V.

What would have been her reaction, had she known? Again, an ambiguity. It would have meant, ultimately, V.'s death: in a sudden establishment here, of the inanimate Kingdom, despite all efforts to prevent it. The smallest realization - at any step: Cairo, Florence, Paris - that she fitted into a larger scheme leading eventually to her personal destruction, and she might have shied off, come to establish eventually so many controls over herself that she became - to Freudian, behaviorist, man of religion, no matter - a purely determined organism, an automaton, constructed, only quaintly, of human flesh. Or by contrast, might have reacted against the above which we have come to call Puritan, by journeying even deeper into a fetish-country until she became entirely and in reality - not merely as a love-game with any Mélanie - an inanimate object of desire. Stencil even departed from his usual ploddings to daydream a vision of her now, at age seventy-six: skin radiant with the bloom of some new plastic; both eyes glass but now containing photoelectric cells, connected by silver electrodes to optic nerves of purest copper wire and leading to a brain as exquisitely wrought as a diode matrix could ever be. Solenoid relays would be her ganglia, servo-actuators move her flawless nylon limbs, hydraulic fluid be sent by a platinum heart-pump through butyrate veins and arteries. Perhaps Stencil on occasion could have as vile a mind as any of the Crew - even a complex system of pressure transducers located in a marvelous vagina of polyethylene; the variable arms of their Wheatstone bridges all leading to a single silver cable which fed pleasure-voltages direct to the correct register of the digital machine in her skull. And whenever she smiled or grinned in ecstasy there would gleam her crowning feature: Eigenvalue's precious dentures.

Why did she tell so much to Porcépic? She was afraid, she said, that it wouldn't last; that Mélanie might leave her. Glittering world of the stage, fame, foul-mind's darling of a male audience: the woe of many a lover. Porcépic gave her what comfort he could. He was under no delusions about love as anything but transitory, he left all such dreaming to his compatriot Satin, who was an idiot anyway. Sad-eyed, he commiserated with her: what else should he've done? Pass moral judgment? Love is love. It shows up in strange displacements. This poor woman was racked by it. Stencil however only shrugged. Let her be a lesbian, let her turn to a fetish, let her die: she was a beast of venery and he had no tears for her.

The night of the performance arrived. What happened then was available to Stencil in police records, and still told, perhaps, by old people around the Butte. Even as the pit orchestra tuned up there was loud argument in the audience. Somehow the performance had taken on a political cast. Orientalism - at this period showing up all over Paris in fashions, music, theater - had been connected along with Russia to an international movement seeking to overthrow Western civilization. Only six years before, a newspaper had been able to sponsor an auto-race from Peking to Paris, and enlist the willing assistance of all the countries between. The political situation these days was somewhat darker. Hence, the turmoil which erupted that night in the Theatre Vincent Castor.

Before the first act was barely under way, there came catcalls and uncouth gestures from the anti-Porcépic faction. Friends, already calling themselves Porcépiquistes, sought to suppress them. Also present in the audience was a third force, who merely wanted quiet enough to enjoy the performance and, naturally enough, tried to silence, prevent or mediate all disputes. A three-way wrangle developed. By intermission it had degenerated into near-chaos.

Itague and Satin screamed at each other in the wings, neither able to hear the other for the noise out in the audience. Porcépic sat by himself in a corner, drinking coffee, expressionless. A young ballerina, returning from the dressing room, stopped to talk.

"Can you hear the music?" Not too well, she admitted. "Dommage. How does La Jarretiere feel?" Mélanie knew the dance by heart, she had perfect rhythm, she inspired the whole troupe. The dancer was ecstatic in her praise: another Isadora Duncan! Porcépic shrugged, made a moue. "If I ever have money again," more to himself than to her, "I'll hire an orchestra and dance company for my own amusement and have them perform L'Enlévement. Only to see what the work is like. Perhaps I will catcall too." They laughed sadly with one another, and the girl passed on.