Fremder

12

There’s an asteroid in the Sixth Galaxy called A373 — it hasn’t even got a name, just a number. It’s a supply dump for the Thoth cluster, a desert-coloured rock with nothing on it but an open-frame warehouse with an oxybubble in one corner. There’s an automatic coffee shop and a robot modelled on Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. Her questioning eyes are the same as those that look out of the painting. A plate in her back says that she’s donated by the Sixth Galaxy Poetry Society. Her catalogue includes everything from Sappho to T. P. Stumm. They haven’t named her but I call her Pearl. She’s strictly for poetry, with a contact-activated shielding circuit so there’s no fooling around. You can take her outside the bubble — she doesn’t need air — and you just tell her what you want to hear.

I was on A373 for an inventory a couple of years ago and Pearl recited the first of Rilke’s Duino Elegies for me as we sat on a rock outside the warehouse:

Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel

Who, were I to cry, would hear me out of the angelic

Ordnungen? und gesetzt selbst, es nähme

orders? and suppose even that one were to take

einer mich plötzlich ans Herz: ich verginge von seinem

me suddenly to his heart: I should perish through his

stärkeren Dasein. Denn das Schöne ist nichts als des

stronger existence. For beauty is nothing but the

Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen,

beginning of terror, which we only barely endure,

und wir bewundern es so, weil es gelassen verschmäht

and we admire it so, because it calmly disdains

uns zu zerstören. Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich.

to destroy us. Every angel is terrible.

She spoke the poem in the original German. The voice that came out of her was what I think of as a Eurydice voice, low and breathy and full of shadows. We sat there on a tawny rock, the strange and beautiful Pearl in her seventeenth-century costume and I, looking at a red moon called Isis (there’s a red sun called Osiris in that system) and I heard that voice and Rilke’s words and the sound of my own breathing in my helmet. Nobody but the two of us on the asteroid and nothing happening but Rilke’s words coming alive out of her mouth. Pearl’s lips moved as she spoke but the voice was that of my mother. Pearl spoke in many voices; this was a recording made by Helen Gorn for Amnesty International in November of 2019, three months after she was raped and Izzy crippled by the Shorties and the Clowns.

I’ve given a lot of thought to Rilke’s angels and I’ve come to the conclusion that for him an angel was the ultimate degree of perception, in the same way that terror is the ultimate degree of beauty, living at the farther end of a spectrum on which we find, closer to us, the never-to-be answered question in the eyes of the girl with the pearl earring.

A3 73 and Badr al-Budur are two of the quiet places in my head. I like sometimes to think of Pearl speaking in my mother’s voice under the red Isis moon and I like to think of the robot sweepers humming through the silence of the spaceport under the noctolux lamps of Badru.