by Eric Brown
He had the sensation of hovering on the edge of some infinite vastness, a pool of immanence which would bathe him in glory. Then, in the second that he fluxed, he was one with the vastness, and his soul, or rather his mind, was flooded with rapture.
What was happening to him had two explanations, one religious and the other secular. If the Disciples were to be believed, then his soul was briefly conjoined with the ultimate reality, the source of all things, which underpinned the everyday, physical world. It was this union, or rather being wrenched from it, that brought about the Enginemen’s sense of craving, the desire for reunion... The secular, scientific explanation, which Mirren subscribed to, was that upon neurological union with null-space, or the nada-continuum, the only part of the human brain able to function in such a void, the pineal gland, bloomed and activated and produced the power to push the bigship through the medium which underpinned reality. As simple as that—even though scientists were still theorising over the precise cause of the effect. There was no evidence of an afterlife, Mirren maintained, no souls departed or those awaiting birth, just the wondrous mind-trip produced by the excitation of one’s pineal gland, and the subsequent craving was the effect of denial.
For a timeless duration, Mirren fluxed.
Then, one by one, his senses returned. The hatch was cracked and the slide-bed withdrawn, and Mirren emerged into the dazzling, though muted, light of the engine-room. He sat up, dazed, knowing that anything from six to twelve hours had elapsed but unable to believe the fact. Dan unjacked him, and as he did so it came to Mirren in a rush that that had been the very last time he would ever mind-push a starship.
“Ten lightyears,” he thought, “in almost an instant.”
Before the tank, Olafson was holding Elliott, who was clearly agitated. She was sobbing in the arms of the taller woman, shaking her head and trying to say something. Mirren looked at Dan, who shrugged. “She can’t bear the thought...” he began.
“Elliott!” Mirren snapped. “If you’re in no condition to flux, We’ll en-tank Olafson and you can go without, understood? We’re all in the same situation, so don’t think you’re a special case. Pull yourself together. Fekete, set the tank. Leferve, jack her. Elliott...” The tone of his voice held a warning.
Sniffing, Elliott nodded. Olafson assisted her to the tank.
Mirren climbed from the slide-bed and made his way unsteadily towards the viewscreen. He collapsed into a lounger and stared out at the cobalt depths of the nada-continuum, and as he did so he heard Dan intoning, “Grant her smooth union/ With the majesty of the Sublime, the Infinite.”
Mirren closed his eyes, let the residuum of the wonder he’d experienced percolate through his whole being. Enjoy it, he told himself, because it won’t happen again.
He sensed someone beside him and opened his eyes. Dan was sitting on the edge of a lounger, staring at his clasped hands.
“What is it, Dan?”
“Weren’t you rather hard on her?”
Mirren looked at the Breton, the bearded giant, the peasant—as he sometimes called him—who should be ploughing the earth rather than ploughing the continuum.
Mirren sighed. “I know I was, Dan.” He shook his head. “She isn’t the only one who’s going through this.”
“But it’s affecting her more-”
“Is it? How the hell do you know how it’s affecting me? At least fucking Elliott here can shoot herself when she gets back to Earth, achieve union that way.”
Dan said, “Knowing Elliott, she might just do that.”
Mirren waved. “I’m sorry. You know how it is... I can’t take three months without the flux. How will I cope after three years...?”
Dan said, “Or thirty.”
Both men looked out at the white light marbling the blue of the continuum, and fell silent —
And the vision that Mirren was reliving became diffuse, distant, and he knew the flashback was drawing to a close. He was back in his apartment, the sudden translocation disconcerting.
He blinked, and watched Hunter’s photograph complete its pendulum drift to the carpet. He returned his arm from its outstretched position, feeling within him the vivid recollection of the union.
In reality, the flashback had lasted for a fraction of a second, while subjectively Mirren had experienced the events aboard the ‘ship for what seemed like hours. What the hell was happening to him?
He looked up at the screen. Dan Leferve could wait. He’d contact him later. It was all he could do to drag himself to his room, swallow two sleeping tablets with a mouthful of water and fall into bed.
* * * *
Chapter Five
Ella Fernandez sat in the ‘port transit lounge on the colony world of A-Long-Way-From-Home, staring at her fingers and reliving again the explosion that had taken Eddie from her. She shifted position in the uncomfortable bucket seat, her silversuit squeaking against the padded mock-leather. Around her, a hundred travellers waited patiently for the interface to open on their destinations.
“Ms Schwartz.” A tanned, blonde woman was crouching before her. She wore a bright two-piece uniform in the blue and yellow national colours of Sweden.
“Oh...” Ella looked up, too tired to realise the mistake the woman had made.
“We’ll be processing travellers to Carey’s Sanctuary in fifteen minutes.”
The courier’s gaze lingered on the Schwartz name-tag stitched to the chest of Ella’s silversuit. The tags were much sought after among those who held Enginemen and Enginewomen in high esteem.
Christ, Ella thought, yawning and stretching. The courier obviously thought she looked old enough to have been an Enginewoman.
The courier was still smiling, as if expecting words of wisdom from someone she thought had communed with the ultimate. Ella smiled uneasily in return. She recalled Eddie’s frustration, sometimes anger, at how he was often regarded. Civilians held E-men in awe, and Eddie had found that this misplaced respect served only to emphasise the fact of his redundancy.
“I think you’re very brave,” the courier said, “using the ‘face. I’ve met some E-women who can’t do it.”
Ella shrugged. “I need to travel,” she murmured.
The courier appraised her. “You’re obviously feeling the strain. Good luck, anyway.” She tapped Ella’s knee, stood and scanned the lounge for other travellers in her tour group.
Ella pulled her feet onto the seat and sat cross-legged, hanging her head. She was touched by the Swede’s sympathy, mistaken though it was. She closed her eyes, and the afterimage of the explosion bloomed in her mind’s eye. She was aware of Eddie’s body odour in the material of the silversuit.
She had watched Eddie kill himself just ten hours ago, though it seemed like much longer. It felt like a week ago when she had hung on the fence at Orly, watching the slow progress of his flier towards the interface. Even now Eddie’s death was an abstract concept. She wondered if the curious absence of feeling was due to the fact that his suicide was too much to comprehend, or that she comprehended it all too well and was unable to grieve over someone she had never really loved, and who had ultimately deserted her. Was what she felt now nothing more than self-pity, the fear of the future without the reassuring and familiar presence of Eddie around to give her life a centre?
She opened her eyes and stared through the sheer crystal viewscreen that fronted the terminal complex. She certainly was, she thought, a long way from home. So far she had made three jumps out towards the Rim — from Earth to Addenbrooke, to Rousseau, and then to the Swedish colony world. Each step she had taken through the interfaces had carried her approximately three thousand light years through space, though, of course, the concept was just too much to grasp. She told herself that the journey so far, nine thousand light years across the spiral arm to the threshold of the Rim, which had taken just six hours with medical examinations and identity checks, would in the old days of the bigships have taken the better part of a standard month. The advent of interface te
chnology, invented and developed on Mars twenty years ago and installed in stages throughout the Expansion over the following ten years, had had the effect of shrinking the human-populated quadrant galaxy to the size of a single planet. In the time it took a traveller to get from London to Sydney by sub-orbital jet—ten hours — the interstellar traveller could pass from Earth, via the junction planets, to the outermost colony on the Rim. Far-flung outposts settled in the Galactic Core, which had been lucky to see a ‘ship from Earth once a year, now enjoyed a monthly influx of goods and tourists. Among the hundred densely-populated worlds in the vicinity of Earth, the portals were often opened on a daily basis. The Keilor-Vincicoff Organisation ran the interfaces in the more populated sectors of the Expansion, but in the Core and out on the Rim the operation was conducted by smaller companies.
Ella appreciated the obvious benefits of interface transportation, but at the same time she mourned the passing of the bigship Lines, the tragedy and suffering of the Enginemen, and the simple lack of romance of the portals compared to the gut-wrenching, heartwarming sight of the bigships which had dominated the spaceports like magnificent leviathans.
And, of course, portal travel was painful.
She looked out across the ‘port to the interface a kilometre away, a high blue membrane set against the only slightly paler blue midday sky. Beyond the ‘face was the city of New Stockholm, looking impossibly clean and prosperous: a panorama of glass towers, forests and parks. A greater contrast to Paris she could not imagine. The staff working in the terminal building, and the citizens come to see off friends and family, were all well-built, blonde and bronzed, descendants of the Scandinavians who had made the planet their home more than fifty years ago. She compared these people with the travellers who had left Paris with her, harried and beset individuals, either leaving Earth for good or glad to be getting away from a fragmenting Europe if only for a short time.
She considered the teeming crowds of travellers she had seen over the past few hours. The multitude of citizens in the Expansion, and the multiplicity of events, made her realise the insignificance of her attempt at communicating her thoughts and feelings through the medium of her art. Hell, even in a culture which understood the type of work she did, there were people like Vasquez and her father who shut their minds to what she was saying—and Eddie, too, she had to admit. In the years she had known him, he had made no effort to try to understand what she was doing: that he had appreciated the degree of difficulty involved in producing a piece made the fact that he could not interpret her work all the more frustrating. She gained heart from the knowledge that for every hundred people like Vasquez, Eddie and her father, there was perhaps one who loved and cared for works of art—like the off-worlder who had bought Conversion.
Her thoughts were interrupted by the activation of the interface. The blue light flickered and coruscated briefly, hinting at the vaguest outline of the ‘port on the other side—then disappeared to be replaced by the rain-slicked tarmac, dull terminal building and overcast sky of Carey’s Sanctuary. The slit portals and viewscreens in the frame of the interface glowed warm and yellow against the grey winter scene beyond.
The call went out for travellers to Carey’s Sanctuary to assemble at the identity check-point. Perhaps fifty people stood and gathered their possessions. Ella remained seated, watching her fellow travellers move in line towards and through the security check. There were few families making their way to Sanctuary; the majority of travellers seemed to be business-people and soldiers in uniform.
Ella shouldered her bag and tagged onto the end of the queue, her pass and identity card at the ready. The Swedish courier was smiling them through. “I trust you’ve enjoyed your stay on A-Long-Way-From-Home, or if you were a transit traveller that you might return one day to enjoy our hospitality. Thank you.”
Ella was the last traveller through.
“Excuse me,” the courier said. “I thought you might like this. I found it in lost property.” The women held out a black synthetic-leather jacket. “Sanctuary is a Danzig-run world, they might give you a hard time if they knew you were a Disciple.” She indicated the infinity symbol tattooed on Ella’s arm.
“Thank you.” Ella accepted the jacket, “That bad, is it?”
“They’re clamping down on the passage of Disciples, E-men and -women to the Rim,” the courier said. “At least this’ll cover your tattoo.”
Ella smiled and shrugged on the jacket. As she was zipping it, she saw the frayed name-tag on the chest of her silvers. She looked up at the Swede, who was watching her still—then ripped off the tag and handed it to the woman.
“Here,” she said, “you might as well have this.”
She hurried through the identity check.
A hover-coach carried them in a long arc across the tarmac to the interface, where it idled in a convoy of wheeled vehicles and hover-trucks passing though the ‘face, ball-lightning sparking off their outlines as they made the transition. The coach edged slowly forward.
Ella watched the passengers seated before her pass though the advancing membrane of the interface. She awaited her turn with the kind of trepidation she had once experienced when awaiting surgery—the awareness that what was about to happen might go wrong, would be painful, but at the same time was necessary. Not many people had actually perished travelling this way, at least not since the early days, but it was the physical sensation of the process that scared Ella, rather than the danger of an accident. She tried to recall the sensation from the last time she’d interfaced, but she found the recollection of pain impossible — which in a way made the anticipation all the harder to bear. All she knew was that it hurt.
The man in the seat before her braced himself at the approach of the hazy membrane that hung between A-Long-Way-From-Home and Sanctuary. Silver lights outlined him briefly, and then he was on the other side. Ella took a deep breath as the interface hit her. The pain was intense, but mercifully fleeting—though in retrospect it seemed to go on forever. Cruel, invisible hands reached into her body and squeezed her vital organs. Nausea swept through her in a hot wave and she gasped.
Then she was on Carey’s Sanctuary, and the pain was a thing of the past.
The portal deactivated with a swift rushing sound like a thousand birds taking flight. The sunlight that had poured through the interface was suddenly extinguished, and the blue light of the deactivated ‘face washed over the coach as it crossed the spaceport towards the terminal building. A fine rain misted from the overcast sky.
The terminal was low and shabby. The courier who led them from the coach and into the building was garbed in the green uniform and the black beret of the Danzig Organisation. “All travellers onwards to Mephisto and Jet, continue through to lounge two. Passengers bound for Hennessy’s Reach, please take a seat and wait here.”
The majority of travellers continued through to the second lounge. Five others, besides Ella, seated themselves before the rain-spattered viewscreen: three low-ranking soldiers in uniform, an officer with a peaked cap and over-the-top epaulettes, and a businessman with a briefcase. Ella took a seat well away from them, conscious of being the only woman and casual traveller, and stared out at the bleak scene of the ‘port.
Two minutes later the ‘face activated, and before she had time to hope that the first world onto which it opened would be the Reach, she recognised the familiar sky-scape of the Rim world. Framed in the exact centre of the portal was the apex of the fiery red giant, like a plasma graphic committed by an incurable romantic. Before the giant primary was an expanse of dark sea, the great Merida ocean which covered a quarter of the planet’s surface. In the foreground was the ‘port, a collection of functional terminal buildings and control towers. Ella found herself staring at the low arc of the red giant, at the great loops and geysers of flame erupting from its circumference in majestic slow motion. She recalled her last summer on the Reach, a certain friendship prematurely ended, and experienced a sour-sweet pang of sadness.
A long convoy of armoured vehicles trundled across the rain-swept tarmac and approached the interface. Before she could remind herself of the repression represented by such a show of force, something elemental within her thrilled to the power, uniformity and synchronised precision of the military convoy. The vehicles rumbled through the ‘face with a deafening roar of engines. Ella recognised tanks and personnel carriers, nuclear rocket launchers like long tankers and fliers lashed to the flat-beds of low-loaders—but there were other vehicles, bulbous pantechnicons and things that looked like helicopters without rotor-blades, the function of which she could only guess at.
She recalled Hennessy’s Reach from the days in her teens. It had been a quiet, backwater world on which nothing ever seemed to happen. She remembered that her father had considered his posting there as a demotion, which might have been a contributory factor to his moods at the time. Now she wondered what had happened, in the ten years she had been away, to account for the military build-up.