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In one of these streets, in the morning fog, plastered over two slippery cobblestones, is a scrap of newspaper headline, with a wirephoto of a giant white cock, dangling in the sky straight downward out of a white pubic bush. The letters MB DRO ROSHI appear above with the logo of some occupation newspaper, a grinning glamour girl riding astraddle the cannon of a tank, steel penis with slotted serpent head, 3rd Armored treads 'n' triangle on a sweater rippling across her tits. The white image has the same coherence, the hey-lookit-me smugness, as the Cross does. It is not only a sudden white genital onset in the sky—it is also, perhaps, a Tree. . . . Slothrop sits on a curbstone watching it, and the letters, and girl with steel cock waving hi fellas, as the fog whitens into morning, and figures with carts, or dogs, or bicycles go by in brown-gray outlines, wheezing, greeting briefly in fog-flattened voices, passing. He doesn't remember sitting on the curb for so long staring at the picture. But he did. At the instant it happened, the pale Virgin was rising in the east, head, shoulders, breasts, 17° 36' down to her maidenhead at the horizon. A few doomed Japanese knew of her as some Western deity. She loomed in the eastern sky gazing down at the city about to be sacri- ficed. The sun was in Leo. The fireburst came roaring and sovereign.... listening to the toilet The basic idea is that They will come and shut off the water first. The cryptozoa who live around the meter will be paralyzed by the great inbreak of light from overhead . . . then scatter like hell for lower, darker, wetter. Shutting the water off interdicts the toilet: with only one tankful left, you really can't get rid of much of anything any more, dope, shit, documents, They've stopped the inflow/outflow and here you are trapped inside Their frame with your wastes piling up, ass hanging out all over Their Movieola viewer, waiting for Their editorial blade. Reminded, too late, of how dependent you are on Them, for neglect if not good will: Their neglect is your freedom. But when They do come on it's like society-gig Apollos, striking the lyre ZONGGG Everything freezes. The sweet, icky chord hangs in the air ... there is no way to be at ease with it. If you try the "Are you quite finished, Superintendent?" gambit, the man will answer, "No, as a matter of fact. . . no, you nasty little wet-mouthed prig, I'm not half finished, not with you. ..." So it's good policy always to have the toilet valve cracked a bit, to maintain some flow through the toilet so when it stops you'll have that extra minute or two. Which is not the usual paranoia of waiting for a knock, or a phone to ring: no, it takes a particular kind of mental illness to sit and listen for a cessation of noise. But— Imagine this very elaborate scientific lie: that sound cannot travel through outer space. Well, but suppose it can. Suppose They don't want us to know there is a medium there, what used to be called an "aether," which can carry sound to every part of the Earth. The Soniferous Aether. For millions of years, the sun has been roaring, a giant, furnace, 93 millionmile roar, so perfectly steady that generations of men have been born into it and passed out of it again, without ever hearing it. Unless it changed, how would anybody know? Except that at night now and then, in some part of the dark hemisphere, because of eddies in the Soniferous Aether, there will come to pass a very shallow pocket of no-sound. For a few seconds, in a particular place, nearly every night somewhere in the World, sound-energy from Outside is shut off. The roaring of the sun stops. For its brief life, the point of sound-shadow may come to rest a thousand feet above a desert, between floors in an empty office building, or exactly around a seated individual in a working-class restaurant where they hose the place out at 3 every morning . . . it's all white tile, the chairs and tables riveted solid into the floor, food covered with rigid shrouds of clear plastic . . . soon, from outside, rrrnnn! clank, drag, squeak of valve opening oh yes, ah yes, Here Are The Men With The Hoses To Hose The Place Out— At which instant, with no warning, the arousing feather-point of the Sound-Shadow has touched you, enveloping you in sun-silence for oh, let us say 2:36:18 to 2:36:24, Central War Time, unless the location is Dungannon, Virginia, Bristol, Tennessee, Asheville or Franklin, North Carolina, Apalachicola, Florida, or conceivably in Murdo Mackenzie, South Dakota, or Phillipsburg, Kansas, or Stockton, Plainville, or Ellis, Kansas—yes sounds like a Roll of Honor don't it, being read off someplace out on the prairie, foundry colors down the sky in long troughs, red and purple, darkening crowd of civilians erect and nearly-touching as wheat stalks, and the one old man in black up at the microphone, reading off the towns of the war dead, Dungannon . . . Bristol . . . Murdo Mackenzie . . . his white hair blown back by a sculpting thine-alabaster-cities wind into leonine wreathing, his stained pored old face polished by wind, sandy with light, earnest outboard corners of his eyelids folding down as one by one, echoing out over the anvil prairie, the names of death-towns unreel, and surely Bleicheröde or Blicero will be spoken any minute now. . . . Well, you're wrong, champ—these happen to be towns all located on the borders of Time Zones, is all. Ha, ha! Caught you with your hand in your pants! Go on, show us all what you were doing or leave the area, we don't need your kind around. There's nothing so loathsome as a sentimental surrealist. "Now—the eastern towns we've listed are on Eastern War Time. All the other towns along the interface are on Central. The western towns just read off are on Central, while the other towns along that interface are on Mountain. ..." Which is all our Sentimental Surrealist, leaving the area, gets to hear. Just as well. He is more involved, or "unhealthily obsessed," if you like, with the moment of sun-silence inside the white tile greasy-spoon. It seems like a place he has been (Kenosha, Wisconsin?) already, though he can't remember in what connection. They called him "the Kenosha Kid," though this may be apocryphal. By now, the only other room he can remember being in was a two-color room, nothing but the two exact colors, for all the lamps, furniture, drapes, walls, ceiling, rug, radio, even book jackets in the shelves—everything was ei- ther (1) Deep Cheap-Perfume Aquamarine, or (2) Creamy Chocolate FBI-Shoe Brown. That may've been in Kenosha, may not. If he tries he will remember, in a minute, how he got to the white tiled room half an hour before hose-out time. He is sitting with a coffee cup half full, heavy sugar and cream, crumbs of a pineapple Danish under the saucer where his fingers can't reach. Sooner or later he'll have to move the saucer to get them. He's just holding off. But it isn't sooner and it isn't later, because the sound-shadow comes down on him, settles around his table, with the invisible long vortex surfaces that brought it here swooping up away like whorls of an Aetheric Danish, audible only by virtue of accidental bits of sound-debris that may happen to be caught in the eddying, voices far away out at sea our position is two seven degrees two six minutes north, a woman crying in some high-pitched language, ocean waves in gale winds, a voice reciting in Japanese, Hi wa Ri ni katazu, Ri wa Ho ni katazu, Ho wa Ken ni katazu, Ken wa Ten ni katazu, which is the slogan of a Kamikaze unit, an Ohka outfit—it means Injustice cannot conquer Principle, Principle cannot conquer Law, Law cannot conquer Power, Power cannot conquer Heaven. Hi, Ri, Ho, Ken, Ten go Jap-gibbering away on the long solar eddy and leave the Kenosha Kid at the riveted table, where the roaring of the sun has stopped. He is hearing, for the first time, the mighty river of his blood, the Titan's drum of his heart. Come into the bulbshine and sit with him, with the stranger at the small public table. It's almost hosing-out time. See if you can sneak in under the shadow too. Even a partial eclipse is better than never finding out—better than cringing the rest of your life under the great Vacuum in the sky they have taught you, and a sun whose silence you never get to hear. What if there is no Vacuum? Or if there is—what if They're using it on you? What if They find it convenient to preach an island of life surrounded by a void? Not just the Earth in space, but your own indi- vidual life in time? What if it's in Their interest to have you believing that? "He won't bother us for a while," They tell each other. "I just put him on the Dark Dream." They drink together, shoot very very synthetic drugs into skin or blood, run incredible electronic waveforms into Their skulls, directly into the brainstem, and backhand each other, playfully, with openmouth laugh—-you know, don't you is in those ageless eyes . . . They speak of taking So-and-So and "putting him on the Dream." They use the phrase for each other too, in sterile tenderness, when bad news is passed, at the annual Roasts, when the endless mind-gaming catches a colleague unprepared—"Boy, did we put him on the Dream." You know, don't you? witty repartee Ichizo comes out of the hut, sees Takeshi in a barrel under some palm leaves taking a bath and singing "Doo-doo-doo, doo-doo," some koto tune, twanging through his nose—Ichizo screams runs back inside reemerging with a Japanese Hotchkiss machine gun, a Model 92, begins setting it up with a lot of jujitsu grunting and eyepopping. About the time he's got the ammo belt poised, ready to riddle Takeshi in the tub, takeshi: Wait a minute, wait a minute! What's all this? ICHIZO: Oh, it's you! I—thought it was General MacArthur, in his—rowboat! Interesting weapon, the Hotchkiss. Comes in many nationalities, and manages to fit in ethnically wherever it goes. American Hotchkisses are the guns that raked through the unarmed Indians at Wounded Knee. On the lighter side, the racy 8 mm French Hotchkiss when fired goes haw-haw-haw-haw, just as nasal and debonair as a movie star. As for our cousin John Bull, a lot of British Hotchkiss heavies were either resold privately after World War I, or blow-torched. These melted machine guns will show up now and then in the strangest places. Pirate Prentice saw one in 1936, during his excursion with Scorpia Mossmoon, at the Chelsea home of James Jello, that year's king of Bohemian clowns—but a minor king, from a branch prone to those loathsome inbred diseases, idiocy in the family, sexual peculiarities surfacing into public view at most inappropriate times (a bare penis dangling out of a dumpster one razor-clear and rainwashed morning, in an industrial back-street about to be swarmed up by a crowd of angry workers in buttontop baggy caps carrying spanners three feet long, Kelly crowbars, lengths of chain, here's bareass Crown Prince Porfirio with a giant halo of aluminum-shaving curls on his head, his mouth made up with black grease, his soft buttocks squirming against the cold refuse picking up steel splinters that sung deli-ciously, his eyes sultry and black as his lips, but oh dear what's this, oh how embarrassing here they come around the corner he can smell the rabble from here, though they are not too sure about Porfirio—the march pauses in some confusion as these most inept revolutionaries fall to arguing whether the apparition is a diversionary nuisance planted here by the Management, or whether he's real Decadent Aristocracy to be held for real ransom and if so how much . . . while up on the rooftops, out from the brick and corrugated doorways begin to appear brown Government troops manning British Hotchkisses which were not melted down, but bought up by machinegun jobbers and sold to a number of minor governments around the world). It may have been in memory of Crown Prince Porfirio that day of massacre that James Jello kept a melted Hotchkiss in his rooms—or it may've been only another flight of grotesquerie on dear James's part you know, he's so unaware. . . . heart-to-heart, man-to-man —Son, been wondering about this, ah, "screwing in" you kids are doing. This matter of the, shooting electricity into head, ha-ha? —Waves, Pop. Not just raw electricity. That's fer drips! —Yes, ah, waves. "Keying waves," right? ha-hah. Uh, tell me, son, what's it like? You know I've been something of a doper all m'life, a-and— —Oh Pop. Gripes. It isn't like dope at all! —Well we got off on some pretty good "vacations" we called them then, some pretty "weird" areas they got us into 's a matter of fact— —But you always came back, didn't you. —What?
—I mean it was always understood that this would still be here when you got back, just the same, exactly the same, right? —Well ha-ha guess that's why we called 'em vacations, son! Cause you always do come back to old Realityland, don't you. —You always did. —Listen Tyrone, you don't know how dangerous that stuff is.Suppose someday you just plug in and go away and never come back? Eh? —Ho, ho! Don't I wish! What do you think every electrofreak dreams about? You're such an old fuddyduddy! A-and who sez it's a dream, huh? M-maybe it exists. Maybe there is a Machine to take us away, take us completely, suck us out through the electrodes out of the skull 'n' into the Machine and live there forever with all the other souls it's got stored there. It could decide who it would suck out, a-and when. Dope never gave you immortality. You hadda come back, every time, into a dying hunk of smelly meat! But We can live forever, in a clean, honest, purified Electroworld— —Shit that's what I get, havin' a double Virgo fer a son. . . .
Imipolex G is the first plastic that is actually erectile. Under suitable stimuli, the chains grow cross-links, which stiffen the molecule and increase intermolecular attraction so that this Peculiar Polymer runs far outside the known phase diagrams, from limp rubbery amorphous to amazing perfect tessellation, hardness, brilliant transparency, high resistance to temperature, weather, vacuum, shock of any kind (slowly gleaming in the Void. Silver and black. Curvewarped reflections of stars flowing across, down the full length of, round and round in meridians exact as the meridians of acupuncture. What are the stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing? Shadows of the creature's bones and ducts— leaky, wounded, irradiated white—mingling in with its own. It is entangled with the bones and ducts, its own shape determined by how the Erection of the Plastic shall proceed: where fast and where slow, where painful and where slithery-cool . . . whether areas shall exchange characteristics of hardness and brilliance, whether some areas should be allowed to flow over the surface so that the passage will be a caress, where to orchestrate sudden discontinuities—blows, wrenchings—in among these more caressive moments). Evidently the stimulus would have had to be electronic. Alternatives for signaling to the plastic surface were limited:
What has been inserted or What has actually grown itself a skin of Imipolex G, depending which heresy you embrace. We need not dwell here on the Primary Problem, namely that everything below the plastic film does after all lie in the Region of Uncertainty, except to emphasize to beginning students who may be prone to Schwärmerei, that terms referring to the Subimipolexity such as "Core" and "Center of Internal Energy" possess, outside the theoretical, no more reality than do terms such as "Supersonic Region" or "Center of Gravity" in other areas of Science), (c) alternatively, the projection, onto the Surface, of an electronic "image," analogous to a motion picture. This would require a minimum of three projectors, and perhaps more. Exactly how many is shrouded in another order of uncertainty: the so-called Otyiyumbu Indeterminacy Relation ("Probable functional derangement yR resulting from physical modification D D D D D D D Meantime, Tchitcherine has found it necessary to abandon his smegma-gathering stake-out on the Argentine anarchists. The heat, alias Nikolai Ripov of the Commissariat for Intelligence Activities, is in town and closing in. The faithful Dzabajev, in terror or disgust, has gone off across the cranberry bogs on a long wine binge with two local derelicts, and may never be back. Rumor sez he is cutting a swath these days across the Zone in a stolen American Special Services getup, posing as Frank Sinatra. Comes into town finds a tavern and starts crooning out on the sidewalk, pretty soon there's a crowd, sub-deb cuties each a $65 fine and worth every penny dropping in epilep-tiform seizures into selfless heaps of cable-stitching, rayon pleats and Xmastree applique. It works. It's always good for free wine, an embarrassment of wine, rolling Fuder and Fass in a rumbling country procession through the sandy streets, wherever the Drunkards Three find themselves. Never occurs to anybody to ask what Frank Sinatra's doing flanked by this pair of wasted rumdurns. Nobody doubts for a minute that it is Sinatra. Town hepcats usually take the other two for a comedy team. While nobles are crying in their nights' chains, the squires sing. The terrible politics of the Grail can never touch them. Song is the magic cape. Tchitcherine understands that he is finally alone now. Whatever is to find him will find him alone. He feels obliged to be on the move, though there's noplace for him to go. Now, too late, the memory of Wimpe, longago IG Farben V-Mann, finds him. Tags along for the run. Tchitcherine was hoping he might find a dog. A dog would have been ideal, a perfect honesty to calibrate his own against, day to day, till the end. A dog would have been good to have along. But maybe the next best thing is an albatross with no curse attached: an amiable memory. Young Tchitcherine was the one who brought up political narcotics. Opiates of the people. Wimpe smiled back. An old, old smile to chill even the living fire in Earth's core. "Marxist dialectics? That's not an opiate, eh?" "It's the antidote." "No." It can go either way. The dope salesman may know everything that's ever going to happen to Tchitcherine, and decide it's no use—or, out of the moment's velleity, lay it right out for the young fool. "The basic problem," he proposes, "has always been getting other people to die for you. What's worth enough for a man to give up his life? That's where religion had the edge, for centuries. Religion was always about death. It was used not as an opiate so much as a technique—it got people to die for one particular set of beliefs about death. Perverse, natürlich, but who are you to judge? It was a good pitch while it worked. But ever since it became impossible to die for death, we have had a secular version—yours. Die to help History grow to its predestined shape. Die knowing your act will bring a good end a bit closer. Revolutionary suicide, fine. But look: if History's changes are inevitable, why not not die? Vaslav? If it's going to happen anyway, what does it matter?" "But you haven't ever had the choice to make, have you." "If I ever did, you can be sure—" "You don't know. Not till you're there, Wimpe. You can't say." "That doesn't sound very dialectical." "I don't know what it is." "Then, right up till the point of decision," Wimpe curious but careful, "a man could still be perfectly pure ..." "He could be anything. / don't care. But he's only real at the points of decision. The time between doesn't matter." "Real to a Marxist." "No. Real to himself." Wimpe looks doubtful. "I've been there. You haven't." Shh, shh. A syringe, a number 26 point. Bloods stifling in the brownwood hotel suite. To chase or worry this argument is to become word-enemies, and neither man really wants to. Oneirine theophos-phate is one way around the problem. (Tchitcherine: "You mean thio-phosphate, don't you?" Thinks indicating the presence of sulfur. . . . Wimpe: "I mean ífoophosphate, Vaslav," indicating the Presence of God.) They shoot up: Wimpe eying the water-tap nervously, recalling Tchaikovsky, salmonella, a fast medley of whistlable tunes from the Pathétique. But Tchitcherine has eyes only for the point, its German precision, its fine steel grain. Soon he will come to know a circuit of aid stations and field hospitals, as good for postwar nostalgia as a circuit of peacetime spas—army surgeons and dentists will bond and hammer patent steel for life into his suffering flesh, and pick out what has entered it by violence with an electromagnetic device bought between the wars from Schumann of Düsseldorf, with a light bulb and adjustable reflector, 2-axis locking handles and a complete set of weird-shaped Polschuhen, iron pieces to modify the shape of the magnetic field . . . but there in Russia, that night with Wimpe, was his first taste—his initiation into the bodyhood of steel ... no way to separate this from the theophosphate, to separate vessels of steel from the ungodly insane rush. . . . For 15 minutes the two of them run screaming all over the suite, staggering around in circles, lined up with the rooms' diagonals. There is in Laszlo Jamf's celebrated molecule a particular twist, the so-called "Pokier singularity," occurring in a certain crippled indole ring, which later Oneirinists, academician and working professional alike, are generally agreed is responsible for the hallucinations which are unique to this drug. Not only audiovisual, they touch all senses, equally. And they recur. Certain themes, "mantic archetypes" (as Jolli-fox of the Cambridge School has named them), will find certain individuals again and again, with a consistency which has been well demonstrated in the laboratory (see Wobb and Whoaton, "Mantic Archetype Distribution Among Middle-Class University Students," J. Oneir. Psy. Pharm., XXIII, pg. 406-453). Because analogies with the ghost-life exist, this recurrence phenomenon is known, in the jargon, as "haunting." Whereas other sorts of hallucinations tend to flow by, related in deep ways that aren't accessible to the casual dopefiend, these Oneirine hauntings show a definite narrative continuity, as clearly as, say, the average Reader's Digest article. Often they are so ordinary, so conventional—Jeaach calls them "the dullest hallucinations known to psychopharmacology"—that they are only recognized as hauntings through some radical though plausible violation of possibility: the presence of the dead, journeys by the same route and means where one person will set out later but arrive earlier, a printed diagram which no amount of light will make readable. . . . On recognizing that he is being haunted, the subject enters immediately into "phase two," which, though varying in intensity from subject to subject, is always disagreeable: often sedation (0.6 mg atropine subcut.) will be necessary, even though Oneirine is classified as a CNS depressant. Yüklə 3,05 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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is directly proportional to a higher power p of sub-imipolectic derangement yB, p being not necessarily an integer and determined empirically"), in which subscript R is for Rakete, and B for Blicero.