GRAVITY RAINBOW (95 page)

"We have to carry on under the possibility that we die
only
because They want us to: because They need our terror for Their survival. We are their harvests…

"It must change radically the nature of our faith. To ask that we keep faith in Their mortality, faith that They also cry, and have fear, and feel pain, faith They are only pretending Death is Their servant- faith in Death as the master of us all-is to ask for an order of courage that I know is beyond my own humanity, though I cannot speak for others… But rather than make that leap of faith, perhaps we will choose instead to turn, to fight: to demand, from those for whom we die, our own immortality. They may not be dying in bed any more, but maybe They can still die from violence. If not, at least we can learn to withhold from Them our fear of Death. For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross. And at least the physical things They have taken, from Earth and from us, can be dismantled, demolished- returned to where it all came from.

"To believe that each of Them
will
personally die is also to believe that Their system will die-that some chance of renewal, some dialectic, is still operating in History. To affirm Their mortality is to affirm Return. I have been pointing out certain obstacles in the way of affirming Return…" It sounds like a disclaimer, and the priest sounds afraid. Pirate and the girl have been listening to him as they linger outside a hall Pirate would enter. It isn't clear if she will come in with him. No, he rather thinks not. It is exactly the sort of room he was afraid it would be. Jagged holes in the walls, evidently where fixtures have been removed, are roughly plastered over. The others, waiting for him it seems, have been passing the time with games in which pain is the overt commodity, such as Charley-Charley, Hits 'n' Cuts, and Rock-Scissors-and-Paper. From next door comes a sound of splashing water and all-male giggling that echoes a bit off of the tiles. "And
now,"
a fluent wireless announcer can be heard, "it's
time
for? Drop – The
Soap!"
Applause and shrieks of laughter, which go on for a disagreeably long time.

"Drop the Soap?" Sammy Hilbert-Spaess ambles over to the thin dividing wall, puts his nose around the end of it to have a look.

"Noisy neighbors," remarks German film director Gerhardt von Goll. "Doesn't this sort of thing ever stop?"

"Hullo, Prentice," nods a black man Pirate doesn't recognize, "we seem to be old school tie." What
is
this, who are all these- His name is St.-Just Grossout. "For most of the Duration, the Firm had me trying to infiltrate the Schwarzkommando. I never saw anyone else trying to. It sounds a bit paranoiac, but I think I was the only one…" This forthright breach of security, if that's what it is, takes Pirate a little aback.

"Do you think you could-well, give me a sort of sitrep on all this?"

"Oh, Geoffrey. Oh, my." Here comes Sammy Hilbert-Spaess back from watching the shower-room frolic, shaking his head, pouched and Levantine eyes continuing to stare straight down his nose, "Geoffrey, by the time you get
any
summary, the whole thing will have changed. We could shorten them for you as much as you like, but you'd be losing so much resolution it wouldn't be worth it, really it wouldn't. Just look
around you,
Geoffrey. Have a nice look, and see who's here."

Pirate is surprised to find Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck more fit than he ever looked in his life. The man is
actively at peace,
in the way of a good samurai-each time he engages Them fully expecting to die, without apprehension or remorse. It is an amazing change. Pirate begins to feel hope for himself. "When did you turn?" He knows Sir Stephen won't be offended at his asking. "How did it happen?"

"Oh, no, don't let
this
one fool you?" who in the world is this, with this greasy pompadour combed nearly as high again as his face, through which shows the peened, the tenderized soul of a fighter who's not only taken dives, but also thought heavily about them all the way down. It is Jeremiah ("Merciful") Evans, the well-known political informer from Pembroke. "No, our little Stevie's not ready for sainthood
quite
yet, are we my fine chap?" Slapping him, playful, clubbing slaps on the cheek: "Eh? eh? eh?"

"Not if they've thrown me in wiv v' likes o' you," replies the knight, churlishly. But it's hard to say really who's provoking whom, for Merciful Evans now bursts into song, and a terrible singer he is, a discredit to his people, in fact-

Say a prayer for the common informer,

He came out of a quim, just like yoooou-

Yes be kind what you chortle,

For narks are as mortal

As any, Kilkenny to Kew…

And the next time you sigh in your comfort,

Ask yourself how he's doing, today-

Is it worse being sold,

For those handfuls of gold,

Than to sigh all your real-life, away?

"I don't know that I'm going to like it in here," Pirate, an unpleasant suspicion growing on him, looking about nervously.

"The worst part's the shame," Sir Stephen tells him. "Getting

through that. Then your next step-well, I talk like an old hand, but that's really only as far as I've come, up through the shame. At the moment I'm involved with the 'Nature of Freedom' drill you know, wondering if
any
action of mine is truly my own, or if I always do only what They want me to do… regardless of what I
believe,
you see… I've been given the old Radio-Control-ImplantedTn-The-Head-At-Birth problem to mull over-as a kind of koan, I suppose. It's driving me really, clinically insane. I rather imagine that's the whole point of it. And who knows what comes
next?
Good God. I don't find out, of course, till I break through this one… I don't mean to discourage you so soon-"

"No, no, I've been wondering something else-are all you lot my Group or something? Have I been
assigned
here?"

"Yes. Are you beginning to see why?"

"I'm afraid I am." With everything else, these are, after all, people who kill each other: and Pirate has always been one of them. "I'd been hoping for-oh, it's foolish, a bit of mercy… but I was at the all-night cinema, around the corner from Gallaho Mews, the intersection with the extra street, the one you can't always see because it comes in at such a strange angle… I had a bad stretch of time to get through, poison, metallic time… it smelled as sour as a burned pot… all I wanted was a place to sit for a while, and they don't care who you are really, what you eat or how long you sleep or who-whom you get together with…"

"Prentice, really it's all right," it's St.-Just Grossout, whom the others call "Sam Juiced" when they want to shout him down, during the passages in here when there is nothing for it but a spot of rowdyism.

"I… just can't… I mean if it is true, then," a laugh it hurts him, deep in his windpipe, to make, "then I defected for nothing, didn't I? I mean, if I haven't really defected at all…"

The word reached him during a government newsreel. FROM CLOAK-AND-DAGGER TO CROAK-AND-STAGGER, the sequin title twinkled to all the convalescent souls gathered for another long night of cinema without schedule-shot of a little street-crowd staring in a dusty show-window, someplace so far into the East End that no one except those who lived there had ever heard of it… bomb-tilted ballroom floor of the ruin slipping uphill behind like a mountain meadow, but dodgy as a trampoline to walk upon, conch-twisting stucco columns tilted inward, brass elevator cage drooping from the overhead. Right out in front was a half-naked, verminous and hairy creature, approximately human, terribly pale, writhing behind

the crumbled remains of plate glass, tearing at sores on his face and abdomen, drawing blood, scratching and picking with dirt-black fingernails. "Every day in Smithfield Market, Lucifer Amp makes a spectacle of himself. That's not so surprising. Many a demobilized soldier and sailor has turned to public service as a means of keeping at least body and soul together, if nothing else. What is unusual is that Mr. Amp used to work for the
Special Operations Executive.
…"

"It's quite good fun, actually," as the camera moves in for a close-up of this individual, "only took me a week to pick up the knack of it…"

"Do you feel a sense of belonging now, that you hadn't when you came, or-have they still not accepted you out here?"

"They-oh the people, the people have been just wonderful. Just grand. No, no problems
there
at all."

At which point, from the bishopwise seat behind Pirate, came an alcohol smell, and warm breath, and a pat on the shoulder. "You hear? 'Used to work.' That's rich, that is. No one has ever left the Firm alive, no one in history-and no one ever will." It was an upper-class accent, one Pirate might have aspired to once in his rambling youth. By the time he decided to look back, though, his visitor was gone.

"Think of it as a handicap, Prentice, like any other, like missing a limb or having malaria… one can still live… one learns to get round it, it becomes part of the day-"

"It's all right. 'Being a-'?"

"Being a double agent? 'Got round'?" He looks at the others, computing. Everyone here seems to be at
least
a double agent.

"Yes… you're down here now, down here with us," whispers Sammy. "Get your shame and your sniffles all out of the way, young fellow, because we don't make a practice of indulging
that
for too long."

"It's a
shadow,"
cries Pirate, "it's working under a shadow, forever."

"But think of the free-dom?" sez Merciful Evans. "I can't even trust myself? can I. How much freer than that can a man be? If he's to be sold out by anyone? even by
himself you
see?"

"I don't want that
-"

"You don't have a choice," Dodson-Truck replies. "The Firm know perfectly well that you've come here. They'll expect a full report from you now. Either voluntary or some other way."

"But I wouldn't… I'd never tell them-" The smiles they are putting on for him now are deliberately cruel, to help him through it a bit. "You don't, you really don't trust me?"

"Of course not," Sammy sez. "Would you-really-trust any of us?"

"Oh, no," Pirate whispers. This is one of his own in progress. Nobody else's. But it's still a passage They can touch quite as easily as that of any client. Without expecting to, it seems Pirate has begun to cry. Odd. He has never cried in public like this before. But he understands where he is, now. It will be possible, after all, to die in obscurity, without having helped a soul: without love, despised, never trusted, never vindicated-to stay down among the Preterite, his poor honor lost, impossible to locate or to redeem.

He is crying for persons, places, and things left behind: for Scorpia Mossmoon, living in St. John's Wood among sheet-music, new recipes, a small kennel of Weimaraners whose racial purity she will go to extravagant lengths to preserve, and husband Clive who shows up now and then, Scorpia living only a few minutes away by Underground but lost to Pirate now for good, no chance for either of them to turn again… for people he had to betray in the course of business for the Firm, Englishmen and foreigners, for Ion so naive, for Gongy-lakis, for the Monkey Girl and the pimps in Rome, for Bruce who got burned… for nights up in partisan mountains when he was one with the smell of living trees, in full love with the at last undeniable beauty of the night… for a girl back in the Midlands named Virginia, and for their child who never came to pass… for his dead mother, and his dying father, for the innocent and the fools who
are
going to trust him, poor faces doomed as dogs who have watched us so amiably from behind the wire fences at the city pounds… cries for the future he can see, because it makes him feel so desperate and cold. He is to be taken from high moment to high moment, standing by at meetings of the Elect, witnessing a test of the new Cosmic Bomb -"Well," a wise old face, handing him the black-lensed glasses, "there's your Bomb…" turning then to see its thick yellow exploding down the beach, across the leagues of Pacific waves… touching famous assassins, yes actually touching their human hands and faces… finding out one day how long ago, how early in the game the contract on his own life was let. No one knows exactly when the hit will come-every morning, before the markets open, out before the milkmen, They make Their new update, and decide on what's going to be sufficient unto the day. Every morning Pirate's name will be on a list, and one morning it will be

close enough to the top. He tries to face it, though it fills him with a terror so pure, so cold, he thinks for a minute he'll pass out. Later, having drawn back a bit, gathering heart for the next sortie, it seems to him he's done with the shame, just as Sir Stephen said, yes past the old shame and scared now, full of worry for nothing but his own ass, his precious, condemned, personal ass…

"Is there room here for the dead?" He hears the question before he can see her asking it. He isn't sure how she came into this room. From all the others now flow impressions of male jealousy, a gruff sort of women-on-ships-is-bad-luck chill and withdrawal. And here's Pirate left alone with her and her question. He holds out to her the ball of taffy he's been carrying, boobish as young Porky Pig holding out the anarchist's ticking bomb to him. But there's to be no sweetness. They are here instead to trade some pain and a few truths, but all in the distracted style of the period:

"Come now," what sort of idiotic trouble does she think she's in now? "you're not dead. I'll wager not even figuratively so."

"I meant, would I be allowed to bring my dead in with me," Katje explains. "They
are
my credentials, after all."

"I rather liked Frans van der Groov. Your ancestor. The dodo chap."

It's not quite what she meant by her dead. "I mean the ones who owe their deadness directly to me. Besides, if Frans were ever to walk in here you'd only stand around, all of you, making sure he understood just how guilty he was. The poor man's world held an inexhaustible supply of dodoes-why teach him about genocide?"