‘I’m going to go deeper than before,’ said Pythia. ‘Just let yourself go loose and floaty, think of all the nice flickering we’ve had and all we’re going to have. Are you lying comfortably?’
‘“There was a man/He went mad/He jumped into a paper bag.” I’m as comfortable as I’m going to be; let’s do it if we’re going to do it.’
‘Listen to the flicker pattern, look at the colours: there’s no picture now. Whatever comes up is from you. Close your eyes, I’ll tell you what I see; let yourself go empty as we go down, down, down, down to meet whatever’s coming up. How do you feel?’
‘Crazy.’
‘Good, crazy is good. Crazy is where reality lives. That’s it, you’re doing geometries, lovely geometrics, now you’re in the purple-blue, you’re in the entry frequency, oh yes, it’s such a strong, such a vibrant, such a deep entry, everything is open to you, everything wherever you want to go, so deep and easy, deep and strange but there’s nothing strange, there’s only the strange and the strange is home to us from Hubble Straits to Inanna’s Girdle, from the Hand of Glory to the Lote-Tree Galaxy and the Mists of Unbeing. Yes, it’s the blackness and I see faint green spirals, stronger now, those curious spiral eyes, how they look at us from the beginning, the eyes of becoming, the eyes of the Mother on ancient bones and stones, in darks of caves and passage graves, eyes of bone, eyes of stone and birth and death, Aiyee! eyes of time, the oldness of the great eyes expanding into darkness, ringed eyes widening, growing great, becoming ever greater eyes of becoming and increasing to vast nodes of possibility and archipelagos of being expanding and mutually annihilating and slowly fading into the blackness as we go deeper, deeper, so much deeper and stranger and easier because it’s our nature, because there’s nothing strange, there’s only everything to find and home is always and everywhere in the deeps of the strange and the red, yes, the far and the red, farther into the red and the purple, the purple-blue and the deep blue, descending and moving always out, out beyond and deeper and deeper, yes into the green, the deep green not the sunlit sea-green but the old green, the ancient and the early down and down and vasty in the deeps, the old, the ancient and the beckoning primal, the very proto-blue-green of peptides and amino acids swarming, swarming into golden bees of being, golden swarming of the Mother in the small hours of the morning of the fourth of November, the small, small quivering hours between darkness and daylight when out at sea the dawn wind wrinkles and slides …’
For the second time there was a needle-prick in my left arm and something rushed through me in a wave of heat and nausea. The Omphalos went out of focus, changed shape and colour, jumped and jittered, danced all around me, melted and ran, then snapped back into place ten times sharper than before while my ears rang and my eyes started out of my head. I could smell the coffee in staff rooms, disinfectant in the lavatories, individual perspirations and perfumes in other parts of the Ziggurat. My brain seemed to be on fire as hard-edged pictures in brilliant colours riffled through it.
‘That was Mnemodol I just shot you full of,’ said Pythia. ‘It’s a little more advanced than anything they’ve got at Hubble Straits. It might burn out a few billion neurons but you’ll remember whatever there is to remember.’
I was smelling the rain and the flicker docks at Nova Central a year ago. Not only could I remember everything but I needed to tell it before my brain shrivelled like a paper flower in a furnace.
14
The things I’ve seen, oh babe, you wouldn’t believe -
things I’ve seen, oh no, you wouldn’t believe.
Some times I have to laugh, most times I sit and grieve.
‘By 03:00 on the morning of 4 November 2052 all the paperwork was in,’ I said. ‘We’d done the pre-flicker and we were ready to go. I set the frequency, Traffic Control confirmed it and gave us OK, Plessik hit the switch, and we were gone. Everybody always tries to look as if it’s nothing special but no matter how many times you do it you can’t help wondering if you’re going to come out of it the same as you went in. You hear of the crew of eight that ended up in one lump and there are other horror stories that you hope are just stories.
‘The first-stage hop to World’s End was routine — no blips, no glips. Our second flicker pause was at Hubble Straits …’ As I spoke, my needle-sharp recall appeared on the pixels: the buffers under the white arc-lamps and the bright jewel of Mikhail’s Quadrangle 4 Snackdome with 24 HOURS — FREIGHTERS YES circling it in yellow lights as it revolved slowly with its couplers flashing WELCOME in ten languages and its robot staff all smiling hard and ready to serve deep-space travellers around the clock with Galaktik Miks (‘Guaranteed 100 % Safe Non-identifiable Quasi-Protein’), fries and Krasnaya-Kola. Girdling the Snackdome like Saturn’s rings was the slowly moving drift of rubbish descending to the suction bin below. Beyond Mikhail’s revolved the glittering torus of Hubble Straits Station all spangled with coloured lights and trailing clouds of exhaust vapour. There were little bursts of smoke at various ports as waste bombs shot out into space to explode far away and drift as galaxies of ashes. We turned our short-range DXR to the Hubble Straits frequency and got Linda Sue Fletcher singing “Deep-Space Trucker”:
Deep-space trucker, deep-space lonely,
deep-space trucker — that’s the only
way you know to live. Baby, can’t you give,
give a little love?
‘Union regulations specify an hour’s break at every flicker pause so all of us except Commander Plessik got into the dinghy and zipped over to Mikhail’s for Galaktik Miks and chatting up the robot waitresses — they get new programs every fortnight. Before we left I tuned us to the Penzias-Wilson frequency and confirmed the transmission window with Hubble Straits Traffic Control. We were all back in the ship by 04:00. Everything was as it ought to be on the flight deck and the displays all chattering with their colours reflected in the faces bending over them. I always like that dim red light and the smell of the duralene upholstery and the oxyvitalium breathing mixture and that comfortable feeling of good hardware and all systems go.’ I paused as something shadowy and unfocused loomed ahead of me. I wanted to get past whatever it was but mostly I wanted to retreat into forgetfulness.
‘Keep going,’ said Pythia. ‘Don’t stop now.’
‘At 04:06 Plessik hit the flicker switch and we were out of there and ETA for Penzias-Wilson instant T.
‘The next thing … The next thing …’ The image that had hidden itself all through the RE runs and the hypno sessions was ripped out of my memory with a violence like that of a scalp being torn off. I cried out in pain as on the pixels there appeared a face anamorphically distorted as if printed on rubber and laterally stretched galaxy-wide but somehow still recognisable as the face of Isodor Gorn.
There was something like a gasp from Pythia. ‘Not’, she murmured, ‘in the wind. Not in the earthquake and not in the fire. What do the dead see? Only the dark, only the, only THISNNN/THSNNNNV/THSNNVS/NNVSNNU/NNGH/NNVSNU/RRN DU/NNVSNURNDUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU …’
The flicker pattern was pulsing with colour faster than the eye could follow and the music was such as I’d never heard before; the sensors, moist on my naked skin, tightened and loosened, tightened and loosened spasmodically, then went slack. A great calm flooded through me. I listened to the rain and watched the wild colours slowly fading on the pixels as Mazur came running in.
‘Nnnnnnnn,’ she said, looking quite wild, ‘nnnvsnurn-duuuuuu.’