Fremder Read online

  I have no recall of that conversation but I do remember the next one, which took place two days later in another part of Newton Centre. I was vibrant with fear at the time; I felt as if I was a puzzle of many pieces, all of them speeding outward from me in all directions. I was afraid I’d never get them back together and at the same time I was afraid that I would. The song in my head was:

  ON THE GOOD SHIP LOLLIPOP,

  IT’S A SHORT TRIP TO THE CANDY SHOP, …

  At a desk opposite me was a tall bald man with glittering spectacles. He was wearing faded jeans, hiking boots, a denim shirt, and an old green cardigan. Through the window behind him I could see the lights of the flicker docks passing in the black sparkle of space and just beyond them Mikhail’s Quadrangle 4 Snackdome (24 HRS – FREIGHTERS YES) revolving like a beacon with a ring of bright rubbish in slow orbit as it majestically receded from view with the turning of the station. Far beyond Mikhail’s there came and went the occulting blue flash of the Hawking Threshold light, beyond it the pale planet Ereshkigal with its seven circling Anunnaki, and beyond those the jewelled fling of Inanna’s Girdle.

  The tall bald man’s spectacles were twinkling as if he had ways to make me talk. I had no idea why I was sitting in a chair in his office; I couldn’t remember anything between flickering out of Nova Central and waking up at Hubble Straits and I rather thought I’d like to keep it that way. ‘Perhaps you’ll tell me’, I said, ‘what I’m charged with.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘Deep Space Command might possibly have one or two questions about the disappearance of the rest of the crew and a spacecraft and cargo worth two hundred million credits.’ His accent was like waving fields of American grain. ‘And I expect the Ziggurat will want you to help with enquiries but here at Newton Centre the only thing you’re charged with is survival. We’d like to know how you did it.’ His spectacles sparkled cordially as he leaned over the desk to shake my hand and the rest of me vigorously. ‘I’m Waldo Simkin, Head of Research here.’ The room smelled of paper, the floor under my feet hummed and shook a little. In the ceiling the fluorescent lights sizzled faintly: Si, Si, Simkin. Si, Si, Simkin.

  You needn’t keep repeating it, I thought. I heard you the first time.

  ‘I wasn’t repeating it,’ he said. ‘Have you got some kind of echo in your head?’

  So I must have spoken aloud; he didn’t look like a telepath. Some of the time I could see him clearly but much of the time not. I was getting ringed centres of bright emptiness in my vision, circles of nothing. They kept expanding and wiping one another out so new circles of nothing could appear. Beyond the Hawking Threshold, beyond Ereshkigal and the Anunnaki and Inanna’s Girdle the dead howled and whistled.

  ‘ “Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror,”’ I said.

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘It’s a line from the First Duino Elegy.’

  ‘I don’t think I know Duino’s work.’

  ‘He’s a dead guy. I know a lot of dead guys.’

  ‘You’re alive. Keep your eye on the doughnut and not on the hole. You’re shaking.’

  ‘Isn’t everything?’

  ‘No. Are you wearing bio?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Let’s do an AFR, OK? I want to see what kind of shape you’re in.’

  ‘OK.’ I opened my shirt and he got a biofeedback kit out of his desk. He placed the electrodes on my head and chest and slid the lancet sleeve over my thumb. I jabbed myself and we watched the numbers climbing on the gauge.

  ‘That’s an ambient-fear reading of 727.2,’ he said. He removed the thumb sleeve, replaced the lancet, opened his shirt, hooked himself up, and did his own AFR. It was 214.7.

  ‘Between 200 and 400 is what you expect from somebody in a reasonably functional state,’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen one over 600 till now. What’re you afraid of?’

  ‘Everything.’

  YES! bellowed the mind in my head, SAY IT, SAY THE EVERYTHING-FEAR, THE ALL-TERROR. I TOO FEAR EVERYTHING. I FEAR MY LONG-AGO BEGINNING AND THE AWAKENING OF DREAD, I FEAR THE UNCEASING BECOMING OF ME. I FEAR THE HUGE AND THE TINY, THE FAR AND THE NEAR OF ME, AND I FEAR THE MOMENT THAT IS NOW AND NOW AND NOW WITHOUT RESPITE.

  The power of that utterance and the relief of it! With those words my fear seemed all at once a mighty fortress in which I was no longer alone. No, not a fortress – not something that stood still but a voyaging thing, a black boat rising and falling in the sea-dark, a vessel in which I could journey far. You again! I said. It’s been so long! Will you be with me from now on?

  No answer.

  Simkin was looking at me oddly, so I must have been speaking aloud again. ‘I think this might be a good time to turn you over to our head of Physio/Psycho,’ he said. I followed him down the hall to another office where I was introduced to Dr Caroline Lovecraft, a tall, handsome woman: red hair in a Psyche knot, green eyes, horn-rimmed glasses, heroic figure wonderfully enhanced by a tightly-belted green overall with many pockets. As she came towards me I think a little sigh may have escaped me.

  ‘Hi,’ she said, gripped my right hand firmly, and shot some of her voltage into me. ‘Remember me?’

  ‘No, but I will from now on.’

  ‘Well,’ said Simkin to me, ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ and vanished.

  Lovecraft sat down at her desk, motioned me to a chair, and gave me her full attention. ‘Bad night?’ she said.

  ‘I got through it.’

  ‘I can hear your teeth grinding. Have an E-ZO, have a couple of them – loosen you up a little.’ She offered me a green foil ten-strip of tablets.

  ‘No, thanks. My problem isn’t loosening up, it’s staying together.’

  ‘Together is for squilches. The real thing is what comes through the cracks when you fall apart.’

  ‘I don’t think I can handle that just yet.’

  ‘Yes, you can – you’ve handled it already or you wouldn’t be here. What we need to do is get it out in the open and see what’s what.’ Like Simkin she had an American accent but not from the same place: hers was suggestive of huge green breakers and shining people on surfboards. She took my hand again. ‘You’ve got the balls for it so let’s do it, yes?’

  ‘OK, but first tell me, are you related to H. P. Lovecraft?’

  ‘No. You like H. P. Lovecraft?’

  ‘Oh yes, I’ve been a heavy user for a long time.’

  ‘I can do Cthulhu-speak.’

  ‘Show me.’

  ‘“Ph-nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn,”’ she said in a menacing alien voice that gave me goosepimples. ‘“In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”’

  ‘I’m impressed. That stuff’s hard to memorise and it’s quite scary the way you do it.’

  ‘It’s my only accomplishment – I don’t tap-dance or play the piano.’

  You don’t have to, I thought – your accomplishment is being you. I closed my eyes and tried to hold her voice in my head where I waited for the rain with my face between my knees. Then I settled into my chair and looked around. Her office had the usual Hubble Straits revolving view of Mikhail’s Snack-dome, the flicker docks, the Hawking Threshold light, Ereshkigal, and so on. It was a large and busy-looking place containing a hurly-burly of professional impedimenta with knobs and dials, an overflowingness of books in shelves and stacks, a shadowy black-and-white drawing of a female nude on the wall, a platoon of file cabinets, a small jungle of plants, a big couch heavily burdened with books and papers, and a well-littered desk on which was a museum replica of a small head of a goddess, a thin shell of bronze with a dark green patina, almost a mask because there was no back to it, the edges of its incompleteness following pleasingly the undulations of the hair.

  ‘Greek, second century B.C.,’ said Lovecraft, ‘found near Mersin, Cilicia. It’s only a replica.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I used to visit her at the British Museum.’ As on the original the whites of the eyes had been painted in and the wea
ring-away of the paint had been duplicated: the dark and light gave the impression of an upward seductive glance when viewed from above; when I brought my face down to the level of her eyes her look changed to one of fear and doubt. The card on the plinth said, HEAD OF A GODDESS.

  ‘She’s got to be Aphrodite,’ said Lovecraft. ‘She couldn’t be anyone else.’

  ‘I think you’re right. Sometimes it took four or five tries before I could walk away from her.’

  Lovecraft had been sorting through some videodiscs but now she paused, took off the horn-rims, and gave me a long look. ‘That’s how it is with Aphrodite,’ she said. She picked up several discs. ‘Let’s start with the automatic flicker-break transmission that came in to Traffic Control from Clever Daughter at 04:06:03 on 4 November.’ On her way to the video she passed close to me. The continually recycled air of Hubble Straits Station is moist and jungly; her smell was that of a strong healthy woman just out of the shower and sweating a little. She passed me again going back to her desk and I closed my eyes and felt the breeze of her on my face.

  FLICK, FLICK, FLICK AND FADE, JOHN, sang my head, ON THE PLANET WHERE YOU ARE.

  ‘… hear me?’ said Lovecraft.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Those green spirals and circles we’re seeing on the screen, what are they?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said as circles of bright emptiness expanded in my vision. The other circles, the ones on the screen, seemed strange but familiar. ‘Interference, maybe?’

  ‘You trying to scramble me, John?’ Had she heard the song in my head?

  ‘Why? What did I say?’

  ‘You said interference but that’s not like any interference I ever saw. Those circles are like ringed eyes.’

  On the screen the circles were widening, growing larger, becoming great eyes of becoming that became vast nodes of possibility and archipelagos of being constantly expanding and mutually annihilating as they slowly faded into blankness. ‘I’ve seen something like that before,’ said Lovecraft: ‘it’s like the chemical oscillation in the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction.’

  ‘I don’t know what that is,’ I said as the circles faded into darkness and my head began The Art of Fugue, its voices tracing the vaultings of terror and the windings of its desolation. Forgetting myself I became the music, became the action of it and the joy at the heart of the terror. Yes! I thought, I must remember how to do this, how to be the music.

  ‘What?’ said Lovecraft.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Listen, Fremder, all this constipated Q and A is boring me to death. Let’s talk fragic, yes? Darkly me, whisper me, echoes and murmurs.’

  I hadn’t talked fragic since Judith. ‘I don’t think I can go loose just like that.’

  ‘Sure you can. Whisper me, whisper me, deeply the shadows.’

  ‘Shadows and places,’ I said. ‘O the horror.’ I could feel my head going slanty.

  ‘Horror me, horror me, infinite vortex whisper me urgently, dark without end.’

  ‘Only the horror, only the onliness.’ It was hard to resist her.

  ‘More than the onliness, more than the every.’ She seemed full of desire as she leant towards me.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘I can’t keep up with you. Could we just continue in the ordinary way for now?’

  ‘Right – I know I’m pushy.’ She sighed, rolled her chair back a little, expelled some breath, looked out of the window for a while, then took a crystal out of her pocket and stuck it in the audio beam. A man’s voice hummed, somewhat flat, the opening of Contrapunctus One of The Art of Fugue. ‘That’s Bill Charteris the other morning,’ she said, ‘humming Bach as you came into view.’ She was looking down as she stopped the audio beam, then she caught me with a swift upward glance. ‘Bill’s not into Bach – he had the feeling that it was coming from you. Can you receive as well? Can you tell me what I’m thinking?’

  ‘I’d rather not say – if I’m wrong it could be awkward.’

  She laughed. ‘Never mind. Let’s go back to the first time you spoke to me, while you were still in Intensive Care: you said, “If you can hold on to the terror you can hold on to the world.”’

  ‘I don’t remember that conversation.’

  She ejected the flicker-break disc and as the next one slid into place and started she froze-frame on a cross-section of a human brain in computerised colour. At the bottom I read: F. Gorn 04:22:16 IGT 04.11.52.

  ‘You’re looking at a domicilium scan of your brain,’ she said. ‘Domicilium is the collective name for those temporal-lobe systems that are the seat of the identity. This scan was done shortly after your admission to Intensive Care. The purple dot you see there is a peak of biochemical activity. Now see what happens when I unfreeze the frame.’

  I watched as the purple dot jumped from one point to another in an anti-clockwise circle; around it went again and again.

  ‘That’s known as mandalic circuitry,’ she said. ‘You see it sometimes in autistics and in cult believers like the Sons of Osiris and the Sisters of Lorena. It’s a closed loop of self-reinforcing perception that locks out external stimuli. Your brain kept it up with diminishing intensity for most of three days. By the time you could speak intelligibly it had quieted down and there were only occasional bursts of it.’

  ‘Interesting.’

  ‘Isn’t it. So what kind of shape were you in that morning? In your head, I mean.’

  ‘Nothing out of the ordinary.’

  ‘And what is the ordinary?’

  ‘Nothing special.’

  ‘Mr Gorn – my job is to find out what I can about what happened. Have you decided that your job is to keep me from finding out?’

  ‘I remember flickering out of Nova Central and the next thing I remember is waking up in the room I have now. I don’t remember anything in between.’

  ‘And you don’t want to, right?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Look,’ she said, and her breezy professional manner was gone; her voice was low and quiet, ‘I can’t even imagine what happened to you out there – probably it was indescribable. Holding on to the world isn’t easy; some mornings when I have to open my eyes and be me I almost can’t do it, everything seems to be slipping away. But you did it drifting in deep space at 3 Kelvin with no spacesuit, no helmet, and no oxygen. I’ve looked at the Sun Ra video and I can’t get it out of my mind. The Level 4 is what I’m assigned to and they want official answers but now I’m talking to you just as one person to another. Somewhere in your mind is the total recall of what happened. I can feel your terror and I want to be in that terror with you. Talk to me, for God’s sake – I’ve been waiting in my house at R’lyeh for such a long time!’

  ‘You want to be in the terror with me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Her face was close to mine, her eyes seemed full of fear and doubt, her pupils wide and dark and ringed with green, eyes of becoming, and all around us a blackness that tilted and beckoned with eyes of becoming, becoming …

  ‘Careful!’ she said, and caught me as I almost fell out of my chair. Then we were holding on to each other and kissing. ‘Oh yes,’ she murmured, ‘whisper me, whisper me, whisper me!’ I was shaking all over as we let go long enough to clear the books and papers off the couch while the dead whooped and hollered and my head sang hoarsely:

  ANOTHER BRIDE, ANOTHER JUNE,

  ANOTHER SUNNY HONEYMOON,

  ANOTHER SEASON, ANOTHER REASON

  FOR MAKIN’ WHOOPEE.

  Then the singing faded into black sky, thunder, lightning, and rain. And I, Elijah, was running, running ahead of the chariot, being Elijah, being my whole self.

  *

  ‘How do you feel now?’ said Caroline while I was getting my breath back.

  ‘Less alone.’ There were still circles of emptiness in my vision. ‘Did you get into the terror with me?’

  ‘Wherever I was, it felt good.’ She hugged me.

&nb
sp; ‘Maybe we could go somewhere dark and quiet and have a drink?’

  ‘We’re still on Corporation time.’ She stood up, retrieved her underwear, picked her overall off the floor, zipped herself up, and re-did her Pysche knot.

  ‘Dr Lovecraft, tell me the truth – do you do this with every Level 4 subject?’

  ‘Did it feel that way to you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then don’t ask stupid questions. You got into my knickers because desperation turns me on and you’re the most desperate man I’ve met in a long time.’

  ‘You haven’t got anyone now? No partner?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Twenty-eight.’

  ‘How can it be that a woman like you hasn’t got anybody?’

  ‘What can I tell you? Lot of frogs out there. Let’s look at the Fremder Gorn video.’ She ejected the brain-scan disc and there was F. Gorn drifting through space as seen by Sun Ra’s nose camera. As we watched me tumbling over and over in frozen stillness she advanced the audio beam to its next track and The Art of Fugue, performed by Marie-Claire Alain, came stalking into the room on its centuries-high legs. It was as if Bach had with spells and numbers called forth some cosmic monster that would eat me up, eat up the world with its implacable and insatiable logic. And yet the terror in that music was what I’d held on to when Clever Daughter disappeared from around me.

  ‘“Be the music” is what you said on November 7,’ said Caroline’s voice from far away.

  ‘I’m trying to remember.’ But all that came to me was Rilke’s line ‘Every angel is terrible’. In German it sounds more so: ‘Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich’.

  ‘“Thou?”’ said Caroline.

  ‘Are you getting familiar?’

  ‘I’m looking at the 7 November transcript. After “Be the music” you said, “Thou.” Or maybe it was “Thowl”. Thowl, thowl-the owl?’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Owlshit?’

  ‘Could we take a break?’

  She looked at her watch. ‘OK,’ she said, and began to clear the books and papers off the couch again.

  ‘Are you trying to kill me or cure me?’ I said as she unzipped her overall.