GRAVITY RAINBOW (57 page)

"Outase," sez Enzian, which is one of many Herero words for shit, in this case a large, newly laid cow turd.

Andreas Orukambe sits in front of an army-green, wrinkle-finished transmitter/receiver rig, off in a rock alcove of the room. A pair of rubber headphones covers his ears. The Schwarzkommando use the 50 cm band-the one the Rocket's Hawaii II guidance operated on. Who but rocket-maniacs would listen in at 53 cm? Schwarzkommando can be sure, at least, that they're being monitored by every competitor in the Zone. Transmissions from the Erdschweinhohle begin around 0300 and run till dawn. Other Schwarzkommando stations broadcast on their own schedules. Traffic is in Herero, with a German loan-word now and then (which is too bad, since these are usually technical words, and valuable clues for whoever's listening).

Andreas is on the second dog watch, now, copying mostly, answering when he has to. Keying any transmitter is an invitation to instant paranoia. There springs into being an antenna pattern, thousands of square kilometers full of enemies out in their own night encampments in the Zone, faceless, monitoring. Though they are in contact with one another-the Schwarzkommando try to listen in to as much as they can-though there can be no illusion about their plans for the

Schwarzkommando, still they are holding off, waiting for the optimum time to move in and destroy without a trace… Enzian believes they will wait for the first African rocket to be fully assembled and ready for firing: it will look better if they move against a real threat, real hardware. Meantime Enzian tries to keep security tight. Here at the home base it's no problem: penetration by less than a regiment would be impossible. But farther out in the Zone, rocket-towns like Celle, En-schede, Hachenburg-they can pick us off out there one by one, first a campaign of attrition, then a coordinated raid… leaving then only this metropolis, under siege, to strangle…

Perhaps it's theater, but they
seem
no longer to be Allies… though the history they have invented for themselves conditions us to
expect
"postwar rivalries," when in fact it may all be a giant cartel including winners and losers both, in an amiable agreement to share what is there to be shared… Still, Enzian has played them off, the quarreling scavengers, one against the other… it
looks
genuine enough… Marvy must be together with the Russians by now, and with General Electric too-throwing him off the train the other night bought us- what? a day or two, and how well have we used the time?

It comes down to this day-to-day knitting and unraveling, minor successes, minor defeats. Thousands of details, any one of which carries the chance of a fatal mistake. Enzian would like to be more out of the process than he is-to be able to see where it's going, to know, in real time, at each splitting of the pathway of decision, which would have been right and which wrong. But it is
their
time,
their
space, and he still expects, naively, outcomes the white continuum grew past hoping for centuries ago. The details-valves, special tools that may or may not exist, Erdschweinhohle jealousies and plots, lost operating manuals, technicians on the run from both East and West, food shortages, sick children-swirl like fog, each particle with its own array of forces and directions… he can't handle them all at the same time, if he stays too much with any he's in danger of losing others… But it's not only the details. He has the odd feeling, in moments of reverie or honest despair, that he is speaking lines prepared somewhere far away (not far away in space, but in levels of power), and that his decisions are not his own at all, but the flummeries of an actor impersonating a leader. He has dreamed of being held in the pitiless emprise of something from which he cannot wake… he is often aboard a ship on a broad river, leading a rebellion which must fail. For reasons of policy, the rebellion is being allowed to go on for a bit. He is being hunted, his days are full of narrow escapes which he finds exciting, physically

graceful… and the Plot itself! it has a stern, an intense beauty, it is music, a symphony of the North, of an Arctic voyage, past headlands of very green ice, to the feet of icebergs, kneeling in the grip of this incredible music, washed in seas blue as blue dye, an endless North, vast country settled by people whose old culture and history are walled off by a great silence from the rest of the world… the names of their peninsulas and seas, their long and powerful rivers are unknown down in the temperate world… it is a return, this voyage: he has grown old inside his name, the sweeping music of the voyage is music he wrote himself, so long ago that he has forgotten it completely… but now it is finding him again…

"Trouble in Hamburg-" Andreas is scribbling away, lifting one earpiece back
smock
damp with sweat so that he can be on both ends of the link at once. "Sounds like it might be the DPs again. Got a bad signal. Keeps fading-"

Since the surrender there have been these constant skirmishes between the German civilians and foreign prisoners freed from the camps. Towns in the north have been taken over by displaced Poles, Czechs, Russians who've looted the arsenals and granaries and mean to hold what they've taken. But nobody knows how to feel about the local Schwarzkommando. Some see only the ragged pieces of SS uniform, and respond to that one way or another-others take them for Moroccans or Indians drifted somehow over the mountains from Italy. Germans still remember the occupation of the Rhineland 20 years ago by French colonial units, and the posters screaming SCHWARZE BESATZUNG AM RHEIN! Another stress in the pattern. Last week in Hamburg, two Schwarzkommando were shot. Others were badly beaten. The British military government sent in some troops, but only after the killing was over. Their main interest seemed to be in enforcing a curfew.

"It's Onguruve." Andreas hands over the earphones and swivels to roll out of Enzian's way.

"… can't tell if it's us they want, or the oil refinery…" the voice goes crackling in and out, "… hundred, maybe two hundred… so many… -fles, clubs, handguns-"

Bl-bleep and a burst of hissing, then in laps a familiar voice. "I can bring a dozen men."

"Hannover's answering," Enzian murmurs, trying to sound amused.

"You mean Josef Ombindi." Andreas is not amused.:

Now Onguruve, calling for help, is neutral on the Empty Ones Question, or tries to be. But if Ombindi can bring a relief force to Hamburg, he may decide to stay. Hannover, even with the Volkswagen plant there, is only a stepping-stone for him. Hamburg would give the Empty Ones a stronger power base, and this could be the opportunity. The north ought to be their native element, anyway…

"I'll have to go," handing the phones back to Andreas. "What's wrong?"

"Could be the Russians, trying to draw you out."

"It's all right. Stop worrying about Tchitcherine. I don't think he's up there."

"But your European said-"

"Him? I don't know how far to trust him. Remember, I did hear him talking with Marvy on the train. Now he's with Tchitcherine's girl in Nordhausen. I mean, would you trust him?"

"But if Marvy's chasing him now, it might mean he's worth something."

"If he is, we're sure to see him again."

Enzian grabs his kit, swallows two Pervitins for the road, reminds Andreas of a business detail or two for tomorrow, and climbs the long salt and stone ramps to the surface.

Outside, he breathes the evergreen air of the Harz. In the old villages, it would be the time of evening for the milking. The first star is out, okanumaihi, the little drinker of sweet milk…

But this must be a different star, a northern star. There is no comfort. What has happened to us? If choices have never been our own, if the Zone-Hereros are meant to live in the bosom of the Angel who tried to destroy us in Sudwest… then: have we been passed over, or have we been chosen for something even more terrible?

Enzian has to be in Hamburg before another spearing of the sun. Security on the trains is troublesome, but the sentries know him. The long freights are rolling out from the Mittelwerke day and night, carrying A4 hardware west to the Americans, north to the English… and soon, when the new map of the occupation goes into effect, east to the Russians too… Nordhausen will be under Russian administration and we should have some action then… will it give him a chance at Tchitcherine? Enzian has never seen the man, but they are meant to come together. Enzian is his half-brother. They are the same flesh.

His sciatic nerve is throbbing now. Too much sitting. He goes limping, alone, head still down for the low clearances back down in

the Erdschweinhohle-who knows what waits out here for the head held too high? Down the road to the railway overpass, tall and gray in the growing starlight, Enzian is heading into the North…

Just before dawn. A hundred feet below flows a pallid sheet of cloud, stretching west as far as they can see. Here are Slothrop and the apprentice witch Geli Tripping, standing up on top of the Brocken, the very plexus of German evil, twenty miles north by northwest of the Mittelwerke, waiting for the sun to rise. Though May Day Eve's come and gone and this frolicking twosome are nearly a month late, relics of the latest Black Sabbath still remain: Kriegsbier empties, lace undergarments, spent rifle cartridges, Swastika-banners of ripped red satin, tattooing-needles and splashes of blue ink-"What the heck was
that
for?" Slothrop wondered.

"For the devil's kiss, of course," Geli snuggling oh-you-old-silly up to his armpit there, and Slothrop feeling a little icky and square for not knowing. But then he knows next to nothing about witches, even though there was, in his ancestry, one genuine Salem Witch, one of the last to join the sus. per coll. crowd dangling, several of them back through the centuries' couplings, off of the Slothrop family tree. Her name was Amy Sprue, a family renegade turned Antinomian at age 23 and running mad over the Berkshire countryside, ahead of Crazy Sue Dunham by 200 years, stealing babies, riding cows in the twilight, sacrificing chickens up on Snodd's Mountain. Lot of ill will about those chickens, as you can imagine. The cows and babies always, somehow, came back all right. Amy Sprue was not, like young skipping Dorothy's antagonist, a mean witch.

She headed for Rhode Island, seeking some of that asylum, And she thought she'd stop by Salem on her way, But they didn't like her style, and they didn't like her smile, So she never saw that Narragansett Bay…

They busted her for witchery and she got death. Another of Slothrop's crazy kinfolks. When she was mentioned aloud at all it was with a shrug, too far away really to be a Family Disgrace-more of a curiosity. Slothrop grew up not quite knowing what to think about her. Witches were certainly not getting a fair shake in the thirties. They were depicted as hags who called you dearie, not exactly a

wholesome lot. The movies had not prepared him for this Teutonic version here. Your kraut witch, for example, has six toes on each foot and no hair at all on her cunt. That is how the witches look, anyhow, in the stairway murals inside the one-time Nazi transmitter tower up on the Brocken here, and government murals are hardly places to go looking for irresponsible fantasy, right? But Geli thinks the hairless cunt derives from the women von Bayros drew. "Aw, you just don't wanna shave
yours"
crows Slothrop. "Ha! Ha! Some witch!"

"I'll show
you
something," she sez, which is why they are now awake at this ungodly hour, side by side, holding hands, very still as the sun begins to clear the horizon. "Now watch," Geli whispers: "out there."

As the sunlight strikes their backs, coming in nearly flat on, it begins developing on the pearl cloudbank: two gigantic shadows, thrown miles overland, past Clausthal-Zelterfeld, past Seesen and Goslar, across where the river Leine would be, and reaching toward Weser… "By golly," Slothrop a little bit nervous, "it's the Specter." You got it up around Greylock in the Berkshires too. Around these parts it is known as the Brockengespenst.

God-shadows. Slothrop raises an arm. His fingers are cities, his biceps is a province-of course he raises an arm. Isn't it expected of him? The arm-shadow trails rainbows behind as it moves reaching eastward for a grab at Gottingen. Not ordinary shadows, either-
three-dimensional
ones, cast out on the German dawn, yes and Titans
had
to live in these mountains, or under them… Impossibly out of scale. Never to be carried by a river. Never to look to a horizon and think that it might go on forever. No trees to climb, no long journeys to take… only their deep images are left, haloed shells lying prone above the fogs men move in…

Geli kicks a leg out straight as a dancer, and tilts her head to the side. Slothrop raises his middle finger to the west, the headlong finger darkening three miles of cloud per second. Geli grabs for Slothrop's cock. Slothrop leans to bite Geli's tit. They are enormous, dancing the floor of the whole visible sky. He reaches underneath her dress. She twines a leg around one of his. The spectra wash red to indigo, tidal, immense, at all their edges. Under the clouds out there it's as still, and lost, as Atlantis.

But the Brockengespenstphanomen is confined to dawn's slender interface, and soon the shadows have come shrinking back to their owners.

"Say, did that Tchitcherine ever-"

"Tchitcherine's too busy for this."

"Oh, and I'm some kind of a drone or something."

"You're different."

"We-e-e-11… he
ought
to see it."

She looks at him curiously, but doesn't ask why-her teeth halt on her lower lip, and the
ivarum
(varoom, a Plasticman sound) hovers trapped in her mouth. Just as well. Slothrop doesn't
know
why. He's no help to anybody who's fixing to interrogate. Last night he and Geli blundered onto a Schwarzkommando picket outside one of the old mine entrances. The Hereros threw questions at him for an hour. Oh, just wandering about you know, looking for a bit of the odd, what we call "human interest," fascinating of course, we're always interested in what you chaps are up to… Geli snickering in the darkness. They must have known her. They didn't ask
her
anything.