S: No.
G: Neither do I, because whatever I do is Corporation business. If I weren’t who I am you wouldn’t be interested in me.
S: I’m interested because what you’ve done is my business now.
G: You really care about me, do you? (PUTS HER HAND BETWEEN HER LEGS) Do you fancy me?
S: Can you remember what you were thinking when you took the Lethenil tablets?
G: Life is a dis-integration.
S: Can you say more about that?
G: Before we’re born we’re integrated with the black. Birth tears us loose from that and dis-integrates us into life. So I thought, why not re-integrate. Haven’t you ever thought that, Dr Black? You’re quite hairy, aren’t you.
S: No, I haven’t ever thought that.
G: What — never thought that you’re quite hairy?
S: Never thought of re-integrating with the black. When you took the tablets were you mindful of the fact that another life besides your own was involved?
G: It was in my mind, yes.
S: Can you say a little more about that?
G: How can I say more to someone who’s never thought about re-integrating with the black?
S: Two other lives, I should have said — there’s the father, isn’t there?
G: You’re right, this was not an immaculate conception. That’s a very shrewd insight.
S: Physio says you’re about six months pregnant. Does the father know?
G: Now I know what happened: I died and went to hell and my punishment is to spend eternity talking to arseholes.
S: You haven’t answered my question.
G: Who the hell are you, that all your questions must be answered? You think all my questions get answered?
S: Do you know who the father is?
G: Do you know who yours was?
S: Yes, I do.
G: Was he an arsehole too?
S: We were talking about the father of the child you’re carrying.
G: You were, I wasn’t. I don’t think I can give you any more time just now. (GORN LEAVES THE ROOM)
That session followed Helen Gorn’s first attempt at reintegration with the black. A month later she made a better job of it.
In Izzy’s notebooks the handwriting was different but the voice is pretty much the same. Here’s one of his entries about two months before his death:
10.02.22
The black is all there is. That’s why if you build your house on the black it’ll last for ever.
12
Where is it hidden, the speechless
body of Osiris? Where is it hidden?
In a quiet place, in a place of no words.
When will it speak, the silent
mouth of Osiris? When will it speak?
Later.
There’s an asteroid in the Sixth Galaxy called A373 — it hasn’t even got a name, just a number. It’s a supply dump for the Thoth cluster, a desert-coloured rock with nothing on it but an open-frame warehouse with an oxybubble in one corner. There’s an automatic coffee shop and a robot modelled on Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. Her questioning eyes are the same as those that look out of the painting. A plate in her back says that she’s donated by the Sixth Galaxy Poetry Society. Her catalogue includes everything from Sappho to T. P. Stumm. They haven’t named her but I call her Pearl. She’s strictly for poetry, with a contact-activated shielding circuit so there’s no fooling around. You can take her outside the bubble — she doesn’t need air — and you just tell her what you want to hear.
I was on A373 for an inventory a couple of years ago and Pearl recited the first of Rilke’s Duino Elegies for me as we sat on a rock outside the warehouse:
Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel
Who, were I to cry, would hear me out of the angelic
Ordnungen? und gesetzt selbst, es nähme
orders? and suppose even that one were to take
einer mich plötzlich ans Herz: ich verginge von seinem
me suddenly to his heart: I should perish through his
stärkeren Dasein. Denn das Schöne ist nichts als des
stronger existence. For beauty is nothing but the
Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen,
beginning of terror, which we only barely endure,
und wir bewundern es so, weil es gelassen verschmäht
and we admire it so, because it calmly disdains
uns zu zerstören. Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich.
to destroy us. Every angel is terrible.
She spoke the poem in the original German. The voice that came out of her was what I think of as a Eurydice voice, low and breathy and full of shadows. We sat there on a tawny rock, the strange and beautiful Pearl in her seventeenth-century costume and I, looking at a red moon called Isis (there’s a red sun called Osiris in that system) and I heard that voice and Rilke’s words and the sound of my own breathing in my helmet. Nobody but the two of us on the asteroid and nothing happening but Rilke’s words coming alive out of her mouth. Pearl’s lips moved as she spoke but the voice was that of my mother. Pearl spoke in many voices; this was a recording made by Helen Gorn for Amnesty International in November of 2019, three months after she was raped and Izzy crippled by the Shorties and the Clowns.
I’ve given a lot of thought to Rilke’s angels and I’ve come to the conclusion that for him an angel was the ultimate degree of perception, in the same way that terror is the ultimate degree of beauty, living at the farther end of a spectrum on which we find, closer to us, the never-to-be answered question in the eyes of the girl with the pearl earring.
A3 73 and Badr al-Budur are two of the quiet places in my head. I like sometimes to think of Pearl speaking in my mother’s voice under the red Isis moon and I like to think of the robot sweepers humming through the silence of the spaceport under the noctolux lamps of Badru.
13
You go to my head and you linger like
a haunting refrain
and I find you spinning round in my brain
like the bubbles in a glass of champagne …
Corporation flickered me home with a couple of ViTech 8s minding me. One of them was very tall and the other was very short. The tall one’s working name was Mojo; the short one’s was High John and he didn’t smile when he said it. When we reassembled at Nova Central they cleared me through Quarantine with Red 1 Priority, got us into a waiting hopper, and took me to the Ziggurat in London Central for the Pythia session. It was a grey and rainy end-of-November day, I was glad for that; I hate those hard sunny days that break your teeth. This one was gentle, there was a little mercy coming down with the rain; the colours of everything were heightened by the rainlight; except for the holes of bright emptiness it was a day you could work with. I was glad for that because I knew that I was coming to the end of my forgetting; whatever you might try to hide, Pythia would get it out of you one way or another.