GRAVITY RAINBOW (126 page)

fat-glazed crust, is turning, whose face is about to come rotating around, why it's-

"No ketchup, no ketchup," the hirsute bluejacket searching agitatedly among the cruets and salvers, "seems to be no… what th' fuck kind of a place is this,
Rog,"
yelling down slantwise across seven enemy faces, "hey,
buddih
you find any
ketchup
down there?"

Ketchup's a code word, okay-

"Odd," replies Roger, who clearly has seen exactly the same thing down at the pit, "I was just about to
ask you
the same question!"

They are grinning at each other like fools. Their auras, for the record, are green. No shit. Not since winter of '42, in convoy in a North Atlantic gale, with accidental tons of loose 5-inch ammo rolling all over the ship, the German wolf pack invisibly knocking off sister ships right and left, at Battle Stations inside mount 51 listening to Pappy Hod tell disaster jokes, really funny ones, the whole gun crew clutching their stomachs hysterically, gasping for air-not since then has Seaman Bodine felt so high in the good chances of death.

"Some layout, huh?" he calls. "Pretty good food!" Conversation has fallen nearly silent. Politely curious faces are turning. Flames leap in the pit. They are not "sensitive flames," but if they were they might be able now to detect the presence of Brigadier Pudding. He is now a member of the Counterforce, courtesy of Carroll Eventyr. Courtesy is right. Seances with Pudding are at least as trying as the old Weekly Briefings back at "The White Visitation." Pudding has even more of a mouth on him than he did alive. The sitters have begun to whine: "Aren't we
ever
to be rid of him?" But it is through Pudding's devotion to culinary pranksterism that the repulsive stratagem that follows was devised.

"Oh, I don't know," Roger elaborately casual, "I can't seem to find
any snot soup
on the menu…"

"Yeah, I could've done with some of that
pus pudding,
myself. Think there'll be any of that?"

"No, but there might be a scum souffle!" cries Roger, "with a side of-
menstrual marmalade!"

"Well I've got eyes for some of that rich, meaty smegma stew!" suggests Bodine. "Or howbout a
clot casserole?"

"I say," murmurs a voice, indeterminate as to sex, down the table.

"We could plan a better meal than
this"
Roger waving the menu. "Start off with afterbirth appetizers, perhaps some clever little
scab
sandwiches
with the crusts trimmed off of course… o-or booger bis-

cuits! Mmm, yes, spread with mucus mayonnaise? and topped with a succulent bit of slime sausage…"

"Oh
I
see," sez Commando Connie, "it has to be al
lit
erative. How about… urn…
discharge dumplings?"

"We're doing the soup course, babe," sez cool Seaman Bodine, "so let me just suggest a canker consomme, or perhaps a barf bouillon."

"Vomit vichysoisse," sez Connie.

"You got it."

"Cyst salad," Roger continues, "with little cheery-red squares of abortion aspic, tossed in a subtle dandruff dressing."

There is a sound of well-bred gagging, and a regional sales manager for ICI leaves hurriedly, spewing a long crescent of lumpy beige vomit that splatters across the parquetry. Napkins are being raised to faces all down the table. Silverware is being laid down, silver ringing the fields of white, a puzzling indecision here again, the same as at Clive Mossmoon's office…

On we go, through fart fondue (skillfully placed bubbles of anal gas rising slowly through a rich cheese viscosity, yummm), boil blintzes, Vegetables Venereal in slobber sauce…

A kazoo stops playing. "Wart waffles!" Gustav screams.

"Puke pancakes, with sweat syrup," adds Andre Omnopon, as Gustav resumes playing, the Outer Voices meantime having broken off in confusion.

"And spread with pinworm preserves," murmurs the cellist, who is not above a bit of fun.

"Hemorrhoid hash," Connie banging her spoon in delight,
''bowel
burgers!"

Frau Utgarthaloki jumps to her feet, upsetting a platter of stuffed sores-
beg
pardon, no they're deviled eggs-and runs from the room, sobbing tragically. Her suave metal husband also rises and follows, casting back at the troublemakers virile stares that promise certain death. A discreet smell of vomit has begun to rise through the hanging tablecloth. Nervous laughter has long embrittled to badmouth whispering.

"A choice of gangrene goulash, or some scrumptious creamy-white
leprosy loaf,"
Bodine in a light singsong "le-pro-sy [down a third to] loaf," playfully hounding the holdouts, shaking a finger, c'mon ya little rascals, vomit for the nice zootster…

"Fungus fricassee!" screams Roger the Rowdy. Jessica is weeping on the arm of Jeremy her gentleman, who is escorting her, stiff-armed,

shaking his head at Roger's folly, away forever. Does Roger have a second of pain right here? Yes. Sure. You would too. You might even question the worth of your cause. But there are nosepick noodles to be served up buttery and steaming, grime gruel and pustule porridge to be ladled into the bowls of a sniveling generation of future executives, pubic popovers to be wheeled out onto the terraces stained by holocaust sky or growing rigid with autumn.

"Carbuncle cutlets!"

"With
groin gravy!"

"And ringworm relish!"

Lady Mnemosyne Gloobe is having a seizure of some kind, so violent that her pearls break and go rattling down the silk tablecloth. A general loss of appetite reigns, not to mention overt nausea. The flames in the pit have dwindled. No fat to feed them tonight. Sir Hannibal Grunt-Gobbinette is threatening, between spasms of yellow bile foaming out his nose, to bring the matter up in Parliament. "I'll see you two in the Scrubs if it kills me!" Well…

A gentle, precarious soft-shoe out the door, Bodine waving his widebrim gangster hat. Ta-ta, foax. The only guest still seated is Constance Flamp, who is still roaring out dessert possibilities: "Crotch custard! Phlegm fudge! Mold muffins!" Will she catch hell tomorrow. Pools of this and that glitter across the floor like water-mirages at the Sixth Ante-chamber to the Throne. Gustav and the rest of the quartet have abandoned Haydn and are all following Roger and Bodine out the door, kazoos and strings accompanying the Disgusting Duo:

Oh gimme some o' that acne, a-la-mode, Eat so much-that Ah, jes'ex-plode! Say there budd
ih
? you can chow all nite, on Toe-jam tarts 'n' Diarrhea Dee-lite…

"I have to tell you," Gustav whispering speedily, "I feel so awful about it, but perhaps you don't want people like me. You see… I was a Storm Trooper. A long time ago. You know, like Horst Wessel."

"So?" Bodine's laughing. "Maybe I was a Melvin Purvis Junior G-Man."

"A what?"

"For Post Toasties."

"For whom?" The German actually thinks Post Toasties is the name of some American Fuhrer, looking vaguely like Tom Mix or some other such longlip bridlejaw cowboy.

The last black butler opens the last door to the outside, and escape. Escape tonight. "Pimple pie with filth frosting, gentlemen," he nods. And just at the other side of dawning, you can see a smile.

In her pack, Geli Tripping brings along a few of Tchitcherine's toenail clippings, a graying hair, a piece of bedsheet with a trace of his sperm, all tied in a white silk kerchief, next to a bit of Adam and Eve root and a loaf of bread baked from wheat she has rolled naked in and ground against the sun. She has left off tending her herd of toads on the witches' hillsides, and has passed her white wand to another apprentice. She is off to find her gallant Attila. Now there are a good few hundred of these young women in the
Zone
who're smitten with love for Tchitcherine, all of them sharp as foxes, but none quite as stubborn as Geli-and none are witches.

At noon she comes to a farmhouse with a floor of blue and white tiles in the kitchen, elaborate old china plates hung like pictures, and a rocking-chair. "Do you have a photo of him?" the old woman handing her a tin army plate with the remains of her morning's Bauernfruh-stuck. "I can give you a spell."

"Sometimes I can call up his face in a cup of tea. But the herbs have to be gathered carefully. I'm not that good at it yet."

"But you're in love. Technique is just a substitute for when you get older."

"Why not stay in love always?"

The two women watch each other across the sunny kitchen. Cabinets with glass panes shine from the walls. Bees buzz outside the windows. Geli goes and pumps water from the well, and they brew some strawberry-leaf tea. But Tchitcherine's face doesn't appear.

The night the blacks started off on their great trek, Nordhausen felt like a city in a myth, under the threat of some special destruction-en-gulfment by a crystal lake, lava from the sky… for an evening, the sense of preservation there was lost. The blacks, like the rockets in the Mittelwerke, had given Nordhausen continuity. Now the blacks are gone: Geli knows they are on collision course with Tchitcherine. She doesn't want duels. Let the university boys duel. She wants her graying steel barbarian alive. She can't bear to think that she may already have touched him, felt his scarred and historied hands, for the last time.

Behind, pushing her, is the town's somnolence, and at night-the

strange canaried nights of the Harz (where canary hustlers are busy shooting up female birds with male hormones so they'll sing long enough to be sold to the foreign suckers who occupy the Zone)-full of too many spells, witch-rivalries, coven politics… she knows that's not what magic is about. The Hexes-Stadt, with its holy mountains cropped in pale circles all up and down their green faces by the little tethered goats, has turned into just another capital, where the only enterprise is administrating-the feeling there is of upstairs at the musicians' union-no music, just glass-brick partitions, spittoons, indoor plants-no
practicing
witches left. You either come to the Brocken-complex with a bureaucratic career in mind, or you leave it, and choose the world. There are the two distinct sorts of witch, and Geli is the World-choosing sort.

Here is the World. She is wearing gray men's trousers rolled to the knee that flap around her thighs as she walks by the rye fields… walking, with her head down, pushing hair out of her eyes often. Sometimes soldiers come by, and give her rides. She listens for news of Tchitcherine, of the trekking Schwarzkommando. If it feels right, she will even ask about Tchitcherine. The variety of the rumors surprises her.
I'm not the only one who loves him…
though
their
love of course is friendly, admiring, unsexual… Geli's the only one in the Zone who loves him completely. Tchitcherine, known in some circles as "the Red Doper," is about to be purged: the emissary is none other than Beria's top man, the sinister N. Ripov himself.

Bullshit, Tchitcherine's already dead, didn't you hear, he's been dead for months…

… they've had somebody impersonating him till all the others in his Bloc are taken care of…

… no, he came into Luneburg last weekend, my mate's seen him before, no mistake, it's him…

… he's lost a lot of weight and takes a heavy bodyguard everywhere he goes. At least a dozen. Orientals mostly…

… fully equipped with Judas Iscariot no doubt.
That
one's hard to believe. A dozen? Where does anybody find that many people he can trust? Especially out at the edge like he is-

"What edge?" They're rattling along in the back of a 2 1/2-ton lorry through very green rolling country… a storm is blowing up mute purple, veined in yellow, behind them. Geli's been drinking wine with this scurvy lot of tommies, a demolition squad who've been out all day clearing canals. They smell of creosote, marsh-mud, ammonia from the dynamite.

"Well
you
know what he's doing."

"The rockets?"

"I wouldn't want to be in his place, that's all."

Up on the crest of a hill, an army surveying party is restoring a damaged road. One silhouette leans peering through a transit, one holds a bob. A bit apart from the instrument man another engineer stands with his arms out straight to the sides, his head moves sighting along either pointed hand, then the arms swoop together… if you close your eyes, and have learned to let your arms move by themselves, your fingers will touch making a perfect right angle from where they were… Geli watches the tiny act: it is devotional, graceful, and she
feels the cross
the man has made on his own circle of visible earth… unconsciously a mandala… it is a sign for her. He is pointing her on her way. Later that evening she sees an eagle flying across the marshes, in the same direction. It's golden-dark, almost night. The region is lonely and Pan is very close. Geli has been to enough Sabbaths to handle it-she thinks. But what is a devil's blue bite on the ass to the shrieking-outward, into stone resonance, where there is no good or evil, out in the luminous spaces Pan will carry her to? Is she ready yet for anything so real? The moon has risen. She sits now, at the same spot where she saw the eagle, waiting, waiting for something to come and take her. Have you ever waited for
it?
wondering whether it will come from outside or inside? Finally past the futile guesses at what might happen… now and then re-erasing brain to keep it clean for the Visit… yes wasn't it close to here? remember didn't you sneak away from camp to have a moment alone with What you felt stirring across the land… it was the equinox… green spring equal nights… canyons are opening up, at the bottoms are steaming fumaroles, steaming the tropical life there like greens in a pot, rank, dope-perfume, a hood of smell… human consciousness, that poor cripple, that deformed and doomed thing, is about to be born. This is the World just before men. Too violently pitched alive in constant flow ever to be seen by men directly. They are meant only to look at it dead, in still strata, transputrefied to oil or coal. Alive, it was a threat: it was Titans, was an overpeaking of life so clangorous and mad, such a green corona about Earth's body that some spoiler
had
to be brought in before it blew the Creation apart. So we, the crippled keepers, were sent out to multiply, to have dominion. God's spoilers. Us. Counterrevolutionaries.
It is our mission to promote death.
The way we kill, the way we die, being unique among the Creatures. It was something we had to work on, historically and personally. To build from scratch up