OF need then, and longing, and of the yearning which makes men bum in the night, men lacking any interior, what we once were taught to call “soul,” men who plod and plod then way through the anguished and sterile routine of their circumstance… not reflecting upon that necessity or upon much else, men who were closed in early, taken in disarray from their own warm and living hearts and placed — well, placed where? It is not the nature of our metaphysics to consider this, now when the universe itself implodes so reluctantly and we are told, as if it were a declaration of truth, that this is the end of time.
Of those men, then, and of their uses, of what can be made of them from the sterile detritus of their necessity but first, because there is no understanding any of this without the background, without the helpless, mocking heart of the truth … of the Lady Louisiana Toy first.
In the known places her name was a curse or prayer and m the myriad galaxies not yet discovered or in discovery of hers that presence still might have been a benison, a plainchant, but here, too, and in the huge arcs among the stars where the birds of time themselves swooped, men knelt to her spirit and flesh with imprecations and cries, prayers infused with scatology, joined to a scatology which lifted from the ruins of their hearts. It was a ruinous age, one of blank corruption and discontent, yet one not without a certain romantic necessity, the architecture of desire still present in the space drives, in the whispers of the trawlers of space. In this age there were icons, icons for all of the men without interior which rose unevenly in small arcs from the concavities of the stars, and the greatest of them was the Lady Louisiana Toy whose dreams and spirit passed through the network, amplified to proportion beyond imagining, crushed into the hearts of all who witnessed her. She inspired woe and death, lust and darkness, cries of desperation and climax under the axis of her powerful emoting, that image of herself — and all we might have loved — spread in huge discolored patches through all the devices of dissemination. The treasure of the galaxies, Lady Louisiana Toy, and when she was kidnapped by those we called the Possessors a sigh like all mourning rose from a billion trapped and riven witnesses. What she did was not to be explained, her kidnapping unspeakable and yet this is only the least part of the actress and focused modem known as Lady Louisiana Toy. It will have to do as so much else of this limited document will have to grant service because it is impossible in these final times — or perhaps before them — to convey what had gone on, what it meant, we can only approximate, some sum of an ideal, dim image of the cave, flicker of approximation against the absolute of the cave, that Paolo and Francesca of the galaxies drifting by in their terrible embrace the closest simulacrum we might find.
They remembered Dante in this era, too. It was, perhaps, that set of cantos, the last of what they remembered. Heavens, the spirit of transcendence, all of this collapses but the purgatorial ring is not to be limned by the laws of relativity or the great, groaning hyperspace drives which opened before finally closing to us the universe.
This is not the story of the Lady Louisiana Toy.
It concerns her and she is at the axis, but of her and her kidnapping there is to be apprehension only by indirection. If it is ultimately her story (we cannot know and It is hard to rule the approximation) that would be only because it deals with the man who stole her back from the Possessors and the planet of the doubled suns where she had been smuggled, plucked her back, still beautiful but irreparably damaged from that prison of unspeakable pain where they had made her — for their pleasure, their pleasure, O brothers! — to cry out her necessity in the tongues of her projection. It is, then, the story of that simple and doomed man, a man very much like ourselves except that he possessed no interior whatsoever, no framing consciousness, no newstape of commentary as he struggled through his own purgatory, who lifted the Lady Louisiana Toy from her imprisonment, took her (but only briefly, only briefly!) for his paralyzed satisfaction and in so doing elevated far beyond his apprehension by the sheer expression of that unspeakable need. How could the stalker Stanley Montana have known then that he was the source of this chronicle, that it was he who triggered its necessity, he who had thought of himself only as a minor character, a wretched ingredient, a tiny actor in the story of the Lady Louisiana Toy, in the earlier and grayly unfolding chronicle of his life? We do not know what he would have said, and this at least is unavailable to us although too much else has been expressed. There are parts of Stanley Montana which, like his very soul, remain swaddled, cannot be apprehended. How did he know, this man, that what he had done would be magnified through the millions of telepathic receptors of the Possessors? How would he know that nothing was performed in secret, that detection no less than yearning would be an expressed and public act? But he could not know, of course, there is no way in which he could have known. This man knew nothing.
There is no understanding this chronicle if it is not known that the man knew nothing.
So this is really the story of Stanley Montana and his undoing, the latter undoing which he brought upon us all. It is the story of Stanley Montana and then necessarily of the ravishing Lady Louisiana Toy, all of it legend, long spoken, then passed out in that savage, blinking instant of revelation when the Lady, magnificent in her captivity and pain, suffused with the pale gold light of her sufficiency, suffused with the knowledge that what the Possessors had done had destroyed her utterly and yet had left her at some other level intact ... in that knowledge she opened her arms and mind to receive his cry, took that strangled confession from Stanley Montana then and with it the shrieking inference which took us to this terrific and ongoing explosion, that explosion which has sealed our doom even as it has closed off our fate and sprung us from that ravaged and beautiful final age in which these events took place. That was the end of this chronicle as we knew it then, although of course it did not feel like an ending as it was witnessed but like a series of acts which, beautiful and terrible in their juxtaposition, seemed to point the way to — well, to where? We did not know that either; in the spaces among the suns we crawled through our scripts, no less fixated, no more thoughtful than Stanley Montana.
This, then, the chronicle. It is offered not in reasonable explanation, there is none, but in humility and hope even as the very act — like the investigations of Stanley Montana — turn in upon themselves.
Dragged from the bed of the Emperor by the savage telepathic Possessors who had stalked her for years, had made their plans well, knew at last what they would do with her, the Lady Louisiana Toy felt them pounce upon her unshielded and now ungifted consciousness and she screamed. She screamed both within and without herself, trying to magnify that scream toward salvation, but it could not be done. She was the treasure of the Possessors now and they had taken her. She had not one moment for farewell, for some righting of accounts long since imbalanced against her.
Taken from the Emperor’s bed, the Lady Louisiana Toy was placed into the closed box of corporeal transport and taken through secret and powerful means whose technology is unavailable to us and which will defy any reasonable explanation to places not known to any of the conventional historians of the galaxies, and the damaged Stanley Montana must have felt — we theorize as best we can under the circumstances — that thrill of displacement in his own sensibility, felt that he knew of the abduction of the treasured Lady Louisiana Toy before the awful news had been publicly disseminated, and it was at that moment, no later, that his odyssey began. We must consider his reaction as a feeling, it was visceral woe (looking back upon it he theorized) deep in the gut, not thought as we know it, thought being unavailable to Montana, and it was thus without apprehension. He did not know then, might never have known that subsequent events would bring him into the presence of what we called the Possessors, those plundering and predatory aliens of which he had previously known so little, of which Montana had thought nothing at all. His skull was impenetrable, his thoughts limited to his own transparent capacity. Had he but known, that song of regret of the spheres. We will not deal with it. He could not have known anything, of course. Tropism was his response, small and grumbling resistance to the prank the cosmos had played upon him was limited to vagrant drinking and curses.
There were then, as long before and at sometime in the imponderable future as well, so many men like Montana. They suspire in the small bars and lounges, the restaurants and galleyways of all the planets, usually alone, sometimes in groups with their blasted eyes at moments of repose revealing everything. They sit hunched unto themselves, their expressions casting not so much mystery — come to them close in the guise of a sympathetic companion and sketch this out if you will — as entrapment. They are men of small devices and foolishness who hire out their wretched and painful selves not so much for the small compensation which is their excuse but because they are looking for annihilation. They are looking for something so terrible to happen that they will be freely able to abandon the struggle to have their lives make sense and go over the line into that death they have always sought. They can be inspected at our leisure, they will be there again as they have been in all of the annals of that blasted time, and the message will be one of such utter consistency. They have no secrets, their faces are their secret and beat truth to the world.
“That is not so,” Stanley Montana would say, confronted with this assessment. “Leave annihilation to the stars out there, speak to me of thugs and mean streets and the blood that runs toward the blood of killers. This is my business. Essential solutions to old mysteries, drink up, stay out of a coffin, go home.” Do not listen to any of this, regardless of the fervency of Montana’s wink and nod. Observe only the facts of the case, consider the testimony of what the ages have taught us. The thinkers and prophets of this terrible age of which we write knew the truth and they passed it on, the detective (and that is Stan Montana’s self-designation, he is a detective, he would put it on his forms and identifying statement, seeker of solutions, detective for hire) is exquisitely and finally the man who would seek to unravel the primal scene, and come close to the struggling bodies linked on that bed locked away behind the primal door, turn those bodies — hip ho turn! — to his humble and needful face and identify at last Mommy and Daddy as they go about the heavy and sad business of replicating Montana, reinfusing Montana. This is the business of the detective, to crawl up to the masks hip ho! and ripping them away discover the sad and necessitous faces of none other than old Dad and Mom. Believe this, believe that all the rest of it — the plodding, the compensation, the deductions, the small scrambling connections of their own saddened and diminished lives, the posturing and good old self-annihilation — all of it comes from the need of these brethren to conceal this necessity from themselves.
Oh, really? “Having none of it. Good-bye, then,” Montana would say, raising his hands from the bar in a gesture of perfect and final dismissal, making his plan to move toward another place where inquiries would cease. But all of this is denial, a denial of which Lady Louisiana Toy would more than the rest of us be clearly aware.
Louisiana Toy!
The name itself arouses, even these eons after her kidnapping, her recovery and destruction, these long limping ages after she had spun through the infernal heart of the stars a crazed and incessant longing, a twitch not unlike Stan Montana’s twitch as — hip ho! — he jiggled his leg underneath the stanchion and with blasted eyes considered anachronistic possibility. Descriptions and holographs abound these centuries later of this lady of sorrows; she is one of the most famous of her or any time at all, and yet none of them can conjure but an approximation, so great the force which she could bring without even trying to bear. Capacious bosom, longing arms, lips and eyes reproduced on a billion transceivers, the image of lust and connection for all of us febrile doomed of the Republics and the lady herself, sad and witnessing, watching all of this at the secret heart of her own possibility, carrying her own difficult way through the annals of her life with the sad sustenance, the dignity and the self-knowledge of the truly possessed.
A treasure swept away by the Possessors, our lady, a descendant of a race of telepaths similar to them so that she could apprehend everything, the flood of our longing, the lustful and needful thoughts like tracer fire skidding across the consciousness which she gave to the visiphones. Her parents were unknown, the legends said. She had been found abandoned, adopted at birth by the nurturing institutions who sprung her telepathy from its locked-away place and made it bloom no less than the flowers and purchase of her being. This is what the holographs told us, what the advisers said; how much of this was true, whether Louisiana Toy, no less than the emotions and actions she placed over the visiphone, was “real” we cannot know, but ultimately it does not matter. If there has been one lesson to be absorbed from the fourteen centuries of guilt and abomination before at last the collapse of which we read it is this: that there is no difference between what exists and what we would have exist that cannot be patched over by technology, lies, the insistence of our dreams. Even the fourteen centuries themselves must come into dispute; there are those who will argue for fifteen, others saying that fourteen millennia would not truly apprehend the situation. So the arguments go on and on in their echoing and imprecise fashion, but of the lady’s true torment and distress we can only speculate in this chronicle.
We can speculate, but the speculation itself is true; what we would have is what will exist, or so the Possessors told her during the disgusting months of her captivity and indoctrination. We can get no nearer her distress, that distress is part of a story which — were it cataloged would become appallingly sentimental and would then involve the necessity of discussing the seventeen hundred worlds, the politics of genocide which led only to the mild fracture of the Republics (genocide being only another arm of policy), the corruption of the lost judges, the nefarious and wretched spin of dispersion which had made the occupation and performance of the damaged Stan Montana and those in his trade essential to any realpolitick of that long surpassed century which we can consider only as paradigm. Image of an image, dusk of a night, there was the Lady Louisiana Toy, telepathic treasure, her bosom of lace and dreams hurled heavenward in a trillion reproductions to the storming gates of Montana’s lust. Louisiana Toy, actress and saint, Mother of God and cruel partisan of the lost spirit, Mary and Medusa and Medea and Electra and a thousand other icons as well, taken from the very center of her being and laid out for us, just as the Possessors — that stem and damaged lupine race of telepaths and technophiliac monsters — took her then to the cold and distant heart of their own galaxy. It was only at that point that the practicalities commenced; the initial crime had been so audacious, so furious and — somehow beyond conception as to deny paraphrase. The demands were issued, of course, through telepathic beam and — for the rest of us who were not telepaths — the lesser systems of transports.
They were blackmail, of course, they were insouciant and outrageous. Even in what the inhabitants of this period thought of as “advanced times” the rockets yet crawled between the stars while in the bowels of those machines creatures whose pain and appearance were unspeakable and thus unknown to the passage hammered and stoked the slow fires of increase While trying not to be consumed by the FTL drives and trying to make of the universe a small, elegant, somehow comprehensible business. The messages crawled with the rockets then, the telepathic waves crackling only to the very few who could· understand them and who (by the prejudicial and murderous nature of this age) could not reveal their telepathic capacity.
For only at the cutting edge — this is an interpolation and it may be forgiven for its relevance ultimately will become clear — does one feel the rush of possibility, does the interface of history and condition, threat and desire, need and damage become somehow fused and resistible. The rest of us stagger in the dark of our desire like rockets crawling at slower than light speeds through the ridges of space. All of what we do is controlled by our ignorance; in the flickering instants of Lady Louisiana Toy’s image we may feel that something different is possible, but it is not possible and that understanding bounds everything we do.
Had the Possessors had the true wherewithal or means which they threatened, had they, too, not been bound to the sublight speeds of the stokers, none of this would have happened, they would have been invulnerable. But their vulnerability was sealed by the fact that telepathy was not a universal gift, they had to proceed in the language of their inferiors or not function at all. Had the case been different, the likes of the hapless Stan Montana would never have been engaged. He would not have lived to function. But the Possessors. were trapped in the glue of their constancy, the very ether itself contained them.
Ultimately it was not their age after all. It was the age of Stan Montana.
For Montana lived, even at this sprawling and unspeakable time, at the margins of all possibility. Ungifted by an interior, deprived of coherent or reasonable thought, he scuffed into his clothing, made his arrangements with prostitutes, heaved and unloaded his discharge of semen or necessity, collaborated with any who would hire him, engaged on the most dubious and slimiest of deeds which at this or any time at all still comprises the text and sorrow of life. In the twenty-ninth century (where this does not take place) or the thirty-fifth, in the ninth or the unspeakable billionth millennium, the business with which Montana was engaged will go on. One will find him here and there, at this or any other point of the past, pounding his fist against tables, ordering his feet to move even when they would die on him, bribing the ships’ porters or space jockeys in the holes of the rapt Beltegeuse system to yield small bits of information on adulterous pursuit. His whine of release maybe heard in the dives or alleyways of the millionth planet, his plans and formulations scrambled like Kilroy’s upon walls so distant that we cannot imagine them.
For this, then: Stan Montana and no one else, not even the Lady herself, must be seen as the abcissa upon which the stars themselves tum, he is at the center of our condition now and forevermore, and it must be admitted that he was as stunned and distracted by the news of the Lady’s abduction as any of us. Perhaps he was more shaken because in ways that he, too, could not have known he had secretly loved her, dreamed, of her body, confessed to her image, kept her holograph along with the ever ready but certainly unconscious primal scene close to him in the dark and inelegant pause of his nights. If Stan Montana did not then love Louisiana Toy, he came as close to that as any simulacrum of “love” could be known in the spaceyards and boneyards of this disastrous age which we are forced to remember as the last time when it was possible to come together through the transceiver, to find a kind ofcommunity, to understand anything. They had selected Stanley Montana to seek the Possessors and recover Louisiana Toy because, they said (“they” involving the massed governments and corporate entities of that time who interpreted the kidnapping as the most audacious infliction yet upon their perilous way of life, and so they were able for the duration of this crisis to work together in a kind of unity) he lacked subtlety, lacked understanding of any kind, lacked — as we have been pointing out from the earliest part of this recollection — any significant interior life. He obviously knew nothing and therefore he had a chance with·the Posessors which heavier and more sophisticated help — with genuine technological knowledge. With something approxitimating an interior monologue — could not have possessed.
“You are stupid enough not to know that you must fail,” was the way they explained matters to Stanley Montana when they put her holograph and last known whereabouts in his hands and sent him spinning clumsily on his journey to seek the Lady and somehow return her. “You have absolutely no conception of what is against you therefore you may succeed.” is what they said and this was probably far more than was necessary, but they gave him this much at least as he was sent out. With him rode the fate of suns for Louisiana Toy, as the Possessors knew and those who defended her interest, were responsible for her condition, was at the secret heart of all purpose, she was no metaphor but a constancy; It was this constancy which granted her the power she held.
Her body was the primal vault of the galaxies themselves, at least as they had been rearranged, in her ovaries she carried the imploded hearts of suns and other galactic debris which need not be further evaluated in this context. A universal figure, a truly generating force, a metaphor gone so lucidly explosive that she had beep forced to become an entertainer simply as a means of controlling her visibility, if she was on the transceivers they knew at least where she was and could track her movement at all times. Of the dangers, the climactic risks, the sheer lunacy of allowing the Galactic Riddle to become a holograph for the billions we need not speak, it is of course this lunacy itself which gave the age its divination and truest madness and not to apprehend this is to miss the point; further explication is not necessary. They owed Montana no part of the truth and did not give it to him. What difference would the truth have made? By the same reasoning, the truth is a part of this narrative only when it is of a momentary sufficiency, it must be left to other sources to explain how the galactic riddle had been placed into such a position. Of the reckoning and madness of that age we can ourselves make no judgdment.
“Go, then, and find her,” they said to Stanley Montana. “Recover her, find her for us, bridge the gate of telepaths, and return the Lady Louisiana Toy to the hearts of those now bereaved.” They added little to this essential imprecation and sent him away, promising rich compensation but only if he were successful and giving proper impetus in the form of the holograph and the promise they whispered to him in parting, he promise that they knew would work if anything would.
“For you may have her,” they whispered. “She can be yours at last. Find her, shield your thoughts and purpose from the Possessors who would otherwise apprehend them. Find where she has been hidden, bring her back to us and we will put her in a room with you. There you may close the door and you may enact upop her — shall we say this, do we dare? — anything you wish. Anything of your description, anything you can imagine, that and more and we will help you. She is love, she is loving, she is the one who has always been in search of a handsome operative like you. She lusts for your need even as you and a billion others have prayed to her.”
What is there to say? What is there to be made of such mischief as this? They lied to him, of course, but they lied no less than that which had beep the modicum of social and sexual intercourse for all of the indefinable history and in the stacks of deceit from which had beep tossed the sprawling galaxies, the quarks and their boneyards, how awful is their lie! Looking at the tablelands we have found now, is this the worst of all the evils which life has perpetrated upon life? It was at least for a good purpose. Purpose was all. Sincerity was a counterfeit, simply a position. And this Stanley Montana himself must have known for he had whispered to himself that confidence in all of the silent places as he had plodded his way through the small interstices of his tiny necessities. “Mean streets, mean doings,” he had confided to himself. “Someone must always solve a murder; unearth the truth, find the wrongdoer, relieve the damaged, give comfort to the sick. Just as an army must always search, destroy, and occupy, so a man must take on the burdens of his time.
“I am good I am good,” Stanley Montana would praise himself in those last chants before sleep, “I am of a necessity I am here to save, I act bad but I do good.” Of this and so many other small deceptions we must be accepting then, seek complaisance; he suffered for us after all, Stanley Montana lived and died — multiplied by the millions! — for those of us who have, however, equivocally survived and if there are no explanations for this — well, then, there are no possibilities as well. One must equate one must show mercy in order to gain advantage or so at least has been another of the difficult lessons which (forever unlearned by the rest of us) have been the contemptible and limited total of all the burnt suns, all the progression of disaster and pain up to the time of these events. Or beyond.
But this, too, begins to edge into the theology of the Possessors, a race whose telepathy had created as one could imagine a complex teleological basis not really to be equated with our own numbed worship of disbelief ... their group purposes, intense gestalt, cynicism and retrieval does not really fit into this chronicle any more than Stanley Montana’s halting and stumbling efforts to find them. We must — like the Possessors, but With a different ascription to the word “faith” — take all of those deductive efforts of Montana with a kind of faith. He plodded and plotted (not through thought, through tropism as we must often be reminded) through the corridors of the dark and hidden passageways between the stars to find the Lady Louisiana Toy. And this, the nature of this quest must be seen as the evil and secret genius of those who had assigned him (in despair, of course, but With a kind of cunning) to the task: his thoughts his ploddings and tropistic scuttle could not be read by the assiduous Possessors, eager as they might have been to understand him because Stan Montana had no thoughts. His processes could not be deduced because there were none, there was only that small core of purpose, the low, flickering flame of his desire to get behind the door and read the faces, this codified by dim possession. On and on he prowled, doing the best he could, doing what he must as the stars curled in their traces and the Possessors cackled with the slow realization of their desire, demanding ransom then and performing unspeakable acts which like so much else need not be summarized here.
No, of the nature of the Lady’s captivity of those acts performed upon and inside her during that terrible period of her captivity, we will not speak. Such a report would only be distressing to Stanley Montana, his residue and descendants (we are all, of course, his descendants) and would play little role in what is, for all of its tortuous rhetoric and sly inference, quite a simple recapitulation. It is a recapitulation as simple as Stan Montana himself, because we are not dealing with complex figures here, we are doing with a man of no interior life, a lady who was an icon and a telepathic net but whose own interior had been gutted from her so that the wires could be placed and she could become a vehicle for the necessity of others. Understand that long before the Possessors had taken their toll there were others who had touched the child Louisiana Toy and played with her, jiggled her insides and known her outside, filled all of her tender and vulnerable being with disgusting thoughts, human and panicky needs, hints of desolation, desolate and lasting purposes: she was assigned early to her task of enacting for all of the galaxies what they most wanted. Pictures were drawn inside and outside her heart and on the walls of her cell, she had been in a cell long before the Possessors then and the effect of her imprisonment was most equivocal. She had seen it all before.
Still there was that need for her to be shown, for the demonstration to be made. From time to time then the Possessors would take Louisiana Toy to the arena they had constructed for just this purpose and there she was compelled before, a stunned audience of several billion, all that they could summon to this greatest of all links, to reenact aspects of her life and anticipated death for their edification and amusement. She was not an actress, what she did was something far beyond acting and in the sands cast before her Louisiana Toy did what they wanted, knowing that she was giving back to them what from the first had always been in the contract. She bad never expected any different. If Stan Montana had expected everything, the Lady had — by charm and essence his doubled opposite — expected nothing at all. So she went through what she must and it is generally conceded by those who witnessed the events and made transcription at that time that these were indeed the greatest, the most memorable and shocking of all her performances.
The ransom demands were of course subordinate. Did the Possessors ever expect them to be met? One must doubt this, all of it was posturing, an excuse for the abuse and the inch by inch shrieking extraction of Louisiana Toy’s memory. Worlds were demanded, then more worlds, then the flaming captive hearts of undiscovered stars which yet more worlds insidiously circled, then at last in an act of sheer audacious loathing the Possessors demanded the great Troast Lock itself with its billion suns; flaming passions, untold worlds of slavery and treasure. They demanded not only the Lock but the complete submission of all who were to be heaped up in the heat of the stars as untainted treasure. It was impossible. From the very start now, it was clear, the Possessors had never had any intention but the final evisceration of Louisiana Toy and the rupturing of her link. How it had taken so long to ascertain their purposes was not known, but now there could be no doubt.
The disciples and creators of Louisiana Toy; her lovers, those who had not known her at all but themselves had somehow been touched, all of them, the totality of witness in the billions was left with nothing to say nothing to be done. Grasping at last the full audacity and cruelty of the Possessors, they had been shocked beyond response, moved beyond edification. Had they been telepathic in the fullest sense — but only the Possessors and their captive and a few sterile mutants in this narrative were, that must be understood, what we encompass here are the trillions of dumb, enclosed minds excluded from the cold Circle of communion — had they been telepathic then, they would have been struck insensate,cleaved from their very powers. The hopelessness was that absolute, the devastating intention of the Possessors that clear. But in the absence of telepathy, knowing only empathy then and witness to the sufferings of Louisiana Toy, those that could weep did so … and the others — but what is there to be said of the others? There are always such. At the moment of Crucifixion, the horse and rider carry on, sail out of the clear frame of the picture in the Beaux Arts Museums of our souls.
Stan Montana plodded on.
He plodded on, that is all. That is what the Montanas do. In the junkshops and the small arenas, in medieval or real time, they go on and on. Their living is a kind of dying to us, but what do they know? They do not grasp any of this. They think little of themselves less of their needs or destination, do not after a while even consider those who hire them, they know nothing either of that tropism which unfurls them like pennants wearily in the night. They pay that tropism as little regard as primal Mommy and Daddy did to the watcher beyond the window. In his insensibility, say it and be done, Stanley Montana was unconquerable. That is the burning heart of this chronicle. One cannot destroy that which was never born or (choose your vision of demolition) that which has been hammered to silt. How does one vanquish a nullity? This is a mathematical conundrum to puzzle Xeno. Like Caliban, another refugee who had learned speech and the only good of it to curse, Montana went here and there, flagged spaceships, curled into the engine rooms with the press gangs, knew captains and kings and the lower spaces, went around and about in the eternities of Louisiana Toy’s imprisonment, plodded through and around and beyond purpose and at last — through means which we will elide the question of exposition — confronted the Possessors in that small jeweled cave at the furthest point of the finite, that cave which they had taken to be utterly secret, unapproachable.
How did he do it? How did he not do it? That is the essential mystery … for he had moved beyond paradox to that point where nullity and confrontation were the same. Some of this has to do with the curvature of space but more with the wretched anchorage of the heart.
Inside his garments, the holograph twinkled, then made sullen noises as Stan Montana entered the cave and confronted the astonished Possessors. Amazed,they leaped toward their weapons, but they were unprepared for consciousness and quickly they were cut down by the conventional weaponry of Stanley Montana, devoid of incantation or cleverness. They were, ultimately, that vulnerable. They fell away and Stanley Montana moved beyond their fallen bodies, looked behind the stones to see the lady herself waiting. She had been crouched there, apprehending it all, broadcasting this (as she had broadcast everything, the flickering transceivers picking up this astonishing moment. Oh, they had been hard with her.
The Possessors had been hard with Louisiana Toy but no harder than she with herself, trapped by remorse, blocked in her own passageway. She had laid down her lovely life and spirit again and again until at last that spirit, broken, had seemed to rush from her in a dying exhalation. But as Stan Montana could now see, that was only part of her spirit, the rest had remained, clinging to the walls of what looked at him in that cave and it was this spirit, now rebounding to her flesh,which seized Lady Louisiana Toy with awful force and turned her on Stan Montana, then past him to the Possessors who keyed to the awful confrontation in the cave had gathered, those that remained around and about her.
Now! she said, now! Her thoughts were projected as speech, speech had become codified only to a great desire and at last, come to some consciousness in this space Stanley Montana heard it. “Now!” he shouted, carrying forward, “now it is our time, our turn!” and the clumsy weapon which he had carried through all the passageways of his great and storming quest was in his hand, it was a revolver, and he fired this antique weapon — a point ninety-eight if you will, a Dramatii welded from the backs of the beasts of the Drunk Worlds — just as his predecessors in myths too old to be available to him had fired. The Dramatii trembled and flayed him and the stunned Possessors collapsed, all of them fell there in the view of the transceivers and the transmitting Louisiana Toy.
They collapsed, too sophisticated and smart by far to be able to deal with that which had no interior at all, too smart to know that dumb is the only way to get through the universe, they fell and fell and Stan Montana tossed the weapon high and away. Lady Louisiana Toy was upon him then, clung to Stan Montana tightly and because of her great gift, a gift which makes possible the emergence of this chronicle at the same time that it doomed the chronicle and all who witnessed it to the ages of descent which so quickly followed — the brief and flickering moments between them were opened to all of the tearful galaxies who had watched through all the millennia for the supraprojectivity of a moment like this. Cries like the origin of all cries came from Louisiana Toy, sounds came from Stan Montana which the detective could neither describe nor locate, and then the two of them held one another in terrible and clinging embrace under the merciless attention of the billion suns. “Oh. yes,” Louisiana Toy murmured, “I knew that I would be spared, I knew that you would come, I waited and waited, but I always knew that you would be here.”
“Madre,” said Stanley Montana. “Madre de Dios. Maman. Ah Pieta.” The dead Possessors around them, the acres of the dead oozing and blinking in their appalled truncation caught them with blood, welded them ever tighter With the gouts of their extinguishing. “Ala, Madre,” Stanely Montana said. “Mommy.” He held her then, ever more tightly, uncaring of the celestial breakup which then began.
The celestial breakup began. The collapse began. The implosion commenced at that moment. The slow and long-awaited dismantling of time and space previously intimated in so many sources but only known at this moment began … but of this we are not entitled to speak, not in these chronicles which are limited to the hard and crucial joining amplified through the billions of transceivers. “Madre,” Stanley Montana said. He grafted himself upon the lady. “Ah, Maman.”
Thus was the mystery Solved.
Thus was the spirit of our strange and tentative quest, the arc of our passage so tenderly and terrifically revealed. Of the implosion which followed and followed and whose seizures are with us yet we need neither write nor speak, broadcast nor think. It goes on. It goes on and on. Louisiana Toy and Stanley Montana, drifting through the rings of that inferno, clasped to one another now and for the ages to come, drifting, and falling, falling like a dead body falls. Thus, then, the tale of the capture and the salvation of the Lady Louisiana Toy, the ascension of Stanley Montana, and the fate of all the suns. There is less on the record. There is little left on the record. The record is still being compiled. The time and the constancy are yet unrevealed; wait and watch as to morning, to morning.
Here, Paolo. There Francesca. Everywhere the ninth circle of light.