GRGR(32) - Oneirine

[Wbfu Xbegorva]

p. 702: rather than become "word-enemies," Tchitcherine and Wimpe
shoot up: Oneirine theophosphate (Tchitcherine: "You mean _thio_phosphate,
don't you?" Thinks _indicating the presence of sulfur_. . . . Wimpe:
"I mean _theo_phosphate, Vaslav," _indicating the Presence of God._)

I notice that earlier not much was said of Oneirine; I had some thoughts
on it a while back while catching up, that might be of interest.

See p. 389. The neo-Gauchos (in their stolen U-boat) encounter the
U.S.S. John E. Badass and fire "Der Aal" (a torpedo) at them.

     Der Aal's pale tunnel of wake is set to intersect the Badass's
     desperate sea-squirm about midships. What intervenes is the drug
     Oneirine, as the hydrochloride. The machine from which it has
     emerged is the coffee urn in the mess hall of the John E. Badass.
     Playful Seaman Bodine - none other - has seeded tonight's grounds
     with a massive does of Laszlo Jamf's celebrated intoxicant, scored
     on Bodine's most recent trip to Berlin.

     The property of time-modulation peculiar to Oneirine was one of the
     first to be discovered by its investigators. "It is experienced,"
     writes Shetzline in his classic study, "in a subjective sense . . .
     uh . . . well. Put it this way. It's like stuffing wedges of silver
     sponge, _right_, _into_, your _brain_!" So, out in the mellow sea-return
     tonight, the two fatal courses do intersect in space, but not in
     time. Not nearly in time, heh heh. What Balaustegui fired his
     torpedo at was a darkrust old derelict, carried passively by
     currents and wind, but bringing to the night something of the
     skull: an announcement of metal emptiness, of shadow, that has
     spooked even stronger positivists than Belaustegui. And what passed
     into visual recognition from the small speeding pip on the Badass's
     radar screen proved to be a corpse, dark in color, perhaps a North
     African, which the crew on the destroyer's aft 3-inch gun mount
     spend half an hour blowing to pieces as the gray warship slid by at
     a safe distance, fearful of plague.

When I first read this, I read it not as saying that the time modulation
made the Gauchos miss, or anything of that sort - "Der Aal's... set to
intersect the Badass... midships." They will be hit; but that inevitability
is prevented by the drug. So I took the phenomenon to be more spectacular
than some fuzziness on the crews' parts; this is more like time dilation
on the _long-term_ scale; what the crews sea are old, long-dead ships.
Their courses are so warped that the times they occupy (think of points
on a timeline here) are moved far apart.

This seems to be "real" in the story, due to the effects of
Oneirine. But how does it effect both the Badass crew, and the
U-boat crew? And, the effect seems a little pronounced, for a drug
related to morphine and heroin (according to the section it was
introduced, where Tchitcherine chats with Wimpe, his supplier and
chemist). So, real or not? And if not, can it be tied to one
character's mind? This is the case with many, if not all, of the
surreal passages - there are clues that they are drug-induced, or
"internal monologue" sort of things. The specific reminder of
Balaustegui's positivism seems to suggest that the characters
have trouble with figuring this one out, more than normal.

pp. 702-3 go on to paint a more scientific picture of the drug -
all its strange effects are confidently (and by the narrator)
attributed to its molecular form, even studied in its own academic
journal. Hallucinations recur - "Certain themes, 'mantic archetypes' ...
will find certain individuals again and again...". These are
ghost-like and referred to as "hauntings." They are often "so
ordinary, so conventional -- Jeaach calls them 'the dullest
hallucinations known to psychopharmacology' -- that they are
only recognized as hauntings through some radical though
plausible violation of possibility: the presence of the dead,
journeys by the same route and means where one person will set out
later but arrive earlier...".

How does this description reflect on the torpedo scene?

Oh, and drug paranoia... nothing remarkable. "Like other sorts of
paranoia, it is nothing less than the onset, the leading edge,
of the discovery that _everything is connected_...".

Tomorrow, TCHITCHERINE'S HAUNTING and a couple musings on small caps,
too.



Josh

-- 
josh blog: http://www.public.iastate.edu/~kortbein/blog/