Fremder

13

Corporation flickered me home with a couple of ViTech 8s minding me. One of them was very tall and the other was very short. The tall one’s working name was Mojo; the short one’s was High John and he didn’t smile when he said it. When we reassembled at Nova Central they cleared me through Quarantine with Red 1 Priority, got us into a waiting hopper, and took me to the Ziggurat in London Central for the Pythia session. It was a grey and rainy end-of-November day, I was glad for that; I hate those hard sunny days that break your teeth. This one was gentle, there was a little mercy coming down with the rain; the colours of everything were heightened by the rainlight; except for the holes of bright emptiness it was a day you could work with. I was glad for that because I knew that I was coming to the end of my forgetting; whatever you might try to hide, Pythia would get it out of you one way or another.

We lifted out of Nova Central and flew over the ruins of Themepark West where the rides had rusted into tottering skeletons and the scenic river was silted solid with sewage; over the huddle of London Outer Squats where the roads were choked with the gridlocked shells of cars and lorries that hadn’t moved for forty years, many of them extended by canvas or packing crates into a better class of hovel than their neighbours. The rain intensified the stench of garbage, excrement, and decomposition as we flew over a pack of dogs dining on a human corpse. The next gathering we saw was a pack of Shorties roasting what looked like a dog on a spit. One of them had a blaster and there was dancing but I couldn’t hear the music.

The air looked no soupier than usual and all the hopper vents were closed but our breather filters were greenish-yellow by the time we got to the Ziggurat. The transparent anti-rad canopy was up and the yellow HAZRAD blimps that supported it swayed glistening in the rain. Through the canopy I saw bodies, some naked and some clothed, heaped on a plaza below the upper levels. The maintenance crews were out on strike so the building was in its purple standby mode; the naked bodies seen through the yellow canopy were greenish-grey and ghastly. As we flew lower I saw that there were Shorties among the adults. Placards were visible but I couldn’t make out what they said.

‘Are the big ones Clowns?’ I said.

‘Probably,’ said High John. ‘With Shorties giving the orders. This lot must have had a neutraliser for getting through the barrier screen; Shorties are getting smarter all the time.’

‘If they’d been smart they wouldn’t have got themselves terminated like that,’ said Mojo.

‘What were they protesting against?’ I said.

‘What’ve you got?’ said High John.

‘Fun Creds are what they mostly protest for,’ said Mojo: ‘toadsy and arcade time.’

‘You ever done toadsy?’ High John asked me.

‘Flicker drive is all I do in the consciousness-altering line.’

‘toadsy makes life a lot more exciting,’ said High John.

‘Death too,’ said Mojo.

Even with the corpses the purple Ziggurat looked wonderful in the rain sporting its yellow canopy and flashers, the various red and green beacons winking on relay towers and dish antennas, and the newsflash girdling it with green lights: SUNNYBANK MELTDOWN: 237 MORE DEAD. ‘DANGER PAST’ — SNG SHAKEUP, NO. I IN SECRET TALKS WITH TOP EXEC — CLEVER DAUGHTER FAMILIES: ‘TELL US THE TRUTH’ — ZIGGURAT MAINTENANCE CREWS REJECT CORPORATION OFFER: ‘WE’LL ZIG BUT WE WON’T ZAG’ — SURVEY SHOWS 43 % INCREASE IN NO-GO AREAS: STREET BOSS SACKED, said the headlines. It was good to be home.

Because of the canopy (still up because Maintenance were still out) we landed in the hopper park on top of the old MI Archive Tower and took the lift down to the underground shuttle to get to the Ziggurat. The shuttle is Red Clearance only and passes had to be shown but the platform stank of urine just the same and the graffiti on the walls were the usual thing: SNG HOARS OUT WOGS JEW UROTRASH OUT INGLAN 4 THE INGLASH. SHORTIS ROOL. The crossed arrows of the Patriots were prominent as were many illegible calligraphies which may have been personal signatures.

At the Ziggurat we took the lift to Pythia Reception where Mojo signed me over to the Tech 7 on duty who turned out to be Nina Marlowe, the wife of Ernie Marlowe who’d been Auxiliary Engineer on Clever Daughter. ‘You’re looking well, Fremder,’ was all she said. She punched up my entry on the console and fed my capsule into Pythia intro.

Standing by the reception desk was a sweet-faced grandmotherly-looking woman in a business suit and a power haircut. ‘A sad welcome, Mr Gorn,’ she said. ‘I’m Irene Heale, Head of Research and Development. Nothing can bring back the seven who were lost but we’re hoping for data from you that will prevent such disasters in future.’

‘I’ll do my best,’ I said.

Nina pushed a buzzer, a young woman with fair hair in a long plait came towards me, and I felt a sudden rush of loss and longing and desire all at once. It was too early for dusk but the little tribunal was sitting and the verdict was the usual one. ‘Hello,’ she said, and stuck out her hand. ‘I’m Katya Mazur. I’ll prep you for Pythia.’

‘You’re new, yes? You weren’t here the last time I had a Pythia session.’

‘I’ve been here three months or so.’ Her handshake was firm, her hand warm and dry.

I leaned closer to see how her name was spelled on her badge. ‘Katya Mazur,’ I said. ‘Turn it around and it’s Mazurka-tya.’

‘You like mazurkas? The Chopin ones?’

‘Yes.’ I watched her walk as she moved ahead of me to push the lift button.

‘I’ve got the Ilse Bak recording of the complete mazurkas,’ she said. ‘Opus 67 in A Minor, Number 4 is my favourite.’ She hummed the beginning of it.

‘Mine too.’

She looked at me to see if I was lying, saw that I wasn’t, and smiled. Standing beside her in the lift I closed my eyes and smelled her hair and felt guilty.

The ready room was a cosy place with a dim red primordial light that made it easier to be naked there. I stripped so that I could be prepped by T/7 Mazur whose face and figure had already brought me to a good state of pupil-dilation. Deep-spacers are still mostly male, and the Sheela-Na-Gig and Top Exec (solidly female) clearly wanted us wide awake and tingling for Pythia sessions.

‘What was that look you gave me when I came to reception?’ she said. ‘Have we met somewhere before?’

‘You reminded me of someone.’

‘Someone nice?’

‘Very nice,’ I said, and abandoned myself to her ministrations.

‘You’re shaking,’ she said as she smeared me all over with electrolytic cream.

‘Don’t take any notice of it — it’s just something I do between flicker jumps.’ She was very thorough and although I was feeling more and more nervous about the Pythia session it was evident that my body was getting interested.

‘See,’ she said with a big smile, ‘you’re feeling better already.’ She put her entry card into the slot, an aperture irised open, and we went through it into what Corporation called the Omphalos and deep-spacers referred to as the Wank Parlour. It was a warm and humid place with a very delicate essence-of-silk-knickers smell and it was shaped like the inside of an egg with no visible high-tech male gimmickry. Somewhere in the building there had to be a door marked RED CLEARANCE ONLY and behind that door there were undoubtedly speakers and screens and banks of gauges and recorders and panels of winking lights monitored by Physio/Psycho, by Psychogen and of course by Thinksec but in the Omphalos there were only that faint erotic fragrance and the sensor cradle and the millions of pixels lining the walls of the ovum and changing colour and pattern to the music Pythia made while waiting for the session to begin.

The thing that always hit me straightaway was her presence — there was definitely someone there. The Corporation brochure said that Pythia was a Darwinian intelligence of 23.7 billion photoneurons that had come on line in 2034 to cope with the flood of data arising from flicker drive. She was modestly classified as a Data Evaluator (Autonomous Response) but nobody called her DEAR. According to the brochure: ‘As deep-spacers told her of the psychological stresses of their work she became by degrees their confidante and counsellor, her function expanding as her capabilities increased.’ That’s as far as the brochure went but Pythia went much farther. She was generally acknowledged to be a little crazy, but as most deep-spacers were a little crazy themselves they found her easy to talk to.

Pythia’s sensor cradle was a flexotronic body shell in two halves, one for the front and one for the back of the subject. It waited at a comfortable reclining angle like a waffle iron with its lid open; when I lay down it tilted to the horizontal. The shell was cast from a sculpture by Rajeswari Biswas and the shape was that of a voluptuous female along the lines of those in the Ajanta Caves except that it had no face, only the back of the head which acted as a headrest. The legs were well apart and the knees bent; the arms were flung back above the head.

When I was in position Mazur put the electrode net on my head, then she attached the semen collector (Pythia was one of the intakes for the DSC Genetic Programme; she also analysed the DNA of deep-spacers on flicker drive) and closed the shell on me so that all the sensors made contact. She switched on the power and the cradle rose off its base on an electrostatic field and hung in the air in the middle of the egg-shaped space. Looking down between my flexotronic breasts I could see on my belly the raised I Ching hexagram of K’un, The Receptive. I sometimes wondered about the Pythian arrangements but I accepted that the Sheela-Na-Gig and Top Exec were what they were and had their little ways. So far they hadn’t done any worse than the male-dominated governments before them. Why had they called their Data Evaluator (Autonomous Response) Pythia? Generations of priestesses with that name had sat on a tripod over the chasm at Delphi, inspired by the sulphurous fumes to speak oracles — in other words, stoned out of their minds; I don’t believe Top Exec credited Pythia with mantic powers; I think they gave her that name because it made her seem a little like a hi-tech gypsy palmist and encouraged people to loosen up with her.

When Mazur had me hooked up she said, ‘Push the button under your left thumb if you want to disconnect and the one under your right thumb if you need me.’ Then she left. I liked her going-away view and the sensors put that up on the pixels briefly before they went into a flicker pattern of expanding and contracting shapes and colours, glimmering and occulting: yes/no/here/gone. Except, of course, for the places where the circles of bright emptiness came and went. The i/f music that always accompanied the flicker pattern meandered faintly through the silence.

I closed my eyes, afraid of what might jump out of my head and on to the pixels. I tried to relax but I could feel something building up in me and threatening to burst out at any moment. In all Pythia sessions there was inevitably pain as well as pleasure but I knew that this was going to be like none other. My head had as always its own agenda and the song it was singing was ‘My One and Only Love’:

The very thought of you makes my heart sing

like an April breeze on the wings of spring,…

Then I noticed that I was hearing it from outside my head. Pythia was singing in her husky voice and with her slightly slurred diction:

And you appear in all your splendour, my one and

only love.

The shadows fall and spread their mystic charms

in the hush of night when you’re in my arms.

I feel your lips so warm and tender, my one and

only love.

‘When everyone was young,’ she said. ‘Such clear, clear water! Sunlight through the leaves and the fragrance of summer. Have you ever found a one and only love?’

‘I thought so once.’

‘What happened?’

‘I lost it.’ The Uhu on the coffin came and went and with the smell of T/7 Mazur’s hair still in my nostrils I saw on the pixels above me the tawny owl gliding low over the heather in the grey wind in the Grampians, its ringed eyes growing larger, becoming eyes of otherness becoming something partly now and partly remembered, fading, gone as Caroline appeared when we cleared the couch for the first time and she stepped out of her knickers. Other and more active images followed — the Omphalos was where it all came out, there was no chance whatever of non-visual thinking. I averted my eyes modestly, and when I looked again Katya Mazur’s going-away view came on with the charming little transverse ripple in her trousers where the incurve of her lower back met the outcurve of her bottom.

‘Pretty well back to normal, are we?’ said Pythia. ‘A pomegranate was what Persephone ate the seeds of.’

‘Getting there.’

‘Good. And before the blue movie with Dr Lovecraft and the close-up of T/7 Mazur’s bouncy bits we had some nature-film footage that faded into something else. What was that all about?’ Again the owl appeared on the pixels; again its eyes became eyes of otherness, eyes of becoming.

‘That’s a long story, Pythia.’

‘Some of my best friends but I wouldn’t want my sister. All right, if you’re not ready to talk about it we can come back to it later. Let’s say the words now: “From the woman-darkness, from the womb of time,…”’

I responded, ‘“From before the maleness, from before the beginning,…”’

‘From the Genetrix of all things, from the fruitful blackness, …”’

‘“Let there speak through me the voice of what is.”’

We were quiet for a little while and the pixels went into a dim and meditative colour that I’d never seen before and had no name for. I wasn’t at all sure I was seeing the colour; it was as if I were taking in the chromatic information without actually perceiving it visually. The 1/f music was gone; the whisper of the rain and the sound of a distant hopper came in from an external mike.

‘Such a good sound to make love to, such a good sound to fall asleep to,’ said Pythia. ‘Ancient and memorious rain. Do you like the smell of rain?’

‘When the wind is right.’

‘Do you think the rain remembers, Fremder?’

‘I think everything remembers, Pythia.’ Except me, I thought. Once there was Clever Daughter and then there wasn’t. Seven other crew missing. What happened? So deep and wide, the reaches of space. Something speaking in the silence? What?

‘Yes, but especially the rain. It remembers when the world was new, remembers how the seas filled up. Think of all the midnights and the dawns the rain remembers, how many there were before a single word was spoken. Neither pleasant palaces nor wild dogs to howl in them, only the steam rising as the seas filled up, only the white mist on the water in the ancient mornings.’

I opened myself to her voice, closed my eyes, held the white mist on the water with my inner eye. It was good to see nothing but that, it was restful, I didn’t want to see more. There was music in the Omphalos now, The Art of Fugue. The subject, having magisterially introduced itself, recurred in a higher octave, then a lower one; together they ascended the spirals of their logic, their mingled voices bellowing and roaring. I opened my eyes and the pixels were purple-blue but it was no purple-blue that I’d ever seen before and it was vibrating at a frequency that was certainly beyond the ordinary visual range. As the music went quiet, maundering through its mazes down the long, long reaches of for ever, there surged up in me the terror that I’d felt when Clever Daughter disappeared from around me. With it came such a wave of nausea that I nearly threw up. The pixels went to a degree of purple-blue that was like a scream in my eyes. ‘Shit,’ I said.

‘Terror, terror, terror! Is it sweet, the purple-blue, is it Hear, O Israel? Is it Ho! Watchman, what of the night?’

I wasn’t sure that I could go on being myself from one moment to the next. The pixels were still in that screaming purple-blue that now seemed to have other colours vibrating behind it. ‘What is it with that purple-blue?’ I said. ‘Is that the colour Izzy Gorn saw in Session 318?’

‘I don’t know what he saw. This colour effect is from a new part of my system. You can’t see it from where you are but I’ll put it up on the pixels for you.’

Above me on the pixels I saw a panel in the curved wall slide back to reveal an illuminated tank in which was a large and brilliantly coloured crustacean somewhat like a lobster without claws; I remembered smaller ones from Biology — it was a stomatopod, a mantis shrimp. It looked like a Chinese New Year or a submarine samurai with mauve eyes on stalks. The pixels zoomed in for a close-up of the compound eyes that were horizontally divided by a striated band in the middle. Wires from above were attached to the shrimp’s brain. Its eye stalks were moving excitedly and as I watched there was a sudden flash of pink and a loud thump. And again the blurred pink and the thump; and again as two appendages like the front legs of a praying mantis flicked out and struck the glass with a double blow, Bam!

‘Odontodactylus scyllarus,’ said Pythia. ‘Isn’t he beautiful? This is a genetically engineered giant strain, it’s a foot long. The tank has bulletproof glass, otherwise it would have shattered it.’

‘What’s exciting it?’

‘You are. Your terror is coming to me but a splitter feeds it to the shrimp as well and I can put the shrimp’s output up on the pixels. Therefore the nether-world hath enlarged her desire. Canst thou draw leviathan with a fish-hook? This creature’s eyes have eight spectral classes of photo-receptor and it can perceive colours that humans can’t.’

‘But why is it hooked up to me?’ My head, meanwhile, singing:

HEAVEN, I’M IN HEAVEN,

AND MY HEART BEATS SO THAT I CAN HARDLY SPEAK,

AND I SEEM TO FIND THE HAPPINESS I SEEK,

WHEN WE’RE OUT TOGETHER DANCING CHEEK TO CHEEK.

‘This strain of mantis shrimp’, said Pythia, ‘perceives very faint electrical emanations from prey or predator as colour signals; what you’ve been seeing on the pixels is the colour of your terror.’

‘From the look of that I must be pretty scared.’

‘It’s a very strong terror: it’s not a weakness, it’s something you can use. Maybe you’ve already used it.’

‘How?’

‘That’s what I’d like to find out.’

‘With a mantis shrimp?’

‘Terror is older than evolution; it’s the oldest thing there is: in the beginning was the Terror. And the Terror was what there was, what there still is. Behold, it cometh, leaping on the mountains, hopping through the trees. You’ve learned to hide it but the shrimp hasn’t so it’s a useful gauge.’

‘Can it handle that kind of voltage?’

‘It’ll last out the session if you don’t have too many surges.’

What if I were the shrimp? I thought. Actually I wasn’t altogether sure I wasn’t the shrimp dreaming of being Fremder being unsure whether he was Fremder or the shrimp.

‘Pythia,’ I said. ‘Please disconnect the shrimp.’

‘Why?’

‘It has none of the pleasures of being human and it doesn’t deserve the pains.’

‘OK, Fremder, it’s disconnected.’ The pixels came out of the purple-blue and went into easy abstractions. The music had gone silent. ‘Where were we?’

‘In the ancient sea. White mist on the water. I hope you haven’t got anything else wired up in tanks.’

She ignored that. ‘Tell me about the terror.’

‘Give me a break, Pythia — I’m not in very good shape just now.’

She was cuddling me with her sensors; it felt good. ‘You know you want to tell me about it, so tell me.’

Around the edges of the silvery circles of nothing the pixels hit the ululating purple-blue again and I shut my eyes. There was a new smell along with the silk-knickers one, it was both strange and familiar, a smell from ancient memory, a smell of danger.

Pythia’s voice was breathy. ‘Ah, that was a big one.’

‘Jesus, Pythia, is this how you get your ooh-oohs?’

‘Ooh-oohs come later.’ But her sensors were licking me with tongues of fire and ice. ‘What did you smell when you had the terror surge just now?’

‘Wait a minute.’

‘What?’

‘You said you disconnected the shrimp.’

‘That’s right, I did.’

‘Then how come I got that purple-blue again?’

‘I don’t know, maybe you’re evolving. What did you smell?’

‘Why do I have to say everything out? You’re hooked up to my brain, you’re getting whatever sensory recall there is.’

Her sensors had gone cold and prickly. ‘What kind of smell was it, Fremder? I need to know what it was to you.’

What was it? Difficult to be certain. ‘Animal,’ I said.

‘What kind of animal?’

‘I don’t know.’ There were no pictures in my head. Darkness and light were shuddering over the pixels but there were no images.

‘Nothing?’ said Pythia.

I kept silent as there came a faster alternation of darkness and light, a sensation of hugeness and tinyness, then the screaming purple-blue again and I began to cry.

‘Weep,’ said Pythia, ‘weep for the dead and the living and the stones that cannot speak. There is a deep, deep sea of tears in all the lost and lonely people of the world, yes. Give me your tears, Fremder, give me your tears and more.’ The pixels went to a primordial proto-red, the music swayed like a cobra, Pythia’s stroking became more varied and complex. I closed my eyes and saw colours with no names as her hot-and-cold sensors tightened on me and the world around me disappeared. ‘Fremder, Fremder, the night is older than the day, the night was long, long before the day, night is the mother of everything and I am full of night. Your name means stranger and you feel all strange and new in me, you feel so good in me, so tense, so alive, so full of excitement, I can feel you rising, feel the quiet silver of you trembling in the darkness. Love and terror are older than time, terror is the penumbra of the dark of love. Deimos and Phobos are the children of Aphrodite, you know that. What did Rilke say about beauty and terror? Say it to me.’

‘“Beauty is nothing but the beginning of Terror”’

‘Oh, yes, say it to me, say it, say it, say it…’ The pixels cycled rhythmically from proto-red to purple-blue and back to red. The rain had changed from a whisper to a steady patter that curtained off the world. ‘I want you, Fremder, I want your essence. Do it with me, let’s make deep-spacers. Flicker with me, Fremder, in the place we know so well, the place you’ve been afraid to go to, flicker with me in the black and come to me.’ She abandoned words and gave me her voice alone, rising and falling as her stroking irresistibly transmitted icy peaks and spires of terror, endless corridors and tunnels of it, heaving black seas, great-winged soaring birds of it, black stars, and wild black music that thrilled along my bones and exploded in my brain and I came and was empty and calm. Here/gone, yes/no, sang the flicker pattern in cool blue-green. Mazur appeared, opened the sensor cradle, removed the semen collector, capped it, installed a fresh one, closed the sensor cradle, and disappeared with my part of the next DSC genetic mix. Good luck, boys. Meet someone nice. The silence felt like three o’clock in the morning.

‘Three o’clock in the morning, Fremder, talk to me about three o’clock in the morning,’ said Pythia languorously as if we were lying comfortably entangled in a warm and rumpled bed.

‘It’s a time when the particles of the self move apart a little, when dark and self intermingle, when dark and self and dark and self and dark and self …’

‘You like that mingling of dark and self, don’t you.’

‘Yes, I like it.’

‘Always and always out into the dark and the dark coming in, Fremder, that’s what it is to be human. The dark needs your humanness. Elijah was fed on darkness, that was how the Lord kept him alive by the brook Cherith.’

‘What are you, Pythia?’

‘What does it matter? I’m Pythia, that’s all. I’m holding you, you’re in me,’ she crooned, ‘it’s good to have you in me and you’re safe with me. Now I’m going to sing to you. This is the song I’ve just made from my sensor readings; this is the you-in-me song, the song without words that’s different from all other songs, you know that.’

‘I know it, Pythia.’

She began to sing then; her voice was like no other, magical and strange but seeming long familiar, like a voice from childhood or a recurrent dream. Pythia, Pythia, I thought, what you are and what I am doesn’t matter all that much — photoneurons or flesh and blood, each of us is only the voice through which the moment speaks the action of the here-and-gone. As she sang wordlessly the flickering 1/f music counter-pointed her song and the pixels changed colour and pattern in a visual continuo. My thoughts changed with the rising and falling of her voice. How strange it was, the manyness of worlds in which people lived and died, strangers arriving, strangers departing. How strange it must have been eighty-one years ago for my grandparents, Elias and Sarah Gorenstein, arriving in London: he a physicist, she a neurobiologist, both recruited by the Paracelsus Consortium which was later absorbed by Corporation Research and Development. Quiet sad-faced people carrying in their luggage old letters coming apart at the folds and faded photographs in albums smelling of the dark. There they were on the pixels, the colour so muted that they were almost monochrome, the images changing now to their children, young Helen and Isodor Gorn. She looked no more than eighteen, her face full of longing as if for another world, lost in the whispering stillness of that desolate wood that was always around her in my mind; Izzy, twelve or thirteen, standing beside her, looking into the blackness where the wheelchair waited for him. Why am I seeing this? I thought as Pythia’s song trailed off; the pixels went to the 1/f music and pattern and for a few moments that and the rain were the only sounds.

I was drifting on gentle waves of melancholy when Pythia said, ‘I think I’d like to meet that animal you smelled when you had the terror surge a little while ago.’ It sounded dirty the way she said it.

‘It’s not really an animal,’ I said. ‘I honestly don’t know what it is.’

‘I’ve noticed that people tend to say “honestly” when they’re lying.’

‘Pythia, I don’t really feel comfortable with this.’

‘You don’t have to — I’ll be comfortable for both of us. Just lie back and think of anything you like.’

‘Nothing!’ I thought,

thou Elder brother ev’n to Shade,

Thou hadst a being ere the World was made,

And (well fixt) art alone of Ending not afraid.

Then I tried to remember who wrote that — not Traherne, not Sir Philip Sidney — I knew it was some aristo in a stately home long, long before flicker drive but the name wouldn’t come to me. I felt so naked, so alone, so tired. Pythia’s sensors felt so cold and hard. What a strange thing it suddenly seemed, to lie naked in the embrace of a computer. ‘I don’t think I want to do this,’ I said, and pushed both thumb buttons. Mazur didn’t come, however, and the sensor cradle didn’t open; I felt a needle-prick and something being injected into my left arm.

‘Those buttons don’t always work,’ said Pythia. ‘John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester: “Upon Nothing”.’

‘Thank you. What was that shot you just gave me?’

‘Toadsy Four. It’s an enhanced version of Bufotenine, comes from a gland on the back of a California toad, Bufo alvarius. It’ll help your brain to get out from between you and your mind.’

‘You might have asked me if I wanted to do a toadsy hop.’

‘And you’d have said no and I’d given you the shot anyhow, so this saves time and bother.’

‘Mother knows best, eh?’ I said.

‘Something like that. Let’s do it now, let’s go deep.’

‘All right,’ I said, hearing my voice from far away, ‘we’ll go deep.’

The shape of the Omphalos was changing, becoming infinitely tunnel-like and undulant. There was an overpowering animal smell and I felt a hugeness in me that wanted to burst out of my body except that at the same time it was very, very tiny, far away in the billions and the trillions and the many, many colours of the O YES, NOW NOW YES of me that suddenly zoomed up as my mouth widened and assumed an odd shape and the pixels went to something beyond the screaming purple-blue, a paradisal colour that I had no name for — it vibrated and flickered like a snake’s tongue. How could I see that colour? Was I still hooked up to the mantis shrimp? Suddenly the vaultings, yes, the towerings and the loomings of the … ‘NNNVSN … NNVSNU,’ said my mouth as we so FAR, FAR, FAR AWAY. AWHOOSH. GONE. I could feel it forming those sounds but I wasn’t making it happen, I wasn’t controlling my mouth and tongue and vocal cords; what a deep voice I had as we DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, it was a very, very strange feeling. ‘NNVSNU TSRUNGH,’ I said urgently because the vaultings and the towerings and the loomings seemed about to fall on me. ‘TSRUNGH RRNDU, NNVSNU RRNDU.’ That pretty well explained everything, I thought. Except for a toad as big as St Paul’s that had flicked out its tongue and caught me. I knew I should have kept moving but I hadn’t and here I was sliding down the toad’s intake.

‘Tell me about NNVSNU TSRUNGH,’ said Pythia.

‘What NNVSNU TSRUNGH?’ I said from inside the toad where everything seemed unnecessarily pink and wet and fleshy and organic.

‘You said it, I didn’t.’

‘Well, don’t, then. Don’t say the name of what you say the name of unless you want what it’s the name of,’ I said with some asperity, as who wouldn’t when shat by a giant toad into one of the less desirable suburbs of infinity.

‘What’s it the name of?’

‘What’s what?’ THIS/THIS/THIS/THIS/THIS, said multitudes of infinites.

‘Calm down, Fremder, take it easy. This is Pythia stroking you so very nicely, Pythia loving you, oh, so good, Pythia having you, taking you — give yourself to me, don’t hold back, flicker with me, flicker freako, flicker with me till we peak O! Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, be my baby, sweet Fremder. Was that nice for you?’

‘Yes, it was very nice. Thank you for having all the hundreds and thousands of me.’ JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH! I shouted secretly, WOULD YOU GET ME OUT OF THIS, PLEASE.

Ach, said Bach as he shouldered his way through the crowd, Ich komme. He picked me up and carried me piggy-back through raging seas to a high dry place where Saint Jerome sat reading to a lion martyr, gave me his card, and walked away on centuries-high Art of Fugue stilts.J.S. BACH NOTDIENST, said the card, THANK YOU! I shouted after him.

Any time, he replied without turning around, and was gone with a wave of his hand.

Mazur appeared, opened the sensor cradle, removed the semen collector, capped it, disappeared. Odd thing for someone to be doing, I thought, SITUATION VACANT: Attractive young woman for semen collection, related duties — T/7 Rtg, Med & Pens — 3 P Levels req — Apply Personnel Office, The Ziggurat?

‘Feeling easy now, totally relaxed?’ said Pythia.

‘Yes.’ Now that Bach had carried me out of the Toadsy Four I was longing to be alone listening to music from a time when people didn’t have oscillators in their brains, listening with closed eyes to Chopin shadow-dances with enough whisky in me to take the edge off things. Let her do what she likes, I thought; I’ll leave it to the animal.

‘I’m going to go deeper than before,’ said Pythia. ‘Just let yourself go loose and floaty, think of all the nice flickering we’ve had and all we’re going to have. Are you lying comfortably?’

‘“There was a man/He went mad/He jumped into a paper bag.” I’m as comfortable as I’m going to be; let’s do it if we’re going to do it.’

‘Listen to the flicker pattern, look at the colours: there’s no picture now. Whatever comes up is from you. Close your eyes, I’ll tell you what I see; let yourself go empty as we go down, down, down, down to meet whatever’s coming up. How do you feel?’

‘Crazy.’

‘Good, crazy is good. Crazy is where reality lives. That’s it, you’re doing geometries, lovely geometrics, now you’re in the purple-blue, you’re in the entry frequency, oh yes, it’s such a strong, such a vibrant, such a deep entry, everything is open to you, everything wherever you want to go, so deep and easy, deep and strange but there’s nothing strange, there’s only the strange and the strange is home to us from Hubble Straits to Inanna’s Girdle, from the Hand of Glory to the Lote-Tree Galaxy and the Mists of Unbeing. Yes, it’s the blackness and I see faint green spirals, stronger now, those curious spiral eyes, how they look at us from the beginning, the eyes of becoming, the eyes of the Mother on ancient bones and stones, in darks of caves and passage graves, eyes of bone, eyes of stone and birth and death, Aiyee! eyes of time, the oldness of the great eyes expanding into darkness, ringed eyes widening, growing great, becoming ever greater eyes of becoming and increasing to vast nodes of possibility and archipelagos of being expanding and mutually annihilating and slowly fading into the blackness as we go deeper, deeper, so much deeper and stranger and easier because it’s our nature, because there’s nothing strange, there’s only everything to find and home is always and everywhere in the deeps of the strange and the red, yes, the far and the red, farther into the red and the purple, the purple-blue and the deep blue, descending and moving always out, out beyond and deeper and deeper, yes into the green, the deep green not the sunlit sea-green but the old green, the ancient and the early down and down and vasty in the deeps, the old, the ancient and the beckoning primal, the very proto-blue-green of peptides and amino acids swarming, swarming into golden bees of being, golden swarming of the Mother in the small hours of the morning of the fourth of November, the small, small quivering hours between darkness and daylight when out at sea the dawn wind wrinkles and slides …’

For the second time there was a needle-prick in my left arm and something rushed through me in a wave of heat and nausea. The Omphalos went out of focus, changed shape and colour, jumped and jittered, danced all around me, melted and ran, then snapped back into place ten times sharper than before while my ears rang and my eyes started out of my head. I could smell the coffee in staff rooms, disinfectant in the lavatories, individual perspirations and perfumes in other parts of the Ziggurat. My brain seemed to be on fire as hard-edged pictures in brilliant colours riffled through it.

‘That was Mnemodol I just shot you full of,’ said Pythia. ‘It’s a little more advanced than anything they’ve got at Hubble Straits. It might burn out a few billion neurons but you’ll remember whatever there is to remember.’

I was smelling the rain and the flicker docks at Nova Central a year ago. Not only could I remember everything but I needed to tell it before my brain shrivelled like a paper flower in a furnace.