GRAVITY RAINBOW (86 page)

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 Swinemunde. 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…"

Up on the bridge of the
Anubis,
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 Swinemunde 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.

Pitching and rolling furiously, the
Anubis
drives northward. Lightning flickers all around the horizon, and thunder that reminds the military men on board of drumfire announcing battles they're not sure now if they survived or still dream, still can wake up into and die… Weather decks shine slick and bare. Party litter clogs the drains. Stale fat-smoke goes oozing out the galley porthole into the rain. The saloon's been set up for baccarat, and filthy movies are showing in the boiler room. The second dog watch is about to come on. The white ship settles, like the soul of a kerosene lamp just lit, into its evening routine.

Partygoers stagger fore and aft, evening clothes decorated with sunbursts of vomit. Ladies lie out in the rain, nipples erect and heaving under drenched silk. Stewards skid along the decks with salvers of Dramamine and bicarbonate. Barfing aristocracy sag all down the lifelines. Here comes Slothrop now, down a ladder to the main deck, bounced by the rolling off of alternate manropes, feeling none too keen. He's lost Bianca. Gone fussing through the ship doubling back again and again, can't find her any more than his reason for leaving her this morning.

It matters, but how much? Now that Margherita has wept to him, across the stringless lyre and bitter chasm of a ship's toilet, of her last days with Blicero, he knows as well as he has to that it's the S-Gerat after all that's following him, it and the pale plastic ubiquity of Laszlo Jamf. That if he's been seeker and sought, well, he's also baited, and bait. The Imipolex question was planted for him by somebody, back at the Casino Hermann Goering, with hopes it would flower into a full
Imipolectique
with its own potency in the Zone-but They knew Slothrop would jump for it. Looks like there are sub-Slothrop needs They know about, and he doesn't: this is humiliating on the face of it, but now there's also the even more annoying question,
What do I need
that badly?

Even a month ago, given a day or two of peace, he might have found his way back to the September afternoon, to the stiff cock in his pants sprung fine as a dowser's wand trying to point up at what was hanging there in the sky for everybody. Dowsing Rockets is a gift, and he had it, suffered from it, trying to fill his body to the pores and follicles with ringing prurience… to enter, to be filled… to go hunting

after… to be shown… to begin to scream… to open arms legs mouth asshole eyes nostrils without a hope of mercy to its intention waiting in the sky paler than dim commercial Jesus…

But nowadays, some kind of space he cannot go against has opened behind Slothrop, bridges that might have led back are down now for good. He is growing less anxious about betraying those who trust him. He feels obligations less immediately. There is, in fact, a general loss of emotion, a numbness he ought to be alarmed at, but can't quite…

Russian transmissions come crackling out of ship's radio, and the static blows like sheets of rain. Lights have begun to appear on shore. Procalowski throws a master switch and cuts off all the lights of the
Anubis.
St. Elmo's fire will be seen spurting at moments from cross-ends, from sharp points, fluttering white as telltales about the antennas and stays.

The white ship, camouflaged in the storm, will slip by Stettin's great ruin in silence. Rain will slacken for a moment to port and reveal a few last broken derricks and charred warehouses so wet and gleaming you can almost smell them, and a beginning of marshland you can smell, where no one lives. And then the shore again will be invisible as the open sea's. The Oder Haff will grow wider around the
Anubis.
No patrol boats will be out tonight. Whitecaps will come slamming in out of the darkness, and break high over the bow, and brine stream from the golden jackal mouth… Count Wafna lurch aft in nothing but his white bow tie, hands full of red, white, and blue chips that spill and clatter on deck, and he'll never cash them in… the Countess Bibes-cue dreaming by the fo'c'sle of Bucharest four years ago, the January terror, the Iron Guard on the radio screaming
Long Live Death,
and the bodies of Jews and Leftists hung on the hooks of the city slaughter-houses, dripping on the boards smelling of meat and hide, having her breasts sucked by a boy of 6 or 7 in a velvet Fauntleroy suit, their wet hair flowing together indistinguishable as their moans now, will vanish inside sudden whiteness exploding over the bow… and stockings ladder, and silk frocks over rayon slips make swarming moires… hardons go limp without warning, bone buttons shake in terror… lights be thrown on again and the deck become a blinding mirror… and not too long after this, Slothrop will think he sees her, think he has found Bianca again-dark eyelashes plastered shut and face running with rain, he will see her lose her footing on the slimy deck, just as the
Anubis
starts a hard roll to port, and even at this

stage of things-even in his distance-he will lunge after her without thinking much, slip himself as she vanishes under the chalky lifelines and gone, stagger trying to get back but be hit too soon in the kidneys and be flipped that easy over the side and it's adios to the
Anubis
and all its screaming Fascist cargo, already no more ship, not even black sky as the rain drives down his falling eyes now in quick needlestrokes, and he hits, without a call for help, just a meek tearful
oh fuck,
tears that will add nothing to the whipped white desolation that passes for the Oder Haff tonight…

The voices are German. Looks like a fishing smack here, stripped for some reason of nets and booms. Cargo piled on deck. A pink-faced youth is peering down at Slothrop from midships, rocking in, rearing back. "He's wearing evening clothes," calling in to the pilot house. "Is that good or bad? You're not with the military government, are you?"

"Jesus, kid, I'm drowning. I'll sign
a form
if you want." Well, that's Howdy Podner in German. The youth reaches out a pink hand whose palm is crusted with barnacles, and hauls him on up, ears freezing, salty snot pouring out his nose, flopping onto a wood deck that reeks with generations of fish and is scarred bright from more solid car go. The boat gets under way again with this tremendous surge of acceleration. Slothrop is sent rolling wetly aft. Behind them a great roostertail foams erect against the rain. Maniacal laughter blows aft from the pilot house. "Hey who, or what, is in command of this vessel, here?"

"My mother," the pink boy crouching beside him with an apologetic and helpless look. "The terror of the high seas."

This apple-cheeked lady is Frau Gnahb, and her kid's name is Otto. When she's feeling affectionate she calls him "the Silent Otto," which she thinks is very funny, but it dates her. While Slothrop gets out of the tuxedo and hangs it up inside to dry, wrapping himself in an old army blanket, mother and son tell him how they run black market items all along the Baltic coast. Who else would be out tonight, during a storm? He has a trustworthy face, Slothrop does, people will tell him anything. Right now seems they're headed for Swinemunde to take on cargo for a run tomorrow up the coast of Usedom.

"Do you know a man in a white suit," quoting Geli Tripping from

a few eras back, "who's supposed to be on the Strand-Promenade in that Swinemunde every day around noon?"

Frau Gnahb takes a pinch of snuff, and beams. "Everybody does. He's the white knight of the black market, as I am queen of the coastal trade."

"Der Springer, right?"

"Nobody else."

Nobody else. Up in his pants pocket Slothrop is still packing around that chesspiece old Saure Bummer gave him. By it shall Springer know him. Slothrop falls asleep in the pilot house, gets in two or three hours, during which Bianca comes to snuggle in under his blanket with him. "You're really in that Europe now," she grins, hugging him. "Oh my goo'ness," Slothrop keeps saying, his voice exactly like Shirley Temple's, out of his control. It sure is embarrassing. He wakes to sunlight, gulls squealing, smell of number 2 fuel oil, the booming of wine barrels down racketing planks to shore. They are docked in Swinemunde, by the sagging long ash remains of warehouses. Frau Gnahb is supervising some offloading. Otto has a tin can of honest-to-God Bohnenkaffee simmering. "First I've had in a while," Slothrop scorching his mouth.

"Black market," purrs the Silent Otto. "Good business to be in."

"I was in it for a while…" Oh, yes, and he's left the last of that Bodine hashish, hasn't he, several fucking ounces in fact, back on the
Anubis,
wasn't that clever. See the sugar bowl do the Tootsie Roll with the big, bad, Devil's food cake-

"Nice morning," Otto remarks.

Slothrop puts his tux back on, wrinkled and shrunken and almost dry, and debarks with Otto to find Der Springer. It seems to be Springer who's chartered today's trip up the coast. Slothrop keeps looking around for the
Anubis,
but she's nowhere in sight. In the distances, gantries huddle together, skeletal, presiding over the waste that came upon this port so sudden. The Russian assault in the spring has complicated the layout here. The white ship could be hiding behind any of these heaps of dockyard wreckage. Come out, come out…