GRAVITY RAINBOW (123 page)

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…

some characteristics of imipolex G

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:

(a) a thin matrix of wires, forming a rather close-set coordinate

system over the Imipolectic Surface, whereby erectile and other com

mands could be sent to an area quite specific, say on the order of

'/
₂
cm
²
,

(b) a beam-scanning system-or several-analogous to the well-

known video electron stream, modulated with grids and deflection

plates located as needed on the Surface (or even below the outer layer

of Imipolex, down at the interface with What lies just beneath: with

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 Schwarmerei, 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 y
_R
resulting from physical modification
is directly proportional to a higher power
p
of sub-imipolectic derangement y
_B
,
p
being not necessarily an integer and determined empirically"), in which subscript R is for Rakete, and B for Blicero.

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, naturlich, 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 ifoophosphate, 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
Pathetique.
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 Dusseldorf, 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.