Fremder by Russell Hoban

flicker drive) and closed the shell on me so that all the sensors made contact. She switched on the power and the cradle rose off its base on an electrostatic field and hung in the air in the middle of the egg-shaped space. Looking down between my flexotronic breasts I could see on my belly the raised
I Ching
hexagram of K’un, The Receptive. I sometimes wondered about the Pythian arrangements but I accepted that the Sheela-Na-Gig and Top Exec were what they were and had their little ways. So far they hadn’t done any worse than the male-dominated governments before them. Why had they called their Data Evaluator (Autonomous Response) Pythia? Generations of priestesses with that name had sat on a tripod over the chasm at Delphi, inspired by the sulphurous fumes to speak oracles – in other words, stoned out of their minds; I don’t believe Top Exec credited Pythia with mantic powers; I think they gave her that name because it made her seem a little like a hi-tech gypsy palmist and encouraged people to loosen up with her.
    When Mazur had me hooked up she said, ‘Push the button under your left thumb if you want to disconnect and the oneunder your right thumb if you need me.’ Then she left. I liked her going-away view and the sensors put that up on the pixels briefly before they went into a flicker pattern of expanding and contracting shapes and colours, glimmering and occulting: yes/no/here/gone. Except, of course, for the places where the circles of bright emptiness came and went. The i/f music that always accompanied the flicker pattern meandered faintly through the silence.
    I closed my eyes, afraid of what might jump out of my head and on to the pixels. I tried to relax but I could feel something building up in me and threatening to burst out at any moment. In all Pythia sessions there was inevitably pain as well as pleasure but I knew that this was going to be like none other. My head had as always its own agenda and the song it was singing was ‘My One and Only Love’:
    The very thought of you makes my heart sing
like an April breeze on the wings of spring,…
    Then I noticed that I was hearing it from outside my head. Pythia was singing in her husky voice and with her slightly slurred diction:
    And you appear in all your splendour, my one and
    only love.
    The shadows fall and spread their mystic charms
in the hush of night when you’re in my arms.
I feel your lips so warm and tender, my one and
    only love.
    ‘When everyone was young,’ she said. ‘Such clear, clear water! Sunlight through the leaves and the fragrance of summer. Have you ever found a one and only love?’
    ‘I thought so once.’
    ‘What happened?’
    ‘I lost it.’ The Uhu on the coffin came and went and with the smell of T/7 Mazur’s hair still in my nostrils I saw on the pixels above me the tawny owl gliding low over the heather in the grey wind in the Grampians, its ringed eyes growing larger, becoming eyes of otherness becoming something partly now and partly remembered, fading, gone as Caroline appeared when we cleared the couch for the first time and she stepped out of her knickers. Other and more active images followed – the Omphalos was where it all came out, there was no chance whatever of non-visual thinking. I averted my eyes modestly, and when I looked again Katya Mazur’s going-away view came on with the charming little transverse ripple in her trousers where the incurve of her lower back met the outcurve of her bottom.
    ‘Pretty well back to normal, are we?’ said Pythia. ‘A pomegranate was what Persephone ate the seeds of.’
    ‘Getting there.’
    ‘Good. And before the blue movie with Dr Lovecraft and the close-up of T/7 Mazur’s bouncy bits we had some nature-film footage that faded into something else. What was that all about?’ Again the owl appeared on the pixels; again its eyes became eyes of otherness, eyes of becoming.
    ‘That’s a long story, Pythia.’
    ‘Some of my best friends but I wouldn’t