Engineman

by Eric Brown

  Macready cradled the empty bottle in his lap. He stared into the interface with unseeing eyes.

  All activity had ceased on the tarmac below. The fliers and trucks were parked up on the perimeter of the ‘port and the bigship had returned to its hangar, a sad animal at the end of its life.

  The broad screen of the interface no longer showed the distant alien landscape. Now, deactivated, it coruscated cobalt blue. Rumour among Enginemen, especially those who believed that the nada-continuum represented Nirvana, was that in its deactivated state the ‘face provided a portal to the infinite, a shortcut to eternity. They could have taken their lives in the privacy of their own homes, of course—and over the years many had—but there was a certain esteem to be had, a status gained in the hierarchy of martyrs, when one single-mindedly and with intent aforethought rendezvoused with the screen and destroyed oneself in a spectacular blaze of glory.

  As Mirren watched, a suicide prepared his exit. He came in from the south, slung horizontal beneath the triangular wing of a power glider. Arc-lights dazzled off the propeller and the silver struts. There was about the suicides an element of the innovative that had less to do with the theatrical than the practical: suicides had to find new ways to evade the guards and fry themselves.

  The drunken Macready, with his bottle of cognac and desire for oblivion, would have tried to dodge the guards and leap into the ‘face in an act as humble as it was. ill-planned. Mirren had saved the oldster, if temporarily: if Macready wished to end his life, then sooner or later he would succeed.

  Macready had seen the glider. The oldster was leaning forward in the chesterfield, his attention fixed on the small, emerald triangle as it banked over the mansion and dived for the ‘port. He wore an expression of fascination, as if he knew he would not make the ‘face tonight and was vicariously sharing the pilot’s final approach.

  The glider arrowed towards the interface and slammed into the screen. Contact was brief and blinding. For a fraction of a second the outline of the glider and its spread-eagled pilot remained etched in silver on the blue screen, then dissolved and vanished. Mirren fancied he could hear the suicide’s scream, diminishing, and smell his roasted corpse on the night air. He was at once appalled by the wanton forfeit of life, and awe-struck. He marvelled at the faith of the suicide, his certainty that absorption into the nada-continuum was the reward for so spectacular and beauteous an incineration.

  Beside him on the chesterfield, Macready attempted to climb to his feet. Mirren restrained him, and the old man was too insensate with drink to resist.

  “Let me go, damn you!” He slumped back into the cushions, exhausted.

  “You’d never make it down there,” Mirren said. “And even if you did, you wouldn’t get past the guards-”

  “Then I’ll die trying!”

  Mirren gripped the stringy, tattooed bicep. “Why?” he asked. “Why not just jump off the damned building and have done!”

  Macready tipped back his head and cried at the stars. “When I was discharged I... I swore to myself that an interface death was the only way-” He struggled to stand again, but was too weak and fell back, crying. “Life’s hell, Mirren. If only you could feel the pain.”

  “Damn you—and you think I don’t miss the flux, too?”

  The oldster cackled. “I mean I’m ill, Mirren. I’m dying.”

  Mirren stared at him.

  Macready went on, “It’s a terminal condition, Mirren. There’s no cure. No cure at all. Only...” His head fell back, as if the fight had drained from him, and his breath came in ragged spasms.

  Mirren averted his eyes, aware of the slow thump of his heartbeat.

  Down on the tarmac, the guards were clearing up what remained of the kamikaze pilot and his glider—a few charred spars, scraps of clothing, larger chunks of what might have been charcoaled flesh. They disposed of the remains with little ceremony, scooping them up in the shovel of a tractor.

  In the quiet aftermath of the spectacular suicide, Mirren found himself saying, “I was married before I became an Engineman. I had a child, a daughter in Australia. I thought I loved them both... Then I signed on the Canterbury Line, experienced the flux. When I came back—you know how it is. Nothing’s the same. I lived only for the flux...” He wondered whether to add that his wife had come looking for him recently, but decided that the oldster wouldn’t want to hear about his problems.

  He glanced at Macready. He tried to remember the last time he’d spoken to someone about his life before the flux.

  Macready sat unmoving. His head rested against the back of the chesterfield and his mouth hung open. Mirren reached out and touched the withered cheek. The old man’s head fell forward, chin on chest. He felt Macready’s frail wrist for a pulse.

  He returned his gaze to the interface. He closed his eyes. Even the darkness was tinged with the blue light that glowed through his eyelids. If the Disciple’s theology was to be believed, then right now Macready was being absorbed into the vastness which underlay everything, the infinite realm of the nada-continuum.

  Silently he cursed the flux and its terrible consequences.

  He heard the vehicle before he saw it.

  When he opened his eyes and turned his head, the police cruiser was settling on the rooftop beside his flier. The cop climbed out, stretching after a long shift. Mirren knew the officer from the nightly patrols he made around the ‘port. He’d even joined Mirren on the chesterfield, sharing a drink and appreciating the dawn view.

  “Ralph,” the cop said, striding over. He saw Macready. “Got company?”

  “He’s dead.” Mirren laid back his head and stared at the stars. He was aware of the cop, kneeling beside him. When he looked, the officer was performing a routine on-the-spot autopsy. He strapped a sleek black device to Macready’s forearm, and a dozen sub-dermals pumped a host of nanomedic drones into the dead Engineman’s moribund circulatory system.

  The cop stood with the device, reading off the cause of death. “Don’t worry yourself,” he said, misinterpreting Mirren’s silence. “You couldn’t have done a thing.”

  Mirren smiled to himself. “He came to the ‘port to kill himself.” He indicated the interface.

  The cop laughed. “He did? That case, it’d save a lot of work if I just dumped him in the ‘face.”

  “He was a Disciple of the Nada-Continuum,” Mirren said. “In the circumstances I think he would have wanted a formal funeral.”

  The cop strode away and spoke quietly into his handset. Mirren looked at his watch. There were still a few hours to go before dawn broke over the city.

  Fifteen minutes later the ambulance arrived, landing on the rooftop in a wash of revolving light. Mirren moved from the chesterfield—he really wanted to remain where he was, lethargic with apathy and depression, but that might have appeared crass. He watched the paramedics load the body of the old Engineman onto a stretcher and carry it across to the ambulance. It lifted, turned on its axis and banked, away towards the centre of Paris, followed by the police cruiser.

  Mirren tried to analyse his feelings, find within himself some compassion. He wondered if what he did feel was nothing more than the fear that he too would one day end his life as Macready had, one more unmourned Engineman. As he sat in silence and stared at the constellations overhead, he began to regret that he had denied the oldster his final wish to be taken by the flames of the interface.

  * * * *

  Chapter Two

  Ella Fernandez surfaced from her dream like a diver coming up for air. She sat bolt upright, gasping with panic. As the dream receded and became abstract she managed to control her breathing. Soon all she could recall was the ill-defined image of her father, walking away from her. She tried to persuade herself that the figure could have been any male, or a representation of every man she’d ever known, but she knew she was selling herself a lie. It was ironic that ever since she’d left him ten years ago, her father had followed her, turning up in her dreams with the regularity o
f a onetime star guesting on crummy vid-shows.

  Ella fumbled in the darkness for the light-pad beside the bed. The room was large and high-ceilinged, the walls decorated with abstract murals. Her other work, her serious work—oils, acrylics, a few plasma graphics—leaned against the walls in back-to-front stacks.

  The double-doors to the balcony were open to admit the warm breeze, the fragrance of flowers masking the stale smell of the mould which rashed the ceiling. While she’d slept, an alien creeper had found the opening and worked its way in. The magnificent red-and-yellow striped bloom hung above her head, presenting its spread petals and erect stamen like a gift. Ella smiled at it. “Too bad you aren’t a golden-flower, buddy,” she said. They were a new extra-terrestrial plant whose spores had blown through the interface recently, the golden pollen of which was mildly hallucinogenic. The authorities let the ghettos rot and fall to pieces, but they had been pretty damned quick last week to send out teams to eradicate the alien flowers.

  She glanced across the room, looking for the jar of pollen on the upturned crate which doubled as her dressing-table. She could see a bulb of toothpaste and a few buckled tubes of oil paint—but no bottled sunshine. Eddie, you cheating bastard... Thing was, she’d have gladly given him the stuff if only he’d asked. He’d been on a downer for the past week and probably needed the pollen to get him through.

  She swung herself out of bed and pulled on a wrap. She gently back-handed the flower from her path, ducked beneath the gnarled vine and pushed her way through the tangle of vegetation which had invaded the balcony during the day. Before she’d gone to bed that morning she’d cleared the balcony, cut back the persistent fronds and vines and dumped them in the street below. Now, in just eight hours, they were back again, forceful and vital as ever. She leaned against the balcony rail and stared out over what could have been an exo-botanical garden.

  The sun had set and the street was in darkness. As her eyes adapted, she made out the pale pastel colours of the luminous blooms strung out along the facade of the opposite buildings, like a replacement for the neon shop-fronts and the advertisements of a long-gone, prosperous Paris. Directly below, the Rue Chabrol was a dense riot of tropical vegetation, as if a strip of jungle had been laid down between the buildings. The occasional tail shoot arced above the mass, extending great green leaves like spinnakers, nodding in the breeze. At ground level, tunnels and runs had been forced through the undergrowth to connect the few inhabited buildings with the central, caged strip which ran the length of the street to the nearest cleared thoroughfare.

  Over the past year, Ella had seen many friends and fellow squatters give in and move out, a combination of the fecund plant-life and the decline in services finally driving them away to the suburbs. At one time, about four years ago when Ella had moved here with Eddie, there had been a dozen other artists living and working in the street — a community of like-minded people doing their own thing in the face of the authorities’ displeasure. They’d been good times, and Ella had accomplished some of her best work. Now she was the only artist in the area, and she didn’t have too much to do with the freaks and weirdoes she had as neighbours. She liked eccentrics—real, hundred-proof kooks who were original and had something to say—but over the past few months the free accommodation along the street, and the fact that the law rarely patrolled this far into the ghetto, had attracted the kind of people usually only found on the inside of secure psychiatric units.

  Increasingly, Paris was becoming rapidly depopulated, the exodus from the city indicative of a much more widespread exodus from Europe itself. Those that could afford to were fleeing the Union and moving to the prosperous haven of Oceania, or off-world entirely to the colonies which the interfaces were opening up in ever-increasing numbers. Only the poor were left—or sorry bastards like Eddie, Enginemen who were unable to tear themselves away from the once-proud centre of the space age—the poor and the very rich who, cushioned against the privations of a ruined Europe, built themselves magnificent strongholds in cultivated Babylons and lived like siege-lords... Ella wondered where she fitted in.

  She leaned over the balcony rail and peered south. The interface at Orly, three kilometres away, was in its deactivated phase: a vast membrane of cobalt blue notched between the buildings on either side of the street. Ella shivered. The interface filled her with a strange crawling sensation of dread. She wondered if she should suggest moving away, but she knew what Eddie would have to say about that.

  With luck, she told herself, Europe will become so impoverished that the ‘face will no longer be viable and Keilor-Vincicoff will relocate it...

  She returned inside, wiping the soles of her sap-sticky feet on the filthy carpet. In the tiny, overcrowded kitchen she found her own chipped mug and boiled some water. She never bothered with breakfast, but drank cup after cup of real coffee—her one luxury—to sustain her through the nights while she worked. She’d become nocturnal on moving in with Eddie Schwartz. Enginemen were night creatures, and it didn’t bother Ella when she slept—she could create just as well at three in the morning or three in the afternoon. She’d soon got used to never seeing the sun. In her down cycles, she told herself that darkness suited the state of her psyche; when she was up, high on the buzz of creating, she knew that she liked the night because it reminded her of the long, balmy twilight phases on the planet of Hennessy’s Reach, where she’d spent the happiest years of her life.

  She poured herself a black coffee and left the kitchen, holding the mug in both hands and taking tiny sips. She paused outside Eddie’s room, deciding to try and wake him. He’d be blitzed on the gold dust he’d stolen, but she could have fun watching his confusion as she asked him nonsense questions. Ella had finished a painting the night before; she was feeling good. She pushed open the door with her toes and saw that his bed was empty.

  No doubt he’d be up on the roof, staring at the interface. He’d been spending a lot of time up there, lately.

  She stared around the room. Like her, Eddie was not materialistic. He had few possessions. The walls were bare—no pix or graphics to remind him of his time pushing for the Chantilly Line; no ornaments, books or discs. Just a bed, a chair, and a crate containing his clothes.

  Ella stepped inside, unable to suppress the feeling that she was trespassing. She could not recall the last time she’d been in his bedroom, nor when he’d last been in hers. Although they’d been together for the last seven years, in real terms they lived very much apart, Ella spending all her time painting and sculpting, and Eddie working nights at the food-irradiation plant in north Paris. Their relationship was very much platonic. She was like an elder sister to him—even though Eddie in his mid-forties was twenty years older than her—advising him, and looking after him during his periods of sickness, both physical and mental.

  Even in the early days there had been a certain distance between them. Ella had needed someone she could rebuild her life around—someone who could have looked after and protected her would have been ideal, but the alternative, a man she could look after and protect, was better than nothing. Eddie had needed, though he probably hadn’t realised it at the time, someone to keep him alive in the dark years after the closure of the shipping Lines. He was a physically big man, solid and greying, not at all imaginative or artistic, and Ella’s friends had said that they were ill-matched, that it couldn’t possibly work, and given them a year at best. As things turned out, her friends were right on two counts—they were ill-matched and it hadn’t worked. But here they were seven years later, still together, mainly due to the fact that Eddie still needed someone, and Ella had found no-one else.