Against the Day (49 page)

nience
’s
armaments manifest as
Contrabuoyancy Devices.
The
unspoken question, at the postengagement critique held that day directly after
midday mess, was whether it may have been one of these—fired at the
Bol’shaia
Igra
without allowing for a number of critical factors, such as the
humidity—that had toppled the Campanile.

“What stood for a thousand years,”
Randolph pronounced, “what neither tempest not earthquake, nor even the
catastrophic Napoleon Bonaparte could touch, we have bumblingly brought down in
an instant. What shall be the next target of our ineptitude? Notre Dame? the
Pyramids?”

“It was an accident of war,” Lindsay
insisted. “And I am not so sure we did it anyway.”

“Then you did actually see something,
Noseworth?” inquired Chick Counterfly.

“I regret,” sniffed Lindsay, “that
seldom in the heat of engagement have I found sufficient leisure for
scientific
observation,
though the wellknown propensity of the other commander for
attacking his targets with deciduous masonry would strongly if not inescapably
suggest—”

“Yet being aloft, we were not at all
in the path of the tower’s collapse,” pointed out Chick, patiently. “We had the
weathergauge. We were bearing down upon them.”

“—coupled with their swift
departure,” Lindsay, oblivious, had continued, “as if in shame at what they had
done—”

“Hey, Lindsay, you can still catch
’em if you hurry,” taunted Darby.

“Or we might send in pursuit
your
maternal relation,
Suckling, one glimpse of whom should prove more than
sufficient fatally to compromise their morale, if not indeed
transform them
all
into masonry—”

“Well,
your
mother,” riposted the readily nettled youth, “is
so ugly
—”

“Gentlemen,” implored Randolph, in
whose voice it required little clairvoyance to detect a neuræsthenic
prostration only with difficulty resisted, “we may have committed today a great
wrong against History, beside which this petty squabbling shrinks to submicroscopic
insignificance. Please be so kind as to save it for some more recreational
moment.”

They arranged to meet with Captain
Padzhitnoff and his officers on an allbutdeserted stretch of Adriatic beach
over on the Lido, toward Malamocco. The commanders embraced in a curious
mixture of formality and sorrow.

“This is so terrible,” said Randolph.

“Was not
Bol’shaia Igra.
”

“No. We didn’t think so. It wasn’t
the
Inconvenience
either. Who then?”

The Russian aeronaut appeared to be
struggling with an ethical question. “St. Cosmo. You are aware that something
else is out there.”

“Such as . . .”

“You have seen nothing? Detected
nothing unusual?”

“Over the Piazza, you mean.”

“Anywhere. Geography is irrelevant.”

“I’m not sure—”

“They appear out of. . . some other condition,
and they vanish back into it.”

“And you believe it was they who
knocked down the Campanile?” said Chick. “But how?”

“Vibrational rays, nearly as we can
make out,” said Chick’s opposite number, Dr. Gerasimoff. “Adjustable to
target’s exact sympathetic frequency, thereupon inducing divergent
oscillation.”

“How convenient,” muttered Lindsay
darkly, “that one cannot analyze the rubble for evidence of the quadruple
brickbats it is your delight to drop on anyone you take a dislike to.”

The Russian, remembering his vision
of the collapse, smiled wanly. “Tetraliths are only deployed in anger,” he
said. “A detail acquired from Japanese, who will never, unless they wish to
offend, present you with four of anything—Japanese character for ‘four’
being same as that for ‘death.
’ ”

“You have been in Japan, Captain?”
Randolph glaring meanwhile at Lindsay.

“These days, who in my line of work
has not?”

“You wouldn’t happen to know a Mr.
Ryohei Uchida
. . . .
”

Nodding, eyes glittering with
enthusiastic hatred, “Bastard we have been trying to assassinate for two years
now. Nearly got him in Yokohama with nice, rightangled fragment, so close he
was actually
standing inside angle,
but missed him by millimeters—
polny
pizdets
!
such luck,
that man!”

“He seemed like quite a wellspoken
gentleman when he interviewed us for the mission—”

Padzhitnoff squinted warily.
“Mission?”

“Last year his people—an outfit
called the Black Dragon Society?—wanted to hire us for some routine
aerial surveillance.”

“St. Cosmo, are you insane? Why are
you telling me this? Don’t you know who they are?”

Randolph shrugged. “A patriotic
organization of some kind. I mean they may be Japanese, but they do take as
much pride in their country as anyone.”

“
Smirno,
balloonboy! Here is
political situation! Black Dragon’s purpose is to subvert and destroy Russian
presence in Manchuria. Manchuria has been Russian since 1860, but after war
with China, Japanese now believe it belongs to them. Ignoring treaties, Chinese
Eastern Railway, wishes of European Powers, even their own promise to respect
Chinese borders, Japanese are

gathering worst criminal classes in
Manchuria, arming and training them as guerrilla forces to fight against us
there. I respect you, St. Cosmo, and I cannot believe you would ever consider
working for such people.”

“Manchuria?” puzzled Randolph. “Why?
It’s a miserable swamp. Frozen half the year. Why would anyone take that much
trouble over it?”

“Gold and opium,” Padzhitnoff
shrugged, as if everyone knew. Randolph didn’t, though he could appreciate in
theory that elements of the surfaceworld might go to war over gold—it was
happening in South Africa at that very moment—the “gold standard” was
even said to be a factor in the social unrest currently afflicting the United
States. He knew also that sixty years ago there had been “Opium Wars” between
China and Great Britain. But between the history and the groundlevel emotions
driving it, the fear of being poor, let’s say, the blessedness of deliverance
from pain, lay this strange interval forbidden to him to enter. He frowned.
Both parties had lapsed into a perplexed silence.

Reviewing the conversation later, it
seemed to Chick Counterfly that Padzhitnoff had taken a disingenuous line. “No
reflections upon the Manchurian question can usefully neglect the TransSiberian
Railroad,” he pointed out. “From a high enough altitude, as we have often
observed, indeed that great project appears almost like a living organism, one
dares to say a conscious one, with needs and plans of its own. For our
immediate purposes, in opening up huge regions of Inner Asia, it can only make
more inevitable Russian, and to a degree, European access to Shambhala,
wherever that may prove to lie.”

“Then . . .”

“We have to assume they are here for
the Sfinciuno Itinerary, the same as we.”

Meanwhile, like a form of
architectural prayer, civic plans had been set in motion to rebuild the
Campanile
dov’era, com’era
,
as
if the dilapidations of time and entropy could be reversed. The texture of the
choir of city bells had changed—without the deepest, La Marangona, to
anchor them, the skyfarers felt that much closer to the pull of the sky and
imminent departure. As if a significant polarity had been reversed and they
were no longer held but summoned. Or as Miles put it one evening just at sunset,
“Bells are the most ancient objects. They call to us out of eternity.”

euce and Sloat were sharing quarters at Curly Dee’s spread
down the valley, where Curly and his woman ran a sort of road ranch for
fugitives, tendayers, threats to society, and assorted cases of moral
idiocy—a squalid, undersize bangtogether sagging between its posts, whose
roof might as well have been made of windowscreen, for all the good it did in a
storm.

“What say we go into town, find us
some pussy, bring ’em back here—”

“You don’t bring women to a place
like this, Sloat. They get distracted, all’s they can see’s the tobaccojuice,
the rats, the meals from long ago, it wrecks their mood.”

“You don’t like this room?”

“Room, it ain’t even a stall.”

“Wouldn’t want to think you ’s going
domestic
or nothin.”

“We’d best go into town. Big Billy’s
or Jew Fanny’s or someplace.”

They rode up into town. The electric
lighting crept out to meet and saturate them, turn wrinkles in clothes and skin
inside out. A seething of human and animal voices. Some in pain, some having a
time, some doing business. Telluride. Creede, but with only the one way in and
out.

“How about we go look in to the
Cosmopolitan for a minute.”

“Why? Th’only pussy in there chases
mice.”

“Pussy on the brain, Big S.”

“Better’n opium smoke,” dodging out
of the way as Deuce playfully drew and brandished his .44. A sly reference to
Deuce’s onandoff romance with HsiangChiao, who worked in a laundry down the
street. This was an old routine between the partners, and in fact each was to
find his way that evening to

his preferred recreation,
reconnecting only hours later after a long spell of that glaring nightlessness
Telluride was known for.

Close to dawn Deuce came lurching
into the Nonpareil Eating House, Sloat walking shotgun right over his shoulder.
The place was full of hungry drunks. Drovers with imperfectly developed social
skills chased among the tables after saloon girls who were not too tired to
move as fast as they had to. Place was full of lard smoke. Mayva was in and out
of the kitchen cooking and working whatever tables Lake wasn’t. Both women kept
up a level of determined bustling, as if allowing the thousand details of the
day to fill up what otherwise would’ve been some insupportable vacuum.

Deuce took this for “female
restlessness,” which he thought he understood. When Lake came over to inquire
with a silent lift of the eyebrows and chin if they were there to eat or sit,
he did not remark at the time how desirable she looked. What surprised him was
the way she’d kept some fire in her eye, rare in a biscuitshooter, that no long
shift was about to put out. Later he would also become aware of a darkness just
as indelible, that could not be, but maybe was, the stain of some undivulged
sin.

“Don’t be in a rush, boys, grocery
wagon’s due in before noon, bound to be something on it you can eat.”

“Enjoying the scenery,” said suave
Deuce.

“Nothin like this down Cañon City, I
expect.”

“Oooh,” lowed Sloat appreciatively.

“Coffee,” Deuce shrugged.

“You’re sure. Think it through now.”

“Lake,” Mayva called from the
kitchen, just about the same time Sloat muttered, “Deuce.” Steam and smoke
curled out the kitchen window into cones of white electric light from bulbs
installed high on stripped fir poles. Urgent Chinese conversation proceeded out
in the street. Prolonged echoes of explosion rolled in from somewhere down the
valley. Mine whistles went off up in the mountains. Morning came straining in
through eyelashes and bootsoles, welcome as a marshal with a saddlebag full of
warrants. Lake shrugged and got back to work.

Sloat sat nodding within some deep
private smirk. “Civilians, now, my gosh. That gong’s about to start kickin you
back, li’l amigo.”

“Don’t much care who does or don’t
like it, Sloat.”

Meanwhile in the kitchen, “Better watch
’at flirtin’ of yours, Lake, he’s dangerous goods, that little buckaroo.”

“Mamma, I hardly caught his name.”

“I saw what you were up to. Hundred
men a day come through here, some

of em regular celluloidcollar ads,
too, and them, why you’re all business, but in strolls some shiftyeyed little
hardcase with trouble wrote all over him, and you’re ready to—well I
don’t know what.”

“I do.”

“Lake . . .”