GRAVITY RAINBOW (81 page)

"Come on. It's all right." Back to Berlin talk. "She's just a patient here." Idiot, idiot-before he can stop her she's pulled away, some quiet, awful cry in the back of her throat, and turned and begun to run, a desperate tattoo of high heels across the stone, into the shadowed arches of the Kurhaus.

"Hey," Slothrop, feeling queasy, accosts the woman in black. "What's the big idea, lady?"

But her face has changed by now, it is only the face of another woman of the ruins, one he would have ignored, passed over. She smiles, all right, but in the forced and business way he knows. "Zi-garetten, bitte?" He gives her a long stub he's been saving, and goes looking for Margherita.

He finds the arcade empty. All the doors of the Kurhaus are locked. Overhead passes a skylight of yellow panes, many of them fallen out. Down the corridor, fuzzy patches of afternoon sun stagger along, full of mortar dust. He climbs a broken flight of steps that end in the sky. Odd chunks of stone clutter the way. From the landing at the top, the Spa stretches to country distances: handsome trees, graveyard clouds, the blue river. Greta is nowhere in sight. Later he will figure out where it was she went. By then they will be well on board the
Anubis,
and it will only make him feel more helpless.

He keeps looking for her till the darkness is down and he's come back by the river again. He sits at an open-air cafe strung with yellow lights, drinking beer, eating spaetzle and soup, waiting. When she materializes it is a shy fade-in, as Gerhardt von Goll must have brought her on a time or two, not moving so much as Slothrop's own vantage swooping to her silent closeup stabilized presently across from him, finishing his beer, bumming a cigarette. Not only does she avoid the

subject of the woman by the spring, she may have lost the memory already.

"I went up in the observatory," is what she has to say finally, "to look down the river. She's coming. I saw the boat she's on. It's only a kilometer away."

"The what now?"

"Bianca, my child, and my friends. I thought they'd have been in Swinemunde long ago. But then nobody's on timetables any more…"

Sure enough, after two more bitter cups of acorn coffee and another cigarette, here comes a cheerful array of lights, red, green, and white, down the river, with the faint wheeze of an accordion, the thump of a string bass, and the sound of women laughing. Slothrop and Greta walk down to the quay, and through mist now beginning to seep up off the river they can make out an ocean-going yacht, nearly the color of the mist, a gilded winged jackal under the bowsprit, the weather-decks crowded with chattering affluent in evening dress. Several people have spotted Margherita. She waves, and they point or wave back, and call her name. It is a moving village: all summer it has been sailing these lowlands just as Viking ships did a thousand years ago, though passively, not marauding: seeking an escape it has not yet defined clearly.

The boat comes in to the quay, the crew lower an access ladder. Smiling passengers halfway down are already stretching out gloved and ringed hands to Margherita.

"Are you coming?"

"Uh… Well, should I?"

She shrugs and turns her back, steps gingerly off the landing and on board, skirt straining and glossy a moment in the yellow light from the cafe. Slothrop dithers, goes to follow her-at the last moment some joker pulls the ladder up and the boat moves away, Slothrop screams, loses his balance and falls in the river. Head first: the Rocket-man helmet is pulling him straight down. He tugs it off and comes up, sinuses burning and vision blurred, the white vessel sliding away, though the churning screws are moving his direction, beginning to suck at the cape, so he has to get rid of that, too. He backstrokes away and then cautiously around the counter, lettered in black: ANUBIS
Swinoujscie,
trying to keep away from those screws. Down the other side he spots a piece of line hanging, and manages to get over there and grab hold. The band up on deck is playing polkas. Three drunken ladies in tiaras and pearl chokers are lounging at the lifelines, watching

Slothrop struggle up the rope. "Let's cut it," yells one of them, "and see him fall
in
again!" "Yes, let's!" agree her companions. Jesus Christ. One of them has produced a huge meat cleaver, and is winding up all right, amid much vivacious laughing, at about which point somebody grabs hold of Slothrop's ankle. He looks down, observes sticking out a porthole two slender wrists in silver and sapphires, lighted from inside like ice, and the oily river rushing by underneath.

"In here." A girl's voice. He slides back down while she tugs on his feet, till he's sitting in the porthole. From above comes a heavy thump, the rope goes falling and the ladies into hysterics. Slothrop squirms on inside, water squeegeeing off, falls into an upper bunk next to a girl maybe 18 in a long sequined gown, with hair blonde to the point of pure whiteness, and the first cheekbones Slothrop can recall getting a hardon looking at. Something has definitely been happening to his brain out here, all right…

"Uh-"

"Mmm." They look at each other while he continues to drip water all over. Her name, it turns out, is Stefania Procalowska. Her husband Antoni is owner of the
Anubis
here.

Well, husband, all right. "Look at this," sez Slothrop, "I'm soaking wet."

"I noticed. Somebody's evening clothes ought to fit you. Dry off, I'll go see what I can promote. You can use the head if you want, everything's there."

He strips off the rest of the Rocketman rig, takes a shower, using lemon verbena soap in which he finds a couple of Stefania's white pubic hairs, and is shaving when she gets back with dry clothes for him.

"So you're with Margherita."

"Not sure about that 'with.' She find that kid of hers?"

"Oh indeed-they're already deep into it with Karel. This month he's posing as a film producer. You know Karel. And of course
she
wants to get Bianca into the films worse than anything."

"Uh…"

Stefania shrugs a lot, and every sequin dances. "Margherita wants her to have a legitimate career. It's guilt. She never felt her own career was anything more than a string of dirty movies. I suppose you heard about how she got pregnant with Bianca."

"Max Schlepzig, or something."

"Or something, right. You never saw
Alfdruckern?
In that one scene, after the Grand Inquisitor gets through, the jackal men come in to ravish and dismember the captive baroness. Von Goll let the cameras run right on. The footage got cut out for the release prints of course, but found its way into Goebbels's private collection. I've seen it-it's frightening. Every man in the scene wears a black hood, or an animal mask… back at Bydgoszcz it became an amusing party game to speculate on who the child's father was. One has to pass the time. They'd run the film and ask Bianca questions, and she had to answer yes or no."

"Yup." Slothrop goes on dousing his face with bay rum.

"Oh, Margherita had her corrupted long before she came to stay with us. I wouldn't be surprised if little Bianca sleeps with Karel tonight. Part of breaking into the business, isn't it? Of course it will have to be all business-that's the least a mother can do. Margherita's problem was that she always enjoyed it too much, chained up in those torture rooms. She couldn't enjoy it any other way. You'll see. She and Thanatz. And whatever Thanatz brought in his valise."

"Thanatz."

"Ah, she didn't tell you." Laughing. "Miklos Thanatz, her husband. They get together off and on. Toward the end of the war they had a little touring show for the boys at the front-a lesbian couple, a dog, a trunk of leather costumes and implements, a small band. They entertained the SS troops. Concentration camps… the barbed-wire circuit, you know. And then later, in Holland, out at the rocket sites. This is the first time since the surrender they've been together, so I wouldn't actually expect to see too much of her…"

"Oh, yeah, well, I didn't know that." Rocket sites? The hand of Providence creeps among the stars, giving Slothrop the finger.

"While they were away, they left Bianca with us, at Bydgoszcz. She has her bitchy moments but she's really a charming child. I never played the father game with her. I doubt she had a father. It was parthenogenesis, she's pure Margherita, if pure is the word I want."

The evening clothes fit perfectly. Stefania leads Slothrop up a companionway and out on deck. The
Anubis
moves now through starlit countryside, the horizon broken now and then by silhouettes of a windmill, haycocks, a row of pig arks, some line of trees set on a low hill for the wind… There are ships we can dream across terrible rapids, against currents… our desire is wind and motor…

"Antoni." She has brought Slothrop to an enormous figure in Polish cavalry fatigues and with a lot of maniacal teeth.

"American?" pumping Slothrop's hand. "Bravo. You nearly complete the set. We are the ship of all nations now. We've even got a Japanese on board. An ex-liaison man from Berlin who didn't quite get

out by way of Russia. You'll find a bar on the next deck. Anything wandering around"-hugging Stefania to him-"except this one, is fair game."

Slothrop salutes, gathers they would like to be alone, and finds the ladder to the bar. The bar is hung with festive garlands of flowers and light bulbs, and crowded with dozens of elegantly-decked guests, who have just now, with the band accompanying, broken into this uptempo song:

welcome aboard!

Welcome aboard, gee, it's a fabulous or-gy

That you just dropped in on, my friend-

We can't recall just how it star-ted,

But there's only one way it can end!

The behavior is bestial, hardly Marie-Celestial,

But you'll fit right in with the crowd,

If you jettison all of those prob-lems,

And keep it hysterically loud!

There are mo-thers, with their lo-vers,

Stealing rot-ters, from their daught-ers,

Big erec-tions, predilec-tions

That you wouldn't believe,

So put your brain on your sleeve,

And come a-

board the
Titanic,
things'll really be manic, Folks'll panic the second that sunken
iceberg
is knocked, Naughty 'n' noisy, and very Walpurgisnacht, That's how the party will end, So-welcome aboard, welcome aboard, my friend!

Well here's couples moaning together in the lifeboats, a drunk's gone to sleep in the awning over Slothrop's head, fat fellows in white gloves with pink magnolias in their hair are dancing tummy-to-tummy and murmuring together in Wendish. Hands grope down inside satin gowns. Waiters with brown skins and doe eyes circulate with trays on which you are likely to find any number of substances and paraphernalia. The band is playing a medley of American fox-trots. The Baron de Mallakastra sifts a sinister white powder into the highball of Mme. Sztup. It is the same old shit that was going on back at Raoul de la Perlimpinpin's place, and for all Slothrop knows it's the same party.

He gets a glimpse of Margherita and her daughter, but there is a

density of orgy-goers around them that keeps him at a distance. He knows he's vulnerable, more than he should be, to pretty little girls, so he reckons it's just as well, because that Bianca's a knockout, all right: 11 or 12, dark and lovely, wearing a red chiffon gown, silk stockings and high-heeled slippers, her hair swept up elaborate and flawless and interwoven with a string of pearls to show pendant earrings of crystal twinkling from her tiny lobes… help, help. Why do these things have to keep coming down on him? He can see the obit now in
Time
magazine-Died, Rocketman, pushing 30, in the Zone, of lust.

The woman who tried to chop Slothrop down with the cleaver is now seated on a bitt, holding a half-liter of some liquid which has already seeped into and begun to darken the orchid garnishing it. She is telling everybody a story about Margherita. Her hair has been combed or styled in a way that makes it look like a certain cut of meat. Slothrop's drink, nominally Irish whisky and water, arrives and he moves in to listen.

"… her Neptune is afflicted. Whose isn't? some will ask. Ah. But as residents on
this
planet, usually. Greta lived, most of the time,
on
Neptune-her affliction was more direct, purer, clearer than we know it here.

"She found Oneirine on a day when her outpost in England, the usual connection for Chlordyne, failed. Beside the Thames, as geraniums of light floated in the sky too slow to tell-brass light, tanned-skin and mellow peach light, stylized blooms being drafted on and on among the clouds, to fade here, to regenerate there-as this happened to the day's light, he fell. A fall of hours, less extravagant than Lucifer's, but in the same way part of a deliberate pattern. Greta was meant to find Oneirine. Each plot carries its signature. Some are God's, some masquerade as God's. This is a very advanced kind of forgery. But still there's the same meanness and mortality to it as a falsely made check. It is only more complex. The members have names, like the Archangels. More or less common, humanly-given names whose security can be broken, and the names learned. But those names are not magic. That's the key, that's the difference. Spoken aloud, even with the purest magical intention,
they do not work.

"So he fell from their grace. So there was no Chlordyne. So she happened to meet V-Mann Wimpe in the street, in Berlin, under a theatre marquee whose sentient bulbs may have looked on, a picturesque array of extras, witnesses to grave and historic encounters. So she had come to Oneirine, and the face of her afflicted home planet was rearranged in the instant."

Oneirine Jamf Imipolex A4…

"That silly bitch," observes a voice at Slothrop's elbow, "tells it worse every time."

"Beg pardon?" Slothrop looks around and finds Miklos Thanatz, full beard, eyebrows feathering out like trailing edges of hawks' wings, drinking absinthe out of a souvenir stein on which, in colors made ghastly by the carnival lights on deck, bony and giggling Death is about to surprise two lovers in bed.