Russell Hoban - Fremder

‘Are you telling me that Helen Gorn was seriously wondering about that?’

‘One thing about Helen — she was serious in all of her thinking, even when she was just fooling around with ideas. She’d try anything as a possible working proposition if it helped her get a handle on the problem. Sometimes she talked about Elijah as a man and sometimes as a metaphor for a new world of action and possibility. This new action was triggered by something the Israelites named with a tetragrammaton that wasn’t to be spoken. What I’m telling you is what Helen told me: why a tetragrammaton? Four is a Hermetic number, a number of chance and change and flow from one state to another, from one world to another. Hermes is the god of roadways and thieves and a thief moves things from here to there.

‘Maybe Elijah was a nobody where he was before, a failure, whatever.’ Here Sexe paused and looked at me with something like a challenge in his face.

‘Or maybe a cripple in a wheelchair?’ I said. ‘In 2021 it was Helen and Izzy together doing the limbic-system experiments. Were they thinking of a world where Helen hadn’t got raped and Izzy had all his parts in working order?’

‘Even before the Shorties and the Clowns did what they did, Helen and Izzy weren’t happy in the world. Izzy was dead when I met Helen but she was still trying to convert her Elijah obsession into some kind of practical reality.’

‘You mean …?’

‘I’ll tell you what I mean when I get to it. Whatever Elijah was, according to Helen, something jumped him out of where he was and into First Kings because that was where it had work for him. These are Helen’s words I’m giving you: Elijah as metaphor. Look at the ravens, she used to say — what we call Yahweh sent the action we call Elijah into the wilderness to be fed first by the blackness, then by the female principle, the widow. Then the Elijah action fed the widow by making her meal and oil go on inexhaustibly; as male principle it replenished her. Elijah brought back to life her dead child, the dead world-child, with the male power of Yahweh surging in him he pulled that child out of the world of the dead and back into the world of the living.

‘Next with the fire of Yahweh he showed that Baal was an idea without potency and he killed the servants of that dead idea. Only then could the rain come, the rain that the parched earth had waited for so long. Then Elijah began to fade and he was afraid of Jezebel and he wanted to die. He went to Mount Horeb and Yahweh showed him how it was when the power moves on and leaves the vessel behind. Because the power and the action are too much for the vessel, the vessel can only take so much. Helen went on about Elijah and how Yahweh showed him the stillness and Yahweh spoke the stillness that comes after the earthquake and the wind and the fire, the stillness that follows the release of energy from the potential to the actual.

‘There was still a little Elijah action when he zapped the two captains and their fifties with the Yahweh-fire but the action was about to move on with Elisha. That’s where the writers of the Scriptures phased Elijah out with a whirlwind and a chariot and horses of fire and all that. Helen thought Elijah probably just died when he was used up but the writers had to give him an impressive exit that would show the transfer of the action to Elisha.’

‘Exactly what was Helen Gorn after? What was she trying to do with the Elijah Project?’

‘The thing about Helen was, she’d tell me a lot but she wouldn’t tell me everything. She’d give me that little look that said I didn’t need to know certain things. When I asked her what you just asked me she said she wanted to jump into a world where she could feel the way Elijah must have felt when he was running ahead of Ahab’s chariot in the rain, running to Jezreel in the rain. Two images she talked about a lot — Elijah with his head between his knees waiting for the rain and Elijah running to Jezreel. She knew how the first one felt but she’d never had the second. Can you believe that?’

‘Yes. Have you ever had the running-ahead-of-the-chariot-feeling?’

‘I had it the first time I slept with Helen. You?’

It wasn’t a woman that came to mind when he asked me that, it was a spacecraft, Constanze De Groot , an old Service and Supply jet held together with sealing tape and promises. I was Records Clerk on that ship when I was eighteen, in my gap year between pro school and polytechnic. We shuttled around the Second Galaxy servicing the mining operations on the various De Groot planets. We flew the same safe courses day after day but old Pieter Paul De Groot kept his profits up by keeping his maintenance down; one morning the Number Three gyro packed up and we found ourselves in the Third Galaxy with the flicker-intercept alarm flashing red and the klaxon blaring.

Hermo Weitermann was First Nav. He used to let me hang about on the flight deck in my breaks, so I was there when it happened. Hermo hadn’t a clue where to go but when I closed my eyes and just let myself be with it I could see on the screen of my mind the flicker transmissions shooting around us like red lasers in the black and I could feel our position in the quadrangle the way a gymnast feels where his body is. I told Hermo to drop one K into the clear and we were out of there without randomising the ship and crew flickering on their pilot beam into the space we’d occupied. We radioed Scansat Control and they told us it was the Consortium Française courier Atalante we’d almost scattered all over the galaxy. They had a crew of four who lived to flicker another day and I knew I was going to be a navigator.

I still remember that moment vividly, even fiercely; that brilliant flash of Yes! Here I am! I’ve often recalled it at times when I didn’t know where I was or what I was. The tawny owl is of course my anchorbird but I think sometimes of the migrations of the arctic tern: thousands of miles and they never get lost. Once I was fully qualified I was mostly out of jets and into flicker and then navigation was reduced to checking the frequency schedules and sticking the right transmission card into the autofreak. But I never lost that sense of myself as a moving point on the screen of the mind that lives in my head. On that night in November 2054 Lowell Sixe entered into my navigation as a spacemark of some kind, a density of dark matter on the screen. I told him about Constanze De Groot , then I said, ‘Were you with Helen until she went into the sanatorium?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know who my father was?’

‘I wondered when you’d ask that. The answer is no. Your mother was pregnant when I met her and although she talked about it sometimes she never said who the father was.’

‘How far did she get with the Elijah Project?’

‘Let me tell this in my own time; right now I’m trying to give you some background. Lossiter was working on the many-worlds thing until he died three days after writing that second letter you read: twenty-seventh of April, 2021.’

‘How old was he?’

‘Thirty-seven.’

‘What did he die of?’

‘Faulty hearing. Corporation told him to lie down but he stood up.’

‘Ah. They wanted …?’

‘The fruits of his labours. They sussed he was on the way to other worlds and they wanted to take it over. He thought it was safer with him which was of course a crazy idea. He was so unbalanced that he fell off the top of a block of flats and ended up in another world sooner than he expected to.’

‘But Helen Gorn was carrying on from where he left off, wasn’t she? Did Corporation know that?’

‘Did they know! She couldn’t fart without Top Exec knowing and they made sure she heard how Lossiter died. Then they left her alone to get on with it.’