THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 1, "THE AEON" :: CHAPTER 2, EPISODE 7

During the worst of that, six and seven years back, Bill let on that his clamshell friends maneuver their craft telepathically, since impulses of mind, like magnetism, can be intercepted after-the-fact. Bill faithfully attends conferences, evaluating the testimony of contactees who report minds and genitals to have been probed... listens, with resignation, to their stories of predictable Zetic rashes... once in a while, however, he'll confess, "I have begun to ponder just what I am thinking and, if anything, what they might be trying to get through to me."

UFOs are no big whoop in Costazul (as in most of Spanish America, they're given the sobriquet 'Ovnis', a variation of your probative name, dear Egg) but, thirty years ago, all miracles were reserved solely to the Holy Apostolic and Catholic church. Elena Maria, terrified by Tapes' pilgrims, locked herself in against their importunities, so I became occasional ambassador to the self-maimed and hopeful shambling past our door. "It's a fool's venture," she warned, "there is no God, no Gloria, only the grave."

But she was kind, despite her words of despair, leaving bowls of posole by our blue door.

The third day, as she slept, I made a soft escape and, as I did, two thousand miles to the north, Bill Streich was ushering his son through the door of "Experience Arcade"... one of several bizarre halls of fantasy plotted by a madman, Morton Heilig, whose Sensorama challenge to Disney would abruptly crash in 1955 with an aircraft full of his investors, including the movie mogul Mike Todd and a president-elect of Mexico.

One surviving Sensoramoid who'd missed the flight was their optic biologist, Tom Varney, whom Bill Streich would bump into at conferences. Varney finally escaped American academia and, in fact, all America to pursue independent optical researches on a Suelan ranch twenty kilos from the Guat border. To support his venture he raised monkeys, which he sold to stateside labs; I visited the place in '69, with Jeff and Brendan, only to find Varney ascended to that Sensorama in the sky. The Monkey Ranch is also gone now, like so many things, vanished in the chaos of Arcillismo. But it's not wholly passed GO without leaving baneful influenza; footprints, like one of those elusive, deadly big cats, the gatos del monte... Ix, in the Uay... who, against nature, roam from Patagonia to the bleak Aleutians.

Jeff had written Varney, on his father's suggestion, between intervals of study and employment - he'd received no answer but the siren's call of lazy tropic afternoons and primo Costazuelan weed at fifteen old pesos the kilo. Distance from the draft and Nixon impelled our odyssey, and what we found there would change... and I am not being presumptuous... change the course of cyberhistory. Wreathed in sin, smoke and sunburned naivete, we descended upon the Rancho de Monos; wrathful gringo tygers hustling free lunches or, in Brendan's case, that perfect interval of dissonance between Pythagorean tones acoustic scientists call "brown noise". But of this more, later... Egg... for the pixin, souls of Costazuelan pilgrims arrive at Elena's door by thousands, a motley but grateful host of ghosts, united by their discontent, by hunger.

"God bless you," the negroes and bush English reply.

"Se dios lo quiere," volunteer the ladinos...

"Ma alo," say the Uay.

After I attached myself to their procession, I heard Father Tapes warn his pilgrims, "those who give their lives and souls to El Diablo shall be stricken blind to that which lies ahead for we, verily, are of... and are makers of... the last days."

A strange rain, falling on only the north side of the dirt road through Xul, wetted and ruined half the paper idols that the pilgrims had left behind in payment to worldly authority: to Tata Eisenhower, Tata Pio Doce, Tata Zamora. Ten years after, I hear bullhorns echo; Carlo dead in LBJ's war, LBJ himself under siege in Los Angeles, police with bullhorns... pighorns? doghorns?... ordering mobs to disperse "in the name of the people of California!"

"We are the people of California!" the mob had replied.

And the doghorns had answered back - "No! No, you are Not the People!" Adam, as I've been educated by Harry Stone, created Eve from his own rib in order that the whole of humankind might be derived entirely from clay. To let God off the hook!

With what sadness he glared across the parlor at T... and through the window to the Meat House!

If numbers are symbols of morality, laws are the oily blanket spread across the face of nature's strings; tygers of light that cannot escape the gravity of society, denizens of Musil's Kakania into whom mathematics enters "like a daemon".

And on this beach, the mathematics of fish rot and skeletons compounded by Harry Stone's herzes that lay Brendan to a pyramid of cinders... that, from the broken aftertones of "Resonator", forced windows for demons of aluminum nuggetry to squeeze through, I charge the spotted sky - "If you only had listened to me, none of this would had to have happened!"

Quatsch!