Bilocations, Chapter One: The Amazing Giant Talking Blood-Sucking Sand Fleas of Central Asia!

Let's try to kick it up a notch with the titles, eh? I don't want anyone, god forbid, getting bored reading this.

We begin the chapter with Lindsay: he was left behind when the other Chums left for Central Asia because he was found to have a very serious condition: Incipient Gamomania, "that is, the abnormal desire to be married" (432). That's probably something you'd expect from Lindsay, and it shows--maybe?--a contradiction in the Chums organization: getting married is a kind of conventional, bourgeois thing that supports the status quo, and you'd think that a sort of squeaky-clean, all-American organization like the Chums would support it--but...no. You can't do that. You're not allowed to grow up and exist in time and things like that; you have to stay young and innocent forever (and really, that "innocent" is starting to look like a cudgel designed to prevent actual growth than real innocence innocence). Regardless, this passage is poignant:

Outside, it was summer, and in the last light, townsfolk were our bowling on the green. Laughter, calls of children, quiet bursts of applause, and something about it all made Lindsay, forever denied any such tranquil community, briefly fear for the structural integrity of his heart (432).

Anyway, he has to undergo mental testing and then met up with the others in the region (they're supposed to rendezvous with a ship, the HMSF (Her Majesty's Sand Frigtate) Saksaul. He succeeds in this, in spite of being tempted by siren-songs tempting him with promises of wives, "wives in blossom, panspectral fields full of wives Lindsay, here is the great WifeBazaar of the WorldIsland" (528). One thing that people who don't like Pynchon might complain about is that you have little storylines like this that aren't taken up again, or at least not in an obvious way: they just peter out. Of course, there are storylines that continue and conclude, but...well, some don't. I think that's characteristic of this kind of writing: you sort of have to appreciate things like this for what they are rather than necessarily expect every plotline to conclude in tidy fashion.

So the Chums reach this sandship, which is commanded by a Captain Toadflax. The ship moves through the sand, and there are mysterious things there:

It as little resembled the upperworld view of the desert as the depths of an ocean do its own surface. Enormous schools of what might have been some beetle species swarmed, as if curious, iridescently in and out of the searchlightbeams, while, too far away to examine in any detail--in some cases, indeed, well past the smeared boundaries of the visible--darker shapes kept shapes kept pace with the ship's progress, showing now and then a flash, bright as unsheathed steel. (530)

Evocative. Kind of Mievelle-esque.

The ship's mission, naturally, is to find Shambhala--they want to be first, obviously, though what they intend to do on finding it is a little murky. They have a paramorphoscope to help them suss out where it is. What's a paramorphoscope? Well...presumably, it measures paramorphism, which is a geological term for "a change in the physical structure of a mineral without any chemical change." Analogous, I suppose to a person receiving a deep cut that results in a scar--they look different, but it's not like it's changed their genetic makeup. I suppose you have the question of different levels of reality: these two things are on some level the same, but they're also different. Dare I mention duality? I would never do such a thing.

The guy in charge of "paramorphoscopical activities" is a civilian named Stilton Gaspereaux. He theorizes that "crusades began as holy pilgrimages." You're there to defeat the infidel, but you're also there for less--as Pynchon likes to put it--secular reasons. Obviously, we're talking more of that dang ol' duality. And you need an enemy on some level:

Introduce to your sacred project the element of weaponry and everything changes. Now you need not only a destination but an enemy as well. The European Crusaders who went to the Holy Land to fight Saracens found themselves, when Saracens were not immediately available, fighting each other (533).

Make what you will of that. To reveal the route, Gaspereaux overlays the itinerary with a sheet of Iceland spar, to reveal the two layers: the religious and the military. But it's still not working, apparently, "almost as if there were some...additional level of encryption" (534). The problem may lie with a mountain peak on the map, which was originally thought to be Mount Kailash, but...it might be that, only different: "as if it were made of some variety of Iceland spar that can polarize light not only in space but in time as well" (534). I'm covering this because I'm trying to engage with the novel, even the parts that are hard to understand, but this is definitely one of those. Excitingly so, though!

Moving onward, we get some stuff about "the ancient Manicheans out here [who] worshipped light, loved it the way the Crusaders claimed to love God, for its own sake, and in whose service no crime was too extreme" (534). If your thematic-o-meter is buzzing crazily here, you're probably doing it right: duality! Light! It's all you need! These Manicheans, Gaspereaux goes on to explain, abjured all physical sensation: they let people be part of the group while accepting some level of imperfection, which is why they could have families and children and stuff, but to be perfect, they would have to denounce all that. Are the Chums, in fact, willing to do that? The section about Lindsay at the beginning of this very chapter calls that into doubt.

They dock at a town called Nuovo Rialto--this is in theory a Venician colony, remember--where they encounter--well, a number of things, but I must mention the Sandfleas of the title I made up. They suck your blood, but they also talk "in a dialect of ancient Uyghur" (537). And remember, these fleas are intelligent creatures, so you can't go around killing them. Honestly, I'm not sure what thematic purpose they serve, or they're just--"just"--a Pynchonian flight of fancy.

Another possible reason for them to be there at all is uncovered in a bar, where Chick meets two oil prospectors named Leonard and Lyle. Boy, a crusade for oil? I see no conceivable relevance of that to anything, certainly not the period when the novel was written. But really: you can sort of see some of this same duality in the US's ill-advised Middle Eastern adventures. There's an obvious religious aspect to it, don't deny, the assumption that Muslims are the enemies and this is a latter-day crusade. Don't deny it. And then, of course, the purely mercenary, capitalistic aspect: blood for oil, please!

This makes them suspicious of the motives of the sandship's crew; Randolph is caught trying to dynamite open a safe, and they return to the Inconvenience on less than great terms with the sandship folks. Something apocalyptic is going to happen, per Miles:

"Whatever is to happen," he reported upon his return [from his 'extratemporal excursions'] "will begin out here, with an engagement of cavalry on a scale no one living has ever seen, and perhaps no one dead either, an inundation of horse, spanning these horizons, their flanks struck an unearthly green, stormlit, relentless, unwindling, arisen boiling form the very substance of desert and steppe. And all that incarnation and slaughter will transpire in silence, all across this great planetary killingfloor, absorbing wind, steel, hooves upon and against earth, massed clamor of horses, cries of men. Millions of souls will arrive and depart. (542)

This, Chick notes, recalls the vision that he and Darby had in Dr. Zoot's putative time machine. "But its meaning, even as simple prophecy, was as obscure to them now as them" (542).

That's all we get of the Chums in this chapter. Next, we return to the Saksaul, which "came to grief. Survivors were few, accounts sketchy and inconsistent" (542). They are under attack, though it's not clear by whom or for what, except that they probably want the Itinerary. Gaspereaux is sent off to get word to Whitehall of what has happened--he's to take one of the undersand suits. It still seems like a tricky thing to me. But he makes it! He gets back to London, where he's looking for an inspector named Sands, "soon to be known to Whitehall--as well as to readers of the Daily Mail--as 'Sands of Inner Asia'" (543). I must say, that does sound like an old-timey British nickname for an imperialist officer.

War still rages in Central Asia, which, we are told, involved "Quaternionray weapons," of which definitely more later.

These now fell into the hands of goatherders, falconers, shamans, to be taken out into the emptiness, disassembled, studied, converted to uses religious and practical, and eventually to change the history of the WorldIsland beyond even the most unsound projections of those Powers who imagined themselves somehow, at this late date, still competing for it. (544)

That's good: it really is about perspective, when you think about it: we always think of the Great Game in terms of the European Powers and what they want, but there are other ways of looking at the situation, clearly.

We get this dopey conversation between Sands and some kind of subordinate, about a suspicious character (who will turn out to be Gaspereaux); I probably don't need to say much about it, but he, the suspicious character, is in disguise and carrying a bag, about which this: "The bag might be only for carrying his lunch." "Typical of these people, who else would think of eating an explosive substance?" (544) And the answer, of course, is the erstwhile Lew Basnight.

Anyway. Gaspereaux reports what's going on. Sands is excited about the chance to take Shambhala, but Gaspereaux explains that it may not be that easy. And THAT, my friends, is yer chapter. Phew.