Fremder

9

‘You ever been to Badru?’ said Caroline next morning.

‘It’s one of my favourite places.’

‘Feel like going there today?’

‘What for?’

‘I don’t know. It’s nothing official — I just want to see what it feels like, the two of us on Badru. We’ll drink Krasnaya Kola and eat Galaktik Miks with Spudnik Fry and spend the night in a Q-BO SLEEP. How’s that grab you?’

‘Hard. But is this a you-and-me personal thing or is it a new approach to the Level 4?’

‘Look, Frem — the you that’s part of the you-and-me personal thing is the same you that’s nilsponding the Level 4. So I don’t really know how much of it is for me and how much is for Corporation. Is that OK?’

‘OK, let’s do Badru.’

There was a 10:00 jet so we caught it. The other passengers were mostly lingerie salesman from a company called Flauntees Ltd, all of them wearing badges with their first names on them and all of them bound for Yamomoto Pleasure Station 7 for their annual sales conference. Several of them looked at Caroline with eyes that were obviously undressing her and putting her into something more comfortable but they were quiet about it.

‘Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,’ said a husky female voice after we buckled ourselves in. ‘Welcome aboard the Pandora, your Interjet shuttle service to Badr al-Budur. I’m Captain Kurtz and I’ve got a green board in front of me so as soon as we get the word from Traffic Control we’ll be off. Our jump time to Badru is eight minutes, give or take the odd half-hour depending on the El Niños. Today’s forecast is fifteen per cent so it shouldn’t be too bad. A final reminder: if you haven’t already checked all electronic equipment, please buzz a cabin attendant and do it now.’ There was a pause while three or four laptops were collected, then the clear for blastoff sounded. ‘Cabin attendants, please buckle up,’ said the captain, and there was a bone-rattling roar as we blasted off. Once in our flight path we lurched, wobbled, shook, rattled, and rolled as we hit the El Niños and Pandora and all of us grew alternately longer, shorter, and otherwise, bending and twisting with the varying force fields. Strange colours surged around the ship and faded into blackness on the seatback monitors. Some of the Flauntees Ltd first-names began to chant, ‘Tees-Flaun, Tees-Flaun,’ then became quiet as sick bags were brought into play and the cabin staff were kept on the hop with urgent calls for aid of one kind or another. Eventually the spaceport at Badru appeared in the seatback monitors, the captain said, ‘Layzen gemmen, than kyoufer flynnerjet, hopesee yougen. Hava plenstop Badru,’ and we were down after an hour and sixteen minutes of jump.

Everybody staggered off Pandora into the dim blue noctolux and many-coloured neon of the spaceport. The Flauntees Ltd crowd dispersed into the gift shop, the bar, and MIKHAIL’S QWIKSNAK; Caroline and I wobbled to a bench and sat down as the spaceport filled up with emptiness and that imbricated silence made up of the low roar of the air-cycling system, the hum of the robot sweepers, the sizzle of the noctolux lamps, and the sound of distant footsteps. The smell of the spaceport at Badru, that blend of LavaKleen, floor wax, and frying, is the smell of all-alone and faraway that meets the traveller everywhere in the world of nowheres. The big board showed that it was 19:23 in Tokyo, 11:23 in Paris, 06:23 in New York. Departures on offer were:

YAM PLEAS STATN 7 INTGAL JMP 14 DEP 12:15 NOT READY

NEWCOMP CONF CTR TRNSCT JMP 03 DEP 13:40 NOT READY

Caroline took my hand and laced her fingers into mine. ‘Jesus,’ she said, ‘dawmsfergahn hamuch s’plasis wah’iss.’

‘Saygen,’ I said. ‘Berrwaylill.’

We waited a little and tried again. ‘Jesus,’ said Caroline, ‘I’d almost forgotten how much this place is what it is.’

‘I hadn’t.’ I was seeing the figure in the blue coverall tumbling over and over in the icy cold, Badr al-Budur like a pale moon in the distance.

‘This is the real thing,’ said Caroline. ‘It’s the deepest, the profoundest. It’s the big bazonga, it’s really existential.’

‘Yes,’ I said, watching a distant sweeper with a faulty program banging again and again into the Information kiosk, ‘just don’t tell me it’s a metaphor, OK?’

‘Sorry! Shall we go for a Galaktik Mik?’

‘Right. That’s what I need — that Quasi-Protein fix.’ Followed by our echoing footsteps we made our way to MIKHAIL’S QWIKSNAK where the smell of frying embraced us greasily and the coloured neon hung like exotic nocturnal fruit.

‘Have a good hello,’ burbled the charming female robot at the entrance to the cafeteria. ‘Welcome day Qwiksnak to Mikhail’s hello, have a, have a, have a … Come back and see us hello.’

‘You too,’ we said. We slid our trays along the rails under red, orange, yellow, purple, and blue neon, loaded up with Galaktik Miks, Spudnik Fry, and Krasnaya Kolas, and found ourselves a table by the windows. In the distance Qamar al-Zaman the rubbish planet hung like a rotting grapefruit while all around us the Flauntees reps chewed and swallowed and called each other Kevin and Tony and Fred in loud voices.

‘This is one of your special places, is it?’ ‘I said to Caroline. ‘One of your reference points?’

She nodded. ‘This is a paradigm of what-it-is,’ she said. ‘It’s a place where you eat non-food and wait for a jump to somewhere else that’s not ready.’

‘Only we’re not waiting for a jump to somewhere else.’

‘No, we’re not going to somewhere else, you and I.’

‘We could, though, if we wanted to.’

‘Pleasure Station Seven? Would you like to see me in Flauntees with suspenders and net stockings?’

‘I like to see you any way at all, Caroline.’

‘Let’s walk — I’ve had as much Quasi as I can handle.’

‘Have a good hello,’ said the robot hostess as we left. We went to the observation bubble, not a very big one. From there we had a good view of the Anunnaki, Ereshkigal, and Inanna’s Girdle as well as Qamar al-Zaman. ‘Everything has a name put to it,’ said Caroline, ‘but the name has nothing to do with the reality. The name Caroline is derived from Charles which means manly. Do you think I’m manly?’

‘In a very womanly way. What’s the matter, Caroline? What’s bothering you?’

‘Nothing in particular; I just wanted to come here because sometimes I like to be in a place where what’s outside me isn’t too different from what’s inside me.’

‘I guess that’s why I like it. But you don’t look as if desolation is your thing.’

‘Maybe that’s my problem — I look like a lot of laughs but I’m not. Let’s go to the mini-cine and watch something old in black-and-white — Brief Encounter maybe.’

We went to the mini-cine near the Q-BO SLEEP, found an empty two-seater that reeked of beer and semen, and punched up Brief Encounter.

‘Oh God,’ said Caroline as the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto came in over the credits, ‘look! The very first thing you see is a train hurtling away from you in great clouds of steam, then a train coming towards you, then Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson sitting at a table in the refreshment room at Milford Junction and that awful woman chattering so they can’t even have a proper goodbye. Their story begins with the ending of it. That’s so true, it’s so much the way life is.’ She began to sniffle, brought a box of tissues out of her shoulder bag, and settled back to enjoy the film. When Celia Johnson, trapped in a compartment with the dreadful Dolly, said to herself, ‘Nothing lasts, really — neither happiness nor despair. Not even life lasts very long,’ Caroline wept openly. ‘Oh shit,’ she said, ‘that gets me every time.’

I hugged her and kissed her and she made little comfortable noises and told me more about the film which I too had seen several times. ‘Their story begins when he takes a bit of grit out of her eye, he opens her eyes to something she hadn’t seen before. She knew what was happening by the time they’d spent their first afternoon together at the pictures; and it was obviously one of those things that just couldn’t be but it’s so sad and I cry every time.’

After the film we had dinner at Mikhail’s Bistro where the prices are higher than those at the Qwiksnak but the Quasi-Protein is pretty much the same except for the sauces. Afterwards we walked around the spaceport not talking, just being with each other in the echoing silence. At Hubble Straits when I wasn’t with Caroline and I thought about her, the picture that came first was always her walk: it was a walk that pleasured the eye, a noble way of moving. As we slowly strolled with her arm linked in mine and our bodies touching I felt proud to be the one she walked with.

‘What do you want out of life, Frem?’ she said.

Again I saw the figure in the blue coverall tumbling over and over, drifting in deep space, pictures frozen in its mind. ‘I want to be the whole me, whatever that is.’

‘Then you’ll have to remember all that you’ve forgotten, won’t you?’

‘It’ll come back when it’s ready, I guess.’ We didn’t say any more about it then. It was after midnight when we got to the Q-BO SLEEP. We found a double, punched in our IDs and our wake-up time, cleaned our teeth, washed our faces, undressed, and crept naked under the thin grey blankets — two bare forked creatures holding each other tight with a great blackness all around.