PNS 553Partial List of Wishes on Evening Stars for This Period: Let me find that chicken coop the old lady told me about. Well, Ludwig. Slothrop finds him one morning by the shore of some blue anonymous lake, a surprisingly fat kid of eight or nine, gazing into the water, crying, shuddering all over in rippling fat-waves. His lemming's name is Ursula, and she has run away from home. Ludwig's been chasing her all the way north from Pritzwalk. He's pretty sure she's heading for the Baltic, but he's afraid she'll mistake one of those inland lakes for the sea, and jump into that instead -- "One lemming, kid?" "I've had her for two years," he sobs, "she's been fine, she's never tried to -- I don't know. Something just came over her. "Quit fooling. Lemmings never do anything alone. They need a crowd. It gets contagious. You see, Ludwig, they overbreed, it goes in cycles, when there are too many of them they panic and run off looking for food. I learned that in college, so I know what I'm talking about. Harvard. Maybe that Ursula's just after a boy friend or something." "She would have let me know." "I'm sorry." "Russians aren't sorry about anything." "I'm not a Russian." "Is that why you took off all your insignia?" They look at each other. "Uh, well, you need a hand finding that lemming?" This Ludwig, now, may not be completely Right in the Head. He is apt to drag Slothrop up out of sleep in the middle of the night, waking up half the DP encampment, spooking the dogs and babies, absolutely sure that Ursula is out there, just beyond the circle of the fire, looking in at him, seeing him but not the way she used to. He leads Slothrop into detachments of Soviet tankers, into heaps of ruins high-crested as the sea, that collapse around and, given a chance, on top of you the minute you step in, also into sucking marshes where the reeds pull away in your fingers when you try to grab them, and the smell is of protein disaster. This is either maniac faith, or something a little darker: it does dawn on Slothrop at last that if there's any impulse to suicide around her it ain't Ursula's, it's Ludwig's -- why, the lemming may not even exist! Still ... hasn't Slothrop, once or twice, seen something? scooting along ahead down gray narrow streets lined with token saplings in one or another of these Prussian garrison-towns, places whose whole industry and meaning was soldiering, their barracks and stone walls deserted now -- or-or crouching by the edge of some little lake, watching clouds, white sails of gaff-riggers against the other shore so green, foggy, and far away, getting secret instruction from waters whose movements in lemming-time are oceanic, irresistible, and slow enough, solid-looking enough at least to walk out on safely .... "That's what Jesus meant," whispers the ghost of Slothrop's first American ancestor William, "venturing out on the Sea of Galilee. He saw it from the lemming point of view. Without the millions who had plunged and drowned, there could have been no miracle. The successful loner was only the other part of it: the last piece to the jigsaw puzzle, whose shape had already been created by the Preterite, like the last blank space on the table." "Wait a minute. You people didn't have jigsaw puzzles." "Aw, shit." |