The Process

9. IT

“IT!” poor Amos always cries when I bring him in this portfolio of headaches; Princess Mya’s affairs. “Please don’t tag me with all that again, Rolf!” he begs me. “I’m It, already,” he says. And, now, that’s quite literally true since he has been taken prisoner and tortured, we have word tonight, by the captains in Tam. An emergency, a most unfortunate emergency arose abruptly during those hours we were out of communication with the Himmers; most disturbing, the first time it’s happened, ever. As Amos saw it, there was nothing for him to do but risk a night flight to Tam to try and save his twin sister, Freeky Fard, who is one of our Players, of course. As I now understand it from the Princess herself, this unique break in the very communication on which all our success depends was entirely due to the events surrounding your, ah, contact by means of the Saharan Seal. While the Seal is suspended there are no available words; or so I am led to believe. Well. It is interesting, I suppose, to see the way in which Mr. Himmer’s unorthodox, ah, methods work out. However, Amos and I have prognosticated your arrival or the arrival of someone just, ah, like you at any rate, long before we became cognizant of Mr. Himmer’s, ah, game. Nevertheless, let us, for a moment, call it just that: a game.

Well, what has happened in game-terms: what have we here? Here we have the newly-made king in “Malamut,” beyond a doubt, but one of his Towers of, ah, Strength has been taken by Tam. That is Amos Africanus. This other, ah, Tower of Strength, here; i.e., myself, must move off to Basel immediately because Basel is Banking, you know. A great deal is involved. There is a plane waiting for me out on the field, ready to take off as soon as we have lights, so I must be very brief. To go on with the game: the consort, while making a king, has been overtaken; first, by a voluntary abstinence from words and, then, an acute shortage of breath. That is Thay. Thay Himmer needs immediate medical attention, we agree on that, but: is Francis-X. Fard a competent medical practitioner? That I cannot answer. Nonetheless, it has been decided that the next move will be to transport Thay to Tam tonight in the other Lear jet: that’s what the princess flies best. You will be seven aboard: the plane’s maximum load. There will be several Players on hand to help. Olav Pesonius, a Finnish friend, whom Mr. Himmer calls his Little White Reindeer, was brought into “Malamut” today by the Foulba, along with the younger Africanus sister, Ana Lyse, and a rather unfortunate American newspaperwoman called Mag Media, I am afraid. Here, by the way, is Olav’s journal of his trip down here overland; it might amuse you to run through it before you take your plane, tonight or early tomorrow morning before dawn. The Princess Mya has done really very little night flying: you might insist on a dawn flight, if you can. I say advisedly, if you can, because the king merely modifies moves: he cannot initiate any move until he has been crowned. The king is simply a Champion, you see, until he has been shown to his people — in this case, the Foulba, first. There will be no tiresome parades or risky public appearances. Don’t worry — none of that! We will project you on television when it is feasible — the Sahara has been widely transistorized, you realize — but we expect to do an inaugural flyover while the Foulba bards and court poets are acclaiming you on international shortwave bands. However, before this can take place, you must first reclaim and rescue your other Tower of Strength from, ah, Tam. That is Amos, naturally, on whom a great deal depends.

Now, how can this best be done? A frontal attack on Tam would be absurd. The only way for a restricted number of people to take an impregnable fortress is from inside. You will, therefore, gain admittance to the Steel Star by flying in and declaring yourselves a medical emergency. Voilá! International law obliges Tam to allow you to land. The hypocrite colonels do have an iron lung in there because they call it a hospital. Ergo! You do a judo on them and play Thay the Consort into the Trojan Lung. Princess Mya must follow with her Borbor in hand, which she will instill into the drinking water of, at least, Captain Mohamed. The captain, from all I hear, may well turn out to be some other color of horse in Thay Himmer’s psychic sweepstakes, but the princess herself is running this race, as you know. What she wants out of it, first and foremost, is freedom: she’ll tell you so herself. “I want all the freedom in the world!” She says so every day. Freedom, first of all, for Amos and the Fards because they are, if you like, full-fledged Players. Then, freedom for the entire cabinet of First Wave ex-ministers who are being held prisoner in Tam. Once their considerable, ah, human ability has been increased by GRAMMA and they have been properly, ah, secured by Mya’s Borbor, they will form an ideal super-government for Africa; for the world.

All that postulates Phase Five and Phase Five will link “Malamut” on the Atlantic to Tam in the center of the Sahara, its very umbilicus. This will be done through the atomic center — which very conveniently for us, lies abandoned by the French at Reggan, exactly midway between here and Tam. Since they pulled their rods out of the pile, the entire installation has been in the hands of the famous Belgian physicist Dr. Henri Feldzahler, who is an old friend of the Africanus family and a Player, too, in his way. Our contact with him has been through Amos’s sister, Freeky Fard: you see her importance, of course. We need Dr. Feldzahler and his atomic artifact to blow out a harbor right here below “Malamut.” The obstruction, here, is the famous offshore reef, the natural bar which has cut off this bump of Africa forever from outside contact and left this whole section of the Sahara so, ah, sensitive to our approach. We shall, ah, inherit this part of the earth. From Basel, I fly to New York to arrange with the UN our plebiscite, which we will hold here for the Foulba, who will be voting for the first time in their long cultural life. The necessary documents are in the hands of Dr. Fard, so you see why we must get to him right away. The Foulba will vote in a phalanx which we can airlift back and forth to wherever voting is to be set up. They are very mobile by, ah, nature — being nomads — and they have all been, ah, grammatized: “Hello Yes Hello.” They will vote as a man, of course, for you.

The Board has often discussed your, ah, image and I must say you fit it very, ah, adequately, indeed. I am completely, ah, cognizant of Mya’s judgment in men, having lived through all of her seven husbands, after all. You, on the other hand, are something quite else again. You were found by the Foundation for Fundamental Findings — you will recall our original interview in the Hotel Saint Georges of Algut. At the time, it was not possible to speak to you frankly in front of that man Knoblock, who represented the CIA. They were trying to infiltrate the Foundation. You can imagine how hopeless to offer us mere money but we needed them for the time being. We were casting for a man in a million; someone as unique as you yourself; someone, if you will excuse me, someone odd. Then, we had to garner, microfilm and destroy — utterly wipe out any documentary proof of that person’s previous existence. We needed the, ah, special services to get into the files in Albany, N.Y., for example. Beginning with your birth certificate, we have erased Ulys O. Hanson, III, “Hassan Merikani,” etc.; the infant, the child, the boy and the man.

In Present Time, you are the great-grandson of Ma el Ainin, the mahdi or miraculous leader who stirred up the Sahara a couple of generations ago. In his time of triumphs, your great-grandfather sent your grandfather to America to meet Marcus Garvey and the man called Elijah, a predestined name. In the time of his troubles, your father was smuggled out of the country to the States as a babe and the, ah, dynasty died out — or seemed to have done. You will not be asked to preach but your great-grandfather, old Ma el Ainin, was a fiery preacher, fulminating at the Foulba about what he called a “Desert Democracy,” with him as sole chief of state and, ah, immortal, of course. He turned out not to be, but, as no one dared prod him, and everyone around him was blind, they didn’t even know it until long after he was dead. In the heat of the desert, he dried up into a leathery mummy under which they staggered around and around through the sand with it on a palanquin, carrying it around on their shoulders for years. Your great-grandfather was called Ma el Ainin, which means: “Watery Eyes,” because he had very highly contagious trachoma all of his life. He could always manage to see out of one eye until the day that he died but he blinded everybody around him by sticking his dirty fingers into their eyes. You know the phrase: “Le borgne est roi! In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king!” It was a very efficient way to govern these people. It ensured him the utmost in love and fearful respect that the Sahara enjoys. Prince Pio would have liked to, ah, pull something like this but he was not a man of such caliber. The Sahara is a harsh and scurvy place, is it not?

Before I begin to go into what we envisage as your role in all this, let me break out this bottle of American Borbor — ah, excuse me: I meant American Bourbon, of course. Alas, we have nothing glamorous to offer you with it, like ice. No one around here seems to be able to keep the generator going … well, cheers! Now, the Board originally intended to have Mr. Himmer teach you faith-healing, as being more in the line of what the UN approves these days but, now that Thay has fallen silent, I really don’t know. The Board felt very strongly that your official title should be released immediately to the world press — a scoop for this Media woman, perhaps, but it may be more than she deserves. We’ll see. In any case, there is still the question of your title itself. The Board felt it should in-corporate all the singular strength of the Sahara. If you do not object to the word; its Soul. The natives all tell us that the spirit of the Sahara is named Ghoul. The Africans fear and respect Ghoul. Therefore, one suggestion was Great Ghoul or Grand Ghoul. Both voted down. You can imagine, perhaps, whose suggestion it was that, in order to impress the impact of immortality on your people, you should be called The Ghost of Ghoul. It has been decided that it will have the greatest possible impact everywhere and, above all, in the American States where the, ah, television culture and the Garveyite heritage of Black Power must be considered, if you were to be known quite simply as: The Ghoul. How does that strike you: powerful, is it not? I need hardly give you a detailed exposé of the latitude this title allows you. Everything is permitted to Ghoul, they say, and nothing is true. Nothing … well …

Ah, yes! Now, where was I? Living down here in the Sahara on this blank page of history, I have become a little mystical myself. Mysticals are much more common than you might think, in our Switzerland; despite our republican sentiments. My first mystical meeting was with Princess Mya — Madame PP Strangleblood, as she was then. I was utterly “grammatized” the minute she laid eyes on me. Then, later, “Hello Yes Hello,” gave me the ability to communicate with people like the naked Foulba out there where you see the lights of their camp-city; with your primary friend, Hamid; with you. I am a very down to earth Swiss person of business who can begin to grasp the amplitude of Madame Mya’s magnificent design. Madame knows how to take things: that’s Swiss! Quite apart from her stupendous advantages of beauty, intelligence, power, culture and wealth, she holds the final inestimable trump. “I am yellow!” she can proclaim, as she did to the huge Chinese delegation we received here and sent on their way. The Chinese offered to build her a solar-powered water-distillation chain-project to be strung right across the Sahara from “Malamut” to the Red Sea, but Mya just thanked them sweetly and said: “I am a poor Asiatic colonial victim of the whites.” Now, who else could say that and mean it; I ask you? The woman is colossal, immense!

Just let me brief you on some of the, ah, shape of our projects; going through them alphabetically.

A: stands for: Ability, the Creation of (see GRAMMA), then: Affrica, Mrs. Francis-Xavier Fard (see AFRICANUS, family). All the headings in capital letters refer you to the very complete electronic library we have here; those panels over there and that screen. Alas, as I have already said, the generator …

B: stands for: BIO-KEY. Bio-Key is the name of our pharmaceutical combine based on Mexico, producing steroids for the Pill. Fundamental Funds won the patents to the thirty-two-stage process for extracting steroids from the Mexican giant yam. Weight for weight, steroids are worth about seventeen times the value of gold; some ninety-one million pre-devaluation dollars a ton. Today? Pull any figure you like out of the air. Right here directly below us, Madame Mya is sitting on the biggest steroid bank in the world. Unfortunately, steroids have to be refrigerated. Every time I become aware that our generator is not pounding away, I shudder to think of our steroid stock. After all, that’s a good many yams. Mya is always complaining, too, that changes in temperature are not good for her Charles Heidsieck champagne.

There is no file for Borbor, you will notice: maybe she keeps the bubbles of that in her head.

C: stands for: Chemicals: (Private File). This file contains all her work on the hallucinogens in Basel. You might find the Borbor formula in here but only Mya knows which one it is.

D: stands for: DOMINGUEZ (Lindissima Reuther y Dominguez, deceased). Poor Lindissima, she was really a very foolish woman. “All attraction and then no traction,” Mya once said of her. It was a bit cruel because Lindissima was no match for her. This file contains all the transfers, the property transfers by which this little corner of the hump of Africa became ours. There is a rumor, put out by the Spaniards, that Mya did away with Lindissima but that is as absurd as the story that she killed Prince Pio, Dr. Labesse. La Reuther had a terrible barbiturate problem and she tried to keep up with Mya, drink for drink. She was found on the floor with a broken glass in her hand. Pio died from sheer megalomania: he thought he was Hakim, Caliph of Bagdad, and walked off in the desert alone; trailing his gold encrusted burnous to wipe out his footsteps. He shouted: “I’ll be back in no time!” as he disappeared over a dune. Mya ran him down in her jeep but he died in her arms, whispering: “Assassinate everybody!”

This little file must not fall into the hands of the Spanish authorities, who claim that the entire ex-Reuther estate, including Cape Noon and “Malamut” is still under their authority and jurisdiction. The UN has still not yet set a date for the last of the Spaniards to leave but we are asking for a plebiscite, the day that they do.

E: stands for: Emerald Seal. That is, the so-called Scarab of the Sahara which is now in your possession. The name was given to this artifact by Mr. Himmer, who likes to live under the impression that he got it for nothing. Here are the documents. This is the result of the assay done at Hatton Gardens in London: Green stone: 45.7 carats. Specific gravity, 2.70: emerald. Here we have the report from the British Museum: “No ancient artifact of Egyptian provenance was made out of emerald.” And, here, you have a record of the sum paid by our agent to a certain Mohamed Imsak of Cairo: quite staggering, as you can see.

F: stands for: 1. FARD (see files). 2. Farout Islands (Himmer estate). As he may have told you, Mr. Himmer chooses to own nothing; nothing at all. What little money he had when they married — it could not have come to a million predevaluation dollars, at the most — he handed over to the Board. This file, therefore, is empty. That brings us to: 3. FUNDAMENTAL FUNDS, my own particular preoccupation and, then: 4. FOULBA, which will be yours. Here are some pictures of the boys during one of their annual orgies. I am not entirely in sympathy with these people. In fact, I think it might be said that we have had an, ah, floop with the Foulba. The Himmers may like to think they got them for nothing but the Foulba cost us a fortune, daily, in fodder alone. Just to keep them and their cows on this idle desert around “Malamut” means that we fly tons of hay in from Switzerland, three times a week. We call it the “Milk Run” and that is what I will be catching to Basel, tonight, if we ever get any lights on the field.

As you may know, the Foulba have lived for many a millennia in a state approaching symbiosis with their lovely lyre-horned cattle. As a Swiss, I love cows and of all cows these antique animals are the most beautiful. When we introduced the Foulba to “Hello Yes Hello,” it swept the Sahara as soon as we had paired off a few. Previously, there had been no real communication between them: “Never trust a fellow Foulba,” they say about themselves, ingenuously. A Foulba’s best friends were always his four-footed ones into whose soft furry ears the Foulba used to confide their infantile fantasies. They lived off their cattle without ever killing them, drinking their milk and enough of their salty blood for both man and beast to keep going together. Now, they have suddenly stopped; now, for the first time in their long history, they have become Assassins to their animals, killers of cows, cannibals. I don’t mean that they slaughter them; if only they did! Out there where you see the flickering lights of their campfires on the mainland, even now, they are feasting on raw, still-living beef. They hack quivering steaks out of the flanks of their bellowing, bleeding animals, who stumble and stagger away to die in the dark while their former lovers, the Foulba, cram their mouths with the meat. I have been a vegetarian all my life: I cannot pretend to judge these people, but I do know why it happened. They cut into their cattle, you understand, when the cattle could not communicate. “Hello Yes Hello,” said into a long silky ear got only: “Moo!” in reply and that is why those cattle are dying so atrociously out there tonight that you can hear their pitiful bellowing over the cry of the sea when the wind is right. For me, the lesson has been that we must communicate that the other may not devour us, but the Himmers insist there is much more to it than that and, no doubt, they are right.

Now, we come to the letter, H.

H: stands for: HANSON, Ulys Othello of Ithaca, New York: I think you will be amazed by our documentation on this person. If ever they get the generator going, you must project all the material on the screen over there. As I said, the original documents have been destroyed and all this file will be demagnetized and, ah, disintegrated the day you actually become the Ghoul.

H: also stands for: HORMONE (see BIO-KEY). You may find this horrid or endlessly, ah, fascinating. Some of the ramifications are, at present, quite distasteful; such as our dealings with Brazilian sources through Recife, where we have managed to tap a pituitary supply in the Amazonian jungle which looks as though it may be drying up. Amos has been concerned with the, ah, practical aspects of this business. It grew out of Mya’s determination to get her money out of, ah, money; long before the dollar was devaluated, as a matter of fact. Mya, today, is the world’s richest woman because she holds the key to the future in hormones: she’s got a grip on the Life Force, itself. The financing of “Malamut” has devolved on me. The, ah, philosophic, ah, theory, behind “Malamut,” we owe to Thay in his role as Bishop Himmer when he proposes the stockpiling of human pituitary glands as a sort of, ah, religious principle of, ah, Eternal Life. All our problems may be said to be genetic: it all depends who you like to have around. Race, color, creed, crime, cramps in the belly and death can be controlled only by hormones and hormones are horribly hard to come by. Each one of us has only one pituitary so, to prepare a thimble-sized stockpile of these hormones, we need five thousand cadavers. Your pituitary is a gland the size of a pea; right here at the base of your skull.

Now, if we are not merely to fulfill but surpass our, ah, purpose here on this planet, we need every single one of those pituitaries out there existing in Present Time. To begin with, the hormone content of that entire Foulba nation out there, nearly two million of them hacking apart their live cows, could be carried around in a briefcase. …