Russell Hoban - Fremder

‘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.

When I was in position Mazur put the electrode net on my head, then she attached the semen collector (Pythia was one of the intakes for the DSC Genetic Programme; she also analysed the DNA of deep-spacers on flicker drive) and closed the shell on me so that all the sensors made contact. She switched on the power and the cradle rose off its base on an electrostatic field and hung in the air in the middle of the egg-shaped space. Looking down between my flexotronic breasts I could see on my belly the raised I Ching hexagram of K’un, The Receptive. I sometimes wondered about the Pythian arrangements but I accepted that the Sheela-Na-Gig and Top Exec were what they were and had their little ways. So far they hadn’t done any worse than the male-dominated governments before them. Why had they called their Data Evaluator (Autonomous Response) Pythia? Generations of priestesses with that name had sat on a tripod over the chasm at Delphi, inspired by the sulphurous fumes to speak oracles — in other words, stoned out of their minds; I don’t believe Top Exec credited Pythia with mantic powers; I think they gave her that name because it made her seem a little like a hi-tech gypsy palmist and encouraged people to loosen up with her.

When Mazur had me hooked up she said, ‘Push the button under your left thumb if you want to disconnect and the one under your right thumb if you need me.’ Then she left. I liked her going-away view and the sensors put that up on the pixels briefly before they went into a flicker pattern of expanding and contracting shapes and colours, glimmering and occulting: yes/no/here/gone. Except, of course, for the places where the circles of bright emptiness came and went. The i/f music that always accompanied the flicker pattern meandered faintly through the silence.

I closed my eyes, afraid of what might jump out of my head and on to the pixels. I tried to relax but I could feel something building up in me and threatening to burst out at any moment. In all Pythia sessions there was inevitably pain as well as pleasure but I knew that this was going to be like none other. My head had as always its own agenda and the song it was singing was ‘My One and Only Love’:

The very thought of you makes my heart sing

like an April breeze on the wings of spring,…

Then I noticed that I was hearing it from outside my head. Pythia was singing in her husky voice and with her slightly slurred diction:

And you appear in all your splendour, my one and

only love.

The shadows fall and spread their mystic charms

in the hush of night when you’re in my arms.

I feel your lips so warm and tender, my one and

only love.

‘When everyone was young,’ she said. ‘Such clear, clear water! Sunlight through the leaves and the fragrance of summer. Have you ever found a one and only love?’

‘I thought so once.’

‘What happened?’

‘I lost it.’ The Uhu on the coffin came and went and with the smell of T/7 Mazur’s hair still in my nostrils I saw on the pixels above me the tawny owl gliding low over the heather in the grey wind in the Grampians, its ringed eyes growing larger, becoming eyes of otherness becoming something partly now and partly remembered, fading, gone as Caroline appeared when we cleared the couch for the first time and she stepped out of her knickers. Other and more active images followed — the Omphalos was where it all came out, there was no chance whatever of non-visual thinking. I averted my eyes modestly, and when I looked again Katya Mazur’s going-away view came on with the charming little transverse ripple in her trousers where the incurve of her lower back met the outcurve of her bottom.

‘Pretty well back to normal, are we?’ said Pythia. ‘A pomegranate was what Persephone ate the seeds of.’

‘Getting there.’

‘Good. And before the blue movie with Dr Lovecraft and the close-up of T/7 Mazur’s bouncy bits we had some nature-film footage that faded into something else. What was that all about?’ Again the owl appeared on the pixels; again its eyes became eyes of otherness, eyes of becoming.

‘That’s a long story, Pythia.’

‘Some of my best friends but I wouldn’t want my sister. All right, if you’re not ready to talk about it we can come back to it later. Let’s say the words now: “From the woman-darkness, from the womb of time,…”’

I responded, ‘“From before the maleness, from before the beginning,…”’

‘From the Genetrix of all things, from the fruitful blackness, …”’

‘“Let there speak through me the voice of what is.”’

We were quiet for a little while and the pixels went into a dim and meditative colour that I’d never seen before and had no name for. I wasn’t at all sure I was seeing the colour; it was as if I were taking in the chromatic information without actually perceiving it visually. The 1/f music was gone; the whisper of the rain and the sound of a distant hopper came in from an external mike.

‘Such a good sound to make love to, such a good sound to fall asleep to,’ said Pythia. ‘Ancient and memorious rain. Do you like the smell of rain?’

‘When the wind is right.’

‘Do you think the rain remembers, Fremder?’

‘I think everything remembers, Pythia.’ Except me, I thought. Once there was Clever Daughter and then there wasn’t. Seven other crew missing. What happened? So deep and wide, the reaches of space. Something speaking in the silence? What?

‘Yes, but especially the rain. It remembers when the world was new, remembers how the seas filled up. Think of all the midnights and the dawns the rain remembers, how many there were before a single word was spoken. Neither pleasant palaces nor wild dogs to howl in them, only the steam rising as the seas filled up, only the white mist on the water in the ancient mornings.’