The desert rendezvous with Steeply — the sixth-or-seventh night-long interface

pivotal · 30 April – 1 May YDAU

• When: the night of 30 April into pre-dawn/dawn 1 May YDAU, on an outcropping northwest of Tucson AZ (per the archive's dating ruling: every installment of the mountainside serial is this one night)
• What: Marathe, blanket-lapped in his customized fauteuil de rollent (machine pistol — a Sterling UL35 with Mag Na Port silencer — held beneath the blanket), meets the U.S.O.U.S. agent Steeply, who is in field-drag as a huge, ill-convincing female journalist ("Helen Steeply" of Moment magazine), assigned to cultivate the auteur's relatives and inner circle. They face out over the city, "an air of careless intimacy, as of old friends… or a long-married couple," speaking mostly Steeply's English. It is their "sixth or seventh" such meeting; both agencies "looked forward to these meetings"; "they accomplished little." The A.F.R. believe Marathe eidetic (near-perfect recall) — which Marathe privately knows is untrue. This is the frame for events 9-16.