Free Fremder by Russell Hoban

first of Rilke’s
Duino Elegies
for me as we sat on a rock outside the warehouse:
    Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel

Who, were I to cry, would hear me out of the angelic
    Ordnungen? und gesetzt selbst, es nähme

orders? and suppose even that one were to take
    einer mich plötzlich ans Herz: ich verginge von seinem

me suddenly to his heart: I should perish through his
    stärkeren Dasein. Denn das Schöne ist nichts als des

stronger existence. For beauty is nothing but the
    Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen
,
beginning of terror, which we only barely endure,
    und wir bewundern es so, weil es gelassen verschmäht

and we admire it so, because it calmly disdains
    uns zu zerstören. Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich
.
to destroy us. Every angel is terrible.
    She spoke the poem in the original German. The voice that came out of her was what I think of as a Eurydice voice, low and breathy and full of shadows. We sat there on a tawny rock, the strange and beautiful Pearl in her seventeenth-century costume and I, looking at a red moon called Isis (there’s a red sun called Osiris in that system) and I heard that voice and Rilke’s words and the sound of my own breathing in my helmet. Nobody but the two of us on the asteroid and nothing happening but Rilke’s words coming alive out of her mouth. Pearl’s lips moved as she spoke but the voice was that of my mother. Pearl spoke in manyvoices; this was a recording made by Helen Gorn for Amnesty International in November of 2019, three months after she was raped and Izzy crippled by the Shorties and the Clowns.
    I’ve given a lot of thought to Rilke’s angels and I’ve come to the conclusion that for him an angel was the ultimate degree of perception, in the same way that terror is the ultimate degree of beauty, living at the farther end of a spectrum on which we find, closer to us, the never-to-be answered question in the eyes of the girl with the pearl earring.
    A3 73 and Badr al-Budur are two of the quiet places in my head. I like sometimes to think of Pearl speaking in my mother’s voice under the red Isis moon and I like to think of the robot sweepers humming through the silence of the spaceport under the noctolux lamps of Badru.

13
    You go to my head and you linger like
   a haunting refrain
and I find you spinning round in my brain
like the bubbles in a glass of champagne …
    Haven Gillespie and J. Fred Coots, ‘You Go to My Head’
    Corporation flickered me home with a couple of ViTech 8s minding me. One of them was very tall and the other was very short. The tall one’s working name was Mojo; the short one’s was High John and he didn’t smile when he said it. When we reassembled at Nova Central they cleared me through Quarantine with Red 1 Priority, got us into a waiting hopper, and took me to the Ziggurat in London Central for the Pythia session. It was a grey and rainy end-of-November day, I was glad for that; I hate those hard sunny days that break your teeth. This one was gentle, there was a little mercy coming down with the rain; the colours of everything were heightened by the rainlight; except for the holes of bright emptiness it was a day you could work with. I was glad for that because I knew that I was coming to the end of my forgetting; whatever you might try to hide, Pythia would get it out of you one way or another.
    We lifted out of Nova Central and flew over the ruins of Themepark West where the rides had rusted into tottering skeletons and the scenic river was silted solid with sewage; over the huddle of London Outer Squats where the roads were choked with the gridlocked shells of cars and lorries that hadn’tmoved for forty years, many of them extended by canvas or packing crates into a better class of hovel than their neighbours. The rain intensified the stench of garbage, excrement, and decomposition as we flew over a pack of dogs dining on a human corpse. The next gathering we saw was a pack of Shorties