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"Yup." Slothrop goes on dousing his face with bay rum.

"Oh, Margherita had her corrupted long before she came to stay with us. I wouldn't be surprised if little Bianca sleeps with Karel tonight. Part of breaking into the business, isn't it? Of course it will have to be all business—that's the least a mother can do. Margherita's problem was that she always enjoyed it too much, chained up in those torture rooms. She couldn't enjoy it any other way. You'll see. She and Thanatz. And whatever Thanatz brought in his valise."

"Thanatz."

"Ah, she didn't tell you." Laughing. "Miklos Thanatz, her husband. They get together off and on. Toward the end of the war they had a little touring show for the boys at the front—a lesbian couple, a dog, a trunk of leather costumes and implements, a small band. They entertained the SS troops. Concentration camps . . . the barbed-wire circuit, you know. And then later, in Holland, out at the rocket sites. This is the first time since the surrender they've been together, so I wouldn't actually expect to see too much of her. ..."

"Oh, yeah, well, I didn't know that." Rocket sites? The hand of Providence creeps among the stars, giving Slothrop the finger.

"While they were away, they left Bianca with us, at Bydgoszcz. She has her bitchy moments but she's really a charming child. I never played the father game with her. I doubt she had a father. It was parthenogenesis, she's pure Margherita, if pure is the word I want."

The evening clothes fit perfectly. Stefania leads Slothrop up a companionway and out on deck. The Anubis moves now through starlit countryside, the horizon broken now and then by silhouettes of a windmill, haycocks, a row of pig arks, some line of trees set on a low hill for the wind. . . . There are ships we can dream across terrible rapids, against currents . . . our desire is wind and motor. . . .

"Antoni." She has brought Slothrop to an enormous figure in Polish cavalry fatigues and with a lot of maniacal teeth.

"American?" pumping Slothrop's hand. "Bravo. You nearly complete the set. We are the ship of all nations now. We've even got a Japanese on board. An ex-liaison man from Berlin who didn't quite get

out by way of Russia. You'll find a bar on the next deck. Anything wandering around"—hugging Stefania to him—"except this one, is fair game."

Slothrop salutes, gathers they would like to be alone, and finds the ladder to the bar. The bar is hung with festive garlands of flowers and light bulbs, and crowded with dozens of elegantly-decked guests, who have just now, with the band accompanying, broken into this uptempo song:

welcome aboard!

Welcome aboard, gee, it's a fabulous or-gy

That you just dropped in on, my friend—

We can't recall just how it star-ted,

But there's only one way it can end!

The behavior is bestial, hardly Marie-Celestial,

But you'll fit right in with the crowd,

If you jettison all of those prob-lems,

And keep it hysterically loud!

There are mo-thers, with their lo-vers,

Stealing rot-ters, from their daught-ers,

Big erec-tions, predilec-tions

That you wouldn't believe,

So put your brain on your sleeve,

And come a-

board the Titanic, things'll really be manic, Folks'll panic the second that sunken iceberg is knocked, Naughty 'n' noisy, and very Walpurgisnacht, That's how the party will end, So—welcome aboard, welcome aboard, my friend!

Well here's couples moaning together in the lifeboats, a drunk's gone to sleep in the awning over Slothrop's head, fat fellows in white gloves with pink magnolias in their hair are dancing tummy-to-tummy and murmuring together in Wendish. Hands grope down inside satin gowns. Waiters with brown skins and doe eyes circulate with trays on which you are likely to find any number of substances and paraphernalia. The band is playing a medley of American fox-trots. The Baron de Mallakastra sifts a sinister white powder into the highball of Mme. Sztup. It is the same old shit that was going on back at Raoul de la Perlimpinpin's place, and for all Slothrop knows it's the same party.

He gets a glimpse of Margherita and her daughter, but there is a

density of orgy-goers around them that keeps him at a distance. He knows he's vulnerable, more than he should be, to pretty little girls, so he reckons it's just as well, because that Bianca's a knockout, all right: 11 or 12, dark and lovely, wearing a red chiffon gown, silk stockings and high-heeled slippers, her hair swept up elaborate and flawless and interwoven with a string of pearls to show pendant earrings of crystal twinkling from her tiny lobes . . . help, help. Why do these things have to keep coming down on him? He can see the obit now in Time magazine—Died, Rocketman, pushing 30, in the Zone, of lust.

The woman who tried to chop Slothrop down with the cleaver is now seated on a bitt, holding a half-liter of some liquid which has already seeped into and begun to darken the orchid garnishing it. She is telling everybody a story about Margherita. Her hair has been combed or styled in a way that makes it look like a certain cut of meat. Slothrop's drink, nominally Irish whisky and water, arrives and he moves in to listen.

". . . her Neptune is afflicted. Whose isn't? some will ask. Ah. But as residents on this planet, usually. Greta lived, most of the time, on Neptune—her affliction was more direct, purer, clearer than we know it here.

"She found Oneirine on a day when her outpost in England, the usual connection for Chlordyne, failed. Beside the Thames, as geraniums of light floated in the sky too slow to tell—brass light, tanned-skin and mellow peach light, stylized blooms being drafted on and on among the clouds, to fade here, to regenerate there—as this happened to the day's light, he fell. A fall of hours, less extravagant than Lucifer's, but in the same way part of a deliberate pattern. Greta was meant to find Oneirine. Each plot carries its signature. Some are God's, some masquerade as God's. This is a very advanced kind of forgery. But still there's the same meanness and mortality to it as a falsely made check. It is only more complex. The members have names, like the Archangels. More or less common, humanly-given names whose security can be broken, and the names learned. But those names are not magic. That's the key, that's the difference. Spoken aloud, even with the purest magical intention, they do not work.

"So he fell from their grace. So there was no Chlordyne. So she happened to meet V-Mann Wìmpe in the street, in Berlin, under a theatre marquee whose sentient bulbs may have looked on, a picturesque array of extras, witnesses to grave and historic encounters. So she had come to Oneirine, and the face of her afflicted home planet was rearranged in the instant."

Oneirine Jamf Imipolex A4. ...

"That silly bitch," observes a voice at Slothrop's elbow, "tells it worse every time."

"Beg pardon?" Slothrop looks around and finds Miklos Thanatz, full beard, eyebrows feathering out like trailing edges of hawks' wings, drinking absinthe out of a souvenir stein on which, in colors made ghastly by the carnival lights on deck, bony and giggling Death is about to surprise two lovers in bed.

There is no problem steering him onto the subject of the Rocket— "I think of the A4," sez he, "as a baby Jesus, with endless committees of Herods out to destroy it in infancy—Prussians, some of whom in their innermost hearts still felt artillery to be a dangerous innovation. If you'd been out there . . . inside the first minute, you saw, you grew docile under its ... it really did possess a Max Weber charisma . . . some joyful—and deeply irrational—force the State bureaucracy could never routinize, against which it could not prevail. . . they did resist it, but they also allowed it to happen. We can't imagine anyone choosing a role like that. But every year, somehow, their numbers grow."

But the tour with General Kamrnler's rocketeers is what Slothrop, perversely, wants—wants?—to know about, "Well I've been to that Nordhausen, sure, seen the bits and pieces. But never a fully-assembled A4. That must really be something, huh?"

Thanatz is holding out his stein for a refill. The waiter, deadpan, dribbles water down a spoon to turn the absinthe milky green while Thanatz caresses his buttocks, then moves away. It is not clear if Thanatz has been thinking about his answer. "Yes, fueled, alive, ready for firing . . . fifty feet high, trembling . . . and then the fantastic, virile roar. Your ears nearly burst. Cruel, hard, thrusting into the virgin-blue robes of the sky, my friend. Oh, so phallic. Wouldn't you say?"

"Uh ..."

"Hmm, ja, you would have got on with them out at the batteries, they were sedate, like you. More studious than your infantry or Panzer types, attentive to the point of fanaticism. Oh, with notable exceptions of course. One lives for notable exceptions. . . . There was a boy." Drunk reminiscence? Is he faking this? "His name was Gottfried. God's peace, which I trust he's found. For us I hold no such hope. We are weighed in the balance and found wanting, and the Butcher has had His thumb in the scales . . . you think I'm jaded. So did I, until that terrible week. It was a time of dissolution, falling back across the Niedersächsisch oil fields. Then I understood I was but a dewy child. The battery commander had become a screaming maniac. He called himself 'Blicero.' He'd begun to talk the way the captain in Wozzeck sings, his voice breaking suddenly up into the higher registers of hysteria. Things were falling apart, and he reverted to some ancestral version of himself, screamed at the sky, sat hours in a rigid trance, with his eyes rolled clear up into his head. Breaking without warning into that ungodly coloratura. White blank ovals, the eyes of a statue, with the gray rain behind them. He had left 1945, wired his nerves back into the pre-Christian earth we fled across, into the Urstoff of the primitive German, God's poorest and most panicked creature. You and I perhaps have become over the generations so Christianized, so enfeebled by Gesellschaft and our obligation to its celebrated 'Contract,' which never did exist, that we, even we, are appalled by reversions like that. But deep, out of its silence, the Urstoff wakes, and sings . . . and on the last day ... it is shameful. . . through that whole terrible day, I had an erection . . . don't judge me ... it was out of my control . . . everything was out of control—"

About here they are interrupted by Margherita and Bianca, playing stage mother and reluctant child. Whispers to the bandleader, fun-seekers crowding eagerly around a cleared space where Bianca now stands pouting, her little red frock halfway up her slender thighs, with black lace petticoats peeping from beneath the hem, surely it's going to be something sophisticated, bigcity, and wicked, but what's she doing with her finger posed aside of one dimpled cheek like this—at which point comes the band's intro, and pre-vomit saliva begins to gush into Slothrop's mouth, along with a horrible doubt into his brain about how he is going to make it through the next few minutes.

Not only is her song "On the Good Ship Lollipop," but she is also now commencing, without a trace of shame, to grunt her way through it, in perfect mimickry of young Shirley Temple—each straining baby-pig inflection, each curl-toss, unmotivated smile, and stumbling toe-tap . . . her delicate bare arms have begun to grow fatter, her frock shorter—is somebody fooling with the lights? But the billowings of asexual child-fat have not changed her eyes: they remain as they were, mocking, dark, her own. . . .

Much applause and alcoholic bravo-ing when it's finally over. Thanatz abstains, fatherly head wagging, great eyebrows in a frown. "She's never going to be a woman if this goes on. . . ."

"And now, liebling," Margherita with a rare, and somewhat phony, smile, "let's hear 'Animal Crackers in My Soup'!"

" 'Super Animals in My Crack,' " hollers a humorist from the crowd.

"No," groans the child.

"Bianca—"

"You bitch," spike heel ringing on the steel deck. It's an act. "Haven't you humiliated me enough?"

"Not nearly enough," pouncing on her daughter, grabbing her by the hair and shaking her. The little girl has fallen to her knees, struggling, trying to get away.

"Oh, delightful," cries the meat-cleaver lady, "Greta's going to punish her."

"How I'd like to," murmurs a striking mulatto girl in a strapless gown, pushing forward to watch, tapping Slothrop's cheek with her jeweled cigarette holder as satin haunches whisper across his thigh. Someone has provided Margherita with a steel ruler and an ebony Empire chair. She drags Bianca across her lap, pushing up frock and petticoats, yanking down white lace knickers. Beautiful little-girl buttocks rise like moons. The tender crevice tightens and relaxes, suspender straps shift and stretch as Bianca kicks her legs, silk stockings squeak together, erotic and audible now that the group have fallen silent and found the medium of touch, hands reaching out to breasts and crotches, Adam's apples bobbing, tongues licking lips . . . where's the old masochist and monument Slothrop knew back in Berlin? It's as if Greta is now releasing all the pain she's stored up over the past weeks onto her child's naked bottom, the skin so finely grained that white centimeter markings and numerals are being left in mirror-image against the red stripes with each blow, crisscrossing, building up a skew matrix of pain on Bianca's flesh. Tears go streaming down her inverted and reddening face, mixing with mascara, dripping onto the pale lizard surfaces of her mother's shoes . . . her hair has loosened and spills to the deck, dark, salted with the string of little seed pearls. The mulatto girl has backed up against Slothrop, reaching behind to fondle his erection, which has nothing between it and the outside but somebody's loosely-pleated tuxedo trousers. Everyone is kind of aroused, Thanatz is sitting up on the bar having his own as yet unsheathed penis mouthed by one of the white-gloved Wends. Two of the waiters kneel on deck lapping at the juicy genitals of a blonde in a wine velvet frock, who meantime is licking ardently the tall and shiny French heels of an elderly lady in lemon organza busy fastening felt-lined silver manacles to the wrists of her escort, a major of the Yugoslav artillery in dress uniform, who kneels with nose and tongue well between the bruised buttocks of a long-legged ballerina from Paris, holding up her silk skirt for him with docile fingertips while her com-

panion, a tall Swiss divorcee in tight-laced leather corselette and black Russian boots, undoes the top of her friend's gown and skillfully begins to lash at her bared breasts with the stems of half a dozen roses, red as the beads of blood which spring up and soon are shaking off the ends of her stiff nipples to splash into the eager mouth of another Wend who's being jerked off by a retired Dutch banker sitting on the deck, shoes and socks just removed by two adorable schoolgirls, twin sisters in fact, in identical dresses of flowered voile, with each of the banker's big toes inserted now into a downy little furrow as they lie forward along his legs kissing his shaggy stomach, pretty twin bottoms arched to receive in their anal openings the cocks of the two waiters who have but lately been, if you recall, eating that juicy blonde in that velvet dress back down the Oder River a ways. . . .

As for Slothrop, he ends up coming between the round shuddering tits of a Viennese girl with hair the color of a lioness's pelt and emerald eyes with lashes thick as fur, his sperm surging out into the hollow of her arched throat and among all the diamonds of her necklace, burning agelessly through the haze of his seed—and it feels, at least, like everybody came together, though how could that be? He does notice that the only person not connected, aside from Antoni and Stefa-nia, seems to be the Jap liaison man, who's been sitting alone, one deck up, watching. Not masturbating or anything, just watching, watching the river, the night . . . well, they're pretty inscrutable, you know, those Japs.

There is a general withdrawing from orifices after a while, drinking, doping and gabbing resume, and many begin to drift away to catch some sleep. Here and there a couple or threesome linger. A C-melody saxophone player has the bell of his instrument snuggled between the widespread thighs of a pretty matron in sunglasses, yes sunglasses at night, this is some degenerate company Slothrop has fallen in with all right—the saxman is playing "Chattanooga Choo Choo," and those vibrations are just driving her wild. A girl with an enormous glass dildo inside which baby piranhas are swimming in some kind of decadent lavender medium amuses herself between the buttocks of a stout transvestite in lace stockings and a dyed sable coat. A Montenegran countess is being fucked simultaneously in her chignon and her navel by a pair of octogenarians who wear only jackboots and are carrying on some sort of technical discussion in what seems to be ecclesiatical Latin.

The sun is still hours away, down the vast unreadable underslope of Russia. Fog closes in, and the engines slow. Wrecks slide away un-

der the keel of the white ship. Springtime corpses caught in the wreckage twist and flow as the Anubis moves by overhead. Under the bowsprit, the golden jackal, the only being aboard that can see through the fog, stares ahead, down the river, toward Swinemünde.

D D D D D D D

Slothrop here's been dreaming about Llandudno, where he spent a rainy furlough once drinking bitter in bed with a tug skipper's daughter. Also where Lewis Carroll wrote that Alice in Wonderland. So, they put up a statue of the White Rabbit in Llandudno. White Rabbit's been talking to Slothrop, serious and crucial talk, but on the way up to waking he loses it all, as usual. He lies staring at ducts and raceways overhead, asbestos-covered elbows, pipes, gages, tanks, switchboards, flanges, unions, valve-wheels and all their thickets of shadow. It's noisy as hell. Sunlight filters down the hatches, so that must mean it's morning. In a corner of his vision now, he catches a flutter of red.

"You mustn't tell Margherita. Please." That Bianca. Hair down to her hips, cheeks smudged, eyes hot. "She'll kill me."

"What time is it?"

"The sun's been up for hours. Why do you want to know?"

Why does he want to know. Hmm. Maybe he'll go back to sleep, here. "Your mother upset with you, or something?"

"Oh, she's gone out of her mind, she just accused me of having an affair with Thanatz. Madness, of course we're good friends, but that's all... if she paid any attention to me she'd know that."

"She sure was paying attention to your ass there, kid."

"Oh, dear," lifting her dress, turning so she can also watch Slothrop back over a shoulder. "I can still feel that. Did she leave marks?"

"Well, you'll have to come closer."

She moves toward him, smiling, pointing toes each step. "I watched you sleep. You're very pretty, you know. Mother also said you're cruel."

"Watch this." He leans to bite her gently on one cheek of her ass. She squirms, but doesn't move away.

"Mm. There's a zipper there, could you . . ." She shrugs, twists as he unzips her, red taffeta slides down and off and sure enough there's one or two lavender bruises starting to show up on her bottom, which is perfectly shaped, smooth as cream. Small as she is, she's been further laced into a tiny black corset, which compresses her waist now to the diameter of a brandy bottle and pushes pre-subdeb breasts up into little white crescents. Satin straps, adorned with intricately pornographic needlework, run down each thigh to hold up stockings with tops of dark Alençon lace. The bare backs of her legs come brushing softly across Slothrop's face. He starts taking giant, ass-enthusiast bites now, meantime reaching around to play with cuntlips and clit, Bianca's little feet shifting in a nervous dance and scarlet nails digging sharp as needles underneath her stocking tops and into her legs as he goes planting hickeys, red nebulae across her sensitive spaces. She smells like soap, flowers, sweat, cunt. Her long hair falls to the level of Slothrop's eyes, fine and black, the split ends whispering across the small of her white back in and out of invisibility, like rain . . . she has turned, and sinks to her knees to undo his pleated trousers. Leaning, brushing hair back behind her ears, the little girl takes the head of Slothrop's cock into her rouged mouth. Her eyes glitter through fern lashes, baby rodent hands race his body unbuttoning, caressing. Such a slender child: her throat swallowing, strummed to a moan as he grabs her hair, twists it . .. she has him all figured out. Knows exactly when to take her mouth away and stand up, high-heeled Parisian slippers planted to either side of him, swaying, hair softly waving forward to frame her face, repeated by the corset darkly framing her pubic mound and belly. Raising bare arms, little Bianca lifts her long hair, tosses her little head to let the mane shiver down her back, needle-tipped fingers drifting then down slowly, making him wait, down over the satin, all the shiny hooks and laces, to her thighs. Then her face, round with baby-fat, enormous night-shadowed eyes comes swooping in as she kneels, guides his penis into her and settles slow, excruciating till he fills her, stuffs her full. . . .

Now something, oh, kind of funny happens here. Not that Slothrop is really aware of it now, while it's going on—but later on, it will occur to him that he was—this may sound odd, but he was somehow, actually, well, inside his own cock. If you can imagine such a thing. Yes, inside the metropolitan organ entirely, all other colonial tissue forgotten and left to fend for itself, his arms and legs it seems woven among vessels and ducts, his sperm roaring louder and louder, getting ready to erupt, somewhere below his feet . . . maroon and evening cuntlight reaches him in a single ray through the opening at the top, refracted through the clear juices flowing up around him. He is en-

closed. Everything is about to come, come incredibly, and he's helpless here in this exploding emprise . . . red flesh echoing ... an extraordinary sense of waiting to rise. . . .

She posts, his pretty horsewoman, face to the overhead, quivering up and down, thightop muscles strung hard as cable, baby breasts working out the top of her garment. . . Slothrop pulls Bianca to him by her nipples and bites each one very hard. Sliding her arms around his neck, hugging him, she starts to come, and so does he, their own flood taking him up then out of his expectancy, out the eye at tower's summit and into her with a singular detonation of touch. Announcing the void, what could it be but the kingly voice of the Aggregat itself?

Somewhere in their lying-still are her heart, buffeting, a chickadee in the snow, her hair, draping and sheltering both their faces, little tongue at his temples and eyes on and on, silk legs rubbing his flanks, cool leather of her shoes against his legs and ankles, shoulderblades rising like wings whenever she hugs him. What happened back there? Slothrop thinks he might cry.

They have been holding each other. She's been talking about hiding out.

"Sure. But we'll have to get off sometime, Swinemünde, someplace."

"No. We can get away. I'm a child, I know how to hide. I can hide you too."

He knows she can. He knows. Right here, right now, under the makeup and the fancy underwear, she exists, love, invisibility. . . . For Slothrop this is some discovery.

But her arms about his neck are shifting now, apprehensive. For good reason. Sure he'll stay for a while, but eventually he'll go, and for this he is to be counted, after all, among the Zone's lost. The Pope's staff is always going to remain barren, like Slothrop's own unflowering cock.