Fremder

1

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.