Against the Day, Chapter Six: The Horrendous Space Kablooey!

This is the chapter where the Tunguska Incident happens. I mean, you have to have known that was coming, right, what with this taking place in Siberia at this place and time? The first section of this chapter simply reads "A heavenwide blast of light."

The first part after THAT is about Padzhitnoff of the Tovarischi Slutchainyi--the Russian Chums, speculating with his crew about what the heck is going on here Is it possible that "the local distortion of other variables was so intense that the crater somehow actually got displaced along the time axis?" Well, that would certainly fit in with the novel's themes. It also means that "there is now potentially a hold in the Earth no one can see, waiting to materialize with no warning at all" (781).

Of course, Kit and Prance (I'm not sure what's happened to Hassan) experience this as well: "the voice of a world announcing that it would never go back to what it had been" (782). Prance especially is freaked out by this, which is extremely not according to plan.

"For a while after the Event, crazed Raskol'niki ran around in the woods, flagellating themselves and occasional onlookers who got to close, raving about Tchernobyl, the destroying star known as Wormwood in the book of Revelation." A bit of searching reveals that "Chernobyl" is indeed sometimes translated as "wormwood"--it doesn't get more suggestive that this, people. We've seen intimations of nuclear catastrophe before, but this takes the cake. Cake that you really shouldn't eat. Cake that you should probably enclose in a lead-lined case and bury in the desert for five hundred years.

Anyway, reality is briefly a little shaky after this, resulting in things like "reindeer discover[ing] again their ancient powers of flight, which had lapsed over the centuries since humans began invading the North. Some were stimulated by the accompanying radiation into an epidermal luminescence at the red end of the spectrum." Ho ho. "Clocks and watches ran backwards"--of course. "Siberian wolves walked into churches in the middle of services, quoted passages from the Scriptures in fluent Old Slavonic, and walked peaceably out again" (784). Sure! Also, "from everywhere in the Taiga, all up and down the basins of the Yenisei, came reports of a figure walking through the aftermath, not exactly an angel but moving like one" (785). Is this the mysterious Magyakan, who seems to have vanished? We may never know.

Prance is freaked out by the situation and wants out. He is questioning all his assumptions and beliefs. He and Kit part ways, but don't worry about him! He's picked up by the Chums of Chance, who just so happen to be in the area.

Meanwhile, Kit is wandering about when he meets a group of travelers that happens to include Fleetwood Vibe, Scarsdale's son who had been involved in that disastrous Arctic expedition as well as colonialist antics in Africa about which he felt ambivalent. His state of mind isn't so great now. He tells about his dad:

He is no longer of sound mind. Apparently something happened in Italy while he was there. He is beginning to see things. The directors are muttering about a coup d'état. The trust funds are still in effect, but none of us will ever see a penny of his fortune. It's all going to some Christian propaganda mill down south. He's disowned all of us.

I mean JEEZ, at least OUR robber-baron plutocrats endowed universities. As for Kit's old roommate Colfax, he's apparently a triple-A pitcher in California, which is kind of fun. But Fleetwood feels the need to keep moving. He's in search of some kind of transcendence, as everyone seems to be, but feeling kind of fatalistic about it: "Whatever goes on in there, whatever unspeakable compact with sin and death, it is what I am destined for--the goal of this long pilgrimage, whose penance is my life" (790). I wish Fleetwood well. This is the last we'll see of him.