In the mountains around Nordhausen and Bleicheröde, down in abandoned mine shafts, live the Schwarzkommando. These days it's no longer a military tide: they are a people now, Zone-Hereros, in exile for two generations from South-West Africa. Early Rhenish missionaries began to bring them back to the Metropolis, that great dull zoo, as specimens of a possibly doomed race. They were gently experimented with: exposed to cathedrals, Wagnerian soirees, Jaeger underwear, trying to get them interested in their souls. Others were taken back to Germany as servants, by soldiers who went to put down the great Herero rising of 1904-1906. But only after 1933 did most of the present-day leadership arrive, as part of a scheme—never openly admitted by the Nazi party—for setting up black juntas, shadow-states for the eventual takeover of British and French colonies in black Africa, on the model of Germany's plan for the Maghreb. Südwest by then was a protectorate administered by the Union of South Africa, but the real power was still with the old German colonial families, and they cooperated.

Just a big hunk of desert, no more maids, no field-hands, no laborers for the construction or the mining—wait, wait a minute there, yes it's Karl Marx, that sly old racist skipping away with his teeth together and his eyebrows up trying to make believe it's nothing but Cheap Labor and Overseas Markets. . . . Oh, no. Colonies are much, much more. Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit. Where he can fall on his slender prey roaring as loud as he feels like, and guzzle her blood with open joy. Eh? Where he can just wallow and rut and let himself go in a softness, a receptive darkness of limbs, of hair as woolly as the hair on his own forbidden genitals. Where the poppy, and cannabis and coca grow full and green, and not to the colors and style of death, as do ergot and agaric, the blight and fungus native to Europe. Christian Europe was always death, Karl, death and repression. Out and down in the colonies, life can be indulged, life and sensuality in all its forms, with no harm done to the Metropolis, nothing to soil those cathedrals, white marble statues, noble thoughts. . . . No word ever gets back. The silences down here are vast enough to absorb all behavior, no matter how dirty, how animal it gets. . . .

[...] yes well actually this goes on, verse after verse, for quite some time. In its complete version it represents a pretty fair renunciation of the things of the world. The trouble with it is that by Gödel's Theorem there is bound to be some item around that one has omitted from the list, and such an item is not easy to think of off the top of one's head, so that what one does most likely is go back over the whole thing, meantime correcting mistakes and inevitable repetitions, and putting in new items that will surely have occurred to one, and—well, it's easy to see that the "suicide" of the title might have to be postponed indefinitely!

"Oneirine, and Methoneirine. Variations reported by Laszlo Jamf in the ACS Journal, year before last. Jamf was on loan again, this time as a chemist, to the Americans, whose National Research Council had begun a massive program to explore the morphine molecule and its possibilities—a Ten-Year Plan, coinciding, most oddly, with the classic study of large molecules being carried on by Carothers of du Pont, the Great Synthesist. Connection? Of course there's one. But we don't talk about it. NRC is synthesizing new molecules every day, most of them from pieces of the morphine molecule. Du Pont is stringing together groups such as amides into long chains. The two programs seem to be complementary, don't they? The American vice of modular repetition, combined with what is perhaps our basic search: to find something that can kill intense pain without causing addiction.

"Results have not been encouraging. We seem up against a dilemma built into Nature, much like the Heisenberg situation. There is nearly complete parallelism between analgesia and addiction. The more pain it takes away, the more we desire it. It appears we can't have one property without the other, any more than a particle physicist can specify position without suffering an uncertainty as to the particle's velocity—"

[...] on the last day of his life, with Japanese iron whistling down on him from ships that are too far off in the haze for him even to see, he will think of the slowly carbonizing faces of men he thought he knew, men turning to coal, ancient coal that glistened, each crystal, in the hoarse sputter of the Jablochkov candles, each flake struck perfect... a conspiracy of carbon, though he never phrased it as "carbon," it was power he walked away from, the feeling of too much meaningless power, flowing wrong ... he could smell Death in it. So he waited till the master-at-arms turned to light a cigarette, and then just walked away—they were all too black, artificially black, for it to be easily noticed—and found ashore the honest blackness of the solemn Herero girl, which seemed to him a breath of life after long confinement, and stayed with her at the edge of the flat sorrowful little town, near the railroad, in a one-room house built of saplings, packing-cases, reeds, mud. The rain blew. The trains cried and puffed. The man and woman stayed in bed and drank kari, which is brewed from potatoes, peas, and sugar, and in Herero means "the drink of death." It was nearly Christmas, and he gave her a medal he had won in some gunnery exercise long ago on the Baltic. By the time he left, they had learned each other's names and a few words in the respective languages—afraid, happy, sleep, love . . . the beginnings of a new tongue, a pidgin which they were perhaps the only two speakers of in the world.

And print just goes marching on without him. Copy boys go running down the rows of desks trailing smeared galleys in the air. Native printers get crash courses from experts airlifted in from Tiflis on how to set up that NTA. Printed posters go up in the cities, in Samarkand and Pishpek, Verney and Tashkent. On sidewalks and walls the very first printed slogans start to show up, the first Central Asian fuck you signs, the first kill-the-police-commissioner signs (and somebody does! this alphabet is really something!) and so the magic that the shamans, out in the wind, have always known, begins to operate now in a political way, and Dzaqyp Qulan hears the ghost of his own lynched father with a scratchy pen in the night, practicing As and Bs. . . .

Buenos Aires, on through Spottbilligfilm AG in Berlin (another IG outlet) from whom von Göll used to get cut rates on most of his film stock, especially on the peculiar and slow-moving "Emulsion J," invented by Laszlo Jamf, which somehow was able, even under ordinary daylight, to render the human skin transparent to a depth of half a millimeter, revealing the face just beneath the surface. This emulsion was used extensively in von Coil's immortal Alpdrücken, and may even come to figure in Martin Fierro. The only part of the epic that really has von Göll fascinated is a singing-duel between the white gaucho and the dark El Moreno. It seems like an interesting framing device. With Emulsion J he could dig beneath the skin colors of the contestants, dissolve back and forth between J and ordinary stock, like sliding in and out of focus, or wipe—how he loved wipes! from one to the other in any number of clever ways. Since discovering that Schwarzkommando are really in the Zone, leading real, paracinematíc lives that have nothing to do with him or the phony Schwarzkommando footage he shot last winter in England for Operation Black Wing, Springer has been zooming around in a controlled ecstasy of megalomania. He is convinced that his film has somehow brought them into being. "It is my mission," he announces to Squalidozzi, with the profound humility that only a German movie director can summon, "to sow in the Zone seeds of reality. The historical moment demands this, and I can only be its servant. My images, somehow, have been chosen for incarnation. What I can do for the Schwarzkommando I can do for your dream of pampas and sky. ... I can take down your fences and your labyrinth walls, I can lead you back to the Garden you hardly remember. ..."

"Greta, somebody also thought it prudent to name me Max Schlepzig." He shows her the pass he got from Säure Bummer.

She gazes at it, then at Slothrop briefly. She's begun to tremble again. Some mixture of desire and fear. "I knew it."

"Knew what?"

Looking away, submissive. "Knew he was dead. He disappeared in '38. They've been busy, haven't They?"

Slothrop has picked up, in the Zone, enough about European passport-psychoses to want to comfort her. "This is forged. The name's just a random alias. The guy who made it probably remembered Schlepzig from one of his movies."

All Margherita's chains and fetters are chiming, black skirt furled back to her waist, stockings pulled up tight in classic cusps by the suspenders of the boned black rig she's wearing underneath. How the penises of Western men have leapt, for a century, to the sight of this singular point at the top of a lady's stocking, this transition from silk to bare skin and suspender! It's easy for non-fetishists to sneer about Pavlovian conditioning and let it go at that, but any underwear enthusiast worth his unwholesome giggle can tell you there is much more here—there is a cosmology: of nodes and cusps and points of osculation, mathematical kisses . . . singularities! Consider cathedral spires, holy minarets, the crunch of trainwheels over the points as you watch peeling away the track you didn't take . . . mountain peaks rising sharply to heaven, such as those to be noted at scenic Berchtesgaden . . . the edges of steel razors, always holding potent mystery . . . rose thorns that prick us by surprise . . . even, according to the Russian mathematician Friedmann, the infinitely dense point from which the present Universe expanded. ... In each case, the change from point to no-point carries a luminosity and enigma at which something in us must leap and sing, or withdraw in fright. Watching the A4 pointed at the sky—just before the last firing-switch closes—watching that singular point at the very top of the Rocket, where the fuze is. ... Do all these points imply, like the Rocket's, an annihilation? What is that, detonating in the sky above the cathedral? beneath the edge of the razor, under the rose?

But Leni was wrong: no one was using him. Pökler was an extension of the Rocket, long before it was ever built. She'd seen to that. When she left him, he fell apart. Pieces spilled into the Hinterhof, down the drains, away in the wind. He couldn't even go to the movies. Only rarely did he go out after work and try to fish lumps of coal from the Spree. He drank beer and sat in the cold room, autumn light reaching him after impoverishments and fadings, from gray clouds, off courtyard walls and drainpipes, through grease-darkened curtains, bled of all hope by the time it reached where he sat shivering and crying. He cried every day, some hour of the day, for a month, till a sinus got infected. He went to bed and sweated the fever out. Then he moved to Kummersdorf, outside Berlin, to help his friend Mondaugen at the rocket field.