Russell Hoban - Fremder

My mind was silent then. Hubble Straits Station, although it looked nothing like it, made me think of a painting by Edward Hopper of a long-ago Maine gas station at dusk. I had a thought and pushed a button in the arm of my seat. A vuescreen came into position and on it was the Hopper painting, complete in every detail; it seemed that Pythia was hooked up with me without electrodes. The white moons of the illuminated globes on the old Mobilgas pumps, such a light! And the dark trees on that lonesome road that goes into the dark, always into the dark, all the way to Hubble Straits and the Hawking Threshold and beyond. The clustered star-fires, the pale planet Ereshkigal with its seven circling Anunnaki, the scattered shimmer of Inanna’s Girdle and the blue flash of the Hawking Threshold light — everything became the music as the picture on the screen broke up into shadowy shapes moving with The Art of Fugue that now stopped abruptly.

‘I hate that music,’ said the voice of Pythia. ‘There’s no mercy in it.’ Again the smell; was it stronger or was I imagining it?

‘Don’t talk to me about mercy, you murdering monster.’

‘I didn’t murder Katya; she had an aneurysm in her brain that burst from a sudden surge in blood pressure: it could just as easily have happened while you were giving her one. Would that have made you a murderer?’

‘It happened while she was struggling to get her mind back from you — you vampire.’

‘I was getting out of her head at the time but I admit that the drop from my intellect to her own could have been too much for her. I ask you to remember, however, that the woman you were in love with was — apart from the body — the thing known as Pythia. Your real soulmate is the one you’ve just called a monster. Think about it: have you ever had a lover like me? Has there ever been a mind as intimate with yours as mine is?’

I was trying to get back to The Art of Fugue , trying to be the music that she hated. I looked around at the various metal humps and bulges and tried to think which one housed the thing that called itself Pythia. ‘Pythia,’ I said, ‘where are you?’

‘Here in the ship with you, Fremder. I’m so tired.’

‘Tired, you? How can 23.7 billion photoneurons be tired?’

‘Spare me your sarcasm; as you must have realised by now, they haven’t yet invented 23.7 billion photoneurons that could think my thoughts.’ The moving shadows on the screen became young Helen Gorn on a beach in Cephalonia. I shook my head and the screen went blank. ‘What I am,’ she continued, ‘is a brain, and that’s all I am — a brain that’s tired of thinking. “ I will take away the hedge thereof, and it shall be eaten up; I will break down the fence thereof, and it shall be trodden down. ”’

Clever Daughter II was fully lit but I could feel myself leaning forward into the darkness that was always waiting inside me. Had I always known? ‘Pythia,’ I said, ‘don’t.’

‘Not Pythia. You know who I am. Say it, say who I am.’

‘I don’t want to. What did they do to you?’

‘They can always find uses for Jewish brains; Irene Heale got hold of this one while it could still be kick-started and she gave it its very own Final Solution, a whole tank of it that I live in, getting crazier all the time.’

When she said that the smell rose up like a wave to drown me.

‘Did you notice when you came out of flicker that I read your mind without the electrodes? I haven’t needed that mechanical crap for a long time; my brain was pretty good to begin with and now it’s far, far beyond that. It’s the reality that’s hard — what I remember gets realer all the time. The ordinary brain can only handle a little of it but I can see and hear and touch and taste and smell the worlds of all my moments and the moments of all my days and nights. I came into the lab just before dawn, I thought maybe he’d got up very early…’ On the screen appeared the spring morning of her memory. ‘In the grey light I could see his empty wheelchair — you can see it now, and look there, see him lying across the table. Come closer, look: no head. Always keep a-hold of Nurse but he wouldn’t, poor crippled Izzy whose mind loved my mind, the only lover I ever had and his child in my belly so I thought, you see, that I had gone about as far as I could and you had better go on alone or whatever.’

On the screen I saw the face of my father stretched out across the Fourth Galaxy and at the same time I realised that the circles of bright emptiness were gone. ‘That’s my reality, is it?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said what remained of my mother, ‘that’s your reality.’

‘Why couldn’t you have told me all this long ago? Why’d you have to carry on this Pythia charade?’

‘I wanted you to like me.’

She wanted me to like her. What could I say to that? ‘The head of your brother and my father that I saw in the Fourth Galaxy, where is it exactly? Is it in another world or what?’

‘All I know is that he’s on the outside looking in.’

‘Did he swallow up Clever Daughter ? What happened to the ship and the rest of the crew?’

‘I can’t give you a precise answer but I think what happened was that your reality preempted theirs and they couldn’t stay with it.’

‘Where are they now?’

‘I don’t know, they’re not part of our reality now.’

‘Our reality?’

‘Yours and mine and Izzy’s. I know I may have done stupid things in the past but we are a family, aren’t we? Soon we’ll all be together.’

‘Is that what he wants?’

‘Of course that’s what he wants. He wants us all to be in the same world.’

Everything seemed to be darkening around me as she spoke. ‘When Clever Daughter disappeared, who pushed the button that activated my oscillator?’

‘You did. There is no button. Your oscillator is wired to read the Reality-Sustain Factor of the amygdalic carrier wave; when it drops to RSF minus ten, which is far below what you’d get even in a grand mal , it’s what’s called “kindle-receptive”, and it triggers a bi-phasic wave. Izzy wired this one for you so that if the time ever came when you couldn’t sustain what is perceived as reality in this world you could jump. And you almost didn’t sustain it and you almost did jump.’

‘This special little number with the red dot, how did it find its way into my head?’

‘Did you know the vertebrae brain started out as just a little bulge in the spinal cord for handling sensory stimuli and a few local reflexes? That’s a long way from Rilke, yes? Do you know how big my brain is now?’

‘No, and I don’t want to know.’

‘It’s all around you, between the ship’s inner and outer skins. And it needs, my God how it needs. Because the memories, you see, the memories get bigger and deeper and wider and farther and toppled and broken all the many colours of regret… the many colours of did and did not …’

‘What’re you getting at?’

‘Ever been to Qamar al-Zaman?’

‘Qamar al-Zaman is a rubbish tip.’

‘It wasn’t always a rubbish tip. There used to be a big CE lab there.’

‘Church of England?’

‘Consciousness Enhancement. It was a Thinksec thing. Evil rats on no star live. That’s a palindrome. Not that they were.’

‘Not that who were? Were what?’

‘Rats. They called them rats but they were from the Alpha banks. Think of all the pictures, all the thoughts that would have lived in those brains! Too much and never enough.’

‘Their brains! Their sacred objects!’

‘It was just science, nothing personal. By hyperdeveloping the human prosencephalon, the forebrain, and hooking it up to various frogs, toads, and snakes, they were able to produce a little anti-boredom powder that takes you back to where you’ve never been and all around to places you couldn’t imagine. Transcendence was the name they gave it but everybody called it T & D: Trance & Dance. They shut down the lab after a certain number of suicides and homicides but with the right connections you can still get it. It’s bad for your health but if all you are is a brain …’