Penguin books

From overhead, from a German camera-angle, it occurs to Webley Silvernail, this lab here is also a maze, i'n't it now . . . behaviorists run these aisles of tables and consoles just like rats 'n' mice. Reinforcement for them is not a pellet of food, but a successful experiment. But who watches from above, who notes their responses? Who hears the small animals in the cages as they mate, or nurse, or communicate through the gray quadrilles, or, as now, begin to sing . . . come out of their enclosures, in fact, grown to Webley Silvernail-size (though none of the lab people seem to be noticing) to dance him down the long aisles and metal apparatus, with conga drums and a peppy tropical orchestra taking up the very popular beat and melody of:

pavlovia (beguine)

It was spring in Pavlovia-a-a, I was lost, in a maze ... Lysol breezes perfumed the air, I'd been searching for days. I found you, in a cul-de-sac, As bewildered as I— We touched noses, and suddenly My heart learned how to fly!

So, together, we found our way, Shared a pellet, or two ...

Like an evening in some cafe,

Wanting nothing, but you . . .

Autumn's come, to Pavlovia-a-a, Once again, I'm alone— Finding sorrow by millivolts, Back to neurons and bone. And I think of our moments then, Never knowing your name— Nothing's left in Pavlovia, But the maze, and the game. ...

They dance in flowing skeins. The rats and mice form circles, curl their tails in and out to make chrysanthemum and sunburst patterns, eventually all form into the shape of a single giant mouse, at whose eye Silvernail poses with a smile, arms up in a V, sustaining the last note of the song, along with the giant rodent-chorus and orchestra. One of PWD's classic propaganda leaflets these days urges the Volks-grenadier: SETZT V-2 ein!, with a footnote, explaining that "V-2" means to raise both arms in "honorable surrender"—more gallows-humor—and telling how to say, phonetically, "ei ssörrender." Is Web-ley's V here for victory, or ssörrender?

They have had their moment of freedom. Webley has only been a guest star. Now it's back to the cages and the rationalized forms of death—death in the service of the one species cursed with the knowledge that it will die. ... "I would set you free, if I knew how. But it isn't free out here. All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all. I can't even give you hope that it will be different someday—that They'll come out, and forget death, and lose Their technology's elaborate terror, and stop using every other form of life without mercy to keep what haunts men down to a tolerable level—and be like you instead, simply here, simply alive. .. ." The guest star retires down the corridors.

Lights, all but a sprinkling, are out at "The White Visitation." The sky tonight is deep blue, blue as a Navy greatcoat, and the clouds in it are amazingly white. The wind is keen and cold. Old Brigadier Pudding, trembling, slips from his quarters down the back stairs, by a route only he knows, through the vacant orangery in the starlight, along a gallery hung to lace dandies, horses, ladies with hard-boiled eggs for eyes, out a small entresol (point of maximum danger . . .) and into a lumber-room, whose stacks of junk and random blacknesses, even this far from his childhood, are good for a chill, out again and down a set of metal steps, singing, he hopes quietly, for courage:

Wash me in the water

That you wash your dirty daughter,

And I shall be whiter than the whitewash on the wall. . . .

at last to D Wing, where the madmen of the '30s persist. The night attendant is asleep under the Daily Herald. He is a coarse-looking fellow, and has been reading the leader. Is it an indication of things to come, next election? Oh, dear . . .

But orders are to let the Brigadier pass. The old man tiptoes by, breathing fast. Mucus rattles back in his throat. He's at the age where mucus is a daily companion, a culture of mucus among the old, mucus in a thousand manifestations, appearing in clots by total surprise on a friend's tablecloth, rimming his breath-passages at night in hard ven-turi, enough to darken the outlines of dreams and send him awake, pleading. . . .

A voice from some cell too distant for us to locate intones: "I am blessed Metatron. I am keeper of the Secret. I am guardian of the Throne. ..." In here, the more disturbing Whig excesses have been chiseled away or painted over. No point disturbing the inmates. All is neutral tones, soft draperies, Impressionist prints on the walls. Only the marble floor has been left, and under the bulbs it gleams like water. Old Pudding must negotiate half a dozen offices or anterooms before reaching his destination. It hasn't yet been a fortnight, but there is already something of ritual to this, of iteration. Each room will hold a single unpleasantness for him: a test he must pass. He wonders if Pointsman hasn't set these up too. Of course, of course he must . . . how did the young bastard ever find out? Have I been talking in m' sleep? Have they been slipping in at night with their truth serums to—and just at the clear emergence of the thought, here is his first test tonight. In the first room: a hypodermic outfit has been left lying on a table. Very clear and shining, with the rest of the room slightly out of focus. Yes mornings I felt terribly groggy, couldn't wake, after dreaming—were they dreams? I was talking. . . . But it's all he remembers, talking while someone else was there listening. . . . He is shivering with fear, and his face is whiter than whitewash.

In the second antechamber is an empty red tin that held coffee. The brand name is Savarin. He understands that it means to say "Sev-erin." Oh, the filthy, the mocking scoundrel. . . . But these are not malignant puns against an intended sufferer so much as a sympathetic magic, a repetition high and low of some prevailing form (as, for instance, no sane demolition man at his evening dishwater will wash a

spoon between two cups, or even between a glass and a plate, for fear of the Trembler it implies . . . because it's a trembler-tongue he really holds, poised between its two fatal contacts, in fingers aching with having been so suddenly reminded). ... In the third, a file drawer is left ajar, a stack of case histories partly visible, and an open copy of Krafft-Ebing. In the fourth, a human skull. His excitement grows. In the fifth, a Malacca cane. I've been in more wars for England than I can remember . . . haven't I paid enough? Risked it all for them, time after time. .. . Why must they torment an old man? In the sixth chamber, hanging from the overhead, is a tattered tommy up on White Sheet Ridge, field uniform burned in Maxim holes black-rimmed as the eyes of Cléo de Mérode, his own left eye shot away, the corpse beginning to stink ... no ... no! an overcoat, someone's old coat that's all, left on a hook in the wall. . . but couldn't he smell it? Now mustard gas comes washing in, into his brain with a fatal buzz as dreams will when we don't want them, or when we are suffocating. A machine-gun on the German side sings dum diddy da da, an English weapon answers dum dum, and the night tightens coiling around his body, just before H-Hour. . . .

At the seventh cell, his knuckles feeble against the dark oak, he knocks. The lock, remotely, electrically commanded, slams open with an edge of echo trailing. He enters, and closes the door behind him. The cell is in semidarkness, with only a scented candle burning back in a corner that seems miles away. She waits for him in a tall Adam chair, white body and black uniform-of-the-night. He drops to his knees.

"Domina Nocturna . . . shining mother and last love . . . your servant Ernest Pudding, reporting as ordered."

In these war years, the focus of a woman's face is her mouth. Lipstick, among these tough and too often shallow girls, prevails like blood. Eyes have been left to weather and to tears: these days, with so much death hidden in the sky, out under the sea, among the blobs and smears of recco photographs, most women's eyes are only functional. But Pudding conies out of a different time, and Pointsman has considered this detail too. The Brigadier's lady has spent an hour at her vanity mirror with mascara, liner, shadow, and pencil, lotions and rouges, brushes and tweezers, consulting from time to time a looseleaf album filled with photographs of the reigning beauties of thirty and forty years ago, so that her reign these nights may be authentic if not—it is for her state of mind as well as his—legitimate. Her blonde hair is tucked and pinned beneath a thick black wig. When she sits with her head down, forgetting the regal posture, the hair comes forward, over

her shoulders, below her breasts. She is naked now, except for a long sable cape and black boots with court heels. Her only jewelry is a silver ring with an artificial ruby not cut to facets but still in the original boule, an arrogant gout of blood, extended now, waiting his kiss.

His clipped mustache bristles, trembling, across her fingers. She has filed her nails to long points and polished them the same red as her ruby. Their ruby. In this light the nails are almost black. "That's enough. Get ready."

She watches him undress, medals faintly jingling, starch shirt rattling. She wants a cigarette desperately, but her instructions are not to smoke. She tries to keep her hands still. "What are you thinking, Pudding?"

"Of the night we first met." The mud stank. The Archies were chugging in the darkness. His men, his poor sheep, had taken gas that morning. He was alone. Through the periscope, underneath a star shell that hung in the sky, he saw her . . . and though he was hidden, she saw Pudding. Her face was pale, she was dressed all in black, she stood in No-man's Land, the machine guns raked their patterns all around her, but she needed no protection. "They knew you, Mistress. They were your own."

"And so were you."

"You called to me, you said, 'I shall never leave you. You belong to me. We shall be together, again and again, though it may be years between. And you will always be at my service.' "

He is on his knees again, bare as a baby. His old man's flesh creeps coarse-grained in the light from the candle. Old scars and new welts group here and there over his skin. His penis stands at present arms. She smiles. At her command, he crawls forward to kiss her boots. He smells wax and leather, and can feel her toes flexing beneath his tongue, through the black skin. From the corner of his eye, on a little table, he can see the remains of her early evening meal, the edge of a plate, the tops of two bottles, mineral water, French wine. . . .

"Time for pain now, Brigadier. You shall have twelve of the best, if your offering tonight pleases me."

Here is his worst moment. She has refused him before. His memories of the Salient do not interest her. She doesn't seem to care for mass slaughter as much as for myth, and personal terror . . . but please . . . please let her accept. . . .

"At Badajoz," whispering humbly, "during the war in Spain ... a bandera of Franco's Legion advanced on the city, singing their regi-

mental hymn. They sang of the bride they had taken. It was you, Mistress: they-they were proclaiming you as their bride. . . ."

She's silent for a bit, making him wait. At last, eyes holding his, she smiles, the component of evil in it she has found he needs taking care of itself as usual: "Yes. . . . Many of them did become my bridegrooms that day," she whispers, flexing the bright cane. There seems to be a winter wind in the room. Her image threatens to shake apart into separate flakes of snow. He loves to listen to her speak, hers is the voice that found him from the broken rooms of the Flemish villages, he knows, he can tell from the accent, the girls who grew old in the Low Countries, whose voices went corrupted from young to old, gay to indifferent, as that war drew out, season into ever more bitter season. ... "I took their brown Spanish bodies to mine. They were the color of the dust, and the twilight, and of meats roasted to a perfect texture . . . most of them were so very young. A summer day, a day of love: one of the most poignant I ever knew. Thank you. You shall have your pain tonight."

It's a part of her routine she can enjoy, at least. Though she has never read any classic British pornography, she does feel herself, sure as a fish, well in the local mainstream. Six on the buttocks, six more across the nipples. Whack where's that Gourd Surprise now? Eh? She likes the way the blood leaps to cross last night's welts. Often it's all she can do to keep from moaning herself at each of his grunts of pain, two voices in a dissonance which would be much less accidental than it sounded. . . . Some nights she's gagged him with a ceremonial sash, bound him with a gold-tasseled fourragère or his own Sam Browne. But tonight he lies humped on the floor at her feet, his withered ass elevated for the cane, bound by nothing but his need for pain, for something real, something pure. They have taken him so far from his simple nerves. They have stuffed paper illusions and military euphemisms between him and this truth, this rare decency, this moment at her scrupulous feet... no it's not guilt here, not so much as amazement—that he could have listened to so many years of ministers, scientists, doctors each with his specialized lies to tell, when she was here all the time, sure in her ownership of his failing body, his true body: undisguised by uniform, uncluttered by drugs to keep from him her communiques of vertigo, nausea and pain. . . . Above all, pain. The clearest poetry, the endearment of greatest worth. . . .

He struggles to his knees to kiss the instrument. She stands over him now, legs astride, pelvis cocked forward, fur cape held apart on her hips. He dares to gaze up at her cunt, that fearful vortex. Her pubic hair has been dyed black for the occasion. He sighs, and lets escape a small shameful groan.

"Ah . . . yes, I know." She laughs. "Poor mortal Brigadier, I know. It is my last mystery," stroking with fingernails her labia, "you cannot ask a woman to reveal her last mystery, now, can you?"

"Please ..."

"No. Not tonight. Kneel here and take what I give you."

Despite himself—already a reflex—he glances quickly over at the bottles on the table, the plates, soiled with juices of meat, Hollandaise, bits of gristle and bone. . . . Her shadow covers his face and upper torso, her leather boots creak softly as thigh and abdominal muscles move, and then in a rush she begins to piss. He opens his mouth to catch the stream, choking, trying to keep swallowing, feeling warm urine dribble out the corners of his mouth and down his neck and shoulders, submerged in the hissing storm. When she's done he licks the last few drops from his lips. More cling, golden clear, to the glossy hairs of her quim. Her face, looming between her bare breasts, is smooth as steel.

She turns. "Hold up my fur." He obeys. "Be careful. Don't touch my skin." Earlier in this game she was nervous, constipated, wondering if this was anything like male impotence. But thoughtful Pointsman, anticipating this, has been sending laxative pills with her meals. Now her intestines whine softly, and she feels shit begin to slide down and out. He kneels with his arms up holding the rich cape. A dark turd appears out the crevice, out of the absolute darkness between her white buttocks. He spreads his knees, awkwardly, until he can feel the leather of her boots. He leans forward to surround the hot turd with his lips, sucking on it tenderly, licking along its lower side ... he is thinking, he's sorry, he can't help it, thinking of a Negro's penis, yes he knows it abrogates part of the conditions set, but it will not be denied, the image of a brute African who will make him behave. . . . The stink of shit floods his nose, gathering him, surrounding. It is the smell of Passchendaele, of the Salient. Mixed with the mud, and the putrefaction of corpses, it was the sovereign smell of their first meeting, and her emblem. The turd slides into his mouth, down to his gullet. He gags, but bravely clamps his teeth shut. Bread that would only have floated in porcelain waters somewhere, unseen, untasted—risen now and baked in the bitter intestinal Oven to bread we know, bread that's light as domestic comfort, secret as death in bed . . . Spasms in his

throat continue. The pain is terrible. With his tongue he mashes shit against the roof of his mouth and begins to chew, thickly now, the only sound in the room. . . .

There are two more turds, smaller ones, and when he has eaten these, residual shit to lick out of her anus. He prays that she'll let him drop the cape over himself, to be allowed, in the silk-lined darkness, to stay a while longer with his submissive tongue straining upward into her asshole. But she moves away. The fur evaporates from his hands. She orders him to masturbate for her. She has watched Captain Blicero with Gottfried, and has learned the proper style.

The Brigadier comes quickly. The rich smell of semen fills the room like smoke.

"Now go." He wants to cry. But he has pleaded before, offered her—absurdly—his life. Tears well and slide from his eyes. He can't look into hers. "You have shit all over your mouth now. Perhaps I'll take a photograph of you like that. In case you ever get tired of me."

"No. No, I'm only tired of that," jerking his head back out of D Wing to encompass the rest of "The White Visitation." "So bloody tired. . . ."

"Get dressed. Remember to wipe your mouth off. I'll send for you when I want you again."

Dismissed. Back in uniform, he closes the cell door and retraces his way in. The night attendant is still asleep. Cold air hits Pudding like a blow. He sobs, bent, alone, cheek resting a moment against the rough stone walls of the Palladian house. His regular quarters have become a place of exile, and his real home is with the Mistress of the Night, with her soft boots and hard foreign voice. He has nothing to look forward to but a late-night cup of broth, routine papers to sign, a dose of penicillin that Pointsman has ordered him to take, to combat the effects of E. coli. Perhaps, though, tomorrow night . . . perhaps then. He can't see how he can hold out much longer. But perhaps, in the hours just before dawn . . .

D D D D D D D

The great cusp—green equinox and turning, dreaming fishes to young ram, watersleep to firewaking, bears down on us. Across the Western Front, up in the Harz in Bleicheröde, Wernher von Braun, lately wrecked arm in a plaster cast, prepares to celebrate his 33rd birthday.

Artillery thunders through the afternoon. Russian tanks raise dust phantoms far away over the German leas. The storks are home, and the first violets have appeared.

At "The White Visitation," days along the chalk piece of seacoast now are fine and clear. The office girls are bundling into fewer sweaters, and breasts peaking through into visibility again. March has come in like a lamb. Lloyd George is dying. Stray visitors are observed now along the still-forbidden beach, sitting among obsolescent networks of steel rod and cable, trousers rolled to the knee or hair unsnooded, chilly gray toes stirring the shingle. Just offshore, underwater, run miles of secret piping, oil ready at a valve-twist to be released and roast German invaders who belong back in dreams already old . . . fuel waiting hypergolic ignition that will not come unless now as some junior-bureaucratic rag or May uprising of the spirit, to Bavarian tunesmith Carl Orff's lively

0,0,0,

To-tus flore-o! lam amore virginali Totus ardeo ...

all this fortress coast alight, Portsmouth to Dungeness, blazing for the love of spring. Plots to this effect hatch daily among the livelier heads at "The White Visitation"—the winter of dogs, of black snowfalls of issueless words, is ending. Soon it will be behind us. But once there, behind us—will it still go on emanating its hooded cold, however the fires burn at sea?

At the Casino Hermann Goering, a new regime has been taking over. General Wivern's is now the only familiar face, though he seems to've been downgraded. Slothrop's own image of the plot against him has grown. Earlier the conspiracy was monolithic, all-potent, nothing he could ever touch. Until that drinking game, and that scene with that Katje, and both the sudden good-bys. But now—

Proverbs for Paranoids, 1: You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.

And then, well, he is lately beginning to find his way into one particular state of consciousness, not a dream certainly, perhaps what used to be called a "reverie," though one where the colors are more primaries than pastels . . . and at such times it seems he has touched, and stayed touching, for a while, a soul we know, a voice that has more than once spoken through research-facility medium Carroll Eventyr: the late Roland Feldspath again, long-co-opted expert on control sys-

terns, guidance equations, feedback situations for this Aeronautical Establishment and that. Seems that, for personal reasons, Roland has remained hovering over this Slothropian space, through sunlight whose energy he barely feels and through storms that tickled his back with static electricity has Roland been whispering from eight kilometers, the savage height, stationed as he has been along one of the Last Parabolas—flight paths that must never be taken—working as one of the invisible Interdictors of the stratosphere now, bureaucratized hopelessly on that side as ever on this, he keeps his astral meathooks in as well as can be expected, curled in the "sky" so tense with all the frustrations of trying to reach across, with the impotence of certain dreamers who try to wake or talk and cannot, who struggle against weights and probes of cranial pain that it seems could not be borne waking, he waits, not necessarily for the aimless entrances of boobs like Slothrop here—

Roland shivers. Is this the one? This? to be figurehead for the latest passage? Oh, dear. God have mercy: what storms, what monsters of the Aether could this Slothrop ever charm away for anyone?

Well, Roland must make the best of it, that's all. If they get this far, he has to show them what he knows about Control. That's one of his death's secret missions. His cryptic utterances that night at Snoxall's about economic systems are merely the folksy everyday background chatter over here, a given condition of being. Ask the Germans especially. Oh, it is a real sad story, how shoddily their Schwärmerei for Control was used by the folks in power. Paranoid Systems of History (PSH), a short-lived periodical of the 1920s whose plates have all mysteriously vanished, natch, has even suggested, in more than one editorial, that the whole German Inflation was created deliberately, simply to drive young enthusiasts of the Cybernetic Tradition into Control work: after all, an economy inflating, upward bound as a balloon, its own definition of Earth's surface drifting upward in value, uncontrolled, drifting with the days, the feedback system expected to maintain the value of the mark constant having, humiliatingly, failed. . . . Unity gain around the loop, unity gain, zero change, and hush, that way, forever, these were the secret rhymes of the childhood of the Discipline of Control—secret and terrible, as the scarlet histories say. Diverging oscillations of any kind were nearly the Worst Threat. You could not pump the swings of these playgrounds higher than a certain angle from the vertical. Fights broke up quickly, with a smoothness that had not been long in coming. Rainy days never had much lightning or thunder to them, only a haughty glass grayness collecting in

the lower parts, a monochrome overlook of valleys crammed with mossy deadfalls jabbing roots at heaven not entirely in malign playfulness (as some white surprise for the elitists up there paying no mind, no . . .), valleys thick with autumn, and in the rain a withering, spin-sterish brown behind the gold of it... very selectively blighted rainfall teasing you across the lots and into the back streets, which grow ever more mysterious and badly paved and more deeply platted, lot giving way to crooked lot seven times and often more, around angles of hedge, across freaks of the optical daytime until we have passed, fevered, silent, out of the region of streets itself and into the countryside, into the quilted dark fields and the wood, the beginning of the true forest, where a bit of the ordeal ahead starts to show, and our hearts to feel afraid . . . but just as no swing could ever be thrust above a certain height, so, beyond a certain radius, the forest could be penetrated no further. A limit was always there to be brought to. It was so easy to grow up under that dispensation. All was just as wholesome as could be. Edges were hardly ever glimpsed, much less flirted at or with. Destruction, oh, and demons—yes, including Maxwell's—were there, deep in the woods, with other beasts vaulting among the earthworks of your safety. . . .