“Many people believe that there is a mathematical correlation between sin, penance, and redemption. More sin, more penance, and so forth. Our own point has always been that there is no connection. All the variables are inde-pendent. You do penance not because you have sinned but because it is your destiny. You are redeemed not through doing penance but because it happens. Or doesn’t happen. It’s nothing supernatural. Most people have a wheel riding up on a wire, or some rails in the street, some kind of guide or groove, to keep them moving in the direction of their destiny. But you keep bouncing free. Avoiding penance and thereby definition.”
“Going off my trolley. And you’re trying to help me get back to the way most people live, ’s that it?” “ ‘Most people,’ ” not raising his voice, though something in Lew jumped as if he had, “are dutiful and dumb as oxen. Delirium literally means going out of a furrow you’ve been plowing. Think of this as a productive sort of delirium.”

Nunatak, in the Eskimo tongue literally “land connected,” refers to a mountain peak tall enough to rise above the wastes of ice and snow that otherwise cover the terrain. Each, believed to have its own guardian spirit, is alive, an ark sheltering whatever lichens, mosses, flowers, insects, or even birds may be borne to it by the winds of the Region. During the last Ice Age, many of our own mountains in the U.S., familiar and even famous now, were nunataks then, rising in the same way above that ancient frozen expanse, keeping the flames of species aglow till such time as the ice should recede and life resume its dominion.

There was debate in the aftermath about what had happened to the Mayor. Fled, dead, not right in the head, the theories proliferated in his absence.

Out of that night and day of unconditional wrath, folks would’ve expected to see any city, if it survived, all newly reborn, purified by flame, taken clear beyond greed, real-estate speculating, local politics—instead of which, here was this weeping widow, some one-woman grievance committee in black, who would go on to save up and lovingly record and mercilessly begrudge every goddamn single tear she ever had to cry, and over the years to come would make up for them all by developing into the meanest, crudest bitch of a city, even among cities not notable for their kindness. To all appearance resolute, adventurous, manly, the city could not shake that terrible all-night rape, when “he” was forced to submit, surrendering, in-admissably, blindly feminine, into the Hellfire embrace of “her” beloved. He spent the years afterward forgetting and fabulating and trying to get back some self-respect. But inwardly, deep inside, “he” remained the catamite of Hell, the punk at the disposal of all the denizens thereof, the bitch in men’s clothing.

All her brothers were long gone, the one she missed most being Kit, for they were the two youngest and had shared a kind of willfulness, a yearning for the undreamt-of destiny, or perhaps no more than a stubborn aversion to settling for the everyday life of others.

Deuce had been one of these Sickly Youths who was more afraid of the fate all too obviously in store for weaklings in this country than of the physical exertion it would take to toughen up and avoid it. However self-schooled in the ways of Strenuosity, he had still absorbed enough early insult to make inevitable some later re-emission, at a different psychical frequency—a fluorescence of vindictiveness. He thought of it usually as the need to prevail over every challenge that arose regardless of scale, from cutting a deck to working a rock face.

Owing to a stubborn belief in Whitehall that the eccentric enjoy access to paranormal forces with nothing better to do than whisper suggestions for ever-more-improved weapons design, personnel offices throughout the Empire had been alert for at least a generation to the genteel stammer, the ungovernably darting eyeball, the haircut that no known pomade could subdue.

She was a virgin bride. At the moment of surrendering, she found herself wishing only to become the wind. To feel herself refined to an edge, an invisible edge of unknown length, to enter the realm of air forever in motion over the broken land. Child of the storm.

Lake was nowhere near the kind of girl he thought he was looking to settle down with, she was all his plans flying out the window, a chance to “choose wrong” early enough in life to do him some good.

Duels were fought, lawsuits brought, all for nought.

“No prologues among us, Gasper, tantum dic verbo isn’t it.”

Cyprian, while rejecting his family’s High Church faith, strangely had begun—especially when the Mags and Nuncs and Matins responsories could be heard from services at Trinity or King’s—to glimpse that, precisely because of its impossibilities, the disarray of self-important careerists and hierarchy-obsessed functionaries, the yawning and fidgeting town-lad choristers and narcotic sermonizing—it was possible to hope, not so much despite as paradoxically because of this very snarled web of human flaw, for the emergence of the incommensurable mystery, the dense, unknowable Christ, bearing the secret of how once on a hilltop that was not Zion, he had conquered death. Cyprian stood in the evenings, at the Compline hour, just outside the light cast from the chapel windows, and wondered what was happening to his skepticism, which was seldom being addressed these days except by such truly horrible specimens as the Te Deum in Commemoration of the Khaki Election by Filtham, which—although in the hymn-writing trade botching a Te Deum is thought to be next to impossible, the psalmodic formulae being well established, even unto what notes to end on—nonetheless, from its stultifying length, in arguable violation of any number of child-labor statutes, as well as a relentless chromaticism that might have made even Richard Strauss uneasy, too “modern” to have retained any power to penetrate and sacredly stun, it was already known among schoolchild choristers from Stain-drop to St. Paul’s as “Filtham’s Tedium.”

Kit made what he hoped was the universal sign for short funds by pulling out an imaginary pair of trouser pockets and shrugging in apology.

At first glance, there might seem little to choose between the French Foreign Legion and the Belgian Force Publique. In both cases one ran away from one’s troubles to soldier in Africa. But where the one outfit envisaged desert penance in a surfeit of light, in radiant absolution, the other sought, in the gloom of the fetid forest, to embrace the opposite of atonement—to proclaim that the sum of one’s European sins, however disruptive, had been but facile apprenticeship to a brotherhood of the willfully lost. Whose faces, afterward, would prove as unrecallable as those of the natives.

Accelerated by an awareness of diminishing returns, Woevre was out the door.

Woevre watched her leave the room. Women looked better from behind, but one saw them that way only when taking their leave after one was done with them, and what good was that? Why did this society insist on a woman entering a room face-first instead of ass-first? Another of the civilized complexities that made him miss intensely the forest life. Since returning to Belgium he had found only an increasing number of these, deployed around him like traps or mines.

“I know I’m supposed to explain,” Dally said. “Wish I could. You know how you’ll pass through a place, after a long string of places you’d never want to stop in, let alone live, or could understand anybody else wanting to, and maybe it’s the time of day, the weather, what you just ate, no way to tell, but you don’t ride into it, it comes out to surround you, and you know it’s where you belong. There’s nothing else like this place anywhere, and I know it’s where I belong.”

“Those curves are everywhere continuous but nowhere differentiable,” sighed Humfried. “Noli me tangere, don’t you know. Held to stronger criteria, like a function of a complex variable.”

Kit had begun to notice Russians in the Weenderstraße. Yashmeen was convinced they were in town to spy on her. They were trying to blend in, but certain telltale nuances—fur hats, huge unkempt beards, a tendency in the street to drop and begin dancing the kazatsky to music only they could hear—kept giving them away.

They found the inside strangely deserted, lit only by a few whispering gas-sconces which receded down the corridors leading away from the shadows of the entrance-hall. Yet there was the smell of German tidiness constantly exercised, of Sapoleum and floor-wax, of massive applications of formalin gas still pungently lingering. The corridors seemed swept by generations of sighing, which occasionally had reached wind force—a sadness, a wild exclusion from the primly orthogonal floor-plans of academic endeavor…

Could be all those Catholics he’d run into in this line of work, Irish and Polish in Chicago, Mexicans in Colorado and so forth, had it right all along, and there was nothing in the day’s echoing cycle but penance, even if you’d never committed a sin, to live in the world was to do penance—actually, as his teacher Drave had pointed out back during that winter in Chicago, another argument for reincarnation— “Being unable to remember sins from a previous life won’t excuse you from doing penance in this one. To believe in the reality of penance is almost to have proof of rebirth.”

Cyprian Latewood’s return to Vienna was accompanied either in or outside of his head by the Adagio from the Mozart Piano Concerto in A Major, K. 488. It might have been prophetic, had he been listening. This was a period in the history of human emotion when “romance” had slipped into an inexpensive subfusc of self-awareness, unnaturally heightening the effect of the outmoded pastels peeping from beneath, as if in some stylistic acknowledgment of the great trembling that showed through, now and then, to some more than others, of a hateful future nearly at hand and inescapable. But many were as likely to misinterpret the deep signals as physical symptoms, or another case of “nerves,” or, like the earlier, dimmer Cyprian, some kind of “romance” in the offing, however little prepared he might have been for that.

This is the only place on earth, Auberon Halfcourt reflected, where lethargy of the soul can arrive in spasms.

They sat among the choiring clepsydras of the evening garden, time elapsing in a dozen ways, allowing their cigars to go out, keeping a companionable silence.

By the Edwardian standards of rationally-arrived-at code of values and stable career, young Traverse here was an obviously drifting wreck without much hope of ever being straightened out. What on earth sort of family produced wastrels like this? As long as he was this far from the orbit of an ordinary life, he might as well be pressed into service for a mission the Lieutenant-Colonel had had in mind since Prance had brought his news.

Here are places we fear, places we dream, places whose exiles we became and never learned it until, sometimes, too late.

And in the instant, there was Baikal. He had gazed into pure, small mountain lakes in Colorado, unsoiled by mine tailings or town waste, and was not surprised by the perfect clarity which had more than once taken him to the verge of losing himself, to the dizzying possibility of falling into another order of things. But this was like looking into the heart of the Earth itself as it was before there were eyes of any kind to look at it. It was a mile deep, so he’d been told by Auberon Halfcourt, and sheltered critters unknown elsewhere in Creation. Trying to sail on it was dangerous and unpredictable—winds rose in seconds, waves became small mountains. A journey to it was not a holiday excursion. In some way he was certain of but had not quite worked through, it was another of those locations like Mount Kailash, or Tengri Khan, parts of a superterrestrial order included provisionally in this lower, broken one.

All maps were useless. Cartographers of different empires, notably the Russian, had been driven to nervous collapse trying to record the country around the Tushuk Tash. Some settled for embittered fantasy, others more conscientious left it blank.

Two small black birds who had not been there now emerged out of the light as it faded to everyday green and blue again. Kit understood for a moment that forms of life were a connected set—critters he was destined never to see existing so that those he did see would be just where they were, when he saw them. Somewhere on the other side of the world, an exotic beetle stood at a precise distance and compass bearing from an unclassified shrub so that here, in this clearing, these two black birds might appear to Kit, precisely as they were. He had entered a state of total attention to no object he could see or sense, or eventually even imagine in any interior way,

“The Balkan Peninsula is the boardinghouse dining-room of Europe,” Ratty grumbled, “dangerously crowded, eternally hungry, toxic with mutual antagonism. A paradise for arms dealers, and the despair of bureaucrats.”

Leaving the Südbahn, she gazed backward at iron convergences and receding signal-lamps. Outward and visible metaphor, she thought, for the complete ensemble of “free choices” that define the course of a human life. A new switching point every few seconds, sometimes seen, sometimes traveled over invisibly and irrevocably. From on board the train one can stand and look back, and watch it all flowing away, shining, as if always meant to be.

Once he would have snarled back at her, and the phrase “thankless task” would almost certainly have to be deployed by one of them. But lately he was finding a perverse fascination in Patience, not so much as a virtue but more as a hobby requiring discipline, like chess or mountain-climbing.

If there is an inevitability to arrival by water, he reflected, as we watch the possibilities on shore being progressively narrowed at last to the destined quay or slip, there is no doubt a mirror-symmetry about departure, a denial of inevitability, an opening out from the point of embarkation, beginning the moment all lines are singled up, an unloosening of fate as the unknown and perhaps the uncreated begins to make its appearance ahead and astern, port and starboard, everywhere an expanding of possibility, even for ship’s company who may’ve made this run hundreds of times…

He also noted a defective sense of history, common among field operatives, given their need to be immersed in the moment. So it was history—Time’s pathology—that he must first address. “I know it is difficult for an Englishman, but try for a moment to imagine that, except in the most limited and trivial ways, history does not take place north of the forty-fifth parallel. What North Europe thinks of as its history is actually quite provincial and of limited interest. Different sorts of Christian killing each other, and that’s about it. The Northern powers are more like administrators, who manipulate other people’s history but produce none of their own. They are the stock-jobbers of history, lives are their units of exchange. Lives as they are lived, deaths as they are died, all that is made of flesh, blood, semen, bone, fire, pain, shit, madness, intoxication, visions, everything that has been passing down here forever, is real history.

It is in the nature of prey, Cyprian was later to reflect, that at times, instead of submitting to the demands of some predator, they will insist upon being difficult. Running for their lives. Putting on disguises. Disappearing into clouds of ink, miles of bush, holes in the earth. Even, strange to tell, fighting back. Social Darwinists of the day were forever on about the joys of bloody teeth and claws, but they were curiously uncelebratory of speed and deception, poison and surprise.

Cyprian felt the sadness peculiar to the contemplation of recent time unrecapturable. Anything earlier, childhood, adolescence, they were done with, he could get by without any of that—what he wanted back was last week, the week before.

As Cyprian’s field skills, held to the whetstone of European crisis, had sharpened, so Theign’s, from overindulgence in various luxuries, including Viennese cuisine, had deteriorated. Cyprian would never become a Venetian, but he had learned a useful thing or two, among these that whatever rumors were worth in other towns, here in Venice they could be trusted as scientific fact. He went out to Castello, and sat at caffès and bàcari and waited, and presently there was Theign, accompanied by his brace of plug-uglies. Cyprian recited the appropriate formulae and became invisible. Before long, in the intricate though mismatched dance which then began, he had learned every minute of Theign’s daily timetable, and managed to hover unobserved within mischief-making distance, hiring pickpockets to make off with notecases, arranging at the fish-market for Theign to be assaulted with a dubious haddock, taking to the rooftops of Venice himself to launch the odd furtive tile at Theign’s head.

What they would find difficult were not so much the grander elements—they had discovered that they all three tended politically to be Anarchists, their view of human destiny was pessimistic with excursions into humor only jail occupants and rodeo riders might recognize—what really made the day-to-day so laborious and apt at any turn to come apart in disaster were rather the small annoyances, which, through some homeopathic principle of the irksome, acted more powerfully the more trivial they were.

Yashmeen certainly was the one who shared most deeply the Anarchist beliefs around here. She had no illusions about bourgeois innocence, and yet held on to a limitless faith that History could be helped to keep its promises, including someday, a commonwealth of the oppressed. It was her old need for some kind of transcendence—the fourth dimension, the Riemann problem, complex analysis, all had presented themselves as routes of escape from a world whose terms she could not accept, where she had preferred that even erotic desire have no consequences, at least none as weighty as the desires for a husband and children and so forth seemed to be for other young women of the day. But lovers could not in general be counted as transcendent influences, and history had gone on with its own relentless timetable. Now at Yz-les-Bains, though, Yashmeen wondered if she hadn’t found some late reprieve, some hope of passing beyond political forms to “planetary oneness,” as Jenny liked to put it. “This is our own age of exploration,” she declared, “into that unmapped country waiting beyond the frontiers and seas of Time. We make our journeys out there in the low light of the future, and return to the bourgeois day and its mass delusion of safety, to report on what we’ve seen. What are any of these ‘utopian dreams’ of ours but defective forms of time-travel?”

At the fringes of these discussions, the good folk were averting their faces, repeatedly and compulsively crossing themselves, and making other hand-gestures less familiar, some indeed quite complicated, as if overlain, since ancient days, with manual commentary.

Now and then in the weeks that followed they would find themselves wondering—though they could never find the time to just sit and talk it through—if the permission they had felt when Cyprian was with them, the freedom to act extraordinarily, had come from residence in a world about to embrace its end—closer to the freedom of the suicide than that of the un-governed spirit.

It wasn’t exactly a religious experience, but somehow, a little at a time, she had found herself surrendering to her old need to take care of people. Not for compensation, certainly not for thanks. Her first rule became “Don’t thank me.” Her second was “Don’t take the credit for anything that turns out well.” One day she woke up understanding clear as the air that as long as a person was willing to forgo credit, there were very few limits on the good it became possible to do.

The evening was advanced, the ladies had long since retired, and with them any need for euphemism.

Chick and Viridian would turn out to be the most problematical, or off-and-on-again, of the five pairings. Chick acted sometimes as if his heart were still back at the scenes of previous adventures, and Viridian’s day was itself not without lapses into the sentimental pluperfect.

She had stopped believing quite so much in cause and effect, having begun to find that what most people took for some continuous reality, one morning paper to the next, had never existed. Often these days she couldn’t tell if something was a dream into which she had drifted, or one from which she had just awakened and might not return to. So through the terrible cloudlessness of the long afternoons she passed among dreams, and placed her wagers at the Universal Dream Casino as to which of them should bring her through, and which lead her irreversibly astray.