Of the what? Does Tchitcherine know what he’s doing with this forgery of his? It is more than blasphemy, it is an invitation to holy war. Blobadjian, accordingly, is pursued through the black end of Baku by a passel of screaming Arabists waving scimitars and grinning horribly. The oil towers stand sentinel, bone-empty, in the dark. Hunchbacks, lepers, hebephrenics and amputees of all descriptions have come popping out of their secret spaces to watch the fun. They loll back against the rusting metal flanks of refinery hardware, their whole common sky in a tessellation of primary colors. They occupy the chambers and bins and pockets of administrative emptiness left after the Revolution, when the emissaries from Dutch Shell were asked to leave, and the English and Swedish engineers all went home. It is a period now in Baku of lull, of retrenchment. All the oil money taken out of these fields by the Nobels has gone into Nobel Prizes. New wells are going down elsewhere, between the Volga and the Urals. Time for retrospection here, for refining the recent history that’s being pumped up fetid and black from other strata of Earth’s mind….

“In here, Blobadjian—quickly.” Close behind, Arabists are ululating, shrill, merciless, among the red-orange stars over the crowds of derricks.

Slam. The last hatch is dogged. “Wait—what is this?”

“Come. Time for your journey now.”

“But I don’t want—”

“You don’t want to be another slaughtered infidel. Too late, Blobadjian. Here we go….”

The first thing he learns is how to vary his index of refraction. He can choose anything between transparent and opaque. After the thrill of experimenting has worn off, he settles on a pale, banded onyx effect.

“It suits you,” murmur his guides. “Now hurry.”

“No. I want to pay Tchitcherine what he’s got coming.”

“Too late. You’re no part of what he’s got coming. Not any more.”

“But he—”

“He’s a blasphemer. Islam has its own machineries for that. Angels and sanctions, and careful interrogating. Leave him. He has a different way to go.”

How alphabetic is the nature of molecules. One grows aware of it down here: one finds Committees on molecular structure which are very similar to those back at the NTA plenary session. “See: how they are taken out from the coarse flow—shaped, cleaned, rectified, just as you once redeemed your letters from the lawless, the mortal streaming of human speech…. These are our letters, our words: they too can be modulated, broken, recoupled, redefined, co-polymerized one to the other in worldwide chains that will surface now and then over long molecular silences, like the seen parts of a tapestry.”