THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 1, "THE AEON" :: CHAPTER 13, EPISODE 3

They do! They do. And once, when they'd quite wheeled over me, I sat blankly, blinking at the table covered with things no longer mattering and the telegram over them and Lorenzo's bottle (it was two thirds gone) strikes the table as his fist strikes me three times, twice in the belly, once in the face; he pushes me against the refrigerator to empty himself while I look over his shoulder, out the window to sour trees and television antennae of Trailerville, Lo grunting with his every thrust... "Why? Why? Why?"

Why did you bring Carlo up here to die?

Lorenzo strikes three more times, drawing blood... when he's gone I call Wally and cut our deal to go to Monterey.

Yesterday afternoon, as I wiped spilled pineapple punch off the table with one of Bobby Portaleza's napkins... jolly party hats, tooty horns, Groucho glasses... Melanie points out Fanny Scarlatta who'd waved, but didn't come round. Slipping out Delfinas' sliding door to the patio, followed by a tip-hungry waiter... the wind Fanny's invited in for us blew a good, bracing breath of oil and marine decay; Michael, imbibing a deep draught of La Grua, smiled: "Eau dharmageddon," nose twitching rattishly.

"Actually, do you know what the beauty of the situation was?" Korbel wondered out loud.

I shook my head, though I have a pretty good idea of things to come. Mike's like rat psychologists who kill their critters when results don't validate their theories, so that they can report that all subjects varied from the norm together.

"What?" Melanie prompts.

"Evie knows," Korbel teases. "Come on..."

"No," I'm tired, "you tell her. You were there. I was just behind the scenes, helping a little with the tech stuff."

"Ahh. Behind the scenes. The witchy little techy peeking through her glass curtain." He pinched his nose to sound more like W. C. Fields, or some drunken British humbug. "Pay no mind to Mrs. Stone behind the curtain..."

So Korbel enjoyed his little laugh... finally says, "Well, you see, the Kramdens were really playing against each other."

"No!" I reply with theatrical shock. Gambling? Round up the usual systems!

Korbel skates me a sour look, "You know, the Russians weren't even effective as last year, not surprising, considering whom they've lost. There's a certain weight left, of course, a brutal carrying-on but on the whole it's rather backwards, rather..."

"Like the Klingon Empire," Melanie guesses. Korbel made a little pistol, drilled her between the eyes.

"Bingo! Now how they do it's interesting, because parameters allow for multiple brains on each side. Needless to say if we're using Ralph and Alice, the Soviets won't be satisfied with two, they have to install a bunch of nephews... five I think. Totally unintegrated, of course, but they're not going to give us the satisfaction of postponing while they reconfigure, so what they've done is take ALGOL-spewing kludges grafted onto bits and pieces filched from the French and Germans over the past year... mostly Ralph, appropriately, but enough Alice so their system's not merely schizophrenic, its personality's diced, artificed. It's a five-headed calf, with most of the Russian intelligence marooned between the Kramdens like a pink and white King Jesus apple. Candy from a dead man's pocket."

I do know General Johnny has inserted legalisms into his programs - "They're decoy, obviously nobody's going to run to law books while the monkeys fly..." but maybe he'd confounded the Russians further, as if that proved necessary...

"The greatest lawyer practicing in the English language wasn't Gladstone or Disraeli, not even Oliver Wendell Holmes..." Mike pronounces, "...it was Jefferson. Do you know what he did to dampen the anticolonial fires in England?"

I fear I shall hear whether I desire or not: "He argued to the Crown that, since the Colonies had not been conquered by William the First, America was subject only to the laws and land-tenure of Saxons before 1066. Since nobody remembered or had written down tenets of Saxon law, he had Parliament scurrying to bury their noses in old monastery manuscripts... Catholic documents, at that!... while the rebellion armed itself. Oh... and he also managed to court conservative Dissenters while shoring up his liberal Deist base by quoting medieval sources to bolster the argument that Old Testament codes applied only to Jews."

A Professor I had, whom we'd called Medieval Don (after his attachment to twelfth and thirteenth century logicians), declared that busted programs... like insoluble conundrums of the law, and knots untied... go to Tumbolia, which is a sort of East Coast conceit, varying slightly but subtly from Mount Confusion.

Actually I've locked the sickness in its box, I'm just burned out, sour stomached... though the rain has gone, frozen mist clings to everything, almost. It's ten degrees in midtown, minus one in Wasconshire and, after a morning like a thousand toothaches, I go to Regine's a full half hour before Eileen and Geneva, gulp screwdrivers for Vitamin C, watch people out the window and glance at the papers' reporting on the slaughter of Jimi Carter's synfuels program... Tom Wendell must be kicking up his heels back in Odessa.

"If the Russians had linked up two more nephews into their mess," Korbel suggests, "at least they'd have had a psychological advantage... seven heads..."

"What?" Melanie rasps, a busted gambling machine.

"The Beast!" Mike explains, scowling behind his pink, paper umbrella. "Antichrist! The Devil!" he shouts, crunching ice between his teeth, "doesn't anybody understand what's going on down here?" One pays dearly for immortality, Nietzsche warned, with the shadow of madhouse bars across his brow...one must die often, while alive, in order to have lived.