Iceland Spar, Chapter Eleven: The Chums of Chance in Venice!

I really didn't remember this chapter at first. I mean, I did once I got into it, but at first it was, huh. They stopped in Venice? But here they are, preparing for their next mission. Here also are their Russian counterparts, for mysterious reasons.

These are still the more "adult"--or, I suppose it would be more accurate to say, adolescent, although they're drinking wine and everything--Chums, which is why it seems odd to read that "Chick Counterfly, as the most worldly of the company, [was] spokesman by default in fair-sex encounters that might turn in any way ambiguous" (246). I mean, not that they wouldn't be awkward around girls, but would they be awkward in this very childlike way? Seems weird.

But anyway, the situation is pretty interesting: they're here at the behest of this "shadow-doge-in-exile" Domenico Sfinciuno: the idea being that you have this lineage of people who, way back when, were disqualified from possible dogery (there's a word I made up), but even after the position was abolished, they still feel entitled to it. They're sorta like Jacobites, but it might be more relevant to think about what Nookshaft was talking about a few chapters ago, about the idea that we could be living in this "shadow world" where the entire Victorian Age was just an illusion. Time works in mysterious ways.

Anyway, what they want is for the Chums to help them find these lost routes to--wait for it--Inner Asia, which are at least in part metaphysical--the real goal is the lost city of Shambhala. You see, "there are two distinct versions of 'Asia' out there, one an object of political struggle among the Powers of the Earth--the other a timeless faith by whose terms all such earthly struggle is illusion" (249).

Miles--the mystic of the crew, remember--encounters "some Being clearly not of the immediate region," which, again, makes you think of the Trespassers. But more interesting, perhaps--I mean, it's all interesting, but--is Chick's encounter with this woman, Renata, who...may or may not be a prostitute? Chick lights her cigarette with a special lighter powered by a radioactive alloy, which "hasn't been invented yet. [He] found it--it found [him]?--a fisherman in the fog of Time, hoping to retrieve just such artifacts as this" (252). This is one of these things where it could be the whole damn premise for a book, but here it's just stuck in like it's nothing. But will you one day be able to buy these? "Not necessarily. Your own future my never include it. Nor mine. It's not the way Time seems to work" (ibid). Here we think again to all this talk about time bifurcating and moving at ninety-degree angles--not like a linear thing.

Chick spends the night with Renata. Does that mean he sleeps with her? Well, that's not made clear, but it's obviously at least supposed to be a possibility that you think about. Chick, it seems, is feeling ambivalent about his Chumsness:

"I have some problems with the retirement plan." And old pleasantry in the business--there was no retirement plan, in fact no retirement. Chums of Chance were expected to die on the job. Or else live forever, there being two schools of thought, actually. (254)

Nothing we don't already know about them, but it's still interesting to see it spelt out like that.

Next, we have an ambiguous sky encounter between the Chums and the Tovarishchi. There's more with Padzhitnoff and Tetris blocks, which I can't not quote:

In the next instant, Padzhitnoff saw the ancient structure separate cleanly into a multitude of four-brick groupings, each surrounded by a luminous contour, and hang an instant in space, as though time slowed and each permutation of shapes appeared, to begin their gentle, undeadly descent, rotating and translating in all available modes as if endeavoring to satisfy some demented group-theoretical analysis.

Whee! The long and short of it is, the Campanile di San Marco is destroyed. Who did it? unclear. But Padzhitnoff warns Randolph that "something else is out there"--the same thing that Miles saw?--and conjectures that whatever it is, it was responsible for the destruction.

The chapter ends with some geopolitics--which who doesn't love? There's this Japanese group, the Black Dragon Society, that wants, supposedly, "to subvert and destroy Russian presence in Manchuria" (258). How relevant will this prove to the narrative? We'll see. In the meantime, the Chums are off! "Bells are the most ancient objects. They call to us out of eternity" (259).