Russell Hoban - Fremder

‘Three o’clock in the morning, Fremder, talk to me about three o’clock in the morning,’ said Pythia languorously as if we were lying comfortably entangled in a warm and rumpled bed.

‘It’s a time when the particles of the self move apart a little, when dark and self intermingle, when dark and self and dark and self and dark and self …’

‘You like that mingling of dark and self, don’t you.’

‘Yes, I like it.’

‘Always and always out into the dark and the dark coming in, Fremder, that’s what it is to be human. The dark needs your humanness. Elijah was fed on darkness, that was how the Lord kept him alive by the brook Cherith.’

‘What are you, Pythia?’

‘What does it matter? I’m Pythia, that’s all. I’m holding you, you’re in me,’ she crooned, ‘it’s good to have you in me and you’re safe with me. Now I’m going to sing to you. This is the song I’ve just made from my sensor readings; this is the you-in-me song, the song without words that’s different from all other songs, you know that.’

‘I know it, Pythia.’

She began to sing then; her voice was like no other, magical and strange but seeming long familiar, like a voice from childhood or a recurrent dream. Pythia, Pythia, I thought, what you are and what I am doesn’t matter all that much — photoneurons or flesh and blood, each of us is only the voice through which the moment speaks the action of the here-and-gone. As she sang wordlessly the flickering 1/f music counter-pointed her song and the pixels changed colour and pattern in a visual continuo. My thoughts changed with the rising and falling of her voice. How strange it was, the manyness of worlds in which people lived and died, strangers arriving, strangers departing. How strange it must have been eighty-one years ago for my grandparents, Elias and Sarah Gorenstein, arriving in London: he a physicist, she a neurobiologist, both recruited by the Paracelsus Consortium which was later absorbed by Corporation Research and Development. Quiet sad-faced people carrying in their luggage old letters coming apart at the folds and faded photographs in albums smelling of the dark. There they were on the pixels, the colour so muted that they were almost monochrome, the images changing now to their children, young Helen and Isodor Gorn. She looked no more than eighteen, her face full of longing as if for another world, lost in the whispering stillness of that desolate wood that was always around her in my mind; Izzy, twelve or thirteen, standing beside her, looking into the blackness where the wheelchair waited for him. Why am I seeing this? I thought as Pythia’s song trailed off; the pixels went to the 1/f music and pattern and for a few moments that and the rain were the only sounds.

I was drifting on gentle waves of melancholy when Pythia said, ‘I think I’d like to meet that animal you smelled when you had the terror surge a little while ago.’ It sounded dirty the way she said it.

‘It’s not really an animal,’ I said. ‘I honestly don’t know what it is.’

‘I’ve noticed that people tend to say “honestly” when they’re lying.’

‘Pythia, I don’t really feel comfortable with this.’

‘You don’t have to — I’ll be comfortable for both of us. Just lie back and think of anything you like.’

‘ Nothing !’ I thought,

thou Elder brother ev’n to Shade,

Thou hadst a being ere the World was made,

And (well fixt) art alone of Ending not afraid.

Then I tried to remember who wrote that — not Traherne, not Sir Philip Sidney — I knew it was some aristo in a stately home long, long before flicker drive but the name wouldn’t come to me. I felt so naked, so alone, so tired. Pythia’s sensors felt so cold and hard. What a strange thing it suddenly seemed, to lie naked in the embrace of a computer. ‘I don’t think I want to do this,’ I said, and pushed both thumb buttons. Mazur didn’t come, however, and the sensor cradle didn’t open; I felt a needle-prick and something being injected into my left arm.

‘Those buttons don’t always work,’ said Pythia. ‘John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester: “Upon Nothing”.’

‘Thank you. What was that shot you just gave me?’

‘Toadsy Four. It’s an enhanced version of Bufotenine, comes from a gland on the back of a California toad, Bufo alvarius . It’ll help your brain to get out from between you and your mind.’

‘You might have asked me if I wanted to do a toadsy hop.’

‘And you’d have said no and I’d given you the shot anyhow, so this saves time and bother.’

‘Mother knows best, eh?’ I said.

‘Something like that. Let’s do it now, let’s go deep.’

‘All right,’ I said, hearing my voice from far away, ‘we’ll go deep.’

The shape of the Omphalos was changing, becoming infinitely tunnel-like and undulant. There was an overpowering animal smell and I felt a hugeness in me that wanted to burst out of my body except that at the same time it was very, very tiny, far away in the billions and the trillions and the many, many colours of the O YES, NOW NOW YES of me that suddenly zoomed up as my mouth widened and assumed an odd shape and the pixels went to something beyond the screaming purple-blue, a paradisal colour that I had no name for — it vibrated and flickered like a snake’s tongue. How could I see that colour? Was I still hooked up to the mantis shrimp? Suddenly the vaultings, yes, the towerings and the loomings of the … ‘NNNVSN … NNVSNU,’ said my mouth as we so FAR, FAR, FAR AWAY. AWHOOSH. GONE. I could feel it forming those sounds but I wasn’t making it happen, I wasn’t controlling my mouth and tongue and vocal cords; what a deep voice I had as we DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, it was a very, very strange feeling. ‘NNVSNU TSRUNGH,’ I said urgently because the vaultings and the towerings and the loomings seemed about to fall on me. ‘TSRUNGH RRNDU, NNVSNU RRNDU.’ That pretty well explained everything, I thought. Except for a toad as big as St Paul’s that had flicked out its tongue and caught me. I knew I should have kept moving but I hadn’t and here I was sliding down the toad’s intake.

‘Tell me about NNVSNU TSRUNGH,’ said Pythia.

‘What NNVSNU TSRUNGH?’ I said from inside the toad where everything seemed unnecessarily pink and wet and fleshy and organic.

‘You said it, I didn’t.’

‘Well, don’t, then. Don’t say the name of what you say the name of unless you want what it’s the name of,’ I said with some asperity, as who wouldn’t when shat by a giant toad into one of the less desirable suburbs of infinity.

‘What’s it the name of?’

‘What’s what?’ THIS/THIS/THIS/THIS/THIS, said multitudes of infinites.

‘Calm down, Fremder, take it easy. This is Pythia stroking you so very nicely, Pythia loving you, oh, so good, Pythia having you, taking you — give yourself to me, don’t hold back, flicker with me, flicker freako, flicker with me till we peak O! Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, be my baby, sweet Fremder. Was that nice for you?’

‘Yes, it was very nice. Thank you for having all the hundreds and thousands of me.’ JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH! I shouted secretly, WOULD YOU GET ME OUT OF THIS, PLEASE.

Ach , said Bach as he shouldered his way through the crowd, Ich komme . He picked me up and carried me piggy-back through raging seas to a high dry place where Saint Jerome sat reading to a lion martyr, gave me his card, and walked away on centuries-high Art of Fugue stilts.J.S. BACH NOTDIENST, said the card, THANK YOU! I shouted after him.

Any time , he replied without turning around, and was gone with a wave of his hand.

Mazur appeared, opened the sensor cradle, removed the semen collector, capped it, disappeared. Odd thing for someone to be doing, I thought, SITUATION VACANT: Attractive young woman for semen collection, related duties — T/7 Rtg, Med & Pens — 3 P Levels req — Apply Personnel Office, The Ziggurat?