THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 2, "MAD DOG in a SILVER FOG" :: CHAPTER 6, EPISODE 5

All ghosts of Xul have gathered on Xaitan's horizon: darkernesses within darkness parading, glumly, west to east. Alejandro leads this spirit army, shoes tied round his neck, "Strange Days" on the Walkman. Elena carrying her Bible in codices, folded and threaded through her earlobes, T. grasps sheet music. Blood drips to stones on which I walk, shoeless, mingled with salty seawater.

Brendan traipses across the sky whispering of morality. Don Juan in a humid country...

"Talk to Louis," I say, feeling lost amid currents of bribery, its ever-shifting rituals and cyphers... I know what Baggott will say; that Kazelka, even in Congress, can't do anything more for Lentex than others on our pad, more than a hundred of them, both parties. Mitchell wants to be paid for his silence; not what he'll do but what he'll not.

"I don't plan on being Congressman forever," Mitchell says, a little more jauntily than before. "Trust me?" I hear him calling to my back as I walk towards Kara and Bobby Portaleza...

Gurus need our trust, they feed on it as mosquitoes drink blood. I hear Ralph on the children's television or, maybe, Norton... convening a stockholders' meeting of one. Abner lays cold fingers on my arm in the Berkshires. "If you could have the world and Heaven by staying with me, what would you reply?" I tell him; the Grandmaster winces and adds, darkly, "Then thy house will be mother of all, and in it shall dwell the Spiritual Father, who shall govern over all..."

I push his arm aside, inclining towards the living room. One of the "wives" glides past, tossing us both a vacant smile. Art Carney tells Ralph: "You're a bigger crook than I thought you were."

Then I see Abner pick his nose... the holy man extracting a bogumental booger!

Alice's sepulchre under the Malibu mountains is paneled in white tile, bathed in sickly fluorescent glow. Her dark omphale, features blurred by time and much thinking, is mounted beneath glass, cooled with a faintly pink emulsion of sanguinated nitrogen vapors... thirteen monolith processors encircle her like Stonehenge sentinels. From each processor seven cables emanate, emissaries to a hungry world without. "Omnicard will wipe the competition," Hal predicts. "Domestically anyway, there's fifth-generation shit from Japan I don't think anybody wants to mess with yet." His brow furrows. "That's strictly outside our parameters for the time being, though. Max's problem."

A dark wave of foam shoots up out of jets mounted in more polymerized glass, condensing to bathe Alice... tiny lightnings, blue and yellow, crisscross the omphale. The cooling nourishment recedes as vapor, condensing to milky liquid, bubbling away through crenellations on the floor.

"Well, let's have beginnings!" Bob withdraws, first, the error test disks, then Omni specs from his briefcase. "A run of this program should be sufficient to detect foundation bugs. By the way, is there anything to drink here? A Seven-Up?" Coolant and electricity have stimulated my thirst too, I crave saccharines and cyclamates... nourishment artificial as the intelligence MIT and FITheads ascribe to the Kramdens or the wine T. drinks with Abner. Talking of ends of all time.

"Cuahtemoc's Dark Sun, the Mayan Armageddon and seer of Patmos are all in reasonable compliance," T'd said. "Because of the depopulation of Uayax... letters from the good friars, a century after Yumby, lament that Indian slaves are "son pocos"... Africa and its superstitions tossed into the pot, as were those remote Celtic vestigia England preferred to exile as too volatile, even, for their Jamaican colony. You almost have your pick of apocalypses between 2000, 2001 and 2012, isn't that so?"

"Apocalypsii?" Jeff ventures. "Calypsoes? Evie's promised to take me to Carneval Salamanca next May."

Abner's mustache is orange with pie. "Most of my own researches run from the Mideast to India. But there's a dating problem with Vedas, the Mahabarata... over six hundred years' slack, the longer end quite coinciding with your Mayan genesis. Both cultures score inhabitants of sinful epochs, who were changed by God into apes. Those Indo-Aryans who swept down from Siberia might have been cannibals and eaters of monkeys but their veneration of the number seven is purely Mosaic... except their seven chalices of Revelation are seven skulls holding wine, sometimes, or a deeper crimson refreshment."

"But trumpets?" Jeff asks, "and the seals?"

"Not present," the Grandmaster admitted. "Instead, they venerated seven maidens, inflicting seven diseases... perhaps having something to do with root word-origins of venereation..."

"As long as we speak literally," I'd reminded him, "Joachim of Fiore took three and one half years, totaling twelve hundred and sixty days, literally, and declared the world would end on that date Anno Domini. His intellectual heir, Columbus, predicted a Great Mutation by 1666, but that failed too."

"Although his English enemy endured plague and fire," Abner pointed out...

"But Peter Beard of England captured and looted Spanish Costazul in that very year," I interrupt. "Besides, what Columbus didn't borrow from Joachim he stole from Bacon, and Joachim was a Communist before the word was made. Wouldn't want to see any of that about now, would we?"

Bob's briefcase has a plan to deal with Communists... Joachimite or domestic. "Commercial interests are concerned whether Omnicard will port with Universal Price Codes developed behind the iron curtain," Hal asks, "...those so-called zebras?"

"Sure," Bob replies. "Omni's perfectly compatible. Let's say a friendly system like... why not the Kramdens, or whatever we succeeds them..." and he trails off.

The Alice cooling system has shot up more jets of fluid that coat the glass bubble, then sink back into their void. There's sympathetic resonance from the compilers, angry tinklings from whirring, striated crystals... Bob looks like he's expecting Heaven's axe.

"Don't worry," Cord laughs, "she can't hear you and, if she did, she wouldn't understand. You know the state of voice recognition technology these days!"

"Anyway," Bob resumes, "Omni has space to store personal data, sectors for floating information... credit and debit balances and such. In our best case you have a one-stop card that just dumps everything into the system. K-Mart clerk wants to know if your check's covered... there it is. Cop stops you, thinks you fit Atlanta's child-killer profile... all that goes into your jacket. Next comes what I call the beginnings of intelligence... any system can input library data to see whose checking out Kapital by Karl Marx or the Anarchists' Cookbook... Omni cross references according to FBI and legal parameters, fingering terrorists without disturbing the civil liberties of law-abiding people who may hold a singular, unusual opinion. We'll compile liquor store receipts for the insurance companies, gun and ammo purchases. The post office... what junk mail goes to whom, what magazines. Phone company, ditto, certain numbers flagged and tagged. Consumers of religion and pornography. Patterns evolve. Little messenger-spiders backwards to commerce, when we can... governmnt, when we must. And when Max upgrades ASCII to allow for hieroglyphic compilation, the potentialities increase a hundredfold. Omni's a piece of plastic with a strip but what it's really is just impulses... carried from card to card and stepped-up... to use the electrician's metaphor. That's where you get..."

The steel doors at the far end of the room swoosh open and another man in khaki enters with a plastic tub of ice, cans peeking out, some glasses in his other hand. "Hello stranger," he grins.

"Doug! No monkeys?" Hal Cord looks confused and even Bob seems rattled.

Doug Wolf lays his burden on a table. "Thought I'd run this by when I heard you were here. I don't handle monkeys anymore. Too dicey. I've transitioned into birds."

"Doug keeps our cover covering," Hal says.

"Hope you've brushed all the garrapatas from your crotch."

Doug winces at the memory. Cord directs him to the last of the thirteen compiler sarsens, whose beeping competes with our popping tops off Diet Cokes and Sprites. Wolf removes a reel of tape from the compiler.

"I'll have something in a half an hour... if it's nothing. If there's something... might be longer. Hear about the Feds and Soviets?" I hadn't, so he gives us the thirty second treatment. "Some moaxes importing orangutans by a really roundabout route... Indonesia via Russia to Belgrade, Zurich, then to the States through a company called Prudintorg, KGB front that acquires apes for Russian circuses."

"God damn those circuses," I can't help saying. "Nothing but spies!"

"Exactly! We get a tip from, I think, Italy and they put a US agent in a gorilla suit, ship him from Trieste in a box marked "Birds!" for sale and bust a whole bunch of Serbs."

"So you've moved into birds for real," I say.