Where We're At: Part 4.15: Against the Day

Reef, Yashmeen, Cyprian

• Reef, Yashmeen, and Cyprian are following the tourist casino circuit and end up at the Anarchist spa , Yz-les-Bains."It might have reminded Reef of a mining camp early in the history of a silver strike, except that these solemn young folks carried with them an austerity, a penultimacy before some unstated future, a Single Idea, whose power everything else ran off of. Here it was not silver or gold but something else. Reef could not quite see what it was." Ratty's there, and so are people Reef recognizes from the tunnels and (different) people Yashmeen recognizes from London/the TWIT. Cyprian's people killing Theign felt like release for a lot of operatives, including Ratty (now calling himself Reg); he's quit. The group is working toward "[t]he replacement of governments by other, more practical arrangements." There are many former TWIT people here--betrayed by TWIT.
• Ratty tells them that they, the Anarchists, have received a map (in code) of the Balkan Peninsula (where Austrians, generally, are profiting off people who've lived, worked, and died there for centuries). It shows, coded, plans for gas attacks?
  
• Coombs de Bottle is at Yz-les-Bains as well. The rate of self-inflicted bombing casualties among Anarchists is high and he wants to instruct them in basic bomb safety (he initially tried this while he was still working at the War Office; he was fired).
• The map ultimately came from Renfrew, via former students.
• If a general European war happens, the Anarchists will be the ultimate losers as the war provides reason for governments to further centralize in self-preservation--that's what war does--centralized government is arranged to facilitate war, not peace.
• There's Renfrew and Werfner's Interdikt field again, running across the Peninsula, waiting to be triggered. Yashmeen, pregnant and concerned for the future, wants to go disarm it. Cyprian had vowed never to return to the Balkans ("'Of the earth were alive, with a a planet- shaped consciousness, then the 'Balkan Peninsula' might easily map on to whatever in this consciousness most darkly wishes for its own destruction'") but Ratty's convincing him that he's their best bet. Besides, Cyprian's been looking or heading for some bigger purpose since meeting Danilo's cousin Vesna--real, not Danilo's hopeful hallucination-- in Serbia.
• Professor Sleepcoat is researching why the Lydian mode (F to B natural, rather than B flat) in missing in Balkan church and folk music. He's also looking into Pythagoreans. Since 1900 there have been song-gatherers all over Europe "as if somehow the work had to be done quickly, before each people's heritage of song was somehow lost for good." They'll travel as song-gatherers.
  
• This is Yashmeen's quest for transcendence.
• They meet Professor Sleepcoat and his party at Sofia and the whole group sets out.
• Reef, Yashmeen, and Cyprian's main task is to locate and disable the Interdikt line. The countryside is full of misdirection and showing the map makes townspeople shut up and be wary: "'You don't look for them... if they want to, they will find you. Better if they don't find you.'"
• They randomly run into Gabrovo Slim, whose life Cyprian saved. Gabrovo offers to house the trio at his farm--it'd be better for everyone including the baby. The farm is in the Rozovata Donlina, Valley of the Roses (which runs east-west bet ween the Balkans and the Sredna Gora), which Cyprian thinks is as good a place as any to look for the Interdikt. Cyprian asks whether anything's going on there-- there have been people there who shouldn't be, Germans, with machinery, dynamos, cables. People who've tried to see what they're doing have disappeared.
• They split from Professor Slipcoat. "Maybe that gap in the musical continuum, that silence, is a first announcement of something terrible, of which this structural silence is only an inoffensive metaphor."
• At Slim's farm is his wife Zhivka, who breeds, grows, and talks to her roses.
• Cyprian's aware that he's searching for something--not sex.
• The baby, a girl name Ljubica, is born.
• While Yashmeen's on the farm with the newborn, Cyprian and Reef are going out looking for the "Austrian minefield." Gabrovo shows them a hundred-foot tower with an antenna--it wasn't there before. Reef recognizes it as a Tesla rig (radio).
• A crowd of motorcyclists show up at the antenna house--they're Theign's elite shadowing unit, RUSH, including Mihaly Vamos, who's worked closely with Cyprian in Venice. Vamos tells Cyprian that they owe him for getting rid of Theign. He explains that the locals call the Interdikt the Zabraneno; whoever installed it is gone, and it no longer belongs to anyone--the Germans and Austrians disavow it, the locals are terrified of it, the Turks check it monthly, and the Brits, who RUSH still work for, just make sure no one triggers it by accident, because no one knows how to dismantle it, It acts as if it's alive and it protects itself. They take Cyprian and Reef to the thing; Cyprian senses something else there. The building is abandoned and holds hundreds of canisters of phosgene. But phosgene isn't especially exotic anymore--it can be made easily now by using light. The weapon is light, not gas. Super-bright light can be projected as destructive energy, causes blindness and fear. But there are no light sources there. It's another code; Cyprian is furious.
• They decide not to tell Yashmeen or Ratty's people what they've found--it's not what it was supposed to be.
• The trio leaves for Varna, on the Black Sea, to follow rich gamblers; Yashmeen assumes that like her, the men are focusing on the baby rather than Interdikt.
• They stumble on a rogue monastery on a hill; Cyprian is home. He stays.
• Reef and Yashmeen mourn Cyprian as they make their way west toward the Adriatic. They don't see much point anymore in heading toward the Black Sea. They head toward Macedonia. The sunlight is pitiless. Macedonia declares war on Turkey; as Serbs, Greeks, and Bulgarians invade, Reef, Yashmeen, and Ljubica see their choices narrow. This is what they were sent to stop, and clearly they didn't, so Yashmeen regards the mission as a failure and the assignment as over. They just want to get out.
• They're part of a vast array of refugees. They don't know what's going on further away; all Europe could be at war.
• They hear machine guns for the first time as Turkey falls and the history of Turkey in Europe ends. As they move west with the troops they find themselves wondering "if the permission they had felt when Cyprian was with them, the freedom to act extraordinarily, had come from residence in a world about to embrace its end--closer to the freedom of the suicide than that of the ungoverned spirit."
• They arrive at the lake at Ohrid. Before leaving, they send picture postcards of the war to everyone they know or knew, certain that none will arrive.
• They'll head for Albania. Cyprian had warned them to stay away and there's some sort of revolution in the north, but it's winter in the mountains and there's only one road.
• In Albania, everyone's shooting at everyone. They find themselves in a farm outbuilding; Ljubica makes friends with a dog. Later, Reef will learn that this dog is Ksenjia, Pugnax's mate; the Chums have been "invisibly but attentively" been watching over Reef and his family as they leave the Balkans; it's Ksenjia's task to steer then to safety without appearing to do so. And here are three Albanians, ready to shoot-- and there's Ramiz, whose life Reef saved in a Swiss tunnel. Ramiz's village takes them in.
• At last they reach the Adriatic; a fisherman gives them a ride to Corfu where they spend the rest of the winter and the spring. The Compassionate take steps to re-establish contact with Yashmeen. And there's Auberon--he got their postcard and figured they'd come through Corfu, so he's been waiting for them. Auberon's deserted and the English think he's dead. He's with Umeki Tsurigane, who he'd met when she was posted to the Japanese embassy at Constantinople--Kit introduced them; he'd been working there as a bartender. Auberon tells Yashmeen that Shambhala turned out to be "not a goal but an absence. Not the discovery of a place but the act of leaving the futureless place where I was." (And in the process he arrived in Constantinople and met Umeki.)

(p. 975.)