Russell Hoban - Fremder

In a dream I fell asleep and dreamed; and in that dream it was made known to me, perhaps by a written message, perhaps by the sound of faint and distant weeping, that the rats were lamenting the removal of their sacred objects. How sad, I thought, when they already have so little and their holy places are impermanent.

‘What do you think their sacred objects are?’ said Pythia as I came out of one dream and the other and was awake.

‘Maybe the head and hands of a rat martyr who died to save them all,’ I said. ‘Maybe his name was Elijah and his arse went off to another world in a flaming chariot.’

No answer. Darkness and music: The Art of Fugue spidering through the upper reaches of Contrapunctus 9 ( alia duodecima ). ‘Better not, Skipper,’ I said to Plessik, ‘you don’t want to let infinity in.’ But Plessik wasn’t there, nor were the others of the Clever Daughter crew, HUBBLE STRAITS FLICKER PAUSE, the display said, and there on the forward 180 were the arc-lit flicker docks and Mikhail’s revolving Quadrangle 4 Snackdome, 24 HOURS — FREIGHTERS YES. Beyond Mikhail’s the brilliant doughnut of the station, spangled with blue and yellow lights, trailed clouds of exhaust vapour as it revolved contrapuntally with the Snackdome in the black sparkle of space.

As always after the first flicker I felt as if I’d been knocked on the head and left lying in the road overnight. My mouth tasted as if I’d been chewing old circuit boards and I seemed to have lost the knack of breathing automatically. For a moment I had my usual panic, then I remembered to relax and just let it happen. I looked down at myself to check whether I’d come out of flicker the same as I went in and that’s when I remembered Mojo and High John at the door. Obviously I’d been doped and this was Clever Daughter II . And back on Earth Katya lay dead, various of her organs probably already removed for transplant. She’d been too good to be real and the reality of it, like a lump of iron in my throat, was no more Katya.

Had we had any moments that were truly ours? Had she really liked mazurkas? I’d never know. And on the Red Mountain, what she’d said about the grass — had the words been her own? What was left of what had been between us? What about the owl — had we really seen it?

Pythia had been talking to me outside of the dream. Where was she? The spacecraft in which I found myself was little more than a shipping container — there was no flight deck and there were no visible controls of any kind. ‘Pythia!’ I said. ‘Where are you?’ No answer. My hand was on my head as if it wanted to remind me of something. Ah, yes: the oscillator that wasn’t the same as everyone else’s, the oscillator with a phase-jump circuit. Wonderful. And somewhere there was a button that had perhaps already been pushed once.

The display above me continued to show HUBBLE STRAITS FLICKER PAUSE. I undid my seat harness and got up to have a look around. Was there any way out of this ship? There was an airlock but no spacesuit and no dinghy. ‘Great,’ I said. ‘Thanks very much,’ and went on with my recce. Ordinarily such things as the VMET, the artificial gravity, the gyros, and the back-up thrusters would be in plain view, labelled and colour-coded and displaying readouts and gauges; but in this ship nothing was in plain view except my seat and the overhead display and a snack-and-drink dispenser. There were metal shapes and bulges that housed the various systems; some of them were warm and some of them were humming but there were no little coloured lights, no switches: everything was sealed and blank and smelled of newness. Except, under the newness, there was a smell or perhaps only the idea of a smell — blocked drains and dead rats came to mind. I thought of ancient rituals and walled-up sacrifices, then tried to concentrate on matters of more immediate concern.

I was hoping to disable the VMET before I got flickered again, then if I could find some way of driving this thing I might (unless the ship was remote-controlled, which it probably was) be able to jet to Hubble Straits Station where I could figure out what to do next. I’d been in enough spacecraft to be able to recognise the components whether they were labelled or not and the layout was always pretty much the same: the AG motor was unmistakable because of the cable conduit that connected it to the traveller channel that girdled the ship; the gyros I located by feeling the spin through the housing; and I identified the VMET by smell but there were no screws or wingnuts — it had been operated by remote and was welded shut. In every other ship I’d been in there was a tool locker with welding equipment and everything else but not this one, and there was nothing that I could use for breaking into the VMET box.

I sat down again, and on the left side of my seat I found a panel with buttons for the lights, the heating, the artificial gravity, the snack-and-drink dispenser, and one labelled AUDIO. Bach was still spidering around the web of the universe but I wasn’t receptive. I pushed the AUDIO button and got the end of a song rendered by fluting computerised voices:

Woyodin rumumba, hey, hey, hey, hey?

Woyodin rumumba, hey? O woyodin

rumumba luv?

I remembered love and cried a little. ‘That was Nymphs and Shepherds with “The Waters of Forgetfulness” moving up to Number Three,’ said the American DJ, ‘and that was a dedication from T/2 Jack Longfellow at the Hubble Straits Cardio Clinic to Doreen, Sue Anne and Shirley at the Hydroponic Lab on Anunnaku Seven with the message, “Thanks for a great weekend.” Those cardio guys are all heart. Or long fellow, as the case may be. Well, the clock here at the Hubble of the universe shows 13:12 in the intergalactic stream of consciousness and you’re making it through the day with your Hubble Straits hubbub, Jim Bob Jackson, as we move on to …’ I pushed the button again and I was back with Bach; the AUDIO button offered nothing beyond Jim Bob and Johann Sebastian.

I left my seat and looked for a radio transmitter; I had friends at Hubble Straits, maybe I could raise Bill Charteris; he was an experienced Fremder Gorn rescuer. And of course Caroline was there. But there was no transmitter. I resumed my seat, leant back and closed my eyes. The dead-rat-and-blocked-drain-smell was getting stronger and I tried to move my awareness away from it. Katya was dead. The old feeling of sitting up in bed and looking into the dark came over me and I could feel my reality envelope beginning to come apart like a wet paper bag. Let it, I said to myself: perhaps this world that’s in us, this world that we’re in, was never meant to be fixed and permanent; perhaps it’s only one of a continuous succession of world-ideas passing through the world-mind. And we are, all of us, the passing and impermanent perceivers of it.

With that thought all the venues of my being seemed to weave themselves together on the loom of the mind that was thinking me: the owl and the B-Z, the ravens that fed Elijah, The Art of Fugue and Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring and Chopin’s mazurkas together with the images of all my years of memories and fantasies.

Now on high, high ancient legs, on legs like stilts of centuries, The Art of Fugue stalked through the black sparkle of the silence as I became the music, recurring in the iterations of my subjects and answers in the many worlds and deaths of all my moments, partly now and partly remembered.