Where We're At: Parts 3.8-3.9: Bilocations

The Chums

• Are in Brussels for the annual memorial service for General Boulanger; they have ground leave at Ostend, where they run into the Quaternionists-in-exile at the Grand Hotel de la Nouvelle Digue. (They last saw Quaternionists at Candlebrow, which was one of the Quaternionists few safe harbors during the Quaternion Wars.)
• Most people no longer really see the Inconvenience; it's becoming invisible.
• De Decker's shop has an electromagnetic monitoring station that's been picking up messages intended for the Inconvenience's Tesla rig (a power generator). They're conflating these messages with rumors of a Quaternist weapon which Piet Woevre has been obsessed by.
• The Chums are getting intimidated by Pugnax's increasing ferocity; only Miles really communicates with him anymore.
• During the undersand voyage, Miles was taken by a vision of the holy city, separated from them only by time, a separation which was becoming increasingly frail.
• Miles sees one of the Trespassers--Ryder Thorn, who was also at Candlebrow-- on the ground is Ostend. Ryder arranges to meet with Miles and they take off on bicycles for Ypres (Flanders). Ryder tells Miles that the Trespassers know what will happen here ten years from now--it's his task to find out what Miles's people know. Miles claims to be only a cook for a bunch of balloonists--says he knows nothing. The Trespassers know that Miles was spying on them at Candlebrow; Miles denies it . Ryder explains that the Trespassers have the answer for time (and any study of time is ultimately about the human fear of mortality): "This world you take to be 'the' world will die, and descend into Hell, and all history after that will belong properly to the history of Hell...Flanders will be the mass grave of History... And that is not the most perverse part of it. They will all embrace death. Passionately." "The Flemish." "The world."
• The Trespassers come from the future and have no choice but to come here. Time was (will be) ripped open here and they can't cross back.
• Miles realizes that there's no technical knowhow behind the Trespassers' presence in his world-- it was a chance blundering on a shortcut enabled by whatever was going to happen at Flanders.
• Miles explains to the Chums that the Trespassers aren't in fact immortal and can't provide immortality or eternal youth as they promise.

page 556. More than halfway through.

Kit

• Arms tycoon Viktor Mulciber has been sent by Basil Zaharoff to Ostend to ask about the Quaternioneers (including Barry Nebulay, Dr. V. Ganesh Rao, Umeki Tsurigane, and Root; Kit has tagged along with Umeki) about the Qweapon. (Huh?) The weapon does something with time ("the fulfiller of the Trinity" [which could just mean the standard three dimensions]). Time is "the one force no one knows how to defeat, resist, or reverse. It kills all forms of life sooner or later." (Mulciber) Other arms dealers find the Quaternists as well.
• Piet Woevre has beaten them all, bought from Edoard Gevaert--what he bought is "something in a sleek leather case, shaped exquisitely by northern Italian maskmakers to the exact facets of the shape within, a perfectly tailored black skin, a deployment of light among a careful clutter of angles, a hundred blurry highlights." Woevre wants to destroy the world.
• Kit's in love (or lust) with Umeki. They're still in Ostend. So is Pleiade Lafrisee. Kit and Umeki run into Pleiade with Woevre. Kit thinks that Woevre is capable of killing via mayonnaise.
• De Decker sends operatives, including Woevre, to the hotel to make mischief. Kit sees Woevre, assumes he's the target, and takes off. Pino and Rocco run into him and offer him a ride to Bruges on their torpedo. They get lost in the canals and suddenly there's Woevre shooting at Kit; Pino and Rocco are gone. Woevre's not sure why he's shooting--why not?
• Woevre's been vaguely aware of the Inconvenience and he's seen the Chums on land. He knows he needs to take down the ship. He takes out the mysterious weapon he bought and tries to shoot... and sees a strange light and hears the voices of everyone he's ever killed. He ends up on his back; Kit helps him up; Woevre wants nothing more to do with whatever this weapon is and gives it to Kit. Woevre takes off and Kit hears shots.
• Umeki has been fooling with the weapon. It's double refracting. (Any light entering becomes a pair of rays, one ordinary, one extraordinary.) Kit has a dream about the weapon's power and knows he has to give it to Umeki. He does; she goes back to Japan.

page 567.