Fremder (3 page)

Even when she was young there was nothing charming about her face: she had a long jaw, a heavy mouth, a big nose. And large eyes that make you ask, ‘What, Helen? What is it you want?’ But there’s a photo of her on a beach on the island of Cephalonia in the summer of 2015 when she was seventeen: a tall girl, golden-brown. Wearing nothing but her nakedness and a bit of white cloth and string covering her sex. Her body’s half-turned
away from the camera and she’s looking back over her shoulder. Long dark hair blowing in the wind as she holds a beach ball high over her head. Long torso, small breasts, round bottom, a dancer’s legs. Like an
art nouveau
figure holding up a lamp. And almost a smile on her face.

She had little use for contemporary artists of any kind: she liked Bach and Chopin and Thelonious Monk and she played the saxophone. She liked The Old Testament and Rilke, Caspar David Friedrich and Odilon Redon, the sound of rain and the small hours of the night. It’s raining now. Almost three in the morning. Down in the street below the barrier screen Prongs and Arseholes are fighting by the light of torches as I listen to Gislebertin’s
Dédales
, performed by the composer on the organ of the church of St Lazarus at Autun. The volume is turned down so low that I’m not sure if I’m hearing it or just thinking it.

Here and gone, the music; the mind shielding it from the winds of forgetting, holding what is partly now and partly remembered. Here and gone the whisper of the
vox humana
in the stones of darkness. On earth and out beyond the Hawking Threshold yesterdays and everydays in the morning mirror, the red glimmer of the Dog Nebula, the unremembrance of flicker dreams, a tawny owl flying low over the heather in the Grampians, great sea-shapen rocks at Portknockie, and the rattle of pebbles in the suck of the tidewash …

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

I’ve got photographs of my mother with her brother. He was like Franz Kafka, all eyes and ears. Looked as if a blackness inside him was trying to join up with a blackness outside.
Here’s one of his notebook entries written shortly before he died:

18.2.22

In the beginning was The Black. Sing it. Feel it. Hold it. Only The Black. O the too-muchness of The Black. In the beginning was the forever of The Black and it went on for ever. Then! After for ever! In The Black was The Rage growing growing growing. AAAAIIIIYEEEEEE! How it wanted how it waited. Yes, TO BECOME! So it NNNNNNGGHHH YNNNGGGHH AAAAAAAAA. Became. Now it is. Now it is Itself. The Rage. Sing it. Feel it. Rock in the cradle of it. NNNNNNNNNNNNNNN NNNNNNNYAHHHH. The Rage. It is now. It is beyond for ever. In it is every thing.

I too feel The Black and The Rage in everything; maybe it’s a family trait. I’ve always felt them, even long ago with Judith when we saw the owl. I feel The Black and The Rage when I’m alone and perhaps even more when I’m not.

Thinking about Helen and Isodor: I see them in the darkened laboratory at the top of that big old Victorian house in Oldtown West 71.1 can smell formalin and furniture polish, old upholstery and carpets. And that other smell: of a house where the parents have died. Bookshelves everywhere, busts and paintings, framed photographs of Planck, Heisenberg, Einstein, Hawking, Rilke, and Thelonious Monk. Also dead and Gorn aunts and uncles: if they weren’t scientists or mathematicians they played the violin.

I’ve never actually seen that room but it’s very vivid in my imagination, always with rain streaming down the windows. Isodor is in his wheelchair; he wasn’t born crippled: he and
Helen made the mistake of looking Jewish when some Shorties and Clowns caught them at street level one night. What they did to her doesn’t show. He was sixteen and she was twenty-one when it happened (I sometimes wonder why they were down at street level when they both had keys to the Class A walkway. Reality envelopes interest me). His head is shaved and he’s got a perspex window in the top of his skull. The Shorties and their friends didn’t do that – this is research. Under the perspex his brain looks like a strange and ancient coral. Wires from it pass through the perspex to a console where Helen moves a slider and watches her gauges. It’s the middle of the night; the curtains are drawn, the room is dark; their faces, dimly lit by the console, gleam with a religious fervour. I can hear the rain.

Here’s part of the transcript for 16 February 2022:

LIMBIC SYSTEM – SESSION 318

(03:40. RAIN, MUSIC:
THE ART OF FUGUE
)
H
: Amygdala, site 26, right anterior: .5 sec, 80 Hz.
I
: (CHILDISH VOICE) Oh, oh.
H
: What’s the matter?
I
: The bed’s all wet. (CRYING) I’m sorry, Mummy, I’ll try very hard not to do it again. Sorry, sorry, sorry, Mummy. Not do it again, no.
H
: Was it the bad dream again, Izzy?
I
: No, it was a nice one: I was mountains, I was valleys, I was the rain.
H
: Did you like being the rain?
I
: Yes.
H
: Why did you like being the rain?
I
: The rain doesn’t know anything, the rain doesn’t have dreams.
H
: Amygdala, site 27, right anterior: .5 sec, 80 Hz.
I
: (YOUNG VOICE BUT OLDER THAN SITE 26) Oh yes, in the colours of the numbers, in the deep greens of the thousands
and the purples of the tens. Where the millions and the mollions and the riffling of the wherewhen and the why-when, yes, my way is always and the purpling of the tens returning.
H
: Tell me about your way.
I
: Always in the wherewhen of returning and the purpling of the tens, yes.
H
: How many tens?
I
: As the riffling, where it happens.
H
: Where what happens, Izzy?
I
: (NO ANSWER)
H
: Amygdala, site 28, left posterior: .5 sec, 100 Hz.
I
: (WHIMPERING, FOLLOWED BY VERY GUTTURAL SPEECH IN A LOW AND UNFAMILIAR VOICE) NO. Not this. Please don’t, I don’t want this.
H
: Don’t want what?
I
: The music is letting it in, the music is opening the door.
H
: Opening the door to what?
I
: It’s too much. No more much, please, no more.
H
: Should I close the door?
I
: (BRACING HIS ARMS TO LIFT HIMSELF HALF OUT OF WHEELCHAIR) Nnnyhh. I can smell it.
H
: Smell what?
I
: The purple-blue, very strong, very luminous and intense.
H
: What does it smell like?
I
: Like itself, like the purple-blueness of itself. Like a great beast, ancient and forgotten. Yes, this. Let it come to me.
H
: Just a moment ago you said you didn’t want it.
I
: I was wrong, I want it. Get out of the way.
H
: What is this ‘it’? Who’s in the way?
I
: Only the brain stands between us and it.

That’s where Session Transcript 318 comes to an end and that’s as far as the transcripts go. In just a little less than two
months Izzy was gone. I was reasonably sure that the ‘it’ that Izzy referred to was what I’d been trying to get in touch with ever since the day I broke Albert Stiggs’s nose but I still hadn’t learned how to get my brain out of the way.

Here’s the rest of ‘A Note on Flicker Drive’. It’s all right as far as it goes but it doesn’t tell you what it’s like to flicker: you hit the switch that disappears you and if everything goes all right you reappear somewhere else. In between you’re being transmitted as M-waves, called Ems by those of us in the trade. An apt word, that: back in the days of movable type an em was a thin bit of brass stuck between letters or words to space them out. The deep-space Em derives from Maximum Probability, which sounded a little dicey and was therefore shortened to M to make it less worrying. And there are one or two things to worry about if you’re the worrying type: suppose they send you out on a frequency that’s already occupied – think what can happen. And it
has
happened although Corporation won’t admit it. Never mind. Back to the
Corporation Yearbook
; the sooner we get through this the sooner we can move on to other things:

Helen Gorn then calculated the scaling fractal of the electrical output of the amygdala and plotted the Schulz-Moreno curve that gave her the voltage necessary to boost the carrier-wave frequency and extend the alternating intervals of non-being to the maximum at which the zoetic current could be maintained, so creating the reserve that would make flicker drive possible. Exploiting the self-similarity of the being/non-being wave pattern, she scaled it down several thousandfold but kept its profile so that at the chrono-zoetic interface the condensed carrier-wave profile would be accepted as normal and months of time would pass as moments.

Following on from her parents’ pioneering work in molecular translation, Helen Gorn hypothesised that a non-being zoetic reserve could be sustained in the conversion of mass into energy: particles of matter into quantum-probability waves. It was at this point that she saw the possibility of what is now known as flicker drive. Gorn presented a proposal to the Sheela-Na-Gig in February 2021 and they voted unanimously to fund her project.

Using a radio-controlled oscillator implanted in her brother Isodor’s amygdala she was able to step up the frequencies of its output to achieve the reserve of non-being that she had theorised, but there still remained the problem of molecular translation and transmission.

Tragically, Helen Gorn died while the project was still in its early stages; Corporation colleague Irene Heale, however, took up the work, and through original thinking of rare brilliance, brought it to fruition. By 2024 she had developed the diapason scanner for boosting the frequencies of the molecules of every substance in and of the spacecraft synchronously with those of the human organism, and in 2030 built the first external variable mass/energy translator (EVMET) for the conversion and transmission of humans and their cargoes as M-waves to galaxies far beyond our own.

On 2 May 2032, after a number of successful transmissions with EVMETS, Heale presented the prototype onboard flicker drive at the Annual Corporation Conference, sending the spacecraft
Prospero
from Nova Central to the Circle of Copernicus and back with a chimpanzee aboard. Ship and crew flickered out of being at Nova Central and were seen on the monitor screens to flicker into being at the target point, having been transmitted and received almost instantaneously at points millions of megakilometres apart. Intergalactic travel, until then impossible within human lifespan, was an accomplished fact.

In 2033 Irene Heale was honoured with the Max Planck Prize for Megaphysics. Since then she has remained preeminent in her field and continues to initiate and carry out projects characteristically daring in conception and elegant in execution.

With the help of a hacker acquaintance I did some research on the
Prospero
mission. The chimp they sent to the Circle of Copernicus was called, you guessed it, Caliban. This Caliban was famous for his intelligence and had been taught to communicate with humans by means of coloured push-buttons with symbols. For
eat, consume, take in, absorb
, or
banana
, for example, there was a button with a yellow banana and so on. His only message after he was reconstituted at the Circle of Copernicus was: ‘I have taken in much too much nothing.’ Or, if you like: ‘I banana many, many not something.’ When questioned on his return to Nova Central he pushed the button with a two-finger symbol, strangled his keeper, and was put down.

Back to ‘A Note on Flicker Drive’:

Now in 2053 Corporation ships flicker out from Nova Central, from Daedopolis, and from Hubble Straits to the planets of seven galaxies; in them go our deep-spacers whose daring is a bright flame in the darkness all around us, on their shoulders the Deep Space Command emblem with our motto: ‘
SEMPER LONGIUS
’, ‘ALWAYS FARTHER’.

*

Puts a lump in your throat, doesn’t it. Those of us who made a living being sent here and there as maximum-probability (but not dead-certainty) waves sometimes wondered what sort of effect flicker drive might have on us. Potency and fertility were major concerns but those fears proved groundless. Cynics like
me, pondering the high pay and the easy life, wondered sometimes if there might not be some kind of a catch to the whole thing and I was not terribly surprised one evening towards the end of October 2052 when, as I sat in
The Black Hole
in London Central refreshing my solitude with Glenfiddich, a colleague stuck a copy of
Nature
under my nose and pointed to a little item headed
Tempus Fugit
:

Drs Melissa Chundera and Ernestine Morrison of the Daedalus Institute have published the results of a five-year study of deep-space personnel travelling on flicker drive. Their controversial report establishes a definite connection between flicker travel and accelerated cellular and neuronal decay; they estimate that a half-second Earth-Elapsed-Time flicker jump to the Second Galaxy might consume as much as two months of life expectancy. A second study now under way is expected to show a comparable effect on metals and other substances.

As the
Financial Timesfax
reported a plunge in the value of deep-space shares, Corporation Top Exec have, not surprisingly, challenged the Chundera-Morrison life-expectancy findings, claiming that coincidental data have been transmuted by statistical alchemy into apparent cause and effect. As to the deterioration of metal and other substances, they say that constant monitoring and safety checks have shown this to be no greater than in conventional spacecraft.

The colleague who brought this to my attention had done twelve more flicker jumps than I had so we both had a few more drinks and told each other that Drs Chundera and Morrison hadn’t taken into consideration the preservative effects of alcohol.

Some love too little, some too long,
   Some sell, and others buy;
Some do the deed with many tears,
   And some without a sigh: …