Fremder

18

Still the same night, getting on for 03:00. Katya was asleep and I was watching Fractal Bims of Titan and listening with headphones when I heard a very quiet self-effacing knock at the door. I looked through the peephole and recognised the Ziggurat Maintenance man I’d seen in the wirecar.

‘I want to talk to Fremder Gorn,’ he said.

‘Who are you?’ I whispered without opening.

‘Wait a moment,’ he said, and wrote a note which he slid under the door:

I’M LOWELL SIXE — I HAVE THINGS TO TELL YOU.

THIS FLAT IS BUGGED. PLEASE COME OUTSIDE

SO WE CAN TALK. BRING TWO GLASSES.

TRUST ME.

The name meant nothing to me. My first thought was: he’s going to tell me who my father was. What if he is my father! ‘Wait a moment,’ I whispered. I hurried on some clothes, got two glasses, programmed the lock for my thumb, opened the door, saw that he was apparently alone, and went out. He opened a small rucksack, took out a bottle, and held it up for my inspection: Glenfiddich, which certainly put him in a class above your ordinary geriatric mugger. So I thought: why not?

‘What did you want to tell me?’ I said.

He put his finger to his lips, then pointed up. We took the lift to the roof and went to a dark corner where the ventilators made a soft roar. The night was like damp flannel. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘What’s this all about?’

Sixe opened the bottle and poured the glasses nearly full. ‘Absent friends,’ he said. We clinked glasses and he emptied more than half of his.

There was enough light for me to see him pretty well; for a while he just stood there with his eyes closed while the drink went down. My earlier description of him as a failed-looking sort of man with dirty fingernails was unkind but there’s no escaping the fact that people carry their wins and their losses in their faces and the way they walk; although this man’s face seemed blurred and unreadable his general manner was that of someone who’d had more losses than wins. The dark shape of him against the red glow in the sky seemed to impose an additional reality (or unreality) on the one I was already struggling with. I didn’t want to be a character in his story but it seemed I had no choice.

‘Why would that flat be bugged?’ I said.

‘Don’t come the innocent with me — you must know why Corporation is interested in you.’

That seemed a reasonable answer but I felt as if I ought to be careful. ‘Got any ID?’ I said.

He handed me his Ziggurat card. The photo was of him but the name was Charles Harris. ‘Charles Harris?’

‘That isn’t the face I used to have either. If I were walking around as Lowell Sixe I wouldn’t be walking around any more.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s a long story.’ He drank more whisky and seemed disinclined to talk.

‘Where do I come into it?’

‘You’re the son of Helen Gorn. I knew her and there are things I think you should know.’

‘Why choose this particular time to tell me?’

‘Might be useful, I don’t know.’ He took another drink and coughed for about ten minutes; then he reached into the rucksack again and brought out three books: two hardbacks and a paperback. ‘These were Helen’s,’ he said. ‘I’m giving them to you.’ He handed them over as if he didn’t really want to let go of them.

The books smelled as if they’d been lying in the dark in an old trunk for a long time. One of the hardbacks was the 1955 Jewish Publication Society Holy Scriptures, stuck full of strips of yellow paper with her notations in faded black ink: ‘NOT IN THE WIND, NOT IN THE EARTHQUAKE’, ‘WHAT I WILL DO TO MY VINEYARD’, and so on in her cursive block-lettering. The paperback was Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance, and the other hardback, art-book sized, was a falling-apart and clearly loved-to-death Die Bibel in Bildern, the wood-engravings of Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld and the text of Martin Luther. On the cover was Elijah going up to heaven with the chariot and horses of fire: Elias Himmelfahrt.

As I took that book in my hands it fell open to Elijah being fed by ravens at the brook Cherith: Elijah had what looked like a slice of gammon in his hand while a raven delivered either a potato or a bun and a second raven offered another non-kosher slice. In the background was a deer drinking at the brook. The ravens were tidy little things and so was the deer; everything was small and neat, even the trees limited their spread as if Carolsfeld, like a photographer at a wedding, had said, ‘Everybody a little closer together, please.’ I held the book to my face and fancied that some faint fragrance was mingled with the musty-paper and dark-trunk smell.

I once saw some real live ravens, it was during a DSC short-jump exercise in the Grampians. A VMET blew and a crew of six were instantly translated from M-waves to raven snacks. I was in the search party, and when we found what was left of them on Rannoch Moor the ravens were tucking in heartily and chuckling about all the Elijahs that had dropped in to feed them. Those ravens were not little tidy birds, they were very big and black and wild, no table manners at all but they croaked a big loutish ‘Thank you, it’s been nice having you’ as they took off heavily and flapped away.

All three books bore on their flyleaves the date 16.2.84 and S.P.C.K London written in a German-looking hand. Elias always entered the date and the name of the shop in the secondhand books he bought; these were from the long-gone bookshop of the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge that used to be in the Marylebone Road. As a child Helen Gorn must have loved the neat 1860 wood-engravings in the Carolsfeld book; in them the universe was a graspable proposition and on the Sabbath God snoozed in a cloud-swing between the sun and the moon and stars, his hands folded across his stomach and his bare feet on the ball of the earth while fourteen angels sang whatever angels sing on Sundays. But even when she was a child I think the god she spoke to was the old savage one who could never be pictured and whose name was an unpronounceable tetragrammaton. When I look at that book now, as when I first saw it that night on the roof with Lowell Sixe, the ravens of Rannoch Moor come between me and the visual marzipan of those engravings.

‘You ever heard of the Elijah Project?’ said Sixe.

‘The Elijah Project — was that to do with flicker drive?’

He shook his head, looked out over the lights of Oldtown and had another drink. He was a sad man but I could see that he felt good having someone to tell his story to. ‘In 2016 Helen Gorn was eighteen and her brother Izzy was thirteen. They were living in that big house in Oldtown West 71 with their housekeeper. That summer Helen sat her Professionals in Neurophysiology, Physics, Fractals, and Speculative Mathematics at the Corporation School of Science and Technology. She got As in everything but she wasn’t having much fun. She’d never had a boyfriend — she’d been hoping to go to the May Ball with a boy she liked but it didn’t happen. She said she’d begun to feel invisible — she half expected people to try to walk through her in the walkways or sit on her in the wirecar.

‘Her parents had killed themselves in August seven years before and August was always a hard month for her to get through. That summer of 2016, years before I ever met her, she began to think a lot about being and not-being. She kept notebooks, wrote down her thoughts and quotations from things she read. Here’s a notebook page from that time.’ He gave me a folded photocopy and a pocket torch and I read in my mother’s handwriting:

14.8.16

Dream: clustered hollownesses arching to a point as in an Islamic muqarnas vault that makes the transition from base to dome, from cube to sphere, earth to heaven — clustered hollownesses glowing with a luminous ancient proto-red — I am this muqarnas vault of clustered red — I am immensities of geometrically multiplied red ascending to an unseen dome — I have no speech, the clustered hollownesses are my speech — I am recesses of goneness — I am like the many emptinesses left where the seeds of a pomegranate have been eaten — in each emptiness is the shape of the seed, ghost of the seed, shape of the idea of the pomegranate of me, of the manyness of what might or might not be me — a manyness of possible me/not-me selves.

16.8.16

Non-architectural muqarnas — of time, of sex. The soul’s need making the transition from base to dome, from this to other? Clusters of thought, of emotion, of transition. Clusters of possibility and transition.

17.8.16

When I ask people whether they experience being as a smoothly continuous state or a flickering one they all say it’s smooth and continuous for them. For me it’s always been a flickering. Not visually — I’ve never actually seen the black between the pictures in my eyes but I’ve sensed it in my brain and for that reason I don’t make any assumptions about reality. Can it be that the world flickers? Can it be that the chair I sit on is only rhythmically and repetitively but not continuously there? Why don’t I fall to the floor between therenesses? How do I manage to flicker synchronously with the chair?

*

Standing on the roof of that building at three o’clock in the morning and reading the thoughts of my dead mother when she was young made my throat ache. All around me were the night lights of here and now; in the distance was the purple glow of the Ziggurat that never slept, while like a single cell containing all the genetic information for a complete organism, these fragments of my mother’s past seemed to contain my whole being, not only what I remembered but also what I never knew, events and presences beyond my recall. Sixe decently averted his eyes and handed me another photocopy, saying without looking at it, as if quoting from a mental catalogue, ‘Extract from a letter from Victor Lossiter to Helen Gorn dated 17.2.19.’

I read:

… I agree with what you say about Kant’s empty time and space: if there are empty time and space before and after the world, then they are time and space of other than the actualised world, in which case the accessing of other can be considered as a hypothetical possibility in propositions aimed at calculating the means of such access. Intermittency of matter manifests itself in a ‘world-pulse’ of very-low-frequency emissions below the infraband. A profile of this pulse-rate should yield the intervals in which the non-being reserve of the zoetic carrier wave can be matched to the world-pulse to allow crossover.

The world-pulse has so far not been calibrated and although I’ve tried to calculate it by extrapolation I’ve not been successful. In experiments with rats I’ve attempted crossover by bracketing the most likely frequencies but the EEGs have been inconclusive; there is very little observable deviation from the EEGs of the control group but in every case trauma is evident and all the rats have died.

If I can get a grant for the equipment and the help I need I can calibrate all emissions and separate the WPR from everything else. All I need is satellite time with the Hawking radio telescope, about forty fractal analysts, and a month or so with the PN20. Time, strength, cash, and patience!

‘He got the WPR measured — I remember reading about that,’ I said.

‘That’s right,’ said Sixe. ‘Corporation funded his research and he measured the world-pulse rate in 2021. Here’s one more bit for you to look at.’ He gave me a photocopy of an extract from another letter from Lossiter to Helen Gorn, dated 23.4.21:

… I’m enclosing a copy of my printout. It’s as we both expected: a sub-infraband nonlinear oscillation moving rhythmically from quiescence to excitation and showing marked similarities to the B-Z.

It may be that circumstances will prevent my continuing with this research but I think the WPR data will enable you to move on to the next stage of your work.

Good luck,

Victor

‘Was this all to do with flicker drive?’ I said.

‘No.’

‘Are you going to tell me what it was about?’

‘It began with some ideas of Helen’s.’ He produced a thick bundle of folded photocopies, found the desired one immediately, and read: ‘“27.8.16, A quantum wave of strangeness. The stranger who appears. Elijah as collapse of wave function, his world precipitated from an infinite wave of possibilities. Suddenly he’s there bringing his reality that is now the only reality.”’

Hearing my mother’s thoughts articulated by this man was a strange experience. I once read an interview with Ilse Bak in which she said that in order to play Chopin she had to become Chopin. This old man, animated now by what he was reading, became in some way my mother. I said, ‘This is all about the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics, right?’

‘Right. Elijah just turns up in First Kings 17: bang, there he is with nothing at all leading up to his arrival. Helen was wondering whether Elijah might have got into this world by jumping out of another one.’

‘Are you telling me that Helen Gorn was seriously wondering about that?’

‘One thing about Helen — she was serious in all of her thinking, even when she was just fooling around with ideas. She’d try anything as a possible working proposition if it helped her get a handle on the problem. Sometimes she talked about Elijah as a man and sometimes as a metaphor for a new world of action and possibility. This new action was triggered by something the Israelites named with a tetragrammaton that wasn’t to be spoken. What I’m telling you is what Helen told me: why a tetragrammaton? Four is a Hermetic number, a number of chance and change and flow from one state to another, from one world to another. Hermes is the god of roadways and thieves and a thief moves things from here to there.

‘Maybe Elijah was a nobody where he was before, a failure, whatever.’ Here Sexe paused and looked at me with something like a challenge in his face.

‘Or maybe a cripple in a wheelchair?’ I said. ‘In 2021 it was Helen and Izzy together doing the limbic-system experiments. Were they thinking of a world where Helen hadn’t got raped and Izzy had all his parts in working order?’

‘Even before the Shorties and the Clowns did what they did, Helen and Izzy weren’t happy in the world. Izzy was dead when I met Helen but she was still trying to convert her Elijah obsession into some kind of practical reality.’

‘You mean …?’

‘I’ll tell you what I mean when I get to it. Whatever Elijah was, according to Helen, something jumped him out of where he was and into First Kings because that was where it had work for him. These are Helen’s words I’m giving you: Elijah as metaphor. Look at the ravens, she used to say — what we call Yahweh sent the action we call Elijah into the wilderness to be fed first by the blackness, then by the female principle, the widow. Then the Elijah action fed the widow by making her meal and oil go on inexhaustibly; as male principle it replenished her. Elijah brought back to life her dead child, the dead world-child, with the male power of Yahweh surging in him he pulled that child out of the world of the dead and back into the world of the living.

‘Next with the fire of Yahweh he showed that Baal was an idea without potency and he killed the servants of that dead idea. Only then could the rain come, the rain that the parched earth had waited for so long. Then Elijah began to fade and he was afraid of Jezebel and he wanted to die. He went to Mount Horeb and Yahweh showed him how it was when the power moves on and leaves the vessel behind. Because the power and the action are too much for the vessel, the vessel can only take so much. Helen went on about Elijah and how Yahweh showed him the stillness and Yahweh spoke the stillness that comes after the earthquake and the wind and the fire, the stillness that follows the release of energy from the potential to the actual.

‘There was still a little Elijah action when he zapped the two captains and their fifties with the Yahweh-fire but the action was about to move on with Elisha. That’s where the writers of the Scriptures phased Elijah out with a whirlwind and a chariot and horses of fire and all that. Helen thought Elijah probably just died when he was used up but the writers had to give him an impressive exit that would show the transfer of the action to Elisha.’

‘Exactly what was Helen Gorn after? What was she trying to do with the Elijah Project?’

‘The thing about Helen was, she’d tell me a lot but she wouldn’t tell me everything. She’d give me that little look that said I didn’t need to know certain things. When I asked her what you just asked me she said she wanted to jump into a world where she could feel the way Elijah must have felt when he was running ahead of Ahab’s chariot in the rain, running to Jezreel in the rain. Two images she talked about a lot — Elijah with his head between his knees waiting for the rain and Elijah running to Jezreel. She knew how the first one felt but she’d never had the second. Can you believe that?’

‘Yes. Have you ever had the running-ahead-of-the-chariot-feeling?’

‘I had it the first time I slept with Helen. You?’

It wasn’t a woman that came to mind when he asked me that, it was a spacecraft, Constanze De Groot, an old Service and Supply jet held together with sealing tape and promises. I was Records Clerk on that ship when I was eighteen, in my gap year between pro school and polytechnic. We shuttled around the Second Galaxy servicing the mining operations on the various De Groot planets. We flew the same safe courses day after day but old Pieter Paul De Groot kept his profits up by keeping his maintenance down; one morning the Number Three gyro packed up and we found ourselves in the Third Galaxy with the flicker-intercept alarm flashing red and the klaxon blaring.

Hermo Weitermann was First Nav. He used to let me hang about on the flight deck in my breaks, so I was there when it happened. Hermo hadn’t a clue where to go but when I closed my eyes and just let myself be with it I could see on the screen of my mind the flicker transmissions shooting around us like red lasers in the black and I could feel our position in the quadrangle the way a gymnast feels where his body is. I told Hermo to drop one K into the clear and we were out of there without randomising the ship and crew flickering on their pilot beam into the space we’d occupied. We radioed Scansat Control and they told us it was the Consortium Française courier Atalante we’d almost scattered all over the galaxy. They had a crew of four who lived to flicker another day and I knew I was going to be a navigator.

I still remember that moment vividly, even fiercely; that brilliant flash of Yes! Here I am! I’ve often recalled it at times when I didn’t know where I was or what I was. The tawny owl is of course my anchorbird but I think sometimes of the migrations of the arctic tern: thousands of miles and they never get lost. Once I was fully qualified I was mostly out of jets and into flicker and then navigation was reduced to checking the frequency schedules and sticking the right transmission card into the autofreak. But I never lost that sense of myself as a moving point on the screen of the mind that lives in my head. On that night in November 2054 Lowell Sixe entered into my navigation as a spacemark of some kind, a density of dark matter on the screen. I told him about Constanze De Groot, then I said, ‘Were you with Helen until she went into the sanatorium?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know who my father was?’

‘I wondered when you’d ask that. The answer is no. Your mother was pregnant when I met her and although she talked about it sometimes she never said who the father was.’

‘How far did she get with the Elijah Project?’

‘Let me tell this in my own time; right now I’m trying to give you some background. Lossiter was working on the many-worlds thing until he died three days after writing that second letter you read: twenty-seventh of April, 2021.’

‘How old was he?’

‘Thirty-seven.’

‘What did he die of?’

‘Faulty hearing. Corporation told him to lie down but he stood up.’

‘Ah. They wanted …?’

‘The fruits of his labours. They sussed he was on the way to other worlds and they wanted to take it over. He thought it was safer with him which was of course a crazy idea. He was so unbalanced that he fell off the top of a block of flats and ended up in another world sooner than he expected to.’

‘But Helen Gorn was carrying on from where he left off, wasn’t she? Did Corporation know that?’

‘Did they know! She couldn’t fart without Top Exec knowing and they made sure she heard how Lossiter died. Then they left her alone to get on with it.’

‘So she took off the top of Izzy’s skull and went to work on him. Do you know how he died?’

‘Can I tell this my way or is your concentration span too short?’

‘Sorry. Tell it your way.’

He poured himself another drink, gulped it down, had another coughing fit, then continued. ‘I was working in the Physitronics Lab in 2022. She was alone then — Izzy had died in April. On the fifteenth of May she rang up my department wanting help with a Broca relay modification and they put the call through to me. Did you ever hear a recording of her voice?’

‘Yes. “Wie eine Frucht von Süssigkeit und Dunkelheit.” Like a fruit of sweetness and darkness.’

Sixe let off what sounded like a little burst of steam: ‘Puh!’

‘What?’

‘You’re assuming that I don’t understand German.’

‘Do you?’

‘No. But if you already assume that, why don’t you simply say the sodding thing in English to begin with? Helen was always doing that — she’d say something in German or French and then translate it for me. Bloody show-off.’ He poured the last of the Glenfiddich into our glasses and looked at me defiantly.

‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Helen needed a full-time assistant, and when her new grant came through she got me assigned to her. I lived in her house until that night in September when I came home and found her gone.

‘Did I say that August was always a bad month for her? Well, it was. That August she was six months pregnant and that didn’t make it any easier. Three years before, the twenty-first of August 2019, was the night the Shorties and the Clowns raped her and crippled Izzy. Seven of them: two twelve-year-olds and five of the others. The Clowns were the worst of it, she said — that she could be used like that by less-than-human things. She said to me, “In an infinite number of possible worlds there must have been one in which I had a gun and shot the lot of them. The quantum wave just happened to collapse in the wrong universe for me.”

‘“Helen,” I said to her, “you’ve got to put that behind you, it’s in the past.”

‘She said, “No, it isn’t, it’s happening right now and it keeps on happening, it doesn’t go away. They made an Auschwitz with their cocks and they made me live in it. ‘Jewish bitch,’ the Shorties kept calling me, ‘Jewish bitch,’ while they defiled me.” She went on about how it excited them to call her that while they did what they did to her, how in her mind they were still doing it; how her grandparents had their Auschwitz and she had hers that she lived in every day and every night. Then she said,’ “At eventide, Lo, terror! By morning it is no more.”’

‘I said, “What is no more, the terror?”

‘She said. “No, Lowell. This world is no more, not for me — I’ll find another one.”’ He spat on the ground. ‘Fucking Richard Soames.’

‘Who’s Richard Soames?’

‘He’s the one she wanted to go to the May Ball with when she was eighteen.’

‘Did she?’

‘No, she didn’t. Richard Soames had his pick of the prettiest daughters of the Twenty CC

‘What’s the Twenty CC?’

‘Families who had company cars twenty years or more before Gridlock.’

‘And you think if Richard Soames had taken her to the May Ball it would have made a big difference in her life?’

‘Yes, I do.’ He shook his head as if baffled by my obtuseness.

‘She hadn’t much luck with men, had she?’

‘She had me, whatever kind of luck that was, from the time we met until the end. Best part of my life. What’ve I got now? Shit. Where was I?’

‘You were saying she said she’d find another world.’

‘Right: another world. She said to me, “You think I can’t do it?”

‘I said, “I don’t know.”

‘She said, “I can do it. It takes a Jew to do it, to find the magic door, the quantum exit. Einstein, Oppenheimer, Teller — all Jews.” Then she told me how back in the sixteenth century in Prague this rabbi saved the Jews in the ghetto when the Gentiles were after them. He’d studied the Cabbala and that sort of thing and he made a big figure out of clay, what they called a golem. Then he wrote the name of God on its forehead and he whispered in its ear and the golem went out and sorted out the Gentiles. When things quieted down again the rabbi took the golem up to the attic of the synagogue and he told it to lie down and go to sleep. Then he wiped the name off its forehead. Then, according to Helen, the golem stayed there in the attic of the synagogue all covered with dust and cobwebs and batshit until the Nazis killed six million Jews, at which time Rabbis Einstein, Oppenheimer, and Teller plus one or two honorary rabbis wrote the name of God in a new way on the golem’s forehead and it woke up much bigger than before and got busy again. I said to her, “Helen, that golem killed Japanese. What did the Japanese ever do to the Jews?”

‘“They were allies of Germany, weren’t they,” she said. “Anyhow, retribution doesn’t necessarily work in parallel — sometimes it’s just an exchange of volumes. Millions of one kind are slaughtered in one place so millions of another kind get slaughtered in another place; evil action gets passed along the same as good. Shit happens, that’s the first law of Nature, and it happens to Jews again and again. Don’t talk to me about the Armenians and the Kurds and the native Americans — it isn’t the same thing for them. Nobody keeps circulating The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Kurdistan or stories about the Armenians and the native Americans ritually sacrificing Christian babies.”

‘She said this world had become a place in which the unspeakable was allowed to happen while everybody looked the other way. She said that her world wasn’t the same as mine: I lived in a world in which it had happened to them and she lived in a world in which it had happened to us.

‘There wasn’t much I could say when she got like that. I said to her, “Still, we’ve got each other.” She said yes but not as if it mattered a whole lot. She was never a very happy woman and August was always a bad month for her. You know about her suicide attempt?’

‘Yes, that was in the newsfax at the time — I’ve seen it at the library.’

‘I oughtn’t to have left her alone but she was hell to live with around then and sometimes I just had to get out of the house for a while. On the night of the twentieth I came back from a walk and found her drowning in her own vomit; she’d swallowed most of a bottle of Nepenthol and half a bottle of gin. Her note said: “MAYBE NO WORLD IS BEST.”’

‘She was a lot of laughs, my mum. It was wonderful doing my pre-natal time with her.’

‘I turned her over and got her to heave up most of it and when the paramedics arrived they pumped out her stomach right away so we got her through that one alive but of course she succeeded the next time.

‘She spent a couple of days at the SNG Rest and Reassessment Centre and had a little therapy and some tranquillisers and when she came home she was the cheerfullest I’d ever seen her. So we got back to work.

‘Our cover project was sensory remotes and we always had experimental prototypes and a lot of paper for the Review Board to look at. That June the Sheela-Na-Gig had appointed a tough Top Exec named Irene Heale Head of Project Review.’

‘I just met her today, she’s head of R & D now.’

‘That’s right — sweet-looking lady, isn’t she. “Iron” Heale, everybody called her back then. She and Helen had been at Elite Poly together and they’d both been working on brain mapping. Helen was Number One in her year; Heale was Number Two and it bothered her a lot. She wanted to team up with Helen on a joint project but Helen preferred to work alone and she won the Rousseau prize that year. Heale claimed that Helen had stolen some of her research and Helen denied it. There was a tribunal and the adjudicators cleared Helen.

‘Heale never forgave her for winning that prize. As soon as she was appointed Head of Project Review she went through Helen’s file, saw some references to Elijah, got curious, and came over to investigate. Heale got a lot of pleasure out of that — you could almost see her flicking her boot with a riding crop while she interrogated Helen.

‘Helen told her those Elijah ideas had never gone anywhere and Heale told her to try again and to keep in touch. Helen said she’d see what she could do. “Jewish brains they can always use,” she said to me later. “One of these days they’ll find a way to separate the Jew brains from the Jew bodies and that’ll be The Final Solution.”

‘“What will they do with the brains?” I said.

‘“They’ll transplant them into the top goyim,” she said, “which of course will make them think Jewish. So maybe the whole thing’s a Jewish plot.”’ Sixe shook his head.

‘From then on,’ he continued, ‘we worked on Elijah day and night. But we kept double books — the blackboards and diagrams anybody would see on a surprise visit weren’t the real thing. The idea was to make the jump before they knew where we were with it.’

‘The two of you were going to do it.’

‘That’s right; she couldn’t find anyone better so I was invited.’

‘But you talk about making the jump the way bank robbers in films talk about getting away to Rio. Were you expecting a completely different world where all of your troubles would be left behind or what?’

‘It’s hard to tell you how it was without sounding stupid and maybe we were stupid. And maybe your mother was crazy but it was a world-class craziness if you know what I mean — she could have told me the moon was made of green cheese and I’d have believed her because somehow she’d have made it seem believable. And what happens when you get caught up in an idea like that — it expands to take in everything, it becomes the answer to all your problems even though you know better.’

‘How close were you to doing it?’

‘Pretty close. The preliminary calculations were easy enough. The hard part came after we got the WPR figures from Lossiter. It took quite a long time and a lot of models to work out the phase-scaling fractal and sync it up: if Being is B and Non-Phase is NP, then all we had to do was make B/NP jump WPR which isn’t any harder than jumping over yourself but as far as we knew it hadn’t ever been done and it took us a while to figure it out. We were going to use oscillator implants similar to the ones for flicker drive. The difficulty was in scaling the input for the phase jump and of course there was the matter of the implants. Helen had authority to call in medical personnel but once she used it they’d be on to us. We were under surveillance but through the old family network she was able to find a neurosurgeon who said she’d do it whenever we had the oscillators ready.’

‘Let me get this straight — you were going to use the oscillators with a VMET?’

‘That’s right, but instead of transmitting ourselves to a distant point we were going to collapse our wave function into another world.’

‘Your wave function? Wasn’t all the rest of the world included in that same wave function?’

‘That’s what I said to Helen and she said the rest of the world would have to take its chance. She used to sit there at her computer working up equations and diagrams and singing under her breath while she played Bach’s Art of Fugue over and over on the audio beam. The words she sang were always the same: “I will tell you what I will do …” Just those words over and over again to that Bach tune that kept repeating itself. It was spooky.’

‘I can’t place the words.’

‘Isaiah, Chapter Five, Verse Five:

And now come, I will tell you

What I will do with my vineyard:

I will take away the hedge thereof,

And it shall be eaten up;

I will break down the fence thereof,

And it shall be trodden down;…

‘Verse Six begins:

And I will lay it waste …’

‘That must have been a little worrying.’

‘It was, and when she wasn’t doing her Art of Fugue thing she’d be playing a recording of Mendelsohn’s Elijah which isn’t exactly a knees-up either. She said to me, “Listen to how Elijah out of nowhere jumps in and says how it’s going to be.” The recording was in German and she translated the opening words for me, First Kings, Seventeen, One:

As truly as the Lord, the God of Israel, lives,

before whom I stand, there shall these years

neither dew nor rain come unless I say so.

‘I said to her, “What is it with you and this no-rain business? Has there been a long drought in your life lately?”

‘She ignored that. Sometimes she talked about sex in a very common way and other times she acted as if she had nothing between her legs but four thousand years of history. She said, “You’ll notice that he says ‘before whom I stand’. He’s letting Ahab know straightaway where he stands with his Baal rubbish. Ahab is a Jew too and he knows Elijah has him by the balls, he knows he’s in big trouble.’

‘I said, “The chorus sound like Gentiles.”

‘She said, “Choruses always sound like Gentiles; what I’m saying is that the spirit of Elijah possessed the spirit of Mendelssohn when he was putting down the notes on paper. And it’s possessing me as I do my equations.’

‘I said, “OK, any possessor of yours is a possessor of mine.”

‘“Not unless you get circumcised,” she said. She was high on Elijah. I think one of the reasons she liked me was that I was hairy like him.

‘By the middle of September 2022 we had a computer model that worked and Helen wanted to wire the oscillators and get them implanted and have a go. I wanted to run the model against a list of “What if?” parameters which would have taken a few more days to evaluate. She said why not a test run. With what? I wanted to know. She said, “I don’t really care a rat’s arse, so why not a rat?”

‘I still wasn’t altogether happy with the numbers and I didn’t feel too comfortable with the whole thing. I said, “Let’s wait a little — at least until we’ve run all the what ifs. Even if we do it with a flea we could change the whole universe.”

‘“Big deal,” she said. “Who’s going to notice a rat-sized change?”’

‘I said, “How can we know it’ll only be a rat-sized change? Mightn’t the rat take everything else with it?” But she was the one who made the decisions, I was only a kind of kept man, never her equal. So we did it with a rat.’

‘Do you think she was crazy? Really crazy, I mean.’

‘What does crazy mean? Crazy is anything different from what the majority think isn’t crazy. Your mother was never with the majority.

‘We always had lab rats around and we had a small VMET we used for parcels. I limited the field to the rat’s cage and checked the shielding to make sure the rest of the room was safe from flare. I did an EEG to get the frequency of the rat’s carrier wave, then I scaled down the phase input figures to that output and printed up an oscillator.

‘It was a male rat, a Delta Three laboratory strain. I anaesthetised him and shaved his head. Helen drilled a hole in his skull and implanted the oscillator which was smaller than the head of a pin. While she was doing that I ran the phase input figures again to be sure they checked out. They did. The first part of the procedure was the same as flicker drive: switching on the VMET would activate the oscillator and phase the rat to M-waves. Then a second signal from a hand transmitter would jump the rat to a parallel phase and presumably another world.

‘The rat was just lying there while we waited for it to come out of the anaesthetic. I checked the phase input figures again and the calibration of the hand transmitter and I set up a videocamera. When the rat was fully conscious and moving around I pushed the button on the newsfax and the 19:45 update slid out. The headline was CHS FOR UNDER-25S ONLY. I laid it on the table beside the cage where the camera could see it.

‘Helen put on a recording of Chopin mazurkas. It was the sixteenth of September 2022, the end of the day. The light in the window was a sad kind of purple-blue. I started the video-camera at 19:48 BST.

‘I tuned the VMET to the WPR and at 19:50 I switched on. The oscilloscope showed in-phase as the rat disappeared. I jumped phase and switched off. I had that funny dropping sensation you get sometimes when you’re drifting off to sleep. I looked at Helen and she looked a little shaken. “You too?” I said, and she nodded. A terrible sadness took hold of me and I began to cry.’

You began to cry! I thought. You and your terrible sadness. For all we know you jumped us into a different world from what we had before. You jumped unborn me and everybody else into this world we’re stuck with now.

‘I remembered my mother giving me hot milk with butter and honey in it when I had a sore throat,’ Sixe continued. ‘I remember my father reading me “The Story of Kwashin Koji”, how a boat comes out of a picture and takes Kwashin Koji back into the picture and away.

‘We looked at the rat and it was only half a rat, the rear half. “Oh shit,” Helen said, “not again.” Then she went into the lav and was sick. I just stood there like an idiot looking at what was left of the rat. The front of the half-body was all scrunched up against the back of the cage — it was pretty messy and there was a lot of blood, it was as if someone had taken a cleaver and chopped the rat in half, severed arteries and split entrails and all that. The rat was backing up when he got the chop: his hind feet were dug in so hard he’d torn through the card he was standing on.

‘When Helen came out of the lav I said to her, “What did you mean when you said, ‘Not again’? Has this happened before?”

‘She said, “Not with a rat.”

‘“With what then?” I said. She didn’t answer. “Tell me, Helen,” I said. “With what?”

‘“You mean with whom,” she said.

‘I said, “Oh my God. What are you saying?”

‘“It happened with my brother,” she said.

‘“What?” I said. “What happened?”

‘“He did it in the middle of the night when I was asleep,” she said. “It was a Wednesday, the thirteenth of April. He’d set a timer to switch on the VMET and he’d got up on the table and arranged himself in the field. Then his head went somewhere but the rest of him stayed behind.”

‘“Where did it go?” I said.

‘“Who knows?” she said. “We lost touch.”

‘“Why did he do it?” I said.

‘“Hard to say,” she said. “He didn’t leave a note.”

‘“Did he do it with a phase jump, the same as we did with the rat?” I said. “Did he have the same kind of oscillator implant?”

‘“The one we used for the rat was wired from Izzy’s diagram,” she said.

‘“Well, if it didn’t work for Izzy,” I said, “why’d you do the same circuitry again?”

‘“It should have worked,” she said. “I checked it every possible way — the only explanation is that Izzy and the rat changed their minds and overrode the phase jump. Izzy certainly started out willing; he planned the whole thing very carefully. He’d been complaining of headaches and dizzy spells and he’d been to hospital for what he said were a couple of days of tests. He wouldn’t let me go with him — we had a regular driver who helped him into and out of buildings — and that’s when he must have had the implant done.”

‘“And you think he changed his mind at the last moment?” I said.

‘“Yes,” she said, “it’s the only explanation.”

‘“We’re talking quantum mechanics here,” I said. “How could changing his mind affect that?”

‘“Maybe all it takes is a little variation in the brain’s electrical output,” she said. “Reality, after all, is subjective.”’ Sixe took some papers from his pocket, selected one, and read:

‘Centricity of event as perceived by a participant in the event is reciprocal with the observed universe: the universe configures the event and the event configures the universe. Each life is a sequence of event-universes, each sequence having equal reality subjectively and no reality objectively. Objective reality is not possible within the sequence, therefore subjective reality, regardless of consensus, is the only reality.’

‘What a load of bollocks,’ I said to Sixe.

‘Izzy wrote that.’

‘I think he must have been a couple of quanta short of a probability by then.’

‘Helen recited that to me, she knew it by heart. I said to her, “Do you really believe that?”

‘She said, “Izzy was a genius. You saw what was left of the rat; I saw what was left of Izzy: both of them changed their minds.”’

As Sixe spoke I saw again the face of Izzy Gorn spread across the darkness of space. Had it tried to speak? I thought I might be going mad. I thought of Izzy lying on the table with his head torn off. ‘What did she do with the body?’ I said.

‘That’s the same question I asked but it was no big problem — one of her medical friends signed the death certificate with cause of death listed as VMET accident, there was a fast and private cremation with a closed coffin, life went on, and here we were with half a rat. Between that and the subjective reality business I was pretty confused, besides which I was worried about that dropping feeling we’d both had.

‘I replayed the videodisc and the date on the newsfax was the same: 16 September 2022. The headline was still CHS FOR UNDER-25S ONLY. The rest of the news hadn’t changed either: Top Exec A had resigned from her post following allegations of financial fraud and B was under investigation for having procured young girls for C; wirecar service would be disrupted by industrial action; and the latest survey showed that seventy-three per cent of those surveyed lied when being surveyed.’

‘But that doesn’t mean there was no change,’ I said. ‘Whatever recent past you recalled or saw evidence of would be the recent past that came with the collapse of the quantum wave into an alternative here-and-now, wouldn’t it?’

He ignored me. ‘The music on the audio beam was still the Chopin mazurkas. The clock said 19:59.1 looked all round the room, looked out of the window, looked at Helen. For a moment I didn’t know where I was and whether I’d ever seen that place and that person before. Then I was myself again but feeling weird.

‘The time was on every frame of the videodisc. There was the rat moving around in its cage at 19:48 when I started the camera. At 19:50 when I switched on the VMET it disappeared. When I jumped phase after that there was a blur that came and went. I restarted the disc and went to single-frame-advance. The blur was the very faint transparent shape of the rat as the light seemed to get brighter but it was impossible to say what was happening. The newsfax on the table seemed blurred as well. This ghost-image was only on three frames. I replayed and froze frame. The headline appeared to have another faint headline superimposed on it like a cross-dissolve. I zoomed up the frame and fiddled with the focus but I couldn’t get it clear enough to read. I took prints of those three frames and put them under a magnifier but had no better luck. The next frame after those three showed the newsfax and the half-rat as we’d found them after I switched off the VMET.

‘I said to Helen, “It’s the same world, isn’t it? The rat — half of it anyway — jumped back from whatever it was getting into and maybe the headline started to change but it changed back.”

‘She said, “What do you expect when you send a rat on a man’s errand? We’re not going to get anywhere with this until we do it ourselves.”

‘I said, “I’ll be damned if I want to end up with my arse in one place and my head in another.”

‘She said, “How much difference would it make?”’

Sixe paused there. ‘Not a lot, I guess,’ he said reflectively, ‘not a lot.’ During this long narrative his apparently total recall had transported me to that long-past September; I’d been seeing my mother’s face and hearing her voice that I knew from recordings. She was gone and here I was with this yesterday man whose sadness was evidently little relieved by alcohol.

‘I could see she wasn’t in the mood for a rational discussion,’ he continued, ‘but I kept trying. I said, “I think before we do anything else we should try to figure out what happened here.”

‘She said, “Looks pretty simple to me: the rat chickened out at the last moment.”

‘I said, “Be serious, God knows what the implications of this are.”

‘“God!” she said. “He didn’t care about my arse. Why should He care about a rat’s? He didn’t care about my grandmother’s arse either, when they used her for their so-called medical experiments at Auschwitz. Don’t talk to me about God, He and I aren’t speaking these days.”

‘I said, “I wasn’t talking about whether or not God cares — I was talking about the significance of what happened to the rat.”

‘“Significance!” she said. “What it signifies is: make sure your arse follows where your head leads. If you’re going to do something, then fucking do it.”

‘“Maybe this just doesn’t want to happen,” I said. She didn’t answer; she switched on the videoscan and moved it from station to station around town. There was the Ziggurat in purple standby mode, then Stilt City and Raftville, you could almost smell them. Sleazeworld and the central Fungames complex showing THREE BIG PUKIES TONITE — HORROR LIKE YOU’VE NEVER SEEN BEFORE! She punched in the street-level view and we saw Prongs and Arseholes, Shorties, Clowns, Funboys, Executives, and Wankers. She zoomed in for a good look at their tattoos and their paint, their shaven heads and their tribal hairdos. She said, “Maybe every world is a rats’ world. Let’s try again.”

‘I said, “What, with another rat?”

‘She said, “With us. Let’s get the oscillators implanted and do a jump before Heale decides to have a closer look at what we’ve been up to.”

‘I said, “But Helen, maybe Izzy and the rat didn’t change their minds; maybe the wrong phase-scaling got fed in both times or the oscillator circuitry wasn’t correct.”

‘She said “I’m sick of all this goddam arithmetic; Elijah didn’t have to piss about with numbers, he just fucking did it and the Lord took care of the details.”

‘“Don’t forget that you and He aren’t speaking these days,” I said.

‘“Maybe He’ll do it for old times’ sake,” she said.

‘I said, “I don’t think we can count on the Lord for that, he’s got a lot on his plate just now. And before I do a jump I’d really like to know where Izzy’s head and the rat’s front half ended up.”

‘“Wherever they are is better than here,” she said.

‘By then of course I realised that she was well and truly unwired and there was no knowing what she might do next. I was feeling pretty crazy myself — I mean, for all I knew we’d replaced the existing world, which was already one head short, with one that was missing half a rat. I was angry at God for creating a universe that could be mucked about like that. Why couldn’t He, She, or It have made something solid and tamperproof?

‘Helen said, “As soon as I can get hold of Ulrike let’s do it.” Ulrike was the neurosurgeon who was going to do our implants.

‘I said, “Helen, don’t be crazy.”

‘She said, “Why not? Where has being sane got me?”

‘I said, “For God’s sake, try to act like a scientist.”

‘She said, “Is that what you are — a scientist? You just don’t have the balls to take a chance. And who are you to advise me anyhow? You’re a loser who’s been getting a free ride on me.”

‘That’s when I left the house for a long walk. I had a key to the Class A walkway but I didn’t use it, I felt like being down on the ground with the Prongs and the Arseholes and the rest of the street life. I was half-hoping I’d get jumped and not have to make any decisions for a while or maybe for ever. I walked as far as Stilt City past people kicking each other’s heads in and breaking whatever was unbroken. The streets stank of vomit and sewage and the air was full of noise but the nastiness of it didn’t seem as nasty as what we’d been doing quietly in our nice clean lab.

‘It was raining; London always looks more itself by night and in the rain — all black and shining and full of lights and colours like a nightmare. People offered me everything from slammo to little boys but nobody bothered me. I think I must have looked a little too weird to take a chance on.

‘I got back to the house about three o’clock in the morning and two guys jumped me at the front door — professionals. They didn’t waste any time talking, they just gagged me and cuffed me and shoved me into a hopper and flew me to a building in the Inner Exec Circle. No blindfold so I knew I was for it. They took me to a lab where they strapped me to a bed and a woman medic gave me an injection. When I came to I heard myself talking and I saw that I was hooked up to a downloader. The medic was sitting by the bed and she whispered, “Listen but keep babbling. I’m a friend of Ulrike’s. I have orders to terminate you as soon as there’s nothing more to be got from you. Be careful when you leave.” Then she took off the electrodes, undid the straps, stuck a card in my pocket, pointed to the window, and said, “Quick, the fire escape — go!” So I went.

‘I walked to Sleazeworld and hired a Q-BO-SLEEP for the night. Next morning’s newsfax had this item.’ He took yet another photocopy from the wad. It was dated 17.09.22.

HELEN GORN BREAKDOWN

Physicist-neurologist Helen Gorn was found by a Corporation patrol at 02:20 wandering in her nightdress on the Class A walkway in OW 71. Gorn, 7 months pregnant, was taken to SNG Rest and Reassessment where she was diagnosed as suffering from clinical depression.

‘I’ve seen this before,’ I said to Sixe.

‘You’ve probably seen this one as well.’ He gave me another photocopy, dated 24.09.22:

HELEN GORN DEAD

Helen Gorn was found dead from a drug overdose early this morning in her room at SNG Rest and Reassessment where she had been in therapy for the last week. Gorn, 26, was seven months pregnant. The foetus was safely transferred to an artificial womb to complete full-term gestation. (See obituary p.4.)

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Why are you showing me these?’

‘Pay close attention to the dates. Helen goes into SNG Rest and Reassessment on 17 September and she ODs a week later on 24 September. Now look at this one. It’s a Code Red Memo, SNG ONLY which means SNG, Thinksec, and Top Exec.’

I looked:

CODE RED SNG ONLY INT TE AUTH I 14:32 28.09.22

Elijah newgo I Heale Speed I CN Flicker.

‘Elijah resumed under Irene Heale: top priority. Codename Flicker,’ Sixe translated. ‘Notice the date: four days after Helen’s death.’

‘So? They had her notes and all the data the two of you accumulated and they were going ahead. What else would you expect?’

‘There might be a little more to this than you’d expect. Helen and I made up some code signatures just in case we ever needed to authenticate communications between us — nonsense groups that could be inserted in a page of calculations. This is one of them.’ He wrote something on the back of an envelope and showed it to me: (**)+<0>%. ‘Now here’s part of a printout from Irene Heale’s lab dated ten days after Helen’s death.’ In a thicket of numbers, symbols, and Greek letters I saw what was unmistakably the same group.

‘You’re trying to tell me she was alive ten days after being reported dead,’ I said.

He shook his head. ‘Maybe it’s not quite that simple.’ He looked up, stuck a card in my hand, and collapsed as a wire-thin beam of blue light hit him and a hovering peeper dwindled into the night.