THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 1, "THE AEON" :: CHAPTER 11, EPISODE 3

Once God and Darwin's ghost played ball, then God went home, leaving the court to devils so, like a head slipping beneath the waves... raising a hand in one last, cheery wave... Carlo proceeded to Vietnam. The Uay war glyph remains a fig, a gesture to the Toltec Itzae who drove them from Yucatan, then out of Guatemala. Inverted... as in the Tarot and Pyrate's Bones... it is the last sign of Ahau, the King. When laid upside down, becoming the augur of revolutions.

The Uay practiced celibacy only one month of the year... a twenty-day month at that... so they placated Lord Kin with human sacrifices. Vietnam's root was ritual sacrifice of youth to artificially maintain a poisoned culture, procreation to grave. So, in our regimented winter, do such gestures as Brendan's repeat anti-heroic epic as anti-farce? Tragic, pathetic, finally bathetic... I leave Brendan and Carlo to ashes. Xul, Hue, Aeon.

Harry washed his bloody old hands in religion's bowl, but, long after temples have been pulled down, old passions curdle into dull and spiteful yearnings. Sealing the tomb, as Dr. Kitigawa observed in Egypt as Costazul... a ritual... the old king gathering, in death, his counselors, wives and retainers, and any children and grandchildren that he can swallow. Ultimately, his nation. Apres roi, le deluge!

Among Olmecs, a thousand years before the Uay, ball games were called "pitz"... (ytz again!) the Doctor also believes they were sometimes played with skulls, or even severed heads of enemy authorities. Manny, the world's worst revolutionary, would have loved Olmec games... during the troubles he couldn't help baiting cops, he's like Carlo was, in too many respects.

A Templar tenet Harry Stone adhered to is the Godliness of headlessness and mindlessness in a machine, because thought... even machine-thought (as in Perceptrons)... requires soul. This was why he quarreled with Von Neumann; Johnny thought even primitive chips of the '50s and the '60s were superior to brain cells... the disadvantage being in the wiring, a bag of Tellerisms certainly overcome with time. "But he was dying, quite delusional," remembers T., himself not faring well, "barriers between science and science fiction collapsing for him," despite clear, contrary evidence that they were multiplying, like pallets of spoiled Lucchesi yogurt, heaved out of trucks all spraypainted with silver graffiti. Slices of Behemoth, shimmering on beds of rice.

Despite his pain, T. had taken personal attention in an encryption contract for NASA, based upon ciphers ironically called VC (after Vignere, cryptologiste): a simple, though annoying ASCII code using thirteen bit keys. For example, in a sequence that went...

Remember, Egg, that ASCII text letters, numerals and instructions consume eight bits... such crypto has a solution, letter for letter, but must be decoded by functions of 13/8ths. "With any luck," T. had told Houston, "that ratio will have an especially debilitating effect upon the Japanese."

"Hang Japan," said the astronauts, "we're trying to keep secret from the Russkis. They're the enemy!" And T. had regarded them with pity... though at least a little envy, too, for their youth and their prospects.

"What's that?" I ask, it's aspirin, Michael has a bug. I decline, he pops several in his mouth, chewing them raw like that killer from Truman Capote's "Cold Blood". Games fall into Mike's hands naturally as raindrops from the sky... access becoming a confluence of contingencies with select, young pork...

"Anything competitive?" I ask. In eight years, there have been three serious and numerous crude Dogs and Dominoes piracies; each detected, tracked to their source, dispatched. Michael's crimes, he rationalizes, are defensive in origin.

"It would be criminal not to get into the market," he says.

"It would be criminal to tie our money up in games, with Quad being pulled together. Why collect clutter when you can get Datorium's service over a line."

"Because it's now?"

"Nobody builds machines that work with anybody else's system. And now, exclusivity is even being designed into product generations. It's the only way to keep units moving out the door... the market just hasn't matured yet."

"Meanwhile," Mike answers, "stockholders grumble. We're down another three eighths...

"Can't help it if they want product that works and want it yesterday. Let's see what's here..."

The games are of end-user quality - shrink wrapped with instructions that read like the cardboard placards Carlo said the vacuum cleaner agents held up in their boiler room to memorize before the salesmen were set loose upon the world:

Of the Ataris I prefer Asteroids, though they obviously won't ever be competitive with the Star Wars genus of arcade shoot-em- ups, busting out all over; the other companies' tribute includes simulated sports games I put aside for Bud, who likes his toys with balls.

Finally, I hold up Datorium's cartridge. "By the way, how do these fine specimens of Indonesian craftsmanship hold up... physically?"

Korbel winces. "Lousy. The bounded loops... Bloops now... degenerate, especially the stop codes so you're grinding your teeth while the action keeps recycling in a Floop." He raises a hand. "Free loops. Even so, they will outlast the attention span of the users. Jamais criticale, non?"

Datorium's unit appears, unlike the others, to be a beta... the shrink is white with only one dark word in gray... "Tet!"

Carlo received his greetings during a week of unprecedented anti-Vietnam activity... smoke still lingering from Watts. We watched the riots on TV, courtesy of cigarette companies that urged mobs to seek out and beat up eggheads who preferred "good grammar to good taste". Way in the midnight news reports, or the back pages of newspapers, were tiny blurbs on Project Camelot and decapitation of the silver standard... a treasury official smiling for the camera in an empty room represented as Fort Knox.

I had a pretty good idea Carlo's interest in door-to-door vacuum sales involved more than spreading oatmeal and invoking suction. Sometimes the odors swirling round him were positively marsupial. "You want I should quit? I quit!" he threatened, making me the object of his collapse, and not his inability to move the vacuums. Two months later, when he received Greetings, he was working at the carwash and mightily confused since, in Salamanca, it was tradition that only the unemployed were drafted, military gangs rounding up young men in bars and cinemas during the daylight hours.

So I was blamed for the carwash, and Vietnam too! Quitting the vacuum people, he brought home one of their signs... Phil Diamond, always nattering on about motivational consultants and our need to hire them, would have loved it this version of the salesman's tarot, also... undeniably... Hugh Hefner...