Fremder (4 page)

Oscar Wilde, ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’

I wonder if others have, as I do, the little tribunal of the dusk. The twelve of them don’t require the physical twilight – they’ll sit whenever there’s twilight in the soul and the bat wings of memory and guilt come flittering through the crepuscule. The look of them varies with the occasion: sometimes they’re human; sometimes they’re owls.

Judith had long black hair, brown eyes of sybilline intensity, a melancholy face and a sinuous figure. I met her at a Camera Obscura recital in the Thames Concordia Dome. It was summer, the river lights and those of the Raft City slums seemed magical in the luminous dusk, and I was alone. She was in the seat next to mine and halfway through the Adagio of the Schubert C Major String Quintet I noticed that she was crying. The sight of a good-looking woman being sad made me lust for entry to the privacy of her sadness. She began to look through her bag with no apparent success so I handed her a tissue and she smiled her thanks.

In the interval I asked if I could buy her a drink. She said yes and we went to the Overlook Bar. ‘Does Schubert always make you cry?’ I said.

‘Sometimes everything makes me cry,’ she said: ‘the lights on the water, the sound of the wirecars coming into the platform, the look of the sky.’

We ended up at my place that evening and in no time at all we were talking fragic. ‘Moony, moony glimmers,’ she said. ‘Lost and treasure found so deep and sleeping birds.’ It was only a matter of weeks before I told her that I loved her.

‘Are you part of my reality now?’ she said.

‘Always.’

‘You’ll leave me one day.’

There flashed into my mind Elijah on Carmel, face between his knees. ‘Why do you say that?’ I said.

‘I just know.’

I was twenty-two, just made Second Navigator. She was twenty-eight, a stage designer. On my next downtime in London we hoppered up to Dundee, got a surface hirecar permit, and drove up through Recreation Reserve 7 to the Moray Firth. At the RR7 checkpoint we paid our toll and had a Rescue 2-Way plugged into the dashboard. An electronic sign said:

CORPORATION RECREATION RESERVE 7
TODAY’S AIR CONTENT IS GREEN 3.
OZONE READING RED 1.
U-V PROTECTION MUST BE WORN!
24-HR PATROLS ON DUTY.
IF YOU ARE TRAVELLING WITH
A CLONE OR A ROBOT
YOU MUST HAVE A PERMIT.
REPORT ALL DANGER SIGHTINGS ON D1.
FOR RESCUE CALL R1
AND SPECIFY TYPE OF EMERGENCY.

The sky over the Cairn o’Mount Road through the Grampians
was immense and complex: it had a foreground, a middle distance, and a background receding to the beginning of time under vast architectures of cumulonimbus and stratocumulus clouds roofed over with a magisterial darkness. At first there’d been sunshine but up ahead a curtain of rain hung over the mountains and we drove into it. Judith turned on the car radio and got Number One on the charts, Dark Matter with ‘Planetary Fade’:

Flick flick, flick and fade, John,
flick and fade.
Flick flick, flick and fade, John,
on the planet where you are.

After the rain came sleet and snow, then a clear grey light like the first day of the world and a tawny owl low over the heather. Neither of us had ever seen an owl before: there it was, astonishingly real with its flat face and the grey distance receding behind it. ‘Look!’ we both said at once. ‘An owl!’ and I felt that with those words we were vowing never to forget that moment, vowing to be faithful to it and each other for ever.

We reached the Moray Firth without sighting any dangers or needing to be rescued and found ourselves a hotel in Portknockie, a sometime herring port with its brown-sailed luggers long gone: a steadfast and enduring harbour with empty arms, thick flakes of rust in the shape of big ring-bolts, a silence full of the ghost shouts of departed fishermen, gulls crying, and the wind moaning to itself on Green Castle, Bow Fiddle, Port Hill.

‘The luggers and the herring are gone,’ said Judith.

‘But not us,’ I said. ‘Rings and ropes and baskets.’

‘So many voices,’ said Judith. ‘So many stars beneath the sea,’ and we held each other close. In those three days everything that we did, everything that I saw, heard, smelled, tasted, and touched imprinted itself vividly on my memory so that later I
was able to identify that time in the same way that one names, with the help of a book, the rare bird only briefly seen: yes, it had this and this and this. That was what it was, then: happiness.

Even then, sometimes when I closed my eyes I could sense at the heart of the blackness something that I belonged to more than I could ever belong to happiness, something that I could be faithful to more than to any woman. You can disappear as M-waves and reappear as supposedly the same person but after a while the deep-space emptiness gets into you. Flickerheads call it the MTs. When I was in London Judith and I did what we always did – walked and talked, dined at intimate little restaurants, went to concerts, opera, theatre, and films but little by little the flavour went out of it. And more and more I’d wake at night to find myself sitting up in bed and leaning forward into the darkness, listening to the ravens and the dead, waiting like Elijah with his head between his knees.

‘Where are you?’ Judith kept saying.

‘Here,’ I said.

‘No, you’re not.’

Holding on to the world is mostly an act of faith: you see a little bit of it in front of you and you believe in the rest of it both in time and space. If you’re scheduled for a jump to Hubble on Tuesday you believe in you, in Hubble, in the jump, and in Tuesday. Sometimes it was hard for me to believe all of it.

Towards the end of August the year after Portknockie we walked what was left of the Ridgeway, both of us hoping that putting ourselves on that ancient track might earth us to our own past. Because of funding cuts there were no longer security patrols; the fee included robots and stun guns and to be on the safe side we joined up with some Avebury pilgrims at Streatley.

There seemed always to be power stations on all sides of us and the air was never better than Yellow 2 so we did the whole walk wearing breathers. There was toxic rain every day but one; we squelched through ankle-deep mud, our clothes wet with
sweat and condensation under our rain gear. At night the robots stood watch in the rain outside our tent while not-very-distant Shorties and Clowns sang, ‘Hawa
ko
, hawa
ko
, hawa
ko
!’

There are four things that I think of when I remember that walk: a clump of beech trees; a lark; Wayland’s Smithy; and a herd of cows. The beech trees were on a little hill off to one side of the track somewhere around Thurle Down. They were spotted with some kind of mould and their leaves were yellow; when we were in among them there suddenly fell the kind of silence you get when you walk into the wrong pub and all the faces turn towards you. That night Judith woke me at a quarter to four talking in her sleep. ‘Where is it?’ she said.

‘Where’s what?’

‘I don’t know,’ and she went back to sleep.

The famous Uffington White Horse, long unmaintained, was mostly overgrown. Wayland’s Smithy had become a latrine. The graffiti said, among other things, SHORTIS RUL and LOKKUP YUR MISSUS & DOTTERS HEAR CUM THE FUNBOYS. I closed my eyes and put my hands to the stone and listened with my mind but all I heard was a tinnitus like the chattering of dead cicadas.

On the day when it didn’t rain we saw through our anti-U-V goggles a lark fly straight up into the grey but the song that came down to us was small and without lift.

‘Shit above and shit below,’ said Judith, ‘shitwhistles in the sky. You know what?’

‘What?’

‘I’d like to finish on an up if we could.’

‘Me too.’

‘If we find one between here and Avebury let’s be off out of this, OK?’

‘OK.’

The next evening we came along the side of a hill through a Corporation pasture near Ogbourne St George. The guards passed us through the checkpoint and we went on our way
through a herd of Friesians who stood and watched us in the rainy dusk. Their dark and glistening forms seemed monumental, prehistoric, unretentive of evil. I was overwhelmed by their air of innocent sapience and Judith burst into tears.

‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘We’re not going to top this. I don’t need to see the graffiti on the Avebury stones.’

‘Right.’ We left our robots for the Avebury pilgrims to turn in, phoned for a hopper, and in half an hour we were back at Judith’s place where we had a shower and drinks and didn’t say much for the rest of the evening.

More and more I find that life is a series of disappearances followed usually but not always by reappearances; you disappear from your morning self and reappear as your afternoon self; you disappear from feeling good and reappear feeling bad. And people, even face to face and clasped in each other’s arms, disappear from each other.

I flickered out and back as the job required and felt a little fuller of emptiness each time. There’s more emptiness in the air than there used to be, and its spores grow flowers of dust in the lungs. Things between Judith and me dwindled month by month until we were no longer part of each other’s reality. After half a year of not hearing from me she sent me a photocopy of a pencil-and-sepia drawing by Caspar David Friedrich: a burly eagle owl (
Uhu
in German) sitting on a coffin that rested on boards laid across a freshly-dug grave. A child’s coffin it was, not fully grown. There was no note – that was the whole message and it arrived the day after her suicide was briefly mentioned in the newsfax.

I still think of that child’s coffin and the Uhu. Sometimes I see them tumbling over and over in deep space with that figure in the blue coverall. And sometimes when evening comes and the little tribunal of the dusk I remember how, when I first saw Judith, I needed to penetrate her sadness that waited with its face between its knees for the rain.

In the ancient tale of the Clever Daughter, she is soon to gain the king’s hand by having solved his riddle and come to him neither driving nor walking nor riding (she’s only half-seated on the goat), neither dressed nor naked (thus draped in a fishnet), neither out of the road nor in the road (only her right big toe touches the ground) and bearing a gift that’s no gift (the hare will leap off on release).

Marshall Laird,
English Misericords

I was First Navigation Officer on
Clever Daughter
when we flickered out of Nova Central on 4 November 2052 bound for the Morrigan in the Fourth Galaxy. I always avoided flicker jumps on my birthday if possible – it never felt lucky. DSC allows one refusal for every ten jumps and I put in for one but several people were off sick and my refusal was refused. The night before we flickered out I’d had my usual three hours of sleep and I’d woken in the middle of that time sitting up and leaning forward into the dark feeling myself getting closer and closer to some kind of edge.

Clever Daughter
terminated Jump One pause at Hubble Straits and was into Jump Two for Penzias-Wilson at 04:06 IGT. Traffic Control’s screens showed our dock empty and the M-scope registered the burst of peaks that indicate a flicker transmission so they knew we’d gone off as scheduled. At 04:06:03 Hubble Straits Traffic Control received an automatic flicker-break TX from
Clever Daughter
and there was no
further communication from the ship.

At 04:10:28 Bill Charteris in Quadrangle Sweeper
Sun Ra
about 4oMk from Badr al-Budur on the Hubble side found himself humming an unfamiliar tune and at the same he saw something about 200 metres ahead tumbling over and over as it drifted towards him. It turned out to be me in a blue coverall -no spacesuit, no helmet, no oxygen.

The outside temperature was 3 Kelvin, that last fading remnant of warmth from the Big Bang. My arms were held rigidly out in front of me and my legs were drawn up as if to push me away from something. Bill radioed Hubble Straits while manoeuvring
Sun Ra
’s grab arm to bring me in, and in less than three minutes I was being looked after by Caroline Lovecraft P/Pl, Director, Physio/Psycho, Newton Centre for Deep-Space Research at Hubble Straits.

She ascertained that although I looked like an odd-shaped ice lolly I was not dead but in a state of suspended animation. After a long soaking in warm water my clothes were peeled off me with the care usually reserved for ancient manuscripts. When naked I was coated with synthoderma and floated in a nutrient solution while they gave me a variety of anti-freeze injections and hooked me up to several drip-feeds. I was monitored constantly and after three days Lovecraft made verbal contact as shown in this transcript from 7 November 2052.

CL
: Hi.

FG
: Hi.

CL
: I’m Caroline Lovecraft, Head of Physio/Psycho at Newton Centre. Will you state your name for the record?

FG
: Johann Sebastian Bach.

CL
: Do you know where you are now?

FG
: Contrapunctus One. (HUMS BEGINNING OF
THE ART OF FUGUE
)

CL
: Mr Bach, can you tell me what happened to
Clever Daughter
and the other seven crew members?

FG
: Very, very high, the legs of Contrapunctus One. Centuries and centuries – mustn’t look down.

CS
: About
Clever Daughter -
can you remember anything at all?

FG
: If you can hold on to the terror you can hold on to the world, (HUMS AGAIN THE BEGINNING OF
THE ART OF FUGUE
) B said. (OR ‘BEA SAID’ OR POSSIBLY ‘B.Z.’ SPEECH BECOMING SLURRED)

CS
: What did B say?

FG
: Be the music. Thou. (OR POSSIBLY ‘THOWL’)

CS
: Couldn’t quite catch that. Please say again.

FG
: Is he? (SPEECH MORE INDISTINCT)

CS
: Is he what?

FG
: (LOOKING AROUND) Not here. Gone. (OR POSSIBLY ‘GORN’)

CS
: Did you say ‘gone’ or ‘Gorn’?

FG
: (SHAKES HEAD, THEN OPENS MOUTH AND POINTS TO IT)