Fremder (6 page)

‘You want to be in the terror with me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know.’ Her face was close to mine, her eyes seemed full of fear and doubt, her pupils wide and dark and ringed with green, eyes of becoming, and all around us a blackness that tilted and beckoned with eyes of becoming, becoming …

‘Careful!’ she said, and caught me as I almost fell out of my chair. Then we were holding on to each other and kissing. ‘Oh yes,’ she murmured, ‘whisper me, whisper me, whisper me!’ I was shaking all over as we let go long enough to clear the books and papers off the couch while the dead whooped and hollered and my head sang hoarsely:

ANOTHER BRIDE, ANOTHER JUNE,
ANOTHER SUNNY HONEYMOON,
ANOTHER SEASON, ANOTHER REASON
FOR MAKIN’ WHOOPEE.

Then the singing faded into black sky, thunder, lightning, and rain. And I, Elijah, was running, running ahead of the chariot, being Elijah, being my whole self.

*

‘How do you feel now?’ said Caroline while I was getting my breath back.

‘Less alone.’ There were still circles of emptiness in my vision. ‘Did you get into the terror with me?’

‘Wherever I was, it felt good.’ She hugged me.

‘Maybe we could go somewhere dark and quiet and have a drink?’

‘We’re still on Corporation time.’ She stood up, retrieved her underwear, picked her overall off the floor, zipped herself up, and re-did her Pysche knot.

‘Dr Lovecraft, tell me the truth – do you do this with every Level 4 subject?’

‘Did it feel that way to you?’

‘No.’

‘Then don’t ask stupid questions. You got into my knickers because desperation turns me on and you’re the most desperate man I’ve met in a long time.’

‘You haven’t got anyone now? No partner?’

‘No.’

‘How old are you?’

‘Twenty-eight.’

‘How can it be that a woman like you hasn’t got anybody?’

‘What can I tell you? Lot of frogs out there. Let’s look at the Fremder Gorn video.’ She ejected the brain-scan disc and there was F. Gorn drifting through space as seen by
Sun Ra
’s nose camera. As we watched me tumbling over and over in frozen stillness she advanced the audio beam to its next track and
The Art of Fugue
, performed by Marie-Claire Alain, came stalking into the room on its centuries-high legs. It was as if Bach had with spells and numbers called forth some cosmic monster that would eat me up, eat up the world with its implacable and insatiable logic. And yet the terror in that music was what I’d held on to when
Clever Daughter
disappeared from around me.

‘“Be the music” is what you said on November 7,’ said Caroline’s voice from far away.

‘I’m trying to remember.’ But all that came to me was Rilke’s line ‘Every angel is terrible’. In German it sounds more so: ‘
Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich
’.

‘“Thou?”’ said Caroline.

‘Are you getting familiar?’

‘I’m looking at the 7 November transcript. After “Be the music” you said, “Thou.” Or maybe it was “Thowl”. Thowl, thowl-the owl?’

‘Shit.’

‘Owlshit?’

‘Could we take a break?’

She looked at her watch. ‘OK,’ she said, and began to clear the books and papers off the couch again.

‘Are you trying to kill me or cure me?’ I said as she unzipped her overall.

She gave me a quick leer over her shoulder. ‘A change is as good as a rest.’

*

Although I still think of huge green breakers when I remember that time it turned out that Caroline wasn’t from California but from Pennsylvania and she’d never done any surfing. She’d played lacrosse at college, though; I’d like to have seen that.

After the break we went to the Cyberspace Lab for a reality-envelope run in which the
Clever Daughter/Sun Ra
episode was simulated in real time with a model developed from the
Clever Daughter
automatic transmission, the
Sun Ra
disc and log, and Bill Charteris’s recall. The whole thing was then analysed with ten-permutation parameters but none of it helped me to remember anything.

Then a hypno session with Caroline. Here’s the transcript:

L
: Can you hear me?

G
: Yes.

L
: You’re aboard
Clever Daughter
and it’s the 4th of November.

G
: Happy Birthday, Frem.

L
: Right, Happy Birthday, Frem. Now it’s 04:06.

G
: OK for flicker on 47.7 Ems. Hit the switch, Plessik. Bye bye Hubble.

L
: Bye bye Hubble. What now?

G
: What?

L
: What’s happening?

G
: Oh no. Hold on.

L
: Hold on to what?

G
: No, no, no.

L
: What are you seeing?

G
: Not seeing.

L
: What then? Hearing?

G
: (VIBRATES TONGUE AGAINST ROOF OF MOUTH WHILE EXPELLING BREATH) Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

L
: What’s that? Did you hear a sound like that?

G
: No.

L
: What then?

G
: Riffling.

L
: What? What riffling?

G
: Like a great big pack of cards.

L
: This is something you heard?

G
: No.

L
: It was in your mind?

G
: Piss off, Dr Lovecraft.

Caroline gave me that to read after the session. When I finished I put it back on her desk so that it was lying at an angle in front of her. She lined it up parallel to the edge of the desk. ‘Why did you tell me to piss off?’ she said.

‘I don’t know – I suppose I don’t like having too many people inside my head.’

‘OK, I can understand that; I know it’s an intrusion but we need answers. Do you remember telling me about the riffling?’

‘No.’

She put the transcript in the file. ‘Can you tell me anything else at all?’

‘No.’

‘Straightsies?’

‘Straightsies.’

‘You’re not bleeping for a Section 10, are you?’ Section 10 is
Contract annulled without censure due to job-related illness or injury; full pay and compensation as stipulated in Clause 86.

‘All I’m bleeping for is a little peace and quiet.’

‘You won’t find it in this world, Frem.’

That was where the first day of the Level 4 ended. When somebody in a white jacket came to take me to my quarters I found various colours in my head for which there were no words. I wanted to demonstrate these colours to the somebody in the white jacket but he seemed to want me to keep still so I had to knock him down, after which he got up and knocked me down and sat on me while somebody else zapped me with a large shot of Be-a-Good-Chap and I woke up the next morning feeling very well rested.

Let’s take a kayak to Quincey or Nyack,
Let’s get away from it all.

Matt Dennis and Thomas Adair, ‘Let’s Get Away from It All’

‘You ever been to Badru?’ said Caroline next morning.

‘It’s one of my favourite places.’

‘Feel like going there today?’

‘What for?’

‘I don’t know. It’s nothing official – I just want to see what it feels like, the two of us on Badru. We’ll drink Krasnaya Kola and eat Galaktik Miks with Spudnik Fry and spend the night in a Q-BO SLEEP. How’s that grab you?’

‘Hard. But is this a you-and-me personal thing or is it a new approach to the Level 4?’

‘Look, Frem – the you that’s part of the you-and-me personal thing is the same you that’s nilsponding the Level 4. So I don’t really know how much of it is for me and how much is for Corporation. Is that OK?’

‘OK, let’s do Badru.’

There was a 10:00 jet so we caught it. The other passengers were mostly lingerie salesman from a company called Flauntees Ltd, all of them wearing badges with their first names on them and all of them bound for Yamomoto Pleasure Station 7 for their annual sales conference. Several of them looked at Caroline with eyes that were obviously undressing her and
putting her into something more comfortable but they were quiet about it.

‘Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,’ said a husky female voice after we buckled ourselves in. ‘Welcome aboard the
Pandora
, your Interjet shuttle service to Badr al-Budur. I’m Captain Kurtz and I’ve got a green board in front of me so as soon as we get the word from Traffic Control we’ll be off. Our jump time to Badru is eight minutes, give or take the odd half-hour depending on the El Niños. Today’s forecast is fifteen per cent so it shouldn’t be too bad. A final reminder: if you haven’t already checked all electronic equipment, please buzz a cabin attendant and do it now.’ There was a pause while three or four laptops were collected, then the clear for blastoff sounded. ‘Cabin attendants, please buckle up,’ said the captain, and there was a bone-rattling roar as we blasted off. Once in our flight path we lurched, wobbled, shook, rattled, and rolled as we hit the El Niños and
Pandora
and all of us grew alternately longer, shorter, and otherwise, bending and twisting with the varying force fields. Strange colours surged around the ship and faded into blackness on the seatback monitors. Some of the Flauntees Ltd first-names began to chant, ‘Tees-Flaun, Tees-Flaun,’ then became quiet as sick bags were brought into play and the cabin staff were kept on the hop with urgent calls for aid of one kind or another. Eventually the spaceport at Badru appeared in the seatback monitors, the captain said, ‘Layzen gemmen, than kyoufer flynnerjet, hopesee yougen. Hava plenstop Badru,’ and we were down after an hour and sixteen minutes of jump.

Everybody staggered off
Pandora
into the dim blue noctolux and many-coloured neon of the spaceport. The Flauntees Ltd crowd dispersed into the gift shop, the bar, and MIKHAIL’S QWIKSNAK; Caroline and I wobbled to a bench and sat down as the spaceport filled up with emptiness and that imbricated silence made up of the low roar of the air-cycling system, the hum of the robot sweepers, the sizzle of the noctolux lamps,
and the sound of distant footsteps. The smell of the spaceport at Badru, that blend of LavaKleen, floor wax, and frying, is the smell of all-alone and faraway that meets the traveller everywhere in the world of nowheres. The big board showed that it was 19:23 in Tokyo, 11:23 in Paris, 06:23 in New York. Departures on offer were:

YAM PLEAS STATN 7 INTGAL JMP 14 DEP 12:15 NOT READY

NEWCOMP CONF CTR TRNSCT JMP 03 DEP 13:40 NOT READY

Caroline took my hand and laced her fingers into mine. ‘Jesus,’ she said, ‘dawmsfergahn hamuch s’plasis wah’iss.’

‘Saygen,’ I said. ‘Berrwaylill.’

We waited a little and tried again. ‘Jesus,’ said Caroline, ‘I’d almost forgotten how much this place is what it is.’

‘I hadn’t.’ I was seeing the figure in the blue coverall tumbling over and over in the icy cold, Badr al-Budur like a pale moon in the distance.

‘This is the real thing,’ said Caroline. ‘It’s the deepest, the profoundest. It’s the big bazonga, it’s really existential.’

‘Yes,’ I said, watching a distant sweeper with a faulty program banging again and again into the Information kiosk, ‘just don’t tell me it’s a metaphor, OK?’

‘
Sorry
! Shall we go for a Galaktik Mik?’

‘Right. That’s what I need – that Quasi-Protein fix.’ Followed by our echoing footsteps we made our way to MIKHAIL’S QWIKSNAK where the smell of frying embraced us greasily and the coloured neon hung like exotic nocturnal fruit.

‘Have a good hello,’ burbled the charming female robot at the entrance to the cafeteria. ‘Welcome day Qwiksnak to Mikhail’s hello, have a, have a, have a … Come back and see us hello.’

‘You too,’ we said. We slid our trays along the rails under red, orange, yellow, purple, and blue neon, loaded up with Galaktik
Miks, Spudnik Fry, and Krasnaya Kolas, and found ourselves a table by the windows. In the distance Qamar al-Zaman the rubbish planet hung like a rotting grapefruit while all around us the Flauntees reps chewed and swallowed and called each other Kevin and Tony and Fred in loud voices.

‘This is one of your special places, is it?’ ‘I said to Caroline. ‘One of your reference points?’

She nodded. ‘This is a paradigm of what-it-is,’ she said. ‘It’s a place where you eat non-food and wait for a jump to somewhere else that’s not ready.’

‘Only we’re not waiting for a jump to somewhere else.’

‘No, we’re not going to somewhere else, you and I.’

‘We could, though, if we wanted to.’

‘Pleasure Station Seven? Would you like to see me in Flauntees with suspenders and net stockings?’

‘I like to see you any way at all, Caroline.’

‘Let’s walk – I’ve had as much Quasi as I can handle.’

‘Have a good hello,’ said the robot hostess as we left. We went to the observation bubble, not a very big one. From there we had a good view of the Anunnaki, Ereshkigal, and Inanna’s Girdle as well as Qamar al-Zaman. ‘Everything has a name put to it,’ said Caroline, ‘but the name has nothing to do with the reality. The name Caroline is derived from Charles which means manly. Do you think I’m manly?’

‘In a very womanly way. What’s the matter, Caroline? What’s bothering you?’

‘Nothing in particular; I just wanted to come here because sometimes I like to be in a place where what’s outside me isn’t too different from what’s inside me.’

‘I guess that’s why I like it. But you don’t look as if desolation is your thing.’

‘Maybe that’s my problem – I look like a lot of laughs but I’m not. Let’s go to the mini-cine and watch something old in black-and-white –
Brief Encounter
maybe.’

We went to the mini-cine near the Q-BO SLEEP, found an empty two-seater that reeked of beer and semen, and punched up
Brief Encounter
.

‘Oh God,’ said Caroline as the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto came in over the credits, ‘look! The very first thing you see is a train hurtling away from you in great clouds of steam, then a train coming towards you, then Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson sitting at a table in the refreshment room at Milford Junction and that awful woman chattering so they can’t even have a proper goodbye. Their story begins with the ending of it. That’s
so
true, it’s so much the way life is.’ She began to sniffle, brought a box of tissues out of her shoulder bag, and settled back to enjoy the film. When Celia Johnson, trapped in a compartment with the dreadful Dolly, said to herself, ‘Nothing lasts, really – neither happiness nor despair. Not even life lasts very long,’ Caroline wept openly. ‘Oh shit,’ she said, ‘that gets me every time.’