The woman who tried to chop Slothrop down with the cleaver is now seated on a bitt, holding a half-liter of some liquid which has already seeped into and begun to darken the orchid garnishing it. She is telling everybody a story about Margherita. Her hair has been combed or styled in a way that makes it look like a certain cut of meat. Slothrop’s drink, nominally Irish whisky and water, arrives and he moves in to listen.

“… her Neptune is afflicted. Whose isn’t? some will ask. Ah. But as residents on this planet, usually. Greta lived, most of the time, on Neptune—her affliction was more direct, purer, clearer than we know it here.

“She found Oneirine on a day when her outpost in England, the usual connection for Chlordyne, failed. Beside the Thames, as geraniums of light floated in the sky too slow to tell—brass light, tanned-skin and mellow peach light, stylized blooms being drafted on and on among the clouds, to fade here, to regenerate there—as this happened to the day’s light, he fell. A fall of hours, less extravagant than Lucifer’s, but in the same way part of a deliberate pattern. Greta was meant to find Oneirine. Each plot carries its signature. Some are God’s, some masquerade as God’s. This is a very advanced kind of forgery. But still there’s the same meanness and mortality to it as a falsely made check. It is only more complex. The members have names, like the Archangels. More or less common, humanly-given names whose security can be broken, and the names learned. But those names are not magic. That’s the key, that’s the difference. Spoken aloud, even with the purest magical intention, they do not work.

“So he fell from their grace. So there was no Chlordyne. So she happened to meet V-Mann Wimpe in the street, in Berlin, under a theatre marquee whose sentient bulbs may have looked on, a picturesque array of extras, witnesses to grave and historic encounters. So she had come to Oneirine, and the face of her afflicted home planet was rearranged in the instant.”

Oneirine Jamf Imipolex A4….

“That silly bitch,” observes a voice at Slothrop’s elbow, “tells it worse every time.”

“Beg pardon?” Slothrop looks around and finds Miklos Thanatz, full beard, eyebrows feathering out like trailing edges of hawks’ wings, drinking absinthe out of a souvenir stein on which, in colors made ghastly by the carnival lights on deck, bony and giggling Death is about to surprise two lovers in bed.

There is no problem steering him onto the subject of the Rocket—“I think of the A4,” sez he, “as a baby Jesus, with endless committees of Herods out to destroy it in infancy—Prussians, some of whom in their innermost hearts still felt artillery to be a dangerous innovation. If you’d been out there… inside the first minute, you saw, you grew docile under its… it really did possess a Max Weber charisma… some joyful—and deeply irrational—force the State bureaucracy could never routinize, against which it could not prevail… they did resist it, but they also allowed it to happen. We can’t imagine anyone choosing a role like that. But every year, somehow, their numbers grow.”