GRAVITY RAINBOW (91 page)

It wasn't ever necessary to see around the entire Plan… really that's asking too much of anyone… not true? This S-Gerat strategy he's going out of his way to die for tonight, what does he know of the Springer's
full
intentions in the affair? It is reasonable to Narrisch that he, being smaller, he should be the sacrifice, if it helps Springer survive, even survive another day… wartime thinking, ja, ja… but too late to change…

Did the S-Gerat program at Nordhausen in its time ever hint that so many individuals, nations, firms, communities of interest would come after the fact? Of course he was flattered then at being chosen to work on the modification to the guidance, minor as it was… hardly worth the special treatment… still, it was his first high historical moment and he sourly figured it to be his last, up until meeting with Springer's recruiting team, back during the rainier part of June… Conferences in cafes and entrances to churchyards around Braun-

schweig (stucco arches, vines dripping onto thin collars) without an umbrella but with that light, belled hope inside-a field, crowded with lines of force, to expand, to fill, to keep him in good health and spirits… Berlin! The Chicago Cabaret! "Cocaine-or cards?" (an old movie line the gunsels loved to use that summer)… the
Big Time!

But the ringing bright thing inside brought him here, instead: here, down in a pipe, to only a handful more of minutes…

The idea was always to carry along a fixed quantity, A. Sometimes you'd use a Wien bridge, tuned to a certain frequency A
_{
, whistling, heavy with omen, inside the electric corridors… while outside, according to the tradition in these matters, somewhere a quantity B would be gathering, building, as the Rocket gathered speed. So, up till assigned Brennschluss velocity, "v
," electric-shocked as any rat into following this very narrow mazeway of clear space-yes, radio signals from the ground would enter the Rocket body, and by reflex-literally by electric signal traveling a reflex arc-the control surfaces twitch, to steer you back on course the instant you'd begin to wander off (how could you've kept from lapsing, up here, into that radiant inattention, so caught up in the wind, the sheer altitude… the unimaginable fires at your feet?)… so, for that tightly steered passage, all was carried on in the sharpest, most painful
anticipation,
with B always growing, as palpably cresting as the assault of a tidal wave that stills every small creature and hones the air down to a cold stir… Your quantity A- shining, constant A, carried as they must have once packed far overland at night the Grail, in their oldtime and military bleakness of humor… and one morning a wide upper lip steelwool gray with the
one day's growth,
the fatal, the terrible sign, he shaved smooth every day, it meant that this
was
the Last Day-and, too, with only the grim sixth sense, as much faith as clear reception, that the B of Many Subscripts just over the electric horizon was really growing closer, perhaps this time as "B
_iw
," the precession angle of the gyro, moving invisibly
but felt,
terrifically arousing, over the metal frame toward angle A
_iw
(which is how they have set you the contacts: to close, you must see, at that exact angle). Or as "B
_iL
," another integrating, not of gyro rate but of the raw current flow itself, bled from the moving coil inside the poles, the "fettered" pendulum… they thought this way, Design Group, in terms of captivity, prohibition… there was an attitude toward one's hardware more brutal and soldierly than most engineers' got the chance to be… They felt quite the roughshod elite, Driwelling, and Schmeil, with the fluorescent lights shining on his

bared forehead night after night… Inside their brains they shared an old, old electro-decor-variable capacitors of glass, kerosene for a dielectric, brass plates and ebonite covers, Zeiss galvanometers with thousands of fine-threaded adjusting screws, Siemens milliammeters set on slate surfaces, terminals designated by Roman numerals, Standard Ohms of manganese wire in oil, the old Gulcher Thermosaule that operated on heating gas, put out 4 volts, nickel and antimony, asbestos funnels on top, mica tubing…

Wasn't that life more decent than gangstering? A cleaner sort of friendship… less devious, anyway… There we
saw
how we had to fit in… the machinery itself determined that… everything was so clear then, paranoia was all for the enemy, and never for one's own…

– What about the SS?

– Oh, they were the enemy, I'd say… [Laughter.]

No, Klaus, don't drift away, please, not onto dreams of kindly Soviet interrogation that will end in some ermine bed, some vodka-perfumed stupor, you know that's foolish…

B, B-sub-N-for-Narrisch, is nearly here-nearly about to burn through the last whispering veil to equal "A"-to equal the only fragment of himself left by them to go through the moment, the irreducible doll of German styrene, shabbier, less authentic than any earlier self… a negligible quantity in this last light… this tattoo of hunters' boots, and rifle bolts in oiled keyways…

Here come Enzian, Andreas, and Christian, coming on like Smith, Klein, 'n' French, crashing into the basement room-field-gray kit, newspaper shoes, rolled trouser-cuffs, hands and bare forearms shining with motor oil and gear grease, toting carbines in a show of force. But no Empty Ones here to see them. It's too late. Just the mute bed, and the brown ellipse her blood made on the torn ticking. And washing-blue in grainy splashes in the corners, under the bed… their signature, their challenge.

"Where
is she
-" Christian is just this side of berserk. One word astray and he'll be off to kill the first Empty One he finds. Maria, his sister, is, was, may be-

"We'd better," Enzian already back out the door, "where's, uh… her husband, you know…"

"Pavel." Christian wants to see his eyes, but Enzian won't turn.

Pavel and Maria meant to have the child. Then Josef Ombindi and his people started their visiting. They have learned their vulturehood from the Christian missionaries. They keep lists of all the women of childbearing age. Any pregnancy is an invitation to hover, to tune in, to swoop. They will use threats, casuistry, physical seduction-there's an arsenal of techniques. Washing-blue is the abortifacient of choice.

"The refinery," suggests Andreas Orukambe.

"Really? I thought he'd sworn off that."

"Maybe not now." The girl's brother stares him hard as fists.
En
zian, old bastard, you really are out of touch…

They remount their motorcycles and head off again. Blasted dry-docks, charcoal ribs of warehouses, cylindrical chunks of submarine that never got assembled, go ripping by in the darkness. British security are about, but that's another, encapsulated world. The British G-5 occupy their own space and Zone congruent but not identical to what these serious Schwarzkommando astride bikes unmuffled go blasting on through tonight.

Separations are proceeding. Each alternative Zone speeds away from all the others, in fated acceleration, red-shifting, fleeing the Center. Each day the mythical return Enzian dreamed of seems less possible. Once it was necessary to know uniforms, insignia, airplane markings, to observe boundaries. But by now too many choices have been made. The single root lost, way back there in the May desolation. Each bird has his branch now, and each one is the Zone.

A crowd of DPs is milling by the ruin of an ornamental fountain, a score of them, eyes of ash, smudged into faces white as salt. The Hereros go swerving by them, halfway up a shallow flight of long steps dovetailing into the grade of the street, teeth slamming together upper and lower, cycle frames squeaking shrill, up and down the steps past wordless plosions of Slavic breath. Ashes and salt. A sound-truck appears around a wall a hundred meters away: the voice, University-bred and long tired of the message, recites, "Clear the streets. Go to your homes." Clear the-go to your
what?
There must be a mistake, it must be for some other town…

Whir
underneath an oil pipeline up on trestles running down leftward to the water now, huge bolted flanges overhead softened by rust and oily dirt. Far out in the harbor rides an oil tanker, rocking serene as a web of stars…
Zoom
uphill slantwise toward a rampart of wasted, knotted, fused, and scorched girderwork, stacks, pipes, ducting, windings, fairings, insulators reconfigured by all the bombing, grease-stained pebblery on the ground rushing by a mile a minute and wait, wait, say what, say
"reconfigured"
now?

There doesn't exactly dawn, no but there
breaks,
as that light you're afraid will break some night at too deep an hour to explain away-there floods on Enzian what seems to him an extraordinary understanding. This serpentine slag-heap he is just about to ride into now, this ex-refinery, Jamf Olfabriken Werke AG, is
not a ruin at all. It is in perfect working order.
Only waiting for the right connections to be set up, to be switched on… modified, precisely,
deliberately
by bombing that was never hostile, but part of a plan both sides-
"sides?"
-had always agreed on… yes and now what if we-all right, say we
are
supposed to be the Kabbalists out here, say that's our real Destiny, to be the scholar-magicians of the Zone, with somewhere in it a Text, to be picked to pieces, annotated, explicated, and masturbated till it's all squeezed limp of its last drop… well we assumed-naturlich!-that this holy Text had to be the Rocket, orururumo orunene the high, rising, dead, the blazing, the great one ("orunene" is already being modified by the Zone-Herero children to "omunene," the eldest brother)… our Torah. What else? Its symmetries, its latencies, the
cuteness
of it enchanted and seduced us while the real Text persisted, somewhere else, in its darkness, our darkness… even this far from Sudwest we are not to be spared the ancient tragedy of lost messages, a curse that will never leave us…

But, if I'm riding through it, the Real Text, right now, if this is it… or if I passed it today somewhere in the devastation of Hamburg, breathing the ash-dust, missing it completely… if what the IG built on this site were not at
all
the final shape of it, but only an arrangement of fetishes, come-ons to call down special tools in the form of 8th AF bombers
yes
the "Allied" planes all would have been, ultimately, IG-built, by way of Director Krupp, through his English interlocks-the bombing was the exact industrial process of conversion, each release of energy placed exactly in space and time, each shock-wave plotted in advance to bring
precisely tonight's wreck
into being thus decoding the Text, thus coding, recoding, redecoding the holy Text… If it is in working order, what is it meant to do? The engineers who built it as a refinery never knew there were any further steps to be taken. Their design was "finalized," and they could forget it.

It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted… secretly, it was being die-

tated instead by the needs of technology… by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by something that needed the energy-burst of war, crying, "Money be damned, the very life of [insert name of Nation] is at stake," but meaning, most likely,
dawn is nearly here, I
need my night's blood, my funding, funding, ahh more, more…
The real crises were crises of allocation and priority, not among firms-it was only staged to look that way-but among the different Technologies, Plastics, Electronics, Aircraft, and their needs which are understood only by the ruling elite…

Yes but Technology only responds (how often this argument has been iterated, dogged and humorless as a Gaussian reduction, among the younger Schwarzkommando especially), "All very well to talk about having a monster by the tail, but do you think we'd've had the Rocket if someone, some specific somebody with a name and a penis hadn't
wanted
to chuck a ton of Amatol 300 miles and blow up a block full of civilians? Go ahead, capitalize the T on technology, deify it if it'll make you feel less responsible-but it puts you in with the neutered, brother, in with the eunuchs keeping the harem of our stolen Earth for the numb and joyless hardens of human sultans, human elite with no right at all to be where they are-"

We have to look for power sources here, and distribution networks we were never taught, routes of power our teachers never imagined, or were encouraged to avoid… we have to find meters whose scales are unknown in the world, draw our own schematics, getting feedback, making connections, reducing the error, trying to learn the real function… zeroing in on what incalculable plot? Up here, on the surface, coaltars, hydrogenation, synthesis were always phony, dummy functions to hide the real,
the planetary mission
yes perhaps centuries in the unrolling… this ruinous plant, waiting for its Kab-balists and new alchemists to discover the Key, teach the mysteries to others…