Free Turn of the Cards by George R. R. Martin, Victor Milan

she was calling herself Marshal Pasionara of the Symbionese Liberation Army. A dental emergency had pulled her out of the SLA’s hideout in Watts just in time to miss the fiery shootout in which Field Marshal Cinque and the others lost their lives.
    The SLA’s harsh discipline had brought her off recreational chemicals of all sorts, but after four months on the Revolution’s far nut fringe she was as weird as if she’d been tweaking on crystal meth the whole time. The live news coverage of flames shooting out of the house she was supposed to be in — and the dark hints in the cell that she was showing signs of dangerous deviation and bourgeois weakness when she left to seek attention for her toothache — had slammed her to reality’s cold, hard ground.
    To her parents she was dead, to her old Movement buddies she was either a dangerous zany, a deserter from the real revolution, or a possible government agente provocateuse — there was anything but consensus about the Symbionese crew — and to the United States government she was a wanted fugitive, though not under her real name or a reliable description. In all the world she knew of only one person who wouldn’t judge her, one way or another.
    Mark was scraping by on sheer if sporadic brilliance, helping lesser lights deliver on their research grants. Most of his money went for his chemical dream quest and enough marijuana to take the edge off his continual disappointment. But he took her in, and felt only joy. The first two weeks she was like a fresh-trapped wild animal, all nerve ends. He let her be, even cutting his tiny apartment in two by hanging a Madras print to give her some privacy. Eventually the adrenaline buzz began to recede.
    On August 8, 1974, the sixties officially came to an end with the resignation of a Whittier College alum even more notorious than Kimberly Anne and Nancy Ling Perry. Mark and Kimberly killed a bottle of wine — not Gallo — and wound up fumbling together on the rump-sprung mattress on the floor on his side of the partition. The divider came down the next day.
    The next seven months or so were the happiest time Mark could remember. At dawn on the vernal equinox of 1975 Mark and Kimberly — again calling herself Sunflower — were married at Golden Gate State Park.
    After that, nothing seemed to go quite right. Sunflower drifted from cause to cause, cult to cult, at once restless and listless. She began to drink and take pills. Mark retreated further into pot smoke and his search for the Radical. His odd research jobs got odder, not to mention less frequent.
    Sprout was born in the spring of 1977. It was another case where partners in a failing marriage shared an unspoken belief that having a child would somehow cement their relationship. As a remedy it was akin to trying to save a crumbling bridge by running more semis over it. By the time Sprout’s developmental problem, or whatever euphemism they were using, was diagnosed in 1978, Mark and Sunflower were communicating solely in screams and silences.
    The divorce was finalized in 1981. A nasty custody fight was aborted when Sunflower broke down completely at a hearing. She was declared incompetent and institutionalized in Camarillo. Mark was given sole custody of their daughter.
    He took her and fled east. As a countercultural pole star, the Village had shone almost as brightly as San Francisco and Berkeley and didn’t harbor the landmarks and memories that reproached Mark for his many failures. His father, now four-star General Marcus Meadows, lent him the money to go into business for himself. He opened the Cosmic Pumpkin head shop and deli on Fitz-James O’Brien Street on the southern fringe of Greenwich Village.
    He was not, to say the least, a natural businessman. His father established a trust fund to discreetly funnel money into the store. Mark and Sprout got by.
    Then, in early 1983, his long quest for the Radical bore fruit. But like Cristoforo Colombo setting forth