Fremder (8 page)

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.

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.

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 still 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.’

‘You like mazurkas? The Chopin ones?’

‘Yes.’ I watched her walk as she moved ahead of me to push the lift button.

‘I’ve got the Ilse Bak recording of the complete mazurkas,’ she said. ‘Opus 67 in A Minor, Number 4 is my favourite.’ She hummed the beginning of it.

‘Mine too.’

She looked at me to see if I was lying, saw that I wasn’t, and smiled. Standing beside her in the lift I closed my eyes and smelled her hair and felt guilty.

The ready room was a cosy place with a dim red primordial light that made it easier to be naked there. I stripped so that I could be prepped by T/7 Mazur whose face and figure had already brought me to a good state of pupil-dilation. Deep-spacers are still mostly male, and the Sheela-Na-Gig and Top Exec (solidly female) clearly wanted us wide awake and tingling for Pythia sessions.

‘What was that look you gave me when I came to reception?’ she said. ‘Have we met somewhere before?’

‘You reminded me of someone.’

‘Someone nice?’

‘Very nice,’ I said, and abandoned myself to her ministrations.

‘You’re shaking,’ she said as she smeared me all over with electrolytic cream.

‘Don’t take any notice of it – it’s just something I do between flicker jumps.’ She was very thorough and although I was feeling more and more nervous about the Pythia session it was evident that my body was getting interested.

‘See,’ she said with a big smile, ‘you’re feeling better already.’ She put her entry card into the slot, an aperture irised open, and we went through it into what Corporation called the Omphalos and deep-spacers referred to as the Wank Parlour. It was a warm and humid place with a very delicate essence-of-silk-knickers smell and it was shaped like the inside of an egg with no visible high-tech male gimmickry. Somewhere in the building there had to be a door marked RED CLEARANCE ONLY and behind that door there were undoubtedly speakers and screens and banks of gauges and recorders and panels of winking lights monitored by Physio/Psycho, by Psychogen and of course by Thinksec but in the Omphalos there were only that faint erotic fragrance and the sensor cradle and the millions of pixels lining the walls of the ovum and changing colour and pattern to the music Pythia made while waiting for the session to begin.

The thing that always hit me straightaway was her presence -there was definitely someone there. The Corporation brochure said that Pythia was a Darwinian intelligence of 23.7 billion photoneurons that had come on line in 2034 to cope with the flood of data arising from flicker drive. She was modestly classified as a Data Evaluator (Autonomous Response) but nobody called her DEAR. According to the brochure: ‘As deep-spacers told her of the psychological stresses of their work she became by degrees their confidante and counsellor, her function expanding as her capabilities increased.’ That’s as far as the brochure went but Pythia went much farther. She was generally
acknowledged to be a little crazy, but as most deep-spacers were a little crazy themselves they found her easy to talk to.

Pythia’s sensor cradle was a flexotronic body shell in two halves, one for the front and one for the back of the subject. It waited at a comfortable reclining angle like a waffle iron with its lid open; when I lay down it tilted to the horizontal. The shell was cast from a sculpture by Rajeswari Biswas and the shape was that of a voluptuous female along the lines of those in the Ajanta Caves except that it had no face, only the back of the head which acted as a headrest. The legs were well apart and the knees bent; the arms were flung back above the head.