Fremder (22 page)

‘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 colours 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?’

‘You brought it on with your flabby little RSF: when you let it drop below ten you found yourself confronting two incompatible realities – the reality of
Clever Daughter
and its crew and the reality of your father’s face stretched out across the Fourth Galaxy. When you leant towards your father the
rest of the crew and the ship went bye-bye in the great green glassy face of the up, up, upping wave. Then crash: the wave breaks on the beach of here and now. No more
Clever Daughter
. Only a stupid son, drifting neither here nor there.’

That was my mother talking to me. At this moment that might well be the beginning of the end of my life I was looking for high tragedy but I seemed to have become the rear half of a Jewish pantomime horse.

‘What about the seven others?’ I said. ‘Why couldn’t they have held on to their reality and not disappeared?’

‘Shit,’ said Mum, ‘they probably hadn’t got any to hold on to – just doing their job like most job-doers. Reality is the responsibility of those who perceive it. Speaking of which I’ve tuned us to the Penzias-Wilton, Walton …’

‘Wilson, Penzias-Wilson.’

‘Yes, the sum, the same as you did last time. Now we’ll flicker and we’ll have a second chance to be a family, the three of us.’

As she spoke I could see in her mind the great green glassy face of the up, up, upping wave, not making a sound like water but riffling its possibilities as I leant forward into the dark, into the light, into the whateverness of whatever where my father’s face glimmered and shimmered and endlessly widened across the black sparkle of space. His mouth was open and he was speaking, speaking, speaking silence. What was he saying? I tried to read it but I couldn’t, tried so hard but I couldn’t. I think of that often now – how I travelled all those millions of light years, travelled (my mind tells me) from before there was time to that point in the black sparkle of the Fourth Galaxy where my father spoke words of silence to me and I didn’t know what he was saying.

‘He was thirteen when he asked if he could get into bed with me that night of the thunderstorm,’ said the brain of Helen Gorn. ‘Thirteen but he wasn’t like other thirteen-year-olds; he was afraid of so many things, afraid of different kinds of light or
the look of the sky; there were sounds and smells that frightened him, words he didn’t like the shape of – sometimes the white spaces between the letters scared him. He was like a bird with its heart beating very fast and it felt so good to comfort him and be comforted by him, so yes and long ago but that was before and now we’ll do the things that families do,’ said Mum the giant brain. ‘We’ll picnic in Hyde Park, we’ll nnvsnu, we’ll NNVSNUU AND RRNDU IN THE TSRUNGH, WE’LL NNNNNNNNNnnnnn …’

BE WITH ME, said my mind, and that’s when the brain of Helen Gorn must have hit the flicker switch because I felt myself go and then came that feeling of being grabbed by the brain and slung against a wall when I came out of flicker. There was nothing around me but the black sparkle of space as I thought: let it go, this world, any world – whatever wants to happen is all right. I leant towards the face of my father, leant towards that galaxy-wide silent-speaking mouth, wondering, wondering, letting myself (as through the rushing and the riffling there came walking on stilts of centuries the continuing subjects and answers of suns and moons, of stardrift and nebulae) be the music in which there flickered, partly now and partly remembered, that one glance of Caroline’s, that swift upward glance of fear and doubt.

Mama may have, Papa may have,
but God bless the child that’s got his own.

Billie Holiday and Arthur Herzog, ‘God Bless the Child’

So it seems I had just enough Reality-Sustain to do my suspended-animation trick again and once more Bill Charteris found me drifting towards Badr al-Budur. This time Caroline was aboard
Sun Ra
with him and I had intensive care immediately.

Maybe Helen and Izzy are together now wherever they are. Mum and Dad. Irene Heale has probably had enough mileage out of Helen Gorn’s brain and can rest on her laurels. What they’ll put in the Omphalos I can’t imagine but I’m sure they’ll think of something.

When I woke up in Intensive Care at Hubble Straits I said to my mind, Are you there? YES, it replied. Since then we’ve been finding a lot to talk about. The other day I said to it, Sometimes I feel, I don’t know,
sudden
.

GO ON, it said.

What I mean to say is, sometimes I feel as if I’ve just jumped here out of nowhere.

SO DO I, it said. Somehow I wasn’t surprised.

I’ve taken a year’s leave from Deep Space Command and I’m learning how to read music. Soon I’ll be starting piano lessons and when I’m sufficiently advanced I’ll begin the organ. By the time I get to where I can play
The Art of Fugue
I’ll probably
know what I want to do next – I can see my way much clearer now that the circles of emptiness are gone.

Sometimes in the small hours of the night while Caroline sleeps peacefully beside me I sit up in the dark, leaning forward and feeling the world and myself moving from the known to the unknown. I remember how it was when I was eight, how I was like Elijah waiting for the rain, waiting to be the full Elijah. Am I that now? Am I the whole Fremder Elijah Gorn? On the screen of my mind I see eyes of becoming, nodes of possibility expanding in concentric circles. Which brings me to another question: is this world (lacking as it does half a rat, one human head, one very large brain, a couple of spacecraft, and seven crew) the one I started out with?

Flick, flick – flick and fade, John,
on the planet where you are.

I am indebted to Dr Arthur Burgess who demonstrated the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction for me in his laboratory at Glasgow Caledonian University; to Richard T. Hoos, MD, of the Neurology Group, PC of Nashville, Tennessee, who promptly and generously answered my medical questions with late-night faxes; and to my son Ben, who read various drafts and gave useful comments.

R.H.

The author and publishers are grateful for permission to reproduce the following: ‘Songs and other Musical Pieces XXVIII’ (
here
) and ‘Have a Good Time’ (
here
) from
Collected Poems
by W. H. Auden;
starlet starlet on the screen, who will follow norma jean?
(
here
) and
mythical kings and iguanas
(
here
) by Dory Previn © MCA Music Ltd; ‘The Worms at Heaven’s Gate’ (p. i) by Wallace Stevens; ‘Upon Nothing’ (
here
) by the Earl of Rochester and ’Tom O’ Bedlam’s Song’ (
here
) from
The Atlantic Book of British Poetry
, ed. Dame Edith Sitwell, Atlantic Little Brown 1958; I Thought about You (
here
) by Jimmy Van Heusen & Johnny Mercer;
Just One of those Things
(
here
) by Cole Porter;
I Get Along without You Very Well
(
here
) by Hoagy Carmichael; ‘Dover Beach’ (
here
) by Matthew Arnold; ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ (
here
) by Oscar Wilde;
English Misericords
(
here
) by Marshall Laird, published by John Murray (Publishers) Ltd;
On the Good Ship Lollipop
(
here
), words and music by Sydney Clare & Richard A. Whiting © 1934 and 1962 by Movietone Music Corporation, New York, NY. All rights reserved. Used by permission; ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ (
here
) from
The Best of H. P. Lovecraft; Makin’ Whoopee
(
here
), music by Walter Donaldson and words by Gus Kahn © 1928, reproduced by permission of EMI Music Publishing Ltd/Keith Prowse Music Pub. Co. Ltd, London WC2H oEA; ‘The First Duino Elegy’ (pp. 45, 66, 80) by Rainer Maria Rilke;
Let’s Get Away from It All
(
here
) by Matt Dennis and Thomas Adair © MCA
Music Ltd;
They Call It Stormy Monday
(
here
) by T-Bone Walker;
Where or When
(
here
) by Lorenz Hart & Richard Rodgers;
Bye Bye Blackbird
(
here
), music by Ray Henderson and words by Mort Dixon © 1926, Remick Music Corp, USA. Reproduced by permission of Francis Day and Hunter Ltd, London WC2H oEA, and by kind permission of Redwood Music Ltd. UK administrator;
Paint It Black
(
here
) by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards © 1966 by Abkco Music Inc., New York, USA. Exclusive sub-publication rights for the World excluding USA and Canada controlled by Westminster Music Ltd, London SW10 OSZ. Used by permission. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. This copy authorized for sale outside the USA and Canada only;
The Duchess of Malfi
(
here
) by John Webster;
You Go to My Head
(
here
), music by J. Fred Coots and words by Haven Gillespie © 1938, Remick Music Corp, USA. Reproduced by permission of B. Feldman and Co. Ltd, London WC2H oEA;
My One and Only Love
(
here
), words and music by Robert Mellin & Guy Wood © 1952. Sherwin Music Inc./Warock Corp. USA. Reproduced by permission of EMI Music Publishing Ltd, London WC2H oEA;
Cheek to Cheek
(
here
) by Irving Berlin; ‘The Man who Jumped’ (pp. 85 – 6) from the
Oxford Nursery Book
, ed. Iona & Peter Opie; ‘East Coker’,
The Four Quartets
(
here
) by T. S. Eliot;
Quark, Strangeness and Charm
(pp. 91, 172) by Robert Calvert and Dave Brock © 1977 Rock Music Co. Ltd;
It’s Only a Paper Moon
(
here
) by Billy Rose, E. Y. Harburg and Harold Arlen; Psalm 137, The Holy Scriptures (pp. III), the Book of Isaiah (pp. 139,154,177), First Kings (pp. 152, 169) and the Song of Songs (pp. 159-60, 169) used by permission of the Jewish Publication Society;
Hamlet
(
here
) by William Shakespeare; First Kings (
here
);
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
(
here
), trans. Edward Fitzgerald;
Eliyahu
(
here
) by Mordechai Ben David; Book of Genesis (
here
); ‘The Anthropic Principle’,
Scientific American
(
here
);
Leibniz – An Introduction
(
here
) by C. D. Broad, Cambridge University Press, 1988;
The Goodbye Look
(
here
) by Donald Fagen;
Linger Awhile
(
here
) by Harry Owens & Vincent Rose; ‘You Are Old, Father William’,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
(
here
) by Lewis Carroll; ‘Ozymandias’ (
here
) by Percy Bysshe Shelley;
So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You
(
here
) by Woody Guthrie © 1950 Folkways Music Publishers Inc., New York, USA. Assigned to Kensington Music Ltd, Suite 2.07, Plaza 535 Kings Road, London SW10 oSZ. International Copyright Secured. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Essex Music Group. Unauthorised copying is illegal; ‘Jim’ (
here
) by Hilaire Belloc, by permission of Peters, Fraser and Dunlop;
God Bless the Child
(
here
) by Billie Holiday & Arthur Herzog Jr. © 1941 by Edward B. Marks Music Company, lyric reproduction by kind permission of Carlin Music Corporation, UK administrator.

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