So far, the news sounded merely quaint, an exotic, unimportant aberration in the faraway, and therefore easily dismissed, South Pacific. But what followed was not so readily ignored. Thousands of welldisciplined “Filbistani” revolutionaries had made coordinated armed assaults on Lilliput-Blefuscu’s key installations, taking the very largely ceremonial Elbee army by surprise, and engaging the Bolgolamites occupying the Parliament, the radio and TV stations, the telephone company, and the offices of the Lillicon Internet server, as well as the aerodrome and seaport, in fierce and prolonged fighting. The foot soldiers wore the usual hats, shades and kerchiefs to hide their faces, but some officers were more grandly attired. The cyborgs of Akasz Kronos led the way in what, Malik Solanka realized, was no less than a third “revolt of the living dolls.” Many “Dollmakers” and “Zameens” were seen, confidently directing operations. “Let the fittest survive!” the Fremen were heard to shout as they charged the Bolgolamite positions. At the end of this bloody day, the FRM had gained the victory, but the price was high: hundreds dead, hundreds more seriously injured or classified as walking wounded. The medical facilities of Lilliput-Blefuscu were having great difficulty in caring for the casualties with the urgency that their injuries made necessary. Some of the wounded died while waiting to be treated. The noise of pain and fear filled the little nation’s hospital corridors throughout the night.

As Lilliput-Blefuscu resumed contact with the outside world, it emerged that both President Golbasto Gue and the leader of the original and now failed coup, Skyresh Bolgolam, had been taken alive. The leader of the FRM uprising, who was dressed from head to foot in a Kronos/Dollmaker costume and who referred to himself only as Commander Akasz, went briefly on LBTV to announce his operation’s success, to praise the martyrs, and to announce, with clenched fist, “The fittest have survived!” Then he announced his demands: the restitution of the ditched Golbasto constitution and the trial of the Bolgolam gang for high treason, which, under Elbee law, was punishable by death, although no executions had occurred in living memory and none would be expected in this case. He further stated that he, “Commander Akasz of the Fremen,” demanded the right to be consulted about LilliputBlefuscu’s next government and had his own slate of candidates for inclusion in that administration. He specified no post for himself, a piece of false modesty that fooled nobody. Bal Thackeray in Bombay and JBrg Haider in Austria had proved that a man didn’t have to hold public office to run the show. A genuine strongman had emerged. Until his demands were met, “Commander Akasz” concluded, he would “invite the respected president and the traitor Bolgolam to remain in the Parliament building as his personal guests.”

Solanka was troubled; the old problem of ends and means again. “Commander Akasz” didn’t sound to him like the servant of a just cause, and while, Solanka granted, Mandela and Gandhi weren’t the only models for revolutionaries to consider, bully-boy tactics needed always to be called by their right name. Neela, though, was elated. “The incredible thing is that it’s so unlike Indo-Lillys to be like this: militarized, disciplined, taking action in their own defense instead of just weeping and wringing their hands. What a miracle he’s worked, don’t you think?” She was leaving for Mildendo in the morning, she said. “Be happy for me. This coup makes my film really sexy. The phone’s been ringing off the hook all day.” Malik Solanka, standing at one of the high peaks of his life, feeling, like Gulliver or Alice, like a giant among pygmies, invincible, invulnerable, suddenly felt tiny invisible fingers tugging at his garments, as if a horde of little goblins were trying to drag him down to Hell. “It is him, you know,” Neela added. “‘Commander Akasz,’ I mean. I’ve seen the tape and there’s no doubt. That body: I’d know it again anywhere. He really is quite a guy.”

The speed of contemporary life, thought Malik Solanka, outstripped the heart’s ability to respond. Jack’s death, Neela’s love, the defeat of fury, Asmaan’s elephant, Eleanor’s grief, Mila’s hurt, the contemptuous triumphalism of the plumber Schlink, summer’s end, the Bolgolam coup in Lilliput-Blefuscu, Solanka’s own jealousy of the FRM radical Babur, his quarrel with Neela, the shrieks in the night, the telling of his back-story, the high-speed development of the Galileo-Puppet Kings project and its gigantic success, the countercoup of “Commander Akasz,” Neela’s imminent departure: such an acceleration of the temporal flow was almost comically overpowering. Neela herself felt none of this; a creature of speed and motion, a child of her hopped-up age, she accepted the current rate of change as normal. “You sound so old when you talk that way,” she chided him. “Stop it and come here at once.” Their farewell lovemaking was unhurriedly, deliriously prolonged. No problems there of excessive postmodern rapidity. There were evidently still a few areas in which slowness was valued by the young.

He slipped into dreamless sleep but awoke, two hours later, into a nightmare. Neela was still there—she was often happy to sleep over at Solanka’s place, although she continued to dislike waking up beside him in her own bed, a double standard that he’d accepted without demur, but there was a stranger in the room, there actually was a large, no, a very large man standing by Solanka’s side of the bed, holding up—oh, awful mirror of Solanka’s own misdeed!—an ugly-looking knife. Coming fully awake at once, Solanka sat bolt upright in bed. The intruder greeted him, vaguely waving the blade in his direction. “Professor,” Eddie Ford said, not without courtesy. “Glad you could be with us tonight.”

Once before, some years ago in London, Solanka had had a knife pulled on him by a flash young black kid, who leapt out of a convertible and insisted on using a phone booth that Solanka was just entering. “It’s a woman, man,” he reasoned. “It’s urgent, right?” When Solanka said that his own call was important, too, the youth freaked out. “I’ll cut you, you bastard, don’t think I won’t. I don’t give a fuck, me.” Solanka had worked hard on his body language. The thing was not to act too scared or too confident. A fine line had to be walked. He also fought to keep his voice level. “That would be bad for me,” he’d said, “but also bad for you.” Then came a staring match, which Solanka was not stupid enough to win. “Okay, fuck you, you cunt, okay?” the knife man said, and went in to make his call. “Hey, baby, forget him, baby, let me show you what that sad sack could never know.” He began crooning into the telephone receiver lines that Solanka recognized as Bruce Springsteen’s. “Tell me now, baby, is your daddy home, did be go and leave you all alone, uh-huh, I got a bad desire; oh, oh, oh, I’m on fire.” Solanka walked quickly away, rounded a corner, and fell back, trembling, against a wall.

So here it was again, but this time it was personal, and body Language and voice skills might not suffice. This time there was a woman sleeping beside him in his bed. Eddie Ford had begun to walk slowly back and forth at the foot of the bed. “I know what’s in your head, man,” he said. “Big fuckin’ movie buff like you. Lincoln Plaza, et cetera, sure, sure. Knife in the Dark, yougot it right off, second Pink Panther movie, featurin’ the lovely Elke Sommer, am I right.” The film had been called A Shot in the Dark, but Solanka decided not to correct Eddie for the moment. “Fuckin’ knife movies,” Eddie mused. “Mila liked Bruno Ganz in Knife in the Head, but for me it has to be the old classic, Polanski’s first feature, Knife in the Water. A man starts playin’ with a knife to impress his wife. She fancied that fuckin’ blond hitchhiker. That was a bad fuckin’ mistake, lady. That was grievous.”