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You can keep Der Bingle too, a-And that darn "bu-bu-bu-boo," Cause I'm sold on suicide!

Oh! I'm not too keen on ration stamps,

Or Mothers who used to be baby vamps,

But I'm sold, on, suicide!

Don't like either, the Cards or Browns, Piss on the country and piss on the town, But I'm S.O.S., yes well actually this goes on, verse after verse, for quite some time. In its complete version it represents a pretty fair renunciation of the things of the world. The trouble with it is that by Gödel's Theorem there is bound to be some item around that one has omitted from the list, and such an item is not easy to think of off the top of one's head, so that what one does most likely is go back over the whole thing, meantime correcting mistakes and inevitable repetitions, and putting in new items that will surely have occurred to one, and—well, it's easy to see that the "suicide" of the title might have to be postponed indefinitely!

Conversations between Ombindi and Enzian these days are thus a series of commercial messages, with Enzian not so much mark as unwilling shill, standing in for the rest of the tip, who may be listening and maybe not.

"Ahh, do I see your cock growing, Nguarorerue? . . . no, no, perhaps you are only thinking of someone you loved, somewhere, long ago . . . back in Südwest, eh?" To allow the tribal past to disperse, all memories ought to be public record, there's no point in preserving history with that Final Zero to look forward to. ... Cynically, though, Ombindi has preached this in the name of the old Tribal Unity, and it's a weakness in his pitch all right—it looks bad, looks like Ombindi's trying to make believe the Christian sickness never touched us, when everyone knows it has infected us all, some to death. Yes it is a little bit jive of Ombindi here to look back toward an innocence he's really only heard about, can't himself believe in—the gathered purity of oppo-sites, the village built like a mandala. . . . Still he will profess and proclaim it, as an image of a grail slipping through the room, radiant, though the jokers around the table be sneaking Whoopee Cushions into the Siege Perilous, under the very descending arse of the grailseeker, and though the grails themselves come in plastic these years, a dime a dozen, penny a gross, still Ombindi, at times self-conned as any Christian, praises and prophesies that era of innocence he just missed living in, one of the last pockets of Pre-Christian Oneness left on the planet: "Tibet is a special case. Tibet was deliberately set aside by the Empire as free and neutral territory, a Switzerland for

the spirit where there is no extradition, and Alp-Himalayas to draw the soul upward, and danger rare enough to tolerate. . . . Switzerland and Tibet are linked along one of the true meridians of Earth, true as the Chinese have drawn meridians of the body. . . . We will have to learn such new maps of Earth: and as travel in the Interior becomes more common, as the maps grow another dimension, so must we. ..." And he tells too of Gondwanaland, before the continents drifted apart, when Argentina lay snuggled up to Südwest. . . the people listen, and filter back to cave and bed and family calabash from which the milk, unconsecrated, is swallowed in cold whiteness, cold as the north. . . .

So, between these two, even routine greeting does not pass without some payload of meaningfulness and the hope of Blitzing the other's mind. Enzian knows that he is being used for his name. The name has some magic. But he has been so unable to touch, so neutral for so long . . . everything has flowed away but the name, Enzian, a sound for chanting. He hopes it will be magic enough for one thing, one good thing when the time comes, however short of the Center. . . . What are these persistences among a people, these traditions and offices, but traps? the sexual fetishes Christianity knows how to flash, to lure us in, meant to remind us of earliest infant love. . . . Can his name, can "Enzian" break their power? Can his name prevail?

The Erdschweinhöhle is in one of the worst traps of all, a dialectic of word made flesh, flesh moving toward something else. . . . Enzian sees the trap clearly, but not the way out. . . . Sitting now between a pair of candles just lit, his gray field-jacket open at the neck, beard feathering down his dark throat to shorter, sparser glossy black hairs that go running in a whirl, iron filings about the south pole of his Adam's apple . . . pole . . . axis . . . axle-tree. . . . Tree . . . Omum-borombanga . . . Mukuru . . . first ancestor . .. Adam . . . still sweating, hands from the working day gone graceless and numb, he has a minute to drift and remember this time of day back in Südwest, above ground, participating in the sunset, out watching the mist gather, part fog, part dust from the cattle returning to the kraals to milking and sleep ... his tribe believed long ago that each sunset is a battle. In the north, where the sun sets, live the one-armed warriors, the one-legged and one-eyed, who fight the sun each evening, who spear it to death until its blood runs out over the horizon and sky. But under the earth, in the night, the sun is born again, to come back each dawn, new and the same. But we, Zone-Hereros, under the earth, how long will we wait in this north, this locus of death? Is it to be reborn? or have we really been buried for the last time, buried facing north like all the rest of

our dead, and like all the holy cattle ever sacrificed to the ancestors? North is death's region. There may be no gods, but there is a pattern: names by themselves may have no magic, but the act of naming, the physical utterance, obeys the pattern. Nordhausen means dwellings in the north. The Rocket had to be produced out of a place called Nordhausen. The town adjoining was named Bleicheröde as a validation, a bit of redundancy so that the message would not be lost. The history of the old Hereros is one of lost messages. It began in mythical times, when the sly hare who nests in the Moon brought death among men, instead of the Moon's true message. The true message has never come. Perhaps the Rocket is meant to take us there someday, and then Moon will tell us its truth at last. There are those down in the Erdschwein-höhle, younger ones who've only known white autumn-prone Europe, who believe Moon is their destiny. But older ones can remember that Moon, like Ndjambi Karunga, is both the bringer of evil and its avenger. . . .

And Enzian's found the name Bleicheröde close enough to "Blicker," the nickname the early Germans gave to Death. They saw him white: bleaching and blankness. The name was later Latinized to "Dominus Blicero." Weissmann, enchanted, took it as his SS code name. Enzian was in Germany by then. Weissmann brought the new name home to his pet, not showing it off so much as indicating to Enzian yet another step to be taken toward the Rocket, toward a destiny he still cannot see past this sinister cryptography of naming, a sparse pattern but one that harshly will not be denied, that cries and nags him on stumbling as badly as 20 years ago. . . .

Once he could not imagine a life without return. Before his conscious memories began, something took him, in and out of his mother's circular village far out in the Kakau Veld, at the borders of the land of death, a departure and a return. . . . He was told about it years later. Shortly after he was born, his mother brought him back to her village, back from Swakopmund. In ordinary times she would have been banished. She'd had the child out of wedlock, by a Russian sailor whose name she couldn't pronounce. But under the German invasion, protocol was less important than helping one another. Though the murderers in blue came down again and again, each time, somehow, Enzian was passed over. It is a Herod myth his admirers still like to bring up, to his annoyance. He had been walking only for a few months when his mother took him with her to join Samuel Maherero's great trek across the Kalahari.

Of the stories told about these years, this is the most tragic. The

refugees had been on the desert for days. Khama, king of the Bechua-nas, sent guides, oxen, wagons and water to help them. Those who arrived first were warned to take water only little by little. But by the time the stragglers arrived, everyone else was asleep. No one to warn them. Another lost message. They drank till they died, hundreds of souls. Enzian's mother was among them. He had fallen asleep under a cowhide, exhausted from hunger and thirst. He woke among the dead. It is said that he was found there by a band of Ovatjimba, taken and cared for. They left him back at the edge of his mother's village, to walk in alone. They were nomads, they could have taken any other direction in that waste country, but they brought him back to the place he'd left. He found hardly anyone remaining there. Many had gone on the trek, some had been taken away to the coast and herded into kraals, or to work on the railroad the Germans were building through the desert. Many others had died eating cattle dead of rinderpest.

No return. Sixty per cent of the Herero people had been exterminated. The rest were being used like animals. Enzian grew up into a white-occupied world. Captivity, sudden death, one-way departures were the ordinary things of every day. By the time the question occurred to him, he could find no way to account for his own survival. He could not believe in any process of selection. Ndjambi Karunga and the Christian God were too far away. There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of pure chance. Weiss-mann, the European whose protege he became, always believed he'd seduced Enzian away from religion. But the gods had gone away themselves: the gods had left the people. . . . He let Weissmann think what he wanted to. The man's thirst for guilt was insatiable as the desert's for water.

It's been a long time now since the two men have seen each other. Last time they spoke was during the move from Peenemünde down here to the Mittelwerke. Weissmann is probably dead by now. Even in Südwest, 20 years ago, before Enzian could even speak his language, he'd seen that: a love for the last explosion—the lifting and the scream that peaks past fear. . . . Why should Weissmann want to survive the war? Surely he'd have found something splendid enough to match his thirst. It could not have ended for him rationalized and meek as his hundred glass bureaus about the SS circuit—located in time and space always just to miss grandeur, only to be in its vacuum, to be tugged slightly along by its slipstream but finally left to lie still again in a few tarnished sequins of wake. Bürgerlichkeit played to Wagner, the

brasses faint and mocking, the voices of the strings drifting in and out of phase. . . .

At night down here, very often lately, Enzian will wake for no reason. Was it really Him, pierced Jesus, who came to lean over you? The white faggot's-dream body, the slender legs and soft gold European eyes . . . did you catch a glimpse of olive cock under the ragged loincloth, did you want to reach to lick at the sweat of his rough, his wooden bondage? Where is he, what part of our Zone tonight, damn him to the knob of that nervous imperial staff. . . .

There are few such islands of down and velvet for him to lie and dream on, not in these marble passages of power. Enzian has grown cold: not so much a fire dying away as a positive coming on of cold, a bitter taste growing across the palate of love's first hopes. ... It began when Weissmann brought him to Europe: a discovery that love, among these men, once past the simple feel and orgasming of it, had to do with masculine technologies, with contracts, with winning and losing. Demanded, in his own case, that he enter the service of the Rocket. . . . Beyond simple steel erection, the Rocket was an entire system won, away from the feminine darkness, held against the entropies of lovable but scatterbrained Mother Nature: that was the first thing he was obliged by Weissmann to learn, his first step toward citizenship in the Zone. He was led to believe that by understanding the Rocket, he would come to understand truly his manhood. . . .

"I used to imagine, in some naive way I have lost now, that all the excitement of those days was being put on for me, somehow, as a gift from Weissmann. He had carried me over his threshold and into his house, and this was the life he meant to bring me to, these manly pursuits, devotion to the Leader, political intrigue, secret re-arming in naughty defiance of the aging plutocracies all around us ... they were growing impotent, but we were young and strong ... to be that young and strong, at such a time in the life of a nation! I could not believe so many fair young men, the way the sweat and dust lay on their bodies as they lengthened the Autobahns day into ringing day: we drove among trumpeters, silk banners impeccably tailored as suits of clothes . . . the women seemed to move all docile, without color ... I thought of them in ranks, down on all fours, having their breasts milked into pails of shining steel. ..."

"Was he ever jealous of the other young men—the way you felt about them?"

"Oh. It was still very physical for me then. But he had already

moved past that part of it. No. No, I don't think he minded. ... I loved him then. I could not see into him, or the things he believed in, but I wanted to. If the Rocket was his life, then I would belong to the Rocket."

"And you never doubted him? He certainly hadn't the most ordered personality—"

"Listen—I don't know how to say this . . . have you ever been a Christian?"

"Well... at one time."

"Did you ever, in the street, see a man that you knew, in the instant, must be Jesus Christ—not hoped he was, or caught some resemblance—but knew. The Deliverer, returned and walking among the people, just the way the old stories promised ... as you approached you grew more and more certain—you could see nothing at all to contradict that first amazement . . . you drew near and passed, terrified that he would speak to you . . . your eyes grappled ... it was confirmed. And most terrible of all, he knew. He saw into your soul: all your make-believe ceased to matter. ..."

"Then . . . what's happened, since your first days in Europe, could be described, in Max Weber's phrase, almost as a 'routinization of charisma.' "

"Outase," sez Enzian, which is one of many Herero words for shit, in this case a large, newly laid cow turd.

Andreas Orukambe sits in front of an army-green, wrinkle-finished transmitter/receiver rig, off in a rock alcove of the room. A pair of rubber headphones covers his ears. The Schwarzkommando use the 50 cm band—the one the Rocket's Hawaii II guidance operated on. Who but rocket-maniacs would listen in at 53 cm? Schwarzkommando can be sure, at least, that they're being monitored by every competitor in the Zone. Transmissions from the Erdschweinhöhle begin around 0300 and run till dawn. Other Schwarzkommando stations broadcast on their own schedules. Traffic is in Herero, with a German loan-word now and then (which is too bad, since these are usually technical words, and valuable clues for whoever's listening).

Andreas is on the second dog watch, now, copying mostly, answering when he has to. Keying any transmitter is an invitation to instant paranoia. There springs into being an antenna pattern, thousands of square kilometers full of enemies out in their own night encampments in the Zone, faceless, monitoring. Though they are in contact with one another—the Schwarzkommando try to listen in to as much as they can—though there can be no illusion about their plans for the

Schwarzkommando, still they are holding off, waiting for the optimum time to move in and destroy without a trace. . . . Enzian believes they will wait for the first African rocket to be fully assembled and ready for firing: it will look better if they move against a real threat, real hardware. Meantime Enzian tries to keep security tight. Here at the home base it's no problem: penetration by less than a regiment would be impossible. But farther out in the Zone, rocket-towns like Celle, En-schede, Hachenburg—they can pick us off out there one by one, first a campaign of attrition, then a coordinated raid . . . leaving then only this metropolis, under siege, to strangle. . . .

Perhaps it's theater, but they seem no longer to be Allies . . . though the history they have invented for themselves conditions us to expect "postwar rivalries," when in fact it may all be a giant cartel including winners and losers both, in an amiable agreement to share what is there to be shared. . . . Still, Enzian has played them off, the quarreling scavengers, one against the other ... it looks genuine enough. . . . Marvy must be together with the Russians by now, and with General Electric too—throwing him off the train the other night bought us— what? a day or two, and how well have we used the time?

It comes down to this day-to-day knitting and unraveling, minor successes, minor defeats. Thousands of details, any one of which carries the chance of a fatal mistake. Enzian would like to be more out of the process than he is—to be able to see where it's going, to know, in real time, at each splitting of the pathway of decision, which would have been right and which wrong. But it is their time, their space, and he still expects, naively, outcomes the white continuum grew past hoping for centuries ago. The details—valves, special tools that may or may not exist, Erdschweinhöhle jealousies and plots, lost operating manuals, technicians on the run from both East and West, food shortages, sick children—swirl like fog, each particle with its own array of forces and directions ... he can't handle them all at the same time, if he stays too much with any he's in danger of losing others. . . . But it's not only the details. He has the odd feeling, in moments of reverie or honest despair, that he is speaking lines prepared somewhere far away (not far away in space, but in levels of power), and that his decisions are not his own at all, but the flummeries of an actor impersonating a leader. He has dreamed of being held in the pitiless emprise of something from which he cannot wake ... he is often aboard a ship on a broad river, leading a rebellion which must fail. For reasons of policy, the rebellion is being allowed to go on for a bit. He is being hunted, his days are full of narrow escapes which he finds exciting, physically

graceful . . . and the Plot itself! it has a stern, an intense beauty, it is music, a symphony of the North, of an Arctic voyage, past headlands of very green ice, to the feet of icebergs, kneeling in the grip of this incredible music, washed in seas blue as blue dye, an endless North, vast country settled by people whose old culture and history are walled off by a great silence from the rest of the world . . . the names of their peninsulas and seas, their long and powerful rivers are unknown down in the temperate world ... it is a return, this voyage: he has grown old inside his name, the sweeping music of the voyage is music he wrote himself, so long ago that he has forgotten it completely . . . but now it is finding him again. . . .

"Trouble in Hamburg—" Andreas is scribbling away, lifting one earpiece back smock damp with sweat so that he can be on both ends of the link at once. "Sounds like it might be the DPs again. Got a bad signal. Keeps fading—"

Since the surrender there have been these constant skirmishes between the German civilians and foreign prisoners freed from the camps. Towns in the north have been taken over by displaced Poles, Czechs, Russians who've looted the arsenals and granaries and mean to hold what they've taken. But nobody knows how to feel about the local Schwarzkommando. Some see only the ragged pieces of SS uniform, and respond to that one way or another—others take them for Moroccans or Indians drifted somehow over the mountains from Italy. Germans still remember the occupation of the Rhineland 20 years ago by French colonial units, and the posters screaming SCHWARZE BESATZUNG AM RHEIN! Another stress in the pattern. Last week in Hamburg, two Schwarzkommando were shot. Others were badly beaten. The British military government sent in some troops, but only after the killing was over. Their main interest seemed to be in enforcing a curfew.

"It's Onguruve." Andreas hands over the earphones and swivels to roll out of Enzian's way.

". . . can't tell if it's us they want, or the oil refinery . . ." the voice goes crackling in and out, ". . . hundred, maybe two hundred ... so many . . . —fles, clubs, handguns—"

Bl-bleep and a burst of hissing, then in laps a familiar voice. "I can bring a dozen men."

"Hannover's answering," Enzian murmurs, trying to sound amused.

"You mean Josef Ombindi." Andreas is not amused. :

Now Onguruve, calling for help, is neutral on the Empty Ones Question, or tries to be. But if Ombindi can bring a relief force to Hamburg, he may decide to stay. Hannover, even with the Volkswagen plant there, is only a stepping-stone for him. Hamburg would give the Empty Ones a stronger power base, and this could be the opportunity. The north ought to be their native element, anyway . . .

"I'll have to go," handing the phones back to Andreas. "What's wrong?"

"Could be the Russians, trying to draw you out."

"It's all right. Stop worrying about Tchitcherine. I don't think he's up there."

"But your European said—"

"Him? I don't know how far to trust him. Remember, I did hear him talking with Marvy on the train. Now he's with Tchitcherine's girl in Nordhausen. I mean, would you trust him?"

"But if Marvy's chasing him now, it might mean he's worth something."

"If he is, we're sure to see him again."

Enzian grabs his kit, swallows two Pervitins for the road, reminds Andreas of a business detail or two for tomorrow, and climbs the long salt and stone ramps to the surface.

Outside, he breathes the evergreen air of the Harz. In the old villages, it would be the time of evening for the milking. The first star is out, okanumaihi, the little drinker of sweet milk. . . .

But this must be a different star, a northern star. There is no comfort. What has happened to us? If choices have never been our own, if the Zone-Hereros are meant to live in the bosom of the Angel who tried to destroy us in Südwest . . . then: have we been passed over, or have we been chosen for something even more terrible?

Enzian has to be in Hamburg before another spearing of the sun. Security on the trains is troublesome, but the sentries know him. The long freights are rolling out from the Mittelwerke day and night, carrying A4 hardware west to the Americans, north to the English . . . and soon, when the new map of the occupation goes into effect, east to the Russians too. . . . Nordhausen will be under Russian administration and we should have some action then . . . will it give him a chance at Tchitcherine? Enzian has never seen the man, but they are meant to come together. Enzian is his half-brother. They are the same flesh.

His sciatic nerve is throbbing now. Too much sitting. He goes limping, alone, head still down for the low clearances back down in

the Erdschweinhöhle—who knows what waits out here for the head held too high? Down the road to the railway overpass, tall and gray in the growing starlight, Enzian is heading into the North. . . .

D D D D D D D

Just before dawn. A hundred feet below flows a pallid sheet of cloud, stretching west as far as they can see. Here are Slothrop and the apprentice witch Geli Tripping, standing up on top of the Brocken, the very plexus of German evil, twenty miles north by northwest of the Mittelwerke, waiting for the sun to rise. Though May Day Eve's come and gone and this frolicking twosome are nearly a month late, relics of the latest Black Sabbath still remain: Kriegsbier empties, lace undergarments, spent rifle cartridges, Swastika-banners of ripped red satin, tattooing-needles and splashes of blue ink—"What the heck was that for?" Slothrop wondered.