Fremder

10

Back at Hubble Straits next morning the Level 4 continued and Caroline again produced the hypno session transcript. ‘Maybe if we go over it once more something will come back to you,’ she said. Her manner seemed to suggest that now I was ready to be good and perform as required.

‘Why should anything more come back to me?’

‘Maybe you haven’t such a tight grip on yourself as you did the day of the hypno session.’

‘Do you mean that our trip to Badru was meant to loosen me up?’

‘Not really. But I did think that maybe some of the walls were down.’

‘Do you remember, Dr Lovecraft, in Hamlet, where Hamlet shows Guildenstern a recorder and asks him if he can play it?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Guildenstern says no, he can’t. And Hamlet says something like, “If you can’t play a simple instrument like this, how do you think you can play me?”’

‘I’m not trying to play you.’

‘You say you’re not but you are.’

‘What’s the big secret here, Fremder? What is it you don’t want to look at?’

I could feel it growing huge in me but I didn’t know what it was. ‘I don’t remember.’

‘I believe that you don’t remember but I think you don’t want to remember and I think you could if you wanted to.’

‘You’re welcome to your opinion, Dr Lovecraft.’

Things became distinctly cooler between us after that. We didn’t sleep together again after Badru but Caroline didn’t give up on the Level 4. Sometimes she attacked the physical symptoms of my problems: the best neuro specialists in Physio/Psycho did many EEGs and VC scans but they couldn’t find anything organically wrong with my vision so I had to go on looking at things past bright circles of emptiness.

The Caroline-and-me thing didn’t grind to a complete halt; sometimes we had drinks and dinner together at the Hubble Bubble. The light there was dim and retentive and the pianist in the lounge was Wasny Flim whose ‘Planetary Fade’ had been Top of the Charts when Judith and I saw the owl. He was a small dark man, all slants and angles like his music. Under the spotlight his eyes were closed and his head thrown back as he wove his wistful intervals through the shadows and the circumambient murmur. And always beyond him receded the black sparkle of space in which the flicker docks and Mikhail’s Snackdome regularly came and went together with the Hawking Threshold light, Ereshkigal, the seven Anunnaki, and Inanna’s Girdle. When Caroline and I came to the lounge at the end of the first week he was playing ‘Where or When’ and talking a throwaway vocal in the Sun Ra manner:

Some things that happen for the first time,

Seem to be happening again.

‘Maybe there’s no such thing as a first time for anything,’ said Caroline. ‘Maybe the same things keep happening over and over.’ Her voice was lower than usual and she wasn’t looking at me. Flim and his piano continued to suggest that we had met before and laughed before and loved before but who knew where or when? 24 HRS — FREIGHTERS YES, said Mikhail’s Snackdome silently.

I’ve mentioned before this the little tribunal of the dusk. There’s no dusk at Hubble Straits but the little tribunal were sitting anyhow, this time as twelve eagle owls, each on a child’s coffin. Please, I said to the mind that had spoken to me of the everything-fear and the all-terror, tell me how to be.

To my inner eye came white mist on the ancient waters of time’s beginning but there were no words as the Snackdome came round again.

‘Freighters yes,’ said Caroline. ‘Everybody’s carrying some kind of a load.’ I let that lie there. She held up her empty glass and I signalled the waiter to bring two more of the same.

‘One more river to cross,’ said Caroline as she looked into her fresh gin-and-tonic.

I didn’t ask her what she meant. We had several more of the same; the bright circles of emptiness in my vision spangled into soft focus and the effect was not unpleasant.

‘Maybe this will get us to Level 5,’ she said. ‘Level 4 certainly hasn’t amounted to much.’

My head was singing:

PACK UP ALL MY CARE AND WOE,

HERE I GO, SINGING LOW,

BYE BYE BLACKBIRD.

‘Coward,’ said Caroline.

‘That’s your professional opinion, is it?’

‘Yes, it is: I’ve given you four openings and you’re afraid to get into it with me.’

‘Into what?’

‘You know very well what — you’ve stonewalled the one-on-ones and somehow you’ve managed to jam the RE runs and the hypno sessions. We’re seven days into the Level 4 and I haven’t got diddly-poo to show for it.’

‘I’m sorry if I’m making you look bad with the Sheela-Na-Gig but there are things I just can’t remember.’

‘You’re not sorry. When it’s ooh-ooh time you’re out of your pants like greased lightning but when it’s Level 4 time you zip your mouth shut and you don’t care how it makes me look.’

‘Oh, I see. This is the first time that you’ve made it absolutely clear that this was a sex-for-answers deal. And for a little while I thought it was my desperation pheromones that were lighting your fire.’

‘Goddam it, Frem, give me a break, will you? What I said about you and me was true but I have got a job to do.’

‘And we both know what your priorities are, don’t we.’

‘That’s not fair — I haven’t been trading sex for answers but you’ve been using me while giving nothing.’

‘Giving nothing! I’ve been giving you whatever I am, and what I mostly am is desperation — I thought that’s what you liked.’

We went on like that for a while and the evening came to an end early. The remaining two weeks were strictly business and not very productive from Caroline’s point of view — I wasn’t giving her the answers she wanted and even elephant-sized shots of Epiphanol couldn’t get them out of me.

At the end of the Level 4 there was a DSC Board of Enquiry and the finding of the suits and uniforms was that no action was to be taken pending further investigation and a Pythia session back on Earth. The Level 4 material, such as it was, had been sent to the Ziggurat for processing. When my orders came through, Caroline, who’d been hoping to go Earthside for the next stage of things, didn’t get that assignment.

‘You can see how impressed they were with my work,’ she said. ‘I’m lucky they didn’t bust me to emptying bedpans.’

On my last night at Hubble Straits we went to the Hubble Bubble again. We didn’t talk much, just sat there emptying and refilling our glasses. Wasny Flim’s last song was one of his own, ‘Here and Gone’:

Here and gone,

the picture of you in my eyes,

your voice, your laughter, and your walk …

My eyes were on Flim when I heard sniffling. I turned to look at Caroline and saw that she was crying a little. ‘What?’ I said.

She looked at me as if she were seeing me for the first time, seeing me as someone unknown. ‘First Navigator Fremder Gorn,’ she said, ‘it just occurred to me that there might be something missing in you and that’s why you didn’t disappear with the ship and the others. You’re the most alone person I’ve ever met. You know how wirecars have couplers, what they call male and female couplers — you push one car up against another and there’s a clunk and they connect? Most people have couplers but you seem not to. You weren’t connected to your ship or the others; when they went you stayed alone. And you never connected with me although you stuck your male part into my female one. I wanted you to give me the how-it-is-with-Fremder the same as I gave you the how-it-is-with-Caroline but you wouldn’t do it and now you’re going Earthside with all the how-it-is still locked up in you. OK, that’s the last assessment from Dr Love-but-not-very-crafty.’

The circles of emptiness were very bright, the shadows blurred and dim, the space outside the Bubble bleaker than usual as Flim continued:

Here and gone,

the kisses and the lies,

the small dark hours when we used to talk -

here and gone, all that we were together,

here and gone.

She was sitting there looking like the goddess on her desk, at the same time seductive and full of fear and doubt.

‘Listen, Caroline,…’ I began.

‘Please,’ she said, ‘no bullshit. We had one good week and that’s it. You’ll remember me as Caroline Not-very-crafty who was fun in bed and dead easy to outsmart in the Level 4.’

‘No, I won’t.’

‘Even better — you’ll forget me.’

‘You know I won’t.’

‘Sure, Frem, let’s have lunch sometime. Here comes Mikhail’s Snackdome again. Time to go.’