But there’s no answer from Blicero. His eyes go casting runes with the windmill silhouettes. A number of contributed scenes do now flash by for Thanatz. From Ensign Morituri, a banana-leaf floor somewhere near Mabalacat in the Philippines, late ’44, a baby squirms, rolls, kicks in drops of sunlight, raising dust off the drying leaves, and the special-attack units roar away overhead, Zeros bearing comrades away, finally as fallen cherry-blossoms—that favorite Kamikaze image—in the spring… from Greta Erdmann, a world below the surface of Earth or mud—it crawls like mud, but cries like Earth, with layer-pressed generations of gravities and losses thereto—losses, failures, last moments followed by voids stringing back, a series of hermetic caves caught in the suffocated layers, those forever lost… from someone, who’ll ever know who? a flash of Bianca in a thin cotton shift, one arm back, the smooth powdery hollow under the arm and the leaping bow of one small breast, her lowered face, all but forehead and cheekbone in shadow, turning this way, the lashes now whose lifting you pray for… will she see you? a suspension forever at the hinge of doubt, this perpetuate doubting of her love—

They’ll help him through it. The Erdschweinhöhlers will sit up all night with this nonstop intelligence briefing. He is the angel they’ve hoped for, and it’s logical he should come now, on the day when they have their Rocket all assembled at last, their single A4 scavenged all summer piece by piece clear across the Zone from Poland to the Low Countries. Whether you believed or not, Empty or Green, cunt-crazy or politically celibate, power-playing or neutral, you had a feeling—a suspicion, a latent wish, some hidden tithe out of your soul, something—for the Rocket. It is that “something” that the Angel Thanatz now illuminates, each in a different way, for everybody listening.

By the time he’s done, they will all know what the Schwarzgerät was, how it was used, where the 00000 was fired from, and which way it was pointed. Enzian will smile grimly, and groan to his feet, the decision already made for him hours ago, and say, “Well, let’s have a look at the timetables now.” His Erdschweinhöhle rival, Empty One Josef Ombindi, grips him by the forearm—“If there’s anything…” Enzian nods. “See if you can work us out a tight security watch, ’kurandye.” He hasn’t called Ombindi that for a while. Nor is it a small concession to give the Empty Ones control of the watch lists, at least for the duration of this journey…

… which has already begun, as one and a half levels below, men and women are busy with tackle, lines, and harness easing rocket sections each onto its dolly, more Schwarzkommando waiting in leather and blueflowered files up the ramps to the outside, along the present and future vectors strung between wood rails and grooves, Empty, Neutral and Green all together now, waiting or hauling or supervising, some talking for the first time since the dividing along lines of racial life and racial death began, how many years ago, reconciled for now in the only Event that could have brought them together (I couldn’t, Enzian knows, and shudders at what’s going to happen after it’s over—but maybe it’s only meant to last its fraction of a day, and why can’t that be enough? try to let it be enough…).