‘You were listening to the Pythia session,’ I said. ‘Did I say anything about the B-Z then?’
‘No.’
‘Odd, that you should have it on the hologram just now. When did you put it on?’
‘This morning before going on duty. Why?’
‘I wondered what made you think of it.’
‘I read the Level 4 from Hubble Straits and I saw the flicker-break video. I can’t understand how you could have seen that in deep space. And yet it seems to belong there, like the signature of Creation. Has it got any significance for you? That’s a stupid question — it must, or it wouldn’t have been on the flicker-break transmission.’
‘I wrote it up for P-Level Chemistry. Dr Stillwell was the Chemistry prof and he helped me with it. He was a strange man, a little hunchback with a gnostic manner and he wore his hunch as if it had some practical function, like a radar dome on an aircraft. We darkened the lab and we had the Petri dish sitting on a light box. The wavelines were bluish-white in the pink liquid and they formed single concentric circles and groups of concentric circles concentrically outlined. All of the circular formations were expanding and where they collided they mutually annihilated. Those that hit the edge of the dish didn’t stop or bounce back, they vanished as if they’d passed through the glass to an invisible existence beyond the Petri dish where the expansion continued.
‘Dr Stillwell said, “Interesting, isn’t it? They had no place to go but they found some place to go.” The year after that he killed himself.’
‘You found some place to go and you’re still alive.’
‘Funny thing to say.’
‘When you said that about passing through the glass it reminded me of you and Clever Daughter. You certainly passed through something, some kind of mortal barrier. Four minutes in 3 Kelvin with no space suit and no oxygen! It said in the report that you arrived at Hubble Straits in a state of suspended animation and when you came out of it three days later you sat up and asked for orange juice, coffee, two eggs over easy, chips, bacon, and sausages. When you’d finished you asked for the same again: three times.’
‘I was hungry.’
‘There was something about an owl in the report as well.’
‘I don’t remember. At the beginning of those Level 4 sessions I wasn’t altogether there.’
‘I can believe that.’ She changed the hologram to Vermeer’s GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING.
The sequence of hologram plates that I described earlier was not part of a packaged series; each of the plates had been individually selected from a museum catalogue. ‘This much coincidence is a little difficult for me to believe,’ I said. ‘Somebody’s trying something on here — is it Pythia or Thinksec or what?’
‘Why does someone have to be trying something on? Can’t you accept things for what they are? If we both have the same favourite mazurka why shouldn’t we have some of the same holograms? I put the Vermeer on because the B-Z eyes are looking out of her eyes.’
She was standing close enough for me to smell her fragrance, and as she moved into my arms my scepticism vanished: anyone who smelled that right couldn’t be doubted. ‘Her face is like your face,’ I said. ‘Her eyes are like yours.’ I took her face in my hands and looked into her blue eyes that darkened as the pupils dilated. I felt that our souls were joined but I didn’t know who or what was looking out of her eyes or mine. ‘Is it possible that you and I thought each other up?’ I said.
‘Yes, I think we did — it needed to happen so it happened.’ She went over to her audio beam. ‘My name is Mazur and I like mazurkas.’ She put on the Ilse Bak recording and No. 1 in F Sharp Minor, Opus 6, No. 1, bodying itself out of half-lights and shadows, became the space and time around us, became all the years inside us, became all there was.
*
I’ve always considered sleep after lovemaking more intimate than the lovemaking: getting through the night together, lying embraced until an arm becomes numb, then lying like two spoons until sleep doesn’t come that way, then turning backs and reverting to aloneness together and the snores, farts, and sighs of the passage from darkness to morning. Katya in her sleep seemed to have no rest: she mumbled, laughed, cursed, muttered strings of numbers, hummed a variety of tunes, and quoted from the Bible, sometimes in a voice that seemed different from her own. I recognised Loewe’s ‘Herr Oluf, snatches of Isaiah, First and Second Kings, and Psalm 137:
How shall we sing the Lord’s song
In a foreign land?
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem,
Let my right hand forget her cunning.
In the morning I was worn out but Katya seemed quite refreshed. Looking at her face that was considerably brighter than the new day I was impressed by how well she carried the tonnage of her mental traffic. Her head like mine was evidently an attic full of obsolete gear, childhood toys, faded letters, inexplicably preserved papers and cuttings, photos of forgotten people and places, and dustballs. I looked at her with new respect and found myself taking her more seriously as a partner than I had before. This is the real thing, I thought. The circles of bright emptiness had been there all through the lovemaking and they were still there but I supposed in time I’d get used to them. We had coffee and croissants and looked out of the fortieth-floor viewbubble at the smog and the world was more or less ours. I was overwhelmed by the feeling that this woman was my woman. ‘Katya,’ I said, ‘do you know that you hum and sing and talk in your sleep?’
She blushed. ‘Anything interesting?’
‘Lots. Your head seems to have about the same amount of rubbish in it as mine.’
‘Should it have less? Are women meant to have tidier heads than men?’
‘Not at all. I only mentioned it because we seem to be alike in that way and it pleased me.’
‘If I were you I shouldn’t take too much alikeness for granted.’
‘I’m sorry I spoke. Could we rewind to where we were before I opened my mouth?’
She put her hand on mine. ‘I don’t mean to sound that way — it’s just that the idea of your listening makes me uncomfortable. What I say in my sleep isn’t always mine and I hate not belonging to myself that way.’
‘Not yours. Whose is it then?’
‘I have an implant in my brain the same as you do.’ The way she said it she might have been admitting to an artificial leg.
‘What kind of implant?’
‘It’s a synaptic relay.’
‘From where, from whom?’
‘Pythia. You have to have one of those to be a Pythia T/7. Sometimes there’s overspill and I offload it in my sleep.’
‘“Overspill”? “Offload?” Are you saying that a computer is using you as a buffer, as a receptacle?’
‘What are you getting so excited about?’
‘What do you think I’m getting excited about, for God’s sake? Next you’ll be telling me that you take the overspill from all the guys that come to the Wank Parlour as well.’
‘That’s not fair and you know it. Anyhow, look who’s talking — you’ve got a thing in your brain that turns you into some kind of radio waves. For all I know, the next time we make love I’ll have to wear headphones to receive you.’
We both laughed then and hugged and kissed and got butter and marmalade on each other and felt a lot better. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘tell me about this implant. What’s it for?’