Profane decided not to argue. So all he said was: "It is probably a nice place, that Rusty Spoon. But out of my class."

"Rot," she said, "class. Aristocracy is in the soul. You may be a descendant of kings. Who knows."

I know, Profane thought. I am a descendant of schlemihls, Job founded my line. Mafia wore a knit dress of some fabric that could be seen through. She sat with her chin on her knees so that the lower part of the skirt fell away. Profane rolled over on his stomach. Now this would he interesting, he thought. Yesterday Rachel had led him in by the hand to find Charisma, Fu and Mafia playing Australian tag-teams minus one on the living room floor.

Mafia bad squirmed to a prone position parallel to Profane. Apparently she had some idea of touching noses. Boy I'll bet she thinks that's cute, he thought. But Fang the cat came tearing in and jumped between them. Mafia lay on her back and started scratching and dandling the cat. Profane padded to the icebox for more beer. In came Pig Bodine and Charisma, singing a drinking song: There are sick bars in every town in America, Where sick people can pass the time o' day.

You can screw on the floor in Baltimore, Make Freudian scenes in New Orleans, Talk Zen and Beckett in Keokuk, Ioway.

There's espresso machines in Terre Haute, Indiana Which is a cultural void if ever a void there be, But though I've dragged my ass from Boston, Mass.

To the wide Pacific sea, The Rusty Spoon is still the bar for me, The Rusty Spoon is the only place for me.

It was like bringing a little bit of that gathering-place in among the proper facades of Riverside Drive. Soon without anyone realizing it there was a party. Fu wandered in, got on the phone and started calling people. Girls appeared miraculously at the front door, which had been left open. Someone turned on the FM, someone else went out for beer. Cigarette smoke began to hang from the low ceiling in murky strata. Two or three members got Profane off in a corner and began to indoctrinate him in the ways of the Crew. He let them lecture, and drank beer. Soon he was drunk and it was night. He remembered to set the alarm clack, found an unoccupied corner of a room and went to sleep.

IV.

That night, April 15, David Ben-Gurion warned his country in an Independence Day speech that Egypt planned to slaughter Israel. A Mideast crisis had been growing since winter. April 19, a cease-fire between the two countries went into effect. Grace Kelly married Prince Rainier III of Monaco the same day. The spring thus wore on, large currents and small eddies alike resulting in headlines. People read what news they wanted to and each accordingly built his own rathouse of history's rags and straws. In the city of New York alone there were at a rough estimate five million different rathouses. God knew what was going on in the minds of cabinet ministers, heads of state and civil servants in the capitals of the world. Doubtless their private versions of history showed up in action. If a normal distribution of types prevailed they did.

Stencil fell outside the pattern. Civil servant without rating, architect-by-necessity of intrigues and breathings-together, he should have been, like his father, inclined toward action. But spent his days instead at a certain vegetation, talking with Eigenvalue, waiting for Paola to reveal how she fitted into this grand Gothic pile of inferences he was hard at work creating. Of course too there were his "leads" which he hunted down now lackadaisical and only half-interested, as if there were after all something more important he ought to be doing. What this mission was, however. came no clearer to him than the ultimate shape of his V-structure - no clearer, indeed than why he should have begun pursuit of V. in the first place. He only felt (he said "by instinct") when a bit of information was useful, when not: when a lead ought to be abandoned, when hounded to the inevitable looped trail. Naturally about drives as intellectualized as Stencil's there can be no question of instinct: the obsession was acquired, surely, but where along the line, how in the world? Unless he was as he insisted purely the century's man, something which does not exist in nature. It would be simple in Rusty Spoon-talk to call him contemporary man in search of an identity. Many of them had already decided this was his Problem. The only trouble was that Stencil had all the identities he could cope with conveniently right at the moment: he was quite purely He Who Looks for V. (and whatever impersonations that might involve), and she was no more his own identity than Eigenvalue the soul-dentist or any other member of the Crew.

It did bring up, however, an interesting note of sexual ambiguity. What a joke if at the end of this hunt he came face to face with himself afflicted by a kind of soul-transvestism. How the Crew would laugh and laugh. Truthfully he didn't know what sex V. might be, nor even what genus and species. To go along assuming that Victoria the girl tourist and Veronica the sewer rat were one and the same V. was not at all to bring up any metempsychosis: only to affirm that his quarry fitted in with The Big One, the century's master cabal, in the same way Victoria had with the Vheissu plot and Veronica with the new rat-order. If she was a historical fact then she continued active today and at the moment, because the ultimate Plot Which Has No Name was as yet unrealized, though V. might be no more a she than a sailing vessel or a nation.

Early in May Eigenvalue introduced Stencil to Bloody Chiclitz, president of Yoyodyne, Inc., a company with factories scattered careless about the country and more government contracts than it really knew what to do with. In the late 1940's Yoyodyne had been breezing along comfortably as the Chiclitz Toy Company, with one tiny independent-making shop on the outskirts of Nutley, New Jersey. For some reason the children of America conceived around this time a simultaneous and psychopathic craving for simple gyroscopes, the kind which are set in motion by a string wound around the rotating shaft, something like a top. Chiclitz, recognizing a market potential there, decided to expand. He was well on the way to cornering the toy gyroscope market when along came a group of school kids on tour to point out that these toys worked on the same principle as a gyrocompass. "As wha," said Chiclitz. They explained gyrocompasses to him, also rate and free gyros. Chiclitz remembered vaguely from a trade magazine that the government was always in the market for these. They used them on ships, airplanes, more lately, missiles. "Well," figured Chiclitz, "why not." Small-business opportunities in the field at the time were being described as abundant. Chiclitz started making gyros for the government. Before he knew it he was also in telemeter instrumentation, test-set components, small communications equipment. He kept expanding, buying, merging. Now less than ten years later he had built up an interlocking kingdom responsible for systems management, airframes, propulsion, command systems, ground support equipment. Dyne, one newly hired engineer had told him, was a unit of force. So to symbolize the humble beginnings of the Chiclitz empire and to get the idea of force, enterprise, engineering skill and rugged individualism in there too, Chiclitz christened the company Yoyodyne.

Stencil toured one plant out on Long Island. Among instruments of war, he reasoned, some clue to the cabal might show up. It did. He'd wandered into a region of offices, drafting boards, blueprint files. Soon Stencil discovered, sitting half hidden in a forest of file cabinets, and sipping occasionally at the coffee in a paper cup which for today's engineer is practically uniform-of-the-day, a balding and porcine gentleman in a suit of European cut. The engineer's name was Kurt Mondaugen, he had worked, yes, at Peenemunde, developing Vergeltungswaffe Eins and Zwei. The magic initial! Soon the afternoon had gone and Stencil had made an appointment to renew the conversation.

A week or so later, in one of the secluded side rooms of the Rusty Spoon, Mondaugen yarned, over an abominable imitation of Munich beer, about youthful days in South-West Africa.

Stencil listened attentively. The tale proper and the questioning after took no more than thirty minutes. Yet the next Wednesday afternoon at Eigenvalue's office, when Stencil retold it, the yarn had undergone considerable change: had become, as Eigenvalue put it, Stencilized.

chapter nine.

Mondaugen's story I.

One May morning in 1922 (meaning nearly winter here in the Warmbad district) a young engineering student named Kurt Mondaugen, late of the Technical University in Munich, arrived at a white outpost near the village of Kalkfontein South. More voluptuous than fat, with fair hair, long eyelashes and a shy smile that enchanted older women, Mondaugen sat in an aged Cape cart idly picking his nose, waiting for the sun to come up and contemplating the pontok or grass hut of Willem van Wijk, a minor extremity of the Administration in Windhoek. His horse drowsed and collected dew while Mondaugen squirmed on the seat, trying to control anger, confusion, petulance; and below the farthest verge of the Kalahari, that vast death, the tardy sun mocked him.

Originally a native of Leipzig, Mondaugen exhibited at least two aberrations peculiar to the region. One (minor), he had the Saxon habit of attaching diminutive endings to nouns, animate or inanimate, at apparent random. Two (major), he shared with his fellow-citizen Karl Baedeker a basic distrust of the South, however relative a region that might be. Imagine then the irony with which he viewed his present condition, and the horrid perversity he fancied had driven him first to Munich for advanced study, then (as if, like melancholy, this southsickness were progressive and incurable) finally to leave depression-time in Munich, journey into this other hemisphere, and enter mirror-time in the South-West Protectorate.

Mondaugen was here as part of a program having to do with atmospheric radio disturbances: sferics for short. During the Great War one H. Barkhausen, listening in on telephone messages among the Allied forces, heard a series of falling tones, much like a slide whistle descending in pitch. Each of these "whistlers" (as Barkhausen named them) lasted only about a second and seemed to be in the low or audio-frequency range. As it turned out, the whistler was only the first of a family of sferics whose taxonomy was to include clicks, hooks, risers, nose-whistlers and one like a warbling of birds called the dawn chorus. No one knew exactly what caused any of them. Some said sunspots, others lightning bursts; but everyone agreed that in there someplace was the earth's magnetic field, so a plan evolved to keep a record of sferics received at different latitudes. Mondaugen, near the bottom of the list, drew South-West Africa, and was ordered to set up his equipment as close to 28 degrees S. as he conveniently could.

It had disturbed him at first, having to live in what had once been a German colony. Like most violent young men - and not a few stuffy old ones - he found the idea of defeat hateful. But he soon discovered that many Germans who'd been landowners before the war had simply continued on, allowed by the government of the Cape to keep their citizenship, property and native workers. A kind of expatriate social life bad indeed developed at the farm of one Foppl, in the northern part of the district, between the Karas range and the marches of the Kalahari, and within a day's journey of Mondaugen's recovery station. Boisterous were the parties, lively the music, jolly the girls that had filled Foppl's baroque plantation house nearly every night since Mondaugen's arrival, in a seemingly eternal Fasching. But now what well-being he'd found in this godforsaken region seemed about to evaporate.

The sun rose and van Wijk appeared in his doorway like a two-dimensional figure jerked suddenly onstage by hidden pulleys. A vulture lit in front of the but and stared at van Wijk. Mondaugen himself acquired motion; jumped down off the cart, moved toward the but.

Van Wijk waved a bottle of homemade beer at him. "I know," he shouted across the parched earth between them, "I know. I've been up all night with it. You think I don't have more to worry about?"

"My antennas," Mondaugen cried.

"Your antennas, my Warmbad district," the Boer said. He was half drunk. "Do you know what happened yesterday? Get worried. Abraham Morris has crossed the Orange."

Which, as had been intended, shook Mondaugen. He managed, "Only Morris?"

"Six men, some women and children rifles, stock. It isn't that. Morris isn't a man. He's a Messiah."

Mondaugen's annoyance had given way all at once to fear; fear began to bud from his intestinal walls.

"They threatened to rip down your antennas, didn't they."

But he'd done nothing ....

Van Wijk snorted. "You contributed. You told me you'd listen for disturbances and record certain data. You didn't say you'd blast them out all over my bush country and become a disturbance yourself. The Bondelswaartz believe in ghosts, the sferics frighten them. Frightened, they're dangerous."

Mondaugen admitted he'd been using an audio amplifier and loudspeaker. "I fall asleep," he explained. "Different sorts come in at different times of day. I'm a one-man research team, I have to sleep sometime. The little loudspeaker is set up at the head of my cot, I've conditioned myself to awake instantaneously, so no more than the first few of any group are lost . . ."

"When you return to your station," van Wijk cut in, "those antennas will be down, and your equipment smashed. A moment -" as the young man turned, redfaced and snuffling - "before you dash off screaming revenge, one word. Just one. An unpleasant word: rebellion."

"Every time a Bondel talks back to you people, it's rebellion." Mondaugen looked as if he might cry.

"Abraham Morris has joined forces by now with Jacobus Christian and Tim Beukes. They're trekking north. You saw for yourself that they'd heard about it already in your own neighborhood. It wouldn't surprise me if every Bondelswaartz in the district were under arms within the week. Not to mention a number of homicidally-disposed Veldschoendragers and Witboois from up north. Witboois are always looking for a fight." Inside the but a telephone began to ring. Van Wijk saw the look on Mondaugen's face. "Yes," he said. "Wait here, it may be interesting news." He vanished inside. From a nearby but came the sound of a Bondelswaartz pennywhistle, insubstantial as wind monotonous as sunlight in a dry season. Mondaugen listened as if it had something to say to him. It didn't.

Van Wijk appeared in the doorway. "Now listen to me, younker, if I were you I would go to Warmbad and stay there until this blows over."

"What's happened."

"That was the location superintendent at Guruchas. Apparently they caught up with Morris, and a Sergeant van Niekerk tried an hour ago to get him to come in to Warmbad peacefully. Morris refused, van Niekerk placed his hand an Morris's shoulder in token of arrest. According to the Bondel version - which you may be sure has already spread to the Portuguese frontier - the Sergeant then proclaimed 'Die lood van die Goevernement sal nou op julle smelt.' The lead of the Government shall now melt upon you. Poetic, Wouldn't you say?

"The Bondels with Morris took it as a declaration of war. So the balloon's gone up, Mondaugen. Go to Warmbad, better yet keep going and get safely across the Orange. That's my best advice."

"No, no," Mondaugen said, "I am something of a coward, you know that. But tell me your second-best advice, because you see there are my antennas."

"You worry about your antennas as if they sprouted from your forehead. Go ahead. Return - if you have the courage, which I certainly don't - return up-country and tell them at Foppl's what you've heard here. Hole up in that fortress of his. If you want my own opinion it will be a blood bath. You weren't here in 1904. But ask Foppl. He remembers. Tell him the days of yon Trotha are back again."

"You could have prevented this," Mondaugen cried. "Isn't that what you're all here for, to keep them happy? To remove any need for rebellion?"

Van Wijk exploded in a bitter fit of laughing. "You seem," he finally drawled, "to be under certain delusions about the civil service. History, the proverb says, is made at night. The European civil servant normally sleeps at night. What waits in his IN basket to confront him at nine in the morning is history. He doesn't fight it, he tries to coexist with it.

"Die lood van die Goevernement indeed. We are, perhaps, the lead weights of a fantastic clock, necessary to keep it in motion, to keep an ordered sense of history and time prevailing against chaos. Very well! Let a few of them melt. Let the clock tell false time for a while. But the weights will be reforged, and rehung, and if there doesn't happen to be one there in the shape or name of Willem van Wijk to make it run right again, so much the worse for me."

To this curious soliloquy Kurt Mondaugen flipped a desperate farewell salute, climbed into his Cape cart, and headed back up-country. The trip was uneventful. Once in a great while an oxcart would materialize out of the scrubland; or a jet-black kite would come to hang in the sky, studying something small and quick among the cactus and thorn trees. The sun was hot. Mondaugen leaked at every orifice; fell asleep, was jolted awake; once dreamed gunshots and human screams. He arrived at the recovery station in the afternoon, found the Bondel village nearby quiet and his equipment undisturbed. Working as quickly as he could, he dismantled the antennas and packed them and the receiving equipment in the Cape cart. Half a dozen Bondelswaartz stood around watching. By the time he was ready to leave the sun was nearly down. From time to time, at the edges of his field of vision, Mondaugen would see small scurrying bands of Bondels, seeming almost to merge with the twilight, moving in and out of the small settlement in every direction. Somewhere to the west a dogfight had started. As he tightened the last half-hitch a pennywhistle began to play nearby, and it took him only a moment to realize that the player was imitating sferics. Bondels who were watching started to giggle. The laughter swelled, until it sounded like a jungleful of small exotic animals, fleeing some basic danger. But Mondaugen knew well enough who was fleeing what. The sun set, he climbed on the cart. No one said anything in farewell: all he heard at his back were the whistle and the laughter.

It was several more hours to Foppl's. The only incident on route was a flurry of gunfire - real, this time - off to his left, behind a hill. At last, quite early in the morning, the lights of Foppl's burst on him suddenly out of the scrubland's absolute blackness. He crossed a small ravine on a plank bridge and drew up before the door.

As usual a party was in progress, a hundred windows blazed, the gargoyles, arabesques, pargeting and fretwork of Foppl's "villa" vibrated in the African night. A cluster of girls and Foppl himself stood at the door while the farm's Bondels offloaded the Cape cart and Mondaugen reported the situation.

The news alarmed certain of Foppl's neighbors who owned farms and stock nearby. "But it would be best," Foppl announced to the party, "if we all stayed here. If there's to be burning and destruction, it will happen whether or not you're there to defend your own. If we disperse our strength they can destroy us as well as our farms. This house is the best fortress in the region: strong, easily defended. House and grounds are protected on all sides by deep ravines. There is more than enough food, good wine, music and -" winking lewdly - "beautiful women.

"To hell with them out there. Let them have their war. In here we shall hold Fasching. Bolt the doors, seal the windows, tear down the plank bridges and distribute arms. Tonight we enter a state of siege."

II.

Thus began Foppl's Siege Party. Mondaugen left after two and a half months. In that time no one had ventured outside, or received any news from the rest of the district. By the time Mondaugen departed, a dozen bottles of wine still lay cobwebbed in the cellar, a dozen cattle remained to be slaughtered. The vegetable garden behind the house was still abundant with tomatoes, yams, chard, herbs. So affluent was the farmer Foppl.

The day after Mondaugen's arrival, the house and grounds were sealed off from the outside world. Up went an inner palisade of strong logs, pointed at the top, and down went the bridges. A watch list was made up, a General Staff appointed, all in the spirit of a new party game.

A curious crew were thus thrown together. Many, of course, were German: rich neighbors, visitors from Windhoek and Swakopmund. But there were also Dutch and English from the Union; Italians, Austrians, Belgians from the diamond fields near the coast; French, Russian, Spanish and one Pole from various corners of the earth; all creating the appearance of a tiny European Conclave or League of Nations, assembled here while political chaos howled outside.

Early on the morning after his arrival, Mondaugen was up on the roof, stringing his antennas along the iron fanciwork that topped the villa's highest gable. He had an uninspiring view of ravines, grass dry pans, dust, scrub; all repeating, undulating east to the eventual wastes of the Kalahari; north to a distant yellow exhalation that rose from far under the horizon and seemed to hang eternally over the Tropic of Capricorn.

Back here Mondaugen could also see down into a kind of inner courtyard. Sunlight, filtered through a great sandstorm far away in the desert, bounced off an open bay window and down, too bright, as if amplified, into the courtyard to illuminate a patch or pool of deep red. Twin tendrils of it extended to a nearby doorway. Mondaugen shivered and stared. The reflected sunlight vanished up a wall and into the sky. He looked up, saw the window opposite complete its swing open and a woman of indeterminate age in a negligee of peacock blues and greens squint into the sun. Her left hand rose to her left eye, fumbled there as if positioning a monocle. Mondaugen crouched behind curlicues of wrought iron, astonished not so much at anything in her appearance as at his own latent desire to see and not be seen. He waited for the sun or her chance movement to show him nipples, navel, pubic hair.

But she had seen him. "Come out, come out, gargoyle," she called playfully. Mondaugen lurched vertical, lost his balance, nearly fell off the roof, grabbed hold of a lightning rod, slid to a 45 degree angle and began to laugh.

"My little antennas," he gurgled.

"Come to the roof garden," she invited, and disappeared then back into a white room turned to blinding enigma by a sun finally free of its Kalahari.

He completed his job of setting up the antennas, then made his way round cupolas and chimney pots, up and down slopes and slates till at length he vaulted clumsily over a low wall and it seemed some tropic as well, for the life there he found too lavish, spectral, probably carnivorous; not in good taste.

"How pretty he is." The woman, dressed now in jodhpurs and an army shirt, leaned against the wall, smoking a cigarette. All at once, as he'd been half-expecting, cries of pain lanced a morning quiet that had known only visiting kites and wind, and the dry rustling of the exterior veld.

Mondaugen knew, without having to run to see, that the cries had come from the courtyard where he'd seen the crimson stain. Neither he nor the woman moved. It somehow having become part of a mutual constraint that neither of them show curiosity. Voila: conspiracy already, without a dozen words having passed between them.

Her name proved to be Vera Meroving, her companion a Lieutenant Weissmann, her city Munich.

"Perhaps we even met one Fasching," she said, "masked and strangers."

Mondaugen doubted, but had they met: were there any least basis for that "conspiracy" a moment ago: it would surely have been somewhere like Munich, a city dying of abandon, venality, a mark swollen with fiscal cancer.

As the distance between them gradually diminished Mondaugen saw that her left eye was artificial: she, noticing his curiosity, obligingly removed the eye and held it out to him in the hollow of her hand. A bubble blown translucent, its "white" would show up when in the socket as a half-lit sea green. A fine network of nearly microscopic fractures covered its surface. Inside were the delicately-wrought wheels, springs, ratchets of a watch, wound by a gold key which Fraulein Meroving wore on a slender chain round her neck. Darker green and flecks of gold had been fused into twelve vaguely zodiacal shapes, placed annular on the surface of the bubble to represent the iris and also the face of the watch.

"What was it like outside?"

He told her the little he knew. Her hands had begun to tremble: he noticed it when she went to replace the eye. He could scarcely hear her when she said: "It could be 1904 again."

Curious: van Wijk had said that. What was 1904 to these people? He was about to ask her when Lieutenant Weissmann appeared in mufti from behind an unwholesomelooking palm and pulled her by the hand, back into the depths of the house.

Two things made Foppl's a fortunate place to be carrying on sferic research. First, the farmer had given Mondaugen a room to himself in a turret at one corner of the house; a little enclave of scientific endeavor, buffered by a number of empty storage roams and with access to the roof through a stained-glass window portraying an early Christian martyr being devoured by wild beasts.

Second, modest though their demands were, there was an auxiliary source of electric power for his receivers in the small generator Foppl kept to light the giant chandelier in the dining hall. Rather than rely, as he had been doing, on a number of bulky batteries, Mondaugen was sure it wouldn't be too difficult simply to tap off and devise circuitry to modify what power he needed, either to operate the equipment directly or to recharge the batteries. Accordingly, that afternoon, after arranging his effects, equipment and the attendant paper work into an imitation of professional disorder, Mondaugen set off into the house and down, in search of this generator.

Soon, padding down a narrow, sloping corridor, he was brought to attention by a mirror hung some twenty feet ahead, angled to reflect the interior of a room around the next corner. Framed for him there were Vera Meroving and her lieutenant in profile, she striking at his chest with what appeared to be a small riding crop, he twisting a gloved hand into her hair and talking to her all the while, so precisely that the voyeur Mondaugen could lip-read each obscenity. The geometry of the corridors somehow baffled all sound: Mondaugen, with the queer excitement he'd felt watching her at her window that morning, expected captions explaining it all to flash on to the mirror. But she finally released Weissmann; he reached out with the curiously gloved hand and closed the door, and it was as if Mondaugen had dreamed them.

Presently he began to hear music, which grew louder the deeper he descended into this house. Accordion, fiddle and guitar were playing a tango full of minor chords and an eerie Ratting of certain notes which to German ears should have remained natural. A young girl's voice was singing sweetly: Love's a lash, Kisses gall the tongue, harrow the heart; Caresses tease Cankered tissue apart.

Liebchen, come Be my Hottentot bondsman tonight, The sjambok's kiss Is unending delight.

Love, my little slave, Is color-blind; For white and black Are only states of mind.

So at my feet Nod and genuflect, whimper for me: Though tears are dried Their pain is yet to be.

Enchanted, Mondaugen peered round the door jamb and found the singer to be a child of not more than sixteen, with white-blond, hip-length hair and breasts perhaps too large for her slender frame.

"I am Hedwig Vogelsang," she informed him, "and my purpose on earth is to tantalize and send raving the race of man." Whereupon the musicians, hidden from them in an alcove behind a hanging arras, struck up a kind of schottische; Mondaugen, overcome by the sudden scent of musk, brought in a puff to his nostrils by interior winds which could not have arisen by accident, seized her round the waist and wheeled with her across the room, and out, and through a bedroom lined with mirrors round a canopied four-poster and into a long gallery, stabbed at ten-yard intervals down its length by yellow daggers of African sun, hung with nostalgic landscapes of a Rhine valley that never existed, portraits of Prussian officers who'd died long before Caprivi (some even before Bismarck) and their blond, untender ladies who'd nothing now but dust to bloom in; past rhythmic gusts of blond sun that crazed the eyeballs with vein-images; out of the gallery and into a tiny unfurnished room hung all in black velvet, high as the house, narrowing into a chimney and open at the top, so that one could see the stars in the daytime; finally down three or four steps to Foppl's own planetarium, a circular room with a great wooden sun, overlaid with gold leaf, burning cold in the very center and round it the nine planets and their moons, suspended from tracks in the ceiling, actuated by a coarse cobweb of chains, pulleys, belts, racks, pinions and worms, all receiving their prime impulse from a treadmill in the corner, usually operated for the amusement of the guests by a Bondelswaartz, now unoccupied. Having long fled all vestiges of music Mondaugen released her here, skipped to the treadmill and began a jog-trot that set the solar system in motion, creaking and whining in a way that raised a prickling in the teeth. Rattling, shuddering, the wooden planets began to rotate and spin, Saturn's rings to whirl, moons their precessions, our own Earth its nutational wobble, all picking up speed; as the girl continued to dance, having chosen the planet Venus for her partner; as Mondaugen dashed along his own geodesic, following in the footsteps of a generation of slaves.

When at length he tired, slowed and stopped she'd gone, vanished into the wooden reaches of what remained after all a parody of space. Mondaugen, breathing heavily, staggered off the treadmill to carry on his descent and search for the generator.

Soon he stumbled into a basement room where gardening implements were stored. As if the entire day had come into being only to prepare him for this, he discovered a Bondel male, face down and naked, the back and buttocks showing scar tissue from old sjambokings as well as more recent wounds, laid open across the flesh like so many toothless smiles. Hardening himself the weakling Mondaugen approached the man and stooped to listen for breathing or a heartbeat, trying not to see the white vertebra that winked at him from one long opening.

"Don't touch him." Foppl stood holding a sjambok or cattle whip of giraffe hide, tapping the handle against his leg in a steady, syncopated figure. "He doesn't want you to help. Even to sympathize. He doesn't want anything but the sjambok." Raising his voice till it found the hysterical-bitch level Foppl always affected with Bondels: "You like the sjambok, don't you, Andreas."

Andreas moved his head feebly and whispered; "Baas . . ."

"Your people have defied the Government," Foppl continued, "they've rebelled, they have sinned. General yon Trotha will have to come back to punish you all. He'll have to bring his soldiers with the beards and the bright eyes, and his artillery that speaks with a loud voice. How you will enjoy it, Andreas. Like Jesus returning to earth, yon Trotha is coming to deliver you. Be joyful; sing hymns of thanks. And until then love me as your parent, because I am yon Trotha's arm, and the agent of his will."

As van Wijk had bade him do, Mondaugen remembered to ask Foppl about 1904 and the "days of yon Trotha." If Foppl's response was sick, it was sick of more than simple enthusiasm; not only did he yarn about the past - first there in the cellar as both stood watching a Bondelswaartz whose face Mondaugen was never to see continue to die; later at riotous feasting, on watch or patrol, to ragtime accompaniment in the grand ballroom; even up in the turret, as deliberate interruption to the experiment - but he also seemed under compulsion somehow to recreate the Deutsch-Sudwestafrika of nearly twenty years ago, in word and perhaps in deed. "Perhaps" because as the siege party progressed it became more and more difficult to make the distinction.

One midnight Mondaugen stood on a small balcony just under the eaves, officially on watch, though little could be seen in the uncertain illumination. The moon, or half of it, had risen above the house: his antennas cut like rigging dead-black across its face. As he swung his rifle idly by its shoulder strap, gazing out across the ravine at nothing in particular, someone stepped on to the balcony beside him: it was an old Englishman named Godolphin, tiny in the moonlight. Small scrubland noises now and again rose to them from the outside.

"I hope I don't disturb you," Godolphin said. Mondaugen shrugged, keeping his eyes in a constant sweep over what he guessed to be the horizon. "I enjoy it on watch," the Englishman continued, "it's the only peace there is to this eternal celebration." He was a retired sea captain; in his seventies, Mondaugen would guess. "I was in Cape Town, trying to raise a crew for the Pole."

Mondaugen's eyebrows went up. Embarrassed, he began to pick at his nose. "The South Pole?"

"Of course. Rather awkward if it were the other, haw-haw.

"And I'd heard of a stout boat in Swakopmund. But of course she was too small. Hardly do for the pack ice. Foppl was in town, and invited me out for a weekend. I imagine I needed the rest."

"You sound cheerful. In the face of what must be frequent disappointment."

"They leave the sting out. Treat the doddering old fool with sympathy. He's living in the past. Of course I'm living in the past. I was there."

"At the Pole."

"Certainly. Now I have to go back, it's that simple. I'm beginning to think that if I get through our siege party I shall be quite ready for anything the Antarctic has for me."

Mondaugen was inclined to agree. "Though I don't plan on any little Antarctic."

The old sea dog chuckled. "Oh there will be. You wait. Everyone has an Antarctic."

Which it occurred to Mondaugen, was as far South as one could get. At first he'd plunged eagerly into the social life that jittered all over the sprawling plantation house, usually leaving his Scientific duties until the early afternoon, when everyone but the watch was asleep. He had even begun a dogged pursuit of Hedwig Vogelsang, but somehow kept running into Vera Meroving instead. Southsickness in its tertiary stage, whispered that adenoidal Saxon youth who was Mondaugen's doubleganger: beware, beware.

The woman, twice as old as he, exerted a sexual fascination he found impossible to explain away. He'd meet her head-on in corridors, or rounding some salient of cabinetwork, or on the roof, or simply in the night, always unlooked for. He would make no advances, she no response; but despite all efforts to hold it in check, their conspiracy grew.