Fremder (13 page)

I went to the hologram box, ejected the Vermeer girl, and keyed in Plate 68 in my catalogue, BELOUSOV-ZHABOTINSKY REACTION; CHEMICAL SCROLL WAVES. The involute spirals sprang up in red, not green, and stared at me out of the darkness spiralised by Gislebertin. Plates 69, 70, 71, 72 and 73 showed successive stages of the reaction; 73 had the ringed eyes, the nodes of possibility, the archipelagos of being. Plate 74 was EYE IDOLS; ENGRAVED COW BONES, SPAIN, NEOLITHIC. The three bones appeared before me twice actual size and hung there in the dark. The three pairs of eyes, concentrated into masks by the underlining and overlining, replicated the stare of the chemical scroll waves. Plate 75 was
The Sorcerer
, the drawing, after Breuil, of the antlered dancing man from the cave of Les Trois Frères, his round eyes staring in astonishment or ecstasy out of the dark backward and abysm of time. Plate 76 was the photo of the smudged remains of the original drawing on the cave wall. Then the Vermeer girl again, Plate 77, then Plate 78, LOUGHCREW PASSAGE-TOMB CEMETERY; DECORATED STONE, CARNBANE EAST. The carved stone was like the body of a cephalopod marked all over with concentric circles with deep holes at their centres. Two of these arranged themselves as eyes and a third became a mouth in a snoutlike configuration; the eyes gazed sombrely out of darkness, the mouth was either open in a scream or closed. I returned the gaze of the eyes, watched the mouth, saw it open and screaming, saw it closed and silent. But the eyes – there were so many eyes everywhere, and out of all of them looked the great animal of the everything.

The ghostly voices of the organ of St Lazarus flickered in the dark, flickered through the centuries to the present moment and sent out
La Terreur de Devenir
high over the filthy streets and uncollected garbage of Oldtown West 81.1 wept for long-gone twilights, for music long silent and for all the voices, all the speaking breath of lovers long dead. I wept for the sickened earth huddled under its ruins and its rot and its shining new
machines; I wept for all star-wanderers and deep-spacers for ever riding out to the blackness and back to the fading and broken green jewel of their birth. I wept for myself, afraid to ship out again.

Say, it’s only a paper moon,
Sailing over a cardboard sea,
But it wouldn’t be make-believe,
If you believed in me.

Billy Rose, E. Y. Harburg and Harold Arlen,
‘It’s Only a Paper Moon’

Katya’s place was on the fortieth floor of the Tech 7 residence complex between the Outer Executive Circle and the non-Corporation parts of Oldtown. She didn’t turn on any lamps when she opened the door; in the night beyond the viewbubble the Outer Executive Circle newsboard was insistent: ‘GAY ROBOT NOT A ROBOT’: TOP EXEC; SNG INVESTIGATION SCHEDULED – CORPORATION: NEW CUTS TO IMPROVE LOCAL SERVICES; DUSTMEN: ‘LOAD OF RUBBISH’. The light from outside picked shapes out of the dimness of the tiny room; the interior darkness annexed the night and the red glow in the sky to make the flat seem bigger than it was.

The place was dense with clutter: books, pictures, baskets of stones and bones and seashells, several teddy bears and a cloth frog in a condition of terminal belovedness, an MM/PN 800 Omnicom, various stacks and leafpiles of paper, and a hologram table over which glowed the image that was No. 69 in my catalogue, BELOUSOV-ZHABOTINSKY REACTION; CHEMICAL SCROLL WAVES.

‘You were listening to the Pythia session,’ I said. ‘Did I say
anything about the B-Z then?’

‘No.’

‘Odd, that you should have it on the hologram just now. When did you put it on?’

‘This morning before going on duty. Why?’

‘I wondered what made you think of it.’

‘I read the Level 4 from Hubble Straits and I saw the flicker-break video. I can’t understand how you could have seen that in deep space. And yet it seems to belong there, like the signature of Creation. Has it got any significance for you? That’s a stupid question – it
must
, or it wouldn’t have been on the flicker-break transmission.’

‘I wrote it up for P-Level Chemistry. Dr Stillwell was the Chemistry prof and he helped me with it. He was a strange man, a little hunchback with a gnostic manner and he wore his hunch as if it had some practical function, like a radar dome on an aircraft. We darkened the lab and we had the Petri dish sitting on a light box. The wavelines were bluish-white in the pink liquid and they formed single concentric circles and groups of concentric circles concentrically outlined. All of the circular formations were expanding and where they collided they mutually annihilated. Those that hit the edge of the dish didn’t stop or bounce back, they vanished as if they’d passed through the glass to an invisible existence beyond the Petri dish where the expansion continued.

‘Dr Stillwell said, “Interesting, isn’t it? They had no place to go but they found some place to go.” The year after that he killed himself.’

‘You found some place to go and you’re still alive.’

‘Funny thing to say.’

‘When you said that about passing through the glass it reminded me of you and
Clever Daughter
. You certainly passed through
something
, some kind of mortal barrier. Four minutes in 3 Kelvin with no space suit and no oxygen! It said in
the report that you arrived at Hubble Straits in a state of suspended animation and when you came out of it three days later you sat up and asked for orange juice, coffee, two eggs over easy, chips, bacon, and sausages. When you’d finished you asked for the same again: three times.’

‘I was hungry.’

‘There was something about an owl in the report as well.’

‘I don’t remember. At the beginning of those Level 4 sessions I wasn’t altogether there.’

‘I can believe that.’ She changed the hologram to Vermeer’s GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING.

The sequence of hologram plates that I described earlier was not part of a packaged series; each of the plates had been individually selected from a museum catalogue. ‘This much coincidence is a little difficult for me to believe,’ I said. ‘Somebody’s trying something on here – is it Pythia or Thinksec or what?’

‘Why does someone have to be trying something on? Can’t you accept things for what they are? If we both have the same favourite mazurka why shouldn’t we have some of the same holograms? I put the Vermeer on because the B-Z eyes are looking out of her eyes.’

She was standing close enough for me to smell her fragrance, and as she moved into my arms my scepticism vanished: anyone who smelled that right couldn’t be doubted. ‘Her face is like your face,’ I said. ‘Her eyes are like yours.’ I took her face in my hands and looked into her blue eyes that darkened as the pupils dilated. I felt that our souls were joined but I didn’t know who or what was looking out of her eyes or mine. ‘Is it possible that you and I thought each other up?’ I said.

‘Yes, I think we did – it needed to happen so it happened.’ She went over to her audio beam. ‘My name is Mazur and I like mazurkas.’ She put on the Ilse Bak recording and No. 1 in F Sharp Minor, Opus 6, No. 1, bodying itself out of half-lights
and shadows, became the space and time around us, became all the years inside us, became all there was.

*

I’ve always considered sleep after lovemaking more intimate than the lovemaking: getting through the night together, lying embraced until an arm becomes numb, then lying like two spoons until sleep doesn’t come that way, then turning backs and reverting to aloneness together and the snores, farts, and sighs of the passage from darkness to morning. Katya in her sleep seemed to have no rest: she mumbled, laughed, cursed, muttered strings of numbers, hummed a variety of tunes, and quoted from the Bible, sometimes in a voice that seemed different from her own. I recognised Loewe’s ‘
Herr Oluf
, snatches of Isaiah, First and Second Kings, and Psalm 137:

How shall we sing the Lord’s song
In a foreign land?
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem,
Let my right hand forget her cunning.

In the morning I was worn out but Katya seemed quite refreshed. Looking at her face that was considerably brighter than the new day I was impressed by how well she carried the tonnage of her mental traffic. Her head like mine was evidently an attic full of obsolete gear, childhood toys, faded letters, inexplicably preserved papers and cuttings, photos of forgotten people and places, and dustballs. I looked at her with new respect and found myself taking her more seriously as a partner than I had before. This is the real thing, I thought. The circles of bright emptiness had been there all through the lovemaking and they were still there but I supposed in time I’d get used to them. We had coffee and croissants and looked out of the fortieth-floor viewbubble at the smog and the world was more or less
ours. I was overwhelmed by the feeling that this woman was my woman. ‘Katya,’ I said, ‘do you know that you hum and sing and talk in your sleep?’

She blushed. ‘Anything interesting?’

‘Lots. Your head seems to have about the same amount of rubbish in it as mine.’

‘Should it have less? Are women meant to have tidier heads than men?’

‘Not at all. I only mentioned it because we seem to be alike in that way and it pleased me.’

‘If I were you I shouldn’t take too much alikeness for granted.’

‘I’m sorry I spoke. Could we rewind to where we were before I opened my mouth?’

She put her hand on mine. ‘I don’t mean to sound that way -it’s just that the idea of your listening makes me uncomfortable. What I say in my sleep isn’t always mine and I hate not belonging to myself that way.’

‘Not yours. Whose is it then?’

‘I have an implant in my brain the same as you do.’ The way she said it she might have been admitting to an artificial leg.

‘What kind of implant?’

‘It’s a synaptic relay.’

‘From where, from whom?’

‘Pythia. You have to have one of those to be a Pythia T/7. Sometimes there’s overspill and I offload it in my sleep.’

‘“Overspill”? “Offload?” Are you saying that a computer is using you as a buffer, as a receptacle?’

‘What are you getting so excited about?’

‘What do you think I’m getting excited about, for God’s sake? Next you’ll be telling me that you take the overspill from all the guys that come to the Wank Parlour as well.’

‘That’s not fair and you know it. Anyhow, look who’s talking – you’ve got a thing in your brain that turns you into
some kind of radio waves. For all I know, the next time we make love I’ll have to wear headphones to receive you.’

We both laughed then and hugged and kissed and got butter and marmalade on each other and felt a lot better. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘tell me about this implant. What’s it for?’

‘What you said: I’m a buffer, a receptacle for storing data and response so that Pythia can handle input and access database as fast as she needs to.’

‘That means she’s both transmitting to and receiving from you.’

‘Well, yes.’

‘Great. I hope she’s been enjoying your broadcasts when we make love.’

‘We keep saying “she”. Try to remember that she’s an it.’

‘That’s even worse: an it listening to what we do in bed.’

‘She … It says it only accesses its own output.’

‘Pull the other one.’

‘This one?’

‘Don’t distract me. If Pythia needs a buffer why don’t they just lay on a few billion more photoneurons? Why do they have to crawl into your brain?’

‘What do I know about photoneurons? Bear in mind that this was my first job; Pythia duty is the top T/7 spot and I beat out a lot of other applicants for the post.’

‘I’m thinking about yesterday when Pythia went deep with me and you fainted. Why didn’t you tell me what it was in the after-session room?’

‘The first time we made love I didn’t want you thinking of me as someone whose head was bugged. Do you blame me?’

‘How can I blame you for anything, Katya? I love you.’

She kissed me. ‘Are you sure about that?’

‘Yes, I’m sure.’

‘That’s good because there’s no knowing how much time we’ve got and I don’t want you to be sorry later.’

‘What do you know that I don’t about how much time we’ve got?’

‘Nothing, but it was easy enough to see from that session that Pythia isn’t through with you yet; that means that Top Exec wants something more from you; and that means we should make the most of today which is my day off. Let’s have a picnic on the Red Mountain.’ She opened the fridge. ‘I’ve got a tin of sardines, half a French bread, and a bottle of red.’

‘Maybe we could do a little shopping on the way.’

‘Let’s just go, let’s give ourselves some memories before something happens.’

‘Don’t say that, it’s unlucky.’

‘Sorry. I never expect anything good to last.’

‘Try not to think that way; expectation is part of the reality envelope – you’re transmitting event configurations that are searching for receptors.’

‘Don’t tell me any more, I don’t want to know about the reality envelope; life is hard enough.’

We wired to the Ziggurat, went up to the flight pad, got a Red Zone day pass on Katya’s ID, and signed out a microhopper. Then we flew out to Red Mountain Park. The mountain stood up before us roseate and golden with rust and green with copper oxides like something in a Max Ernst painting, a scanty matting of grass covering the compacted wreckage of ancient roaders, choppers, hovers, skimmers, tankers, bombers, fighters, freighters, and other vehicles arrested in a state of romantic ruin and kept from further decay by many coatings of permalin. A bronze plaque said:

THIS MOUNTAIN OF DEAD NOISE IS DEDICATED
BY THE SHEELA-NA-GIG TO THE USES OF TRANQUILLITY.

1 April 2010

The electronic sign below it said:

TODAY’S AIR IS RED 3 – OZONE IS RED 2
BREATHERS AND U-V PROTEX MUST BE WORN!

Our pass got us on to the top level and we had it to ourselves except for a young Exec couple with a small son named Bert. This child had a toy terminator beam that emitted a nasty little whine every time he pulled the trigger. Bert terminated us many times, each time yelling, ‘You’re terminated!’

‘Stop that, Bert! Stop bothering those people,’ shouted his smiling parents. Whatever noise there was below us was muffled by the barrier screen and the polariser cut off visibility so that the mountaintop we sat on had no apparent bottom. Beyond the quivering air that marked the limit of the screen London lay sweltering under its grey November sky through which circles of bright emptiness looked out at me. Wirecars and microhoppers buzzed like flies in the heavy air. The Ziggurat stood glowing its dull purple against the grey with circlings of crows marking the plaza where the dead still lay.