Mark felt his head drop forward on his neck, as if the people it contained were too heavy for his muscles to support. Tears dripped to the back of his hands. Misreading his body language, the others drew back to leave him to his triumph.

All he felt was numb. Dead from the neck both ways. Maybe that’s a blessing, he thought. The voices in his head were still for the moment.

In the shadows stood J. Bob Belew, sipping tea from a cracked old French porcelain cup. “We’re winning,” he said.

Mark shook his head. It was as if he had not five – four now – personae, but dozens of them, hundreds, and each was filled to bursting with a different emotion. He raised his hands, moved them ineffectually in the air. The only possible release he could see for all those volcanic emotions was to throw his head back and open his mouth wide and just vent them in one long scream.

Except, once started, that scream would go on forever, as near as he could calculate.

“…How?…” he managed to ask in a strangled voice. “How – is it – possible? There’s so many of them. There’s – so few – of us.”

“‘In war, numbers alone confer no advantage,’” Belew quoted. “‘Do not advance relying on sheer military power.’ Sun Tzu.”

Mark shook his head. “Just words, man. I need… answers.”

Belew laughed. “All right. First of all, don’t give yourself – or Moonchild – too much credit. What’s happening here is as close to inevitable as anything ever is – it’s like the ’historic process’ the Marxists are so fond of, only they’re the ones it’s grinding into cotto salami. Soon or late – this year, next year, 1999 – what is happening now would happen anyway. What you, your friends, all of us, are is merely a catalyst.”

Mark stared at his hands. They had come to seem great and ungainly to him, as he himself did, in contrast to the tiny and graceful Vietnamese. Even Moonchild felt bloated around them.

He didn’t know whether he felt resentment or relief at what Belew said. Part of him wanted to trumpet, I am too important!

Another part was happy to avoid the blame.

“Next,” Belew said, ticking off right-hand fingers with his bandaged stump, “don’t discount the numbers of ’us.’ Our name is legion. If you take passive sympathy into account, I’d say upward of half the population is with us – and I’d say an overwhelming majority from the old DMZ south, in Annam and Cochin China. But even in the North we have support, if the demonstrations in Hanoi are any indication. There’s a twenty-four-hour vigil going on at the lake where the Trung sisters drowned themselves, you know, and the authorities are afraid to break it up.”

“Hey, I was at People’s Park in ’70, man. We had the people then too. They had the guns.”

“That didn’t stop you then, I notice, Mark. Or were you not really the Radical?”

All Mark could do was thrust his face into his palms and sob. When he could see and speak again, Belew was squatting Vietnamese-style on the mat nearby, not close enough to threaten, but close enough that Mark could feel his presence.

“I don’t know, man,” Mark said brokenly. “I’ve never known. All I’ve done since, the experimentation, turning into my friends, all that – it was all so I could know. Know that just once, in this fucked-up, useless life of mine, to know that I was a hero.”

He dabbed his eyes clear, raised his head, matched Belew gaze for gaze. “Whether I was or not, man, it didn’t matter. Radical won that fight, yeah. The other side won the war.”

“You’re beginning to grasp the essence of strategy, son, which is the difference between winning a battle and winning a war. But just the same, I have to disagree with you. You won. Trust me; I was on the other side. I know. We cut and ran and left South Vietnam in the lurch, because in the crunch Nixon didn’t have any balls in his pants. You – Radical, whoever – you helped cut his nuts off. You might as well feel proud.”

Mark laughed. It wasn’t much of a laugh. But it was a laugh.

“Well, anyway, we didn’t win it all. There was no revolution. We had the numbers, but they had the guns.”

“No,” Belew said, “you didn’t win it all. But you did exercise leverage on the government – mainly, of course, because our government was sadly lacking in will. At home or abroad.

“That’s why People Power fizzled out so badly, with the Tiananmen massacre. People thought that what ran the Shah out of Iran and Marcos from the Philippines was the popular will, peacefully expressed. But it wasn’t that at all. The army and the secret police – the enforcers – lost faith in their main man to hold the center. And if he went, the army and the secret police wouldn’t be the biggest, baddest, most untouchable gangs around anymore. They’d be a mass of individuals, each liable to be hunted down and killed by the friends and family of anybody they wasted trying to defend their boss. People in the West underestimate the socializing effect of the blood feud in these ceiling-fan countries.

“That’s what happened in Guatemala. The Hero Twins got to exploit Soviet aid to an extant underground movement, plus the intense racial hatred the Indians harbored for mestizos and the Spanish. They dealt themselves guns and numbers. That’s what we’ve been trying to do here. That’s why we’re winning.”

“But all we’re doing – we’re picking at them. It’s like the bugs around here.” A pang for Croyd, still asleep, still being bundled along as baggage. “They bite you and bite you, and you go, like, half crazy. But you don’t stop what you’re doing.”

“That’s right. Because unlike your swarming bugs, we don’t bite at random. Each bite is calculated to make the enemy feel the most insecure, to make us seem most supernaturally powerful to them – and to the population we’re trying to attract to the cause. People want to go with a winner. We seem to have a hundred aces on our side, and we strike where we please. What does it matter that the strikes don’t amount to anything much, singly or taken all together? We live in the world of Maya, Mark, the world of illusion. Perception is reality The perception we are creating is that we are invincible.

“Add that to the marvelous job the Northerners, the Tonkinese, have done of instilling the resentment of the conquered in their ’liberated’ southern brothers, and the standard hash that communist rule has made of the economy and of everyday life, and you have a highly receptive audience. The Viet in the village and the Ho-ville street looks at Rumania and East Germany and even the USSR and asks, ’Why not?’ And that’s why we’re winning.”

“And what are we winning? A chance for brother to exploit brother?”

“Come on, Mark. That’s not your brain talking, it’s sixties nostalgia. You’ve lived on the fringes of Jokertown, and you’ve lived here. Who has it better, the despised minority members in their New York ghetto – even with Barnett and his crazies on the loose – or the dead – average ethnic Vietnamese in the villes?”

Mark hung his head. “Back home.”

Belew nodded. “I’m not saying it’s perfect, Mark. It’s lousy in a lot of ways – I’m a wild card too. That’s why I’m here.”

“Bullshit.”

Belew’s head snapped back. Mark cursed as seldom as he did.

“You’re taking another shot at the title, man,” Mark said accusingly. “You didn’t win it all back in the sixties and seventies. You’re trying again to do it right this time. You’re just like… like…

His voice trailed away. He could not speak the name that had come into his mind.

“Like Colonel Charles Self-Righteousness Personified Sobel?” Belew laughed. “Guilty as charged. We’re middle-aged assholes trying to erase the failures of our youth. Did you think you were going to shame me? I know what I am: I’m a man who always does what he believes to be right, and I’m not embarrassed when what’s right happens to gratify my less noble instincts – which I don’t think are necessarily ignoble, by the way. I legitimately want Vietnam to be free I fought and spilled my blood to that end in the first round, and I’ve done it this time too. And I am a wild card, mark, and I do know a hawk from a hernshaw.”