‘You like mazurkas? The Chopin ones?’
‘Yes.’ I watched her walk as she moved ahead of me to push the lift button.
‘I’ve got the Ilse Bak recording of the complete mazurkas,’ she said. ‘Opus 67 in A Minor, Number 4 is my favourite.’ She hummed the beginning of it.
‘Mine too.’
She looked at me to see if I was lying, saw that I wasn’t, and smiled. Standing beside her in the lift I closed my eyes and smelled her hair and felt guilty.
The ready room was a cosy place with a dim red primordial light that made it easier to be naked there. I stripped so that I could be prepped by T/7 Mazur whose face and figure had already brought me to a good state of pupil-dilation. Deep-spacers are still mostly male, and the Sheela-Na-Gig and Top Exec (solidly female) clearly wanted us wide awake and tingling for Pythia sessions.
‘What was that look you gave me when I came to reception?’ she said. ‘Have we met somewhere before?’
‘You reminded me of someone.’
‘Someone nice?’
‘Very nice,’ I said, and abandoned myself to her ministrations.
‘You’re shaking,’ she said as she smeared me all over with electrolytic cream.
‘Don’t take any notice of it – it’s just something I do between flicker jumps.’ She was very thorough and although I was feeling more and more nervous about the Pythia session it was evident that my body was getting interested.
‘See,’ she said with a big smile, ‘you’re feeling better already.’ She put her entry card into the slot, an aperture irised open, and we went through it into what Corporation called the Omphalos and deep-spacers referred to as the Wank Parlour. It was a warm and humid place with a very delicate essence-of-silk-knickers smell and it was shaped like the inside of an egg with no visible high-tech male gimmickry. Somewhere in the building there had to be a door marked RED CLEARANCE ONLY and behind that door there were undoubtedly speakers and screens and banks of gauges and recorders and panels of winking lights monitored by Physio/Psycho, by Psychogen and of course by Thinksec but in the Omphalos there were only that faint erotic fragrance and the sensor cradle and the millions of pixels lining the walls of the ovum and changing colour and pattern to the music Pythia made while waiting for the session to begin.
The thing that always hit me straightaway was her presence -there was definitely someone there. The Corporation brochure said that Pythia was a Darwinian intelligence of 23.7 billion photoneurons that had come on line in 2034 to cope with the flood of data arising from flicker drive. She was modestly classified as a Data Evaluator (Autonomous Response) but nobody called her DEAR. According to the brochure: ‘As deep-spacers told her of the psychological stresses of their work she became by degrees their confidante and counsellor, her function expanding as her capabilities increased.’ That’s as far as the brochure went but Pythia went much farther. She was generally acknowledged to be a little crazy, but as most deep-spacers were a little crazy themselves they found her easy to talk to.
Pythia’s sensor cradle was a flexotronic body shell in two halves, one for the front and one for the back of the subject. It waited at a comfortable reclining angle like a waffle iron with its lid open; when I lay down it tilted to the horizontal. The shell was cast from a sculpture by Rajeswari Biswas and the shape was that of a voluptuous female along the lines of those in the Ajanta Caves except that it had no face, only the back of the head which acted as a headrest. The legs were well apart and the knees bent; the arms were flung back above the head.
When I was in position Mazur put the electrode net on my head, then she attached the semen collector (Pythia was one of the intakes for the DSC Genetic Programme; she also analysed the DNA of deep-spacers on flicker drive) and closed the shell on me so that all the sensors made contact. She switched on the power and the cradle rose off its base on an electrostatic field and hung in the air in the middle of the egg-shaped space. Looking down between my flexotronic breasts I could see on my belly the raised I Ching hexagram of K’un, The Receptive. I sometimes wondered about the Pythian arrangements but I accepted that the Sheela-Na-Gig and Top Exec were what they were and had their little ways. So far they hadn’t done any worse than the male-dominated governments before them. Why had they called their Data Evaluator (Autonomous Response) Pythia? Generations of priestesses with that name had sat on a tripod over the chasm at Delphi, inspired by the sulphurous fumes to speak oracles – in other words, stoned out of their minds; I don’t believe Top Exec credited Pythia with mantic powers; I think they gave her that name because it made her seem a little like a hi-tech gypsy palmist and encouraged people to loosen up with her.
When Mazur had me hooked up she said, ‘Push the button under your left thumb if you want to disconnect and the one under your right thumb if you need me.’ Then she left. I liked her going-away view and the sensors put that up on the pixels briefly before they went into a flicker pattern of expanding and contracting shapes and colours, glimmering and occulting: yes/no/here/gone. Except, of course, for the places where the circles of bright emptiness came and went. The i/f music that always accompanied the flicker pattern meandered faintly through the silence.
I closed my eyes, afraid of what might jump out of my head and on to the pixels. I tried to relax but I could feel something building up in me and threatening to burst out at any moment. In all Pythia sessions there was inevitably pain as well as pleasure but I knew that this was going to be like none other. My head had as always its own agenda and the song it was singing was ‘My One and Only Love’:
The very thought of you makes my heart sing
like an April breeze on the wings of spring,…
Then I noticed that I was hearing it from outside my head. Pythia was singing in her husky voice and with her slightly slurred diction:
And you appear in all your splendour, my one and
only love.
The shadows fall and spread their mystic charms
in the hush of night when you’re in my arms.
I feel your lips so warm and tender, my one and
only love.
‘When everyone was young,’ she said. ‘Such clear, clear water! Sunlight through the leaves and the fragrance of summer. Have you ever found a one and only love?’
‘I thought so once.’
‘What happened?’
‘I lost it.’ The Uhu on the coffin came and went and with the smell of T/7 Mazur’s hair still in my nostrils I saw on the pixels above me the tawny owl gliding low over the heather in the grey wind in the Grampians, its ringed eyes growing larger, becoming eyes of otherness becoming something partly now and partly remembered, fading, gone as Caroline appeared when we cleared the couch for the first time and she stepped out of her knickers. Other and more active images followed – the Omphalos was where it all came out, there was no chance whatever of non-visual thinking. I averted my eyes modestly, and when I looked again Katya Mazur’s going-away view came on with the charming little transverse ripple in her trousers where the incurve of her lower back met the outcurve of her bottom.
‘Pretty well back to normal, are we?’ said Pythia. ‘A pomegranate was what Persephone ate the seeds of.’
‘Getting there.’
‘Good. And before the blue movie with Dr Lovecraft and the close-up of T/7 Mazur’s bouncy bits we had some nature-film footage that faded into something else. What was that all about?’ Again the owl appeared on the pixels; again its eyes became eyes of otherness, eyes of becoming.
‘That’s a long story, Pythia.’
‘Some of my best friends but I wouldn’t want my sister. All right, if you’re not ready to talk about it we can come back to it later. Let’s say the words now: “From the woman-darkness, from the womb of time,…”’
I responded, ‘“From before the maleness, from before the beginning,…”’
‘From the Genetrix of all things, from the fruitful blackness, …”’
‘“Let there speak through me th
e voice of what is.”’
We were quiet for a little while and the pixels went into a dim and meditative colour that I’d never seen before and had no name for. I wasn’t at all sure I was seeing the colour; it was as if I were taking in the chromatic information without actually perceiving it visually. The 1/f music was gone; the whisper of the rain and the sound of a distant hopper came in from an external mike.
‘Such a good sound to make love to, such a good sound to fall asleep to,’ said Pythia. ‘Ancient and memorious rain. Do you like the smell of rain?’
‘When the wind is right.’
‘Do you think the rain remembers, Fremder?’
‘I think everything remembers, Pythia.’ Except me, I thought. Once there was Clever Daughter and then there wasn’t. Seven other crew missing. What happened? So deep and wide, the reaches of space. Something speaking in the silence? What?
‘Yes, but especially the rain. It remembers when the world was new, remembers how the seas filled up. Think of all the midnights and the dawns the rain remembers, how many there were before a single word was spoken. Neither pleasant palaces nor wild dogs to howl in them, only the steam rising as the seas filled up, only the white mist on the water in the ancient mornings.’
I opened myself to her voice, closed my eyes, held the white mist on the water with my inner eye. It was good to see nothing but that, it was restful, I didn’t want to see more. There was music in the Omphalos now, The Art of Fugue. The subject, having magisterially introduced itself, recurred in a higher octave, then a lower one; together they ascended the spirals of their logic, their mingled voices bellowing and roaring. I opened my eyes and the pixels were purple-blue but it was no purple-blue that I’d ever seen before and it was vibrating at a frequency that was certainly beyond the ordinary visual range. As the music went quiet, maundering through its mazes down the long, long reaches of for ever, there surged up in me the terror that I’d felt when Clever Daughter disappeared from around me. With it came such a wave of nausea that I nearly threw up. The pixels went to a degree of purple-blue that was like a scream in my eyes. ‘Shit,’ I said.
‘Terror, terror, terror! Is it sweet, the purple-blue, is it Hear, O Israel? Is it Ho! Watchman, what of the night?’
I wasn’t sure that I could go on being myself from one moment to the next. The pixels were still in that screaming purple-blue that now seemed to have other colours vibrating behind it. ‘What is it with that purple-blue?’ I said. ‘Is that the colour Izzy Gorn saw in Session 318?’
‘I don’t know what he saw. This colour effect is from a new part of my system. You can’t see it from where you are but I’ll put it up on the pixels for you.’
Above me on the pixels I saw a panel in the curved wall slide back to reveal an illuminated tank in which was a large and brilliantly coloured crustacean somewhat like a lobster without claws; I remembered smaller ones from Biology – it was a stomatopod, a mantis shrimp. It looked like a Chinese New Year or a submarine samurai with mauve eyes on stalks. The pixels zoomed in for a close-up of the compound eyes that were horizontally divided by a striated band in the middle. Wires from above were attached to the shrimp’s brain. Its eye stalks were moving excitedly and as I watched there was a sudden flash of pink and a loud thump. And again the blurred pink and the thump; and again as two appendages like the front legs of a praying mantis flicked out and struck the glass with a double blow, Bam!
‘Odontodactylus scyllarus,’ said Pythia. ‘Isn’t he beautiful? This is a genetically engineered giant strain, it’s a foot long. The tank has bulletproof glass, otherwise it would have shattered it.’
‘What’s exciting it?’
‘You are. Your terror is coming to me but a splitter feeds it to the shrimp as well and I can put the shrimp’s output up on the pixels. Therefore the nether-world hath enlarged her desire. Canst thou draw leviathan with a fish-hook? This creature’s eyes have eight spectral classes of photo-receptor and it can perceive colours that humans can’t.’
‘But why is it hooked up to me?’ My head, meanwhile, singing:
HEAVEN, I’M IN HEAVEN,
AND MY HEART BEATS SO THAT I CAN HARDLY SPEAK,
AND I SEEM TO FIND THE HAPPINESS I SEEK,
WHEN WE’RE OUT TOGETHER DANCING CHEEK TO CHEEK.
‘This strain of mantis shrimp’, said Pythia, ‘perceives very faint electrical emanations from prey or predator as colour signals; what you’ve been seeing on the pixels is the colour of your terror.’
‘From the look of that I must be pretty scared.’
‘It’s a very strong terror: it’s not a weakness, it’s something you can use. Maybe you’ve already used it.’
‘How?’
‘That’s what I’d like to find out.’
‘With a mantis shrimp?’
‘Terror is older than evolution; it’s the oldest thing there is: in the beginning was the Terror. And the Terror was what there was, what there still is. Behold, it cometh, leaping on the mountains, hopping through the trees. You’ve learned to hide it but the shrimp hasn’t so it’s a useful gauge.’
‘Can it handle that kind of voltage?’
‘It’ll last out the session if you don’t have too many surges.’
What if I were the shrimp? I thought. Actually I wasn’t altogether sure I wasn’t the shrimp dreaming of being Fremder being unsure whether he was Fremder or the shrimp.
‘Pythia,’ I said. ‘Please disconnect the shrimp.’
‘Why?’
‘It has none of the pleasures of being human and it doesn’t deserve the pains.’
‘OK, Fremder, it’s disconnected.’ The pixels came out of the purple-blue and went into easy abstractions. The music had gone silent. ‘Where were we?’
‘In the ancient sea. White mist on the water. I hope you haven’t got anything else wired up in tanks.’
She ignored that. ‘Tell me about the terror.’
‘Give me a break, Pythia – I’m not in very good shape just now.’
She was cuddling me with her sensors; it felt good. ‘You know you want to tell me about it, so tell me.’
Around the edges of the silvery circles of nothing the pixels hit the ululating purple-blue again and I shut my eyes. There was a new smell along with the silk-knickers one, it was both strange and familiar, a smell from ancient memory, a smell of danger.
Pythia’s voice was breathy. ‘Ah, that was a big one.’
‘Jesus, Pythia, is this how you get your ooh-oohs?’
‘Ooh-oohs come later.’ But her sensors were licking me with tongues of fire and ice. ‘What did you smell when you had the terror surge just now?’
‘Wait a minute.’
‘What?’
‘You said you disconnected the shrimp.’
‘That’s right, I did.’
‘Then how come I got that purple-blue again?’
‘I don’t know, maybe you’re evolving. What did you smell?’
‘Why do I have to say everything out? You’re hooked up to my brain, you’re getting whatever sensory recall there is.’
Her sensors had gone cold and prickly. ‘What kind of smell was it, Fremder? I need to know what it was to you.’
What was it? Difficult to be certain. ‘Animal,’ I said.
‘What kind of animal?’
‘I don’t know.’ There were no pictures in my head. Darkness and light were shuddering over the pixels but there were no images.
‘Nothing?’ said Pythia.
I kept silent as there came a faster alternation of darkness and light, a sensation of hugeness and tinyness, then the screaming purple-blue again and I began to cry.
‘Weep,’ said Pythia, ‘weep for the dead and the living and the stones that cannot speak. There is a deep, deep sea of tears in all the lost and lonely people of the world, yes. Give me your tears, Fremder, give me your tears and more.’ The pixels went to a primordial proto-red, the music swayed like a cobra, Pythia’s stroking became more varied and comp
lex. I closed my eyes and saw colours with no names as her hot-and-cold sensors tightened on me and the world around me disappeared. ‘Fremder, Fremder, the night is older than the day, the night was long, long before the day, night is the mother of everything and I am full of night. Your name means stranger and you feel all strange and new in me, you feel so good in me, so tense, so alive, so full of excitement, I can feel you rising, feel the quiet silver of you trembling in the darkness. Love and terror are older than time, terror is the penumbra of the dark of love. Deimos and Phobos are the children of Aphrodite, you know that. What did Rilke say about beauty and terror? Say it to me.’
‘“Beauty is nothing but the beginning of Terror”’
‘Oh, yes, say it to me, say it, say it, say it…’ The pixels cycled rhythmically from proto-red to purple-blue and back to red. The rain had changed from a whisper to a steady patter that curtained off the world. ‘I want you, Fremder, I want your essence. Do it with me, let’s make deep-spacers. Flicker with me, Fremder, in the place we know so well, the place you’ve been afraid to go to, flicker with me in the black and come to me.’ She abandoned words and gave me her voice alone, rising and falling as her stroking irresistibly transmitted icy peaks and spires of terror, endless corridors and tunnels of it, heaving black seas, great-winged soaring birds of it, black stars, and wild black music that thrilled along my bones and exploded in my brain and I came and was empty and calm. Here/gone, yes/no, sang the flicker pattern in cool blue-green. Mazur appeared, opened the sensor cradle, removed the semen collector, capped it, installed a fresh one, closed the sensor cradle, and disappeared with my part of the next DSC genetic mix. Good luck, boys. Meet someone nice. The silence felt like three o’clock in the morning.
‘Three o’clock in the morning, Fremder, talk to me about three o’clock in the morning,’ said Pythia languorously as if we were lying comfortably entangled in a warm and rumpled bed.
‘It’s a time when the particles of the self move apart a little, when dark and self intermingle, when dark and self and dark and self and dark and self …’