Slothrop reckons he’ll get off there. Head for that Cuxhaven. “Springer, you think you’ll have those papers for me on time?”

“I can’t guarantee anything,” sez Gerhardt von Göll.

At Stralsund, on the quai, in the lamplight and the rain, they say good-by. Frau Gnahb kisses Slothrop, and Otto gives him a pack of Lucky Strikes. The Springer looks up from his green notebook and nods auf Wiedersehen over his pince-nez. Slothrop walks away, over the brow, into the wet Hafenplatz, sea-legs trying to balance rolling he’s left behind, past booms and masts and strung tackle of derricks, past a crew on the night shift offloading the creaking lighters into wood wagons, bowed gray horses kissing the grassless stones… good-bys in his pockets warming his empty hands….

□□□□□□□

Where is the Pope whose staff will bloom for me?

Her mountain vamps me back, with silks and scents,

Her oiled, athletic slaves, her languid hints

Of tortures transubstantiate to sky,

To purity of light—of bonds that sing,

And whips that trail their spectra as they fall.

At weather’s mercy now, I find her call

At every turn, at night’s foregathering.

I’ve left no sick Lisaura’s fate behind.

I made my last confession as I knelt,

Agnostic, in the radiance of his jewel…

Here, underneath my last and splintering wind,

No song, no lust, no memory, no guilt:

No pentacles, no cups, no holy Fool….

Brigadier Pudding died back in the middle of June of a massive E. coli infection, whining, at the end, “Me little Mary hurts…” over and over. It was just before dawn, as he had wished. Katje stayed on at “The White Visitation” for a while, roaming the demobbed corridors, smoky and still at the ends of all the emptied lattices of cages in the laboratory, herself part of the ash-colored web, the thickening dust and fly-pocked windows.

One day she found the cans of film, stacked carelessly by Webley Silvernail in what had been a music room, occupied now only by a disintegrating Wittmaier harpsichord no one played, quills and stops broken shamefully, strings left to sharp, flat, or corrode in the busy knives of weather pushing relentlessly into all the rooms. Pointsman happened that day to be up in London, working out of Twelfth House, lingering at alcoholic luncheons with his various industrialists. Was he forgetting her? Would she be free? Was she, already?

Out of apparently nothing more than the emptiness of “The White Visitation,” she finds a projector, threads a reel and focuses the image on a water-stained wall, next to a landscape of some northern coomb, with daft aristocrats larking about. She sees a white-haired girl in Pirate Prentice’s Chelsea maisonette, a face so strange that she has recognized the mediaeval rooms before she does herself.