Marathe and Steeply: the betrayal and the quarry

The Entertainment as the gravitational center that organizes even a spy's identity. Steeply reveals that his whole current existence in the field — the prosthetic breasts, the woman-journalist cover, the false name — has been assembled for a single purpose: to approach "the Entertainment's alleged filmmaker's relatives and inner circles." A man has been physically and biographically rebuilt so he can get near the family of the thing's maker. It's the samizdat's reach demonstrated obliquely: the lethal cartridge doesn't only pull viewers toward the screen, it pulls the entire counter-apparatus toward its source, bending an operative's very self into a shape designed to close on the Incandenzas. The quarry of the long desert night is not a person but a film, and everything Steeply is has been tailored to hunt it.