Fremder

14

‘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.’

This time the thumb buttons worked and I sprung the sensor cradle and jumped to the floor trailing electrodes. ‘Katya,’ I said, ‘are you all right?’

‘Nnnnnnvs.’ Her eyes rolled back and I caught her as she fell.