Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  “We’re on our own,” Kit said.

  “And separately, too, I fear.”

  “Nothing personal.”

  “Not anymore, is it?”

  As Kit rode away over a patch of open steppe, the wind came up, and presently he heard the peculiar, bass throat-singing again. A sheepherder was standing angled, Kit could tell, precisely to the wind, and the wind was blowing across his moving lips, and after a while it would have been impossible to say which, the man or the wind, was doing the singing.

  AFTER A BIT, Lieutenant Prance thought he’d begun to detect a presence overhead, which was neither eagle nor cloud, and which slowly drew closer until he could make out a vast airship, from which a crew of animated youngsters were regarding him with great curiosity. Lieutenant Prance greeted them in a high voice with a sort of tremolo to it. “Are you kind deities? or wrathful deities?”

  “We endeavor to be kind,” supposed Randolph St. Cosmo.

  “Me, I’m wrathful,” snarled Darby Suckling, “what’s it to you, Bo Peep?”

  “I only meant that whenever they appear,” said Prance, “these guardian deities, one must show them compassion, regardless of their level of threat to one personally.”

  “Never work,” muttered Darby. “They’ll squash you like bugs. But thanks anyway. For nothing.”

  “According to the classical Tibetan sources, the relevant parts of the Tengyur, to begin with—”

  “Kid . . .” Darby looking around in some distraction, as if for a firearm.

  “Perhaps we could discuss this over a ’99 Château Lafite,” suggested Randolph.

  So was Dwight Prance taken aloft and on to an uncertain fate.

  KIT MEANTIME HAD fallen in with a band of brodyagi, former hard-labor convicts who had been sentenced years before to internal exile in Siberia, and settled in Siberian villages. Unable to live with the misery and poverty of the life, they chose mobility, each for his own reason but all for the same reason. Around 1900 the practice of internal exile was officially abandoned, but by then they were long gone, wanting only to get back to Russia. Easiest way would have been to pick up the dilapidated, brush-covered road known as the Trakt that ran clear across Eurasia, and head west. “But things interrupt, detours happen,” explained their leader, a Siberian short-ax genius known only as “Topor,” who with a single ax could do every job from tree-felling to the most finely detailed bone scrimshaw, including milling lumber of any size and cross-section, trimming taiga deadfall for the fire, dressing out game, mincing herbs, chopping vegetables, threatening government officials, and so forth—“some of us have been out here for years, found local girls, got married, had children, abandoned them again, allegiances to the past and the former Russian life fading, like reincarnation, only different, and still some inertia of escape bears us on, west. . . .”

  Once Kit would have said, “A vector.” But the word now did not occur to him. At first he thought of the holy wanderers that Yashmeen had told him about. But these brodyagi tended to be not so much God-possessed as violently insane. They drank incessantly, whatever they could get their hands on, some of it pretty horrible. They had devised a steam-distillery with which they could turn everything they found with any discernible sugar content into a species of vodka. Fusel oils made up one of the major nutritional groups in their diet. They came back to camp with sacks full of strange mottled red mushrooms that sent them off on internal journeys out to Siberias of the soul. There was apparently a two-part structure to the narrative, part one being pleasant, visually entertaining, spiritually enlightening, and part two filled with unspeakable horror. The fungomaniacs did not seem put out at any of this, regarding one as the price of the other. To enhance the effect, they drank one another’s urine, in which alchemized forms of the original hallucinatory agent were present.

  One day Kit heard shouting in the taiga. Following the sound, he came upon cleared right-of-way and no track, and later in the day track running between the trees, with clearances of only inches. At night he heard steam whistles, mysterious passages, invisible weight hurtling through the forest, and next day somewhere among the trees the voices of section hands, surveyors, work crews, not always calling in local languages, in fact sometimes Kit swore he was hearing phrases in English, and from putting them together he understood that this railway line was supposed to provide a link between the Trans-Siberian and the Taklamakan.

  KIT PROCEEDED THROUGH the dark forests as if there were no doubt as to his way. At first light he found himself in a clearing above a meandering river, where, far below through the humid breathing of the taiga, a plume of steam from a riverboat was just visible. . . .

  He had left the brodyagi miles back among the trees. Finally, just at nightfall, he came upon the camp of a small exploring party—high-pitched tents, pack horses, a fire. Unaware of how he looked, Kit strolled into the firelight and was surprised when everybody grabbed for a weapon.

  “Wait. I know him.” It turned out to be Fleetwood Vibe, in a broad-brim hat with a hatband of Siberian tiger skin.

  Kit declined food but did chisel a few smokes. Unable to help asking, “How about your father, what do you hear from him?”

  Fleetwood fed pieces of deadfall to the fire. “He is no longer of sound mind. Apparently something happened in Italy while he was there. He is beginning to see things. The directors are muttering about a coup d’état. The trust funds are still in effect, but none of us will ever see a penny of his fortune. It’s all going to some Christian propaganda mill down south. He’s disowned all of us.”

  “And ’Fax, how’s he handling that?”

  “It set him free. He’s pitching professionally, under another name, out in the Pacific Coast League. Pretty good career so far, earned-run average just under two, a no-hitter last season. . . . He’s married to a barmaid from Oakland.”

  “Houseful of kids, another on the way, never been happier.”

  Fleetwood shrugged. “Some are meant for that. Others can only keep moving.” This time he was seeking not a waterfall or the source of a river, not to map in a stubborn gap in the known terrain but a railroad—a hidden railroad existing so far only as shadowy rumor, the legendary and famous “Tuva-to-Taklamakan.”

  “That must have been the one I’ve been hearing.”

  “Show me.” He brought out a map, of sorts, mostly in pencil, smudged and beginning to be split at the creases, decorated with cooking grease and cigarette-burns.

  “Unless you’re bound for the Stony Tunguska,” Kit said. He angled his head up at the pale sky. “As close as possible to where that happened.”

  Fleetwood looked stricken, as if someone had seen into his history and detected at the heart of it the impossibility of any redemption. “It’s only the first step,” he said, “only what brought me out here. Do you remember once, years ago, we talked of cities, unmapped, sacramental places . . .”

  “Shambhala,” Kit nodded. “I may have just been there. If you’re still interrested, it’s Tannu Tuva. Or I left somebody there at the edge of madness who was making a good argument that’s where it is.”

  “I wish . . .” Through the fear and guilt, a kind of perverse shyness. “I wish it could be Shambhala that I seek. But I no longer have the right. I have since learned of other cities, out here, secret cities, secular counterparts to the Buddhist hidden lands, more indelibly contaminated by Time, deep in the taiga, only guessed at from indirect evidence—unmanifested cargoes, power consumption—ancient before the Cossacks settled, before the Kirghiz or the Tatars. I almost sense these places, Traverse, so close now, as if at any moment, just behind my shoulder, beneath the next unconsidered footfall, their gates could open . . . dense with industry, unsleeping, dedicated to designs no one speaks of aloud, as one hesitates to speak the name of the wilderness Creature that feeds on all other creatures. . . .

  “As nearly as I’ve been able to triangulate, they lie in a cluster, located quite close to the event of 30 June . . . for practical purposes th
eir rail depot is Krasnoyarsk. Though there’s no official acknowledgement of that, no records kept, anyone booking passage there on the Trans-Sib is automatically a subject of interest to the Okhrana.” He had tried the previous winter to approach the secret cities. In the unhopeful light of evening arival, from the bruise-colored shadows of Krasnoyarsk, invisible functionaries in fur hats and heavy greatcoats had watched the platforms, escorting those with approved business to unmarked ice-vessels moored by the frozen Yenisei, turning back the others like Fleetwood whose motives seemed little more than idle tourism. “But now, given the Event, it may be possible to enter . . . perhaps somehow terms have been renegotiated.

  “Whatever goes on in there, whatever unspeakable compact with sin and death, it is what I am destined for—the goal of this long pilgrimage, whose penance is my life.”

  Kit looked around. The dark miles were empty of witnesses. He could kill this self-pitying loudmouth so easily. He said, “You know, you’re like every other so-called explorer out here, a remittance man with too much sense of privilege, no idea of what to do with it.”

  There was just enough light from the fire to see the despair in Fleetwood’s face, despair like a corrupt form of hope, that here at last might be his great crisis—the unappeasable tribesmen, the unforeseen tempest, the solid terrain gone to quicksand, the beast stalking him for miles and years. Otherwise what life could he expect as one more murderer with his money in Rand shares, destined for golf courses, restaurants with horrible food and worse music, the aging faces of his kind?

  The two of them might have been sitting right at the heart of the Pure Land, with neither able to see it, sentenced to blind passage, Kit for too little desire, Fleetwood for too much, and of the opposite sign.

  Neither got much sleep that night. Both were troubled by unpleasant dreams in which one, not always literally, was murdering the other. They woke into a midnight storm that had already taken one or two tents. The bearers were running in all directions, screaming in one or more dialects. Prevented by the inertia of dream from entering the present tense, Fleetwood’s first thoughts were of his duty to the past. In the light from the fallen star of 30 June, in its pallid nightlessness, he had dreamed insomniac the possibility of another fallen thing like the one he had once helped the Vormance people so terribly bring to its victims. Would young Traverse, would someone, for God’s sake, bring this to an end? He looked over, through the wind-beaten confusion, at where Kit’s bedroll should have been. But Kit had left sometime in the night, as if taken by the wind.

  Having journeyed eastward through the day, the Inconvenience had set down beneath the bleak sunset with the menacing flank of a sandstorm not far off. At first glance no one appeared to live here. From the air it had seemed a single giant roof of baked mud, as if you could walk across the entire city without descending to the invisible streets. Beneath the unpenetrated surface, the world, scarcely comprehensible, went about its business, the cosmetics artists in hidden rooms who knew how to conceal white patches appearing on the skin, which, leprosy or not, found on anyone outside the lepers’ quarter meant summary execution . . . the rishta-doctors patiently removing guinea-worms, making an incision, trapping the three-foot-long creature’s head in a cleft at the end of a stick, and then slowly winding it out of the incision, around the stick, cautiously, so as not to break the rishta and cause an infection . . . the secret drinkers and merchants’ wives insatiably drawn to caravan drivers who would be gone long before morning.

  Nobody aboard Inconvenience slept soundly that night. Darby had the 4:00 to 8:00 A.M. watch, and Miles was rattling around the galley preparing breakfast, and Pugnax was on the bridge, looking east, still as stone, when the Event in the sky occurred, the early daylight deepening past orange, too general in space or memory to know where to look till the sound arrived, ripping apart the firmament over western China—by which time the terrible pulse had already begun to fade to a counter-stain of aquamarine, and a mutter of drumfire at the horizon. They were all gathered at the quarterdeck by now. A sudden hot wind enveloped them, gone nearly before they could think of how to get in out of it. Randolph ordered the special sky detail set, and they ascended to have a look at whatever it was.

  In the pale blue aftermath, the first thing they noticed was that the city below was not the same as the one they had arrived at the night before. The streets were all visible now. Fountains sparkled everywhere. Each dwelling had its own garden inside. Markets seethed in cheerful commotion, caravans came and went through the city gates, tiled and gilded domes shone in the sun, towers soared like song, the desert was renounced.

  “Shambhala,” cried Miles, and there was no need to ask how he knew—they all knew. For centuries the sacred City had lain invisible, cloaked in everyday light, sun-, star-, and moonlight, the campfires and electric torches of desert explorers, until the Event over the Stony Tunguska, as if those precise light-frequencies which would allow human eyes to see the City had finally been released. What it would take the boys longer to understand was that the great burst of light had also torn the veil separating their own space from that of the everyday world, and that for the brief moment they had also met the same fate as Shambhala, their protection lost, and no longer able to count on their invisibility before the earthbound day.

  They proceeded rapidly eastward, high above the taiga. Evidence of disaster somewhere ahead began to appear. They arrived over the scene of devastation shortly after the Bol’shaia Igra.

  “It was the Trespassers,” Lindsay declared.

  “We do know they are far more advanced than we in the applied sciences,” Randolph said. “Their will to act is pure and uninflected. Would a catastrophe of this size be beyond their means? Technically? morally?”

  “At least we cannot say this time that we were sent here,” added Lindsay, meaningfully glaring at Darby Suckling.

  “That hardly establishes anybody’s innocence,” opined the Legal Officer, but before they could get into a dispute, the Tesla device wheezed into active status. Miles began throwing appropriate switches, and Randolph took the speaking-horn.

  It proved to be Professor Vanderjuice, transmitting from Tierra del Fuego, where he had been measuring variations in the Earth’s gravity. “Discombobulated dynamos!” he cried, “apparently we happened to be at the point on Earth directly opposite this Event. Everything here just went chaotic—magnetic storms, all communication interrupted, the wiring in the power supplies melted . . . as for the gravity readings, it is difficult even this soon after to quite believe, but . . . gravity itself for a moment simply vanished. Motor launches, tents, cookstoves, all went flying up into the sky, perhaps never to land again on Earth. Bless me, if I hadn’t been down by the water fishing, why, I might have been taken anywhere.

  “Now that Gibbs is gone, I’ve no one back at Yale to consult with about this,” said the distraught academician. “It is still possible to contact Kimura, I suppose, and Dr. Tesla. Unless the terrible rumors about him are true.”

  According to Professor Vanderjuice, the story was abroad that Tesla, seeking to communicate with the explorer Peary, then in the Arctic, projecting unspecified rays from his tower at Wardenclyffe in a direction slightly west of due north, had mistaken his aim by a small but fatal angle, causing the beam to miss Peary’s base at Ellsmere Island, cross the Polar region over into Siberia, and hit the Stony Tunguska instead.

  “Here is what puzzles me about the story. Did Tesla want to send Peary a message, or beam him a quantity of electric power, or for some undisclosed reason blast him off the map? Tesla may not even have been involved, for it is unclear just who is at Wardenclyffe anymore—Tesla seems to have abandoned the place after Morgan’s abandoned him. That is all I can find out at this antipodal remove.”

  “It sounds like capitalistic propaganda,” said Darby. “Dr. Tesla has always had his enemies in New York. The place is a nightmare of backbiting, tort lawyers, and patent disputes. It is the fate of anyone who does serious science.
Look at Edison. Look particularly at our colleague, Brother Tom Swift. He spends more time these days in court than in the laboratory.”

  “The last time I saw Tom, he looked older than I do,” the Professor said. “Nothing like perpetual litigation to age a man before his time.”

  THEY ARRANGED a sky-rendezvous with the Bol’shaia Igra, over Semipalatinsk. Seen from the ground, the two airships together accounted for a quarter of the visible sky. The boys wore matching sable hats and wolfskin cloaks, purchased at the great February market in Irbit.

  “Why didn’t you tell us about Trespassers sooner?” Padzhitnoff struggling to be amiable. “We’ve known since Venice, and we might have been able to help.”

  “Why should you have believed anything we told you?”

  “Officially, of course not. Must always be ‘some American trick.’ You can imagine emotions up at staff level—very delicate balance of interests out here, who needs Americans to come blundering in, like galloping cowboys, disrupting all known quantities?”

  “But unofficially . . . you, as a sky-brother, might have believed us?”

  “I? since Tunguskan obstanovka, I believe everything. Back in St. Petersburg”—a shared look of not so much disdain as sympathetic resignation to the ways of the surface-world—“they want to believe it was a Japanese weapon. Russian military intelligence wants us to confirm it was Japanese—or at least Chinese.”

  “But . . . ?”

  “American government? What do they think?”

  “We don’t work for them anymore.”

  “Zdorovo! You are working for whom now? Large American corporation?”

  “Ourselves.”

  Padzhitnoff narrowed his gaze, which remained friendly. “You—balloon-boys—are large American corporation?”