BEg2 ch 34 - karmic balance

[Michael Bailey]

“THE PHONE CALL TO IGOR isn’t one she’s looking forward to. Whatever the
karmic balance is outstanding between him and Gabriel Ice, she was
deliberately avoiding it till Misha and Grisha, noodges from beyond the
daytime envelope she would much rather keep inside, made this impossible
anymore.”

Maxine hashes out with Igor what was the dealio with Lester Traipse. Igor
said it wasn’t just the money, Traipse had seen something, and had reached
out to Igor asking him to intervene with Ice. Specifically Traipse offered
to forget whatever it was he’d seen.

Igor doesn’t tell Maxine what that was, but it can’t be conducive to calm
for her: she has seen the Stinger footage and the vircator footage - but
apparently whatever Traipse saw was even worse.

The reference to karmic balance ties in with “Lester said, ‘Only choice I
have left is DeepArcher.’”

And with earlier references during Maxine’s tour to people living within
DeepArcher who no longer live on earth.

I associate this loosely with Takeshi’s karmic adjustment business in
_Vineland_ and the Thanatoids.

So many patently unjust outcomes cry out for some kind of recourse.

As Bob Dylan sang, “Death is not the end.”

In _Vineland_, Takeshi and DL are working on some kind of solutions for
Thanatoids such as Weed, and maybe eventually Vond.

The nascent computer stuff in VL has burgeoned into the Internet and
DeepArcher in BE.

DL & Takeshi were meeting their Thanatoid clients in barbecue joints and
celebrity roasts (“Knight of the Living Dead”) and helping them by means
largely  unspelled-out in the novel.

Their karmic adjustment biz has a more sharply fraud-focused BE counterpart
in Maxine’s “Tail ‘Em and Nail ‘Em” - and information about injustice’s
depredations on the dead and the living is more available than ever in
prosaic form on the Internet & instantiated poetically in DeepArcher.