GRAVITY RAINBOW (26 page)

Each time, each turning, his own blood and heart are stroked, beaten, brought jubilantly high, and triggered to the icy noctiluca, to flare and fusing Thermite as he begins to expand, an uncontainable light, as the walls of the chamber turn a blood glow, orange, then white and begin to slip, to flow like wax, what there is of labyrinth collapsing in rings outward, hero and horror, engineer and Ariadne consumed, molten inside the light of himself, the mad exploding of himself…

Years ago. Dreams he hardly remembers. The intermediaries come long since between himself and his final beast. They would deny him even the little perversity of being in love with his death…

But now with Slothrop in it-sudden angel, thermodynamic sur-

prise, whatever he is… will it change now? Might Pointsman get to have a go at the Minotaur after all?

Slothrop ought to be on the Riviera by now, warm, fed, well-fucked. But out in this late English winter the dogs, thrown over, are still ranging the back-streets and mews, sniffing the dustbins, skidding on carpets of snow, fighting, fleeing, shivering in their wet pools of Prussian blue… seeking to avoid what cannot be smelled or seen, what announces itself with the roar of a predator so absolute they sink to the snow whining and roll over to give It their soft and open bellies…

Has Pointsman renounced them in favor of one untried human subject? Don't think he hasn't doubts as to the validity of this scheme, at least. Let Vicar de la Nuit worry about its "rightness," he's the staff chaplain. But… what about the dogs? Pointsman knows them. He's deftly picked the locks of their awareness. They have no secrets. He can drive them mad, and with bromides in adequate doses he can bring them back. But Slothrop…

So the Pavlovian dithers about his office, feeling restless and old. He should sleep but he can't. It has to be more than the simple conditioning of a child, once upon a time. How can he've been a doctor this long and not developed reflexes for certain conditions? He knows better: he knows it is more. Spectro is dead, and Slothrop
(sentiments d'
emprise,
old man, softly now) was with his Darlene, only a few blocks from St. Veronica's, two days before.

When one event happens after another with this awful regularity, of course you don't automatically assume that it's cause-and-effect. But you do look for some mechanism to make sense of it. You probe, you design a modest experiment… He owes Spectro that much. Even if the American's not legally a murderer, he is sick. The etiology ought to be traced, the treatment found.

There is to this enterprise, Pointsman knows, a danger of seduction. Because of the symmetry… He's been led before, you know, down the garden path by symmetry: in certain test results… in assuming that a mechanism must imply its mirror image-"irradiation," for example, and "reciprocal induction"… and who'd ever said that either had to exist? Perhaps it will be so this time, too. But how it haunts him, the symmetry of these two secret weapons, Outside, out in the Blitz, the sounds of V-l and V-2, one the reverse of the other… Pavlov showed how mirror-images Inside could be confused. Ideas of the opposite. But what new pathology lies Outside now? What sickness to events-to History itself-can create symmetrical opposites like these robot weapons?

Sign and symptoms. Was Spectro right? Could Outside and Inside be part of the same field? If only in fairness… in fairness… Pointsman ought to be seeking the answer at the interface… oughtn't he… on the cortex of Lieutenant Slothrop. The man will suffer-perhaps, in some clinical way, be destroyed-but how many others tonight are suffering in his name? For pity's sake, every
day
in Whitehall they're weighing and taking risks that make his, in this, seem almost trivial. Almost. There's something here, too transparent and swift to get a hold on-Psi Section might speak of ectoplasms-but he knows that the time has never been better, and that the exact experimental subject
is
in his hands. He must seize now, or be doomed to the same stone hallways, whose termination he knows. But he must remain open- even to the possibility that the Psi people are right. "We may all be right," he puts in his journal tonight, "so may be all we have speculated, and more. Whatever we may find, there can be no doubt that he is, physiologically, historically, a monster.
We must never lose control.
The thought of him lost in the world of men, after the war, fills me with a deep dread I cannot extinguish…"

More and more, these days of angelic visit and communique, Carroll Eventyr feels a victim of his freak talent. As Nora Dodson-Truck once called it, his "splendid weakness." It showed late in life: he was 35 when out of the other world, one morning on the Embankment, between strokes of a pavement artist's two pastels, salmon darkening to fawn, and a score of lank human figures, rag-sorrowful in the distances interlacing with ironwork and river smoke, all at once someone was speaking through Eventyr, so quietly that Nora caught hardly any of it, not even the identity of the soul that took and used him. Not then. Some of it was in German, some of the words she remembered. She would ask her husband, whom she was to meet that afternoon out in Surrey-arriving late though, all the shadows, men and women, dogs, chimneys, very long and black across the enormous lawn, and she with a dusting of ocher, barely noticeable in the late sun, making a fan shape near the edge of her veil-it was that color she'd snatched from the screever's wood box and swiftly, turning smoothly, touching only at shoe tip and the creamy block of yellow crumbling onto the surface, never leaving it, drew a great five-pointed star on the pavement, just upriver from an unfriendly likeness of Lloyd George in heliotrope and

sea-green: pulling Eventyr by the hand to stand inside the central pentagon, seagulls in a wailing diadem overhead, then stepping in herself, an instinctive, a motherly way, her way with anyone she loved. She'd drawn her pentagram not even half in play. One couldn't be too safe, there was always evil.,..

Had he felt her, even then, beginning to recede… called up the control from across the Wall as a way of holding on? She was deepening from his waking, his social eye like light at the edge of the evening when, for perhaps a perilous ten minutes, nothing helps: put on your glasses and light lamps, sit by the west window and still it keeps going away, you keep losing the light and perhaps it is forever this time… a good time of day for learning surrender, learning to diminish like the light, or like certain music. This surrender is his only gift. Afterward he can recall nothing. Sometimes, rarely, there may be tantalizing- not words, but halos of meaning around words his mouth evidently spoke, that only stay behind-if they do-for a moment, like dreams, can't be held or developed, and, presently, go away. He's been under Rollo Groast's EEG countless times since first he came to "The White Visitation," and all's normal-adult except for, oh once or twice perhaps a stray 50-millivolt spike off a temporal lobe, now left now right, really no pattern to it-indeed a kind of canals-of-Mars controversy has been in progress for these years among the different observers-Aaron Throwster swears he's seen slow delta-wave shapes out of the left frontal and suspects a tumor, last summer Edwin Treacle noted a "subdued petitmal spike-and-wave alternation, curiously much slower than the usual three per second"-though admittedly Treacle was up in London all the night before debauching with Allen Lamplighter and his gambling crowd. Less than a week later the buzzbomb gave Lamplighter his chance: to find Eventyr from the other side and prove him to be what others had said: an interface between the worlds, a sensitive. Lamplighter had offered 5-to-2 odds. But so far he's been silent: nothing in the soft acetate/metal discs or typed transcripts that mightn't be any of a dozen other souls…

They've come, in their time, from as far away as the institute at Bristol to gape at, to measure and systematically doubt the freaks of Psi Section. Here's Ronald Cherrycoke, the noted psychometrist, eyes lightly fluttering, hands a steady inch away framing the brown-wrapped box in which are securely hidden certain early-War mementos, a dark-maroon cravat, a broken Schaeffer fountain pen, a tarnished pince-nez of white gold, all belonging to a Group Captain "Basher" St. Biaise, stationed far away north of London… as this

Cherrycoke, a normal-looking lad, perhaps a bit overweight, begins now to recite in his lathe-humming Midland accents an intimate resume of the Group Captain, his anxieties about his falling hair, his enthusiasm over the Donald Duck cinema cartoons, an incident during the Lubeck raid which only he and his wingman, now passed on, shared and agreed not to report-nothing that violated security: confirmed later, in fact, by St. Biaise himself smiling a bit openmouthed well the joke's certainly on me and now tell me how'd you do it? Indeed, how does Cherrycoke do it? How do any of them? How does Margaret Quartertone produce voices on discs and wire recorders miles distant without speaking or physically touching the equipment? And what speakers are now beginning to assemble? Where are the five-digit groups coming from which the Reverend Dr. Paul de la Nuit, chaplain and staff automatist, has been writing for weeks now, and which, it is felt ominously, no one up in London quite knows how to decrypt? What do Edwin Treacle's recent dreams of flight mean, especially as time-correlated with Nora Dodson-Truck's dreams of falling? What gathers among them all, that each in his own freak way can testify to but not in language, not even the lingua franca of the offices? Turbulences in the aether, uncertainties out in the winds of karma. Those souls across the interface, those we call the dead, are increasingly anxious and evasive. Even Carroll Eventyr's own control, the habitually cool and sarcastic Peter Sachsa, the one who found him that day long ago on the Embankment and thereafter-whenever there are messages to be passed across-even Sachsa's become nervous…

Lately, as if all tuned in to the same aethereal Xth Programme, new varieties of freak have been showing up at "The White Visitation," all hours of the day and night, silent, staring, expecting to be taken care of, carrying machines of black metal and glass gingerbread, off on waxy trances, hyperkinetically waiting only the right trigger-question to start blithering 200 words a minute about their special, terrible endowments. An assault. What are we to make of Gavin Trefoil, for whose gift there's not even a name yet? (Rollo Groast wants to call it
autochromatism.)
Gavin, the youngest here, only 17, can somehow metabolize at will one of his amino acids, tyrosine. This will produce melanin, which is the brown-black pigment responsible for human skin color. Gavin can also inhibit this metabolizing by-it appears-varying the level of his blood phenylalanine. So he can change his color from most ghastly albino up through a smooth spectrum to very deep, purplish, black. If he concentrates he can keep this up, at

any level, for weeks. Usually he is distracted, or forgets, and gradually drifts back to his rest state, a pale freckled redhead's complexion. But you can imagine how useful he was to Gerhardt von Goll during the shooting of the Schwarzkommando footage: he helped save literally hours of make-up and lighting work, acting as a variable reflector. The best theory of
how
is Rollo's, but it's hopelessly vague-we do know that the dermal cells which produce melanin-the melanocytes-were once, in each of us, at an early stage of embryonic growth, part of the central nervous system. But as the embryo grows, as tissue goes on differentiating, some of these nerve cells move away from what will be the CNS, and migrate out to the skin, to become melanocytes. They keep their original tree-branch shapes, the axon and dendrites of the typical nerve cell. But the dendrites are used now to carry not electric signals but skin pigment. Rollo Groast believes in some link, so far undiscovered-some surviving cell-memory that will, retrocolonial, still respond to messages from the metropolitan brain. Messages that young Trefoil may not consciously know of. "It is part," Rollo writes home to the elder Dr. Groast in Lancashire, in elaborate revenge for childhood tales of Jenny Greenteeth waiting out in the fens to drown him, "part of an old and clandestine drama for which the human body serves only as a set of very allusive, often cryptic programme-notes- it's as if the body we can measure is a scrap of this programme found outside in the street, near a magnificent stone theatre we cannot enter. The convolutions of language denied us! the great Stage, even darker than Mr Tyrone Guthrie's accustomed murk… Gilt and mirroring, red velvet, tier on tier of box seats all in shadows too, as somewhere down in that deep proscenium, deeper than geometries we know of, the voices utter secrets we are never told…"

– Everything that comes out from CNS we have to file here, you see. It gets to be a damned nuisance after a while. Most of it's utterly useless. But you never know when they'll want something. Middle of the night, or during the worst part of an ultraviolet bombardment you know, it makes no difference to them back there.

– Do you ever get out much to… well, up to the Outer Level?

(A long pause in which the older operative stares quite openly, as several changes flow across her features-amusement, pity, concern- until the younger one speaks again.) I-I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be-

– (Abruptly) I'm supposed to tell you, eventually, as part of the briefing.

– Tell me what?

– Just as I was told once. We hand it on, one generation to the

next. (There is no piece of business plausible enough for her to find refuge in. We sense that this has not yet become routine for her. Out of decency now, she tries to speak quietly, if not gently.) We
all
go up to the Outer Level, young man. Some immediately, others not for a while. But sooner or later everyone out here has to go Epidermal. No exceptions.

– Has to-

– I'm sorry.

– But isn't it… I thought it was only a-well, a
level.
A place you'd visit. Isn't it…?

– Outlandish scenery, oh yes so did I-unusual formations, a peep into the Outer Radiance. But it's all of
us,
you see. Millions of
us,
changed to interface, to horn, and no feeling, and silence.