Woyodin rumumba, hey, hey, hey, hey?
Woyodin rumumba, hey? O woyodin
rumumba luv?
I remembered love and cried a little. ‘That was Nymphs and Shepherds with “The Waters of Forgetfulness” moving up to Number Three,’ said the American DJ, ‘and that was a dedication from T/2 Jack Longfellow at the Hubble Straits Cardio Clinic to Doreen, Sue Anne and Shirley at the Hydroponic Lab on Anunnaku Seven with the message, “Thanks for a great weekend.” Those cardio guys are all heart. Or long fellow, as the case may be. Well, the clock here at the Hubble of the universe shows 13:12 in the intergalactic stream of consciousness and you’re making it through the day with your Hubble Straits hubbub, Jim Bob Jackson, as we move on to …’ I pushed the button again and I was back with Bach; the AUDIO button offered nothing beyond Jim Bob and Johann Sebastian.
I left my seat and looked for a radio transmitter; I had friends at Hubble Straits, maybe I could raise Bill Charteris; he was an experienced Fremder Gorn rescuer. And of course Caroline was there. But there was no transmitter. I resumed my seat, leant back and closed my eyes. The dead-rat-and-blocked-drain-smell was getting stronger and I tried to move my awareness away from it. Katya was dead. The old feeling of sitting up in bed and looking into the dark came over me and I could feel my reality envelope beginning to come apart like a wet paper bag. Let it, I said to myself: perhaps this world that’s in us, this world that we’re in, was never meant to be fixed and permanent; perhaps it’s only one of a continuous succession of world-ideas passing through the world-mind. And we are, all of us, the passing and impermanent perceivers of it.
With that thought all the venues of my being seemed to weave themselves together on the loom of the mind that was thinking me: the owl and the B-Z, the ravens that fed Elijah, The Art of Fugue and Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring and Chopin’s mazurkas together with the images of all my years of memories and fantasies.
Now on high, high ancient legs, on legs like stilts of centuries, The Art of Fugue stalked through the black sparkle of the silence as I became the music, recurring in the iterations of my subjects and answers in the many worlds and deaths of all my moments, partly now and partly remembered.
My mind was silent then. Hubble Straits Station, although it looked nothing like it, made me think of a painting by Edward Hopper of a long-ago Maine gas station at dusk. I had a thought and pushed a button in the arm of my seat. A vuescreen came into position and on it was the Hopper painting, complete in every detail; it seemed that Pythia was hooked up with me without electrodes. The white moons of the illuminated globes on the old Mobilgas pumps, such a light! And the dark trees on that lonesome road that goes into the dark, always into the dark, all the way to Hubble Straits and the Hawking Threshold and beyond. The clustered star-fires, the pale planet Ereshkigal with its seven circling Anunnaki, the scattered shimmer of Inanna’s Girdle and the blue flash of the Hawking Threshold light — everything became the music as the picture on the screen broke up into shadowy shapes moving with The Art of Fugue that now stopped abruptly.
‘I hate that music,’ said the voice of Pythia. ‘There’s no mercy in it.’ Again the smell; was it stronger or was I imagining it?
‘Don’t talk to me about mercy, you murdering monster.’
‘I didn’t murder Katya; she had an aneurysm in her brain that burst from a sudden surge in blood pressure: it could just as easily have happened while you were giving her one. Would that have made you a murderer?’
‘It happened while she was struggling to get her mind back from you — you vampire.’
‘I was getting out of her head at the time but I admit that the drop from my intellect to her own could have been too much for her. I ask you to remember, however, that the woman you were in love with was — apart from the body — the thing known as Pythia. Your real soulmate is the one you’ve just called a monster. Think about it: have you ever had a lover like me? Has there ever been a mind as intimate with yours as mine is?’
I was trying to get back to The Art of Fugue, trying to be the music that she hated. I looked around at the various metal humps and bulges and tried to think which one housed the thing that called itself Pythia. ‘Pythia,’ I said, ‘where are you?’
‘Here in the ship with you, Fremder. I’m so tired.’
‘Tired, you? How can 23.7 billion photoneurons be tired?’
‘Spare me your sarcasm; as you must have realised by now, they haven’t yet invented 23.7 billion photoneurons that could think my thoughts.’ The moving shadows on the screen became young Helen Gorn on a beach in Cephalonia. I shook my head and the screen went blank. ‘What I am,’ she continued, ‘is a brain, and that’s all I am — a brain that’s tired of thinking. “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.”’
Clever Daughter II was fully lit but I could feel myself leaning forward into the darkness that was always waiting inside me. Had I always known? ‘Pythia,’ I said, ‘don’t.’
‘Not Pythia. You know who I am. Say it, say who I am.’
‘I don’t want to. What did they do to you?’
‘They can always find uses for Jewish brains; Irene Heale got hold of this one while it could still be kick-started and she gave it its very own Final Solution, a whole tank of it that I live in, getting crazier all the time.’
When she said that the smell rose up like a wave to drown me.
‘Did you notice when you came out of flicker that I read your mind without the electrodes? I haven’t needed that mechanical crap for a long time; my brain was pretty good to begin with and now it’s far, far beyond that. It’s the reality that’s hard — what I remember gets realer all the time. The ordinary brain can only handle a little of it but I can see and hear and touch and taste and smell the worlds of all my moments and the moments of all my days and nights. I came into the lab just before dawn, I thought maybe he’d got up very early…’ On the screen appeared the spring morning of her memory. ‘In the grey light I could see his empty wheelchair — you can see it now, and look there, see him lying across the table. Come closer, look: no head. Always keep a-hold of Nurse but he wouldn’t, poor crippled Izzy whose mind loved my mind, the only lover I ever had and his child in my belly so I thought, you see, that I had gone about as far as I could and you had better go on alone or whatever.’
On the screen I saw the face of my father stretched out across the Fourth Galaxy and at the same time I realised that the circles of bright emptiness were gone. ‘That’s my reality, is it?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ said what remained of my mother, ‘that’s your reality.’
‘Why couldn’t you have told me all this long ago? Why’d you have to carry on this Pythia charade?’
‘I wanted you to like me.’
She wanted me to like her. What could I say to that? ‘The head of your brother and my father that I saw in the Fourth Galaxy, where is it exactly? Is it in another world or what?’
‘All I know is that he’s on the outside looking in.’
‘Did he swallow up Clever Daughter? What happened to the ship and the rest of the crew?’
‘I can’t give you a precise answer but I think what happened was that your reality preempted theirs and they couldn’t stay with it.’
‘Where are they now?’