Penguin books

They get separated in a crowd of newly-risen roisterers. There is hardly a thing now in Slothrop's head but getting to Bianca. At the end of the passageway, across a score of empty faces, he spots Stefania in white cardigan and slacks, beckoning. It takes him five minutes to thread his way to her, by which time he's picked up a brandy Alexander, a party hat, a sign taped to his back urging whoever reads it, in Low Pomeranian, to kick Slothrop, lipstick smudges in three shades of magenta, and a black Italian maduro someone has thoughtfully already lit.

"You may look like the soul of conviviality," Stefania greets him, "but it doesn't fool me. Under that cheerful mask is the face of a Jonah."

"You mean, uh, the, uh—"

"I mean Margherita. She's locked herself in the head. Hysterical. Nobody can bring her out."

"So you're looking at me. How about Thanatz?"

"Thanatz has disappeared, and so has Bianca."

"Oh, shit."

"Margherita thinks you've done away with her."

"Not me." He gives her a quick rundown of Ensign Morituri's tale. Some of her elan, her resilience, go away. She bites a fingernail.

"Yes, there were rumors. Sigmund, before he vanished, leaked just enough to titillate people, but never got specific. That was his style. Listen, Slothrop. Do you think Bianca's in any danger?"

"I'll try to find out." He is interrupted here by a swift kick in the ass.

"Unlucky you," crows a voice behind them. "I'm the only one on board who reads Low Pomeranian."

"Unlucky you," Stefania nods.

"All I wanted was a free ride to Swinemünde."

But like Stefania sez, "There's only one free ride. Meantime, start working off the fare for this one. Go see Margherita."

"You want me to—come on."

"We don't want anything to happen."

One of the General Orders aboard this vessel. Nothing shall happen. Well, Slothrop politely sticks the rest of his cigar between Mme. Procalowska's teeth and leaves her puffing on it, fists jammed in her sweater pockets.

Bianca isn't in the engine room. He moves around in pulsing bulb-light, among asbestos-packed masses, burning himself once or twice where insulation's missing, looking into pale recesses, shadows, wondering about his own insulation here. Nothing but machinery, noise. He heads for the ladder. A scrap of red is waiting for him . . . no, only her frock, with a damp trace of his own semen still at the hem . . . this loud humidity has kept it there. He crouches, holding the garment, smelling her smell. I'm a child, I know how to hide, and I can hide you. "Bianca," he calls, "Bianca, come out."

Gathered about the door to the head, he finds an assortment of upper-class layabouts and drunks blocking the passageway along with a litter of bottles and glassware, and a seated circle of cocaine habitues, crystal birds flying up into forests of nose hair off the point of a gold and ruby dagger. Slothrop pushes through, leans on the door and calls Margherita's name.

"Go away."

"You don't have to come out. Just let me in."

"I know who you are."

"Please."

"They were very clever, sending you as poor Max. But it won't work now."

"I'm through with Them. I swear it. I need you, Greta." Bullshit. For what?

"They'll kill you, then. Go away."

"I know where Bianca is."

"What have you done with her?"

"Just—will you let me in?" After a full minute's silence, she does. A funseeker or two tries to push in, but he slams the door and locks it

again. Greta is wearing nothing but a black chemise. Strokes of black hair curl high on her thighs. Her face is white, old, strained.

"Where is she?"

"Hiding."

"From me?"

"From Them."

A quick look at him. Too many mirrors, razors, scissors, lights. Too white. "But you're one of Them."

"Quit it, you know I'm not."

"You are. You came up out of the river."

"Well, that's cause I fell in, Greta."

"Then They made you."

He watches her playing, nervous, with strands of her hair. The Anubis has begun to rock some, but the sickness rising in him is for his head, not his stomach. As she begins to talk, nausea begins to fill him: a glowing black mudslide of nausea. ...

D D D D D D D

It was always easy for men to come and tell her who to be. Other girls of her generation grew up asking, "Who am I?" For them it was a question full of pain and struggle. For Gretel it was hardly even a question. She had more identities than she knew what to do with. Some of these Gretels have been only the sketchiest of surfaces—others are deeper. Many have incredible gifts, antigravity, dreams of prophecy . . . comatic images surround their faces, glowing in the air: the light itself is actually crying tears, weeping in this stylized way, as she is borne along through the mechanical cities, the meteorite walls draped in midair, every hollow and socket empty as a bone, and the failing shadow that shines black all around it ... or is held in staring postures, long gowns, fringe and alchemical symbol, veils flowing from leather skullcaps padded concentric as a bike-racer's helmet, with crackling-tower and obsidian helix, with drive belts and rollers, with strange airship passages that thread underneath arches, solemnly, past louvers and giant fins in the city mist. . . .

In Weisse Sandwüste von Neumexiko she played a cowgirl. First thing, they'd asked, "Can you ride?" "Of course," she'd answered. Never been closer than roadside ditches in time of war to any horse in her life, but she needed the work. When the moment came to saddle

up, it never occurred to her to be afraid of the beast pressing up between her thighs. It was an American horse named Snake. Trained or not, it could have run away with her, even killed her. But they pranced the screen full of the Sagittarian fire, Gretel and that colt, and her smile never drew back.

Here is one of the veils she has shed, a thin white scum, a caustic residue from one recent night in Berlin. "While you were asleep, I left the house. I went out in the street, without my shoes. I found a corpse. A man. A week's gray beard and old gray suit. . . ." It was lying still and very white behind a wall. She lay down beside it and put her arms around it. There was frost. The body rolled toward her and the wrinkles stayed frozen in the cloth. She felt its bristled face rub her own cheek. The smell was no worse than cold meat from the icebox. She lay, holding it, till morning.

"Tell me how it is in your land." What woke her? Boots in the street, an early steamshovel. She can hardly hear her tired whispering.

Corpse answers: "We live very far beneath the black mud. Days of traveling." Though she couldn't move its limbs easily as a doll's, she could make it say and think exactly what she wished.

For an instant too she did wonder—not quite in words—if that's how her own soft mind might feel, under the fingers of Those who . . .

"Mm, it's snug down here. Now and then you can pick up something from Them—a distant rumbling, the implied silhouette of some explosion, conducted here through the earth overhead . . . but nothing, ever, too close. It's so dark that things glow. We have flight. There's no sex. But there are fantasies, even many of those we used to attach to sex—that we once modulated its energy with. . . ."

As the dizzy debutante Lotte Lüstig, she found herself during a flood, disguised as a scrubwoman, proceeding downriver in a bathtub with rich playboy Max Schlepzig. Every girl's dream. Name of the movie was Jugend Herauf! (a lighthearted pun, of course, on the then popular phrase "Juden heraus!"). Actually, all the bathtub scenes were process shots—she never did get to go out on the river in the bathtub with Max, all that was done with doubles, and in the final print it survives only as a very murky long shot. The figures are darkened and deformed, resembling apes, and the quality of the light is peculiar, as if the whole scene were engraved on a dark metal such as lead. Greta's double was actually an Italian stunt man named Blazzo in a long blonde wig. They carried on a romance

for a while. But Greta wouldn't go to bed with him, unless he wore that wig!

Out on the river the rain lashes: the rapids can now be heard approaching, still impossible to see, but real, and inevitable. And the doubles both experience an odd, ticklish fear now that perhaps they are really lost, and that there is really no camera on shore behind the fine gray scribbling of willows ... all the crew, sound-men, grips, gaffers have left ... or never even arrived . . . and what was that the currents just brought to knock against our snow-white cockle shell? and what was that thud, so stiffened and so mute?

Bianca is usually silver, or of no color at all: thousands of times taken, strained through glass, warped in and out the violet-bleeding interfaces of Double and Triple Protars, Schneider Angulons, Voigtländer Collínears, Steinheil Orthostigmats, the Gundlach Turner-Reichs of 1895. For Greta it is her daughter's soul each time, an inexhaustible soul. . . . This scarf of an only child, tucked in waist-high, always out vulnerable to the wind. To call her an extension of her mother's ego is of course to invite the bitterest sarcasm. But it's possible, now and then, for Greta to see Bianca in other children, ghostly as a double exposure . . . clearly yes very clearly in Gottfried, the young pet and protege of Captain Blicero.

"Pull down my straps for a moment. Is it dark enough? Look. Thanatz said they were luminous. That he knew each one by heart. They're very white today, aren't they? Hmm. Long and white, like cobwebs. They're on my ass too. Around the ínsides of my thighs. . . ." Many times, afterward, after the blood had stopped and he had put on the alcohol, Thanatz would sit with her lying across his knees, and read the scars down her back, as a gypsy reads a palm. Life-scar, heart-scar. Croix mystique. What fortunes and fantasies! He was so exalted, after the whippings. So taken away by the idea that they would win out, escape. He'd fall asleep before the wildness and hope had quite left him. She loved him most at those moments, just before sleep, her own dorsal side aflame, his little head heavy on her breast, while scar-tissue formed silently on her, cell by cell, in the night. She felt almost safe. . . .

Each time the lash struck, each attack, in her helplessness to escape, there would come to her a single vision, on]y one, for each peak of pain. The Eye at the top of the pyramid. The sacrificial city, with figures in rust-colored robes. The dark woman waiting at the end of

the street. The hooded face of sorrowing Denmark, leaning out over Germany. The cherry-red coals falling through the night. Bianca in a Spanish dancer's costume, stroking the barrel of a gun. . . .

Out by one rocket site, in the pine woods, Thanatz and Gretel found an old road that no one used any more. Pieces of pavement were visible here and there among the green underbrush. It seemed that if they followed the road they would come to a town, a station or outpost ... it wasn't at all clear what they would find. But the place would be long deserted.

They held hands. Thanatz wore an old jacket of green suede, with patches on the sleeves. Gretel wore her camel's-hair coat and a white kerchief. In places, pine needles were drifted across the old roadway, so deep as to silence their footsteps.

They came to a slide where years ago the road had been washed away. Gravel spilled salt-and-pepper downhill toward a river they heard but couldn't see. An old automobile, a Hannomag Storm, hung there, nose-down, one door smashed open. The lavender-gray metal shell had been picked clean as the skeleton of a deer. Somewhere in these woods was the presence that had done this. They skirted the wreck, afraid to come too near the spidered glass, the hard mortality in the shadows of the front seat.

Remains of houses could be glimpsed, back in the trees. There was now a retreat of the light, though it was still before noon, and the forest grew no thicker here. In the middle of the road, giant turds showed up, fresh, laid in twists like strands of rope—dark and knotted. What could have left them?

At the same instant, she and Thanatz both realized that for hours now they must have been walking through the ruin of a great city, not an ancient ruin, but brought down inside their lifetime. Ahead of them, the path curved on, into trees. But something stood now between them and whatever lay around the curve: invisible, impalpable . . . some monitor. Saying, "Not one step farther. That's all. Not one. Go back now."

It was impossible to move any farther into it. They were both terrified. They turned, feeling it at their backs, and moved away quickly.

Back at the Schußstelle they found Blicero in his final madness. The trunks in the cold little clearing were stripped of bark, bleeding with beads of gum from the rocket blasts.

"He could have banished us. Blicero was a local deity. He wouldn't even have needed a piece of paper. But he wanted us all to stay. He gave us the best there was, beds, food, liquor, drugs. Something was being planned, it involved the boy Gottfried, that was as unmistakable as the smell of resin, first thing those blue hazy mornings. But Blicero would tell us nothing.

"We moved into the Heath. There were oilfields, and blackened earth. Jabos flew over in diamond shapes, hunting us. Blicero had grown on, into another animal... a werewolf. . . but with no humanity left in its eyes: that had faded out, day after day, and been replaced by gray furrows, red veins in patterns that weren't human. Islands: clotted islands in the sea. Sometimes even the topographic lines, nested on a common point. 'It is the map of my Ur-Heimat,' imagine a shriek so quiet it's almost a whisper, 'the Kingdom of Lord Blicero. A white land.' I had a sudden understanding: he was seeing the world now in mythical regions: they had their maps, real mountains, rivers, and colors. It was not Germany he moved through. It was his own space. But he was taking us along with him! My cunt swelled with blood at the danger, the chances for our annihilation, delicious never knowing when it would come down because the space and time were Blicero's own. . . . He did not fall back along roads, he did not cross bridges or lowlands. We sailed Lower Saxony, island to island. Each firing-site was another island, in a white sea. Each island had its peak in the center ... was it the position of the Rocket itself? the moment of liftoff? A German Odyssey. Which one would be the last, the home island?

"I keep forgetting to ask Thanatz whatever became of Gottfried. Thanatz was allowed to stay with the battery. But I was taken away: driven in a Hispano-Suiza with Blicero himself, out through the gray weather to a petrochemical plant that for days had stalked us in a wheel at our horizon, black and broken towers in the distance, clustered together, a flame that always burned at the top of one stack. It was the Castle: Blicero looked over, about to speak, and I said, 'The Castle.' The mouth smiled quickly, but absent: the wrinkled wolf-eyes had gone even beyond these domestic moments of telepathy, on into its animal north, to a persistence on the hard edge of death I can't imagine, tough cells with the smallest possible flicker inside, running on nothing but ice, or less. He called me Katje. 'You'll see that your little trick won't work again. Not now, Katje.' I wasn't frightened. It was madness I could understand, or else the hallucinating of the very old. The silver stork flew wings-down into our wind, brow low and legs back, Prussian occipital knot behind: on its shiny surfaces now appeared black swirls of limousines and staff cars in the driveway of the main office. I saw a light plane, a two-seater, at the edge of the parking

lot. The faces of the men inside seemed familiar. I knew them from films, the power and the gravity were there—they were important men, but I only recognized one: Generaldirektor Smaragd, from Le-verkusen. An elderly man who used a cane, a notorious spiritualist before the War, and, it seemed, even now. 'Greta,' he smiled, groping for my hand. 'Ah, we're all here.' But his charm was shared by none of the others. They'd all been waiting for Blicero. A meeting of nobles in the Castle. They went into the board room. I was left with an assistant named Drohne, high forehead, graying hair, always fussing with his necktie. He'd seen every one of my films. We moved off into the machinery. Through the windows of the board room I saw them at a round conference table, with something in the center. It was gray, plastic, shining, light moving on its surfaces. 'What is it?' I asked, vamping Drohne. He took me out of earshot of the others. 'I think it's for the F-Gerät,'he whispered."

"F?" sez Slothrop, "F-Gerät, you sure of that?"

"Some letter."

"S?"

"All right, S. They are children at the threshold of language with these words they make up. It looked to me like an ectoplasm—something they had forced, by their joint will, to materialize on the table. No one's lips were moving. It was a seance. I understood then that Blicero had brought me across a frontier. Had injected me at last into his native space without a tremor of pain. I was free. Men crowded behind me in the corridor, blocking the way back. Drohne's hand was sweating on my sleeve. He was a plastics connoisseur. Flipping his fingernail against a large clear African mask, cocking his ear—'Can you hear it? The true ring of Polystyrene . . .' and going into raptures for me over a heavy chalice of methyl methacrylate, a replica of the San-graal. . . . We were by a tower reactor. A strong paint-thinner smell was in the air. Clear rods of some plastic came hissing out through an extruder at the bottom of the tower, into cooling channels, or into a chopper. The heat was heavy in the room. I thought of something very deep, black and viscous, feeding this factory. From outside I heard motors. Were they all leaving? Why was I here? Plastic serpents crawled endlessly to left and right. The erections of my escort tried to crawl out the openings in their clothes. I could do whatever I wanted. Black radiant and deep. I knelt and began unbuttoning Drohne's trousers. But two others took me by the arms and dragged me off into a warehouse area. Others followed, or entered from other doors. Great curtains of styrene or vinyl, in all colors, opaque and transparent, hung

row after row from overhead. They flared like the northern lights. I felt that somewhere beyond them was an audience, waiting for something to begin. Drohne and the men stretched me out on an inflatable plastic mattress. All around, I watched a clear crumbling of the air, or of the light. Someone said 'butadiene,' and I heard beauty dying.... Plastic rustled and snapped around us, closing us in, in ghost white. They took away my clothes and dressed me in an exotic costume of some black polymer, very tight at the waist, open at the crotch. It felt alive on me. 'Forget leather, forget satin,' shivered Drohne. 'This is Imipolex, the material of the future.' I can't describe its perfume, or how it felt— the luxury. The moment it touched them it brought my nipples up swollen and begging to be bitten. I wanted to feel it against my cunt. Nothing I ever wore, before or since, aroused me quite as much as Imipolex. They promised me brassieres, chemises, stockings, gowns of the same material. Drohne had strapped on a gigantic Imipolex penis over his own. I rubbed my face against it, it was so delicious. . . . There was an abyss between my feet. Things, memories, no way to distinguish them any more, went tumbling downward through my head. A torrent. I was evacuating all these, out into some void . . . from my vertex, curling, bright-colored hallucinations went streaming . . . baubles, amusing lines of dialogue, objets d'art ... I was letting them all go. Holding none. Was this 'submission,' then—letting all these go?

"I don't know how long they kept me there. I slept, I woke. Men appeared and vanished. Time had lost meaning. One morning I was outside the factory, naked, in the rain. Nothing grew there. Something had been deposited in a great fan that went on for miles. Some tarry kind of waste. I had to walk all the way back to the firing site. They were all gone. Thanatz had left a note, asking me to try to get to Swinemünde. Something must have happened at the site. There was a silence in that clearing I'd felt only once before. Once, in Mexico. The year I was in America. We were very deep in the jungle. We came on a flight of stone steps, covered with vines, fungus, centuries of decay. The others climbed to the top, but I couldn't. It was the same as the day with Thanatz, in the pine forest. I felt a silence waiting for me up there. Not for them, but for me alone . . . my own personal silence. ..."

D D D D D D D

Up on the bridge of the Anubìs, the storm paws loudly on the glass, great wet flippers falling at random in out of the night whap! the living

shape visible just for the rainbow edge of the sound—it takes a certain kind of maniac, at least a Polish cavalry officer, to stand in this pose behind such brittle thin separation, and stare each blow full in its muscularity. Behind Procalowski the clinometer bob goes to and fro with his ship's rolling: a pendulum in a dream. Stormlight has turned the lines of his face black, black as his eyes, black as the watchcap cocked so tough and salty aslant the furrows of his forehead. Light clusters, clear, deep, on the face of the radio gear . . . fans up softly off the dial of the pelorus . . . spills out portholes onto the white river. Inexplicably, the afternoon has been going on for longer than it should. Daylight has been declining for too many hours. Corposants have begun to flicker now in the rigging. The storm yanks at rope and cable, the cloudy night goes white and loud, in huge spasms. Procalowski smokes a cigar and studies charts of the Oder Haff.

All this light. Are the Russian lookouts watching from shore, waiting in the rain? Is this arm of the passage being kept in grease-pencil, X by dutiful X, across some field of Russian plastic, inside where cobwebs whiten the German windows nobody needs to stand at, where phosphor grass ripples across the A-scopes and the play you feel through the hand-crank in the invisible teeth is the difference between hit and miss. . . . Vaslav—is the pip you see there even a ship? In the Zone, in these days, there is endless simulation—standing waves in the water, large drone-birds, so well-known as to have nicknames among the operators, wayward balloons, flotsam from other theatres of war (Brazilian oildrums, whisky cases stenciled for Fort-Lamy), observers from other galaxies, episodes of smoke, moments of high albedo— your real targets are hard to come by. Too much confusion out here . for most replacements and late draftees. Only the older scope hands can still maintain a sense of the appropriate: over the watches of their Durations, jittering electric green for what must have seemed, at first, forever, they have come to understand distribution . . . they have learned a visual mercy.

How probable is the Anubis in this estuary tonight? Its schedule has lapsed, fashionably, unavoidably: it should have been through Swinemünde weeks ago, but the Vistula was under Soviet interdiction to the white ship. The Russians even had a guard posted on board for a while, till the Anubian ladies vamped them off long enough to single up all lines—and so the last long reprise of Polish homeland was on, across these water-meadows of the north, radio messages following them in clear one day and code the next, an early and shapeless situation, dithering between executioner's silence and the Big Time. There

are international reasons for an Anubis Affair right now, and also reasons against, and the arguments go on, too remote to gather, and orders are changed hour to hour.