Fremder

by Russell Hoban

  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 f
ortieth 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 w
aves. 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?’