Now the boy—Jarad was his name—squirms in behind him with the KY musk. The fingers like loading a gun slide in and touch the trigger and the Traveler spurts, hitting a target on the wall. The boys are pounding him on the back. They carry him back to the room and Jarad blows smoke down his chest to the crotch and the Traveler falls on his knees, sniffing the smoke up with the rank musky ferret smell. Runs his hand lovingly over the cloning equipment. Sound of running water a flute Lifebuoy Carbolic Soap peels off his underwear grin. They are standing there serene impure kinky red hair that shines in the shuttered room like fine gold wire. They are holding up fingers the Ganymede Hotel. He doesn't understand the bargaining the boys sniffing him a humming sound on all fours on the pallet teeth bared like wild dogs stiffens and throbs. The boys are pounding him on the back. He remembers the game of taking three deep breaths while a boy behind him pulls his arms tight across his chest and he blacks out and comes around with the boys all laughing, he has passed some sort of test.
They carry him back to his room and lay him on the bed where he falls asleep. He wakes up with Jarad shaking him gently to the smell of roasting mutton, cooked over coals on the balcony.
After dinner the four boys bring out maps. It's an action of some sort. They are pointing to the map, setting up an ambush. (One boy ejaculates across the map. Another traces the spurts with a crayon. He makes calculations with a slide rule.)
They handle their bodies like their guns, as artifacts, with the knowing caressing fingers of connoisseurs. Jarad is naked, his gun disassembled on a low table in front of him. He picks up each piece, feeling it and memorizing the shape of it like braille, he can disassemble and assemble the gun in the dark. The boys play a game of recognizing each other in the dark by touching each other's cocks.
Kim sits up naked and yawns, tightening his sphincter lest he soil the bed. At the end of the room is a marble toilet and a water faucet and a hip bath with a copper kettle over it and a low kerosene flame. He defecates with a loud sound that spatters the bowls with liquid feces streaked with blood. Nobody pays the slightest attention. He washes himself in carbolic soap and dries himself and takes his 44 special Russian with a set trigger out of its case. A tip-up revolver and not a fraction of an inch of play in the cylinder. He takes the gun down carefully, oiling and memorizing each part. Another boy has an eighteen-shot 17-caliber revolver, the thin cartridges three inches long, the bullet long and pointed with soft metal in the middle and hard metal at both ends that mushrooms on impact to the size of a half-dollar.
Kim feels a numbing blow in the chest, sucking, gasping for breath that won't come...
"Code Blue...Code Blue!"
The doctor holds up a restraining hand.
"He's coming around...No need to electrocute him."
Kim is spitting blood into a basin. His throat aches and every breath stabs through his lungs with searing pain...The doctor prepares an injection...
"You'll be out of here in a few days...Your accent is Moroccan...Casablanca...Profession: perfume dealer...That covers any amount of travel...Pick up further instructions in Tangier.
3
I am Captain Zomba...Hotel Continental."
Guide English accent, Kim decided. The man had a sincere untrustworthy face beneath a worn red fez. His smile showed gold teeth to go with the braid in his funky old fez.
The Captain began shouting orders as Kim's luggage was hoisted into the carriage. The porters screamed curses as the carriage pulled away from the docks and the Captain stuck his head out and snarled some smashers back. They jolted through narrow streets, exchanging pleasantries with pedestrians, some of whom had to flatten themselves in doorways to avoid being crushed against a wall by the horse. Kim took a suite with a balcony overlooking the harbor and he could see across the straits. A steep slope led down to the water. There was a smell of garbage and the sea. The sunset was magnificent...The boy arrived with gin and tonic.
"Put it there..." Kim learned that these sunsets were a regular feature said to be surpassed only by the Timbuktu sunsets, owing to a suspension of red dust in the Timbuktu area. As a connoisseur of sunsets he intended to visit Timbuktu eventually. Now there was his mission and Timbuktu would have to wait. He unpacked his pistols and opium pipes. He had letters of course but arriving in a strange town he preferred to have a look around on his own first. He selected a sword cane and a lightweight 44 Russian with a three-inch barrel, the holster sewn into a vest.
Brushing aside a horde of beggars, guides, and procurers (Kim has a NO he learned from Salt Chunk Mary. It's a NO that never means yes. A NO that is understood even by a Tangier guide) and wrapping himself in a cloak of invisibility, he went for an evening stroll. He loved the narrow twisting streets, the smell of sewage, the tiny cafes where the natives sit on stone benches drinking mint tea and smoking their kief pipes. He found an English bar in the European quarter and had three gin and tonics. He could feel a quickening of interest. Small place, a stranger in town is news here. Avoiding conversational overtures he went back to the hotel and had dinner served on his balcony. Then he unpacked his typewriter and wrote until 3:00 a.m.
As soon as an article goes into mass production the company doesn't want to know about a simpler better article, especially if it is basically different. So a number of very good inventions are scrapped and forgotten. We can extrapolate that the same formula applies to living organisms once we have accepted the supposition that living organisms are artifacts created for a definite purpose. There are no cosmic accidents in this universe. I mean of course the universe which we see and experience. No reason to think that this is the only universe. This universe is probably a minute fraction of the overall picture, which we will not have time to see. And if we saw it it would be, to our limited perceptions, completely incomprehensible, which is why we can't see it. (A phenomenon must be to some extent comprehensible to be perceived at all.)
So at the outset is a breakthrough that makes a new technology possible and an efflorescence of inventions good and bad. Then one of these models, and not necessarily the best one, goes into mass production and that's it. No more changes, no more basic innovations...just technical improvements. There is no basic difference between Kitty Hawk and a modern jet liner.
Now apply this concept to living organisms. The mammalian configuration opened a whole new technology with an outpouring of mammalian models. And there were creatures between mammals and reptiles...quite good, some of them...models about the size of a wolf with lizard claws and teeth...promising...Imagine a mammalian brain with reptilian features of quiescence and renewable neural tissue...Look at Homo sapiens...Before they went into mass production there must have been some good models lost in the shuffle and for what? Look around you on the street and what do you see, a creature that functions at one-fiftieth of its potential and is only saved from well-deserved extinction by an increasingly creaky social structure...So let's go back and take a look. You want new ideas in cars, go back to the early models before they started rolling the inefficient internal combustion engines off the assembly line...
Consider the mammalian species we see at the present time. Mass production set in and that was the end of evolution. Darwin doesn't explain why the whole evolutionary process has ground to a halt. Why aren't the present-day cats evolving into horses? Answer is simple. The mutation process has stopped. There won't be any more changes at this rate. Just as the auto industry doesn't want to know about any turbine engines because they would have to scrap their dies and that is the most expensive thing they could do. So the present-day controllers don't want to scrap their horse dog human molds. Because doing so would involve paying in currency that they don't have: the currency of creation. They don't want to know about a better human model that is basically different. They can be relied upon to sabotage any meaningful space program that involves biologic alterations instead of transportation in an aqualung, which is like moving a fish up onto land in an aquarium.
[The Scriptwri
ter turns from his TV set..."Oh God, the salmon are at it again, leaping up waterfalls to spawn and die...How tiresome of them! Mother Nature in all her rich variety of an old shit house...What does She offer us? A toilet in Hell."]
I theorize that the present God or gods were not the creators. They took over something already created and are using it for their own purposes, which is not at all to our advantage.
To put it country simple: the Christian God exists. He is not the Creator. He stole someone else's work after the manner of his parasitic species. He steals and curses the source. The Christian God, and that goes for Allah, is a self-seeking asshole planning to cross us all up. Like all colonists he despises those he exploits. To him we are nothing but escape energy. He needs our energy to escape because he has none of his own. Who but an asshole wants to see people groveling in front of him?
"Like a little soldier I stand at attention before my captain," said Pope John 23. Gawd, what shit is this? And the prayer-mewling Allah freaks is molded from the same crock of shit...ALLAH ALLAH ALLAH...
The magical theory of history: the magical universe presupposes that nothing happens unless someone or some power, some living entity wills it to happen. There are no coincidences and no accidents.
A chaotic situation is always deliberately produced. Ask yourself who or what sort of creature could benefit from such a situation. Even in the crudest economic terms there are those who profit from chaos...speculators, black marketeers, ultimately warlords and bandits...
Now look at the whole of human history and prehistory from this viewpoint. Look at it spread out spatially before you...
Mechanical devices exteriorize the processes of the human nervous system...A tape recorder externalizes the vocal function, a computer externalizes one function of the human brain, the faculty that stores and processes data. See human history as a vast film spread out in front of you. Take a segment of film:
This is a time segment. You can run it backward and forward, you can speed it up, slow it down, you can randomize it do anything you want with your film. You are God for that film segment. So "God," then, has precisely that power with the human film.
The only thing not prerecorded in a prerecorded universe is the prerecordings themselves: the master film. The unforgivable sin is to tamper with the prerecordings. Exactly what Kim is doing. Acting through his representatives like Hart and Old Man Bickford, God has prerecorded Kim's death.
The exercise of seeing a section of time as a film can be applied to small arms...Spread out from the matchlock to the automatic assault rifle and machine pistol...
The percussion principle was a basic improvement so radical that any possibilities residual in the flintlock were immediately ignored. So what constitutes a new concept as opposed to a radical improvement? Generally in the case of a manufactured article like the motor car, it is a concept that would constrain manufacturers to junk their existing dies. For example the turbine engine, a workable steam or electric car. We might say that the next radically new concept biologically speaking will be the transition from Time to Space. This transition consigns the entire Time film, a whole prerecorded and prefilmed universe, to the scrap heap, where we hope it will have the consideration to rot. Its final monument may be great heaps of plastic, Pepsi-Cola hits the spot and stays there forever...the pause that refreshes...a long pause and nobody there to refresh...The film flickers out...only the plastic containers remain...
So our local war revolves around a basically simple situation: a conflict between those who must go into space or die and those who will die if we go. They need us for their film. They have no other existence. And as soon as anyone goes into space the film is irreparably damaged. One hole is all it takes. With the right kind of bullet, Kim thought, with that little shiver...
A strange pistol in his hand...wild Pan music...screaming crowds...Kim's pistol is cutting the sky-like a torch. Chunks of sky are falling away. The music swells and merges with the shrieking wind...
Yes we can lose any number of times. They can only lose once. They say a silver bullet can kill a ghost. Garlic could kill a vampire if it was strong enough and he couldn't escape, trapped for example in an Italian social club. So what bullet, what smell can rupture or damage or immobilize or totally destroy the film? Quite simply, any action or smell not prerecorded by the prerecorder, who stands outside the film and does not include himself as data.
Castaneda would describe it as a sudden eruption of the Nagual, the unknown and unpredictable, into the Tonal, which is the totality of prerecorded film. This violates the most basic laws of a predictable control-oriented universe. Introduce one unforeseen and therefore unforeseeable factor and the whole structure collapses like a house of cards.
Judge Farris said I stink like a polecat. And what is that smell? It's the smell of the film rotting. And that is why the Farrises and the Greenfields didn't want to see me. I had no right to be there in the first place.
"WHO IN THE FUCK IS THAT IN MY FILM?" the Director bellows. "GIVE HIM THE TREATMENT."
So they did and it backfired. Kim grins out between his legs and fires. His bullet takes out the water tower, half a mesa, a piece of sky...a gaping black hole...a humming sound like a swarm of distant bees...getting closer...
It is 4:00 a.m. Kim smokes five pipes of opium and retires.
Kim dreams about a young man he recognizes as his "benefactor," in the Castaneda sense of the word.
The youth explains to him that he has not yet achieved the (a word that Kim cannot exactly understand) necessary for immortality.
After breakfast on the terrace, Kim wrote a note to one of his contacts, to be delivered by a boy from the hotel. The boy was back in two hours with an invitation to dinner.
At 6:30 the carriage arrived. The horse was a strawberry roan. It looked at Kim dubiously and laid back its ears. The driver was a boy of twenty in army slacks and jodhpurs with a Colt 45 automatic at his hip. He had a Cockney accent and a criminal face, acne-scarred but showing perfect teeth in his slimy insinuating smile. Unusual for a Limey, Kim observed.
"I'm John Atkins."
They shook hands and Kim could feel the probe of appraisal, looking for signs of weakness.
"The Pater was a dairy farmer...saw you digging my teeth."
"I'm glad to see it."
With a mocking bow, Atkins motioned for Kim to get in the carriage. As Kim swung himself up onto the seat he could feel the insolent eyes on his ass and hear the words in his head clear as a bell.
"I want to bottle you, mate."
Clearly Atkins was a verbal telepathist. Mostly it's done in pictures. Cockneys are especially good at sending words. It's the whole accent thing, which is basic to the English system.
Atkins leaped into the driver's seat with a lithe inhuman movement that was somehow ugly and deformed. He took the reins in his thin red hands, which looked very capable. Kim could see those hands with a broken beer bottle, a razor, or a bicycle chain.
Kim was a man of the world. He knew that many queens and especially the English adore these slimy dangerous types, these listeners at keyholes, the flawed products of the hierarchical social structure built by the Tony's. John Atkins is their creature and would you believe it my dear the English refer to their trade as "creatures."...?
A serviceable little demon, Kim decides, if properly handled.
They rattle off. Atkins is sitting there with insolence reflected in every jolt of the carriage.
"Now that there's the Casbah..." He points to a massive fort, two sloppy lackadaisical soldiers in front of it with Lee-Enfield rifles.
"Now lots of people think it's the whole native quarter is the Casbah but the native quarter is the Medina and this here fort at the top of the Medina is the Casbah..."
Kim nods absently with a snotty smile.
"I guess you knew that. I guess your type of bloke reads up on a place before he goes there."
"Oh yes, and the people I will meet...John Atkins also uses the nam
es James Armitage and Denton Westerbury. Convicted of atrocious assault for blinding a man in one eye with a broken beer bottle in the Blind Beggar Inn...Did six months in Brixton...Worked with a smash-and-grab mob...Five arrests, no convictions...Wanted for questioning in connection with a warehouse robbery in the course of which a watchman was killed...Interesting reading, what? Passed along to me by an obliging French police inspector..."
"Coo ain't you the one? Ain't it a bit unhealthy to know as much as you know?"
"Not when it's on deposit with one's solicitor, my dear."
"I know a thing or so myself, Mr. Carsons...Could be useful to you."
"Let's start with a rundown on the dinner guests for this evening..."
"Well there's old George Hargrave the Aussie, and a rottener man never drew breath. He takes a broad general view of things...nothing too low or too dirty for old George."
The road wound steeply up the mountain...heavily wooded with chestnut, oak, cypress and cedar...villas on both sides well back from the road behind walls and gates...the muted redolence of ease and wealth...servant children playing in the street...Kim turns to watch a barefoot boy run down the street, slapping his bare soles with each step...
"Got his fat greasy fingers into all the pies and puddings...Not much on the heavy. He's a right coward and doesn't care who knows it...Two lizzies run the bookstore and the tearoom—French Intelligence...They do business with the Russians and the English as well...The Americans don't seem to have much in this sector..."
The Place of Dead Roads Page 20
