Engineman

by Eric Brown

  Mirren thought of Bobby, the certainty of his belief. He felt a deep emptiness like an ache inside him. There were times when he wanted nothing more than to share in the comforting faith that this life was not everything.

  Dan joined him, seating himself quietly.

  “What’s going on?” Mirren whispered. The chanting had increased in volume and tempo and celestial organ music played.

  “It’s the funeral service of an Engineman,” Dan told him. “A believer from Nanterre. Heine’s disease.”

  Heine’s...

  Heine’s was a neurological virus which attacked the victim’s nervous system, a highly contagious meningital-analogue that had come through the interface three years ago from the newly-discovered world of El Manaman. There was no cure for the infected, who usually died within a few years of contracting the disease.

  The organ music ceased abruptly. The chanting continued, each chorister sustaining a long, mournful note. The lighting in the chamber dimmed, and Mirren was put in mind of the half-light of an engine-room immediately before phase-out. Then the chanting ceased and was replaced by a familiar, low-pitched hum. Mirren was suddenly flooded with memories and he realised that, for him, this little stage-show would soon be played out for real. He was choked with emotion. Tears welled in his eyes. Through the viewscreens let into the flank of the ‘ship, the cobalt blue of an ersatz nada-continuum, streaked with marmoreal streamers of white light, gave the illusion that the smallship was actually phasing-out. He understood then the function of the bulky units on the outside of the ‘ship that he had noticed earlier. Around him, Enginemen murmured in appreciation.

  The robed figure Dan had spoken to earlier climbed into the pulpit beside the flux-tank. The lighting in the Church dimmed; a spot-light picked out the High Priest as he pushed back his cowl to reveal his bald head. The chanting ceased, along with the low-pitched hum, and the congregation fell silent.

  “Brothers and Sisters,” said the High Priest, his voice resonating in the chamber. “On behalf of the Church of the Disciples of the Nada-Continuum and our departed colleague, I thank you for attending. Let us pray...”

  Around Mirren, Enginemen and Enginewomen knelt. Mirren followed suit, feeling self-conscious in his ignorance.

  “We give thanks to the Continuum/” the Priest intoned, “The Sublime, the Infinite/ Into whose munificence we pass/ At the end of this cruel illusion...”

  Spontaneously, the congregation took up the chant. “We give thanks...” Mirren mumbled along, wishing the service would end so that he could escape.

  When the congregation had repeated the verse, four dark figures in robes stepped slowly up the aisle, swinging censers and exclaiming in Latin. The scented smoke filled the air, roiling through the beam of the spotlight. The censer-bearers came to the altar and stood on either side of the flux-tank, still chanting. They knelt, heads bowed.

  The Priest continued, “We have lived, we are mortal/ For our mortality we give thanks/ Without this illusion we would be without immortality...”

  Around Mirren, Enginemen started up,. “We have lived...”

  The words charged the air, creating an atmosphere that even Mirren, as a none believer, had to admit was powerful, even emotional.

  The low-pitched humming of phase-out resumed, a bass note more felt in the solar plexus than heard.

  Then, six pall-bearers made their way slowly down the aisle, a streamlined silver coffin on their shoulders. They halted before the flux-tank and placed the coffin reverently upon the slide-bed. Mirren made out the decal of the old Taurus Line painted on the lid of coffin below a blurred pix of the dead Engineman. ‘

  “Brothers and Sisters,” the High Priest intoned, “we are gathered here today to bless the mortal remains of a fellow Engineman. He has made the great leap to the ultimate we have all experienced, and to which we will all return, and for his release we give thanks. Edward Macready served twenty years pushing the Pride of Idaho for the Taurus Line...”

  The Priest went on, but Mirren heard nothing for the pounding of his pulse in his ears. He seemed to be aware of the proceedings around him as if from a great distance; he felt suddenly isolated with the burden of his knowledge.

  He clutched Dan’s arm. “I knew Macready!” he hissed.

  Dan glanced at him. “You did? I’m sorry...” And he returned his gaze to the front.

  “You don’t understand—I was with him when he died!”

  Dan leaned over and hissed, “That’s impossible! He had Heine’s. He’d’ve been quarantined until he died-”

  “For chrissake, I was with him. He broke into the ‘port. I stopped him from trying to kill himself. We sat talking for a couple of hours.” Mirren recalled the scotch. “We even shared a bottle.”

  “You sure it was the same guy?”

  “How many other Macready’s have pushed for the Taurus Line and died recently?” He tried to keep the panic from his voice.

  “But Heine’s cases are supposed to be kept in isolation.”

  “Then the bastard escaped. He wanted to throw himself into the interface. He even told me he was ill.”

  Around them, Enginemen murmured their disapproval.

  Dan gripped Mirren’s elbow. “How do you feel?”

  His stomach turned. “Terrible...” He was shaking again.

  Dan ran a hand through his hair. He looked at Mirren. “We’re going. We’ve got to get you to a hospital.”

  Mirren gave a hollow laugh. “Isn’t that a little too late?”

  They were already out of their seats and edging along the pew, disturbing disgruntled Enginemen as they went. They hurried to the exit, and behind him Mirren heard the priest intone, “Let us now rejoice that Edward Macready has cast off this cruel illusion...”

  * * * *

  Chapter Twelve

  Ella leaned expertly into the bend. The snow-capped peaks of the Torreon mountains stood high and distant to her right, and to her left was the ever-present sunset. She came into the straight and accelerated, luxuriating in the feel of the headwind, the illusion of liberty gained through speed and an open road.

  She might have been physically free, but mentally she was the prisoner of her thoughts. She could not shake from her head the images of Eddie and Max, Jerassi and Rodriguez. They had given their lives willingly; Eddie through despair, and the others for a cause far greater than their lives, and maybe through despair, too. They were all in a far better place now, but that didn’t make the pain of her bereavement any easier to bear. Ella had faith, she believed in the joyous afterlife that awaited everyone, but all she asked was for a little joy in this life, too.

  She had been on the road an hour, stopping and pulling into the cover at the side of the road only when she spotted vehicles up ahead. She had no doubt that, after the destruction of the interface, the militia would be all the more vigilant in their search for possible accomplices. So far she had seen only civilian vehicles, farm trucks and the occasional private car, and fortunately not many of either.

  Now she slowed as she came to the last bend before her destination, rounded it and brought the bike to a halt.

  Ahead, the central plateau lowered itself in ever-widening steps down to the coast. Each semi-circular terrace was bountiful with wild jungle and carefully cultivated tropical gardens, ablaze with bougainvillea and a dozen varieties of alien flowers. Dwellings of different designs occupied the levels, from traditional villas to A-frames, ziggurats in white ceramics to cluster-domes like so many over-blown soap bubbles. But more spectacular than the gardens and mansions was the feature that gave the Falls its name. Perhaps a hundred waterfalls poured cleanly from level to level, perfectly geometrical like arcs of blue glass, each maintaining the water-level of as many dazzling lagoons. The sight always struck Ella as breathtakingly beautiful.

  She kick-started the bike and set off, but not in the direction of the residences. Perhaps because she feared the impending meeting with her father, or because his villa held fewer happ
ier memories than where she was heading, she turned right along the track which switch-backed up the steep face of the hillside.

  She braked at a bend in the track before she reached the top. In the sudden silence she heard the musical cascade of splashing water. She concealed the bike beside the track, ducked under the branches of a palm tree and found herself-suddenly on the very edge of the lagoon.

  The sight of the oval sink brimming with bright blue water released a flood of happy memories. The sanguine light of the sunset, filtering through the surrounding foliage, gave the scene a tint of rose which corresponded with her recollections. The unbroken arc of water which tipped from the rockface high above might have been the very same that had surged down ten years ago. There was the flat rock she had used as a diving platform, and there, in the very centre of the lagoon, was the camel’s hump.

  Between the age of twelve and fifteen she had spent at least one day of every weekend here. During her holidays, summer and winter, she had often defied her father’s wishes and camped overnight. What had made the place such an attraction, apart from its obvious beauty, was the fact that it was secret—a place she could call her own, a paradise from which her father and her minders were excluded.

  Then, in the summer holidays of her fourteenth year, she’d discovered that someone else used her lagoon. What could have been a crushing blow turned out to be a miracle that made her secret extra-special.

  She recalled the evening as if it were yesterday.

  Her father was having guests for dinner, and he wanted Ella present to serve the food and pour the drinks and talk about how well she was doing at school, but the draw of the lagoon was too much. She had slipped from the house and ran up the zigzag track to the final bend before the summit.

  She had pushed her way through the fringe of shrubs and...

  At first she thought the figure standing on the camel’s hump of rock in the centre of the lagoon was a naked boy of around her own age. Suffused with rage and indignation, she stepped forward to shout or remonstrate.

  Then she stopped. Her rage evaporated, replaced by fear—fear at having her expectations so thoroughly subverted—for the boy was not a boy at all. Ella experienced a sudden, chill dread of the unfamiliar, the unknown.

  The boy was not a boy, but an alien; a member of the Lho-Dharvo people. It was tall and spectacularly elongated, and Ella’s first reaction was revulsion, even though there was something beautiful about the tone of its copper-bronze skin.

  Its stance on the rock was not a human stance. It stood with its arms outstretched slightly behind it, its head tilted back, eyes closed.

  A shiver coursed down her spine.

  This was the first Lho-Dharvon Ella had ever seen, though she had watched anthropological films about them on vid-screen, and read articles in magazines and on discs. They were a tribal people, nomadic for part of the year, who herded animals similar to goats and lived off the land. They were at the stage of their evolution that corresponded to Homo sapien’s stone-age, and a xeno-anthropologist working with them over thirty years ago had recorded their religious beliefs in a work known as the Book of the Lho. They lived on all four continents of the Reach, in conditions ranging from polar to desert. Ella had never heard mention of the fact that a tribe was living so close to the Falls.

  She watched the alien for the next ten minutes. It maintained its odd pose, unmoving. Wanting to get closer, Ella edged around the lagoon, always ensuring that she was concealed by shrubbery. At last she was as close as she could get to the creature, on an overhang of rock above the water, concealed by scant, sprouting grass. She knelt and stared down.

  She could not tell to which sex it belonged. Where its reproductive organ should have been was nothing more than a slight protuberance. It was so thin and long that it seemed that its torso and limbs had been stretched. She stared and stared, and could not decide whether she saw more of its alienness or its humanity: one moment she was taken in by its familiar features and thought it human, and the next it appeared horribly alien in its crude mimicry of the human form. Watching the alien was like looking at an optical illusion that the brain had worked out at one second, and lost the next.

  Its eyes were massive, bulging and lidded like those of a toad. Its nose was almost non-existent, two tiny slits, and its mouth was similarly atrophied. Thin lips curved around the hull of its jaw in a thin, stoic, reptilian line.

  Ella was wondering whether she had seen enough when the alien opened its eyes—its lids dropping from underneath, she saw—and stared directly at her. In panic she tried to scramble away, but lost her footing and slipped from the overhang. She struck her head as she fell, and in a second of panic she was aware of the warm, cloying water enveloping her as she slipped into oblivion.

  She had no idea how long she was unconscious. When she came to her senses she was lying on her side on the flat rock she used as a diving platform. She tried to sit up, and cried out in pain. The back of her head throbbed as if someone was hitting it from the inside with a hammer. She touched her hair, and her fingers came away smeared with blood. She peered at the collar of her blouse and saw that that too was blood-soaked. At the thought of how her father might react, she quickly removed her blouse, crouched at the water’s edge and scrubbed it thoroughly.

  Only then did she recall the alien. She looked across to the camel’s hump on which it had stood, but it was no longer there. Then she looked up at the overhang from which she’d fallen, a good ten metres above her. There was no tide in the pool, of course. There was no way she could have fetched up here without...

  Hard on the realisation that the alien had saved her life, she experienced first revulsion that the creature had actually touched her, and then a profound amazement that something so... so alien had bothered to save her life—the kind of amazement she might have felt had she been saved by a monkey or a bear.

  Then she saw the alien. It was crouching three metres from her, its long shins drawn up before its chest, its elongated head peering at her from above the peaks of its bony knees.

  Ella jumped up in fright—at the same time trying to drag on her blouse to cover her nakedness—but the pain in her head forced her down again. Sobbing, she fumbled with the wet, clinging material, finally getting it on and fastening the studs.

  All the time she watched the alien, as if it might spring up and attack her at any second.

  When it did move, she was ready. The alien unfolded itself to its full height and took a step towards her. She scrambled to her feet, trying to ignore the insistent throbbing in her head. She backed off, sobbing in fear and confusion.

  “Don’t come near me!” she screamed. “Why did you have to come here anyway?” And she knelt and found a rock and hurled it at the frozen alien. It missed by a long way, sailing over its head, but the creature never flinched. It regarded Ella without expression as she ran off through the bushes to the track.

  By the time she reached her father’s villa she was sick with exhaustion and shame. The party had broken up—she must have been unconscious for longer than she’d thought. Her minder was swimming in the artificial lagoon behind the house, and her father was in the lounge, staring through the picture window at the sunset. He didn’t even look around as Ella hurried to her room. She showered and washed her bloody clothes, hanging them on her balcony rail to dry, then lay on her bed and thought through the events of that evening, the alien and her reaction to it. The contusion at the base of her skull was the size of a racquet-ball, but that had nothing to do with the fact that she slept little that night.

  For disobeying her father’s orders and not attending the party, she was not allowed out of the villa for a week. In the circumstances she could think of no worse punishment. She wanted nothing more than to find the alien, to make amends for her ungrateful behaviour.

  She used the week to good effect; she remained in her room and made a gift for the Lho-Dharvon. On the first day of her freedom, she rushed up to the lagoon. She waited for hours
but there was no sign of the alien. The following day she returned, and her heart jumped as she pushed through the bushes and saw, on the rock in the centre of the lagoon, the slim golden Lho, arms outstretched behind it, head in the air. She moved around the water’s edge, her resolve to confront the being and apologise diminishing with a renewal of her uneasiness at the creature’s very alienness.

  She crouched on the flat rock and watched for perhaps thirty minutes. At the end of that time, it opened its eyes and gracefully lowered its arms. It did not seem surprised to see her.