The Medusa Frequency

by Russell Hoban

  The main thing to keep in mind in the situation I have just described is that nothing is gained by pretending not to care about the mud-brick article; on the contrary, any lapse in concentration may well result in falling off a ladder or stepping into a month-old mug of coffee. The search for the mud-brick article must simply be accepted as that part of the work that precedes reading what one has written yesterday and recognizing it as rubbish.

  24 Not Rubbish

  Nnvsnu the Tsrungh stayed with me, however. Poor bastard, I thought, stuck down there in the blughole of the universe, ceaselessly spinning his mind like a prayer wheel as he transmitted the mothercode. Late that night as I thought about it I realized that he himself was ignorant of that mothercode; he span his mind because the pressures of the ultimate deep forced him to do so, and through the centrifuge of his consciousness flung out, unknown to him, the numinosities and nexialities that were the frail but constant web of the universe.

  Nabilca, his thing of darkness, his sender and receiver of messages to and from the deep, would he ever see her, would he ever touch her?

  Not likely.

  25 Longer than the Moment

  So The Seeker from Nexo Vollma wasn’t rubbish and I was going to have a go with it. The next morning I was at my desk early and keen to begin.

  It’s funny, though, how the odd detail will stick in the mind and give you no peace. I found myself remembering the morning when Melanie and I had first met at Hermes Soundways; she’d left a tape cassette with Istvan Fallok. I’d always wondered what was on that cassette. It was certainly none of my business but it was just one of those little things that I wanted to know about.

  So I rang her up at home. No answer. Just then the post arrived and I went to get it. Among the bills and letters was a little padded brown envelope with a cassette inside. On the cassette was written:

  Herman, this is from me.

  M

  I knew what it was before I played it but I played it anyhow.

  ‘Herman,’ said her voice, ‘I don’t want this to be just words on a piece of paper but I’m too much of a coward to look you in the eye and say what I’m going to say and the telephone is no good either.’

  Hearing her voice like that without seeing her there in front of me I found her oddly more real to me than she had been. This was Melanie who was a mystery to me and, as everyone is, to herself, whose thoughts I didn’t know, whose being had its own spacetime and its own world line separate from mine. We had talked intimately, had been lovers briefly, yet her voice came to me as strange and distant as those many voices from far away reflected from the ionosphere and expressed digitally on my radio’s frequency counter.

  ‘Death is longer than life,’ she said, ‘and the death of each moment is longer than the moment. The goneness is what we’re left with, maybe some of us more than others. It’s very hard to have anything, isn’t it? Like our blue-black shining rainy night, when I call it to mind it’s the going-awayness of it, the goneness of it that I taste. I’ve always been a sort of phoney percy, you see - Persephone more than Eurydice, with my own little dark realm. Or I’m like Rilke’s Eurydike, so full of my large death that I understand nothing. I suppose that’s why I need, how shall I put it, more of a red-pyjama type than you are. I lied to you about General Sphincter’s mistress, I was with Sol that weekend and I was with him the other night when you rang up at three o’clock in the morning to tell him you wouldn’t do the Orpheus thing for Classique. So at least you don’t have to feel guilty about me, I did it to you before you did it to me. Goodbye, Herman. We’ll undoubtedly see each other here and there in the normal course of things and I don’t expect it’ll be awkward. I have a feeling that now you’ll be able to write again, better than before. And it was nice, that blue-black shining rainy night, it really was.’

  26 Roughage

  ‘I like the texture of it, Herman,’ said Bill Novad. ‘It’s got the right polypeptides if you know what I mean.’

  ‘Amino acids?’

  ‘That’s it: primordial soup and all that. All your really deep comics have it, and if you can’t be deep you’ll never make it in comics. Nnvsnu the Tsrungh gets to me.’

  ‘I was hoping it would.’

  ‘How do you feel about the backs of cereal boxes?’

  ‘As noumenon or phenomenon?’

  ‘As an art form.’

  ‘They seem to have fallen into disuse; I remember when they had little stories on them.’

  ‘Right. They’ve gone with our pre-atom-bomb innocence. We’re living in a time that cries out for the reaffirmation of traditional values. Used properly the back of a cereal box is to literature what Buddy Holly is to music: it’s got drive, it’s got soul, it’s got bebop. Look at this.’ He took a box of Holywell Corn Flakes out of a desk drawer and showed me first the front and then the back of it. They were both the same, with a picture of a bowl of corn flakes and the words CORN FLAKES. ‘Do you believe that?’ he said. ‘Two fronts, no back, you don’t know where you are with it, your whole day starts off funny. Put a comic on one side and that’s the back, you eat your corn flakes and you read it, you know where you are.’ He tapped one of the two fronts. ‘Can you see it right there, THE SEEKER FROM NEXO VOLLMA?’ He said it in capital letters.

  ‘I can see it,’ I said. I could too: the deeps were a strong purply-blue shading off to black. Nnvsnu the Tsrungh, obscure and amorphous, was a dim blue-green. I could see myself reading it at breakfast, could feel the peace and natural order of it. BONGGGGG, rang the great bell of the deep as Nabilca, responsive to the call of Nnvsnu, plunged down, down, down through green and sunlit waters.

  ‘And you will see it,’ he said. ‘Slithe & Tovey have just given me the Holywell breakfast line to do: that’s corn flakes, bran flakes, and muesli. I think bran is what we want for The Seeker.’

  ‘It’s more regular.’

  ‘It’s your Guardian-reader market. Do a good job on this and you can have the corn flakes as well.’

  ‘What about the muesli?’

  ‘No comics on the muesli, just recipes. Can you give me six episodes in a fortnight and six more two weeks later?’

  ‘What kind of money are we talking about?’

  ‘Five hundred up front for development, one hundred per episode. Flat fee, no royalties.’

  ‘Seventeen hundred isn’t much for what they’re getting.’

  ‘It is when you think of how many guys are trying to break into cereal boxes. Plus you’ll probably do the whole twelve in two nights or maybe even one night. Once you’ve got your original premise it’s a piece of cake.’

  ‘More like a load of bran. Holywell can have first cereal rights but the characters belong to me and if I do a book or a TV series or a line of toys they’ve got no part of it.’

  ‘You should be so lucky. I’ll talk to Slithe & Tovey and see what kind of a deal we can do and get back to you later. OK?’

  The deeps were gone, the hiss and rush of traffic overran the moving of great waters and the darkness. I was standing by the bicycle shop that was under the offices of Novad Ventures in Gray’s Inn Road. It was like coming out of the cinema, I was blinking in the sunlight. The terror and the excitement slid back behind the screen of everyday and I walked slowly to the underground.

  27 To Borrow the World

  I’d no plans to go anywhere but home but when OXFORD CIRCUS appeared in the train windows I got out and walked over to Hermes Soundways.

  Fallok was sitting in his electronic twilight holding a small terrestrial globe, a cheap tin one, badly dented, with no base. Through the closed door I could hear the Hermes music.

  ‘I never should have let him do it,’ he said as I came in.

  ‘Let whom do what?’

  ‘I never should have let Kraken get his head zapped.’

  ‘Kraken! Do you mean to tell me that Mr Deep Mind himself came to you with art trouble?’

  ‘How can you joke about it with the poor bastard dead?’


  ‘Dead! Of what?’

  ‘Heart attack. I think he may have had some trouble with the head of Orpheus.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘After our lunch at L’Escargot I was walking slowly back here when I heard a voice speaking to me from a dustbin in Wardour Street and it was the head. I didn’t want to stand there in the street talking to it so I wrapped it up in the Guardian and brought it here. I was surprised to see it on the loose and I rang you up but there was no answer.’

  ‘I must’ve been in hospital by then.’

  ‘Anything bad?’

  ‘Bit of angina. What happened with the head?’

  ‘I asked it what it wanted and it wouldn’t answer but it began to sing. I was recording the singing when Kraken dropped in and asked me why I had a microphone in front of a perfectly silent tin globe. So I told him about it and then he wanted to get his head done so he could see the head of Orpheus too. We had a session but he didn’t see the head and he asked if he could borrow the globe; I gave it to him and he left. He’d said he’d ring me up to let me know how he was getting on but after three or four days I heard from Hilary Forthryte that he was dead. He was found sitting in a chair with the globe in his lap.

  ‘Poor Kraken. I doubt that he and the head would have got on very well.’

  ‘Actually he was a pretty boring guy,’ said Fallok, ‘but I liked his films.’

  28 No More Klage

  It was the fourth of December and the Geburtstag of Rainer Maria Rilke, said the girl from Tirana, and she went on to read ‘Orpheus, Eurydike, Hermes’. I’m always forgetting what I read, so the same lines can be new to me many times, as now when I heard her enchanting voice say:

  daβ eine Welt aus Klage ward, in der

  that a world became out of lament, in which

  alles noch einmal da war: Wald und Tal

  everything existed once more: forest and valley

  und Weg und Ortschaft, Feld und Fluβ und Tier;

  and path and hamlet, field and river and animal;

  und daβ um diese Klage-Welt, ganz so

  and that around this lament-world, just as

  wie um die andre Erde, eine Sonne

  around the other earth, a sun

  und ein gestirnter stiller Himmel ging,

  and a starry quiet sky went,

  ein Klage-Himmel mit entstellten Sternen

  – : a lament-sky with disfigured stars – :

  As once before, the words departed and I heard only that sweet and promising voice of Eurydice unfound and unlost.

  ‘Right,’ I said, ‘no more Klage,’ and when I looked up at the Vermeer girl it was Medusa I saw, flickering and friendly, trusting me with the idea of her.

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks to Jonathan Gibbs for a music session with the

  Fairlight computer; to Dr N. de M. Rudolf for his help

  with electrophysiological technicalities; and to my wife

  Gundula for translations from the German.

  A Note on the Author

  Russell Hoban (1925-2011) was the author of many extraordinary novels including Turtle Diary, Angelica Lost and Found and his masterpiece, Riddley Walker. He also wrote some classic books for children including The Mouse and his Child and the Frances books. Born in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, USA, he lived in London from 1969 until his death.

  By the Same Author

  NOVELS

  The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

  Kleinzeit

  Turtle Diary

  Riddley Walker

  Pilgermann

  The Medusa Frequency

  Fremder

  Mr Rinyo-Clacton’s Offer

  Angelica’s Grotto

  Amaryllis Night and Day

  The Bat Tattoo

  Her Name Was Lola

  Come Dance With Me

  Linger Awhile

  My Tango with Barbara Strozzi

  Angelica Lost and Found

  POETRY

  The Pedalling Man

  The Last of the Wallendas and Other Poems

  COLLECTIONS

  The Moment Under the moment

  FOR CHILDREN

  The Mouse and His Child

  The Frances Books

  The Trokeville Way

  The author and publishers are grateful to the following for permission

  to reproduce lyrics from copyright material: Chappell Music Ltd for

  ‘My Happiness’ by Borney Bergantine and Betty Peterson (© 1948

  Happiness-Music Corp,); Radio Music Britain Ltd for ‘Yessir I Can

  Boogie’ by Rolf Soja and Frank Dostal (all rights reserved, international

  copyright secured); Rondor Music Ltd and Four Knights Ltd for ‘Same Old

  Story (Same Old Song)’ by Will Jennings.

  First published 1987 by Jonathan Cape

  This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Copyright © 1987 by Russell Hoban

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages

  Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  50 Bedford Square

  London WC1B 3DP

  A CIP catalogue record for this

  book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9781408835685

  Visit www.bloomsbury.com to find out more about our authors and their books

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Contents

  1 Art is a Tough Business

  2 First Appearance of the Kraken

  3 The Vermeer Girl

  4 Hermes Soundways

  5 The Head of Orpheus Begins Its Story

  6 We’re not Talking about a Bloke with Winged Sandals

  7 Nnngghh, Zurff, Kruljjj

  8 Tower Hill and the Cheshire Cheese

  9 The Thinking Man’s Cabbage

  10 All Hallows by the Tower

  11 The Big Rain

  12 In the Morning

  13 The Hague

  14 No Balls

  15 Life after Death?

  16 Blvgsvo

  17 Where Do We Go from Here?

  18 Louisa, not Luise

  19 Still Three O’Clock in the Morning

  20 The Visit

  21 The Seeker from Nexo Vollma

  22 Questions

  23 I Mention This

  24 Not Rubbish

  25 Longer than the Moment

  26 Roughage

  27 To Borrow the World

  28 No More klage

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  eCopyright