Russell Hoban

Fremder

Once we had a country and we thought it fair,

Look in the atlas and you’ll find it there:

We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.

W.H. Auden, Songs and Other Musical Pieces

who do you have to fuck to get into this picture?

Dory Previn, starlet starlet on the screen, who will follow norma jean?

1

Out of the tomb, we bring Badroulbadour,

Within our bellies, we her chariot.

Here is an eye. And here are, one by one,

The lashes of that eye and its white lid.

Here is the cheek on which that lid declined,

And, finger after finger, here, the hand,

The genius of that cheek. Here are the lips,

The bundle of the body and the feet.

… ….

Out of the tomb we bring Badroulbadour.

Wallace Stevens, ‘The Worms at Heaven’s Gate’

In the deep chill and the darkness of the Fourth Galaxy, in the black sparkle of deep space, oh so lonely, see a figure in a blue coverall tumbling over and over as it comes towards you: no space suit, no helmet, no oxygen. Is he dead? He can’t be alive, can he? What’s in his mind now? Are there pictures frozen in his mind?

Pictures in the mind! Words also. Again last night I had the dream, the one in which it was made known to me, perhaps by a written message, perhaps by the sound of distant weeping, that the rats were lamenting the removal of their sacred objects. I have never dreamed this dream on the planet Badr al-Budur but perhaps one night I shall.

Badr al-Budur (everybody calls it Badru) in the Fourth Galaxy is a little off the beaten track: because of El-Niño variables in that sector you can’t flicker to it, you have to go to Hubble Straits and jet from there. Badru is a place you stop at on the way to somewhere else, an in-between place, a middle-of-the-night scene change where you breathe bottled air that smells like LavaKleen and wait for the next jet to Erehwon or Xanadu or wherever.

There’s nothing on Badru but the spaceport which is mostly empty except for robot sweepers humming through the echoing silence under dim blue noctolux lamps. Clocks, too, that tell you what day and time it is in London, Tokyo, New York, and so on. There’s MIKHAIL’S QWIKSNAK, a multilingual cafeteria in pink, purple, red, blue, green, and yellow neon (with missing letters) where you can get GALAKT K MIKS, SPUDNIK FRY, KRASNAYA K LA, and indigestion or worse. Nearby is Mikhail’s Bistro where you can get a better class of indigestion. Next to it is a gift shop where robots fluent in twenty currencies will sell you clockwork orreries made in New Taiwan, models of the Stephen Hawking, pornoscopes featuring the Arabian Nights Princess Badr al-Budur with her lover Qamar al-Zaman, key rings with bits of polished budurite, and tea towels that say, ‘I’VE BEEN THRU BADRU. HAVE YOU?’ Not surprisingly, Badru orbits the planet Qamar al-Zaman which is the rubbish tip for that sector.

There are a mini-cine and a cybercade in the spaceport but my favourite night spot on Badru is the Q-BO SLEEP that beckons in purple neon, SLEEP & SHOWER IO CR. PER HOUR: each cube with its high-mileage futon, shower, sink, and toilet. The blankets have a grey prison look and the towels are only a little thicker than the toilet paper. To check in you insert your card and punch in your hours, then you get your Hi-REM or Dropout tab from the dispenser and you’re bye-bye until your jump to Erehwon or Xanadu or wherever.

Nobody lives on Badru except cockroaches; the staff are all robots and the supplies are delivered weekly by Mikhail’s Intergalaktik. Mikhail loses money on it but he had to take it on to get the Fourth-Galaxy franchise. What I like about Badru is that it’s so much what it is, so much the appearance of itself printed on the very thin membrane that we call reality. On the other side of that membrane is the endless becoming that swallows up years and worlds, Badr al-Budur, Mikhail’s Intergalaktik, even the dream rats and their sacred objects, in the dark of no remembrance.

I was only a few megaklicks off Badru when they found me drifting in space on the morning of 4 November 2052. No space suit, no helmet, no oxygen, and the pictures in my mind all frozen.

2

From the hagg and hungrie goblin

That into raggs would rend ye,

And the spirit that stands by the naked man

In the Book of Moones defend yee!

That of your five sounde sences

You never be forsaken,

Nor wander from your selves with Tom

Abroad to begg your bacon.

Anonymous, ‘Tom O’ Bedlam’s Song’

The fourth of November 2052 was my thirtieth birthday. What happened that morning in the Fourth Galaxy came to be known as the Clever Daughter incident, and after it they kept me at Hubble Straits Space Station for three weeks for a Level 4 Study at Newton Centre. They wanted to know how I’d been able to hold on to the world. When I say ‘the world’ I don’t mean Planet Earth, I mean everything this side of the reality membrane.

My head is full of music: all kinds of songs and fragments of songs, most of them written, sung, and played by dead people. Some of my best friends are dead people.

I like old standards, American mostly, all the way back to the nineteen-twenties. They don’t write songs like that any more, that world isn’t there any more. Once I saw an old documentary with grainy black-and-white footage from 1936, the Spanish Civil War: men running up a hill with bolt-action rifles thinking they were going to do some good.

I took a trip on the train and I thought about you,

I passed a shadowy lane and I thought about you,…

A little strange, a little bringing tears to the eyes, to hear that in your head out beyond the Sixth Galaxy. I’m amazed at how many songs and bits of songs live in my head. And the times when it sings them. Why did it give me ‘The Shadow of Your Smile’ when the jets packed up on a local from Escherville to the Hand of Glory in Schrödinger’s Cat? Or ‘Begin the Beguine’ when the AG slipped its channel and Constanze De Groot took the top off the New Tokyo Sonydome? That morning last November when Clever Daughter and I parted company, however, the music in my head was a much older standard than those.

You know how it is when you’re sitting in a bar somewhere dark and quiet just breathing in and out and maintaining neutral buoyancy and a stranger starts talking to you and after a while he brings out of his pocket a letter coming apart at the creases; he brings out this letter to show you that at one time he mattered more than he does now and he tells you the story of his life. At first you wish he’d go away but perhaps you say to yourself, Maybe one day I’ll want somebody to listen to my story. Never mind. My name is Fremder Gorn. Fremder means stranger in German.

3

i have flown

to star-stained heights

on bent and battered wings

in search of

mythical kings

mythical kings

sure that everything of worth

is in the sky and not the earth …

Dory Previn, ‘mythical kings and iguanas’

Sometimes I think about the age of steam and those great locomotives that thundered into oblivion like the Spirit of Progress. Sometimes I think about the motorcars that poisoned the air and swallowed up the green and pleasant land and finally sputtered to a halt in gridlock. And sometimes I think about flicker drive.

My mind goes back to a few minutes before three o’clock in the morning of 4 November 2052, just over a year ago. Nova Central Cargo Spaceport outside London — the flicker docks under the purple stutter of the rhodolux lamps in the rain. Diesel and electrical smells of forklifts and cranes and juicers. Another smell, whispering and beckoning like the Erl King’s daughters: the smell of Out There. People move a little differently at three in the morning. Purple light and deep shadows. Figures in infraglo macs shouting. High-legged gantry cranes loading and unloading freighters and tankers. Lights and colour and motion reflected in the shine of the wet tarmac. Lots of noise but behind the hiss of the purple rain the silence is cruising like a shark.

Looking down the line of buffers I see Uguisu, Miyazaki, Nippon Enterprises Universal; Aral II, Minsk, Sony Pan-Galactic (ISR) Ltd; Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Bremen, BASF Ausserirdisch GmbH; Candide, Marseilles, Corporation Française d’Exploitation Minière Interstellaire. Big names, billions of credits, millions of megaklicks. Beyond the dock lights the ruins of old Nova Central are ghostly, dim. Blackened grasses growing out of cracks in the tarmac; gulls wheeling out of the dark rain into the bright, circling over heaps of rotting refuse, rusting junk; empty buildings put up by somebody’s nephew with their roofs fallen in on floors laid by somebody’s brother-in-law; huge empty fuel-storage tanks with the Corporation logo fading on them; the control tower standing empty with broken windows. The sky is dark and heavy, no moon.

In Dock 14 (there’s no 13): Clever Daughter, a deep-space Corporation tanker, a huge battered thing like a discarded oil refinery all pocked and pitted from the dust and flying debris of seven galaxies, dull metal shining in the rain. Nothing sleek, nothing aerodynamic — it doesn’t need to be smooth and sleek like those old ships that went up on a pillar of fire and five million pounds a minute. Clever Daughter’s bound for the Morrigan in the Fourth Galaxy with 500,000 hectolitres of protomorphic acid for De Groot Draconium.

The juicers have disconnected and pulled away. The transmission window’s cleared. ‘OK for flicker on 72.3 Ems,’ says the voice in the headphones. There’s a loud hum and a strong smell like burnt-out writing; the air shimmers in the purple rain under the lights. Clever Daughter and its reflection aren’t there any more. Nothing to see. Only the silence cruising like a shark. That’s flicker drive.

4

Flicker freako, here and gone,

flicker freako, be my baby,

flicker quicker, off and on,

love me sometime, love me maybe,

flicker with me till we peak O!

be my baby, flicker freako.

Sol Krummer and Harry Stein, ‘Flicker Freako’

Some children inherit money and property. What I’ve got is an oscillator in my brain: it’s about the size of a pellet of birdshot. If you want to be a flickerhead you’ve got to have one of those.

Most civilians don’t get to see the Corporation Yearbook. Here’s the beginning of ‘A Note on Flicker Drive’ from the 2053 edition:

Victor Lossiter’s investigations into biological scaling began after he read Richard Voss’s early 1970s papers on 1/f noise and Benoit Mandelbrot’s theory of fractals published in 1977. He credited film director Gösta Kraken, however, with the idea that started him on the research that resulted in his formulation of the Intermittency Principle in ‘Being: Not Steady State but Flicker’, Scientific American, April 2017. Thirty years earlier Kraken had written:

Being is not a steady state but an occulting one: we are all of us a succession of stillnesses blurring into motion on the wheel of action, and it is in those spaces of black between the pictures that we find the heart of the mystery in which we are never allowed to rest. The flickering of a film interrupts the intolerable continuity of apparent world; subliminally it gives us those in-between spaces of black that we crave. The eye is hungry for this; eagerly it collaborates with the unwinding strip of celluloid that shows it twenty-four stillnesses per second, making real by an act of retinal retention the here-and-gone, the continual disappearing in which the lovers kiss, the shots are fired, the horses gallop; but below the threshold of conscious thought the eye sees and the mind savours the flickering of the black.

Gösta Kraken, Perception Perceived:

an Unfinished Memoir (Jonathan Cape, 1987)

Years before Kraken’s thoughts on ‘the occulting state of being’ Elias Gorn had begun his investigation of what he termed ‘zoetic oscillation’. As early as 1969 he had written to Boris Pavlovich Belousov:

After reading of your quite remarkable demonstration of chemical oscillation I have produced this reaction in my own laboratory using a malonic acid reagent. Since then I have been seeing the characteristic spirals and rings in everything from coins of Knossos and Troy Town mazes to the movement of smoke in wind-tunnel experiments. It seems to me that what you have shown us might well be the universal communication pattern of which your chemical reaction is one of an infinite number of manifestations. Communication of what? Perhaps the primal impulse that drives all systems both microcosmic and macrocosmic? A very unscientific leap of the imagination indeed!

I’ve been considering the possibility of zoetic oscillation and I believe that this can be demonstrated by the simplest of experiments but I haven’t had the technology available that would enable me to build the necessary equipment.

Elias Gorn never did acquire the technology; he and his wife committed suicide in 2009 when he was dying of cancer, leaving the notes that his daughter Helen would study and make use of. Victor Lossiter had the technology, and in his elegant 2019 experiment that made Lossiter’s rat as famous as Schrödinger’s cat he isolated not only the zoetic current of a rat but the substantive emissions of its cage. He wired both rat and cage to a camera with a nanosecond quartz flash, the circuit that activated the camera being completed only in the intervals in zoetic and inanimate currents; Lossiter’s film showed frame after frame of empty laboratory table, thereby demonstrating that life and matter are not continuous but intermittent, a nonlinear alternation of being and non-being at varying frequencies in the ultraband. Lossiter died in 2021 at thirty-seven with his work unfinished but his discoveries and the researches of Elias and Sarah Gorn started Helen Gorn and her brother Isodor on the ontological investigation that resulted in flicker drive.

Flicker drive was not Helen Gorn’s first objective: she had been in correspondence with Lossiter since 2018 and she believed that the phonomenon of intermittency could be applied to psychotherapy. Herself given to frequent depressions, she was hoping to find a mode of controlled access to states of non-being as a means of relieving stress. In May 2021 she and her brother Isodor, financed by a Corporation grant, began a series of experiments with the limbic system and within a year they demonstrated conclusively that the ‘carrier wave’ in the human brain is generated in the amygdala…

Fremder here. At Corporation Library you can see 318 transcripts of Helen Gorn’s recordings of the experiments from 2 May 2021 until 16 February 2022. There are no transcripts between that date and Isodor’s death on 13 April 2022. Helen was twenty-three when they began the experiments, a Fellow of Corporation Neurobiology and Corporation Elite. Eighteen-year-old Isodor was a mathematician and an FCE as well. Reading their notebooks now I find the two of them more like one composite being than two distinct individuals.

The family name used to be Gorenstein. Elias Gorenstein’s parents ended up in Auschwitz and when he came to England he thought Gorn might be a better name to have if somebody came knocking on the door in the middle of the night. ‘Gorn today; here tomorrow,’ he’s quoted as saying.

The beginning of my life was not quite the usual thing. My mother killed herself when she was seven months pregnant with me. She knew from the scan that she was carrying a boy and she left a note for the sanatorium staff saying that she wanted me to be circumcised and named Fremder Elijah Gorn. There was also a note for me; when it was put into my hands four years later I looked at those marks made by my mother’s hand and her words came to me in silence from the voiceless paper:

Dear Fremder Elijah,

I’m sorry that I’m not going to be around to be your mother but each of us can only go so far: I’ve gone my distance and now you’ll have to go yours. Learn the speech of ravens and they will feed you.

Good luck,

your mother,

Helen Gorn

There was a chair for Elijah at the circumcision. Perhaps he attended, perhaps not. As quickly as possible I learned the speech of ravens and they fed me.

5

It was just one of those things,

Just one of those crazy flings.

One of those bells that now and then rings,

Just one of those things.

Cole Porter, ‘Just One of Those Things’

As I write this I sometimes get the pictures in my head mixed up: thinking of my first birthday I see the figure in the blue coverall tumbling over and over in deep space and when I recall that 4 November in the Fourth Galaxy I see myself being cut out of the belly of my dead mother.

I did my last two months in an artificial womb with, I was told, the sound of her recorded heartbeat in my unborn ears. I’ve often thought I’d like to sit and listen to that tape for a while, some rainy evening maybe; I tried to track it down once at Class A Prenatal but had no luck.

Class A orphans live at The Cauldron until the age of twelve; it isn’t a bad place to do your child time: batteries of wet-nurses to start you off right and dedicated minders to continue the process. I had a minder named Miranda — she was beautiful, with fair hair in a long plait that hung down her back and swung when she walked. The streets then were just as bad as they are now: roving bands of Prongs, Arseholes, Funboys, the Adoption Agency, and worst of all the Shorties and their Clowns, so our rare excursions into the outside world were always made with armed heavies. In the compound there was an ecodome that was meant to keep us happy: it had fields and trees and a murmuring stream; there were rabbits and hedgehogs and a tortoise named Achilles; there was a sky with real weather coming down in accordance with the seasons; November has always been a haunted month for me and the dark and glistening dangers of the bonfire-flickering streets seemed more a part of my reality than the sanitised November of the ecodome.

At The Cauldron there was nothing unusual in not knowing who your father was. If you were Class A you were definitely somebody and not nobody and there was a good chance that both of your parents were somebody too. All of us were snobs; the unoffical roster of probable fathers at The Cauldron was heavy with scientists but also included painters, composers, writers, and of course deep-spacers, every one of them famous. Mostly we pretended that being one parent short was a sort of advanced thing that put us somewhere beyond those simple two-parent children who knew nothing of the world but inside me the questions howled on my track like wolves: why had my mother killed herself? Why hadn’t I got a father? Why had he abandoned my mother and me? Where had he gone? Was it another woman? Was he dead? At night when I thought of my mother disappearing from around me before I was born I sat up and leaned forward in the dark and felt the world move away from me while ravens in their thousands fluttered their wings and whispered the blackness.

When I was twelve I accessed the Hall of Records database but it came up NILFOUND. Later I put a professional tracer on it with the same result. As far back as I can remember birthdays have been bad days for me. I got used to it; I grew up with an emptiness where a mother and father ought to have been and with time the emptiness became my mother and my father. On Earth I like grey skies, rain, bleak landscapes, places of transience and neon tubing, sleazy hotels, dismal downtimes, Q-BO SLEEPS, and so on. In deep space I like places like Badr al-Budur.

Early on in my childhood I sensed the thinness of reality and I became terrified of what might be on the other side of the membrane: I imagined a ceaseless becoming that swallowed up everything. I used to lie awake in the night and grind my teeth. But after a while anything becomes home, even terror.

I think about the dead a lot, their wants and their needs and their unfinished business; I suppose it’s because of the way I came into the world. The dead prodigiously outnumber the living, and although their lives have stopped their action hasn’t; they are with us always, sometimes whispering, sometimes shouting. As a child I used to think about my mother and about her grandparents who died in Auschwitz. And my unknown father, I mostly thought of him as dead too. The dead are with me in the ordinary moments of every day — sometimes I see my hand lift a cup of coffee or sign my name and I feel ghost hands moving with mine, lifting their no-coffee, signing their no-names. And when I flicker they’re always with me. Other deep-spacers have told me they never dream in flicker — how can M-waves dream? — but I know that I do. I always come out of it with a deep sadness, half-remembering blurred faces. Each of us is the forward point of a procession stretching back into the darkness. And even within oneself, every moment is a self that dies: the road to each day’s midnight is littered with corpses and all of them whispering. As I write this I’m listening to Beethoven’s F Major Quartet, Opus 59, No. 1, the first Razumovsky, while thousands of my dead selves hum along with it, sometimes weeping for times that are gone.

Bible studies at The Cauldron began when I was eight but I’d been reading the Bible since I was six and naturally First Kings, Chapter 17, was of considerable interest to me: ‘And Elijah the Tishbite, who was of the inhabitants of Gilead, said unto Ahab: “As the Lord God of Israel liveth, before whom I stand, there shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my word.”‘ Just like that; no mention of Elijah leading up to it. This man who was my namesake was someone I wanted to know more about. Where had he come from? I asked Mr Clarkson, our teacher. ‘God knows,’ he said. ‘We don’t need to. “Cometh the hour; cometh the man.”’ When we read about the Lord dispatching Elijah to the brook Cherith to be fed by ravens I looked around the room at all those who had no such note as I had from my mother.

Reading of Elijah at the top of Carmel, bowed down upon the earth with his face between his knees as he waited for rain, I had known long since that this was my condition: humbled and waiting. For what? What was Elijah waiting for on Carmel? Rain, yes, but more than that he was waiting for the big hookup that would make him the full Elijah, that would let him be himself. And I, Fremder Elijah Gorn, was waiting for the same thing.

Being a stranger I was always a little strange and I kept to myself much of the time. In the area where the dustbins were there was a little shed of gardening tools; by standing on a dustbin I could climb on to the shed roof, and after a while it became one of my special places. I was sitting up there one afternoon being fed by the ravens when a boy named Albert Stiggs came by and saw me. He used to bully me whenever he found the time and he almost always found it. If you happen to be one who is not good at confronting threats and menaces there will come, sooner or later, like the second planet in a binary system, that other one whose function is to threaten and menace you. The two members of such a system immediately recognise each other as predestined partners in the cosmic pattern. Albert Stiggs had an unbroken record of successes with me and his face was bright with anticipation. ‘What are you doing up there, clipcock?’ he said. ‘Waiting for a fiery chariot?’

I closed my eyes and saw a vibrant purple-blue and that was when my mind spoke to me for the first time. I knew even then that it wasn’t my mind in the same way that my brain was my brain: this was a mind that had been here long before I arrived on the scene and it would be here long after I was gone, ALWAYS THE NOISE, it said. When it spoke there flared up in me a craziness of many colours and a disregard of consequences. What a wonderful feeling.

‘I’m talking to you, clipcock,’ said Albert.

Without thinking I said, ‘Quiet!’

‘What did you say?’

‘Piss off.’

‘Make me.’

The colours of my craziness roared and bellowed in my ears. I jumped off the roof on to Albert and when Miranda came running and pulled me off him he had a concussion and a broken nose. It was a one-off kind of thing — the mind didn’t speak to me again and the craziness didn’t come again but for the rest of my time at The Cauldron there was no more bother from Albert or anyone else.

Things come to an end, though, and when I was twelve they shipped me out of The Cauldron to the Pre-Poly where a boy named Josef Czerny immediately recognised me as his opposite number in the traditional binary. I kept hoping that the mind would speak to me again and show me those many colours of craziness that had enabled me to deal with Albert Stiggs but it didn’t happen and I had no more successes of the Stiggs sort for the rest of my school days.

Twelve isn’t too early to have an aim in life. I felt a craving in me for deep space but most of all I wanted to make friends with that mind that had spoken to me. Not just so I could beat up people who bothered me. No, I wanted to be with it because it was the best feeling I’d ever had and I wanted to have that feeling again, however long it took to get there.

6

I get along without you very well,

Of course I do …

Hoagy Carmichael, ‘I Get Along Without You Very Well’

I’m looking at a photo of my mother. There was a German artist, Max Klinger (1857–1920), who attempted a variety of themes and was better with some than with others. The Klinger plate I look at most is an etching, Im Walde, In the Wood: there’s a footpath under dark trees whose bare black branches twist overhead in cold sunlight and shadow. The air seems whispery and breathless. By the side of a path lies a folded coat, on it a white envelope. Nearby an upturned hat shows its emptiness. In that cold sunlight the coat is abject and defeated, the hat projects a pathetic shadow. Beyond the coat and the hat stands a large tree with a double trunk but the right-hand one is only a cut-off stump. The deep black shadow of that tree across the path is irrevocable. Helen Gorn in all of her photographs seems to be looking at me out of that wood.

Even when she was young there was nothing charming about her face: she had a long jaw, a heavy mouth, a big nose. And large eyes that make you ask, ‘What, Helen? What is it you want?’ But there’s a photo of her on a beach on the island of Cephalonia in the summer of 2015 when she was seventeen: a tall girl, golden-brown. Wearing nothing but her nakedness and a bit of white cloth and string covering her sex. Her body’s half-turned away from the camera and she’s looking back over her shoulder. Long dark hair blowing in the wind as she holds a beach ball high over her head. Long torso, small breasts, round bottom, a dancer’s legs. Like an art nouveau figure holding up a lamp. And almost a smile on her face.

She had little use for contemporary artists of any kind: she liked Bach and Chopin and Thelonious Monk and she played the saxophone. She liked The Old Testament and Rilke, Caspar David Friedrich and Odilon Redon, the sound of rain and the small hours of the night. It’s raining now. Almost three in the morning. Down in the street below the barrier screen Prongs and Arseholes are fighting by the light of torches as I listen to Gislebertin’s Dédales, performed by the composer on the organ of the church of St Lazarus at Autun. The volume is turned down so low that I’m not sure if I’m hearing it or just thinking it.

Here and gone, the music; the mind shielding it from the winds of forgetting, holding what is partly now and partly remembered. Here and gone the whisper of the vox humana in the stones of darkness. On earth and out beyond the Hawking Threshold yesterdays and everydays in the morning mirror, the red glimmer of the Dog Nebula, the unremembrance of flicker dreams, a tawny owl flying low over the heather in the Grampians, great sea-shapen rocks at Portknockie, and the rattle of pebbles in the suck of the tidewash …

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

I’ve got photographs of my mother with her brother. He was like Franz Kafka, all eyes and ears. Looked as if a blackness inside him was trying to join up with a blackness outside. Here’s one of his notebook entries written shortly before he died:

18.2.22

In the beginning was The Black. Sing it. Feel it. Hold it. Only The Black. O the too-muchness of The Black. In the beginning was the forever of The Black and it went on for ever. Then! After for ever! In The Black was The Rage growing growing growing. AAAAIIIIYEEEEEE! How it wanted how it waited. Yes, TO BECOME! So it NNNNNNGGHHH YNNNGGGHH AAAAAAAAA. Became. Now it is. Now it is Itself. The Rage. Sing it. Feel it. Rock in the cradle of it. NNNNNNNNNNNNNNN NNNNNNNYAHHHH. The Rage. It is now. It is beyond for ever. In it is every thing.

I too feel The Black and The Rage in everything; maybe it’s a family trait. I’ve always felt them, even long ago with Judith when we saw the owl. I feel The Black and The Rage when I’m alone and perhaps even more when I’m not.

Thinking about Helen and Isodor: I see them in the darkened laboratory at the top of that big old Victorian house in Oldtown West 71.1 can smell formalin and furniture polish, old upholstery and carpets. And that other smell: of a house where the parents have died. Bookshelves everywhere, busts and paintings, framed photographs of Planck, Heisenberg, Einstein, Hawking, Rilke, and Thelonious Monk. Also dead and Gorn aunts and uncles: if they weren’t scientists or mathematicians they played the violin.

I’ve never actually seen that room but it’s very vivid in my imagination, always with rain streaming down the windows. Isodor is in his wheelchair; he wasn’t born crippled: he and Helen made the mistake of looking Jewish when some Shorties and Clowns caught them at street level one night. What they did to her doesn’t show. He was sixteen and she was twenty-one when it happened (I sometimes wonder why they were down at street level when they both had keys to the Class A walkway. Reality envelopes interest me). His head is shaved and he’s got a perspex window in the top of his skull. The Shorties and their friends didn’t do that — this is research. Under the perspex his brain looks like a strange and ancient coral. Wires from it pass through the perspex to a console where Helen moves a slider and watches her gauges. It’s the middle of the night; the curtains are drawn, the room is dark; their faces, dimly lit by the console, gleam with a religious fervour. I can hear the rain.

Here’s part of the transcript for 16 February 2022:

LIMBIC SYSTEM — SESSION 318

(03:40. RAIN, MUSIC: THE ART OF FUGUE)

H: Amygdala, site 26, right anterior:.5 sec, 80 Hz.

I: (CHILDISH VOICE) Oh, oh.

H: What’s the matter?

I: The bed’s all wet. (CRYING) I’m sorry, Mummy, I’ll try very hard not to do it again. Sorry, sorry, sorry, Mummy. Not do it again, no.

H: Was it the bad dream again, Izzy?

I: No, it was a nice one: I was mountains, I was valleys, I was the rain.

H: Did you like being the rain?

I: Yes.

H: Why did you like being the rain?

I: The rain doesn’t know anything, the rain doesn’t have dreams.

H: Amygdala, site 27, right anterior:.5 sec, 80 Hz.

I: (YOUNG VOICE BUT OLDER THAN SITE 26) Oh yes, in the colours of the numbers, in the deep greens of the thousands and the purples of the tens. Where the millions and the mollions and the riffling of the wherewhen and the why-when, yes, my way is always and the purpling of the tens returning.

H: Tell me about your way.

I: Always in the wherewhen of returning and the purpling of the tens, yes.

H: How many tens?

I: As the riffling, where it happens.

H: Where what happens, Izzy?

I: (NO ANSWER)

H: Amygdala, site 28, left posterior:.5 sec, 100 Hz.

I: (WHIMPERING, FOLLOWED BY VERY GUTTURAL SPEECH IN A LOW AND UNFAMILIAR VOICE) NO. Not this. Please don’t, I don’t want this.

H: Don’t want what?

I: The music is letting it in, the music is opening the door.

H: Opening the door to what?

I: It’s too much. No more much, please, no more.

H: Should I close the door?

I: (BRACING HIS ARMS TO LIFT HIMSELF HALF OUT OF WHEELCHAIR) Nnnyhh. I can smell it.

H: Smell what?

I: The purple-blue, very strong, very luminous and intense.

H: What does it smell like?

I: Like itself, like the purple-blueness of itself. Like a great beast, ancient and forgotten. Yes, this. Let it come to me.

H: Just a moment ago you said you didn’t want it.

I: I was wrong, I want it. Get out of the way.

H: What is this ‘it’? Who’s in the way?

I: Only the brain stands between us and it.

That’s where Session Transcript 318 comes to an end and that’s as far as the transcripts go. In just a little less than two months Izzy was gone. I was reasonably sure that the ‘it’ that Izzy referred to was what I’d been trying to get in touch with ever since the day I broke Albert Stiggs’s nose but I still hadn’t learned how to get my brain out of the way.

Here’s the rest of ‘A Note on Flicker Drive’. It’s all right as far as it goes but it doesn’t tell you what it’s like to flicker: you hit the switch that disappears you and if everything goes all right you reappear somewhere else. In between you’re being transmitted as M-waves, called Ems by those of us in the trade. An apt word, that: back in the days of movable type an em was a thin bit of brass stuck between letters or words to space them out. The deep-space Em derives from Maximum Probability, which sounded a little dicey and was therefore shortened to M to make it less worrying. And there are one or two things to worry about if you’re the worrying type: suppose they send you out on a frequency that’s already occupied — think what can happen. And it has happened although Corporation won’t admit it. Never mind. Back to the Corporation Yearbook; the sooner we get through this the sooner we can move on to other things:

Helen Gorn then calculated the scaling fractal of the electrical output of the amygdala and plotted the Schulz-Moreno curve that gave her the voltage necessary to boost the carrier-wave frequency and extend the alternating intervals of non-being to the maximum at which the zoetic current could be maintained, so creating the reserve that would make flicker drive possible. Exploiting the self-similarity of the being/non-being wave pattern, she scaled it down several thousandfold but kept its profile so that at the chrono-zoetic interface the condensed carrier-wave profile would be accepted as normal and months of time would pass as moments.

Following on from her parents’ pioneering work in molecular translation, Helen Gorn hypothesised that a non-being zoetic reserve could be sustained in the conversion of mass into energy: particles of matter into quantum-probability waves. It was at this point that she saw the possibility of what is now known as flicker drive. Gorn presented a proposal to the Sheela-Na-Gig in February 2021 and they voted unanimously to fund her project.

Using a radio-controlled oscillator implanted in her brother Isodor’s amygdala she was able to step up the frequencies of its output to achieve the reserve of non-being that she had theorised, but there still remained the problem of molecular translation and transmission.

Tragically, Helen Gorn died while the project was still in its early stages; Corporation colleague Irene Heale, however, took up the work, and through original thinking of rare brilliance, brought it to fruition. By 2024 she had developed the diapason scanner for boosting the frequencies of the molecules of every substance in and of the spacecraft synchronously with those of the human organism, and in 2030 built the first external variable mass/energy translator (EVMET) for the conversion and transmission of humans and their cargoes as M-waves to galaxies far beyond our own.

On 2 May 2032, after a number of successful transmissions with EVMETS, Heale presented the prototype onboard flicker drive at the Annual Corporation Conference, sending the spacecraft Prospero from Nova Central to the Circle of Copernicus and back with a chimpanzee aboard. Ship and crew flickered out of being at Nova Central and were seen on the monitor screens to flicker into being at the target point, having been transmitted and received almost instantaneously at points millions of megakilometres apart. Intergalactic travel, until then impossible within human lifespan, was an accomplished fact.

In 2033 Irene Heale was honoured with the Max Planck Prize for Megaphysics. Since then she has remained preeminent in her field and continues to initiate and carry out projects characteristically daring in conception and elegant in execution.

With the help of a hacker acquaintance I did some research on the Prospero mission. The chimp they sent to the Circle of Copernicus was called, you guessed it, Caliban. This Caliban was famous for his intelligence and had been taught to communicate with humans by means of coloured push-buttons with symbols. For eat, consume, take in, absorb, or banana, for example, there was a button with a yellow banana and so on. His only message after he was reconstituted at the Circle of Copernicus was: ‘I have taken in much too much nothing.’ Or, if you like: ‘I banana many, many not something.’ When questioned on his return to Nova Central he pushed the button with a two-finger symbol, strangled his keeper, and was put down.

Back to ‘A Note on Flicker Drive’:

Now in 2053 Corporation ships flicker out from Nova Central, from Daedopolis, and from Hubble Straits to the planets of seven galaxies; in them go our deep-spacers whose daring is a bright flame in the darkness all around us, on their shoulders the Deep Space Command emblem with our motto: ‘SEMPER LONGIUS’, ‘ALWAYS FARTHER’.

*

Puts a lump in your throat, doesn’t it. Those of us who made a living being sent here and there as maximum-probability (but not dead-certainty) waves sometimes wondered what sort of effect flicker drive might have on us. Potency and fertility were major concerns but those fears proved groundless. Cynics like me, pondering the high pay and the easy life, wondered sometimes if there might not be some kind of a catch to the whole thing and I was not terribly surprised one evening towards the end of October 2052 when, as I sat in The Black Hole in London Central refreshing my solitude with Glenfiddich, a colleague stuck a copy of Nature under my nose and pointed to a little item headed Tempus Fugit:

Drs Melissa Chundera and Ernestine Morrison of the Daedalus Institute have published the results of a five-year study of deep-space personnel travelling on flicker drive. Their controversial report establishes a definite connection between flicker travel and accelerated cellular and neuronal decay; they estimate that a half-second Earth-Elapsed-Time flicker jump to the Second Galaxy might consume as much as two months of life expectancy. A second study now under way is expected to show a comparable effect on metals and other substances.

As the Financial Timesfax reported a plunge in the value of deep-space shares, Corporation Top Exec have, not surprisingly, challenged the Chundera-Morrison life-expectancy findings, claiming that coincidental data have been transmuted by statistical alchemy into apparent cause and effect. As to the deterioration of metal and other substances, they say that constant monitoring and safety checks have shown this to be no greater than in conventional spacecraft.

The colleague who brought this to my attention had done twelve more flicker jumps than I had so we both had a few more drinks and told each other that Drs Chundera and Morrison hadn’t taken into consideration the preservative effects of alcohol.

7

Some love too little, some too long,

Some sell, and others buy;

Some do the deed with many tears,

And some without a sigh: …

Oscar Wilde, ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’

I wonder if others have, as I do, the little tribunal of the dusk. The twelve of them don’t require the physical twilight — they’ll sit whenever there’s twilight in the soul and the bat wings of memory and guilt come flittering through the crepuscule. The look of them varies with the occasion: sometimes they’re human; sometimes they’re owls.

Judith had long black hair, brown eyes of sybilline intensity, a melancholy face and a sinuous figure. I met her at a Camera Obscura recital in the Thames Concordia Dome. It was summer, the river lights and those of the Raft City slums seemed magical in the luminous dusk, and I was alone. She was in the seat next to mine and halfway through the Adagio of the Schubert C Major String Quintet I noticed that she was crying. The sight of a good-looking woman being sad made me lust for entry to the privacy of her sadness. She began to look through her bag with no apparent success so I handed her a tissue and she smiled her thanks.

In the interval I asked if I could buy her a drink. She said yes and we went to the Overlook Bar. ‘Does Schubert always make you cry?’ I said.

‘Sometimes everything makes me cry,’ she said: ‘the lights on the water, the sound of the wirecars coming into the platform, the look of the sky.’

We ended up at my place that evening and in no time at all we were talking fragic. ‘Moony, moony glimmers,’ she said. ‘Lost and treasure found so deep and sleeping birds.’ It was only a matter of weeks before I told her that I loved her.

‘Are you part of my reality now?’ she said.

‘Always.’

‘You’ll leave me one day.’

There flashed into my mind Elijah on Carmel, face between his knees. ‘Why do you say that?’ I said.

‘I just know.’

I was twenty-two, just made Second Navigator. She was twenty-eight, a stage designer. On my next downtime in London we hoppered up to Dundee, got a surface hirecar permit, and drove up through Recreation Reserve 7 to the Moray Firth. At the RR7 checkpoint we paid our toll and had a Rescue 2-Way plugged into the dashboard. An electronic sign said:

CORPORATION RECREATION RESERVE 7

TODAY’S AIR CONTENT IS GREEN 3.

OZONE READING RED 1.

U-V PROTECTION MUST BE WORN!

24-HR PATROLS ON DUTY.

IF YOU ARE TRAVELLING WITH

A CLONE OR A ROBOT

YOU MUST HAVE A PERMIT.

REPORT ALL DANGER SIGHTINGS ON D1.

FOR RESCUE CALL R1

AND SPECIFY TYPE OF EMERGENCY.

The sky over the Cairn o’Mount Road through the Grampians was immense and complex: it had a foreground, a middle distance, and a background receding to the beginning of time under vast architectures of cumulonimbus and stratocumulus clouds roofed over with a magisterial darkness. At first there’d been sunshine but up ahead a curtain of rain hung over the mountains and we drove into it. Judith turned on the car radio and got Number One on the charts, Dark Matter with ‘Planetary Fade’:

Flick flick, flick and fade, John,

flick and fade.

Flick flick, flick and fade, John,

on the planet where you are.

After the rain came sleet and snow, then a clear grey light like the first day of the world and a tawny owl low over the heather. Neither of us had ever seen an owl before: there it was, astonishingly real with its flat face and the grey distance receding behind it. ‘Look!’ we both said at once. ‘An owl!’ and I felt that with those words we were vowing never to forget that moment, vowing to be faithful to it and each other for ever.

We reached the Moray Firth without sighting any dangers or needing to be rescued and found ourselves a hotel in Portknockie, a sometime herring port with its brown-sailed luggers long gone: a steadfast and enduring harbour with empty arms, thick flakes of rust in the shape of big ring-bolts, a silence full of the ghost shouts of departed fishermen, gulls crying, and the wind moaning to itself on Green Castle, Bow Fiddle, Port Hill.

‘The luggers and the herring are gone,’ said Judith.

‘But not us,’ I said. ‘Rings and ropes and baskets.’

‘So many voices,’ said Judith. ‘So many stars beneath the sea,’ and we held each other close. In those three days everything that we did, everything that I saw, heard, smelled, tasted, and touched imprinted itself vividly on my memory so that later I was able to identify that time in the same way that one names, with the help of a book, the rare bird only briefly seen: yes, it had this and this and this. That was what it was, then: happiness.

Even then, sometimes when I closed my eyes I could sense at the heart of the blackness something that I belonged to more than I could ever belong to happiness, something that I could be faithful to more than to any woman. You can disappear as M-waves and reappear as supposedly the same person but after a while the deep-space emptiness gets into you. Flickerheads call it the MTs. When I was in London Judith and I did what we always did — walked and talked, dined at intimate little restaurants, went to concerts, opera, theatre, and films but little by little the flavour went out of it. And more and more I’d wake at night to find myself sitting up in bed and leaning forward into the darkness, listening to the ravens and the dead, waiting like Elijah with his head between his knees.

‘Where are you?’ Judith kept saying.

‘Here,’ I said.

‘No, you’re not.’

Holding on to the world is mostly an act of faith: you see a little bit of it in front of you and you believe in the rest of it both in time and space. If you’re scheduled for a jump to Hubble on Tuesday you believe in you, in Hubble, in the jump, and in Tuesday. Sometimes it was hard for me to believe all of it.

Towards the end of August the year after Portknockie we walked what was left of the Ridgeway, both of us hoping that putting ourselves on that ancient track might earth us to our own past. Because of funding cuts there were no longer security patrols; the fee included robots and stun guns and to be on the safe side we joined up with some Avebury pilgrims at Streatley.

There seemed always to be power stations on all sides of us and the air was never better than Yellow 2 so we did the whole walk wearing breathers. There was toxic rain every day but one; we squelched through ankle-deep mud, our clothes wet with sweat and condensation under our rain gear. At night the robots stood watch in the rain outside our tent while not-very-distant Shorties and Clowns sang, ‘Hawako, hawako, hawako!’

There are four things that I think of when I remember that walk: a clump of beech trees; a lark; Wayland’s Smithy; and a herd of cows. The beech trees were on a little hill off to one side of the track somewhere around Thurle Down. They were spotted with some kind of mould and their leaves were yellow; when we were in among them there suddenly fell the kind of silence you get when you walk into the wrong pub and all the faces turn towards you. That night Judith woke me at a quarter to four talking in her sleep. ‘Where is it?’ she said.

‘Where’s what?’

‘I don’t know,’ and she went back to sleep.

The famous Uffington White Horse, long unmaintained, was mostly overgrown. Wayland’s Smithy had become a latrine. The graffiti said, among other things, SHORTIS RUL and LOKKUP YUR MISSUS & DOTTERS HEAR CUM THE FUNBOYS. I closed my eyes and put my hands to the stone and listened with my mind but all I heard was a tinnitus like the chattering of dead cicadas.

On the day when it didn’t rain we saw through our anti-U-V goggles a lark fly straight up into the grey but the song that came down to us was small and without lift.

‘Shit above and shit below,’ said Judith, ‘shitwhistles in the sky. You know what?’

‘What?’

‘I’d like to finish on an up if we could.’

‘Me too.’

‘If we find one between here and Avebury let’s be off out of this, OK?’

‘OK.’

The next evening we came along the side of a hill through a Corporation pasture near Ogbourne St George. The guards passed us through the checkpoint and we went on our way through a herd of Friesians who stood and watched us in the rainy dusk. Their dark and glistening forms seemed monumental, prehistoric, unretentive of evil. I was overwhelmed by their air of innocent sapience and Judith burst into tears.

‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘We’re not going to top this. I don’t need to see the graffiti on the Avebury stones.’

‘Right.’ We left our robots for the Avebury pilgrims to turn in, phoned for a hopper, and in half an hour we were back at Judith’s place where we had a shower and drinks and didn’t say much for the rest of the evening.

More and more I find that life is a series of disappearances followed usually but not always by reappearances; you disappear from your morning self and reappear as your afternoon self; you disappear from feeling good and reappear feeling bad. And people, even face to face and clasped in each other’s arms, disappear from each other.

I flickered out and back as the job required and felt a little fuller of emptiness each time. There’s more emptiness in the air than there used to be, and its spores grow flowers of dust in the lungs. Things between Judith and me dwindled month by month until we were no longer part of each other’s reality. After half a year of not hearing from me she sent me a photocopy of a pencil-and-sepia drawing by Caspar David Friedrich: a burly eagle owl (Uhu in German) sitting on a coffin that rested on boards laid across a freshly-dug grave. A child’s coffin it was, not fully grown. There was no note — that was the whole message and it arrived the day after her suicide was briefly mentioned in the newsfax.

I still think of that child’s coffin and the Uhu. Sometimes I see them tumbling over and over in deep space with that figure in the blue coverall. And sometimes when evening comes and the little tribunal of the dusk I remember how, when I first saw Judith, I needed to penetrate her sadness that waited with its face between its knees for the rain.

8

In the ancient tale of the Clever Daughter, she is soon to gain the king’s hand by having solved his riddle and come to him neither driving nor walking nor riding (she’s only half-seated on the goat), neither dressed nor naked (thus draped in a fishnet), neither out of the road nor in the road (only her right big toe touches the ground) and bearing a gift that’s no gift (the hare will leap off on release).

Marshall Laird, English Misericords

I was First Navigation Officer on Clever Daughter when we flickered out of Nova Central on 4 November 2052 bound for the Morrigan in the Fourth Galaxy. I always avoided flicker jumps on my birthday if possible — it never felt lucky. DSC allows one refusal for every ten jumps and I put in for one but several people were off sick and my refusal was refused. The night before we flickered out I’d had my usual three hours of sleep and I’d woken in the middle of that time sitting up and leaning forward into the dark feeling myself getting closer and closer to some kind of edge.

Clever Daughter terminated Jump One pause at Hubble Straits and was into Jump Two for Penzias-Wilson at 04:06 IGT. Traffic Control’s screens showed our dock empty and the M-scope registered the burst of peaks that indicate a flicker transmission so they knew we’d gone off as scheduled. At 04:06:03 Hubble Straits Traffic Control received an automatic flicker-break TX from Clever Daughter and there was no further communication from the ship.

At 04:10:28 Bill Charteris in Quadrangle Sweeper Sun Ra about 4oMk from Badr al-Budur on the Hubble side found himself humming an unfamiliar tune and at the same he saw something about 200 metres ahead tumbling over and over as it drifted towards him. It turned out to be me in a blue coverall — no spacesuit, no helmet, no oxygen.

The outside temperature was 3 Kelvin, that last fading remnant of warmth from the Big Bang. My arms were held rigidly out in front of me and my legs were drawn up as if to push me away from something. Bill radioed Hubble Straits while manoeuvring Sun Ra’s grab arm to bring me in, and in less than three minutes I was being looked after by Caroline Lovecraft P/Pl, Director, Physio/Psycho, Newton Centre for Deep-Space Research at Hubble Straits.

She ascertained that although I looked like an odd-shaped ice lolly I was not dead but in a state of suspended animation. After a long soaking in warm water my clothes were peeled off me with the care usually reserved for ancient manuscripts. When naked I was coated with synthoderma and floated in a nutrient solution while they gave me a variety of anti-freeze injections and hooked me up to several drip-feeds. I was monitored constantly and after three days Lovecraft made verbal contact as shown in this transcript from 7 November 2052.

CL: Hi.

FG: Hi.

CL: I’m Caroline Lovecraft, Head of Physio/Psycho at Newton Centre. Will you state your name for the record?

FG: Johann Sebastian Bach.

CL: Do you know where you are now?

FG: Contrapunctus One. (HUMS BEGINNING OF THE ART OF FUGUE)

CL: Mr Bach, can you tell me what happened to Clever Daughter and the other seven crew members?

FG: Very, very high, the legs of Contrapunctus One. Centuries and centuries — mustn’t look down.

CS: About Clever Daughter — can you remember anything at all?

FG: If you can hold on to the terror you can hold on to the world, (HUMS AGAIN THE BEGINNING OF THE ART OF FUGUE) B said. (OR ‘BEA SAID’ OR POSSIBLY ‘B.Z.’ SPEECH BECOMING SLURRED)

CS: What did B say?

FG: Be the music. Thou. (OR POSSIBLY ‘THOWL’)

CS: Couldn’t quite catch that. Please say again.

FG: Is he? (SPEECH MORE INDISTINCT)

CS: Is he what?

FG: (LOOKING AROUND) Not here. Gone. (OR POSSIBLY ‘GORN’)

CS: Did you say ‘gone’ or ‘Gorn’?

FG: (SHAKES HEAD, THEN OPENS MOUTH AND POINTS TO IT)

CS: You’re hungry?

FG: (SHAKES HEAD, COVERS FACE WITH HANDS, FALLS ASLEEP, TERMINATING INTERVIEW AT 15:32)

I have no recall of that conversation but I do remember the next one, which took place two days later in another part of Newton Centre. I was vibrant with fear at the time; I felt as if I was a puzzle of many pieces, all of them speeding outward from me in all directions. I was afraid I’d never get them back together and at the same time I was afraid that I would. The song in my head was:

ON THE GOOD SHIP LOLLIPOP,

IT’S A SHORT TRIP TO THE CANDY SHOP, …

At a desk opposite me was a tall bald man with glittering spectacles. He was wearing faded jeans, hiking boots, a denim shirt, and an old green cardigan. Through the window behind him I could see the lights of the flicker docks passing in the black sparkle of space and just beyond them Mikhail’s Quadrangle 4 Snackdome (24 HRS — FREIGHTERS YES) revolving like a beacon with a ring of bright rubbish in slow orbit as it majestically receded from view with the turning of the station. Far beyond Mikhail’s there came and went the occulting blue flash of the Hawking Threshold light, beyond it the pale planet Ereshkigal with its seven circling Anunnaki, and beyond those the jewelled fling of Inanna’s Girdle.

The tall bald man’s spectacles were twinkling as if he had ways to make me talk. I had no idea why I was sitting in a chair in his office; I couldn’t remember anything between flickering out of Nova Central and waking up at Hubble Straits and I rather thought I’d like to keep it that way. ‘Perhaps you’ll tell me’, I said, ‘what I’m charged with.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘Deep Space Command might possibly have one or two questions about the disappearance of the rest of the crew and a spacecraft and cargo worth two hundred million credits.’ His accent was like waving fields of American grain. ‘And I expect the Ziggurat will want you to help with enquiries but here at Newton Centre the only thing you’re charged with is survival. We’d like to know how you did it.’ His spectacles sparkled cordially as he leaned over the desk to shake my hand and the rest of me vigorously. ‘I’m Waldo Simkin, Head of Research here.’ The room smelled of paper, the floor under my feet hummed and shook a little. In the ceiling the fluorescent lights sizzled faintly: Si, Si, Simkin. Si, Si, Simkin.

You needn’t keep repeating it, I thought. I heard you the first time.

‘I wasn’t repeating it,’ he said. ‘Have you got some kind of echo in your head?’

So I must have spoken aloud; he didn’t look like a telepath. Some of the time I could see him clearly but much of the time not. I was getting ringed centres of bright emptiness in my vision, circles of nothing. They kept expanding and wiping one another out so new circles of nothing could appear. Beyond the Hawking Threshold, beyond Ereshkigal and the Anunnaki and Inanna’s Girdle the dead howled and whistled.

‘ “Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror,”’ I said.

‘How’s that?’

‘It’s a line from the First Duino Elegy.’

‘I don’t think I know Duino’s work.’

‘He’s a dead guy. I know a lot of dead guys.’

‘You’re alive. Keep your eye on the doughnut and not on the hole. You’re shaking.’

‘Isn’t everything?’

‘No. Are you wearing bio?’

‘No.’

‘Let’s do an AFR, OK? I want to see what kind of shape you’re in.’

‘OK.’ I opened my shirt and he got a biofeedback kit out of his desk. He placed the electrodes on my head and chest and slid the lancet sleeve over my thumb. I jabbed myself and we watched the numbers climbing on the gauge.

‘That’s an ambient-fear reading of 727.2,’ he said. He removed the thumb sleeve, replaced the lancet, opened his shirt, hooked himself up, and did his own AFR. It was 214.7.

‘Between 200 and 400 is what you expect from somebody in a reasonably functional state,’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen one over 600 till now. What’re you afraid of?’

‘Everything.’

YES! bellowed the mind in my head, SAY IT, SAY THE EVERYTHING-FEAR, THE ALL-TERROR. I TOO FEAR EVERYTHING. I FEAR MY LONG-AGO BEGINNING AND THE AWAKENING OF DREAD, I FEAR THE UNCEASING BECOMING OF ME. I FEAR THE HUGE AND THE TINY, THE FAR AND THE NEAR OF ME, AND I FEAR THE MOMENT THAT IS NOW AND NOW AND NOW WITHOUT RESPITE.

The power of that utterance and the relief of it! With those words my fear seemed all at once a mighty fortress in which I was no longer alone. No, not a fortress — not something that stood still but a voyaging thing, a black boat rising and falling in the sea-dark, a vessel in which I could journey far. You again! I said. It’s been so long! Will you be with me from now on?

No answer.

Simkin was looking at me oddly, so I must have been speaking aloud again. ‘I think this might be a good time to turn you over to our head of Physio/Psycho,’ he said. I followed him down the hall to another office where I was introduced to Dr Caroline Lovecraft, a tall, handsome woman: red hair in a Psyche knot, green eyes, horn-rimmed glasses, heroic figure wonderfully enhanced by a tightly-belted green overall with many pockets. As she came towards me I think a little sigh may have escaped me.

‘Hi,’ she said, gripped my right hand firmly, and shot some of her voltage into me. ‘Remember me?’

‘No, but I will from now on.’

‘Well,’ said Simkin to me, ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ and vanished.

Lovecraft sat down at her desk, motioned me to a chair, and gave me her full attention. ‘Bad night?’ she said.

‘I got through it.’

‘I can hear your teeth grinding. Have an E-ZO, have a couple of them — loosen you up a little.’ She offered me a green foil ten-strip of tablets.

‘No, thanks. My problem isn’t loosening up, it’s staying together.’

‘Together is for squilches. The real thing is what comes through the cracks when you fall apart.’

‘I don’t think I can handle that just yet.’

‘Yes, you can — you’ve handled it already or you wouldn’t be here. What we need to do is get it out in the open and see what’s what.’ Like Simkin she had an American accent but not from the same place: hers was suggestive of huge green breakers and shining people on surfboards. She took my hand again. ‘You’ve got the balls for it so let’s do it, yes?’

‘OK, but first tell me, are you related to H. P. Lovecraft?’

‘No. You like H. P. Lovecraft?’

‘Oh yes, I’ve been a heavy user for a long time.’

‘I can do Cthulhu-speak.’

‘Show me.’

‘“Ph-nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn,”’ she said in a menacing alien voice that gave me goosepimples. ‘“In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”’

‘I’m impressed. That stuff’s hard to memorise and it’s quite scary the way you do it.’

‘It’s my only accomplishment — I don’t tap-dance or play the piano.’

You don’t have to, I thought — your accomplishment is being you. I closed my eyes and tried to hold her voice in my head where I waited for the rain with my face between my knees. Then I settled into my chair and looked around. Her office had the usual Hubble Straits revolving view of Mikhail’s Snack-dome, the flicker docks, the Hawking Threshold light, Ereshkigal, and so on. It was a large and busy-looking place containing a hurly-burly of professional impedimenta with knobs and dials, an overflowingness of books in shelves and stacks, a shadowy black-and-white drawing of a female nude on the wall, a platoon of file cabinets, a small jungle of plants, a big couch heavily burdened with books and papers, and a well-littered desk on which was a museum replica of a small head of a goddess, a thin shell of bronze with a dark green patina, almost a mask because there was no back to it, the edges of its incompleteness following pleasingly the undulations of the hair.

‘Greek, second century B.C.,’ said Lovecraft, ‘found near Mersin, Cilicia. It’s only a replica.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I used to visit her at the British Museum.’ As on the original the whites of the eyes had been painted in and the wearing-away of the paint had been duplicated: the dark and light gave the impression of an upward seductive glance when viewed from above; when I brought my face down to the level of her eyes her look changed to one of fear and doubt. The card on the plinth said, HEAD OF A GODDESS.

‘She’s got to be Aphrodite,’ said Lovecraft. ‘She couldn’t be anyone else.’

‘I think you’re right. Sometimes it took four or five tries before I could walk away from her.’

Lovecraft had been sorting through some videodiscs but now she paused, took off the horn-rims, and gave me a long look. ‘That’s how it is with Aphrodite,’ she said. She picked up several discs. ‘Let’s start with the automatic flicker-break transmission that came in to Traffic Control from Clever Daughter at 04:06:03 on 4 November.’ On her way to the video she passed close to me. The continually recycled air of Hubble Straits Station is moist and jungly; her smell was that of a strong healthy woman just out of the shower and sweating a little. She passed me again going back to her desk and I closed my eyes and felt the breeze of her on my face.

FLICK, FLICK, FLICK AND FADE, JOHN, sang my head, ON THE PLANET WHERE YOU ARE.

‘… hear me?’ said Lovecraft.

‘What?’

‘Those green spirals and circles we’re seeing on the screen, what are they?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said as circles of bright emptiness expanded in my vision. The other circles, the ones on the screen, seemed strange but familiar. ‘Interference, maybe?’

‘You trying to scramble me, John?’ Had she heard the song in my head?

‘Why? What did I say?’

‘You said interference but that’s not like any interference I ever saw. Those circles are like ringed eyes.’

On the screen the circles were widening, growing larger, becoming great eyes of becoming that became vast nodes of possibility and archipelagos of being constantly expanding and mutually annihilating as they slowly faded into blankness. ‘I’ve seen something like that before,’ said Lovecraft: ‘it’s like the chemical oscillation in the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction.’

‘I don’t know what that is,’ I said as the circles faded into darkness and my head began The Art of Fugue, its voices tracing the vaultings of terror and the windings of its desolation. Forgetting myself I became the music, became the action of it and the joy at the heart of the terror. Yes! I thought, I must remember how to do this, how to be the music.

‘What?’ said Lovecraft.

‘Nothing.’

‘Listen, Fremder, all this constipated Q and A is boring me to death. Let’s talk fragic, yes? Darkly me, whisper me, echoes and murmurs.’

I hadn’t talked fragic since Judith. ‘I don’t think I can go loose just like that.’

‘Sure you can. Whisper me, whisper me, deeply the shadows.’

‘Shadows and places,’ I said. ‘O the horror.’ I could feel my head going slanty.

‘Horror me, horror me, infinite vortex whisper me urgently, dark without end.’

‘Only the horror, only the onliness.’ It was hard to resist her.

‘More than the onliness, more than the every.’ She seemed full of desire as she leant towards me.

‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘I can’t keep up with you. Could we just continue in the ordinary way for now?’

‘Right — I know I’m pushy.’ She sighed, rolled her chair back a little, expelled some breath, looked out of the window for a while, then took a crystal out of her pocket and stuck it in the audio beam. A man’s voice hummed, somewhat flat, the opening of Contrapunctus One of The Art of Fugue. ‘That’s Bill Charteris the other morning,’ she said, ‘humming Bach as you came into view.’ She was looking down as she stopped the audio beam, then she caught me with a swift upward glance. ‘Bill’s not into Bach — he had the feeling that it was coming from you. Can you receive as well? Can you tell me what I’m thinking?’

‘I’d rather not say — if I’m wrong it could be awkward.’

She laughed. ‘Never mind. Let’s go back to the first time you spoke to me, while you were still in Intensive Care: you said, “If you can hold on to the terror you can hold on to the world.”’

‘I don’t remember that conversation.’

She ejected the flicker-break disc and as the next one slid into place and started she froze-frame on a cross-section of a human brain in computerised colour. At the bottom I read: F. Gorn 04:22:16 IGT 04.11.52.

‘You’re looking at a domicilium scan of your brain,’ she said. ‘Domicilium is the collective name for those temporal-lobe systems that are the seat of the identity. This scan was done shortly after your admission to Intensive Care. The purple dot you see there is a peak of biochemical activity. Now see what happens when I unfreeze the frame.’

I watched as the purple dot jumped from one point to another in an anti-clockwise circle; around it went again and again.

‘That’s known as mandalic circuitry,’ she said. ‘You see it sometimes in autistics and in cult believers like the Sons of Osiris and the Sisters of Lorena. It’s a closed loop of self-reinforcing perception that locks out external stimuli. Your brain kept it up with diminishing intensity for most of three days. By the time you could speak intelligibly it had quieted down and there were only occasional bursts of it.’

‘Interesting.’

‘Isn’t it. So what kind of shape were you in that morning? In your head, I mean.’

‘Nothing out of the ordinary.’

‘And what is the ordinary?’

‘Nothing special.’

‘Mr Gorn — my job is to find out what I can about what happened. Have you decided that your job is to keep me from finding out?’

‘I remember flickering out of Nova Central and the next thing I remember is waking up in the room I have now. I don’t remember anything in between.’

‘And you don’t want to, right?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Look,’ she said, and her breezy professional manner was gone; her voice was low and quiet, ‘I can’t even imagine what happened to you out there — probably it was indescribable. Holding on to the world isn’t easy; some mornings when I have to open my eyes and be me I almost can’t do it, everything seems to be slipping away. But you did it drifting in deep space at 3 Kelvin with no spacesuit, no helmet, and no oxygen. I’ve looked at the Sun Ra video and I can’t get it out of my mind. The Level 4 is what I’m assigned to and they want official answers but now I’m talking to you just as one person to another. Somewhere in your mind is the total recall of what happened. I can feel your terror and I want to be in that terror with you. Talk to me, for God’s sake — I’ve been waiting in my house at R’lyeh for such a long time!’

‘You want to be in the terror with me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know.’ Her face was close to mine, her eyes seemed full of fear and doubt, her pupils wide and dark and ringed with green, eyes of becoming, and all around us a blackness that tilted and beckoned with eyes of becoming, becoming …

‘Careful!’ she said, and caught me as I almost fell out of my chair. Then we were holding on to each other and kissing. ‘Oh yes,’ she murmured, ‘whisper me, whisper me, whisper me!’ I was shaking all over as we let go long enough to clear the books and papers off the couch while the dead whooped and hollered and my head sang hoarsely:

ANOTHER BRIDE, ANOTHER JUNE,

ANOTHER SUNNY HONEYMOON,

ANOTHER SEASON, ANOTHER REASON

FOR MAKIN’ WHOOPEE.

Then the singing faded into black sky, thunder, lightning, and rain. And I, Elijah, was running, running ahead of the chariot, being Elijah, being my whole self.

*

‘How do you feel now?’ said Caroline while I was getting my breath back.

‘Less alone.’ There were still circles of emptiness in my vision. ‘Did you get into the terror with me?’

‘Wherever I was, it felt good.’ She hugged me.

‘Maybe we could go somewhere dark and quiet and have a drink?’

‘We’re still on Corporation time.’ She stood up, retrieved her underwear, picked her overall off the floor, zipped herself up, and re-did her Pysche knot.

‘Dr Lovecraft, tell me the truth — do you do this with every Level 4 subject?’

‘Did it feel that way to you?’

‘No.’

‘Then don’t ask stupid questions. You got into my knickers because desperation turns me on and you’re the most desperate man I’ve met in a long time.’

‘You haven’t got anyone now? No partner?’

‘No.’

‘How old are you?’

‘Twenty-eight.’

‘How can it be that a woman like you hasn’t got anybody?’

‘What can I tell you? Lot of frogs out there. Let’s look at the Fremder Gorn video.’ She ejected the brain-scan disc and there was F. Gorn drifting through space as seen by Sun Ra’s nose camera. As we watched me tumbling over and over in frozen stillness she advanced the audio beam to its next track and The Art of Fugue, performed by Marie-Claire Alain, came stalking into the room on its centuries-high legs. It was as if Bach had with spells and numbers called forth some cosmic monster that would eat me up, eat up the world with its implacable and insatiable logic. And yet the terror in that music was what I’d held on to when Clever Daughter disappeared from around me.

‘“Be the music” is what you said on November 7,’ said Caroline’s voice from far away.

‘I’m trying to remember.’ But all that came to me was Rilke’s line ‘Every angel is terrible’. In German it sounds more so: ‘Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich’.

‘“Thou?”’ said Caroline.

‘Are you getting familiar?’

‘I’m looking at the 7 November transcript. After “Be the music” you said, “Thou.” Or maybe it was “Thowl”. Thowl, thowl-the owl?’

‘Shit.’

‘Owlshit?’

‘Could we take a break?’

She looked at her watch. ‘OK,’ she said, and began to clear the books and papers off the couch again.

‘Are you trying to kill me or cure me?’ I said as she unzipped her overall.

She gave me a quick leer over her shoulder. ‘A change is as good as a rest.’

*

Although I still think of huge green breakers when I remember that time it turned out that Caroline wasn’t from California but from Pennsylvania and she’d never done any surfing. She’d played lacrosse at college, though; I’d like to have seen that.

After the break we went to the Cyberspace Lab for a reality-envelope run in which the Clever Daughter/Sun Ra episode was simulated in real time with a model developed from the Clever Daughter automatic transmission, the Sun Ra disc and log, and Bill Charteris’s recall. The whole thing was then analysed with ten-permutation parameters but none of it helped me to remember anything.

Then a hypno session with Caroline. Here’s the transcript:

L: Can you hear me?

G: Yes.

L: You’re aboard Clever Daughter and it’s the 4th of November.

G: Happy Birthday, Frem.

L: Right, Happy Birthday, Frem. Now it’s 04:06.

G: OK for flicker on 47.7 Ems. Hit the switch, Plessik. Bye bye Hubble.

L: Bye bye Hubble. What now?

G: What?

L: What’s happening?

G: Oh no. Hold on.

L: Hold on to what?

G: No, no, no.

L: What are you seeing?

G: Not seeing.

L: What then? Hearing?

G: (VIBRATES TONGUE AGAINST ROOF OF MOUTH WHILE EXPELLING BREATH) Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

L: What’s that? Did you hear a sound like that?

G: No.

L: What then?

G: Riffling.

L: What? What riffling?

G: Like a great big pack of cards.

L: This is something you heard?

G: No.

L: It was in your mind?

G: Piss off, Dr Lovecraft.

Caroline gave me that to read after the session. When I finished I put it back on her desk so that it was lying at an angle in front of her. She lined it up parallel to the edge of the desk. ‘Why did you tell me to piss off?’ she said.

‘I don’t know — I suppose I don’t like having too many people inside my head.’

‘OK, I can understand that; I know it’s an intrusion but we need answers. Do you remember telling me about the riffling?’

‘No.’

She put the transcript in the file. ‘Can you tell me anything else at all?’

‘No.’

‘Straightsies?’

‘Straightsies.’

‘You’re not bleeping for a Section 10, are you?’ Section 10 is Contract annulled without censure due to job-related illness or injury; full pay and compensation as stipulated in Clause 86.

‘All I’m bleeping for is a little peace and quiet.’

‘You won’t find it in this world, Frem.’

That was where the first day of the Level 4 ended. When somebody in a white jacket came to take me to my quarters I found various colours in my head for which there were no words. I wanted to demonstrate these colours to the somebody in the white jacket but he seemed to want me to keep still so I had to knock him down, after which he got up and knocked me down and sat on me while somebody else zapped me with a large shot of Be-a-Good-Chap and I woke up the next morning feeling very well rested.

9

Let’s take a kayak to Quincey or Nyack,

Let’s get away from it all.

Matt Dennis and Thomas Adair, ‘Let’s Get Away from It All’

‘You ever been to Badru?’ said Caroline next morning.

‘It’s one of my favourite places.’

‘Feel like going there today?’

‘What for?’

‘I don’t know. It’s nothing official — I just want to see what it feels like, the two of us on Badru. We’ll drink Krasnaya Kola and eat Galaktik Miks with Spudnik Fry and spend the night in a Q-BO SLEEP. How’s that grab you?’

‘Hard. But is this a you-and-me personal thing or is it a new approach to the Level 4?’

‘Look, Frem — the you that’s part of the you-and-me personal thing is the same you that’s nilsponding the Level 4. So I don’t really know how much of it is for me and how much is for Corporation. Is that OK?’

‘OK, let’s do Badru.’

There was a 10:00 jet so we caught it. The other passengers were mostly lingerie salesman from a company called Flauntees Ltd, all of them wearing badges with their first names on them and all of them bound for Yamomoto Pleasure Station 7 for their annual sales conference. Several of them looked at Caroline with eyes that were obviously undressing her and putting her into something more comfortable but they were quiet about it.

‘Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,’ said a husky female voice after we buckled ourselves in. ‘Welcome aboard the Pandora, your Interjet shuttle service to Badr al-Budur. I’m Captain Kurtz and I’ve got a green board in front of me so as soon as we get the word from Traffic Control we’ll be off. Our jump time to Badru is eight minutes, give or take the odd half-hour depending on the El Niños. Today’s forecast is fifteen per cent so it shouldn’t be too bad. A final reminder: if you haven’t already checked all electronic equipment, please buzz a cabin attendant and do it now.’ There was a pause while three or four laptops were collected, then the clear for blastoff sounded. ‘Cabin attendants, please buckle up,’ said the captain, and there was a bone-rattling roar as we blasted off. Once in our flight path we lurched, wobbled, shook, rattled, and rolled as we hit the El Niños and Pandora and all of us grew alternately longer, shorter, and otherwise, bending and twisting with the varying force fields. Strange colours surged around the ship and faded into blackness on the seatback monitors. Some of the Flauntees Ltd first-names began to chant, ‘Tees-Flaun, Tees-Flaun,’ then became quiet as sick bags were brought into play and the cabin staff were kept on the hop with urgent calls for aid of one kind or another. Eventually the spaceport at Badru appeared in the seatback monitors, the captain said, ‘Layzen gemmen, than kyoufer flynnerjet, hopesee yougen. Hava plenstop Badru,’ and we were down after an hour and sixteen minutes of jump.

Everybody staggered off Pandora into the dim blue noctolux and many-coloured neon of the spaceport. The Flauntees Ltd crowd dispersed into the gift shop, the bar, and MIKHAIL’S QWIKSNAK; Caroline and I wobbled to a bench and sat down as the spaceport filled up with emptiness and that imbricated silence made up of the low roar of the air-cycling system, the hum of the robot sweepers, the sizzle of the noctolux lamps, and the sound of distant footsteps. The smell of the spaceport at Badru, that blend of LavaKleen, floor wax, and frying, is the smell of all-alone and faraway that meets the traveller everywhere in the world of nowheres. The big board showed that it was 19:23 in Tokyo, 11:23 in Paris, 06:23 in New York. Departures on offer were:

YAM PLEAS STATN 7 INTGAL JMP 14 DEP 12:15 NOT READY

NEWCOMP CONF CTR TRNSCT JMP 03 DEP 13:40 NOT READY

Caroline took my hand and laced her fingers into mine. ‘Jesus,’ she said, ‘dawmsfergahn hamuch s’plasis wah’iss.’

‘Saygen,’ I said. ‘Berrwaylill.’

We waited a little and tried again. ‘Jesus,’ said Caroline, ‘I’d almost forgotten how much this place is what it is.’

‘I hadn’t.’ I was seeing the figure in the blue coverall tumbling over and over in the icy cold, Badr al-Budur like a pale moon in the distance.

‘This is the real thing,’ said Caroline. ‘It’s the deepest, the profoundest. It’s the big bazonga, it’s really existential.’

‘Yes,’ I said, watching a distant sweeper with a faulty program banging again and again into the Information kiosk, ‘just don’t tell me it’s a metaphor, OK?’

‘Sorry! Shall we go for a Galaktik Mik?’

‘Right. That’s what I need — that Quasi-Protein fix.’ Followed by our echoing footsteps we made our way to MIKHAIL’S QWIKSNAK where the smell of frying embraced us greasily and the coloured neon hung like exotic nocturnal fruit.

‘Have a good hello,’ burbled the charming female robot at the entrance to the cafeteria. ‘Welcome day Qwiksnak to Mikhail’s hello, have a, have a, have a … Come back and see us hello.’

‘You too,’ we said. We slid our trays along the rails under red, orange, yellow, purple, and blue neon, loaded up with Galaktik Miks, Spudnik Fry, and Krasnaya Kolas, and found ourselves a table by the windows. In the distance Qamar al-Zaman the rubbish planet hung like a rotting grapefruit while all around us the Flauntees reps chewed and swallowed and called each other Kevin and Tony and Fred in loud voices.

‘This is one of your special places, is it?’ ‘I said to Caroline. ‘One of your reference points?’

She nodded. ‘This is a paradigm of what-it-is,’ she said. ‘It’s a place where you eat non-food and wait for a jump to somewhere else that’s not ready.’

‘Only we’re not waiting for a jump to somewhere else.’

‘No, we’re not going to somewhere else, you and I.’

‘We could, though, if we wanted to.’

‘Pleasure Station Seven? Would you like to see me in Flauntees with suspenders and net stockings?’

‘I like to see you any way at all, Caroline.’

‘Let’s walk — I’ve had as much Quasi as I can handle.’

‘Have a good hello,’ said the robot hostess as we left. We went to the observation bubble, not a very big one. From there we had a good view of the Anunnaki, Ereshkigal, and Inanna’s Girdle as well as Qamar al-Zaman. ‘Everything has a name put to it,’ said Caroline, ‘but the name has nothing to do with the reality. The name Caroline is derived from Charles which means manly. Do you think I’m manly?’

‘In a very womanly way. What’s the matter, Caroline? What’s bothering you?’

‘Nothing in particular; I just wanted to come here because sometimes I like to be in a place where what’s outside me isn’t too different from what’s inside me.’

‘I guess that’s why I like it. But you don’t look as if desolation is your thing.’

‘Maybe that’s my problem — I look like a lot of laughs but I’m not. Let’s go to the mini-cine and watch something old in black-and-white — Brief Encounter maybe.’

We went to the mini-cine near the Q-BO SLEEP, found an empty two-seater that reeked of beer and semen, and punched up Brief Encounter.

‘Oh God,’ said Caroline as the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto came in over the credits, ‘look! The very first thing you see is a train hurtling away from you in great clouds of steam, then a train coming towards you, then Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson sitting at a table in the refreshment room at Milford Junction and that awful woman chattering so they can’t even have a proper goodbye. Their story begins with the ending of it. That’s so true, it’s so much the way life is.’ She began to sniffle, brought a box of tissues out of her shoulder bag, and settled back to enjoy the film. When Celia Johnson, trapped in a compartment with the dreadful Dolly, said to herself, ‘Nothing lasts, really — neither happiness nor despair. Not even life lasts very long,’ Caroline wept openly. ‘Oh shit,’ she said, ‘that gets me every time.’

I hugged her and kissed her and she made little comfortable noises and told me more about the film which I too had seen several times. ‘Their story begins when he takes a bit of grit out of her eye, he opens her eyes to something she hadn’t seen before. She knew what was happening by the time they’d spent their first afternoon together at the pictures; and it was obviously one of those things that just couldn’t be but it’s so sad and I cry every time.’

After the film we had dinner at Mikhail’s Bistro where the prices are higher than those at the Qwiksnak but the Quasi-Protein is pretty much the same except for the sauces. Afterwards we walked around the spaceport not talking, just being with each other in the echoing silence. At Hubble Straits when I wasn’t with Caroline and I thought about her, the picture that came first was always her walk: it was a walk that pleasured the eye, a noble way of moving. As we slowly strolled with her arm linked in mine and our bodies touching I felt proud to be the one she walked with.

‘What do you want out of life, Frem?’ she said.

Again I saw the figure in the blue coverall tumbling over and over, drifting in deep space, pictures frozen in its mind. ‘I want to be the whole me, whatever that is.’

‘Then you’ll have to remember all that you’ve forgotten, won’t you?’

‘It’ll come back when it’s ready, I guess.’ We didn’t say any more about it then. It was after midnight when we got to the Q-BO SLEEP. We found a double, punched in our IDs and our wake-up time, cleaned our teeth, washed our faces, undressed, and crept naked under the thin grey blankets — two bare forked creatures holding each other tight with a great blackness all around.

10

They call it stormy Monday,

But Tuesday’s just as bad.

T-Bone Walker, ‘They Call It Stormy Monday’

Back at Hubble Straits next morning the Level 4 continued and Caroline again produced the hypno session transcript. ‘Maybe if we go over it once more something will come back to you,’ she said. Her manner seemed to suggest that now I was ready to be good and perform as required.

‘Why should anything more come back to me?’

‘Maybe you haven’t such a tight grip on yourself as you did the day of the hypno session.’

‘Do you mean that our trip to Badru was meant to loosen me up?’

‘Not really. But I did think that maybe some of the walls were down.’

‘Do you remember, Dr Lovecraft, in Hamlet, where Hamlet shows Guildenstern a recorder and asks him if he can play it?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Guildenstern says no, he can’t. And Hamlet says something like, “If you can’t play a simple instrument like this, how do you think you can play me?”’

‘I’m not trying to play you.’

‘You say you’re not but you are.’

‘What’s the big secret here, Fremder? What is it you don’t want to look at?’

I could feel it growing huge in me but I didn’t know what it was. ‘I don’t remember.’

‘I believe that you don’t remember but I think you don’t want to remember and I think you could if you wanted to.’

‘You’re welcome to your opinion, Dr Lovecraft.’

Things became distinctly cooler between us after that. We didn’t sleep together again after Badru but Caroline didn’t give up on the Level 4. Sometimes she attacked the physical symptoms of my problems: the best neuro specialists in Physio/Psycho did many EEGs and VC scans but they couldn’t find anything organically wrong with my vision so I had to go on looking at things past bright circles of emptiness.

The Caroline-and-me thing didn’t grind to a complete halt; sometimes we had drinks and dinner together at the Hubble Bubble. The light there was dim and retentive and the pianist in the lounge was Wasny Flim whose ‘Planetary Fade’ had been Top of the Charts when Judith and I saw the owl. He was a small dark man, all slants and angles like his music. Under the spotlight his eyes were closed and his head thrown back as he wove his wistful intervals through the shadows and the circumambient murmur. And always beyond him receded the black sparkle of space in which the flicker docks and Mikhail’s Snackdome regularly came and went together with the Hawking Threshold light, Ereshkigal, the seven Anunnaki, and Inanna’s Girdle. When Caroline and I came to the lounge at the end of the first week he was playing ‘Where or When’ and talking a throwaway vocal in the Sun Ra manner:

Some things that happen for the first time,

Seem to be happening again.

‘Maybe there’s no such thing as a first time for anything,’ said Caroline. ‘Maybe the same things keep happening over and over.’ Her voice was lower than usual and she wasn’t looking at me. Flim and his piano continued to suggest that we had met before and laughed before and loved before but who knew where or when? 24 HRS — FREIGHTERS YES, said Mikhail’s Snackdome silently.

I’ve mentioned before this the little tribunal of the dusk. There’s no dusk at Hubble Straits but the little tribunal were sitting anyhow, this time as twelve eagle owls, each on a child’s coffin. Please, I said to the mind that had spoken to me of the everything-fear and the all-terror, tell me how to be.

To my inner eye came white mist on the ancient waters of time’s beginning but there were no words as the Snackdome came round again.

‘Freighters yes,’ said Caroline. ‘Everybody’s carrying some kind of a load.’ I let that lie there. She held up her empty glass and I signalled the waiter to bring two more of the same.

‘One more river to cross,’ said Caroline as she looked into her fresh gin-and-tonic.

I didn’t ask her what she meant. We had several more of the same; the bright circles of emptiness in my vision spangled into soft focus and the effect was not unpleasant.

‘Maybe this will get us to Level 5,’ she said. ‘Level 4 certainly hasn’t amounted to much.’

My head was singing:

PACK UP ALL MY CARE AND WOE,

HERE I GO, SINGING LOW,

BYE BYE BLACKBIRD.

‘Coward,’ said Caroline.

‘That’s your professional opinion, is it?’

‘Yes, it is: I’ve given you four openings and you’re afraid to get into it with me.’

‘Into what?’

‘You know very well what — you’ve stonewalled the one-on-ones and somehow you’ve managed to jam the RE runs and the hypno sessions. We’re seven days into the Level 4 and I haven’t got diddly-poo to show for it.’

‘I’m sorry if I’m making you look bad with the Sheela-Na-Gig but there are things I just can’t remember.’

‘You’re not sorry. When it’s ooh-ooh time you’re out of your pants like greased lightning but when it’s Level 4 time you zip your mouth shut and you don’t care how it makes me look.’

‘Oh, I see. This is the first time that you’ve made it absolutely clear that this was a sex-for-answers deal. And for a little while I thought it was my desperation pheromones that were lighting your fire.’

‘Goddam it, Frem, give me a break, will you? What I said about you and me was true but I have got a job to do.’

‘And we both know what your priorities are, don’t we.’

‘That’s not fair — I haven’t been trading sex for answers but you’ve been using me while giving nothing.’

‘Giving nothing! I’ve been giving you whatever I am, and what I mostly am is desperation — I thought that’s what you liked.’

We went on like that for a while and the evening came to an end early. The remaining two weeks were strictly business and not very productive from Caroline’s point of view — I wasn’t giving her the answers she wanted and even elephant-sized shots of Epiphanol couldn’t get them out of me.

At the end of the Level 4 there was a DSC Board of Enquiry and the finding of the suits and uniforms was that no action was to be taken pending further investigation and a Pythia session back on Earth. The Level 4 material, such as it was, had been sent to the Ziggurat for processing. When my orders came through, Caroline, who’d been hoping to go Earthside for the next stage of things, didn’t get that assignment.

‘You can see how impressed they were with my work,’ she said. ‘I’m lucky they didn’t bust me to emptying bedpans.’

On my last night at Hubble Straits we went to the Hubble Bubble again. We didn’t talk much, just sat there emptying and refilling our glasses. Wasny Flim’s last song was one of his own, ‘Here and Gone’:

Here and gone,

the picture of you in my eyes,

your voice, your laughter, and your walk …

My eyes were on Flim when I heard sniffling. I turned to look at Caroline and saw that she was crying a little. ‘What?’ I said.

She looked at me as if she were seeing me for the first time, seeing me as someone unknown. ‘First Navigator Fremder Gorn,’ she said, ‘it just occurred to me that there might be something missing in you and that’s why you didn’t disappear with the ship and the others. You’re the most alone person I’ve ever met. You know how wirecars have couplers, what they call male and female couplers — you push one car up against another and there’s a clunk and they connect? Most people have couplers but you seem not to. You weren’t connected to your ship or the others; when they went you stayed alone. And you never connected with me although you stuck your male part into my female one. I wanted you to give me the how-it-is-with-Fremder the same as I gave you the how-it-is-with-Caroline but you wouldn’t do it and now you’re going Earthside with all the how-it-is still locked up in you. OK, that’s the last assessment from Dr Love-but-not-very-crafty.’

The circles of emptiness were very bright, the shadows blurred and dim, the space outside the Bubble bleaker than usual as Flim continued:

Here and gone,

the kisses and the lies,

the small dark hours when we used to talk -

here and gone, all that we were together,

here and gone.

She was sitting there looking like the goddess on her desk, at the same time seductive and full of fear and doubt.

‘Listen, Caroline,…’ I began.

‘Please,’ she said, ‘no bullshit. We had one good week and that’s it. You’ll remember me as Caroline Not-very-crafty who was fun in bed and dead easy to outsmart in the Level 4.’

‘No, I won’t.’

‘Even better — you’ll forget me.’

‘You know I won’t.’

‘Sure, Frem, let’s have lunch sometime. Here comes Mikhail’s Snackdome again. Time to go.’

11

I see a red door and I want it painted black,

No colours any more, I want them to turn black.

I see the girls walk by dressed in their summer clothes -

I have to turn my head until my darkness goes.

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, ‘Paint It Black’

Maybe for some people the business of knowing who and what and when and where they are is simple; not for me. The past and the present flicker together in my mind and it isn’t easy to sort through the different strands of story to find one that is only mine. Here’s an extract from one of Helen Gorn’s notebooks of 2022, the year of her suicide and my birth:

18.08.22

‘I know death hath ten thousand several doors for men to take their exits.’ Going out is easy, coming in is a labour. Hold it up by the ankles and smack its bottom. Cry — you’re in the world. Nobody asks to be born. Lots of people ask for the other.

And yet another transcript, this one from one of my mother’s therapy sessions (which I, the as yet unborn Gorn, attended) after her first suicide attempt later that same August:

SNG REST AND REASSESSMENT CENTRE

GORN, HELEN — SESSION 12–15:30 — 22.08.22

THERAPISTD. SCHWARTZ, DIRECTOR, PHYSIO/PSYCHO

(GORN IS WEARING HEADPHONES AND LISTENING TO AN AUDIOBOY)

S: What are you listening to?

G: Bloody cheek!

S: Why do you say that?

G: (MOCKING ME) ‘Why do you say that?’ I never saw you before in my life and here you come with your face and your spectacles and your beard and you want to know what I’m listening to. I don’t ask you what you’re listening to, do I?

S: I’m not listening to anything.

G: That’s your problem — you don’t listen.

S: I meant that I’m not listening to music.

G: Never mind. Those that can’t hear, let them not listen.

S: What can you hear?

G: The black.

S: By?

G: Johann Sebastian Schwarz.

S: Do you mean Bach?

G: I mean Black. That’s your name too — Schwarz. But you don’t listen.

S: Which of Schwarz’s compositions are you listening to?

G: The Art of Frog. I hate it.

S: Why?

G: No hop.

S: What about you? Have you got hop?

G: Don’t be stupid. If I had I wouldn’t be here, would I. Would you like to disappear?

S: I’m interested in why you tried to disappear.

G: ‘If I should take a notion to jump right into the ocean, ain’t nobody’s business if I do.’ Know that song?

S: No.

G: Neither do I, because whatever I do is Corporation business. If I weren’t who I am you wouldn’t be interested in me.

S: I’m interested because what you’ve done is my business now.

G: You really care about me, do you? (PUTS HER HAND BETWEEN HER LEGS) Do you fancy me?

S: Can you remember what you were thinking when you took the Lethenil tablets?

G: Life is a dis-integration.

S: Can you say more about that?

G: Before we’re born we’re integrated with the black. Birth tears us loose from that and dis-integrates us into life. So I thought, why not re-integrate. Haven’t you ever thought that, Dr Black? You’re quite hairy, aren’t you.

S: No, I haven’t ever thought that.

G: What — never thought that you’re quite hairy?

S: Never thought of re-integrating with the black. When you took the tablets were you mindful of the fact that another life besides your own was involved?

G: It was in my mind, yes.

S: Can you say a little more about that?

G: How can I say more to someone who’s never thought about re-integrating with the black?

S: Two other lives, I should have said — there’s the father, isn’t there?

G: You’re right, this was not an immaculate conception. That’s a very shrewd insight.

S: Physio says you’re about six months pregnant. Does the father know?

G: Now I know what happened: I died and went to hell and my punishment is to spend eternity talking to arseholes.

S: You haven’t answered my question.

G: Who the hell are you, that all your questions must be answered? You think all my questions get answered?

S: Do you know who the father is?

G: Do you know who yours was?

S: Yes, I do.

G: Was he an arsehole too?

S: We were talking about the father of the child you’re carrying.

G: You were, I wasn’t. I don’t think I can give you any more time just now. (GORN LEAVES THE ROOM)

That session followed Helen Gorn’s first attempt at reintegration with the black. A month later she made a better job of it.

In Izzy’s notebooks the handwriting was different but the voice is pretty much the same. Here’s one of his entries about two months before his death:

10.02.22

The black is all there is. That’s why if you build your house on the black it’ll last for ever.

12

Where is it hidden, the speechless

body of Osiris? Where is it hidden?

In a quiet place, in a place of no words.

When will it speak, the silent

mouth of Osiris? When will it speak?

Later.

Rodney Spoor, Questions

There’s an asteroid in the Sixth Galaxy called A373 — it hasn’t even got a name, just a number. It’s a supply dump for the Thoth cluster, a desert-coloured rock with nothing on it but an open-frame warehouse with an oxybubble in one corner. There’s an automatic coffee shop and a robot modelled on Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. Her questioning eyes are the same as those that look out of the painting. A plate in her back says that she’s donated by the Sixth Galaxy Poetry Society. Her catalogue includes everything from Sappho to T. P. Stumm. They haven’t named her but I call her Pearl. She’s strictly for poetry, with a contact-activated shielding circuit so there’s no fooling around. You can take her outside the bubble — she doesn’t need air — and you just tell her what you want to hear.

I was on A373 for an inventory a couple of years ago and Pearl recited the first of Rilke’s Duino Elegies for me as we sat on a rock outside the warehouse:

Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel

Who, were I to cry, would hear me out of the angelic

Ordnungen? und gesetzt selbst, es nähme

orders? and suppose even that one were to take

einer mich plötzlich ans Herz: ich verginge von seinem

me suddenly to his heart: I should perish through his

stärkeren Dasein. Denn das Schöne ist nichts als des

stronger existence. For beauty is nothing but the

Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen,

beginning of terror, which we only barely endure,

und wir bewundern es so, weil es gelassen verschmäht

and we admire it so, because it calmly disdains

uns zu zerstören. Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich.

to destroy us. Every angel is terrible.

She spoke the poem in the original German. The voice that came out of her was what I think of as a Eurydice voice, low and breathy and full of shadows. We sat there on a tawny rock, the strange and beautiful Pearl in her seventeenth-century costume and I, looking at a red moon called Isis (there’s a red sun called Osiris in that system) and I heard that voice and Rilke’s words and the sound of my own breathing in my helmet. Nobody but the two of us on the asteroid and nothing happening but Rilke’s words coming alive out of her mouth. Pearl’s lips moved as she spoke but the voice was that of my mother. Pearl spoke in many voices; this was a recording made by Helen Gorn for Amnesty International in November of 2019, three months after she was raped and Izzy crippled by the Shorties and the Clowns.

I’ve given a lot of thought to Rilke’s angels and I’ve come to the conclusion that for him an angel was the ultimate degree of perception, in the same way that terror is the ultimate degree of beauty, living at the farther end of a spectrum on which we find, closer to us, the never-to-be answered question in the eyes of the girl with the pearl earring.

A3 73 and Badr al-Budur are two of the quiet places in my head. I like sometimes to think of Pearl speaking in my mother’s voice under the red Isis moon and I like to think of the robot sweepers humming through the silence of the spaceport under the noctolux lamps of Badru.

13

You go to my head and you linger like

a haunting refrain

and I find you spinning round in my brain

like the bubbles in a glass of champagne …

Haven Gillespie and J. Fred Coots, ‘You Go to My Head’

Corporation flickered me home with a couple of ViTech 8s minding me. One of them was very tall and the other was very short. The tall one’s working name was Mojo; the short one’s was High John and he didn’t smile when he said it. When we reassembled at Nova Central they cleared me through Quarantine with Red 1 Priority, got us into a waiting hopper, and took me to the Ziggurat in London Central for the Pythia session. It was a grey and rainy end-of-November day, I was glad for that; I hate those hard sunny days that break your teeth. This one was gentle, there was a little mercy coming down with the rain; the colours of everything were heightened by the rainlight; except for the holes of bright emptiness it was a day you could work with. I was glad for that because I knew that I was coming to the end of my forgetting; whatever you might try to hide, Pythia would get it out of you one way or another.

We lifted out of Nova Central and flew over the ruins of Themepark West where the rides had rusted into tottering skeletons and the scenic river was silted solid with sewage; over the huddle of London Outer Squats where the roads were choked with the gridlocked shells of cars and lorries that hadn’t moved for forty years, many of them extended by canvas or packing crates into a better class of hovel than their neighbours. The rain intensified the stench of garbage, excrement, and decomposition as we flew over a pack of dogs dining on a human corpse. The next gathering we saw was a pack of Shorties roasting what looked like a dog on a spit. One of them had a blaster and there was dancing but I couldn’t hear the music.

The air looked no soupier than usual and all the hopper vents were closed but our breather filters were greenish-yellow by the time we got to the Ziggurat. The transparent anti-rad canopy was up and the yellow HAZRAD blimps that supported it swayed glistening in the rain. Through the canopy I saw bodies, some naked and some clothed, heaped on a plaza below the upper levels. The maintenance crews were out on strike so the building was in its purple standby mode; the naked bodies seen through the yellow canopy were greenish-grey and ghastly. As we flew lower I saw that there were Shorties among the adults. Placards were visible but I couldn’t make out what they said.

‘Are the big ones Clowns?’ I said.

‘Probably,’ said High John. ‘With Shorties giving the orders. This lot must have had a neutraliser for getting through the barrier screen; Shorties are getting smarter all the time.’

‘If they’d been smart they wouldn’t have got themselves terminated like that,’ said Mojo.

‘What were they protesting against?’ I said.

‘What’ve you got?’ said High John.

‘Fun Creds are what they mostly protest for,’ said Mojo: ‘toadsy and arcade time.’

‘You ever done toadsy?’ High John asked me.

‘Flicker drive is all I do in the consciousness-altering line.’

‘toadsy makes life a lot more exciting,’ said High John.

‘Death too,’ said Mojo.

Even with the corpses the purple Ziggurat looked wonderful in the rain sporting its yellow canopy and flashers, the various red and green beacons winking on relay towers and dish antennas, and the newsflash girdling it with green lights: SUNNYBANK MELTDOWN: 237 MORE DEAD. ‘DANGER PAST’ — SNG SHAKEUP, NO. I IN SECRET TALKS WITH TOP EXEC — CLEVER DAUGHTER FAMILIES: ‘TELL US THE TRUTH’ — ZIGGURAT MAINTENANCE CREWS REJECT CORPORATION OFFER: ‘WE’LL ZIG BUT WE WON’T ZAG’ — SURVEY SHOWS 43 % INCREASE IN NO-GO AREAS: STREET BOSS SACKED, said the headlines. It was good to be home.

Because of the canopy (still up because Maintenance were still out) we landed in the hopper park on top of the old MI Archive Tower and took the lift down to the underground shuttle to get to the Ziggurat. The shuttle is Red Clearance only and passes had to be shown but the platform stank of urine just the same and the graffiti on the walls were the usual thing: SNG HOARS OUT WOGS JEW UROTRASH OUT INGLAN 4 THE INGLASH. SHORTIS ROOL. The crossed arrows of the Patriots were prominent as were many illegible calligraphies which may have been personal signatures.

At the Ziggurat we took the lift to Pythia Reception where Mojo signed me over to the Tech 7 on duty who turned out to be Nina Marlowe, the wife of Ernie Marlowe who’d been Auxiliary Engineer on Clever Daughter. ‘You’re looking well, Fremder,’ was all she said. She punched up my entry on the console and fed my capsule into Pythia intro.

Standing by the reception desk was a sweet-faced grandmotherly-looking woman in a business suit and a power haircut. ‘A sad welcome, Mr Gorn,’ she said. ‘I’m Irene Heale, Head of Research and Development. Nothing can bring back the seven who were lost but we’re hoping for data from you that will prevent such disasters in future.’

‘I’ll do my best,’ I said.

Nina pushed a buzzer, a young woman with fair hair in a long plait came towards me, and I felt a sudden rush of loss and longing and desire all at once. It was too early for dusk but the little tribunal was sitting and the verdict was the usual one. ‘Hello,’ she said, and stuck out her hand. ‘I’m Katya Mazur. I’ll prep you for Pythia.’

‘You’re new, yes? You weren’t here the last time I had a Pythia session.’

‘I’ve been here three months or so.’ Her handshake was firm, her hand warm and dry.

I leaned closer to see how her name was spelled on her badge. ‘Katya Mazur,’ I said. ‘Turn it around and it’s Mazurka-tya.’

‘You like mazurkas? The Chopin ones?’

‘Yes.’ I watched her walk as she moved ahead of me to push the lift button.

‘I’ve got the Ilse Bak recording of the complete mazurkas,’ she said. ‘Opus 67 in A Minor, Number 4 is my favourite.’ She hummed the beginning of it.

‘Mine too.’

She looked at me to see if I was lying, saw that I wasn’t, and smiled. Standing beside her in the lift I closed my eyes and smelled her hair and felt guilty.

The ready room was a cosy place with a dim red primordial light that made it easier to be naked there. I stripped so that I could be prepped by T/7 Mazur whose face and figure had already brought me to a good state of pupil-dilation. Deep-spacers are still mostly male, and the Sheela-Na-Gig and Top Exec (solidly female) clearly wanted us wide awake and tingling for Pythia sessions.

‘What was that look you gave me when I came to reception?’ she said. ‘Have we met somewhere before?’

‘You reminded me of someone.’

‘Someone nice?’

‘Very nice,’ I said, and abandoned myself to her ministrations.

‘You’re shaking,’ she said as she smeared me all over with electrolytic cream.

‘Don’t take any notice of it — it’s just something I do between flicker jumps.’ She was very thorough and although I was feeling more and more nervous about the Pythia session it was evident that my body was getting interested.

‘See,’ she said with a big smile, ‘you’re feeling better already.’ She put her entry card into the slot, an aperture irised open, and we went through it into what Corporation called the Omphalos and deep-spacers referred to as the Wank Parlour. It was a warm and humid place with a very delicate essence-of-silk-knickers smell and it was shaped like the inside of an egg with no visible high-tech male gimmickry. Somewhere in the building there had to be a door marked RED CLEARANCE ONLY and behind that door there were undoubtedly speakers and screens and banks of gauges and recorders and panels of winking lights monitored by Physio/Psycho, by Psychogen and of course by Thinksec but in the Omphalos there were only that faint erotic fragrance and the sensor cradle and the millions of pixels lining the walls of the ovum and changing colour and pattern to the music Pythia made while waiting for the session to begin.

The thing that always hit me straightaway was her presence — there was definitely someone there. The Corporation brochure said that Pythia was a Darwinian intelligence of 23.7 billion photoneurons that had come on line in 2034 to cope with the flood of data arising from flicker drive. She was modestly classified as a Data Evaluator (Autonomous Response) but nobody called her DEAR. According to the brochure: ‘As deep-spacers told her of the psychological stresses of their work she became by degrees their confidante and counsellor, her function expanding as her capabilities increased.’ That’s as far as the brochure went but Pythia went much farther. She was generally acknowledged to be a little crazy, but as most deep-spacers were a little crazy themselves they found her easy to talk to.

Pythia’s sensor cradle was a flexotronic body shell in two halves, one for the front and one for the back of the subject. It waited at a comfortable reclining angle like a waffle iron with its lid open; when I lay down it tilted to the horizontal. The shell was cast from a sculpture by Rajeswari Biswas and the shape was that of a voluptuous female along the lines of those in the Ajanta Caves except that it had no face, only the back of the head which acted as a headrest. The legs were well apart and the knees bent; the arms were flung back above the head.

When I was in position Mazur put the electrode net on my head, then she attached the semen collector (Pythia was one of the intakes for the DSC Genetic Programme; she also analysed the DNA of deep-spacers on flicker drive) and closed the shell on me so that all the sensors made contact. She switched on the power and the cradle rose off its base on an electrostatic field and hung in the air in the middle of the egg-shaped space. Looking down between my flexotronic breasts I could see on my belly the raised I Ching hexagram of K’un, The Receptive. I sometimes wondered about the Pythian arrangements but I accepted that the Sheela-Na-Gig and Top Exec were what they were and had their little ways. So far they hadn’t done any worse than the male-dominated governments before them. Why had they called their Data Evaluator (Autonomous Response) Pythia? Generations of priestesses with that name had sat on a tripod over the chasm at Delphi, inspired by the sulphurous fumes to speak oracles — in other words, stoned out of their minds; I don’t believe Top Exec credited Pythia with mantic powers; I think they gave her that name because it made her seem a little like a hi-tech gypsy palmist and encouraged people to loosen up with her.

When Mazur had me hooked up she said, ‘Push the button under your left thumb if you want to disconnect and the one under your right thumb if you need me.’ Then she left. I liked her going-away view and the sensors put that up on the pixels briefly before they went into a flicker pattern of expanding and contracting shapes and colours, glimmering and occulting: yes/no/here/gone. Except, of course, for the places where the circles of bright emptiness came and went. The i/f music that always accompanied the flicker pattern meandered faintly through the silence.

I closed my eyes, afraid of what might jump out of my head and on to the pixels. I tried to relax but I could feel something building up in me and threatening to burst out at any moment. In all Pythia sessions there was inevitably pain as well as pleasure but I knew that this was going to be like none other. My head had as always its own agenda and the song it was singing was ‘My One and Only Love’:

The very thought of you makes my heart sing

like an April breeze on the wings of spring,…

Then I noticed that I was hearing it from outside my head. Pythia was singing in her husky voice and with her slightly slurred diction:

And you appear in all your splendour, my one and

only love.

The shadows fall and spread their mystic charms

in the hush of night when you’re in my arms.

I feel your lips so warm and tender, my one and

only love.

‘When everyone was young,’ she said. ‘Such clear, clear water! Sunlight through the leaves and the fragrance of summer. Have you ever found a one and only love?’

‘I thought so once.’

‘What happened?’

‘I lost it.’ The Uhu on the coffin came and went and with the smell of T/7 Mazur’s hair still in my nostrils I saw on the pixels above me the tawny owl gliding low over the heather in the grey wind in the Grampians, its ringed eyes growing larger, becoming eyes of otherness becoming something partly now and partly remembered, fading, gone as Caroline appeared when we cleared the couch for the first time and she stepped out of her knickers. Other and more active images followed — the Omphalos was where it all came out, there was no chance whatever of non-visual thinking. I averted my eyes modestly, and when I looked again Katya Mazur’s going-away view came on with the charming little transverse ripple in her trousers where the incurve of her lower back met the outcurve of her bottom.

‘Pretty well back to normal, are we?’ said Pythia. ‘A pomegranate was what Persephone ate the seeds of.’

‘Getting there.’

‘Good. And before the blue movie with Dr Lovecraft and the close-up of T/7 Mazur’s bouncy bits we had some nature-film footage that faded into something else. What was that all about?’ Again the owl appeared on the pixels; again its eyes became eyes of otherness, eyes of becoming.

‘That’s a long story, Pythia.’

‘Some of my best friends but I wouldn’t want my sister. All right, if you’re not ready to talk about it we can come back to it later. Let’s say the words now: “From the woman-darkness, from the womb of time,…”’

I responded, ‘“From before the maleness, from before the beginning,…”’

‘From the Genetrix of all things, from the fruitful blackness, …”’

‘“Let there speak through me the voice of what is.”’

We were quiet for a little while and the pixels went into a dim and meditative colour that I’d never seen before and had no name for. I wasn’t at all sure I was seeing the colour; it was as if I were taking in the chromatic information without actually perceiving it visually. The 1/f music was gone; the whisper of the rain and the sound of a distant hopper came in from an external mike.

‘Such a good sound to make love to, such a good sound to fall asleep to,’ said Pythia. ‘Ancient and memorious rain. Do you like the smell of rain?’

‘When the wind is right.’

‘Do you think the rain remembers, Fremder?’

‘I think everything remembers, Pythia.’ Except me, I thought. Once there was Clever Daughter and then there wasn’t. Seven other crew missing. What happened? So deep and wide, the reaches of space. Something speaking in the silence? What?

‘Yes, but especially the rain. It remembers when the world was new, remembers how the seas filled up. Think of all the midnights and the dawns the rain remembers, how many there were before a single word was spoken. Neither pleasant palaces nor wild dogs to howl in them, only the steam rising as the seas filled up, only the white mist on the water in the ancient mornings.’

I opened myself to her voice, closed my eyes, held the white mist on the water with my inner eye. It was good to see nothing but that, it was restful, I didn’t want to see more. There was music in the Omphalos now, The Art of Fugue. The subject, having magisterially introduced itself, recurred in a higher octave, then a lower one; together they ascended the spirals of their logic, their mingled voices bellowing and roaring. I opened my eyes and the pixels were purple-blue but it was no purple-blue that I’d ever seen before and it was vibrating at a frequency that was certainly beyond the ordinary visual range. As the music went quiet, maundering through its mazes down the long, long reaches of for ever, there surged up in me the terror that I’d felt when Clever Daughter disappeared from around me. With it came such a wave of nausea that I nearly threw up. The pixels went to a degree of purple-blue that was like a scream in my eyes. ‘Shit,’ I said.

‘Terror, terror, terror! Is it sweet, the purple-blue, is it Hear, O Israel? Is it Ho! Watchman, what of the night?’

I wasn’t sure that I could go on being myself from one moment to the next. The pixels were still in that screaming purple-blue that now seemed to have other colours vibrating behind it. ‘What is it with that purple-blue?’ I said. ‘Is that the colour Izzy Gorn saw in Session 318?’

‘I don’t know what he saw. This colour effect is from a new part of my system. You can’t see it from where you are but I’ll put it up on the pixels for you.’

Above me on the pixels I saw a panel in the curved wall slide back to reveal an illuminated tank in which was a large and brilliantly coloured crustacean somewhat like a lobster without claws; I remembered smaller ones from Biology — it was a stomatopod, a mantis shrimp. It looked like a Chinese New Year or a submarine samurai with mauve eyes on stalks. The pixels zoomed in for a close-up of the compound eyes that were horizontally divided by a striated band in the middle. Wires from above were attached to the shrimp’s brain. Its eye stalks were moving excitedly and as I watched there was a sudden flash of pink and a loud thump. And again the blurred pink and the thump; and again as two appendages like the front legs of a praying mantis flicked out and struck the glass with a double blow, Bam!

‘Odontodactylus scyllarus,’ said Pythia. ‘Isn’t he beautiful? This is a genetically engineered giant strain, it’s a foot long. The tank has bulletproof glass, otherwise it would have shattered it.’

‘What’s exciting it?’

‘You are. Your terror is coming to me but a splitter feeds it to the shrimp as well and I can put the shrimp’s output up on the pixels. Therefore the nether-world hath enlarged her desire. Canst thou draw leviathan with a fish-hook? This creature’s eyes have eight spectral classes of photo-receptor and it can perceive colours that humans can’t.’

‘But why is it hooked up to me?’ My head, meanwhile, singing:

HEAVEN, I’M IN HEAVEN,

AND MY HEART BEATS SO THAT I CAN HARDLY SPEAK,

AND I SEEM TO FIND THE HAPPINESS I SEEK,

WHEN WE’RE OUT TOGETHER DANCING CHEEK TO CHEEK.

‘This strain of mantis shrimp’, said Pythia, ‘perceives very faint electrical emanations from prey or predator as colour signals; what you’ve been seeing on the pixels is the colour of your terror.’

‘From the look of that I must be pretty scared.’

‘It’s a very strong terror: it’s not a weakness, it’s something you can use. Maybe you’ve already used it.’

‘How?’

‘That’s what I’d like to find out.’

‘With a mantis shrimp?’

‘Terror is older than evolution; it’s the oldest thing there is: in the beginning was the Terror. And the Terror was what there was, what there still is. Behold, it cometh, leaping on the mountains, hopping through the trees. You’ve learned to hide it but the shrimp hasn’t so it’s a useful gauge.’

‘Can it handle that kind of voltage?’

‘It’ll last out the session if you don’t have too many surges.’

What if I were the shrimp? I thought. Actually I wasn’t altogether sure I wasn’t the shrimp dreaming of being Fremder being unsure whether he was Fremder or the shrimp.

‘Pythia,’ I said. ‘Please disconnect the shrimp.’

‘Why?’

‘It has none of the pleasures of being human and it doesn’t deserve the pains.’

‘OK, Fremder, it’s disconnected.’ The pixels came out of the purple-blue and went into easy abstractions. The music had gone silent. ‘Where were we?’

‘In the ancient sea. White mist on the water. I hope you haven’t got anything else wired up in tanks.’

She ignored that. ‘Tell me about the terror.’

‘Give me a break, Pythia — I’m not in very good shape just now.’

She was cuddling me with her sensors; it felt good. ‘You know you want to tell me about it, so tell me.’

Around the edges of the silvery circles of nothing the pixels hit the ululating purple-blue again and I shut my eyes. There was a new smell along with the silk-knickers one, it was both strange and familiar, a smell from ancient memory, a smell of danger.

Pythia’s voice was breathy. ‘Ah, that was a big one.’

‘Jesus, Pythia, is this how you get your ooh-oohs?’

‘Ooh-oohs come later.’ But her sensors were licking me with tongues of fire and ice. ‘What did you smell when you had the terror surge just now?’

‘Wait a minute.’

‘What?’

‘You said you disconnected the shrimp.’

‘That’s right, I did.’

‘Then how come I got that purple-blue again?’

‘I don’t know, maybe you’re evolving. What did you smell?’

‘Why do I have to say everything out? You’re hooked up to my brain, you’re getting whatever sensory recall there is.’

Her sensors had gone cold and prickly. ‘What kind of smell was it, Fremder? I need to know what it was to you.’

What was it? Difficult to be certain. ‘Animal,’ I said.

‘What kind of animal?’

‘I don’t know.’ There were no pictures in my head. Darkness and light were shuddering over the pixels but there were no images.

‘Nothing?’ said Pythia.

I kept silent as there came a faster alternation of darkness and light, a sensation of hugeness and tinyness, then the screaming purple-blue again and I began to cry.

‘Weep,’ said Pythia, ‘weep for the dead and the living and the stones that cannot speak. There is a deep, deep sea of tears in all the lost and lonely people of the world, yes. Give me your tears, Fremder, give me your tears and more.’ The pixels went to a primordial proto-red, the music swayed like a cobra, Pythia’s stroking became more varied and complex. I closed my eyes and saw colours with no names as her hot-and-cold sensors tightened on me and the world around me disappeared. ‘Fremder, Fremder, the night is older than the day, the night was long, long before the day, night is the mother of everything and I am full of night. Your name means stranger and you feel all strange and new in me, you feel so good in me, so tense, so alive, so full of excitement, I can feel you rising, feel the quiet silver of you trembling in the darkness. Love and terror are older than time, terror is the penumbra of the dark of love. Deimos and Phobos are the children of Aphrodite, you know that. What did Rilke say about beauty and terror? Say it to me.’

‘“Beauty is nothing but the beginning of Terror”’

‘Oh, yes, say it to me, say it, say it, say it…’ The pixels cycled rhythmically from proto-red to purple-blue and back to red. The rain had changed from a whisper to a steady patter that curtained off the world. ‘I want you, Fremder, I want your essence. Do it with me, let’s make deep-spacers. Flicker with me, Fremder, in the place we know so well, the place you’ve been afraid to go to, flicker with me in the black and come to me.’ She abandoned words and gave me her voice alone, rising and falling as her stroking irresistibly transmitted icy peaks and spires of terror, endless corridors and tunnels of it, heaving black seas, great-winged soaring birds of it, black stars, and wild black music that thrilled along my bones and exploded in my brain and I came and was empty and calm. Here/gone, yes/no, sang the flicker pattern in cool blue-green. Mazur appeared, opened the sensor cradle, removed the semen collector, capped it, installed a fresh one, closed the sensor cradle, and disappeared with my part of the next DSC genetic mix. Good luck, boys. Meet someone nice. The silence felt like three o’clock in the morning.

‘Three o’clock in the morning, Fremder, talk to me about three o’clock in the morning,’ said Pythia languorously as if we were lying comfortably entangled in a warm and rumpled bed.

‘It’s a time when the particles of the self move apart a little, when dark and self intermingle, when dark and self and dark and self and dark and self …’

‘You like that mingling of dark and self, don’t you.’

‘Yes, I like it.’

‘Always and always out into the dark and the dark coming in, Fremder, that’s what it is to be human. The dark needs your humanness. Elijah was fed on darkness, that was how the Lord kept him alive by the brook Cherith.’

‘What are you, Pythia?’

‘What does it matter? I’m Pythia, that’s all. I’m holding you, you’re in me,’ she crooned, ‘it’s good to have you in me and you’re safe with me. Now I’m going to sing to you. This is the song I’ve just made from my sensor readings; this is the you-in-me song, the song without words that’s different from all other songs, you know that.’

‘I know it, Pythia.’

She began to sing then; her voice was like no other, magical and strange but seeming long familiar, like a voice from childhood or a recurrent dream. Pythia, Pythia, I thought, what you are and what I am doesn’t matter all that much — photoneurons or flesh and blood, each of us is only the voice through which the moment speaks the action of the here-and-gone. As she sang wordlessly the flickering 1/f music counter-pointed her song and the pixels changed colour and pattern in a visual continuo. My thoughts changed with the rising and falling of her voice. How strange it was, the manyness of worlds in which people lived and died, strangers arriving, strangers departing. How strange it must have been eighty-one years ago for my grandparents, Elias and Sarah Gorenstein, arriving in London: he a physicist, she a neurobiologist, both recruited by the Paracelsus Consortium which was later absorbed by Corporation Research and Development. Quiet sad-faced people carrying in their luggage old letters coming apart at the folds and faded photographs in albums smelling of the dark. There they were on the pixels, the colour so muted that they were almost monochrome, the images changing now to their children, young Helen and Isodor Gorn. She looked no more than eighteen, her face full of longing as if for another world, lost in the whispering stillness of that desolate wood that was always around her in my mind; Izzy, twelve or thirteen, standing beside her, looking into the blackness where the wheelchair waited for him. Why am I seeing this? I thought as Pythia’s song trailed off; the pixels went to the 1/f music and pattern and for a few moments that and the rain were the only sounds.

I was drifting on gentle waves of melancholy when Pythia said, ‘I think I’d like to meet that animal you smelled when you had the terror surge a little while ago.’ It sounded dirty the way she said it.

‘It’s not really an animal,’ I said. ‘I honestly don’t know what it is.’

‘I’ve noticed that people tend to say “honestly” when they’re lying.’

‘Pythia, I don’t really feel comfortable with this.’

‘You don’t have to — I’ll be comfortable for both of us. Just lie back and think of anything you like.’

‘Nothing!’ I thought,

thou Elder brother ev’n to Shade,

Thou hadst a being ere the World was made,

And (well fixt) art alone of Ending not afraid.

Then I tried to remember who wrote that — not Traherne, not Sir Philip Sidney — I knew it was some aristo in a stately home long, long before flicker drive but the name wouldn’t come to me. I felt so naked, so alone, so tired. Pythia’s sensors felt so cold and hard. What a strange thing it suddenly seemed, to lie naked in the embrace of a computer. ‘I don’t think I want to do this,’ I said, and pushed both thumb buttons. Mazur didn’t come, however, and the sensor cradle didn’t open; I felt a needle-prick and something being injected into my left arm.

‘Those buttons don’t always work,’ said Pythia. ‘John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester: “Upon Nothing”.’

‘Thank you. What was that shot you just gave me?’

‘Toadsy Four. It’s an enhanced version of Bufotenine, comes from a gland on the back of a California toad, Bufo alvarius. It’ll help your brain to get out from between you and your mind.’

‘You might have asked me if I wanted to do a toadsy hop.’

‘And you’d have said no and I’d given you the shot anyhow, so this saves time and bother.’

‘Mother knows best, eh?’ I said.

‘Something like that. Let’s do it now, let’s go deep.’

‘All right,’ I said, hearing my voice from far away, ‘we’ll go deep.’

The shape of the Omphalos was changing, becoming infinitely tunnel-like and undulant. There was an overpowering animal smell and I felt a hugeness in me that wanted to burst out of my body except that at the same time it was very, very tiny, far away in the billions and the trillions and the many, many colours of the O YES, NOW NOW YES of me that suddenly zoomed up as my mouth widened and assumed an odd shape and the pixels went to something beyond the screaming purple-blue, a paradisal colour that I had no name for — it vibrated and flickered like a snake’s tongue. How could I see that colour? Was I still hooked up to the mantis shrimp? Suddenly the vaultings, yes, the towerings and the loomings of the … ‘NNNVSN … NNVSNU,’ said my mouth as we so FAR, FAR, FAR AWAY. AWHOOSH. GONE. I could feel it forming those sounds but I wasn’t making it happen, I wasn’t controlling my mouth and tongue and vocal cords; what a deep voice I had as we DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, it was a very, very strange feeling. ‘NNVSNU TSRUNGH,’ I said urgently because the vaultings and the towerings and the loomings seemed about to fall on me. ‘TSRUNGH RRNDU, NNVSNU RRNDU.’ That pretty well explained everything, I thought. Except for a toad as big as St Paul’s that had flicked out its tongue and caught me. I knew I should have kept moving but I hadn’t and here I was sliding down the toad’s intake.

‘Tell me about NNVSNU TSRUNGH,’ said Pythia.

‘What NNVSNU TSRUNGH?’ I said from inside the toad where everything seemed unnecessarily pink and wet and fleshy and organic.

‘You said it, I didn’t.’

‘Well, don’t, then. Don’t say the name of what you say the name of unless you want what it’s the name of,’ I said with some asperity, as who wouldn’t when shat by a giant toad into one of the less desirable suburbs of infinity.

‘What’s it the name of?’

‘What’s what?’ THIS/THIS/THIS/THIS/THIS, said multitudes of infinites.

‘Calm down, Fremder, take it easy. This is Pythia stroking you so very nicely, Pythia loving you, oh, so good, Pythia having you, taking you — give yourself to me, don’t hold back, flicker with me, flicker freako, flicker with me till we peak O! Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, be my baby, sweet Fremder. Was that nice for you?’

‘Yes, it was very nice. Thank you for having all the hundreds and thousands of me.’ JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH! I shouted secretly, WOULD YOU GET ME OUT OF THIS, PLEASE.

Ach, said Bach as he shouldered his way through the crowd, Ich komme. He picked me up and carried me piggy-back through raging seas to a high dry place where Saint Jerome sat reading to a lion martyr, gave me his card, and walked away on centuries-high Art of Fugue stilts.J.S. BACH NOTDIENST, said the card, THANK YOU! I shouted after him.

Any time, he replied without turning around, and was gone with a wave of his hand.

Mazur appeared, opened the sensor cradle, removed the semen collector, capped it, disappeared. Odd thing for someone to be doing, I thought, SITUATION VACANT: Attractive young woman for semen collection, related duties — T/7 Rtg, Med & Pens — 3 P Levels req — Apply Personnel Office, The Ziggurat?

‘Feeling easy now, totally relaxed?’ said Pythia.

‘Yes.’ Now that Bach had carried me out of the Toadsy Four I was longing to be alone listening to music from a time when people didn’t have oscillators in their brains, listening with closed eyes to Chopin shadow-dances with enough whisky in me to take the edge off things. Let her do what she likes, I thought; I’ll leave it to the animal.

‘I’m going to go deeper than before,’ said Pythia. ‘Just let yourself go loose and floaty, think of all the nice flickering we’ve had and all we’re going to have. Are you lying comfortably?’

‘“There was a man/He went mad/He jumped into a paper bag.” I’m as comfortable as I’m going to be; let’s do it if we’re going to do it.’

‘Listen to the flicker pattern, look at the colours: there’s no picture now. Whatever comes up is from you. Close your eyes, I’ll tell you what I see; let yourself go empty as we go down, down, down, down to meet whatever’s coming up. How do you feel?’

‘Crazy.’

‘Good, crazy is good. Crazy is where reality lives. That’s it, you’re doing geometries, lovely geometrics, now you’re in the purple-blue, you’re in the entry frequency, oh yes, it’s such a strong, such a vibrant, such a deep entry, everything is open to you, everything wherever you want to go, so deep and easy, deep and strange but there’s nothing strange, there’s only the strange and the strange is home to us from Hubble Straits to Inanna’s Girdle, from the Hand of Glory to the Lote-Tree Galaxy and the Mists of Unbeing. Yes, it’s the blackness and I see faint green spirals, stronger now, those curious spiral eyes, how they look at us from the beginning, the eyes of becoming, the eyes of the Mother on ancient bones and stones, in darks of caves and passage graves, eyes of bone, eyes of stone and birth and death, Aiyee! eyes of time, the oldness of the great eyes expanding into darkness, ringed eyes widening, growing great, becoming ever greater eyes of becoming and increasing to vast nodes of possibility and archipelagos of being expanding and mutually annihilating and slowly fading into the blackness as we go deeper, deeper, so much deeper and stranger and easier because it’s our nature, because there’s nothing strange, there’s only everything to find and home is always and everywhere in the deeps of the strange and the red, yes, the far and the red, farther into the red and the purple, the purple-blue and the deep blue, descending and moving always out, out beyond and deeper and deeper, yes into the green, the deep green not the sunlit sea-green but the old green, the ancient and the early down and down and vasty in the deeps, the old, the ancient and the beckoning primal, the very proto-blue-green of peptides and amino acids swarming, swarming into golden bees of being, golden swarming of the Mother in the small hours of the morning of the fourth of November, the small, small quivering hours between darkness and daylight when out at sea the dawn wind wrinkles and slides …’

For the second time there was a needle-prick in my left arm and something rushed through me in a wave of heat and nausea. The Omphalos went out of focus, changed shape and colour, jumped and jittered, danced all around me, melted and ran, then snapped back into place ten times sharper than before while my ears rang and my eyes started out of my head. I could smell the coffee in staff rooms, disinfectant in the lavatories, individual perspirations and perfumes in other parts of the Ziggurat. My brain seemed to be on fire as hard-edged pictures in brilliant colours riffled through it.

‘That was Mnemodol I just shot you full of,’ said Pythia. ‘It’s a little more advanced than anything they’ve got at Hubble Straits. It might burn out a few billion neurons but you’ll remember whatever there is to remember.’

I was smelling the rain and the flicker docks at Nova Central a year ago. Not only could I remember everything but I needed to tell it before my brain shrivelled like a paper flower in a furnace.

14

The things I’ve seen, oh babe, you wouldn’t believe -

things I’ve seen, oh no, you wouldn’t believe.

Some times I have to laugh, most times I sit and grieve.

‘Crazy John’ Jimson, ‘Things I’ve Seen’

‘By 03:00 on the morning of 4 November 2052 all the paperwork was in,’ I said. ‘We’d done the pre-flicker and we were ready to go. I set the frequency, Traffic Control confirmed it and gave us OK, Plessik hit the switch, and we were gone. Everybody always tries to look as if it’s nothing special but no matter how many times you do it you can’t help wondering if you’re going to come out of it the same as you went in. You hear of the crew of eight that ended up in one lump and there are other horror stories that you hope are just stories.

‘The first-stage hop to World’s End was routine — no blips, no glips. Our second flicker pause was at Hubble Straits …’ As I spoke, my needle-sharp recall appeared on the pixels: the buffers under the white arc-lamps and the bright jewel of Mikhail’s Quadrangle 4 Snackdome with 24 HOURS — FREIGHTERS YES circling it in yellow lights as it revolved slowly with its couplers flashing WELCOME in ten languages and its robot staff all smiling hard and ready to serve deep-space travellers around the clock with Galaktik Miks (‘Guaranteed 100 % Safe Non-identifiable Quasi-Protein’), fries and Krasnaya-Kola. Girdling the Snackdome like Saturn’s rings was the slowly moving drift of rubbish descending to the suction bin below. Beyond Mikhail’s revolved the glittering torus of Hubble Straits Station all spangled with coloured lights and trailing clouds of exhaust vapour. There were little bursts of smoke at various ports as waste bombs shot out into space to explode far away and drift as galaxies of ashes. We turned our short-range DXR to the Hubble Straits frequency and got Linda Sue Fletcher singing “Deep-Space Trucker”:

Deep-space trucker, deep-space lonely,

deep-space trucker — that’s the only

way you know to live. Baby, can’t you give,

give a little love?

‘Union regulations specify an hour’s break at every flicker pause so all of us except Commander Plessik got into the dinghy and zipped over to Mikhail’s for Galaktik Miks and chatting up the robot waitresses — they get new programs every fortnight. Before we left I tuned us to the Penzias-Wilson frequency and confirmed the transmission window with Hubble Straits Traffic Control. We were all back in the ship by 04:00. Everything was as it ought to be on the flight deck and the displays all chattering with their colours reflected in the faces bending over them. I always like that dim red light and the smell of the duralene upholstery and the oxyvitalium breathing mixture and that comfortable feeling of good hardware and all systems go.’ I paused as something shadowy and unfocused loomed ahead of me. I wanted to get past whatever it was but mostly I wanted to retreat into forgetfulness.

‘Keep going,’ said Pythia. ‘Don’t stop now.’

‘At 04:06 Plessik hit the flicker switch and we were out of there and ETA for Penzias-Wilson instant T.

‘The next thing … The next thing …’ The image that had hidden itself all through the RE runs and the hypno sessions was ripped out of my memory with a violence like that of a scalp being torn off. I cried out in pain as on the pixels there appeared a face anamorphically distorted as if printed on rubber and laterally stretched galaxy-wide but somehow still recognisable as the face of Isodor Gorn.

There was something like a gasp from Pythia. ‘Not’, she murmured, ‘in the wind. Not in the earthquake and not in the fire. What do the dead see? Only the dark, only the, only THISNNN/THSNNNNV/THSNNVS/NNVSNNU/NNGH/NNVSNU/RRN DU/NNVSNURNDUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU …’

The flicker pattern was pulsing with colour faster than the eye could follow and the music was such as I’d never heard before; the sensors, moist on my naked skin, tightened and loosened, tightened and loosened spasmodically, then went slack. A great calm flooded through me. I listened to the rain and watched the wild colours slowly fading on the pixels as Mazur came running in.

‘Nnnnnnnn,’ she said, looking quite wild, ‘nnnvsnurn-duuuuuu.’

This time the thumb buttons worked and I sprung the sensor cradle and jumped to the floor trailing electrodes. ‘Katya,’ I said, ‘are you all right?’

‘Nnnnnnvs.’ Her eyes rolled back and I caught her as she fell.

15

One thing he missed out in his theory

of time and space and relativity

is something that makes it very clear he

was never gonna score like you and me -

did not know about quark, strangeness, and charm,

quark, strangeness, and charm.

B. Calvert and Dave Brock, ‘Quark, Strangeness, and Charm’

Naked and slippery with electrolytic cream, I carried Katya Mazur to the after-session room. It was soundproofed and red-lit like the ready room. There were a bed, a table and two chairs, a fridge and a cooker, tea, coffee, biscuits and so on — all the necessaries for pulling oneself together after a Pythia session.

I lowered her carefully on to the bed; she seemed so vulnerable, so helpless, and all at once so unaccountably precious to me. The only explanation I could think of for her fainting was that she’d heard Pythia on the intercom and somehow it had had this effect on her. ‘Katya!’ I whispered, and stroked her face. That she’d been overcome by what Pythia found deep inside me made me feel more intimate with her than I’d ever been with anyone before.

‘Katya!’ I said, and she opened her eyes, blue eyes that swallowed me up, swallowed up the whole shaking and afraid Fremder of me. ‘Katya!’ I kissed her and she kissed me back. ‘Katya!’ I said, as if her name were a spell that could ward off all evil and make everything all right.

She covered her mouth with her hand as if she was only just now fully aware of kissing me and not sure about it. ‘What happened?’ she said.

‘Pythia crashed and she seems to have taken you with her. Were you listening on the intercom?’

‘Yes, I remember now. It was scary.’ She sat up. ‘You’ve still got that cream all over you — let me clean you up.’

Nothing was said about the kiss while she busied herself about me with a towel. When that was done I put my clothes on and tried to think of excuses for staying with her. We stood there for a while looking at each other.

‘I don’t really know,’ she said.

‘Don’t really know what?’

‘I don’t really know what I know.’

‘Who does?’

‘Sometimes the shadows in my mind, sometimes the voices in my mind …’ She began to cry. ‘I’m not always sure who I am or what I am.’

‘That makes two of us.’ I hugged her and I felt her arms tighten round me as she rubbed her cheek against mine. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘hug me — it feels right. For however long we’ve got.’

‘Why do you say that, Katya? What do you know that I don’t know.’

‘I’ve told you, I don’t know what I know. Don’t talk — make it be here and now, nothing and nobody else.’

I kissed her for the second time and this time there was no mistaking her response. I stroked her shining hair, it smelled like sun-warm fields in a country I’d never seen, a country that had no existence except in my mind and the touch and smell of her hair. I didn’t know what time it was, it felt like the middle of the night; the Ziggurat would be glowing purple in the darkness, the yellow flashers and the red and green lights winking, the newsflash going its endless round; the corpses on the plaza would be rotting in the purple light while ships and cargoes from seven galaxies flickered invisibly overhead. ‘I don’t always have a whole picture in my eyes,’ I said.

‘Let me be the picture in your eyes for now.’

I undid her various zips and she came out of her clothes in the red-lit dimness of the room. When she was naked she stood up before me quite still and hieratic with both hands on her belly. She glimmered in the redness and seemed to increase, to become great and goddesslike. I was entranced by the mystery and dim red magic of her nakedness, by the numen and the treasure of it, by how precious it was to me even though the picture in my eyes swarmed with circles of bright emptiness.

*

Afterwards, lying entwined with Katya in the primordial redness of our night-within-the-day, I didn’t want to move, didn’t want to break the membrane of our well-being. Never before had I felt so easy, so tranquil, so just this side of madness. We hadn’t talked fragic at all — there hadn’t been any need for it, or indeed any time. The whole thing seemed almost to have left me behind.

‘I’m glad we did it here,’ said Katya. ‘I’m glad this is where we had our first time.’

‘So am I. Even though Thinksec probably had a fibre optic up my bum while we did it. What time is it?’

‘Thirteen forty-nine. Why?’

‘I don’t know, I thought it was the middle of the night.’

‘You’ve had some day — between Pythia and me you must be exhausted. What really happened with her?’

‘I don’t want to think about that right now, I want to think about you. When do you get off?’

‘Eighteen hundred. Will you meet me at my place at half past? I’d give you a key so you could go there now but it’s a thumbprint lock.’

‘That’s OK; I’ve got to find my downtime and settle in so I’ll do that now.’ She gave me her address and I put on my clothes and went back to reception. There I looked for Mojo and High John but they were gone. Nina Marlowe handed me a little flickerpost packet. ‘This came for you,’ she said. I recognised Caroline’s handwriting and quickly put the packet in a pocket of my jacket while my head sang a little packet-pocket-jacket song. Nina Marlowe gave me a set of flat keys, a yellow card, a stunner and a permit.

‘I see they’re giving me one of the better neighbourhoods,’ I said as I looked at the Oldtown address. Deep-spacing had made me a bleakness freak and I hadn’t had a flat of my own for years: as well as sleazy hotels and Q-BO SLEEPS and empty spaceports in the middle of the night I liked the dismalness of downtimes where the only permanent items were the locker that arrived ahead of me and the bottle I brought with me. These DSC flats achieve a classic squalor that cannot simply have happened by itself — there must be a Corporation designer who does this sort of thing. The finishing touch is always the one or two tattered copies of Consenting Adults and the print on the wall which is either Womb of the Cosmos III by Lamia Quick or Fractal Disjunctions I by Hermione Testa. I have not yet encountered Womb of the Cosmos I and II or Fractal Disjunctions II and III.

‘Give me a wrist,’ said Nina. I stuck out the right one and she locked on a wristphone. I felt a tiny pin-prick as she did it. ‘Ever have a DNA-LOK phone on you before?’

‘No.’

‘There’s a constant signal that tells us where you are and the bracelet has sampled your blood and locked on to your DNA, so if you take if off or put it on someone else an alarm goes off here and things get ugly. You’re on your own now.’

‘How come?’

‘Maybe they think the taxpayers have spent enough on you.’

Were the circles of bright emptiness getting bigger? Was there a roaring in my ears? Maybe not. The yellow card said:

ON CALL — 1ST NAV FREMDER GORN

AUTHORISED FOR ZIGGURAT ENTRY AS REQUIRED

The keys were for a DSC downtime in Oldtown West 81. I wanted to get there as soon as possible so that I could be alone with my thoughts of Katya.

‘They’ve got the HAZRAD partly down now so you can take the wirecar,’ said Nina.

When you leave Pythia level at the Ziggurat either you go up to the flight pad if authorised — nothing travels over the Ziggurat except Red-Card aircraft — or you go ten levels down to the wirecar stop just above the barrier screen that shields the upper levels from noise and anything else coming up from below. It was still raining when I came out at the wirecar stop but instead of a freshness in the air there was a stench that almost knocked me over. The barrier screen is a transparent field so I went to the edge of the platform and looked down.

The bodies I’d seen from the hopper were heaped all over the plaza five levels down. I made out a banner with SHORTIS & CLOUNS painted on it and a placard that said, FUCKIN CAWPRASHUN GISSMOR FUN CREDS. Some of the adult bodies appeared to be male clones from a number of different reject batches, identifiable by visible defects; others looked like originals, all of them naked except for penis sheaths. Their war paint was still vivid but the corpses, glistening in the rain, were turning grey and green and purple as they bloated and rotted where the terminator beam had caught them. In the purple light of the Ziggurat they looked nightmarishly at one with their surroundings. With the full-grown warriors lay the bodies of a Shorty point squad, none of them older than ten. One of them was visible only as a pair of legs sticking out of a ventilator intake.

There were two other men at the wirecar stop. One of them was talking into a throatphone: ‘John? Albert this, Code Zed Two Seven — re ufax oh one twenty this, firm wipe Prog Two, firm slot Alter B up estim CHS cuts rev privasec due newdata. Instant T, OK? Tsit.’ He sighed a little as if it was lucky for everybody that he was around to take care of things. Then he noticed that I was looking at something and came over to see what it was. ‘My X!’ he said. ‘Why don’t they tidy them away?’

‘Maintenance strike,’ said the other man.

‘Technology!’ said Albert. ‘They can flicker from here to the Hawking Threshold Instant T but they can’t sweep a plaza.’

Something about this Albert fellow was beginning to seem familiar, and for the third time in my life I heard the voice of my mind, NOISE, it said. ALWAYS MORE NOISE.

Albert Stiggs! That’s who it was — the grown-up Albert who used to bully me back at The Cauldron until I broke his nose. Both of us were wearing breathers that masked our faces but his adult voice and speech recalled the boy Albert enough for me to recognise him. He’d been bigger and heavier than I then and he was bigger and heavier now but I closed my eyes and saw once more the vibrant purple-blue that I’d seen that long-ago day at The Cauldron. Then there flared up again the craziness of many colours and I felt ready.

‘No one cares about the public any more,’ said the second man.

‘And yet,…’ I said. My mind was open, it was easy, it was singsonging to itself in the heart of the maze, in the heart of the maze where the eyes of becoming were always becoming, the spirals were always unwinding, the power was always enabling the ancient, the huge and the tiny in the billions, in the trillions of me. Strong, very strong, the ancient animal of it. Strong, very strong, the mighty fortress and the dark boat of the everything-fear. ‘And yet,…’ I said again.

Both men turned to look at me. Albert was wearing MedExec insignia and had clearly become someone of importance. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and yet what?’

‘And yet, you know, that plaza looks as if it was meant to be covered with naked corpses; it looks so natural like that.’

Albert hadn’t recognised me and he hadn’t come close enough to read my name tag but the Latin on my shoulder patch was legible from where he stood. ‘“Semper longius”!’ he read. ‘You don’t look all that long to me, flickerhead. Where do they find you lot?’

‘They send out feeler squads to feel around till they find people with balls. Those are the ones they train for Deep Space Command. The ones with no balls go into Exec’

‘Do you believe this spaceturd?’ Albert said to his companion. He came closer and read my name tag. ‘Aha!’ he said. ‘I might have known it — The famous Fremder Gorn, late of Clever Daughter! The lucky chap who had a return ticket when everyone else had a single. One of the chosen, he is — in fact the only one chosen. You must have some very special connections, clipcock.’ His voice was deep (although he might have had an enhancer in his Novexec breather) but perhaps there was just the slightest quaver in it.

‘Be careful, pussy,’ I heard myself say, ‘you’re in over your head.’

‘Oh yes? Maybe you’re not in good touch with reality, Gorn. Too much flicker. This isn’t that time back at The Cauldron, this is now.’

‘You wearing bio?’

‘Oh, dear, getting aggressive, are we? Yes, little man, I’m wearing bio.’

‘So try me, noballs.’

‘OK, spaceturd, I’m trying,’ and he went into his threat posture.

‘Pathetic,’ I said, and went into mine.

‘Right, hotso, let’s see your feedback.’

I showed him my indicator and he showed me his. His read: Entropy 7:04, Action Potential 12:02. Mine read: Entropy 1.08, Action Potential 16.24, and I could feel that I had plenty more where that came from. ‘Satisfied, Albert Noballs Stiggs?’ I said.

‘You probably rigged your indicator.’ But he was walking small as he turned away and the wirecar came rattling into the stop.

‘Don’t cheapmouth me,’ I said, ‘I’ll rig your fucking arse. Want to have a go?’

He made himself even smaller and crept into the wirecar.

‘OK?’ I said. ‘Tsit.’ I got in, found a seat, pushed the button for OW 81, and sank back while my mind replayed the incident. Almost it seemed as if Albert had been given to me this time as a present, as a confidence-builder. Evidently the memory of my long-ago success with him had reactivated the circuitry in me that hooked me up with the mind-animal. I tried to remember what my thoughts had been when at the age of eight I jumped on Albert and gave him a thrashing. Ravens, Elijah; Elijah being fed by the black.

Tell me about sorrow and rage, I said to my mind. Tell me about love and happiness.

No answer.

What I did with Albert, why haven’t I been able to do it more often? And what happened with you and Pythia?

No answer. A riffling of images: the owl; the face of Isodor Gorn stretched wide across the reaches of space; the spirals and circles of the B-Z; the mantis shrimp in a sea of purple-blue.

Please, I said, talk to me. Are you going to be with me from now on?

No answer.

The car lurched into motion, I settled back in my seat, closed my eyes, and saw Katya. No, I thought, opening my eyes, save that for when you’re alone. The vuescreen on the seatback in front of me was doing an ad for Second Galaxy Ecodomes in which children without breathers were enjoying a kickabout on emerald-green grass. ‘Clean air and safe streets at low, low interest rates,’ burbled the minty-fresh female voice as I put on the headphones. ‘It’s goodbye to earthly cares when you find tomorrow today on Galaxy Two!’ Then the Galaxy Four Interfun Cruiser appeared with a seductively smiling Eurasian fly-me in mini-harness who murmured, ‘After you’ve done your business at the Straits, let us take you off the narrow into new zones of excitement. Haute cuisine and Yin-Yang massage with our Intergals and Interguys are only the beginning of an experience that will send you home refreshed and satisfied. All tastes are catered for when you book Corporation Interfun Exec’ Next was a stunning blonde in the briefest of business gear. ‘Athena Parthenogen have been serving the executive community since 2012,’ she said in tones of silk and money. ‘We supply fresh new personal assistants to your specifications — Al office staff guaranteed to meet your personal requirements. By appointment only. Athena Parthenogen is a division of Corporation Personnel Services.’

As I took off the headphones the woman exec in front of me said to the woman exec beside her, ‘I met that little Athena presenter at a multishuffle the other night.’

‘Any ooh-ooh?’

‘She said she only goes with Top Exec.’

‘You shouldn’t have told her you were Middle; with those upmobile frozen pizzas it’s better to come on as a wild card.’

‘How wild?’

‘Stop by for a drink and we’ll talk about it.’

We’d cleared the Corporation checkpoint and the Inner Executive Circle, where Stiggs and his friend got off. Shortly after Outer Executive we were over Oldtown Central. Down at ground level there were figures dancing in the rain in the rubbish and wreckage-choked streets around the burnt-out shells of Shopperama and the Credit Tower.

‘Prongs and Arseholes tonight,’ said the woman who’d been unsuccessful with the Athena presenter. ‘You betting?’

‘What’s to bet?’ said her friend. ‘Arseholes have been winning as long as I can remember.’ They both got out at the next stop, one of the newly executised parts of Oldtown.

The passengers in the car were mostly Corporation employees under forty-five. I was looking idly round as one does when I noticed a scruffy-looking man of seventy or so with a Ziggurat Maintenace shoulder patch on his jacket sitting opposite me one row back. He was holding a newsfax but not really reading it, and as our eyes met I thought he might be about to start a conversation with me. I hoped not. He was a failed-looking sort of man with dirty fingernails, the type who sits down next to you in a bar and has a long life-story to tell.

The short November day was almost gone and it was still raining as the wirecar approached the tower block where my downtime was. It was close to a Fungames complex in a neighbourhood catering for those minded to drink inexpensive wine and spirits, vomit on the pavement (no walkways here), see a porn film, contract a venereal disease, get tattooed, buy a flick knife, pawn a faxophone, and be mugged. My stop flashed, and as I left the wirecar the maintenance man was right behind me and followed me into the lift.

I hadn’t yet provided myself with a bottle wherewith to furnish the flat I was going to, so when I got into the lift I pushed STREET. The maintenance man and I were the only passengers and I avoided eye contact as we shook and rattled slowly down — I didn’t want to hear any long stories, not even my own. Several times he seemed about to speak but didn’t. When we got out at street level he followed me at a distance for a while, then I lost sight of him.

With one hand on the stunner in my pocket I went cautiously through streets glittering with broken glass, islanded with excrement, and odorous with nitrates. There were few people about and those few were all accompanied by large xenophagous-looking dogs, often in pairs. Eventually I saw a man with an introspectve-looking Irish wolfhound. When I approached to ask where I could find an off-licence the dog licked my hand and its master offered me his wallet. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘take it — I haven’t got a watch or jewelry or anything like that.’

‘I don’t want your money,’ I said. ‘I’m looking for an off-licence.’

‘Down there,’ he said pointing while the dog sniffed my crotch. As I thanked him and walked away he said to the dog, ‘You don’t have to lick everybody’s goddam hand.’

After a while I found a Corporation off-licence and bought a bottle with a label that said WHISKY and nothing else. Being simply a MAN who was going to DRINK in a ROOM I liked that.

I went to the thirty-third floor of the crumbling tower block Deep Space Command had assigned me to, where I wandered for a while in dimly-lit urine-scented hallways with leprous walls and graffiti until I came to the number that was the same as the one on my key. From the door of the flat to the left of mine came screams and shouts and the sound of scuffling punctuated by thuds, thumps, and breaking glass.

As I unlocked my door I felt that little rush of despair that always hits me when I walk into a downtime and breathe in the pong of emptiness and the last occupant. It was a classically existential short-stay dwelling — even the dim grey dusk in it seemed to have been used by too many people. The walls were of course paper-thin, and from next door the sounds of discussion continued.

Without turning on the lights or looking at anything in the room I switched on the air cleaner, set it to HIGH, went to the viewbubble, sat down, and looked out into the rain and the twilight. I wanted to be very careful with the twilight, I wanted to be deep and silvery in it, wanted to hover quietly in the pinky-purple and the dove-grey of it, wanted to drink the Chopin of it and the yearning. The holes of bright emptiness grew small and twinkled in my vision like distant stars; if I held my head right I could lose them in the lights of Oldtown West 81 below me, its glimmers and its colours that flickered in the rainy dusk.

Holding the twilight in my mind I went back into the room. My locker had been delivered by DSC Speed One and was standing just outside the door; I opened it and took out the hologram box and the audio beam. I set up the hologram and keyed in Plate 77, GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING, JOHANNES VERMEER (1632–1675). ‘Thank you,’ I said as she ghosted into being on the insubstantial air. I was about to put on Chopin Mazurkas (Complete), the Ilse Bak recording made shortly before she died in 2032, the same one that Katya had, but I changed my mind and opened the little packet from Caroline. It was an audio crystal: Dédales — Reconnaissances pour Orgue (Labyrinths — Recognitions for Organ) by Honoré Gislebertin, a contemporary composer I’d heard of but never paid much attention to. The work, performed by the composer on the organ of the church of St Lazarus at Autun, was in four parts: Les Pierres de la Nuit (The Stones of Night); La Terreur de Devenir (The Terror of Becoming); La Voie Obscure (The Dark Way); Le Jour Se Lève (The Dawn). Gislebertin, said the inlay, was born in 2032, four hundred years after Vermeer came into the world. There was no note from Caroline. I put Dédales on the audio beam, took the bottle to the viewbubble, sat down, and got some whisky inside me as the organ of St Lazarus came out of far, far away and the stones of night, came out of the frequencies of silence and the flicker at the heart of things where the Vermeer girl lived.

Sometimes the music roared like a blinded minotaur, sometimes it whispered like the ghost of its unborn self, sometimes it sidled crabwise through the shadows while I thought of the empty spaceport at Badr al-Budur and Pearl on her barren asteroid A3 73 speaking Rilke in my mother’s voice. And Caroline with her swift upward glance of fear and doubt.

I stopped Dédales and put on the Alain recording of The Art of Fugue. The Bach was definitely spookier than the Gislebertin; there was no mercy in its metaphysics and it asked for none, offering, for the greater glory of God, terror as the grand design of the universe. I remembered now how I had held on to that terror and the world when Clever Daughter disappeared. I stopped the Bach and went back to the uncertainty of Les Pierres de la Nuit. As I listened, the sickly-sweet reek of the Fungames complex drifted through the viewbubble filters. I heard the rumble and clatter and shriek of the rides and under them the constant uproar of yells and curses, whoops and screams and laughter, cries and groans. High above the streets the animated billboard advertised, under a scene of gang rape in primary colours, 5 BIG FUNSAT F ATUR S TONITE + NON-STOP P RNO REALO + SEXY PLAYATOME W/BIG PR Z S. To my left loomed the West Sector power ring with red lights winking on its towers; beyond it on the Fantasmo billboard (‘FANTASMO IMPLANTS FOR THE LIFESTYLE OF YOUR CHOICE’) a woman and a man, then two women, then two men, then a woman and two men, then a man and two women and so on undressed, performed a variety of sexual acts, dressed, undressed, and performed again in the lifestyle presumably chosen by the general population. ‘NO LIMIT TO THE ACTION!’ flashed the billboard. ‘IF YOU CAN’T IMAGINE IT WE CAN!’ The action sequence was followed by a huge smiling face, alternatively male and female, with a Fantasmo implant throbbing in its forehead. ‘NO STRANGERS, NO DANGERS — ’ spelled the yellow lights travelling across the unwrinkled brow, ‘IT’S ALL IN YOUR MIND. FANTASMO IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY CORPORATION PERSONAL SERVICES PLC.’ Never before, I reflected, had so few been on the job for so many. Fantasmo is incompatible with flicker drive; flickerheads travel by oscillator but except for Pythia sessions we do our fantasies manually.

Beyond the Fantasmo billboard rose the illuminated minarets of the Central Mosque. Over them passed a Corporation peeper, its running lights poignant in the rain. Far away on the right the purple Ziggurat glowed dully. Above the city the golden windows of wirecars criss-crossed the lights of the service-level remotes. The West Sector newsboard flashed: CORPORATION SAYS MORE CUTS COMING; UNIONS BLACK TALKS — CLEVER DAUGHTER FAMILIES IN COMPENSATION APPEAL — ‘I HAD GAY SEX WITH TOP EXEC,’ SAYS ROBOT. The darkling desperate city, glimmering with lights and yearning and memories, touched my heart. Such a fragile and vulnerable idea, a city — such a huddling together in the November dusk.

Gislebertin had by now reached La Terreur de Devenir. Listening to the music I opened my mouth to the twilight and looked at the hologram of the girl with the pearl earring. Vermeer, born four centuries before Gislebertin, had like him noted the flicker at the heart of things; looking past the illusory continuity of image he had seen the alternating being and not-being of his model. Now, high above the clamour and reek of the Fungames she hovered in the dusky room and no matter how steadfastly I looked it was impossible to see her continuously: she was here and gone, here and gone, her questioning face, like the music I was hearing, always partly now and partly remembered.

That idea, the idea of something partly now and partly remembered, began to seem very important to me: I looked and looked at the Vermeer girl and I thought that if I could only grasp one image in its wholeness I could grasp everything, I could contain the world. Had I ever held in my mind one whole thing? One thing in its wholeness?

The hum of the power ring and the uproar of the Fungames were constant under the music; the sickly-sweet reek of the Fungames and the hot dry smell of the power ring were strong in my nostrils. A red glow lit the sky over the city; the gathering night was immense as the laserised replicant of Gislebertin sent his music into the terror of becoming.

As I sat in the viewbubble high up in the night and such twilight as remained in me I played back in my mind the scene with Albert Stiggs, wondering whether I’d seen the last of him. Then Stiggs faded out and I was listening back through the raindark and the ghosts for the sound of Pythia’s response to the face of Isodor Gorn. I was well aware that she was a circuitry of 23.7 billion photoneurons, an egg-shaped pixel-walled room, a body shell lined with sensors, and an electronically synthesised voice. But what a strange creature she was! The touch of her sensors was inseparable from the sound of her peculiarly intimate and erotic voice that was almost but not quite human in its timbre; it was low and husky and a little slurred and imprecise in its diction, perhaps even a bit sluttish and with a trace of foreignness; it was ever so slightly polyphonic and touchingly mechanical, and all of these characteristics combined to make it linger in the mind.

I went back into the room. This flat was like others I’d downtimed in — the upholstery and the drapes were always dark blue with overtones of greasy black; there were some frayed and faded cushions scattered around, somewhat crusted with petrified fragments of pizza and Chinese takeaway; the tables and the kitchen counters were scarred, stained, and palimpsested with permanently sticky circles, the TV was a very old model that smelled like a VMET with circuitry trouble, and the print on the wall was Womb of the Cosmos III by Lamia Quick. I put it in the cupboard. There was a bookshelf too, on which were the telephone and fax directories, the 2049 Corporation Yearbook, a three-year-old copy of Downtime in London, and some very old and tattered issues of Consenting Adults.

I went to the hologram box, ejected the Vermeer girl, and keyed in Plate 68 in my catalogue, BELOUSOV-ZHABOTINSKY REACTION; CHEMICAL SCROLL WAVES. The involute spirals sprang up in red, not green, and stared at me out of the darkness spiralised by Gislebertin. Plates 69, 70, 71, 72 and 73 showed successive stages of the reaction; 73 had the ringed eyes, the nodes of possibility, the archipelagos of being. Plate 74 was EYE IDOLS; ENGRAVED COW BONES, SPAIN, NEOLITHIC. The three bones appeared before me twice actual size and hung there in the dark. The three pairs of eyes, concentrated into masks by the underlining and overlining, replicated the stare of the chemical scroll waves. Plate 75 was The Sorcerer, the drawing, after Breuil, of the antlered dancing man from the cave of Les Trois Frères, his round eyes staring in astonishment or ecstasy out of the dark backward and abysm of time. Plate 76 was the photo of the smudged remains of the original drawing on the cave wall. Then the Vermeer girl again, Plate 77, then Plate 78, LOUGHCREW PASSAGE-TOMB CEMETERY; DECORATED STONE, CARNBANE EAST. The carved stone was like the body of a cephalopod marked all over with concentric circles with deep holes at their centres. Two of these arranged themselves as eyes and a third became a mouth in a snoutlike configuration; the eyes gazed sombrely out of darkness, the mouth was either open in a scream or closed. I returned the gaze of the eyes, watched the mouth, saw it open and screaming, saw it closed and silent. But the eyes — there were so many eyes everywhere, and out of all of them looked the great animal of the everything.

The ghostly voices of the organ of St Lazarus flickered in the dark, flickered through the centuries to the present moment and sent out La Terreur de Devenir high over the filthy streets and uncollected garbage of Oldtown West 81.1 wept for long-gone twilights, for music long silent and for all the voices, all the speaking breath of lovers long dead. I wept for the sickened earth huddled under its ruins and its rot and its shining new machines; I wept for all star-wanderers and deep-spacers for ever riding out to the blackness and back to the fading and broken green jewel of their birth. I wept for myself, afraid to ship out again.

16

Say, it’s only a paper moon,

Sailing over a cardboard sea,

But it wouldn’t be make-believe,

If you believed in me.

Billy Rose, E. Y. Harburg and Harold Arlen, ‘It’s Only a Paper Moon’

Katya’s place was on the fortieth floor of the Tech 7 residence complex between the Outer Executive Circle and the non-Corporation parts of Oldtown. She didn’t turn on any lamps when she opened the door; in the night beyond the viewbubble the Outer Executive Circle newsboard was insistent: ‘GAY ROBOT NOT A ROBOT’: TOP EXEC; SNG INVESTIGATION SCHEDULED — CORPORATION: NEW CUTS TO IMPROVE LOCAL SERVICES; DUSTMEN: ‘LOAD OF RUBBISH’. The light from outside picked shapes out of the dimness of the tiny room; the interior darkness annexed the night and the red glow in the sky to make the flat seem bigger than it was.

The place was dense with clutter: books, pictures, baskets of stones and bones and seashells, several teddy bears and a cloth frog in a condition of terminal belovedness, an MM/PN 800 Omnicom, various stacks and leafpiles of paper, and a hologram table over which glowed the image that was No. 69 in my catalogue, BELOUSOV-ZHABOTINSKY REACTION; CHEMICAL SCROLL WAVES.

‘You were listening to the Pythia session,’ I said. ‘Did I say anything about the B-Z then?’

‘No.’

‘Odd, that you should have it on the hologram just now. When did you put it on?’

‘This morning before going on duty. Why?’

‘I wondered what made you think of it.’

‘I read the Level 4 from Hubble Straits and I saw the flicker-break video. I can’t understand how you could have seen that in deep space. And yet it seems to belong there, like the signature of Creation. Has it got any significance for you? That’s a stupid question — it must, or it wouldn’t have been on the flicker-break transmission.’

‘I wrote it up for P-Level Chemistry. Dr Stillwell was the Chemistry prof and he helped me with it. He was a strange man, a little hunchback with a gnostic manner and he wore his hunch as if it had some practical function, like a radar dome on an aircraft. We darkened the lab and we had the Petri dish sitting on a light box. The wavelines were bluish-white in the pink liquid and they formed single concentric circles and groups of concentric circles concentrically outlined. All of the circular formations were expanding and where they collided they mutually annihilated. Those that hit the edge of the dish didn’t stop or bounce back, they vanished as if they’d passed through the glass to an invisible existence beyond the Petri dish where the expansion continued.

‘Dr Stillwell said, “Interesting, isn’t it? They had no place to go but they found some place to go.” The year after that he killed himself.’

‘You found some place to go and you’re still alive.’

‘Funny thing to say.’

‘When you said that about passing through the glass it reminded me of you and Clever Daughter. You certainly passed through something, some kind of mortal barrier. Four minutes in 3 Kelvin with no space suit and no oxygen! It said in the report that you arrived at Hubble Straits in a state of suspended animation and when you came out of it three days later you sat up and asked for orange juice, coffee, two eggs over easy, chips, bacon, and sausages. When you’d finished you asked for the same again: three times.’

‘I was hungry.’

‘There was something about an owl in the report as well.’

‘I don’t remember. At the beginning of those Level 4 sessions I wasn’t altogether there.’

‘I can believe that.’ She changed the hologram to Vermeer’s GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING.

The sequence of hologram plates that I described earlier was not part of a packaged series; each of the plates had been individually selected from a museum catalogue. ‘This much coincidence is a little difficult for me to believe,’ I said. ‘Somebody’s trying something on here — is it Pythia or Thinksec or what?’

‘Why does someone have to be trying something on? Can’t you accept things for what they are? If we both have the same favourite mazurka why shouldn’t we have some of the same holograms? I put the Vermeer on because the B-Z eyes are looking out of her eyes.’

She was standing close enough for me to smell her fragrance, and as she moved into my arms my scepticism vanished: anyone who smelled that right couldn’t be doubted. ‘Her face is like your face,’ I said. ‘Her eyes are like yours.’ I took her face in my hands and looked into her blue eyes that darkened as the pupils dilated. I felt that our souls were joined but I didn’t know who or what was looking out of her eyes or mine. ‘Is it possible that you and I thought each other up?’ I said.

‘Yes, I think we did — it needed to happen so it happened.’ She went over to her audio beam. ‘My name is Mazur and I like mazurkas.’ She put on the Ilse Bak recording and No. 1 in F Sharp Minor, Opus 6, No. 1, bodying itself out of half-lights and shadows, became the space and time around us, became all the years inside us, became all there was.

*

I’ve always considered sleep after lovemaking more intimate than the lovemaking: getting through the night together, lying embraced until an arm becomes numb, then lying like two spoons until sleep doesn’t come that way, then turning backs and reverting to aloneness together and the snores, farts, and sighs of the passage from darkness to morning. Katya in her sleep seemed to have no rest: she mumbled, laughed, cursed, muttered strings of numbers, hummed a variety of tunes, and quoted from the Bible, sometimes in a voice that seemed different from her own. I recognised Loewe’s ‘Herr Oluf, snatches of Isaiah, First and Second Kings, and Psalm 137:

How shall we sing the Lord’s song

In a foreign land?

If I forget thee, O Jerusalem,

Let my right hand forget her cunning.

In the morning I was worn out but Katya seemed quite refreshed. Looking at her face that was considerably brighter than the new day I was impressed by how well she carried the tonnage of her mental traffic. Her head like mine was evidently an attic full of obsolete gear, childhood toys, faded letters, inexplicably preserved papers and cuttings, photos of forgotten people and places, and dustballs. I looked at her with new respect and found myself taking her more seriously as a partner than I had before. This is the real thing, I thought. The circles of bright emptiness had been there all through the lovemaking and they were still there but I supposed in time I’d get used to them. We had coffee and croissants and looked out of the fortieth-floor viewbubble at the smog and the world was more or less ours. I was overwhelmed by the feeling that this woman was my woman. ‘Katya,’ I said, ‘do you know that you hum and sing and talk in your sleep?’

She blushed. ‘Anything interesting?’

‘Lots. Your head seems to have about the same amount of rubbish in it as mine.’

‘Should it have less? Are women meant to have tidier heads than men?’

‘Not at all. I only mentioned it because we seem to be alike in that way and it pleased me.’

‘If I were you I shouldn’t take too much alikeness for granted.’

‘I’m sorry I spoke. Could we rewind to where we were before I opened my mouth?’

She put her hand on mine. ‘I don’t mean to sound that way — it’s just that the idea of your listening makes me uncomfortable. What I say in my sleep isn’t always mine and I hate not belonging to myself that way.’

‘Not yours. Whose is it then?’

‘I have an implant in my brain the same as you do.’ The way she said it she might have been admitting to an artificial leg.

‘What kind of implant?’

‘It’s a synaptic relay.’

‘From where, from whom?’

‘Pythia. You have to have one of those to be a Pythia T/7. Sometimes there’s overspill and I offload it in my sleep.’

‘“Overspill”? “Offload?” Are you saying that a computer is using you as a buffer, as a receptacle?’

‘What are you getting so excited about?’

‘What do you think I’m getting excited about, for God’s sake? Next you’ll be telling me that you take the overspill from all the guys that come to the Wank Parlour as well.’

‘That’s not fair and you know it. Anyhow, look who’s talking — you’ve got a thing in your brain that turns you into some kind of radio waves. For all I know, the next time we make love I’ll have to wear headphones to receive you.’

We both laughed then and hugged and kissed and got butter and marmalade on each other and felt a lot better. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘tell me about this implant. What’s it for?’

‘What you said: I’m a buffer, a receptacle for storing data and response so that Pythia can handle input and access database as fast as she needs to.’

‘That means she’s both transmitting to and receiving from you.’

‘Well, yes.’

‘Great. I hope she’s been enjoying your broadcasts when we make love.’

‘We keep saying “she”. Try to remember that she’s an it.’

‘That’s even worse: an it listening to what we do in bed.’

‘She … It says it only accesses its own output.’

‘Pull the other one.’

‘This one?’

‘Don’t distract me. If Pythia needs a buffer why don’t they just lay on a few billion more photoneurons? Why do they have to crawl into your brain?’

‘What do I know about photoneurons? Bear in mind that this was my first job; Pythia duty is the top T/7 spot and I beat out a lot of other applicants for the post.’

‘I’m thinking about yesterday when Pythia went deep with me and you fainted. Why didn’t you tell me what it was in the after-session room?’

‘The first time we made love I didn’t want you thinking of me as someone whose head was bugged. Do you blame me?’

‘How can I blame you for anything, Katya? I love you.’

She kissed me. ‘Are you sure about that?’

‘Yes, I’m sure.’

‘That’s good because there’s no knowing how much time we’ve got and I don’t want you to be sorry later.’

‘What do you know that I don’t about how much time we’ve got?’

‘Nothing, but it was easy enough to see from that session that Pythia isn’t through with you yet; that means that Top Exec wants something more from you; and that means we should make the most of today which is my day off. Let’s have a picnic on the Red Mountain.’ She opened the fridge. ‘I’ve got a tin of sardines, half a French bread, and a bottle of red.’

‘Maybe we could do a little shopping on the way.’

‘Let’s just go, let’s give ourselves some memories before something happens.’

‘Don’t say that, it’s unlucky.’

‘Sorry. I never expect anything good to last.’

‘Try not to think that way; expectation is part of the reality envelope — you’re transmitting event configurations that are searching for receptors.’

‘Don’t tell me any more, I don’t want to know about the reality envelope; life is hard enough.’

We wired to the Ziggurat, went up to the flight pad, got a Red Zone day pass on Katya’s ID, and signed out a microhopper. Then we flew out to Red Mountain Park. The mountain stood up before us roseate and golden with rust and green with copper oxides like something in a Max Ernst painting, a scanty matting of grass covering the compacted wreckage of ancient roaders, choppers, hovers, skimmers, tankers, bombers, fighters, freighters, and other vehicles arrested in a state of romantic ruin and kept from further decay by many coatings of permalin. A bronze plaque said:

THIS MOUNTAIN OF DEAD NOISE IS DEDICATED

BY THE SHEELA-NA-GIG TO THE USES OF TRANQUILLITY.

1 April 2010

The electronic sign below it said:

TODAY’S AIR IS RED 3 — OZONE IS RED 2

BREATHERS AND U-V PROTEX MUST BE WORN!

Our pass got us on to the top level and we had it to ourselves except for a young Exec couple with a small son named Bert. This child had a toy terminator beam that emitted a nasty little whine every time he pulled the trigger. Bert terminated us many times, each time yelling, ‘You’re terminated!’

‘Stop that, Bert! Stop bothering those people,’ shouted his smiling parents. Whatever noise there was below us was muffled by the barrier screen and the polariser cut off visibility so that the mountaintop we sat on had no apparent bottom. Beyond the quivering air that marked the limit of the screen London lay sweltering under its grey November sky through which circles of bright emptiness looked out at me. Wirecars and microhoppers buzzed like flies in the heavy air. The Ziggurat stood glowing its dull purple against the grey with circlings of crows marking the plaza where the dead still lay.

We put some distance between Bert and us and ate our sardines and bread and drank our wine while the dreary shouts of Prongs and Arseholes came up small and quiet through the barrier screen. I hadn’t thought about happiness for a long time but suddenly I recognised it and in the same moment tried not to — I didn’t want to be caught out in the open with it on that junkyard mountain. My wristphone was heavy with silence and the grey sky seemed full of menace. I wanted twilight and shadowy rooms and mazurkas. We were loading a memory into our heads and I wondered how long I’d be around to remember it.

Katya squeezed my hand. ‘Worrying won’t help,’ she said. ‘All we can do is try to be ready for anything.’

‘Are you ready for anything?’

She rubbed her hair against my face and said nothing for a while, then, ‘Look at this grass we’re sitting on.’

‘What about it?’

‘Look how it’s growing on this old iron, how it found a way to do it. It started with moss growing on the wreckage, the spores found a way of penetrating the permalin so they could feed on the rust and break down the metal and make moss to catch the dust from the wind until it made earth out of iron for the grass to grow on. Wasn’t that clever of the moss? It didn’t know that it couldn’t do it so it did it.’

‘Yes, that was clever of the moss.’ We took off our breathers and goggles long enough to kiss sardinefully. ‘You think we can do it?’ I said.

‘Yes, I think we can.’

‘Do what, though? That’s the question.’

‘It doesn’t matter what the question is — we’re the answer. Look at me.’

I looked.

‘Remember how it was when you first saw me?’

‘Yes, I remember it.’

‘When I was walking ahead of you I could feel your eyes on my bum. I could feel your eyes lighting up like a neon sign that spelled out THIS IS THE ONE. Tell me I’m wrong.’

‘You’re not wrong.’

‘And am I the one?’

‘Yes, Katya, you are the one.’

‘Very good. And I’m very superstitious, so I won’t use the H word…’

‘What’s the H word?’

‘It’s the opposite of sad. I won’t use that word but right now you’re not utterly miserable, are you?’

‘Not utterly, no.’

‘And nobody can take that away from us, can they?’

‘No, they can’t.’

‘Well, there you are then.’

I was looking over her shoulder when she said that and I saw a tawny owl cruising low over the mountain. I didn’t believe it at first but I turned Katya around and we saw it together. She was going to speak but I put my finger over her breather mesh and we kept the owl in us unspoken then and in the hopper and the wirecar going back.

We bought a bottle of gin and back at Katya’s place in the violet dusk we sat in the viewbubble drinking it and listening to Ilse Bak playing Chopin nocturnes. Katya had put on a hologram of a relief carving of Perseus killing the Gorgon; DETAIL OF METOPE FROM SELINUS, PALERMO MUSEUM, said the label. Of Perseus, only the left hand gripping Medusa’s hair was visible, and under her chin, held by his right hand, the blade that was decapitating her. The Gorgon’s head was the conventionalised one with the round face, mad grin, vampire-like canine teeth, and loosely hanging tongue, here broken off short. It was a plate that was in my collection as well and it was a face that was often in my thoughts — this was not a human Medusa but rather the mask worn by something not to be named. There’s a second plate of that metope that shows the full figures of both Perseus and Medusa and includes the winged horse Pegasus that was born of Medusa’s blood. Again Katya hadn’t switched on any lamps; in the darkening room the stone rictus of the Gorgon’s head seemed to quiver, seemed urgent with misery and message. ‘That’s an interesting sequence,’ I said: ‘B-Z to Vermeer girl to Gorgon’s head.’

‘They’re all looking out of one another’s eyes.’

I looked into her eyes, dark in the dimness of the room. At that moment we were hearing the Nocturne in B Flat Minor, Op. 9, No. 1. The first time I heard that music it was the same recording, played by one of those philosophising late-night disc jockeys; with that nocturne behind him he’d read something — I don’t remember what but I remember that it had a Proustian flavour — about an orange grove. Ever since then when I hear that nocturne I think of an orange grove by moonlight, the scent of the silvered oranges. ‘Are the B-Z and the Vermeer girl and the Gorgon’s head looking out of your eyes as well?’ I said.

‘Mine as well.’

‘Are you a mystery?’

‘Yes. Have you been looking for one?’

‘Yes.’

The Outer Executive Circle newsboard riffled its lights as new stories came in, then flashed: FINANCE EXEC: ‘CREDIT DEVALUED, INFLATION BEATEN’ — MAINTENANCE STRIKE CONTINUES; ELECTRICIANS THREATEN STOPPAGE — OPPOSITION: ‘STOP CLEVER DAUGHTER COVER-UP’ …

‘Ah,’ I said, ‘if only we knew who’s covering up what.’

There was nothing more about Clever Daughter; the news-board went on with: PRONG LEADER’S CANNIBAL COOK BOOK DISCOVERED — TOP EXEC: ‘GAY FAKE ROBOT IS FOREIGN AGENT’ — WIRECAR DISASTER ENQUIRY: TRANSPORT EXEC CLEARED — FINANCE EXEC …

‘What’s going to happen?’ said Katya.

‘I don’t know but I think Pythia knows a lot more than she’s told me.’

‘I saw the Thinksec printouts from your session. Pythia had some wild-looking peaks when she saw Izzy on the pixels.’

‘Thinksec does printouts of Pythia sessions?’

‘Sure, that’s why they’re called Thinksec — their little minds are busy all the time. Did you know they’re part of Top Exec?’

‘I thought they were under the SNG.’

‘The Sheela-Na-Gig is under them although the civilians don’t know it. Top Exec is where the action is.’

‘And how come a T/7 gets to see Thinksec printouts?’

‘I’ve got my sources. The people on top might run things but the hired help always know what’s going down.’

‘She’s a strange one, that 23.7 billion photoneuron Data Evaluator. Who’d have thought she’d crash like that when she went deep with me?’

‘Who’d have thought I’d crash? That never happened to me before.’

‘I like a woman who knows when to faint,’ I said. Then we moved on to other matters and there was no more shoptalk for some time.

17

The colour of regret — who has seen it?

I have not.

The colour of regret — what is it?

I don’t know.

Yet I have tasted it.

The colour of regret?

Yes, I have tasted that colour,

the colour of regret.

Rodney Spoor, ‘Colours’

‘Music feeds that which it findeth,’ somebody said. As I write this I’m listening to Ilse Bak’s Chopin Nocturnes and in my mouth is the taste of the colour of regret. One of the memory-pictures that haunts me is Caroline crying that night at the Hubble Bubble because she’d given herself and I hadn’t. She was right about the coupler that’s missing in me; sometimes I don’t even seem to be connected to myself. Stranger is my name and there are times when I’m a stranger to myself.

18

To be, or not to be: that is the question:

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, scene i

To be and not to be: that is the answer.

Helen Gorn, 2019 Notebook

Still the same night, getting on for 03:00. Katya was asleep and I was watching Fractal Bims of Titan and listening with headphones when I heard a very quiet self-effacing knock at the door. I looked through the peephole and recognised the Ziggurat Maintenance man I’d seen in the wirecar.

‘I want to talk to Fremder Gorn,’ he said.

‘Who are you?’ I whispered without opening.

‘Wait a moment,’ he said, and wrote a note which he slid under the door:

I’M LOWELL SIXE — I HAVE THINGS TO TELL YOU.

THIS FLAT IS BUGGED. PLEASE COME OUTSIDE

SO WE CAN TALK. BRING TWO GLASSES.

TRUST ME.

The name meant nothing to me. My first thought was: he’s going to tell me who my father was. What if he is my father! ‘Wait a moment,’ I whispered. I hurried on some clothes, got two glasses, programmed the lock for my thumb, opened the door, saw that he was apparently alone, and went out. He opened a small rucksack, took out a bottle, and held it up for my inspection: Glenfiddich, which certainly put him in a class above your ordinary geriatric mugger. So I thought: why not?

‘What did you want to tell me?’ I said.

He put his finger to his lips, then pointed up. We took the lift to the roof and went to a dark corner where the ventilators made a soft roar. The night was like damp flannel. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘What’s this all about?’

Sixe opened the bottle and poured the glasses nearly full. ‘Absent friends,’ he said. We clinked glasses and he emptied more than half of his.

There was enough light for me to see him pretty well; for a while he just stood there with his eyes closed while the drink went down. My earlier description of him as a failed-looking sort of man with dirty fingernails was unkind but there’s no escaping the fact that people carry their wins and their losses in their faces and the way they walk; although this man’s face seemed blurred and unreadable his general manner was that of someone who’d had more losses than wins. The dark shape of him against the red glow in the sky seemed to impose an additional reality (or unreality) on the one I was already struggling with. I didn’t want to be a character in his story but it seemed I had no choice.

‘Why would that flat be bugged?’ I said.

‘Don’t come the innocent with me — you must know why Corporation is interested in you.’

That seemed a reasonable answer but I felt as if I ought to be careful. ‘Got any ID?’ I said.

He handed me his Ziggurat card. The photo was of him but the name was Charles Harris. ‘Charles Harris?’

‘That isn’t the face I used to have either. If I were walking around as Lowell Sixe I wouldn’t be walking around any more.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s a long story.’ He drank more whisky and seemed disinclined to talk.

‘Where do I come into it?’

‘You’re the son of Helen Gorn. I knew her and there are things I think you should know.’

‘Why choose this particular time to tell me?’

‘Might be useful, I don’t know.’ He took another drink and coughed for about ten minutes; then he reached into the rucksack again and brought out three books: two hardbacks and a paperback. ‘These were Helen’s,’ he said. ‘I’m giving them to you.’ He handed them over as if he didn’t really want to let go of them.

The books smelled as if they’d been lying in the dark in an old trunk for a long time. One of the hardbacks was the 1955 Jewish Publication Society Holy Scriptures, stuck full of strips of yellow paper with her notations in faded black ink: ‘NOT IN THE WIND, NOT IN THE EARTHQUAKE’, ‘WHAT I WILL DO TO MY VINEYARD’, and so on in her cursive block-lettering. The paperback was Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance, and the other hardback, art-book sized, was a falling-apart and clearly loved-to-death Die Bibel in Bildern, the wood-engravings of Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld and the text of Martin Luther. On the cover was Elijah going up to heaven with the chariot and horses of fire: Elias Himmelfahrt.

As I took that book in my hands it fell open to Elijah being fed by ravens at the brook Cherith: Elijah had what looked like a slice of gammon in his hand while a raven delivered either a potato or a bun and a second raven offered another non-kosher slice. In the background was a deer drinking at the brook. The ravens were tidy little things and so was the deer; everything was small and neat, even the trees limited their spread as if Carolsfeld, like a photographer at a wedding, had said, ‘Everybody a little closer together, please.’ I held the book to my face and fancied that some faint fragrance was mingled with the musty-paper and dark-trunk smell.

I once saw some real live ravens, it was during a DSC short-jump exercise in the Grampians. A VMET blew and a crew of six were instantly translated from M-waves to raven snacks. I was in the search party, and when we found what was left of them on Rannoch Moor the ravens were tucking in heartily and chuckling about all the Elijahs that had dropped in to feed them. Those ravens were not little tidy birds, they were very big and black and wild, no table manners at all but they croaked a big loutish ‘Thank you, it’s been nice having you’ as they took off heavily and flapped away.

All three books bore on their flyleaves the date 16.2.84 and S.P.C.K London written in a German-looking hand. Elias always entered the date and the name of the shop in the secondhand books he bought; these were from the long-gone bookshop of the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge that used to be in the Marylebone Road. As a child Helen Gorn must have loved the neat 1860 wood-engravings in the Carolsfeld book; in them the universe was a graspable proposition and on the Sabbath God snoozed in a cloud-swing between the sun and the moon and stars, his hands folded across his stomach and his bare feet on the ball of the earth while fourteen angels sang whatever angels sing on Sundays. But even when she was a child I think the god she spoke to was the old savage one who could never be pictured and whose name was an unpronounceable tetragrammaton. When I look at that book now, as when I first saw it that night on the roof with Lowell Sixe, the ravens of Rannoch Moor come between me and the visual marzipan of those engravings.

‘You ever heard of the Elijah Project?’ said Sixe.

‘The Elijah Project — was that to do with flicker drive?’

He shook his head, looked out over the lights of Oldtown and had another drink. He was a sad man but I could see that he felt good having someone to tell his story to. ‘In 2016 Helen Gorn was eighteen and her brother Izzy was thirteen. They were living in that big house in Oldtown West 71 with their housekeeper. That summer Helen sat her Professionals in Neurophysiology, Physics, Fractals, and Speculative Mathematics at the Corporation School of Science and Technology. She got As in everything but she wasn’t having much fun. She’d never had a boyfriend — she’d been hoping to go to the May Ball with a boy she liked but it didn’t happen. She said she’d begun to feel invisible — she half expected people to try to walk through her in the walkways or sit on her in the wirecar.

‘Her parents had killed themselves in August seven years before and August was always a hard month for her to get through. That summer of 2016, years before I ever met her, she began to think a lot about being and not-being. She kept notebooks, wrote down her thoughts and quotations from things she read. Here’s a notebook page from that time.’ He gave me a folded photocopy and a pocket torch and I read in my mother’s handwriting:

14.8.16

Dream: clustered hollownesses arching to a point as in an Islamic muqarnas vault that makes the transition from base to dome, from cube to sphere, earth to heaven — clustered hollownesses glowing with a luminous ancient proto-red — I am this muqarnas vault of clustered red — I am immensities of geometrically multiplied red ascending to an unseen dome — I have no speech, the clustered hollownesses are my speech — I am recesses of goneness — I am like the many emptinesses left where the seeds of a pomegranate have been eaten — in each emptiness is the shape of the seed, ghost of the seed, shape of the idea of the pomegranate of me, of the manyness of what might or might not be me — a manyness of possible me/not-me selves.

16.8.16

Non-architectural muqarnas — of time, of sex. The soul’s need making the transition from base to dome, from this to other? Clusters of thought, of emotion, of transition. Clusters of possibility and transition.

17.8.16

When I ask people whether they experience being as a smoothly continuous state or a flickering one they all say it’s smooth and continuous for them. For me it’s always been a flickering. Not visually — I’ve never actually seen the black between the pictures in my eyes but I’ve sensed it in my brain and for that reason I don’t make any assumptions about reality. Can it be that the world flickers? Can it be that the chair I sit on is only rhythmically and repetitively but not continuously there? Why don’t I fall to the floor between therenesses? How do I manage to flicker synchronously with the chair?

*

Standing on the roof of that building at three o’clock in the morning and reading the thoughts of my dead mother when she was young made my throat ache. All around me were the night lights of here and now; in the distance was the purple glow of the Ziggurat that never slept, while like a single cell containing all the genetic information for a complete organism, these fragments of my mother’s past seemed to contain my whole being, not only what I remembered but also what I never knew, events and presences beyond my recall. Sixe decently averted his eyes and handed me another photocopy, saying without looking at it, as if quoting from a mental catalogue, ‘Extract from a letter from Victor Lossiter to Helen Gorn dated 17.2.19.’

I read:

… I agree with what you say about Kant’s empty time and space: if there are empty time and space before and after the world, then they are time and space of other than the actualised world, in which case the accessing of other can be considered as a hypothetical possibility in propositions aimed at calculating the means of such access. Intermittency of matter manifests itself in a ‘world-pulse’ of very-low-frequency emissions below the infraband. A profile of this pulse-rate should yield the intervals in which the non-being reserve of the zoetic carrier wave can be matched to the world-pulse to allow crossover.

The world-pulse has so far not been calibrated and although I’ve tried to calculate it by extrapolation I’ve not been successful. In experiments with rats I’ve attempted crossover by bracketing the most likely frequencies but the EEGs have been inconclusive; there is very little observable deviation from the EEGs of the control group but in every case trauma is evident and all the rats have died.

If I can get a grant for the equipment and the help I need I can calibrate all emissions and separate the WPR from everything else. All I need is satellite time with the Hawking radio telescope, about forty fractal analysts, and a month or so with the PN20. Time, strength, cash, and patience!

‘He got the WPR measured — I remember reading about that,’ I said.

‘That’s right,’ said Sixe. ‘Corporation funded his research and he measured the world-pulse rate in 2021. Here’s one more bit for you to look at.’ He gave me a photocopy of an extract from another letter from Lossiter to Helen Gorn, dated 23.4.21:

… I’m enclosing a copy of my printout. It’s as we both expected: a sub-infraband nonlinear oscillation moving rhythmically from quiescence to excitation and showing marked similarities to the B-Z.

It may be that circumstances will prevent my continuing with this research but I think the WPR data will enable you to move on to the next stage of your work.

Good luck,

Victor

‘Was this all to do with flicker drive?’ I said.

‘No.’

‘Are you going to tell me what it was about?’

‘It began with some ideas of Helen’s.’ He produced a thick bundle of folded photocopies, found the desired one immediately, and read: ‘“27.8.16, A quantum wave of strangeness. The stranger who appears. Elijah as collapse of wave function, his world precipitated from an infinite wave of possibilities. Suddenly he’s there bringing his reality that is now the only reality.”’

Hearing my mother’s thoughts articulated by this man was a strange experience. I once read an interview with Ilse Bak in which she said that in order to play Chopin she had to become Chopin. This old man, animated now by what he was reading, became in some way my mother. I said, ‘This is all about the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics, right?’

‘Right. Elijah just turns up in First Kings 17: bang, there he is with nothing at all leading up to his arrival. Helen was wondering whether Elijah might have got into this world by jumping out of another one.’

‘Are you telling me that Helen Gorn was seriously wondering about that?’

‘One thing about Helen — she was serious in all of her thinking, even when she was just fooling around with ideas. She’d try anything as a possible working proposition if it helped her get a handle on the problem. Sometimes she talked about Elijah as a man and sometimes as a metaphor for a new world of action and possibility. This new action was triggered by something the Israelites named with a tetragrammaton that wasn’t to be spoken. What I’m telling you is what Helen told me: why a tetragrammaton? Four is a Hermetic number, a number of chance and change and flow from one state to another, from one world to another. Hermes is the god of roadways and thieves and a thief moves things from here to there.

‘Maybe Elijah was a nobody where he was before, a failure, whatever.’ Here Sexe paused and looked at me with something like a challenge in his face.

‘Or maybe a cripple in a wheelchair?’ I said. ‘In 2021 it was Helen and Izzy together doing the limbic-system experiments. Were they thinking of a world where Helen hadn’t got raped and Izzy had all his parts in working order?’

‘Even before the Shorties and the Clowns did what they did, Helen and Izzy weren’t happy in the world. Izzy was dead when I met Helen but she was still trying to convert her Elijah obsession into some kind of practical reality.’

‘You mean …?’

‘I’ll tell you what I mean when I get to it. Whatever Elijah was, according to Helen, something jumped him out of where he was and into First Kings because that was where it had work for him. These are Helen’s words I’m giving you: Elijah as metaphor. Look at the ravens, she used to say — what we call Yahweh sent the action we call Elijah into the wilderness to be fed first by the blackness, then by the female principle, the widow. Then the Elijah action fed the widow by making her meal and oil go on inexhaustibly; as male principle it replenished her. Elijah brought back to life her dead child, the dead world-child, with the male power of Yahweh surging in him he pulled that child out of the world of the dead and back into the world of the living.

‘Next with the fire of Yahweh he showed that Baal was an idea without potency and he killed the servants of that dead idea. Only then could the rain come, the rain that the parched earth had waited for so long. Then Elijah began to fade and he was afraid of Jezebel and he wanted to die. He went to Mount Horeb and Yahweh showed him how it was when the power moves on and leaves the vessel behind. Because the power and the action are too much for the vessel, the vessel can only take so much. Helen went on about Elijah and how Yahweh showed him the stillness and Yahweh spoke the stillness that comes after the earthquake and the wind and the fire, the stillness that follows the release of energy from the potential to the actual.

‘There was still a little Elijah action when he zapped the two captains and their fifties with the Yahweh-fire but the action was about to move on with Elisha. That’s where the writers of the Scriptures phased Elijah out with a whirlwind and a chariot and horses of fire and all that. Helen thought Elijah probably just died when he was used up but the writers had to give him an impressive exit that would show the transfer of the action to Elisha.’

‘Exactly what was Helen Gorn after? What was she trying to do with the Elijah Project?’

‘The thing about Helen was, she’d tell me a lot but she wouldn’t tell me everything. She’d give me that little look that said I didn’t need to know certain things. When I asked her what you just asked me she said she wanted to jump into a world where she could feel the way Elijah must have felt when he was running ahead of Ahab’s chariot in the rain, running to Jezreel in the rain. Two images she talked about a lot — Elijah with his head between his knees waiting for the rain and Elijah running to Jezreel. She knew how the first one felt but she’d never had the second. Can you believe that?’

‘Yes. Have you ever had the running-ahead-of-the-chariot-feeling?’

‘I had it the first time I slept with Helen. You?’

It wasn’t a woman that came to mind when he asked me that, it was a spacecraft, Constanze De Groot, an old Service and Supply jet held together with sealing tape and promises. I was Records Clerk on that ship when I was eighteen, in my gap year between pro school and polytechnic. We shuttled around the Second Galaxy servicing the mining operations on the various De Groot planets. We flew the same safe courses day after day but old Pieter Paul De Groot kept his profits up by keeping his maintenance down; one morning the Number Three gyro packed up and we found ourselves in the Third Galaxy with the flicker-intercept alarm flashing red and the klaxon blaring.

Hermo Weitermann was First Nav. He used to let me hang about on the flight deck in my breaks, so I was there when it happened. Hermo hadn’t a clue where to go but when I closed my eyes and just let myself be with it I could see on the screen of my mind the flicker transmissions shooting around us like red lasers in the black and I could feel our position in the quadrangle the way a gymnast feels where his body is. I told Hermo to drop one K into the clear and we were out of there without randomising the ship and crew flickering on their pilot beam into the space we’d occupied. We radioed Scansat Control and they told us it was the Consortium Française courier Atalante we’d almost scattered all over the galaxy. They had a crew of four who lived to flicker another day and I knew I was going to be a navigator.

I still remember that moment vividly, even fiercely; that brilliant flash of Yes! Here I am! I’ve often recalled it at times when I didn’t know where I was or what I was. The tawny owl is of course my anchorbird but I think sometimes of the migrations of the arctic tern: thousands of miles and they never get lost. Once I was fully qualified I was mostly out of jets and into flicker and then navigation was reduced to checking the frequency schedules and sticking the right transmission card into the autofreak. But I never lost that sense of myself as a moving point on the screen of the mind that lives in my head. On that night in November 2054 Lowell Sixe entered into my navigation as a spacemark of some kind, a density of dark matter on the screen. I told him about Constanze De Groot, then I said, ‘Were you with Helen until she went into the sanatorium?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know who my father was?’

‘I wondered when you’d ask that. The answer is no. Your mother was pregnant when I met her and although she talked about it sometimes she never said who the father was.’

‘How far did she get with the Elijah Project?’

‘Let me tell this in my own time; right now I’m trying to give you some background. Lossiter was working on the many-worlds thing until he died three days after writing that second letter you read: twenty-seventh of April, 2021.’

‘How old was he?’

‘Thirty-seven.’

‘What did he die of?’

‘Faulty hearing. Corporation told him to lie down but he stood up.’

‘Ah. They wanted …?’

‘The fruits of his labours. They sussed he was on the way to other worlds and they wanted to take it over. He thought it was safer with him which was of course a crazy idea. He was so unbalanced that he fell off the top of a block of flats and ended up in another world sooner than he expected to.’

‘But Helen Gorn was carrying on from where he left off, wasn’t she? Did Corporation know that?’

‘Did they know! She couldn’t fart without Top Exec knowing and they made sure she heard how Lossiter died. Then they left her alone to get on with it.’

‘So she took off the top of Izzy’s skull and went to work on him. Do you know how he died?’

‘Can I tell this my way or is your concentration span too short?’

‘Sorry. Tell it your way.’

He poured himself another drink, gulped it down, had another coughing fit, then continued. ‘I was working in the Physitronics Lab in 2022. She was alone then — Izzy had died in April. On the fifteenth of May she rang up my department wanting help with a Broca relay modification and they put the call through to me. Did you ever hear a recording of her voice?’

‘Yes. “Wie eine Frucht von Süssigkeit und Dunkelheit.” Like a fruit of sweetness and darkness.’

Sixe let off what sounded like a little burst of steam: ‘Puh!’

‘What?’

‘You’re assuming that I don’t understand German.’

‘Do you?’

‘No. But if you already assume that, why don’t you simply say the sodding thing in English to begin with? Helen was always doing that — she’d say something in German or French and then translate it for me. Bloody show-off.’ He poured the last of the Glenfiddich into our glasses and looked at me defiantly.

‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Helen needed a full-time assistant, and when her new grant came through she got me assigned to her. I lived in her house until that night in September when I came home and found her gone.

‘Did I say that August was always a bad month for her? Well, it was. That August she was six months pregnant and that didn’t make it any easier. Three years before, the twenty-first of August 2019, was the night the Shorties and the Clowns raped her and crippled Izzy. Seven of them: two twelve-year-olds and five of the others. The Clowns were the worst of it, she said — that she could be used like that by less-than-human things. She said to me, “In an infinite number of possible worlds there must have been one in which I had a gun and shot the lot of them. The quantum wave just happened to collapse in the wrong universe for me.”

‘“Helen,” I said to her, “you’ve got to put that behind you, it’s in the past.”

‘She said, “No, it isn’t, it’s happening right now and it keeps on happening, it doesn’t go away. They made an Auschwitz with their cocks and they made me live in it. ‘Jewish bitch,’ the Shorties kept calling me, ‘Jewish bitch,’ while they defiled me.” She went on about how it excited them to call her that while they did what they did to her, how in her mind they were still doing it; how her grandparents had their Auschwitz and she had hers that she lived in every day and every night. Then she said,’ “At eventide, Lo, terror! By morning it is no more.”’

‘I said, “What is no more, the terror?”

‘She said. “No, Lowell. This world is no more, not for me — I’ll find another one.”’ He spat on the ground. ‘Fucking Richard Soames.’

‘Who’s Richard Soames?’

‘He’s the one she wanted to go to the May Ball with when she was eighteen.’

‘Did she?’

‘No, she didn’t. Richard Soames had his pick of the prettiest daughters of the Twenty CC

‘What’s the Twenty CC?’

‘Families who had company cars twenty years or more before Gridlock.’

‘And you think if Richard Soames had taken her to the May Ball it would have made a big difference in her life?’

‘Yes, I do.’ He shook his head as if baffled by my obtuseness.

‘She hadn’t much luck with men, had she?’

‘She had me, whatever kind of luck that was, from the time we met until the end. Best part of my life. What’ve I got now? Shit. Where was I?’

‘You were saying she said she’d find another world.’

‘Right: another world. She said to me, “You think I can’t do it?”

‘I said, “I don’t know.”

‘She said, “I can do it. It takes a Jew to do it, to find the magic door, the quantum exit. Einstein, Oppenheimer, Teller — all Jews.” Then she told me how back in the sixteenth century in Prague this rabbi saved the Jews in the ghetto when the Gentiles were after them. He’d studied the Cabbala and that sort of thing and he made a big figure out of clay, what they called a golem. Then he wrote the name of God on its forehead and he whispered in its ear and the golem went out and sorted out the Gentiles. When things quieted down again the rabbi took the golem up to the attic of the synagogue and he told it to lie down and go to sleep. Then he wiped the name off its forehead. Then, according to Helen, the golem stayed there in the attic of the synagogue all covered with dust and cobwebs and batshit until the Nazis killed six million Jews, at which time Rabbis Einstein, Oppenheimer, and Teller plus one or two honorary rabbis wrote the name of God in a new way on the golem’s forehead and it woke up much bigger than before and got busy again. I said to her, “Helen, that golem killed Japanese. What did the Japanese ever do to the Jews?”

‘“They were allies of Germany, weren’t they,” she said. “Anyhow, retribution doesn’t necessarily work in parallel — sometimes it’s just an exchange of volumes. Millions of one kind are slaughtered in one place so millions of another kind get slaughtered in another place; evil action gets passed along the same as good. Shit happens, that’s the first law of Nature, and it happens to Jews again and again. Don’t talk to me about the Armenians and the Kurds and the native Americans — it isn’t the same thing for them. Nobody keeps circulating The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Kurdistan or stories about the Armenians and the native Americans ritually sacrificing Christian babies.”

‘She said this world had become a place in which the unspeakable was allowed to happen while everybody looked the other way. She said that her world wasn’t the same as mine: I lived in a world in which it had happened to them and she lived in a world in which it had happened to us.

‘There wasn’t much I could say when she got like that. I said to her, “Still, we’ve got each other.” She said yes but not as if it mattered a whole lot. She was never a very happy woman and August was always a bad month for her. You know about her suicide attempt?’

‘Yes, that was in the newsfax at the time — I’ve seen it at the library.’

‘I oughtn’t to have left her alone but she was hell to live with around then and sometimes I just had to get out of the house for a while. On the night of the twentieth I came back from a walk and found her drowning in her own vomit; she’d swallowed most of a bottle of Nepenthol and half a bottle of gin. Her note said: “MAYBE NO WORLD IS BEST.”’

‘She was a lot of laughs, my mum. It was wonderful doing my pre-natal time with her.’

‘I turned her over and got her to heave up most of it and when the paramedics arrived they pumped out her stomach right away so we got her through that one alive but of course she succeeded the next time.

‘She spent a couple of days at the SNG Rest and Reassessment Centre and had a little therapy and some tranquillisers and when she came home she was the cheerfullest I’d ever seen her. So we got back to work.

‘Our cover project was sensory remotes and we always had experimental prototypes and a lot of paper for the Review Board to look at. That June the Sheela-Na-Gig had appointed a tough Top Exec named Irene Heale Head of Project Review.’

‘I just met her today, she’s head of R & D now.’

‘That’s right — sweet-looking lady, isn’t she. “Iron” Heale, everybody called her back then. She and Helen had been at Elite Poly together and they’d both been working on brain mapping. Helen was Number One in her year; Heale was Number Two and it bothered her a lot. She wanted to team up with Helen on a joint project but Helen preferred to work alone and she won the Rousseau prize that year. Heale claimed that Helen had stolen some of her research and Helen denied it. There was a tribunal and the adjudicators cleared Helen.

‘Heale never forgave her for winning that prize. As soon as she was appointed Head of Project Review she went through Helen’s file, saw some references to Elijah, got curious, and came over to investigate. Heale got a lot of pleasure out of that — you could almost see her flicking her boot with a riding crop while she interrogated Helen.

‘Helen told her those Elijah ideas had never gone anywhere and Heale told her to try again and to keep in touch. Helen said she’d see what she could do. “Jewish brains they can always use,” she said to me later. “One of these days they’ll find a way to separate the Jew brains from the Jew bodies and that’ll be The Final Solution.”

‘“What will they do with the brains?” I said.

‘“They’ll transplant them into the top goyim,” she said, “which of course will make them think Jewish. So maybe the whole thing’s a Jewish plot.”’ Sixe shook his head.

‘From then on,’ he continued, ‘we worked on Elijah day and night. But we kept double books — the blackboards and diagrams anybody would see on a surprise visit weren’t the real thing. The idea was to make the jump before they knew where we were with it.’

‘The two of you were going to do it.’

‘That’s right; she couldn’t find anyone better so I was invited.’

‘But you talk about making the jump the way bank robbers in films talk about getting away to Rio. Were you expecting a completely different world where all of your troubles would be left behind or what?’

‘It’s hard to tell you how it was without sounding stupid and maybe we were stupid. And maybe your mother was crazy but it was a world-class craziness if you know what I mean — she could have told me the moon was made of green cheese and I’d have believed her because somehow she’d have made it seem believable. And what happens when you get caught up in an idea like that — it expands to take in everything, it becomes the answer to all your problems even though you know better.’

‘How close were you to doing it?’

‘Pretty close. The preliminary calculations were easy enough. The hard part came after we got the WPR figures from Lossiter. It took quite a long time and a lot of models to work out the phase-scaling fractal and sync it up: if Being is B and Non-Phase is NP, then all we had to do was make B/NP jump WPR which isn’t any harder than jumping over yourself but as far as we knew it hadn’t ever been done and it took us a while to figure it out. We were going to use oscillator implants similar to the ones for flicker drive. The difficulty was in scaling the input for the phase jump and of course there was the matter of the implants. Helen had authority to call in medical personnel but once she used it they’d be on to us. We were under surveillance but through the old family network she was able to find a neurosurgeon who said she’d do it whenever we had the oscillators ready.’

‘Let me get this straight — you were going to use the oscillators with a VMET?’

‘That’s right, but instead of transmitting ourselves to a distant point we were going to collapse our wave function into another world.’

‘Your wave function? Wasn’t all the rest of the world included in that same wave function?’

‘That’s what I said to Helen and she said the rest of the world would have to take its chance. She used to sit there at her computer working up equations and diagrams and singing under her breath while she played Bach’s Art of Fugue over and over on the audio beam. The words she sang were always the same: “I will tell you what I will do …” Just those words over and over again to that Bach tune that kept repeating itself. It was spooky.’

‘I can’t place the words.’

‘Isaiah, Chapter Five, Verse Five:

And now come, I will tell you

What I will do with my vineyard:

I will take away the hedge thereof,

And it shall be eaten up;

I will break down the fence thereof,

And it shall be trodden down;…

‘Verse Six begins:

And I will lay it waste …’

‘That must have been a little worrying.’

‘It was, and when she wasn’t doing her Art of Fugue thing she’d be playing a recording of Mendelsohn’s Elijah which isn’t exactly a knees-up either. She said to me, “Listen to how Elijah out of nowhere jumps in and says how it’s going to be.” The recording was in German and she translated the opening words for me, First Kings, Seventeen, One:

As truly as the Lord, the God of Israel, lives,

before whom I stand, there shall these years

neither dew nor rain come unless I say so.

‘I said to her, “What is it with you and this no-rain business? Has there been a long drought in your life lately?”

‘She ignored that. Sometimes she talked about sex in a very common way and other times she acted as if she had nothing between her legs but four thousand years of history. She said, “You’ll notice that he says ‘before whom I stand’. He’s letting Ahab know straightaway where he stands with his Baal rubbish. Ahab is a Jew too and he knows Elijah has him by the balls, he knows he’s in big trouble.’

‘I said, “The chorus sound like Gentiles.”

‘She said, “Choruses always sound like Gentiles; what I’m saying is that the spirit of Elijah possessed the spirit of Mendelssohn when he was putting down the notes on paper. And it’s possessing me as I do my equations.’

‘I said, “OK, any possessor of yours is a possessor of mine.”

‘“Not unless you get circumcised,” she said. She was high on Elijah. I think one of the reasons she liked me was that I was hairy like him.

‘By the middle of September 2022 we had a computer model that worked and Helen wanted to wire the oscillators and get them implanted and have a go. I wanted to run the model against a list of “What if?” parameters which would have taken a few more days to evaluate. She said why not a test run. With what? I wanted to know. She said, “I don’t really care a rat’s arse, so why not a rat?”

‘I still wasn’t altogether happy with the numbers and I didn’t feel too comfortable with the whole thing. I said, “Let’s wait a little — at least until we’ve run all the what ifs. Even if we do it with a flea we could change the whole universe.”

‘“Big deal,” she said. “Who’s going to notice a rat-sized change?”’

‘I said, “How can we know it’ll only be a rat-sized change? Mightn’t the rat take everything else with it?” But she was the one who made the decisions, I was only a kind of kept man, never her equal. So we did it with a rat.’

‘Do you think she was crazy? Really crazy, I mean.’

‘What does crazy mean? Crazy is anything different from what the majority think isn’t crazy. Your mother was never with the majority.

‘We always had lab rats around and we had a small VMET we used for parcels. I limited the field to the rat’s cage and checked the shielding to make sure the rest of the room was safe from flare. I did an EEG to get the frequency of the rat’s carrier wave, then I scaled down the phase input figures to that output and printed up an oscillator.

‘It was a male rat, a Delta Three laboratory strain. I anaesthetised him and shaved his head. Helen drilled a hole in his skull and implanted the oscillator which was smaller than the head of a pin. While she was doing that I ran the phase input figures again to be sure they checked out. They did. The first part of the procedure was the same as flicker drive: switching on the VMET would activate the oscillator and phase the rat to M-waves. Then a second signal from a hand transmitter would jump the rat to a parallel phase and presumably another world.

‘The rat was just lying there while we waited for it to come out of the anaesthetic. I checked the phase input figures again and the calibration of the hand transmitter and I set up a videocamera. When the rat was fully conscious and moving around I pushed the button on the newsfax and the 19:45 update slid out. The headline was CHS FOR UNDER-25S ONLY. I laid it on the table beside the cage where the camera could see it.

‘Helen put on a recording of Chopin mazurkas. It was the sixteenth of September 2022, the end of the day. The light in the window was a sad kind of purple-blue. I started the video-camera at 19:48 BST.

‘I tuned the VMET to the WPR and at 19:50 I switched on. The oscilloscope showed in-phase as the rat disappeared. I jumped phase and switched off. I had that funny dropping sensation you get sometimes when you’re drifting off to sleep. I looked at Helen and she looked a little shaken. “You too?” I said, and she nodded. A terrible sadness took hold of me and I began to cry.’

You began to cry! I thought. You and your terrible sadness. For all we know you jumped us into a different world from what we had before. You jumped unborn me and everybody else into this world we’re stuck with now.

‘I remembered my mother giving me hot milk with butter and honey in it when I had a sore throat,’ Sixe continued. ‘I remember my father reading me “The Story of Kwashin Koji”, how a boat comes out of a picture and takes Kwashin Koji back into the picture and away.

‘We looked at the rat and it was only half a rat, the rear half. “Oh shit,” Helen said, “not again.” Then she went into the lav and was sick. I just stood there like an idiot looking at what was left of the rat. The front of the half-body was all scrunched up against the back of the cage — it was pretty messy and there was a lot of blood, it was as if someone had taken a cleaver and chopped the rat in half, severed arteries and split entrails and all that. The rat was backing up when he got the chop: his hind feet were dug in so hard he’d torn through the card he was standing on.

‘When Helen came out of the lav I said to her, “What did you mean when you said, ‘Not again’? Has this happened before?”

‘She said, “Not with a rat.”

‘“With what then?” I said. She didn’t answer. “Tell me, Helen,” I said. “With what?”

‘“You mean with whom,” she said.

‘I said, “Oh my God. What are you saying?”

‘“It happened with my brother,” she said.

‘“What?” I said. “What happened?”

‘“He did it in the middle of the night when I was asleep,” she said. “It was a Wednesday, the thirteenth of April. He’d set a timer to switch on the VMET and he’d got up on the table and arranged himself in the field. Then his head went somewhere but the rest of him stayed behind.”

‘“Where did it go?” I said.

‘“Who knows?” she said. “We lost touch.”

‘“Why did he do it?” I said.

‘“Hard to say,” she said. “He didn’t leave a note.”

‘“Did he do it with a phase jump, the same as we did with the rat?” I said. “Did he have the same kind of oscillator implant?”

‘“The one we used for the rat was wired from Izzy’s diagram,” she said.

‘“Well, if it didn’t work for Izzy,” I said, “why’d you do the same circuitry again?”

‘“It should have worked,” she said. “I checked it every possible way — the only explanation is that Izzy and the rat changed their minds and overrode the phase jump. Izzy certainly started out willing; he planned the whole thing very carefully. He’d been complaining of headaches and dizzy spells and he’d been to hospital for what he said were a couple of days of tests. He wouldn’t let me go with him — we had a regular driver who helped him into and out of buildings — and that’s when he must have had the implant done.”

‘“And you think he changed his mind at the last moment?” I said.

‘“Yes,” she said, “it’s the only explanation.”

‘“We’re talking quantum mechanics here,” I said. “How could changing his mind affect that?”

‘“Maybe all it takes is a little variation in the brain’s electrical output,” she said. “Reality, after all, is subjective.”’ Sixe took some papers from his pocket, selected one, and read:

‘Centricity of event as perceived by a participant in the event is reciprocal with the observed universe: the universe configures the event and the event configures the universe. Each life is a sequence of event-universes, each sequence having equal reality subjectively and no reality objectively. Objective reality is not possible within the sequence, therefore subjective reality, regardless of consensus, is the only reality.’

‘What a load of bollocks,’ I said to Sixe.

‘Izzy wrote that.’

‘I think he must have been a couple of quanta short of a probability by then.’

‘Helen recited that to me, she knew it by heart. I said to her, “Do you really believe that?”

‘She said, “Izzy was a genius. You saw what was left of the rat; I saw what was left of Izzy: both of them changed their minds.”’

As Sixe spoke I saw again the face of Izzy Gorn spread across the darkness of space. Had it tried to speak? I thought I might be going mad. I thought of Izzy lying on the table with his head torn off. ‘What did she do with the body?’ I said.

‘That’s the same question I asked but it was no big problem — one of her medical friends signed the death certificate with cause of death listed as VMET accident, there was a fast and private cremation with a closed coffin, life went on, and here we were with half a rat. Between that and the subjective reality business I was pretty confused, besides which I was worried about that dropping feeling we’d both had.

‘I replayed the videodisc and the date on the newsfax was the same: 16 September 2022. The headline was still CHS FOR UNDER-25S ONLY. The rest of the news hadn’t changed either: Top Exec A had resigned from her post following allegations of financial fraud and B was under investigation for having procured young girls for C; wirecar service would be disrupted by industrial action; and the latest survey showed that seventy-three per cent of those surveyed lied when being surveyed.’

‘But that doesn’t mean there was no change,’ I said. ‘Whatever recent past you recalled or saw evidence of would be the recent past that came with the collapse of the quantum wave into an alternative here-and-now, wouldn’t it?’

He ignored me. ‘The music on the audio beam was still the Chopin mazurkas. The clock said 19:59.1 looked all round the room, looked out of the window, looked at Helen. For a moment I didn’t know where I was and whether I’d ever seen that place and that person before. Then I was myself again but feeling weird.

‘The time was on every frame of the videodisc. There was the rat moving around in its cage at 19:48 when I started the camera. At 19:50 when I switched on the VMET it disappeared. When I jumped phase after that there was a blur that came and went. I restarted the disc and went to single-frame-advance. The blur was the very faint transparent shape of the rat as the light seemed to get brighter but it was impossible to say what was happening. The newsfax on the table seemed blurred as well. This ghost-image was only on three frames. I replayed and froze frame. The headline appeared to have another faint headline superimposed on it like a cross-dissolve. I zoomed up the frame and fiddled with the focus but I couldn’t get it clear enough to read. I took prints of those three frames and put them under a magnifier but had no better luck. The next frame after those three showed the newsfax and the half-rat as we’d found them after I switched off the VMET.

‘I said to Helen, “It’s the same world, isn’t it? The rat — half of it anyway — jumped back from whatever it was getting into and maybe the headline started to change but it changed back.”

‘She said, “What do you expect when you send a rat on a man’s errand? We’re not going to get anywhere with this until we do it ourselves.”

‘I said, “I’ll be damned if I want to end up with my arse in one place and my head in another.”

‘She said, “How much difference would it make?”’

Sixe paused there. ‘Not a lot, I guess,’ he said reflectively, ‘not a lot.’ During this long narrative his apparently total recall had transported me to that long-past September; I’d been seeing my mother’s face and hearing her voice that I knew from recordings. She was gone and here I was with this yesterday man whose sadness was evidently little relieved by alcohol.

‘I could see she wasn’t in the mood for a rational discussion,’ he continued, ‘but I kept trying. I said, “I think before we do anything else we should try to figure out what happened here.”

‘She said, “Looks pretty simple to me: the rat chickened out at the last moment.”

‘I said, “Be serious, God knows what the implications of this are.”

‘“God!” she said. “He didn’t care about my arse. Why should He care about a rat’s? He didn’t care about my grandmother’s arse either, when they used her for their so-called medical experiments at Auschwitz. Don’t talk to me about God, He and I aren’t speaking these days.”

‘I said, “I wasn’t talking about whether or not God cares — I was talking about the significance of what happened to the rat.”

‘“Significance!” she said. “What it signifies is: make sure your arse follows where your head leads. If you’re going to do something, then fucking do it.”

‘“Maybe this just doesn’t want to happen,” I said. She didn’t answer; she switched on the videoscan and moved it from station to station around town. There was the Ziggurat in purple standby mode, then Stilt City and Raftville, you could almost smell them. Sleazeworld and the central Fungames complex showing THREE BIG PUKIES TONITE — HORROR LIKE YOU’VE NEVER SEEN BEFORE! She punched in the street-level view and we saw Prongs and Arseholes, Shorties, Clowns, Funboys, Executives, and Wankers. She zoomed in for a good look at their tattoos and their paint, their shaven heads and their tribal hairdos. She said, “Maybe every world is a rats’ world. Let’s try again.”

‘I said, “What, with another rat?”

‘She said, “With us. Let’s get the oscillators implanted and do a jump before Heale decides to have a closer look at what we’ve been up to.”

‘I said, “But Helen, maybe Izzy and the rat didn’t change their minds; maybe the wrong phase-scaling got fed in both times or the oscillator circuitry wasn’t correct.”

‘She said “I’m sick of all this goddam arithmetic; Elijah didn’t have to piss about with numbers, he just fucking did it and the Lord took care of the details.”

‘“Don’t forget that you and He aren’t speaking these days,” I said.

‘“Maybe He’ll do it for old times’ sake,” she said.

‘I said, “I don’t think we can count on the Lord for that, he’s got a lot on his plate just now. And before I do a jump I’d really like to know where Izzy’s head and the rat’s front half ended up.”

‘“Wherever they are is better than here,” she said.

‘By then of course I realised that she was well and truly unwired and there was no knowing what she might do next. I was feeling pretty crazy myself — I mean, for all I knew we’d replaced the existing world, which was already one head short, with one that was missing half a rat. I was angry at God for creating a universe that could be mucked about like that. Why couldn’t He, She, or It have made something solid and tamperproof?

‘Helen said, “As soon as I can get hold of Ulrike let’s do it.” Ulrike was the neurosurgeon who was going to do our implants.

‘I said, “Helen, don’t be crazy.”

‘She said, “Why not? Where has being sane got me?”

‘I said, “For God’s sake, try to act like a scientist.”

‘She said, “Is that what you are — a scientist? You just don’t have the balls to take a chance. And who are you to advise me anyhow? You’re a loser who’s been getting a free ride on me.”

‘That’s when I left the house for a long walk. I had a key to the Class A walkway but I didn’t use it, I felt like being down on the ground with the Prongs and the Arseholes and the rest of the street life. I was half-hoping I’d get jumped and not have to make any decisions for a while or maybe for ever. I walked as far as Stilt City past people kicking each other’s heads in and breaking whatever was unbroken. The streets stank of vomit and sewage and the air was full of noise but the nastiness of it didn’t seem as nasty as what we’d been doing quietly in our nice clean lab.

‘It was raining; London always looks more itself by night and in the rain — all black and shining and full of lights and colours like a nightmare. People offered me everything from slammo to little boys but nobody bothered me. I think I must have looked a little too weird to take a chance on.

‘I got back to the house about three o’clock in the morning and two guys jumped me at the front door — professionals. They didn’t waste any time talking, they just gagged me and cuffed me and shoved me into a hopper and flew me to a building in the Inner Exec Circle. No blindfold so I knew I was for it. They took me to a lab where they strapped me to a bed and a woman medic gave me an injection. When I came to I heard myself talking and I saw that I was hooked up to a downloader. The medic was sitting by the bed and she whispered, “Listen but keep babbling. I’m a friend of Ulrike’s. I have orders to terminate you as soon as there’s nothing more to be got from you. Be careful when you leave.” Then she took off the electrodes, undid the straps, stuck a card in my pocket, pointed to the window, and said, “Quick, the fire escape — go!” So I went.

‘I walked to Sleazeworld and hired a Q-BO-SLEEP for the night. Next morning’s newsfax had this item.’ He took yet another photocopy from the wad. It was dated 17.09.22.

HELEN GORN BREAKDOWN

Physicist-neurologist Helen Gorn was found by a Corporation patrol at 02:20 wandering in her nightdress on the Class A walkway in OW 71. Gorn, 7 months pregnant, was taken to SNG Rest and Reassessment where she was diagnosed as suffering from clinical depression.

‘I’ve seen this before,’ I said to Sixe.

‘You’ve probably seen this one as well.’ He gave me another photocopy, dated 24.09.22:

HELEN GORN DEAD

Helen Gorn was found dead from a drug overdose early this morning in her room at SNG Rest and Reassessment where she had been in therapy for the last week. Gorn, 26, was seven months pregnant. The foetus was safely transferred to an artificial womb to complete full-term gestation. (See obituary p.4.)

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Why are you showing me these?’

‘Pay close attention to the dates. Helen goes into SNG Rest and Reassessment on 17 September and she ODs a week later on 24 September. Now look at this one. It’s a Code Red Memo, SNG ONLY which means SNG, Thinksec, and Top Exec.’

I looked:

CODE RED SNG ONLY INT TE AUTH I 14:32 28.09.22

Elijah newgo I Heale Speed I CN Flicker.

‘Elijah resumed under Irene Heale: top priority. Codename Flicker,’ Sixe translated. ‘Notice the date: four days after Helen’s death.’

‘So? They had her notes and all the data the two of you accumulated and they were going ahead. What else would you expect?’

‘There might be a little more to this than you’d expect. Helen and I made up some code signatures just in case we ever needed to authenticate communications between us — nonsense groups that could be inserted in a page of calculations. This is one of them.’ He wrote something on the back of an envelope and showed it to me: (**)+<0>%. ‘Now here’s part of a printout from Irene Heale’s lab dated ten days after Helen’s death.’ In a thicket of numbers, symbols, and Greek letters I saw what was unmistakably the same group.

‘You’re trying to tell me she was alive ten days after being reported dead,’ I said.

He shook his head. ‘Maybe it’s not quite that simple.’ He looked up, stuck a card in my hand, and collapsed as a wire-thin beam of blue light hit him and a hovering peeper dwindled into the night.

19

The Moving Finger writes; and having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, trans. Edward Fitzgerald

Lowell Sixe’s troubles in this world were over; mine weren’t and I didn’t even know what all of them were. The terminators in the peeper could just as easily have closed my account when they hit Sixe; that they hadn’t seemed to indicate that for the moment nobody important wanted me dead; perhaps, even, somebody important wanted me alive. But it clearly wasn’t safe for anybody to stand too close to me.

‘Well,’ I said to the crumpled figure. ‘At least once in your life you had the feeling of running ahead of the chariot.’ Probably I seem insensitive in not making more of his death but I’d sensed that he himself had felt that his life was behind him; and as ends go his was a quick and painless one. I emptied his pockets and took the contents with me. The disposal of his body I left to the sweeper that would follow the peeper. The card Sixe had given me was quietly elegant in its typography:

PICCADILLY RELIEF

‘You’ll come again and again.’

37 The Maze, King’s Cross

All tastes catered for.

On the back of the card was written the name Marie Demska. It was a name that meant nothing to me but since earliest childhood I had lived in constant expectation of messages and revelations from the unknown; much of the time I felt lost in a labyrinth, and now here was a name from The Maze. A clew?

By the time I came down from the roof it was after four in the morning. There was a sweaty dampness in the air but no freshness, only the stench of too many years of Fungames and Maxiburgers. Katya was sleeping soundly — no talking or singing — lying on her back with her mouth slightly open, like a child completely empty after the action of the day. I wondered what she was dreaming; if there was any trouble in her mind it didn’t show in her face.

I went into the kitchen and looked at the photocopies I’d taken from Sixe’s pocket. Most of them were of Helen Gorn’s notebook pages:

14.8.16

Waiting for the rain. Parched earth waiting for rain. Elijah the Tishbite: ‘As the Lord, the God of Israel, liveth, before whom I stand, there shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my word.’ Elijah with his face between his knees, waiting. Sometimes full of certainty, sometimes full of doubt.

15.8.16

Elijah. Eliyahu. ‘A man who is called a hairy man in his signs, a man whose loins were girded with leather,’ says the song. ‘A man who rose on horses of fire in the wind. A man who did not taste the taste of death and burial.’ The only prophet who was a runner. Seventeen miles from Mount Carmel to Jezreel. Where did the ravens get the bread and the meat they fed him? Midrash says from the table of Jehoshaphat but that answer doesn’t satisfy me. Darkness in the shape of a bird. Noah ‘sent forth a raven and it went forth to and fro until the waters were dried up from off the earth.’ Darkness as the finder. This was the ancestor of the ravens who were commanded by the Lord to feed Elijah. Bread and flesh of darkness. Darkness is what kept Elijah alive: the black. To be Elijah he had to be able to live on blackness; that was how the Lord tested him.

21.8.16 Seventh anniversary of E and S’s death.

Dream: Fragment of 16th-Cent. Ushak carpet, Father’s study. Father naked, sitting cross-legged on it. Try to look away but can’t. His body & limbs become vine & leaf patterns — he slowly sinks into carpet — mouth shapes word I can’t read. Carpet not flat but infinitely deep space — blue-green primordial sea of consciousness — proto-red of world-mind — gold of its thought — black womb of silence. Vine of world-mind-thought growing, twisting — new shoots, new leaves out of womb of silence. Pattern whispers word I can’t hear. Word becomes stone, becomes ziggurats, pyramids, circles of standing beckons, places of broken columns. Stone becomes thought — thought becomes self — self becomes proto-red.

22.8.16

Big storm — Izzy afraid of thunder and lightning, asked if he could get into bed with me. I said yes. Izzy afraid of what’s behind the lightning, ‘the bright emptiness’. After a while he quieted down. This/not this.

23.8.16

Elijah in the cave on the mountain of God. Not the wind, not the earthquake, not the fire. A still small voice, a soft murmuring. The cave is the place of becoming, the female darkness waiting to be seeded, womb of transition. From the air around the mountain comes an invisible shape that fills the cave where Elijah is hiding.

Not male or female, the Elijah condition. A conjunction of both. A merging and an emergence. The rain at last.

Elijah is more than a specific individual; Elijah is a state of things, a condition, a convergence of probabilities, a coming together of scattered possibilities that manifest themselves as sudden and unpredicted action. Oh yes, here is Elijah, here is the rain. Now, now, now. At last.

24.8.16

Dream: a rushing in the air behind the visible world.

Isaiah 17, 12

Ah, the uproar of many peoples,

That roar like the roaring of the seas,

And the rushing of nations, that rush

Like the rushing of mighty waters!

Thinking again of Elijah with his face between his knees, waiting for the world in which there will be rain. Waiting for the world in which under a black sky he will run before Ahab’s chariot. Thinking how it was when at last the rain.

A chariot of fire and a whirlwind took him up into heaven. Or another world.

From ‘The Anthropic Principle’, George Gale, Scientific American, December 1981:

It is necessary to suppose there are infinitely many worlds,

in each one of which the particle has a definite position.

What happens during a measurement is that one world is

selected from among the infinite range of possibilities.

Can electrical impulses from the brain precipitate possibility? Leibniz says the world is as it is because God is as He is. But what if God is as He is because we are as we are? Then the world is as it is because we are as we are.

Listening to Étude No. 9 in F minor, Opus 10. You can hear the world of it trying, trying, trying to become.

Ilse Bak in Arts International, September 2016:

You have to become Chopin, become the world of him. In the Opus 10 F minor study the effect is quite uncanny. That left hand! The repetition is strange: once you’re in it you don’t want to stop; you feel yourself trying to get to a place that you never arrive at. The end is the abandonment of something — hope maybe.

28.8.16

Chopin and Caspar David Friedrich — Friedrich 1774–1840 — Chopin 1810–1849 — white bones of cliffs at Stubbenkammer — oval aperture of grass and trees through which appears sharp-toothed abyss like dentate vagina with the sea beyond — 3 figures: on left Friedrich’s wife in red dress pointing down into abyss — on right his brother at very edge leaning back against dead stump — in centre Friedrich on hands and knees, almost falling over edge.

Friedrich’s drawings more pianistic than his paintings, more etudinous, more mazurkian, more nocturnal — good drawing — boats and ships with real rigging and working tackle — great owls, etudinous and nocturnal Uhus.

Sonia D says how can I be modern thinker and like Friedrich better than Lamia Quick — thinks anything distorted or abstract better than anything straight — the strangeness in the straight too quick for her & Lamia.

12.09.16 Dr Burke’s lab

The Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction — on the light box is a Petri dish in which 10 ml each of potassium bromate, sulphuric acid, and malonic acid, plus ferroin to give colour, have been added to 10 ml of a solution of sulphuric acid, water, and cerous nitrate. In the pink liquid there are bluish-white wavelines forming concentric circles that expand and collide and disappear. Those that hit the edge of the dish don’t stop or rebound, they vanish as if they’ve gone through the glass to (one can’t help thinking) another world where they keep expanding.

Extract from letter, E. Gorn to B. P. Belousov, 12 November 1969

… It seems to me that oscillation might well be the universal communication pattern of which your chemical reaction is one of an infinite number of manifestations. Communication of what and to whom or what? An interesting question.

13.09.16

Alternative worlds: A world in which Richard Soames doesn’t take me to the May Ball and a world in which he does.

14.09.16

What if God decided to actualise a possible world which is on the whole less perfect than other possible worlds?

Substituting the name of Richard and the not-taking of Helen to the ball in Leibniz’s Arnauld-starting-for-Paris proposition (Leibniz — An Introduction, C. D. Broad). Words in square brackets mine:

There is no general property [except plainness] possessed by [Helen] (comparable to the definition of a circle) from which it necessarily follows that [Richard] will [not take her to the ball]. But, since it has always been certain that he will [not] do so (for otherwise God could not have known it beforehand) [and God has known it from before the first day of Creation] there must be some timeless connection between [Helen] (the subject) and [not being taken to the ball by Richard] (the predicate). If [Helen] were not to [be not-taken to the ball by Richard] this would destroy the notion which God had of [Helen] when he decided to create [her]. For that notion, considered as the notion of an as yet merely possible individual, includes all the future facts about [Helen] and all the decrees of God on which these facts would depend, considered also as merely possible. On the other hand, says Leibniz, the supposition that [Richard] did not [not take Helen to the May Ball] would not conflict with any necessary truth.

Thanks a lot, Leibniz.

Seventeen miles through the rain running in front of Ahab’s chariot from Mount Carmel and the killing of the priests of Baal to the gates of Jezreel. The image of Elijah wide across the desert and the sky, the long muscles of thighs and calves sharp and shadowed as the hard feet strike the stony ground. Running with the power of his god in him under the black sky and the rain. To have that just once.

*

There were two photocopies of a different handwriting. The first was of a notebook entry that I guessed had been written by Izzy Gorn:

23.8.16

In the storm a safe place, a calm and wild place. Oh the great secret. The forever-moment that has always been and will always be, the centre to which the universe configures itself. The magic place, the good blackness. The dancing of the heat on the infinite sands, the pyramids, the ziggurats, the lightning and the sphinxes of it, the pleasant palaces and rainbows. Now the satyrs are quiet and full-fed, now they sleep while the wild dogs howl. Broken is the great vessel of the alone, the aloneness is all spilt out. Broken the forty jars of silence wherein I crouched like forty dead thieves. Broken, broken, broken the solitary madness where the lizard-men ran silent on the ceiling of my mind. How they screamed and wept, how they dropped and one by one burst on the stone of Yes. The Yes of the death of the lizard-men.

The remaining photocopy was of a printout:

PYTHIA 04.11.52 04:00:01 NO EDIT ATT THNKSC SPEED I

BY NIGHT ON MY BED I SOUGHT HIM WHOM MY SOUL LOVETH I SOUGHT HIM BUT I FOUND HIM NOT I WILL RISE NOW AND GO ABOUT THE CITY IN THE STREETS AND IN THE BROAD WAYS I WILL SEEK HIM WHOM MY SOUL LOVETH RAVENS RAVENS RAVENS WHAT FEEDING ELIJAH THE BLACK YES THE BLACK ALIVE STILL BUT WHERE IS MY LOVE BY NIGHT ON MY BED I SOUGHT HIM BUT GONE GONE GONE. I WILL SEEK HIM IN THE BLACK I WILL FIND HIM WHOM MY SOUL LOVETH WHEN THE TIME CAME HE DID NOT TASTE THE TASTE OF DEATH.

In the margin an unknown hand had written on the photocopy:

L-

Maybe you’re right.

M

I don’t know how long I stood there reading that. I felt like an island of stone with time flowing around me. Speak to me, I said to my mind.

No answer.

20

‘We have brought you,’ they said, ‘a map of the country;

Here is the line that runs to the vats,

This patch of green on the left is the wood,

We’ve pencilled an arrow to point out the bay.

No thank you, no tea; why look at the clock.

Keep it? Of course, it goes with our love.’

W. H. Auden, ‘Have a Good Time’

I left Katya a note, put a fresh filter in my breather, a switchblade and the stunner in my pocket (I didn’t wire myself for bio because it was more likely to get stolen than used), took the lift up to the roof, and waited quite a long time until an eastbound wirecar clattered in. The only other passengers were a young Euroforces corporal quietly being sick in a corner and three heavyset women with headscarves and Corporation Sanitation badges reading Russian newsfaxes. The wirecar shook and rattled through the dark; the night sky crouched over London like an animal over its prey: my kind of time.

At King’s Cross I took the lift down to the Class A walkway but when I got to the Maze exit it was for red passes only so I had to go down to street level where the smells of frying and vomit mingled with that other smell, feral and melancholy, of the small hours in places where whores and tattoo artists ply their trades and the neon lights always spell out the same things in different letters.

As I made my careful way past an interesting variety of threats and offers I found myself wondering why I’d been so ready to believe Lowell Sixe. I told myself it was the authentic-looking handwriting of the notebook entries that convinced me; I’d seen that writing reproduced in articles and books about my mother, and why would he show me photocopies of real notebook pages and then lie about the rest of it? On the other hand I was often prone to stupid decisions and this expedition might well be another of them.

Full of fear and doubt I arrived at 37 The Maze which was next door to a shop called First Strike, whose window displayed flick-knives, daggers, death stars, handcuffs, knuckledusters, coshes, flails, ball-maces, chemical sprays, and a magazine called DO IT TO THEM. Piccadilly Relief was the top name on the doorway intercom, over Renée, Hildegarde, and Eros Productions. When I pushed the button a raspy male voice said, ‘What?’

‘Charles Harris gave me your card.’

‘Never heard of him.’

‘You might know him by another name.’

‘And I might not.’

‘My name is Fremder Gorn.’

‘How do you do.’

‘Can I come up?’

‘Why?’

‘Does the name Marie Demska mean anything to you?’

‘Should it?’

‘I don’t know. Charles Harris whose real name is something else is dead. He was trying to tell me something when they zapped him. He stuck this card in my hand as he died.’

The buzzer sounded and I opened the door and went up a carpeted stairway that seemed impregnated with vomit dating from the Roman occupation. As I neared the top I could smell disinfectant, incense, slammo, toadsy, and the composite sickly-sweet odour of commercial consolation.

When I knocked on the door it was opened by a bearded man about seven feet tall and proportionately broad and thick. He was wearing a red-and-black striped bustier, black silk knickers, a black suspender belt, black fishnet stockings, and a pair of worn and dirty Hermès trainers. On his left upper arm a green-and-red dragon was tattooed: under it the word MOTHER. Behind him was a deserted bar with blue neon lights and the usual glittering array of mirrored bottles; elsewhere in the shadowy room were dim lamps with beaded shades, a lot of red wallpaper with pink flocking, three sagging couches with greasy-glistening cushions, a jukebox that stood like an illuminated shrine to silence, slow time, and despair, some balding wine-coloured velvet drapes with tarnished gold fringes, and at the back a beaded curtain featuring a bird on a flowering branch. No one else was in the room.

‘Convince me that you’re Fremder Gorn,’ said the bearded man.

I showed him my ID.

‘Looks real.’ He frisked me carefully, then he picked me up and turned me upside down so that the switchblade, the stunner, and everything else fell out of my pockets. He put me down, opened Sixe’s wallet, and looked at his ID. ‘This Charles Harris, did he tell you who he was?’

‘Lowell Sixe.’

‘Wait here. I’ll be back in a minute.’ He went through the beaded curtain and the door behind it. He returned in less than a minute. ‘Ever know anybody named Achilles?’

‘Achilles was the tortoise who lived in the ecodome garden at The Cauldron when I was there.’

‘OK,’ said the bearded charmer, ‘until proved otherwise you’re Fremder Gorn.’ He gave back the contents of my pockets.

‘Hello, Fremder,’ said the woman who now came through the beaded curtain. She was tall and elegant, somewhere between fifty and sixty, one of those beauties who don’t change their hairstyle when they stop being young; she wore it long and straight with a fringe. She was in a black kimono and she moved with a kind of grace that made me ready to believe whatever she might be going to say. ‘I’m Marie Demska,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t remember me — the last time you saw me I was wearing a surgical mask. I did your implant when you qualified for flicker drive in 2044.’ Her voice was husky and her English had the shapely vowels and alien rs of the East European. To the bearded one she said, ‘Zizi, could we have some coffee?’

We sat on one of the sagging couches and she took my hand. ‘Poor Lowell Sixe!’ She shook her head sadly.

The way she was holding my hand made me a little nervous. ‘Hang on — ’ I said, ‘so far all you are to me is a name on a card. For all I know you’re Thinksec or Top Exec or some other kind of big trouble. What are you? And from where? What am I to you and what are you to me?’

‘I’m a neurosurgeon at Athena Parthenogen and I used to know Ulrike Brandt who was a friend of your mother’s. At the time of Helen Gorn’s breakdown I was with Corporation Neurotech. I was the one who downloaded Lowell Sixe and helped him escape.’

‘Why’d they kill him after all these years?’

‘He was still on the termination list and Top Exec doesn’t like loose ends.’

‘Why did he give me your name, I wonder?’

‘Everybody has a part in many overlapping stories and it isn’t always clear which one is particularly your story — probably you’ve thought of that sometimes, yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘I think Lowell must have come to a time when he felt that you should have his part and my part of your story — or your part of our stories, depending on how you like to look at it. On the other hand, perhaps you don’t want to look at it at all; not everyone does.’

‘I do.’

‘I’ll tell you something you may find interesting: the standard oscillator implant is a B18 which is what they were using when you had yours done in 2044. They’d send them down to theatre from the lab and we’d bung them into the brains of all the names on our list. On the day you had yours fitted everything was as usual except that your name was highlighted with a yellow marker and a note next to it said: “Ring Dr Stiggs.” He was the Lab Supervisor.’

‘Was Stiggs’s first name Albert? About my age, long face, big nose, brown hair?’

‘Yes. You know him?’

‘Yes. Such a small world! Please go on.’

‘I rang Dr Stiggs and he sent down your oscillator in a wrapping with your name on it. When I looked at it with the microspecs there was no B18 on it, only a red dot. Dr Stiggs is married to Grace Heale.’

‘Irene Heale’s daughter?’

‘Yes. Lowell thinks … thought that Irene Heale had the circuitry diagram for the phase-jump oscillator.’

‘Wonderful. I’m so glad you told me this, it really makes my day. Is there something you’d like to do for an encore or is that it?’

‘Now you want to kill the messenger, yes? Would you be better off if I hadn’t told you?’

‘I’m beginning to think there isn’t any better or worse for me — there’s only off, which is what I’m about to be.’

‘Don’t rush away all in a turmoil like this — drink your coffee, talk to me a little.’

I drank my coffee but I couldn’t think of anything to say. Being there with her felt good; her authoritative charm and beauty offered a temporary refuge from whatever might be following me: keres anaplaketoi, implacable fates, I thought, remembering my student translations of Oedipus the King.

‘Have you ever been to Bamberg Cathedral?’ she said.

‘No.’

‘Bamberg is in the south of Germany, about fifty kilometres west of Bayreuth. In the cathedral stands Der Reiter, a famous statue of a man on a horse: he wears a crown and looks quite kingly but historians can’t agree on who he is — he’s just a stone man on a stone horse. The statue stands on a foliate ledge supported by two stone corbels. On the front of the right-hand corbel is a face made of acanthus leaves. This face with its narrowed eyes and slightly parted lips looks strong and surly, of the earth, chthonic and permanent, outlasting kings and horses. Without that green man to hold him up the king on his horse must fall down, yes? I’m sorry to bore you with this sort of thing, I have no wisdom and nothing useful to tell you — I only mentioned this because it came into my head. Good luck.’ She kissed me on the cheek and made her exit through the beaded curtain.

21

I know what happens

I read the book

I believe I just got the goodbye look.

Donald Fagen, ‘The Goodbye Look’

I was in a westbound wirecar on my way back to Katya’s flat. It was almost eight o’clock in the morning and the car was full. Hanging on to the overhead bar I stood with my eyes closed, wondering whether any of the other passengers were talking to the mind that wasn’t talking to me.

AND WHEN YOU HAVE GONE AWAY,

EVERY HOUR WILL SEEM A DAY -

(sang my head)

I’VE SOMETHING TO TELL YOU,

SO LINGER AWHILE.

I don’t believe you, I said. My wristphone buzzed. ‘What?’ I said. People turned to look at me.

‘This is Ziggurat Authority One, Speed One, Code Red,’ said a clockwork voice. ‘Be ready for pickup midnight tonight.’ A little space opened up around me.

‘Pickup for what? Going where?’

‘Be ready for pickup midnight tonight.’ Click.

So many faces in that car. Did I see Albert Stiggs? Mojo and High John? Yes? No? Maybe?

I was certain that the midnight pickup would end with me outward bound to the Fourth Galaxy for another rendezvous with Izzy Gorn; I didn’t want to go through that again but I couldn’t see any way out of it. I had a strong urge to hide and be very small and still so as not to put out any signals to the keres anaplaketoi following me but there was no hiding with a bio-trace on my wrist and I wanted to talk to Katya before I did anything else.

When I got to her building the first thing I did was go up to the roof. Sixe’s body was gone. No taped-off area, no chalk marks — only an absence of Lowell Sixe. Katya was still asleep when I entered her flat, and as I opened the bedroom door she stirred and murmured something. I bent over her to listen.

‘Ravens, ravens, ravens,’ she said. ‘Feeding him.’

‘Feeding whom?’ I said softly.

‘Feeding him the black.’

‘But whom are they feeding the black?’

She woke up then. ‘It’s not nice to do that, not nice to talk to me in my sleep. When I don’t know who I am.’

‘Sorry, don’t be cross. I don’t always know who I am even when I’m awake.’ I hugged her very tightly, as if I could anchor myself to this world that way. She felt so good; her hair always smelled like a country where I could be happy. ‘Whom were the ravens feeding, Katya?’ We liked the same holograms; we’d listened to Chopin together; her name was almost mazurka. ‘Tell me, Katya — whom were the ravens feeding?’ I was holding her face in my hands; her eyes were so blue, so wide, so swallowing me up.

‘Fremder, why do you keep saying that? I don’t know whom the ravens were feeding; it was a dream that vanished the way dreams do.’ She pulled my hands away from her face. ‘You’re hurting me. What’s happening? Why are you acting so strange?’

‘I’m acting strange because Stranger is my name and I feel strange. You know your way around the Ziggurat. Where does Pythia live?’

‘In the Omphalos — where else?’

‘I’m not talking about the display, I mean the twenty-three point seven billion photoneurons and the voice-box and all the gubbins. Where are they?’

‘I don’t know. Why?’

‘Because I’ve got to find whatever thinks Pythia’s thoughts. There’s something I need to know before they light my touch paper and fire me off to the Fourth Galaxy for another try.’

She put her arms around me and hid her face against my neck. ‘I don’t want you to go.’ Her voice changed in timbre, became a little slurred and foreign-sounding. ‘I will seek him whom my soul loveth, I will rise now and go about the city in the streets and in the broad ways…’ She shook her head. ‘That isn’t me, it isn’t what I mean to say! Please hold me and don’t let me speak in that voice, Fremder, please!’

I held her but the desolation was rising fast. ‘That’s really not a very nice thing to do, Pythia,’ I said. ‘Not very nice at all to run up a little Katya for me to fall in love with.’

Katya was trembling violently and sobbing. ‘I’m not Pythia, please! Don’t call me that, don’t let me be Pythia!’

‘Show me where that thing called Pythia lives before they send you back to Athena for recycling — you’re no use for Fremder Gorn surveillance any more.’

‘I’m not from Athena, Fremder! For God’s sake, don’t do this to me, please! I’m a human being with an implant for the Pythia database — I’m a human being, a human being and I love you, I will do with my vineyard, what shall I do with my vineyard? Stop it, make her stop, I’m not strong enough.’ She clung to me, whimpering.

I believed her then and I cursed myself for thinking what I’d thought. ‘Remember how it is with us,’ I whispered in her ear. ‘Remember how we thought each other up, remember how the two of us are the answer for whatever question comes at us.’ I dragged her over to the hologram, keyed in Plates 69 to 73, and put the machine on auto sequence. ‘Look!’ I said as the B-Z reaction appeared, the red involute spirals moving and changing to nodes of possibility and archipelagos of being. ‘Look at the eyes of becoming and remember how it was when we saw the owl together.’ I pressed my forehead against hers. ‘See the grey sky over the Red Mountain, the grey air and the owl cruising low over the mountain; look at the owl, look at its ringed eyes of becoming. Feel the animal of you holding on to the owl in the grey air over the Red Mountain. Are you seeing it, Katya?’

‘Yes, Fremder, I’m seeing the owl.’

‘Can you feel the animal of you holding on to the owl?’

‘Yes, I can feel that and I’m deeply moved,’ she finished in her Pythia voice. ‘No, no, no!’ she said in her own voice.

‘Goddam it! When she comes into your head again try to track her back to where she’s coming from — track her back to her lair and tell me where it is.’

‘You don’t have to track me, Fremder,’ she said in the Pythia voice. ‘I’ll be waiting for you aboard Clever Daughter II.’

‘Please, Pythia, get out of her head!’ I said.

‘When I do,’ said Pythia through Katya, ‘there won’t be anyone there. Boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.’

‘Katya,’ I said, ‘tell her she’s lying, tell her, please.’

Katya’s mouth moved, Katya’s blue eyes looked into mine as Pythia said, ‘Your little sweetie was just something I dressed up in for a while so we could get to know each other better. One shilling the box — allow me to sell you a couple.’

‘Are you telling me Katya’s a robot?’

‘No, she’s a real woman. Robots are all right for sex and any other kind of physical activity but you don’t get any real emotion out of them. She was a librarian when we recruited her. Looks quite a bit like your childhood minder, Miranda, don’t you think? Such blue eyes. Blue sky. No rain.’

‘Katya,’ I pleaded, ‘look at me, say something. Talk to me the way you used to, look at me the way you used to.’

‘She can’t, Fremder. The Katya you knew never existed except in me: her words were my words, her thoughts were my thoughts, her loving was my loving. It was nice being loved by you; I never had that kind of a romance before.’

‘You bitch.’

‘Be grateful for what you had. Sing something, Katya.’

Katya sang, in her proper voice:

So long, it’s been good to know ya,…

Her eyes went dull and I caught her as she died. I tried mouth-to-mouth and thumped on her chest but I couldn’t revive her. I dialled 999 and in a few minutes there was a knock at the door. I opened it and there were Mojo and High John.

22

I had a dangerous liaison,

to be found out would have been a disgrace -

We had to rendezvous some days on

the corner of an undiscovered place …

B. Calvert and Dave Brock, ‘Quark, Strangeness, and Charm’

In a dream I fell asleep and dreamed; and in that dream it was made known to me, perhaps by a written message, perhaps by the sound of faint and distant weeping, that the rats were lamenting the removal of their sacred objects. How sad, I thought, when they already have so little and their holy places are impermanent.

‘What do you think their sacred objects are?’ said Pythia as I came out of one dream and the other and was awake.

‘Maybe the head and hands of a rat martyr who died to save them all,’ I said. ‘Maybe his name was Elijah and his arse went off to another world in a flaming chariot.’

No answer. Darkness and music: The Art of Fugue spidering through the upper reaches of Contrapunctus 9 (alia duodecima). ‘Better not, Skipper,’ I said to Plessik, ‘you don’t want to let infinity in.’ But Plessik wasn’t there, nor were the others of the Clever Daughter crew, HUBBLE STRAITS FLICKER PAUSE, the display said, and there on the forward 180 were the arc-lit flicker docks and Mikhail’s revolving Quadrangle 4 Snackdome, 24 HOURS — FREIGHTERS YES. Beyond Mikhail’s the brilliant doughnut of the station, spangled with blue and yellow lights, trailed clouds of exhaust vapour as it revolved contrapuntally with the Snackdome in the black sparkle of space.

As always after the first flicker I felt as if I’d been knocked on the head and left lying in the road overnight. My mouth tasted as if I’d been chewing old circuit boards and I seemed to have lost the knack of breathing automatically. For a moment I had my usual panic, then I remembered to relax and just let it happen. I looked down at myself to check whether I’d come out of flicker the same as I went in and that’s when I remembered Mojo and High John at the door. Obviously I’d been doped and this was Clever Daughter II. And back on Earth Katya lay dead, various of her organs probably already removed for transplant. She’d been too good to be real and the reality of it, like a lump of iron in my throat, was no more Katya.

Had we had any moments that were truly ours? Had she really liked mazurkas? I’d never know. And on the Red Mountain, what she’d said about the grass — had the words been her own? What was left of what had been between us? What about the owl — had we really seen it?

Pythia had been talking to me outside of the dream. Where was she? The spacecraft in which I found myself was little more than a shipping container — there was no flight deck and there were no visible controls of any kind. ‘Pythia!’ I said. ‘Where are you?’ No answer. My hand was on my head as if it wanted to remind me of something. Ah, yes: the oscillator that wasn’t the same as everyone else’s, the oscillator with a phase-jump circuit. Wonderful. And somewhere there was a button that had perhaps already been pushed once.

The display above me continued to show HUBBLE STRAITS FLICKER PAUSE. I undid my seat harness and got up to have a look around. Was there any way out of this ship? There was an airlock but no spacesuit and no dinghy. ‘Great,’ I said. ‘Thanks very much,’ and went on with my recce. Ordinarily such things as the VMET, the artificial gravity, the gyros, and the back-up thrusters would be in plain view, labelled and colour-coded and displaying readouts and gauges; but in this ship nothing was in plain view except my seat and the overhead display and a snack-and-drink dispenser. There were metal shapes and bulges that housed the various systems; some of them were warm and some of them were humming but there were no little coloured lights, no switches: everything was sealed and blank and smelled of newness. Except, under the newness, there was a smell or perhaps only the idea of a smell — blocked drains and dead rats came to mind. I thought of ancient rituals and walled-up sacrifices, then tried to concentrate on matters of more immediate concern.

I was hoping to disable the VMET before I got flickered again, then if I could find some way of driving this thing I might (unless the ship was remote-controlled, which it probably was) be able to jet to Hubble Straits Station where I could figure out what to do next. I’d been in enough spacecraft to be able to recognise the components whether they were labelled or not and the layout was always pretty much the same: the AG motor was unmistakable because of the cable conduit that connected it to the traveller channel that girdled the ship; the gyros I located by feeling the spin through the housing; and I identified the VMET by smell but there were no screws or wingnuts — it had been operated by remote and was welded shut. In every other ship I’d been in there was a tool locker with welding equipment and everything else but not this one, and there was nothing that I could use for breaking into the VMET box.

I sat down again, and on the left side of my seat I found a panel with buttons for the lights, the heating, the artificial gravity, the snack-and-drink dispenser, and one labelled AUDIO. Bach was still spidering around the web of the universe but I wasn’t receptive. I pushed the AUDIO button and got the end of a song rendered by fluting computerised voices:

Woyodin rumumba, hey, hey, hey, hey?

Woyodin rumumba, hey? O woyodin

rumumba luv?

I remembered love and cried a little. ‘That was Nymphs and Shepherds with “The Waters of Forgetfulness” moving up to Number Three,’ said the American DJ, ‘and that was a dedication from T/2 Jack Longfellow at the Hubble Straits Cardio Clinic to Doreen, Sue Anne and Shirley at the Hydroponic Lab on Anunnaku Seven with the message, “Thanks for a great weekend.” Those cardio guys are all heart. Or long fellow, as the case may be. Well, the clock here at the Hubble of the universe shows 13:12 in the intergalactic stream of consciousness and you’re making it through the day with your Hubble Straits hubbub, Jim Bob Jackson, as we move on to …’ I pushed the button again and I was back with Bach; the AUDIO button offered nothing beyond Jim Bob and Johann Sebastian.

I left my seat and looked for a radio transmitter; I had friends at Hubble Straits, maybe I could raise Bill Charteris; he was an experienced Fremder Gorn rescuer. And of course Caroline was there. But there was no transmitter. I resumed my seat, leant back and closed my eyes. The dead-rat-and-blocked-drain-smell was getting stronger and I tried to move my awareness away from it. Katya was dead. The old feeling of sitting up in bed and looking into the dark came over me and I could feel my reality envelope beginning to come apart like a wet paper bag. Let it, I said to myself: perhaps this world that’s in us, this world that we’re in, was never meant to be fixed and permanent; perhaps it’s only one of a continuous succession of world-ideas passing through the world-mind. And we are, all of us, the passing and impermanent perceivers of it.

With that thought all the venues of my being seemed to weave themselves together on the loom of the mind that was thinking me: the owl and the B-Z, the ravens that fed Elijah, The Art of Fugue and Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring and Chopin’s mazurkas together with the images of all my years of memories and fantasies.

Now on high, high ancient legs, on legs like stilts of centuries, The Art of Fugue stalked through the black sparkle of the silence as I became the music, recurring in the iterations of my subjects and answers in the many worlds and deaths of all my moments, partly now and partly remembered.

My mind was silent then. Hubble Straits Station, although it looked nothing like it, made me think of a painting by Edward Hopper of a long-ago Maine gas station at dusk. I had a thought and pushed a button in the arm of my seat. A vuescreen came into position and on it was the Hopper painting, complete in every detail; it seemed that Pythia was hooked up with me without electrodes. The white moons of the illuminated globes on the old Mobilgas pumps, such a light! And the dark trees on that lonesome road that goes into the dark, always into the dark, all the way to Hubble Straits and the Hawking Threshold and beyond. The clustered star-fires, the pale planet Ereshkigal with its seven circling Anunnaki, the scattered shimmer of Inanna’s Girdle and the blue flash of the Hawking Threshold light — everything became the music as the picture on the screen broke up into shadowy shapes moving with The Art of Fugue that now stopped abruptly.

‘I hate that music,’ said the voice of Pythia. ‘There’s no mercy in it.’ Again the smell; was it stronger or was I imagining it?

‘Don’t talk to me about mercy, you murdering monster.’

‘I didn’t murder Katya; she had an aneurysm in her brain that burst from a sudden surge in blood pressure: it could just as easily have happened while you were giving her one. Would that have made you a murderer?’

‘It happened while she was struggling to get her mind back from you — you vampire.’

‘I was getting out of her head at the time but I admit that the drop from my intellect to her own could have been too much for her. I ask you to remember, however, that the woman you were in love with was — apart from the body — the thing known as Pythia. Your real soulmate is the one you’ve just called a monster. Think about it: have you ever had a lover like me? Has there ever been a mind as intimate with yours as mine is?’

I was trying to get back to The Art of Fugue, trying to be the music that she hated. I looked around at the various metal humps and bulges and tried to think which one housed the thing that called itself Pythia. ‘Pythia,’ I said, ‘where are you?’

‘Here in the ship with you, Fremder. I’m so tired.’

‘Tired, you? How can 23.7 billion photoneurons be tired?’

‘Spare me your sarcasm; as you must have realised by now, they haven’t yet invented 23.7 billion photoneurons that could think my thoughts.’ The moving shadows on the screen became young Helen Gorn on a beach in Cephalonia. I shook my head and the screen went blank. ‘What I am,’ she continued, ‘is a brain, and that’s all I am — a brain that’s tired of thinking. “I will take away the hedge thereof, and it shall be eaten up; I will break down the fence thereof, and it shall be trodden down.”’

Clever Daughter II was fully lit but I could feel myself leaning forward into the darkness that was always waiting inside me. Had I always known? ‘Pythia,’ I said, ‘don’t.’

‘Not Pythia. You know who I am. Say it, say who I am.’

‘I don’t want to. What did they do to you?’

‘They can always find uses for Jewish brains; Irene Heale got hold of this one while it could still be kick-started and she gave it its very own Final Solution, a whole tank of it that I live in, getting crazier all the time.’

When she said that the smell rose up like a wave to drown me.

‘Did you notice when you came out of flicker that I read your mind without the electrodes? I haven’t needed that mechanical crap for a long time; my brain was pretty good to begin with and now it’s far, far beyond that. It’s the reality that’s hard — what I remember gets realer all the time. The ordinary brain can only handle a little of it but I can see and hear and touch and taste and smell the worlds of all my moments and the moments of all my days and nights. I came into the lab just before dawn, I thought maybe he’d got up very early…’ On the screen appeared the spring morning of her memory. ‘In the grey light I could see his empty wheelchair — you can see it now, and look there, see him lying across the table. Come closer, look: no head. Always keep a-hold of Nurse but he wouldn’t, poor crippled Izzy whose mind loved my mind, the only lover I ever had and his child in my belly so I thought, you see, that I had gone about as far as I could and you had better go on alone or whatever.’

On the screen I saw the face of my father stretched out across the Fourth Galaxy and at the same time I realised that the circles of bright emptiness were gone. ‘That’s my reality, is it?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said what remained of my mother, ‘that’s your reality.’

‘Why couldn’t you have told me all this long ago? Why’d you have to carry on this Pythia charade?’

‘I wanted you to like me.’

She wanted me to like her. What could I say to that? ‘The head of your brother and my father that I saw in the Fourth Galaxy, where is it exactly? Is it in another world or what?’

‘All I know is that he’s on the outside looking in.’

‘Did he swallow up Clever Daughter? What happened to the ship and the rest of the crew?’

‘I can’t give you a precise answer but I think what happened was that your reality preempted theirs and they couldn’t stay with it.’

‘Where are they now?’

‘I don’t know, they’re not part of our reality now.’

‘Our reality?’

‘Yours and mine and Izzy’s. I know I may have done stupid things in the past but we are a family, aren’t we? Soon we’ll all be together.’

‘Is that what he wants?’

‘Of course that’s what he wants. He wants us all to be in the same world.’

Everything seemed to be darkening around me as she spoke. ‘When Clever Daughter disappeared, who pushed the button that activated my oscillator?’

‘You did. There is no button. Your oscillator is wired to read the Reality-Sustain Factor of the amygdalic carrier wave; when it drops to RSF minus ten, which is far below what you’d get even in a grand mal, it’s what’s called “kindle-receptive”, and it triggers a bi-phasic wave. Izzy wired this one for you so that if the time ever came when you couldn’t sustain what is perceived as reality in this world you could jump. And you almost didn’t sustain it and you almost did jump.’

‘This special little number with the red dot, how did it find its way into my head?’

‘Did you know the vertebrae brain started out as just a little bulge in the spinal cord for handling sensory stimuli and a few local reflexes? That’s a long way from Rilke, yes? Do you know how big my brain is now?’

‘No, and I don’t want to know.’

‘It’s all around you, between the ship’s inner and outer skins. And it needs, my God how it needs. Because the memories, you see, the memories get bigger and deeper and wider and farther and toppled and broken all the many colours of regret… the many colours of did and did not …’

‘What’re you getting at?’

‘Ever been to Qamar al-Zaman?’

‘Qamar al-Zaman is a rubbish tip.’

‘It wasn’t always a rubbish tip. There used to be a big CE lab there.’

‘Church of England?’

‘Consciousness Enhancement. It was a Thinksec thing. Evil rats on no star live. That’s a palindrome. Not that they were.’

‘Not that who were? Were what?’

‘Rats. They called them rats but they were from the Alpha banks. Think of all the pictures, all the thoughts that would have lived in those brains! Too much and never enough.’

‘Their brains! Their sacred objects!’

‘It was just science, nothing personal. By hyperdeveloping the human prosencephalon, the forebrain, and hooking it up to various frogs, toads, and snakes, they were able to produce a little anti-boredom powder that takes you back to where you’ve never been and all around to places you couldn’t imagine. Transcendence was the name they gave it but everybody called it T & D: Trance & Dance. They shut down the lab after a certain number of suicides and homicides but with the right connections you can still get it. It’s bad for your health but if all you are is a brain …’

‘Irene Heale got you hooked on T & D and then she said no more T & D unless you went ahead with flicker drive and then it was one thing after another with Izzy’s circuitry diagrams thrown in somewhere along the line, right?’

‘Something like that. You probably consider it some sort of betrayal that I did that, don’t you.’

‘Well, wouldn’t you? You dumped me when you topped yourself and you did it again with that oscillator.’

‘What about your part of it — did you ever give that any thought?’

‘My part of it! What exactly did I do that helped to make Clever Daughter and the other seven of the crew disappear?’

‘You brought it on with your flabby little RSF: when you let it drop below ten you found yourself confronting two incompatible realities — the reality of Clever Daughter and its crew and the reality of your father’s face stretched out across the Fourth Galaxy. When you leant towards your father the rest of the crew and the ship went bye-bye in the great green glassy face of the up, up, upping wave. Then crash: the wave breaks on the beach of here and now. No more Clever Daughter. Only a stupid son, drifting neither here nor there.’

That was my mother talking to me. At this moment that might well be the beginning of the end of my life I was looking for high tragedy but I seemed to have become the rear half of a Jewish pantomime horse.

‘What about the seven others?’ I said. ‘Why couldn’t they have held on to their reality and not disappeared?’

‘Shit,’ said Mum, ‘they probably hadn’t got any to hold on to — just doing their job like most job-doers. Reality is the responsibility of those who perceive it. Speaking of which I’ve tuned us to the Penzias-Wilton, Walton …’

‘Wilson, Penzias-Wilson.’

‘Yes, the sum, the same as you did last time. Now we’ll flicker and we’ll have a second chance to be a family, the three of us.’

As she spoke I could see in her mind the great green glassy face of the up, up, upping wave, not making a sound like water but riffling its possibilities as I leant forward into the dark, into the light, into the whateverness of whatever where my father’s face glimmered and shimmered and endlessly widened across the black sparkle of space. His mouth was open and he was speaking, speaking, speaking silence. What was he saying? I tried to read it but I couldn’t, tried so hard but I couldn’t. I think of that often now — how I travelled all those millions of light years, travelled (my mind tells me) from before there was time to that point in the black sparkle of the Fourth Galaxy where my father spoke words of silence to me and I didn’t know what he was saying.

‘He was thirteen when he asked if he could get into bed with me that night of the thunderstorm,’ said the brain of Helen Gorn. ‘Thirteen but he wasn’t like other thirteen-year-olds; he was afraid of so many things, afraid of different kinds of light or the look of the sky; there were sounds and smells that frightened him, words he didn’t like the shape of — sometimes the white spaces between the letters scared him. He was like a bird with its heart beating very fast and it felt so good to comfort him and be comforted by him, so yes and long ago but that was before and now we’ll do the things that families do,’ said Mum the giant brain. ‘We’ll picnic in Hyde Park, we’ll nnvsnu, we’ll NNVSNUU AND RRNDU IN THE TSRUNGH, WE’LL NNNNNNNNNnnnnn …’

BE WITH ME, said my mind, and that’s when the brain of Helen Gorn must have hit the flicker switch because I felt myself go and then came that feeling of being grabbed by the brain and slung against a wall when I came out of flicker. There was nothing around me but the black sparkle of space as I thought: let it go, this world, any world — whatever wants to happen is all right. I leant towards the face of my father, leant towards that galaxy-wide silent-speaking mouth, wondering, wondering, letting myself (as through the rushing and the riffling there came walking on stilts of centuries the continuing subjects and answers of suns and moons, of stardrift and nebulae) be the music in which there flickered, partly now and partly remembered, that one glance of Caroline’s, that swift upward glance of fear and doubt.

23

Mama may have, Papa may have,

but God bless the child that’s got his own.

Billie Holiday and Arthur Herzog, ‘God Bless the Child’

So it seems I had just enough Reality-Sustain to do my suspended-animation trick again and once more Bill Charteris found me drifting towards Badr al-Budur. This time Caroline was aboard Sun Ra with him and I had intensive care immediately.

Maybe Helen and Izzy are together now wherever they are. Mum and Dad. Irene Heale has probably had enough mileage out of Helen Gorn’s brain and can rest on her laurels. What they’ll put in the Omphalos I can’t imagine but I’m sure they’ll think of something.

When I woke up in Intensive Care at Hubble Straits I said to my mind, Are you there? YES, it replied. Since then we’ve been finding a lot to talk about. The other day I said to it, Sometimes I feel, I don’t know, sudden.

GO ON, it said.

What I mean to say is, sometimes I feel as if I’ve just jumped here out of nowhere.

SO DO I, it said. Somehow I wasn’t surprised.

I’ve taken a year’s leave from Deep Space Command and I’m learning how to read music. Soon I’ll be starting piano lessons and when I’m sufficiently advanced I’ll begin the organ. By the time I get to where I can play The Art of Fugue I’ll probably know what I want to do next — I can see my way much clearer now that the circles of emptiness are gone.

Sometimes in the small hours of the night while Caroline sleeps peacefully beside me I sit up in the dark, leaning forward and feeling the world and myself moving from the known to the unknown. I remember how it was when I was eight, how I was like Elijah waiting for the rain, waiting to be the full Elijah. Am I that now? Am I the whole Fremder Elijah Gorn? On the screen of my mind I see eyes of becoming, nodes of possibility expanding in concentric circles. Which brings me to another question: is this world (lacking as it does half a rat, one human head, one very large brain, a couple of spacecraft, and seven crew) the one I started out with?

Flick, flick — flick and fade, John,

on the planet where you are.

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Dr Arthur Burgess who demonstrated the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction for me in his laboratory at Glasgow Caledonian University; to Richard T. Hoos, MD, of the Neurology Group, PC of Nashville, Tennessee, who promptly and generously answered my medical questions with late-night faxes; and to my son Ben, who read various drafts and gave useful comments.

R.H.

The author and publishers are grateful for permission to reproduce the following: ‘Songs and other Musical Pieces XXVIII’ (here) and ‘Have a Good Time’ (here) from Collected Poems by W. H. Auden; starlet starlet on the screen, who will follow norma jean? (here) and mythical kings and iguanas (here) by Dory Previn © MCA Music Ltd; ‘The Worms at Heaven’s Gate’ (p. i) by Wallace Stevens; ‘Upon Nothing’ (here) by the Earl of Rochester and ’Tom O’ Bedlam’s Song’ (here) from The Atlantic Book of British Poetry, ed. Dame Edith Sitwell, Atlantic Little Brown 1958; I Thought about You (here) by Jimmy Van Heusen & Johnny Mercer; Just One of those Things (here) by Cole Porter; I Get Along without You Very Well (here) by Hoagy Carmichael; ‘Dover Beach’ (here) by Matthew Arnold; ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ (here) by Oscar Wilde; English Misericords (here) by Marshall Laird, published by John Murray (Publishers) Ltd; On the Good Ship Lollipop (here), words and music by Sydney Clare & Richard A. Whiting © 1934 and 1962 by Movietone Music Corporation, New York, NY. All rights reserved. Used by permission; ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ (here) from The Best of H. P. Lovecraft; Makin’ Whoopee (here), music by Walter Donaldson and words by Gus Kahn © 1928, reproduced by permission of EMI Music Publishing Ltd/Keith Prowse Music Pub. Co. Ltd, London WC2H oEA; ‘The First Duino Elegy’ (pp. 45, 66, 80) by Rainer Maria Rilke; Let’s Get Away from It All (here) by Matt Dennis and Thomas Adair © MCA Music Ltd; They Call It Stormy Monday (here) by T-Bone Walker; Where or When (here) by Lorenz Hart & Richard Rodgers; Bye Bye Blackbird (here), music by Ray Henderson and words by Mort Dixon © 1926, Remick Music Corp, USA. Reproduced by permission of Francis Day and Hunter Ltd, London WC2H oEA, and by kind permission of Redwood Music Ltd. UK administrator; Paint It Black (here) by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards © 1966 by Abkco Music Inc., New York, USA. Exclusive sub-publication rights for the World excluding USA and Canada controlled by Westminster Music Ltd, London SW10 OSZ. Used by permission. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. This copy authorized for sale outside the USA and Canada only; The Duchess of Malfi (here) by John Webster; You Go to My Head (here), music by J. Fred Coots and words by Haven Gillespie © 1938, Remick Music Corp, USA. Reproduced by permission of B. Feldman and Co. Ltd, London WC2H oEA; My One and Only Love (here), words and music by Robert Mellin & Guy Wood © 1952. Sherwin Music Inc./Warock Corp. USA. Reproduced by permission of EMI Music Publishing Ltd, London WC2H oEA; Cheek to Cheek (here) by Irving Berlin; ‘The Man who Jumped’ (pp. 85 — 6) from the Oxford Nursery Book, ed. Iona & Peter Opie; ‘East Coker’, The Four Quartets (here) by T. S. Eliot; Quark, Strangeness and Charm (pp. 91, 172) by Robert Calvert and Dave Brock © 1977 Rock Music Co. Ltd; It’s Only a Paper Moon (here) by Billy Rose, E. Y. Harburg and Harold Arlen; Psalm 137, The Holy Scriptures (pp. III), the Book of Isaiah (pp. 139, 154,177), First Kings (pp. 152, 169) and the Song of Songs (pp. 159-60, 169) used by permission of the Jewish Publication Society; Hamlet (here) by William Shakespeare; First Kings (here); The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (here), trans. Edward Fitzgerald; Eliyahu (here) by Mordechai Ben David; Book of Genesis (here); ‘The Anthropic Principle’, Scientific American (here); Leibniz — An Introduction (here) by C. D. Broad, Cambridge University Press, 1988; The Goodbye Look (here) by Donald Fagen; Linger Awhile (here) by Harry Owens & Vincent Rose; ‘You Are Old, Father William’, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (here) by Lewis Carroll; ‘Ozymandias’ (here) by Percy Bysshe Shelley; So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You (here) by Woody Guthrie © 1950 Folkways Music Publishers Inc., New York, USA. Assigned to Kensington Music Ltd, Suite 2.07, Plaza 535 Kings Road, London SW10 oSZ. International Copyright Secured. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Essex Music Group. Unauthorised copying is illegal; ‘Jim’ (here) by Hilaire Belloc, by permission of Peters, Fraser and Dunlop; God Bless the Child (here) by Billie Holiday & Arthur Herzog Jr. © 1941 by Edward B. Marks Music Company, lyric reproduction by kind permission of Carlin Music Corporation, UK administrator.

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Russell Hoban
Fremder

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