‘Interesting.’
‘Isn’t it. So what kind of shape were you in that morning? In your head, I mean.’
‘Nothing out of the ordinary.’
‘And what is the ordinary?’
‘Nothing special.’
‘Mr Gorn — my job is to find out what I can about what happened. Have you decided that your job is to keep me from finding out?’
‘I remember flickering out of Nova Central and the next thing I remember is waking up in the room I have now. I don’t remember anything in between.’
‘And you don’t want to, right?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Look,’ she said, and her breezy professional manner was gone; her voice was low and quiet, ‘I can’t even imagine what happened to you out there — probably it was indescribable. Holding on to the world isn’t easy; some mornings when I have to open my eyes and be me I almost can’t do it, everything seems to be slipping away. But you did it drifting in deep space at 3 Kelvin with no spacesuit, no helmet, and no oxygen. I’ve looked at the Sun Ra video and I can’t get it out of my mind. The Level 4 is what I’m assigned to and they want official answers but now I’m talking to you just as one person to another. Somewhere in your mind is the total recall of what happened. I can feel your terror and I want to be in that terror with you. Talk to me, for God’s sake — I’ve been waiting in my house at R’lyeh for such a long time!’
‘You want to be in the terror with me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know.’ Her face was close to mine, her eyes seemed full of fear and doubt, her pupils wide and dark and ringed with green, eyes of becoming, and all around us a blackness that tilted and beckoned with eyes of becoming, becoming …
‘Careful!’ she said, and caught me as I almost fell out of my chair. Then we were holding on to each other and kissing. ‘Oh yes,’ she murmured, ‘whisper me, whisper me, whisper me!’ I was shaking all over as we let go long enough to clear the books and papers off the couch while the dead whooped and hollered and my head sang hoarsely:
ANOTHER BRIDE, ANOTHER JUNE,
ANOTHER SUNNY HONEYMOON,
ANOTHER SEASON, ANOTHER REASON
FOR MAKIN’ WHOOPEE.
Then the singing faded into black sky, thunder, lightning, and rain. And I, Elijah, was running, running ahead of the chariot, being Elijah, being my whole self.
*
‘How do you feel now?’ said Caroline while I was getting my breath back.
‘Less alone.’ There were still circles of emptiness in my vision. ‘Did you get into the terror with me?’
‘Wherever I was, it felt good.’ She hugged me.
‘Maybe we could go somewhere dark and quiet and have a drink?’
‘We’re still on Corporation time.’ She stood up, retrieved her underwear, picked her overall off the floor, zipped herself up, and re-did her Pysche knot.
‘Dr Lovecraft, tell me the truth — do you do this with every Level 4 subject?’
‘Did it feel that way to you?’
‘No.’
‘Then don’t ask stupid questions. You got into my knickers because desperation turns me on and you’re the most desperate man I’ve met in a long time.’
‘You haven’t got anyone now? No partner?’
‘No.’
‘How old are you?’
‘Twenty-eight.’
‘How can it be that a woman like you hasn’t got anybody?’
‘What can I tell you? Lot of frogs out there. Let’s look at the Fremder Gorn video.’ She ejected the brain-scan disc and there was F. Gorn drifting through space as seen by Sun Ra’s nose camera. As we watched me tumbling over and over in frozen stillness she advanced the audio beam to its next track and The Art of Fugue, performed by Marie-Claire Alain, came stalking into the room on its centuries-high legs. It was as if Bach had with spells and numbers called forth some cosmic monster that would eat me up, eat up the world with its implacable and insatiable logic. And yet the terror in that music was what I’d held on to when Clever Daughter disappeared from around me.
‘“Be the music” is what you said on November 7,’ said Caroline’s voice from far away.
‘I’m trying to remember.’ But all that came to me was Rilke’s line ‘Every angel is terrible’. In German it sounds more so: ‘Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich’.
‘“Thou?”’ said Caroline.
‘Are you getting familiar?’
‘I’m looking at the 7 November transcript. After “Be the music” you said, “Thou.” Or maybe it was “Thowl”. Thowl, thowl-the owl?’
‘Shit.’
‘Owlshit?’
‘Could we take a break?’
She looked at her watch. ‘OK,’ she said, and began to clear the books and papers off the couch again.
‘Are you trying to kill me or cure me?’ I said as she unzipped her overall.
She gave me a quick leer over her shoulder. ‘A change is as good as a rest.’
*
Although I still think of huge green breakers when I remember that time it turned out that Caroline wasn’t from California but from Pennsylvania and she’d never done any surfing. She’d played lacrosse at college, though; I’d like to have seen that.
After the break we went to the Cyberspace Lab for a reality-envelope run in which the Clever Daughter/Sun Ra episode was simulated in real time with a model developed from the Clever Daughter automatic transmission, the Sun Ra disc and log, and Bill Charteris’s recall. The whole thing was then analysed with ten-permutation parameters but none of it helped me to remember anything.
Then a hypno session with Caroline. Here’s the transcript:
L: Can you hear me?
G: Yes.
L: You’re aboard Clever Daughter and it’s the 4th of November.
G: Happy Birthday, Frem.
L: Right, Happy Birthday, Frem. Now it’s 04:06.
G: OK for flicker on 47.7 Ems. Hit the switch, Plessik. Bye bye Hubble.
L: Bye bye Hubble. What now?
G: What?
L: What’s happening?
G: Oh no. Hold on.
L: Hold on to what?
G: No, no, no.
L: What are you seeing?
G: Not seeing.
L: What then? Hearing?
G: (VIBRATES TONGUE AGAINST ROOF OF MOUTH WHILE EXPELLING BREATH) Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
L: What’s that? Did you hear a sound like that?
G: No.
L: What then?
G: Riffling.
L: What? What riffling?
G: Like a great big pack of cards.
L: This is something you heard?
G: No.
L: It was in your mind?
G: Piss off, Dr Lovecraft.
Caroline gave me that to read after the session. When I finished I put it back on her desk so that it was lying at an angle in front of her. She lined it up parallel to the edge of the desk. ‘Why did you tell me to piss off?’ she said.