Bilocations, Chapter Nine: Guided by the Beauty of Our Weapons!

Enter Viktor Mulciber, a British arms dealer--an "amiable death merchant" (557)--trying to get his hands on this Quaternion Weapon in spite of not having any real conception of what it is. It seems to have something to do with time, however: "a weapon based on time . . . well, why not? The one force no one knows how to defeat, resist, or reverse. It kills all forms of life sooner or later. With a Time-weapon you could become the most feared person in history" (558). However, for better or worse, Mulciber is too late: Piet Woevre is ahead of the game, and he purchases the weapon in question from some guy in a bar in Brussels.

But when he buys it, he can't quite made head or tails of what he has: "he was surprised and a little disappointed to find it so small." How, he wonders, will it work "without a peripheral component, a power supply of some sort?" (559)

So at this point Kit has become involved with this Umeki, "this miracle, this sorceress from the East," and I know this is to an extent supposed to be Kit's perspective, but I'm not gonna lie: it still come across as kind of gross. Is this really necessary, Tom? What is its purpose? Hmm.

There's a party scheduled for "October 16, the anniversary of Hamilton's 1843 discovery of the Quaternion (or, as a disciple might say, theirs of him), by tradition the climactic day of each World Convention" (560). That's William Rowan Hamilton, an Irish mathematician. However, the whole thing becomes a farce, which I will quote at length because it amuses me:

In the festivities attending departure, romance, intoxication, and folly were so in command, so many corridor doors opening and closing, so many guests wandering in and out of the wrong rooms, that de Decker's shop, declaring an official Mischief Opportunity, sent over to the hotel as many operatives as they could spare, among them Piet Woevre, who would rather have been working at night and toward some more sinister end. The minute he caught sight of Woevre, Kit, assuming he was the target of murderous intent, went running off into the hotel's labyrinth of back stairways and passages. Root Tubsmith, thinking Kit was trying to avoid paying off a side-bet made several evenings ago in the Casino, gave chase. Umeki, who had understood that she and Kit would be spending the day and night together, immediately assumed there was another woman in the picture, no doubt that Parisian bitch again, and joined the pursuit. As Pino and Rocco, fearing for the security of their torpedo, ran off in a panic, Policarpe, Denis, Eugénie, and Fatou, recognizing and number of familiar faces among the police operatives swarming everywhere, concluded that the long-awaited action against Young Congo had begun, an went jumping out of various low windows into the shrubbery, then remembering absinthe spoons, cravats, illustrated magazines, and other items it was essential to salvage, crept back into the hotel, turned the wrong corner, opened the wrong door, screamed, ran back outside. This sort of thing went on till well after dark. In those days it was the everyday texture of people's lives. Stage productions which attempted to record this as truthfully as possible, like dramatic equivalents of genre paintings, became known as "four-door farce," and its period as the Golden Age. (561)

If somebody actually made this into a stage-play, I would watch the shit out of it.

Anyway, Kit is wandering around outside. Rocco and Pino are tooling around on their rocket as usual, and offer him a ride to Bruges. There, Piet Woevre finds him and tries to murder him.

Woevre stood unprotected in the nocturnal light, feeling an exaltation beyond anything he could remember, even from the days in Africa. He was no longer sure who he was shooting at, or how he had come here. It seemed somehow to be about the Italians in their manned torpedo, that was in the message which had come in to the office earlier in the day, but nothing like that stirred now in these bright empty canals. The activity of interest seemed to be in the sky....He knew he must try to bring down the flying ship. He pocketed his Borchardt, and went fumbling for the weapon he had brought back from Brussels, with no idea even how to get the case open, much less use what was inside. He didn't know if it needed to be charged somehow with ammunition. But there were details. He was who he was, and trusted his intuitiveness with any weapon when the moment came. But Woevre had not really seen it before, at least not out in the night like this, in the pitiless moonlight. He was overcome with certainty that the device was conscious, regarding him, not particularly happy to be in his possession. (563).

He somehow activates the weapon, but it does not work as hoped. "Something flashed, blinding him for a moment, leaving his field of vision a luminous green. The sound accompanying was nothing he wanted to hear again, as if the voices of everyone he had ever put to death had been precisely, diabolically scored for some immense choir" (564). He ends up flat on his face, so freaked out that when Kit appears to help him up (why isn't he running?) he thrusts it upon him: "take the fucking thing. I cannot bear it...this terrible light..." (564). Again with the light.

Umeki becomes obsessed with the device, carefully analyzing it and talking about math that is not super-easy for me to understand. This part seems important:

"Deep among the equations describing the behavior of light, field equations, Vector and Quaternion equations, lies a set of directions, an itinerary, a map to a hidden space. Double refraction appears again and again as a key element, permitting a view into a Creation set just to the side of this one, so close as to overlap, where the membrane between the worlds, in many places, has become to frail, too permeable, for safety... (566)

Hmm!

Anyway, they're going to part: it's not entirely clear to me why, but Kit has the feeling that with this weapon around, the European powers are going to be interested. She keeps the weapon--it seems--to see what she can make of it. I'm not clear where either of them are going, but I think neither are they.

OPERA WATCH:

Later they lay smoking, about to leave the room for the last time. "There's a new Puccini opera," she said. "An American betrays a Japanese woman. Butterfly. He ought to die of shame, but does not--Butterfly does. What are we to make of this? Is it that Japanese do die of shame and dishonor but Americans don't? Maybe can't ever die of shame because they lack the cultural equipment? As if, somehow, your country is just mechanically destined to move forward regardless of who is in the way or underfoot? (567)

So that places the novel firmly in 1904, anyway. I guess I was just confused. How dumb I am! It seems like a bit of a stretch to say that Cio-Cio-san dies of "shame," per se, as opposed to just a broken heart (or, perhaps most accurately, from stabbing), but I guess you could easily play it that way. ANYWAY. Onward.