The Erdschweinhöhle is in one of the worst traps of all, a dialectic of word made flesh, flesh moving toward something else… . Enzian sees the trap clearly, but not the way out… . Sitting now between a pair of candles just lit, his gray field-jacket open at the neck, beard feathering down his dark throat to shorter, sparser glossy black hairs that go running in a whirl, iron filings about the south pole of his Adam’s apple… pole… axis… axle-tree… . Tree… Omumborombanga… Mukuru… first ancestor… Adam… still sweating, hands from the working day gone graceless and numb, he has a minute to drift and remember this time of day back in Südwest, above ground, participating in the sunset, out watching the mist gather, part fog, part dust from the cattle returning to the kraals to milking and sleep… his tribe believed long ago that each sunset is a battle. In the north, where the sun sets, live the one-armed warriors, the one-legged and one-eyed, who fight the sun each evening, who spear it to death until its blood runs out over the horizon and sky. But under the earth, in the night, the sun is born again, to come back each dawn, new and the same. But we, Zone-Hereros, under the earth, how long will we wait in this north, this locus of death? Is it to be reborn? or have we really been buried for the last time, buried facing north like all the rest of our dead, and like all the holy cattle ever sacrificed to the ancestors? North is death’s region. There may be no gods, but there is a pattern: names by themselves may have no magic, but the act of naming, the physical utterance, obeys the pattern. Nordhausen means dwellings in the north. The Rocket had to be produced out of a place called Nordhausen. The town adjoining was named Bleicheröde as a validation, a bit of redundancy so that the message would not be lost. The history of the old Hereros is one of lost messages. It began in mythical times, when the sly hare who nests in the Moon brought death among men, instead of the Moon’s true message. The true message has never come. Perhaps the Rocket is meant to take us there someday, and then Moon will tell us its truth at last. There are those down in the Erdschweinhöhle, younger ones who’ve only known white autumn-prone Europe, who believe Moon is their destiny. But older ones can remember that Moon, like Ndjambi Karunga, is both the bringer of evil and its avenger… .

And Enzian’s found the name Bleicheröde close enough to “Blicker,” the nickname the early Germans gave to Death. They saw him white: bleaching and blankness. The name was later Latinized to “Dominus Blicero.” Weissmann, enchanted, took it as his SS code name. Enzian was in Germany by then. Weissmann brought the new name home to his pet, not showing it off so much as indicating to Enzian yet another step to be taken toward the Rocket, toward a destiny he still cannot see past this sinister cryptography of naming, a sparse pattern but one that harshly will not be denied, that cries and nags him on stumbling as badly as 20 years ago… .