Fremder Read online

  ‘Goddam it, Frem, give me a break, will you? What I said about you and me was true but I have got a job to do.’

  ‘And we both know what your priorities are, don’t we.’

  ‘That’s not fair – I haven’t been trading sex for answers but you’ve been using me while giving nothing.’

  ‘Giving nothing! I’ve been giving you whatever I am, and what I mostly am is desperation – I thought that’s what you liked.’

  We went on like that for a while and the evening came to an end early. The remaining two weeks were strictly business and not very productive from Caroline’s point of view – I wasn’t giving her the answers she wanted and even elephant-sized shots of Epiphanol couldn’t get them out of me.

  At the end of the Level 4 there was a DSC Board of Enquiry and the finding of the suits and uniforms was that no action was to be taken pending further investigation and a Pythia session back on Earth. The Level 4 material, such as it was, had been sent to the Ziggurat for processing. When my orders came through, Caroline, who’d been hoping to go Earthside for the next stage of things, didn’t get that assignment.

  ‘You can see how impressed they were with my work,’ she said. ‘I’m lucky they didn’t bust me to emptying bedpans.’

  On my last night at Hubble Straits we went to the Hubble Bubble again. We didn’t talk much, just sat there emptying and refilling our glasses. Wasny Flim’s last song was one of his own, ‘Here and Gone’:

  Here and gone,

  the picture of you in my eyes,

  your voice, your laughter, and your walk …

  My eyes were on Flim when I heard sniffling. I turned to look at Caroline and saw that she was crying a little. ‘What?’ I said.

  She looked at me as if she were seeing me for the first time, seeing me as someone unknown. ‘First Navigator Fremder Gorn,’ she said, ‘it just occurred to me that there might be something missing in you and that’s why you didn’t disappear with the ship and the others. You’re the most alone person I’ve ever met. You know how wirecars have couplers, what they call male and female couplers – you push one car up against another and there’s a clunk and they connect? Most people have couplers but you seem not to. You weren’t connected to your ship or the others; when they went you stayed alone. And you never connected with me although you stuck your male part into my female one. I wanted you to give me the how-it-is-with-Fremder the same as I gave you the how-it-is-with-Caroline but you wouldn’t do it and now you’re going Earthside with all the how-it-is still locked up in you. OK, that’s the last assessment from Dr Love-but-not-very-crafty.’

  The circles of emptiness were very bright, the shadows blurred and dim, the space outside the Bubble bleaker than usual as Flim continued:

  Here and gone,

  the kisses and the lies,

  the small dark hours when we used to talk -

  here and gone, all that we were together,

  here and gone.

  She was sitting there looking like the goddess on her desk, at the same time seductive and full of fear and doubt.

  ‘Listen, Caroline,…’ I began.

  ‘Please,’ she said, ‘no bullshit. We had one good week and that’s it. You’ll remember me as Caroline Not-very-crafty who was fun in bed and dead easy to outsmart in the Level 4.’

  ‘No, I won’t.’

  ‘Even better – you’ll forget me.’

  ‘You know I won’t.’

  ‘Sure, Frem, let’s have lunch sometime. Here comes Mikhail’s Snackdome again. Time to go.’

  11

  I see a red door and I want it painted black,

  No colours any more, I want them to turn black.

  I see the girls walk by dressed in their summer clothes -

  I have to turn my head until my darkness goes.

  Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, ‘Paint It Black’

  Maybe for some people the business of knowing who and what and when and where they are is simple; not for me. The past and the present flicker together in my mind and it isn’t easy to sort through the different strands of story to find one that is only mine. Here’s an extract from one of Helen Gorn’s notebooks of 2022, the year of her suicide and my birth:

  18.08.22

  ‘I know death hath ten thousand several doors for men to take their exits.’ Going out is easy, coming in is a labour. Hold it up by the ankles and smack its bottom. Cry – you’re in the world. Nobody asks to be born. Lots of people ask for the other.

  And yet another transcript, this one from one of my mother’s therapy sessions (which I, the as yet unborn Gorn, attended) after her first suicide attempt later that same August:

  SNG REST AND REASSESSMENT CENTRE

  GORN, HELEN – SESSION 12 – 15:30 – 22.08.22

  THERAPISTD. SCHWARTZ, DIRECTOR, PHYSIO/PSYCHO

  (GORN IS WEARING HEADPHONES AND LISTENING TO AN AUDIOBOY)

  S: What are you listening to?

  G: Bloody cheek!

  S: Why do you say that?

  G: (MOCKING ME) ‘Why do you say that?’ I never saw you before in my life and here you come with your face and your spectacles and your beard and you want to know what I’m listening to. I don’t ask you what you’re listening to, do I?

  S: I’m not listening to anything.

  G: That’s your problem – you don’t listen.

  S: I meant that I’m not listening to music.

  G: Never mind. Those that can’t hear, let them not listen.

  S: What can you hear?

  G: The black.

  S: By?

  G: Johann Sebastian Schwarz.

  S: Do you mean Bach?

  G: I mean Black. That’s your name too – Schwarz. But you don’t listen.

  S: Which of Schwarz’s compositions are you listening to?

  G: The Art of Frog. I hate it.

  S: Why?

  G: No hop.

  S: What about you? Have you got hop?

  G: Don’t be stupid. If I had I wouldn’t be here, would I. Would you like to disappear?

  S: I’m interested in why you tried to disappear.

  G: ‘If I should take a notion to jump right into the ocean, ain’t nobody’s business if I do.’ Know that song?

  S: No.

  G: Neither do I, because whatever I do is Corporation business. If I weren’t who I am you wouldn’t be interested in me.

  S: I’m interested because what you’ve done is my business now.

  G: You really care about me, do you? (PUTS HER HAND BETWEEN HER LEGS) Do you fancy me?

  S: Can you remember what you were thinking when you took the Lethenil tablets?

  G: Life is a dis-integration.

  S: Can you say more about that?

  G: Before we’re born we’re integrated with the black. Birth tears us loose from that and dis-integrates us into life. So I thought, why not re-integrate. Haven’t you ever thought that, Dr Black? You’re quite hairy, aren’t you.

  S: No, I haven’t ever thought that.

  G: What – never thought that you’re quite hairy?

  S: Never thought of re-integrating with the black. When you took the tablets were you mindful of the fact that another life besides your own was involved?

  G: It was in my mind, yes.

  S: Can you say a little more about that?

  G: How can I say more to someone who’s never thought about re-integrating with the black?

  S: Two other lives, I should have said – there’s the father, isn’t there?

  G: You’re right, this was not an immaculate conception. That’s a very shrewd insight.

  S: Physio says you’re about six months pregnant. Does the father know?

  G: Now I know what happened: I died and went to hell and my punishment is to spend eternity talking to arseholes.

  S: You haven’t answered my question.

  G: Who the hell are you, that all your questions must be answered? You think all my questions get answered?

  S: Do you know
who the father is?

  G: Do you know who yours was?

  S: Yes, I do.

  G: Was he an arsehole too?

  S: We were talking about the father of the child you’re carrying.

  G: You were, I wasn’t. I don’t think I can give you any more time just now. (GORN LEAVES THE ROOM)

  That session followed Helen Gorn’s first attempt at reintegration with the black. A month later she made a better job of it.

  In Izzy’s notebooks the handwriting was different but the voice is pretty much the same. Here’s one of his entries about two months before his death:

  10.02.22

  The black is all there is. That’s why if you build your house on the black it’ll last for ever.

  12

  Where is it hidden, the speechless

  body of Osiris? Where is it hidden?

  In a quiet place, in a place of no words.

  When will it speak, the silent

  mouth of Osiris? When will it speak?

  Later.

  Rodney Spoor, Questions

  There’s an asteroid in the Sixth Galaxy called A373 – it hasn’t even got a name, just a number. It’s a supply dump for the Thoth cluster, a desert-coloured rock with nothing on it but an open-frame warehouse with an oxybubble in one corner. There’s an automatic coffee shop and a robot modelled on Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. Her questioning eyes are the same as those that look out of the painting. A plate in her back says that she’s donated by the Sixth Galaxy Poetry Society. Her catalogue includes everything from Sappho to T. P. Stumm. They haven’t named her but I call her Pearl. She’s strictly for poetry, with a contact-activated shielding circuit so there’s no fooling around. You can take her outside the bubble – she doesn’t need air – and you just tell her what you want to hear.

  I was on A373 for an inventory a couple of years ago and Pearl recited the first of Rilke’s Duino Elegies for me as we sat on a rock outside the warehouse:

  Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel

  Who, were I to cry, would hear me out of the angelic

  Ordnungen? und gesetzt selbst, es nähme

  orders? and suppose even that one were to take

  einer mich plötzlich ans Herz: ich verginge von seinem

  me suddenly to his heart: I should perish through his

  stärkeren Dasein. Denn das Schöne ist nichts als des

  stronger existence. For beauty is nothing but the

  Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen,

  beginning of terror, which we only barely endure,

  und wir bewundern es so, weil es gelassen verschmäht

  and we admire it so, because it calmly disdains

  uns zu zerstören. Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich.

  to destroy us. Every angel is terrible.

  She spoke the poem in the original German. The voice that came out of her was what I think of as a Eurydice voice, low and breathy and full of shadows. We sat there on a tawny rock, the strange and beautiful Pearl in her seventeenth-century costume and I, looking at a red moon called Isis (there’s a red sun called Osiris in that system) and I heard that voice and Rilke’s words and the sound of my own breathing in my helmet. Nobody but the two of us on the asteroid and nothing happening but Rilke’s words coming alive out of her mouth. Pearl’s lips moved as she spoke but the voice was that of my mother. Pearl spoke in many voices; this was a recording made by Helen Gorn for Amnesty International in November of 2019, three months after she was raped and Izzy crippled by the Shorties and the Clowns.

  I’ve given a lot of thought to Rilke’s angels and I’ve come to the conclusion that for him an angel was the ultimate degree of perception, in the same way that terror is the ultimate degree of beauty, living at the farther end of a spectrum on which we find, closer to us, the never-to-be answered question in the eyes of the girl with the pearl earring.

  A3 73 and Badr al-Budur are two of the quiet places in my head. I like sometimes to think of Pearl speaking in my mother’s voice under the red Isis moon and I like to think of the robot sweepers humming through the silence of the spaceport under the noctolux lamps of Badru.

  13

  You go to my head and you linger like

  a haunting refrain

  and I find you spinning round in my brain

  like the bubbles in a glass of champagne …

  Haven Gillespie and J. Fred Coots, ‘You Go to My Head’

  Corporation flickered me home with a couple of ViTech 8s minding me. One of them was very tall and the other was very short. The tall one’s working name was Mojo; the short one’s was High John and he didn’t smile when he said it. When we reassembled at Nova Central they cleared me through Quarantine with Red 1 Priority, got us into a waiting hopper, and took me to the Ziggurat in London Central for the Pythia session. It was a grey and rainy end-of-November day, I was glad for that; I hate those hard sunny days that break your teeth. This one was gentle, there was a little mercy coming down with the rain; the colours of everything were heightened by the rainlight; except for the holes of bright emptiness it was a day you could work with. I was glad for that because I knew that I was coming to the end of my forgetting; whatever you might try to hide, Pythia would get it out of you one way or another.

  We lifted out of Nova Central and flew over the ruins of Themepark West where the rides had rusted into tottering skeletons and the scenic river was silted solid with sewage; over the huddle of London Outer Squats where the roads were choked with the gridlocked shells of cars and lorries that hadn’t moved for forty years, many of them extended by canvas or packing crates into a better class of hovel than their neighbours. The rain intensified the stench of garbage, excrement, and decomposition as we flew over a pack of dogs dining on a human corpse. The next gathering we saw was a pack of Shorties roasting what looked like a dog on a spit. One of them had a blaster and there was dancing but I couldn’t hear the music.

  The air looked no soupier than usual and all the hopper vents were closed but our breather filters were greenish-yellow by the time we got to the Ziggurat. The transparent anti-rad canopy was up and the yellow HAZRAD blimps that supported it swayed glistening in the rain. Through the canopy I saw bodies, some naked and some clothed, heaped on a plaza below the upper levels. The maintenance crews were out on strike so the building was in its purple standby mode; the naked bodies seen through the yellow canopy were greenish-grey and ghastly. As we flew lower I saw that there were Shorties among the adults. Placards were visible but I couldn’t make out what they said.

  ‘Are the big ones Clowns?’ I said.

  ‘Probably,’ said High John. ‘With Shorties giving the orders. This lot must have had a neutraliser for getting through the barrier screen; Shorties are getting smarter all the time.’

  ‘If they’d been smart they wouldn’t have got themselves terminated like that,’ said Mojo.

  ‘What were they protesting against?’ I said.

  ‘What’ve you got?’ said High John.

  ‘Fun Creds are what they mostly protest for,’ said Mojo: ‘toadsy and arcade time.’

  ‘You ever done toadsy?’ High John asked me.

  ‘Flicker drive is all I do in the consciousness-altering line.’

  ‘toadsy makes life a lot more exciting,’ said High John.

  ‘Death too,’ said Mojo.

  Even with the corpses the purple Ziggurat looked wonderful in the rain sporting its yellow canopy and flashers, the various red and green beacons winking on relay towers and dish antennas, and the newsflash girdling it with green lights: SUNNYBANK MELTDOWN: 237 MORE DEAD. ‘DANGER PAST’ – SNG SHAKEUP, NO. I IN SECRET TALKS WITH TOP EXEC – CLEVER DAUGHTER FAMILIES: ‘TELL US THE TRUTH’ – ZIGGURAT MAINTENANCE CREWS REJECT CORPORATION OFFER: ‘WE’LL ZIG BUT WE WON’T ZAG’ – SURVEY SHOWS 43% INCREASE IN NO-GO AREAS: STREET BOSS SACKED, said the headlines. It was good to be home.

  Because of the canopy (still up because Maintenance were st
ill out) we landed in the hopper park on top of the old MI Archive Tower and took the lift down to the underground shuttle to get to the Ziggurat. The shuttle is Red Clearance only and passes had to be shown but the platform stank of urine just the same and the graffiti on the walls were the usual thing: SNG HOARS OUT WOGS JEW UROTRASH OUT INGLAN 4 THE INGLASH. SHORTIS ROOL. The crossed arrows of the Patriots were prominent as were many illegible calligraphies which may have been personal signatures.

  At the Ziggurat we took the lift to Pythia Reception where Mojo signed me over to the Tech 7 on duty who turned out to be Nina Marlowe, the wife of Ernie Marlowe who’d been Auxiliary Engineer on Clever Daughter. ‘You’re looking well, Fremder,’ was all she said. She punched up my entry on the console and fed my capsule into Pythia intro.

  Standing by the reception desk was a sweet-faced grandmotherly-looking woman in a business suit and a power haircut. ‘A sad welcome, Mr Gorn,’ she said. ‘I’m Irene Heale, Head of Research and Development. Nothing can bring back the seven who were lost but we’re hoping for data from you that will prevent such disasters in future.’

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ I said.

  Nina pushed a buzzer, a young woman with fair hair in a long plait came towards me, and I felt a sudden rush of loss and longing and desire all at once. It was too early for dusk but the little tribunal was sitting and the verdict was the usual one. ‘Hello,’ she said, and stuck out her hand. ‘I’m Katya Mazur. I’ll prep you for Pythia.’

  ‘You’re new, yes? You weren’t here the last time I had a Pythia session.’

  ‘I’ve been here three months or so.’ Her handshake was firm, her hand warm and dry.

  I leaned closer to see how her name was spelled on her badge. ‘Katya Mazur,’ I said. ‘Turn it around and it’s Mazurka-tya.’