Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  Randolph shrugged. “I guess not quite yet. Though with what’s been coming in on investments, we may have to incorporate soon. We’re looking into Switzerland, Neutral Moresnet, a couple of remote island territories—”

  “What do you think of Rand shares? Will bubble burst? Most of our money is there, and in armaments.”

  “We have been gradually reducing our exposure in South Africa,” Lindsay said, “but what’s looking very promising lately are Chinese Turkestan railway bonds.”

  “Some tchudak in bar in Kiakhta told me same thing. He was blind drunk, of course.”

  In a clicking and whistling cascade of electrical noises, the Russian wireless receiver now came to life. Padzhitnoff picked up and was soon chatting away a mile a minute, consulting maps and charts, sketching, calculating. When he was done, he noticed Chick Counterfly looking at him strangely. “What.”

  “You just had that whole conversation in clear?”

  “Clear? What is ‘clear’?”

  “Not encrypted,” clarified Miles Blundell.

  “No need! Nobody else is listening! This is ‘wireless’! New invention! Better than telephone!”

  “All the same, I’d be looking into some kind of encryption system.”

  “Much work for nothing! Not even Russian Army does that! Balloon-boys, balloon-boys! Too careful, like old people!”

  Returning from the taiga, the crew of Inconvenience found the Earth they thought they knew changed now in unpredictable ways, as if whatever had come to visit above Tunguska had jolted the axes of Creation, perhaps for good. Below, across the leagues of formerly unmarked Siberian forest and prairie, they saw a considerable webwork of rail, steel within cleared rights-of-way below shining as river-courses once had. Industrial smoke, in unhealthy shades of yellow and reddish brown and acid green climbed the sky to lick at the underside of the gondola. Birds they were used to sharing the sky with, migratory European species, had vanished, leaving the region to the eagles and hawks that had formerly hunted them. Huge modern cities of multiple domes, towers of open girderwork, smokestacks, and treeless plazas sprawled beneath, without a living creature in sight.

  By dusk they had approached the fringes of a great aerial flotilla. Below them the taiga was falling silent, as if beginning to yield to the hours of darkness and sleep. Of the light seeping from the day, enough remained to reveal a sky crowded everywhere with cargo balloons, immense and crewless, hung at all altitudes upon the sky, the sunset illuminating finely-etched load-rings and rigging, cargo nets and laded pallets swaying in the rising winds of the evening, each borne by a different envelope, some perfectly spherical, others shaped like watermelons, Polish sausages, or prize cigars, or streamlined like ocean-cruising fish, or square or pointed or sewn together tightly into stellated polyhedra or Chinese dragons, solid, striped, or streaked, yellow or scarlet, turquoise or purple, a few of the newer craft equipped with low-horsepower engines, which now and then emitted brilliant gasps of steam, just enough to keep station. Each was tethered by steel cable to a different piece of rolling-stock somewhere below, moving invisibly on its own track, guiding its buoyed cargo to a different destination, all across the map of Eurasia—as the boys watched, the highest envelopes of the fleet were taken by the arc of Earth’s shadow advancing, flowing then in swift descent among the lacquered-silk flanks of the others, sweeping down onto the countryside at last, to release it from quotidian light. Soon all that could be seen were an earthbound constellation of red and green running-lights.

  “As above,” remarked Miles Blundell, “so below.”

  SLOWLY AS GOD’S JUSTICE, reports began arriving out of the East, from what seemed incomprehensibly eastward, as if the countless tiny engagements of an unacknowledged war had at last been expressed as a single explosion, in an almost-musical crescendo of a majesty usually encountered only in dreams. Photographs would in due course begin to emerge, as if from a developing-bath, and be circulated . . . then copies of copies, after a while degraded nearly to the most current of abstract art, but no less shocking—virgin forest—every single trunk stripped white, blown the unthinkable ninety degrees—flattened for miles. Reactions in the West were uniformly hushed and perplexed, even among those known as chattering fools. No one could dare to say which was worse—that it had never happened before, or that it had, and that all the agencies of history had conspired never to record it and then, displaying a sense of honor hitherto unnoted, to maintain their silence.

  Whatever had happened out there provided its own annunciation, beginning upriver from Vanavara and booming westward at six hundred miles per hour, all through that darkless night, one seismograph station to the next, across Europe to the Atlantic, via posts, pendulums, universal joints, slender glass threads writing on smoked paper rolls driven clockwork-slow beneath, via needles of light on coatings of bromide of silver, there was the evidence . . . in distant cities to the west, “sensitive flames,” some of them human, dipped, curtseyed, feebly quivered at all-but-erotic edges of extinction. Questions arose as to the timing, the “simultaneousness” of it. New converts to Special Relativity took a fascinated look. Given the inertia of writing-points and mirrors, the transit times at focusing lenses, the small variations in the speed at which the bromide paper might have been driven, the error of the seismograph recordings more than embraced the “instant” in which a hitherto-unimagined quantity of energy had entered the equations of history.

  “Power being equal to the area under the curve,” as it seemed to Professor Heino Vanderjuice, “the shorter the ‘instant,’ the greater the amplitude—it begins to look like a singularity.”

  Others were less restrained. Was it Tchernobyl, the star of Revelation? An unprecedented harrowing of the steppe by cavalry in untold millions, flooding westward in a simultaneous advance? German artillery of a secret design more powerful by orders of magnitude than any military intelligence office had ever suspected? Or something which had not quite happened yet, so overflowing the tidy frames of reference available to Europe that it had only seemed to occur in the present, though really originating in the future? Was it, to be blunt, the general war which Europe this summer and autumn would stand at the threshold of, collapsed into a single event?

  DALLY RIDEOUT, still moping around about Kit, not that she expected any word from him, had gone on maturing into an even more desirable young package, negotiable on the Venetian market as a Circassian slave in old Araby, pale redhead’s coloring, bruisable skin inviting violent attention, hair gone beyond the untamed spill she had hit town with, now a blazing announcement of desire about which no one was ready to be convinced otherwise. That same summer day, she had been approached scarcely steps from Ca’ Spongiatosta by a disagreeable gent with the usual 1894 Bodeo tucked into his belt, no longer willing to cut her any slack. “Tonight, the minute it gets dark, understand? I’m coming for you. Better be wearing something pretty.” She went through the rest of the day in dread of nightfall, with tep-pisti following everywhere and making little secret of it.

  Who was there to talk to about this? Hunter Penhallow was not really the best choice, more than ever preoccupied with his own ghosts, failing to retrieve memories which avoided him as if wishing consciously to be cruel. The Princess was off on one of her daytime adventures and would not be back till evening, by which point Dally herself, she reckoned, had best be well hidden.

  But that night it would not get dark, there would be light in the sky all night. Hunter walked out into quite a different sort of “nocturnal light,” to pass these unnaturally skylit hours working in a cold frenzy, while all up and down the little waterways, on bridges, in campielli and on rooftops, out on the Riva, over on the Lido while the moneyed guests in the new hotels stared down at the beach, wondering if this had been arranged just for them and how much extra it would cost, all manner of Venetian artists had likewise come out, with watercolor gear, chalk, pastels, oils, all trying to “acquire” tonight’s light as if it were something they must nego
tiate for—or even with—throwing desperate looks heavenward from time to time as if at a common subject up there posing, as if to make sure it had not moved or disappeared, this gift from far away, perhaps another Krakatoa, no one knew, perhaps the deep announcement of a change in the Creation, with nothing now ever to be the same, or of some more sinister advent incomprehensible as that of any Christ fixed in paint on the ceilings, canvases, plaster walls of Venice. . . .

  Cocks crowed at intervals, as if being reminded haphazardly of their duty. Dogs wandered bemused, or lay peacefully next to cats with whom they ordinarily didn’t get along, each appearing to take turns guarding the sleep of the other, which in any case was brief. The night was too strange. Skippers of vaporetti were detained wherever they pulled in by insomniac Venetians out lining the landings who imagined them privy to the doings of some wider world. When the morning newspapers finally arrived, they were sold out in a few minutes, though none had any explanation for the cold and gentle light.

  Somewhere in the unsketched regions of Ca’ Spongiatosta, “You are a step,” the Princess warned, “the turn of an eye, the whisper of a skirt, from the mala vita. I can protect you, but can you protect yourself?” The two young women sat in an upper room of the great Palazzo, in muted shadow, as reflected water-glare flickered across the ceiling. The Princess was holding Dally’s face, lightly but imperiously, between exquisitely-gloved palms, as if the price of inattention would be a sound slap, though an uninformed observer could not have said which, if either, was in command. The Princess still wore an afternoon dress of dark gray satin, while the girl was all but naked, her small breasts visible through the brides picotées of her newly-purchased lace chemise, the nipples darker than usual and more defined, as if recently and purposefully bitten. In this fractional light, her freckles seemed darker, too, like a reverse glittering across her flesh. She would not reply.

  BACK ON THE TRIESTE STATION, no longer entirely welcome in Venice, in a warren partially below street level, seething with tobacco smoke, most of it Balkan in origin, Cyprian Latewood conferred with a newly-arrived cryptographer named Bevis Moistleigh. Gaslight, which remained on through the long day, revealed aboriginal limestone forming parts of certain walls, and produced ambiguous highlights off the ebonite valve-handles and chromium plating of communal coffee urns of quite ancient Italian design, not to mention those individual macchinette not secreted in file drawers. The place ran on coffee.

  “What is this? I can’t read it—all these little circles. . . .”

  “It’s the Glagolitic alphabet,” explained Bevis. “Old Slavonic. Orthodox Church texts and so forth. You’ve been out here awhile, I’m surprised you haven’t learned it.”

  “Little occasion to go into any Orthodox churches.”

  “Not yet. The time comes, however.”

  Cyprian found he could neither pronounce nor make sense of the strings of characters the young crypto wizard was showing him, straight or transliterated.

  “Of course not, it’s in code, isn’t it,” said Bevis. “Fiendish code, I might add. Right off I noticed it uses both Old and New Style alphabets—quite pleased with myself until twigging that each letter in this alphabet also has its own numerical value, what was known among ancient Jewish students of the Torah as ‘gematria.’ So, as if there wasn’t quite enough threat to the old mental balance already, the message must now be taken also as a series of digits, wherewith readers may discover in the text at hand certain hidden messages by adding together the number-values of the letters in a group, substituting other groups of the same value, so generating another, covert message. Furthermore, this particular gematria doesn’t stop at simple addition.”

  “Oh, dear. What else?”

  “Raising to powers, calculating logarithms, converting strings of characters to terms of a series and finding the limits they converge to, and— I say Latewood, if you could see the look on your face. . . .”

  “Feel free, please. As there’s little enough hysterical giggling out here, why we must snatch it wheree’er we find it, mustn’t we.”

  “Not to mention field-coefficients, eigenvalues, metric tensors—”

  “I say, it could take forever, couldn’t it. How many working here in your shop?”

  Bevis indicated himself, with a single finger, held like a pistol to his head. “You can imagine how quickly it all rushes along. So far I’ve been able to decipher one word, fatkeqësi, which is Albanian for ‘disaster.’ First word of a message intercepted months ago, and I still don’t know what to have looked out for back then, or even who sent it. The event, whatever it was, is long over with, the lives lost, the mourning frocks handed along to the widows next in line. The Eastern-Question brigade, having done their worst, pass along to promotions, gongs, landed ease, and whatever, leaving us ash-cats of the Balkans among their miserable debris, with all the tidying-up to do. Irredentism? Don’t make me laugh. Nothing out here is ever redeemed, or for that matter even redeemable—”

  “All quite chummy then?” Derrick Theign with his head in the door, an inspection visit no doubt, “excellent, boys, do carry on. . . .”

  “That person gives me the chills,” confided Bevis.

  “Step carefully, then.”

  “Bevis,” Theign was in the habit of pronouncing each time he looked into young Moistleigh’s cubbyhole—“the Story of a Boy.” Before the cryptographer could even look up in annoyance, Theign had passed along the corridor to perplex someone else.

  “And another peculiar thing,” Bevis regarding with suspicion Theign’s form receding into the smoky establishment, “he has me working on Italian ciphers. They are supposed to be our allies, are they not? Yet day after day, all this naval material finds its way onto my morning pile. They have this practice in the Royal Italian N. of encrypting long articles from the daily papers, so one can practically break the code in one’s sleep as long as one is willing to read a good deal of rubbish every day, then endless typing, translation into both English and German, a tremendous drain on one’s time don’t you know—”

  “German?” no more than idle curiosity, really, “Bevis, where are these deciphered messages being routed, exactly?”

  “Dunno—one of Theign’s people takes care of that. Oh I say, German, I never thought of that, they’re not supposed to be allies, are they?”

  “Another of his elaborate games no doubt.”

  They turned back to the intractable blocks of Glagolitic code. By now enough caffeine had found its way to the brain centers which took care of such matters for Bevis that he felt comfortable moving to greater questions. “And further—suppose the messages could be inscribed somehow into ‘the world,’ into a self-consistent collection, analogous to a mathematical ‘group.’ The physical engine would have to be designed and built of course, perhaps something along the lines of Mr. Tesla’s Magnifying Transformer. And because the ‘great world’ is no more than the distribution, dense without practical limit, of just these symbols, written in just this code, any errors in the original inscription, however minor, could in time prove immense—even if not obvious immediately, one day someone will notice an inevitable blur, a cascade of false identity, a disintegration into massive absence. As if some great departure that no one can quite make out were under way, an emigration of reason itself.”

  “Something on a scale—” Cyprian imagined.

  “Hitherto unprovided for in the future tense of any language. No matter what alphabet it’s written in. As we like to say, ‘High susceptibility to primordial variables.’”

  “A departure—”

  “An emigration.”

  “To . . . ?”

  “Or worse—some sort of Crusade.”

  When they stepped outside at last and went to supper, Cyprian happened to notice the sky. “Something’s wrong with the light, Moistleigh,” as if it were physics he hadn’t studied, some form of reverse eclipse that a cryptanalyst could explain, and possibly even repair. But Moistleigh was standing stricken,
like the crowds in the Piazza Grande and along the Rive, glancing nervously upward from time to time though not gazing steadily, for who knew what sort of counterattention that might invite?

  AFTER LEAVING VENICE, Reef had caught up with Ruperta at Marienbad, and for a while the old sad routine recommenced. He won more at the table than he lost, but on the other side of the ledger, Ruperta kept finding occasions, some describable as desperate, to claim his attention. Neither of their hearts must have been in it any longer, however, because one day she just took off without telling him. An empty bedroom, no information at the front desk, fresh vasefuls of flowers waiting for the next happy couple. The lapdog Mouffette, whom Reef had always suspected of being a cat in disguise, had vomited in his Borsalino.

  Taking care to look woeful, while secretly feeling like he’d just walked out the gates of the pokey, Reef went back to touring the hydropathics, pretending different sorts of neuræsthenia, most successfully Railway Brain, the idea being to claim he’d been in a traumatic train accident in the recent past—and preferably in some nearby country whose records of the event would not be that easy to come by—with no immediate symptoms till the day before he appeared at the gate to check himself in, whereupon he could choose to suffer from a range of conditions, all carefully researched during his time at other establishments in the company of other hydro cases. The beauty of Railway Brain lay in its mental nature. The spa doctors knew that none of the ailments presented were real, but pretended to go about curing whatever it happened to be—the business office downstairs was happy, the croakers thought they were putting one over, the obscenely rich cardplayers got to lose enough money week by week to absolve them of their sins against the laboring classes, not to mention allow Reef to afford imported Havanas and tip widely.

  On the night of 30 June, all the neuræsthenics of Europe, emerging from electric bathtubs and playing-rooms out onto what ought to’ve been dark terraces and pavement, glowing all over with radioactive mud-bath slime, electrodes dangling off their heads, syringes forgetfully poised inches from veins, came out of their establishments to marvel at what was going on in the sky. Reef, recently among them, happened to be in Mentone in and out of the hazardous bed of one Magdika, the blonde wife of a Hungarian cavalry officer noted as much for his readiness to take offense as his skill with dueling weapons. Since his arrival Reef had become intimate with the rooftiles and laundry chutes of the Splendide, and was indeed at the moment stuck like a fly to the façade of that establishment, inching along a perilous window-ledge as the exercised voice of the unexpectedly-arrived husband slowly faded, to be replaced by one more cosmically annoyed, and seeming to proceed, how peculiar, from the sky, which now Reef noticed—risking, at the most precarious step of his passage, a look upward and freezing and breathless at what he saw—was an evening sky which had refused the dusk, chosen a nacreous glow instead, an equivalent in light of the invitation to attend that Reef was now receiving from the overhead voice—“Really Traverse you know you must abandon this farcical existence, rededicate yourself to real-world issues such as family vendetta, which though frowned upon by the truly virtuous represents even so a more productive use of your own precious time on Earth than the aimless quest to get one’s ashes hauled, more likely in your case to result in death by irate Hungarian than anything of more lasting value . . .” and so forth, by which time Reef was on the ground, running in the queer illumination down the boulevard Carnolès, he understood, for his life, or anyhow the resumption of it.