Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  The crew meanwhile were busy with the Passing of the Remarks traditional when entering a new liberty port.

  “‘As above, so below,’ ain’t it.”

  “Never fails.”

  “Talk about battered caravanserais!”

  “Lot of laundry to do, maybe I’ll just stay on the ship. . . .”

  “Place smells like Coney Island.”

  “What, the beach?”

  “Naahh—Steeplechase Park, at the vaudeville show!”

  “Now prepare for docking, starboard side to,” the Captain announced. Nearby loomed a high, ruinous structure of great antiquity, of some red-brown color suggestive of blood spilled none too recently, whose supporting pillars were torch-bearing statues male and female, and whose pediment was inscribed in an alphabet invented, according to Gaspereaux, by Mani himself, and in which The Book of Secrets and other sacred Manichæan texts were also written.

  It was here, evidently, that the sand-frigate planned to tie up. After evening “chow,” enjoying a cigar on the fantail, Chick heard a high-pitched screaming, which seemed to him almost articulated into speech. He located a pair of under-sand goggles, slipped them on, and peered into the darkness beyond the settlement walls. Something large and heavy came thundering by, in high swooping hops, and Chick thought he recognized the smell of blood. “What in Creation was that?”

  Gaspereaux had a look. “Oh. Local sand-fleas. Always coming round to see what’s what whenever a new ship pulls in.”

  “What are you talking about? Whatever just went by was the size of a camel.”

  Gaspereaux shrugged. “Down here they are known as chong pir, big lice. Since the first Venetians arrived, these creatures, following a diet exclusively of human blood, have grown over the generations larger, more intelligent, one ventures to say more resourceful. Feeding upon the host is no longer a matter as simple as mandibular assault but has evolved into a conscious negotiation, if not indeed a virtual exchange of views—”

  “People down here talk to giant fleas?” inquired Darby with his accustomed directness.

  “Indeed. Usually in a dialect of ancient Uyghur, though, owing to the mouth structure unique to Pulex, one finds certain difficulties with phonology, notably the voiced interdental fricative—”

  “Yes . . . oh, attendant? Over here? Time for the hose again?”

  “Nonetheless, lad, a useful phrase or two might prove handy in the event of an encounter.”

  Darby patted the skeleton rig beneath his left lapel and moved his eyebrows up and down meaningfully.

  “Afraid not,” Gaspereaux objected, “that’d be pulicide. Covered down here by the same felony statutes that apply up there to homicide.”

  Nevertheless Darby kept his Browning close by him as, with mixed feelings of anticipation and terror, the boys buckled on their Hypops gear and set out on that evening’s recreational visit to Nuovo Rialto. Moving through the sand took some getting used to, especially the lengths of time needed to perform even the simplest of motor tasks, but soon had resolved to a leisurely andante, with a sibilance, owing to the graininess of the medium, as much felt as heard.

  Screaming came from different directions, and blood could be observed in jagged three-dimensional blobs, usually in the vicinity of taverns and other low resorts.

  Had it not been for an overheard scrap of conversation, Chick would have been unaware of another motive, perhaps the frigate’s real one, for which Shambhala might be serving only as a pretext. In the Sandman Saloon, he had fallen into conversation with Leonard and Lyle, a couple of oil prospectors headed for their next likely field of endeavor.

  “Yehp we was into it over here well before the Swedes got in, been wildcat-tin’ all over. . . .”

  “Sodom and Gomorrah will just be a Sunday-school picnic in comparison to this place.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Oh, we’re headed for the Holy Land.”

  “Or unholy, if you consider the Scriptures.”

  It seemed that one night in Baku, in a waterfront teke or hasheesh den, as if by supernatural direction, a drifter from the States with nothing to gamble but a pocket Bible had lost it to Lyle, in front of whose face the Good Book had fallen open to Genesis 14:10 and the phrase “the Vale of Siddim was full of slimepits.”

  “Dead Sea area, ‘slimepit’ being King James English for bituminous deposit,” Leonard explained.

  “It was like a light come on. Fact, we run to the door thinkin it was some kind of surprise gas burn-off outside. No, it was the Lord inviting our attention down to those onetime honkytonk cities of the plain which are fixin to be the next damn Spindletop, and you can bet the farm on that.”

  “Bigger’n that gusher up to Groznyi they couldn’t figure how to cap,” Leonard declared.

  “So what are you doing here instead of there?” inquired the blunt Darby Suckling.

  “Getting a stake together basically. Lots of quick cash to be had out here, no lengthy routines nor forms to fill out, if you get our drift.”

  “There’s oil out here?” inquired Chick, though unable to prevent from creeping into his voice a faint note of disingenuousness.

  The two wildcatters guffawed at length and bought the boys another round of the local aryq before Lyle replied, “Take a look down the hold of that frigate you come in on, tell us if you don’t find some rods and tubing and calyx bits and all.”

  “Hell, we ought to know that prospector look by now, even with some of those boys’s faces already familiar from Baku.”

  Darby found this amusing, one more bit of evidence proving how little adults could be trusted. “This whole Shambhala story of theirs is just a pretext, then.”

  “Oh the place is probably real,” Leonard shrugged. “But I’d bet if your Captain sailed right into it, he might say ässalamu äläykum on his way through, but he’d have his eye more likely on that next anticline.”

  “This is distressing,” Randolph muttered. “Once again we are being used to further someone’s hidden plans.”

  Chick noticed the two oil gypsies exchanging a look. “What does occur to us all of a sudden,” Lyle hitching his chair closer to the table and lowering his voice, “for somebody on that frigate is bound to be keeping logbooks of every bituminous possibility they come across out in these strata—locations, depths, estimated volumes—there’s no telling what some folks’d be willing to pay for jealously guarded information like that.”

  “Dismiss the thought,” protested Lindsay from a certain equine altitude, “for it would make us no better than common thieves.”

  “If the price was high enough, however,” mused Randolph, “it would surely make us extraordinary thieves.”

  It had been a peculiar liberty weekend in Nuovo Rialto. The ship happened to have tied up at a quay belonging to an aryq shipper, along which many sailors were discovered each morning semi-paralyzed, having got no further in their pursuit of recreation, their Hypops units humming on in Dormant mode. A number of the crew reported being waylaid by sand-fleas, the queues at sick bay each morning running down passageways and ladders well into the Viscosity spaces. Some, apparently having enjoyed the accostments, didn’t report them at all. The quarterdeck witnessed scenes of vituperation, smuggling attempts failed and successful, romantic melodrama as the more adventurous crew members discovered the complex allure of Veneto-Uyghur women, who were a byword of emotional volatility throughout the Subdesertine Service. When the time came at last to single up all lines, some 2 percent of the crew, about average as these things went, had announced plans to stay behind and get married. Captain Toadflax took this with the equanimity of a long-time trooper in the region, figuring he’d get most of them back when he came through town again at the end of the cruise. “Marriage or under-sand duty,” shaking his head as at some cosmic sadness. “What a choice!”

  As H.M.S.F. Saksaul merrily droned along beneath the desert, one paleo-Venetian oasis to the next—Marco Querini, Terrenascondite, Pozzo San Vito—her crew
continued to pretend that prospecting for oil was the furthest thing from their thoughts. Randolph before long was obsessed, recklessly so, by the petro-geological logbooks Lyle and Leonard had mentioned, all closely held, as far as he knew, along with the detailed mission documents, inside Captain Toadflax’s cabin safe. In his increasingly unbalanced state, Randolph sought Darby Suckling’s advice.

  “As Legal Officer,” Darby said, “I’m not sure how much loyalty we owe them, especially when they’re keeping so much from us. Myself, I’d favor the peterman option—ain’t the safe built Counterfly can’t blow, see him.” Thus, although he was not, as later alleged, actually planning to steal, or even unauthorizedly scrutinize, the documents, it was an awkward moment when Q. Zane Toadflax entered his cabin one midwatch to find Randolph gazing at the safe, with a number of dynamite sticks and detonators on his person.

  From then until the boys’ departure, there were masters-at-arms posted outside Toadflax’s cabin round the clock. When at last they surfaced near the compound where Inconvenience was moored, the farewells were notable for their economy.

  The boys returned to the Inconvenience to find the pantries depleted, decks unattended to, and the Gurkhas all vanished—Called away on a matter of some urgency, according to the note left in Randolph’s cabin—leaving the security of the vessel entirely to Pugnax. Though the sentiments of fawning gratitude exhibited now and then by specimens of his race had been seldom observed in Pugnax, today he was clearly overjoyed to see the boys again. “Rr rr-rff rf rrr rrf-ff rr rrff rr rrr rrff-rf rf!” he exclaimed, which the boys understood to mean “I haven’t had two blessed hours’ sleep since you fellows left!” Miles headed directly for the galley, and before he knew it, Pugnax was lying before a sumptuous “spread” which included Consommé Impérial, Timbales de Suprêmes de Volailles, Gigot Grillé à la Sauce Piquante, and aubergines à la Sauce Mousseline. The wine-cellar had been none-too-discreetly ransacked by the Gurkhas, but Miles was able to locate a ‘00 Pouilly-Fuissé and a ‘98 Graves which met Pugnax’s approval, and he fell to and, presently, asleep.

  THAT EVENING as the Inconvenience soared above the vast and silent desert, Chick and Darby strolled the weather decks, gazing down at circular wave-fronts in the sand, revealed by the low angle of the setting sun, flowing away to the limits of this unknown world. Miles joined them and was soon off on one of his extra-temporal excursions.

  “Whatever is to happen,” he reported upon his return, “will begin out here, with an engagement of cavalry on a scale no one living has ever seen, and perhaps no one dead either, an inundation of horse, spanning these horizons, their flanks struck an unearthly green, stormlit, relentless, undwin-dling, arisen boiling from the very substance of desert and steppe. And all that incarnation and slaughter will transpire in silence, all across this great planetary killing-floor, absorbing wind, steel, hooves upon and against earth, massed clamor of horses, cries of men. Millions of souls will arrive and depart. Perhaps news of it will take years to reach anyone who might understand what it meant. . . .”

  “I’m not so sure Darby and I haven’t seen something like it already,” mused Chick, recalling their brief though unpleasant experience in the “time-chamber” of Dr. Zoot. But its meaning, even as simple prophecy, was as obscure to them now as then.

  Somewhere out past Oasis Benedetto Querini, H.M.S.F. Saksaul came to grief. Survivors were few, accounts sketchy and inconsistent. The first salvo came from nowhere, precisely aimed, ear-splitting, sending the bridge into a fearful cataplexy. Operators sat dumbstruck before their viewing screens, trying to re-scale the images before them, switching in every combination of enhancement and filtering circuitry they could think of in an effort to find their invisible attackers, who appeared to be using a frequency-shifting device of some power and sophistication, able to mask an entire under-sand fighting vessel from all known viewing equipment.

  The copy of the Sfinciuno Itinerary which the Chums in their innocence had brought aboard had led H.M.S.F. Saksaul into ambush and disaster.

  “Who are they?”

  “German or Austrian, would be likely, though one mustn’t rule out the Standard Oil, or the Nobel brothers. Gaspereaux, we are in a desperate state. The moment for which you came aboard has arrived. Get to the shaft-alley and put on the Hypops gear you find in the locker there along with a canteen of water, the oasis maps, and some meat lozenges. Make your way to the surface, get back to England at all cost. They must be told in Whitehall that the balloon is up.”

  “But you’ll need all the men you can—”

  “Go! find someone in the F.O. intelligence section. It is our only hope!”

  “Under protest, Captain.”

  “Complain to the Admiralty. If I’m still alive, you can have me up on charges.”

  As days passed out here in this great ambiguity of Time and Space, it would not be long at all before Gaspereaux was back in London, endeavoring to reach the legendary Captain, now Inspector, Sands, soon to be known to Whitehall—as well as to readers of the Daily Mail—as “Sands of Inner Asia.”

  Meanwhile, for days, weeks in some places, the battles of the Taklamakan War were raging. The earth trembled. Now and then a subdesertine craft would suddenly break the surface with no warning, damaged mortally, its crew dead or dying . . .petroleum deposits far underground were attacked, lakes of the stuff would appear overnight and great pillars of fire would ascend to the sky. From Kashgar to Urumchi, the bazaars were full of weapons, breathing units, ship fittings, hardware nobody could identify, full of strange gauges and prisms and electrical wiring which later proved to be from Quaternion-ray weapons, which all the Powers had deployed. These now fell into the hands of goat-herders, falconers, shamans, to be taken out into the emptiness, disassembled, studied, converted to uses religious and practical, and eventually to change the history of the World-Island beyond even the most unsound projections of those Powers who imagined themselves somehow, at this late date, still competing for it.

  APPEARING THESE DAYS in the infant science of counter-terrorism as an all-purpose code name, the bloke you sent out a discreet summons for to alert your own security staff to a crisis, the real “Inspector Sands,” beleaguered, ever struggling to define and maintain a level of professional behavior, unaware of his drift into legend, soon enough aged beyond his years and sweated into a moodiness at home that could not but slop over onto the wife and kids, would find by midcareer no time even to take off his hat, hurrying as ever from one emergency to the next—”Ah, Sands, there you are, and high time, too. We’ve a suspect individual—just down there at the far wicket, can you see him?—no one can really place his accent, some think Irish, others Italian, not to mention that queerly-shaped bag he’s brought with him—we’re putting the ‘stall’ on him, of course, but if there’s a timed device you see, well that won’t do much good, will it?”

  “In the shiny green suit, and sort of gondolier’s hat, except for that . . . well it’s not a ribbon, is it—”

  “More of a feather, almost a plume, really—rather extreme wouldn’t you say?”

  “Could be Italian I suppose.”

  “Some sort of wog, obviously. The thing is, how shall one make out his short-term intentions? Not likely in here for a spot of Vic removal, is he?”

  “The bag might be only for carrying his lunch.”

  “Typical of these people, who else would think of eating an explosive substance?”

  “What I meant, actually, was . . . instead of explosives?”

  “Quite so, I knew that, but it could be anything, then, couldn’t it? His laundry for instance.”

  “Indeed. Though, what could you blow up with a bag of laundry, I wonder.”

  “Oh, bother, there now he’s pulling something out of his pocket, I knew it?”

  Uniformed guards at once began to converge on the intruder, while outside in the street the metropolitan police were suddenly everywhere up and down St. Martin le Grand and over into Angel Street, swarming i
n and out of the horse-drawn and motor traffic, dropping suggestions into the ears of drivers best situated to create a general vehicular paralysis, should one prove useful. The clerk at the wicket having thrown himself sniveling beneath a nearby table, the subject quickly took up his bag and fled out the front exit and across the street toward the G.P.O. West, where all the telegraphic business was done. This was a vast and, to many, an intimidating space, in the center of which, sunk below floor level, four enormous steam engines labored to provide the pressures and vacuums that propelled to and fro about the City and Strand thousands of pneumatic dispatches per day, being tended by a sizable crew of stokers and monitored round the clock for entropy fluctuations, vacuum failures and so forth by staff engineers in gray drill suits and darkly gleaming dicers.

  Cries of “There he goes!” and “Hold up, you bloody anarchist!” were absorbed in the relentless polyrhythms of the steam-machinery. Against the greased writhing of these dark iron structures, a brightwork of brass fittings and bindings, kept a-shine through the nights by a special corps of unseen chars, flashed like halos of industrious saints in complex periodic motion everywhere. Hundreds of telegraphers, ranked about the great floor attending each his set, scarcely looked up from their universe of clicks and rests—uniformed messenger boys came and went among the varnished hardwood labyrinth of desks and sorting-bureaux, and customers leaned or paced or puzzled over messages they had just received, or must send, as cheerless London daylight descended through the windows and rising steam produced an all-but-tropical humidity in this Northern Temple of Connexion. . . .