‘I don’t know, they’re not part of our reality now.’
‘Our reality?’
‘Yours and mine and Izzy’s. I know I may have done stupid things in the past but we are a family, aren’t we? Soon we’ll all be together.’
‘Is that what he wants?’
‘Of course that’s what he wants. He wants us all to be in the same world.’
Everything seemed to be darkening around me as she spoke. ‘When Clever Daughter disappeared, who pushed the button that activated my oscillator?’
‘You did. There is no button. Your oscillator is wired to read the Reality-Sustain Factor of the amygdalic carrier wave; when it drops to RSF minus ten, which is far below what you’d get even in a grand mal, it’s what’s called “kindle-receptive”, and it triggers a bi-phasic wave. Izzy wired this one for you so that if the time ever came when you couldn’t sustain what is perceived as reality in this world you could jump. And you almost didn’t sustain it and you almost did jump.’
‘This special little number with the red dot, how did it find its way into my head?’
‘Did you know the vertebrae brain started out as just a little bulge in the spinal cord for handling sensory stimuli and a few local reflexes? That’s a long way from Rilke, yes? Do you know how big my brain is now?’
‘No, and I don’t want to know.’
‘It’s all around you, between the ship’s inner and outer skins. And it needs, my God how it needs. Because the memories, you see, the memories get bigger and deeper and wider and farther and toppled and broken all the many colours of regret… the many colours of did and did not …’
‘What’re you getting at?’
‘Ever been to Qamar al-Zaman?’
‘Qamar al-Zaman is a rubbish tip.’
‘It wasn’t always a rubbish tip. There used to be a big CE lab there.’
‘Church of England?’
‘Consciousness Enhancement. It was a Thinksec thing. Evil rats on no star live. That’s a palindrome. Not that they were.’
‘Not that who were? Were what?’
‘Rats. They called them rats but they were from the Alpha banks. Think of all the pictures, all the thoughts that would have lived in those brains! Too much and never enough.’
‘Their brains! Their sacred objects!’
‘It was just science, nothing personal. By hyperdeveloping the human prosencephalon, the forebrain, and hooking it up to various frogs, toads, and snakes, they were able to produce a little anti-boredom powder that takes you back to where you’ve never been and all around to places you couldn’t imagine. Transcendence was the name they gave it but everybody called it T & D: Trance & Dance. They shut down the lab after a certain number of suicides and homicides but with the right connections you can still get it. It’s bad for your health but if all you are is a brain …’
‘Irene Heale got you hooked on T & D and then she said no more T & D unless you went ahead with flicker drive and then it was one thing after another with Izzy’s circuitry diagrams thrown in somewhere along the line, right?’
‘Something like that. You probably consider it some sort of betrayal that I did that, don’t you.’
‘Well, wouldn’t you? You dumped me when you topped yourself and you did it again with that oscillator.’
‘What about your part of it — did you ever give that any thought?’
‘My part of it! What exactly did I do that helped to make Clever Daughter and the other seven of the crew disappear?’
‘You brought it on with your flabby little RSF: when you let it drop below ten you found yourself confronting two incompatible realities — the reality of Clever Daughter and its crew and the reality of your father’s face stretched out across the Fourth Galaxy. When you leant towards your father the rest of the crew and the ship went bye-bye in the great green glassy face of the up, up, upping wave. Then crash: the wave breaks on the beach of here and now. No more Clever Daughter. Only a stupid son, drifting neither here nor there.’
That was my mother talking to me. At this moment that might well be the beginning of the end of my life I was looking for high tragedy but I seemed to have become the rear half of a Jewish pantomime horse.
‘What about the seven others?’ I said. ‘Why couldn’t they have held on to their reality and not disappeared?’
‘Shit,’ said Mum, ‘they probably hadn’t got any to hold on to — just doing their job like most job-doers. Reality is the responsibility of those who perceive it. Speaking of which I’ve tuned us to the Penzias-Wilton, Walton …’
‘Wilson, Penzias-Wilson.’
‘Yes, the sum, the same as you did last time. Now we’ll flicker and we’ll have a second chance to be a family, the three of us.’
As she spoke I could see in her mind the great green glassy face of the up, up, upping wave, not making a sound like water but riffling its possibilities as I leant forward into the dark, into the light, into the whateverness of whatever where my father’s face glimmered and shimmered and endlessly widened across the black sparkle of space. His mouth was open and he was speaking, speaking, speaking silence. What was he saying? I tried to read it but I couldn’t, tried so hard but I couldn’t. I think of that often now — how I travelled all those millions of light years, travelled (my mind tells me) from before there was time to that point in the black sparkle of the Fourth Galaxy where my father spoke words of silence to me and I didn’t know what he was saying.
‘He was thirteen when he asked if he could get into bed with me that night of the thunderstorm,’ said the brain of Helen Gorn. ‘Thirteen but he wasn’t like other thirteen-year-olds; he was afraid of so many things, afraid of different kinds of light or the look of the sky; there were sounds and smells that frightened him, words he didn’t like the shape of — sometimes the white spaces between the letters scared him. He was like a bird with its heart beating very fast and it felt so good to comfort him and be comforted by him, so yes and long ago but that was before and now we’ll do the things that families do,’ said Mum the giant brain. ‘We’ll picnic in Hyde Park, we’ll nnvsnu, we’ll NNVSNUU AND RRNDU IN THE TSRUNGH, WE’LL NNNNNNNNNnnnnn …’
BE WITH ME, said my mind, and that’s when the brain of Helen Gorn must have hit the flicker switch because I felt myself go and then came that feeling of being grabbed by the brain and slung against a wall when I came out of flicker. There was nothing around me but the black sparkle of space as I thought: let it go, this world, any world — whatever wants to happen is all right. I leant towards the face of my father, leant towards that galaxy-wide silent-speaking mouth, wondering, wondering, letting myself (as through the rushing and the riffling there came walking on stilts of centuries the continuing subjects and answers of suns and moons, of stardrift and nebulae) be the music in which there flickered, partly now and partly remembered, that one glance of Caroline’s, that swift upward glance of fear and doubt.
23
Mama may have, Papa may have,
but God bless the child that’s got his own.
So it seems I had just enough Reality-Sustain to do my suspended-animation trick again and once more Bill Charteris found me drifting towards Badr al-Budur. This time Caroline was aboard Sun Ra with him and I had intensive care immediately.
Maybe Helen and Izzy are together now wherever they are. Mum and Dad. Irene Heale has probably had enough mileage out of Helen Gorn’s brain and can rest on her laurels. What they’ll put in the Omphalos I can’t imagine but I’m sure they’ll think of something.