|
Xf
ORDERS IN THE SIGNS OF XF or THE SYMBOL FOR THIS HAPPENS HERE It was a dork & starmy night. Chiin was huddled amongst the dead & wounded vapruux down in down downtown Phrinedde, out on Xf. These vayz advertived mostly adjectives & the odd, brokemen prepositium, which is sad to contemfuckinplate & to read & to see see see. These pathetic, sentient signs of Xf‑‑the Vapruux Entities, or Vayz (just name for the signs!)‑‑craved & vacantly pined with aberrant desires just to be read. They pressed themselves to your face till‑‑if you were possessed of breath‑‑you couldn't breathe till you read. But these signs long expired just couldn't be read. This was the low-life on fabulous Xf, but Chiin had his orders from something funneling orders through the intricacies of Xf. This was Jeeg's Solo in B-Flat for Master Thief wherein Chiin has none of his equipment. Xf was effless, heaven knows. Chiin was under the thumb of these rotten orders, except he had no orders but to nestle in his breath amongst the signs like a broken sign himself. He guessed he was to steal for the Xf, but he didn't begin to know whether or what. His orders come within the signs of Xf. He had to nestle down deep inside, right in the fluffy guts of the goddam signs‑‑& this proved much less disgusting than he thought. He got the pale-green fever of the signs, the pastel fevers of the fabulous signs (they still had some of their magic that was the ESSENCE OF SIGN!), & he began to even think he could read these signs. He blurt out his eyes (this happens here, §, the symbol for This Happens Here}) trying to read them, & that's where his orders come in. His instructions come within great clusters of Fluctuating Nothingness which is something like mud suffused in doubt, sometimes so severe he found xmxelf making plans to leave, thinking he was never sent there in the first place, that it was all the impulse of some aberrated dream or some drug or marching like an idiot in my sleep. Then a small fold of the rumpled cloth or something would turn, & he would have another part of the message. He had to stop planning things then & settle down like a Gake antegrovidy bob, & wait, trying to see such meaning in the meaningless everything the meaningless everything the meaningless everything the meaningless everything the meaningless everything the meaningless everything the meaningless everything the meaningless everything the meaningless everything the meaningless everything the meaningless everything. HIRTUAL VAMP or THERE IS NO BODY OF THE QUESTIONER Q: Are you not in fact trying to take over the reader's mind with these repetition? A: You mean "repetitions," asshole. Absolutely not. (thundering) I give the lie to that! (roaring) May God strike me down if that's a fact. (sinistring) If you repeat that question or rephrase it to me in any way I will skin you alive. Do you understand? But no questioner is to be found, nor parts of a body. There is No Body of the Questioner. God may have struck herorhim down. Now back to our story. Chiin was, to speak bluntly, a corrupt formulation‑‑an experimental compound, perhaps‑‑simmered into being in the glades of Dew, my sources tell me (OK‑‑giggling, somewhat psychotic sources...and yet always so true)‑‑somewhere in the deep glades, they figure‑‑you know, where the rains become visionary, & where breath is plucked like light from the very thought of (breath) plucked from the very thought of (it), plucked from the very thought of the sources of the memory of my Very First (Breath) resources memory, with with the sap of the turquoise pollum pouring over my face. Great clouds filled the Faces of the Innihlatians watching me. These were some weird faces, I don't mind telling you) I don't mind telling you) I don't mind telling you &) I don't mind telling you. Excuse me. I believe I may have reached enlightenment. Certainly I'm levitating. Certainly I'm feeling pretty good. Author quits writing at this point. Xf is now & will till the end be written by a Hirtual Vamp {* or narrator here} we've created here... Yea right. You can't believe everything you read, including that you can't believe everything you read except you can't believe everything you read saving for believing everything you read, which is well-nigh impossible. Mystery Box Q: Why this syntactic shit, Mr. Hampton? K: A rhythm-riff. A sort of rhythm-riff. Honestly! I was also trying to express the Chinese box of confusion that comes with trying to throw off your myriad illusive selves. Yea right! But back to our story, if any. Figure 1: Story If Any The formula was registered as Bad®‑‑he was registered as Bad®. There was laughter everywhere. His Lightplume Seal of Induction read curtly he was to be "the Genius of the Genius of Thieves" (!)! His plume spoke to him curtly, yet gently, surly yet sexy, sullenly yet swirly, soddenly but z!rly. It definitely has something very soft beneath, which Chiin could find, & steal, & corrupt as he could steal up forth (which means the truth) from words. Everyone condemned Chiin for thinking this, but he thought he was supposed to be the quintessent angel of the Poets of Omstrolohom, something insanely beautiful & extraordinary. But the image of what might have been me went wrong, or had bad sectors, or was just too illegally daring ever to work. No, Chiin was the umpteenth conception of himself, & he was still All Wrong. He would have been rescinded like a broken law had he not been illegal in the first place, & a lost corruption lost in the ridiculous everglades of poor, forgotten Dew. He was instead raised by the Innihlatians, who would of course raise anything, even with those gog-clouds of fascination in their faces. THE MERCHANT OF THE STRANGE or THE SHOP OF THE FRIGID AIR Chiin stomped his feet in front of the glass of the shop of the crystal store & heaved out one preparatory sigh. He stepped through coronas of light coorornaos nofa lsight crnso ih coronas of light signifying passage through the Meanings of the Meanings of the Store. He gasped as his suit shiddered up much shuver to an yltramuff. "Bracing in here," piped the sidling little Pl p coming up again as if he hadnt just crawled like a snail up your spine one time. The air was white, but this Pl p? was seeming here to Chiin to be seeming to move to be in these strange little ice-skating motions. He had the frosted face of Pl p? & mercurial perforations opening up to eyes & the skin covered in tattoos in the shape of metaphors & the snow-peaked cap of a head with the miniature pinetuffs atop it & the trademark "signature sloup" of the casual Pl p? & the general Pl p?y aura typified in the Book of Atmospheres as of "sleaze-congeniality." This skating stuff curved against the back of the crystal floor. Chiin cracked pop his mask pock off & pulled back the crust of his frosted crunch (with fragment antique eggshells rollicking downdown everywhere!) & looked down at the Pl p? (he couldn't help himself) awfully askance. He couldn't help himself. This slight chap must be one of the lower forms. "I am not of the lower forms, you fucking thief," the Pl p? said, as if reading the poem. What's worse, he was attemping a comforting tone. But he sounded odd, dry. He sounded like someone gone quite mad quoting the exact words of an ancient story of himself (except for the "fucking thief" part). He sounded dead. He sounded creepy. He sounded very suggestive & lewd & at the same time enchantingly sycophantic. He sounded very mesmerizing, for what or hero didn't know didn't hurt him not to know these Ploops or Pleeps or whatever they are with their smiley faces & their big, friendly eyes, the way they lick your face, do for you, etc., these Pl ps if you will, can very quickly control your whole mind with their voices personality. It's just a thing they can do. Our hero is a slave for the rest of this narrative. I tell you the things he made him do!!! "No...of course not," Chiin said somewhere back in the stream of time far behind me, & he sounded cold, like someone in a frozen room babling into the puffings of his all-too-visible visible breaths. "Did you come up twice just now?" "I beg your pardon, motherfucker? You sayin I came up twice or sumtin?" Scene of Chiin enduring Gross Physical Intimidation, Chiin eating humble pie, Chiin humiliated, Chiin abased & used, etc. The Usual Humiliation, but I promised I would cut out the Big Humiliation Scene from this here poem. This is just me, your long-dead author, keeping his word. Chiin was worried he would be thrown out through Empurpled Coronas unto Reversions of the Outside (outside night) night outside air, but the Pl p? merely smüff'd, electing the Zemblances of Professional Deportment and poked some sort of skein which had just then floated to floating by happen when, & two lonely flows of music began chatting back & forth. He poked the skein again & the skein again & the music stopped. The music stopped its little talk, & the event folded in gracefully like a very tidy dream. The separate strands of music fromthe ambulant skein stoptok, & the skein infolds in the shadows of the imfolled trance, & it moves right on. The Pl p? paused to savor the silence. "You seem a bit dumbfounded, sir," he said, with that spike of acrid scorn only sir can carry. "What can I show you?" Chiin sniffed. Lower order definitely. Two signs certain of the lower forms: 1) deny they're LO; 2) talk funny. "My name is Chiin Said Chiin," said Chiin Said Chiin. "I'm seeking a means by which to disappear." Why wasn't this as hard to say as he had thought? But there was no time for thought. "Yes. The frijj * hoover round you like a vacancy of flies," the shrewd Pl p? noted, nodding at the nothingness outside. "Like fucking vacancies of flies, sir. I don' think I can help you here." "Well" Chiin sighed, with surpising breath. "I'll see everything, then." "Ah. That we have. This way." TRANSPOSITIONAL CLOCK He drew Chiin deeper into Madness Bazaar®. They come to the weaving of tenses from past to present (just happens sometimes) a tall bureau sort of thing, leaning & glinting like a ruined tooth. "Beautiful, in't?" the Pl p? said cheerfully, though it wasn't reality. I mean, you could tell you were in the midst of a powerful hallucination, overwhelming dream or some sort of mind control. But there was nothing you could do but live it out, & hope it doesn't get too bad, really hope like mad... "Here may indeed be perhaps maybe be the perfect item for your impossible needs," the guy with the weirdassed name goes on, evidently not aware of the literary hankypanky going on just behind his ears, if those are ears... Those are not ears. Back in the story, Chiin was trying to let many things pass. Signs rustled past the distant window in the distant stormy spaces of out doors (though the doors, the doors, the doors I must say were like DISAPPEARING FAST). "Perfect? Why?" "The cabinet of a man gone mad," the Pl p? laughed madly. You shoulda heard it! You should definitely find this & download it & listen to it. This would explain everything! Just kidding. But he was really & truthfully covered with that lurid make-up that comes in on the air (if you want it to) but then but swug but open the door, which swig unugently on its crystal hinges. There were distinctly mad devices inside. "Alien objects?" quap Quiin, licking his liverlips. The little Pl p? plucked one of the bright devices out & actually tossed it in the air. The arc was uncertain, & Chiin reached out to catch the thing, only to find his hands entangled in the Pl p?'s. They looked at one another. "No bother," the merchant of strangeness said, pulling his hands back. The shiny thing was hanging in the air, emitting a phased series of charmlike wrinkles to the light in the spaces of the light between the spaces of the airairair. "An ether clock," said le geek or creep or Pl p? nodding up at the thing. "Measures time‑‑or the stuff you see that passeth for time‑‑on a much much finer basis than ours. & this‑‑" plucking out a green ovoid sheathed in a series of amidly I mean amadly-interacting lunar slices. This object he tossed up & down in his palm, then lobbed to Chiin, who caught it with the awkward reflexes of misfiring fear. Ze Pl p?'s pleasure was obvious. What a name, huh? "Another clock?" "Indeed. You begin to see a pattern here. Technicians of Snall as I recall keep studying this one. They've come to really hate the thing but they can't stop coming‑‑sometimes tattered & alone, sometimes at awful hours. They seem to think it's some sort of transposition clock, because its units‑‑inasmuch as they can measure them‑‑are going down." "Counting down?" "Counting down‑‑like fate, sir." the Pl p? took the device from Chiin & placed it back with a French-curved slice through the shop of the frigid air. "Measurring what‑‑antitime?" "Reading backwards from the end of time, methinks. Then there's that." This time he merely pointed, at an object like the gashes of a silver sphere, crisscrossed & clustered together into intricate fractal ratios. "An ogre," the Pl p? said, firmly but mytseriously. "Perhaps measuring subparticular time or time as seen from the quanta of a tachyon, not that it's working. Hard to say. It simmers in the mind, eventually, boiling it, & drives one mad." With that he closed the cabinet, knowing that Chiin was aching to see more. "You should purchase this & leave," the Pl p? said abrutly, I mean abruptly. "If you can't disappear, you could at least be relieved of reality. Believe me, that would drive the frijj mad." "But they would still be here?" "Of course, sir. They would be in your dreams‑‑in even & especially your maddest dreams." Chiin stood in black silence. "They would be much larger...in your dreams." Chiin couldn't speak, his fingers on the door. The Pl p? gently pulled the door away & closed the cabinet with its madness of clocks inside. "But there are other ways," the Pl p? said cheerfully. "Over here, for instance." He pointed & then actually skated toward the model of an iridescnt ship implanted in the darkness of your brain or unwieldy ymusical instrument lowering in the corner like the genius of a sullen child. The Pl p? let Chiin observe the thing, sloping his neck yo & bobbinghis little head in the dance of incomprehension. "This," the Pl p? said, "manufactures health‑‑but whose kind of health we cannot say." "It's been tried?" "It has been tested indeed‑‑on some of the 'lower forms,' you might say." "And...?" The Pl p? looked affectionately at the thing, seeming at once inclined & afraid to actually touch it. "It gave them health," he said slowly, "but of the wrong kind. & then there is this..." * held the thing to his eye which he had for an eye which he had for an eye what he had for the occasion, handed it to Chiin who held it to his eyewhhfto, who then tossed the thing high up into the air, where it paused where the author forgot he had the scene. "It looks like an eye," sez Chiin. "Yeawell it is an eye, sir," the Pl p? cooed admiingly. "It is taking everything in‑‑nt watching us, you mind, but rather seeing (& no doubt more than seeing) the seeingof all other beings." "'Seeing the seeing of all other beings.'" "It is the eye of collected vision. From Gpadjygom V. The only one left of its kind, of course. There could never be two of these for long, now could there, sir?" Another thing about your lower forms‑‑they liked to mess with your mind. "And even though you are thinking lower order," the Pl p? went on, "I will still show you more." "You'll note, sir, this hollow‑‑here, in the air here‑‑shape of an enraptured woman. You'll note the plane of the table over which snow flies. You will note the puddle of ice. & here, swelling its bottle, what looks to be an insufferably tough beast in colossal chains ("symbolic chains, of course"). Here we have a vessel, still sealed, full of unreleased seasons‑‑seasons whih have therefore never ben seen, & here, quite a few wafers of a fluttering sun, a very literal, subtle sun, right there in the room with you & me." & here is a book. They call it The Rotten Gospel, although such sweet smells waffle out of it! Here..." He held the Rotten Gospel to Chiin's nose. It smelled indeed most sweet, like one of the azure mint glades of Bphreen or Pake. Just think‑‑I could buy it & open it, Chiin thought like an evil child. But he simply nodded & pulled his face away from the book. "God knows what's in there, ay, sir?" the Pl p? piped, tossing the book into a vat of hadow like a piece of junk, then plucking out another ting‑‑a lamp that filled the room with an absolutely startling light. Chiin's smood opaqued all but the instantaneous phases of that light. "Amnovoreeyan spring," the Pl p? said. He waved the light around the room. Everything warped into its light. It was rather dizzying. "Observe, of you will, how nothing that was here in the dark is here in this awful light." The Pl p? said this loudly, as if the light were deafening, & distinctly, as if the light rendered (or revealed) Chiin an idiot. He put the light back down & it faded slowly. "Dusk!" said the Pl p? fulsomely. This thing must be one of his favorites. ... Thus did the Pl p? adroitly pique & tantalize, always pulling Chiin gawking away from each precious item h was stolen from. And they went down the corridor that flows forth wealth, & in some nook there Chiin & he were looking at a box of spare planets‑‑aromatic balls rich with the tracings of every color. Nice velvet box you could coo into. Chiin felt astonishing maze of mountains. "I'm feeling very very warm toward you!" Chiin declared‑‑something he would never dare later to believe. "And I toward you sir." "Chiin." Infamous pizzichilli love scene goes here, but has been deleted to protect the children, or else stolen by the children when they disappeared, if that's what happened. "Yes well, that would be this box here of luminous buds. Watch it! They serve as currency on Armam, which is imploded deep, somewhere very deep & not to be found‑‑in this cabinet here. You could find it if you bought it, I suppose. & here‑‑a loge * full of suppositions‑‑peculiar half-thoughts ("Three-forths, octually") curled forth curiously in the terminus of their own utterance. .... "We have to strip naked to see these other things," the Pl p? said. "You're kidding," Chiin said reflexively, but the Pl p? was instantly. Chiin noticed nothing about his body. Please note that there is nothing to notice in his body. "Or have you seen enough?" the Pl p? said, but Chiin was naked instantly. They went through a serious of perspicuous paintings * hanging chiffon in their very faces. Chiin heard a brook‑‑distinct inclinations of a brook with a crystal clashing. The Pl p? clicked it on & the room went transparent. He could see the outlines of things, like bubbles on an invisible hand dunked in the water, but he stood within limitless spans of perspicuity & was breathless & without words anyway (the light made words too limpid to use, or he was just in shock. "Night light," the Pl p? said, taking the device rather sternly from Chiins somewhat stuporous grasp. "Dangerous, though. If you leave it on too long you lose all vision of solidity. I should put this thing amongst the locked things." He brightened & looked at Chiin. "Would you like to see the locked-up things‑‑the dangerous things? Come this way." Chiin noticed that the Pl p? never waited for an answer. "You'll excuse me while I put on a disguise," the Pl p? said, & swept up his hand before his body, instantly attaining the look of an acid-crazed charlatan. His each & every furrow seemed to be laughing. While Chiin stood more naked than ever. Not only naked, neither‑‑but wet...suddenly very wet. There were internal storms everywhere. "Just a precaution," the painfully grinning charlatan painfully said. "When you descry this stuff you'll forget you're dying, believe me." He's just messing with me, thought darkly Chiin, trying to reassure himself by looking at his hands‑‑& it did reassure him, till he notice he uh-huh-huh-huh! notice these not his hands, & there too many. Way too many many alien hands (& they look as though they want to touch his body!!!). "Nothing, sir," came the voice of the harlequin, but it was coming from nowhere. "Come in here, please. Don't mind those. Those are just the hands of amazement," as if this canceled everything. There were bones & skeletons & remains everywhere. Inasmuch as Chiin could decipher the bodies that once lay the bodies that once lay behind them, it looked like their heads simply rolled right off. This is a nightmare realm. This is a scarey realm. What on earth * would he want to buy in here? "You'll be buying your way out, basically," the smile on the harlequin brooding oer the doer into the locked chamber said. "Get your ass on in," & Chiin‑‑feeling very sorry for himself in the mist of these compulsions‑‑pulled the portions of his body pulled the portions of his of, which seemed druping loose like the portions of my syntax prose, & then nevertheless then went right in. Everything was back up to normal now, possibly. He stood up in a room whose warmness were like voices in the half-remembered room you droop to long past certain horizons of a half-half sleep, & whose warmness, by the way, increased toward the level of your head. "Just above your head, it is freezing," the Pl p? seemed to said. Anyway, normal. They had clothes on; there were no longer bones no no longer round, and, in general, so on & on. "That was the lock we went through, sir," the Pl p? said. "Just a precaution. Actually everything I sell is‑‑well, limitlessly dangerous, bringing on all sorts of fates beyond the comprehension of even a dying consciousness." "You're trying to calm me down?" Possible sex scene here. Lost or deleted, the subject of many a failed archeological dig by many a failed archeologist. Definitely something about this spot in the text our universe my master your personal sexual slave, something that leads to innumerable further sex scenes, but we're just not sure. "Now this, I call this the Labyrinth Chair." It was a chair indeed‑‑miniature, obviously the plaything of a sinister child, & it was overstuffed unto absurdity or else a dumb uncertainty, "onto which the sitter clambers to be perched & which then, as near as we can figger, superimploves into the sitter's inner picture of the sitter, if you will, the comprehensions of a picture of each soul who has sat upon it then took the picture of the compressions of the soul now sitting in it then throws the nub of the former sitter quite off, like a crushed Bacon painting, to...not so much to a floor as onto thse trickular invert lost-velocity rivulets of some sort of dismally playful crud, like a melted rug, which you would lay on forever, till you turned unto these tricky bones, unable in your sudden multifariousness to figure out how unable how to figure out to move, if you know what I mean, sir. It's Quoaquoalean in origin. God doaknow what they might have had in mind. It might possibly be a reward, or a joke to them." "Have you asked them?" "We're afraid to ask them. They might find out that we had their chair." The Pl p?'s tone suggested he was talking to an idiot, which Chiin certainly felt. "Well I don't want it." "Of course you do. But neverthelss, come here. Come to the transparency of here, & look at this baby here, my friend. IN THE MANNER OF A MANUFACTURED DEER Tired of showing me shit, the shopkeeper shows me some slides in a media hallucination wihtin a media hallucination wihtin a control group not undergoing any form of reality alteration whatsoever, & that you're going to just have to believe, believe or die, ha ha. I was just kidding there‑‑just some narrational hankeryprankery, just dickin withya. Here are some slides to calm you down while I slip my hand into your pants. Just kidding. What an asshole! I'm thoughtform of beads containing various interesting fevers, "most of them letal, judging from experience," commented Pl p?. Presentation thoughtform of a vast collection of fingerguns, which were guns that fit the fingers perfectly. You couldn't wriggle off the fingers till you'd wriggled off the guns, & the guns looked like cannons by then. "God!" cried Chiin in dismay. Chiin was grunting through the forest of his fingernerves with a machete, disconnectinghim one by numberless oneway ones. "What do these fingers shoot any anyway?" "Mm," answered the Pl p?, with a sweep of histrionic magnitude. "The silver ones with the sharp tips‑‑you know, the ones that seem so clean they shoot blindness. The Jnebraem tastegun there‑‑you know: azure-tinged, brachiating space like the antlers of a Csuruitam elastic deer {these were manufactured, in te manner of most deer}?‑‑they shoot you a taste that makes you crazy (actually a pleasant taste; I have in fact shocked myself many times. Shot. I mean I shot myself many times." "You shocked yourself with one of these guns?" "Shot. I shot my goddam self with the Jnebraem tastegun, dear. After I had tasted it, after I had found out what madness was about." He pause. "You want a taste, my friend?" Chiin grunted, pulling his fingers free. He noticed that he had finger after finger to pull free, & that these finger after finger frees lengthened in the manner of a morphic dream almost infinitely. As a matter of fact, he did want a taste of the Jnebraem tastegun. He wanted a taste of just about everything here‑‑& the Pl p?, sweating in the jungle of the fingers of his nerves, wiping his brow now & then, looking tired, feverish, possibly malarial, knew he did. But did the little sugger care that he did? They were too deep inside the shop, both of them, with both seeing vision visitations * much too intense for them. As * had said, "These are the products of imbalance, here‑‑the contrivances that made alien civilizations die, or shy off the edges of the known & practically die. Their respective role had become very very very un unclear, if I may sututter it so. "Well, never mind," sighed the Pl p?, putting down the gun. "Some would shoot you poisons (some would make your mind turn blue‑‑like a bingcrystal egg of poison or the turquoise blob of a meniscial, faceless head), dissatisfactions of the dead, & some would should unprecedented writhings so you make like the wormings of a lower form. Let's see...that one simply sprays you with a bstle of very urgent noise. Backfores sometimes, making everything very quite (I should know!)." "Well, do you?" "What?" "Know." "No," said the Pl p? with the caution usually reverved for a dangerous lunatic‑‑say, a lunatic standing near a plenitude of mysterious alien guns. "No, I don't know," he added. The man had obviously forgotten what they were talking about, as have I as have we all. DIDDLES or REFLECTIONS OF THE Pl p?-WAS-HE "Have I mentioned this one?" he teje, holding up the most beautiful nimbus. "Diddles with your short-term memory, I think. "It leaks, actually. Defective. I could give you this as a steal‑‑a fucking steal, I say." "All right," spez Chiin very calmly. He was hoping the calmness would spread, rather than settling into mists within the blue articulations of the mystical, inner swump. "Would you?" "Would I what?" "Give me the nim at a bargain, friend." Chiin put the gun down, his eyes full of aitated mirrors. "No," he bled, then looked at the flower of the blossoming little nimbus little nimbus rather helplessery. He had no idea why he had just bled "no." It didn't seem to be affecting Chiin, so he took what's left after the Age of the Blistering Laughter of the after of the Pl p?'s little pleepslittle arm. "Let's move away from here," he xoox, & from then on was trying to sell this stuff to the Pl p?. "I'm not actually on the market for any guns," blobe the Pl p? slowly. "Of course not," fneb Chiin, who felt an elation & a confidence he had not felt he had felt in a thousand years. "You want something healthy. Here..." He held up a Xroxy shell‑‑actually the cone from a manufactured tree‑‑a container like a onion of absorptive indimensions which surrounded one with the pollen of strange sycophantic admiration. "With this, you would be the star of the universe from here on in," he told reflections of the Pl p?-was-he. "Why would I want that?" zeet the Pl p?. He was clearly going to be a dificult customer. "Clearly, I shall have to take you round the corner that melts," said Chiin, maintaining his sheen of illustrious humor. He felt he was selling the gifts God that God gave here. That was it: he was selling the gifts that God gave. He was like some sort of angel, an inspired man, he thought with his First Thought. Or like some horrible, decadent worm, on the turn of his Second Thoght. Or like something other still, something inchoate still still worming at the passage of that Third & Awful Thought. & yet there were stil more thoughts... "My kids call it the game of the awful thoughts, though it is actualy called Purplux, the game of the lost thoughts, in which the mind, thinking it is playing Purplux, gets lost in the Mountains of Thought, Thought Mountain of which you can see, you can see yourself seeing, anyway, through consequitous skeins of thought thought. There it is, friend, its crest risen risen through the skeins of the mythic atmosphere (here, sworls secreting three seasons of recursive mental rains, the Rains of Memory; there, a laughter of atmospheres, admixtures of airs too nobly alien to fuse; & over there, at the last sufficient sigh of the lost horizon (where you see it there, lost in the corners of that secret eye you have kept mouring forever over the traces of your dream of a stillborn past. That was your beautiful dream, friend‑‑that was the dream that breaks your heart, not unlike the mutual, respective dreams, the dreams in fact that keep us each all mourning through the ruptures of the dreams of subliminity that were going to be our lives which comprise these actual, dead lives (lonely suckrs, aren' they?), all formed so beautiful in the folds of the red-swelled dawn. You can't see them? Well, never mind. Just as well, & never mind. I was pointing too much in the dreamscape, such as your eye weeping for the nature of its unborn past, right there. You do see the moutnain there, don't you though? its crest breaking past the other thoughts like the fist of God? They call that Fist-of-God, friend." But Chiin couldn't see it. It was all so beautiful. He was weeping way too much. "Look at this," he said, after they had passed across the sands of that aforementioned Corner of the Melting Sandsoresaid. He displayed a tiny array of needles arranged like the pipes of a minuscule organ. "What's is it?" "It's an Uquularian musical aquarium. With this, you can feed passionate swatches of perfect music, each note shimmering through the stanzas like a shiver of beautiful seas." "Where are the fish?" "It is an aquarium of seas, my friend Chiin‑‑an aquarium of nameless seas, my friend my friend." But the Pl p? was getting worse & worse as a customer, worse & worse as a friend. "'Aquarium of nameless seas,' he says," he said. Hor charming." The son of a bitch! "What else you got?" "Here we have rocks‑‑lots of aorcks. A collection of very special rocks." "You selling them as a set, or one by one?" drawled the Pl p? uncaringly. But he was caught up, Chiin could tell, by some of these suggestive sotnes, "Yes," Chiin replied, since straight answers were getting him straight anwers were getting him answers were getting him no nowhere. "Hold this one," said the Pl p?. "It will make you very very still." He plunked it in the Pl p?'s hand rather before he had time to think. The Pl p? turned motionless & mirrory right there theng. He in fact became a statue from then on in." "A Lilimbion statue stone, of course" Chiin said to himself. "Makes statues out of anything, you see. Your Lilinbions were crazy about statues. A Lilinbion sculptor (thy've maintained a few) can can make statues out of air." He paused & enjoyed the stiless of the atued figure there. It was an excellent statue, really. Then he plucked the stone from the statue's hand. "But maybe that's not for you." "I guess the set would be too much for you. How much did you say?" "It's still being calculated," said Chiin. " We can't seem to calculate the cost of the collection in anything like a finite span of time. W're not seeling these sotnes as a set. Whatever gave you that idea?" "I..." "Tell you what: we'll get back to you after the edge of the aftertime." The Pl p? was wondeirng if Chiin was mocking him. "Consider these," he said. --food of unbalanced goodness --a Hoddgoggean tantrum-stone --vacuum pebbles --Here, in box after box, we find the last dose of medicine of some one who disappeared‑‑a murky dreg or crystal or droplet, medicines of numberless kinds, some of probably lethal oxicity, some no doubt far worse. But you could touch & look at each of them, couldn't you, if you owned them‑‑touch & look at & wonder at the touch of each of them: would this one send me into the mystery? But we have much surer stuff. a corner of shatterings TORTURE SONG Unused faces wrapped in a blanket that we found in someone's barn. But these are the faces of an artist‑‑look! Not the face at the artist amazed at the pain of creation, but the faces looking into him like the bowl of a terrarium, exuberant to see the torture morphing more & more into more & more intricate shape‑‑torture growing down the clogged tubeways of past; torture growing round the pure globus of the future, torture riot in the nervous twitchings of time; the torture growing along outside of time like the anagogic Book of Krels the torture like tickling little leaves along the edge of your temple the torture engaged in a distant sound, too loud & to distant for thunder, some sort of horrible sound torture dancing in its masks around the child attempting to play torture awaking from its dreams at night, staggered by its own dreams of pefection. You will notice torture grows along the lines of your favorite song, darkening it like fungus, making it somehow an even finer, more unbearable song. You will notice torture looks on unhappily as God comes along & takes everything you love, one by one you love, away away. Torture is your friend after all. Torture is sad at that. God does not take the torture away, ever. You have therefore a friend. You have a friend in torture, which you niether had in God. The hollows of a storm brood down as you both stand vacantly there. "You tortured me," he says, & you sob hypnotically hypnotically at this weird weird torture song. HARDURNED SHIT "We have to dress up to go to the next section," Chiin says, & they both start to laugh these disgusting laughs these disgusting laughs in which snot comthout, in which great gobbets of this rotten snot goop out the sides of deir dozez at the thought of a party, a very fancy, dress-up ball sort of party, which strikes them as especially funny, lying naked there, after all, rolling around not in their own shit (which would be OK) but in someone else's Hardüürnd Shit, covered in shit & stinking of the rottenness & essential stinkingness of shit. Sorry about that. Author was very bad for a moment & is now very sorry about it, taking all the blame even though it was not strictly speaing he but a powerful rogue alter known as the Tourettes Guy who said that. Plus it ached very much to get up, plus they were grogged with opiates, plus they had used up any credit within Health Division they might of had, so they had no strength nor energy, nor bounce nor stamina, nor resistence to the diseases festring extravagantly ther (& these were extravagant diseases gleaned profusely there (& whoever we're talking about was like afraid to ask if they were for sale, for he could see himself sans resistence & buying all these free diseases up, & setting them free into free diseases into the smaller alcoves of light in the universe which had not yet been darkened to the silence of disease, which had not yet met the affliction of themselves turing the corner of that drugged alley strange in the sicknesses of night of the night) (of extravagant diseases, too.) But wiped & sponged up they were, & sudsed up & sterilized & dried sardonically they were, & powdered down & spiffed were indeed they finally were, & popped into the limosine, & driven through a rain difficult as torture to that great, spangled house like a cluster of bexels in the infinite sky, & sent to a party. Too bad they had to run through the rain to get in. They were slobbering masses of muck but the time they time by the by they arrive. It doesn't matter. No one notices because‑‑even though everybody is there‑‑nobody is really there. This is that party cut from The Great Gatsby (cut, just for so plainly being the all-too-perfect party party it were. Cut out of something great, it is full of stuff to buy, so that it never happened except in the sense it happens over & over again in the Akashic Records, under "Surveillance Tapes of Everything," Section 201). THE BRIDGE OF SIGHS OF SIGHS OF SIGHS or THE TANK OF THE VAGUE & ACHING BONE Then into the chambers. More difficult by far than the Chamber of Exfoliation than the Chamber of Smells than the Chamber of Powders than the Chamber of Executions than at all was this crossing here of the Bridge of the Powerful Sighs or the Bridge of Sighs of Sighs of Sighs. Halfways over the swaying, goddam thing & Chiin & the Pl p? were sobbingone another's sopping arms, their torsoes begleamdid in the dusk of the faded faded Viennese nightnight. Beneath all of this swishing pathos, Chiin was starting to get sick from all the seastruck swaying, & you can see his EYE distend into lumpish horror as he sees the alley of the valley down belo, & he thinks What if I fall into that mud? at which a thousand gackling natives cackle mad. Extrapolation Formula D reveals this sentence splashing through the gasps like the Droned Swimmer of the Hundred Mooms (or is it the Hundred Suns? or is it Hundred? or is it not, not to come not to unthink of it, The Schvimmer in the Zecret Zea? or was that down the effluorescence of another hundred sighs? It is useless to try): "We're so...full of trapped water!" sentence says, gasping on his last against the dreary shore (near the house of Someone Very Important to this story, by remorse of a weeping coincidence, as often happens here). & of course Chiin was going to say "We're going to fall," butcept they tumbled like already dolls in one another's arms (or whatever passes for arms this way) passes for arms like figurines through the waters of the azure, ancient tank in the Tank of Dreams in the Tank of Tanks in the Tank of the Tank of the Tank of the Tank of the Tank of the Vague & Aching Bone. Except that they don't have bones. I deny that completely‑‑that they don't have bones. They had something inside them, of course, which was certainly all broken...except that they couldn't have bones, you see‑‑only the metaphor of bones, which can have but doesn't have but plenty of these yummy goddam bones, what with bones aplenty clopped across the cornucopia of their crossoptyrygian fucking heads, crossing as it were opt with the bones they have across their Very Boneless Face, if you catch my meanin'. GREENHOUSE IN THE SHAPE OF A FRIENDLY FISH The greenhouse took the form of our belovéd Poabby the Greenhouse Fish, i.e., that beautiful, crystal fish from the child's TV show airing just before your parents could ever wake up, therefore your special show, therefore a show that frightened you, & almost cut the squawk of many a lifetime squat, therefore the show that was eventually annulled & then arraigned & then (its bail once gone all gone jumps) hunted down forever in what they call Hunted Down Forever Intent‑‑stalked if you will forever by various of our magnificent form of fridgets, but‑‑even though you might at first blush think that a great crstalline fish in the shape of a green house with these fulsomely friendly, Barny type-of-eyes might be easy to catch‑‑come in images of which which were never quite caught. This greenhouse as we approach through concentric troughs of receding furrows was a fish with scales for facets & facets for scales, blinking like sentient minnows at one another (unlike the limitless crystals seeming to shine in the facets of the grass along the grass along the banks of the Empgnobual Furroughs, where many a fine funeral have been spanned unto the stretches of an the utmost of an endless effervescent death, in a passage on which I or someone like me wrote blinking like sentient willows onto one another's dewbedript, morning breath spread like gems across the furrows of the meadow of death (there are many places here I must say) I must say) I must say "I must say," not to be mistaken for the trenches of death. Anyway, this fish‑‑friendly eyes, all right, but secretly hating everybody & pretty much the random access of anybody‑‑in the shape of a greenhouse in the shape of a friendly fish into which did the customers enter, very distraught‑‑swam in a place ran with squelched & squeaking little plants, sleek & irritable plants, whiny little tendrifiddled plants serpentining like vermin under the log of the nervous rock "These are not plants, actually," registers the Voice of the Inner Fish. "They are more like liquid nerves, or the vegetating gestations of various swaddling, disembodied nerves‑‑nrves too hurt to touch. These are the nerves of babies that have disappeared, my friends. You wouldn't like them any. I like them all right, but you won't like them any." Thus the fish. So of course they imply had to look... "Maybe now we'll find out why babies disappear, enh?" muttered the Pl p?, but Chiin said nothing. In the nadadldadan‑‑which is the glass depicting one hell of an awful alterniverse‑‑Chiin was laughing his ass off, slavering as he asked, & the Pl p?'s own ass fell off, but he still was silent, & in the inerdldreni, or inner glass within the glass in that artful uniternate, there was just this rhythm‑‑"dada DOOM DOOM dum, dada DO da dada," & so on," & in the altenrate glass within the glass refracted in the enhanced glass of the otheroltor univerps was just this scraggle of weeds that were nerves (nerveweeds?) trying to scribble it like an idiotoditherit all down. & in the next room, Had Fine Wafers, they had fine wafers all of these chips & splinters purported to be glass-unto: 1) Proxy Universes One & Seven, 2) Divine Unruly Universe, 3) Le Moon Universe, 4) Le Verse of the Fine Unfitting Moons, 5) da Universe of du Intricate Holes, 6) the Universe of Bulps, 7) Universe the Unsalvageable, 8) Garage-Sale Universe, 8) Junk Universe, 7) Seeming Universe, 5) the Universe of the Splinters to the Other Universe (have we done this one?), 1) the Candle of your memories melting down, 0) the End of the Universe, Manypain, Universe, the Universe, & the wisps of the Whole Damn Goddam Universe, & all manner of other conditional imposter subjunctive vucking fabrications, fakes, & hoax all just nicked in apostrophes just like this humiliating universe, come to think of it, & when leaning like the sixteen-foot face of a movie hero contraposto to just bt one of these fine & crafted chips, why you could see this weasley little loser touch his cheek, a sigh but the microcosm of an anagogical sigh, a sigh misbegotten, I'm afraid, in the vacancy of sighs, not a breath but a drop of blood, a sigh, containing the pain of this unimaginable, blue grief inside the tear inside the unit in the corner of the inside eye. "Hm," sniffs Chiin, stepping back to look like somesorta conoisseur. "Huh." SUMPTIVE BIN BUT-ONE "I'm looking in particular for weapons ah that don't exist," Chiin told the Pl p?. "Ah," the Pl p? replied. "I'm not sure. I lack my the surety of my usual certitude on that. Boy‑‑I've never been asked that within the bifurcative vergents of my assorted be-befores or disarraying clusters of my mixed & sundry yores! But ahh...let me see me see... OK. OK, my friend. You have a deal. Bypass weaponry, weaponry of shunt‑‑that would be somewhere in the Hodly Homper. Lessee...yas...yas. Here in the subjumctif drawer, I'd posit. Posit-scrummage disarrayment bin, Sumptive Bin...Sumptive Bin...ah! Here we are, sir‑‑specifically Sumptive Bin But-One, subjumptif drawer of the Hodly Homper, just like I said." He hadn't said, but Chiin looked in anyway. & there they were, the Weapons of Never, simmering & smarting quite recognizably, snorting hey & shifting like culpable figures of a choir or guilty members of a line-up, the light from inside each of them redoobiling onto each of them, if you catch the meager meanin' of my driff. These were they‑‑precisely they the weapons she'd been firing. Nonweapons from the Hodlybim‑‑no wonder they'd hit missing him! FUTURE ONE (COPS NEVER CLARIFY) "Oh that," mutters the Pl p? (flying upward like a ghost toward the light of present time), & with a strange disconsolance‑‑but then one noticed feelings, faces, aspects of being found astray within inadvertent stratagems of dream. "That there's a kyewg." "A 'kyewg'?" The Pl p? took on the laquered tones of someone who can't help himself. "It's just a box that sits inside you. But you can't buy it. I can't sel it to you. Why, I could give this box to you, but you wouldn't like it. It wouldn't work out. He paused purringly. "I-it sits inside you, right in here," & he touched Chiin's chest which flushed with a radiance of blue & a friendly radiance within the blue which was of a lighter, kinder blue‑‑not quite blue, & not quite friendly either, but smiling, definitely, for him & into him & from & for the depths of into him. Chiin made a face or two & delicately rubbed the meccas of his chest. "Why can't I buy it?" "Forbidden by frijj!" the Pl p? rather snapped. "Strictly forbidden & illegal, friend. Anyway, it's just a memory-leech‑‑just a thief, very smartass & talkative." Chiin stood stoically, murks of suspicion hanging from his eyes. "I sold it once. But it came right back." "The buyer brought it back?" "O no‑‑one can't bring anything back. When I looked, it was back." The pleep stared at the thing as if it were filled with light. Chiin's face was all cramped as it were in stammers. "'It was back?'" "It was back, my friend‑‑right here in this cabinet," He had a light of madness shining from below. "The buyer of the kyewg ceased to exist. The frijj talked to me & left, & then I saw the kyewg was back, as if I had never sold it. I called the frijj back. They took the kyewg, but they came right back. They had lost a fridget, you see. They had 'the remnants of a fridget' (they would never clarify)." "(Cops never clarify)" reponded Chiin, bags hanging grandiosly under his eyes, stealing darkness from the greatness of the sky. "You can bet the frijjs were upset. A frijj had ceased to exist‑‑& the damned kyewg was back. Well, those frijjs took the kyewg again‑‑heedless frijjs. But they came right back after that, having lost another frijj." "And the kyewg was back?" "Yea, the kyewg was back again. Or it had never left. Or something. Anyway, the frijjs came back to inspect it, quite a number of times, but they never took it again. & they told me never to take it, or sell it. So it's illegal to sell it, pretty much." DECIDEDLY XFEAN GREY Anticipatory Frost® was everywhere, preceding your feet in formations like the coursings of a fern, intricate symbologies & silken colors reflecting on your worthiness, your fate, as it were all decided ore it was decided. The Xf Buildings recoiled & got blocklike & even more Decidedly Xfean Grey & insanely grey & more densely unimaginably impossibly specifically Grey. They get greyer & greyer & broke subtly into more & more illusive blocks‑‑structures that cannot possibly exist‑‑& wince like the virgin all blubbered oer with cum as the frost rolls onto them. Disgusting weather, Chiin thinks. This was the dry chill of protowinter‑‑nothing like the colossal color structures of the real & deadly thing, yet already straining his fucking buffers. Fucking buffers, he thought. & he thought of light in a marble washbowl, a perfect morning in the life he'd never lived. He wanted to sigh, but the suit said he couldn't. How ever did the Xf find their way around these strangling, unsigned streets, anyway? & did the Xf realy come from here? Did anyone ever come from Xf? No‑‑one suspected the Xf had been engineered for Xf by the ejjetineers. "Your parents are on Xf," * said. "Not that you have parents. But the ones responsible for forcing you to live‑‑they're on Xf, *." "What the hell is Xf?" "You don't know Xf? Xf? The most fabricated world of all? Outside of iospace, that is?" "Oh yea‑‑Xf. I know Xf," Chiin replied, though he knew no such thing. He could not shake his shame about not knowing things, & he was therefore memorizing all the time, as well as lying all the time BI-GOD "Would you like to land in spatial patterning?" asked the * {ship} with some distaste. We could all taste metal like fillings fillinf the questionable heavymetal lucid hijinxéd mesoaire (which was this bland air made for everyone, even your corrosive vacuum-dwellers, such as the Blelm OK? (the Blelm, who are, come to think of it, the only corrosion-prome vacumm dwellers anywhere the quarries of the sourthern universe, & who the hell are the Blelm (!) to bedull our flaffid air, the drab bastards, anyway? (By the way, try not to tell any member of the Blelm that I called them bastards, OK? I am not afraid of the Blelm, but they know the Brub, you know. & we are all afraid of the Brub from another indistinct loss of a novel dealing with the dealings of the feckless, rolling Brub.) "Why...sure," Chiin gurgled, snuffing the patended mintular kryxtles© of the singular bombardment of the breath of the gasp dying from its own last breath (!!!) of CRUFF!, his pollenation imbibement suave lozenge glide-flux aviator ring, which was the name & the essence of his drink Id guess you call it. "This means we will land in the context of space, within the context of flying, you see," added the ship to a * with his nose stuck deep into his Cruff to snuff the udder shame of his nescience or the Üdderschame of his nescience or the last outer shade of the last eclipse of his languid utterance. A sun comes liquidly to view. "Lovely!" cries Chiin, exhaling that sweet pollen that did make all the women sigh. & it was lovely, too. Hell, it was lovely through & through as they came in on ship mode, employing the grid demarcations of your spatial constants & proprioceptic cautions of your various ocular (or, as in the case of your Hyldelazhios, auracular or oldevacuor arrays) arrays arrays in the display of God's visionary day. "This is beautiful!" everyone enthused. "'Snot real," sniffed this peevish Xylian ship, but he seemed well pleased. NOTHING LIKE A SUN So in they went‑‑not through haphazard clouds fulgent with the sheen of impossible suns, not through random-access astroid belts or various Variegated Clutters of Lustrous Junk, much less your merry rogues waving at them from the far manic distance of afar nor the sharp gleamings of * moons known to be nothing more than dream & nothing less than moons in an astral-twinkling dream, & not past vacuum caves fairly howling with their emptiness, cavemouths agape like the faces of a thousand races petrified by doubt, & with rocks straggling from the toothless caves engaged in light, engaged in an illustrious paralyzing light, & with rock-worlds grokked in their entirety by the vapid nothingness of their vapid, sterilized sand (belonging to nothing, that sand!), clusterworls hung on their various arbitrary arcs of forgotten randomness & various, inferior grades of subregotten sand, sub-snad, dirt, rot, crap, & the crazed entherowlds of the crazed netherworlds of the gas giants sleeping blue inthe bluish wilderness in cones of penumbral scorn flung thoughtless from one lost, omitted sun (really a rumor really...nothing like a sun) Well hell no! Their sun‑‑the Xfs' sun‑‑was a perect cube. That's right‑‑a distinguished, perfect cube but for a jot of festoonery‑‑ornamental traceries upon its "sheened & smoothéd planes" & its insinuated colorations & the coroprate logo falling like the incandescent edges of Dedeenktal data-paper, which is a sort of torn-and-vacant sort-of-snow, down the hatchet edges of the shield-menisces of its beaming faces & faces & faces drippedalong the cartoon cheeks of the incidental phasal faces dinkled like dimples down the wimples sheening the idiocies of diversly reassuring faces, which the Xf they were Xf they were always channeling through the mahogany panels o your senses, where your sense here were understood to be the richly paneled houses of that special class, The Ridiculousy Enriched (& belie me, the Xf all claimed to be rich), & gettingback now to that cube‑‑a plain & perfect cube, you will remember‑‑but fore the aforementionéd butfore & for its goddamned beveled edges (!) & that most smarmy, provoking (equals guilt-provoking) poke-provocative smile, & its name (Larry...Larry the Goddamned Sun), Larrylarry through the carefully-placed planes & the well-posted moons of this gorgeously unnatural supernormal system of Xf, through contextually layered, manicured atmospheres (smiling like airy lovers), down to the landscapes of one finely refined planet after another, with even its darknesses systemarized, Xf had Artificial System marked all over it, & the Xf‑‑like most cohmsprux‑‑seemed almost imperceptibly proud, standing amongst their mad plants varved like buffalo, where buffalo zare understood as long, meandering coils of machine-shaped leaves, furrows & bowers, labyrinths & burrows, phase-changes of intricate, lathed moldings & thumbprint traceries‑‑glint with revelations, nothing less‑‑& ecletic hypergardens riddled with allusions unto All Gardens Everywhere, & themselves full of miniature gardens, of course‑‑the tiny timberlands of Meem & Jakshtro & Goaroaeui, the blind, excandescent blossoms of Qing (absorped in these special lightsops, lightsops, that they have‑‑made in miniature like the lost lense of the Pope's SPECIAL MAGIC SUNGLASSES!!! refracting their fires to the very Xfean core brewing its grand ineluctable blow-up some-blow day up-blow by-day bi-God, not to mention your talking gardens, chattering in intricate crystals & in sentences throwing sparks about like wheels, semantic gardens & thought gardens & that hilariously famous Garden of the Miserable Musicians (& never such a blue bunch have you neverseen!) & the eerie little Garden of Meltings (pictured like a landscape of candles melting like Dali dreaming & yet scintillatingly conscious of his waking dream not to mention the opium-dream of his waking dream & the lucid dream sitting like God, like the Moon in that grade-school play which play which featured God as Moon or the Moon just playing God, explaining all these lesser dreams to his forgotten lesser children, his frozen children, his beautiful little frost-children (this is us I am talking about) exhausted from running naked in those very frosted dreams those naked dreams & those dreams so full of apostrophes) & the garde of fruit that caused the downfall of the serpents (with the race of the serpents tending the dirt of the gardens, shamefully, down below beneath anything we could ever by the Goddess of the Suns be'llow'd to see), & the arden of forgotten & that forgetful, silly garden, & the gardne where they take you, freshly rescued from your own lethal dead vacant excandescent fucking memories, the Garden of Vacancies all very neatly laid out, you understand, & the snarled garden or the gnarled Snarden of Impossibilities und die Garten of Misumbralspandings & the various Gardens of the Vatious Incomprehensibilities (the air in these suckers yes the air fluting with floralamulae, flooting with flootational floalamulae, as vibrantly incomprehensible as the words of the dying physics, wherein physics take to be as the Dying Physicist, finally dying of brilliance in the rotless gleam of his own dying incomprehensible chair, & stuff like that, & THE GRANDILIQUOSITIES OF MAY and the ridiculously redundant ridiculous beebpames or beebpames ridiculous bleeding somehow informatively passing through the garden of the inner beedpames passing with reluctant molecuphemeral deezy ease inane pariformation through your temples or whatever passed therefor, making the temples cling & one's hair (if any) or follicles (if any) or or antennaefaeny or shootsifinny curl or curl up just a bit, saturating your mindstuff with this Xf-intelligence (Xfintlligence that had to be washed out later, up in the pressure cone of your Very Owne Hotel which was something they had there, where you lay like a chilly maggot dreaming you had a hotel all your own, what with superfluous rooms of variegated loves & joys & despairs & rooms of heartaches & rooms full of nothing but the word yes in fatty, azure letters crammed to the everlovin' brim what with if I may-may grandiliquosity beyond the knowledge even of the Grandiliquosities of May & the vapors of the Evermay, which is this May they have on Neth, which is one pf the worlds we have in the Room of Worlds within one of the rooms in the Ballroom there at the center of hell, I mean hotel, I mean the center of Hell Hotel here at the Center-of-Hell Hotel right here within the flux, friends, the fluxless flux, here friends, of of towndown phucking Phrinedde, which is not the Xfean capital city, but which is generally regarded‑‑even by the government‑‑as as Xf's phunquiest city!!! & so what the hell, & any way each sep ar ate Xf e an ci ty the image-containment neural-nexit field of every other Xfean city, such that each Xfan city, whate'er its size, is the same proportionate Xfean city they first constructed out of light, out of these little tothpicks of light, during the Year of Impossible Engineering, during the Decade of Feats, during what they called for a whie the Xf Century, during the onslaught of the fall of the Ikkissles, the creators of Xf, the Xfean builders and/or Xfeal hyperarchitects, now dropped out of context PERMANENTLY!, but as I anyway think I was alleged to be heard to be said to be saying, you or at least someone a great deal like you (& what does THAT imply, friend? Hmmmm?) was washing out the blue of the supersaturated Xf self-commentary the Xfean bleedpanes (special technology) snuck into your heads, creating many heads that were really virtualy heads, or at least virtually virtual heads anyway, not that the Xf the Xf would ever ever fill you in. You arrived, for example, with the structure of the entire Xfean city stuck like an arrogant bolt inside your head. If you were given to dreams you were given a dream throughout the city, swimming its streets like a Opnacalion minnow, or like a school of exuberant xyysies, which are guppies kicked back suave upon the Plane of Intelligence, just a bit south south by south southwester of the lucent mucoid Planes of Indifference where you could, as i say, could dream your way through the city, all night, every night. You could do very lttle else, actually, other than that, that, that & standing on one foot in anxiousness, assuming you had one foot & were ah "gifted" with "anxiosness," gazing in anxiety at Tulg, their perlous, vermillion sun invading town darkling on his bingemurpled chopper, wiping the wie off his mush with a potent flick * of the tibulum, if you are gifted with tibulum, my friend, that, or do some more beebpames, Xfean "entertainment" beadpames in the frame of which succulent univerps everything grows like orderly berries down their cosmic, incandescent groves toward perfect symmetry. Excites some, bores everyone. Everyone dies in excited boredom, in the motel Excited Boredom flashing dismally * at the verges of the idge of the spark-lit "town." "Town" was in quotes up there. It came out like "'town,'" or something like that, which I think is terribly funny. These were the neatest, sweetest, most orderly dreams you could ever wake up screaming from. This was if you didn't shampoo with that azure stuff (they provided, mind you, at behest of the Sector Governants. This was not the Xfs' idea. To those who called Chiin a thief, he would offer the following refutation. He offered the following refutation, followed by a gesture so very viscerally potent in its grim spoliation on the accuser's fucking nerves he would heed these thousand spoilers I spoilers fling before you like swiimpurlz, so ardent with light, through the untold hesitations of the infinte night. The refutation, then, that while he may have been alleged to have been said to had been having been alleged (or is it said?) to have made many things disappear, these things have never turned up, say, at Chiin's house haddy-had-he-houfe or on one of the tangled black markets of the so-called shops of the strange or of the vivid air, whatever that means, nor reappeared anywhere, so down this branch of your unconditional nerve, blind with rain in the supermoist hyperfrigid Extepelian protodawn, he was at worst an annihilator. But he actually denyied (gesture coming) that things had disappeared. Nothing ever disappeared, he said, certainly not by his hand (except he didn't have a hand (excpet he didn't know really what really elsewhat what to say) except). If it were him,so Chiin wendt, he would be handing hand mirrors out handmere to each specific molecule. So the thing's still there, but with the molecules holding up mirrors to their mirrors upselves, refulgent with their own reflected darshan. Chiin wendt to places where things are very incomplete, very uncertain. Someone or something had been trying to drive him mad. Correct that. Someone or something had been taking chunks of existence, or making them appear to go away. --Chiin took certain inhibitions of the *. Now they're relaly getting somewhere. --Chiin took a certain aspect of the *n program, which used to cause madness quite a lot. It ran much better now, he felt, & gave the appearance in fact even fact of not yet stop run running ever, & how much better tis one was. --Chiin had he Chiin he had a few things Chiin keep. Very special, usually problmatical things, such as the famous self-contradictory government of Ioo. He had to see how this thing worked... --People ingest the stupid symbolizations of actions & beings. At least Chiin think it's stupid. Stupid beings! & now the Gesture of the Thief.... COLLAPSED HALF-UNIVERSE OF THE ALLEGED MURDERATION or OR GRAIN OF THE IMPOSSIBILITIES OR Ladoga Bojje was following Chiin because (his lawyer said for him to say hethought she blieved Chiin took some essential part of her femininity‑‑like her femininity done come in these pale, airy divisons, for Chiin if Chiin were to steal to steal away! Nevertheless, she had stuck him with this blame, & she was indeed pursuing him, all the more frightening because she didn't seem to have murder in mind. I mean, we could tell if she had murder in mind because 1) it would show up on the * amber solids we can shoot thoughts through in this age, when the development of everything has developed into everything, & 2) there would be murder. There could me no murder in the first place here, you see. Nay‑‑no murder here, because it (murder) murder (it) was before the crystal daw of Life's Perfect Memories which is Life's Pristine Memory which is the first memory (allowed) of unconditonal (legal) life (was) in fact legislated by the Congress of Subsistence or the Conditional Congress or the Congress of Surds or (before that) the Ylem Congress into pale increments answering only to the Two Legitimate Means of Death, or licit or permissible dying, of which not murder is not not-one. Murder is deathcause NOTONE, not allowed. Deathcause NOTTOO is by any oter means, so the only way you die here is to be dead already. & they say they're working on that. I mean, they1 say they2're working on that, where that equals collapsing of death, equals various collapsings of of death death death in which even this grand ineluctable form would, much like Ladoga's murder of me, compact by means of autozip maneuvers which are these strange maneuvres that we euvres that we do-have here into a sheeries of ever-more limpid curiosities, or grain of the impossibilities, till there were just abstractions, gossamer membranes of a sheer idea, with one (1) Goddam Canceled Version of me wrapped in the block of ice in the frozen middle‑‑this known as the "collapsed half-universe of the alleged murderation, your honor" Chiin felt that if she killed Chiin there would just be this embarrassing little collapsed half-universe of Chiin in murderation (legal jargonese), & she would be fined. But like I say, Ladoga Bojje was not trying to murder Chiin. She was stalking him for some grand cause, not just stalking him for the cause of stalking him, but it was a cause nothing stolen can reveal the causes of, or the nature of, that is, or the stumbling through another Yillt forest of the very palest blue probabilities. She was stalking Chiin in order to do something fearfully improbable to him. Chichi-Chiin-chichi-Chiin chi chi. She was going to inflict the wounds of her unborn children into him, till he staggered off into the realms of invisibility, which is not o say blindmess, the realms of blindness, in the form of her own damned murdered children, doomed as they be to nothingness. XF GRAPES The Xf looked like large lumps with knobs on them, or mountainous knobs with lumps all over them, expressing various floating-point, fractal imageries with l.a.o.t. expressive of perfect Xf poems expressed electronically expressed poems expressed like the dew on the myriad faces of the morning dew or like oil beaded on the brew‑‑O, the serious serious brow of the Moste Serious Brew!‑‑of the fine quanquana nut, or like those lost & final words, words sublimated into the finest very blush of nothingness, blush of purple nothingness, blush of an embarrassed night, blush of one ever-remembered, humiliating night, blush of humiliation, blush of night, rather like those lost words of Laefana as he blurtz his last poems, words unfurled to nothing in the drawn empurpled night...in other words, pure & perfect love-poems engraved in the etch of perfect, pure-and-proven mathematics, with nothing of shame or humiliation in any of it, opne presumes, which however wouln't seem to explain the Xfs' many shells of disguises, unless the disguises are somehow part of the perfect mathematics of the Xfs' own forms. But they would never claim that. No, your Xf would stop short of ever claiming that. "They would just enjoy their eningmatism," as &, that most intransigent critic of the Xf & proponent of deradication would say. Deradication of the Xf. Reduction of the Xf down from superrace status, down further proponents would suggest down past the levels of fractal admiration through the various phylae of quantum enumeration past the worlds of tensor rumination & the subworlds of integral numeration through the sweeping goddam ghostwhirls of ghostworlds of totitive doubt (& superdoubt) & doubt & super (doubt) andoubt andought & indubitible hyperdoubt & the doubt of my hypertext doubt, past various surds & unreal radicals, past the Mountains of Figura & the waves of the Sea of Primes, through the ofreets of the repetendal Fluxions of Modulum, well beyond the tentative branches of Tensor & the hairlike Roots of Totient, down‑‑so the thoery goes‑‑to the level of subsentient equation, where, they have the wonderful nerve to say, the Xf themselves would be happier. "They wouldn't need those sheathes of admiration," which is what the Xfs' sheathes of hallucination are called in the light of admiration, let's face it folks, of the entire universe. But it's just sour grapes. Xf-envy, Xf-begrudgement, envy & rancor & hatred of the some-say-beautiful Xf, or simply Xf drazheuzho, which is a sort of grape, hence Xf grapes. TWENTY TIERS DOWN THE DIMINISHED MINOR IN-MINUSCULATIONS SCALLOPS OF THE IMPLITUDES OF PHASED DIMINISHMENT There had always been eff or dysphasic crud or timedew, & Chiin had always been a skub. Eff was entropy dew or tarstuff accumulated off the excess of time or an excess of uncertainty God had given to us, or something, & I was one of a crew of idiots, sent round the Baarberr ectors, usually, where there was penty of * {filth, crud}, cleaning the entropy off things. A small band of entropic idiots, none more idiot than he. For a very long time all we could see of him was a clothed hand winding down the sinews of a Jyystyrian body wimpling off in the darkness of perpetual mindless twilight (& the dreamo of the Jyyst, coming to life with vivacuou sigh, sighing :Thank you!" & handing hm & handing him some sort ofeocious goddamtip. There were entire races swallowed in darkness, & nothing but these detested ministers to tend to them. They saved no one. They helped no one. They just wiped & wiped & mindlessly, mindlessly, wiped as the eff poured down the back of the wiping hand. It was hopeless, but the * were too dumb to know. {Chiin was one of a crew of idiots, sent round cleaning things. It was very exciting when the owners hung round. The owners were very very sexy‑‑very sexy. It all changed when Chiin found some sort of intelligence heightener. It was then he found he could steal aspects of things‑‑qualities & parts of things‑‑to the point that the vicitms didn't even know they had been robbed. It carried with it a heady sense of power, along with a sense of disturbing responsibility‑‑a very unwanted responsibility‑‑which he doesn't understand.} Chiin would compact hissself & crawl into the {dolls'} houses. That was his specialty. Chiin was the only one who could really do it, "like having a goddam Vuor reducer in your goddam pants!" as * would say. He'd crawl through the window of the dolls' houses, by which time he was every bit as small & as tiny as a microscopic doll. & he would clean these places. Things get infected with a strangeness here, or infected with a strange sort of exhausted discouragement, arguing the imminent end of this imminent end of this imminent universe, or else some sever sort of lassitude in God, suggesting boredom with us (& that is bad, I would think). & into the lesser dollhouses inside those ones, which you would think were more immaculate even still, but which were in fact more compacted & in need of the most radical of cleaning. They * bragged they could make anything disappear, but I tell you‑‑there were...let's call them items‑‑there were items in some of these dolls' houses, say, twenty-odd tiers down-odd the diminished minor in-minusculations scallops of the implitudes of phased diminishment, items most sordid & base & bad & vile, dirty items that had to be expunged to what they called mere ghostments of themselves or of the selves of their former selves, becoming mere hallucinative ghosts of their former selves, faintly glowing. Brother Chiin always felt like a thief when he did these cleanings, & they wree cleanings, he thought, no one other than the * {which is this strange & resident sort mirror that knows everything} would ever know. He was conscious of temptation. He was surprised. None of them * were aware of temptation. It was known that none of them could steal. But when Chiin involuted farther, he found there was temptation‑‑just a tiny, expectant thing, blue as an unborn baby‑‑which grew in magnitude as Chiin grew grew grew smaller. Finally it stood in the room with him, precisely Chiin-size, & seemed rather smugly glad to see him, as if he had been expecting him. & Chiin was cleaning out the remnants of this ghost which came in the form of crescents. I mean, you couldn't even tell what this ghost had might have once had been, just with these lucent crescents glowing vainly in the * air. & temptation was helping hi, like his helpful cousin, the ultra-idiot Umpligeug, blessed with sheer nonexistence, & he didn't say anything or look at him, Chiin-him, & in fact seemed focused on the job to the point of crmaping, so sombre did he look, as if he were doubting everything all of a sudden. They were working, & there was Chiin-he & this mysterious ghost, & this one time Chiin up up & stole the ghost. He received at that moment the genius of theft & emerged like a vapor from the dolls houses * with the invisible unseen smile of the perfect thief. CRUSHEDCRYXTALYM TOUAEMS You should have tried to see Chiin's eyes‑‑like the phases of apathy down sequential tunnels of a Rorrimian Mirror, so effortlessly, so hopelessly detached!‑‑as he did nothing forever but "brush dryest Formes of Light oer impossible powders," as the incredibly boring first book of the first of the Songs of His Exploits says, or as he buffed the contours of a lost fragrance of madness, taking the forums of a curtain in the awesome lunar halls of an awful Noaol (probounced with a wailing interrogative of the wobobobboling lips‑‑"Oa-ao-oa-ao-oa-ao-oa?" quite comely enough to make one "cum & cum," as the Kids® used to say before the Kids disappeared), or as he crept humiliatingly on his awkward knees, reaming the furrows of some longlost ecstasy (probably sexual, but too murked to tell, possibly religious ecstasy, back when they had that here, possibly the ecstasy of an impossible idea, or the energy you expend keeping your hopes up & the seeping loss of life attendant thereong) barely blinking, much less giving out a good long grunt, at the glimpsed winces of goldness rumbling out, like the injured memory of a passionate thunder of the kind they just don't make here anymore, or * wiping the tarp someone had put across the glazed an dintricate center of a crushed crystallie town (which was all they ever had around here‑‑crushed-crystaline towns, crushedcryxtalym touaems!), in supposed preparation for the act of cleaning the shatteres of a shatere town, in imposible preparation for the cleaingof this once-presuméd town, & puttingup the last piece of crystal & then not even turning round, his cloth held vaguely at the ready for the next overgrowth of eff spreading like a ribbon of mad recordings of some lost inanity as if from the emptied, long long emptied, Tombs of the Loft Inanities... or Chiin, cleaning the ribbons of madness recording the chambers of a lost eternity, erasing grains that kept whole continents alive but they were the WRONG GRAINS & then tracong down & erasing, not the records of the deaths of various continents, but the traces of the sundry acts of erasure that had occurred before him‑‑perhaps some other crew, perhaps himself & himself's own crew, the tracers of the memory of having erased these deaths of continents having themselves been erased by God knows what kind of crew, erasing then the drifts of the continents, erasing continents. They all had plumes that said this was all eff, this was all timedew, so they would often find themselves sitting, talking quietly about something the referants to which had been abandoned so achingly long since down echo corridors (the flat slam of doors on their paddings of dust, the hudshlocks of memory, the silence with its distinctive smell, the aching still), & as their plumes like so many dour old Scots informed them all was essentally eff & nothing more, what little dabs of temptation they saw like paintflaws along the edges pf the eye of the agéd master they would suck dimensionless into elongations of dimension tubes. (So the tybes contain temptation, eh?) Yea, the tubes contained temptation, I would say. THERETHERE What they would do was they would suck things into these mobial spiracles of dew they used which were, unknownst to them, known as dimension tubes. This was their basic equipment of this most rareified suction into half-abstraction of a half-abreaction of a half-reaction. Anything would go in there, of any absolute size or conveyance of meaningor fractionated attitude‑‑anything you thought you could point the inklings of tube un to (& every day you found new things you could draw the tube into, though it wasn't a tube, just a smattering or a smatteration of the absolute relative inklingly-invisible visible light of the recoiling lions of physics they had absolutely functioning functionless here & where here meant there & where there meant there there meant therethere‑‑light that you waved at anylight you thought with the inklings of your hand, except that they were not hands, assuming that's confusing enough)‑‑& there indeed & in the withers of a tiny fact (like a broken tree inside desiccations of an awful crystal vat) comes a time along the walking lozenges of a simple singularity called "time" here when Chiin was cleaning out curiosity. He was cleaning it out & drawing like the fluids of the mythical Ether of the Pastl Ethers this curiosity he got from the looks of this sleeping woman sleeping in this woman's curious world that he, world that had charred from the instance of its own curiosities, & he was charged like up with this like curiosity, & he saw temptation slipping through a fork of hallucinative leaves, & he drew up his tube to suck it, & then he paused. He sucked it up all right, that temptation, but then he wondered where it went. he wondered, suddenly, just how many temptations he had drawn into his own dimension tube his own dimension tube of his own dimension tuibe, & suddenly he wanted to see his temptations‑‑where they dwelt & how they might have aligned themselves & their qualities as they may nor mayn't've existed in the chrome hushings of the silver wilderness tube, & what he had been all so tempted about, & what did his plume know anyway, & in short, friends, he went in, because he wanted his temptations back. Just to know what they had been, you understand. The innihlatians raised him, stretched out a long, illusory childhood down azure-crimson bowers & tough forests studded with crystal leaves, etc., then experimented on him wildly, putting him through many phase-changes, detchaed from him his memory & will, hung with his identity like gossamer nothings in a closet choked with strange, darkly insidious coats bearing lethal secrets within indimensional© pockets lined with the razories of being, & made him do the most hilariously humiliating things. This he had been told, & this he had seen on the (uncut, unaired, unedited, unseen) show they had done about him. He liked to think the show had been pulled off the ether by some force that needed him, he liked to imagine. It happened in the case of exploding memories. I mean, he went to this one bright sector bightsector called Blaer known henchfroth as The Sector Where the Memories Blewing Up upsector-up. Yea, Blaer seemed to be expiring constantly, & everywhere the everywhere the atmosphere was popping popping thin blithering vapors of material mists. Yea, thangs were righteously explodindere, specifically memories (were (seen (to (be (ex) plod) ing) here), more specifically more specific memories, & they & they had been (led in their (sleep) to (their sleep to) believe this was an area of exploding memories‑‑specifically of the specific sort explding sordid memories. Apparently, so went the story, memories had just started exploding here‑‑which, as any buff the properties of memories of doth know, the inherent pressures keeping memories memories is very much likely todo, & in any case this area, or sector, or scene, or zxryyn had seen something which was causing the inhibitation membranes of their memories to like explode right in the air! This was all called known as expldong the explodng memories of explodng Blaer Blaer Blaer. Don't ask me why this thing is so. Don't ask me why. & like nothing could help it, neither, because they'd tried pumping out the air‑‑just shipping the motherfucking air right out of the motherfucking sector, then & there, but the seizures kept coming. & they'd pumped out numberless other qualities too. They'd pumped out time, they claimed, & they'd pumped out the intelligence of betterment on the which of the whisch depends, but it didn't help, & they'd pumped out some of the strange & eerie variations on the blindnes of that pure & perfect subnoctural night or moonleth gnight, & sucked out as well as well sucked the variations of blindness hurt forever in the child's lost dreams inhabit & inhibit that night night‑‑but the hurting was not hindered. And, too, they'd exported in this one cavernous mass of a structure of a box the substance (submolecular‑‑more a number, really), OK the number (though really much more a sensatin lingering round the tmeple area, the temple area that everyone & everybeing has, a sensation that someone very close to me is going to going to die) all right, so the sensation (in the form of a substance, actually) all right God damn it, this substance that caused the development of one or more connections aonngst the many many Grey Galaxies of Being that exfaholy-oliate like like self-extracting Exacerbatory Files© connections from one thought to the next, but even as they sat round in this permenant eternal midnight in which their selves like high-memory swap files not din match, blinking like so many assemblies of white, detahced & eyes gloowing with their own intermittent inter inner in intemrminable (gl!nks) which are just like w?nks, they saw, or rther felt some other cousin not fell nor hear, that drastic fundatory psychic reactions still happened, that they still happened, despite this shipping out of the youthfulness of souls & this exporting of the meanings of every single (so they said) of their one-of-their-single lies, despite shipping out even the goddamned Blare of Everything, but that they JUST STILL HAPPENED & were happening. & so the subforce was forthwith called. Everyones hesitates, by the way-reluctant way, to call up your skub, because everyone is no one lying in a gutter, full of blood, unable to feel yourskub were not going to hesiate not to unnegate nor steal something very permanent & personal & most painfully intimate (they could do so, after all, so went this belief of the no-one-belief, knowna as the No-One Belief of the systemsof nonbelief of the Bliefs of the Non-Nonsectors with their blinding God-be-liefs) that they (being no one) did bethought they had, even though the basis of ths god damned belief had itself been longself since not longthought skub skubbed clean. But whattaya gonna do? In come Chiin & his team, explosions fascinating all but that most murk't ovay of eye, & stood with their dimensional brooms held up to the crying sky. It was funny, Chiin thought, as he started cleaning. No one remembered how often memories started exploding. It stood to reason, that. And, he added to the additonal *s of his thought, it served the bastards right. This business of conceiving everyone as bastards was a skub sort thing. Bt it was also a * thing. He had conceived ofeveryone as bastards ever since he had been allowed to pretend to conceive conceive. That's just how it skubbin' was, as the tough women from the coroners of their mouths do not hesitate say. & he started cleaning, & he really did have to get very close to peopelt to do this right. I mean, time had to be frozen (this was the timethey'd shipped in to the sector which as yule requoll had had its time vectored out), & he had to sail in like a lightship through frozen infinite speckles of illicit solar flares & puk up the memories, one by the agonizing lit-gold-canlde of the one one one. & so he did. A STATUE'S BLOODY EYE He root like a joyful pingout the silt-foul furrows of this statue's brow, this statue of a woman's brow here, somewhat like a forehead only much more like a brow, a goddam fucking brow, Mr.Goddam Hall, & it was a grey & a hollow brow like a brow only less so, Mr. Brow. Now he couldn't help but thinking the cleaning couldn't but help but thinking the cleaning might would go better if it couldn't help but thinking the cleaning, goddamit, & What Is More, if this rain would constant stop. I mean if constantly this rain constant wouldn't not but stop. But the rain reversed all meaning. It was grey & grainy & silty, the Evident Rain of the End of Time (time for this little universe to be running the fuck OUT!!!), & he wouldn't if he could of wished they would stop him wasting his time, cleaning out this gutter across the Edge of Time. Hell, those walls thinned out the curtains wove-d'obscure across the undeleted meanings canceling themselves‑‑I say these meanings canceling of themselves!‑‑beyond the Aztect patterns of this stone he was running through. The rain was warm, foc course. The rain inducéd fever, but of course, & metought he was a child running naked through a concrete meadow of some sort. Foreguessing himselve, he roam thro' organic eaves, colossal & most cavernous meaningful eaves, Alle o'ergro'n moste titanically, so he couldn't see who or what was chasing him, but he knew with the dullness of a dullness known in the ill-lit consciousness of dream they were going to torture him. It was a dream, so he knew they would be toruteim, but he couldn't get up that visceral charge of caring that tortures you outside of all dream, as he was runnning here trying to root his way outside this formidable dream. But really, see, he was rooting out the furrows of this woman's brow on the vert phosphorescent lip of the edge of time. I think I've clarified that. I think I've indicated how he was running, viscous with a multitude of fevers (or perhaps I omitted to like clarify that that that) I don't know the names of every switch, but they're working on it. We will fortwith forward you this lists of the names & geneologies, of the forkings & the loopings branchings oftheir anillustrous formings of their many family tree respective tree of the loopingsof aforesaid fever-family tree, doanchew worry boyut that, soon's we've run down the ragged ass of this fucking fever off, in the form of that detestable little boy who is making just things so much just much worser from himself by the runnin of the running of, let me tell you that. He was running his cleansing fluids through the furrows of her brow, & she was watching him. I mean, inasmuch as she couldn't really like reach her eye all the over into those furrows there to see him then, but that BingEye definitely not A Statue's Bloody Eye was like following him, across every second of the minuscule arc, modified constantly & reudndantly with evepresently repeating option-furrows of beief, these are the Option-Furrows of Belief Belief reodubling redupicatively back upon himself, so he was like tracers of his modified internal selves cleaning now the motions he was making of the furrows of his motions cleaning out, then cleaning them out, then once more cleaning out, once more seeing himself (with as i say the BingEye following comically himself) as I think I said before the furrows of my mention didn't said, & then moving on. "I am afraid I'll fall through," he was saying then (to her? to his comrades, lost in the aches of other furrows otherwhen? of his bosses, heavens forfend?). "What do I do when I fall through? It's the end of time here, etc.," at which etc. the passage I just wrote before almost falling through into the mostness about this falling through, I think it musta was. But he was in no ways falling through. He was just getting intimate with the furrows of this woman he was rescuing here. He was saving her, sure, but he was nicking his way far too in the furrows of her most variegated, intimate memories. He was doing his job & cleansing way too far too in, by ye Various Unmentionable heehee Standards (pardon me, heehee) of whomever oer whupever tuck the standards in, you'll parmehee, by which it evidently seemed to him he was cleaningout the Aztec channels of this statue here & risking falling forever I guess through iridecent idges of the edge of time, etc., but it as will later become apparent evidentially seemed somewhat to her that he was you know starting to take things from her & was no doubt scarring her. In any case, this he did, & in any case he did, & came as in the end of any fever to a room full of ill-lit wonders. His eyes close & so do she, & this of course was the Womb of the Curiosities or (rare) the Queer Boudoir, where he would see too many things it would seem to kill him not to take. & so he took a few. In a movement so sublime it missed e'en the quiver'd fevers of the Subtlety Frijj, he buffed up a fine pollenation in that room & drew it away. It wasn't his, but he had it, & he did then first did taste did he then but then but the fine Taste of the Perfect Thief, the taste of his own blood run fiercly cross his lips, this the blood, my friends, that would silence him forever. Never aain, in the future, would a word pass that fine barrier of blood, for a thief's first theft is his own gift of word, tasting like blood in the wounding thereof. Then he couldn't help himself. Then the silky waves of that most pliable air (an atmosphere till then perfectly secret & forever unheard) surrendered to his uprut jaggedness. I mean he was deploying yes he was these increasingly gross arrays of his invasive tumors on the submolecular level, volatile, comic-book rays like explosions in the clarity of most inviolate ice or shrieks of madness racking the sanity of innumerable neural nets (which is how our wars won anyway), or the simple upthrusting ugliness of that face you hated most to see, which is to say he was basically sacking the place. This was his first time, understand, so he was making involuntary grunting sounds (soon to be suppressed within lesser grunting sounds to be suppressed within subtler grunting sounds which can be percevied on enhanced digitalis as gunking sounds, which persist in the ether as that most refinéd sublimation of unevolved gumping sounds the fossils of what was once were in fact supping sounds, but without the gulp, the flavor, not to mention any of the umentionable moistness o those sounds. There was none of that here, I assure you. His head is all a mass of invisible files now, of course, but this was not so when. He wakes up gasping his nothingness at the ribbon of rainrish representing her door or the airless hush at the apparency of door (for this was certainly not a door) with a swollen bag of swag like the great Mother of Leeches snuggled on his shoulder there (certainly no real shoulder there or there or there), with a migraine of disjuncture standing there in its loose & soggy pants braying how imperitively must he suss up somehow how to put back this stuff & pick up the tattered rag (with his name on it) that was his life he had left inside. All thieves, even the perfect ones, even the countless Perfect Thieves of *, have this thought, which can last momentarily forever in the everhours, & which in fact does & did, & is the dusk barely visible behind his eyes as he pickes up the bag & leaves unlike a thief in his native night. It was not her door anymore, but a nameless gate‑‑some sort of park, with the rain on the ironwork just barely edged with ice. A very murky grey, yet bracingly ecstatic to breathe. You better get home. The ice forms across the ground. Soon you won't be waking anymore but just sliding like the dead child on his butt forevermore. But the ice fored righunderfoot, & he had to walk across this empty square on these thousand-year-old legs with his swag compressed up his butt. (H hadn't seen that coming on!) H had to find someplace to hide where he could hide his stuff & then hide the nothing of his stuff‑‑someplace he couldn't sleep. Thre was no team any longer, no little hutch here they could rest. No one sees how brittle is their universe until t cracks, sending them slipping down the gullies of imposible ice. So vanished life, to a strange residue much more intense than life. There was nothing to do, it seemed, but to perfect himself in the stealth of his newborn self, & to bring others into this perfection (in that none can stand the violet night of stealing by oneself, that night in which you cannot that hand you wave so violently, having stolen perforce your naked sight). THE TEEMINGIN OF HEAD He slept that night in the sector of ideas exploding just like ice, with each iceball bashing on the wall of the tidy dumpster. Of course it got all plutonic, & in the pop & puff of bitterness strange sorts of linethings formed across his face, as if diagramming some quality revealed in the oddly panicked face. First he slept atop the bag, then slept ome more (yes, he was sleeping) with the bag coiled blackly round him like a beast formed long before the Evolution of Supposéd Shape, then wriggled into the shape of an even weirder beast & then slept some more that way, then held the bottle of swag which was a bag of swag at arm's length (I think he was dreaming I think I think), then crawled his fat ass into the bag with his tattooed ass like Gully Foyle sticking out & slept most resolutely indeed (this night was going on too long!), then pull'd his head into itself, where he did not sleep. It was a warm room back when a small boy lit soft golden candle after soft golden candle in preparation for his ravishment, & as the frost of the exploding ideas of the Sector of Foresplodling Ideas melted off his head, the migraine he'd been sleeping deliquesced, together with the thought he had been sleeping in a migraine, a goddam migraine, for Chris Chrissake, & he was smelling everything. This water dripping off his nose, & he was smelling everything! Like absurdities of the one hilarious dream God makes you dream, & he laughed very delicately for a long long while. He hadn't een prepared for the long length nights. Either they had these longlength nights in this here sector or what's left of its time wound down into an endless, Blakey night. You just couldn't be sure. Anyway, he warmed himself in there (see him rubbinghis hands!), & he looked around, but he never did dry out. & it was in this special fuzzy light in which it looked like nothing would be clear. It looked that way, but you couldn't be sure. Not in this fuzzy light, that was almost not for sure. He listened to invisible clean commands teeming in The Teemingin of Head, but they were not working anymore. He had to devise a plan, so as not to be suspected, much less caught, but all he could do right now was look into this stuff‑‑like there was some fuzzy light in his eyes pouring like more rain, but it was warm rain now, so no matter how many times he did pinch his eyen he could not make out. Maybe I stole it wrong, he thought in his first ever thought (first-ever thought, not first everthought of course) of course. Maybe I forgot to steal its exact shape. But it had plenty of details & shape, resting in this canvas resitng in this light. Take this small statue of her mother here. It was positively rife with dtail & shape. It was just a matter of pressing your head in close to it till you face took on the magnetics of its field of shape...like this, see... A NOVEL OF ACTUAL CATS He had stolen the shop, stolen the consciousness of the shop, stolen the owner's identity packed up in SO MANY CRESCENT WALLOPS as they they, stolen his own memory of theft (always important) in the form of too many beads of light curling starkly round the cryptic panes of an alien alleyway or a crystal alleyway or an alleyway of the third design or a mere chip in the meremere cube of glass or cube of possible impossible light living in this cube he was staring down (with his eye situated in the cube, thus-ly...) or just another alleyway or the Altogether Alleyway, which is where, since we're all lost here, we cannot say takes place, but which, since we are all lost, most probably takes its place. & now he sat in the vacant alleyway (the unused alleyway whose essence had been stoln, but he can't of course remember which by whuch), & he was going to need plenty of these poison snikes which you dabbed with ice & pulled into your eye. Don't blame me‑‑this is how they get high so this is the alleyway where you have to get high, & so he was pulling these snikes of light into eye (& his eye makes a surreal schlump ing sound like the little whore's mouth around your spurting cock, but never mind, I can't describe that, never mind) producing a succulent sweetness or concupiscent cuteness forming caves across the menisces of his own lost faculties (lost in dark caves, those f cul ies, so that his own lost memories develop those caveblind eyes‑‑eyes which see nothing evenwhee there is noting to see, eyes of lunacy, eyes which, given light, could glow quite mad but see never see) together with the chirping of albino crickets, all in a dithering row in the saturated hue & cry of a billion poisons (be cause that's what the snikes contained‑‑these special poisons that would make you Unconditionally Blind (you could get your money back if they failed to make you fail to see you see). But it wasn't just the snikes that got the man so high on Forguesserships, no. He had quite an array. He was pouring for adhomple that that chillchill music through his nerves that made but ghostly white absences of his special nerves & echololations of his special verve, & he was setting these oonts, I say these things like tiny birds (the size of your neatly-nicked thumb‑‑there) called oonts this & that way through his heart, threading his fucking heart (which was fucking quivering, fucking scared, ready to shit its baggy pants‑‑afraid of the imminent torture, you can be) & a current of fine energies like nuanced spices if you will through some of the vacant corridors of some of his vacant corridors through some of the vacant spaces inhimselves through similar corridors in his vacancies of selves, not to mention another, through & through & I think it's safe to say that we've all been there, & he set loose Variously Incubated Animals (if you can call them that ("Animals!" (Take that!) but you cannot call them animals to breed & envelop & devolve along etiolated shorelines of his various, hypnopompic halp-realities and he poured forth paint into his furrows, & time melting like a soggy watch (he had these vials, these little marbles full of a stuff so volatile it would melt the imaes I mean images of time or melt the images of time melting the images of the images of time of time like like that) or like a Soggy Fucking Watch, & he touched those starthings to his crotch (& we won't get into this (we won't get EVER GET into this) & he lay there cuddling these little gods like cats unless they were really cats, wandered into this novel, actual cats, making this novel, against my better will, a Novel of Actual Cats rather than this novel of the most improbable acts, occurring if you will in a universe filled with bellowous bells or at least the very sound of the bellicose bells, a universe of bells then, if you rill, crawling with the hollows of air oer the backs of these invisible cats I have talked about & so therefore can't get rid of in the memory of these actual acts yes & he was popping down one Annellian tear after another likeit was going out of fact, & so was himself sobbingbelow skies of the Great Annellian Spheres where his flesh was hung among, laughing at the sight of his body racked like the melting face of a Bacon painting‑‑which was why he was taking all this stuff, after afterall: to celebrate & to get the kind of good laugh you can't affford to take unless you've taken way way too too much to ask and he configured those mildly-colored rings that came in pairs, pairs of these different-colored rings, as flat & unambiguous as intrusions of comic books into you rlife, calling into question the breathtaking tensions & the ruddy textures of life you thought was life (THOUGHT, anyway!!!) and he thought he heard this talking, & he had to grunt & try to get up & shuffle around, looking for something, whch was this great, awful effort taking place wihing the great & awful effort of this grt nd wfl dream, but he thought he heard this talking was this talking of the rings. O yea. He had taken the talking rings, now hadn't he now? ‑‑I like the fancy syntax & the rhythm of the fourth sentence below, "Inten within..." Xf is all about syntactic rhythm. THE MONSTER OF BEFORE He hunkered down in the dumpster there, did Chiin. He sat splay-leggéd pulling booty from his bag, item by item, inspecting each with un uncomprohunding nod. This went on for a long long longlong time. Intent within some sorta simian trance, he would note for example how each purloined trinket, however once abstract or massy-large, became when he held it but a nice elaboration of his hand, with its matter blending to the glass of his marbled hand. He would turn each bauble in his wrist (half a circle), then turned it half-a-circle back, then half a circle, then bobbed it in his palm, then finessed it, & finally lay the thing aside. It is verified that each rotation of his hand produced a universe of time‑‑one universal span to the to-rotation, one backward transposition to the fro-rotation. He would lay the thing aside, give it a last, proprietary look, & give it one last nod. He would turn to he next bit of contrabond. All this while he was grunting gently quite a lot, & in this way finally sorted out the lot. The bag was empty, but he groped around inside for a bit. It looked kind of gross, but he finally stopped & tried to read his watch, but his watch was evading his eye. He rumpaged round for a stolen watch, but that watch had died. It still glowed‑‑very much like some forgotten moon, in fact‑‑but it had died. He made a look very much like someone trying to look thoughtful, although there was no thought in his head. He would have to take it all back. He looked at his watch again, but his watch only gave him a disgusted look, much like your mother would if she knew what you'd really done. Surely there was no time to take it back. Surely in a moment dawn would crack. He looked at his nonexistent watch. It had withdrawn in disgust from his idiocy. He looked around the dumpster, as if an entire community stood by appraising him. But it was just like everything: nobody knew enough to care nor cared to know. It was still dark when he got back to her door, which hd kept on chaningng form, to the point where it wouldn't be known as a door anymore, but as a small foreign country of imponderable morals. He'd uniwittingly stole the clock that manufactured dawn, but this he couldn't know. So he tried to act as fast as his pure-clear silence would allow, as he lobed his transposition musket for this unusual return. He presumed she was there & presumed she was still sleeping as he softly he went round her room, emitting soft simulacra of her stuff with a tubular bloop which must might have been fufunny. Each was just a soft emnanatin of light, at first. Each quivered like a jelly as it tried to come back. Yea, they were trying to come back to their like once-accustomed mass, but these things have poor memory, & soon her room was moony with thse tremulous things. She woke up from the sheer & eerie loveliness, just as he was trying to be gone. But their eyes met, he with a liquid sigh in hand (from that series of breaths he had forgot he had forgot he stolen), she with the brittle frailty of surmise‑‑but not for long. She let out a hwar-hwoop & came after him, & he was throwing her OWN STOLEN BREATHS at her to try to slow her down (which just filled the room with gasping as my Theory of the Lies of Air preduced). Hysteric weapons bristled out‑‑doubtless thoughts of His Owne Maddnesse bursting outward into outto inward the masses of these cold wet great bingstatuesques‑‑& O how backed he like to an awkward aching crab yeshedid round & round her room, as she came at him like a sheer plane of madness like nightmares eruptiung in his face. Cornered, he vented a comical little squeak & threw the bag all over her. He knew this was bad, knew she would rip through ten thousand times the monster of before, & he fled that chamber of odzure in much of a curvy streak. CRESCENTS OF SO CUSTOMARILY DEW Like many a lesser thief, Chiin decided never to steal again, & thereby only moreso than they developed thus such an infinitely crabbed & dapper sublety to the craft of his breathless breath... ..... He was cleaning out a burned sector in a world that had very much burned (its stars misplaced, its songs all gone, incredibly its people still just walking about, looking not for water nor the end of thirst, nor even the concept of the end of thirst, but for the lost ideational root of thirst itself, bingeyes, just wandering & trying to clear their powdered throats, asking visitors like Chiin, too pursey with liquids, who would spray them with a synthetic variant on that once-so-fractionated quality known as moistness, but they were too burned. They were too too bunred‑‑it did not connect. (It was enough to make you cry, butcept you was afraid to cry, broken grammar lying like the broken thought of twigs dreaming arid dreams dreams of the ashes of these erstwhile twigs & the ghosts of twigs gazing down at the bark of their own vapid bodies, or so they dreamed they thought.) & Chiin was cleaning this stuff up, his movements just so slightly miiaturized with the pressure of the normal trying to stay within itself, when he noticed he was vacuuming the glee off the edges of the sun. This place had a sun, Sun, Subbsunn the Sublte, they called it, sure, nothing other than a jolly stellar clown with his jingly blue cap & his fat lips painted round like the lapses in a greasy racetrack & his fair eyelashs like brittle Niniscian gorgsproots & his tongue (& his tongue!) & his gaudy Tongue of the Subparentheses, tasting light, so obviously asting the light & the way his flesh quiviverered like the face of a bloond baluum'd with his with his muddled honksters laugh, a sun, forsooth, & a subtle fellow... ...and like I was saying this Subbsunn sun had like a single great unbespectacled eye, as suns in the lostness of these strewn sectors & inkling segments & and Crescents Of so customarily dew, & the sun there had a certain spent sort of glee to the edges of its eye, eye-naturally, & look how he was up there by the sun, calmly vacuuming with a tender swing & a sway, sucking the glint right off the edges of its eye even as the sun shone there looking at him. SUBB ALARMED! the sun's bright headline which is how suns talk likesaid. "Ah," stammered Chiin, who hadn't given it nor anything anything like that scattered tht scattered that thought, "Just cleaning your eye, Mr. Sun?" SUN PROTESTS ABOVE! Chiin looked slyly round, a shadow in these beaming messages, then swept the delicate broom across Subbsunn's subtle brow...and thus stole Subb's awful subble thoughts. & now Sunn now smiled amazingly, his flares churing cheerily, & seemed much as before in this strange strange sector, & Mr. Chiin's work did thus went on an dth ewor kwen ton a ndt hewo rkwe nton. COP'S VIRTUAL BLINK or TUCKING LITTLE STUFFS INTO THE GATES OF NIL This happened to Chiin. "Mr. Chiin?" "Yes?" "You work in this sector, Mr. Chiin? You work in this sector, yes?" "No." "Yes, Mr. Chiin." "Not normally, no." "Ah! I should say you are working in this sector, Chiin?" "Ah...yes. What seem to be the problems, officers?" "Funny you should ask, Mr. Chiin." The officer looked up casually to the great green grinning grünning sky. "It would seem our Subbsunn's giving out strange headlines, Mr. Chiin." Chiin tried to give no reaction, but the signs reacted wildly, psychotically, all over & around all over him. Suddenly he was wet & nested & covered in membranous signs & he just went mad. "Sicky signs," he muttered, pulling them off ALONG WITH HIS SKIN. "I suppose that's sad to hear?" He said this in a drawn-out, airy manner, like a composer's sweeping pen. Ballooms rose behind him. The frijj seemed grimly pleased. "Yes. & did you happen to work near Subbsunn at any time, Mr. Chiin?" "Subsunn....that's the clown one, right? Yea....though so. Mm...No, officer. I'm sweeping up down here, in people's closets, drawn folds of their inklings, the odd childhood sin or two." "I see," said the frijj. He was jotting it down in his notebook, & he obviously wanted to remain very glum, but this incredible spring light was rising (like the aforestead bolwhooms) & simply spritzing silver euphorias over everything. His heart was beating in his wet wet mouth. You could tell as much. "Ahem," he said, trying to clear some ruin into his throat. "Well something is missing from the sun." "'Something is always missing from the sun,'" intonéd Chiin in raese, the articulation of enjoined iterations (phrases of the races, source unknown) which happens as the Fifth of the Damaged Lions of Physics that we claim to you to have. Raese is always ignored. Always noted, I mean, & memoriezed, but always in condust of intercourse IGNORED. "Would you mind mind if we popped into your bag, Mr. Chiin?" "My bag? This bag?" Chiin gave a watery little laugh in the shape of silent bubbles in the shape of the dreams of images in the shape of false hopes in the shape of these audacious marbles‑‑smaller than ordinary marbles‑‑yet etched yet in the imagery of microscopic Buddhist gods & the gods & the goddesses & the godlets of your Hindus, too...especially your Hindus, in fact, once your tiny sub had navigated the larger, jollier Buddhist gods forming the outer circle (& who's to say what insanely detailed gods might lie underneath?) in the shape of a heart, possibly your mother's heart or the the heart of a mother quite close to being your mother or of someone close to being a mother on some dozing level of appal‑‑a heart bent, melted, but not quite broken in the shape of an old metapor, broken in an alley & suzzling some Very Rotten Gwill, ifn youn willm, hacking out last dweggsa meaning in the form of tiny droplets of blood on the rag of his rotten handkerchief, incredibly rolled, in the shape of mixtures of being‑‑these are paisely powders one mixes in the Milkshakes of Being (listen‑‑don't blame me; I never call them that), delicious colors, delciious drinking delicious listening, delicious et ceteras in the shape of in the shape of in the shape of * "You can't 'pop into' a bag." "Yes, we know, sir, but may we virtually do so?" "What's this 'virtually do so' shit?" "You'll see!" they chorused cheerfully, like psychotic cartoon characters, disturbing Crumb characters messing with your primal urges. "Ahhh well then," stammered Chiin for a moment uncertainly moment a for Chiin stamrstamrd, "Well then, I guess it's OK. I guess it;s OK, right? Well then, my Valiant Protectors of the Public Trust, be my guests." Sex scene deleted. Things are hard to delete here, hard to change, hard to edit. The words bite you if you try. The words gnaw at you like the pasty-faced zombies you see in every movie. No shit. You see them in every movie if you look really hard. It helps to have DVD, succession sequencers, bubble analyzers, iospiers, or better yet, just cut to the chase & get whatever they watch movies on at the end of time, if they're not just too totally cool to even watch movies, the pricks. Buncha pricks! (nervous laughter) No, really! Meantime ol Chiin here's forced to watch these cops dive into his stuff, against all laws of physics. This means these cops have control over the laws of physics, suggesting you might want to cooperate with these here cops... After servicing the cops thoroughly, Chiin wipe his cheen & answer questions trying to keep his words cwisp, don't you know, turbulent with desperation gasping for thought gasping of desperation grasping for unthought-of aught-of-thought, but subtones only RECENTLY REVEALED by some advanced research funded in large part by starvations of the poor reveals a blueness melting down the screen, like the saddest poured paint down the faces of an unthought world or paint sobbingdown the faces of an unsobbed world or this confoundingly beautiful gloom down the faces of the Saddest World (that would be Zaypossia‑‑the saddest world, known as the Saddest Fucking World (this is the way we talk), which may not be so sad so sad‑‑not sad at all, in fact in fact (our facts I'm afraid come condensed within these facts we call carrier facts) but with some very sad faces, datz forcerpt). "In you go, *," the frijj said, gesturing vaguely his stick of fridget which was this stick of the instaneity swizzling the veryv lip of Chiin's dimensional bag (which had gone very vague indeed), lying like a knit kitten on the ground which was a floor. Cops are stiff, arent't they? fridgets are always stiff. * {lesser fridget} grunted as he got on down. He had to go many undreds of layers down, down bulged levels of magnitude, which is where, for safety, these thoughtless * bags are kept. Oddly, he didn't use his hands nor any other of our thousand measured appendages that we are capable of, I mean, but rather nuzzled in fact or indeed. Maye that kitten thing had somehow got to him. He began talkingsoon as his head disappeare dinto the bag. Everyoe love's the timbre of a muffled voice, so, future arraignments of intense inevitability aside, this was a jolly time. In fact, as the muffles come out, Chiin & * {cop} were like to chcuckling like chums at one another. "Something distinctly green within here, sir." "Green? Let me see it." Ad Officer * stuck his head into Chiin's bag. "Just the sheen off some exploded idea," muttered Chiin, gently sweeping his tube along the officer's bent spine, making it bed endlessly & * & infinitely into itself in the subtle incurves of this cognizant spine so so self-referneitally intwined within incursive self-entwine, drawing all his suspicions (which is not so say the memory of his children, Suspicion & Suspicions) away. He stood up looking fine. He & * exchanged a very special & unusual, an almost uncategorizable smile. "Nothing amiss in here," he winked (& Chiin winked back, assuring us he is hardened into crime!!!), dropping the flap of the bag onto the other guy's head & walking away. Chiin held his vacuum raised in a distinctly cocky way. .... When the other fridget‑‑inconceivably blinded by the stuff he had seenngly seem‑‑pulled his long long head head out & stood up, discernible twin awarenesses of evil like twin & facing curves braced the sides of his bracketed eyes, & all he could even do was stand there for a minute. * stood there for a minute, too." "Your boss will be missing yoiu," say Chiin. "You..." began, his brackets giving quiver. "Here, let me get that," said Chiin, softly, as in an instant did he zheum-it-all away. Well that was that. Yea, that frijj could not but almost blink (& of course this was a frijj's virtual blink within a blink), flash ona dose momentary smilers of delief‑‑the kinda smile that can nil afford nor gratitude nor strutch‑‑& walked away with a dismissive nod. "Strutch" would be Durational Science's technical term for duration in time. Now Chiin had to sweep his own insufferable smugness ALL AWAY. That bag was getting full of stuff, I'm sure, & it looked like he had found his way. He was stunned with culpabilities‑‑hell, that he could feed keen hungers, freshly evolved‑‑& he could not now not but pass notfive minutes sans "tucking little stuffs away (into the Gates of Nil)," as we would have never come not upcome over to neversay. Durational science is the deviant-goofball theory that (now get this) things have persistence, & that that that that amphitheater stupendous with sound (really just fatmocking tokens standing round blowing smoke out the fags like nothing so much as so much as so many infernally clever dwarves whistling "Derisions measureless" betwix their thin-little, brittle-little teeths (if those teeth could be really be called realy theirs) in in this unvoiced laughter known as hissive derision, ferocious fellows, trivial thunders thrown from the yawns of the yons of of of Erroneous Gog, who is the form of God we thought to know as God, & anyway, sound) across the sounds across the morningfields of mint is more than the Keatsean tones emitting forthwith in the from of formless bubbles therefromfum (look! flitting across the screens or electorinic faces in a field of feverous figures of ink performing redundant gesticulations expressingthe lure of ideation, by which one menk the lure of the possibility that there might be "ideation" (ideas quoting themselves in the forum of philosophers doddering with the drugs of their own inebriation) induced if it but were o be inducted by conductions, say, of astral bubbles of lost stars, lost stars not of matter but of vacancy not of space but of the illusion of pesistence, which is what this is all about, were about but the etiolation of vague sentiments of nothingness stretched across a liquid bridge (not a real bridge but a swaying one‑‑a gold but swaying sort of concoction of fierce intensions, forever lost down that corridor of * seeming to but not leading to the shell of that lost amphitheater‑‑a goregoeus ruin, forsooth!‑‑in which echo the strangest dream-ideas or swoon-ideation of the notions of an animayed doll, created in the loom of the Weaver of Imprecise * Beliefs, where belief is understood as the lamb of delusion, bleating pain, bleating nothing like his pain as if his pain were the rant of a god yearning with pleasure (the gods taking such singular intrinsic pleasures in the multiple natures of our maturating pain, which‑‑outside these theories leaning like transdimensional liquid whims (& these are real, of course) to the oncontonary) representing how deeply I am lost n mine owne parentheses. Yes, I weep. Yes I lie in the famous Amphitheater of Ruin & I lie & I deeply cry. This is the very place they would say before I die) but has duration other than various wassails of incredibiliy, wassails, how shall we say, of negative fevers or love-lies or smookdrames or inverted sighs. ("Astral bubbles"! That really slayeth me...) Durational science was a drug, or rather, a drug that was defiitely on drugs, for if you took enough drugs you were a slave to durational science, & we are not sure but believe that we have took substantial drugs, & so everybody was. THE XFULACRIA "Quite a silver world you've got here," Chiin hooted to Chiin hooted to Chiin hooted to Chiin. "What?" Chiin shouted to Chiin. These various Chiin iner re-chiin-re-flux-i-ons looked around. "Why, we look like a goddamned party of of goddamned Chiins!" one ofem shouted (euhpric little gold-cheeked fucking cherub of a Chiin! But rather small, & one of the larger, one of therger greyer, the larger greye darkmer meaner Chiins crushed this little one's head underfoot, & it smushed. I would like to say how it cruxxed like a Christmas ornament, but it smooshed like the earth did, nack when it was crushed (& you have my condolence, one of my many condolences) smushed I say like a hollow ball of clay. So much for the fellow known as Chingy the Chiin, I'd say!). & they did. Refractive meserfields of the fieldinfoldring atmosphere‑‑just a lot of glitter in the irreflective light‑‑created predumplicate duppelganers bouncing possibly from those madly burnished shoes which Chiin (!naving never neard nabout DAMPMERBOOTS©!) affected too affected, oncoctinf in the trivance of an impstunce manifold Mozartian mutations of a faces of a thousand cheery Chiins (Chiins of light, Chiins of brigh personality, illustriative, close-up Chiins, bingmovie-star Chiins & superficial whoreish Chiins & some of those miniature Christmas ornamental Oriental Chiins I have told you about, & the name Chiin itself existing as a thousand * Chiins, & great sky-Chiins looking down from the persistences of impossible clouds, & numerous ordinary Chiins you might, but for the make up so HEAVY WITH THE GLITTER mistake for GLITTER Chiiny Chiin & our own former antecedant preredundant protofinctioning Chiin, wh had you may recall landed on this silvery hypnotic Xf or "ZIFF?" pro nounc éd "ZIFF!" or simply "Xf?" Many's the visitor to Xf never seen from again. Many's the Xfean tourist replaced by metal emulation in the bosom of the bosom of his crying laughing positively endless friends. It was hard to resist these fellows, these Xfulacria, these silvery refluxions of the selves. "What?" shouted Chiin, then "What?" & then (to himself?) "Shut up!" "Here sir‑‑let me help you with these Chiins," said a *... "You pretty much have to slaughter them all, taking care notto haha slaughter yourself. Like this sir. You crush them like foil. With the help of the man, & with Chiin in fact mostly just helping just a little bit the man, Chiin got rid of this initiatory influxion of his simple selves (he was to find out in the sequences of postsubsequent consequence there would be future pervasions‑‑of many more much more complicated versions of himself. Afterwards he stood confused in the silver litter of the silver blitters of the silver glitters there, everywhere crumpled image of himselves. "You'll have to clean that up, sir!" cried the dimpled vision of the passing of the helpful Xf, who may have never been. "Yes," Chiin muttered. "Sure." Then, inaudibly: "Thanks for your help with my reflected selves," though they felt more like himself than his anyother selves... ...while the sun of his reflected cells beams through time like a throat commercial: "THANKS for your HELP with my RE FLEC TED SELVES!!!" Yea, our commercials are throaty like yourn, but ours beam like laughter through the ghosty halls of time. Our commercials are better than better than yours. HÖD Xf. Gorgeous Xf, glittery Xf, perfect Xf, obnoxious Xf‑‑toxically symmetrical Xf. The action of walking, for example the action of walking, ofr example, created vast, insinating signs, like vacillating billboards at the end of time. They wavered & they hemmed & hawed (or hawd or höd) full of frail intimations & colorous undertones, rife let us say with presumptions of some sort of symbolic connotation‑‑like those "children's allegories" (children's‑‑yea, right) produced upon the beams of vaporous Tieyeelee, or the barebome metaphors distilled from the pollumflowers of Doedreezil, or, yet again, the Miltonic subsymphonies in the hollows of the semisentient, semisolid, wonderful clouds of the clouds having their own bright clouds of the clouds of the clouds of of of Heuc (insanely symphonic Heuc, that least of my favorite worlds!). Which is to say these signs‑‑the self-refluxive, self-generated etheric signs aligned like syzygytic corollas down the astral lanes of this Xf‑‑had in their endless-fluxive undless-flexive lives said so many things they had become sly, then indirect, then clever-clever, then subliminal, then then subsubliminal inal, & thence by insidious declension (technical term) well down your Poundian tubes of inanity, flounderingin "dust moste indecipherable" (Zeej), except that Chiin, being a thief, just had to wonder. BEWARE THE BLUE, some said., some of these sings said, some of these signs seemed to have made intimation to have seemed to have have said. He came to a place or an area of blue. I mean, you couldn't call it an area because it was so blue. It was like stalls selling shck upon shock of cloth, except in this case it was blue, just a pure azurian & immeaurably deepening blue (when you lifted a shock except it was not a shock you came to deeper blue, like the dye got deeper & the dye got a deeper blue, well into the lost intriguing Dopplers of Unseeing Blue (the Lost Dopplers or Lost Dopplers as you must imagine of Unseeing as you must imagine Blue) I lost my shock-parentheses, so deep he didn't even sleep I mean think (did I say sleep? I meant sleep I mean think when I said think I mean sleep when I slept it back back there) of stealing any, but he must have blotted his faces in the phases of soma that plentiful blue blue blue, for a friendly Xf adminished him. "Stay away from that blue," he whispered, with the smuckling undertome (fulsome or chuckling or somewhere in between‑‑oror some other option nt known to man in the notknown options of a perfect man?) of every fucking Xf that Chiin had met. Ah, fucking! "This blue?" stammered Chiin, wiping blue off the aspects of his many miens of face. "This blue here?" "That blue will make you sick," the Xf said. "It is a too-deep blue," and‑‑so typicially Xfean!‑‑he demonstrated by making Chiin & by making poor poor poor poorchiin, very sick indeed. For days Chiin squat in an alley, draped in stolen blue. I must have stolen blue he reasonably & idiotically thought, as did his smiling shadows in the alley of alleys too. The Xf were doctored in the adornment of firey shells that voxed across the talking Xfean talkingly Xfean skies by "the mad physicians of Fel" of the legendary doctorial Felschinniogneeze‑‑handsome, dwarvish critters, dixtantly related to the essence of the Fnools (only gnot zo fnoolusch) who, how shall I say, had a tencdency to hyperspecialize‑‑with these outsized, golden forebrows (forebrows, man!) heavily engineered evidently well beyond the brinx of insanitease‑‑another race we thought had been extinct till we discovered that the Xf had hired them on. May be the Xf had been bruilt so's to sop up all these fools of the overfactored races of the infidelious fools, which they so were doing. & anyway they * up the ailing Chiin up the * rippings of the airbrought on by onesuch flock of the vlying vells or the glistening vysglinting up there like a thousand crying eyes & slid him down many a dizzying planes (these were your usual lightpkames, designed to bring your sicknes bristling like * goosebumps through the porous flattering vassitudes of your face so they could look you in the bristles of your bristling eye & cry), & like "Whoo! Man, you're sick!" as excalaim'd the eager Fellean Doctor-to-the-Xf, Dr. Xaib. Xaib was like a nine-year-old (in a sector that had nine-year-olds, of course, except of course that the nine-year-olds figured within every sector here {save Brimigen, Dacto, & Xf itself oddly enough itself} had as the fruit of the Miltonic Xaprobame is tweezed up forgotten vergesser-vunnels of the gullet of the peckish Apapalac (the Acaca Aca Papa Pappabalac) been long-since all sucked up) with his flimsilly flesh abouncing & the lenses to his eyelets all aflash & so fancilly flashifing. "We're gonna hafta run yex through some tefts," did he shout, & so Chiin went into these tests. He went into this grey test-waffle, which is how your dancing Felschinniogneeze ran their medical tefts. Time was compressed in a series of lightless grey baffles grey & lightness & let's face it baffingly dire, so they could test you for many years. Chiin was tefted for various years, sometimes brought round back to an early year of tefting & yet tefted yet which once more yet again, & sent down through or up as the case mayn't be another tunnel or two of True Apparency Tefting & morphometabolic physiognominie tefts & effortefts & dramexefs & cellular module infravscient teller tefts of all shae manner gazzle fazzle daft & kind (some of them most unkind!), & then pumped round to the opening temrinal & run through again & again, just to make sure he passed his own tefts. The sick Chiin was locked within a so-called nut of time & essentially foreve lost in the lofts of time & thux tefted thoroughly & KILLED SEVEN TIMES until his mad physicians were eventually (with the ghosts of a sorry faraway sigh) satasatisfied. It basically took a moment but it took a long long time. MURQUE ONE OF THE TRIPLE NEGATIVES or THE AQUA OF POSITIVE NIGHT Chiin lies in the Phrineddean dusk, listing the populations of vapruux out on the streets, talking to one another, smoking, leaning on lightstaves, standin round the whirlpools, ventin bluxters of cheeky laughter by the fumeverroz & the vaporraz & the wordless seivevax. Their words‑‑so explicitly seditious‑‑billow across their languid rumples. I can't Q (shaking author's bones, author's eyes rolling up as he cums & cums): What the hell are these things!? KIRK (eyelashes still fluttering, the little slut): They-thu-they thu-thu theythey are are evidently this universe equivalent of sociopaths, too bold to care, or maybe just very stupid. No one knows the intelligence, if any, of these strangely arrayed races of signs, nor what they are planning, if anything, nor what they are capable of, if at all‑‑& once it reach Murque One of the triple negatives, don't nobody not uncare. Author dies at this point. No problem. It had to happen. Author not inordinately fond of life, if truth be spoken. & where better than fantasy for truth to be spoken, I ask of thee? In any case, novel has achieved _____critical mass _____escape velocity _____ultimate orgasm _____event horizon _____higher innocence _____transcendence (check one) & thus continues whether author is alive or not. Besides, this guy is famous for bullshitting about this stuff, not that he isn't dust to the ROF Readers of the Future. Dust to the ROF! Dust to you!!! Now back to our story. No, now back to our story. No...now. No...the nights here deepen off the hollows of the umbral scale‑‑down to where imponderable figures gesture in pressures like hallucinogenic fish. They make it really very dark‑‑so that nothing can possibly happen, possibly. Some smiling Xf‑‑much bigger & more burnished than all the rest‑‑turns up the Bingdarkness! Knob™ to the Almost Endless Crest of the Xfean night; they make it so dark here, by golly, you cannot see the thought of your longlost mother, not even your night-mother, smiling just like that Xf as she puts you to sleep. You can only lie there pouting in this improvident night. & pout, my friends, Chiin does. He wonders if the signs are still out there, & if so, whether they are pounded like lead in the Aqua of Positive Night or still muttering out there in the shadows of recondite murk. He wonders, & then he dreams they sit at colorless tables, under a bulb naked enough to highlight everything in ash, still talking, still vehement, only much more serious now. Sufficient touché the dawn‑‑in which a Xfean * functionary toss a brisk bucket o' light onto the face of your shapeless face, comes as a relief & a bingsurprise. Chiin even got up‑‑which was unusual for him. He nodded smiling like a goddam clown, & he had not known he could feel so satisfied. He capered round his room, making signs at the wavering (susupcious?) signs & the children of the signs which were the signs of signs. Ah! These Xf really knew what thy were doing, even if it was a phase-change in the dopplers of serial illusion in a world of symmetrical spectres immaculately adornmed. I mean, no one was perfect, right? {DETAIL EDITED} He visited the friend whose name he can't remember up on Breen‑‑not the gas Breen nor the rock Breen nor the Breen of silent mists, but the hailing Breen Seventeen where crackling lightning zaps the very crown of your skull the minute you land‑‑special, powerful lightning bracketing everything, great trunks of bolts far too mighty for thunder (thank goodnest), vaporizing even the tiniest clack, the "steely silent realm" Zegagnociourn writes about, the "thunder of silences" where the gasps of thunder bracket everything. This Breen was very up & he was up on Breem. Chiin would never have come to this frightening place, but for an all-important but very tiny {detail edited} {detail edited} {detail edited} from his memory. {detail edited} I crawl round on my hands & knees looking for it. But it's not really down there. Hell of a place for him to try to get sane, he thought. One's entrance to this world that has been excised from my memory‑‑this entrance, I say, was not very graceful, what with the energy fields pouncing on your nerves, making you dance & throw a wide variety of fits on the too-hilarious floor, & the bulbous raindrops flattening you (direct hit), sending you shooting (side shot), or even spinning you round (rim shot, prized by Amnesia's Myriad Voyeurs. I mean Amnesia's Myriad Vapors. Did I say "Voyeurs"? What could I be thinking? The visitors would arrive in this uncertain manner & the nerveless natives leaned on muscular columns in the sinister rain, pondering them. Actually their eyes their eyes, with their limpid lids were far too empty for that, but they stared at you, anyway, very much in the Very Alien Way, showing no joy, if they felt any joy, when the lightning made you jump again & again, & the rain bowled you over. But there was plenty of cheering, as you jerked & plopped. These were the camp followers of the nations come here for this humiliating show. Chiin like to pretend he dint mind, but I must remind myself to rob them blind, he thought which means he said, from the charge on the thought in his inner nerves which brasted inevitably out, such that you shouted everything you thought, but for equally scrambled reasons, no one could hear. I mean, they could hear you shout‑‑they coul certianly hear that!‑‑but they couldn't understand. DIMOUT Despite excesses of weather, DimOut was a quite decent sanitarium, nested in a valley with the tenuous branches of field dampers of branches of dampers reaching all around. It was very peaceful inside, utterly free of vibes. Chiin liked to come here. It was like being without a past, he thought. This character whose name entirely escapes not only me but all of my thousand alters had contracted terminal theft, the disease of the Xf, in which he believed 1) he had stolen everything & that he therefore owned everything, except for his sanity‑‑which he had already owned & could of couse not have very well stole‑‑which somebody else had stoln. Thus believing he was insane, he believed he could not go about stealing back his sanity, but believed he was crawling back to sanity as one might crawl in devolutionary manner to the seeping shore. If this crawling worked, or if the thief would give his sanity back, Whatzisname would give back everything he had stolen, which was everything save his stolen sanity. At least that's what he said. Other than that, Herr Asterisk was perfectly fine. He was in good health & spirits, & was happy to see Chiin, but for his lack of any memory of Chiin, or of anything else. Chiin had seen this disease many many many many many many many many many time. I mean, this happened all the time. As for this theft of saity business, Chiin was the only suspect in his old friend's eyes. That's why he had to come to see him all the time. "Now tell me, Chiin," stammered Asterammer after Chiin had name his on in him filled, fiddling ridiculously with a million cigarettes they were multicolored cigarettes, no really cigarettes but STARS!!!, the stars of of a cigarette novel, stars of a novel of their own which I can't nor never had the time not to imagine. Now Aeeueueuuaaue pulled back & drew in on one of them, then another, then several others, all in that sequence of fluidity known only to madness an science. Each disappread (these are cigarettes we are talkningabout, only they each had vast consciousness), & the smoke & the silences disappeared‑‑evidently the right cigarette. "You didn't steal my sanity or anything, nn?" "I would never do that," Chiin protested with a series ofliquid blinks within blinks within blinks. "Besides, friend‑‑how could you be fighting back if it were something I've got?" "You can't really talk like that," * replied. "Nothing makes sense to me." "That's right. I forgot. Well, I didn't take your sanity, *, nor any part of it." He looked at the longful cigarettes * had splayed out all in a row, like multicolored joints in a tipsy game. "Nor anyone's sanity." Those words stood naked in the room for a while, while everyone looked at them, amazed at their apathy. Anything could happen to them, they think. & I just wouldn't feel anything. This is WOINDERFUL! "Then how do you explain your sanity?" * said, seeming intensely sane, very sane, intently & amazingly sane. "I can't," said my mad, imaginary friend, you might say licking these things he had for lips & staring at I guess you'd say his hands & turning his, ah, face momentariy to chalk & crossing the dustplanes of an amazingly lunar world & thinking of cities, thinking of manya city, & holding his if you will "breaths" & then filling silently with air & then looking at *, hoping he looked sincere (which is not to say he was not sincere), & then breathing out. "I cannot explain my sanity (Third Law of Sanity {* nodded through the pastel paisely cloud around the cloud around his head}). You know that." "Ah but if you were sane you couldn't remember stealing my sanity." "I can't remember stealing your sanity." "Then you did steal my sanity! Nurse! Nuuurse!" * cried, jumping up. This had happened before. This had happened many times. This was always happening, whether or not it was happening now. Chiin gazed with mild accusation at the sheaf of cigarettes. No nurses came. That would have been insane. They were in a booth somewhere near the hub of the raidating hals of this radiating place, staring at the lights indicating insanity. "Well," he or she finally huffed, sitting back down. He looked dangerously refreshed, & for the first time in this visit, Chiin was seen to be was Chiin to have been seem to have ben Chiin to be seeming to squirm. "At least you admit it." "I admit to not remembering it." "That's what I mean." "No it isn't. I mean I admit to not remembering something that does not exist." "Now how could you forget something that does not exist? Hmm?" (more or less like Jackie Gleason) "Look, Norton‑‑I remember not stealing your sanity, all right?" Here Norton was looking very foxily at him. "Then who stole it, Chiin?" ..... "There are laws if insanity, too, you know." {says *} "Yes, I know," Chiin replied, almost inaudibly, then got up & left. They let him out through baffle after baffle, till he didnt know a thing. Outside, he put on his special hat & looked around in the lightning flashing like apocalyptic suns. He knew he would be like * someday. Insanity is the law theft must obey. IN THE EYES OF THE OTHER FLIES The frijjs were closing in on Chiin. He thought this in the special gold thoughts unto given only those in peril. Blind flashes of silver spoke-toff their idges, & even though he was standing in rains beyond imagination beneath the wimp suns of Bayal he was wearing eyesheathes bigger than a sentient Kydeleloobeam (KIE duh luh LOOB ee um?) fly? and this fly? was thinking of itself, friends; this was no mundane fly of the grey Ilustrative Planes but a Faire Flye of Ideas, a likefly with like big, swaggering flyfilled notions of itself making its manic eye eye say its eye like even more absurdly bly‑‑more grotesque, too‑‑certainly in the eyes of the lesser otherflies which looked therebye down at their own insected vergions of him of him of him. The frijj took the form of these little speckles‑‑units of consciousness, actually, embodied in chars from the exploding Double-Suns of Consciousness, Komeematim. They formed like ash in a ballooning sort of sphere wherever Chiin went. They would converge when the moment was appropriate, if that moment ever came, though it was be enough that they tracked him this way, to the end of his awful days. The rain was destroying frijjs by the multitudes. Everywhere, trenchcoated granules fell like dreams inside wet, illustrious versions of the worlds of multifarous rain, each droplet of which was a windfilléd world of the welet drames. I think you know what I mame, & while Chiin here was here here by oxxident, he was still using the cruelness of the rain (which doesn't make him cruel by any means, does it?) to keep them off. As their suspicions grew richer so did their smell, & when their shril suspicions and whentheir suspicions cried with sufficiently shril hysteria, they would enqyaff you in the manner of a thousandfolbs. But see, each of these intersecting nexes of polysynchronous "rainstorms" on laughing Bayal create it own rotund "eye of eternity," as the physicists called them (& when I say "it," of course, I mean "them"‑‑but there are so many of them the physicians calling them!) & last a wayany anyway forever everfor, so Chiin stood like some sort of wary idiot, much like the mythic Wary Idiot of Yore (not to be mistaken for the Merry Idiots of Yoar or the Chary Midiotz of Nor nor the Nary Nydyotz of Oaeure, not that I think you thought I thought you were in any way, manny, nore meems mistaking them for them, & when I say them I know you know I meant the many Thems of Oer), listening gulping to the countless, minuscule trenchcoats sopping to the nubbled streets of umbobular cobobular Beighoeughoghr, the sound of the countless thousands not-to-be-mistaken-for-the-number-thousands sounds of the metaphorical thousandsounds of rhymic granular detectives as it were drownded in the gulfs of the glomular dromplets domering or. I think I should explain, & this thought takes the form of small, humiliating versions of myself (look at their numbers! Thet are wearing NUMBERS, my friends!!!) cowering down the halls of immensely vacant alleys of immensely vacant alleys of various, shamefully vacated infraworlds in which the broken backs of my explanatory selves living in the cells of mine onwe subshelves. There are a lot of statues there, three-dimensional statue-shadows yex they are, & time sloweth down around the gravity-frames of the eventless horisonal statues, "friends," & they are thinking I should explain as well, so there you have it, or at least have half of the have of it, friendless friendlies. As I say, the frijj here take the form of units of suspicin in the for of grains that can grains that can fliat through horizons of varymucks any waryair. They are not beings but singular units of apprehrnsion, & sincefriend Chiin was what they call here an absolute thief or a vukking vief, they were after him‑‑gravitated to the malefactor like my wet faces on the fazes of this STATUE HERE. Didn't mean to be obscure‑‑no that I am admitting anything‑‑but we have no natural light here but have to import all our light from the universe of the other light, such as the emerlad universe of Lor or the crystal fractioating subsubuniverse of * (mad with light, that place! a-absolutely brittle with brittle with light, that *!). We have a lot of light here‑‑I mean, it's not like they say‑‑but it is not our light, & a lot of it is mad light imported which is not to say stolen from the lattices of * of the MaddneedLight. Chiin had stolen a lot of light in his time, & he was actually down on * for a delivery, but that made him suspixios all the more, & the frijjs had followed him through the hollow following tubules of his long wordless trvael there, traveling down the tubes formed as you know from the indentations of meanings gasped in the form of little vacuumjars of words into the astral vacancies of air. I would explain, but I have not the jars nor the wordy airs. FEELINGS OF SUCH IN THE WAREHOUSE OF THE CHILD'S NIGHT SKY He was rudding which is a form of rudning without sound or breath without sound nor breath, buoyed unto nearning spatial weightlessness by his pride in this insanely obdurate silence, brittle as a paralyzed leaf 1of a paralyzed leaf in the ward of the broken, paralyzed leafs 1if you count the crystal constellations constant on the faces of the surfaces of the fronds upon the intricate grounds of Zeez O fatal Zeez mortal leaves lethl Zeez of leaves & the mortal mortal leaves of the Vatic Utterances of the Cauldron of Murk within the (sleeping) Thought (yawn) of the so-qölled "Zeez of Leaves" ("Zeez! It's the Zeez of Leaves!") a proud silence 1I might add & do proudly in-bright-facet of-facet-of fact 1which was none of heeze, just as his thoughts (& feelings, if he'd been having such or if'd'n'g feelings of such) & Bojje, Ladoga A. was firing merrily away at him through these great spools & hoops & locks of this inky fabric, missing him 1) because he was not rudding in the sphere of his own special silence, you will recall you underunderstand, or 2) because she was trying to miss him, making him think the thought she is in love with me, he thought (he thought being part of this thought, but there are not italics enough I think for this degree of thought by which I am speaking by which I mean thinkingonly of thinkingof only of intensely incremental degrees of degrees of thought. I am having such FEELINGS OF SWICH was another of these thoughts, of the now-famous Thoughts of Ilk ilked by every schoolchild in this perfect conservative world without schools or Veltsanssküülen we are living in the running silences in. But to speak plainly, he was ducking down amongst the folds & furrows‑‑acres of infinite warehouses sparkling like darlings of this inky stuff which for example formed a hole or would form or formulate a sort of a forming hole if you placed but a circle on a formulating hook, which is the hook of nonsense or of nothingness, but never mind and this weapon was the lady firing (must have been some Woman Warrior Thing of Which Chiin have made himself the target) this weapon, I say, was ripping the blackness to ribons so that somewhere some child's night sky would be ripping into awful light, for this was the Warehouse of the Child's Night Sky, which is no surprise to you, as I bopped it up to the titles there, the light that kid's night was shredding into being nothing nor none not nunother than the shredding into the light of shredding shame of the light of shame, which happens most especially to some of these children, as had happened in fact both to Ladoga{the woman} & Chiin, though their minds had thereby follen much too folden unto the fabrics of night in this special glazed warehouse of the infinite night‑‑somewhere up by the nexus of the poles of the infiinte cold, of course‑‑for them to remember to any of this. But the shredding of numb nerves or the sjxezzing of begnumgnud mnrvz was throwing all sortsa portionsa Chiin into awful lapses of an awesome shock, let me tell you that, for he could see the sort of flaying sort of damage it could do. She is enjoying this, he tried to think, but as you can perceive it perceive it could never reach the throne of the threhsoldo of the relms of thogth‑‑not in this sort of cold, nossir. But he was running fast out of breathlessness, & running out of places to run. Ripping sheathes & ribbons of blackness most oblivious were raining down. These things were beginning to fall upon his head (& that meant her head), & he was noticing & beginning to take not a little bit of a batchfile of interest in, say, the presence of an occasioanl occasionng occasioning star. & what were stars doing in there? He was gaping with these stars beginning to fill his vacancy of eyes which were eyes full of unreated questions, primal questions of the stars like the binginterrogation point leering at the terminus of an awful dream. These were the bullets or the stars of a mortifying dream. It was too black to tell, but I can in fact tell & am in point of terminus of fact unfact telling you that her bullets were the stars of a mortifyin' dream, which is what she was shooting at him & shooting all of time since the first fainting veil in the veils that grow like so many jungle draperies at the the crystal interstices of time, if I may pose the weightless crystal of the phasing so so so. THE LISTS OF SCOFFING ADMONISHMENT The door to the Otoxxean Warehouse popped in like an inspresh bubble (which used to be a bubble that went backwards in time, but that was back in the used to be of time). Chiin wiped his face & looked & he saw the door & he pulled out one bingeye & rolled it round in the Lists of Scoffing Admonishment. He rolled out that eye & looked up Godwards & let out a noxious little sigh, & he did the little dance of sarcasm which had so scuffed the mat below. The door to the warehouse was just this battered little yellow thing, laquered with the seedy glint of a naked bulb. Deggospace, he groaned. Warehouses tend to subsist within heavily compressed space, but Chiin here‑‑growing somewhat possibly spoiled I'll bet‑‑had expected more like the multiple lusters of a Cobobbian iris or the honeyed glisters of an Irideesian lense‑‑something that would glide you down a fine shank to inestimable (& comfy) compressions of infolded space But the Otoxxean Warehouse took place inside Deggospace©, which was oppressive, overcompacted stuff‑‑cheap & cramped & dangerous, if one were prone to breathe. He had to bend his bones inward & yellow them‑‑just age them & yellow them up a little, letting the buzzing light suck out a little marrow & any of the foftnff they might of had left in the dim possessions of them‑‑just to squeeze through that awful door. & it just got more impossible & cranked inside, & it was tacky, strange, & most insufferably uncomfortable. But it was very miraculously compacted, he had to admit that. It's sphere was far beyond the pales of measurement, filled with infolded foldings of the pure, aboriginal space he had come down here to get all right. ..... Hearing her shots, the space of the warehouse grew chafed with pain. --{He began drawing stuff out of his bag & throwing it at her. It got so he was going out to steal things just for her} YAY BIG She herded him carefully into the Shoppe of the Sundry Sanctities of the Xzhop o' tzh' Xundly Xanctaeetatees, which was full of astral candles & the phosphor leechings of light from the Plains of Beatitude, those that remain, & these white, Easter sort of cloths that had cloths that ad swaddled martyrs (or so the labels say!) blipped only with these notions of immaculately pure & perfect stars by God that stars that God & the cute-little littler gods rode blishfully & bleffedly om, & she kept on shooting & was shooting the hell out of all this sanctified stuff. It was ironic, all this while he wanted to beat her back, but but he was afraid to hurt her. Actually, his heart ached to torture her, to strip slowly her bare skin away in luxurient strips, to ream her orifice & pop out her sockets, to apply mean tattoos, to make her fuck in unthinkable, wasted ways, but he was afraid of this sort of stuff, which had long been numbed from him. Even now, I mean then, his nerves were numb to the white-hot rage. He was completely mad, but in that crack of the rock that was quashing him he was having these squeaks of thoughts‑‑not dissimilar to the 2D Cogitations of the Linear Willows brinking the endless shores of the limnal rivers, Smimno & Limngo & Striedmo & Pissel & Leeng, respectivefuckingly‑‑that were like small squeaks, friendly creatures therafter knownafter hereafter afterbe his own special Nonexistent Squeaks, suggesting anyways to him that if he threw soft things at her he might in the manner of cushions pummel her away. So he began this endavor of like throwing relatively soft stuff at her, even as she was shooting holes into everything, holes in the complications as of space being everything, but the ruptured fields of compacted space turned every cushion he drew out into these charged snowflakes‑‑about yay big‑‑from his bag & throwing them at her, & turned the most muted cloths & supple designations based on some yellow meditations of long-dead gurus he had poached from the ruins of the thought of the ruins of the thought of most-ruinous Dzhaak into these spiked & whirling things‑‑which, unable to stop the action or whocinibltstokthactim, he threw anyway‑‑slashed exacered axerbations if you will through everypuckered cove of the sacred fucking place. So they were mirroring their motions and I would rewrite this whole paragraph backwards in honor of this, if I had the time, but nevermind, nevermind, never mind & sufice it to succulently succulently to say touché motioning their mirrors tucking under most holy folds of cloth, where cloth here must be understood as the Comprehensions of Perfect Love & the extravagantly addictive kick you get from jolt after jolt upon the great Jags of Compassion only to have those folds of cmpassion ripped like moist, dissimilar skins from over them, thence to wince right into the air & counter the salvo in the Valley of the Opulent Volley thence to a cycle of hiding their respective pusses in more of the tissues of consecration (& somewhere a merchant dithrered like an iridescent insect, his hysteria caught in a bubble & sold unheard in the nethers of the heard unsold & that's funny!), until they both had the faces of corrupted saints, with the fiery snowflakes flying & the bullets laying much amazing waste through the beatitudes of the migraine night. WINCING LITTLE MISSILES or THE BULLETS OF SHAME ARE GIVEN JUST ONE EYE She shot off vaporous bullets, each with winces in mind. I mean that each bullet had this specific wince in mind. It was like some humiliation‑‑vast & simple as the planes of nothingness across the face of Keek, gas giant extraordinaire) & with his face so goddam scarless & pretty!)‑‑they had suffered in junior high, when the tart fruit of humiliation rises like a smack of ice into the silent sky, grinning the ill-seeing, all-showing shadow all are sure to see & do surely‑‑assuring you they all do see‑‑all see. So each bullet like blade of understanding, nicking invisible lights with this distinctive singular shame in the coronas of their one respective eye (remember: the bullets of shame are given just one eye). & I think it was the way she shot them off, her wrist wriggling & angling, small rockets shooting up like careless beams what with these small changs scarring with impact impact craters on the impossible face of the firmament thentofore unnoticed blithered with blushes upthere there, feeling the small stings just as surely as you & uncertainty of eye, shots impacting nothing, shots acoss the bow of the blithering great crater appearing in apparency only with the nic of the lasers there, the lasers here & there, shots even firing into the burrowing ground, striking the hearts of the eyeless creatures here, who die quite noticeably despite everything & despite the nothingness of nothing nothing more with surprising sadness. But just when friend Chiin was about to stand up, a seven-shot volley in the split of a silent eye, a discharge of Wincing Little Missiles (that's bullets to you & me & I & I) across the starboard bow you sailed on the miniature ship of crystals sailing the planes of those repetitive dusks that you can't recall like death guttering the candle of your childhood aimlessly and Chiin would drop so fast several lucent lightplanes of his head were left to hanging there, like hesitant cartoon characters shot through too quick to even notice that they know, & this is all occurring in past pluperfect, we will have recall, so the pieces that fall at the start of every moment have to be gone back & picked up afterwards & put away and how the Ball of Every Moment sails away! Goodbye little moments! Whoops‑‑& another butts in front & launches off with a cosmic sigh... ...only to be blown away in a {salvoovlas offo reflectionssnoitcelfer} too impossibly bright to die! The woman is most oppressively armed. Chiin pops up during one of those times when you just gotta DANCE BEFORE THE BULLETS & sees this emerald tuba thing, then this lozenge glown with radioactive rust, then a sort of a searing silver convolution of perspicuous pipes, then a sooty shotgun absolutely dizzy with barrels, then a notion-gun shooting needles & a needlegun shooting the notion of needles, then a black pistol carved of some edible substance like that licorice Spencer Tracy ate, & then a soundgun spraying blaring forms of sonic attack, a gun shaped like a bristling sphere‑‑included here through the sufferance of the definition of gun only as a courtesy to the fact she seemed to be using it to shoot what he believed to be beliefs but could never be sure into him‑‑beliefs & various pains of certain certainty, such as the pain of the certainty we were going to die we once descried, standing in the trenches of cold clay just before we died. Chiin liked some of the guns. Hell, he liked most of the god-damned guns, which is why even people today even people say "He liked most of the god damned guns, didn't he?" especially the brittle black ones or the prittle plak onz she got from nowhere (best place to get yer guns)‑‑the ones that exploded when she fired them, pitching black splinters through concisions of the pressured air, shots which made her EYES START into wafery placards as her voices eeped out this positive cry. This made him love her with an ache. One time he even dropped the script & burrowed through his own damned bag, looking for that supple thing he'd stolen. But there was nothing in the bag, & she had a bag of those little schism guns (made of *, wherein well-ningh everythin' shatters like the pictures done up in magic glass of a loved one leaving you, not even eaving, either, but just crumbling in stained-glass chinks like the window the Bishop kicked in back there in the Spring of Medieval Mesmeries), a bag she reached into often & for unknown often reasons (what with raosns popping up here like anemic demons, often & hysterically) possibly when she forgot what else she had she had forgotten to fire, & then would pick up one of those & fire. I should mention Chiin was cramming stuff into his bag the whole damned while. This was sad for he never had no memory of doing this, & when we replayed the replays he was not only ungrateful but denied, as he was suining us, that his lawyers denied he was even seeing this. & then there was the Version of the Doctored Tape, achieving topical bestsellerdom just before the thund'ring advent you will remember of Bestsellerdoom, but the man had obviously poached his own sad memory, so never mind... So we have this CLOSE-UP of the LONG SHOT she gets there of Chiin hauling his bag through the death of the empty wareouse‑‑& I mean this place is by now all now bag‑‑& scuttling like an insect round, pulling slowly from her ultimate aim, dilations of her famous Sneer of Contemptutous Pity (con tempt tu ous pit ty, yea!), too worked up to finish him as he worms hopelessly through a hole through which he reams only when she pops casually one last sweet rainbow in the blue romantic air. Chiin was a changed & stunted little thief after that, I tell you. Yea, for a while he eased into the statued Voodwörks of Xasma & just winched amongst the cavities there hysterically so low, snivelling & chinzing his pawed little fingers with a sniveling nose (not even his nose‑‑just a NOSE) generally but for relatively simple transactions & the odd exchange‑‑tongueless in his bubblings ningh the neons crackling downtown, which seemed to exist round corners he could have even had he will ever got beyond. THE TIGER OF EVEYTHING Chiin was trying to scrape up enough to pay Yapunzguk. Yap would explain things to you if you paid him, & Chiin felt the ache to understand. He had to understand to breathe. So in one loop after another, each occupying the gist which is this form of superfine flotational vapor-absorbing dust of centuries, Chiin would try to scrape together enough of that gold foil that used to lie in the glistening whiskers of the Tiger of Everything, just beneaththat dense humiiation that dense humiliation that made the sweat shine so shyly on your temples, not on your "brow" nor any quotatin of another brow‑‑but he was into thin pickings down in Xas, where the reality of everything had been pretty much scraped clean, quite panfully, quite ainfuily & with endfully needless agony scraped very quaint white & faintwhite lyclean, & even many of the words describingthis had been scraped quite thin & lean, standing like paupers beneath halucinating streetlights of various pastel undulating long-aching, long-forgotten colors if you haven't ever called them that. He plopped down all the hoops he had collected. These were hoops of wealth, you understand, & Yapunzguk looked at him with surmise. "Chiin," he said, lifting ever-so everso gently the edges of the chain of the edges of lighthoops glistening in the edges of the liquid chian of eyes, which are divine eyes we can all see through if we so devise. "I'm glad that violence has died." Violence had died, in a last muttering, some carved series of endles eon rings ago. Each fluctuatingmodule had imploded suddenly into a dark, internalized energy that had steamed, then darkened, then turned to stais in the fsbric of memory, then become mere fabrications of sleep, then a soft vapor visible only to children (who had also long since died), then something like His last sigh ere God surmised to die. Retentions of God long dead in this sector: God, died by his own Hand, hence this adoration dripping like a liquid forest on the blind & wakeful leaves of his infinite suicide. Or his infinite if you will suicide. Chiin & Yapunzguk pause, sad. "Unless you went back in time," Yapunzguk added, musingly, "and abducted some violence." He leans forward dilating into some of his many faces like the faces of a tiger in the bezels Triphenun fire, dizzyingly. "O I couldn't do that," said an enervated superscript of Chiin's voice. "Or you could have bartered for it, not that I care," added Yap. Yapunzguk liked to throw your mind into disarray information. This really irritates Chiin-chi-chiin-chiin-chiin. "Yeawell, if you don't care, you shouldn't ask," he said with poetic furrows rising from his gently furrowingtoes, fighting with those toes to hold his ground. THE AMPHITHEATER OF THE GREAT WHITE BOTTLE "You're right," chuckled Yapunzguk, "I saves you the trouble of lying, doesn't it?" He paused like he always did at the bristlings of a very strange moment, during which Chiin was becoming distinctly steamed inside the large green bottle Yap would seem‑‑judging from his face in the great blue bottle which we observe within the amphitheater of the Great White Bottle, within which, naturally, everything that happened was to have been subsequently remembered to have been having happened infinite times before under Intricately Precise Circumstamps subtly dissimilar to whatever had not happened ever before. This was where flipped out a piece of his omniscience, just to clinch the sale. So, since right moments never came along anymore, Yapunzguk swerved to it & said, "you hired a * to go back in time & had him barter you some. I can't believe that!" "Then it's not true," sighed Chiin, who always felt infintely tired when Yap put him through the next prism, coming up on himself like a lightless wave approaching * the thought on the face of the consciousness of perfection as it enters into time. "No," Yapunzguk said, evidently satisfied. "Things have long since given up wishing, much less trying to be true. Thanks for the hoops, Chiin. What can I tell you?" Chiin knew he had to begin to ask, his last thought carried off on the dark storm of his own great aspirant, whistling bingas a Druid stone‑‑at which Yap would answer. This was not to prove agin that he knew everything, but for legal reasons. It was believed to be illegal to impart the substructure of existence, so during the inevitable legal actions Yapunzguk took so much pleasure in he could say he was never asked (& he did this with such smiles!). Yap pushed the hoops back. "I'm sorry, Chiin, but I really shouldn't answer that." "Hey!" cried Chiin as the hoops fell by the ckigning millions to his lap. "What's wrong? Why not?" Yap seemed actually nervous, metallic chuckles shivering the tassels of the many heads composing his head. He seemed quite genuinely & magnificently sad, in layers of liquid sadness like some shades of that turquoise paint they pour oer the mantles of the ragged cliffs up there in Waiam. "Come on," implored Chiin, piling the hoops back up. "Well but why bother anyway?" blurt Yapunzguk. "It's just another question you know the answer to." Chiin pushed the hoops at her. "I need faith from your answers," he said. "Aaaa, I recommend you live without it, Chiin." "You mean...maybe...the answer would hurt?" Chiin said. Yapunzguk nodded austerely. "Possibly it would harm me?" Yap nodded with a wind blackness blowing through his heads, "And you'd need more hoops," he added. "What's wrong with you Yap?" "I don't know," muttered Yapunzguk, uncharacteristically. "I like you, is all." Chiin pushed the hoops toward him. "I'll die if you don't tell me, Yap," he said. Yapunzguk's sigh contained a minor sort of moan, heads his little berries wiggling like. "All right, yes," he said quietly. "You'd have to kill her. You see? You really should trust yourself better, Chiin." "Ah," said Chiin, wincing out a blink as bright as those exploding cubes of light that erupt across Ptite. He nodded around, taking in nothing of his surroundings. "Say, Yap‑‑do you suppose I could just...sit here a while?" Yapunzguk looked fatherly. "I wish I had more hoops," Chiin said. "No," said Yapunzguk. "You always know your own answers anyway." "But I don't know the question this time." "Yes you do." "No I don't!" "Yes you do!" Yapunzguk turned something like a bright diamond heel & heel & left. Chiin sits for a long while, then goes back in time to get more hoops. The gang was traveling faster now, & much more often, & changing sizes & with brand-new shapes they were duscovering everywhere‑‑but Ladoga Bojje was still getting to Chiin. She would seem to be swoozing him with this pale sort of bluey Gadingean creme that was cream that was making him act shameless ly in public‑‑shameless ly, definitely on the border of dangerous ly, what with soft-shoeing ly his ass off the dust of the cares of various children he'd run down into down in the Hostel of the Dying Child down into those gaudy crusts of Voaurg wherein the crewd been automatically xent to steal the disturbing Subsidence of Child which was happening, much like in your twn, down in ritzy old Voaurg or Vuorg or (colloquially) Vörgyörgyöörg where everyone caries these small disks of entertainment right before their eyes & where my crew had been sent to steal the thought I had had that I thought I had been saying he had actually goddamn found himself beginning to steal in the form of a monomaniacal obsession dressing formally as this mere diversionary sideline dressed in the garb of a very wealthy, very dying child of a child of dying Voaurg, I think it's spelled. He was soft-shoeing it right in the diamond downtowns of sundry cities, & flipping some of that dust (by which he could be taced‑‑you can always be traced by dust) to get that natty rachet rasping off the fluxion of his soles, his hard heels crushing the winces of the dying child as the members of his gang there clutched their heads which were falling like buildings side to side. A TINY FUSS OF FRIDGET He was confessing, too, & in the steam of his little teas formed hot stars from the gassy gasses of names that didn't even exist. He named fucking numbers & he fucking numbered names, so even his nameless friends flushed industriously‑‑much like the lusty red flushes of Moerz, the ones that blotched the atmosphere (not the other ones), not the other ones‑‑with goddam bloodbuds sweeping off the scars of their foreheads like the obdurate ghosts of a million thrilling military epaulets, which I can explain symbolically, none of whom also had no apparency of name. He was bloody tap-dancing, bloody tap dancing & farting & tapdancing dances & farting farts, & in general throwing out many painful effigies of preety much everything he had ever thus far ever stole, & like the tiny frijjs like dots did sniff the whippets of their little wigs almost entirely auf, by which I mean uff, but they couldn't charge him with littering pictures now could they (by which I mean they could, but not with the honor such a tiny fuss of fridget much need, plus they was under orders like from the lordover overlords of the Consummate Above)? By which segmentation of scruples did they accrue the silent fucking whiffs of sardonic rottenness. common of fridgets, as they took picture after picture of the pictures out-he-chucked. He was dancing & confessing in detail & tossing out all manner of insubstantial evidence, but he was also giving awayplans, inviting everyone along on their next venture, "just to show you how it's done," & this had everyone's ears pricked up let me tell you. This was where Comrade Habb took over. "Bag him, quick," he muttered to Tengley, pulling out thing like a crystal howitzer he had slipped free as we see within the vivid insubstantial whims within the crystal soundgardens of Vultimimm Within Vimm, which is a place they had, till someone not him stole it durng a very peculiar Capturation of Thefts they had till its stole during the early phase of the Peculiar Dilation of Things Habb had had enough of this stuff. This woman was ruining everything. His boss was useless, so Habb went after her. Habb hunted her down. Habb stabbed her several hundred times, & each stab exploded, an also each little stab‑‑whilst little...just a littlestab‑‑had as well a hundred stabs within it, too, & so there were wounds aplenty in the sector that day, as the blood flowed, & some sort of liquid vivid sound, & his boss stopped dancing, but was rendered comatose. Really more a catatonia ringing with the hymns of coma‑‑sweet coma, exalted coma, Goddess of Relief very much worshipped here, by which I mean there, & they didn't know what to do because it was the Boss you know who tended to get all the ideas. & now they were stuck in him. So they had to take Chiin‑‑sling Chiin over something disturbingly like a shoulder one of them had‑‑somewhere special to be thawed out, even though they knew this was the last thing that he wanted. His friend *, in the asylum, would press a teaspoon of food unto his innocent lips & give it a tip, & the food would just dribble down, at which * would cry quite horribly. THE STUDIO OF CRYSTAL XED When Chiin blew the bablaire© at Habb, Habb started to babble. "I left her for dead," he said. "I left her in little pieces I had sliced myself, after all, & she was broken up like tin foil, agder dal, & I thougyt, 'Well, she can't come back‑‑not in the this normality of sector, as science, ere wast somehow swop't all its articulatory capabilities lost in the swop of some sorta Cape of Cape Abilities, as they say...'" "Stick to the subect, Habb." "Yes well, as I say, I figured she just wasn't not coming back not nanymore, unless perhaps in pieces, like if she was built in pieces, like a CHAY kag DEN adore Chaykagdenadore." "We get the point, Habb." "But I know I like did something tewrribly wrong." "You did just fine, comrade Habb." "I did just terribly, friend frinend Chiin." "No. It's just the bablaire talking." "Bablaire?" "We fritzed you with bablaire, Habb." "O God. Did I talk about how I took over the gang?" "No, you didn't." "Don't you care about how I took over the gang, brother Chiin?" "I'm not your brother, comrade Habb. You took nothing over." "Not even in a coma?" "Especially never then, you babbling Habb." "Well, like I say, I left her for dead." But they knew that now, & they let Habb's remaining jabber‑‑which was considerable‑‑ravel out beyond faint comprehensions of being that they always had breathing there, breathing into there, breathing & breathing & breathing in fact the thereness into there, nanoxekket by nannoxekt, there, whilst Chiin had some of the fridgets glaared & called up the identity of Ladoga Bojje, but it was listed as missing. He tried calling it up to the point of vanishment, but these sectors were missing. He tried changing her, blowing huge cylinders of hoops to sink back just a bit in time, sink back a bit & throw her in some thoughts, just to see if they's change her, with the plan of going back to her childhood, following her around, inserting all sorts of menace just to see if he could alter her. But she was not there. In the past, Ladoga Bojje was not there, just undulant vapors oer regressions of an infinite soft bog. "Hmp," Chiin snorted. "Habb must be right." "She is obviously a construct," opined suddenly Oampimipmao, who was nothing but abruptly veering thoughts & sketches of opinion tangled like austere & mystic briars underneath his coat, refined & sealed as carefully as a vial of Yewnzean Hope (Chiin! he wishéd he had one now, to break ope ober every of our orifixxe!), "renewing her concocted molecules through every raveled nanoxekket of time‑‑where time is taken as a grid, of course." "Of course," they all but they all but mechanically xed, as dids everyone within the Studio of Crystal Xed, which was there this reception of recpetion of faint sigignals quoquurdeded quah QUURD deaddead. UNFORESEEN APPENDAGE It was a 900-foot, iridescent edoc (entity, device, or creature) shaped rather like the stamp of the sopping stump permeating the infinite mists of childhood. The odor of lichen blotted everything, & the eyeless thing bent toward a shining orbus with Ladoga Bojje inside‑‑looking hormonious, looking sharp & sexy & sinuous, & the edoc was working on her intimately, mauling the surface of the egg with a bristle of mutated stumps like arms, or arms in the form of mutated stumps like memories of the Tier of Monsters. But Chiin should have such delicate stumps, licking the glass, begetting vaporous auras & lapsing energy fields that made the Ladoga sweat & shimmer in her flimsy dress. Wow...But this was just an image, Chiin reminded himself, swallowing & wiping his palms, then wiping his temples with the plusses of his nonplussed palms, then wiping off his palms again. He had falled into the abscess of some sickly creature. With a whack it slapped him flat like a roach. Some large appendage he had not foreseen. Musta spotted me, he thought in a sort of burstingeffervescence into the substance of an abandoned atmosphere, all blue but for the ochreof his stupid, silly grin. TECHNICAL BIRDCALLS To pack Chiin into this frijj-suit they were going to have to fold him & awful lot. That was the tehcnical term for it, & the air hummed sweet with * the technical guy & his technical birdcalls. "Yea, we're gonna hafta run a lotta mathematical numbers on your body, Chiin!" he chirruped excitedly. "Will it hurt?" "Well it won't 'hurt,' exactly. I mean, it's not at all likely, you now, to cause 'pain' per 'se,' but I would in all honesty, & not to pull any ounches, boss, imagine‑‑though of course nobody within this circularity of time has ever tried anything of the kind of course‑‑I would imagine there'll be inside your flesh these formulations of infinite agony, like death only moreso, which will persist like last night's nightmare, indelibly." "He's pulling your leg," Habb whispered to him, but Chiin still had to sit down. "Remind me t punish him horribly," he whispered to Habb. "No wise," Habb muttered back. "Trying to concentrate over here," called *. "Do you mind?" Habb nad Chiin made akward clucking sounds vaguely approaching the enunciation of "O‑‑sorry about that," & * went back to work with his bloody calculations. This was great. He could absolutely follow her anywhere, watch her doing anything. Chiin's mouth so watered so it caused coruscations of mock flash in the shields of his antimagery. She didn't react, & that should have tipped him off. But Chiin was shrinkrtapped round a positive-ion pollenball, & was therefore not catching anything, so he continued to follow her, absolutely everywhere, & he watched her doing everything indeed‑‑everything you can trust, everything you imagine‑‑but could not, even while he was watching, could not focus anything, so despite his peeping her privacy was intimate & secure. That should have tipped him as well as well, but I already said. She was for a while meeting & talking with life-sized sticks of translucent gum, or some such material. They were alive‑‑probably edocs in a clever disguise, not that she was being watched. She was meeting with them alone & in groups, & she always seemed to be briefing them very rapidly. & these slick edocs witwhom she seemed to be meeting (even though he Chiin here could not come clear on quite a single thing) came across as very important to Chiin whose eyes & forebrains were slowly being fried just as suredly as a positive mock of canvas pulls over the phases of your changing face in the face of these phase-humiliations God is pulling you through. Yea, his eyes were being like fried, which as it tends to give one tended to gave him The Absolute Conviction of the Divine & Sapient Lucidity of His Impressions, & it seemed she was patterning in with some influential people here‑‑government officials, criminals, former power-brokers, perhapos people all but destroyed by the success of their own densely crafted & abysmal machinations‑‑what though thy took the form of limpid sheets of this flexive, chewing-gum material. This was Chiin's impression, & he jotted it down in those cramped & eternally indecipherably snoring notes he was reaming out endlessly since it was impossible to stop or breathe or think anything in this Compacted Everything he was inhabiting throughout Crazed Indelible Loops of orbiting orbiting time, where orbiting orbiting means time orbiting time meaning the loop of something resembling conceptions of itself in impossibly preceding loops of the previous time. Something like that. Are you OK? WORSHIPED BY THE MUD-EDOCS But that was was nothing compared to the way they dragged the nub of his brother through some of the world's most sickly silt. They never let up on his brother, but just kept pulling on that hook implanted in the crown of his neural net till his thoughts all mingled like the coils of a mop, all sopping & loody & parallel, & the pixels of his screams had wandered out into Various Small Universps of Mud & burnt their light out all the time, giving consciousness to the god damned mud edocs therefore worshiped by the god damned mud edocs till their own lazy sunlight embered out, & vaious Other Bad Things Happened unto him & under him. "We're just skinning your brother alive to see what it does to you," was the Official Explanation, along with the law that official explanations had to be lies, preferably the cruelest sort of lies, covering the last sort of cruelties. Well, then they're not skinning my brother at all, he thought he decided, but giving me the half-thoughts of my brother by gving me the definite pleasure of seeing my brother skinned alive & the further deeper pleasure of being my brother being mt brother being skinned alive. Clever trick, but I'll have none of it. But he did. EUPHORIC GOO One day a dewy critter up & poptouta Iooi's theft-tube‑‑he just-he popped right out. This Spritely Form hopped oup & began joyously wiping off its slime. There was too-soon euphoric goo every everywhere, & the groo‑‑unable to help themselves‑‑began playing with them as if they were ga'megdemox, which were those snowy forms of the ancient molecules the which-whiff Jethtoff gave their children to play. When Chiin come in the groo was sitting round the floor, pawing & touching them. Chiin tried to look disgusted overtop of his own overflowent, efferfluent joy. "This is why I tell you never to Steal Organic Forms," he intoned with a giggle-rider on the main signal. "And by the way never paw them if you do." He was trying to stop tuther's hands, which were doing a lot of gross Groping of Slits, but he kept laughing & rolling through the vertigo of various gravitational hoops if he, hoops-if-he-do if he do. "Now," he panted he, "hhwhat do we do?" His groo wouldn't look at him as if he were leader. "You tell us, dad," said Keydapeydeeo. "Well god damn it, isn't it like I aways said?" Chiin said, his eyes pressing themselves in from the sides & his whole head angling. This beaming thing was excellent; he wanted to just go oooo. "Ooo-look at this, you mensas: we can't use them; they eat our stuff, & they can never last," he told them. "Stop pawing him," Chiin said reflexively. Someone inserted the wedge of a large lacuna, through the shadowed shutters of whose allotments of insanity they möbed through for several superstrings of a timeless longlong while. "What do we do?" Habb said finally, now that they were all drenched in irresponsible ecstasy. "You have to kill it," said Chiin, who was obviously being cruel. See, the ability to kill had been lost to this sector long ago, & the pieces of death itself had been largely stolen. The word death meant Longed-For Guest Who Never Comes. "You don't know me, Chiin?" cried Vaom in the form of this dewy sprout. "Vaom?" said Chiin, his face Vaoming in converging squinch of articulations. "Vaom?" His brother Vaom was nodding in fulsome incoherence. "Chiin!" he cried. "I'm here. I...got away!!!" "Vaom!" cried Chiin again in the form of a bowl of crystal resonance. "What are we going to do with you?" ..... "I'm going to see if I can tchich the dewy sprout to steal." THE UNTRUE BIBLE In our sleep we've all heard Vaom's endless stories of torture, humiliation, escape, pursuit (when even Vaom knows no one bothered to pursue him), exfoliating into Stories of Vaom's Heroism, Vaom the Soldier of the Weak, Vaom the Clever, Voam the Resourceful, Vaom the Dry-Eyed, Vaom the Sleepless Baby Sighing in the Eye of the Vacant Night, etc.‑‑all of which seem merely to embellish the fact that he groveled blubbering away, brainless & beshat all over himself, choked on the copious mucous of his own craven gleam. He told these stories to the groo‑‑repetitively, all in a single sentence, until they thought they would die. He drove them to such madness that Chiin had a boal placed over his head to abate the general passages of gasses & lessen his brother's plethora of tics & of irksome fucking TICS & change his goddam diapers & suckle him & otherwise shut him up. I meant group, not groo. I will delete it when I can go back in time. I will also delete this paragraph, of course. Now back to our story. Everyone was mad at Chiin & hated him, & foolish Chiin tried to negate his stropping rage at Iooi by constantly smacking Iooi, & everyone seemed breathlessly & unhappily inebriated all the time, & outbroke various rows & letterless fracases-asesases in the manner of a groo flooing tootally out of controol. Typically, Habb tried to make things better by making things just a bit worse. "I don't think he's your brother," Habb bublaab generally as was he falling to a slightly deeper sleep inside the larger sleep along the Tiers of the Endless Sleep. "I think he's probably that sleazy kid brother of Christ‑‑you know, the one we all see walking the world in his Fetor of Abnegation™, snorting the Untrue Bible, near-voiding with his schismicke step the vials of his brother's holiness." "What are yo talking about?" But Habb never knew, nor ever apologized for speaking out of nothingness. *s {Habb's race}, Chiin sighed painfully. But it was Vaom, all right, who gradually boaled back down to his wonted nature‑‑Voam the creature of watery nothingness, Voam the Trivial, Voam a dreary spark below the netherplanes of contempt, & the ruffled groo was soothed, if never healed. START READING HERE Ignore that. Here at the halfway point of the vo-do-de-o™, Vaom obviously want to talk. The groo took on an attitude of contemptuous solicitude, making a touchy fucking fuss & a fuchy tucking fuff about goddamn leaving Chiin behind on jobs, allowing him & him dear brother to be alone. No number of doleful scowls at the razzing crowd could help Chiin. There was also a lopt of drooling. I'm not at liberty to talk about it. Please ignore all of this. Please start reading. Vaom seemed immune to this sort of contempt. His sensibilties clumped with callouses, he kept calling Chiin his "lost brother," preposterously unaware, his gestures toward love goadingly solicitous. Ignore that. Please start reading if you haven;t already started reading, you big dummy. C'mere! (Scene deleted of author groping the reader. Author has been severely punished for this many times, but keeps going back. Author apologizes for subliterary activity of fondling the Unconsenting Adult Reader. Author cannot help himself. Now back to our story. "So how have you been, lost brother?" someone I forget who said, leaning this way & that in his seat as he nodded goodbye to the happily departing grew, & answering with his wincing nod their sardonic waves. "I'm being stalked by a very angry woman," Chiin heard himself blurt Nabb mocked astonishment as he disappeared into the motherfuck dust they disappear to here. Disgusting, what? Not to mention being so nervous about someone saying to ignore that. "What did you do to her, Chiin?" Vaom sounded unaccusing, but the question ruffled Chiin further. "But how are you?" he countered. He really wanted to know. "I thought you were dead. I thought they'd never...you know..." "Let me go." "Uh. Yes. I guess so." "Well like I told you, brother, I got away." Chiin wondered how‑‑not to mention why‑‑Vaom had found him, but he didn't want to ask. "You're not at all upset at seeing me, are you Chiin? I mean, I can see how you might just be." This was beginning to hurt. "I'm very upset, Vaom," he said quietly. "Any thought of the hlations {innihlatians} bothers me." "And me. to say the least!" Here Vaom laughed, which Chiin found rather frightened him. "And here we are!" Vaom cried, clapping Chiin just once on the knee. He made a small show of looking around. "Don't tell me you live in this zxryyn {sector}. What brings you here?" "How did you find me, Vaom?" & why. "Why is this woman chasing you?" Vaom seemed very adept at discounting the existence of things. "Is there anything I can do to help?" "Oh, no. We've decided she's a construct‑‑malfunctioning, or sent after me." "That sounds bad," Vaom said reflectively. "I was hoping your life would be good, Chiin. What do you do?" "It depends on the circumstances, Vaom. How did you escape?" "Providence," his brother said, staring at everything but Chiin. "What's this stuff?" He was pointing at Chiin's dimension tube. He seemed really not to know what the equipment was. "That's what I do," Chiin replied. "It's a tube. It cleans out eff." "Eff, eff...eff," Vaom frowned. "What is that?" "It's the layer you see over everything," Chiin said. "I clean it off. That's what I'm doing here." "Sounds like a noble profession," Vaom smiled, a diamond-tipped tooth slicing through his lower lip. "Do you have any mint green drinks or azure drinks that would bring us possibly into the depths of some sort of azure-lidden sleep, my good friend?" "What are you getting at?" "Do you have any drugs?" I hadn't thought of it. Drugs are internally generated & administered for all of us. My brother must be different. I think I should probably make a note of that, but have no way of doing that, the nearest tattoo parlor being at least a billion trillion parsecs afuckingway. "Yes, of course," I said. "We have plenty of them‑‑all you could possibly want." This pleased him very much & it didn't take some sort of brain form a flying saucer to tell you he was a doper. Wouldn't ya know, in a Hampton story there'd be a doper... KIRK HAMPTON (appearing as The Doper & doing all his own make-up & costuming & putting out & stunts; here, for example, he scores a literary first in appearing in the midst of his own insane opus wearing only a penis shield, sending readers down the generations into oblivion): I just happen to like dopers, man. Most dopers are very good people. Penis Shield Box If you don't know, don't ask. This is very very sad. Well‑‑it would be merely sad if he didn't have that magnificent erection. I love an author who loves his work. Look at that cock!!! Ignore all boxes, both in & out of time. & where the hell did the author go? Where's the continuity!? Back in the story Vaom was asking about drinks, & here we went into this brief but very jolly & very sexually satisfying fugue & come out finding Vaom sipping a foamy pink something & now we have or seem to be having some foamy thing going here, with a pink head a good deal larger than M. Vaom's cock. I mean head. Lookatim, smiling with his pink-foam moustache! & all because I said cock instead of head. There's the power of language for you, yes? "Narrator aside, this is some great shit!" crows Vaom in a punkrock voice, like now he's all rebellious & aggressive & whatnot, the fucking little snit. TimeBox™ Pause while author, ruthlessly misusing his metafiction license, kicks the crap out of Vaom till he dies, sort of. The facts of the matter themselves are under most severe litigation, so we regret that the part of Vaom is played from here on in by someone dead for the remainder of this Cloud of Hallucinations. Figure 1: The Nature of time Revealed Maybe the boxes represent flashbacks. So time turns out to be these boxes‑‑wouldn't you know? "Yea, that'll make you crazy," Chiin said nonchalantly. "Just like the parentheses." "What?" said his brother in some alarm, & Chiin understood. "I mean it will make you exceedingly & impossibly & permanently happy." "Yea right. Stop replying to the narrator, Chiin. I'm sure there's a rule about that." "Go fuck yourself. Go spum." So Vaom spum in solemn fearfulness. "I don't know who would send that woman after me," Chiin said, though his real attention was taken up up up up up with the array of changes cascading through Vaom's slim being. "Joy! This is...joy!" he stammered, pointing at the beautiful spike of whatever. "Yes it is. But how did you escape?" "Why, by making things suicidally ugly, of course," Vaom said, in the tones of voices too disconnected to lie. "Ugly," bewildered Chiin sighed. "You better have some of this, Chiin. You look like you're dying!" THE FINER THOUGHTS OF GOD The door gave out a hearty metal clunk, like a thought congratulating itself into littler thoughts tickling themselves up unto littlerer thoughts, & so on, on & on, on unto the Finer Thoughts of God (all self-praise, self-worship, which is how he does it, in case you were wondering (case you were wondering (you were wondering (were wondering (wondering) . Chiin & Coam stepped into the steam. Their nostrils widened. "It smells the same," Chiin most certainly did not say, starting at the echo. "Like some sort of primeval cooking," nor did Voam say. The pressure & heat were tremendous. He had remembered it with horror, yet it felt now like a cozy Fagor. "This is the way it always was," Voam never whispered. He looked shrunken, possibly doubting his resolve. They "glazed at a Krel" of endlessly mutating, endlessly fluctuating plants. Chiin placed his fingertips gently inside the cluster, which moved nad morphed like menisces restless with the night. "Is this night ightightightight?" Voam chirped absently had Voam chirped absently, if you get my drift. Their voices <sound> different every time they <don't speak>. Chiin felt his tissues dissipating. He remembered now the feeling‑‑how the place just nourished change, the constant transformation of everything. "Look at this," Voam never said, but Chiin didn't see it, but he recalled the light was very dishonest here. Chiin tried to listen to the rain, pouring in columnar torrents, with lesser arrays of rain coiling through the sleeping pillars & snoozing colonnades of the Spindolio Towers (within which, Chiin knew, there were still larger & larger towers surrounding obelisks of still higher magnitudes, rains oozing into perfect darkness & thickness of sound unequally dark, into the deep rains, impossible rains, the rains of the gods. "To think we were really formed here." "Impossible...don't you think?" Since no one had said anything, they laughed for a moment like crazy schoolbugs. Despite their coats they were beyond wet already, & they tossed the garments off. FLAWLESSLY OBEDIENT BUGS "Remember your bugdays?" Vaom sighed through the distance of his eyes. The rain was getting to him, Chiin thought. But he did remember his bugdays! They were in fact thronging in on him like the crystal children of his class (countless millions of friends, unless they were mirrors; they may have used mirrors for friends on Queigh, if memory served, or mirror-lenses you saw through everything through fitted for school). They fitted you with infinite lenses for school, & extra limbs & digits, & a binghard coat. They turned you into bugs. It was best to go to school as these flawlessly obedient bugs‑‑not ordinary insects, of course, but fantastically sentient if thoughtless in their little bug uniforms (blue, & glitzed with emblems like the Stars of Golden Nobility aching in cascades of golden tears; these were terrific uniforms! Unless they were the shells. But one was filled with meotion which is a {feline formal emotion}. Frew realize just how emotional insects‑‑especially youthful insects‑‑can be, or have to be. Pangs of camraderie choked the throat, hearts throbbed wildly in their chitinous coat; fervid eyes filled with the lensed images of a thousand thousand friends‑‑all perfect, all faceless, jumping in crystal-perfect waves, unless these were electronic wave; but in any case those were your friends!!!). "Ah!" Chiin & Vaom cried! Bugdays, as they say, & with youthful potency compacted inside one's chitinous shell, the classroom actually a tank scattered into tiers of tiny tanks encrypted in serial circuit visionary rows through dispersals of a thousand eyes traced bullets of impossible information, bullets zinging & explosions of knowledge apparently zinging everywhere like flares erupting through the smoke of an ill-seen dream. Unless it was just ill-dreamed. "Man, we learned a lot there," Vaom said staunchly "Yes indeed," Chiin replied in like fashion. "We learned everything." They looked at one another, inspired but definitely scared at all this schoolstuff coming up. "I wonder where it went," one of them said (we have lost signal; we don't know who said that). Probably Vaom. "Well, we were bugs," Chiin pointed out. "Where could it be?" Stored away in connective tissue, awaiting activation. Suspecting this, Chiin had long ago had had had his connective tissue expunged on Baakmyeyk, in a process uniquely Baakmyeykian & so expensive he'd had to steal the denotation of the process & have the thing done along the vector of a conditional slant in order to swing it. So one couldn't at all be absolutely certain at all at all that those murky thicknesses of knowledge weren't still in some lost sense "there." "We shouldn't have come back here," he said suddenly, but his brother had advanced into the first sheet of seething rain. Vaom was shouting & shouting something at him, shouting again & again pressing his face right through menisces of water & shouting at him. We did these de-encryptions, & "We're going to have to learn to whistle all over again!" these deencryptions read, where whistle meant breathe & breathing was indeed whistling here, & they both pressed their fingers to their chests & tried & tried. They tried & tried a certain heavingness of chests but they couldn't hear anything. Their filters weren't working yet, & they couldn't hear nor make out anything. They made their chests bulge quite a lot, actually, but they disinctly weren't whistling, or anyway felt indistinctly unsure. Well, if we die, then it proves we aren't breathing, Chiin thought, though he knew it would prove nothing, since they couldn't die. It felt good to be here, without reason, in this insane situation with his brother, possibly insane. They lost one another. "Vaooomm! Vaooooaaaammmm!!!" Chiin cried, or thought he cried. Actually he was making the noise of an engine, "Vrumm! Vrummmmm!!!," which was what he used to do. The memories were moistened. They had come rustling back... They were shouting at each other as the wind blew these various forms of insanity into the air, blowing them out like hair when the hairwinds of Temzyey blew out morsels of your goddam hair. This was not a truly "hairless" world but suffice it to say hare did not here very fare thee well. Fare very thee well. But that was Temzyey, & of course this was Queigh, & these were not hair but thoughts of insanity blowing out like infinite flares. Actually, it felt wonderful, Chiin & Vaom joining hands & dancing more or less in a circle in the infinite rains, looking like bugs, laughing & dancing & gamboling there, but not turning back into bugs or anything but in fact standing more like two adult idiots chattering there. "NICE DEATHS," INDEED "People like to shoot each other with these guns." "Must be nice bullets." "Not always. Not at all. You never know what they're going to do." "What sort of bullets?" "Like I say, you never know. Hope bullets, bullets of inarticulate joy." "Those sound nice." "Well, death-bullets, to be sure‑‑but deaths of all kinds alternating colors sizes & shapes." "You mean like nice deaths?" "Yes, yes‑‑'nice deaths' indeed. & we've seen crazy bullets, bullets that stop." "That just stop everything." "Yes. & love bullets like little Cupid's dew." "Cupid's dew. Not familiar with that." "Very unfamiliar bullets, to be sure. Bullets that cry & beg & bullets that make things up. They just make thousands of things right up. & creations too of bright wounds of light, unwinding light, & bullets of great certainty, unfailing as an inexhaustible Christ." "No kidding? Not familiar with that." "And vacant bullets‑‑bullets of nothingness. Very painful. You're not sure what any of this means." "That's not true. I'm sure of some of it." "...bullets of effervescent euphoria, containing disease." "Ah. Tricky bullets." "Surprise bullets‑‑like bullets that shoot the shooter in the eye." "Agh! But‑‑hitting him with what?" "Remaining always to be seen!" Chiin laughing emptily. "I don't like these bullets." "No, there would have to be some that you'd really like, that you'd fucking go crazy for!" Pausing, then resuming iteration. "Bullets of doubt. Bullets of deep sympathy with the children of the worlds." "Those could kill you." "O they all of them could. It may be they all kill you, & in every possible way." Chiin put the white gun back. He wanted none of it. He'd have to steal the whole lot right away. * was still enumerating types of bullets, but he was dubtless just making them up. THE FACES OF EMPTINESS "You know‑‑the faces of emptiness. The faces you cheated. The faces you betrayed." "Vaom, you don't understand. Nobody owns anything anymore." "But noody I mean nobody knows that! There are delusions of ownership everywhere." "Yes well, I have seen the faces. I collect the images of every single one." This took Vaom very far aback. You could see a molecule of Vaom trickle back the tunnel of his own outline, right down to the dew of nothingness, which was the dew in the lightless field where they suddnly ran. "You've seen these faces?" "Yes of course." "You have?" It was raining very hard right now, except that it wasn't rain but something so much harder, so much more subtle & painful than any rain right on Chiin's bare face. "No." "I can't believe this," Vaom said. He sounded very hollow & very, very very heavy. Chiin noticed he was beginning to feel what Vaom was thinking. This was dangerous. Vaom felt he was losing everything. He couldn't believe what his brother had become. "Vaom..." Chiin said, interrupted by the startling stillness of the constant rain. "Vaom, it was just something that happened to me." "Just like everything," said Vaom vacantly. It sounded vaguely like a quote, but a quotation of something that was never said. "Well, lost brother, I understand," he said, looking like someone trying to look like the happiness of someone awfully happy. "Wait'll you foind out what 'happened' to me!" But Chiin couldn't wait at all‑‑not even a second, not even the splitness in the middle of a slit between a second. LIKE A CONTAINER OF BINGCHEEKS LYING IN THE GROUND "What's this? Look here," shouted Vaom. This was a large lozenge of a bingcheeked head lodgéd sidewise in the silt of the awful ground. It had bingcheeks, like its mouths were full. It had many mouths, all covered with this one bingcheek, I mean one bingpair of cheeks. "They look full," Chiin said. "They look dangerously full." "Like the cheeks are going to blow?" "Let's set it upright." & set upright it they did. The cheeks seemed even bigger than before‑‑like Chiin said, just about ready to blow. "I wonder what's contained in the goddamned cheeks?" said Vaom squeaking his fingers cross his own dissimilar chin. He was standing contraposto in the silt-rin, visibilities of his figure tapering is the essence of an anemic flame. Such was Vaom. "Those cheeks contain pressure, stress," Chiin said. "You don't know what you're talking about, brother." "Yes it does. I'm a fucking thief, Vaom. I see these things. I know what I'm talking about." Vaom chuckled doubtfully & turned toward the rain. The smoke around his silouette looked like the smoke of a living fag. There are no living fags. "Stop laughing at me!" shouted Chiin psychotically. He wondered if that rock would crush his skull. But his brother, like everyone, had an infinitely reinforced skull. & like I said somewhere upthere that there was no dying there. SEGUÉ It was an extrapolating airlock, "dripping richly with the luxiouƒ Mucke," Chiin was much later to think he thought. & he thought he was having the thoughts of this place. All the rather viscous, liquid thoughts of this place were coming back, & in quotes lingering like the sadness of a liquid eye. "We have to blow it like an eye," Vaom said with adolescent enthusiasm. & Chiin was now thinking of this; he was thinking now about everything his little brother said, & he wondered if Vaom was having "the thoughts of Queigh" as well, or if he was mad. Blow it like an eye, indeed! he thought, & this thought spaced the vast like dew, & everybody stared at this pinpint epitofuckingmememe of Vaom's face, the muck dissolved in terrific rays so all through the muck on the faces of his many layered masks, segments of this one-third model Voamhead tumbled off laughably in the general's trembling hand, the atlas of his blemishes reticulate along the glass of the military graph... "Stop looking at me," said Vaom. "I see through you, you know," he grunted, trying in the apparency of winds to muscle up extrapolations of the hatch. Why has he brought me here? Chiin thought. His brother seemed to not much care. WORLDS DON'T DIE or SHROUDS ALONG THE ETHER WINDS They were going into the other universe. They were going through his brother squirting out like a seed, & Chiin chasing him, slopping through all manner of the pasel torbing-throbbin-torbid muck to get to him, slipping on his face comically, slapping his balls against the pavement strewnéd slop, sliding face-first everywhere, to gales of laughter inaudible in the ether-winds, mocked by ether-creatures, high-level beams stringing their shrouds which are their brains which are their nameless secret shrouds alnog I mean along the shouds along the astrial plames, tackling the bingsquished seed of his astral brother, Vam popping out like the Essence of a Fart, two burgling brothers lying there So this it for, Chiin somewhat thought a Tiny Little Chiin thought somewatt feverishly in feverthought fish feverly. The laughtrack jaggeth down. Tranquil glooping of semen, enhanced unhideoux manytimeds. Vao lay back against a stupid petal. He looked drooped & lacadisially slacked, as if he'd had a bingorgasm all over the floor, all over this dribbling place. He sighed a great fag-sucking sigh, but Chiin knows it meant nothing. "I have some news," he said. "I have some news about our planet." "News about our planet," said Chiin-Vacants-of-Irony of Chiin of bleeging the Vacanz-Ironies. "Yes. Bad news, I'm afriad. Our planet is dead," he vev, making a slight, effervescent little face, just a moue here face, fiddling with some little nick in his little skin, some tiny blemish hideously asymmetrical & covered with light like diseased lichen. Vaom picked at it circumspectly, his eyes hooded oer but like never leaving quite Chiin, & then he started ripping off his face, in stages, awkwardly & with an infantile, whining mewl, till the skin of his whole face dangled ruptured in his hand. The face beneath was just these bubbles like a madman's drool... Whöö...Vaom's face appeared in several screens, out of foocus. The screens swept clean & then they rippled his face again, & the face looped kindly & fine & brotherly, & he was kneeling over Chiin. Vaom waited till Chiin was conscious‑‑he waited until just that moment, then he began moving & speaking. "I'm sorry, brother," Voam vug. Chiin reentered essential anchor points of his body, which took an annex outside the lobes of time, then zed: "You tore off your face? Aaaaa!" "I thought you knew!" Vaom geeooeeuum with a great show of innocence, shrugging his shoulders & splaying his hands & spreading his (reattached) lips & shrugging & making with mincing movements of his spine & casting his gaze across imaginary campfires of exhaustion on the ground of the middle distance. Was he deferring to his bingbrother in some ridiculous way? He thinks I deserve anything, Chiin thought. "I can make things ugly," Vaom exclained. ..... "Did you say Queigh died?" Vaom nodded. "It's covered with nothing but muck now, brother. Nothing but muck for a thousand miles. Then hatches, followed by empty tunnels, nothing but empty tunnels, for thousands & thousands of miles." Vaom was sounding mad again. "I think you're lying, Vaom. Worlds don't die. They don't turn into tunnels & stuff." "It was fuckin murdered, Chiin. We have to go back there." "Why?" "Do you think that woman did it?" "Why would we have to go back there?" "Respective reasons," smiled Vaom, looking very devious & clever. "But I couldn't go alone." "Damn it, Vaom!" Chiin sputtered, & he wished he'd been left with violent capabilities. "What would we go there for?" "Why‑‑you to steal, of course. Me to find out why." Chiin decided he was not traveling with his brother, no matter what there was to steal, no matter what ugly things he could make him see. But he was wrong. ..... Vaom was playing ministrations on the truth, after a fashion. The brothers were back on Queigh for the same reason. "So," so Chiin nervously. He had never been in such a thing before, & his brother was beginning to scare him. "This is headed for‑‑headed for eueueueu Queigh, eigh?" "No," Voam replied. "Xf," dandling the tractable auras of controls, space elongating this & that like the stretches a cosmic cat. "XF?" Chiin squawked as the various idiosyncratic somatics of madness furrowed through his brain of his brain of his brain. "Uahh, why Xf, Vaom?" "To make preparations," Vaom gleb, nodding at incomprehensible animated equations performing vermiform articulations to amazed inverted faces of the incirculating screens. He was steering with the wrist of one uncaring hand. "Keep in mind, brother, our Queigh's one very diseased corpse of a world." "So...we need equipment or something like equipment or something from Xf?" "Nah. You've stolen anything we might ever need, right? Na‑‑I'm getting my orders from Xf," Vaom replied. Vaom was punishing him or maybe killing him. His brother was killing him. "You think I'm lying or something, brother?" Vaom called to Chiin through ridges of crystal that were surrounding Chiin in the revery of a crystal dream. "It hasn't even developed that far," Chiin in instances several severally replied. "I know what you mean. I'm trying to reveal things in sta-ges, Chiin." "More fun that way? Like tearing off your face?" "To keep you going mad, I mean, to keep you from going mad," Vaom thed, still more calling to Chiin than conversing, his vest bursting with suns of absolute vivid camaraderaderie "I know you thieves are prone to going insane!" "Ever been to Xf?" "Xf? No. I've heard of it. Not a bit of timedew there." "But how would you know? But it is‑‑very immaculate, yes‑‑& with sentient frijj, & with those prisons! Hell, I'll bet that kept you away." "What are you implying, Vaom?" "Cowardice, Chiin." "You ought to know about that. What makes you so brave now, Vaom? What makes you so excruciatingly confident?" Vaom leaned back & with that smile on, that smile he had of darkness coming out from under grey, implying ugliness, the coming of ugliness, but Chiin couldn't splay up his fingers over eyes, & he was too afraid anyway, so he just watched as Vao pulled back his vest, pulling back radiating ribs beneath his vest, pulled also back foaming pinkness of surprise & unholy eningmatic labyrinths of eyes (all types of eyes & with some colors vivid as the thoughts of a lucid dream too dream too dream) & inside a cool cube (you could tell it was cool by the halos of steam) steeped with these clusters of silver shivs. "These are my orders," he beamed. "You see how beautiful? Orders & instructions, Chiin, in eclectic & manifold throngs, incalculable echelons orders & instructions & commands‑‑with not a jot overshot! not a molecule! I-I-I always know what to do, Chiin‑‑like I never did. You know how they gave me nothing to do‑‑which is impossible to do‑‑& thenmade me do it, again & again? Do you REMEMBER, Chiin?" "I remember," gasped Chiin. The intricate beauty of that steaming cube! Senescence of time...Vaom pulling his jersey down. "See, that box contains virtually infinite ecessions of blades, where each blade cuts us through to another circumstance. Tiers of possibility, Chiin‑‑the options recede like waves. It just gets cleaner & cleaner, like the Beach of Denimz, getting cleaner with each sliver of moonlit silvery wash. Now I ask you‑‑how could I doubt anymore? How? Can you imagine what it's like, Chiin?" "No, I...The innihs did this?" Vaom bark voiceless at this absurdity. "Of course not! The Innihs!" & his lips razzed out a fume of flustering scorn. Chiin looked back into drear vacancies of past. Nothing but fogs eddied in estuarial jet. "Nothing back there," Vaom jacked absently. "What are you looking for, Chiin?" "Bojje," muttered Chiin. He was biting through his lips where golden lights blossom through the holes in his bitten lips I am told this was a poisoned light, but I am told this by blossomings of the lying signs lying in the light of MINE OWNE BROKE LIPS! this was a blossoming sort of gold of a golden light lying by a sign, an old friend of mine that hang like a falcon over me through the depth of of all these emergents here. "I wonder if she's followed us." "You," corrected Vaom. "She's followed you. I'm counting on it." Chiin came rounds to Chiin making movements with is HORRIBLY WOUNDED LIPS that would have said like "Why-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay?" had but but hum but been but given of the flutters of breathless butterflies oerundehum. "Don' worry," Vaom drawld, LOOKING UP from his desk arrayed in his sorry head with these tiny lenses & mirrors too immaculately perfect to believe. "We'll lose her here, in comeuppance of the muck." "I beg your pardon, brother?" "We'll recollect the hatches, Chiin, infinitely over her." "Ah." Chiin kept thinking about running, I assure you, but that his brother had taken all his will, & he felt really happy, very. Hey‑‑he was loving someone; we was loving his brother‑‑heretofore thought unlovable by science‑‑& loving his brother after all this time! (What time? he thought, but but in no known loop of the intricate time. Let me tell you, he was leaning back against his favorite vap.) They stayed in a cluster of syllables tranlaated as The Klufter Redoubt here in beautiful downtown Phrinedde‑‑the finest hotel on Xf, & here Chiin lost him several days, yet Vaom (this goddamned Voam!) seemed quite used to its pleasures flowing through the thoughts of your many throats like bouquets of the limitless vine. {Vaom had himself experimented on, till he was something quite unique, what with that vacant cube steaming inside him (& a four-dimensional cube it was, too, & with four-dimensional steam!). Then he died (he could do that). Then he auctioned himself off to the interzxryyn scientific underground. All science is illegal here. It is widely known that science is up to no good‑‑at least around here. & the Xf's got Vaom, though not altogether fairly (they had Chiin steal his own brother! albeit unbeknownst).} THE THOUGHTS OF SOMEONE ELSE (ALL ABOUT DEATH) "Well as you know, my brother, the Innihs were ALL ABOUT DEATH‑‑about finding the secret of our stolen death, sniffing out that one mote still containing sweet blessed death this is their thinking I am talking about {though Chiin noticed his tough brother was always doing that‑‑claiming his thoughts were always the thoughts of someone else} and snuffing it up, recreating death. They were fascinated & obsessed with death, with gestating & recreating death‑‑but you know that." Chiin, by the way, never knew "that." "That was my way out, I saw right away. It was the only way out, so I proffered myself for root experimentation. I sold myself, Chiin, so they could probe right down to the royal depths, probe me to death. "And damned if the bastards didn't invent a kind of an artificial death, which they inserted, whereupon I instantly died. It shorted them out a bit: they couldn't think about me now that I'd died, even though I was standing amongst them. "So I {pulled the plug on the planet, made it die} & left. I was dead, so I had to sell myself to {science underground} the Xf. That's my story." CHIIN'S REDUNDANT NEEDLES "I've missed this!!!" hissed Vaom through his zealous teeth as he pulled on these special dimensional gloves‑‑three-fingered, white...Dimensional Gloves; threfngrd...wht...dmnsnl glvs suspending cellular constructs as of ex-sarcoplasmic hand remolding as we say "the 'hand'" so that as he stretched his fingers eagerly stretched his fingers eagerly stretched he stretched he-eagerly his fingers performed in the matrix like some gum, prolonged unto quantum maintenances of uncanny spectrial waves, in lengths if you say "lengths" much longer than the length of the lit revelations they have up here in these stretched, pale layers of resiliant stratosphere. & his elongate paddle-fingers seemed rather laquered, too. "Dimensional gloves," he's explained so's to end the frame. {END FRAME} Chiin nodded coolly. How much could Vaom miss anything, he wondered. How much of anything had his brother done? Pretty good with the fingers there, he had to admit (in a sniff (into himself (ff!). Vaomi's little SURREAL MIRACLES hurt much more than ever, actually, but Chiin & his Chiin's facade had grown cooler & much cooler, like he was taking in his stide rather thn cramping with rather-than nausea inside. For his part, Vaom no longer mocked or made snide comment, but merely glanced off the pins of Chiin's redundant needles with a flaying eye. I wonder if he could be killed, Chiin wondered, which is what you always wonder. Wonder of wonders as those fingers forked into infinite nerves & didde hooke intrinsicate with the bobs of the gnarls that were these lightspike sort of pokey things serving as The Gold Balls of Dominion controlling the thing, controlling whereupon the thing you could see in the middle of your head like transperancies of liquid blue in the center of your head‑‑a rather cloudy head, but you could see all right‑‑the halo round the gesture of the relative little thing made with whips, a coupla quick whits about Vicinity The of Xf like a pextured xignature, then zfed. Yay, unto nothingness diditzip, which they call zf. "Well, we're gone now!" cried a dangerously excited Vaom. "We're officially GONE ON THE CHARTS, fair brother!" Which they were, officially. Someone has checked this out, subsequently, out of an aching idleness and/or lend credence to to the story. Certainly Chiin didn't check it out, pasted to his seat like a tongue on a frozen bat‑‑but they were officially (somewhere) listed as NOWHERE on the Charts of Completion or the Charts of Perfect Place or the Charts of the Whereabouts, & they were Nowheres In Time, neither, flying edgeoff on the drive of the future indefinite. Chiin awoke to Vermilion Beauties, this morning's Beauty of the Day, which was the Klufter's {eerily careful arrangement} of light that shone light-through you at the start of the Xfean dye not to be prehended for the Emerald Night up there, the emerald night of the sapphire sapphire stars you went to sleep to up up there, which was the Feature of the Night you went to sleep to‑‑ruored*like a Xfean rumor to be a work of art of the so-called Astral Apparati brushed it off with the essence of a Syfjgian caress (rather an artist in his own right, at least during the rites of sleep), & turned to this...sloppy gobbling sound, which was his brother huddled under this great arcing artificial flambeau gasping just about THE most sublimated gasses you could ever ƒnort & ƒnorting powders of a liquid ƒnort & bolting capsule-capsules there of variouƒ ƒort & also ƒucking ƒtuff in through needles & assorted ƒtraws & "dying in infusions," as they say which took the form of variegated vapruux entities standing patiently in these pastel sort of decks like a gash of awful cards in one of those cards in one of those unmentionable Pekkean or Tdjekkian gimes which were a form of games, only more formal than any game, & besides with an i, which would step forth over his head & bury his head. His brother sitting at the table with a vapor over head! "Vaom?" "Having breakfast, brudder," brubber an arid simulation of his brother's voice, like a gaunt subscript of his brother's voice in some spidery italics of some flimsy syllables, flimsy syllables sifting across refined stellar dust, out the small door leading into the air of the actual room & padding cross the pristine floor of the room where Chiin was tarrying, then reaching Chiin, there grasping Chiin his wrist him like the Ancient Mariner. Chiin pointed the finger. "Are those drugs? Are you taking drugs, Vaom?" Vaom grinned through a voam ball round his head. "Drugs," he injects with gleeful uncertainty. "Drugs & eating. Same thing out here. Come on in." Chiin went through the curtain. "That's what I love about Xf!" his brother thkweel. "You'ro gonna eat, aren't you, Chiin? I mean at least?" MORE NEVER Vaom had taken to giving abrupt orders. "C'mon," he g'nop, pointing at a vyqyl casing‑‑a special coat, like a Xfean overcoat. "Put that on." Vaom was doing his up in snaps you did up like blasting stars, followed by a great industrial rachet, followed by quadruple sequences of quadruple sequences of quadruple sequences of quadruple sequences of explosive hatches (like the souls of Chivvims‑‑very mean, very delicate), followed by diminishing successions of more or less industrial zippers, followed by finer & finer snaps & latches & catches & Velcro flies, microscopic linkages, followed at last by lasting at last by seamless bonds you couldn't even see suppositions of a palm soothe by with the soundlessness of balm (illustrious balm available in the Shops of the Frigid Air, down in the Raeealeaaen Zxryyn‑‑the White Magnification sectors). "What's with the coat?" Chiin muttered, while obediently putting it on. "Well now what do you think?" Vaom quackied. His contempt was getting easier to hear but harder to understand, & Chiin's worry raced just beyond his curiosity. Vaom seemed soaring toward something horrible. But Chiin had to see what he was about. UD2 They dreamt down vast corridors of rivets. Everhing was rusted & vacant & horrible, & there was somewhat of a suppositional buzzing sound. "Undesignated Districts," Vaom explained. "That's the title of the section we're in, so that's what we're in." "I see." But Chiin thought Vaom quite mad by now, despite any number of strange things they had experienced, if memory served. UD's. The UD District, UD2. These were the Topological Absurdities no one but the mad signs * briefed you about, projections of damaged memory curvatures tilped off the dead recollections of surfaces, forming impossible spaces, the so-called "presumed virtual hoods" littered with beings galore into which entities poured, larger than a universe at many many times, as when they slooped off presumed windings of the Möbius quurve back where the poor Xf were like madmen in their interlunar caves just trying to remember everything. {They were walking} through the famous "steel rain" or needle rain of Xf, which was this condensation of needles in this steely steam, which was by rumor of mutant vapruux entities (all very much desired by the passionate Xfean pleece, of which more never) an offshoot of some longlost industrial activity the Xf kept in shelves of their central memory units, which was where all their memories came from, except (the memries came from) damaged in the awful rains Vaom & Chiinyboy were walking through right now. "Just think," cried Vaom, "The Xf have no idea we're here!" Chiin looked round furtively. No frijjs, no vapruux‑‑nothing but rivets rising in the smolder of these ancient oils (of designated mantles each of each, discernible by hue of grey & brown), mushroom rivets rusted angry as a glare, dead rivets sized like cities everywhere. He shivered in his vyq. He bet the Xf knew, & he damn well knew his brother knew they knew. "Look. They got away." They were walking on * of dead inspresh bubbles. "Dead inspresh," Vaom thrus, kneeling. He placed his fingers on them, but not his palms. He was nodding to himself like an enchancted scout. He stood up again. "They got away in time." "Back with the inspresh? Back in time?" Vaom shook his head. He seemed insanely certain. "No. Forward. They're up there waiting for us, because they know we're going to come." We are? thought Chiin. Of course Chiin had never seen Queigh from the sky, but he had pictures all the time of how it looked‑‑a tidy little place, not a planet anyone would want to have bothered: the miniature halo, the yellow atmosphere, afforestated fractals spreading round the cities in concentric lozenges of overlapping blue & dapplered gray, all that crystal‑‑& everywhere, the pinpoint spangles of titanium white (the eyes in the forest, nonexistent entities‑‑only the children knew & were too frightened to say), & the terrain faceted like broken crystals. He saw such world here‑‑only the grey vacancies of a long-repressed dream...not a world at all, exactly, but more like the portfolio Vaom handed him‑‑ring-bound (which he hated) & awkwardly large, as if designed for giants, for a race just a tad more heroic, just slightly better than he, & with these special pages pages that dropped dead at cube, cube-paged pages then, which when you thumbed them tumbled off their own accords, detailing attempts at a story too fierce to occur in time, too ferocious with details called the story called The Story of Decomposition Pieces of some horrible crime (occurring in incision, in this story) & not like any more stories that occurred in details of time. These pages occurred in threefold transdimensional flips, damaged pictures of a space full of missing pieces of pictures away of something displaced & something horribly goddam wrong. These were the transposition photographs that were all had become Queigh. "Just photographs," Chiin muttered, stunned. "O, but you can walk into them," chirped Vaom ferociously. "You can walk right through, Brother Chiin." "I see," sighed Chiin vacantly. "No really," pressed Vaom, grappling the book into his own lap & beginning to point things out, except that what he pointed out had no marker & stood in the eye like lips moving silently on impossible, unknown words. It was just like that. "No really, Chiin‑‑Queigh's in here, most assuredly. Only it's none of what we remembered. Look here‑‑see?" Chiin squinted, but did he really see this ill-shaped porosity of translucid muck, thoughtless black spots of guck buried visibly within, lit dimly within the rim of frijjs that had formed around it? Surely not! "This isn't..." "Yes it is, Chiin. See, Queigh was forced to the end of time, quite violently. It was burnt to corpses in the process, & its timemarkers utterly obscured. It was then shot back." "Shot back...by what?" Vaom shook his head. "By someone very mad. They murdered it." "There is no such thing as...murder," whispered Chiin. "It seems poor Queigh has rediscovered death. Rediscovered murder, anyway." "How do you know that?" "We need to find out how, don't you think?" "How‑‑how do you do that?" Vaom pointed at the maps & shrugged with mock innocence. "We go home, OK?" Chiin was going mad, straining to pop the top of that most fabulous gooey hatch, & a gorgeous movie hatch, a movie-star hatch opening in gold gold sequins to a golden clustroux void of an icy hatch. Like the harder he pulled the icier did his humd nands got, so the more trifling did his fanciful exertions cumb, so rolling over slower did that flow-blooded time did coldly thor emsue, so closer did Ladoga Bojje beloom, thus elevated raisings of the magnitude of mass of that exaltated hatch, so thus milch more mad did Chiin become‑‑nor was Vaom helping, whining like a girl, losing all heroic muscle in a fluster of inebriative tocs. "Come on! Open up! She's coming, Chiin!" Chiin felt later enervations of his of the various Subchiinian Entities of Sanity (bristling right on the edge of sanity, right bright there on the xixtling-zedge‑‑tiny microdrawings of some lost insanity!). Too many knobs, turning meaningless in a dreamwave of way too, way-too, waytoomany knobs abustle of of too toomany knobs (each had!) each a dream of too toomany hatches eyepening up, wheels of his great brother tucking under him him-arm, soft crescents of the pulpy corridor Ladoga bobbingup, heaving the great wheel of the hatch as if this here were some sorta ocean one war opening up this great hatch leading to an ocean open up which would then quite poeur ouer the lip of the sullen hotch, dribbing the light out of the Next Essential Dream dreamt neveless perforce & hench dreamt very dark, watery dreams sleeping below the layers of those dreams, occasioned bubbles occasioned bubbles tussles of bubbles, Ladoga Bojje popping out of bubbles & firing one shot quite specifically into each & every eye & the tears clearing the dreaming of the hatch, & his poor brother whining in the closures of the hatch (contrivance of the latch), irisin shallowfacet fastenhatch perhaps. "God she got you! God, she was almost in! God we shut her out!" Or she shut us in, drizzling Chiin thought he thought in a dribbling of cream... "Wake up brother," whispered gentle Vome v.1.1. "Chiin, wake up," qoq Careful Nurse of a stermfaced nerving Voem v.2.2. "GODDAM IT, CHIIN, WAKE UP!!!" shrieked this most positively vigilant wakeful Voam v. Voam this vergim Voam. "Sorry," spattered Chiin with such funny repetitions they hurl still elsewhere in syndications of a thousandmind. "She knocked me out. She almost..." "I knocked you out," corrected Voam. "She almost got you, brother, butcept I knocked you out." "She's out?" "Almost out. She's locked in the lock‑‑the limnus of the interstitial hotch oerlock" "She's inside?" "Somewhat. In the erelocked‑‑not inside inside with us." Chiin made painful motions of his sopping mouth. "What?" "Nothing, brother. Nothing. Calm down. She almost drove you nuts." She DID drive me nuts, Chiin thought, holding the surface of his entire up head to keep the thouht of his head from getting back. An she's in the lock. "But she's locked in there," Vaom pointed out. & they say Chiin did get up. RIDUCULES BACKFIRE TERRIBLY They were splashing dwon the Remorque Corridor, full of nothing full of nothing but these white remorques like impairments of a negative or mars on a bent millennial photograph or shocks on the faces of your torturing subcontrollers‑‑& here Vaom kept pushing in his arms in so they arms-in disappeared. "There are like soft nerves back here," he driveled, but he was agruntin' with such improper pleasure Chiin just coun't think. "Go ahead," grunts Vaom. "Reach in." "Ah, no, that's all right, I..." "At the ends of these nerves (I can just barely reach!) we have these miniatures of everything. Reach in, man!" "Miniatures?" "Yea‑‑these albino miniatures, of everything." "Everything what?" "Everything Queigh! I'm trying to tell you our whole fucking world's on the edges of these nerves, if we get behind them, if we can just get in." Chiin hissed air past the dim columns of his back teeth. He was wondering how he might absolutely drop EVERYTHING RIGHT NOW and just GET OUT, what with Ladoga Bojje in the lock, & leave his brother there. That's it‑‑he could leave them both there. That's what his world had come back to him for... "Could you possibly‑‑stick your thing in & suck them out?" Vaom cocksucked pleadingly. He looked very excited yet very cold, with diamondlike spurs of frost attacking the organs living in his face. That's not my brother, Chiin thought, & he could feel his face repulsing into telltale contortions of mortal ugh disgust. That was never my brother there. "I don't know, Vaom. These..." he gestured toward these many white nicks. "Niques," Vaom sniqued. "Remorques." "...remorques seem to be just little gougelets, like mistaken little symbol things." "'Mistaken little symbol things!?" shouted Vaom with the utmost sarcasm. Still, his eyes blurdb parorgamasmically. "Vaom, ahem: you can't be feeling nerves behind them!" "I am feeling nerves behind them!" shrilled his brother Vome. Ridicules backfire terribly, Chiin wrote in his little notes. He had excited Vaom again. "Now push your thingy there & suck them out!" Vaom snorted impatiently. "We have little versions of Queigh in there, just at the end. Just reach right in." I'm not going to do this, thought Chiin, making a supersubtle series of faces indicating this which his brother read‑‑but he stuck it in. VITALS OF THE SECRET DRAWERS or A BREEDER OF ANIMALS THAT WILL NEVER DO They had added special liquids found in vials of the secret chairs, I mean in vitals in the secret drawers of the selfsaid chairs, I mean choirs, & some of the office furniture was growing bigger, but not bigger enough bigger, if you know what I mean, & with bothersome stops & hesitations, like furniture growing out in a diffident dream. & some of it wasn't growing bigger‑‑just a lot harder‑‑& was sitting like miniature furniture on the floors of the greater furniture. & some of it was just swelling into disgusting lousy bumps ("No doubt about it, this was a very sick world," Vaom or somebody commented; I wonder what Ladoga Bojje thinks of this? wondered Chiin irratonally wonderchiim). No...nothing logical here. & besides, this stuff remains in pale‑‑the color of the niques. "This will never do," Vaom snorp, like a breeder of animals that will never do. He ran infinitesimal slivers into the palm flesh whitened to a numbness far beyond the Wordless Cures. Chiin gave a little snart. "I'm afraid," he declaimed like a Russian play. "I am afraid this atmosphere & muck & the nerves you find behind those nicques in the bloody remorques are like making us overly sick beyond the Faculties of Making Well." Which were of course the faculties that made you well. "You don't know the faculties I have," muttered Vaom, & he made a riffling sound as if he were really that child, alive in the green green sun, frolicking through the ruffles of his knowledge-kyewg. But Vaom souns tinny & defensive & morose as seen through a sulking blue atmosphere which Chiin he could suddenly could see, he-he could see. "You don't know," sumbschmuttered like a dog in afterthought. In the dogs of afterthought in afterthought of dogthought. "A dog in afterthought," he snorp. Remorques were itching; these remorques were actually itching them. IN THE MURDERED EYE OF QUEIGH It was the eye of a sphere busted up practically into cubes of aterthought. I mean afterthought. It's not easy typing these things. These things are kind of crazy, aren't they? But anyway everywhere there were the afterimage of afterthought, which is the divulgence of veracity in the revelations of forebegot ofterthought. It was still a sphere, & God Know did it rotate like alternations of a fluctive Eye-Eye-Eye, but was all riddled with cubes all right, all riddled over with the fractures of these splintering cube. "Diseased Intelligence of the Root Mind," Vaom pronounced. He was like a doctor at the moment, only dressed in black & with quite a liquid dethoscoup & a sphygmometer from hell, as if posing for one of the more {pronounced allegorical rendings} of of Albattarat Faffafu fuffuroo. "I-it looks like it's looking," says Chiin disconcertedly this on account of he was losing his identity, there in the room with that great bingbroken eye; most people like that, but Chiin was not much liking that, & not much liing that at all in facets of the manyfact "Wha whawha whawhawhaWhat's it looking for?" "Ah-ahh-ahhhh..." stammered Vaom in his throat, perhaps mimicking the murmurings in the stepseths of his dethoscoup. "Its dead people...it is looking for," Vaom eventually begrunts in a voice more somber & profound than the voice of doom rendered through the caverned vastness of the Murdered Eye of Queigh. He pulled back as his ladder disappeared, & he fell disgracefully, but then both fall & disgrace disappeared, leaving only the trace of the faint smell of humiliation in the air here‑‑a humiliation without a past, however, so logically speaking it might not be his humiliation they were standing in. It might have been there all along, like the very long humiliation we are all very standing in. Logically speaking, like in formulas. Formula = µ3 - Figure 1: Bullshit Formular "Chiin, this eye is bind, but it knows everything. Chiin, you've got to steal this eye." Then a bit of scat did he on my name, making with the chi chichi chi-chi-chi's & doing a little scuffle sort of dance. Looks like a bum, beard & baggy pants, unhealthy glint in his eye. System Alert. This is the system. System is crashing. Please save all work, if any. Please hide children if any, not that there are any children. Goddbye, my children. Goodb . Man, that was weird, huh? Like we were not inr eality at allk I mean not in reality at all but on some sort of system, explaining why I've completely forgotten the story. If any haha. KIRK: I'm sorry. We've reached a rift in the story I just can't seem to fix, no matter how far I go into the fantasy of the insanity insanity the of fantasy the into this particular rupture just keeps coming out. I'm working on it. I'm working on it. But he's not workiong on it. He's jost off there sleeping or something. Fantasists! Now back to our story, if any. Yeawell, "the eye streaks sickeningly in on the petrified eye of an absolute Chiin," was what I was going to write before all this metafiction shit. CHIIN: "Su-su-su-su-su-STEAL it?" he tweep. Seems unaware anything was happening. What luck! DO NOT READ THE FOLLOWING SECTION Pay no attention to titels, if any. Vaom pulls a chair or a rock or something up or something & puts one foot upon it. He leans on his knee & push back his hat with his great THRUSTING THUMB. I mean titles. Pay no attention to distracting titles. I'm sure you ignored it complletely, I mean completely. I assure you nothing can harm you here. No one is insane in any way aound hee, I assure you. No one is on drugs. The systemis not at all crashing. Nothing is wrong. Nothing is wrong, god damn it. "Look," he says, apparently unaware the whole authorial voice thing has gone haywire. "I'm a frijj. I need that eye back in the lab so I can hook it up." "Whu-why?" "Well now that should be obvious brother. I need the answers that bloody eye has to offer, the eye's bloody fucking goddam answers, Chiin. That eye is a witness to murder‑‑& you're gonna help me, son. & don't worry. The author's just switching. The story will go on." Yea, but Vaom was emphasizing too many words. His brother, a fridget! Chiin was afraid, & his face was forming shapes in the forms of many disgusting turds, causing Vaom's face (which I must say looked like a fridget-sin-deed!) to harden into one of great bronzed disgust. Now Chiin was really ashamed. "Knock it off, brother," Vaom snoped with disdainful entreaty. "You know the law." "No I don't," Chiin chutter. "I don't know the law, Vaom. What is the law?" "Aw, you know it," Vaom snarled. "I can't arrest my brother. I'd have to arrest myself." "Ah...then why didn't they send someone else?" "God damn it, Chiin! Someone else would have to arrest you, right?" "Right?" "Well then he couldn't get your help, now could he?" "I suppose not. That's why they made you a frijj?" "Now you're catching on, brother Chiin. You're a thief: that's how I got out." "That's why you're alive." But Vaom didn't answer that. He jumped down. "Come on!" he cried in a skimmed grin wide as a tube. "Let's get to sucking out that eye!" & Chiin set forth, feeling very strange & fazed & proud. "I've found some more babies." "Eh?" "I say I've fond some more babies here." Like dollbabies, contained within an infinite little bin MOTHER DREAMS Meantime Ladoga Bojje burns into the lock... & while Chiin's dreams fell themselves asleep, put to sleep by the dreams of their mothers, dreaming acetylene rages blasted from Ladoga's rightmost eye or performances of torture in a blast of mad atrocities popping her in, she actually she (outside most dream) simply glid it open, scant adjustment of her featured brow, & marched in up to her glossies in dysphasic crud. She knew her way around here. She'd ridden it back here after all, from the future of the Lexz. {You see, Ladoga Bojje was a fridget, subtype scope...or something. Poor Queigh was part of a sting operation from the future, concocted by the fridgets of the Lexz {Lexzyzgia‑‑race of the future}. The Lexz had sent her back aboard Queigh, & they were watching through her eyes.} Ladoga marched. Pert squilching sounds pursued her like the souls of molted papparazzi. She stopped where you couldn't tell. I mean, it looked like no place to (logically) logically stop, O, but amongst distortions of dysphasic mucilage within this particular junction of nothingness as I say you would never find she stopped at a dripping logic sunder screened within staggering wavelimps based on beliefs too impossibly subtle for these {crude moments of primary prototime}‑‑which is what these was‑‑& so you couldn't see it, uh but she dopplered hands across {three fevered embarkations} of control, commencing aegis of screen, inducing scope, initiating latitude of a three-dimensional screen she stood thoughtfully in. She was a robot thrilling with pleasure, standing contraposto with her fingers to her chin, but she was in ecstasy, I assure you, as she activated ott. {She pulls them back to the future...It seems Chiin had stolen all sorts of cool stuff from the future, stuff that Ladoga had.} WITHIN THIS SCREEN OF THOUGHT What was this stuff? Normally, Chiin knew well his stuff, but no means did he een begeen to understand this stuff... & he found that couldn't return it. I mean, he knew he was in great trouble, & he tried, but each item had some special barbs BARBS THAT HAD NOT BEEN THERE BEFORE holding it back. He would place them in their place & they would snap back. Back! It just kept coming back, in fated meetings as in candlelit dark. In glaring apparency were these not-normal things he had stolen that he could never give back. He was caught in felonious possession of items far outside sundrations of reason he might‑‑had he been capable within this screen of actuated thought‑‑potentially concoct. SOLUTIONS OF A FLUENT SWOOM "Don't worry. I have these shisses to hit her with," Vaom smiff, with distinctive chuckles (each in a fine fine opalescent suit, each with its own game show) in his voice, & Chiin want to say "Wha?" but by this silver splinter in the coalescent silt of liquid time Voamad smacketer with these sapphire shisses glugging with liquid, hitting her like a child hitting her like a chink of glass across the temple of her little head, nicking it dead. And it was dark out for a while. Where were they? "Ah her head is surprisingly little," notice Chiin ungto himself. "Yes it is," reipiled the voices of his brother, voices stripping singularity of night like the night like some kind fantastic illimaginary birds released from the cabinet of insignificance‑‑which was also sapphire, come to thimp‑‑he'd bought bought-back-in the Shop of the Awxzym Thexx back on boughtbak Bakyofijumdaire. "Don't worry," gwurry a reassuring curdle of his brother's voice, together qith a squeeze on the backward arm, "the sun'll be up real soon." Vaom had hit her many many times. & the sun come up. It did come up rather soon, & there the flooded brothers stood in {solutions of a fluent swoom}, & Vaom's dark blue spheres of the shisses of fluid spheres of the shisses of stupid liquid lifted the cluds up shifted the dawn op & also filléd the airup, trickling down Ladoga Bojje's temples (there were infinite tears in her little eyes, though her eyes became very piggy & small as the landscape distended round her). "Where are we?" "Why, i' th' Landscape of Ladoga Bojje‑‑whattaday think?" Vaom repiled, attaching to her face & along susceptible receptacles throughout her sloping curvatures of of spine the fuctional supple nubs of some crepuscular instrument you could hardly see, much less bear to see, filling your thoughts with infinite parentheses (in the midst of which "Step away. We don't have much time," Vaom was heard toove said). CRICKETS FALSE AS THE THICKETS OF DAWN "Quiet. Mm. Mm! I'm stickin' it in," rasped Vaom through the lost throat lost in tongue in the coroner of his skull. That tongue runs off with a beam of light right here, just snips into the quantastream & goes, virescently weird & rippling hideously. It runs off with our thoughts for quite a while (lucky thang the timebooth's busted here!), in the thin & dismal mists we list to the shiftless crickets missing their chirps; {beautiful emerald crickets}, though, false as the Thickets of Dawn. A gush of perfectly white light cuts out his figure, dancing from one foot to the other (going "Oo! Ah! Oooh!! AH!") as he alternates) in contrapostal mirrorversals of his stance. {Vaom goes to the future of the Lexzyzgia‑‑mirrored creatures who replace Vaom's cube & send him back. The false Vaom comes back, wearing special glasses. He appeals as a brother & on the future's bebalf. Chiin's gotta come to the future & steal this glitter, take this superreflectiveness, which they can't have Chiin legitimately do, because these members of the future are themselves criminals, see. They've stolen Queigh.} WRAITHS OF THE BOREALIS Instantly he knew everything was wrong. He was there, surrounded by her memories, but he had no weight or substance, & he had no agency whatsoever. None. Like he couldn't reach or touch anything, nor move, but merely float like comprehensions of a web. He moved, sure‑‑but in the mere courses of the wind, like a tapering balloon, & he couldn't turn to look at anything, but had to hope he was swerved in the right direction. So he slipped through the courses of her girlhood like a ghost. Maybe that's why all this love coursing in infinite directions round her, the love emitted from dull balls in the corners of the always-veering, dislocated floors, the love in cascades of sparkles growing like frosted breath in the wraiths of the borealis, & thick love, warm like the mist of a measureless shower‑‑all this radiant love seeming tinged with anguish, some sort of green discoloration like an injury dislocated in disturbances of past like a dangerous web. This was terribly offensive to him, terribly bad. THE COWARDICE OF VAOM The bullet {only it was not a bullet...} broke Vaom into insipid shreds, or sheets dewier than the skin of a Ximxixkikxzikal dropsyfruit, miasmcal dollops whompering mimpses of a hazhed droopulet, which is form of a farced driplet. Vaom's exbody fellex into what revolted viewers called a "pool of {his} mixed-up piss"‑‑symbolic, slick, unfrozen, unfreezably irrediemable goddam piss, manifesting the revealed Cowardice of Vaom smattered everywhere, & Ladoga Bojje‑‑standing with one leg crosspropped upon a rock, friends, bingor bigger than God's Uncrookéd Cock‑‑seemed the {warrior goddess of *} to Chiin, his lashes matted with worship. "I hated my brother, I hated my brother, I hated my brother, I hated my brother," he blub precipitouxly. Bojjeye glimp one ray of contempt upon him, & his own skin, Chiin's own miserable drydoubt skin crackled into white whange of insipid mystery (& his lips were fat, man, a-and foamy & and blubbery, andu you could see just how recently theseud been sucking up on something). Pause within intricate grid of dripping sounds. Sam Coleridge's ghost path by the windowshreds... Vaom's bright kyewg lay like an ice kyewg in the pool of unmixed piss, & shameless Chiin was squatting to pick it up. "Drop it!" Bojje joisted under thin ridges of his skin. "What kyewg?" Chiin gashed, commencing to scuttle, for the kyewg was not so much gone, not very much stolen by the intrictely * skillfull thief, as replaced by a neoextant supplantation which could NEVER have ekzip, a box, instead, consisting of the most beautiful tracers of light vanished just as surely as the parches of King Duncan's spollacked blood (dashed as you know through the scorches of the infinite mirrors down the halls of your howling mystery). Thus drew Chiin her fire, but he had slipped behind the special wavy wallpoipor of of of silk that they silk that they hobbhere, too-oo-oo many syllables of silk our friend had hide coming up beupbehind too many times the unbelievable count... ...meantime doth Vaom reclot or redecurgle, if you will within the shrill reaches of His Infinite Will, & God puts his cock back in his green pants as tree trunks in the forests of fever do begin like impertinent thoughts to throut or groughts too grought or froffs tofroup, & do Bojje's special liquid lips make cursing mooshums aux they irrespectible teef, as she ruvvlezunder the the wallpoipor I am talking the wall poiporout. He wants to follow her, but she is chasing him, & he is hid much too well to run. Vaom sitz with the bones of his ass back in the puddle of piss, only it is liquid brains & piss, psychotic liquid brains in the midst of this miserable, unpronounceable piss (they can't say piss here, which is why I keep repeating miserable pitz), wond'ring dully where his kyewg have gone. "Must find kyewg," he wheezles considerations of wordlessness or near-breathed affiliants betwinx muttration & unfiliated thought. But he can barely get up, but you can see that, but he has some sort of back-up sliver goosing him up, but he can but run his hands but over the wall, admitting the paper, but he doesn't even see the lumps of his brother & Bodega Loadja humping like goats there, but Vaom he can make out the huddle of his brother's hump (see him pass his fingers over‑‑feel!) & subtle bump of her indignant but agitated ass. He pulls out a very large knife‑‑a boowee knife, I believe it was‑‑& starts to hacking his brother out. He hacks & he hacks his brother out, as a curiously drawn-out dusk do long & reproachingly approach, leaving the brothers rich in the midst of this yellow confetti, & Ladoga lodged in the plaster of the nowbarenaked wall, O, the NOW bare NAKE edwol. "Gimme my kyewg," muckerzvome. "Na," says Chiin. "Gimme!" "Nu!" And, surprisingly, Vaom gives it up, {and they wander off together.} THE BOJJE OF LONG AGO Time malfunctioned more than not, so the fright went on forever. Everything went on just short of forever here, so as Ladoga Bojje hunted them down the long capillaries of Poor Dead Queigh she began to whittle down, until the old Bojje, the Bojje of Memory, the Bojje of Long Ago, seemed pursey & corpulent, more like a mass of grease that had been present than the vengeful warrior she had seemed, & they were being chased by a mere hateful glare, an incandescent machine. But as I say, time tocked here within the fog of the metaphor of some unsatisfied watch, so the speed of her pursuit vectored insanely, burning off eventualities of eveything soft-and-slack-and-fleshy till her limbs flogged the mucoid corridors like the corridors like the echoes of relentless corridors or the restless blades of folly or whatever gained & gaining on their asses like a breathless ball of fire, & everywhere her faceless fervor burned their ashes off. Oyesand in much, muchlater years‑‑after which the hard bright ice of the infinite poles turned soft & insipid yellow (& gooey with adjectives) Bojje's once-limbs too seared themselves off, till our boys fled comically from this limbless artifact (forgive mine emphazis), from this glowering nexus, as it were, mere nerveless pathways of light insane with constructs of motion. She has really gone mad, they thought eagerly, giggling, nor could they help but glank at the glanks of one another, that they not so much had the same thought as heard it, too, that they were now, here, at this merciless velocity hearing everything they thought in the awful mirrorthought regressions of the mirrors of the ghosts of the innihlatians torturing them through torture again, you'll notice, like patterns hallucinating oer the road they were running through, ghosts of the impactions lying chilly in the goo. BETRAYAL BETRAYAL & they believed falsely they were racing toward the Queighvean core, that they were running through plasma in the shape of runes in this artful light (this is very important), & that he Chiin he hears the voamthought Cheatiim! & that Voam hear the bells falling after allchimes of the chiinderthought Gypaom! causing many crusading changeexloox across the Sea of the See of the Veering Eyes in the unthought caves of the Unspeaking Seas of the Afterthoughts shearing out the echoes of their Veering Eyes and that they thux crunx they on the powders of suspicion them; & that they run far far far faster than the quivering skiers of Ix (or Yx (oer !x or) or) the racing skiplames of the ethers of the absolute Lightpanes of ?x, where they have or have had or once were seeming never to have been seeming to have had these races much faster than the thought of God's Dying Thought of the Absolute Ice at the absolute center of the universe, where everything is funny & the ice, they say, laughs much faster than Light; physics proved this up till physics disappeared & when physics disappeared along with the children, well, there was nothing left but to doublecross the light and that wasn't it but not yet but three Bare Billennia Zlater‑‑due as I say I say to these dual delusions redoubling in that False Reciprocating Light (if you call that light) which I still think is pretty funny despite all tortures applied in spite that our doublecroxxin rebrudders thought they flad (pastemkps of the pseudotemporal verd to fleb) within a veritable sphere of skeptically dubious wary-leery disbelieding labyrinthime disdain‑‑very possibly implanted by one of her displanting goddam rays that he each did he brother-he bedoublecroxx his olterself, deceptions gleaming like faces in the glaziers of the artful light (this refers obliquely to the false, glazed light up there up in the absolute zeros of the artificial night), & with a brute grip throw the shoulder of the otheroer, to zpeak very plainly, & knock his ass down? No one knows just how well-known this is. & so thus then did thusthen Viim topple his brother's ass right into Harm's Moste Milky Way, e'en as Chaom, in the gasp of the selfsame quantum, pitched his gullible brother down while in the soundless artifact of an artful eye, possibly God's eye here, did each die in the shriek of the other's dire, artificial eye, or at least did they thought they did. Pretty funny, huh? DRIZZLE DRIZZLE This appears to be a roadway of muck, leading into the same mist mist in in every direction. Chiin gets up dripping on his hands & knees. His belly hangs down like a broken ol pony. (Aw! My heart breaks at this point.) "Vaommm?" he calls up n down the road. "Ladoga?" direction other the down up calls he he? Nothing but echoes muttering I wonder who I am. I mean where I am. Not who, but where I am. "You're in the Upper Reaches of the Outer Rim," the kyewg replied. Vaom's kyewg was talking to him! He had slipped it under his skin, never thinking it would work for him. "I'm not working," the kyewg split. "I'm not telling you anything." "Uh...OK..." says Chiinii in a lonlong drawnawn out wayyy. Disgusting drizzle of this little rain pizzling on him. He pulls the coat that Vaom made him wear up wearup tighter. "Well," the kyewg says with tinny grim cheerfulness. "Welcome to Queigh." He lets the drizzle drizzle for a while. Chiin keeps glancing oer his shoeldoer for hits from the Bojje. But he's alone, unless you're counting the kyewg, & he does pass awkwardly the thought I have never been so terribly alone, except the kyewg is there (he can feel it shivering in the rain which is slithering under his skin). "Listen," the kyewg says. "Listen, friend." "Shhh!" "No no no‑‑listen. I know where we can go. I know how we can get there." "Where?" says Chiin regretfully. He is shivering now. What is this rain? "This rain," the kyewg then squat, "is the Rain of Dread." "Which will kill us," reads Chiin on the back of his hand he can see part partially through ough. Hell of an echo here. "Just do what I said," the hand is saying. Chiin sees he is lying in the mud, his hand posed just before the judgment of his eyes where it has always been like you do in the predawn effort just to get back in. But he can't get into his body, & he can't put down the hand. "What did you say?" he calls to the kyewg (which is (kyewg (which is now (very deeply inside of him. "What did you say to do?" The kyewg seems to emit this disdainfully hissy sniff. "Well I put it back there," it says with the distinct sarcasm that you heard all through junior high. "You just have to go back there & find it, friend." Chiin groans as he tries in the muck & one-handed to get up. "Yea," he groans. "All I have to do is go back for it." He looks up the road (& it is straight up the road) he looks. The kyewg is making a peculiar purring breech within him. It feels like power‑‑even as he's dying. It feels pretty good. Chiin makes a swallowing motion & rubs his chest. "We'll die if we don't get out of here," he says. & then‑‑since no one answers‑‑he says: "I know." But in the next moment‑‑a bulbous paisely one, too soft for the breath in which it comes‑‑he has serious doubts he is dying, & starts to believe the kyewg just said that merely to make him faint, this so it could move in deeper tohis chest. He looks up & down the road rather anxiously. "Bojje will be along soon," the kyewg, paring its nails beneath a casual tree, then says. "Well then GET US OUT OF HERE." "I already said." "Well damn it, kyewg, say it again." "I can't," the kyewg says, with a feeling inside of what must feel like a vacant sigh. "I can't say anything twice." The rain, by the way, have cleared its own face away in parentheses, has cleared too many faces of a race distantly to killing him, & he looks through the back of his hand, for it is gone, & nothing here has a goddam cause, & like he feels the rain comprehending his back making it* (*the rain on his back?) disappear which is not killing him. Oh dear, he thinks. I'll have to find my own way out & the kyewg, to give it its grey lusters of grey credit, seems quite satisfied (if that's what purrs mean (haunted purrs (& the talking of haunted purrs here) here) anyway). The kyewg induces a strong feeling of being strong, & Chiin rises up (showing some serious muscle there) with what must become unaccustomed strength above the heavings of the Multifuferouf Mucke. THE ZYLYMDRÖMB Technical difficulties. We can barely see Chiin. Please stand bye... Isn't Chiin as fine as a remnant of silk creeping down the cylinder? It's just a swell we can't see him, 'cause he's barfing up a storm like a storm in the sullen absences of air or wind & the loss of gravity. Yea, there's been a loss of gravity as he crawls down the lenses of the cylinder there they are like lenses of brass you can only see these faces through, & these may be your faces reflected beyond repair, or they may be flying ridges (nightmares to you & me) off the faces of the dead, existing like jewelcases inside (surmising that's just what's inside) nightmares to me nightmares off of you & me, & believe me, he dunt wanna know what's what's inside (I mean, just the steam gibs you nausteative hallusions for a dripping week of time!), & he have to limp with the realization he's chosen the Foul Route to get inside. For this is what he's doing‑‑clambring down the long tubewway deeper to the Queigh inside, assuming Queigh ex-Quiegh has anything down inside, & he's you know notcrawling thux-obscemely down to a future of the vacancy sighs, for I know that's what's been been been said. So he grunx like a worm over & over viftas of the deja view along the dreamy mud of this turquoise cylinder, & according to the guidebook (soggy in the dogears, defective in spelling though it might seem to be), this would be the Zylymdrömb© or the Outxikes Zylinder, containing in itself an infinite reality of an infinite heat (some would say hell & would say some demonic heat, but these've died by the time to time & in savage cubes & in within the Cities of Atrocity). These cities are grey, by the wey. THE ADVENT OF THE NUBBERBLUGS & anyway Chiin is licking in the liquid of his lips (if they are lips & not just emulsions of lips of course) & squirming along there & his kyewg is clicking, supposedly picking up lots of the allotments of lotsa knowledge seeping out from the Zylymdrömb. Yea, he fears he is crawling into some deep machine, but this always happens, buut it has warmed up, & there is no more rain. But a fear of the imminence of bigs is crawling over him. It's probly juss cause everything's become so DESICCANT & DRY, he pombs in a pond of bepomdering fear, which is a form of fear thinking they have crawling down the ladders of energy here where the fearful energies flee. Whoosh‑‑& numbers whiz through his headspim & over his head. It wasn't bugs but numbers he was seeing come‑‑the advent of the numberbugs or nubberblugs in the wind known as the Nudderbluz. THE NAMELESS PAINS OF EYES or THE FIELDS OF THIEVES This is just Chiin, taking in all manner of data. "This is a central thing," the kyewg assureth him. "This is very good. Just a minute. Hang on," activating pinknerve in the swerve of your center forcing the view of countless duplications of hysteria. & Chiin sees indeed‑‑indeed doth Chiinii see‑‑all those numbers representing formerly so much fear (fear-numbers) form from morf mrof numbers unto chunks, those chunks forming into sheets of imprints stamped to his friends' irresolute faces roaring enormously. Silent, of course, but with mouthses roared immense & silently. There are Compaction Numbers stipulating the skins of each & each & every friend, & there is indeed radically compacted on the planet of these surfaces every friend‑‑& not just friends. Ladoga Bojjes shout in duplications there, & Vaoms, & the faces swept off dew in the dreams of memories (you know what I mean), & quite a number of Actual Nonexistent Thieves or as we like to trill them the ANTS of thieves he has once felt envious of, or within the energy field, gold & fiigreed energies of of a possible wince of trices yea, thieves so very clever they stole a cloud around them, stole themselves into a Blind Evidential Nothing or been you know stolen unto nothingness by, say, by thieves in manifolds more cleverer than even than as clever thieves as they. These were the Fields of Thieves, or would be anyway, along with everyone that Chiin has ever knew‑‑all there I swear it, resolved by these numbers in apparencies of sheaves & sheaves there of past imprints stamped like the tics of insanity out of nothingness. The kyewg seems very satisfied. "I'm picking up a lot from this!" it smiled & nodded at Chiin. And, feeling perturbations of his nerves: "Don worry. This is just the Field Coil from the Future, voiding your past, your planet, voiding Queigh. This is just a bingnothingness it is generating here. It's like I say: doan worry‑‑I know what I say." Vertically descend Chiin, & he see now they be nothing but shelves "flating pward" or floating upwards by & by unto a high & infinite recession of the silent sky. The cylinder, whatever it is which is whatever the kyewg tells him, recedes forever both above & above & below, & so below, & when he looks in front of him, does Chiin, he sees these were shelves that once meant a very great deal to him‑‑I mean he could just fucking tell that his little hand kept jerking out in touchy little tix as if to pull them out but then spastically tremboling back, his fingers twitching at his lips as if he were going to open them, but he knew that the numbers had dried now to documents‑‑& to very old & yellowed doubt documents at ascertainment of exactly "that" and that & that the xlurz or slurs of the scratchings of the scrawl done in pens tipped with diamonds smarter een than Starray Circulature & dipped in the essence of transpicuous inks clearer than the Trymps of Xpyqulos & done too in the form of the script upon those docs would be in ITALICS TOO INTENSELY CRAMPED to READ sans much too much too violatiums of the eyes, not to mention mention of the nameless pains of the numberless numerations of his poor & awful eyes. "Don't worry," the kyewg then humped when it humpt right to him. "That's just me working." He must be taking in & measuring everyhing, he thought. I can see why Vaom liked having him around. "Where is Vaom?" he dawoamed, & while the kyewg never thaid "I will tell you that," various grey scratchings under anaesthesia gave as if to understand just very that. RIVETS OF THE GOLDEN GODS He couldn't find Vaom, but he found the vivisection room, per Vaom's map, & the grey silt ghost of his brother butchered on slab with the stretches of his guts affixed to rivets of the golden gods (& conscious, one infers, what with the mouth distended preternaturally almost-wide & the teeth hanging from their gums like crystallizations of a goddam howl) no less than seven powdered innihs (of the Seven Powdered Innhs) standing round geographical extensions of his tusseled fucking limbs and when he touched the tips of their scalpels they just piffed into convulsions of sequestered air (& they froze right there!), & poor Chiin had to walk around it dozens of time. It was the kyewg wants to see it, that is all. It was the kyewg shapping snots of it for its albums or its files "Just taking it in," it bothered to mutter, but which Chiin bothers not even to this day to hear. Afterwards Kyewg bought him ice cream from the Vendor of Inertial Dead & took him to a bench in the Centralized Park of the Powdered Ash. "Sorry, Chiin," he varteth, causing Chiin to be lifting out a foot to crush the occasional bird or two. Kyewg snorts his pleasure & contempt. "This is some place, huh?" "Why did we go there? Vaom would never go." "It's the only place he could go, if he were still attached to me." "But he can't find it?" "No. But I had to check. I had to see that place. It's all your brother thinks about. I needed further details on his madness." "His madness?" "Oh yes. & I had my own compulsions, too, Daddy-O." He made as if to gesture about, but there were noy pixie dusts of his gesturing about. "This is where I was born back into time." "Wait a minute. Did you say 'Daddy-O'?" "Yes. What of it." "Nothing. Nothing." "Could we get back to the story now please?" "OK. Sorry. So you uh ah uh were 'born back into time'?" Kyewg nog moonily. "Yes. I uh ah uh was 'born back into time,' my Brother of Challenge Chiin." "Is it you who've been calling me 'Brother Chiin' & 'Brother of Challenge Chiin' & also 'Brother of Challenge' like I was a fucking superhero all this willowing while?" Kyewg hummed visibly. I mean, he hummed in visible ridges of hexagonal qualities & then he he licked his finger & then he wet his finger on his tongue andthenee touched his finger to the hums (which were positive bubbles of the hums) andee made them pop. "He was dissected," Chiin from his stomach ssected. "Tortured & dissected," Kyewg who was in his stomach ortured. "Just like he said. I don't see how he survived it." Kyewg waved golden sparkles in the air. "'He'd die if there were blessed death in the world,'" he smarkled, & Chiin resent this commonplace saying gratingly saying. Now who was vivisecting whom? "Lick your ice cream, Chiin." Chiin made as if to try, but it was exhausted of its qualities. "Agckh!" he cried & his lips all implicated in the positive cream. "I can't," he added through veils of tongue. "It's...unlickable." Kyewg chuckles & toss the cone down to the ground, though the cone of course did not of course touch technically the ground. "Yea. Sorry, Chiin." But he kept on clutching (I mean chuckling) as italics wince the page. OFFTHOUGHT Our kyewg, Kyewg, kept slapping his forehead, squashing the plastics of that ductile sorry head with compressive dead rhythms caving to alarming optological concavities of sorts (ofsort because it's not a real projection of a brow atall, you see) just forcing Chiin iin hiis chin unto italic winces like the Winches of Impossibility from a future bled white of its erstwhile codes possibly lost forever in the former Cove of Codes. "I should have off thought!" the kyewg seemed saying like your dead brother snapping his fingers in your face for to jostle you sleeping off the incessant edge of time. "You see (ahem), coming to Queigh," Kyewg continued‑‑& when he said 'Queigh' he meant even this abbreviated Queigh of denatured form of the rotten Queigh Queigh Queigh‑‑"have drub'd your brother to a species of preternatural madness only a long draw on this zylymdrömb might not have cost me not to fail to not-compute. I mean it cause me to compute." Now what was he saying? Chiin drew in long passages of a long long thought. This usage of wrong words was giving Chiin constant pause, & he stood in the crystals of the azure puffing air in the powdered air breathing in this constant sense of pause in the passage of the silent pause in the hissages of thought. This is offthought he was paused in thinking here. The kyewg was paused (& don't think these long awful pauses were not bothering chim) within a pause, & seemed waiting for Chiin's heart. He seemed waiting for some movement of Chiin's heart. Kyewg needed approval more than any other machine, but wasn't that because he was the absolute machine? Chiin was very upset & angry at this needling neediness, let me tell you, but he had to found out, so he growled, "So what is your thought, Kyewg?" "I should have figured!" the kyewg fought. "He's hiding in the holes!" "What?" "Your brother is hiding in the Holes of Zhot!" Chiin pursed his lips & shook his head with sage contempt. Kyewg meant amongst the Holes of Zhot. "Those are just pools of numbers, friend," he siend siend siend, trying to irritate the box which just but glowed like a lovely puppy‑‑glowed like a beautiful soul by God‑‑a-and nodded, none the lesh!). "That's where the excess numbers go," snorted Chiin. "Numbers are toxic here‑‑you know that." "Like you tried to hide a lot, huh?" sneered Kyewg. "I never hid," madly answered Chiin. "I never even tried to hide." "Well, naturally not! He was the one they tortured, right?" The kyewg had beat Chiin, & Chiin sputtered in his vacuums of the furious defeat. "Chiin." Chiin had to hold silence in his gut for a long long time. This was the only way to torture him back as he had to do. "Chiin?" Chiin could not hold the torture in his gut. "Chiin, we've got to get up there." "No!" Chiin knew he was going to fucking lose. I mean, how do you fight a box in your fucking gut? Besides, Kyewg was feeling frighteningly sincere. "I tell you he's in there, Chiin. Those numbers are not‑‑they're not numbers anymore. They've been denatured, Chiin! Vaom's in there amongst that stuff. Think!" Kyewg was like kicking him in the heart, from the inside of his heart. Kyewg was worse than Vaom; Kyewg was the fucking essence of Vaom. Chiin decided not to think. So Chiin he started moving, all right, but he was not about to think. PICTURES WITHOUT A DOUBT or GOTTA REJUCT "We must rejuct," Ladoga Bojje smuckt, & we kept CLOSING UP close to her face to an almost sickening degree (where Chiin can see small motors gathering, small motors moving through her skin). "That's the army," she replied, staring at him like a spark in the subsidant air. "It's not the frijjs who are after us now but the army." "Army?" snorted Vaom, & you could tell that he thought that he knew too much. He moved his face like he was eating shit. "What the fuck's an army?" "I think I can answer that," veb Kyewg, stepping out from Voamer's glowing chest to its own small ovoid of existence. "The army is like frijjs of a larger magnitude or, to be more technical, like poison purple berry frijjs." Ladoga Bojje made a movement combined with a gesture just too damned complicated & fast, so that random lightstruts calibrate a careful diagram, a tiny picture fevered in clarity & almost dizzy in the focus of its miniature depths. But her face was something else again, I tell you whut! It was one of those Pictures Without a Doubt no one had never heard about‑‑a picture existing sickingly back in time, all by itself in the so-called Hole of the Evident Pictures or Lost Hole of the Evident Pictures sitting in a fissure of velvet the color of a blindman's black, sitting amongst all the other holes & yet with no memory of others & so inaccessibly alone as to be barely alive, an endlessly dying spark, weeping its eyes right out‑‑a picture this woman from the future could just draw right out, forgetting everything, forgetting manners, time, talk, forgetting doubt, decompacted for excessive lumination of no doubt, so everyone up & make this very special face you can make only in the phases of this untenably awful light. So no one had to say the meaning of the light, which was the meaning of the picture in the light. A globe of rotten berries had contorted them about. It had comglubed all over them. It conglobed about the sorry essence of your poordope, torpid Queigh. "They are actually actuating fire," her words cried but she deg. "We've got to rejuct to the broken future right away." "'Right away.' she says," snurps Kyewg, growing unexpectedly sarcastic. "'Rejuct'! 'Broken future,' she says!" & meantime we keep ZOOMING IN too close to be to her too close to her face. "Hey‑‑what's rejuct?" Chiin snuckufufuckt. "Hang on," she bobbed, but form in the Vaom of Kyewg gets up in her way. "She thinks we're going up!" he gleg. TINY BIRDS "Is that rejuct?" stammered Chiin. "We have to go up? What's going up?" Vaom stroked his finger at the sky, ogling potently. Chiin looks around for somthing to hit him with (he looks round for the bingnucket of ice he hits him with up the high stories of transparent apartments rising high in the airless future of this story in the story, but it absolutely doesn't matter till that rejuction of the story in the story). SUPERFILM But everyone was ignoring Chiin by this time. Everyone loved that‑‑ignoring Chiin. Chiin had this quality, known in postzoologic textbulbs as the Aspect of Disregard. & hey‑‑Chiin was ass-down & sliding on the ice, so to speak, while the others strode firmly, teasing the loops out the gashes of the funnels of the sundration sequencer, remaking their poor shocked faces in the sort of positive instance seen but in witless vigorations of film (& of course no film‑‑not even one filme, not even Superfilm‑‑can be witnessed anymore, except in the dark bubbles stretched along the torpors of unconsciousness). & they jabbered like strange birds Chiin had never seen (birds flit through medial tissues in the eye here, just below the hopes of consciousness, so no one sees they have these tiny birds!). Phrases tumbled to his toes where he could tilt his head round as if he were reading impossible titles of a fever somewhere (back in his sick body, in a land of gravity much too great to imagine). It was hard to say any way. It was a site of murder. The coils of words had choked one another to death in what they call "a bingmututal mass strangulation as of words," but he could put the story together: they were lost in a hall somewhere, a hall which tilted down alarmingly the further you go, so they were like lost & frozen in this infinite, fabulous hall, together & without much air. & Ladoga Bojje wanted to jump or reduct or rejuct back up to her particular time. She was quite worked up & desperately insistent, it looked like it sounded like, & concocted fabulous promises to the others (as that they would not be harmed, that Queigh would be somehow restored (you could not not-tell from her stutters there was no way how), who wanted to rejuct just a little, just a scrizzle of a dither up in time (except they squabbled over their dithers & how much how much was far, & none had heard the word scrizzle before, though they got the idea). & Chiin lay on the floor with his cheek moist against some fluid, & he smiled like dis graybingbleery fool, & he thinks My brother is taking care of me; my brother is fighting for me, whereas further estimaion suggest Vaom was morelike trying for an usculation rather too far for brother Chiin‑‑up rather to somewhere the kyewg was hinting at him, where his peculiar powers would baskim in the boons of "advantageous birth." Chiin would not last a glimmer there. "Let's put it this way," she freaked. "You will all be destroyed without my help, & I will die anywhere else but Future One. So we jump to Future One." Agreed, & so we jump to Future One. ‑‑followoing needs to go earlier THE SWAP OF LOOKS or THE GASPING & GAGGING EXERCISE This couldn't be his brother. He was mad, sure, but he was wildly focused & excited, spreading frenzy all around. Yo & Chiin's groo were talking twice as much, using words only as quaint clothes brittle as a bug hiding the chirpings of translucent wings. "Vaom!" Chiin tried to cry (but it came out as a sadly muddled mutter gummed on the glascine records of Eternity, which is sweating, sticky, constantly recording everything (Eternity exists in things (it is mad (it is completely mad (Eternity is mad) & losing things) & losing things) & losing things) & losing things) & losing things), & then, lamely: "You...got out!" "Why, yes, brother," crowed Vaom with a haught of hilarity. He just kept burrowing through *s bag, his head pecking, then bobbingin, going deeper & deeper inside. Soon he would be crawling bodily into the boiled bag. Chiin could hold no firmness in his face, but just stretched his features oddly sidewise, prompting * to let out a sort of wanton snort. "I've been 'out' for months," Vaom cried from the neck of *'s bag. Now he was throwing things out, the whole choo looking insanely amazed. "Where were you?" Chiin called. Vaom popped out of the bag & grinned. Chiin recalled it. Chiin had seen it, & he had these strange green cubes which were photographs of it. It was the grin Vaom grinned within the depths of injury‑‑Vaom's Humiliation Grin, his despised & disgusting Mouth-Full-of-Shit grin. Vaom tossed something over his shoulder, which a foundering Chiinachiinchiin barely caught. "I've been with you, fair brother, following you & your gorgeous groo." His eyes did this {awful dancing thing}. There was this febrile flame in there, in the sizes of his eye that just kept...just kept shimmying & squatting in disgraceful ways. "Following...us." All possible combinations of significant looks exchanged, then exchanged silver cubes which were photographs, then looking at the photographs, then looking up at Vaom & starting all over again, who waited for the looping swap of looks to stop exchanging photographs of looks within these small silver cubes exchanging looks of photographs, then dove back in, robustly bellowing. "Yea, I was tailing you guys‑‑which wasn't easy, I assure you. No one could follow you. You are very, very good." But disbelief hung like tears in the heady atmosphere. "Vaom, you'll have to get out of there." "Just one more second," came the cry. And, sure enough, Vaom pulled the bag from his head & sat on the ground. He balanced a box on his fingers like a precious skull. "There we go!" "Put that down!" Chiin hollered, ending in a Mortification Choke, which is tough, & a difficult hold to mutter. "Why?" beaming his bleaming brother, bouncing the cube on his fingertips. He looked godawfully pleased. "You didn't even steal it, right?" Now Chiin had to attack, but he did so slugglishly‑‑in grotesque, wounded-giant steps rather than the compacted vault he had wanted, & by the time his hands grasped Vaom his brother had thrust the cube right into his chest. All made the gasping gagging exercise from "Gasping & Gagging Exercise" in The Gasping Gagging Exercise. Right in Chiin's hands, Vaom tenderly convulsed with some sort of gradual ecstasy, unless he was pretending. He was at least pretending as much, & all Chiin's beautiful diagrams of severe & punishing acts flipped in the guise of white cards, white & very scratched but very beautiful as opposed to barely beautiful fell in the mud of the actual ditch by the wayside of the metaphorical road of the groo's collective sigh. "What did he do?" someone stuttered* (*diacritics cleared the stutters in excoriates of time). "Where is Asteriska?" "Well‑‑gone, I think you'd say" Vaom lilted giddily, tossing the bag froth-down in the center of the froth in the center of the group. Froth. It was the weather. Vaom screwed down silkily to sit at the mouth of the bag as it came in microincrements of inertia to a rest at the mouth of the bag coming to rest at the mouth of Zadno's instance of a bag. "He has ceased to exist." "What do you mean?" Chiin piped, his vowels snealing through a light pipette. "What do you mean, 'ceased to exist?' How? Why?" "Because of something he took," replied Vaom. "The question is, is what he took still here?" Vao looked positively thoughtful here, soft fingers to a slick silt chin as the rain continued. "What is it?" "Can't tell you. But I'm thinking there's a copy in here." & he duv into the bag. DOORS OF THE PRESCIENT LASHES or PRIMARY SIDE-EFFECT OF REPETITION "This place is what you believe," Vaom was cooing. Was the effect of the pillow-drugs he was crooning. His face between these pillows, he was in a very soft place he was letting least of all a brother in. "Go on‑‑cruise around around around around around around around around," etc., Primary Side-Effect of Repetition. & Chiin thought, Well I don't believe in anything, & he tried to skim through superficially but got sucked in everywhere. The place had no corners, yet he always found himself pouting in an ardent niche somewhere, amongst sfumato artworks & cushioned linens‑‑perfectly-laundered of course‑‑& with putti wailing their cheeks over positive trumpets longer than anything longer than beacons, & he found himself following cut-glass curves of fantastic stylings such that he wanted names‑‑he wanted to gather names‑‑but they had no latitude of names in the atmosphere here in their incredible diminishments, & sat somewhat at a hookah in remember-satin dens, waiting politely as he notes the dark outside the windows (perfectly black‑‑what did they spray, what did they paint that out of?) with veering inclinations of altering attitudes with change within change of an alternating mind, not one's own, emerging abundantly but not at all from God, much less droning its sonorous nothingness from apparencies of deepness down inside suggesting vast accelerations through infinite space & protractions of a burning ghee lamp. But one had only to hint at the push of another door absolutely lacking in latches (of that supple race of Doors of the Prescient Lashes) so as to sough not so much to open as engrossing flesh, I mean your flesh frisking itself, feeling itself fine & instantly sweeter & absorbed in activities so much more supple even than the dreams generated out of amazement. It was quite a cruiser, all in all. He came across portals of sorts, known as the Xifter Porticles, into which one could not help but thrust his goddam head, through its envelopments of a Perfectly Black Membrane there to see what they called munificent magnifications of the Echo-Ship & its alleged circuitry, replete with etheric workings & cute little little Xifter Proticles, through which you wore a head the size of a pin into the Minds of Everybody's Disembodied Memory of his once-sought, crystal memory, almost insanely lost, as the voices of the critics said, consisting of a brief brook & a very tiny tree, also a number of entities, naively certain of themselves, that once talked perfectly to me. UNSPEAKABLE SECRETS OF AIR or THE MIRROR FULL OF ONE-WAY GIGGLES Of course they had menials & valets‑‑prudently quarter-sized or dime-sized, to save on air & expenses concomitant to air (don't get me started!), including air's special diamond-sized or facet-sized stewards & attendants with their mouths puckered up in Unspeakable Ovals, so's they couldn't give away any of the secrets of air‑‑unspeakable as you might wish to say‑‑as in the highly fictionalized, mightily fantasized, inexpressibly metastasized Unspeakable Secrets of the Lost Air (!), which I enjoy almost as much as anyone, or believe I enjoy, just as Chiin, back up on the Subject Plane, believes he hears stewards smile at him (it's a cellophanic crackling sort of papersound of symmetrical signature) & offer him food. Ah well these stewards were always pressing these eats on you. & they had such eats‑‑cooked up by experimental, Xfean chefs who were always "trying" something, not so much to please prospective diners such as Chiin here with his Luminescent Bib Luminescent Bib Figure 1: You Must Be Kidding as to appease the Trying Gods of the Physics Demimonde, thus & therefore formulating foodspuffs translucid, spicey, & so limitlessly sweet, inevitable gelatins taking the forms of, O, let's say lost globules after the Lost Globules of the Faraenzaekaeiou of Faraenzaekae of the fervid atmospheres or the absolute atmospheres (!), enough to make you wince, OK? a-and structures enough to bleed you white, 's OK? technical structures of the kind favored around the structures of these these parts, with their crystal lattices & goofball helixes & their quivering quadrant shapes (like jello!) with the wide-wobbling faces seen like gravity faces on the other end of your tether, like I say as if those chefs, O O those special Xfean chefs had something scientific in mind they were on the otherside of the Mirror Full of One-Way Giggles taking somewhat the modified form of the latest upgrade of spiroform tears of the Weeping Light v. 5.1+, yo weeping the white, translimpid tears as of the Virgins of the Crying Light, clustered there weeping like mediocre fools wobobbling in the textures of that Jello of Impossible Light (these are all bonafide entities, nor no mere twifles of the wippling shadowlight), the fucking Jelloze of Impoxxible Underlights in the underlying triflelight© so Chiin thought as he make pretense to eat, with the jamstuff treacling right off the edges of his biband that (biband that would be the far, far bibblings of his Himilayean bib, of his impossibly spiritually advanced Himilayean bib, high amongst its peerless chills of something like rarefieid, infinite winds whistling unto one‑‑summoning one, probably, or trying to summon one, possibly‑‑to another gasp of birth (another birth!!!) & another gash thereto...but this was just a bib) {and anyway Chiin figured} might just be the absolutely perfect perfectest food for the lightplane beings or the planar entities existing in forgotten curves of the speedless etherzones (that liked to pretend to be curveless & which had no time to eat‑‑only the pretense of eating, which must be what this food was for. So you came away pretty poorly fed but most impressed with all this crafted jello‑‑stuffed treacly with impressions & mouthfilling awe at the sheer architectonics of the thangs. Chiin stood in the corridor, touching his star of hand to his stomach. Well, not his actual stomach, the internal organ & star of the movie Stomach: the Internal Organ, but he Chiin stood in the hall there & touching the outside of the skin of the body over it (& the clothes, too), thinking That was weird. They had prosaic powders© you could take to fill you up, 'cause that Xfean treaclespuff would never do... TORTURES OF THE UNDERDEW & each day you awoke all covered with this dew. This was the special preservation dew, they said, though Chiin suspects their feeding off of him, & off the sweet, dewy face of his sleeping brother, too, who sleeps, one might say, like there was no today, nor no baby in the folds of the bubble of day, nor no fetuses (the Fetii!) ambling up the road like Blakean devils, thick as toads with heavy preservation dew© & muttering evil curses to themselves (each curse bifurcates themselves, so you have all these half little corpses of your brother and/or moony visions of your brother dying in the underdew in the sound of the sound of the tortures of the Underdew. Chiin‑‑in a manner so absent that it is not really Chiin‑‑wipes absently three layers from his brothers face, though he knows not to weep all of the dew off his brother's absent fazes, not the absence of brother in there but the scorched & arid dryness of his tortured skin, of his thinly tortured skin & excoriated skin (they loved to bake his skin & to bake him in the juices of his skin!), or his brother's triple-fazes under that, & similar & diverse & sundry frightenings of his brother's dewy face, sleeping & slobbering in the dew, if you must know the truth, & and gobbling up the good life as it were, & the off chance he wakes from some petrific dream or impossibly hard impossibility of an undreamt unredeemable dream if you will a-and ugly-face Chiin to a rotten death (i.e., some incubation the rough, dry equivalent of death in Delusion's Cove which is a place we have here here wherein if you must know death seems to have valence & death seems to have a face unlike the ruin of his brother's awful face) right now mute & satisfied with faith, here on Xf where dew is faith (by which I mean dew is death & death is faith‑‑hence, dew of death or preservation death), and Chiin, who could never stomp in the face of a singular thought, was fröen for a möem there in the positive ice storm of a very sad thought, & he thought So absolutely lost in healing & with no desire to heal‑‑& he was thinking about Vaom here, & he was not at all lost, heaven forbid, or at least he was not quite lost (for Chiin is always lost)‑‑not in this universe nor a thousand more as well‑‑amongst turquoise jumbles like formations of rotted rock, rotted rock covered in coats of superficial superself referential crap, which is what we use to fulfill our shortage of interia here (see "Dearth of Inertia"). SUBDEMONS OF THE VAPRUUX ENTITIES But he liked the way Vaom woke him up, later, abolishing the dew from his face with an amber light a powerful religious device, a miniklieg from a very weird & parallel Hollywood he held easily in a hand the Technician of Vigilance always swore he had and in one way or another proposing that they rush directly into pleasure, "while we still can." Oddly, this was not an appeal Chiin could resist, & the two brothers evolved over eons & eons of idiocy into subdemons of the vapruux entities as they reeled off coil within coil of reality. We had signs of them everywhere, in special costumes, crying & carrying symbolic signs representing personal futures so succulently exciting ALL MUST GAWK crosseyed as a Crossopterygian just to grok, & they were always nipping into the veins of Xfean pleasure‑‑& here do we find we find ourselves going mikkle deeper here than dew. REALMS OF THE SUBTLE SMOKE Chiin had not expected this version of Xf, with so many pleasures activated through contrivances of such elusive subtlety, & Vaom was pushing him into it, molding his long-rotten, long-forgotten aura into the shapes of clothes into which preposterous ancestors had froze. Chiin's face was surrounded constantly by these distinctly brittle tears, or, more formally, formations of forgotten tears laughing at the preposterous sadness of everything, as I may say I've spent many a blue lifetime doing (these were known as "the Lives of Connectedness," filled with the weepings of impossible beliefs long since gone into the Realms of the Subtle Smoke I will explain sometime). MANIC-PUFFINGS-OF-THE-PIPE-TILL-DAWN or PARALLEL ANYWAYS or THE ABSENT QUESTION OF THE RAG & Vaom took Chiin to "the vortex" or Torrents of Ym, where he was pressing sensations into the concave Temples of the Cosmic Chiin in the form of small plasters, plastics, plasmic entities in daubs aglow with arousing inflamations whereupon Chiin's puzzlement kept blossoming into dried weeds like the Sliding Analogs of Words stuffed into his manic-puffings-of-the-pipe-till-dawn till he forgot Just About Anything but the basal twinges of another in these endless series of oblivious, forgotten dawns and he would turn dully, not to, but along the General Directional Camera-Lines toward Vum, who was fussily stuffing more impressions down a tube tapering into Chiin's dissociated ear, & ask himvomer what-if-any day this goddam was, or if this were still their room‑‑flooded with gold light & greatly compressed or what, except Chiin found he was shaking a scruff of neck toward his brother, an attachment lacking in stuffing, the scarecrow of the question lacking absolutely air in the forms of shaping & of confidence and Vaom bob zup & says "Enh?" & ducketh back underear if not downright intoear, & thus would it not seem that Vaom was also lacking much with the talking anyway and they would both laugh when he threw down the famous Rag of the Absent Question making them both "laugh-a-loofily," which is a short of shigh & in parallel anywise (& enough with the anyways). ASSISTANT CRYSTAL RESTAURANT or "LIVING IT UP ON XF" & then they'd break for lunch or something, dining in lost mirror-corridors of the endless vinchinchiri, which meant to mean Assistant Crystal Restaurant, where Xf with sparkles for legs float up to serve you, & Chiin would bashfully gasp, "What are we doing here?" "'Doing'?" Vaom gadoinged within would-says within the nexus of the would-have-saids. "We're 'living it up on Xf,' fatal brother." If Chiin should ask about the phrase fatal brother, Vaom would lean back into feedbacks of his wheel of denial and/or loop de loop of repudiation & the glass would crack & Chiin would go mad & miss his dinner. Chiin's missing lips mist-forming why? & Vaom would say within the would-say aura round his head: "We're headed someplace very dismal, Chim. You have absolutely no idea." Vaom loved sayingthis sort of thing. "Seriously, Chiin‑‑we gotta stock up." "On sensations." Vaom would nod & glub, spaghetti-somethings coming out the feedings of his mouth, & he would gesture with his fork & squeak "Eek!" which would make Chiin eat. It was mighty good food, if somewhat ornate in shape, surprisingly bland & soothing. "Xfean food," Vaom rhapsodized. "The nicest in the zxryyn." "Amen!" cried Chiin, actually a swooping polythong filled with meaningless excitement you just can't help hear here alla day long. Gratified Xf would bring more food, which was equally smooth & equally nice. & this Xf food never filled you up, but always held back. You could eat on forever if you were so inclined, & there were special places for that as well, sometimes with vayz vaying Ever you can eat! & there were other, illegal places to get stuffed, though Vaom, playing it safe, never took them there. He was filling their heads with Spenx™‑‑sense-data spikes very taxing to digest. Their rest was impenentrably dense‑‑solid slumbers, compact & impenetrable, of the latest sleep-science design from the taboo labs of Sluu where the bottomless laws of subparticularity (you know, the laws that make you mad) were probed right down their fundaments by scientists too fundamentally mad to give up their findings sans actual vivisection unto photon curtains swelling like scarves in the winds of vermillion dawn. Chiin was afterwards presented with cryogenic caskets of his deeper dreams, steaming with broken pauses of fragmentary frost, & a little succinction lozenge holding (they (with astute, unmentionable looks) said) the memory of his wrestlings, which were cold & titanic, featuring a score of whistling thunder that would make your heart just stop, meaning that his heart had slowed forever in the shell of some madly irrecoverable dream, itself dreamed up in a lab somewhere in the lavish squanderings of a murdered world (he didn't know why he was thinking that, nor who held the why of his positive thoughts). "Don't worry bout that," Vaom muttered with a strange conpiratoriality that went beyond reality, which existed as a small vayz standing on the floor, no more than the tatters of a sad, rent memory. "Are we getting too much rest?" "Well, are you blue?" "Am I what?" "I say have you turned blue yet?" "C'mon, Vaom. Of course not..." "Well then," hum Vaom conclusively. Chiin wondered periodically about trying to get away, but the richness of this Xf thing had him paralyzed him-him, & this Vaom-posing dissembler seemed to KNOW what he was doing more than anyone Chiin had gropped outside omplosiums of some connoptiumgurbs he'd poached once the memory once of onatime not that these surgeless memories didn't swear endless as pirates of the echotime they belonged nowhere‑‑but this is what your memories always fucking say, now isn't it? so that Chiin easily swallowed profusions of feelings, followed by awful thoughts, an follerdim no matter how the dawn was dim. "Time to get up," Vaom was saying within an urgency cold as powder. You couldn't see his face; there was too much snow, & Chiin saw for a moment his brother bothering him in concentric semblances of ever-waking dream: Vaom pouring impossible blue water from a pitcher onto Chiin's wincing face observing Chiin sleeping in a dream; Vaomarcing a tremendous lavender light into the sockets of forgotten eyes (the child wandering the pockets of fields in a lightless photograph, touching various gems within the cave of gems, the child melting in the fever of some longlost visionary eye); Vaoma wavering smile in the tissue of a vayz; Vaomaswarm of azure Vaoms quarreling at the gates of a million ears (not to be mistaken for a billion ears); Vaomaseries of leaps & spirals on the screen of a dusty old scope; Vaomthe wise old man, reasoning with him; Vaomtheghost of Vaom propped at the torture machine; VaomtheBuddha Vaom hugging the light of a sun refracting everything, see too spherical too see; VaomthechildishVaom snapping his fingers, bugging him; VaomIrrefutableVaom squeezing Chiin's arm outside the circlet of his last pastoral dream. Too too many qualities to seem... & when Chiin woke up, none of the simple qualities of dawn had been established. It was dark‑‑not even chilly, not even blue. In the absence of established mass, he began to shake his brother & throw him around. "No, really," Vaom cried with the unfixed echo of a nebulous laugh. "We need to go-o!" "It can't‑‑it can't be time to leave," Chiin stammered, slowly letting the crumples of his brother go. "That's right," deepthroats Vaom, smoothing himself down. He was two-dimensional & colorless, but recognizable at last. "It's no time at all, really. Come on, get up. You need to get us a cep." Chiin headed down a luminous funnel of laughter, but Vaom held grittily still. "Steal a cep, just like that?" Chiin finally gurgld, & his brother shrugged. "Fold it into a scroll of space & vanish with it," he glev blithely. "Whatever." With the goggles, one could see the streets of Phrinedde as green planes within a wilted graph. Sliding your palm along the structures, you could barely make your way. "It's all right," Vaom barfed quietly, though it felt alarmingly loud. "We have essentially forever. But let's hurry." Strange, intangible Vaom, Chiin thought, but he hurried along. THE DRAINAGE TWITTERS or MOSTE REPUGNANT POOLES "This is horrible, horrible!" Chiin kept either shouting or thinking or sucking on the opinon of, but these revulsive white funnels of Queigh just kept pushing him along‑‑at breakneck speed, by the way‑‑& his abdomen plumb wore out making his helpless legs kick every way, but legs were useless in this mucoid mire, & his cries such as they are are recorded in globbles, like this organic fucking oddity seeped with superfluous intelligence (which Chiin angry angrily swore it didn't (no...it didn't) no & no) & was rather randily scrutinizing chiim. & Queigh was certainly not Queigh anymore, but had become the very Queigh of memory, the billowing Qeigh full of gurges & heaves, the icky Qeigh too revolting to rotate, a thick Queigh grim with miasmas of odious toads, a gross, warm, & sultry Queigh congested with adjectives of its own dismay, a Queigh, by the way, without surfaces or boundaries, & with a sort of roller-coaster gravity that kept one sliding along‑‑& what's with all these lymph ducts draining down the slither tubes away? "Don't worry," sounded Vaom's voax with a dribble. "These are just The Drainage Twitters." At least it sounded like twitters. "We're sliding through the medial atmosphere." He sounded like this should have delighted him. Chiin was ill & reeling, & not at all delighted. There was no delight in this denatured world. It glew psychotically bright with the fascination of lifelessness Chiin distinctly did not feel. He fell, & he refused to feel. "Breathe, brother!" shouts a very distant Vaom (& Chiin wonders under the table what if separate he will do). But they finally splashed together, & to the Freudian end of it, replete with these designated, distortive scowls across their faces slapped as if by the hands of plastered make-up men, which don't exist of course, still slipping briskly, hewing their dribbled momentums through the flash of Moste Repugnant Pooles. It was surprisingly bright down there, & sunglasses flipped down soon by the Detachment Yanks kept severely taxed optic nerves from uttlery cratering their eyes. "Special light," Vaom was saying mysteriously, in the context of some vast opium dream existing in the dimmest ignition of the skull of the deadborn poet in his formal clothes, mucked by the uck & micked by the ick, who lay nearby. There were corpses all over, laying by the by. "Ah those are not there," Vaom informed him. "I don't know how I know that. My kyewg is nonfunctional for the nonce. It got splattered quite a bit." "Everything's splattered!" Chiin cried in horror. "Vaom, why did you take us to this place?" But Vaom was spraddled in the fen, attending to his choked-up kyewg. The marshy landsape they'd fallen to was quite clean, actually, except for the ashen fog or smoke, though no less disgusting for all that, & of a pristine clarity. Pure & bodiless, it gave forth dripping sounds, & in its clarity ignited still more light‑‑so believe me, there was plenty of light. There was dripping, plenty of it, & still more light. Chiin's goggles darkened to their ultimate notch & began to eeping. Warning sounds, Chiin thought. They've reached their bloody limit. We just came in & our implements are already failing. "Ah!" cried Vaom with satisfactin. "Kyewg's back & working now." "Well, that's something," groused Chiin, & Vaom looked brightly at him, enjoying Chiin's green consternation & letting his seasoned sarcasm shoot right past. Yea, & Vaom allows that sarcasm to shoot right past till it's positively passed. I wonder how long we'll last, Chiin bethought him down him hollows of forsoken, graven spine. "We made it!" cried Vaom, foolishly trying to stand & slipping every single disk upon the span of his long-forgatten spime. At leads it looked like a spime. "You've got the drainage twissters, boy." ELECTRICAL BEES He was trying to ease past the aprons of a dripping building or mountain or whatever it was, but the mountain was pouring on him, raining its whole substance aiming for his face. & it was certainly hitting his face, & soaking him absolutely. It is impoƒƒible to say, but suffice it nevertheless to say the clouds got an absolute handle on the high rim of the pouring atmospheres of the Altered Queigh & were pouring in the sickle of this moisture-like something overboard & pouring all their vacancies of lies as it were overboard onto the head of any unsuspecting mother passing by much like Chiin here was like to lie. He moved like in absolute fetters‑‑such was the gravit of the gravity here here, & he was clung to by electrical bees or nuggets or insects or entities of some sorts sporting on his sleeves like these psychedelic flies. This was beautiful! he heard thought but did not own the hought. That's how the thoughts come up to you‑‑like small friends, their faces like clocks incandesent, phase-changes waving like a cry, & when he did really try to try to cry his words thux stammerering & his thoughts‑‑his thoughts!‑‑flipping ever back in the flap of the moistened pages flapping backwards in recursions of the abslute whim. I mean wind, which of course has no whim. I correct myself. I correct myself correcting myself & corect myself & get by. I just get by in the flaping of the whislting wind. I mean whim, which naturally has no sound other than the sound wihin itself, dropping like snow inside the tiny glass with the picture of what was once thought snow inside. "This is Queigh?" upchucked Chiin, positively & constantly wiping off his face. "Put on your veil," Vaom puked, giving that veil a flip with his backwards hand (& Chiin notices now that his brother's hand‑‑& possibly his orther's other hand as well & poddibly his other brother's other hand aswell‑‑has been moving backwards in time for this whole time, where tie is understood as something much like the movement of your brother's otherhand in the backwardnexx of time. "Our would has been‑‑altered," Vaom acknowledged. They stopped & looked up. "Hard to make things out here, isn't it?" No one noticed if Chiin ever nod. "Essentially they've denatured it," Vaom went on, & Chiin was not quite certain of his brother's tone. As you might expect, tones never came here through realistically through here & here & here. "...Denatured it a bit, I'd say‑‑& when I say I'd say I'd mean my kyewg'd say." "Denatured it how? & who?" "Which is it Chiin‑‑who or how?" "Denatured whom by how." "Ah," spat Vaom a bit of water-notwater out of his sarcastic mouve. "You're not able to believe this, Chiin, but it was done by the Opterthrong." "I beg your pardon?" Chiin burbled through a bingsphereful of blub he had been forming in the slits of his unconscious lips. "I know what you mean," tossed Vaom, his hand moving backwarfs ever into time smacking casually the glob of the blobule-off. "No, I mean who the hell are the Opterthrong?" "Why, the Lexz, the Lexzyzgia, Chiin. Ladoga Bojje's kind." Vaom nodded at his own words, apparently serious in this cocoon of wounded time. Well, which are they‑‑the Lexz or the Opterthrong?" Chiindemanded hotly, making the best of a lot of sizzling sounds. "They exist beyond exclusion," Vaom glorped portentously, but he was dripping & the dripping on the phases of his faces glistening in a way indicating in a way that he was needling him (& needlessly needling him, I must not fail to neveradd). "The Opts are forms of the Lexz," Vaom went on, with the welcome warmth of a brother now (the place was not cold, but it had no heat). "Like Ladoga Bojje. She's an Opterthrong‑‑a creature of the Lexz." "You getting this from your kyewg?" "Kyewg. Its name is Kyewg‑‑or will be, aftertime." "I beg your...how much time?" "Way up there‑‑aftertime," Vaom vamina'd, slapping Chiin's near-soaking back. "Some place, huh?" "I'm going to have to kill you, Vaom." "In due time." They stood & listened to the treacling quasi-rain. "Welcome to Queigh," whispered Vaom. Their world was, to say the least, really messed up. Everything seemed to be bent & sent off-color, & the substances were no longer quite themselves. There was no life as such‑‑only strange, maneuvering entities. They were cold, like the spirits of insects, & there were long coils growing out of them that lapsed into the tissues of the planet, floating as a cold & mucoid core. Cool light moved through everything, yet carried no image, & there was an absence lack of qualities. The rolling ground, the structures overhead, the strange curvilinear coils that reeled to every side looked unintelligibly gelatinous, with extensions riddled in substantial veins. The veins were some shades darker than the foundation substance. Sometimes the sky was lit with buttresses, as if someone had plaited the atmosphere in some staggering way. Both brothers kept moving their mouths as if to speak or close them, but their movements fell short numbly. As they walked on. The landscape gleamed moist & viscous, & it rose with mountains traced with veins, a yellow horizon edged with structures like frowning continents. At least they looked like continents, though perspective faltered here & there. They might be fogbanks paltry meters away or the shoulders of clouds in the middle distance. It was impossible to say. "Who did this?" hove Chiin, glancig at Vaom, but his brother shruged frailly. His kyewg evidently said nothing. They saw what they thought were canyons oppressed with many a viscous rain, rubbery fjords & broad knobs reaching into disturbingly thick seas, though they may have been just vapors. Effluvia crept everywhere or crouched near the ground & slouched against more solid nameless things. These billows possessed smell & color & temperature & hue, & seemed to exhibit personality & shapes that were almost body-like. & the prodigals thought This can't really be our world. They couldn't help themselves & were not in true possession of their actual, former selves (which waited, cycling back & forth between their very feet, outside the exit now), & these brotherly unselves looked anon at one anonther shuddering their bodies quite a bit, in a dismissive way beyond fear, beyond lies, beyond incredulity. It bonded them a whale of a hell of a lot, I'd be forced if I exist eded to say. "This must be some gross duplication of Queigh," proected Chiin, trying to finger a stubbly protruberance seeming in no way viably alive. They were full of awful guesses. Queigh had been murdered, then brought horribly back to life. Their world had been copied, & this fallacious copy put in its place. Or this was an alien parody or sarcastic garble. They were surrounded by smaller forms with forms equally indistinct & perturbing, & they leaned into these things & stared into their ambiguous insides, as if seeking dissociated memories in an unsure way. "We should go deeper in," slimed Vom. Chiin jerked up. "What?" "My kyewg says we're still aboveground." "You mean there's ground down there?" "We have to go down further. We must be walking round amongst the clouds up here." "What are clouds? Queigh never had clouds." "Queigh was never more than clouds. In here." He was moving toward one of the endless agglomeration of what looked like rotten bubbles. "This is a hole to the inside." Chiin looked stricken. "I don't think I can go in there," he Buicked feebly, but Vaom ripped the flimsy derma and, using his hands as cups, began evacuating a guttering hole that that seeped within the liquids there. "No," hurled Chiin with false finality. His face warped with grotesque dismay, but Vaom's seemed brittly detemrined. He was in fact already wriggling in, the liquids sliding to the side inertly & with blessedly little sound. Of course poor Chiin couldn't stay here, & in dizzy disarray he did the impossible, pursuing Vaom's feet as they were swallowed. It was like wriggling into an ear, & they squirmed down most industriously. Would he ever conceive sufficiently sordid way to kill this brother? AT THE ARROGANT PAW They went for something like drinks at The Arrogant Paw, this something like a pub in the liquid partitions of outer Old Phrinedde. They drank in the midst of a hodgepodge, including large beings with oddly-colored arms & grumpbeasts scowling over the foam of sordid drinks and groups of small robots at tiny tables (under everyone else's foot) who were constantly arguing in a loud skitter of metallica. There were snaky things in the upper reaches of lost corners, as broad as tree trunks & green as the blush of an emerald Kladem & moving in shadowed intimation. They seemed to be observing everything, in the manner of historians or spies, & they smoked these sort of petrified faggy things or sort of things or faggies‑‑that's it, they smoked these faggies‑‑and, smoking these here giant broken faggies (though you couldntna see the smoke except in the form of ammoniac vapruzesisesises) they like warmed to the occasion & then blended most mysteriously in‑‑except as I say they were not in but around everything. Smoking & observing with equal indivisibility, they surrounded everything & cupped in the atmosphere. There were these very glad-looking, starry things that had only two dimensions, or mostly only had they two dimensions, & they had an honorary luster like golden foil, except that their faces were very smooth ("Probably artificially," Vaom murmured in the sputter of music.) There were a lot of Grimnimbs, looking very tense around the clench of their prodigious teeth, consuming varieties of brown planes which only seemed to fix them further on the perches on the columns serving them as seats (they couldn't talk; they wouldn't say), apparently. Hey you could see the bent rays of Jloppnox, transparent as berries, gobbling lots of oblox (transparent berries) and clusters of faceted Quimees who seemed to be doing nothing other than widening their eyes, absorbing excess energy, though of course no ne has ever been sure what Quimees were ever, if anything, doing. One hopes they were enjoying. & enjoying definitely we have the Jymtilasheeums, various rust-colored vibratos structures of sound-buoyant dust springing their mirth around a coupe of tables. They were looking at Chiin. It seemed like they were sizing him up. "They're just pouncing to the music," Vaom told him. "What music?" answered Chiin, feeling very clever. Well, there was not just one kind of music nor one singular kind of a palpiating musical throb, but the polyphasic thrib as they say they of multiple musics, or at least the sort of raw groan such races as the Eedles & Goor acted like they seemed to consider or considered that they seemed to act like music, as they act all the time like music in the throes of that lost & decadent yet pleasant decadent place, or the incessant caw of data racheting much like the throats of sullen crows or which served as the broad-assed Boponoms served as such. The Xf somehow whipped it all together, only it wasn't together but existed as various organically-oriented radio bands, only they weren't radio bands as such, into which the rhythms of into-which toomed according to accordances of their very own irrespective "ears" except of course that they were not ears but secret ears, each aching to its own tune, ignoring secretly the turbulence of its own particular din. "It's a lot of pop music from everywhere," resumed Vaom. "Or almost everywhere." "I don't hear anything from Queigh." "Na. We never had music." Or they had, but it didn't matter. SPLENDROUS FOREVER ARRAY Vaom was talking, but the sense of his words had been drained by the yellow host of some smiling creature, so his wonted portentousness shone out like a star, painfully definite. His words, moving at wordspeed, showed up somewhat later. Chiin looked at his watch, ven though both time & whatever his watch imagined it was measuring were wholly meaningless. Amd when had this strangeness begin, anyway? "I know we're getting near there," Vaom had vozzed. Chiin said something which was nothing but blurble, & his meaning later walked in, & it slurped: "Near where?" Vaom nodded with nervous knowingness as he issued diverse formations of meaningless digital data at the moistness of the flesh of Chiin's slack face, this data later becoming: "That's another sign. You misplace your mind, find it somewhere around your nears or in a constellation in the circlet of your heart, transient galaxies buzzing by your head or transixed aliens of incredibly brilliant colors staring at you through a wash of humid filaments. & my instruments are useless, too." Vaom made a swat at them, whisking his fingers across incredibly * colored lights the brightness of a thousand alien eyes. "They register deviant clusters, nonexistent star systems ulsing impossibly. If I didn't know where we were going we would never have gotten anywhere. Now we're nowhere. But it's all right. That's just where we anted to be before we got lost here, which is where we always wanted not to be." Chiin made with disgusting, treacly sounds like some hypocritical projection of brotherly concern, which translated itself somewhat dourly into: "You OK, Vaom?" Vaom blinked a milion billion times, each blink a spark, each spark a star, eah star a memory in the galaxy of thought, etc., & after the exlosion of existence simply sucked: "Of course. I'm saying we're almost there." "Almost where? Where are we Vaom?" Vaom stood up, a little bit shakily. "In the vicinity of our home world, Chiin. Huh! That's really some name, 'Chiin.' Why the the hell'd they give you that name? That's no kinda name‑‑'Chiin.' Ah‑‑anyway, the crystal remnants of your memories‑‑not to mention the general operations of reflections hereafter referred to as anybody's thought‑‑well, have collapsed in the vicinity of Queigh. This is not the normal Queigh we are approaching here, 'Chiin.' This is the dead Queigh‑‑the murdered Queigh." & with a flourish he causeth space appear between them, which was at first just incalculable batches of frijj arranged in crazy arrays ("It makes them crazy, too," Vaom uttered parenthetically), then tonnage of special gear‑‑you could tell 1) that they didn't know how to use it, 2) that it was obviously never used, 3) that this stuff was hauled out on automatic command or something from the ancient Displacement Arraze where the uncertain machinery was kept in CEF & SFA Compressed Encryptic Form & Splendrous Forever Array, & that 4) no one in the fucking zxryyn knew what Queigh had become. THE HALL OF THE EMPTY STUFF "Look‑‑a Tunnel of Wonderful Stuff!" chirped the voices of Voax or the voixes of Voace in impressions of delighted child he never was. Chiin wander xin. As if moving randomly, like a random duck, he just "wander 'zin.'" A shaft of stuff it was, my friend, full of clammy pockets the size of a pocket of a giant kangaroo, & these pockets were full of pockets full of the wonderstuff, too, & it was the sort of stuff or if I may say, paraphernalia, like belongings that could never blong (I mean elong (I mean belong when I say elong) when I say blong) beneath the weightless vertigo of anybody's sky, tha made you snuff "Huh!" & "Hm!" when you pulled these appurtenances out, turing them over not so much for to see the other side as to see if the other side it did exis, which in turn made you exhale one hell of an amazéd wail and/or flabbergasted weep (in falsetto: "Hee!?") & in then-turn pull another item out, with the result that Vaom & Chiin stood there up to the essence of their schins in eff, pulling itses out of pockets down this long dysphasic hall & going "Yyf!?" & "Aoup?" & dropping these pieces on the floor of impossible crud. "Elegant stuff, no?" "No," replied Chiin, though he felt all so, having had to echo the oh. & he was recognizing it, all right all right. This was the very stuff‑‑or the molten dream of such‑‑he had very stole, the selfsame swuff that had from him been stole. This, then, was the Hall of the Empty Stuff. IMPOSSIBLE QUEIGHS These are fine works of art hanging like eyes in the vacant corridoror melting painted eyes andor melted painting eyes held transfixed in a vacant corridor of dreams. I mean the velvet of this horridor I mean hanging black velvets of this last corridor of hanging black star velvets of this awesome corridor of echoes of this corridor were of hanging eyes, hanging visions of these painterly eyes, which had once been the peoples of the Peopled Queigh but were now, in this Corridor of Depeopled Queigh, merely eyes, & not yet eyes, or not yet their former selves in the semblances of eyes, but rather representations of the dabs of paint, seeping as they looked at you in painterly fashion, I mean seeping in painterly fashion as what's left of their missed representation simply looks at you, & not through you nor into you neither, but bounced riht on your surfaces on the faces of the surfaces, right where the suns* *when there were suns* *where there were siuns* *once so shyly shined or shy did shine‑‑that sort of thing. I men they gazed at the glintz on your surfaces & passed you with their supericial gaze. These were the innihs, then‑‑what were left of innihs. These were his parents, if you will, glazed in these gazes as I sazes forever melting down, but not melting. I mean the melt was some optical delusion of foreverness, so they were always‑‑down the long halls of forgetfulness which is not where we remember where we were which is as I said but the Hall of the Forgotten Innihs or the Hallways of Disjunctive Cieeodors of the Depeopled Versions of This Here Impossible Impossible Queighs‑‑(somehow) always melting down. "What is this?" whispered a later-to-be-regarded-as-ridiculously-emotional Chiin. "I don't know," smope Vaom in much the same tone, only with Vaom it was controlled, with Vaom it was righteous, with Vaom it was OK. "What's left of the innihs, I guess." "You'd guess?" "I guess I'd say. Someone really loused up our world, would you say?" "Someone sucked out our world, I'd say." "Yes," agleeb Vaom with surprised satisfaction. He nodded at Chiin & nodded back at the eyes that nodded back at hiim. "Yes they did." So they stood there nodding but they couldn't really say. (But by the way: you could tell by the eyes in the hallway it was they.) Infinite ultraviolet centuries pass. "I want you to take all this stuff," Vaom ultimately blemb. "Suck it all up." "Suck it up?" "Yea." He waved his hand round & round. He waved his hand round in gestures reminiscent of Glogg's Concertina & Fugue for Hands & Dozends of hands. "Suck up this stuff all up. This is for resale to the Awxzym Thexx." His face numb, Chiin triggered his absence activators. He couldn't say anything. So this is what we're here for, he thought he thought. But Chiin was never sure of what he thought, & he went to work slowly, drawing up the corners of the eyes, which looked imploringly at him, then drew in all but the infinite vacuum at the center sof the eyes, which couldn't be drawn in anywhere or time. "That's not what we're here for," Vaom gok later, "more like a modest idea like a small lamp I thought I had. You know‑‑the kyewg has the real ideas." "Well, why don't I draw it in?" "Blot the kyewg?" Vaom ulu-ulu-lario in falsettio. "I'm surprised at you, Chiin‑‑really surprised. You got all the eyes?" "All the eyes I could see." "That's enough eyes, I guess. There might be limitless eyes all down that corridor." Chiin glanced behind him at the vacant corridor. It was a corridor of vacuums now, & he lifts up the tube & he sucks down corridor so the word will not get over-used. "I could push further in," he gunt. "But they keep getting smaller down in." "Yea," ea Vaom knowingly. "They get smaller than stars in there‑‑small as the stars of Vuor." "I couldn't sop all of them." "No. You shouldn't. We shouldn't do that to our old world, should we?" "No." But his words had no meaning anymore. He had left the spiracle running, & it had accidently sucked in meaning, & heat, & also all the air. Vaom never said anything nor seemed to hold this against him, but all their movements henceforth would take place in a meaningless world, airless of course, & in perfectly absent temperatures. Still, they could never sell all those eyes. THE ICE STORM THAT CAME BEFORE THE LEGENDS OF MEMORY They went round like that unto the cities of the world, sucking things up. They had plenty of time on hand & on many hands, & everything was tiny & made of delicate crystal besides, so they could do this throughout the nyriad dead cities of their murdered world, sucking it up. So what if one could hear these fragile pieces shatter in the grotesque belly of the inside bag as they moved along, their whole world murdered, sucked into a lousy trash like bag, then shattered? What did they care about their dead world anyway? Beats me. They had to move swiftly, because Ladoga Bojje was always there, moving in Mechaniacal Search Patterns through the organic mire, sneaking in insanely circuitous & thorough trackings up on them, more exhaustive than ever any rage could be. They could hear her outside the Caves of Radiated Ooze they moved within, grinding away softly. "Why are we doing this?" Chiin whined like he was being buttfucked. "Why are we here, Vaom?" "I shouldn;t answer someone who asks a question like he's being righteously buttfucked, but since the answer is 'I don't know,' that's what I'll say. Now finish up if you can." This conversation‑‑sometimes minus the buttfucking‑‑occurred many many times, in a pathway worn into the mush of the stuff thhey talked in when they walked in in in there. "The kyewg won't tell me yet. We have to work for the kyewg & do what it says, & when I say 'we' I mean 'I, anyway.' The kyewg will tell us someday." "Does it tell you that?" "No, but it will someday when we'll be able to die, just before we die someday." "Well that's just fine." Chiin nitz this without irony, because irony in this sector had long since frozen up in Zheleej, the ice storm that came before the legends of memory, freezing up all the irony, so there was only now the many frozen legends of their memory. SWADDLED UDDERLY IN LIPS "This planet is disgusting," Chiin exhumed, flipping back a mass of muck like the flap of a meaty pod, his "lips" curling which is not to say quoting themselves back all the wy around his inner head which is the crystal head wihtin the head which is the head formed in the forges of The Company which is this future outfit going back the centuries reforging everything. "It's not a 'planet,'" replied his brother with his habitual sneer replied his brother who was in the form of a crouch deeper then than the surface than of the land they had not landed on, & with a special set of pure crystal lenses oer his oeyoes dissecting it-looked-like the infinitesimal pricking villi sheathing the unfound surface of one of the polyps hanging like a great fat flap within the mantle's shroud. He helf this flap in his lap, & this disgusted Chiin all the more, so, swallowed as he was quite udderly in lips in the midst of this lippy swaddle, Chiin was like to blindering blundly gaggling gagging round. It was a sight to see, let me tell you, though of course the actual recording of sight had run upon the absolute shores of cessation during & after the so-called Edicts of Sight or of Sightlessness during the thoughtless injunctions of the year of Our Thoughtless Longlost Lord of our nineteen-ninety ninety-nine nine nine-nine the year we fall back on the shell of which with a shudder, which is a "shudder," which is the shudder Chiin gave way to when with a wave of shudders moaned: "Then what is it then? Murther?" "It's not exactly murther, no," geep Vaom evenly, though he must have been gagging tu-toto-too-too, somewhere beneath the Quash of Subfluxion if you will within the Interior Sea within the Basin of his Inner Refluxes. "More like expropriation of assured qualities." "And what about all this muck & colorlessness?" "It came bout the sea of evacuated qualities." "'The sea of evacuated qualities,'" snorted Chiin in a failure of sarcasm. "It's uck-disgusting & sick." "That's probably why they sent it back." "Is it making us sick?" "Pal, it is making everything sick!" Vaom cried laughing so hard he slipped right onto his buns within the tearless weepy duskness of that floor of the alien qualities. "You were sent here!" Chiin cried, his head poking like bud from the flower of his lips. "You were sent here by the Zxryyn Governants." "What do you mean?" answered Vaom metallically, taking care not to blush metallically. "We were both sent here. We're THE BROTHERS, Chiin." & the Brothers of Queigh it was. ADMIRABLE STERN They stood in a shadowless court arrayed with effulgent children & miniature elations of childhood play'd out in Spheres & Ovals upon every side, whereon glances overtook the attitudes of a very certain little girl. "Ah yes," she piped within the glass levitations of a droplet of magnificated oil or something somewhat functioning somewhat as a lens in the the essence of lens lens lens lens lens of visualized reply. "We exist in what you might call modes now. Just a spok." & the tot stroked the court into the aspect of a mountain-top, turning thence a knoll & drolly blooming into this little doll-adult. I guess that was another mode. "Another sort of mode, yes," she modied, & she looked very dark & concerned, as if she were getting sick. "Are you OK?" Vaom asked, as if he were concerned. "'OK,'" the doll adult now says, as if answering him. "I negative get OK." "It looked like you were sick," Vaom explained as if. "Ah yes," the woman shimmied, making an effort to seem More Chipper Than Thou now. "Ak! Ak! Ak! Adulthood keying in, you know." Keying in keying in‑‑resolutions bounding off. Vom & Chin look round, but in * you see the same thing all around, part of the Simplification Pleasures of the Area of This Sphere. Pleasure Area Figure 1: Lying Box Do not go in the boxes. Please read on. "'Please read on,' he says? Well in any case, I have come around," the woman ƒaid ƒmugly. "Well then maybe you can explain your destruction of our world," Vaom poked with what Chiin perceived he Chiin perceived as as admirable stern. INSINUATION PLATTERS or DURATIONAL POSITIME "We've gotta spiff you up," twittered Vaom in stylistic twitters. "You have no idea what a wet rat you've become, dear big brother brother brother." For the first time ever Chiin looked at himself. It was true. For clothes he had nothing but this smeared & sopping pelt, & it had little notes attached to it‑‑cryptic missives of the Orboids & other such low-dwelling, interdimensional creatures. He'd compulsively ridged up this big collar to hide his face from the zeelalas or wandering lights & to guard him from the hollows of the tunnelwinds. He had these great Oil Buttons glistening with mornings removed from childhood (there were a million mornings there!), arguing the presence of some unarguable coat, but it was more like the phasing out of a thousand promises, or maybe a million million promises or a billion opalescent promises‑‑I don't know. When he looked down on himself he looked down on himself like he looked down on himself like he looked like a hunched-down mountain looking down upon himself Figure 1: Box Looking Down Upon Himself down upon himself where the wide mountain apron could be seen in these most god-awful Cosmic Shoes, or they were shoey sorts of things or shoey substances‑‑great clodhoppers sundered from the ruptures of the iner earth. They made his mind cold. He was embarrassed. He was dismayed. "A stylistic plate you are not," moueVaom through the merrybright lisp of lips. Chiin didn't understand what he said but he was too ashamed to ask. All his life he had not known what people understood but had not heard he was too ashamed when he was not dismayed to ask. He was a clumsy slattern, standing at the bottom of his great bowl of dampened disheartenment, where Nothing Meant. & you should see it was howlingly pitiful, as pitiful as a sodden hound I say a sodden hound the way he lifted his eyes like a hound (his untidied, ill-mascara'd eyes!) toward the refulgent beacon of his brother, the inviolate pinnacle of absolute fashion, in which there is neither the drift of a thousandth flaw nor the slightest tip of time, much less actual movements of all but the most incandescent of mostly motes across insinuation platters of a positive (heaven forbid!) durational positime. TAILS OF THE RIGHTEOUS SYMMETRY It was a being of the upper closses. You normally couldn't see the upper closses but now the {occasional refulgent apron} sweeps past the beetles of your poor troughed brow (wo-wow-wow-wow) in an eruption of beatitude white as the rises of titanium cloud. Sometimes squatting in alleys vexing the remnants of Transfiguration Bones, you could perceive their parties radiate limbic nimbuses of the borealic aureole twinkling the idges of a crescent sky. & you could almost always see their heels mutate in mathematic phases by. But you rarely saw one, unless it needed something. & then you liked to die. & here was one, in its spatial-beacon hat its ocean-coat & its tails of the righteous symmetry & its constellation hat & its vest of the far-off weathers, in its special distance-jewels & blue remoteness of atmospheres, in its gravitational winding whims & the rims round & round possible millions of its lenses or its focal eyes & the scarves (& the scarves!) spinning millions of millions of impossible, baffling webs & the shoe-glintz & the bustle of invisible butts & of course that well-framed face absolute snoots upon the productions of even of Blakean time SHADES The face refined through art to a burnished Fair-Thee-Well, reflecting in its various mirrors of its preeminent primacy the face of Thy Desolate Wretchedosity and whipping quite off with its Coolly Smok't Shades confounded series of contours much too absolute I see to relatively say revealing {hollow crystal orbits} of transfixation eyes, preparing to speak (my God, I think he's preparing to speak!) eyes out of lips too limber & too quintessentially thin licking those lips unexpectedly one quick time (wait a minute‑‑do they ever lick their lips like that? I mean have you ever even seen out of one of them so much of a much of a tongue?), suggesting teeth wearing Very Fancy Caps indeed in time... ...but the words coming out with a haw of hesitancy (& stammering): "Hey‑‑brother Chiin! I've been looking for you, man!" & at first Chiin daunt recognize, or rather caunt blieve that he comrecognize, the voice...bu-but yet he gawks out his neck a bit & says: "Vaom? Is that you?" & the dude pullsee off soma dat upper-closs garb & says: "Yes, brother Chiin‑‑it's me." Novel by Kirk Hampton |