Fremder

23

So it seems I had just enough Reality-Sustain to do my suspended-animation trick again and once more Bill Charteris found me drifting towards Badr al-Budur. This time Caroline was aboard Sun Ra with him and I had intensive care immediately.

Maybe Helen and Izzy are together now wherever they are. Mum and Dad. Irene Heale has probably had enough mileage out of Helen Gorn’s brain and can rest on her laurels. What they’ll put in the Omphalos I can’t imagine but I’m sure they’ll think of something.

When I woke up in Intensive Care at Hubble Straits I said to my mind, Are you there? YES, it replied. Since then we’ve been finding a lot to talk about. The other day I said to it, Sometimes I feel, I don’t know, sudden.

GO ON, it said.

What I mean to say is, sometimes I feel as if I’ve just jumped here out of nowhere.

SO DO I, it said. Somehow I wasn’t surprised.

I’ve taken a year’s leave from Deep Space Command and I’m learning how to read music. Soon I’ll be starting piano lessons and when I’m sufficiently advanced I’ll begin the organ. By the time I get to where I can play The Art of Fugue I’ll probably know what I want to do next — I can see my way much clearer now that the circles of emptiness are gone.

Sometimes in the small hours of the night while Caroline sleeps peacefully beside me I sit up in the dark, leaning forward and feeling the world and myself moving from the known to the unknown. I remember how it was when I was eight, how I was like Elijah waiting for the rain, waiting to be the full Elijah. Am I that now? Am I the whole Fremder Elijah Gorn? On the screen of my mind I see eyes of becoming, nodes of possibility expanding in concentric circles. Which brings me to another question: is this world (lacking as it does half a rat, one human head, one very large brain, a couple of spacecraft, and seven crew) the one I started out with?

Flick, flick — flick and fade, John,

on the planet where you are.