Even then, sometimes when I closed my eyes I could sense at the heart of the blackness something that I belonged to more than I could ever belong to happiness, something that I could be faithful to more than to any woman. You can disappear as M-waves and reappear as supposedly the same person but after a while the deep-space emptiness gets into you. Flickerheads call it the MTs. When I was in London Judith and I did what we always did — walked and talked, dined at intimate little restaurants, went to concerts, opera, theatre, and films but little by little the flavour went out of it. And more and more I’d wake at night to find myself sitting up in bed and leaning forward into the darkness, listening to the ravens and the dead, waiting like Elijah with his head between his knees.
‘Where are you?’ Judith kept saying.
‘Here,’ I said.
‘No, you’re not.’
Holding on to the world is mostly an act of faith: you see a little bit of it in front of you and you believe in the rest of it both in time and space. If you’re scheduled for a jump to Hubble on Tuesday you believe in you, in Hubble, in the jump, and in Tuesday. Sometimes it was hard for me to believe all of it.
Towards the end of August the year after Portknockie we walked what was left of the Ridgeway, both of us hoping that putting ourselves on that ancient track might earth us to our own past. Because of funding cuts there were no longer security patrols; the fee included robots and stun guns and to be on the safe side we joined up with some Avebury pilgrims at Streatley.
There seemed always to be power stations on all sides of us and the air was never better than Yellow 2 so we did the whole walk wearing breathers. There was toxic rain every day but one; we squelched through ankle-deep mud, our clothes wet with sweat and condensation under our rain gear. At night the robots stood watch in the rain outside our tent while not-very-distant Shorties and Clowns sang, ‘Hawako, hawako, hawako!’
There are four things that I think of when I remember that walk: a clump of beech trees; a lark; Wayland’s Smithy; and a herd of cows. The beech trees were on a little hill off to one side of the track somewhere around Thurle Down. They were spotted with some kind of mould and their leaves were yellow; when we were in among them there suddenly fell the kind of silence you get when you walk into the wrong pub and all the faces turn towards you. That night Judith woke me at a quarter to four talking in her sleep. ‘Where is it?’ she said.
‘Where’s what?’
‘I don’t know,’ and she went back to sleep.
The famous Uffington White Horse, long unmaintained, was mostly overgrown. Wayland’s Smithy had become a latrine. The graffiti said, among other things, SHORTIS RUL and LOKKUP YUR MISSUS & DOTTERS HEAR CUM THE FUNBOYS. I closed my eyes and put my hands to the stone and listened with my mind but all I heard was a tinnitus like the chattering of dead cicadas.
On the day when it didn’t rain we saw through our anti-U-V goggles a lark fly straight up into the grey but the song that came down to us was small and without lift.
‘Shit above and shit below,’ said Judith, ‘shitwhistles in the sky. You know what?’
‘What?’
‘I’d like to finish on an up if we could.’
‘Me too.’
‘If we find one between here and Avebury let’s be off out of this, OK?’
‘OK.’
The next evening we came along the side of a hill through a Corporation pasture near Ogbourne St George. The guards passed us through the checkpoint and we went on our way through a herd of Friesians who stood and watched us in the rainy dusk. Their dark and glistening forms seemed monumental, prehistoric, unretentive of evil. I was overwhelmed by their air of innocent sapience and Judith burst into tears.
‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘We’re not going to top this. I don’t need to see the graffiti on the Avebury stones.’
‘Right.’ We left our robots for the Avebury pilgrims to turn in, phoned for a hopper, and in half an hour we were back at Judith’s place where we had a shower and drinks and didn’t say much for the rest of the evening.
More and more I find that life is a series of disappearances followed usually but not always by reappearances; you disappear from your morning self and reappear as your afternoon self; you disappear from feeling good and reappear feeling bad. And people, even face to face and clasped in each other’s arms, disappear from each other.
I flickered out and back as the job required and felt a little fuller of emptiness each time. There’s more emptiness in the air than there used to be, and its spores grow flowers of dust in the lungs. Things between Judith and me dwindled month by month until we were no longer part of each other’s reality. After half a year of not hearing from me she sent me a photocopy of a pencil-and-sepia drawing by Caspar David Friedrich: a burly eagle owl (Uhu in German) sitting on a coffin that rested on boards laid across a freshly-dug grave. A child’s coffin it was, not fully grown. There was no note — that was the whole message and it arrived the day after her suicide was briefly mentioned in the newsfax.
I still think of that child’s coffin and the Uhu. Sometimes I see them tumbling over and over in deep space with that figure in the blue coverall. And sometimes when evening comes and the little tribunal of the dusk I remember how, when I first saw Judith, I needed to penetrate her sadness that waited with its face between its knees for the rain.
8
In the ancient tale of the Clever Daughter, she is soon to gain the king’s hand by having solved his riddle and come to him neither driving nor walking nor riding (she’s only half-seated on the goat), neither dressed nor naked (thus draped in a fishnet), neither out of the road nor in the road (only her right big toe touches the ground) and bearing a gift that’s no gift (the hare will leap off on release).
I was First Navigation Officer on Clever Daughter when we flickered out of Nova Central on 4 November 2052 bound for the Morrigan in the Fourth Galaxy. I always avoided flicker jumps on my birthday if possible — it never felt lucky. DSC allows one refusal for every ten jumps and I put in for one but several people were off sick and my refusal was refused. The night before we flickered out I’d had my usual three hours of sleep and I’d woken in the middle of that time sitting up and leaning forward into the dark feeling myself getting closer and closer to some kind of edge.
Clever Daughter terminated Jump One pause at Hubble Straits and was into Jump Two for Penzias-Wilson at 04:06 IGT. Traffic Control’s screens showed our dock empty and the M-scope registered the burst of peaks that indicate a flicker transmission so they knew we’d gone off as scheduled. At 04:06:03 Hubble Straits Traffic Control received an automatic flicker-break TX from Clever Daughter and there was no further communication from the ship.
At 04:10:28 Bill Charteris in Quadrangle Sweeper Sun Ra about 4oMk from Badr al-Budur on the Hubble side found himself humming an unfamiliar tune and at the same he saw something about 200 metres ahead tumbling over and over as it drifted towards him. It turned out to be me in a blue coverall — no spacesuit, no helmet, no oxygen.
The outside temperature was 3 Kelvin, that last fading remnant of warmth from the Big Bang. My arms were held rigidly out in front of me and my legs were drawn up as if to push me away from something. Bill radioed Hubble Straits while manoeuvring Sun Ra’s grab arm to bring me in, and in less than three minutes I was being looked after by Caroline Lovecraft P/Pl, Director, Physio/Psycho, Newton Centre for Deep-Space Research at Hubble Straits.