Russell Hoban - Fremder

‘Where’s what?’

‘I don’t know,’ and she went back to sleep.

The famous Uffington White Horse, long unmaintained, was mostly overgrown. Wayland’s Smithy had become a latrine. The graffiti said, among other things, SHORTIS RUL and LOKKUP YUR MISSUS & DOTTERS HEAR CUM THE FUNBOYS. I closed my eyes and put my hands to the stone and listened with my mind but all I heard was a tinnitus like the chattering of dead cicadas.

On the day when it didn’t rain we saw through our anti-U-V goggles a lark fly straight up into the grey but the song that came down to us was small and without lift.

‘Shit above and shit below,’ said Judith, ‘shitwhistles in the sky. You know what?’

‘What?’

‘I’d like to finish on an up if we could.’

‘Me too.’

‘If we find one between here and Avebury let’s be off out of this, OK?’

‘OK.’

The next evening we came along the side of a hill through a Corporation pasture near Ogbourne St George. The guards passed us through the checkpoint and we went on our way through a herd of Friesians who stood and watched us in the rainy dusk. Their dark and glistening forms seemed monumental, prehistoric, unretentive of evil. I was overwhelmed by their air of innocent sapience and Judith burst into tears.

‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘We’re not going to top this. I don’t need to see the graffiti on the Avebury stones.’

‘Right.’ We left our robots for the Avebury pilgrims to turn in, phoned for a hopper, and in half an hour we were back at Judith’s place where we had a shower and drinks and didn’t say much for the rest of the evening.

More and more I find that life is a series of disappearances followed usually but not always by reappearances; you disappear from your morning self and reappear as your afternoon self; you disappear from feeling good and reappear feeling bad. And people, even face to face and clasped in each other’s arms, disappear from each other.

I flickered out and back as the job required and felt a little fuller of emptiness each time. There’s more emptiness in the air than there used to be, and its spores grow flowers of dust in the lungs. Things between Judith and me dwindled month by month until we were no longer part of each other’s reality. After half a year of not hearing from me she sent me a photocopy of a pencil-and-sepia drawing by Caspar David Friedrich: a burly eagle owl ( Uhu in German) sitting on a coffin that rested on boards laid across a freshly-dug grave. A child’s coffin it was, not fully grown. There was no note — that was the whole message and it arrived the day after her suicide was briefly mentioned in the newsfax.

I still think of that child’s coffin and the Uhu. Sometimes I see them tumbling over and over in deep space with that figure in the blue coverall. And sometimes when evening comes and the little tribunal of the dusk I remember how, when I first saw Judith, I needed to penetrate her sadness that waited with its face between its knees for the rain.

I was First Navigation Officer on Clever Daughter when we flickered out of Nova Central on 4 November 2052 bound for the Morrigan in the Fourth Galaxy. I always avoided flicker jumps on my birthday if possible — it never felt lucky. DSC allows one refusal for every ten jumps and I put in for one but several people were off sick and my refusal was refused. The night before we flickered out I’d had my usual three hours of sleep and I’d woken in the middle of that time sitting up and leaning forward into the dark feeling myself getting closer and closer to some kind of edge.

Clever Daughter terminated Jump One pause at Hubble Straits and was into Jump Two for Penzias-Wilson at 04:06 IGT. Traffic Control’s screens showed our dock empty and the M-scope registered the burst of peaks that indicate a flicker transmission so they knew we’d gone off as scheduled. At 04:06:03 Hubble Straits Traffic Control received an automatic flicker-break TX from Clever Daughter and there was no further communication from the ship.

At 04:10:28 Bill Charteris in Quadrangle Sweeper Sun Ra about 4oMk from Badr al-Budur on the Hubble side found himself humming an unfamiliar tune and at the same he saw something about 200 metres ahead tumbling over and over as it drifted towards him. It turned out to be me in a blue coverall — no spacesuit, no helmet, no oxygen.

The outside temperature was 3 Kelvin, that last fading remnant of warmth from the Big Bang. My arms were held rigidly out in front of me and my legs were drawn up as if to push me away from something. Bill radioed Hubble Straits while manoeuvring Sun Ra ’s grab arm to bring me in, and in less than three minutes I was being looked after by Caroline Lovecraft P/Pl, Director, Physio/Psycho, Newton Centre for Deep-Space Research at Hubble Straits.

She ascertained that although I looked like an odd-shaped ice lolly I was not dead but in a state of suspended animation. After a long soaking in warm water my clothes were peeled off me with the care usually reserved for ancient manuscripts. When naked I was coated with synthoderma and floated in a nutrient solution while they gave me a variety of anti-freeze injections and hooked me up to several drip-feeds. I was monitored constantly and after three days Lovecraft made verbal contact as shown in this transcript from 7 November 2052.

CL : Hi.

FG : Hi.

CL : I’m Caroline Lovecraft, Head of Physio/Psycho at Newton Centre. Will you state your name for the record?

FG : Johann Sebastian Bach.

CL : Do you know where you are now?

FG : Contrapunctus One. (HUMS BEGINNING OF THE ART OF FUGUE )

CL : Mr Bach, can you tell me what happened to Clever Daughter and the other seven crew members?

FG : Very, very high, the legs of Contrapunctus One. Centuries and centuries — mustn’t look down.

CS : About Clever Daughter — can you remember anything at all?

FG : If you can hold on to the terror you can hold on to the world, (HUMS AGAIN THE BEGINNING OF THE ART OF FUGUE ) B said. (OR ‘BEA SAID’ OR POSSIBLY ‘B.Z.’ SPEECH BECOMING SLURRED)

CS : What did B say?

FG : Be the music. Thou. (OR POSSIBLY ‘THOWL’)

CS : Couldn’t quite catch that. Please say again.

FG : Is he? (SPEECH MORE INDISTINCT)

CS : Is he what?

FG : (LOOKING AROUND) Not here. Gone. (OR POSSIBLY ‘GORN’)

CS : Did you say ‘gone’ or ‘Gorn’?

FG : (SHAKES HEAD, THEN OPENS MOUTH AND POINTS TO IT)

CS : You’re hungry?

FG : (SHAKES HEAD, COVERS FACE WITH HANDS, FALLS ASLEEP, TERMINATING INTERVIEW AT 15:32)

I have no recall of that conversation but I do remember the next one, which took place two days later in another part of Newton Centre. I was vibrant with fear at the time; I felt as if I was a puzzle of many pieces, all of them speeding outward from me in all directions. I was afraid I’d never get them back together and at the same time I was afraid that I would. The song in my head was:

ON THE GOOD SHIP LOLLIPOP,