Where We're At: Parts 3.6-3.7: Bilocations

Dally and Erlys (and Kit Traverse)

• Katie has an audition in NYC that Wilshire Vibe arranged.
• Dally and Erlys and the Zombini family are in first class on the steamship Stupendica heading toward Europe.
• Erlys recounts meeting Merle Rideout on her way home from burying her ne'er-do-well husband, Bert Snidell, broke and visibly pregnant. This is in Cleveland. Merle takes her in. They travel to keep ahead of winter; Merle does odd jobs. When Erlys took off with Luca Zombini, she was planning to come back for Dally, but Merle just took off again. Luca was the first real passion of Erlys's life.
• Luca reminds Dally of Merle.
• Also on the ship is Kit, who Dally met at the Wilshire Vibe party. He's on his way to Germany to study math; he's interested in Dally.
• Kit's travelling first class but hanging out in fourth where he meets the other mathematician onboard, Root Tubsmith, heading for the University of Berlin to study with Fuchs, Schwarz, and Frobenius. Root specializes in fourth-dimensional geometry (Quarternions, which isn't taught at Yale) and studied under Manning at Brown.
• Dally tells Kit she knew Frank in Colorado. Dally and Kit flirt. Dally knows that Frank and Reef had been looking for someone and someone was looking for Frank. Kit tells her that his brothers don't realize that he, Kit, is in it too (i.e., he's being bankrolled by Scarsdale Vibe).
• Dally's half-sister Bria is interested in Kit's friend Root.
• The Stupendica is really two ships in one. She's also the battleship Emperor Maximilian (Austrian). Root has been poking around and found shell-rooms-to-be, powder magazines, spaces for gun turrets, torpedos, and so forth.
• Belowdecks, Kit and Root meet seamen including a stoker, O.I.C. Bodine.
• The ship receives a telegraph--British and German battle groups are engaged off the Moroccan coast and a state of general European war should be assumed--and everything changes. The ship is transformed into an Austro-Hungarian battleship. (Luca: "[i]t's the old Liner-to-Battleship effect.")
• Kit tries to leave belowdecks and is forced into working to load coal into boilers.The Chief Stoker is Oberhauptheitzer. They're off the coast of Morocco. Either the passenger ship was actually split away from the battleship or the passengers are hidden and Kit can't see them.
• They're initially supposed to go to Tangier (Morocco), controlled by local warlord Mulai Ahmed er-Raisuli but instead the captain heads for Agadir, "the Queen of the Iron Coast" (also in Morocco) because the passengers included a bunch of sequestered Germans who are being sent to "colonize" Morocco ("shadow-colonials on call") so that Germany can legitimize interest in Morocco.
• They land in Agadir; civilians, including Kit, are taken ashore and the battleship leaves.
• Kit ends up crewing on a steam trawler out of Ostend (Belgium), the Formalhaut. They travel back to Belgium and Kit leaves the ship.
• (Discussion of local belief that [Biblical] Jonah was bilocated, Straits of Gibraltar acting as metaphysical juncture point between two worlds.)
• The Zombinis remain on the Stupendica. Dally worries that Kit has disappeared. The ship lands at Trieste (Austria, at the time), its destination and they disembark.

Kit

• Kit lands in Ostend and tries to figure out how he's going to get to Gottingen.
• In a bar, he runs into an unruly band of Quaternions who seem to recognize him. He meets Barry Nebulay from Dublin. It's a Quaternion convention; Quaternions are feeling irrelevant (they lost out in electromagnetism to vectorists?). Kit takes up with the Quaternions, hoping to make enough at the casino to pay for travel to Gottingen.
• Down the hall from the Quaternions are a cell of Belgian nihilists--Eugenie, Fatou, Denis, and Policarpe-- called Young Congo. The Belgian and French intelligence communities are paying attention to them. They feel a moral obligation--some call it an obsession--to assassinate King Leopold of Belgium.
• Young Congo recently joined forces with Italian naval renegades Rocco and Pino, who have stolen plans for a low-speed manned torpedo (the Siluro Dirigible a Lenta Corsa), which they're building (they=Rocco and Pino? Rocco and Pino and Young Congo?) in order to attack King Leopold's royal yacht. This torpedo can target only stationary objects it can physically touch.
• Barry Nebulay introduces Kit to beautiful (and brilliant) female Quaternion UmekiTsurigane.
• Root Tubsmith shows up.
• In the casino, Kit meets Pleiade Lafrisee. The mathematicians win money for her; she buys them dinner.
• Pleiade is to meet Piet Woevre, formerly of the Force Publique in the Congo, a group known for police brutality. He's in Belgium to target "socialists", meaning Slavs and Jews. He's a hired killer; his section chief is de Decker. Woevre is obsessed with the Quaternions. ("Seems that, on the face of it, all mathematics leads, doesn't it, sooner or later, to some kind of human suffering" but the difference between him and them is that their suffering doesn't distinguish who it hits.) He's instructed to look into the group MKIV/ODC which might be involved with something related to torpedos.
• Woevre get s Pleiade to distract Kit; when Kit returns to his hotel his bedroll is gone, taken by the political police. They see him as a nihilist outlaw.
• Belgium is a pawn in international politics just like Colorado is, kind of.
• Pleiade takes Kit on a tour of the Mayonnaise Works, and someone tries to kill him (drown him in mayonnaise) there. He's rescued by Rocco and Pino. Kit didn't trust her to begin with. (Meanwhile, Barry's been teaching her about Quaternism.)

page 548.