by Eric Brown
He asked, “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”
“Of course not...”
“What do you want?”
She lowered her glass, frowning. “What do you mean?”
“It’s too much of a coincidence that you wanted to work in Europe and just happened to find yourself in Paris, and just happened to take a posting here...”
Caroline pouted, regarding her hands laid flat on the table between them. She looked up. “I came to Paris because I honestly wanted the experience. When I got here... I must admit that I thought about you. When the chance came up to work here—I suppose I could have turned it down, but I wanted to see you, to catch up.”
He smiled bitterly. “To see what a mess I’ve made of things?”
Her gaze hit his like a clash of swords. “No! I didn’t come here to score points.” Her stare faltered, dropped, rather than take in his bedraggled appearance. “What happened back then, happened. I’m not angry.”
He caught his reflection in the tinted viewscreen. He was three day’s unshaven and ten year’s balding, the little hair he did possess wild and uncombed. His hands were stained with grease, his fingernails rimmed black. Added to which, no doubt, he stank.
He pushed his glass around the table, making a comet’s tail of condensation on the plastic surface. “So... what have you been doing with yourself?”
“I started my own security service in Sydney. It went okay, but I didn’t like the admin, side of it. I sold at a profit and got back to grass roots. Worked on Mars for ten years, came back here. Australia for a year — then the opportunity came up to work in Europe. So I thought, why not?”
“You never remarried?”
“Ten years ago I met a wonderful man. He worked on the Martian irrigation programme, which was why I left Earth to live there. We married, had nine good years-” She stopped.
“You separated?”
She shook her head, didn’t look up. “He was killed in the Olympus sub-orb accident just over a year ago.”
“I’m sorry.” It was a reflexive response.
“Are you? You never knew him.”
“I mean, I’m sorry for you. I can’t imagine...”
She took a long drink, something in her haste telling him that she regretted her last statement. She smiled brightly. “Anyway, what about you?”
He waited a good ten seconds, wondering what to tell her. “I pushed for the line after leaving Australia, and then the Line was closed down. For the past ten years I’ve worked here.” There, simple and brutal; two sentences that comprehensively summed up his last twenty years.
She hesitated. “You never found anyone else?”
Mirren shook his head.
She dropped her gaze. “I realise things weren’t perfect between us, Ralph. We had our differences. But we just never talked. Then you walked out, didn’t say a word.”
“It was a bastard of a thing to do.”
“Oh, so you realise that now?”
“I realised it then, objectively.”
“But why didn’t you say anything? Why didn’t we talk?”
“What could I have said? You wouldn’t have understood.”
“Thank you. Thanks for giving me the chance!”
“Caroline, I just couldn’t bring myself to care. That’s being perfectly honest.”
“But why? What happened to us? At first everything was so good... I don’t understand, Ralph. What happened?”
He looked across at her. He could see that beneath her calm, trained exterior, she was shaken.
He let the silence lengthen, then said softly, “When I got back after that first flux... all I wanted was to return to the ‘ship, experience the flux. Nothing else mattered.” He couldn’t bring himself to feel anything for anyone—Caroline, his daughter Susan, or his father. “I never once visited my father after I graduated.”
“I know. He never forgave you. He died twelve years ago.”
Mirren said, “I heard.”
“I went to his funeral. Your absence was noticed.”
Mirren regarded his lager. Some part of him wanted to feel guilty, to regret the actions of his past. But he knew that anyone, in his position back then, would have been unable to act any differently.
He lifted his shoulders in a protracted shrug. “I felt nothing, nothing at all for anyone or anything accept the flux.”
“That’s an excuse!”
“No, that’s the reason. You experience the flux, and nothing is ever the same. People don’t matter-”
“All Engineman weren’t affected like that,” Caroline countered.
“No, not all. But many were. I was one of them. I didn’t have any choice in the matter. There was nothing I could do about it. It was like a drug.”
“Would you have had it any other way?”
He thought about that. He shook his head. “No, not at the time. I was hooked... Later I realised what had happened, but by then it was too late.”
“What? Ten years ago, when the Lines closed down?” She wore an expression of exaggerated horror. “But you could have come back, got in touch.”
Mirren almost laughed. “You don’t understand. By then it was too late. Just because I couldn’t flux again, it didn’t mean that the desire diminished. I couldn’t just cure myself like that!”
“But what about now? Surely...”
“Even now, Carrie. Even now I’d give anything to flux again. What happened ten years ago...” It was an indication of his despair that he could only become emotional about the closure of the Lines.
A silence came between them. He saw the compassion in her eyes, and her pity merely mocked, unwittingly, his inability to respond to it.
Outside, beyond the viewscreen, the interface had activated. The bright cobalt portal flickered and, hesitantly, like the image on a defective vid-screen, the scene of some far planet’s spaceport appeared, backed by a dwarf star binary system in a magenta sky and fringed by alien trees. A convoy of trucks and coaches waited to cross to Earth, along with a queue of patient foot-passengers.
Caroline was turning her glass between her palms. She whispered, “What was it like, Ralph? The flux?”
He smiled. “Indescribable. The sense of union, the joy, the incredible feeling of well-being... it was a hundred times greater than the effect of any terrestrial drug. It wiped me out, left me wanting more, looking forward to nothing but the next push. Was it any wonder I couldn’t respond to anyone, to feel emotions? Nothing mattered. This reality simply didn’t matter.”
She looked up at him and smiled. As if to salvage some consolation from the wreckage of his life, she said, “Well, at least you have the next reality to look forward to, Ralph. The afterlife.”
Her smile faltered when she saw his reaction. “What...?”
He said, “I don’t believe. I can’t bring myself to accept that what I—what all Enginemen—experienced in flux was anything more than just a psychological phenomenon existing up here-” he tapped his head “-and nowhere else.”
She stared at him. “You don’t belong to the Church?”
“Of course not. Unfortunately I’ve never been able to stomach blind faith. The concept of afterlife that a lot of Enginemen believe in is exactly what they wanted to believe. How can something that so perfectly fits the bill for what follows death have any basis in fact?”
She was shaking her head. “I don’t know. I don’t believe myself, remember?”
“ And all those school fees your parents paid to have you convent educated...”
She smiled at him and shrugged. They lapsed into silence. Mirren felt incredibly weary and his head throbbed. He thought of the darkness of his room, the oblivion of sleep.
Across the tarmac, the first of the foot-passengers passed through the interface, walking from one world to the next, crossing light years, without so much as breaking their stride. He cursed the Organisation that developed the interface technology.
He drained his beer. He hoped Ca
roline would take it as a signal that their conversation was at an end.
She did. She pushed her glass, still half full, to one side and glanced at the digital watch melded into the fabric of her cuff. “I really should be getting back to work, Ralph. It’s been nice, seeing you again.”
He made an effort and smiled.
She rose, paused, fingertips on the edge of the table. “You haven’t asked about Susan,” she said.
Susan... He hadn’t asked about his daughter because, in all honestly, he had not thought about her in months.
“I’m sorry.” He tried to sound enthusiastic. “How is she?”
Caroline smiled, as if to show that she wasn’t taken in by his deception. “She’s fine, Ralph. She’s twenty-one in a couple of weeks. She’s working as an engineer for KVO on Mars.”
Mirren grunted a laugh. “Traitor.”
“She wants to see you some time.”
“Well, next time she’s in Europe...”
“I’ll send her along.” She hesitated. “I have some photos of her, if you’re interested. Perhaps we could meet for a meal. How about tonight?”
“Afraid I’m busy tonight,” he lied.
“Then some time next week?”
“Okay, why not?” He could always make his excuses when she called.
Caroline smiled. “I’ll look forward to that. Look after yourself, Ralph.”
He gave an affirmative salute and watched her walk from the bar. He ordered another beer, and when it came he sat and watched the bubbles rise to the foaming head. He reflected that for years he’d lived a life of quiet despair and at times had achieved a state of perverse contentment: only when he was reminded of the past was he filled with a sense of impotent dissatisfaction, a reminder of what might have been, and a hatred of what he had become.
“Mr Mirren? Mr Ralph Mirren?”
He looked up. Two heavies, thick-set and swarthy, obviously Jaeger’s bodyguards, stood at the end of his booth.
After three beers Mirren felt distant, removed. Being confronted like this by the bodyguards of a disfigured off-worlder was such a novel turn of events, compared to his usual dreary routine, that his curiosity was aroused.
“Yes?”
“Mr Jaeger,” said one of the bodyguards, “is in the Graveyard.”
Mirren looked up at the speaker. He was dark, Italian-looking, but obviously a colonist from a planet with gravity greater than Earth’s: he was squat, broad, and powerful-looking.
“What does Mr Jaeger want?” he asked.
“That’s his business,” the other guard answered. “But we have to inform you that he won’t be wasting your time.”
Curiouser and curiouser... It was certainly his day for meeting people.
“If I were you,” the first heavy said, “I’d go and see what he wants. Avenue five, lane three, lot seven.”
They nodded fractionally and left the bar.
Mirren sat for another five minutes, drinking his beer and considering the summons. For all their veiled threats, the bodyguards had been too polite to be intimidating. He pulled the pix of Jaeger from the pocket of his flying suit and wondered what the off-worlder might want with him.
He finished his beer and left the bar.
* * * *
Chapter Four
He walked around the terminal building and across the tarmac towards the quiet eastern perimeter of the spaceport. The sun was rising. The horizon was a blaze of gaudily beribboned strata, tinted rose and umber from the effluvia of the recently erupted Etna. The Graveyard stood in stark silhouette against the sunrise.
In the ten years he’d worked at Orly, Mirren had done his best to avoid the Graveyard, working in the vast lot only when he could find no other flier to take his shift. The last time had been five years ago, when his nostalgia for the hey-day of the Lines had been at its height. Since then, and especially over the last year or two, he’d often gazed across the port to the regimented ranks of the derelict starships receding into the distance, and told himself that for old time’s sake he should revisit the last resting place of these mighty behemoths.
He paused and gazed left and right along the phalanx of excoriated and rusting bigships, rising from the tarmac like epitaphs to their own extinction. Dwarfed beneath the rearing hulks, he walked until he came to avenue five. Pushing his own pain at the closure of the Lines to the back of his mind, he experienced a stab of sadness for the ‘ships themselves. It was sentimental, he knew, but he nevertheless thought it wrong, unjust, that such magnificent examples of engineering should have been superseded by a form of transportation as effete as the interface portals.
He turned and walked down the avenue, and it was as if he had entered another realm, a nightmare past in which the symbols of his younger days had been perversely maligned by the ongoing process of entropy. One either side, rows of wrecked and dilapidated starships dwindled to vanishing point—bigships and smallships, scout-ships and survey-vessels, colony-liners like compacted cities and planetary ferries, life-boats, tugs, salvage-ships as ugly as deep-sea fish, sun-divers, two-man boats, express cutters and slowboats pushed once by Gamma crews... He slowed his pace, gazing around in wonder. Every type of spatial architecture was represented here: vertical ships as streamlined as needles, horizontal craft like bulky leviathans; squat blocks on bent stanchion-legs like crabs, oval vessels like polished gems. Many gave the impression of being gloriously intact—though Mirren knew that their innards had been’ ripped out—and many more, tragically, had been strategically dismembered to prevent cannibalisation or salvaging by renegade Enginemen. He passed lots given over to portioned quarters of bigships: tail-sections and lone nose-cones, stranded mid-sections and rearing fins as large as smallships themselves, honeycombed radiation baffles, observation domes, astrodomes, flanks and bulkheads and pitiful cross-sections of ‘ships like the carcasses of slaughtered beasts. Perhaps even more devastating than the piecemeal state of the vessels, however, was the attention of the extraterrestrial flora. Some of the smaller ‘ships were cocooned, others had their legs and tori enwrapped in clinging skirts of jungle growth. Mirren did not fail to see the irony: for years these vessels had ranged among the stars, vanguards of humankinds’ conquest; now the flora of the planets they had conquered was exacting an eloquent revenge.
He found lane three and turned down the narrow aisle. He passed the shell of a rusting smallship, then a bigship missing the domed section of its forward command bridge like the unfortunate victim of some abandoned brain surgery. He came to a halt, there was something painfully familiar about the nose-cone of the bigship which obtruded from its resting place and overhung the lane. The curving panels of its flank were obscured by a beard of purple-leafed vine, but Mirren glimpsed an ornate name-plate through the leaves. He climbed onto the back of a wrecked tug-tractor, reached out and swept aside the vine.
The Pride of Paramatta... He repeated the name, savouring the alliteration on his tongue, the flood of memories it provoked. He had never actually pushed the Paramatta—it was an early Class II survey vessel decommissioned the very year he graduated—but as a boy he’d often watched it phase into the Sydney spaceport and dreamed of one day becoming an Engineman, never for a second imagining that thirty years later the ‘ship would be a thing of the past, and he with it.
He released the vines, allowed them to spring back into place and obscure the name-plate. He jumped down, dusting his hands together, and continued along the lane. He had never before realised quite how beautiful a mausoleum could be.
He came to lot seven. Parked upon it was an old-fashioned perpendicular exploration vessel, an attenuated arrow-head of blue steel. It was tall and proud against the rising sun, intact but for its nose-section fins. Mirren wondered how many planets this ‘ship had discovered, how many other suns it had stood proudly beneath.
He looked around the weed-choked tarmac for Jaeger.
“Hello down there!” The cry echoed from high above.
Mirren cr
aned his neck. Halfway up the tapering flank of the bigship, someone stood on a railed observation platform. The grey-suited figure waved. “Mr. Mirren! Please, join me.”
Mirren crossed the tarmac to the makeshift stairway—a metal chock, an oil barrel—and climbed through the arched hatch. The gloom was pierced by shafts of sunlight slanting in through vacated viewscreens, illuminating dust motes. He climbed a tight spiral staircase, passing levels stripped of fittings and furnishings.
He stepped out onto the observation platform.
Jaeger was leaning against the rail, admiring the view. “Magnificent, is it not, Mr Mirren?”