THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 1, "THE AEON" :: CHAPTER 9, EPISODE 3

I didn't get around to Dr. Kitagawa's problems quite then, mainly because Geneva couldn't get her mind and mouth off this ninja movie she'd made against Wally's advice, coming back in Betamax. "Cheap, cheap bastards, nothing on that set but salami sandwiches, old meat, all turnin' green... if them Japanese hadn't stabbed me halfway through I'd have been poisoned for real."

Bad movies take in adolescents of all ages. Paul's another junk film junkie... there's a great old Art Deco theatre from the '20s in what remains of Wasconshire's downtown, half a mile from the security gates. Paul used to go down there nights until the local kids discovered him and threw rocks... Paul's a red flag to bullies. In the Zone, Archie Pruitt's brood kicked him halfway to Ely and rubbed his face in the dust - Wilson knew but had such contempt for his own son that he wouldn't lift a hand to stop the beatings, whereas I'd have fired Archie's ass. That would happen anyway, eventually, but for another reason.

Anyway Tuesday night, after the Board deadlock, I walk Paul downtown and no rocks fly; we catch "Popeye", which has just replaced "The Formula" with Brando, that movie "...the oil companies don't want you to see." I'm certain neither Robin Williams nor Elzie Crister Segar (who drew the strip) knows anything about the Maya family of languages, of which Uay is a part... that Pop, the word for "mat" big cheeses sat upon in Uayan times, gave its name to the real Temple 22 of Copan, the Popol Nah (or Council-house) plagiarized by Peter Beard and, again, (at least in architectural rendenderment) by Brian Palin.

Popeye would have made a formidable temple monster in the old days... probably also making for a more interesting movie. I'm hypercritical, still pissed... I'd spent most of the day in Jersey. Pop also, Egg, is the first of eighteen solar months of twenty days, immediately following the Uayab... the unlucky days except, of course, in Costazul where the demonic's applauded and foreign liberals only shake their beards in wonder. "Pop" also was a buzzword of early machine code, derived to mean a push up to a higher electrical level; "Push" ironically meaning a switch downwards to lower voltage.

Electric pulses, properly popped or pushed, launch Poseidon birds out of the sea and monkeys through the sky, enable Omnicard to credit or withdraw a sum, draw digitized tapes of "Gilligan" or "Gone With the Wind" down through hundreds of miles of Quad fiber or bisect engineering problems - routing half to Ralph, half to Alice or, alternatively, letting both of them fight all contingencies out to a phased recommendation. Little pulses, all exciting tiny strands of silicon, atomizing and reconfiguring fields of charged and pounded iron... that's what Lentex does. That, Egg, is how I eat.

Only technology evolves faster than those who shape it. Lentex is, frankly, a dinosaur amid a humid forest of quick, fierce, egg-sucking mammals... even our base materials aren't likely to survive the century. Silicon's defense is that it's cheap, where speed becomes a premium few dearer media are beyond consideration... gallium, gold, even diamonds. Besides, some newer media are cheap too... quartz, ceramics... and some silvers even plan to seed trails of genetic matter in a soup of nutrients at the heart of the tarpit out of which Max shall arise, after so many failed, repulsive prototypes.

Smooth new beasts slouch to be born, but will their ease of deliverance make for mediocrity? Great advances have always been midwifed by crime and turmoil... the Renaissance of Petrarch, Michelangelo, the bloody years of Descartes, Newton, Shakespeare. Genius swells under Borgia stars... wars without end or reason in the Old World, slaughter in the New.

God's judgment on the obsolete is terrible, worse even than what happened to Carlo who, at least, did get his hero's burial (although in a closed coffin). The day we married I was so sick I really just wanted to stay in my hammock. Carlo's father was a passable shoemaker but, like Ralph Kramden, a maker of investments that failed and inventions that blew up... the family survived by maintaining an extraordinary herd of pigs who foraged Xul beach for the dead fish, garbage and what-not thrown overboard by mariners on their way to Puerto Saltamontes. He had an older brother, already in the penitentiary for theft, and three married sisters, only one of whom showed at the ceremony. Most of the people who swore that they were my friends also managed to miss the ceremony. "Good with languages," was young Zamora's estimate of Carlo... "speaks fair English, a little French and German, too busy chasing those foreign women with their credit cards."

Others of the Nine sent money... I'm sure they mentioned it to T. Anyway we went north, to California, and that's what sustained us... gifts and what I pulled down waiting tables until Carlo got his fine job leading to the dull chain of circumstance culminating in Vietnam...

A little Lentex story out of 1964 whilst my relationship with T. was rather more prickly than later: the ingratiating Wilson Leonard Junior dropped by the hot, downtown slum that we inhabited... twice... wanting to know whether Carlo would accept a short term job at RAND's cube-by-the-sea, to be debriefed as a "voice of the developing world".

During the Eisenhower years, Herman Kahn, Henry Kissinger, prophets like that, were usual advocates of tactical nuclear war, a concept derided by Generals despite declining pre-emptivism (after '56). A year before he died JFK entered into talks with Nikki Krush about Third World "acceptable mutual targets" (AMTs)... Kennedy raised Cuba, Mr. K countered "Berlin", by and by undersecretaries got around to Brazil, Turkey, places of too many people cluttering up the planet.

The cross-Iron Curtain admiration society/cum wog-disposal unit survived Oswald and Khrushchev's comeuppance (Beria's revenge - as Tess relates it), evolving into SIOP, but with a rogue branching of wild thorns whose pedigree can only be imagined from those metal boxes bleeding punchcards in the desert Jeff acquired - files to Biff, Roach, Rip and all the aspects of the Ralph, and even Mister Galaxy (aka Naxroth) deposited over the Dogmap. And down the bunny hop called Project Camelot fell Carlo, drained by vestal Goddesses of the Aleutian Temple.

"It was a rathole," Billows admits, a strange military study kindly remembered by experts on lies and secrets as "universal post-HERO social systems modeling". A program to monitor and discipline Third World economies with the proviso that deviants would face unhappy times should the flying monkeys' cages fly open. "A thorough fiasco," Charles remembers, even less kindly, "most of cultures trampled were so destitute that extermination might be considered more of a deliverance... as if it was our decision to make for them." I'd like to say incalculable damage had been done to American prestige, especially in Latin America and in Africa, by SIOP... however Vietnam was heating up, so that prestige had already boiled off.