GRAVITY RAINBOW (55 page)

There's only Zwitter: stocky, dark hair parted down the middle, eyeglass lenses thick as the windows of a bathysphere, the fluorescent hydras, eels, and rays of control equations swimming seas behind them…

But when they see Slothrop, there is immediate clearing there, and glazed barriers come down. Hmm, T.S., what's this? Who are these people? What's happened to the apples in old Glimpf's cheeks? What's a Nazi guidance expert doing this side of the fence at Garmisch, with his lab intact?

OH… thur's…

Nazis in the woodwork,

Fascists in the walls,

Little Japs with bucktooth grins

A-gonna grab yew bah th' balls.

Whin this war is over,

How happy Ah will be,

Gearin' up fer thim Rooskies

And Go-round Number Three…

In the days when the white engineers were disputing the attributes of the feeder system that was to be, one of them came to Enzian of Bleicherode and said, "We cannot agree on the chamber pressure. Our calculations show that a working pressure of 40 atu would be the most desirable. But all the data we know of are grouped around a value of only some 10 atu."

"Then clearly," replied the Nguarorerue, "you must listen to the data."

"But that would not be the most perfect or efficient value," protested the German.

"Proud man," said the Nguarorerue. "What are these data, if not direct revelation? Where have they come from, if not from the Rocket which is to be? How do you presume to compare a number you have only derived on paper with a number that is the Rocket's own? Avoid pride, and design to some compromise value."

– from
Tales of the Schwarzkommando,
collected by Steve Edelman

In the mountains around Nordhausen and Bleicherode, down in abandoned mine shafts, live the Schwarzkommando. These days it's no longer a military tide: they are a people now, Zone-Hereros, in exile for two generations from South-West Africa. Early Rhenish missionaries began to bring them back to the Metropolis, that great dull zoo, as specimens of a possibly doomed race. They were gently experi-

merited with: exposed to cathedrals, Wagnerian soirees, Jaeger underwear, trying to get them interested in their souls. Others were taken back to Germany as servants, by soldiers who went to put down the great Herero rising of 1904-1906. But only after 1933 did most of the present-day leadership arrive, as part of a scheme-never openly admitted by the Nazi party-for setting up black juntas, shadow-states for the eventual takeover of British and French colonies in black Africa, on the model of Germany's plan for the Maghreb. Sudwest by then was a protectorate administered by the Union of South Africa, but the real power was still with the old German colonial families, and they cooperated.

There are several underground communities now near Nord-hausen/Bleicherode. Around here they are known collectively as the Erdschweinhohle. This is a Herero joke, a bitter one. Among the Ovatjimba, the poorest of the Hereros, with no cattle or villages of their own, the totem animal was the Erdschwein or aardvark. They took their name from him, never ate his flesh, dug their food from the earth, just as he does. Considered outcasts, they lived on the veld, in the open. You were likely to come across them at night, their fires flaring bravely against the wind, out of rifle range from the iron tracks: there seemed no other force than that to give them locus out in that emptiness. You knew what they feared-not what they wanted, or what moved them. And you had business upcountry, at the mines: so, presently, as the sputtering lights slipped behind, so did all further need to think of them…

But as you swung away, who was the woman alone in the earth, planted up to her shoulders in the aardvark hole, a gazing head rooted to the desert plane, with an upsweep of mountains far behind her, darkly folded, far away in the evening? She can feel the incredible pressure, miles of horizontal sand and clay, against her belly. Down the trail wait the luminous ghosts of her four stillborn children, fat worms lying with no chances of comfort among the wild onions, one by one, crying for milk more sacred than what is tasted and blessed in the village calabashes. In preterite line they have pointed her here, to be in touch with Earth's gift for genesis. The woman feels power flood in through every gate: a river between her thighs, light leaping at the ends of fingers and toes. It is sure and nourishing as sleep. It is a warmth. The more the daylight fades, the further she submits-to the dark, to the descent of water from the air. She is a seed in the Earth. The holy aardvark has dug her bed.

Back in Sudwest, the Erdschweinhohle was a powerful symbol

of fertility and life. But here in the Zone, its real status is not so clear.

Inside the Schwarzkommando there are forces, at present, who have opted for sterility and death. The struggle is mostly in silence, in the night, in the nauseas and crampings of pregnancies or miscarriages. But it is political struggle. No one is more troubled with it than Enzian. He is Nguarorerue here. The word doesn't mean "leader" exactly, but "one who has been proven."

Enzian is also known, though not to his face, as Otyikondo, the Halfbreed. His father was a European. Not that it makes him unique among the Erdschweinhohlers here: there's German, Slavic and Gypsy blood mixed in by now too. Over the couple of generations, moved by accelerations unknown in the days before the Empire, they have been growing an identity that few can see as ever taking final shape. The Rocket will have a final shape, but not its people. Eanda and oruzo have lost their force out here-the bloodlines of mother and father were left behind, in Sudwest. Many of the early emigrants had even gone over to the faith of the Rhenish Missionary Society long before they left. In each village, as noon flared the shadows in tightly to their owners, in that moment of terror and refuge, the omuhona took from his sacred bag, soul after converted soul, the leather cord kept there since the individual's birth, and untied the birth-knot. Untied, it was another soul dead to the tribe. So today, in the Erdschweinhohle, the Empty Ones each carry one knotless strip of leather: it is a bit of the old symbolism they have found useful.

They call themselves Otukungurua. Yes, old Africa hands, it
ought
to be "Omakungurua," but they are always careful-perhaps it's less healthy than care-to point out that
oma-
applies only to the living and human.
Otu-
is for the inanimate and the rising, and this is how they imagine themselves. Revolutionaries of the Zero, they mean to carry on what began among the old Hereros after the 1904 rebellion failed. They want a negative birth rate. The program is racial suicide. They would finish the extermination the Germans began in 1904.

A generation earlier, the declining number of live Herero births was a topic of medical interest throughout southern Africa. The whites looked on as anxiously as they would have at an outbreak of rinderpest among the cattle. How provoking, to watch one's subject population dwindling like this, year after year. What's a colony without its dusky natives? Where's the fun if they're all going to die off?

Just a big hunk of desert, no more maids, no field-hands, no laborers

for the construction or the mining-wait, wait a minute there, yes it's Karl Marx, that sly old racist skipping away with his teeth together

and his eyebrows up trying to make believe it's nothing but Cheap Labor and Overseas Markets… Oh, no. Colonies are much, much more. Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit. Where he can fall on his slender prey roaring as loud as he feels like, and guzzle her blood with open joy. Eh? Where he can just wallow and rut and let himself go in a softness, a receptive darkness of limbs, of hair as woolly as the hair on his own forbidden genitals. Where the poppy, and cannabis and coca grow full and green, and not to the colors and style of death, as do ergot and agaric, the blight and fungus native to Europe. Christian Europe was always death, Karl, death and repression. Out and down in the colonies, life can be indulged, life and sensuality in all its forms, with no harm done to the Metropolis, nothing to soil those cathedrals, white marble statues, noble thoughts… No word ever gets back. The silences down here are vast enough to absorb all behavior, no matter how dirty, how animal it gets…

Some of the more rational men of medicine attributed the Herero birth decline to a deficiency of Vitamin E in the diet-others to poor chances of fertilization given the peculiarly long and narrow uterus of the Herero female. But underneath all this reasonable talk, this scientific speculating, no white Afrikaner could quite put down the way it
felt…
Something sinister was moving out in the veld: he was beginning to look at their faces, especially those of the women, lined beyond the thorn fences, and he knew beyond logical proof: there
was
a tribal mind at work out here, and it had chosen to commit suicide… Puzzling. Perhaps we weren't as fair as we might have been, perhaps we did take their cattle and their lands away… and then the work-camps of course, the barbed wire and the stockades… Perhaps they feel it is a world they no longer want to live in. Typical of them, though, giving up, crawling away to die… why won't they even negotiate? We could work out a solution,
some
solution…

It was a simple choice for the Hereros, between two kinds of death: tribal death, or Christian death. Tribal death made sense. Christian death made none at all. It seemed an exercise they did not need. But to the Europeans, conned by their own Baby Jesus Con Game, what they were witnessing among these Hereros was a mystery potent as that of the elephant graveyard, or the lemmings rushing into the sea.

Though they don't admit it, the Empty Ones now exiled in the Zone, Europeanized in language and thought, split off from the old tribal unity, have found the why of it just as mysterious. But they've

seized it, as a sick woman will seize a charm. They calculate no cycles, no returns, they are in love with the glamour of a whole people's suicide-the pose, the stoicism, and the bravery. These Otukungurua are prophets of masturbating, specialists in abortion and sterilization, pitchmen for acts oral and anal, pedal and digital, sodomistical and zoophiliac-their approach and their game is pleasure: they are spieling earnestly and well, and Erdschweinhohlers are listening.

The Empty Ones can guarantee a day when the last Zone-Herero will die, a final zero to a collective history fully lived. It has appeal.

There is no outright struggle for power. It is all seduction and counterseduction, advertising and pornography, and the history of the Zone-Hereros is being decided in bed.

Vectors in the night underground, all trying to flee a center, a force, which appears to be the Rocket: some immachination, whether of journey or of destiny, which is able to gather violent political oppo-sites together in the Erdschweinhohle as it gathers fuel and oxidizer in its thrust chamber: metered, helmsmanlike, for the sake of its scheduled parabola.

Enzian sits this evening under his mountain, behind him another day of schemes, expediting, newly invented paperwork-forms he manages to destroy or fold, Japanese style, before the day's end, into gazelles, orchids, hunter-hawks. As the Rocket grows toward its working shape and fullness, so does he evolve, himself, into a new configuration. He feels it. It's something else to worry about. Late last night, among the blueprints, Christian and Mieczislav looked up, abruptly smiled, and fell silent. A transparent reverence. They study the drawings as if they were his own, and revelations. This is not flattering to him.

What Enzian wants to create will have no history. It will never need a design change. Time, as time is known to the other nations, will wither away inside this new one. The Erdschweinhohle will not be bound, like the Rocket, to time. The people will find the Center again, the Center without time, the journey without hysteresis, where every departure is a return to the same place, the only place…

He has thus himself found a strange rapprochement with the Empty Ones: in particular with Josef Ombindi of Hannover. The Eternal Center can easily be seen as the Final Zero. Names and methods vary, but the movement toward stillness is the same. It has led to

strange passages between the two men. "You know," Ombindi's eyes

rolled the other way, looking up at a mirror-image of Enzian that only

he can see, "there's… well, something you ordinarily wouldn't think of as erotic-but it's really the most erode thing there is."

"Really," grins Enzian, flirting. "I can't think of what that would be. Give me a clue."

"It's a non-repeatable act."

"Firing a rocket?"

"No, because there's always another rocket. But there's nothing- well, never mind."

"Ha! Nothing to follow it with, that's what you were going to say."

"Suppose I give you another clue."

"All right." But Enzian has already guessed: it's there in the way he holds his jaw and is just about to laugh…

"It embraces all the Deviations in one single act." Enzian sighs, irritated, but does not call him on this use of "Deviations." Bringing up the past is part of Ombindi's game. "Homosexuality, for example." No rise. "Sadism
and
masochism. Onanism? Necrophilia…"

"All those in the same act?"

All those, and more. Both know by now that what's under discussion is the act of suicide, which also includes bestiality ("Think how sweet," runs the pitch, "to show mercy, sexual mercy to
that
hurt and crying animal"), pedophilia ("It is widely reported that just at the edge you grow glaringly younger"), lesbianism ("Yes, for as the wind blows through all the emptying compartments the two shadow-women at last can creep out of their chambers in the dying shell, at the last ashen shoreline, to meet and embrace…"), coprophilia and urolagnia ("The final convulsions…"), fetishism ("A wide choice of death-fetishes, naturally…"). Naturally. The two of them sit there, passing a cigarette back and forth, till it's smoked down to a very small stub. Is it idle talk, or is Ombindi really trying to hustle Enzian here? Enzian's got to be sure before he moves. If he comes out sez, "This is a hustle, right?" and turns out it isn't, well- But the alternative is so
strange,
that Enzian is, in some way, being