Russell Hoban - Fremder

As the Financial Timesfax reported a plunge in the value of deep-space shares, Corporation Top Exec have, not surprisingly, challenged the Chundera-Morrison life-expectancy findings, claiming that coincidental data have been transmuted by statistical alchemy into apparent cause and effect. As to the deterioration of metal and other substances, they say that constant monitoring and safety checks have shown this to be no greater than in conventional spacecraft.

The colleague who brought this to my attention had done twelve more flicker jumps than I had so we both had a few more drinks and told each other that Drs Chundera and Morrison hadn’t taken into consideration the preservative effects of alcohol.

I wonder if others have, as I do, the little tribunal of the dusk. The twelve of them don’t require the physical twilight — they’ll sit whenever there’s twilight in the soul and the bat wings of memory and guilt come flittering through the crepuscule. The look of them varies with the occasion: sometimes they’re human; sometimes they’re owls.

Judith had long black hair, brown eyes of sybilline intensity, a melancholy face and a sinuous figure. I met her at a Camera Obscura recital in the Thames Concordia Dome. It was summer, the river lights and those of the Raft City slums seemed magical in the luminous dusk, and I was alone. She was in the seat next to mine and halfway through the Adagio of the Schubert C Major String Quintet I noticed that she was crying. The sight of a good-looking woman being sad made me lust for entry to the privacy of her sadness. She began to look through her bag with no apparent success so I handed her a tissue and she smiled her thanks.

In the interval I asked if I could buy her a drink. She said yes and we went to the Overlook Bar. ‘Does Schubert always make you cry?’ I said.

‘Sometimes everything makes me cry,’ she said: ‘the lights on the water, the sound of the wirecars coming into the platform, the look of the sky.’

We ended up at my place that evening and in no time at all we were talking fragic. ‘Moony, moony glimmers,’ she said. ‘Lost and treasure found so deep and sleeping birds.’ It was only a matter of weeks before I told her that I loved her.

‘Are you part of my reality now?’ she said.

‘Always.’

‘You’ll leave me one day.’

There flashed into my mind Elijah on Carmel, face between his knees. ‘Why do you say that?’ I said.

‘I just know.’

I was twenty-two, just made Second Navigator. She was twenty-eight, a stage designer. On my next downtime in London we hoppered up to Dundee, got a surface hirecar permit, and drove up through Recreation Reserve 7 to the Moray Firth. At the RR7 checkpoint we paid our toll and had a Rescue 2-Way plugged into the dashboard. An electronic sign said:

CORPORATION RECREATION RESERVE 7

TODAY’S AIR CONTENT IS GREEN 3.

OZONE READING RED 1.

U-V PROTECTION MUST BE WORN!

24-HR PATROLS ON DUTY.

IF YOU ARE TRAVELLING WITH

A CLONE OR A ROBOT

YOU MUST HAVE A PERMIT.

REPORT ALL DANGER SIGHTINGS ON D1.

FOR RESCUE CALL R1

AND SPECIFY TYPE OF EMERGENCY.

The sky over the Cairn o’Mount Road through the Grampians was immense and complex: it had a foreground, a middle distance, and a background receding to the beginning of time under vast architectures of cumulonimbus and stratocumulus clouds roofed over with a magisterial darkness. At first there’d been sunshine but up ahead a curtain of rain hung over the mountains and we drove into it. Judith turned on the car radio and got Number One on the charts, Dark Matter with ‘Planetary Fade’:

Flick flick, flick and fade, John,

flick and fade.

Flick flick, flick and fade, John,

on the planet where you are.

After the rain came sleet and snow, then a clear grey light like the first day of the world and a tawny owl low over the heather. Neither of us had ever seen an owl before: there it was, astonishingly real with its flat face and the grey distance receding behind it. ‘Look!’ we both said at once. ‘An owl!’ and I felt that with those words we were vowing never to forget that moment, vowing to be faithful to it and each other for ever.

We reached the Moray Firth without sighting any dangers or needing to be rescued and found ourselves a hotel in Portknockie, a sometime herring port with its brown-sailed luggers long gone: a steadfast and enduring harbour with empty arms, thick flakes of rust in the shape of big ring-bolts, a silence full of the ghost shouts of departed fishermen, gulls crying, and the wind moaning to itself on Green Castle, Bow Fiddle, Port Hill.

‘The luggers and the herring are gone,’ said Judith.

‘But not us,’ I said. ‘Rings and ropes and baskets.’

‘So many voices,’ said Judith. ‘So many stars beneath the sea,’ and we held each other close. In those three days everything that we did, everything that I saw, heard, smelled, tasted, and touched imprinted itself vividly on my memory so that later I was able to identify that time in the same way that one names, with the help of a book, the rare bird only briefly seen: yes, it had this and this and this. That was what it was, then: happiness.

Even then, sometimes when I closed my eyes I could sense at the heart of the blackness something that I belonged to more than I could ever belong to happiness, something that I could be faithful to more than to any woman. You can disappear as M-waves and reappear as supposedly the same person but after a while the deep-space emptiness gets into you. Flickerheads call it the MTs. When I was in London Judith and I did what we always did — walked and talked, dined at intimate little restaurants, went to concerts, opera, theatre, and films but little by little the flavour went out of it. And more and more I’d wake at night to find myself sitting up in bed and leaning forward into the darkness, listening to the ravens and the dead, waiting like Elijah with his head between his knees.

‘Where are you?’ Judith kept saying.

‘Here,’ I said.

‘No, you’re not.’

Holding on to the world is mostly an act of faith: you see a little bit of it in front of you and you believe in the rest of it both in time and space. If you’re scheduled for a jump to Hubble on Tuesday you believe in you, in Hubble, in the jump, and in Tuesday. Sometimes it was hard for me to believe all of it.

Towards the end of August the year after Portknockie we walked what was left of the Ridgeway, both of us hoping that putting ourselves on that ancient track might earth us to our own past. Because of funding cuts there were no longer security patrols; the fee included robots and stun guns and to be on the safe side we joined up with some Avebury pilgrims at Streatley.

There seemed always to be power stations on all sides of us and the air was never better than Yellow 2 so we did the whole walk wearing breathers. There was toxic rain every day but one; we squelched through ankle-deep mud, our clothes wet with sweat and condensation under our rain gear. At night the robots stood watch in the rain outside our tent while not-very-distant Shorties and Clowns sang, ‘Hawa ko , hawa ko , hawa ko !’

There are four things that I think of when I remember that walk: a clump of beech trees; a lark; Wayland’s Smithy; and a herd of cows. The beech trees were on a little hill off to one side of the track somewhere around Thurle Down. They were spotted with some kind of mould and their leaves were yellow; when we were in among them there suddenly fell the kind of silence you get when you walk into the wrong pub and all the faces turn towards you. That night Judith woke me at a quarter to four talking in her sleep. ‘Where is it?’ she said.