Fremder

by Russell Hoban

  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 wh
en 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 se
lf-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.