Medusa Frequency (17 page)

Why don’t they get Nnvsnu out of the blughole?

BECAUSE THE BLUGHOLE IS WHERE THE MOTHERCODE IS
TRANSMITTED FROM AND THE TRANSMISSION MUSTN’T STOP. THE GREAT SNYUKH USED TO DO IT BUT SINCE THE DEEPLY BAD ONES PULLED THE GREAT SNYUKH NNVSNU’S BEEN DOING IT.

The mothercode is what holds the universe together and of course the Deeply Bad Ones are after it.

IN THE BLACKNESS NNVSNU THE TSRUNGH TRANSMITS THE MOTHERCODE; SPINNING HIS MIND LIKE A PRAYER WHEEL HE REVOLVES CONTINUALLY THE NUMINOSITIES AND NEXIALITIES THAT COMMUNICATE THE UNIVERSE TO ITSELF.

What does Nnvsnu the Tsrungh actually look like?

ACTUALLY HE’S NOT PROPERLY A HE AND HE’S NOTHING YOU COULD PICTURE IN YOUR MIND. WHAT WE’RE TALKING ABOUT HERE IS A SPACE-TIME SINGULARITY WHICH IS IN FACT A NEURON OF THE COSMIC MIND TO WHICH THIS UNIVERSE HAS OCCURRED. SIMILARLY THE GREAT SNYUKH IS A SIMPLIFICATION OF A CUSP OF NEGATIVE PROBABILITY. ONCE INVERTED IT REVERSES ITS POLARITY AND BECOMES AN ACCELERATOR OF EVENT.

It might even be a TV series with a lot of special effects and some really top-class hardware. The Nexo Foundation has all kinds of displays and flashing lights and digital controls to monitor the shifting of probabilities as Nnvsnu the Tsrungh and Nabilca, Thing of Darkness who is really Wendy Nelson, fight the Deeply Bad Ones and various other forces of evil. Wendy Nelson’s cover is marine biology but she’s also a black belt in three or four martial arts, a top mathematician and physicist and an ace mechanic and driver. Sometimes in a violent action scene the bad guys will say, ‘Get the girl!’ and they’ll grab her and take her to a hideout and tie her up but they never tear her clothes off or take advantage of her.

WHY DON’T THEY TEAR HER CLOTHES OFF AND TAKE ADVANTAGE OF HER?

For the same reason they can never shoot straight: they’ve got no self-confidence. That’s why they’re the bad guys – repeated failures have made them bitter and antisocial.

WELL, WHAT DO YOU THINK? CAN YOU DO ANYTHING WITH IT?

I’ll have a go. First I’ll try it as a comic, I’ll work up a couplé of episodes and show them to Bill Novad at Novad Ventures, they do Captain Pituitary.

GOOD LUCK.

Thank you, and thanks for your help.

The morning after my talk with the Kraken I was ready to begin work on
The Seeker from Nexo Vollma.
As one will at such times, I found myself taking stock of the present situation and reviewing recent events. What about the head of Orpheus, was I ever going to see it again? I supposed not, probably the angina had signalled my being dropped from its thoughts back into ordinary life. Where was it now? Had it gone back for another go with Fallok? Had it found someone new?

Often in my researches I’ve come across old books of a specialist nature in which the author, usually a retired wing-commander, expresses in a modest foreword the hope that the little volume may be a
vade mecum
for the model steam engineer, coarse angler, sado-masochist or whatever. I feel that way about these pages: I hope that this little volume may be a
vade mecum
not so much for the specialist as for others like me - the general struggler and straggler, the person for whom the whole sweep of consciousness is often too much. Here I am reminded of the words of H. P. Lovecraft:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

Persons for whom the whole sweep of consciousness is often too much are prone, when in a weakened condition, to wear themselves out by looking feverishly for things they cannot find. I’ve described my desk and I might as well say right here that my whole workroom is in pretty much the same state of terminal clutter. Oh yes, I have filing cabinets and folders to put things in but life isn’t that simple and there are always papers that hide themselves in odd places or in wrong folders.

I mention this because no sooner had I typed the title
The Seeker from Nexo Vollma
on to the screen than I found myself trying to remember where I’d put a loose folder containing a several years’ old article from
Newsweek
on mud-brick architecture. I had no need of that information at the time but my mind in its irregular and desultory patrolling of its boundaries had happened to note that it didn’t know at that moment where the mud-brick architecture article was. So I went looking for it, at first casually and then seriously and with hot waves of aggravation flooding over me like colour changes on a cuttlefish.

I found the folder after about five hours, it was stuck between two books on Çatal Hüyük. By then it was time for
lunch. After lunch I had a kip then read over what I’d typed out during my conversation with the Kraken the day before. Good God, what rubbish it seemed. By then it was drink time which made the burden of my critical faculty easier to bear.

The main thing to keep in mind in the situation I have just described is that nothing is gained by pretending not to care about the mud-brick article; on the contrary, any lapse in concentration may well result in falling off a ladder or stepping into a month-old mug of coffee. The search for the mud-brick article must simply be accepted as that part of the work that precedes reading what one has written yesterday and recognizing it as rubbish.

Nnvsnu the Tsrungh stayed with me, however. Poor bastard, I thought, stuck down there in the blughole of the universe, ceaselessly spinning his mind like a prayer wheel as he transmitted the mothercode. Late that night as I thought about it I realized that he himself was ignorant of that mothercode; he span his mind because the pressures of the ultimate deep forced him to do so, and through the centrifuge of his consciousness flung out, unknown to him, the numinosities and nexialities that were the frail but constant web of the universe.

Nabilca, his thing of darkness, his sender and receiver of messages to and from the deep, would he ever see her, would he ever touch her?

Not likely.

So
The Seeker from Nexo Vollma
wasn’t rubbish and I was going to have a go with it. The next morning I was at my desk early and keen to begin.

It’s funny, though, how the odd detail will stick in the mind and give you no peace. I found myself remembering the morning when Melanie and I had first met at Hermes Soundways; she’d left a tape cassette with Istvan Fallok. I’d always wondered what was on that cassette. It was certainly none of my business but it was just one of those little things that I wanted to know about.

So I rang her up at home. No answer. Just then the post arrived and I went to get it. Among the bills and letters was a little padded brown envelope with a cassette inside. On the cassette was written:

Herman, this is from me.

M

I knew what it was before I played it but I played it anyhow.

‘Herman,’ said her voice, ‘I don’t want this to be just words on a piece of paper but I’m too much of a coward to look you in the eye and say what I’m going to say and the telephone is no good either.’

Hearing her voice like that without seeing her there in front of me I found her oddly more real to me than she had been. This was Melanie who was a mystery to me and, as everyone is, to herself, whose thoughts I didn’t know, whose being had its own spacetime and its own world line separate from mine. We had talked intimately, had been lovers briefly, yet her voice came to me as strange and distant as those many voices from far away reflected from the ionosphere and expressed digitally on my radio’s frequency counter.

‘Death is longer than life,’ she said, ‘and the death of each moment is longer than the moment. The goneness is what we’re left with, maybe some of us more than others. It’s very
hard to
have
anything, isn’t it? Like our blue-black shining rainy night, when I call it to mind it’s the going-awayness of it, the goneness of it that I taste. I’ve always been a sort of phoney percy, you see - Persephone more than Eurydice, with my own little dark realm. Or I’m like Rilke’s Eurydike, so full of my large death that I understand nothing. I suppose that’s why I need, how shall I put it, more of a red-pyjama type than you are. I lied to you about General Sphincter’s mistress, I was with Sol that weekend and I was with him the other night when you rang up at three o’clock in the morning to tell him you wouldn’t do the Orpheus thing for
Classique.
So at least you don’t have to feel guilty about me, I did it to you before you did it to me. Goodbye, Herman. We’ll undoubtedly see each other here and there in the normal course of things and I don’t expect it’ll be awkward. I have a feeling that now you’ll be able to write again, better than before. And it was nice, that blue-black shining rainy night, it really was.’

‘I like the texture of it, Herman,’ said Bill Novad. ‘It’s got the right polypeptides if you know what I mean.’

‘Amino acids?’

‘That’s it: primordial soup and all that. All your really deep comics have it, and if you can’t be deep you’ll never make it in comics. Nnvsnu the Tsrungh gets to me.’

‘I was hoping it would.’

‘How do you feel about the backs of cereal boxes?’

‘As noumenon or phenomenon?’

‘As an art form.’

‘They seem to have fallen into disuse; I remember when they had little stories on them.’

‘Right. They’ve gone with our pre-atom-bomb innocence. We’re living in a time that cries out for the reaffirmation of traditional values. Used properly the back of a cereal box is to literature what Buddy Holly is to music: it’s got drive, it’s got soul, it’s got bebop. Look at this.’ He took a box of Holywell Corn Flakes out of a desk drawer and showed me first the front and then the back of it. They were both the same, with a picture of a bowl of corn flakes and the words CORN FLAKES. ‘Do you believe that?’ he said. ‘Two fronts, no back, you don’t know where you are with it, your whole day starts off funny. Put a comic on one side and that’s the back, you eat your corn flakes and you read it, you know where you are.’ He tapped one of the two fronts. ‘Can you see it right there, THE SEEKER FROM NEXO VOLLMA?’ He said it in capital letters.

‘I can see it,’ I said. I could too: the deeps were a strong purply-blue shading off to black. Nnvsnu the Tsrungh, obscure and amorphous, was a dim blue-green. I could see myself reading it at breakfast, could feel the peace and natural order of it. BONGGGGG, rang the great bell of the deep as Nabilca, responsive to the call of Nnvsnu, plunged down, down, down through green and sunlit waters.

‘And you
will
see it,’ he said. ‘Slithe & Tovey have just given
me the Holywell breakfast line to do: that’s corn flakes, bran flakes, and muesli. I think bran is what we want for
The Seeker.’

‘It’s more regular.’

‘It’s your Guardian-reader market. Do a good job on this and you can have the corn flakes as well.’

‘What about the muesli?’

‘No comics on the muesli, just recipes. Can you give me six episodes in a fortnight and six more two weeks later?’

‘What kind of money are we talking about?’

‘Five hundred up front for development, one hundred per episode. Flat fee, no royalties.’

‘Seventeen hundred isn’t much for what they’re getting.’

‘It is when you think of how many guys are trying to break into cereal boxes. Plus you’ll probably do the whole twelve in two nights or maybe even one night. Once you’ve got your original premise it’s a piece of cake.’

‘More like a load of bran. Holywell can have first cereal rights but the characters belong to me and if I do a book or a TV series or a line of toys they’ve got no part of it.’

‘You should be so lucky. I’ll talk to Slithe & Tovey and see what kind of a deal we can do and get back to you later. OK?’

The deeps were gone, the hiss and rush of traffic overran the moving of great waters and the darkness. I was standing by the bicycle shop that was under the offices of Novad Ventures in Gray’s Inn Road. It was like coming out of the cinema, I was blinking in the sunlight. The terror and the excitement slid back behind the screen of everyday and I walked slowly to the underground.

I’d no plans to go anywhere but home but when OXFORD CIRCUS appeared in the train windows I got out and walked over to Hermes Soundways.

Fallok was sitting in his electronic twilight holding a small terrestrial globe, a cheap tin one, badly dented, with no base. Through the closed door I could hear the Hermes music.

‘I never should have let him do it,’ he said as I came in.

‘Let whom do what?’

‘I never should have let Kraken get his head zapped.’

‘Kraken! Do you mean to tell me that Mr Deep Mind himself came to you with art trouble?’

‘How can you joke about it with the poor bastard dead?’

‘Dead! Of what?’

‘Heart attack. I think he may have had some trouble with the head of Orpheus.’

‘What happened?’

‘After our lunch at L’Escargot I was walking slowly back here when I heard a voice speaking to me from a dustbin in Wardour Street and it was the head. I didn’t want to stand there in the street talking to it so I wrapped it up in the
Guardian
and brought it here. I was surprised to see it on the loose and I rang you up but there was no answer.’

‘I must’ve been in hospital by then.’

‘Anything bad?’

‘Bit of angina. What happened with the head?’

‘I asked it what it wanted and it wouldn’t answer but it began to sing. I was recording the singing when Kraken dropped in and asked me why I had a microphone in front of a perfectly silent tin globe. So I told him about it and then he wanted to get his head done so he could see the head of Orpheus too. We had a session but he didn’t see the head and he asked if he could borrow the globe; I gave it to him and he left. He’d said he’d ring me up to let me know how he was getting on but after three or four days I heard from Hilary
Forthryte that he was dead. He was found sitting in a chair with the globe in his lap.