Gravity's Rainbow (114 page)

“You are under the mountain,” a voice announces. Stony cave-acoustics in here. “Please
remember from this point on to obey all pertinent regulations.”

His guide is a kind of squat robot, dark gray plastic with rolling headlamp eyes.
It is shaped something like a crab. “That’s Cancer in Latin,” sez the robot, “and
in Kenosha, too!” It will prove to be addicted to one-liners that never quite come
off for anyone but it.

“Here is Muffin-tin Road,” announces the robot, “note the smiling faces on all the
houses here.” Upstairs windows are eyes, picket fence is teeth. Nose is the front
door.

“Sa-a-a-y,” asks the colonel, taken by a sudden thought, “does it ever
snow
here in Happyville?”

“Does what ever snow?”

“You’re evading.”

“I’m evading-room vino from Visconsin,” sings this boorish machine, “and you oughta
see the nurses run! So what else is new, Jackson?” The squat creature is actually
chewing gum
, a Laszlo Jamf variation on polyvinyl chloride, very malleable, even sending out
detachable molecules which, through an ingenious Osmo-elektrische Schalterwerke, developed
by Siemens, is transmitting, in code, a damn fair approximation of Beeman’s licorice
flavor to the robot crab’s brain.

“Mister Information
always
answers questions.”

“For what he’s making, I’d even question answers. Does it ever snow? Of
course
it snows in Happyville. Lotta snowmen’d sure be sore if it didn’t!”

“I recall, back in Wisconsin, the wind used to blow right up the walk, like a visitor
who expects to be let in. Sweeps the snow up against the front door, leaves it drifted
there. . . . Ever get that in Happyville?”

“Old stuff,” sez the robot.

“Anybody ever open his front door, while the wind was doing that, eh?”

“Thousands of times.”

“
Then
,” pounces the colonel, “if the door is the house’s
nose
, and the door is open, a-and all of those snowy-white crystals are blowing up from
Muffin-tin Road in a big cloud right into the—”

“
Aagghh!
” screams the plastic robot, and scuttles away into a narrow alley. The colonel finds
himself alone in a brown and wine-aged district of the city: sandstone and adobe colors
sweep away in a progress of walls, rooftops, streets, not a tree in sight, and who’s
this come strolling down the Schokoladestrasse? Why, it’s Laszlo Jamf himself, grown
to a prolonged old age, preserved like a ’37 Ford against the World’s ups and downs,
which are never more than damped-out changes in smile, wide-pearly to wistfully gauze,
inside Happyville here. Dr. Jamf is wearing a bow tie of a certain limp grayish lavender,
a color for long dying afternoons through conservatory windows, minor-keyed lieder
about days gone by, plaintive pianos, pipesmoke in a stuffy parlor, overcast Sunday
walks by canals . . . here the two men are, dry-scratched precisely, attentively on
this afternoon, and the bells across the canal are tolling the hour: the men have
come from very far away, after a journey neither quite remembers, on a mission of
some kind. But each has been kept ignorant of the other’s role. . . .

Now it turns out that this light bulb over the colonel’s head here is the same identical
Osram light bulb that Franz Pökler used to sleep next to in his bunk at the underground
rocket works at Nordhausen. Statistically (so Their story goes), every n-thousandth
light bulb is gonna be perfect, all the delta-q’s piling up just right, so we shouldn’t
be surprised that this one’s still around, burning brightly. But the truth is even
more stupendous. This bulb is
immortal!
It’s been around, in fact, since the twenties, has that old-timery point at the tip
and is less pear-shaped than more contemporary bulbs. Wotta history, this bulb, if
only it could speak—well, as a matter of fact, it
can
speak. It is dictating the muscular modulations of Paddy McGonigle’s cranking tonight,
this is a loop here, with feedback through Paddy to the generator again. Here it is,

T
HE
S
TORY OF
B
YRON THE
B
ULB

Byron was to’ve been manufactured by Tungsram in Budapest. He would probably have
been grabbed up by the ace salesman Géza Rózsavölgyi’s father Sandor, who covered
all the Transylvanian territory and had begun to go native enough to where the home
office felt vaguely paranoid about him throwing some horrible spell on the whole operation
if they didn’t give him what he wanted. Actually he was a salesman who wanted his
son to be a doctor, and that came true. But it may have been the bad witch-leery auras
around Budapest that got the birth of Byron reassigned at the last minute to Osram,
in Berlin. Reassigned, yes. There is a Bulb Baby Heaven, amiably satirized as if it
was the movies or something, well Big
Business
, ha, ha! But don’t let Them fool you, this
is
a bureaucracy first, and a Bulb Baby Heaven only as a sort of sideline. All overhead—yes,
out of its own pocket the Company is springing for square leagues of organdy, hogsheads
of IG Farben pink and blue Baby Dye, hundredweights of clever Siemens Electric Baby
Bulb Pacifiers, giving the suckling Bulb the shape of a 110-volt current without the
least trickle of power. One way or another, these Bulb folks are in the business of
providing the appearance of power, power against the night, without the reality.

Actually, B.B.H. is rather shabby. The brown rafters drip cobwebs. Now and then a
roach shows up on the floor, and all the Babies try to roll over to look (being Bulbs
they
seem
perfectly symmetrical, Skippy, but don’t forget the contact at the top of the thread)
going uh-guh! uhhhh-
guh!
, glowing feebly at the bewildered roach sitting paralyzed and squashable out on the
bare boards, rushing, reliving the terror of some sudden blast of current out of nowhere
and high overhead the lambent, all-seeing Bulb. In their innocence, the Baby Bulbs
don’t know what to make of this roach’s abreaction—they feel his fright, but don’t
know what it is. They just want to be his friend. He’s interesting and has good moves.
Everybody’s excited except for Byron, who considers the other Bulb Babies a bunch
of saps. It is a constant struggle to turn their thoughts on anything meaningful.
Hi there Babies, I’m Byron-the-Bulb! Here to sing a little song to you, that goes—

Light-up, and-shine, you—in-cande-scent Bulb Ba-bies!

Looks-like ya got ra-bies

Just lay there foamin’ and a-screamin’ like a buncha little demons,

I’m deliv’rin’ unto you a king-dom of roa-ches,

And no-thin’ ap-proaches

That joyful feelin’ when-you’re up-on the ceilin’

Lookin’ down—night and day—on the king-dom you sur-vey,

They’ll come out ’n’ love ya till the break of dawn,

But they run like hell when that light comes on!

So shine on, Baby Bulbs, you’re the wave of the fu-ture,

And I’m here to recruit ya,

In m’great crusade,

Just sing along Babies—come-on-and-join-the-big-pa-rade!

Trouble with Byron’s he’s an old, old soul, trapped inside the glass prison of a Baby
Bulb. He hates this place, lying on his back waiting to get manufactured, nothing
to listen to on the speakers but Charleston music, now and then an address to the
Nation, what kind of a setup’s that? Byron wants to get out of here and
into it
, needless to say he’s been developing all kinds of nervous ailments, Baby Bulb Diaper
Rash, which is a sort of corrosion on his screw threads, Bulb Baby Colic, a tight
spasm of high resistance someplace among the deep loops of tungsten wire, Bulb Baby
Hyperventilation, where it actually feels like his vacuum’s been broken though there
is no organic basis. . . .

When M-Day finally does roll around, you can bet Byron’s elated. He has passed the
time hatching some really insane grandiose plans—he’s gonna organize all the Bulbs,
see, get him a power base in Berlin, he’s already hep to the Strobing Tactic, all
you do is develop the knack (Yogic, almost) of shutting off and on at a rate close
to the human brain’s alpha rhythm, and you can actually trigger an
epileptic fit!
True. Byron has had a vision against the rafters of his ward, of 20 million Bulbs,
all over Europe, at a given synchronizing pulse arranged by one of his many agents
in the Grid, all these Bulbs beginning to strobe
together
, humans thrashing around the 20 million rooms like fish on the beaches of Perfect
Energy—Attention, humans, this has been a warning to you. Next time, a few of us will
explode.
Ha-ha. Yes we’ll unleash our
Kamikaze squads!
You’ve heard of the Kirghiz Light? well that’s the ass end of a firefly compared
to what we’re gonna—oh, you haven’t heard of the—oh, well, too bad. Cause a few Bulbs,
say a million, a mere 5% of our number, are more than willing to flame out in one
grand burst instead of patiently waiting out their design hours. . . . So Byron dreams
of his Guerrilla Strike Force, gonna get Herbert Hoover, Stanley Baldwin, all of them,
right in the face with one coordinated blast. . . .

Is Byron in for a rude awakening! There is already an organization, a human one, known
as “Phoebus,” the international light-bulb cartel, headquartered in Switzerland. Run
pretty much by International GE, Osram, and Associated Electrical Industries of Britain,
which are in turn owned 100%, 29% and 46%, respectively, by the General Electric Company
in America. Phoebus fixes the prices and determines the operational lives of all the
bulbs in the world, from Brazil to Japan to Holland (although Philips in Holland is
the mad dog of the cartel, apt at any time to cut loose and sow disaster throughout
the great Combination). Given this state of general repression, there seems noplace
for a newborn Baby Bulb to start but at the bottom.

But Phoebus doesn’t know yet that Byron is immortal. He starts out his career at an
all-girl opium den in Charlottenburg, almost within sight of the statue of Wernher
Siemens, burning up in a sconce, one among many bulbs witnessing the more languorous
forms of Republican decadence. He gets to know all the bulbs in the place, Benito
the Bulb over in the next sconce who’s always planning an escape, Bernie down the
hall in the toilet, who has all kinds of urolagnia jokes to tell, his mother Brenda
in the kitchen who talks of hashish hush puppies, dildos rigged to pump floods of
paregoric orgasm to the capillaries of the womb, prayers to Astarte and Lilith, queen
of the night, reaches into the true Night of the Other, cold and naked on linoleum
floors after days without sleep, the dreams and tears become a natural state. . . .

One by one, over the months, the other bulbs burn out, and are gone. The first few
of these hit Byron hard. He’s still a new arrival, still hasn’t accepted his immortality.
But on through the burning hours he starts to learn about the transience of others:
learns that loving them while they’re here becomes easier, and also more intense—to
love as if each design-hour will be the last. Byron soon enough becomes a Permanent
Old-Timer. Others can recognize his immortality on sight, but it’s never discussed
except in a general way, when folklore comes flickering in from other parts of the
Grid, tales of the Immortals, one in a kabbalist’s study in Lyons who’s supposed to
know magic, another in Norway outside a warehouse facing arctic whiteness with a stoicism
more southerly bulbs begin strobing faintly just at the thought of. If other Immortals
are
out there, they remain silent. But it is a silence with much, perhaps, everything,
in it.

After Love, then, Byron’s next lesson is Silence.

As his burning lengthens toward 600 hours, the monitors in Switzerland begin to keep
more of an eye on Byron. The Phoebus Surveillance Room is located under a little-known
Alp, a chilly room crammed full of German electro hardware, glass, brass, ebonite,
and silver, massive terminal blocks shaggy with copper clips and screws, and a cadre
of superclean white-robed watchers who wander meter to meter, light as snowdevils,
making sure that nothing’s going wrong, that through no bulb shall the mean operating
life be extended. You can imagine what it would do to the market if
that
started happening.

Byron passes Surveillance’s red-line at 600 hours, and immediately, as a matter of
routine, he is checked out for filament resistance, burning temperature, vacuum, power
consumption. Everything’s normal. Now Byron is to be checked out every 50 hours hereafter.
A soft chime will go off in the monitoring station whenever it’s time.

At 800 hours—another routine precaution—a Berlin agent is sent out to the opium den
to transfer Byron. She is wearing asbestos-lined kid gloves and seven-inch spike heels,
no not so she can fit in with the crowd, but so that she can reach that sconce to
unscrew Byron. The other bulbs watch, in barely subdued terror. The word goes out
along the Grid. At something close to the speed of light, every bulb, Azos looking
down the empty black Bakelite streets, Nitralampen and Wotan Gs at night soccer matches,
Just-Wolframs, Monowatts and Siriuses, every bulb in Europe knows what’s happened.
They are silent with impotence, with surrender in the face of struggles they thought
were all myth.
We can’t help
, this common thought humming through pastures of sleeping sheep, down Autobahns and
to the bitter ends of coaling piers in the North,
there’s never been anything we could do. . . .
Anyone shows us the meanest hope of transcending and the Committee on Incandescent
Anomalies comes in and takes him away. Some do protest, maybe, here and there, but
it’s only information, glow-modulated, harmless, nothing close to the explosions in
the faces of the powerful that Byron once envisioned, back there in his Baby ward,
in his innocence.

He is taken to Neukölln, to a basement room, the home of a glass-blower who is afraid
of the night and who will keep Byron glowing and on watch over all the flint bowls,
the griffins and flower-ships, ibexes in mid-leap, green spider-webs, somber ice-deities.
This is one of many so-called “control points,” where suspicious bulbs can be monitored
easily.