Where We're At: Part 3.18: Bilocations

Lew Basnight

• Lew runs into Prof. Renfrew at the theater in London. He's with Max Khautsch. Whoops, that's Werfner, not Renfrew. They look a lot alike. Why is Werfner where he should not be? "[s]ome symmetry was being broken."
• Lew reports to Nookshaft, the Cohen, that Werfner's in London. Nookshaft's not surprised and kind of suggests that it might be nice if Lew would kill him.
• Lew talks to Nigel and Neville about the resemblance between Renfrew and Werfner and realizes that they're just playing the role of twit, and that Renfrew and Werfner are the same person--he's got some paranormal power to be in at least two places at one time. He also realizes that everyone at the TWIT knew, except him; he was played. he feels released from some sense of obligation to TWIT.
• Lew talks with Dr. Otto Ghloix, who's visiting from Switzerland, about bilocation. Ghloix says it's a manifestation of a "deep and fatal contradiction" within the person. And who better than a fallen geographer who might have found Shambhala, found salvation for mankind?
• Is work just penance? "[T]o live in the world [is] to do penance.... Being unable to remember sins from a previous life won't excuse you from doing penance in this one. To believe in the reality of penance is almost to have proof of rebirth."
• Lew goes to Cambridge to see Renfrew who talks about how the railroads are the key to the Balkans--look at the map from a distance. Renfrew tells him that the Gentleman Bomber is in Cambridge. Is that related to Werfner? At the cricket stadium, Lew either sees or doesn't see a mysterious armed man.
• Lew talks to Dr. Coombs de Bottle to ask about carbonyl chloride--what the Gentleman Bomber uses.
• The Grand Cohen suggests the Bomber might be a Messenger.
• Suddenly everyone else has left town and Lew's left alone.
• Lots of mail is being received with weird Swiss stamps, like what's on a letter from Yashmeen.
• Lew leaves the TWIT.

end part 3. page 693.

Where We're At: Parts 3.11-3.12: Bilocations

Kit

• Is in Gottingen with fellow students Gottlob and Humfried. Yashmeen's there, too. Kit meets Yashmeen.
• Yashmeen's out to prove Riemann's Hypothesis and she's feeling overly chaperoned.
• Kit compares how people are pouring into town with a silver camp in Colorado.
• They flirt; Yashmeen tells Kit about the TWIT and the "ghostly neo-Pythagorean cult of tetralatry or worship of the number four"
• Gottlob and Humfried show up at Kit's room; trying to hide, Yashmeen opens a door that didn't exist before and finds herself at the base of the city's coordinate system -- "return to zero." This kind of thing has happened to her before.
• Yashmeen explains to Kit that the political crisis in Europe maps into the crisis in (various school of) mathematics.
• The (1905) Russian Revolution is going on, and Russians are fleeing to all over Europe.
• Yashmeen is originally Russian; she was sold into slavery following a raid, and she sees her birth family in dreams.
• Yashmeen takes up with Gunther von Quassel.
• Gunther finds Yashmeen in Kit's room (with Humfried, as well) and challenges Kit to a duel. They end up talking math instead.
• Among the Russians is someone Yashmeen recognizes from Cambridge -- Sid, who's calling himself Chong. Werfner notices him as well and regards him as a spy sent by Renfrew.
• Meanwhile Kit begins to frequent the Applied Mechanics institute. He's interested in aerodynamics.

Lew Basnight

• Is still in London at the TWIT.
• Police Inspector Vance Aychrome of Scotland Yard comes to see him. Lew deals his (own?) Tarot cards and finds XII, The Hanged Man (and not XV, Renfrew and Werfner). The Hanged Man is currently Lamont Replevin, an antiques dealer. He's been selling a lot of stuff found by Germans in Inner Asia. Add to that that Sands was concerned about Shambhala and the Gas Office (communication by coal gas) is concerned about Replevin as well.
• Lew gets called to the Grand Cohen's office. Nookshaft's term as Grand Cohen is almost done; he's happy to be going back to being Associate Cohen soon. He tells Lew that Replevin has come into possession of a map of Shambhala--which everyone is after. But, notes Nookshaft, the map makes no sense unless viewed through a paramorphoscope.
• Lew picks the lock at Replevin's house (where the floor is "black floor-tiles, each surrounded by silvery grouting, some composite with that soft a shine to it") and finds Replevin hanging from the ceiling like the figure on the Tarot card listening to the daily gas broadcast (Lew tries to rescue him--oops). As a cover Lew explains himself as Gus Swallowfield, insurance underwriter for Pike's Peak Life and Casualty, and tries to sell insurance to Replevin. Replevin takes Lew up to his office, and Lew sees the map of Shambhala. He photographs it (purportedly photographing other stuff).
  
• Chaos = gas.

page 614.

Where We're At: Parts 2.9-2.11: Iceland Spar

TWIT/Lew Basnight:

• Lew Basnight is in London.
• Because they found him "emerg[ing] out of an explosion" Nigel and Neville have sponsored him for membership in TWIT (the True Worshippers of the Ineffable Tetractys), a psychic thing, like Madame Blavatsky ("[these groups] and other arrangements for seekers of certitude, of whom there seemed to be an ever-increasing supply as the century has rushed to its end and through some unthinkable zero and on out the other side"). He's to be a psychic detective for TWIT.
• The Grand Cohen of the London chapter of TWIT is Nicholas Nookshaft.
• Nookshaft explains the explosion as a passageway from another world and therefore Basnight may be some sort of something.
• Yashmeen Halfcourt is a Tzaddik (high level TWIT). She'll be studying math at Girton (Cambridge). She doesn't entirely believe that TWIT is what it claims to be ("it might be politics, or even some scheme to defraud").
• Yasmeen was a ward of Lt.-Colonel G. Auberon Halfcourt, who's believed to be somewhere in India.
• TWIT's mission is to track those 22 people or groups who embody the major arcana of the Tarot.
• The Devil, card #XV, is rival university professors Renfrew (at Cambridge) and Werfner (at Gottingen), who are competing experts and power-brokers in the relationship of the west, and specifically western development, in the Balkans and Asia Minor ("the Eastern Question"). The major issue at the moment is the development of the Baghdad railway (Europe through Turkey and on to the Persian Gulf--a major improvement in trade routes, even more beneficial than the Suez Canal)--who (Germany or Britain) will be allowed to do it and therefore will control it.
• Madame Natalia Eskimoff is a psychic. She used to be The Fool (one of the 22), but changed allegiances to the other side. She predicts that either Renfrew or Werfner will murder the other.
  
• Clive Crouchmas is a low-level TWIT member who works for government doing something related to the Ottoman territories in his day job--he's a channel between TWIT and Renfrew and Werfner.
• Basnight is still looking for Cyclomite dynamite, the hallucinogen.
• Dr. Coombs De Bottle runs something which investigates anarchist bombs and bombers. He's found bombs (poison gas grenades, actually) which are disguised as Australian cricket ball (Australia-England cricket matches are coming up) and which are being placed by the Gentleman Bomber of Headingly.
• Basnight is sent to Cambridge to meet with Renfrew. Renfrew is also trying to find the Gentleman Bomber of Headingly (?), who Basnight may recognize, and tries to hire Basnight to work for him (Renfrew) instead of TWIT--to bring the Bomber to him. Basnight tells the Cohen.

The Chums are in Venice.

• Their mission is to locate the Sfinciuno Itinerary, "a map of chart of post-Polo routes into Asia, believed by many to lead to the hidden city of Shambhala itself."
• The Bol'shaia Igra (Padzhitnoff) is present as well; Padzhitnoff is Counterfly's rival with a waitress.
• Domenico Sfinciuno is the Shadow-Doge-in-Exile. His family has been trading with the east (inner Asia) since the 1300s; their trading route (a chain of oases and Venetian settlements) developed into an alternative to the Silk Road that the Chums are supposed to locate.
• The Sfinciuno Itinerary is a spiritual quest and not a physical map or itinerary. Maybe. Stuff on page 249 about parallel worlds. Artisans on the Isola degli Specchi (Isle of Mirrors) (now flooded and underwater and uninhabitable, maybe unfindable) developed mirrors that revealed parallel worlds--the mirrors are paramorphoscopes. The Sfinciuno Itinerary "was encrypted as a paramorphic distortion meant to be redeemed from the invisible with the aide of one particular configuration of lenses and mirrors, whose exact specifications" have been lost. Something about Iceland spar and mirrors.
• Miles sees a vision that tells him that their quest for the Sfinciuno Itinerary is more for their own benefit than for Sfinciuno's. They're on a Pilgrimage--which is compared to the Franciscans' development of the Stations of the Cross to allow parishioners to journey to Jerusalem in place--"to save us from the blinding terror of having to make the real journey, from one episode to the next of the last day of Christ on Earth, and at last to the real, unbearable Jerusalem."
• Chick meets Renata, who reads his Tarot and finds XVI, The Tower--which signifies that the Campanile will be hit by some kind (metaphoric?) of lightning and two parties of some sort will fall.
• Something from some other existence fires at the Inconvenience and the Bol'shaia Igra and topples the Capanile.
• The Bol'shaia Igra have been trying for two years to assassinate Mr. Ryohei Uchida, in Japan; his Black Dragon Society tried to hire the Chums last year for routine aerial surveillance. The Black Dragon Society's purpose is to destroy the Russian presence in Manchuria--it's technically Russia's but Japan wants it for its opium and gold. (And here's another South Africa/gold reference.)
• Is the Bol'shaia Igra looking for the Sfinciuno Itinerary as well?

(p. 259)