Fremder (16 page)

Sixe let off what sounded like a little burst of steam: ‘Puh!’

‘What?’

‘You’re assuming that I don’t understand German.’

‘Do you?’

‘No. But if you already assume that, why don’t you simply say the sodding thing in English to begin with? Helen was always doing that – she’d say something in German or French and then translate it for me. Bloody show-off.’ He poured the last of the Glenfiddich into our glasses and looked at me defiantly.

‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Helen needed a full-time assistant, and when her new grant came through she got me assigned to her. I lived in her house until that night in September when I came home and found her gone.

‘Did I say that August was always a bad month for her? Well, it was. That August she was six months pregnant and that didn’t make it any easier. Three years before, the twenty-first of August 2019, was the night the Shorties and the Clowns raped
her and crippled Izzy. Seven of them: two twelve-year-olds and five of the others. The Clowns were the worst of it, she said -that she could be used like that by less-than-human things. She said to me, “In an infinite number of possible worlds there must have been one in which I had a gun and shot the lot of them. The quantum wave just happened to collapse in the wrong universe for me.”

‘“Helen,” I said to her, “you’ve got to put that behind you, it’s in the past.”

‘She said, “No, it isn’t, it’s happening right now and it keeps on happening, it doesn’t go away. They made an Auschwitz with their cocks and they made me live in it. ‘Jewish bitch,’ the Shorties kept calling me, ‘Jewish bitch,’ while they defiled me.” She went on about how it excited them to call her that while they did what they did to her, how in her mind they were still doing it; how her grandparents had their Auschwitz and she had hers that she lived in every day and every night. Then she said,’ “At eventide, Lo, terror! By morning it is no more.”’

‘I said, “What is no more, the terror?”

‘She said. “No, Lowell. This world is no more, not for me -I’ll find another one.”’ He spat on the ground. ‘Fucking Richard Soames.’

‘Who’s Richard Soames?’

‘He’s the one she wanted to go to the May Ball with when she was eighteen.’

‘Did she?’

‘No, she didn’t. Richard Soames had his pick of the prettiest daughters of the Twenty CC

‘What’s the Twenty CC?’

‘Families who had company cars twenty years or more before Gridlock.’

‘And you think if Richard Soames had taken her to the May Ball it would have made a big difference in her life?’

‘Yes, I do.’ He shook his head as if baffled by my obtuseness.

‘She hadn’t much luck with men, had she?’

‘She had me, whatever kind of luck that was, from the time we met until the end. Best part of my life. What’ve I got now? Shit. Where was I?’

‘You were saying she said she’d find another world.’

‘Right: another world. She said to me, “You think I can’t do it?”

‘I said, “I don’t know.”

‘She said, “I can do it. It takes a Jew to do it, to find the magic door, the quantum exit. Einstein, Oppenheimer, Teller – all Jews.” Then she told me how back in the sixteenth century in Prague this rabbi saved the Jews in the ghetto when the Gentiles were after them. He’d studied the Cabbala and that sort of thing and he made a big figure out of clay, what they called a
golem
. Then he wrote the name of God on its forehead and he whispered in its ear and the
golem
went out and sorted out the Gentiles. When things quieted down again the rabbi took the golem up to the attic of the synagogue and he told it to lie down and go to sleep. Then he wiped the name off its forehead. Then, according to Helen, the golem stayed there in the attic of the synagogue all covered with dust and cobwebs and batshit until the Nazis killed six million Jews, at which time Rabbis Einstein, Oppenheimer, and Teller plus one or two honorary rabbis wrote the name of God in a new way on the golem’s forehead and it woke up much bigger than before and got busy again. I said to her, “Helen, that golem killed Japanese. What did the Japanese ever do to the Jews?”

‘“They were allies of Germany, weren’t they,” she said. “Anyhow, retribution doesn’t necessarily work in parallel – sometimes it’s just an exchange of volumes. Millions of one kind are slaughtered in one place so millions of another kind get slaughtered in another place; evil action gets passed along the same as good. Shit happens, that’s the first law of Nature, and it happens to Jews again and again. Don’t talk to me about the
Armenians and the Kurds and the native Americans – it isn’t the same thing for them. Nobody keeps circulating
The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Kurdistan
or stories about the Armenians and the native Americans ritually sacrificing Christian babies.”

‘She said this world had become a place in which the unspeakable was allowed to happen while everybody looked the other way. She said that her world wasn’t the same as mine: I lived in a world in which it had happened to
them
and she lived in a world in which it had happened to
us
.

‘There wasn’t much I could say when she got like that. I said to her, “Still, we’ve got each other.” She said yes but not as if it mattered a whole lot. She was never a very happy woman and August was always a bad month for her. You know about her suicide attempt?’

‘Yes, that was in the newsfax at the time – I’ve seen it at the library.’

‘I oughtn’t to have left her alone but she was hell to live with around then and sometimes I just had to get out of the house for a while. On the night of the twentieth I came back from a walk and found her drowning in her own vomit; she’d swallowed most of a bottle of Nepenthol and half a bottle of gin. Her note said: “MAYBE NO WORLD IS BEST.”’

‘She was a lot of laughs, my mum. It was wonderful doing my pre-natal time with her.’

‘I turned her over and got her to heave up most of it and when the paramedics arrived they pumped out her stomach right away so we got her through that one alive but of course she succeeded the next time.

‘She spent a couple of days at the SNG Rest and Reassessment Centre and had a little therapy and some tranquillisers and when she came home she was the cheerfullest I’d ever seen her. So we got back to work.

‘Our cover project was sensory remotes and we always had experimental prototypes and a lot of paper for the Review
Board to look at. That June the Sheela-Na-Gig had appointed a tough Top Exec named Irene Heale Head of Project Review.’

‘I just met her today, she’s head of R & D now.’

‘That’s right – sweet-looking lady, isn’t she. “Iron” Heale, everybody called her back then. She and Helen had been at Elite Poly together and they’d both been working on brain mapping. Helen was Number One in her year; Heale was Number Two and it bothered her a lot. She wanted to team up with Helen on a joint project but Helen preferred to work alone and she won the Rousseau prize that year. Heale claimed that Helen had stolen some of her research and Helen denied it. There was a tribunal and the adjudicators cleared Helen.

‘Heale never forgave her for winning that prize. As soon as she was appointed Head of Project Review she went through Helen’s file, saw some references to Elijah, got curious, and came over to investigate. Heale got a lot of pleasure out of that -you could almost see her flicking her boot with a riding crop while she interrogated Helen.

‘Helen told her those Elijah ideas had never gone anywhere and Heale told her to try again and to keep in touch. Helen said she’d see what she could do. “Jewish brains they can always use,” she said to me later. “One of these days they’ll find a way to separate the Jew brains from the Jew bodies and that’ll be The Final Solution.”

‘“What will they do with the brains?” I said.

‘“They’ll transplant them into the top goyim,” she said, “which of course will make them think Jewish. So maybe the whole thing’s a Jewish plot.”’ Sixe shook his head.

‘From then on,’ he continued, ‘we worked on Elijah day and night. But we kept double books – the blackboards and diagrams anybody would see on a surprise visit weren’t the real thing. The idea was to make the jump before they knew where we were with it.’

‘The two of you were going to do it.’

‘That’s right; she couldn’t find anyone better so I was invited.’

‘But you talk about making the jump the way bank robbers in films talk about getting away to Rio. Were you expecting a completely different world where all of your troubles would be left behind or what?’

‘It’s hard to tell you how it was without sounding stupid and maybe we
were
stupid. And maybe your mother was crazy but it was a world-class craziness if you know what I mean – she could have told me the moon was made of green cheese and I’d have believed her because somehow she’d have made it seem believable. And what happens when you get caught up in an idea like that – it expands to take in everything, it becomes the answer to all your problems even though you know better.’

‘How close were you to doing it?’

‘Pretty close. The preliminary calculations were easy enough. The hard part came after we got the WPR figures from Lossiter. It took quite a long time and a lot of models to work out the phase-scaling fractal and sync it up: if Being is B and Non-Phase is NP, then all we had to do was make B/NP jump WPR which isn’t any harder than jumping over yourself but as far as we knew it hadn’t ever been done and it took us a while to figure it out. We were going to use oscillator implants similar to the ones for flicker drive. The difficulty was in scaling the input for the phase jump and of course there was the matter of the implants. Helen had authority to call in medical personnel but once she used it they’d be on to us. We were under surveillance but through the old family network she was able to find a neurosurgeon who said she’d do it whenever we had the oscillators ready.’

‘Let me get this straight – you were going to use the oscillators with a VMET?’

‘That’s right, but instead of transmitting ourselves to a distant
point we were going to collapse our wave function into another world.’

‘
Your
wave function? Wasn’t all the rest of the world included in that same wave function?’

‘That’s what I said to Helen and she said the rest of the world would have to take its chance. She used to sit there at her computer working up equations and diagrams and singing under her breath while she played Bach’s
Art of Fugue
over and over on the audio beam. The words she sang were always the same: “I will tell you what I will do …” Just those words over and over again to that Bach tune that kept repeating itself. It was spooky.’

‘I can’t place the words.’

‘Isaiah, Chapter Five, Verse Five:

And now come, I will tell you
What I will do with my vineyard:
I will take away the hedge thereof,
And it shall be eaten up;
I will break down the fence thereof,
And it shall be trodden down;…

‘Verse Six begins:

And I will lay it waste …’

‘That must have been a little worrying.’

‘It was, and when she wasn’t doing her
Art of Fugue
thing she’d be playing a recording of Mendelsohn’s
Elijah
which isn’t exactly a knees-up either. She said to me, “Listen to how Elijah out of nowhere jumps in and says how it’s going to be.” The recording was in German and she translated the opening words for me, First Kings, Seventeen, One:

As truly as the Lord, the God of Israel, lives,
before whom I stand, there shall these years
neither dew nor rain come unless I say so.

‘I said to her, “What is it with you and this no-rain business? Has there been a long drought in your life lately?”

‘She ignored that. Sometimes she talked about sex in a very common way and other times she acted as if she had nothing between her legs but four thousand years of history. She said, “You’ll notice that he says ‘before whom
I
stand’. He’s letting Ahab know straightaway where
he
stands with his Baal rubbish. Ahab is a Jew too and he knows Elijah has him by the balls, he knows he’s in big trouble.’

‘I said, “The chorus sound like Gentiles.”

‘She said, “Choruses always sound like Gentiles; what I’m saying is that the spirit of Elijah possessed the spirit of Mendelssohn when he was putting down the notes on paper. And it’s possessing me as I do my equations.’

‘I said, “OK, any possessor of yours is a possessor of mine.”

‘“Not unless you get circumcised,” she said. She was high on Elijah. I think one of the reasons she liked me was that I was hairy like him.

‘By the middle of September 2022 we had a computer model that worked and Helen wanted to wire the oscillators and get them implanted and have a go. I wanted to run the model against a list of “What if?” parameters which would have taken a few more days to evaluate. She said why not a test run. With what? I wanted to know. She said, “I don’t really care a rat’s arse, so why not a rat?”

‘I still wasn’t altogether happy with the numbers and I didn’t feel too comfortable with the whole thing. I said, “Let’s wait a little – at least until we’ve run all the what ifs. Even if we do it with a flea we could change the whole universe.”

‘“Big deal,” she said. “Who’s going to notice a rat-sized change?”’

‘I said, “How can we know it’ll only be a rat-sized change? Mightn’t the rat take everything else with it?” But she was the one who made the decisions, I was only a kind of kept man, never her equal. So we did it with a rat.’

‘
Do
you think she was crazy? Really crazy, I mean.’

‘What does crazy mean? Crazy is anything different from what the majority think isn’t crazy. Your mother was never with the majority.

‘We always had lab rats around and we had a small VMET we used for parcels. I limited the field to the rat’s cage and checked the shielding to make sure the rest of the room was safe from flare. I did an EEG to get the frequency of the rat’s carrier wave, then I scaled down the phase input figures to that output and printed up an oscillator.

‘It was a male rat, a Delta Three laboratory strain. I anaesthetised him and shaved his head. Helen drilled a hole in his skull and implanted the oscillator which was smaller than the head of a pin. While she was doing that I ran the phase input figures again to be sure they checked out. They did. The first part of the procedure was the same as flicker drive: switching on the VMET would activate the oscillator and phase the rat to M-waves. Then a second signal from a hand transmitter would jump the rat to a parallel phase and presumably another world.