‘Yes, Fremder, I’m seeing the owl.’
‘Can you feel the animal of you holding on to the owl?’
‘Yes, I can feel that and I’m deeply moved,’ she finished in her Pythia voice. ‘No, no, no!’ she said in her own voice.
‘Goddam it! When she comes into your head again try to track her back to where she’s coming from — track her back to her lair and tell me where it is.’
‘You don’t have to track me, Fremder,’ she said in the Pythia voice. ‘I’ll be waiting for you aboard Clever Daughter II.’
‘Please, Pythia, get out of her head!’ I said.
‘When I do,’ said Pythia through Katya, ‘there won’t be anyone there. Boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.’
‘Katya,’ I said, ‘tell her she’s lying, tell her, please.’
Katya’s mouth moved, Katya’s blue eyes looked into mine as Pythia said, ‘Your little sweetie was just something I dressed up in for a while so we could get to know each other better. One shilling the box — allow me to sell you a couple.’
‘Are you telling me Katya’s a robot?’
‘No, she’s a real woman. Robots are all right for sex and any other kind of physical activity but you don’t get any real emotion out of them. She was a librarian when we recruited her. Looks quite a bit like your childhood minder, Miranda, don’t you think? Such blue eyes. Blue sky. No rain.’
‘Katya,’ I pleaded, ‘look at me, say something. Talk to me the way you used to, look at me the way you used to.’
‘She can’t, Fremder. The Katya you knew never existed except in me: her words were my words, her thoughts were my thoughts, her loving was my loving. It was nice being loved by you; I never had that kind of a romance before.’
‘You bitch.’
‘Be grateful for what you had. Sing something, Katya.’
Katya sang, in her proper voice:
So long, it’s been good to know ya,…
Her eyes went dull and I caught her as she died. I tried mouth-to-mouth and thumped on her chest but I couldn’t revive her. I dialled 999 and in a few minutes there was a knock at the door. I opened it and there were Mojo and High John.
22
I had a dangerous liaison,
to be found out would have been a disgrace -
We had to rendezvous some days on
the corner of an undiscovered place …
In a dream I fell asleep and dreamed; and in that dream it was made known to me, perhaps by a written message, perhaps by the sound of faint and distant weeping, that the rats were lamenting the removal of their sacred objects. How sad, I thought, when they already have so little and their holy places are impermanent.
‘What do you think their sacred objects are?’ said Pythia as I came out of one dream and the other and was awake.
‘Maybe the head and hands of a rat martyr who died to save them all,’ I said. ‘Maybe his name was Elijah and his arse went off to another world in a flaming chariot.’
No answer. Darkness and music: The Art of Fugue spidering through the upper reaches of Contrapunctus 9 (alia duodecima). ‘Better not, Skipper,’ I said to Plessik, ‘you don’t want to let infinity in.’ But Plessik wasn’t there, nor were the others of the Clever Daughter crew, HUBBLE STRAITS FLICKER PAUSE, the display said, and there on the forward 180 were the arc-lit flicker docks and Mikhail’s revolving Quadrangle 4 Snackdome, 24 HOURS — FREIGHTERS YES. Beyond Mikhail’s the brilliant doughnut of the station, spangled with blue and yellow lights, trailed clouds of exhaust vapour as it revolved contrapuntally with the Snackdome in the black sparkle of space.
As always after the first flicker I felt as if I’d been knocked on the head and left lying in the road overnight. My mouth tasted as if I’d been chewing old circuit boards and I seemed to have lost the knack of breathing automatically. For a moment I had my usual panic, then I remembered to relax and just let it happen. I looked down at myself to check whether I’d come out of flicker the same as I went in and that’s when I remembered Mojo and High John at the door. Obviously I’d been doped and this was Clever Daughter II. And back on Earth Katya lay dead, various of her organs probably already removed for transplant. She’d been too good to be real and the reality of it, like a lump of iron in my throat, was no more Katya.
Had we had any moments that were truly ours? Had she really liked mazurkas? I’d never know. And on the Red Mountain, what she’d said about the grass — had the words been her own? What was left of what had been between us? What about the owl — had we really seen it?
Pythia had been talking to me outside of the dream. Where was she? The spacecraft in which I found myself was little more than a shipping container — there was no flight deck and there were no visible controls of any kind. ‘Pythia!’ I said. ‘Where are you?’ No answer. My hand was on my head as if it wanted to remind me of something. Ah, yes: the oscillator that wasn’t the same as everyone else’s, the oscillator with a phase-jump circuit. Wonderful. And somewhere there was a button that had perhaps already been pushed once.
The display above me continued to show HUBBLE STRAITS FLICKER PAUSE. I undid my seat harness and got up to have a look around. Was there any way out of this ship? There was an airlock but no spacesuit and no dinghy. ‘Great,’ I said. ‘Thanks very much,’ and went on with my recce. Ordinarily such things as the VMET, the artificial gravity, the gyros, and the back-up thrusters would be in plain view, labelled and colour-coded and displaying readouts and gauges; but in this ship nothing was in plain view except my seat and the overhead display and a snack-and-drink dispenser. There were metal shapes and bulges that housed the various systems; some of them were warm and some of them were humming but there were no little coloured lights, no switches: everything was sealed and blank and smelled of newness. Except, under the newness, there was a smell or perhaps only the idea of a smell — blocked drains and dead rats came to mind. I thought of ancient rituals and walled-up sacrifices, then tried to concentrate on matters of more immediate concern.
I was hoping to disable the VMET before I got flickered again, then if I could find some way of driving this thing I might (unless the ship was remote-controlled, which it probably was) be able to jet to Hubble Straits Station where I could figure out what to do next. I’d been in enough spacecraft to be able to recognise the components whether they were labelled or not and the layout was always pretty much the same: the AG motor was unmistakable because of the cable conduit that connected it to the traveller channel that girdled the ship; the gyros I located by feeling the spin through the housing; and I identified the VMET by smell but there were no screws or wingnuts — it had been operated by remote and was welded shut. In every other ship I’d been in there was a tool locker with welding equipment and everything else but not this one, and there was nothing that I could use for breaking into the VMET box.
I sat down again, and on the left side of my seat I found a panel with buttons for the lights, the heating, the artificial gravity, the snack-and-drink dispenser, and one labelled AUDIO. Bach was still spidering around the web of the universe but I wasn’t receptive. I pushed the AUDIO button and got the end of a song rendered by fluting computerised voices: