GRAVITY RAINBOW (132 page)

Weissmann is crossed by the Queen of his suit. Perhaps himself, in drag. She is the chief obstacle in his way. At his foundation is the single sword flaming inside the crown: again, Netzach, victory. In the American deck this card has come down to us as the ace of spades, which is a bit more sinister: you know the silence that falls on the room when it comes up, whatever the game. Behind him, moving out of his life as an influence, is the 4 or Four of Pentacles, which shows a figure of modest property desperately clutching on to what he owns, four gold coins-this feeb is holding two of them down with his feet, balancing another on his head and holding the fourth tightly against his stomach, which is ulcerous. It is the stationary witch trying to hold her candy house against the host of nibblers out there in the dark. Moving in, before him, comes a feast of cups, a satiety. Lotta booze and broads for Weissmann coming soon. Good for him-although in his house he is seen walking away, renouncing eight stacked gold chalices. Perhaps he is to be given only what he must walk away from. Perhaps it is because in the lees of the night's last cup is the bitter presence of a woman sitting by a rocky shore, the Two of Swords, alone at the Baltic edge, blindfolded in the moonlight, holding the two blades crossed upon her breasts… the meaning is usually taken as "concord in a state of arms," a good enough description of the Zone nowadays, and it describes his deepest hopes, or fears.

Himself, as the World sees him: the scholarly young Page of Pentacles, meditating on his magic gold talisman. The Page may also be used to stand for a young girl. But Pentacles describe people of very dark complexion, and so the card almost certainly is Enzian as a young man. And Weissmann may at last, in this limited pasteboard way, have become what he first loved.

The King of Cups, crowning his hopes, is the fair intellectual-king.

If you're wondering where he's gone, look among the successful academics, the Presidential advisers, the token intellectuals who sit on boards of directors. He is almost surely there. Look high, not low. His future card, the card of what will come, is The World.

the last green and magenta

The Heath grows green and magenta in all directions, earth and heather, coming of age- No. It was spring.

the horse

In a field, beyond the clearing and the trees, the last horse is standing, tarnished silver-gray, hardly more than an assembling of shadows. The heathen Germans who lived here sacrificed horses once, in their old ceremonies. Later the horse's role changed from holy offering to servant of power. By then a great change was working on the Heath, kneading, turning, stirring with fingers strong as wind.

Now that sacrifice has become a political act, an act of Caesar, the last horse cares only about how the wind starts up this afternoon: rises at first, and tries to stick, to catch, but fails… each time, the horse feels a similar rising in his heart, at the edges of eye, ear, brain… Finally, at the sure catching of the wind, which is also a turning in the day, his head rises, and a shiver comes over him-possesses him. His tail lashes at the clear elusive flesh of the wind. The sacrifice in the grove is beginning.

isaac

There is an Aggadic tradition from around the 4th century that Isaac, at the moment Abraham was about to sacrifice him on Moriah, saw the antechambers of the Throne. For the working mystic, having the vision and passing through the chambers one by one, is terrible and complex. You must have not only the schooling in countersigns and seals, not only the physical readiness through exercise and abstinence, but also a hardon of resolution that will never go limp on you. The angels at the doorways will try to con you, threaten you, play all manner of cruel practical jokes, to turn you aside. The Qlippoth, shells of the dead, will use all your love for friends who have passed across against you. You have chosen the active way, and there is no faltering without finding the most mortal danger.

The other way is dark and female, passive, self-abandoning. Isaac

under the blade. The glittering edge widening to a hallway, down, up which the soul is borne by an irresistible Aether. Gerhardt von Goll on his camera dolly, whooping with joy, barrel-assing down the long corridors at Nymphenburg. (Let us leave him here, in his transport, in his innocence…) The numinous light grows ahead, almost blue among all this gilt and glass. The gilders worked naked and had their heads shaved bald-to get a static charge to hold the fluttering leaf they had first to run the brush through their pubic hair: genital electricity would shine forever down these gold vistas. But we have long left mad Ludwig and his Spanish dancer guttering, fading scarlet across the marble, shining so treacherously like sweet water… already that lies behind. The ascent to the Merkabah, despite his last feeble vestiges of manhood, last gestures toward the possibility of magic, is irreversibly on route…

pre-launch

A giant white fly: an erect penis buzzing in white lace, clotted with blood or sperm. Deathlace is the boy's bridal costume. His smooth feet, bound side by side, are in white satin slippers with white bows. His red nipples are erect. The golden hairs on his back, alloyed German gold, pale yellow to white, run symmetric about his spine, run in arches fine and whirled as the arches of a fingerprint, as filings along magnetic lines of force. Each freckle or mole is a dark, precisely-set anomaly in the field. Sweat gathers at his nape. He is gagged with a white kid glove. Weissmann has engineered all the symbolism today. The glove is the female equivalent of the Hand of Glory, which second-story men use to light their way into your home: a candle in a dead man's hand, erect as all your tissue will grow at the first delicious tongue-flick of your mistress Death. The glove is the cavity into which the Hand fits, as the 00000 is the womb into which Gottfried returns.

Stuff him in. Not a Procrustean bed, but modified to take him. The two, boy and Rocket, concurrently designed. Its steel hindquarters bent so beautifully… he fits well. They are mated to each other, Schwarzgerat and next higher assembly. His bare limbs in their metal bondage writhe among the fuel, oxidizer, live-steam lines, thrust frame, compressed air battery, exhaust elbow, decomposer, tanks, vents, valves… and one of these valves, one test-point, one pressure-switch is the right one, the true clitoris, routed directly into the nervous system of the 00000. She should not be a mystery to you, Gottfried. Find the zone of love, lick and kiss… you have time-

there are still a few minutes. The liquid oxygen runs freezing so close to your cheek, bones of frost to burn you past feeling. Soon there will be the fires, too. The Oven we fattened you for will glow. Here is the sergeant, bringing the Zundkreuz. The pyrotechnic Cross to light you off. The men are at attention. Get ready, Liebchen.

hardware

He's been given a window of artificial sapphire, four inches across, grown by the IG in 1942 as a mushroom-shaped boule, a touch of cobalt added to give it a greenish tint-very heat-resistant, transparent to most visible frequencies-it warps the images of sky and clouds outside, but pleasantly, like Ochsen-Augen in Grandmother's day, the days before window-glass…

Part of the vaporized oxygen is routed through Gottfried's Imi-polex shroud. In one of his ears, a tiny speaker has been surgically implanted. It shines like a pretty earring. The data link runs through the radio-guidance system, and the words of Weissmann are to be, for a while, multiplexed with the error-corrections sent out to the Rocket. But there's no return channel from Gottfried to the ground. The exact moment of his death will never be known.

chase Music

At long last, after a distinguished career of uttering, "My God, we are too late!" always with the trace of a sneer, a pro-forma condescension-because of course he
never
arrives too late, there's always a reprieve, a mistake by one of the Yellow Adversary's hired bunglers, at worst a vital clue to be found next to the body-now, finally, Sir Denis Nayland Smith
will
arrive, my God, too late.

Superman will swoop boots-first into a deserted clearing, a launcher-erector sighing oil through a slow seal-leak, gum evoked from the trees, bitter manna for this bitterest of passages. The colors of his cape will wilt in the afternoon sun, curls on his head begin to show their first threads of gray. Philip Marlowe will suffer a horrible migraine and reach by reflex for the pint of rye in his suit pocket, and feel homesick for the lacework balconies of the Bradbury Building.

Submariner and his multilingual gang will run into battery trouble. Plasticman will lose his way among the Imipolex chains, and topolo-gists all over the Zone will run out and stop payments on his honorarium checks ("perfectly deformable," indeed!) The Lone Ranger will storm in at the head of a posse, rowels tearing blood from the stallion's white hide, to find his young friend, innocent Dan, swinging from

a tree limb by a broken neck. (Tonto, God willing, will put on the ghost shirt and find some cold fire to hunker down by to sharpen his knife.)

"Too late" was never in their programming. They find instead a moment's suspending of their sanity-but then it's over with, whew, and it's back to the trail, back to the
Daily Planet. Yes Jimmy, it must've
been the day I ran into that singularity, those few seconds of absolute mystery… you know Jimmy, time
-
time is a funny thing…
There'll be a thousand ways to forget. The heroes will go on, kicked upstairs to oversee the development of bright new middle-line personnel, and they will watch their system falling apart, watch those singularities begin to come more and more often, proclaiming another dispensation out of the tissue of old-fashioned time, and they'll call it cancer, and just won't know what things are coming to, or what's the meaning of it all, Jimmy…

These days, he finds he actually misses the dogs. Who would have thought he'd ever feel sentimental over a pack of slobbering curs? But here in the Sub-ministry all is so odorless, touchless. The sensory deprivation, for a while, did stimulate his curiosity. For a while he kept a faithful daily record of his physiological changes. But this was mostly remembering about Pavlov on his own deathbed, recording himself till the end. With Pointsman it's only habit, retro-scientism: a last look back at the door to Stockholm, closing behind him forever. The entries began to fall off, and presently stopped. He signed reports, he supervised. He traveled to other parts of England, later to other countries, to scout for fresh talent. In the faces of Mossmoon and the others, at odd moments, he could detect a reflex he'd never allowed himself to dream of: the tolerance of men in power for one who never Made His Move, or made it wrong. Of course there are still moments of creative challenge-

Yes, well, he's an ex-scientist now, one who'll never get Into It far enough to start talking about God, apple-cheeked lovable white-haired eccentric gabbing from the vantage of his Laureate-no he'll be left only with Cause and Effect, and the rest of his sterile armamentarium… his mineral corridors do not shine. They will stay the same neutral nameless tone from here in to the central chamber, and the perfectly rehearsed scene he is to play there, after all…

countdown

The countdown as we know it, 10-9-8-u.s.w., was invented by Fritz Lang in 1929 for the Ufa film
Die Frau im Mond.
He put it into the

launch scene to heighten the suspense. "It is another of my damned 'touches,' " Fritz Lang said.

"At the Creation," explains Kabbalist spokesman Steve Edelman, "God sent out a pulse of energy into the void. It presently branched and sorted into ten distinct spheres or aspects, corresponding to the numbers 1-10. These are known as the Sephiroth. To return to God, the soul must negotiate each of the Sephiroth, from ten back to one. Armed with magic and faith, Kabbalists have set out to conquer the Sephiroth. Many Kabbalist secrets have to do with making the trip successfully.

"Now the Sephiroth fall into a pattern, which is called the Tree of Life. It is also the body of God. Drawn among the ten spheres are 22 paths. Each path corresponds to a letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and also to one of the cards called 'Major Arcana' in the Tarot. So although the Rocket countdown appears to be serial, it actually conceals the Tree of Life, which must be apprehended all at once, together, in parallel.

"Some Sephiroth are active or masculine, others passive or feminine. But the Tree itself is a unity, rooted exactly at the Bodenplatte. It is the axis of a particular Earth, a new dispensation, brought into being by the Great Firing."

"But but with a new axis, a newly spinning Earth," it occurs to the visitor, "what happens to astrology?"

"The signs change, idiot," snaps Edelman, reaching for his family-size jar of Thorazine. He has become such a habitual user of this tran-quilizing drug that his complexion has deepened to an alarming slate-purple. It makes him an oddity on the street here, where everybody else walks around suntanned, and red-eyed from one irritant or another. Edelman's children, mischievous little devils, have lately taken to slipping wafer capacitors from junked transistor radios into Pop's Thorazine jar. To his inattentive eye there was hardly any difference: so, for a while, Edelman thought he must be developing a tolerance, and that the Abyss had crept intolerably close, only an accident away-a siren in the street, a jet plane rumbling in a holding pattern- but luckily his wife discovered the prank in time, and now, before he swallows, he is careful to scrutinize each Thorazine for leads, mu's, numbering.

"Here-" hefting a fat Xeroxed sheaf, "the Ephemeris. Based on the new rotation."

"You mean someone's actually found the Bodenplatte? The Pole?"

"The delta-t itself. It wasn't made public, naturally. The 'Kaisers-bart Expedition' found it."

A pseudonym, evidently. Everyone knows the Kaiser has no beard.

strung into the apollonian dream…

When something real is about to happen to you, you go toward it with a transparent surface parallel to your own front that hums and bisects both your ears, making eyes very alert. The light bends toward chalky blue. Your skin aches. At last: something real.