Russell Hoban - Fremder

In the deep chill and the darkness of the Fourth Galaxy, in the black sparkle of deep space, oh so lonely, see a figure in a blue coverall tumbling over and over as it comes towards you: no space suit, no helmet, no oxygen. Is he dead? He can’t be alive, can he? What’s in his mind now? Are there pictures frozen in his mind?

Pictures in the mind! Words also. Again last night I had the dream, the one in which it was made known to me, perhaps by a written message, perhaps by the sound of distant weeping, that the rats were lamenting the removal of their sacred objects. I have never dreamed this dream on the planet Badr al-Budur but perhaps one night I shall.

Badr al-Budur (everybody calls it Badru) in the Fourth Galaxy is a little off the beaten track: because of El-Niño variables in that sector you can’t flicker to it, you have to go to Hubble Straits and jet from there. Badru is a place you stop at on the way to somewhere else, an in-between place, a middle-of-the-night scene change where you breathe bottled air that smells like LavaKleen and wait for the next jet to Erehwon or Xanadu or wherever.

There’s nothing on Badru but the spaceport which is mostly empty except for robot sweepers humming through the echoing silence under dim blue noctolux lamps. Clocks, too, that tell you what day and time it is in London, Tokyo, New York, and so on. There’s MIKHAIL’S QWIKSNAK, a multilingual cafeteria in pink, purple, red, blue, green, and yellow neon (with missing letters) where you can get GALAKT K MIKS, SPUDNIK FRY, KRASNAYA K LA, and indigestion or worse. Nearby is Mikhail’s Bistro where you can get a better class of indigestion. Next to it is a gift shop where robots fluent in twenty currencies will sell you clockwork orreries made in New Taiwan, models of the Stephen Hawking , pornoscopes featuring the Arabian Nights Princess Badr al-Budur with her lover Qamar al-Zaman, key rings with bits of polished budurite, and tea towels that say, ‘I’VE BEEN THRU BADRU. HAVE YOU?’ Not surprisingly, Badru orbits the planet Qamar al-Zaman which is the rubbish tip for that sector.

There are a mini-cine and a cybercade in the spaceport but my favourite night spot on Badru is the Q-BO SLEEP that beckons in purple neon, SLEEP & SHOWER IO CR. PER HOUR: each cube with its high-mileage futon, shower, sink, and toilet. The blankets have a grey prison look and the towels are only a little thicker than the toilet paper. To check in you insert your card and punch in your hours, then you get your Hi-REM or Dropout tab from the dispenser and you’re bye-bye until your jump to Erehwon or Xanadu or wherever.

Nobody lives on Badru except cockroaches; the staff are all robots and the supplies are delivered weekly by Mikhail’s Intergalaktik. Mikhail loses money on it but he had to take it on to get the Fourth-Galaxy franchise. What I like about Badru is that it’s so much what it is, so much the appearance of itself printed on the very thin membrane that we call reality. On the other side of that membrane is the endless becoming that swallows up years and worlds, Badr al-Budur, Mikhail’s Intergalaktik, even the dream rats and their sacred objects, in the dark of no remembrance.

I was only a few megaklicks off Badru when they found me drifting in space on the morning of 4 November 2052. No space suit, no helmet, no oxygen, and the pictures in my mind all frozen.

The fourth of November 2052 was my thirtieth birthday. What happened that morning in the Fourth Galaxy came to be known as the Clever Daughter incident, and after it they kept me at Hubble Straits Space Station for three weeks for a Level 4 Study at Newton Centre. They wanted to know how I’d been able to hold on to the world. When I say ‘the world’ I don’t mean Planet Earth, I mean everything this side of the reality membrane.

My head is full of music: all kinds of songs and fragments of songs, most of them written, sung, and played by dead people. Some of my best friends are dead people.

I like old standards, American mostly, all the way back to the nineteen-twenties. They don’t write songs like that any more, that world isn’t there any more. Once I saw an old documentary with grainy black-and-white footage from 1936, the Spanish Civil War: men running up a hill with bolt-action rifles thinking they were going to do some good.

I took a trip on the train and I thought about you,

I passed a shadowy lane and I thought about you,…

A little strange, a little bringing tears to the eyes, to hear that in your head out beyond the Sixth Galaxy. I’m amazed at how many songs and bits of songs live in my head. And the times when it sings them. Why did it give me ‘The Shadow of Your Smile’ when the jets packed up on a local from Escherville to the Hand of Glory in Schrödinger’s Cat ? Or ‘Begin the Beguine’ when the AG slipped its channel and Constanze De Groot took the top off the New Tokyo Sonydome? That morning last November when Clever Daughter and I parted company, however, the music in my head was a much older standard than those.

You know how it is when you’re sitting in a bar somewhere dark and quiet just breathing in and out and maintaining neutral buoyancy and a stranger starts talking to you and after a while he brings out of his pocket a letter coming apart at the creases; he brings out this letter to show you that at one time he mattered more than he does now and he tells you the story of his life. At first you wish he’d go away but perhaps you say to yourself, Maybe one day I’ll want somebody to listen to my story. Never mind. My name is Fremder Gorn. Fremder means stranger in German.

Sometimes I think about the age of steam and those great locomotives that thundered into oblivion like the Spirit of Progress. Sometimes I think about the motorcars that poisoned the air and swallowed up the green and pleasant land and finally sputtered to a halt in gridlock. And sometimes I think about flicker drive.

My mind goes back to a few minutes before three o’clock in the morning of 4 November 2052, just over a year ago. Nova Central Cargo Spaceport outside London — the flicker docks under the purple stutter of the rhodolux lamps in the rain. Diesel and electrical smells of forklifts and cranes and juicers. Another smell, whispering and beckoning like the Erl King’s daughters: the smell of Out There. People move a little differently at three in the morning. Purple light and deep shadows. Figures in infraglo macs shouting. High-legged gantry cranes loading and unloading freighters and tankers. Lights and colour and motion reflected in the shine of the wet tarmac. Lots of noise but behind the hiss of the purple rain the silence is cruising like a shark.