Fremder

by Russell Hoban

  ‘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.