Fremder (11 page)

‘Keep going,’ said Pythia. ‘Don’t stop now.’

‘At 04:06 Plessik hit the flicker switch and we were out of there and ETA for Penzias-Wilson instant T.

‘The next thing … The next thing …’ The image that had hidden itself all through the RE runs and the hypno sessions was ripped out of my memory with a violence like that of a scalp
being torn off. I cried out in pain as on the pixels there appeared a face anamorphically distorted as if printed on rubber and laterally stretched galaxy-wide but somehow still recognisable as the face of Isodor Gorn.

There was something like a gasp from Pythia. ‘Not’, she murmured, ‘in the wind. Not in the earthquake and not in the fire. What do the dead see? Only the dark, only the, only THISNNN/THSNNNNV/THSNNVS/NNVSNNU/NNGH/NNVSNU/RRN DU/NNVSNURNDUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU …’

The flicker pattern was pulsing with colour faster than the eye could follow and the music was such as I’d never heard before; the sensors, moist on my naked skin, tightened and loosened, tightened and loosened spasmodically, then went slack. A great calm flooded through me. I listened to the rain and watched the wild colours slowly fading on the pixels as Mazur came running in.

‘Nnnnnnnn,’ she said, looking quite wild, ‘nnnvsnurn-duuuuuu.’

This time the thumb buttons worked and I sprung the sensor cradle and jumped to the floor trailing electrodes. ‘Katya,’ I said, ‘are you all right?’

‘Nnnnnnvs.’ Her eyes rolled back and I caught her as she fell.

One thing he missed out in his theory
of time and space and relativity
is something that makes it very clear he
was never gonna score like you and me -
did not know about quark, strangeness, and charm,
quark, strangeness, and charm.

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

Naked and slippery with electrolytic cream, I carried Katya Mazur to the after-session room. It was soundproofed and red-lit like the ready room. There were a bed, a table and two chairs, a fridge and a cooker, tea, coffee, biscuits and so on – all the necessaries for pulling oneself together after a Pythia session.

I lowered her carefully on to the bed; she seemed so vulnerable, so helpless, and all at once so unaccountably precious to me. The only explanation I could think of for her fainting was that she’d heard Pythia on the intercom and somehow it had had this effect on her. ‘Katya!’ I whispered, and stroked her face. That she’d been overcome by what Pythia found deep inside me made me feel more intimate with her than I’d ever been with anyone before.

‘Katya!’ I said, and she opened her eyes, blue eyes that swallowed me up, swallowed up the whole shaking and afraid Fremder of me. ‘Katya!’ I kissed her and she kissed me back. ‘Katya!’ I said, as if her name were a spell that could ward off all evil and make everything all right.

She covered her mouth with her hand as if she was only just now fully aware of kissing me and not sure about it. ‘What happened?’ she said.

‘Pythia crashed and she seems to have taken you with her. Were you listening on the intercom?’

‘Yes, I remember now. It was scary.’ She sat up. ‘You’ve still got that cream all over you – let me clean you up.’

Nothing was said about the kiss while she busied herself about me with a towel. When that was done I put my clothes on and tried to think of excuses for staying with her. We stood there for a while looking at each other.

‘I don’t really know,’ she said.

‘Don’t really know what?’

‘I don’t really know what I know.’

‘Who does?’

‘Sometimes the shadows in my mind, sometimes the voices in my mind …’ She began to cry. ‘I’m not always sure who I am or what I am.’

‘That makes two of us.’ I hugged her and I felt her arms tighten round me as she rubbed her cheek against mine. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘hug me – it feels right. For however long we’ve got.’

‘Why do you say that, Katya? What do you know that I don’t know.’

‘I’ve told you, I don’t know what I know. Don’t talk – make it be here and now, nothing and nobody else.’

I kissed her for the second time and this time there was no mistaking her response. I stroked her shining hair, it smelled like sun-warm fields in a country I’d never seen, a country that had no existence except in my mind and the touch and smell of her hair. I didn’t know what time it was, it felt like the middle of the night; the Ziggurat would be glowing purple in the darkness, the yellow flashers and the red and green lights winking, the newsflash going its endless round; the corpses on the plaza would be rotting in the purple light while ships and
cargoes from seven galaxies flickered invisibly overhead. ‘I don’t always have a whole picture in my eyes,’ I said.

‘Let me be the picture in your eyes for now.’

I undid her various zips and she came out of her clothes in the red-lit dimness of the room. When she was naked she stood up before me quite still and hieratic with both hands on her belly. She glimmered in the redness and seemed to increase, to become great and goddesslike. I was entranced by the mystery and dim red magic of her nakedness, by the numen and the treasure of it, by how precious it was to me even though the picture in my eyes swarmed with circles of bright emptiness.

*

Afterwards, lying entwined with Katya in the primordial redness of our night-within-the-day, I didn’t want to move, didn’t want to break the membrane of our well-being. Never before had I felt so easy, so tranquil, so just this side of madness. We hadn’t talked fragic at all – there hadn’t been any need for it, or indeed any time. The whole thing seemed almost to have left me behind.

‘I’m glad we did it here,’ said Katya. ‘I’m glad this is where we had our first time.’

‘So am I. Even though Thinksec probably had a fibre optic up my bum while we did it. What time is it?’

‘Thirteen forty-nine. Why?’

‘I don’t know, I thought it was the middle of the night.’

‘You’ve had some day – between Pythia and me you must be exhausted. What really happened with her?’

‘I don’t want to think about that right now, I want to think about you. When do you get off?’

‘Eighteen hundred. Will you meet me at my place at half past? I’d give you a key so you could go there now but it’s a thumbprint lock.’

‘That’s OK; I’ve got to find my downtime and settle in so I’ll
do that now.’ She gave me her address and I put on my clothes and went back to reception. There I looked for Mojo and High John but they were gone. Nina Marlowe handed me a little flickerpost packet. ‘This came for you,’ she said. I recognised Caroline’s handwriting and quickly put the packet in a pocket of my jacket while my head sang a little packet-pocket-jacket song. Nina Marlowe gave me a set of flat keys, a yellow card, a stunner and a permit.

‘I see they’re giving me one of the better neighbourhoods,’ I said as I looked at the Oldtown address. Deep-spacing had made me a bleakness freak and I hadn’t had a flat of my own for years: as well as sleazy hotels and Q-BO SLEEPS and empty spaceports in the middle of the night I liked the dismalness of downtimes where the only permanent items were the locker that arrived ahead of me and the bottle I brought with me. These DSC flats achieve a classic squalor that cannot simply have happened by itself – there must be a Corporation designer who does this sort of thing. The finishing touch is always the one or two tattered copies of
Consenting Adults
and the print on the wall which is either
Womb of the Cosmos III
by Lamia Quick or
Fractal Disjunctions I
by Hermione Testa. I have not yet encountered
Womb of the Cosmos I
and
II
or
Fractal Disjunctions II
and
III
.

‘Give me a wrist,’ said Nina. I stuck out the right one and she locked on a wristphone. I felt a tiny pin-prick as she did it. ‘Ever have a DNA-LOK phone on you before?’

‘No.’

‘There’s a constant signal that tells us where you are and the bracelet has sampled your blood and locked on to your DNA, so if you take if off or put it on someone else an alarm goes off here and things get ugly. You’re on your own now.’

‘How come?’

‘Maybe they think the taxpayers have spent enough on you.’

Were the circles of bright emptiness getting bigger? Was there a roaring in my ears? Maybe not. The yellow card said:

ON CALL – 1ST NAV FREMDER GORN
AUTHORISED FOR ZIGGURAT ENTRY AS REQUIRED

The keys were for a DSC downtime in Oldtown West 81. I wanted to get there as soon as possible so that I could be alone with my thoughts of Katya.

‘They’ve got the HAZRAD partly down now so you can take the wirecar,’ said Nina.

When you leave Pythia level at the Ziggurat either you go up to the flight pad if authorised – nothing travels over the Ziggurat except Red-Card aircraft – or you go ten levels down to the wirecar stop just above the barrier screen that shields the upper levels from noise and anything else coming up from below. It was still raining when I came out at the wirecar stop but instead of a freshness in the air there was a stench that almost knocked me over. The barrier screen is a transparent field so I went to the edge of the platform and looked down.

The bodies I’d seen from the hopper were heaped all over the plaza five levels down. I made out a banner with SHORTIS & CLOUNS painted on it and a placard that said, FUCKIN CAWPRASHUN GISSMOR FUN CREDS. Some of the adult bodies appeared to be male clones from a number of different reject batches, identifiable by visible defects; others looked like originals, all of them naked except for penis sheaths. Their war paint was still vivid but the corpses, glistening in the rain, were turning grey and green and purple as they bloated and rotted where the terminator beam had caught them. In the purple light of the Ziggurat they looked nightmarishly at one with their surroundings. With the full-grown warriors lay the bodies of a Shorty point squad, none of them older than ten. One of them was visible only as a pair of legs sticking out of a ventilator intake.

There were two other men at the wirecar stop. One of them was talking into a throatphone: ‘John? Albert this, Code Zed Two Seven – re ufax oh one twenty this, firm wipe Prog Two, firm slot Alter B up estim CHS cuts rev privasec due newdata. Instant T, OK? Tsit.’ He sighed a little as if it was lucky for everybody that he was around to take care of things. Then he noticed that I was looking at something and came over to see what it was. ‘My X!’ he said. ‘Why don’t they tidy them away?’

‘Maintenance strike,’ said the other man.

‘Technology!’ said Albert. ‘They can flicker from here to the Hawking Threshold Instant T but they can’t sweep a plaza.’

Something about this Albert fellow was beginning to seem familiar, and for the third time in my life I heard the voice of my mind, NOISE, it said. ALWAYS MORE NOISE.

Albert Stiggs! That’s who it was – the grown-up Albert who used to bully me back at The Cauldron until I broke his nose. Both of us were wearing breathers that masked our faces but his adult voice and speech recalled the boy Albert enough for me to recognise him. He’d been bigger and heavier than I then and he was bigger and heavier now but I closed my eyes and saw once more the vibrant purple-blue that I’d seen that long-ago day at The Cauldron. Then there flared up again the craziness of many colours and I felt ready.

‘No one cares about the public any more,’ said the second man.

‘And yet,…’ I said. My mind was open, it was easy, it was singsonging to itself in the heart of the maze, in the heart of the maze where the eyes of becoming were always becoming, the spirals were always unwinding, the power was always enabling the ancient, the huge and the tiny in the billions, in the trillions of me. Strong, very strong, the ancient animal of it. Strong, very strong, the mighty fortress and the dark boat of the everything-fear. ‘And yet,…’ I said again.

Both men turned to look at me. Albert was wearing MedExec insignia and had clearly become someone of importance. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and yet what?’

‘And yet, you know, that plaza looks as if it was meant to be covered with naked corpses; it looks so natural like that.’

Albert hadn’t recognised me and he hadn’t come close enough to read my name tag but the Latin on my shoulder patch was legible from where he stood. ‘“
Semper longius
”!’ he read. ‘You don’t look all that long to me, flickerhead. Where do they find you lot?’

‘They send out feeler squads to feel around till they find people with balls. Those are the ones they train for Deep Space Command. The ones with no balls go into Exec’

‘Do you believe this spaceturd?’ Albert said to his companion. He came closer and read my name tag. ‘Aha!’ he said. ‘I might have known it – The famous Fremder Gorn, late of
Clever Daughter
! The lucky chap who had a return ticket when everyone else had a single. One of the chosen, he is – in fact the
only
one chosen. You must have some very special connections, clipcock.’ His voice was deep (although he might have had an enhancer in his Novexec breather) but perhaps there was just the slightest quaver in it.

‘Be careful, pussy,’ I heard myself say, ‘you’re in over your head.’

‘Oh yes? Maybe you’re not in good touch with reality, Gorn. Too much flicker. This isn’t that time back at The Cauldron, this is now.’

‘You wearing bio?’

‘Oh, dear, getting aggressive, are we? Yes, little man, I’m wearing bio.’

‘So try me, noballs.’

‘OK, spaceturd, I’m trying,’ and he went into his threat posture.

‘Pathetic,’ I said, and went into mine.

‘Right, hotso, let’s see your feedback.’

I showed him my indicator and he showed me his. His read: Entropy 7:04, Action Potential 12:02. Mine read: Entropy 1.08, Action Potential 16.24, and I could feel that I had plenty more where that came from. ‘Satisfied, Albert Noballs Stiggs?’ I said.

‘You probably rigged your indicator.’ But he was walking small as he turned away and the wirecar came rattling into the stop.

‘Don’t cheapmouth me,’ I said, ‘I’ll rig your fucking arse. Want to have a go?’

He made himself even smaller and crept into the wirecar.