Bianca isn’t in the engine room. He moves around in pulsing bulb-light, among asbestos-packed masses, burning himself once or twice where insulation’s missing, looking into pale recesses, shadows, wondering about his own insulation here. Nothing but machinery, noise. He heads for the ladder. A scrap of red is waiting for him… no, only her frock, with a damp trace of his own semen still at the hem… this loud humidity has kept it there. He crouches, holding the garment, smelling her smell. I’m a child, I know how to hide, and I can hide you. “Bianca,” he calls, “Bianca, come out.”

Gathered about the door to the head, he finds an assortment of upper-class layabouts and drunks blocking the passageway along with a litter of bottles and glassware, and a seated circle of cocaine habitués, crystal birds flying up into forests of nose hair off the point of a gold and ruby dagger. Slothrop pushes through, leans on the door and calls Margherita’s name.

“Go away.”

“You don’t have to come out. Just let me in.”

“I know who you are.”

“Please.”

“They were very clever, sending you as poor Max. But it won’t work now.”

“I’m through with Them. I swear it. I need you, Greta.” Bullshit. For what?

“They’ll kill you, then. Go away.”

“I know where Bianca is.”

“What have you done with her?”

“Just—will you let me in?” After a full minute’s silence, she does. A funseeker or two tries to push in, but he slams the door and locks it again. Greta is wearing nothing but a black chemise. Strokes of black hair curl high on her thighs. Her face is white, old, strained.

“Where is she?”

“Hiding.”

“From me?”

“From Them.”

A quick look at him. Too many mirrors, razors, scissors, lights. Too white. “But you’re one of Them.”

“Quit it, you know I’m not.”

“You are. You came up out of the river.”

“Well, that’s cause I fell in, Greta.”

“Then They made you.”

He watches her playing, nervous, with strands of her hair. The Anubis has begun to rock some, but the sickness rising in him is for his head, not his stomach. As she begins to talk, nausea begins to fill him: a glowing black mudslide of nausea….

□□□□□□□

It was always easy for men to come and tell her who to be. Other girls of her generation grew up asking, “Who am I?” For them it was a question full of pain and struggle. For Gretel it was hardly even a question. She had more identities than she knew what to do with. Some of these Gretels have been only the sketchiest of surfaces—others are deeper. Many have incredible gifts, antigravity, dreams of prophecy… comatic images surround their faces, glowing in the air: the light itself is actually crying tears, weeping in this stylized way, as she is borne along through the mechanical cities, the meteorite walls draped in midair, every hollow and socket empty as a bone, and the failing shadow that shines black all around it… or is held in staring postures, long gowns, fringe and alchemical symbol, veils flowing from leather skullcaps padded concentric as a bike-racer’s helmet, with crackling-tower and obsidian helix, with drive belts and rollers, with strange airship passages that thread underneath arches, solemnly, past louvers and giant fins in the city mist….