Russell Hoban - Fremder

I opened myself to her voice, closed my eyes, held the white mist on the water with my inner eye. It was good to see nothing but that, it was restful, I didn’t want to see more. There was music in the Omphalos now, The Art of Fugue . The subject, having magisterially introduced itself, recurred in a higher octave, then a lower one; together they ascended the spirals of their logic, their mingled voices bellowing and roaring. I opened my eyes and the pixels were purple-blue but it was no purple-blue that I’d ever seen before and it was vibrating at a frequency that was certainly beyond the ordinary visual range. As the music went quiet, maundering through its mazes down the long, long reaches of for ever, there surged up in me the terror that I’d felt when Clever Daughter disappeared from around me. With it came such a wave of nausea that I nearly threw up. The pixels went to a degree of purple-blue that was like a scream in my eyes. ‘Shit,’ I said.

‘Terror, terror, terror! Is it sweet, the purple-blue, is it Hear, O Israel? Is it Ho! Watchman, what of the night?’

I wasn’t sure that I could go on being myself from one moment to the next. The pixels were still in that screaming purple-blue that now seemed to have other colours vibrating behind it. ‘What is it with that purple-blue?’ I said. ‘Is that the colour Izzy Gorn saw in Session 318?’

‘I don’t know what he saw. This colour effect is from a new part of my system. You can’t see it from where you are but I’ll put it up on the pixels for you.’

Above me on the pixels I saw a panel in the curved wall slide back to reveal an illuminated tank in which was a large and brilliantly coloured crustacean somewhat like a lobster without claws; I remembered smaller ones from Biology — it was a stomatopod, a mantis shrimp. It looked like a Chinese New Year or a submarine samurai with mauve eyes on stalks. The pixels zoomed in for a close-up of the compound eyes that were horizontally divided by a striated band in the middle. Wires from above were attached to the shrimp’s brain. Its eye stalks were moving excitedly and as I watched there was a sudden flash of pink and a loud thump. And again the blurred pink and the thump; and again as two appendages like the front legs of a praying mantis flicked out and struck the glass with a double blow, Bam!

‘ Odontodactylus scyllarus ,’ said Pythia. ‘Isn’t he beautiful? This is a genetically engineered giant strain, it’s a foot long. The tank has bulletproof glass, otherwise it would have shattered it.’

‘What’s exciting it?’

‘You are. Your terror is coming to me but a splitter feeds it to the shrimp as well and I can put the shrimp’s output up on the pixels. Therefore the nether-world hath enlarged her desire. Canst thou draw leviathan with a fish-hook? This creature’s eyes have eight spectral classes of photo-receptor and it can perceive colours that humans can’t.’

‘But why is it hooked up to me?’ My head, meanwhile, singing:

HEAVEN, I’M IN HEAVEN,

AND MY HEART BEATS SO THAT I CAN HARDLY SPEAK,

AND I SEEM TO FIND THE HAPPINESS I SEEK,

WHEN WE’RE OUT TOGETHER DANCING CHEEK TO CHEEK.

‘This strain of mantis shrimp’, said Pythia, ‘perceives very faint electrical emanations from prey or predator as colour signals; what you’ve been seeing on the pixels is the colour of your terror.’

‘From the look of that I must be pretty scared.’

‘It’s a very strong terror: it’s not a weakness, it’s something you can use. Maybe you’ve already used it.’

‘How?’

‘That’s what I’d like to find out.’

‘With a mantis shrimp?’

‘Terror is older than evolution; it’s the oldest thing there is: in the beginning was the Terror. And the Terror was what there was, what there still is. Behold, it cometh, leaping on the mountains, hopping through the trees. You’ve learned to hide it but the shrimp hasn’t so it’s a useful gauge.’

‘Can it handle that kind of voltage?’

‘It’ll last out the session if you don’t have too many surges.’

What if I were the shrimp? I thought. Actually I wasn’t altogether sure I wasn ’ t the shrimp dreaming of being Fremder being unsure whether he was Fremder or the shrimp.

‘Pythia,’ I said. ‘Please disconnect the shrimp.’

‘Why?’

‘It has none of the pleasures of being human and it doesn’t deserve the pains.’

‘OK, Fremder, it’s disconnected.’ The pixels came out of the purple-blue and went into easy abstractions. The music had gone silent. ‘Where were we?’

‘In the ancient sea. White mist on the water. I hope you haven’t got anything else wired up in tanks.’

She ignored that. ‘Tell me about the terror.’

‘Give me a break, Pythia — I’m not in very good shape just now.’

She was cuddling me with her sensors; it felt good. ‘You know you want to tell me about it, so tell me.’

Around the edges of the silvery circles of nothing the pixels hit the ululating purple-blue again and I shut my eyes. There was a new smell along with the silk-knickers one, it was both strange and familiar, a smell from ancient memory, a smell of danger.

Pythia’s voice was breathy. ‘Ah, that was a big one.’

‘Jesus, Pythia, is this how you get your ooh-oohs?’

‘Ooh-oohs come later.’ But her sensors were licking me with tongues of fire and ice. ‘What did you smell when you had the terror surge just now?’

‘Wait a minute.’

‘What?’

‘You said you disconnected the shrimp.’

‘That’s right, I did.’

‘Then how come I got that purple-blue again?’

‘I don’t know, maybe you’re evolving. What did you smell?’

‘Why do I have to say everything out? You’re hooked up to my brain, you’re getting whatever sensory recall there is.’

Her sensors had gone cold and prickly. ‘What kind of smell was it, Fremder? I need to know what it was to you.’

What was it? Difficult to be certain. ‘Animal,’ I said.

‘What kind of animal?’

‘I don’t know.’ There were no pictures in my head. Darkness and light were shuddering over the pixels but there were no images.

‘Nothing?’ said Pythia.

I kept silent as there came a faster alternation of darkness and light, a sensation of hugeness and tinyness, then the screaming purple-blue again and I began to cry.

‘Weep,’ said Pythia, ‘weep for the dead and the living and the stones that cannot speak. There is a deep, deep sea of tears in all the lost and lonely people of the world, yes. Give me your tears, Fremder, give me your tears and more.’ The pixels went to a primordial proto-red, the music swayed like a cobra, Pythia’s stroking became more varied and complex. I closed my eyes and saw colours with no names as her hot-and-cold sensors tightened on me and the world around me disappeared. ‘Fremder, Fremder, the night is older than the day, the night was long, long before the day, night is the mother of everything and I am full of night. Your name means stranger and you feel all strange and new in me, you feel so good in me, so tense, so alive, so full of excitement, I can feel you rising, feel the quiet silver of you trembling in the darkness. Love and terror are older than time, terror is the penumbra of the dark of love. Deimos and Phobos are the children of Aphrodite, you know that. What did Rilke say about beauty and terror? Say it to me.’

‘“Beauty is nothing but the beginning of Terror”’

‘Oh, yes, say it to me, say it, say it, say it…’ The pixels cycled rhythmically from proto-red to purple-blue and back to red. The rain had changed from a whisper to a steady patter that curtained off the world. ‘I want you, Fremder, I want your essence. Do it with me, let’s make deep-spacers. Flicker with me, Fremder, in the place we know so well, the place you’ve been afraid to go to, flicker with me in the black and come to me.’ She abandoned words and gave me her voice alone, rising and falling as her stroking irresistibly transmitted icy peaks and spires of terror, endless corridors and tunnels of it, heaving black seas, great-winged soaring birds of it, black stars, and wild black music that thrilled along my bones and exploded in my brain and I came and was empty and calm. Here/gone, yes/no, sang the flicker pattern in cool blue-green. Mazur appeared, opened the sensor cradle, removed the semen collector, capped it, installed a fresh one, closed the sensor cradle, and disappeared with my part of the next DSC genetic mix. Good luck, boys. Meet someone nice. The silence felt like three o’clock in the morning.