Where We're At: Part 4.7: Against the Day

The Event

• The Chums are ... somewhere. Before the Event the town looks muddy and deserted; after the Event ("ripping apart the firmament over western China"), it looks cleansed and new and they know it's Shambhala. But the burst of light that un-hid Shambhala un-hid the Inconvenience at the moment (only that moment) the Event occurred, as well ("tor[e] the veil separating their own space from that of the everyday world").
• The Chums arrive at the site of the Event shortly after the Bol'shaia Igra does; Lindsay says it was the Trespassers.
• Vanderjuice, in Tierra del Fuego, messages the Inconvenience that everything there went chaotic--"gravity itself for a moment simply vanished." Vanderjuice relays the rumor that the Event was caused by an error in some kind of something Tesla was attempting to beam to Peary, in the Arctic. Tesla has abandoned his laboratory since Morgan abandoned him.
• The Chums meet with the Bol'shaia Igra. Padzitnoff wants to know why they didn't tell him/them sooner about the Trespassers; he's known since Venice and might have helped despite official (national) issues. The Russians want to believe the event was caused by the Japanese, or at least the Chinese. The Chums don't know what the American government thinks, because they no longer work for them; they've gone out on their own. Chick is bothered that Padznitnoff is communicating on the wireless without encryption.
• The event has changed the world as the Chums see it. Siberia is crossed by a network of rails , birds have vanished, huge modern cities have appeared. The sky is crowded with cargo balloons of all shapes and sizes, each tethered to its own piece of rolling-stock moving on its own track.
• News of the event radiates out. ("Was it Tchernobyl, the star of Revelation?... Was it... the general war which Europe this summer and autumn would stand at the threshold of, collapsed into a single event?")

• Dally is in Venice and is getting over Kit and working as a prostitute? Someone threatens her that he'll come for her that night, but that night never happens--it's light all night.

• In Trieste, Cyprian ("no longer entirely welcome in Venice") meets with newly-arrived cryptographer Bevis Moistleigh who's trying to decrypt messages about.. .something. All he's gotten so far is the Albanian word for disaster. They're both working for Theign; Bevis wonders why Theign has him decoding stuff from Italy, who's supposed to be an ally, and in German, because Germany isn't. Bevis wonders if the code is (or is related to) some kind of Crusade. They come out of the office into a weird light.

• Reef meets back up with Ruperta in Marienbad, but neither one much cares and she leaves. Reef moves on to touring the spas; he's claiming to have Railway Brain. The spa doctors know he's not sick but because he's a paying customer, they don't say anything. The Event happens and he understands "from the overhead voice--'Really Traverse you know you must abandon this farcical existence, rededicate yourself to real-world issues such as family vendetta, which though frowned upon by the truly virtuous represents even so a more productive use of your own precious time on Earth than the aimless quest to get one's ashes hauled...'"

• Yashmeen is in Vienna, working in a dress shop; Noellyn walks in. They're out to dinner (after sex) and it's not getting dark.

• "It went on for a month.... As nights went on and nothing happened and the phenomenon slowly faded... most had difficulty remembering the earlier rise of heart, the sense of overture and possibility, and went back once again to seeking only orgasm, hallucination, stupor, sleep, to fetch them through the night and prepare them against the day."

(p. 805)

Where We're At: Part 4.6: Against the Day

Padzhitnoff and the Bolsha'ia Igra

• The morning of 30 June 1908, there's a "heavenwide blast of light." For miles around, tree trunks are bleached white. There was a huge sound, as well as light and heat.
• Padzhitnoff, of the Bolsha'ia Igra, has been spying for the Russian secret service (Okhrana).
• It's a time of pogroms and terror and blood; God has abandoned Russia.
• Padzitnoff instructs Ofitser Nauchny Gerasimoff to investigate the event--he's been instructed, in turn, by Okhrana, who believes that it may have been man-made and wants to know the weapons implications.
• Other crew members are Gennady, Pavel Sergeievitch, Bezumyoff.
• They speculate that the event was so intense that the expected crater got displaced in time rather than space. So there could be a hole in the earth no one can see. Maybe it was an artifact of repeated visits from the future. Padzitnoff wonders whether it was a test of some new missile gone awry and therefore never to be admitted actually happened.
• Meanwhile, Kit and Prance: Suddenly everything turned red, then orange as the explosion arrived. It's like when they passed through the Prophet's Gate? Kit thinks whatever it is is by Vanavara; Prance's remit was political, which he believes this isn't.
• And then the drums began, like thunder or like whatever it was that happened.
• Prance is being mistaken for a Japanese spy and is being shot at.
• Kit wonders whether the event was caused by the discharge (intentional or un) of the Quaternion weapon he'd turned over to Umeki Tsurigane.
• Stuff from the Tierra Del Fuego, directly opposite Siberia on the globe, is showing up in Siberia.
• Reports are made of a mysterious figure walking through the aftermath. Maybe it's Magyakan, who hasn't been seen since the event.
• And gradually the event receded and normalcy returned.
• White reindeer Ssagan talks to Kit and convinces his (own) herders that Kit needs him as a guide. He brings them to Tuva, on the border of Mongolia, and leaves. The Tuvan throat singers are in two states at once, like a shaman. Prance believes they've arrived at the heart of the earth--which Kit says would ordinarily have been the reason for the journey, but since the event, who knows? Are Auberon and all still even there?
• Prance detects the Inconvenience above them and is invited onboard the ship.

Kit

• Meanwhile, Kit is with a band of brodyagi, former hard-labor convicts.
• Kit comes upon the trailway line that's to link the Trans-Siberian and the Taklamakan.
• Kit comes upon an exploring party that includes Fleetwood Vibe (looking for the Tuva-to-Taklamakan railway which may or may not exist; it may be what Kit's been seeing), who tells him that Scarsdale's gone mad as a result of something that happened in Venice. Colfax has left the nest and is pitching professionally.
• Or is Fleetwood looking for Shambhala? Kit says he may have been there--Tannu Tuva. Fleetwood sensed other hidden cities that are grouped around the 30 June event site near Krasnoyarsk.
• Fleetwood dreams of the fallen thing that the Voromance Expedition had. And Kit's gone.
  

(page 792.)

Where We're At: Parts 4.4-4.5: Against the Day

Kit, Auberon

• Yashmeen writes to Auberon (and sends the letter via Kit) that TWIT is no longer acting in her interest; they're not protecting her and they're not telling her what they have planned for her. They're leaving Switzerland and about to head for Buda-Pesth where she foresees danger and sorrow. They're still after Shambhala. ("[L]ike those religious charlatans who claim direct intercourse with God, there are an increasing number at the TWIT who presume a similar intimacy with the Hidden City; and who, more disturbingly, cannot separate it from the secular politics of present-day Europe." At Gottingen, she was useful to a group of Bolsheviks; the Russia-England alliance makes her useful to British intelligence; she doesn't know why TWIT wants her. "It is as if I possessed, without my knowledge, some key to an encrypted message of great moment, which others are locked in struggle to come into control of." She wonders about who he's been serving all this time. She dreamed about him last night--he said he wasn't what she's imagining him to be. She dreams (or has visions of) The Compassionate.
• Kit travels by steamer and mostly by train (the Trans-Caspian railroad) across Russia and eventually ends up in Kashgar.
• Kit meets Auberon Halfcourt and tells him that he believes that Yashmeen's being manipulated into breaking from TWIT--which would also be why she was removed from Gottingen. Auberon is living well in Kashgar; he's neither lost nor in need of rescue.
• Auberon's Russian counterpart is Colonel Yevgeny Prokladka. His staff, all in exile from points further west, control vice in the city. Klopski runs surround movies (?); Zipyagin controls prostitution; Chiungiz is his aide. Years ago Volodya had planned to use the Bol'shaia Igra to steal a huge jade statue.
• Mushtaq reports to Auberon that the Bol'shaia Igra is over west Taklamakan, "where its mission is obvious to the lowest camel-thief." Auberon replies that they can't exactly shoot the balloon out of the sky.
• The local prophet, the Doosra, thinks it's his destiny to control all of north Eurasia; he's armed; remote outposts on the trading route are falling to him(?). So, add a local power to England, Russia, Japan, China, Germany, and Islam who all were concerned with the area.
• The Doosra's representative asks Auberon (for England) to give the city to them.
• Auberon and Prokladka commiserate that the region will belong to Islam; neither Russia nor England can fight successfully for it.
• Mustaq had left Auberon when he rescued or kidnapped Yashmeen years ago.
• Lt. Dwight Prance is a Renfrew scholar who's there to do something with the Chinese. Someone will perform in some strange tongue and mesmerize them all so that by the time anyone can act it will be too late.
• Kit and Auberon talk. Auberon can't get back west; his being in Asia isn't his own choice. Auberon sees Kit as lost, so why not use him to establish relations with the Tungus (as in Tungu reindeer dance, from the Chicago expo) living east of the Yenisei--he's not been expressly forbidden by headquarters to do so. Kit agrees to go, and Prance will go with him.
• Auberon arranges for Kit to have an audience with the Doosra; Kit's to report back.
• The Doosra speaks fluent English with a "University-nitwit" accent.
• The Doosra says that Kit should seek out his (the Doosra's) master in the north and he will answer Kit's questions; Kit should come back and relay the answers to the English and the Russians. The Doosra is sending his henchman Hassan along for the journey, as protection.
• After poring over Yashmeen's letter and feeling unworthy, Auberon takes off into the mountains somewhere and arrives weeks later in Bukhara looking for a guide to Shambhala (as have been many Germans lately).

(page 767)

Kit
I don't get this section at all.

• Kit would not understand until he saw Lake Baikal why it had been necessary to travel there "and why, in the process of reaching it, penance, madness, and misdirection are inescapable."
• (Prance doesn't go to Baikal; he stays behind in Irkutsk.)
• Hassan tells Kit that he's (Kit has) already spoken to the Doosra's prophet--and there's Baikal, "part of a supernatural order included provisionally in this lower, broken one." Kit realizes that he should have started the journey through the Tushuk Tash, the arch; Hassan, who calls it the Prophet's Gate, disappears.
• The journey had begun by heading for the Tushuk Tash. The arch/gate is continually crumbling, "shedding pieces of itself from so high up that by the time they hit the ground they'd be invisible, followed by the whizzing sound of their descent, for they fell faster than the local speed of sound."
• As Kit passes through the gate he's overwhelmed by a wave of sound, a vision. He dreams of this moment repeatedly as they journey. The last time he dreams it, a voice he should know tells him "you are released."
• Once past the gate, Kit, Prance, and Hassan travel along the silk road, one oasis to the next. "[T]his space the Gate had opened to them was less geographic than to be measured among axes of sorrow and loss."
• Hassan gathers wild-growing marijuana to use for trade.
• They (Kit and Prance; Hassan took off at Lake Baikal) arrive in Irkutsk and it looks and feels like the San Juans, a mining town, to Kit. Kit's instructions from Auberon are to see Mr. Swithin Poundstock, a British nationalist in import/export. Poundstock's minting his own coinage, using old Chinese coins and black-market-but-real coin stamps to create British gold sovereigns. He shows them a map of eastern Siberia and shows them where they'll be operating--"the three great river basins east of the Yeniusei--Upper Tunguska, Stony Tunguska, Lower Tunguska." They're populated by clans that have been at war with one another forever.The key regional figure, moreso than even the Doosra's superior, is the shaman Magyakan, who's active in the Lower Tunguska tribe (Illimpiya).
• They arrive in Yeniseisk and start looking for Magyakan.
• Prance explains that differences in the major religions are nothing compared to how the major religions align against Shamanism, everywhere. "Every state religion, including your [Kit's] own, considers it irrational and pernicious, and has taken steps to eradicate it." It's not okay with the religions for humans to "be in touch with the powerful gods hiding in the landscape, with no need of any official church to mediate it for them."
• Prance is working for some organization in Whitehall.

( p. 778)