Fremder

by Russell Hoban

  ‘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?’

  ‘“Th
ere 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?’