Bilocations, Chapter Eight: The Chums of Chance and the Bad Ukulelist!

An unexpected switch to Chums perspective for this short but pivotal chapter. They happen to be on shore leave in Ostend at around the same time as all that other stuff is happening--mention is made of the Quaternionist convention. They're supposed to pay tribute to General Boulanger, an odd little detail that I felt I should mention, "there having remained within the Chums of Chance bureaucracy a defiant residue of Boulangism" (549). He was a French nationalist who at one point could maybe possibly have become dictator. He hated Germany. The relevance of this to the Chums certainly deserves more thought than I'm giving it here.

Piet Woevre sort of knows they're there, and fears they have something to do with this Quaternion Weapon, but what, it's unsure, and he "couldn't always see the skyship, but he knew it was there" (549). Can he not always see it because of quaternions? Because of the Chums' ontological status? Probably.

One interesting thing is that it's implied that Pugnax has become a vampire:

With the passing years Pugnax had been evolving from a simple watchdog to a sophisticated defense system, with a highly-developed taste, moreover, for human blood. "Ever since that mission to the Carpathians," Randolph recalled, frowning a little. "And the way he drove off that squadron of Uhlans at Temesvár, almost as if he were hypnotizing their horses into unseating their riders..." (550)

Does this have anything to do with Zoltan, the Hungarian motorcycle daredevil and also-probable-vampire? Difficult to say.

Things are getting weird for the Chums--weirder:

Somehow, the earlier, the great, light had departed, the certitude become broken as ground-dwellers' promises--time regained its opacity, and one day the boys, translated here to Belgium, as if by evil agency, had begun to lapse earthward through a smell of coal smoke and flowers out of season. (551).

So that's ominous. But the most important thing in this chapter is Miles having a little rendezvous with one of the Trespassers, a Ryder Thorn, whom he had met at Candlebrow. They bonded over their shared enthusiasm for the ukulele. They

discussed the widespread contempt in which ukulele players are held--traceable, we concluded, to the uke's all-but-exclusive employment as a producer of chords--single, timeless events apprehended all at once instead of serially. Notes of a linear melody, up and down a staff, being a record of pitch versus time. To play a melody is to introduce an element of time, and hence of mortality. Our perceived reluctance to leave the timelessness of the struck chord has earned ukulele players our reputation as feckless, clownlike children who will not grow up. (552).

Bet ya never thought if like that, as indeed Chick hadn't! It's synchronic versus diachronic, and this definitely aims at the heart of the Chums' existence, and indeed the novel's. Pretty darn brilliant.

Anyway, they meet up. They're in the Flanders region of Belgium, fyi. Ryder wants to get information from the Chums: "Our people know what will happen here...and my assignment is to find out whether, and how much, yours know" (553). Miles irritates him by playing it coy.

The calmer Miles got, the more worked up Thorn became. "You boys spend too much time up there. You lose sight of what is really going on in the world you think you understand. Do you know why we set up a permanent base at Candlebrow? Because all investigations of Time, however sophisticated or abstract, have at their true base the human fear of mortality. Because we have the answer for that. You think you drift above it all, immune to everything, immortal. Are you that foolish? Do you know where we are right now? (ibid)

Things start to get apocalyptic, though the chronology is strange: I would've pinned this as taking place in 1913 or thereabouts, but Ryder specifies "ten years from now," so now I don't know what to think. As maybe I shouldn't. But anyway: "This world you take to be 'the' world will die, and descend into Hell, and all history after that will belong properly to the history of Hell." More than that:

Flanders will be the mass grave of history . . . and that is not the most perverse part of it. They will all embrace death. Passionately. . . . on a scale that has never yet been imagined. . . . This, what you see, the great plain, turned over and harrowed, all that lies below brought to the surface—deliberately flooded, not the sea come to claim its due but the human counterpart to that same utter absence of mercy—for not a village will be left standing. League on league of filth, corpses by the uncounted thousands, the breath you took for granted become corrosive and death-giving. (554)

In conclusion: Trump 2020.

Grim stuff for sure--but who are these people? Well, Miles reaches out to try to touch Ryder, who proves insubstantial,

and in the instant Miles understood that there had been no miracle, no 'time travel' at all--that the presence in this world of Thorn and his people had been owing only to some chance blundering upon a shortcut through unknown topographies of time, enabled somehow by whatever was to happen here, in this part of West Flanders where they stood, by whatever terrible singularity in the smooth flow of Time had opened to them. (555)

I mean...not to nitpick, but that's still a kind of time travel, surely. Point taken, though. It may be--this will be dealt with again later--that the Trespassers are actually World War I dead come unstuck in time. Miles already had had a premonition of this: "you ought to have shared that," Chick comments.
"Overcome as I was, Chick, I knew I would get through it. But you fellows--Lindsay is so frail, really. Darby pretends to be such a weathered old nihilist, but he's hardly out of boyhood. How could I have been that cruel to any of you? My brothers?" (556).

I find that truly poignant, but now, we must return to our regularly scheduled quaternions.