by Eric Brown
“You’ll be getting yourselves into serious trouble.”
“Do you know something, Cas?” Mirren said. “I couldn’t really give a damn. I’d risk anything to flux again.”
“Death? Penal servitude?”
Mirren said, “Anything.”
Fekete shook his head in a gesture of patronising sympathy.
“I give in. Go your own way.” He sighed and checked his watch. “I must be going. I’ll leave you to your celebrations.” He looked from Dan to Mirren. “You two take care, okay? And keep me posted.” He left the booth and hurried around the gallery.
Mirren glanced up at Dan and saw his smile reflected as if in a mirror. He leaned back and sank into the soft membrane of the dome. He recalled spending hours in free-fall aboard the Perseus Bound, colliding with the trampoline-like inner dermis of the astrodome, as if attempting to merge with the cobalt blue of the enveloping nada-continuum outside. He felt euphoria rise in him at the thought.
They took Fekete’s advice and celebrated with half a bottle of cognac.
“Here’s to Hunter.” Dan raised his glass. “To Hunter and the flux—and screw Caspar!”
Mirren smiled. He was considering how his fortune had changed in just one day. Twelve hours ago his life had stretched ahead in a monotonous round of work and sleep; he’d lived so much in the past that the present was an endless time to be endured, the future an abstraction without hope. Now he was on the verge of realising a dream made possible by a disfigured millionaire off-worlder, and it was almost too fantastic to believe.
“Ralph!” Dan cried. “I feel like giving thanks.”
Mirren peered at the Frenchman. It seemed like a good idea. He shrugged. “Fine. How? Where?”
“Where else?” Dan laughed. “The Church! The Church of the Disciples!”
Mirren was too drunk, too elated, to voice any philosophical objections. He recalled that the Church was an old smallship—a smallship similar to the one he’d soon be pushing through the nada-continuum.
So why the hell not?
* * * *
Chapter Eleven
They left the restaurant and made their way to the perimeter of the dome. Mirren was too drunk to pilot his flier; it would have detected the alcohol in his system and shut itself down. Otherwise, buoyed up as he was, he might have taken the risk. He considered the irony of dying in a flier accident mere days before he was due to flux again.
They passed through the arched exit and walked into the heat of unprotected Paris. It was four o’clock in the morning and the temperature was still in the eighties. The Church was two kilometres away, in the run-down Montparnasse district, but for once Mirren didn’t mind the walk. They passed through the respectable, well-kept streets bordering the centre, but the farther they progressed towards the outskirts, the more neglected and disreputable the streets became. They passed shop-fronts at first barred, then boarded up—though the premises were still in use—then derelict and vandalised, and finally given over to the alien creepers which marked a district as beyond redemption. In one area, as they progressed down an avenue whose buildings on either side were solid banks of vegetation, he and Dan were the only things visibly of Earth in the landscape. They stopped in the middle of the street, a layer of lichen slippery underfoot, and stared at the strip of night sky between the high canyon walls. There, rising slowly beneath the stars of Orion, were the red and white lights of an orbiting industrial satellite.
At one point the undergrowth, which so far had restricted itself to the sidewalks, flowed across the street and became so dense that they stumbled and fell. They proceeded by holding each other like drunks wending their way home over treacherous ice. Mirren clutched Dan’s shoulder, feeling the hard ridge of his occipital console.
He pulled his hand away and halted, swaying in the tropical night. “Dan, last... last year I thought of having it removed.”
Dan peered at him. “What?”
He touched his shoulder, felt the light alloy spar beneath his flying suit. “My console.”
They continued walking, leaving the lichen and the creepers behind as they entered a plasma-lighted district of bars and bistros. Prostitutes stood in groups on the kerb. Garishly lighted shops clearing cheap African electronics belted out the latest popular music; revellers danced. It was as if they had stumbled from a jungle and into a party.
Finally, Dan asked, “Why?”
Mirren laughed. “Because it was... obsolete. The rationalist in me said that it served no purpose. I didn’t need it to remind me of the good times. I felt like a walking antique.” “So...” Dan’s belch poisoned the air with acid cognac fumes “...why didn’t you?”
“Because... because it was part of me. It’d be like getting rid of this.” He held a finger before his eyes. “And anyway I couldn’t be bothered...” He gestured feebly, aware that he was rambling. He’d lost the point of his little speech.
Dan reminded him. “Fernandez, Ralph! Thank Fernandez you didn’t have the op!”
Mirren recalled the sensation he’d experienced on touching Dan’s console: the delicious shiver of terror at the thought that he’d decided against the cut.
A young girl fell into step beside them.
Dan smiled and indicated the tattoo on his bicep.
The kid shrugged. “We could always talk.”
“About what?” Dan asked.
The girl blinked at something intimidating in Dan’s tone, stopped and watched them make their way along the lighted boulevard. They passed jazz clubs and bars named after colony worlds, all-night holo-shows and films from all around the Expansion. The occasional flier roared overhead, drowning out the music.
Mirren clutched Dan’s arm. “Dan...”
The big man looked around.
“What do you think Hunter meant when he said we’d be returning to Earth with some people? Why can’t they go through a ‘face?”
“We’ll find out soon enough, Ralph. Have faith. We’ll soon be pushing again, that’s the main thing. I trust Hunter, whoever the hell he is, whatever he’s planning...”
They passed a cafe and the rich, bitter aroma of fresh coffee drifted out on the hot early morning air. They crossed the street and sat at a table on the sidewalk, ordered coffee and croissants and watched an alien bird, as big as an eagle, skim the length of the street.
Mirren stared at the skyline. Far to the north the interface was on an open phase, and the night sky in the vicinity was bright with the light of an alien sun.
Dan said, “It doesn’t seem like ten years since we were last doing this. Remember the cafe we used a couple of blocks away?” He frowned, trying to recall its name.
“Rousseau’s?” They’d spent many a night on the sidewalk outside the cafe between shifts, watching the bigships at Orly rising into the sky and phasing into the continuum. Life then had seemed a simple fact of fluxing and recuperation, a stable existence which promised a future without threat or change. In retrospect, Mirren could not recall ever looking any further ahead than the next push.
Dan said, “How’s Bobby, Ralph?” in a gentle voice which acknowledged Mirren’s reluctance to talk about his brother.
Of course Mirren had always been aware, back then, of the infinitesimally rare hazards to which Enginemen were prone. But he had always dismissed them with the thought that they could never happen to him.
It had been so long since he had last spoken about his brother that he was not offended now, but almost relieved. He shrugged. “Much the same as he was five years ago. You saw him. He was introspective then, a little withdrawn.” Mirren realised what clichés these were to describe his brother’s condition, almost as bad as when, a couple of years ago, he had told someone that Bobby lived in a world of his own.
“But neurologically? There’s been no further lapse?”
“No, it stabilised itself around twenty-four hours!” He looked up to see Dan watching him. “I should be grateful, really. Bobby was the only Engineman to survive th
e Syndrome.”
“Last time we met you were learning touch-signing.”
“I’m fluent now. At least we can communicate.”
“Do you take him out?”
Mirren felt guilty now that years ago he’d failed to insist that Bobby accompany him on walks around the local park. In the early days, before Bobby became absorbed in his meditation, he’d been uncommunicative, reluctant to talk. He’d turned down all offers of help, refusing even to let Mirren guide him on simple walks. Occasionally of late Mirren had taken him in his flier on high-speed tours of the city, but Bobby spent so much of his time now meditating and studying that the physical had ceased to have much meaning.
“I take him out about once a month or so—not that he seems bothered one way or the other. I think I do it to salve my conscience.”
“Have you ever thought of taking him to the Church?” Dan asked. “He’s a believer, isn’t he?”
Mirren smiled. “He’s not what you’d call an orthodox Disciple, Dan.”
For five years before joining the European Javelin Line, Bobby had pushed boats for the Satori Line out of Rangoon. In the countries of the East where the precepts of Buddhism, Zen and Tao had been taken as read for centuries, the discovery of the nada-continuum had come as no surprise; it was the Nirvana accepted by their philosophies for so long.
Enginemen were looked upon as the enlightened, those who had attained Buddhahood on Earth, and whose destination after this life was Nirvana or the nada-continuum. Bobby had taken this belief as his own even before he became an Engineman, and then he had discovered the Disciples. Now, as he liked to remind Mirren, he’d transcended all Earthly creeds and religions.
Dan said, “Have you decided what you’re going to tell him about Hunter’s offer?”
“No. No, I haven’t...” Mirren stared at the grounds of his coffee. The anticipation of the push was soured by the familiar guilt he experienced whenever he considered his brother.
Casually, Dan said, “Bobby could always take Caspar’s place and push with us, Ralph.” He looked up, his stare a challenge.
“You know I couldn’t do that.”
“It’s what Bobby would want.”
“Even so... I couldn’t allow him to do it. Would you let your brother kill himself just like that?”
“It’s not certain that Bobby would die-” Dan began.
“The medics didn’t give him a very good chance of surviving another flux. But you haven’t answered my question: if you had a brother in Bobby’s condition-”
Dan said, “If the circumstances were the same as Bobby’s... then yes, of course I’d let him flux.”
Mirren smiled. “You’re religious. You’ve got to look at it from my point of view.”
Dan laughed at this. “From your point of view! Ralph, you don’t know how selfish that sounds. Why don’t you look at it from Bobby’s point of view?”
Mirren closed his eyes. “I couldn’t hold myself responsible if anything happened to him.”
“But from Bobby’s perspective, and mine, and that of thousands of other Enginemen, you wouldn’t be responsible. Can’t you accept that?”
As Mirren looked at it, his brother’s condition was made worse by the fact that if he were ever to mind-push a ‘ship again, the chances were that the effort would kill him. He’d die a flux-death, the death that religious Enginemen considered the ultimate exit, but which he, Mirren, considered just as final and pointless as any other death.
Mirren had always thought that no matter how terrible and restricted his brother’s life was, it was an improvement on the oblivion which awaited him upon death.
“Look at it this way,” Dan said. “If you asked Bobby whether he wanted to push the ‘ship, what do you think he’d say?”
Mirren sighed. “He’d jump at the chance.”
“Exactly!” Dan hit the table. “Now, could you honestly live with yourself if you denied Bobby the opportunity to flux with us?”
Mirren closed his eyes. The thought of leaving his brother alone in the apartment, while he went off mind-pushing the smallship...
“But how could I live with myself, Dan, if I sent him to his death?”
“It would be what he wanted,” Dan said gently. “Please, when you get back, explain the situation and give him the choice. Promise me.”
He told himself that Dan was right. There was really no excuse for not telling Bobby; to deny him the right to make the choice would be indefensible.
He found himself nodding.
“Good.” Dan looked at his watch. “Come on, it’s time we were going. The Church closes for the day in a couple of hours.”
“How much further?” Suddenly, the thought of going to the Church no longer appealed.
“Just around the corner.”
Mirren clamped the back of his neck, massaging the ache that had been mounting for the past hour.
Dan was watching him. “You okay?”
Mirren wondered whether to tell him about the flashbacks. “Well...”
Dan stared. “Don’t tell me you’re getting them too?”
Mirren laughed. “The flashbacks? You too? Fernandez, I thought I was going mad.”
“We might be,” Dan grunted. “I don’t understand it. For ten years I’ve remembered nothing about that last trip, and then suddenly I’m reliving, not just remembering, but reliving the events again.”
In the early days after their discharge, when he’d seen more of Dan, they’d both commented on how odd it was that they should all be afflicted with an identical memory loss.
“So what the hell’s going on, Dan?” he asked.
“You tell me... I’ve always wanted to know what happened during and after the crash-landing, and now I suppose I’ll find out.”
They paid the bill and left the cafe.
A warm breeze sprang up from nowhere, lapping over them. Mirren shivered, overtaken suddenly by the bone-wearying ache he’d awoken to the evening before. He wondered if this bout was no more than a psychosomatic reaction to his dilemma over Bobby.
They continued through the streets in silence.
The Church of the Disciples of the Nada-Continuum was an old, converted smallship anchored to an area of wasteground between a burnt-out mosque and a derelict warehouse. It squatted on its belly amid overgrown mounds of bricks, its hydraulic rams long since amputated and its shell a patchwork of rust and old paint. The rear auxiliary engines had been removed and replaced by a set of double doors approached by a rickety flight of wooden steps. The viewscreens along its flanks, and the delta screen above its nose-cone, were concealed by bulky metal units which looked for all the world like refrigerators.
Mirren pointed them out as they crossed the street. “What are they?”
Dan smiled to himself. “You’ll see when we get inside.”
They were not the only Enginemen attending the Church that morning. Others approached from along the street, stood on the steps awaiting entry. Mirren and Dan joined the queue at the foot of the wooden construction. “It’s not usually this busy,” Dan said. “There must be a service on.”
They passed inside. Mirren was surprised first by the size of the place, and then by the atmosphere of reverence that permeated what was, after all, nothing more than a junked spaceship. The surprising dimensions were easily accounted for: the ceiling which had formerly divided the body of the ship into the engineroom and, on the second level, the crews’ lounge, had been removed to create a yawning cavern reminiscent of the nave of a cathedral. In pride of place at the front of the church was a flux-tank—or rather a reasonable facsimile. Above it, the pilot’s cabin had been opened up and fronted with rails to form a gallery for the choristers: six cowled Disciples in gowns of light blue chanted in a language Mirren guessed was Latin. The measured, dolorous tone established the ecclesiastical atmosphere, and other religious appurtenances like pews and burning incense left no doubt that this was a place of worship. Above the altar, affixed to the rails of the ga
llery, was a blue fluorescent infinity symbol. The pews were steadily filling with the devoted who knelt, heads bowed in prayer or contemplation.
Mirren slipped into a pew at the rear, while Dan stood in the aisle and conducted a whispered conversation with a tall, robed figure. As he took his seat he began to wonder what he was doing here, and considered the irony of the fact that in all his years as an Engineman he’d prided himself on never entering any of the similar establishments on the many colony worlds serviced by the Canterbury Line. The Church of the Disciples had been in existence for as long as the starship Lines themselves. Most of the Enginemen he had worked with down the years had been believers, and he had often wondered why he could not believe that what he experienced in the tank was Nirvana. Was it just a cussed streak that would not allow him to follow the majority, even though he secretly knew the truth of their faith; some fatal flaw in his soul which prevented his full absorption into the flux; or the realisation that his fellow Enginemen, like most people, were essentially weak creatures who could not accept the fact of their mortality and needed some bogus abstract belief with which to make their lives bearable?