Russell Hoban - Fremder

‘Mine as well.’

‘Are you a mystery?’

‘Yes. Have you been looking for one?’

‘Yes.’

The Outer Executive Circle newsboard riffled its lights as new stories came in, then flashed: FINANCE EXEC: ‘CREDIT DEVALUED, INFLATION BEATEN’ — MAINTENANCE STRIKE CONTINUES; ELECTRICIANS THREATEN STOPPAGE — OPPOSITION: ‘STOP CLEVER DAUGHTER COVER-UP’ …

‘Ah,’ I said, ‘if only we knew who’s covering up what.’

There was nothing more about Clever Daughter; the news-board went on with: PRONG LEADER’S CANNIBAL COOK BOOK DISCOVERED — TOP EXEC: ‘GAY FAKE ROBOT IS FOREIGN AGENT’ — WIRECAR DISASTER ENQUIRY: TRANSPORT EXEC CLEARED — FINANCE EXEC …

‘What’s going to happen?’ said Katya.

‘I don’t know but I think Pythia knows a lot more than she’s told me.’

‘I saw the Thinksec printouts from your session. Pythia had some wild-looking peaks when she saw Izzy on the pixels.’

‘Thinksec does printouts of Pythia sessions?’

‘Sure, that’s why they’re called Thinksec — their little minds are busy all the time. Did you know they’re part of Top Exec?’

‘I thought they were under the SNG.’

‘The Sheela-Na-Gig is under them although the civilians don’t know it. Top Exec is where the action is.’

‘And how come a T/7 gets to see Thinksec printouts?’

‘I’ve got my sources. The people on top might run things but the hired help always know what’s going down.’

‘She’s a strange one, that 23.7 billion photoneuron Data Evaluator. Who’d have thought she’d crash like that when she went deep with me?’

‘Who’d have thought I’d crash? That never happened to me before.’

‘I like a woman who knows when to faint,’ I said. Then we moved on to other matters and there was no more shoptalk for some time.

‘Music feeds that which it findeth,’ somebody said. As I write this I’m listening to Ilse Bak’s Chopin Nocturnes and in my mouth is the taste of the colour of regret. One of the memory-pictures that haunts me is Caroline crying that night at the Hubble Bubble because she’d given herself and I hadn’t. She was right about the coupler that’s missing in me; sometimes I don’t even seem to be connected to myself. Stranger is my name and there are times when I’m a stranger to myself.

Still the same night, getting on for 03:00. Katya was asleep and I was watching Fractal Bims of Titan and listening with headphones when I heard a very quiet self-effacing knock at the door. I looked through the peephole and recognised the Ziggurat Maintenance man I’d seen in the wirecar.

‘I want to talk to Fremder Gorn,’ he said.

‘Who are you?’ I whispered without opening.

‘Wait a moment,’ he said, and wrote a note which he slid under the door:

I’M LOWELL SIXE — I HAVE THINGS TO TELL YOU.

THIS FLAT IS BUGGED. PLEASE COME OUTSIDE

SO WE CAN TALK. BRING TWO GLASSES.

TRUST ME.

The name meant nothing to me. My first thought was: he’s going to tell me who my father was. What if he is my father! ‘Wait a moment,’ I whispered. I hurried on some clothes, got two glasses, programmed the lock for my thumb, opened the door, saw that he was apparently alone, and went out. He opened a small rucksack, took out a bottle, and held it up for my inspection: Glenfiddich, which certainly put him in a class above your ordinary geriatric mugger. So I thought: why not?

‘What did you want to tell me?’ I said.

He put his finger to his lips, then pointed up. We took the lift to the roof and went to a dark corner where the ventilators made a soft roar. The night was like damp flannel. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘What’s this all about?’

Sixe opened the bottle and poured the glasses nearly full. ‘Absent friends,’ he said. We clinked glasses and he emptied more than half of his.

There was enough light for me to see him pretty well; for a while he just stood there with his eyes closed while the drink went down. My earlier description of him as a failed-looking sort of man with dirty fingernails was unkind but there’s no escaping the fact that people carry their wins and their losses in their faces and the way they walk; although this man’s face seemed blurred and unreadable his general manner was that of someone who’d had more losses than wins. The dark shape of him against the red glow in the sky seemed to impose an additional reality (or unreality) on the one I was already struggling with. I didn’t want to be a character in his story but it seemed I had no choice.

‘Why would that flat be bugged?’ I said.

‘Don’t come the innocent with me — you must know why Corporation is interested in you.’

That seemed a reasonable answer but I felt as if I ought to be careful. ‘Got any ID?’ I said.

He handed me his Ziggurat card. The photo was of him but the name was Charles Harris. ‘Charles Harris?’

‘That isn’t the face I used to have either. If I were walking around as Lowell Sixe I wouldn’t be walking around any more.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s a long story.’ He drank more whisky and seemed disinclined to talk.

‘Where do I come into it?’

‘You’re the son of Helen Gorn. I knew her and there are things I think you should know.’

‘Why choose this particular time to tell me?’

‘Might be useful, I don’t know.’ He took another drink and coughed for about ten minutes; then he reached into the rucksack again and brought out three books: two hardbacks and a paperback. ‘These were Helen’s,’ he said. ‘I’m giving them to you.’ He handed them over as if he didn’t really want to let go of them.

The books smelled as if they’d been lying in the dark in an old trunk for a long time. One of the hardbacks was the 1955 Jewish Publication Society Holy Scriptures , stuck full of strips of yellow paper with her notations in faded black ink: ‘NOT IN THE WIND, NOT IN THE EARTHQUAKE’, ‘WHAT I WILL DO TO MY VINEYARD’, and so on in her cursive block-lettering. The paperback was Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance , and the other hardback, art-book sized, was a falling-apart and clearly loved-to-death Die Bibel in Bildern , the wood-engravings of Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld and the text of Martin Luther. On the cover was Elijah going up to heaven with the chariot and horses of fire: Elias Himmelfahrt .

As I took that book in my hands it fell open to Elijah being fed by ravens at the brook Cherith: Elijah had what looked like a slice of gammon in his hand while a raven delivered either a potato or a bun and a second raven offered another non-kosher slice. In the background was a deer drinking at the brook. The ravens were tidy little things and so was the deer; everything was small and neat, even the trees limited their spread as if Carolsfeld, like a photographer at a wedding, had said, ‘Everybody a little closer together, please.’ I held the book to my face and fancied that some faint fragrance was mingled with the musty-paper and dark-trunk smell.

I once saw some real live ravens, it was during a DSC short-jump exercise in the Grampians. A VMET blew and a crew of six were instantly translated from M-waves to raven snacks. I was in the search party, and when we found what was left of them on Rannoch Moor the ravens were tucking in heartily and chuckling about all the Elijahs that had dropped in to feed them. Those ravens were not little tidy birds, they were very big and black and wild, no table manners at all but they croaked a big loutish ‘Thank you, it’s been nice having you’ as they took off heavily and flapped away.