine used to be.

Croyd hoisted his bottle. “Here’s to good friends. Here we are in damn near the last commie country on Earth, waiting for the monsoon to wash us into the South China Sea, in a camp full of refugees from New York’s blood-thirstiest joker street gangs and run by a crazed Nam vet. I say that’s worth drinking to.”

He drained his bottle and tossed it in a corner. “So. You might as well crash the night here. Hell, you might as well move in. Most of these boys don’t have much conversation, if you get my drift. The young ones strut around trying to see who’s got the biggest balls, and the old ones spend all their time spouting slogans and bitching about how all the rest of us don’t appreciate all they did for us the last time they were over here.”

“I don’t want to be any bother, man,” Mark said into his own beer.

“Hey, no bother. I’m not exactly afraid you’ll keep me up with your snoring.”

Mark eyed him guardedly. “So, like, how long has it been?”

On the street they called Croyd the Sleeper. He was an original, who got caught in the open the day Jetboy made his final faux pas. Since then every time he laid him down to sleep, he slept for a long time – and woke with a brand-new face and form, not to mention a brand-new set of ace powers. Actually, that didn’t always happen – sometimes he drew an unadulterated joker. He had, obviously, never yet drawn a Black Queen. A few years ago he had gotten something stranger: the power to produce an infectious form of xenovirus Takis-A in his own body, one that could even re-infect people with expressed wild card traits. He had caused a hell of a stir until he eventually nodded off.

When Croyd woke up, he usually had no trouble staying awake for a while, a period ranging from days to weeks. When he started to sag, though, he frequently found himself none too eager to drop back to dreamland. He might have an especially useful or entertaining form, or unfinished business, and his wake-up-call surprises weren’t always any too pleasant – and there was always the possibility of that Black Bitch slipping out of his personal wild cards deck.

That was the main way Mark had gotten to know him, in his own capacity as overqualified street pharmacologist. When Croyd’s eyelids started drooping, he started gobbling pills in record quantities. After a time they began to affect him – as his sometime speeding buddy Hunter Thompson put it back in the sixties – the way the full moon affected a werewolf.

For his own research Mark kept a stock of powerful and rare stimulants on hand, and Croyd knew him as a man who didn’t like to leave a buddy strung out. For his part Mark had experimented to come up with some speed-analogue that would not, in time, turn Croyd into a raving psychotic. But even if drugs aren’t the irredeemable Devil Things the Just Say No crowd claims they are, there is a payback to overdoing anything – eating, breathing, and sleeping, no less than amphetamines. No-comeback speed proved just as elusive a goal as reviving the Radical had been.

Mark had a good reason for asking Croyd how long he’d been up this time. If the Sleeper was about to start rolling those big yellow candy-flake eyes and raving that invisible creatures were gnawing on his legs, Mark wanted to be, you know, prepared. And there was a still-outstanding matter of what if any powers Gordon Gecko Croyd possessed. He was not too discriminate when the amphetamine psychosis had him.

Mark clutched a vial of blue-and-black powder swirl in a pocket of his trousers, just in case. If he was into the pill-gobbling stage, Croyd could be very touchy.

But Croyd just laughed. “Weeks and weeks. Been here six weeks. Woke up like this in the hold of a Yugo freighter. Crew was too strung out over all the ethnic tension back home even to be scared of me. I’ve been like this ever since, and nary a yawn.”

He held up a sucker-tipped finger and winked conspiratorially. “You see, old man,” he said, “that’s my power this go-round, my current ace-in-the-hole. I like this form just fine, for now – it’s kind of relaxing, being a skink – and I don’t have to worry about losing it and coming back as Snotman Part II, because lizards don’t sleep.”

And while lizards don’t have lips, either, he managed to grin hugely as he sat back on his gold-lamй tail.

“Oh,” Mark said. And he was thinking, I’m not a herpetologist; but I don’t think that’s right.

He decided it wasn’t his problem. He went to the bunk beside the trench wall, which was stabilized with tree trunks from the mountains, sat down, and began to take his boots off. Right now he wished he could take Croyd’s next six-month snooze for him.