Free? What's free?

[Doc Sportello]

"It dawns on Slothrop, literally, through the yellowbrown window shade,
that this is his first day Outside. His first free morning. He doesn't have
to go back. Free? What's free? He falls asleep at last. A little before
noon a young woman lets herself in with a passkey and leaves him the
papers. He is now an English war correspondent named Ian Scuffling."

Plot question (I know right?). Am I supposed to assume Waxwing etc. are
with PISCES etc. or in opposition? Or am I supposed to be confused as I am?

Side note. That paragraph reminded me a lot of Bleeding Edge especially
when I read this on the next page:

"The War has been reconfiguring time and space into it's own image. The
track runs in different networks now. What appears to be destruction is
really the shaping of railroad spaces to other purposes, intentions he can
only, riding through it for the first time, begin to feel the leading edges
of..."

On one hand Slothrop is free from "The White Visitation" but is now
vulnerable to some other, greater, might-as-well-be cosmic threat. His
freedom is a paradox since it seems to tend him toward another structuring.
The War, like the Internet, is not just destruction and chaos, it's being
kneaded, potentially to create whatever They want. Indeed "What is free?"
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