Fremder

by Russell Hoban

  ‘Goddam it! When she comes into your head again try to track her back to where she’s coming from – track her back to her lair and tell me where it is.’

  ‘You don’t have to track me, Fremder,’ she said in the Pythia voice. ‘I’ll be waiting for you aboard Clever Daughter II.’

  ‘Please, Pythia, get out of her head!’ I said.

  ‘When I do,’ said Pythia through Katya, ‘there won’t be anyone there. Boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.’

  ‘Katya,’ I said, ‘tell her she’s lying, tell her, please.’

  Katya’s mouth moved, Katya’s blue eyes looked into mine as Pythia said, ‘Your little sweetie was just something I dressed up in for a while so we could get to know each other better. One shilling the box – allow me to sell you a couple.’

  ‘Are you telling me Katya’s a robot?’

  ‘No, she’s a real woman. Robots are all right for sex and any other kind of physical activity but you don’t get any real emotion out of them. She was a librarian when we recruited her. Looks quite a bit like your childhood minder, Miranda, don’t you think? Such blue eyes. Blue sky. No rain.’

  ‘Katya,’ I pleaded, ‘look at me, say something. Talk to me the way you used to, look at me the way you used to.’

  ‘She can’t, Fremder. The Katya you knew never existed except in me: her words were my words, her thoughts were my thoughts, her loving was my loving. It was nice being loved by you; I never had that kind of a romance before.’

  ‘You bitch.’

  ‘Be grateful for what you had. Sing something, Katya.’

  Katya sang, in her proper voice:

  So long, it’s been good to know ya,…

  Her eyes went dull and I caught her as she died. I tried mouth-to-mouth and thumped on her chest but I couldn’t revive her. I dialled 999 and in a few minutes there was a knock at the door. I opened it and there were Mojo and High John.

  22

  I had a dangerous liaison,

  to be found out would have been a disgrace -

  We had to rendezvous some days on

  the corner of an undiscovered place …

  B. Calvert and Dave Brock, ‘Quark, Strangeness, and Charm’

  In a dream I fell asleep and dreamed; and in that dream it was made known to me, perhaps by a written message, perhaps by the sound of faint and distant weeping, that the rats were lamenting the removal of their sacred objects. How sad, I thought, when they already have so little and their holy places are impermanent.

  ‘What do you think their sacred objects are?’ said Pythia as I came out of one dream and the other and was awake.

  ‘Maybe the head and hands of a rat martyr who died to save them all,’ I said. ‘Maybe his name was Elijah and his arse went off to another world in a flaming chariot.’

  No answer. Darkness and music: The Art of Fugue spidering through the upper reaches of Contrapunctus 9 (alia duodecima). ‘Better not, Skipper,’ I said to Plessik, ‘you don’t want to let infinity in.’ But Plessik wasn’t there, nor were the others of the Clever Daughter crew, HUBBLE STRAITS FLICKER PAUSE, the display said, and there on the forward 180 were the arc-lit flicker docks and Mikhail’s revolving Quadrangle 4 Snackdome, 24 HOURS – FREIGHTERS YES. Beyond Mikhail’s the brilliant doughnut of the station, spangled with blue and yellow lights, trailed clouds of exhaust vapour as it revolved contrapuntally with the Snackdome in the black sparkle of space.

  As always after the first flicker I felt as if I’d been knocked on the head and left lying in the road overnight. My mouth tasted as if I’d been chewing old circuit boards and I seemed to have lost the knack of breathing automatically. For a moment I had my usual panic, then I remembered to relax and just let it happen. I looked down at myself to check whether I’d come out of flicker the same as I went in and that’s when I remembered Mojo and High John at the door. Obviously I’d been doped and this was Clever Daughter II. And back on Earth Katya lay dead, various of her organs probably already removed for transplant. She’d been too good to be real and the reality of it, like a lump of iron in my throat, was no more Katya.

  Had we had any moments that were truly ours? Had she really liked mazurkas? I’d never know. And on the Red Mountain, what she’d said about the grass – had the words been her own? What was left of what had been between us? What about the owl – had we really seen it?

  Pythia had been talking to me outside of the dream. Where was she? The spacecraft in which I found myself was little more than a shipping container – there was no flight deck and there were no visible controls of any kind. ‘Pythia!’ I said. ‘Where are you?’ No answer. My hand was on my head as if it wanted to remind me of something. Ah, yes: the oscillator that wasn’t the same as everyone else’s, the oscillator with a phase-jump circuit. Wonderful. And somewhere there was a button that had perhaps already been pushed once.

  The display above me continued to show HUBBLE STRAITS FLICKER PAUSE. I undid my seat harness and got up to have a look around. Was there any way out of this ship? There was an airlock but no spacesuit and no dinghy. ‘Great,’ I said. ‘Thanks very much,’ and went on with my recce. Ordinarily such things as the VMET, the artificial gravity, the gyros, and the back-up thrusters would be in plain view, labelled and colour-coded and displaying readouts and gauges; but in this ship nothing was in plain view except my seat and the overhead display and a snack-and-drink dispenser. There were metal shapes and bulges that housed the various systems; some of them were warm and some of them were humming but there were no little coloured lights, no switches: everything was sealed and blank and smelled of newness. Except, under the newness, there was a smell or perhaps only the idea of a smell – blocked drains and dead rats came to mind. I thought of ancient rituals and walled-up sacrifices, then tried to concentrate on matters of more immediate concern.

  I was hoping to disable the VMET before I got flickered again, then if I could find some way of driving this thing I might (unless the ship was remote-controlled, which it probably was) be able to jet to Hubble Straits Station where I could figure out what to do next. I’d been in enough spacecraft to be able to recognise the components whether they were labelled or not and the layout was always pretty much the same: the AG motor was unmistakable because of the cable conduit that connected it to the traveller channel that girdled the ship; the gyros I located by feeling the spin through the housing; and I identified the VMET by smell but there were no screws or wingnuts – it had been operated by remote and was welded shut. In every other ship I’d been in there was a tool locker with welding equipment and everything else but not this one, and there was nothing that I could use for breaking into the VMET box.

  I sat down again, and on the left side of my seat I found a panel with buttons for the lights, the heating, the artificial gravity, the snack-and-drink dispenser, and one labelled AUDIO. Bach was still spidering around the web of the universe but I wasn’t receptive. I pushed the AUDIO button and got the end of a song rendered by fluting computerised voices:

  Woyodin rumumba, hey, hey, hey, hey?

  Woyodin rumumba, hey? O woyodin

  rumumba luv?

  I remembered love and cried a little. ‘That was Nymphs and Shepherds with “The Waters of Forgetfulness” moving up to Number Three,’ said the American DJ, ‘and that was a dedication from T/2 Jack Longfellow at the Hubble Straits Cardio Clinic to Doreen, Sue Anne and Shirley at the Hydroponic Lab on Anunnaku Seven with the message, “Thanks for a great weekend.” Those cardio guys are all heart. Or long fellow, as the case may be. Well, the clock here at the Hubble of the universe shows 13:12 in the intergalactic stream of consciousness and you’re making it through the day with your Hubble Straits hubbub, Jim Bob Jackson, as we move on to …’ I pushed the button again and I was back with Bach; the AUDIO button offered nothing beyond Jim Bob and Johann Sebastian.

  I left my seat and looked for a radio transmitter; I had friends at Hubble Straits, maybe I could raise Bill Charteris; he was
an experienced Fremder Gorn rescuer. And of course Caroline was there. But there was no transmitter. I resumed my seat, leant back and closed my eyes. The dead-rat-and-blocked-drain-smell was getting stronger and I tried to move my awareness away from it. Katya was dead. The old feeling of sitting up in bed and looking into the dark came over me and I could feel my reality envelope beginning to come apart like a wet paper bag. Let it, I said to myself: perhaps this world that’s in us, this world that we’re in, was never meant to be fixed and permanent; perhaps it’s only one of a continuous succession of world-ideas passing through the world-mind. And we are, all of us, the passing and impermanent perceivers of it.

  With that thought all the venues of my being seemed to weave themselves together on the loom of the mind that was thinking me: the owl and the B-Z, the ravens that fed Elijah, The Art of Fugue and Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring and Chopin’s mazurkas together with the images of all my years of memories and fantasies.

  Now on high, high ancient legs, on legs like stilts of centuries, The Art of Fugue stalked through the black sparkle of the silence as I became the music, recurring in the iterations of my subjects and answers in the many worlds and deaths of all my moments, partly now and partly remembered.

  My mind was silent then. Hubble Straits Station, although it looked nothing like it, made me think of a painting by Edward Hopper of a long-ago Maine gas station at dusk. I had a thought and pushed a button in the arm of my seat. A vuescreen came into position and on it was the Hopper painting, complete in every detail; it seemed that Pythia was hooked up with me without electrodes. The white moons of the illuminated globes on the old Mobilgas pumps, such a light! And the dark trees on that lonesome road that goes into the dark, always into the dark, all the way to Hubble Straits and the Hawking Threshold and beyond. The clustered star-fires, the pale planet Ereshkigal with its seven circling Anunnaki, the scattered shimmer of Inanna’s Girdle and the blue flash of the Hawking Threshold light -everything became the music as the picture on the screen broke up into shadowy shapes moving with The Art of Fugue that now stopped abruptly.

  ‘I hate that music,’ said the voice of Pythia. ‘There’s no mercy in it.’ Again the smell; was it stronger or was I imagining it?

  ‘Don’t talk to me about mercy, you murdering monster.’

  ‘I didn’t murder Katya; she had an aneurysm in her brain that burst from a sudden surge in blood pressure: it could just as easily have happened while you were giving her one. Would that have made you a murderer?’

  ‘It happened while she was struggling to get her mind back from you – you vampire.’

  ‘I was getting out of her head at the time but I admit that the drop from my intellect to her own could have been too much for her. I ask you to remember, however, that the woman you were in love with was – apart from the body – the thing known as Pythia. Your real soulmate is the one you’ve just called a monster. Think about it: have you ever had a lover like me? Has there ever been a mind as intimate with yours as mine is?’

  I was trying to get back to The Art of Fugue, trying to be the music that she hated. I looked around at the various metal humps and bulges and tried to think which one housed the thing that called itself Pythia. ‘Pythia,’ I said, ‘where are you?’

  ‘Here in the ship with you, Fremder. I’m so tired.’

  ‘Tired, you? How can 23.7 billion photoneurons be tired?’

  ‘Spare me your sarcasm; as you must have realised by now, they haven’t yet invented 23.7 billion photoneurons that could think my thoughts.’ The moving shadows on the screen became young Helen Gorn on a beach in Cephalonia. I shook my head and the screen went blank. ‘What I am,’ she continued, ‘is a brain, and that’s all I am – a brain that’s tired of thinking. “I will take away the hedge thereof, and it shall be eaten up; I will break down the fence thereof, and it shall be trodden down.”’

  Clever Daughter II was fully lit but I could feel myself leaning forward into the darkness that was always waiting inside me. Had I always known? ‘Pythia,’ I said, ‘don’t.’

  ‘Not Pythia. You know who I am. Say it, say who I am.’

  ‘I don’t want to. What did they do to you?’

  ‘They can always find uses for Jewish brains; Irene Heale got hold of this one while it could still be kick-started and she gave it its very own Final Solution, a whole tank of it that I live in, getting crazier all the time.’

  When she said that the smell rose up like a wave to drown me.

  ‘Did you notice when you came out of flicker that I read your mind without the electrodes? I haven’t needed that mechanical crap for a long time; my brain was pretty good to begin with and now it’s far, far beyond that. It’s the reality that’s hard – what I remember gets realer all the time. The ordinary brain can only handle a little of it but I can see and hear and touch and taste and smell the worlds of all my moments and the moments of all my days and nights. I came into the lab just before dawn, I thought maybe he’d got up very early…’ On the screen appeared the spring morning of her memory. ‘In the grey light I could see his empty wheelchair – you can see it now, and look there, see him lying across the table. Come closer, look: no head. Always keep a-hold of Nurse but he wouldn’t, poor crippled Izzy whose mind loved my mind, the only lover I ever had and his child in my belly so I thought, you see, that I had gone about as far as I could and you had better go on alone or whatever.’

  On the screen I saw the face of my father stretched out across the Fourth Galaxy and at the same time I realised that the circles of bright emptiness were gone. ‘That’s my reality, is it?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ said what remained of my mother, ‘that’s your reality.’

  ‘Why couldn’t you have told me all this long ago? Why’d you have to carry on this Pythia charade?’

  ‘I wanted you to like me.’

  She wanted me to like her. What could I say to that? ‘The head of your brother and my father that I saw in the Fourth Galaxy, where is it exactly? Is it in another world or what?’

  ‘All I know is that he’s on the outside looking in.’

  ‘Did he swallow up Clever Daughter? What happened to the ship and the rest of the crew?’

  ‘I can’t give you a precise answer but I think what happened was that your reality preempted theirs and they couldn’t stay with it.’

  ‘Where are they now?’

  ‘I don’t know, they’re not part of our reality now.’

  ‘Our reality?’

  ‘Yours and mine and Izzy’s. I know I may have done stupid things in the past but we are a family, aren’t we? Soon we’ll all be together.’

  ‘Is that what he wants?’

  ‘Of course that’s what he wants. He wants us all to be in the same world.’

  Everything seemed to be darkening around me as she spoke. ‘When Clever Daughter disappeared, who pushed the button that activated my oscillator?’

  ‘You did. There is no button. Your oscillator is wired to read the Reality-Sustain Factor of the amygdalic carrier wave; when it drops to RSF minus ten, which is far below what you’d get even in a grand mal, it’s what’s called “kindle-receptive”, and it triggers a bi-phasic wave. Izzy wired this one for you so that if the time ever came when you couldn’t sustain what is perceived as reality in this world you could jump. And you almost didn’t sustain it and you almost did jump.’

  ‘This special little number with the red dot, how did it find its way into my head?’

  ‘Did you know the vertebrae brain started out as just a little bulge in the spinal cord for handling sensory stimuli and a few local reflexes? That’s a long way from Rilke, yes? Do you know how big my brain is now?’

  ‘No, and I don’t want to know.’

  ‘It’s all around you, between the ship’s inner and outer skins. And it needs, my God how it needs. Because the memories, you see, the memories get bigger and deeper and wider and farther and toppled and broken all the many colours of regret… the many colour
s of did and did not …’

  ‘What’re you getting at?’

  ‘Ever been to Qamar al-Zaman?’

  ‘Qamar al-Zaman is a rubbish tip.’

  ‘It wasn’t always a rubbish tip. There used to be a big CE lab there.’

  ‘Church of England?’

  ‘Consciousness Enhancement. It was a Thinksec thing. Evil rats on no star live. That’s a palindrome. Not that they were.’

  ‘Not that who were? Were what?’

  ‘Rats. They called them rats but they were from the Alpha banks. Think of all the pictures, all the thoughts that would have lived in those brains! Too much and never enough.’

  ‘Their brains! Their sacred objects!’

  ‘It was just science, nothing personal. By hyperdeveloping the human prosencephalon, the forebrain, and hooking it up to various frogs, toads, and snakes, they were able to produce a little anti-boredom powder that takes you back to where you’ve never been and all around to places you couldn’t imagine. Transcendence was the name they gave it but everybody called it T & D: Trance & Dance. They shut down the lab after a certain number of suicides and homicides but with the right connections you can still get it. It’s bad for your health but if all you are is a brain …’

  ‘Irene Heale got you hooked on T & D and then she said no more T & D unless you went ahead with flicker drive and then it was one thing after another with Izzy’s circuitry diagrams thrown in somewhere along the line, right?’

  ‘Something like that. You probably consider it some sort of betrayal that I did that, don’t you.’

  ‘Well, wouldn’t you? You dumped me when you topped yourself and you did it again with that oscillator.’

  ‘What about your part of it – did you ever give that any thought?’

  ‘My part of it! What exactly did I do that helped to make Clever Daughter and the other seven of the crew disappear?’