“And that young woman with the familiar face she’s talking to, isn’t that—”
Ratty beamed. “It is indeed Mrs. McHugh, the old dutch herself, who will be delighted to see you again. Do you need any help meanwhile getting your eyebrows down out of your hat?”
“Yes really Cyprian,” said Yashmeen, “you of all people.”
“I wasn’t—”
“Bit of luck really,” Ratty said, “nothing I arranged or even deserved. Came home that night with old Sophrosyne, expecting a bloodbath, and the two of them just hit it right off. Mysteries of womanhood. We were up all night telling our deepest—well, deeper secrets, and it turned out that all along, since before we married, actually, Jenny had been at work as a sort of crypto-suffragette—whenever she went out to ‘visit her mother,’ the two of them were actually at rallies or loudly insulting government ministers or smashing up shop windows or something.”
“Why didn’t you tell me earlier?” Ratty had asked.
“Your post, dear Reginald. It wouldn’t have done, really, I mean every so often we do attack Whitehall, don’t we?”
“All moot now isn’t it, my pickled onion. You may go and hammer away at your pleasure, though one might suggest some treacle-and-brown-paper arrangement such as burglars use, to avoid injury from broken glass don’t you know. . . .”
“And you wouldn’t mind if I went to prison as well, oh just for a little bit?”
“Of course I should mind, ever so frightfully my own plasmon biscuit, but I shall try somehow to bear it,” and so on at quite nauseating length.
By the time Jenny was out of Holloway and sporting the brooch of honor designed by Sylvia Pankhurst for veterans of residence in that dismal place, Ratty, having tracked rumors and attended to messages he previously would have either ignored or dismissed as supernatural claptrap, had found his way to a secret path which would eventually lead the cheerful ménage here to the hidden lands of Yz-les-Bains and beyond.
“So these days you’re working for . . . ?”
Ratty shrugged. “You see us. We work for one another, I suppose. No ranks, no titles, chain of command . . . no structure, really.”
“How do you plan things?” Yashmeen was curious to know, “assign duties? Coördinate your efforts, that sort of thing?”
“By knowing what has to be done. Which is usually obvious common sense.”
“Sounds like John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart all over again,” she muttered.
“The senior combination-room of a college without a master,” Ratty recalled. “Hmm. Well perhaps not exactly that.”
“And when you folks are out on the job—what do you pack generally?” is what Reef wanted to know.
“Catch as catch can,” supposed Ratty, “anything from a little antique pin-fire pistol to the very latest Hotchkiss. Talk to Jenny, actually, she’s more militant than I’ve ever been, and an even better shot now than she was as a girl.”
“And sometimes,” the hopefulness in Reef’s voice obvious to all, “you’ll also . . . blow something up?”
“Not often. We’ve chosen more of a coevolutionary role, helping along what’s already in progress.”
“Which is what, again?”
“The replacement of governments by other, more practical arrangements,” Ratty replied, “some in existence, others beginning to emerge, when possible working across national boundaries.”
“Like the I.W.W.,” Reef recalled vaguely from some argument back down the trail.
“And the T.W.I.T. I suppose,” said Yashmeen.
“Feelings differ as to the T.W.I.T.,” said Jennifer Invert McHugh, who had joined them. “So many of these mystical fellowships end up as creatures of their host governments.”
“All the while preaching nonattachment,” Yashmeen agreed.
“Then you have been . . .”
“In it but not of it. I hope.”
“Surprising how many ex-T.W.I.T. one keeps running into.”
“The high rate of personal betrayal,” Yashmeen imagined.
“Oh dear.”
“One recovers. But thank you for your concern.”
“A legacy, one finds, of these ancient all-male structures. Blighted the hopes of Anarchism for years, I can tell you—as long as women were not welcome, it never had a chance. In some communities, often quite famous examples, what appeared to be unguided and perfect consensus, some miracle of social telepathy, was in fact the result of a single male authority behind the scenes giving out orders, and a membership willing to comply—all agreeing to work in silence and invisibility to preserve their Anarchist fiction. Only after the passage of years, the death of the leader, would the truth come out.”
“And therefore . . . ?”
“It did not exist. Could not, not with that sort of patriarchal rubbish.”
“But with women in the equation . . .” Yashmeen prompted.
“It depends. If a woman’s only there under the romantic spell of some bearded good-for-nothing then it might as well be croquettes in the kitchen as bombs in the basement.”
“But—”
“But if she’s able to think critically,” Sophrosyne said, “keep men busy where they’ll do the most good, even if men don’t know half the time where that is. Then there’s a chance.”
“As long as men can let go of that old we-know-what’s-best illusion,” Ratty said, “just leave it out there for the dustman.”
“Dustwoman,” said Jenny, Sophrosyne and Yashmeen more or less at the same time.
THE NEXT DAY Reef, Cyprian, and Ratty were out on the Anarchists’ golf course, during a round of Anarchists’ Golf, a craze currently sweeping the civilized world, in which there was no fixed sequence—in fact, no fixed number—of holes, with distances flexible as well, some holes being only putter-distance apart, others uncounted hundreds of yards and requiring a map and compass to locate. Many players had been known to come there at night and dig new ones. Parties were likely to ask, “Do you mind if we don’t play through?” then just go and whack balls at any time and in any direction they liked. Folks were constantly being beaned by approach shots barreling in from unexpected quarters. “This is kind of fun,” Reef said, as an ancient brambled guttie went whizzing by, centimeters from his ear.
“It’s like this,” Ratty had been trying to explain, “we’ve recently obtained a map that’s causing us all a good deal of concern.”
“‘Obtained,’” Cyprian wondered.
“From some people in Tangier, who would probably feel I’ve already told you too much—”
“Were it not . . .” Cyprian suggested.
Ratty found his ball, well in the rough. “Oh, they’re still alive. Somewhere. We hope so, anyway.” He addressed and readdressed the ball from several directions. “Bit like snooker, isn’t it? I believe I’ll try for that one over there,” waving at a distant flag. “You don’t mind the stroll, do you?”
“Well what’s it a map of?” Reef squinting at the scorecard, which he had innocently volunteered to keep, but had lost all sense of how to fill in, three, or possibly that was six, holes ago.
“Purportedly? the ‘Belgian Congo,’” Ratty observing his ball slicing away toward quite another green from the one he’d chosen. “But it’s in code, it’s really the Balkan Peninsula, you see, we’ve learned the transform that far at least—one references this dossier of two-dimensional map-shapes, which are invariant, and wordlessly familiar as a human face. They are also common in dreams, as you may have noticed.”
“So . . . given a shape broader in the north, tapering to the south . . .”
“Right.”
“It could be Bosnia,” said Cyprian.
“South Texas,” said Reef.
“Then beyond the simple geography, there’s the quite intolerable tyranny over people to whom the land really belongs, land which, generation after generation, has been absorbing their labor, accepting the corpses this labor produces, along with obscene profits, which it is left
to other and usually whiter men to gather.”
“Austrians,” Cyprian said.
“Most likely. The rail lines come into it as well, it’s all like reading ancient Tibetan or something. . . .”
LATER IN THE EVENING, owls known here as “hooting cats” went calling up and down the little valley. Toward midnight, the waterfall grew louder. Windows one by one went dark all over Yz-les-Bains. In Coombs De Bottle’s rooms the air grew opaque with tobacco smoke.
Coombs had known since quite early on the job that his days with the War Office were numbered and few. The moment he became aware of the statistics on self-inflicted Anarchist bomb casualties, and began to contemplate an effort to reach out to the community of bombers and instruct them in Bomb-Building Safety, a certain conflict of interest became obvious to everyone at the War Office lab except for Coombs himself.
“But these are British Anarchists,” he tried to argue, “not as if they were Italian, or Spanish, is it.”
“Clever appeal to British racialism,” Coombs said now, “but it didn’t work, that’s how determined they were to sack me.”
If this was a map, it was like none Cyprian had ever seen. Instead of place-names there were hundreds of what looked like short messages. Everything reproduced in just one color, violet, but cross-hatched differently for different areas. Small pictures, almost newspaper-cartoon drawings, of intricate situations Cyprian felt it was important to understand but couldn’t. There were no landmarks or roads he knew, either.
Coombs De Bottle turned up the lamp and held the map at a different angle to the light. “You’ll note a bold horizontal line, along which certain disagreeable events, attributed to ‘Germany,’ are scheduled to occur, unless someone can prevent them. And here, you see these short darkened segments—”
“Land mines,” said Reef.
“Probably. Good. How could you tell?”
“All these little lopsided circles,” Reef gesturing with his cigar ash. “Like what the artillery boys call their ‘ellipse of uncertainty.’ Might be like that each one of these is showing direction and range on what damage they expect.”
“That’s why we think it may refer to poison gas.”
Reef whistled. “So these’d likely be pointing downwind.”
“Where did this map come from?” asked Yashmeen.
“Ultimately, from Renfrew,” said Ratty, “by way of another former student, who’d received it from another, and so on. One more of these trans-national plexuses—by now Renfrew’s web extends around the planet, and other planets as well, shouldn’t wonder.”
“The difficulty with these gas schemes,” said Coombs, “is that one sows these sinister fields and then, oddly often, forgets. An advance turns into a retreat, and in the course of falling back one then may be quite classically hoist by one’s own petard. This one is also somewhat vague as to operational mode. Remotely operated? Electrical? triggered by the weight of a tank or a human foot? launched into the altitudes like skyrockets, where they then burst in silent invisible clouds?”
Cyprian had been closely scanning the map with a Coddington lens. “Here then, the line-segment of interest seems to be labeled ‘Critical Line’— Yashmeen, isn’t that Riemann talk?”
She looked. “Except that this one’s horizontal, and drawn on a grid of latitude and longitude, instead of real against imaginary values—where Riemann said that all the zeroes of the ζ-function will be found.”
Cyprian happened then to be watching her face just as she said not “would” but “will,” and noted the innocent expression of faith—there was no other word for it, was there?—eyes for the rare moment as unnarrowed as they would ever be, lips vulnerably apart, that saint-in-a-painting look he usually saw only while she was being seen to by Reef. The Zeta function might be inaccessible to her now as a former lover. He would never understand the blessed thing, yet it had had the extraordinary capacity to claim her mind, her energies, a good part of her life. She saw him looking, and her eyes tightened again. But the deed had been done on his heart, and for the hour he did not see how he could ever live without her.
He turned back to his scrutiny of the map. After a bit, “Here’s another odd sort of note, in very small italic print. ‘Having failed to learn the lessons of that now mythical time—that pleasures would have to be paid for in later years again and again, by confronting situations like the present one, by negotiating in damaged coin bearing imperial faces too worn to be expressive of any fineness of emotion—thus has the Belgian Congo descended into its destiny.’”
“What,” Reef asked pleasantly, “doesthat mean?”
“Remember, everything on this map stands for something else,” Coombs De Bottle said. “‘Katanga,’ here, could be Greece. ‘Germans’ could as well be the Austrians. And here,” pointing into the middle of the map, “our current focus of concern, this relatively small area, undefined in previous communications—”
“‘ . . . having recently undergone a change of administrative status,’” Cyprian read through the magnifying device.
“Novi Pazar?” Ratty speculated.
“How’s that, Reg?”
Ratty, who found he still liked to talk shop, shrugged in a diffident way. “Persistent long-standing nightmare I suppose. Unpleasantness develops with Turkey, say over Macedonia, Turkish forces have to be taken out of Novi Pazar for deployment southward, and we know that at least three Serbian divisions are poised to march in and occupy the Sanjak. Which would not be kindly regarded by Austria, who would in fact be all too eager to intervene in an armed sort of way, obliging the usual assortment of Powers then to come piling on—”
“General European war.”
“The very phrase.”
“Well?” Yashmeen said, “why not let them have their war? Why would any self-respecting Anarchist care about any of these governments, with their miserable incestuous stew of kings and Cæsars?”
“Self-interest,” said Ratty. “Anarchists would be the biggest losers, wouldn’t they. Industrial corporations, armies, navies, governments, all would go on as before, if not more powerful. But in a general war among nations, every small victory Anarchism has struggled to win so far would simply turn to dust. Today even the dimmest of capitalists can see that the centralized nation-state, so promising an idea a generation ago, has lost all credibility with the population. Anarchism now is the idea that has seized hearts everywhere, some form of it will come to envelop every centrally governed society—unless government has already become irrelevant through, say, family arrangements like the Balkan zadruga. If a nation wants to preserve itself, what other steps can it take, but mobilize and go to war? Central governments were never designed for peace. Their structure is line and staff, the same as an army. The national idea depends on war. A general European war, with every striking worker a traitor, flags threatened, the sacred soils of homelands defiled, would be just the ticket to wipe Anarchism off the political map. The national idea would be reborn. One trembles at the pestilent forms that would rise up afterward, from the swamp of the ruined Europe.
“I wonder if this isn’t Renfrew and Werfner’s ‘Interdikt’ field again, running across the Peninsula, waiting to be triggered.”
“Then,” Reef figured, “somebody’d need to go out and disarm it.”
“Phosgene decomposes violently if it’s exposed to water. That might be the simplest way, though failing that, one might set it off before it could do any harm, which might prove a bit stickier. . . .”
“How could it be set off and not do harm?” Yashmeen protested. “According to the map, unless the map is a bad dream, it runs straight across the heart of Thrace. This thing is terrible. Terrible.” Jenny and Sophrosyne looked over attentively, possibly recognizing behind her voice the silent interior conversation she had been engaged upon since they had all met. Ratty and Reef stood in a corner puffing on cigars, gazing politely. Cyprian, however, had detected the same note as the women, having kept since Yashmeen’s first announc
ement of her pregnancy a running log of every gram of weight gain and distribution, changes in her face, the flow of her hair when she moved and how it gave back the light, how she slept and what she ate or didn’t eat, her lapses into vagueness and episodes of temper, as well as variables so personal he entered them in code. He was in no doubt as to why she wanted to go on this mission, and whom she thought she would be saving.
Close observation and silent concern being one thing, and free advice quite another, the time came nonetheless when Cyprian felt he really ought to say something to her. “Are you crazy?” was how he approached the topic. “You can’t seriously mean to have a baby out there. It’s primitive. It might as well be the jungle. You’ll need to be near competent medical help. . . .”
She wasn’t angry, she rather beamed as if wondering what had taken him so long. “You’re still living in the last century, Cyprian. All the nomadic people of the world know how to have babies on the go. The world that is to be. We are out here, in it. Look around, old Cyprian.”
“Oh, I see, now I’m somehow to get all swotted up on modern midwifery, is that it?”
“Well it wouldn’t do you any harm, really, would it.” He looked so perplexed, not to mention crestfallen, that she laughed and took his little chin in the old commanding way. “Now, we’re not to have any difficulties over this, I hope.”
JUST AFTER HIS RETURN from Bosnia, Cyprian had sworn to himself that he would never go back to the Balkan Peninsula. When he allowed himself to imagine inducements—sexual, financial, honorific—that might get him to change his mind, he was puzzled to find there was nothing the world could plausibly offer that he wanted enough. He tried to explain to Ratty. “If the Earth were alive, with a planet-shaped consciousness, then the ‘Balkan Peninsula’ might easily map on to whatever in this consciousness most darkly wishes for its own destruction.”
“Like phrenology,” Ratty supposed.
“Only some form of madness would take anyone east, right now, into the jaws of what’s almost certainly on the move out there. I don’t suppose you people would have any assignments available to a fair-sized city, such as, oh, Paris, where the less bourgeois choices are easier to make and certainly not as hazardous to pursue?”
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