Little in-flight annoyance for Pirate here, nothing serious… . Out of his earphones now and then, ghost-voices will challenge or reprimand him: air traffic people down in their own kingdom, one more overlay on the Zone, antennas strung in the wilderness like redoubts, radiating half-spheres of influence, defining invisible corridors-in-the-sky that are real only for them. The Thunderbolt is painted Kelly green. Hard to miss. Pirate’s idea. Gray was for the War. Let them chase. Catch me if you can.

Gray was for the War. So, it seems, was Pirate’s odd talent for living the fantasies of others. Since V-E Day, nothing. But it’s not the end of his psychic difficulties. He is still being “haunted,” in the same marginal and uncertain way, by Katje’s ancestor Frans van der Groov, dodo killer and soldier of fortune. The man never quite arrives, nor quite leaves. Pirate is taking it personally. He is the Dutchman’s compatible host, despite himself. What does Frans see in him? Has it to do—of course it does—with the Firm?

He has warped a skein of his dreams into Pirate’s own, heretical dreams, exegeses of windmills that turned in shadow at the edges of dark fields, each arm pointing at a spot on the rim of a giant wheel that turned through the sky, stop and go, always exactly with the spinning cross: “wind” was a middle term, a convention to express what really moved the cross… and this applied to all wind, everywhere on Earth, shrieking between the confectionery pink and yellow mountains of Mauritius or stirring the tulips at home, red cups in the rain filling bead by clear bead with water, each wind had its own cross-in-motion, materially there or implied, each cross a unique mandala, bringing opposites together in the spin (and tell me now, Frans, what’s this wind I’m in, this 25,000-foot wind? What mill’s that, grinding there below? What does it grind, Frans, who tends the stone?).

Far beneath the belly of the Thunderbolt, brushed on the green countryside, pass the time-softened outlines of ancient earthworks, villages abandoned during the Great Dying, fields behind cottages whose dwellers were scythed down without mercy by the northward march of black plague. Behind a scrim, cold as sheets over furniture in a forbidden wing of the house, a soprano voice sings notes that never arrange themselves into a melody, that fall apart in the same way as dead proteins… .

“It’s as clear as the air,” rants Gustav the composer, “if you weren’t an old fool you’d see it—I know, I know, there’s an Old Fools’ Benevolent Association, you all know each other, you vote censures against the most troublesome under-70s and my name’s at the head of the list. Do you think I care? You’re all on a different frequency. There’s no way you’ll get interference from us. We’re too far separated. We have our own problems.”

Cryptozoa of many kinds scurry through crumbs, pubic hairs, winesplashes, tobacco ash and shreds, a litter of dram cocaine vials, each with a red Bakelite top bearing the seal of Merck of Darmstadt. The bugs’ atmosphere ends about an inch from the floor, an ideal humidity, darkness, stability of temperature. Nobody bothers them. There is an unspoken agreement about not stomping on bugs in Säure’s place.