Bilocations, Chapter Thirteen: The End of That Göttingen Rag!

Kit is summoned to the bank and informed that his flow of Vibe money is being cut off. Well, it was gonna happen sooner or later, so it doesn't come as too much of a shock. He still has a certain amount of money in a separate account that he'd made for his gambling winnings. He talks to Yashmeen. MORE MATH, naturally. It seems the T.W.I.T. are in town, and they want her to go back with them. Here's an interesting bit:

At dinner yesterday Madame Eskimoff--perhaps you'll meet her--said that when spirits walk, beings living in four-dimensional space pass through our own three, and the very presences that flicker then at the edges of awareness are those very moments of intersection. When we enter, even in ordinary daylight, upon a chain of events we are certain we have lived through before, in every detail, it is possible that we have stepped outside of Time as it commonly passes here, above this galley-slave repetition of days, and have had a glimpse of future, past, and present...all together." (617)

This is perhaps a good way to think about those ol' Trespassers and related malefactors. Anyway, Kit tentatively agrees to work for the T.W.I.T.

But before that, he thinks he sees Foley Walker right there in Göttingen, which shakes him up. But then, Foley appears in his room at night, in what seems to be simultaneously an apparition and the real deal. He explains how he's able to hear voices thanks to the bullet in his head (that he got when he replaced Vibe during the Civil War). But that may be of limited interest to Kit. "Don't you people honor deals?" he asks. "Don't know nothing about honor," Foley replies, "I'll spare you that lecture, but I can tell you about being bought, and sold, and the obligations that come with that...You weren't honest. You knew things, but you didn't tell us" (620). Honestly, it's sort of hard to see what Vibe was expecting to get out of Kit. He's really just been doing math stuff, occasional entanglements with anarchists and Q-weapons notwithstanding. In any case, Foley disappears.

Drugs! These math people in Göttingen are super-into such things, natch, the preferred poison being chloral hydrate, a sedative which--I think we can fairly read it as such--messes around with time. Kit, having been overdosed on it somewhat against his will, finds himself in some sort of sanitarium. With a doctor who likes ranting about Jews. Plus ça change.

At one point--OPERA WATCH!--the inmates go to see a performance of Strauss' Salome, and after that they start using "the head of Jochanaan" as a catchphrase. Catchy!

There's an inmate who has the delusion that he's a jelly doughnut: "Ich bin ein Berliner!" he keeps saying. This of course is a reference to Kennedy's faux pas back in the day (although really, everyone knew what he was saying, come on). Pretty funny, but it turns out he's ALSO an agent sent by Yashmeen to help break him out.

Back to T.W.I.T. business: he's introduced to their agent in the field, Lionel Swome. He wants Kit and Yashmeen to leave the city together, allaying suspicion by pretending they're eloping. Yashmeen will do, well, no one seems to care at the moment, but Kit's mission is to go east in search of Auberon Halfcourt, Yash's dad, to see where he is and what's going on with Shambhala.

The coda of this chapter involves a visit by Kit, Yashmeen, and her flame Günther to a place called Museum der Monstrositäten, "a sort of noctural equivalent of Professor Klein's huge collection of mathematical models on the third floor of the Auditorienhaus" (632). Here, you can see great murals depicting such pivotal events as "Professor Frege at Jena upon Receiving Russell's Letter Concerning the Set of All Sets That Are Not Members of Themselves" (633).

Anyway, this is all. Yashmeen and Günther part in a melancholy fashion. He's off to Mexico to look at his family's coffee plantations, so maybe we'll see him later? I honestly don't remember. A disembodied voice calls out: "the Museum is closing now. The next time you visit, it might not be exactly where it stands today." Because, you know, the fourth dimension. When Günther asks who it is, it replies "you know who I am," but we the readers really have no idea, in spite of some speculation on the AtD wiki.