For John Fogerty

The very nature of our dreams is changing. We have deconstructed the universe and are refusing to rebuild it. This is our madness and our glory. Now we can again begin the true course of our explorations, without preconceptions or agendas.

—Lobkowitz

1 A Victim of the Game

The heat of the New Orleans night pressed against the window like an urgent lover. Jack Karaquazian stood sleepless, naked, staring out into the sweating darkness as if he might see at last some tangible horror which he could confront and even hope to conquer.

“Tomorrow,” he told his handsome friend Sam Oakenhurst, “I shall take the Star up to Natchez and from there make my way to McClellan by way of the Trace. Will you come?”

(The vision of a sunlit bayou, recollection of an extraordinarily rich perfume, the wealth of the earth. He remembered the yellow-billed herons standing in the shadows, moving their heads to regard him with thoughtful eyes before returning their respect to the water; the grey ibises, seeming to sit in judgement of the others; the delicate egrets congregating on the old logs and branches; a cloud of monarch butterflies, black and orange, diaphanous, settling over the pale reeds and, in the dark green waters, a movement might have been copperhead or alligator, or even a pike. In that moment of silence before the invisible insects began a fresh song, her eyes were humorous, enquiring. She had worked for a while, she said, as a chanteuse at the Fallen Angel on Bourbon Street.)

Sam Oakenhurst understood the invitation to be a courtesy. “I think not, Jack. My luck has been running pretty badly lately and travelling ain’t likely to improve it much.” Wiping his ebony fingers against his undershirt, he delicately picked an ace from the baize of his folding table.

For a moment the overhead fan, fuelled by some mysterious power, stirred the cards. Pausing, Mr. Oakenhurst regarded this phenomenon with considerable satisfaction, as if his deepest faith had been confirmed. “Besides, I got me all the mung I need right now.” And he patted his belt, full of hard guineas—better than muscle.

“It looked for a moment as if our energy had come back.” Mr. Karaquazian got onto his bed and sat there undecided whether to try sleeping or to talk. “I’m also planning to give the game a rest. I swear it will be a while before I play at the Terminal.” They both smiled.

“You still looking to California, Jack?” Mr. Oakenhurst stroked down a card. “And the Free States?”

“Well, maybe eventually.” Jack Karaquazian offered his attention back to the darkness while a small, dry, controlled cough shook his body. He cursed softly and vigorously and went to pour himself a careful drink from the whiskey on the table.

“You should do it,” said Mr. Oakenhurst. “Nobody knows who you are any more.”

“I left some unfinished business between Starkville and McClellan.” Quietly satisfied by this temporary victory over his disease, the gambler drew in a heavy breath. “Anywhere’s better than this, Sam. I’ll go in the morning. As soon as they sound the up-boat siren.”

Putting down the remaining cards, his partner rose to cross, through sluggish shadows, the unpolished floor and, beneath the fluttering swampcone on the wall, pry up one of the boards. He removed a packet of money and divided it into two without counting it. “There’s your share of Texas. Brother Ignatius and I agreed, if only one of us got back, you’d have half.”

Jack Karaquazian accepted the bills and slipped them into a pocket of the black silk jacket which hung over the other chair on top of his pants, his linen and brocaded vest. “It’s rightfully all yours, Sam, and I’ll remember that. Who knows how our luck will run? But it’ll be a sad year down here, I think, win or lose.” Mr. Karaquazian found it difficult to express most emotions; for too long his trade had depended on hiding them. Yet he was able to lay a pale, fraternal hand on his friend’s shoulder, a gesture which meant a great deal more to both than any amount of conversation. His eyes, half-hidden behind long lashes, became gentle for a moment.

Both men blinked when, suddenly, the darkness outside was ripped by a burst of fire, of flickering arsenical greens and yellows, of vivid scarlet sparks. The mechanish squealed and wailed as if in torment, while other metallic lungs uttered loud, suppressed groans occasionally interrupted by an aggressive bellow, a shriek of despair from xylonite vocal cords, or a deeper, more threatening klaxon as the steel militia, their bodies identified by bubbling globules of burning, dirty orange plastic, gouting black smoke, roamed the narrow streets in search of flesh—human or otherwise—which had defied the city’s intolerable curfew. Mr. Karaquazian never slept well in New Orleans. The fundamental character of the authority appalled him.

2 Two of a Kind

At dawn, as the last of the garishly decorated, popishly baroque mechanish blundered over the cobbles of the rue Dauphine, spreading their unwholesome ichor behind them, Jack Karaquazian carried his carpetbag to the quayside, joining other men and women making haste to board L’Étoile d’Memphes, anxious to leave the oppressive terrors of a quarter where the colour-greedy machinoix, that brutal aristocracy, allowed only their engines the freedom of the streets.

Compared to the conscious barbarism of the machines, the riverboat’s cream filigree gothic was in spare good taste, and Mr. Karaquazian ascended the gangplank with his first-class ticket in his hand, briefly wishing he were going all the way to the capital, where at least some attempt was made to maintain old standards. But duty—according to Jack Karaquazian’s idiosyncratic morality, and the way in which he identified an abiding obsession—had to be served. He had sworn to himself that he must perform a particular task and obtain certain information before he could permit himself any relief, any company other than Colinda Dovero’s.

He followed an obsequious steward along a familiar colonnaded deck to the handsomely carved door of the stateroom he favoured when in funds. By way of thanks for a generous tip, he was offered a knowing leer and the murmured intelligence that a high-class snowfrail was travelling in the adjoining suite. Mr. Karaquazian rewarded this with a scowl and a sharp oath so that the steward left before, as he clearly feared, the tip was snatched back from his fingers. Shaking his head at the irredeemable vulgarity of the white race, Mr. Karaquazian unpacked his own luggage. The boat shuddered suddenly as she began to taste her steam, her paddle-wheel stirring the dark waters of the Mississippi. Compared to the big ocean-going schoomer on which, long ago, the gambler had crossed from Alexandria, the Étoile was comfortingly reliable and responsive. For him she belonged to an era when time had been measured by chronometers rather than degrees of deliquescence.

He was reminded, against his guard, of the first day he had met the adventuress, Colinda Dovero, who had been occupying those same adjoining quarters and following the same calling as himself.

(Dancing defiantly with her on deck in the summer night amongst the mosquito lamps to the tune of an accordion, a fiddle, a dobro and a bass guitar, while the Second Officer, Mr. Pitre, sang “Poor Hobo” in a sweet baritone . . . O, pauvre hobo, mon petit pierrot, ah, foolish hope, my grief, mon coeur . . . Ai-ee, no longer, no longer Houston, but our passion she never resolves. Allons dansez! Allons dansez! The old traditional elegies; the pain of inconstancy. La musique, ma tristesse . . . They were dancing, they were told in turn, with a sort of death. But the oracles whom the fashion favoured in those days, and who swarmed the same boats as Karaquazian and his kind, were of proven inaccuracy. Even had they not been, Karaquazian and Mrs. Dovero could have done nothing else than what they did, for theirs was at that time an ungovernable chemistry . . .)

As it happened, the white woman kept entirely to her stateroom and all Karaquazian knew of her existence was an occasional overheard word to her stewardess. Seemingly, her need for solitude matched his own. He spent the better part of the first forty-eight hours sleeping, his nightmares as troubled as his memories. When he woke up, he could never be sure whether he had been dreaming or remembering, but he was almost certain he had shouted out at least once. Horrified by the thought of what he might reveal, he dosed himself with laudanum until only his snores disturbed the darkness. Yet he continued to dream.

Her name, she had said, was West African or Irish in origin, she was not sure. They had met for the second time in the Terminal Café on the stablest edge of the Biloxi Fault. The café’s sharply defined walls constantly jumped and mirrored, expanding space, contracting it, slowing time, frantically dancing in and out of a thousand mirror matrixes; its neon sign (last heat on the beach), usually lavender and cerise, drawing power directly from the howling chaos a few feet away, between the white sand and the blue ocean, where all the unlikely geometries of the multiverse, all the terrible wild colours, that maelstrom of uninterpretable choices, were displayed in a smooth, perfect circle which the engineers had sliced through the core of all-time and all-space, its rim edged by a rainbow ribbon of vanilla-scented crystal. Usually, the Terminal Café occupied roughly the area of space filled by the old pier, which itself had been absorbed by the vortex during the early moments of an experiment intended to bore into the very marrow of ultra-reality and extract all the energy the planet needed.

The operation had been aborted twenty-two seconds after it began.

Since then, adventurers of many persuasions and motives had made the sidestep through the oddly coloured flames of the Fault into that inferno of a billion perishing space-time continua, drawn down into a maw which sucked to nothingness the substance of whole races and civilisations, whole planetary systems, whole histories, while Earth and sun bobbed in some awkward and perhaps temporary semi-parasitical relationship between the feeding and the food; their position in this indecipherable matrix being generally considered a fluke. (Or perhaps the planet was the actual medium of this destruction, as untouched by it as the knife which cuts the throat of the Easter lamb.)

Even the least fanciful of theorists agreed that they might have accelerated or at least were witnesses to a universal destruction. They believed the engineers had drilled through unguessable dimensions, damaging something which had until now regulated the rate of entropy to which human senses had, over millions of years, evolved. With that control damaged and the rate accelerating to infinity, their perceptions were no longer adequate to the psychic environment.

The multiverse raced perhaps towards the creation of a new sequence of realities, perhaps towards some cold and singular conformity; perhaps towards unbridled Chaos, the end of all consciousness. This last was what drew certain people to the edge of the Fault, their fascination taking them step by relentless step to the brink, there to be consumed.

On a dance floor swept by peculiar silhouettes and shifts of light, Boudreaux Ramsadeen, who had brought his café here by rail from Meridian, encouraged the zee-band to play on while he guided his tiny partners in their Cajun steps. These professional dancers travelled from all over Arcadia to join him. Their hands on their swaying hips, their delicate feet performing figures as subtly intricate as the Terminal’s own dimensions, they danced to some other tune than the band’s.

Boudreaux’s neanderthal brows were drawn together in an expression of seraphic concentration as, keeping all his great bulk on his poised left foot, describing graceful steps with his right, he moved his partners with remarkable tenderness and delicacy.

(Jack Karaquazian deals seven hands of poker, fingering the sensors of his kayplay with deliberate slowness. Only here, on the whole planet, is there a reservoir of energy deep enough to run every machine, synthetic reasoner, or cybe in the world, but not transmittable beyond the Terminal’s peculiar boundaries. Only those with an incurable addiction to the past’s electronic luxuries come here, and they are all gamblers of some description. Weird light saturates the table; the light of hell. He is waiting for his passion, his muse.)

Colinda Dovero and Jack Karaquazian had met again across the blue, flat sheen of a mentasense and linked into the wildest, riskiest game of Slick Image anyone had ever witnessed, let alone joined. When they came out of it, Dovero was eight guineas up out of a betting range which had made psychic bids most seasoned players never cared to imagine. It had caused Boudreaux Ramsadeen to rouse himself from his mood of ugly tolerance and insist thereafter on a stakes ceiling that would protect the metaphysical integrity of his establishment. Some of the spectators had developed peculiar psychopathic obsessions, while others had merely become subject to chronic vomiting. Dovero and Karaquazian had, however, gone into spacelessness together and did not properly emerge for nine variations, while the walls expanded and turned at odd angles and the colours saturated and amplified all subtleties of sensation. There is no keener experience, they say, than the act of love during a matrix shift at the Terminal Café.

“That buzz? It’s self-knowledge,” she told the Egyptian, holding him tight as they floated in the calm between one bizarre reality and another.

“No disrespect, Jack,” she had added.

3 Il Fait Chaud

Karaquazian found her again a year later on the Princesse du Natchez. He recognised, through her veil, her honey-coloured almond eyes. She was, she said, now ready for him. They turned their stateroom into marvellous joint quarters. Her reason for parting had been a matter of private business. That business, she warned him, was not entirely resolved but he was grateful for even a hint of a future. The old Confederate autonomies were lucky if their matrixes were only threadbare. They were collapsing. There were constant minor reality meltdowns now and yet there was nothing to be done but continue as if continuation were possible. Soon the Mississippi might become one of the few geographical constants. “When we start to go,” he said, “I want to be on the river.”

“Maybe chaos is already our natural condition,” she had teased. She was always terrifyingly playful in the face of annihilation, whereas he found it difficult even to confront the idea. She still had a considerable amount of hope in reserve.

They began to travel as brother and sister. A month after they had established this relationship, there was some question of her arrest for fraud when two well-uniformed cool boys had stepped aboard at New Auschwitz on the Arkansas side as the boat was casting off and suddenly they had no authority. In midstream they made threats. They insisted on entering the ballroom where she and the Egyptian were occupied. And then Karaquazian had suffered watching her raise promising eyes to the captain who saluted, asked if she had everything she needed, ordered the boys to disembark at Greenville, and said that he might stop by later to make sure she was properly comfortable. She had told him she would greatly appreciate the attention and returned to the floor, where a lanky zee-band bounced out the old favourites. With an unsisterly flirt of her hands, she had offered herself back to her pseudo-brother.

Jack Karaquazian had felt almost sour, though gentleman enough to hide it, while he took charge of the unpleasant feelings experienced by her cynical use of a sensuality he had thought, for the present at least, his preserve. Yet that sensuality was in no way diminished by its knowing employment, and his loyalty to her remained based upon profound respect—a type of love he would cheerfully have described as feminine, and through which he experienced some slight understanding of the extraordinary individual she was. He relished her lust for freedom, her optimism, her insistence on her own right to exist beyond the destruction of their universe, her willingness to achieve some form of immortality in any terms and at any cost. She thrilled him precisely because she disturbed him. He had not known such deep excitement since his last two-and-a-half weeks before leaving Egypt and his first three weeks in America; and never because of a woman. Until then, Mr. Karaquazian had enjoyed profound emotion only for the arts of gaming and his Faith. His many liaisons, while frequently affectionate, had never been allowed to interfere with his abiding passion. At first he had been shocked by the realisation that he was more fascinated by Colinda Dovero than he had ever been by the intellectual strategies of the Terminal’s ranks of Grand Turks.

The mind which had concentrated on gambling and its attendant skills, upon self-defence and physical fitness, upon self-control, now devoted itself almost wholly to her. He was obsessed with her thoughts, her motives, her background, her story, the effect which her reality had upon his own. He was no longer the self-possessed individual he had been before he met her; and, when they had made love again that first night, he had been ready to fall in with any scheme which kept them together. Eventually, after the New Auschwitz incident, he had made some attempt to rescue his old notion of himself, but when she revealed her business had to do with a potential colour strike valuable beyond any modern hopes, he had immediately agreed to go with her to help establish the claim. In return, she promised him a percentage of the proceeds. He committed himself to her in spite of his not quite believing anything she told him. She had been working the boats for some while now, raising money to fund the expedition, ready to call it quits as soon as her luck turned bad. Since Memphis, her luck had run steadily down. This could also be why she had been so happy to seek an ally in him. The appearance of the cool boys had alarmed her: as if that evening had been the first time she had suffered any form of accusation. Besides, she told him, with the money he had they could now easily meet the top price for the land, which was only swamp anyway. She would pay the fees and expenses. There would be no trouble raising funds once the strike was claimed.

At Chickasaw, they had left the boat and set off up the Trace together.

She had laughed as she looked back at the levee and the Princesse outlined against the cold sky. “I have made an enemy, I think, of that captain.” He was touched by what he perceived as her wish to reassure him of her constancy. But in Carthage, they had been drawn into a flat game, which had developed around a random hot-spot no bigger than a penny, and played until the spot faded. When the debts were paid, they were down to a couple of guineas between them and had gambled their emergency batteries. At this point, superstition overwhelmed them and each had seen sudden bad luck in the other.

Jack Karaquazian regretted their parting almost immediately and would have returned to her, but by the time he heard of her again she was already lost to Peabody, the planter. It had been Peabody that time who had sent his cool boys after her. She wrote once to Mr. Karaquazian, in care of the Terminal. She said she was taking a rest but would be in touch.

Meanwhile Mr. Karaquazian had a run of luck at the Terminal which, had he not cheated against himself and put the winnings back into circulation, would have brought a halt to all serious gambling for a while. Jack Karaquazian now played with his back to the Fault. The sight of that mighty appetite, that insatiable mystery, distracted him these days. He was impatient for her signal.

4 La Pointe à Pain

Sometimes Jack Karaquazian missed the ancient, exquisite colours of the Egyptian evening, where shades of yellow, red and purple touched the warm stone of magnificent ruins, flooded the desert and brought deep shadows, as black and sharp as flint, upon that richly faded landscape, one subtle tint blending into the other, one stone with the next, supernaturally married and near to their final gentle merging, in the last, sweet centuries of their material state. Here, on the old Étoile, he remembered the glories of his youth, before they drilled the Fault, and he found some consolation, if not satisfaction, in bringing back a time when he had not known much in the way of self-discipline, had gloried in his talents. When he had seemed free.

Once again, he strove to patch together some sort of consistent memory of when they had followed the map into the cypress swamp; of times when he had failed to reach the swamp. He had a sense of making progress up the Trace after he had disembarked, but he had probably never reached McClellan and had never seen the Stains again. How much of this repetition was actual experience? How much was dream?

Recently, the semi-mutable nature of the matrix meant that such questions had become increasingly common. Jack Karaquazian had countless memories of beginning this journey to join her and progressing so far (usually no closer than Vicksburg) before his recollections became uncertain, and the images isolated, giving no clue to any particular context. Now, however, he felt as if he were being carried by some wise momentum allowing his unconscious to steer a path through the million psychic turnings and culs-de-sac this environment provided. It seemed to him that his obsession with the woman, his insane association of her with his Luck, his Muse, was actually supplying the force needed to propel him back to the reality he longed to find. She was his goal, but she was also his reason.

5 Les Veuves des la Coulee

They had met for the third time while she was still with Peabody, the brute said to own half Tennessee and to possess the mortgages on the other half. Peabody’s red stone fortress lay outside Memphis. He was notorious for the cruel way in which his plantation whites were treated, but his influence among the eight states of the Confederacy meant he would inevitably be next Governor General, with the power of life and death over all but the best-protected machinoix or guild neutrals, like Jack Karaquazian and Colinda Dovero. “I am working for him,” she admitted. “As a kind of ambassador. You know how squeamish people are about dealing with the North. They lose face even by looking directly at a whitey. But I find them no different, in the main. A little feckless. Social conditioning.” She did not hold with genetic theories of race. She had chatted in this manner at a public occasion where, by coincidence, they were both guests.

“You are his property, I think,” Mr. Karaquazian had murmured without rancour. But she had shaken her head.

Whether she had become addicted to Peabody’s power or was merely deeply fascinated by it, Mr. Karaquazian never knew. For his own part, he had taken less and less pleasure in the liaison that followed while still holding profound feelings for her. Then she had come to his room one evening when he was in Memphis and she in town with Peabody, who attended some bond auction at the big hotel, and told him that she deeply desired to stay with him, but they must be so rich they would never lose their whole roll again. Mr. Karaquazian thought she was ending their affair on a graceful note. Then she produced a creased read-out which showed colour sightings in the depths of Mississippi near the Tombigbee not far from Starkville. This was the first evidence she had ever offered him, and he believed now that she was trying to demonstrate that she trusted him, that she was telling the truth. She had intercepted the report before it reached Peabody. The airship pilot who sent it had crashed in flames a day later. “This time we go straight to it.”

She had pushed him back against his cot, sniffing at his neck, licking him. Then, with sudden honesty, she told him that, through her Tarot racing, she was into Peabody for almost a million guineas, and he was going to make her go North permanently to pay him back by setting up deals with the white bosses of the so-called Insurgent Republics. “Peabody’s insults are getting bad enough. Imagine suffering worse from a white man.”

Within two weeks, they had repeated their journey up the Trace, got as far as McClellan, and taken a pirogue into the Streams, following, as best they could, the grey contours of the aerial map, heading towards a cypress swamp. It had been fall then, too, with the leaves turning; the tree-filled landscapes of browns, golds, reds and greens reflected in the cooling sheen of the water. The swamp still kept its heat during the day.

“We are the same,” he had suggested to her, to explain their love. “We have the same sense of boredom.”

“No, Jack, we have the same habits. But I arrived at mine through fear. I had to learn a courage that for you was simply an inheritance.” She had described her anxieties. “It occasionally feels like the victory of some ancient winter.”

The waterways were full of birds which always betrayed their approach. No humans came here at this time of year, but any hunters would assume them to be hunting, too. Beautiful as it was, the country was forbidding and with no trace of Indians, a sure sign that the area was considered dangerous, doubtless because of the snakes.

She foresaw a world rapidly passing from contention to warfare; from warfare to brute struggle, from that to insensate matter, and from that to nothingness. “This is the reality offered as our future,” she said. They determined they would, if only through their mutual love, resist such a future.

They had grown comfortable with one another, and when they camped at night they would remind themselves of their story, piecing it back into some sort of whole, restoring to themselves the extraordinary intensity of their long relationship. By this means, and the warmth of their sexuality, they raised a rough barrier against encroaching Chaos.

6 Mon Coeur et Mon Amour

It had been twilight, with the cedars turning black and silver, a cool mist forming on the water, when they had reached the lagoon marked on the map, poling the dugout through the shallows, breaking dark gashes in the weedy surface, the mud sucking and sighing at the pole. Each movement tired Mr. Karaquazian too much, threatening to leave him with no energy in reserve, so they chose a fairly open spot, where snakes might not find them, and, placing a variety of sonic and visual beacons, settled down to sleep. They would have slept longer had not the novelty and potential danger of their situation excited their lusts.

In the morning, sitting with the canvas folded back and the tree-studded water roseate from the emerging sun, the mist becoming golden, the white ibises and herons flapping softly amongst the glowing autumn foliage, Jack Karaquazian and Colinda Dovero breakfasted on their well-planned supplies, studying their map before continuing deeper into the beauty of that unwelcoming swamp. Then, at about noon, with a cold blue-grey sky reflected in the still surface of a broad, shallow pond, they found colour—one large Stain spread over an area almost five feet in circumference, and two smaller Stains, about a foot across, almost identical to those noted by the pilot.

From a distance, the Stains appeared to rest upon the surface of the water, but as Mr. Karaquazian poled the boat closer, they saw that they had in fact penetrated deeply into the muddy bottom of the pond. The gold Stains formed a kind of membrane over the openings, effectively sealing them, and yet it was impossible to tell if the colour were solid or a kind of dense, utterly stable gas.

“Somebody drilled here years ago and then, I don’t know why, thought better of it.” Colinda looked curiously at the Stains, mistaking them for capped bores. “Yet it must be of first quality. Near pure.”

Jack Karaquazian was disappointed by what he understood to be a note of greed in her voice, but he smiled. “There was a time colour had to come out perfect,” he said. “This must have been drilled before Biloxi—or around the same time.”

“Now they’re too scared, most of them, to drill at all!” Shivering, she peered over the side of the boat, expecting to see her image in the big Stain, and instead was surprised, almost shocked.

Watching her simply for the pleasure it gave him, Jack Karaquazian was curious and moved his own body to look down. The Stain had a strangely solid, unreflective depth, like a gigantic ingot of gold hammered deep into the reality of the planet.

Both were now aware of a striking abnormality, yet neither wanted to believe anything but some simpler truth, and they entered into an unspoken bond of silence on the matter. “We must go to Jackson and make the purchase,” he said. “Then we must look for some expert engineering help. Another partner, even.”

“This will get me clear of Peabody,” she murmured, her eyes still upon the Stain, “and that’s all I care about.”

“He’ll know you double-crossed him as soon as you begin to work this.”

She shrugged.

At her own insistence she had remained with the claim while he went back to Jackson to buy the land and, when this was finalised, buy a prospecting licence without which they would not be able to file, such were Mississippi’s bureaucratic subtleties; but when he returned to the cypress swamp, she and the pirogue were gone. Only the Stains remained as evidence of their experience. Enquiring frantically in McClellan, he heard of a woman being caught wild and naked in the swamp and becoming the common possession of the brothers Berger and their father, Ox, until they tired of her. It was said she could no longer speak any human language but communicated in barks and grunts like a hog. It was possible that the Bergers had drowned her in the swamp before continuing on up towards Tupelo where they had property.

7 Valse de Coeur Casser

Convinced of their kidnapping and assault upon Colinda Dovero, of their responsibility for her insanity and possibly her death, Jack Karaquazian was only an hour behind the Bergers on the Trace when they stopped to rest at the Breed Papoose. The mendala tavern just outside Belgrade in Chickasaw Territory was the last before Mississippi jurisdiction started again. It served refreshments as rough and new as its own timbers.

A ramshackle, unpainted shed set off the road in a clearing of slender firs and birches, its only colour was its sign, the crude representation of a baby, black on its right side, white on its left, and wearing Indian feathers. Usually Jack Karaquazian avoided such places, for the stakes were either too low or too high, and a game usually ended in some predictable brutality. Dismounting in the misty woods, Mr. Karaquazian took firm control of his fury and slept for a little while before rising and leading his horse to the hitching post. A cold instrument of justice, the Egyptian entered the tavern, a mean, unclean room where even the sawdust on the floor was filthy beyond recognition. His weapon displayed in an obvious threat, he walked slowly up to the mendala-sodden bar and ordered a Fröm.

The two Bergers and their huge sire were drinking at the bar with every sign of relaxed amiability, like creatures content in the knowledge that they had no natural enemies. They were honestly surprised as Jack Karaquazian spoke to them, his voice hardly raised, yet cutting through the other conversations like a Mason knife.

“Ladies are not so damned plentiful in this territory we can afford to give offence to one of them,” Mr. Karaquazian had said, his eyes narrowing slightly, his body still as a hawk. “And as for hitting one or cursing one or having occasion to offer harm to one, or even murdering one, well, gentlemen, that looks pretty crazy to me. Or if it isn’t craziness, then it’s dumb cowardice. And there’s nobody in this here tavern thinks a whole lot of a coward, I believe. And even less, I’d guess, of three damned cowards.”

At this scarcely disguised challenge, the majority of the Breed Papoose’s customers turned into discreet shadows until only Mr. Karaquazian, in his dusty silks and linen, and the Bergers, still in their travelling kaftans, their round Ugandan faces bright with sweat, were left confronting one another along the line of the plank bar. Mr. Karaquazian made no movement until the Bergers fixed upon a variety of impulsive actions.

The Egyptian did not draw as Japh Berger ran for the darkness of the backdoor convenience, neither did his hand begin to move as Ach Berger flung himself towards the cover of an overturned bench. It was only as Pa Ox, still mildly puzzled, pulled up the huge Vickers 9 on its swivel holster that Mr. Karaquazian’s right hand moved with superhuman speed to draw and level the delicate silver stem of a pre-rip Sony, cauterising the older Berger’s gun-hand and causing his terrible weapon to crash upon stained, warped boards—to slice away the bench around the shivering Ach, who pulled back withering fingers with a yelp, and to send a slender beam of lilac carcinogens to ensure that Japh would never again take quite the same pleasure in his private pursuits. Then the gambler had replaced the Sony in its holster and signalled, with a certain embarrassment, for a drink.

From the darkness, Ach Berger said: “Can I go now, mister?”

Without turning, Karaquazian raised his voice a fraction. “I hope in future you’ll pay attention to better advice than your pa’s, boy.” He looked directly into the face of the wounded Ox who turned, holding the already healing stump of his wrist, to make for the door, leaving the Vickers and the four parts of his hand in the sawdust.

“I never would have thought that Sony was anything but a woman’s weapon,” said the barkeep admiringly.

“Oh, you can be sure of that.” Jack Karaquazian lifted a glass in cryptic salute.

8 Les Flemmes d’Enfer

It had been perhaps a month later, still in the Territory, that Mr. Karaquazian had met a man who had seen the Bergers with the mad woman in Aberdeen a week before Jack Karaquazian had caught up with them.

The man told Mr. Karaquazian that Ox Berger had paid for the woman’s board at an hotel in Aberdeen. Berger had made sure a doctor was found and a woman hired to look after her “until her folks came looking for her.” The man had spoken, in quiet wonder, of her utter madness, the exquisite beauty of her face, the peculiar cast of her eyes.

“Ox told me she had looked the same since they’d found her, wading waist-deep in the swamp.” From Aberdeen, he heard, she had been taken back to New Auschwitz by Peabody’s people. In Memphis, Mr. Karaquazian learned she had gone North. He settled in Memphis for a while, perhaps hoping she would return and seek him out.

He was in a state of profound shock.

Jack Karaquazian refused to discuss or publicly affirm any religion. His faith in God did not permit it. He believed that when faith became religion it inevitably turned into politics. He was firmly determined to have as little to do with politics as possible. In general conversation he was prepared to admit that politics provided excellent distraction and consolation to those who needed them, but such comfort was usually bought at too high a price. Privately, he held a quiet certainty in the manifest power of Good and Evil. The former he personified simply as the Deity; the latter he called the Old Hunter, and imagined this creature stalking the world in search of souls. He had always congratulated himself on the skill with which he avoided the Old Hunter’s traps and enticements, but now he understood that he had been made to betray himself through what he valued most: his honour. He was disgusted and astonished at how his most treasured virtues had destroyed his self-esteem and robbed him of everything but his uncommon luck at cards.

She did not write. Eventually, he took the Étoile down to Baton Rouge and from there rode the omnus towards the coast, by way of McComb and Wiggins. It was easy to find Biloxi. The sky was a fury of purple and black for thirty miles around, but above the Fault was a patch of perfect pale blue, there since the destruction began. Even as continua collided and became merely elemental, you could always find the Terminal Café, flickering in and out of a thousand subtly altering realities, pulsing, expanding, contracting, pushing unlikely angles through the after-images of its own shadows, making unique each outline of each ordinary piece of furniture and equipment, and yet never fully affected by that furious vortex above which the solar system bobbed, as it were, like a cork at the centre of the maelstrom. They were not entirely invulnerable to the effects of Chaos, that pit of non-consciousness. There were the hot-spots, the time-shifts, the perceptual problems, the energy drains, the odd geographies. Heavy snow had fallen over the Delta one winter, a general cooling, a coruscation, while the following summer, most agreed, was perfectly normal. And yet there remained always that sense of borrowed time. She had seen the winter as an omen for the future. “We have no right to survive this catastrophe,” she had said. “Yet we must try, surely.” He had recognised a faith as strong as his own.

Boudreaux Ramsadeen brought in a new band, electrok addicts from somewhere in Tennessee where they had found a hot-spot and brained in until it went dry. They had been famous in those half-remembered years before the Fault, and they played with extraordinary vigour and pleasure, so that Boudreaux’s strange, limping dance took on increasingly complex figures and his partners, thrilled at the brute’s exquisite grace and gentleness, threw their bodies into rapturous invention, stepping in and out of the zigzagging after-images, sometimes dancing with twin selves, their heads flung back and the colours of hell reflected in their duplicated eyes. And Boudreaux cried with the joy of it, while Jack Karaquazian, on the raised game floor, where the window looked directly out into the Fault, took no notice. Here, at his favourite flat game, his fingers playing a ten-dimensional pseudo-universe like an old familiar deck, the Egyptian still presented his back to that voracious fault. Its colours swirling in a kind of glee, it swallowed galaxies while Mr. Karaquazian gave himself to old habits. But he was never unconscious.

Mr. Karaquazian remained in the limbo of the Terminal Café. Up in Memphis, he heard, bloody rivalries and broken treaties would inevitably end in the Confederacy’s absolute collapse, unless some sort of alliance was made with the reluctant Free States. Either way, wars must begin. Colinda Dovero’s vision of the future had been clearer than most of the oracles’.

Mr. Karaquazian had left Egypt because of civil war. Now he refused to move on or even discuss the situation. He kept his back to the Fault because he had come to believe it was the antithesis of God, a manifestation of the Old Hunter. Yet, unlike most of his fellow gamblers, he still hoped for some chance of reconciliation with his Deity. His faith had grown more painful but was not diminished by his constant outrage at his own obscene arrogance, which had led him to ruin innocent men. Yet something of that arrogance remained, and he believed he would not find any reconciliation until he had rid himself of it. He knew of no way to confront and redeem his action. To seek out the Bergers, to offer them his remorse, would merely compound his crime, shift the moral burden and, what was more, further insult them. He remembered the mild astonishment in Ox’s eyes. At last he understood the man’s expression as Ox sought to defend himself against one whom he guessed must be a psychopath blood looking for a coup.

Sam Oakenhurst wondered, in the words of a new song he had heard, if they were not “killing time for eternity.” Maybe, one by one, they would get bored enough with the game and stroll casually down into the mouth of hell, to suffer whatever punishment, pleasure or annihilation was their fate. But Mr. Karaquazian became impatient with this, and Sam apologised. “I’m growing sentimental, I guess.”

Mr. Oakenhurst and Brother Ignatius had borrowed two of his systems for the big Texas game. They had acted out of good will, attempting to re-involve him in the things which had once pleased him. Mr. Oakenhurst had told of an illegal acoustic school in New Orleans. Only a few people still had those old cruel skills. “Why don’t you meet me down there, Jack, when I get back from Texas?”

“They’re treacherous dudes, those machinoix—outlaws or otherwise.”

“What’s the difference, Jack? It’ll make a change for you.”

So, after a few more hands and a little more time on the edge of eternity, he had joined Mr. Oakenhurst in New Orleans. Brother Ignatius was gone, taken out in some freak pi-jump on the way home, his horse with him. Mr. Karaquazian discovered the machinoix to be players more interested in remorseful nostalgia and the pain than the game itself. It had been ugly money, but easy, and their fellow players, far from resenting losses, grew steadily more friendly, courting their company between games, offering to display their most intimate scarifications.

Jack Karaquazian had wondered, chiefly because of the terror he sensed resonating between them, if the machinoix might allow him a means of salvation, if only through some petty martyrdom. He had nothing but a dim notion of conventional theologies, but the machinoix spoke often of journeying into the shadowlands, by which he eventually realised they meant an afterlife. It was one of their fundamental beliefs. Swearing he was not addicted, Sam Oakenhurst was able, amiably, to accept their strangeness and continue to win their guineas, but Mr. Karaquazian became nervous, not finding the dangers in any way stimulating.

When his luck had turned, Mr. Karaquazian had been secretly relieved. He had remained in the city only to honour his commitment to his partner. He felt it might be time to try the Trace again. He felt she might be calling him.

9 Louisiana Two-Step

“The world was always a mysterious dream to me,” she had told him. “But now it is an incomprehensible nightmare. Was it like this for those Jews, do you think?”

“Which Jews?” He had never had much interest in anthropology.

She had continued speaking, probably to herself, as she stood on the balcony of the hotel in Gatlinburg and watched the aftershocks of some passing skirmish billow over the horizon: “Those folk, those Anglo-Saxons, had no special comfort in dying. Not for them the zealotry of the Viking or the Moor. They paraded their iron and their horses and they made compacts with those they conquered or who threatened them. They offered a return to a Roman Golden Age, a notion of universal justice. And they gradually prevailed until Chaos was driven into darkness and ancient memory. Even the Normans could not reverse what the Anglo-Saxons achieved. But with that achievement, Jack, also vanished a certain wild vivacity. What the Christians came to call ‘pagan.’” She had sighed and kissed his hands, looking away at the flickering ginger moon. “Do you long for those times, Jack? That pagan dream?”

Mr. Karaquazian thought it astonishing that anyone had managed to create a kind of order out of ungovernable Chaos. And that, though he would never say so, was his reason for believing in God and also, because logic would have it, the Old Hunter. “Total consciousness must, I suppose, suggest total anticonsciousness—and all that lies between.”

She told him then of her own belief. If the Fault were manifest Evil, then somewhere there must be an equivalent manifestation of Good. She loved life with a positive relish, which he enjoyed vicariously and which in turn restored to him sensibilities long since atrophied.

When he left the steamboat at Greenville, Mr. Karaquazian bought himself a sturdy riding horse and made his way steadily up the Trace, determined to admire and relish the beauty of it, as if for the first time. Once again, many of the trees had already dropped their leaves.

Through their skeletons, a faint pink-gold wash in the pearly sky showed the position of the sun. Against this cold, soft light, the details of the trees were emphasised, giving each twig a character of its own. Jack Karaquazian kept his mind on these wonders and pleasures, moving day by day towards McClellan and the silver cypress swamp, the gold Stains. In the sharp, new air he felt a strength that he had not known, even before his act of infamy. Perhaps it was a hint of redemption. Of his several previous attempts to return, he had no clear recollections; but this time, though he anticipated forgetfulness, as it were, he was more confident of his momentum. In his proud heart, his sinner’s heart, he saw Colinda Dovero as the means of his salvation. She alone would give him a choice which might redeem him in his eyes, if not in God’s. She was still his Luck. She would be back at her Stains, he thought, maybe working her claim, a rich machine-baron herself by now and unsettled by his arrival; but once united, he knew they could be parted only by an act of uncalled-for courage, perhaps something like a martyrdom. He felt she was offering him, at last, a destiny.

Mr. Karaquazian rode up on the red-gold Trace, between the tall, dense trees of the Mississippi woods, crossing the Broken and New rivers, following the joyfully foaming Pearl for a while until he was in Chocktaw country, where he paid his toll in piles noires to an unsmiling Indian who had not seen, he said, a good horse in a long time. He spoke of an outrage, an automobile which had come by a few days ago, driven by a woman with auburn hair. He pointed. The deep tyre tracks were still visible. Mr. Karaquazian began to follow them, guessing that Colinda Dovero had left them for him. At what enormous cost? It seemed she must already be tapping the Stains. Such power would be worth almost anything when war eventually came. He could feel the disintegration in the air. Soon these people would be mirroring the metaphysical destruction by falling upon and devouring their fellows. Yet, through their self-betrayal, he thought, Colinda Dovero might survive and even prosper, at least for a while.

He arrived in McClellan expecting to find change, enrichment from the colour strike. But the town remained the pleasant, unaltered place he had known, her maze of old railroad tracks crossing and recrossing at dozens of intersections, from the pre-Biloxi days when the meat plants had made her rich, her people friendly and easy, her whites respectful yet dignified.

Jack Karaquazian spent the night at the Henry Clay Hotel and was disappointed to find no one in the tidy little main street (now a far cry from its glory) who had heard of activity out around the Streams. Only a fool, he was told, would go into that cypress swamp at any time of year, least of all during a true season. Consoling himself with the faint hope that she might have kept her workings a secret, Mr. Karaquazian rented himself a pirogue, gave an eager kiddikin a guinea to take care of his horse, and set off into the Streams, needing no map, no memory—merely his will and the unreasoning certainty that she was drawing him to her.

10 Sugar Bee

“I had been dying all my life, Jack,” she had said. “I decided I wanted to live. I’m giving it my best shot. If we are here as the result of an accident, let us take advantage of that!”

The swamp fog obscured all detail. There was the sharp sound of the water as he paddled the pirogue; the rustle of a wing, a muffled rush, a faint shadow moving amongst the trunks. Jack Karaquazian began to wonder if he were not in limbo, moving from one matrix to another. Would those outlines remain the outlines of trees and vines? Would they crystallise, perhaps, or become massive cliffs of basalt and obsidian? There was sometimes a clue in the nature of the echoes. He whistled a snatch of “Grand Mamou.” The old dance tune helped his spirits. He believed he must still be in the same reality.

“Human love, Jack, is our only weapon against Chaos. And yet, consistently, we reject its responsibilities in favour of some more abstract and therefore less effective notion.”

Suddenly, through the agitated grey, as if in confirmation of his instinct, a dozen ibises winged low beneath the branches of the cypresses and cedars, as silvery as bass, so that Mr. Karaquazian in his scarlet travelling cloak felt an intruder on all that exquisite paleness.

When at last the sun began to wash across the west and the mist was touched with the subtle colours of the tea-rose, warming and dissipating to reveal the tawny browns and dark greens it had been hiding, he grew more certain that this time, inevitably, he and Colinda Dovero must reunite. He was half prepared to see the baroque brass and diamonds of the legendary Prosers, milking the Stains for his sweetheart’s security, but only herons disturbed the covering of leaves upon the water; only ducks and perpetua geese shouted and bickered into the cold air, the rapid flutter of their wings bearing eery resemblance to a mechanish engine. The cypress swamp was avoided by men, was genuinely timeless, perhaps the only place on Earth completely unaffected by the Biloxi error.

Why would such changelessness be feared?

Or had fundamental change already occurred? Something too complex and delicate for the human brain to comprehend, just as it could not really accept the experience of more than one matrix. Jack Karaquazian, contented by the swamp’s familiarity, did not wish to challenge its character. Instead, he drew further strength from it so that when, close to twilight, he saw the apparently ramshackle cabin, its blackened logs and planks two storeys high, riveted together by old salt and grit cans that still advertised the virtues of their ancient brands, and perched low in the fork of two great silvery cypress branches overhanging the water and the smallest of the Stains, he knew at once that she had never truly left her claim; that in some way she had always been here, waiting for him.

For a few seconds, Jack Karaquazian allowed himself the anguish of regret and self-accusation, then he threw back his cloak, cupped his hands around his mouth, and with his white breath pouring into the air, called out:

“Colinda!”

And from within her fortress, her nest, she replied:

“Jack.”

She was leaning out over the verandah of woven branches, her almond eyes the colour of honey, bright with tears and hope; an understanding that this time, perhaps for the first time, he had actually made it back to her. He was no longer a ghost. When she spoke to him, however, her language was incomprehensible; seemingly a cacophony, without melody or sense. Terrible yelps and groans burst out of her perfect lips. He could scarcely bear to listen. Is this, he wondered, how we first perceive the language of angels?

The creosoted timbers lay in odd marriage to the pale branches which cradled them. Flitting with urgent joy, from verandah to branch and from branch to makeshift ladder, she was a tawny spirit.

Naked, yet unaffected by the evening chill, she reached the landing she had made. The planks, firmly moored by four oddly plaited ropes tied into the branches, rolled and bounced under her tiny bare feet.

“Jack, my pauvre hobo!” It was as if she could only remember the language through snatches of song, as a child does. “Ma pauvre pierrot.” She smiled in delight.

He stepped from the pirogue to the landing. They embraced, scarlet engulfing dark gold. It was the resolution he had so often prayed for; but without redemption. For now it was even clearer to him that the mistake he had made at the Breed Papoose had never been an honest one. He also knew that she need never discover this; and what was left of the hypocrite in him called to him to forget the past as irredeemable. And when she sensed his tension, a hesitation, she asked in halting speech if he had brought bad news, if he no longer loved her, if he faltered. She had waited for him a long time, she said, relinquishing all she had gained so that she might be united with him, to take him with her, to show him what she had discovered in the Stain.

She drew him up to her cabin. It looked as if it had been here for centuries. It seemed in places to have grown into or from the living tree. Inside it was full of magpie luxury—plush and brass and gold-plated candelabra, mirrors and crystals and flowing muralos . There was a little power from the Stains, she said, but not much. She had brought everything in the car long ago. She took him onto the verandah and, through the semi-darkness, pointed out the burgundy carcass of an antique Oldsmobile.

“I thought . . .” But he was unable either to express the emotion he felt or to comprehend the sickening temporal shifts which had almost separated them for ever. It was as if dream and reality had at last resolved, but at the wrong moment. “Some men took you to Aberdeen.”

“They were kind.” Her speech was still thick.

“So I understand.”

“But mistaken. I had returned to find you. I went into the Stain while you were gone. When I tried to seek you out, I had forgotten how to speak or wear clothes. I got back here easily. It’s never hard for me.”

“Very hard for me.” He embraced her again, kissed her.

“This is what I longed for.” She studied his dark green eyes, his smooth brown skin, the contours of his face, his disciplined body. “Waiting in this place has not been easy, with the world so close. But I came back for you, Jack. I believe the Stain is not a sign of colour but a kind of counter-effect to the Fault. It leads into a cosmos of wonderful stability. Not stasis, they say, but with a slower rate of entropy. What they once called a lower chaos factor, when I studied physics. I met a woman whom I think we would call ‘the Rose’ in our language. She is half-human, half-flower, like all her race. And she was my mentor as she could be yours. And we could have children, Jack. It’s an extraordinary adventure. So many ways of learning to see and so much time for it. Time for consideration, time to create justice. Here, Jack, all the time is going. You know that.” She sensed some unexpected resistance in him. She touched his cheek. “Jack, we are on the edge of chaos here. We must eventually be consumed by what we created. But we also created a way out. What you always talked about. What you yearned for. You know.”

“Yes, I know.” Perhaps she was really describing heaven. He made an awkward gesture. “Through there?” He indicated, in the gathering darkness, the pale wash of the nearest Stain.

“The big one only.” She became enthusiastic, her uncertainties fading before the vividness of her remembered experience. “We have responsibilities. We have duties there. But they are performed naturally, clearly from self-interest. There’s understanding and charity there, Jack. The logic is what you used to talk about. What you thought you had dreamed. Where chance no longer rules unchecked. It’s a heavenly place, Jack. The Rose will accept us both. She’ll guide us. We can go there now, if you like. You must want to go, mon chéri, mon chéri.” But now, as she looked at him, at the way he stood, at the way he stared, unblinking, down into the swamp, she hesitated. She took his hand and gripped it. “You want to go. It isn’t boring, Jack. It’s as real as here. But they have a future, a precedent. We have neither.”

“I would like to find such a place.” He checked the spasm in his chest and was apologetic. “But I might not be ready, ma fancy.”

She held tight to his gambler’s hand, wondering if she had misjudged its strength. “You would rather spend your last days at a table in the Terminal Café, waiting for the inevitable moment of oblivion?”

“I would rather journey with you,” he said, “to paradise or anywhere you wished, Colinda. But paradise will accept you, mon honey. Perhaps I have not yet earned my place there.”

She preferred to believe he joked with her. “We will leave it until the morning.” She stroked his blue-black hair, believing him too tired to think. “There is no such thing as earning. It’s always luck, Jack. It was luck we found the Stains. It’s luck that brought us together. Brought us our love. Our love brought us back together. It is a long, valuable life they offer us, bon papillon. Full of hope and peace. Take your chance, Jack. As you always did.”

He shook his head. “But some of us, my love, have earning natures. I made a foolish play. I am ashamed.”

“No regrets, Jack. You can leave it all behind. This is luck. Our luck. What is it in you, Jack, this new misery?” She imagined another woman.

He could not tell her. He wanted the night with her. He wanted a memory. And her own passion for him conquered her curiosity, her trepidation, yet there was a desperate quality to her love-making which neither she nor he had ever wished to sense again. Addressing this, she was optimistic: “This will all go once we enter the Stain. Doesn’t it seem like heaven, Jack?”

“Near enough,” he admitted. A part of him, a bitter part of him, wished that he had never made this journey, that he had never left the game behind; for the game, even at its most dangerous, was better than this scarcely bearable pain. “Oh, my heart!”

For the rest of the night he savoured every second of his torment, and yet in the morning he knew that he was not by this means to gain release from his pride. It seemed that his self-esteem, his stern wall against the truth, crumbled in unison with the world’s collapse; he saw for himself nothing but an eternity of anguished regret.

“Come.” She moved towards sadness as she led him down through the branches and the timbers to his own pirogue. She refused to believe she had waited only for this.

He let her row them out into the pastel brightness of the lagoon until they floated above the big gold Stain, peering through that purity of colour as if they might actually glimpse the paradise she had described.

“Your clothes will go away.” She was as gentle as a Louisiana April. “You needn’t worry about that.”

She slipped over the side and, with a peculiar lifting motion, moved under the membrane to hang against the density of the gold, smiling up to him to demonstrate that there was nothing to fear, as beautiful as she could ever be, as perfect as the colour. And then she had re-emerged in the shallow water, amongst the lilies and the weeds and the sodden leaves. “Come, Jack. You must not hurt me further, sweetheart. We will go now. But if you stay I shall not return.” Horrified by what she understood as his cowardice, she fell back against the Stain, staring up at the grey-silver branches of the big trees, watching the morning sun touch the rising mist, refusing to look at Jack Karaquazian while he wept for his failures, for his inability to seize this moment, for all his shame, his unforgotten dreams; at his unguessable loss.

She spoke from the water. “It wasn’t anything that happened to me there that turned me crazy. It was the journey here did that. It’s sane down there, Jack.”

“No place for a gambler, then,” he said, and laughed suddenly. “What is this compensatory heaven? What proof is there that it is real? The only reason for its existence appears to be a moral one!”

“It’s a balance,” she said. “Nature offers balances.”

“That was always a human illusion. Look at Biloxi. There’s the reality. I’m not ready.”

“This isn’t worthy of you, Jack.” She was frightened now, perhaps doubting everything.

“I’m not your Jack,” he told her. “Not any longer. I can’t come yet. You go on, ma chérie. I’ll join you if I can. I’ll follow you. But not yet.”

She put her fingers on the edge of the boat. She spoke with soft urgency. “It’s hard for me, Jack. I love you. You’re growing old here.” She reached up her arms, the silver water falling upon his clothes, as if to drag him with her. She gripped his long fingers. It was his hands, she had said, that had first attracted her. “You’re growing old here, Jack.”

“Not old enough.” He pulled away. He began to cough. He lost control of the spasm. Suddenly drops of his blood mingled with the water, fell upon the Stain. She cupped some in her hand and then, as if carrying a treasure, she slipped back into the colour, folding herself down until she had merged with it entirely.

By the time he had recovered himself, there was only a voice, an unintelligible shriek, a rapidly fading bellow, as if she had made one last plea for him to follow.

“And not man enough either, I guess.” He had watched the rest of his blood until it mingled invisibly with the water.

11 Pourquoi m’Aimes-tu Pas?

He remained in her tree-cabin above the Stain for as long as the food she had stored lasted. She had prepared the place so that he might wait for her if she were absent. He forced himself to live there, praying that through this particular agony he might confront and perhaps even find a means of lifting his burden. But pain was not enough. He began to suspect that pain was not even worth pursuing.

More than once he returned to the big Stain and sat in the pirogue, looking down, trying to find some excuse, some rationale which would allow him this chance of paradise. But he could not. All he had left to him was a partial truth. He felt that if he lost that, he lost all hope of grace. Eventually he abandoned the cabin and the colour and made his way up the Trace to Nashville, where he played an endless succession of reckless games until at last, as fighting broke out in the streets between rival guilds of musician-assassins, he managed to get on a military train to Memphis before the worst of the devastation. At the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, he bathed and smoked a cigar and, through familiar luxuries, sought to evade the memories of the colour swamp. He took the Étoile down to Natchez, well ahead of the holocaust, and then there was nowhere to go but the Terminal Café, where he could sit and watch Boudreaux Ramsadeen perform his idiosyncratic measures on the dance floor, his women partners flocking like delicate birds about a graceful bull. As their little feet stepped in and around the uncertain outlines of an infinite number of walls, floors, ceilings and roofs, expertly holding their metaphysical balance even as they grinned and whooped to the remorseless melodies of the fiddles, accordion and tambourines, Jack Karaquazian would come to sense that only when he lost interest in his own damaged self-esteem would he begin to know hope of release.

Then, unexpectedly, like a visitation, Ox Berger, a prosthesis better than the original on his arm, sought Mr. Karaquazian out at the main table and stood looking at him across the flat board, its dimensions roiling, shimmering and cross-flashing within the depths of its singular machinery, and said, with calm respect, “I believe you owe me a game, sir.”

Jack Karaquazian looked as if a coughing fit would take control of him, but he straightened up, his eyes and muscles sharply delineated against a paling skin, and said with courtesy, almost with warmth, “I believe I do, sir.”

And they played the long forms, sign for sign, commitment to commitment, formula for formula; the great classic flat-game schemes, the logic and counter-logic of a ten-dimensional matrix, rivalrous metaphysics, a quasi-infinity held in a metre-long box in which they dabbled minds and fingers and ordered the fate of millions, claimed responsibility for the creation, the maintenance and the sacrifice of whole semi-real races and civilisations, not to mention individuals, some of whom formed cryptic dependencies on an actuality they would never directly enjoy. And Ox Berger played with grace, with irony and skill which, lacking the experience and recklessness of Jack Karaquazian’s style, could not in the end win, but showed the mettle of the player.

As he wove his famous “Faust” web, which only Colinda Dovero had ever been able to identify and counter, Jack Karaquazian developed a dawning respect for the big farmer who had chosen never to exploit a talent as great as the gambler’s own. And in sharing this with his opponent, Ox Berger achieved a profound act of forgiveness, for he released Mr. Karaquazian from his burden of self-disgust and let him imagine, instead, the actual character of the man he had wronged and so understand the true nature of his sin. Jack Karaquazian was able to confront and repent, in dignified humility, his lie for what it had truly been.

When the game was over (by mutual concession) the two men stood together on the edge of the Fault, watching the riotous death of universes, and Mr. Karaquazian wondered now if all he lacked was courage, if perhaps the only way back to her was by way of the chaos which seduced him with its mighty and elaborate violence. But then, as he stared into that university of dissolution, he knew that in losing his pride he had not, after all, lost his soul, and just as he knew that pride would never earn him the right to paradise, so, he judged, there was no road to heaven by way of hell. And he thanked Ox Berger for his game and his charity. Now he planned, when he was ready, to make a final try at the Trace, though he could not be sure that his will alone, without hers, would be sufficient to get him through a second time. Even should he succeed, he would have to find a way through the Stain without her guidance. Mr. Karaquazian shook hands with his opponent. By providing this peculiar intimacy, this significant respect, Ox Berger had done Mr. Karaquazian the favour not only of forgiving him, but of helping him to forgive himself.

The gambler wished the map of the Stain were his to pass on, but he knew that it had to be sought for and only then would the lucky ones find it. As for Ox Berger, he had satisfied his own conscience and required nothing else of Jack Karaquazian. “When you take your journey, sir, I hope you find the strength to sustain yourself.”

“Thanks to you, sir,” says Jack Karaquazian.

The olive intensity of his features framed by the threatening madness of the Biloxi Fault, its vast walls of seething colour rising and falling, the Egyptian plays with anyone, black, white, red or yellow, who wants his kind of game. And the wilder he plays, the more he wins. Clever as a jackal, he lets his slender hands, his woman’s hands, weave and flow within the ten dimensions of his favourite flat game, and he is always happy to raise the psychic stakes. Yet there is no despair in him.

Only his familiar agony remains, the old pain of frustrated love, sharper than ever, for now he understands how he failed Colinda Dovero and how he wounded her. And he knows that she will never again seek him out at the Terminal Café.

“You’re looking better, Jack.” Sam Oakenhurst has recovered from the machinoix’s torments. “Your old self.”

Jack Karaquazian deals seven hands of poker. In his skin is the reflection of a million dying cultures given up to the pit long before their time; in his green eyes is a new kind of courtesy. Coolly amiable in his silk and linen, his raven hair straight to his shoulders, his back firmly set against the howling triumph of Satan, he is content in the speculation that, for a few of his fellow souls at least, there may be some chance of paradise.

“I’m feeling it, Sam,” he says.

Thanks to Garth Brooks, Doug Kershaw, all the artists on Swallow Records, Ville Platte, LA; and friends in Atlanta, New Orleans, Houston, West Point MS, Hattiesburg MS, Oxford MS and Oxford U.K., where this was written. Special thanks to Ed Kramer, Mustafa al-Bayoumi and Brother Willie Love . . .