Fremder

by Russell Hoban

  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.