Russell Hoban - Fremder

The flicker pattern was pulsing with colour faster than the eye could follow and the music was such as I’d never heard before; the sensors, moist on my naked skin, tightened and loosened, tightened and loosened spasmodically, then went slack. A great calm flooded through me. I listened to the rain and watched the wild colours slowly fading on the pixels as Mazur came running in.

‘Nnnnnnnn,’ she said, looking quite wild, ‘nnnvsnurn-duuuuuu.’

This time the thumb buttons worked and I sprung the sensor cradle and jumped to the floor trailing electrodes. ‘Katya,’ I said, ‘are you all right?’

‘Nnnnnnvs.’ Her eyes rolled back and I caught her as she fell.

Naked and slippery with electrolytic cream, I carried Katya Mazur to the after-session room. It was soundproofed and red-lit like the ready room. There were a bed, a table and two chairs, a fridge and a cooker, tea, coffee, biscuits and so on — all the necessaries for pulling oneself together after a Pythia session.

I lowered her carefully on to the bed; she seemed so vulnerable, so helpless, and all at once so unaccountably precious to me. The only explanation I could think of for her fainting was that she’d heard Pythia on the intercom and somehow it had had this effect on her. ‘Katya!’ I whispered, and stroked her face. That she’d been overcome by what Pythia found deep inside me made me feel more intimate with her than I’d ever been with anyone before.

‘Katya!’ I said, and she opened her eyes, blue eyes that swallowed me up, swallowed up the whole shaking and afraid Fremder of me. ‘Katya!’ I kissed her and she kissed me back. ‘Katya!’ I said, as if her name were a spell that could ward off all evil and make everything all right.

She covered her mouth with her hand as if she was only just now fully aware of kissing me and not sure about it. ‘What happened?’ she said.

‘Pythia crashed and she seems to have taken you with her. Were you listening on the intercom?’

‘Yes, I remember now. It was scary.’ She sat up. ‘You’ve still got that cream all over you — let me clean you up.’

Nothing was said about the kiss while she busied herself about me with a towel. When that was done I put my clothes on and tried to think of excuses for staying with her. We stood there for a while looking at each other.

‘I don’t really know,’ she said.

‘Don’t really know what?’

‘I don’t really know what I know.’

‘Who does?’

‘Sometimes the shadows in my mind, sometimes the voices in my mind …’ She began to cry. ‘I’m not always sure who I am or what I am.’

‘That makes two of us.’ I hugged her and I felt her arms tighten round me as she rubbed her cheek against mine. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘hug me — it feels right. For however long we’ve got.’

‘Why do you say that, Katya? What do you know that I don’t know.’

‘I’ve told you, I don’t know what I know. Don’t talk — make it be here and now, nothing and nobody else.’

I kissed her for the second time and this time there was no mistaking her response. I stroked her shining hair, it smelled like sun-warm fields in a country I’d never seen, a country that had no existence except in my mind and the touch and smell of her hair. I didn’t know what time it was, it felt like the middle of the night; the Ziggurat would be glowing purple in the darkness, the yellow flashers and the red and green lights winking, the newsflash going its endless round; the corpses on the plaza would be rotting in the purple light while ships and cargoes from seven galaxies flickered invisibly overhead. ‘I don’t always have a whole picture in my eyes,’ I said.

‘Let me be the picture in your eyes for now.’

I undid her various zips and she came out of her clothes in the red-lit dimness of the room. When she was naked she stood up before me quite still and hieratic with both hands on her belly. She glimmered in the redness and seemed to increase, to become great and goddesslike. I was entranced by the mystery and dim red magic of her nakedness, by the numen and the treasure of it, by how precious it was to me even though the picture in my eyes swarmed with circles of bright emptiness.

*

Afterwards, lying entwined with Katya in the primordial redness of our night-within-the-day, I didn’t want to move, didn’t want to break the membrane of our well-being. Never before had I felt so easy, so tranquil, so just this side of madness. We hadn’t talked fragic at all — there hadn’t been any need for it, or indeed any time. The whole thing seemed almost to have left me behind.

‘I’m glad we did it here,’ said Katya. ‘I’m glad this is where we had our first time.’

‘So am I. Even though Thinksec probably had a fibre optic up my bum while we did it. What time is it?’

‘Thirteen forty-nine. Why?’

‘I don’t know, I thought it was the middle of the night.’

‘You’ve had some day — between Pythia and me you must be exhausted. What really happened with her?’

‘I don’t want to think about that right now, I want to think about you. When do you get off?’

‘Eighteen hundred. Will you meet me at my place at half past? I’d give you a key so you could go there now but it’s a thumbprint lock.’

‘That’s OK; I’ve got to find my downtime and settle in so I’ll do that now.’ She gave me her address and I put on my clothes and went back to reception. There I looked for Mojo and High John but they were gone. Nina Marlowe handed me a little flickerpost packet. ‘This came for you,’ she said. I recognised Caroline’s handwriting and quickly put the packet in a pocket of my jacket while my head sang a little packet-pocket-jacket song. Nina Marlowe gave me a set of flat keys, a yellow card, a stunner and a permit.

‘I see they’re giving me one of the better neighbourhoods,’ I said as I looked at the Oldtown address. Deep-spacing had made me a bleakness freak and I hadn’t had a flat of my own for years: as well as sleazy hotels and Q-BO SLEEPS and empty spaceports in the middle of the night I liked the dismalness of downtimes where the only permanent items were the locker that arrived ahead of me and the bottle I brought with me. These DSC flats achieve a classic squalor that cannot simply have happened by itself — there must be a Corporation designer who does this sort of thing. The finishing touch is always the one or two tattered copies of Consenting Adults and the print on the wall which is either Womb of the Cosmos III by Lamia Quick or Fractal Disjunctions I by Hermione Testa. I have not yet encountered Womb of the Cosmos I and II or Fractal Disjunctions II and III .

‘Give me a wrist,’ said Nina. I stuck out the right one and she locked on a wristphone. I felt a tiny pin-prick as she did it. ‘Ever have a DNA-LOK phone on you before?’

‘No.’

‘There’s a constant signal that tells us where you are and the bracelet has sampled your blood and locked on to your DNA, so if you take if off or put it on someone else an alarm goes off here and things get ugly. You’re on your own now.’

‘How come?’

‘Maybe they think the taxpayers have spent enough on you.’

Were the circles of bright emptiness getting bigger? Was there a roaring in my ears? Maybe not. The yellow card said: