True Hallucinations Part 10

What had originally gotten me looking at the / Ching was the odd way in which my early, simplistic notion of sixty-four day cycles worked very well in my own life at the time.

My mother's death was the first of these points in time that I isolated. Then I noted that my chance-formed relationship with Ev had begun sixty-four days after that, and that the culmination of the experiment at La Chorrera had occurred another sixty-four days later.

The notion of a hexagram-based lunar year grew out of the idea of six cycles of sixty-four days each, a year of six parts, just as an / Ching hexagram has six lines.

The personal worth of the idea was confirmed for me when I noticed that such a year of three hundred and eighty-four days, if begun at the time of my mother's death, would end on my own twenty-fifth birthday on November 16, 1971. I saw then that there were cycles and there were cycles of cycles: I imagined a three-hundred-and-eighty-four day lunar year and then the larger thing of which it was a part, a cycle of sixty-four times three hundred and eight-four days, and so on. The maps that I constructed and the eventual qualification of them that I achieved are described in The Invisible Landscape.

But what was not told there were the experiences at La Chorrera and the way in which these coincidences and my unconscious mind-or something in my mind-guided me to discover these long hidden properties of the / Ching.

What to make of the ocean of resonances that the timewave seemed to show connecting every moment of time to every other moment through a scheme of connection that knew nothing of randomness or causality? And what to make of the fact that certain details in the mathematics of the wave seemed to imply that the time in which we live was the focus of an ages-long and terribly important effort? These were inflationary images-and I recognized them as such-but the power and allure of them as a form of private entertainment was frankly irresistible.

The timewave seemed to be an image from the collective unconscious that sought to prove, at least in its own terms, that the culmination of all the processes in the universe would occur within our lifetimes. For each of us this is obviously true: our own lives do seem to us, embedded as we are in our bodies and our historical milieus, to be somehow the expression of the final purpose of things.

The timewave predicted its own end within our lifetimes; actually only a decade after the turn of the century, a time of such novelty that beyond it there could be nothing less than the end of time itself. This was the most puzzling of all, more puzzling than its personal, idiosyncratic side, this implicit "end of time": a period when a transition of regimes would take place that would completely transform the modalities of reality.

I was familiar with the idea of eschatology-the end of time- in a religious context, but it had never before occurred to me that regimes in nature might undergo sudden shifts that would reshuffle natural laws. There is nothing against it really. It is simply that science, in order to function, must a.s.sume that physical laws are not dependent on the time and the context in which they are tested. If this were not so, the idea of the experiment would have no meaning, since experiments performed at different times might then give different results.

For years I continued to elaborate this theory and to clarify my own understanding of the theory-forming enterprise generally. I succeeded finally in 1974 in achieving a completely formal, mathematical quantification of the fractal structure that I had unearthed inside the structure of the / Ching. Throughout the eighties I worked, first with Peter Broadwell and then with Peter Meyer, to create personal computer software, which I called Timewave Zero, that allowed careful study of this wave. The computer is a powerful tool that made it possible to greatly refine my notions of what const.i.tuted proof or disconfirmation of the theory. Today my conclusion regarding these matters is that the theory of the fractal and cyclical nature of novelty's ingression into the world is a truly self-consistent and completely mathematical theory. It is true to itself. And it returns the human drama and our own lives to the very center of the universal stage.

It is possible, in a certain sense, that all states of liberation are nothing more than perfect knowledge of the contents of eternity. If one knows what is contained in time from its beginning to its end you are somehow no longer in time. Even though you still have a body and still eat and do what you do, you have discovered something that liberates you into a satisfying all-at-onceness. There are other satisfactions that arise out of the theory that are not touched

on in this formulation. Times are related to each other-things happen for a reason and the reason is not a causal one. Resonance, that mysterious phenomenon in which a vibrating string seems magically to invoke a similar vibration in another string or object that is physically unconnected, suggested itself as a model for the mysterious property that related one time to another even though they may be separated by days, years, or even millennia. I became convinced that there is a wave, or a system of resonances, that conditions events on all levels. This wave is fractal and self-referential, much like many of the most interesting new curves and objects being described at the frontiers of research mathematics. This timewave is expressed throughout the universe on a number of extremely discrete levels. It causes atoms to be atoms, cells to be cells, minds to be minds, and stars to be stars. What I am suggesting is a new metaphysics, a metaphysics with mathematical rigor; something that is not simply a new belief or new religious conviction. Rather this insight takes the form of a formal proposition.

I would be the first to admit that it has not been possible to find a bridge between this theory and normal physics. Such a bridge may be neither possible nor necessary. We may find that normal science indicates what is possible, while the time theory I propose offers an explanation for what is. It is a theory that seems to explain how, of the cla.s.s of all things possible, some events and things undergo the formality of actually occurring. It is clear to me that the theory cannot be disproven from without; it can only be disproven by being found inconsistent within itself. Anyone is welcome to dismantle it if they are able; this is what I have attempted to do and failed.

By November 16, 1971, I had begun to realize that the chart had too many variables to ever function as a predictive map of the future. It would be necessary, I realized then, to quantify somehow the various parameters of the wave so that judgments concerning it could be less subject to personal bias. My last piece of writing at La Cho-rrera was done on the morning of the sixteenth, my twenty-fifth birthday. It was a kind of fable:

November 16, 1971 Two old friends, Arabian somehow, yet more ancient, sit in a palace far older than themselves, set on a mountainside surrounded by vineyards, date palms, and citrus orchards. Insomniac and affable, they pa.s.s the long starry hours preceding dawn in the smoking of hashish and the propounding of riddles.

"Share my pleasure at this puzzle and its resolution," said the darker to the older, and he pa.s.sed his hand across his companion 's eyes. The older man then stood in the dream and watched the puzzle-a world of form and law, interlocking wheels and pa.s.sion and intellect-unfold. He pa.s.sed into its species and empires, dynastic families and individual men of genius, he became its philosophers and weathered its catastrophes. He felt the texture and tone of all the beings in the world his friend had created. He sought the secret pattern his friend, he knew, had surely hidden in his creation, for this was a game that they often played.

Finally, in a great despotism, in an age of brash science and bright decadence, he saw himself divided into the persons of two brothers-and through them, through their wanderings and lifetimes which pa.s.sed before him in a moment, he perceived the intricate and pleasing nature of the riddle. Understanding at last, he dissolved the mists and wheels of the dream fable with a laugh-a laugh they shared. And then once more they pa.s.sed their pipe before strolling into the azure garden where dawn would find them conversing among the peac.o.c.ks, beneath the pomegranates and bending acacias.

Are we to be left then with nothing but fable? Or is there more here? Tropical gardens that I have planted have in them small acacias straining toward maturity. Perhaps there is still time for them to grow into shade for philosophical rambles. Life is stranger than even the strangest among us can suppose.

The work at La Chorrera felt finished then. We folded our camp and retraced trails and rivers. It took time, there were books to write, loose ends to a life too loosely lived to be tidied and trimmed. We lived for a time in Florencia at the finca of a friend. There I wrote some of the early chapters of The Invisible Landscape. We went through the Christmas holidays of 1971 there, but the

writing was slow, the lack of reference materials frustrating. We returned to the States and lived in Boulder with Dennis for a few months, during which I worked in the local hot house rose industry. It was a series of mundane American adventures. Eventually though we found ourselves back in Berkeley.

Until the / Ching timewave was quantified with more data, its way of integrating seemingly meaningless and unrelated factors made it very easy to become psychologically entangled within. It seemed to operate like a kind of bottomless inkblot test; one could see whatever one wished to see in it. Even though my twenty-fifth birthday came and went with very little shift toward the novel, either in my own life or in the world, I continued to propagate the cycles of the chart forward into the future. I felt that the idea of a hidden structure of time was correct but that this could not be argued for until the correct alignment between that structure and human history had been found and confirmed. I began looking for a date with special features related to the wave, a date that would be a good candidate for the emergence of a special event.

Here is a part of my story that I found most puzzling: After the seeming disconfirmation of the cycles by my birthday, I looked at other future dates on which the three-hundred- and-eighty-four day cycles would end if I continued to a.s.sume that the sixteenth of November, 1971, was the end of one such cycle. That meant that the next ending date of the three hundred and eighty-four day cycle would be the fourth of December, 1972. I consulted several astronomical tables, but the date seemed unpromising. The closing date of the next three hundred and eighty-four cycle was immediately more interesting, as it fell on the twenty-second day of December, 1973.

I noticed this was the winter solstice. Here was a clue. The winter solstice is traditionally the time of the rebirth of the savior messiah. It is a time of pause when there is a shifting of the cosmic machinery. It is also the time of the transition of the sun from Sagittarius to Capricorn. I put no particular stock in astrology, but I noted that Dennis is a Sagittarius and Ev a Capricorn. I consulted my star

maps and added another coincidence: where the ecliptic crosses the cusp of Sagittarius and Capricorn, at 23 degrees Sagittarius, is the very spot to within one or two degrees where the galactic center is presently located. Over twenty-six thousand years the galactic center, like all points on the ecliptic, slowly moves through the signs, but now it was on the cusp of Sagittarius and Capricorn on the winter solstice day.

This seemed an unusual number of coincidences and so I pressed my search. Consultation with the almanac of the Naval Observatory brought a real surprise. On the very day that I was researching, December 22, 1973, a total, annular eclipse of the sun would occur and the path of totality would sweep directly across La Chorrera and the Amazon Basin. I was dumbfounded. I felt like a person in a novel; this string of clues was actually real! I researched the eclipse to determine exactly where it would achieve totality. This would occur, I learned, almost directly over the city of Belem in Brazil, in the delta of the Amazon River. The vertiginous elf chatter of hypers.p.a.ce rose squealing in my ears. Was it mocking me or egging me on?

Meditation on this eclipse data carried my mind out of the realm of astronomical coincidence and back to the motifs of the trances at La Chorrera. Belem means Bethlehem in Portuguese. My perceptions, sensitive to any messianic possibility, seized on this. Belem is Bethlehem; it lies at the delta of the Amazon. Delta is the symbol for change in time; delta in Joyce's fiction and among graffiti artists throughout history represents the v.a.g.i.n.a. Dennis was born in Delta, Colorado. Was it possible that all of our experiences could have been a premonition of an event at a time and place two years hence in Brazil? Was this why, absurdly, at the conclusion of the experiment at La Chorrera, the strains of "Oh Little Town of Bethlehem" had come echoing through my mind? By late spring of 1972, I knew everything that I have just mentioned. Why did the wave point to December 22, 1973? And why was there such a stream of coincidence pointing to that time? Had I known of the impending eclipse on some unconscious level?

Had I known it would achieve totality over Belem? Why did the dates that were important to my life line up with that date according to the wave I had learned to construct in the wake of the UFO encounter at La Chorrera? To me

it seemed impossible that I had somehow known these things and manipulated my conscious self to imagine that it was "discovering" these things. I was like a snow-blind traveler caught in a blizzard of coincidence.

Finally, in the early spring of 1973, an event occurred that offered perfect proof that something larger than my unconscious, seemingly larger even than the total collective consciousness of the human race, was at work. This was the discovery of the comet Ko- hotek, heralded as the largest comet in human history, dwarfing even Halley's Comet.

"Brightest Comet Ever Headed Toward Earth" was the headline in the San Francisco Chronicle. As I scanned the article, I actually let out a yell of amazement. The comet would make its nearest approach to the sun on the twenty-third of December! A non- periodic comet, unknown to anyone on earth until March of 1973, was hurtling toward a rendezvous with the sun within a hundred hours of the solstice and the eclipse over the Amazon. It was a large coincidence, if we define a coincidence as an improbability that deeply impresses its observer. This coincidence is not diminished by the fact that Kohotek never really lived up to expectations, for the expectations alone became a wave of millenarianism and apocalyptic restlessness among the fringes of the population that would die only as the comet returned to the darkness out of which it emerged. Did anything happen in Belem on the day of the eclipse? I do not know; I was not there. I was by then a prisoner of mundane obligation. But I do know that the compression of events that occurred around that date, and the way in which the charts predicted this, were uncanny.

Only with the development of personal computers was I able to understand the way that the timewave describes the ebb and flow of novelty in time over many different spans of time: some last scant minutes, others endure for centuries. Now anyone who becomes operationally familiar with the theory can join me in this intellectual adventure and see for themselves the immense challenge involved in predicting a concrescence. I have not been content to merely understand the theory: I have continued efforts to apply it specifically to predicting the course of future events. If over years of study one becomes convinced that the wave does

show the future course of novelty, then the ordinary antic.i.p.ation of the future is gradually replaced with an almost Zen-like appreciation and understanding of the complete pattern.

Was the above series of events the first intimation that I had that something of importance was connected with a specific date in time and the city of Belem? Strangely, no; it was not. I must mention the following incident in order to connect the history of my own unconscious processes with the curiously specific and puzzling piece of information that was seeking to emerge from me.

In the spring of 1970, I had been in Taipai, Taiwan, readjusting to city life after a long, b.u.t.terfly-collecting ramble through the outback of Indonesia. I was killing time awaiting a traveling companion, who I had last seen in Bali several months before. One night, I had a very peculiar dream. It occurred, though I did not know it, on the very day that my father and Dennis were told that our mother was dying of cancer. That was something that I would not learn until nearly a week later. My journal records the dream as follows: May 24, 1970 Dhyanna and I were walking up a gentle, gra.s.sy slope. Below us on all sides the valleys were filled with scudding white clouds, tops brilliantly reflecting the sun back into thedepthless azure. Ahead of us the steeply rolling hills ascended-many miles away, as I remarked, into the main range of the Rockies. We were in dream geography, somewhere in Western Colorado [where I was born and lived until I was sixteen]. As we continued upward, Herr B. [an Indonesian acquaintance], came to meet us wearing white tennis shorts and drew our attention to several small meteorological balloons whose dangling nylon cords had caught in nearby wind-bent trees. To our left, upon a crest, deeply dimpled, blazing white, and perhaps thirty feet high, was a large balloon perhaps three- quarters filled with gas. The ropes enclosing the gas bag cut deeply into it, sectioning it as though it were a great, bleached orange. As we gazed, Herr B. depressed a lever that had appeared from nowhere and the apparatus rose simultaneously with my query: Would not the wind whipping over the hill cause it to falter? Its white bulk rushed over us, perhaps only twenty feet above our

heads and then, pa.s.sing higher, it met the wind and the fate I had antic.i.p.ated. Turning on its side, it gently came to earth. We ran toward it and other people [the impression was of children], appeared from the opposite direction, also running toward the rippling white of the now deflated machine.

Amid our laughing examination of the balloon, we were invited into B's home, now visible as a sprawling, "ranch style" house nearby. [This was a house not unlike the house in which I spent my childhood.] As we entered the house I paused to examine a large map of the Amazon Delta on the wall-published, the legend informed me, to commemorate a conference of a French archaeological society which convened on a small island there in 1948. When I rejoined Dhy anna, she informed me that the children ofB. had told her that one of the densest rainforests in the world was nearby. I, familiar as only a native can be with Colorado geography, was incredulous. I returned to the bookcase under the map and, taking out a large atlas, sought the rainfall and forest map of Colorado, opening instead upon a.s.sam- while first rejecting a topological rendering of Bengal. I heard myself say that Shalimar was the logical jumping off place-then allfaded.

The meaning of this dream was far from clear at the time, and even now it remains obscure. What is clear is that at a given date an event of importance was to be expected in the delta of the Amazon. I hoped then that the total eclipse of the sun was that long- antic.i.p.ated event, and that its totality over the v.a.g.i.n.a of the world mother antic.i.p.ated an event of great import for everyone.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

WALTZING THE ENIGMA.

In which I flash back to my near recruitment by a band of renegade n.a.z.i scientists while visiting Timor.

A FEW MONTHS BEFORE that precursive dream a strange incident occurred that I now look back on as further proof that I was destined to travel to the Amazon, and that somehow I had come under the spell of the cosmic giggle: In February of 1970, a year before I arrived at La Chorrera, my fugitive wanderings had taken me to the island of Timor in Eastern Indonesia. Under indictment in the States for the heinous crime of importing hashish, I traveled and lived under the dramatic a.s.sumption that international police agencies were combing the globe looking for me. My cover, that of a graduate student in entomology doing field work for a degree-a b.u.t.terfly collector-had worked well over the previous six months as I had made my way slowly through Malaysia, Sumatra, Java, and a host of other less familiar but equally exotic insular backwaters.

A particularly muggy and showery afternoon found me smoking ganja in my room at the Rama, the best and only hotel in Kupang, Timor. Until that moment, I had been the hotel's only guest for ten days and had pretty much had the run of the place. Not that it was palatial. The Rama was constructed of cinder block, and the walls of

its eight identical rooms stopped well short of the ceiling. With concert walls and drains installed at the converging slopes of the floors, it had the cheerful ambience of a new and unused slaughterhouse. However, it was clean, as the manager would hurriedly point out.

As I smoked, sitting cross-legged on my steel cot and reviewing the morning's collecting in the jungle, I became aware of the arrival of other guests. I could hear what seemed like half a dozen people speaking German and moving luggage about in the lobby, a central s.p.a.ce with four rattan chairs facing each other over a threadbare rug. I presumed that these were travelers off the afternoon plane from Darwin and that they would presumably fly on to Bali on the next day's regular noon flight out of Timor. What was obviously a couple, to judge by their voices, had occupied the room next to mine. I recognized some German and the women seemed to speak some other language, one I could not place.

When I went out for dinner the new arrivals were nowhere to be seen. The next morning I was up at dawn to catch an Indonesian Air Force plane that took me to Flores, the next island on my b.u.t.terfly itinerary, and I thought no more about the unseen guests in a now- distant hotel I expected never to see again. I spent a week in the cloud forests on Flores, staying with an alcoholic Dutch priest with a club foot who ran a mission in the forested interior of the island. Then I returned to the steamy coastal capital, Maumere, a small town down the center of whose unpaved main street were piles of Macadamia nuts drying in the sun, waiting to be bagged for export. Maumere had a two-room Chinese hotel in which I expected to stay one night before returning to Bali.

Then the fog closed in. It was a soupy, ground-hugging tropical fog that my Chinese host a.s.sured me was known to last for weeks this time of year. I visited the airport the next day but it was clearly a futile gesture. The Bali plane circled the field four times looking for a hole in the cloud cover before giving up and flying on. I was no stranger to delay.

Travel in Asia is made of delay. I returned to the hotel for another round of chess with the local chess fiends and a.s.sumed that the next day would be clear. Five days later I was still on Flores. I had played chess with all comers, I was running out of dope, and the specter of staying forever in Maumere seemed too real to be a joke. I thought it over,

decided to forget Bali, and put out the word that I would take the next plane out to anywhere.

That decision seemed to be all that was necessary for the weather to clear off long enough for a plane to get in under the clouds. It was the weekly Garuda flight to Kupang. Before I had time to reconsider my decision, I was on the plane and headed back to Timor.

The town was unchanged and my earlier visit had put me on a first-name basis with the rickshaw boys. I felt almost like I was home. "Rama Hotel," I told my favorite driver, and before I knew it I was back in room number one, and the fog-bound chess tournaments on Flores seemed no more than a half-remembered dream.

As I lay on the bed watching the ceiling fan idle against a background of spider-webbed corrugated metal, I became aware of voices in the next room. German and something else, which was softened by a women's voice and more exotic, not Indonesian, maybe Pashtun, I thought. Apparently the travelers who had checked in the night before my departure nearly two weeks ago were still there. That meant they were certainly not tourists; n.o.body without a good reason lingered long in Kupang.

I am not big on chance meetings. In those days I always tried to avoid having anything to do with what I considered "non-freaks." However, that evening as I let myself out of my room to go to dinner, the door of the next room opened and I was face to face with its occupants.

"Herr McKenna, is it not?"

As I turned to face my questioner, the uneasiness that I felt being addressed by my name must have shown in my face.

"The manager here has told me of your biological researches on Timor. Allow me to introduce myself. I am Dr. Karl Heintz of Far Eastern Mining and Minerals, Inc."

My relief was immediate. Obviously this guy wasn't some kind of Interpol porker come to track me down. But he had the look. He was powerfully built with swept-back, iron- grey hair and strikingly intense eyes of glacial blue. He sported a schmiss on his left cheek, a long, thin scar. I had never seen a schmiss before but the crossword puzzle term sprang into my mind unbidden. I wondered if he had received it in the traditional manner, in a sword duel that is part of the hazings that used to go on in the university fraternities of Prussia.

"As we are the only guests here at Rama Hotel, may I invite you to join my wife and me for some schnapps? I am keen to hear your perceptions concerning Timor."

The town was too small for me to refuse gracefully. Had I said no we would have ended up at separate tables in the same five-table restaurant. I hated the idea of spending time with straight people but there seemed no decent way to escape.

Hearing him speak brought his wife into the small foyer to join us. She made the decision easier, though I was careful to guard my reaction of amazement. Only a year or two older than myself, maybe twenty five, she was stunningly beautiful, dark, sari-clad with huge fawn-like eyes, a gold nose ring, and many bracelets. In that tropical backwater her appearance was as unlikely as a flying saucer; she was a vision of overdressed Brahmanic perfection. Her name was Rani, and when she spoke her voice was cultivated and musical. Though she rarely spoke, her English was better than his. This was no girl from the villages. I confess that I was intrigued. What could I do but accompany this pair? It wasn't as though I had something better to do.

Once we were seated at the restaurant with our quart bottles of Bintang beer in front of us, the conversation began to flow and I started to form an impression of my companions.

Dr. Heintz was, he said, a geologist with an outfit in Singapore. The year before, a survey team had found evidence of a large deposit of nickel that straddled the border between Indonesian and Portuguese Timor. He was there to confirm their findings and to estimate the feasibility of a mining operation. That seemed straightforward enough, although there were references to a set of instruments that could somehow determine the true size of the deposit. I knew very little of prospecting technology, but a device that could see hundreds of feet into the ground sounded farfetched to me.

I gently inquired about the language that I had heard them both speaking, thinking this would lead him on to discussing his wife. It turned out to be a favorite subject of his. She was, he told

me while she merely sat and watched us both, a granddaughter of the Maharani of Maharashtra. It seemed that Heintz had been in the market for a few hundred acres of prime Maharashtran agricultural land and the old Maharani had a parcel that she was willing to cut loose. This had lead to Heintz meeting Rani. Before the deal was closed, it was clear that a wedding would soon follow. He waxed eloquent over the joys of tractor farming in India, how he was really a very simple man, the joys of watching the growth of a new crop, and so on. He was quite a raver, and I was content to let him spin it all out.

It seemed that he was a kind of vice-president in charge of operations for the mining concern, a kind of trouble shooter really. He ordered another beer and told a story about being ambushed by guerrillas during the start up of a big tin extraction operation in northern Thailand. At the story's climax he stood and lifted his shirt to display for my edification three neat scars across his chest. From a machine gun, he said.

"Any one of them could have killed me outright. But no! I was preserved, and the triumph of our company's project was complete." Describing the start up of a tin mine as a triumph seemed a bit overblown to me, but it was clear that I was in the presence of one intense dude.

Hardly pausing he moved on to the time in Tanzania when he alone, bare chested and unarmed except for an axe, had strode into a crowd of six thousand angry workers during a strike at a bauxite operation. Modest he was not, but the stories were well told and compelling. And standards for dinner conversation in the warm tropics leave room for the self-aggrandizing traveler's tale.

Eventually he turned his attention to the company that he worked for. "FEMMI is no ordinary company, Herr McKenna, please be a.s.sured of that. No. We are like a family.

This is the source of our strength. And we have plans for the future. Very big plans." I only nodded, thinking it best not to inform him that I considered large mining corporations the scourge of the earth. But this devotion to his corporation was no casual matter, and he seemed unable to leave the subject alone.

"Nowhere on earth is there a more closely knit and dedicated group than are we. We are bound like comrades in arms. Each member of the core management group is a genius in his or her own

right." He p.r.o.nounced genius like "tchenius." "And why is that you must wonder? Ach, I am telling you why. It is because we, each one of us, has known the horror of privation, the depths of despair, and the glorious feeling that comes from overcoming these things.

We are united in our triumph, Herr McKenna, and the sense of inevitable conquest of difficulty has made us invincible!" At this last word, his voice rose and his fist descended to the flimsy table with such force that our quart bottles of Bintang jumped in reply.

Seeing my uncertain response, he continued. "You are amazed to hear this, I see. Maybe you are asking what privations, what difficulties? It is like this: we all lived through the Hitler times and the war. Germany was nothing after the war. There was not one stone upon another in my Berlin. In the ruins of Europe we were like c.o.c.kroaches. May I tell you that the bank accounts of all the SS families were frozen. My mother, my poor aristocratic mother, was reduced to selling paintings from our estate in order to buy potatoes to feed herself and my younger sister. Imagine this!"

"Oh no," I thought, "Not n.a.z.is. Is this guy telling me he was a n.a.z.i?" I fought to get my look of horror under control, but now he was on a roll and seemed to take no notice. "My father was captured by the Russians during the battle for Berlin. He was hung like a dog in Moscow for war crimes. Can you imagine? Verdammen Russian schweinen talking about war crimes? For all the SS it was like that."

This conversation was like a bad dream or a B-movie. I looked over at his companion who returned my gaze with utter impa.s.sivity. It seemed important to deflect the conversation if only even slightly. "And you, Herr Heintz, what of your role in all of this?"

He shrugged. "I was a mere nothing. A Messerschmidt pilot in the Luftwaffe. A good German only." This last was said without a trace of irony. "Before the war I was a young engineering student. The war changed everything. After the war, a few of us, my fellow, young scholars from the Max Planck Inst.i.tute, gathered in the ruins of Berlin. We were finished with ideology, with the grand political dreams."

This was the first good news in a while. I gratefully signaled the Indonesian waiter for another round of beer while Heintz continued: "We were a small group, pitiful really, but united by our

revulsion at the horror all around us. We determined to build a new world for ourselves, a world based on two principles, two great powers, the power of capital and the power of science. We began slowly, with patents, processes that had been discovered at the Planck Inst.i.tute during the war, trade secrets really. Carefully we expanded on this, we established ourselves in Singapore. There was not a shoemaker among us. Each member of our small team was a genius. Our furher was a professor who' had trained us all, a true genius. His name was Max Bockermann. It was he who held us together; it was his faith and strength that made it all possible."

The schmiss on his cheek had turned bright red at this turn of the conversation. I had hoped that there were no further depths of discomfiture to be plumbed in this conversation but I was wrong, for now I saw that he was moving, perhaps under the influence of the third quart of Bintang, from pa.s.sionate intensity to outright maudlin sentimentality. "No man has ever loved another as Bockermann loved us. We are his kinder, his little birds, ja. When it seemed that there was no hope he inspired us; he made us believe in ourselves."

Tears rose in his eyes at this, then he seemed to regain his self control and continued.

"And what is the result? FEMMI, Herr McKenna, Far East Mining and Minerals Incorporated. We have grown and prospered. From our offices in Singapore we control projects in eleven countries. Oil, nickel, tin, bauxite, uranium-we have it all. But we have more, we have love, companionship, community, and the power to make our dreams come true." At this he broke stride and reached over to put his hand on the thigh of the woman beside him. I looked away. When I returned to his depthless blue gaze his mood had changed. "But what about yourself, Herr McKenna. It is clear that you are leading the gypsy life." He p.r.o.nounced the word gypsy like chipsy. "And we gypsies always have our stories to tell. So what about you?"

I swallowed hard. He didn't look like the sort of person who would appreciate my stories of fighting the police at the Berkeley barricades shoulder-to-shoulder with affinity groups like the Persian f.u.c.kers and the Acid Anarchists. Nor did my partic.i.p.ation in the Human Be-In or the rolling orgies of the Summer of Love in

the Haight-Ashbury seem appropriate to mention. And my recent stint as a hashish smuggler in India and my subsequent move undercover to avoid capture by Interpol also seemed out of place in this particular interview.

I decided to go with the usual half-truth reserved for straight people. "I am an art historian turned biologist. I went to Nepal to study Tibetan but found that I am no linguist when it comes to Asian languages. I have returned to biology, my first love. Specifically, I am an entomologist. I am collecting b.u.t.terflies here in Indonesia retracing the route of Alfred Russell Wallace. Wallace was the real discoverer of the theory of natural selection, but Darwin got all the credit. I identify with his underdog status. Wallace was shafted by Victorian science because he was of the wrong cla.s.s and didn't know how to play politics the way Darwin did. Wallace explored the Amazon Basin as well and if all goes well, I hope to travel and collect there too. Eventually I will write a monograph on speciation among the b.u.t.terflies of Amazonas and Eastern Indonesia, which will get me a degree. Then, who knows. Teaching perhaps. Hard to say."