Engineman

by Eric Brown

  The alien vegetation began as a fibrous matting on the pavement, and the further they drove into the district of cheap tenement rows the more prolific the growth became, climbing the facades of the four-storey buildings, crossing the street in great rafts of gnarled and tangled ground-roots. By the time they arrived at the north end of the Rue Chabrol, only the occasional glimpse of building could be seen beneath the all-consuming plant-life: an odd patch of brickwork here, a cleared window there. Rossilini braked and Hunter peered out at the neighbourhood where his daughter had chosen to make her home. Between the overgrown rows of apartment buildings on either side, the street was a trench filled with a riotous jungle. It was hard to imagine how anyone gained access to the shrouded properties. It occurred to Hunter that perhaps Ella had moved out since his contacts had found her address.

  She might never have received his disc, which would explain why she had not shown up at the restaurant.

  He made out the caged run which penetrated the street jungle, a dark tunnel which passed through the slick green leaves and fronds. He opened the door and climbed out, the heat and the heady scent of alien pollen hitting him in a wave. Sassoon was beside him. “Sir?”

  “It’s okay, Mr Sassoon. Just a little personal pilgrimage.”

  Sassoon glanced down the run. “Do you think it wise?”

  “Stay in the car if you don’t feel up to it.”

  “I didn’t mean...” Sassoon began. “I’m coming with you. You don’t know what kind of creatures live in there.”

  Hunter smiled to himself as he gazed up at the overgrown buildings. “Just artists and anarchists, I suspect, Mr Sassoon.” He stepped into the wire-mesh corridor and entered the green-tinged twilight. At regular intervals, smaller caged runs branched off at right angles, the wire mesh bearing the numbers of the individual buildings. He strode on before Sassoon, who’d drawn his gun and was following warily.

  Hunter stared about him. He could almost believe he’d been miniaturised and set down in the Amazon jungle. On all sides, great blooms and vines had grown through rents in the mesh, impeding their progress.

  He came to the number forty-six painted on a board wired to the mesh on his left. He ducked into the narrow corridor. The collar of mesh finished before the door, and the jungle had poured into the gap as if intent on invading the building. The door was ajar, admitting vines and creepers. Hunter pushed it further open. In the dark hallway he could just make out the shadowy shape of a flight of stairs. He noticed the entrance of a lift, but decided not to trust the mechanical apparatus of such a dilapidated building.

  Sassoon entered behind him.

  “I’ll be able to look after myself now, thank you, Mr Sassoon,” Hunter said.

  His bodyguard nodded. “I’ll stay down here.”

  Hunter climbed the stairs, broken glass and perished linoleum crunching underfoot. Spectacular drifts of fungus covered the walls, flock-textured. Hunter came to the first landing and climbed the second flight of stairs. By the time he reached the fourth floor he was out of breath and more than a little nervous. Dying sunlight slanted through a window, illuminating damp and unpainted walls. Hunter approached a door daubed with the number twenty-four. The words of greeting he had rehearsed over and over were a jumble in his head. Heart hammering, he knocked. At his first touch the door swung open. He found a light switch on the wall and turned it on. For a second he feared that she had indeed moved out, but then revised his opinion. Had she moved out, she would surely have taken her possessions. The narrow hall was stacked with cardboard boxes full of clothes, in lieu of wardrobes; wooden cartons containing chipped cups and plates, pristine canvasses and plastic back-boards for plasma-graphics. He cleared his throat, called out, “Ella?” He moved down the corridor, squeezing past the boxes. Dust covered every horizontal surface, but he suspected that this was more the artist’s aversion to housework than any indication that she’d moved out, for whatever reason, and left her possessions—at least, he hoped so. Of course, there were always other possibilities in a neighbourhood like this...

  “Ella!” His call lingered in the sultry air.

  He pushed open the first door on the left and entered a lounge. It was furnished with an ancient four-piece suite, none of the pieces matching. No carpet, just bare floorboards. The walls were daubed with a yellow and green psychedelic mural. In the corner of the room was a small area of wall-paper, carpet, and a new-looking recliner, situated before a power point and the antenna of a communications vid-screen, but there was no sign of a set. The pathetic show of respectability brought tears to his good eye. He wondered if the screen had been stolen—certainly it would be the only thing in the room worth taking.

  Then he saw the stack of photographs wedged between the cushion and the back-rest of the settee. He sat down, sorted through the thick drift. There were a few pictures of Ella before she left home, at school, on holiday; a slim, pretty olive-skinned girl with long black hair, so painfully like her mother. Most of the photographs were of Ella since arriving on Earth: with a crowd of her bizarre artist friends, at parties and street performances, with the solid, stolid Engineman she lived with. In these pictures, she was a pale, starved-looking shaveskull, and in none of them was she smiling.

  At the very bottom of the pile, Hunter found a picture of Marie, his wife...

  Its sudden appearance, after so many photos of Ella standing seriously beside her work, caused him to gasp. He stared at the photograph. It showed Marie leaning over a sea-wall on braced arms, her shoulders hunched, her gamin’s face mischievous and grinning. So young—Christ, she was so young... He calculated that it had been taken at Zephyr, on the Rim world of New Syria, during one of his too few leave periods. Marie must have been just twenty-two—three years younger than Ella was now—and they had been married just a year. Fernandez, they had been in love. He had known no emotion like it, before or ever since. He’d been consumed at their first meeting, and all through the time of their courtship and marriage, consumed with a love for her that during the next five years had never abated, and consumed with an incommunicable sense of loss, of soul-harrowing grief, when she died giving birth to Ella at the ridiculously young age of twenty-seven.

  He quickly slipped Marie’s picture into the inside pocket of his jacket, and shuffled to a photograph showing Ella standing on a rock in the centre of a lagoon at Zambique. He wondered who had taken it, for he knew for certain that he had not. It showed her with her arms held outstretched behind her, her head back, but the serious posture was belied by her expression: she was laughing despite her best efforts not to, and her resemblance to her mother was painful.

  Fernandez, he had so much to make up for, so much irrational hatred in the early years, so much apathy as she was growing up, so much disaffection that must have seemed to her like casual cruelty, which perhaps it was.

  He had been happily, madly, in love with Marie and looking forward to the birth of a son... and then in the space of minutes Marie was dead and he was presented with the cause of it—a disgustingly healthy baby girl — and though he found it hard to imagine now, looking back with shame, he’d been unable to feel anything but resentment towards his daughter.

  He had mellowed, or so he thought, in his later years, when his grief for Marie abated arid Ella grew into a person in her own right; an attractive, intelligent teenager, even personable when in company, but always mistrustful and reluctant when alone with him. Around the time of her fifteenth birthday, before she’d left the Reach, he began to recognise the mistakes he’d made; though he was totally unable to open up to Ella and apologise or make amends. He had tried to treat her with more understanding, even compassion, hard though that was after so many years of resentment.

  Hunter recalled the time when Conway had suspected that Ella was consorting with the alien tribe which had encamped that summer on the plateau. On reluctantly reading her diary, he had discovered her friendship with a certain alien, and knew that he’d have to end the liaison. The Lho wer
e going down with a devastating plague, and at the time he had not known that humans were unaffected. He felt he had to send her away for her own good, and he recalled the scene in his study when he broke the news to her, relived again his inability to express sympathy or regret.

  He had so, so much to make up for...

  He selected half a dozen photographs of Ella and slipped them into his jacket beside the one of Marie.

  He left the lounge and made his way down the hall. He came to the open door of a small bedroom, so bereft of personal possessions he guessed it must belong to the Engineman. The next door was locked. It could only be Ella’s bedroom. He knocked. “Ella?” he called, his heart racing. “Ella!”

  The timber jamb was rotten. He leaned his shoulder against the door. On the third shove it gave and he entered the room. He found a switch on the wall and turned on the light.

  The was no sign of Ella in the bedroom, but there was every sign of her work. Canvasses and plasma-graphic boards in various stages of completion leaned against the walls, stacked so deep in some places that there was hardly room to move around the bed. Hunter flipped through the paintings and graphics, pulling out those that caught his eye. He experienced a strange sensation of pride in his daughter’s accomplishments, and at the same time the guilt of a voyeur: looking through Ella’s opus was like reading her mind. In canvas after canvas, again and again, he experienced her pain and anger, and he felt the weight of regret and responsibility settle upon him. I made her what she is, he told himself; and by the evidence of her work she is a very unhappy person. Her forte was the depiction of the human form, impressionistically torn and fragmented to suggest the symbolic annihilation of the subject’s psyche or soul. In many of the paintings he recognised diffracted aspects of Ella herself.

  Then he came across a portrait of himself. He thought—he hoped—it might be an early work; certainly it did not possess the technical accomplishment of her later work, and it was certainly influenced. It showed a head, all cadaver—grey with a quarter splotch of crimson, its features twisted and misplaced, the effect almost Mephistophelean. In its brutality and despair it was almost a pastiche of the twentieth-century artist Francis Bacon. Hunter replaced it behind a stack of others, loath to acknowledge the import of the painting, and moved around the room. Pinned to the wall by the head of the bed was a photograph of Ella and the Engineman, Schwartz—according to the name-tag on his silvers—similar to the one she had sent him. In this one, Ella was riding her lover piggy-back, bare legs wrapped around his waist. Her smile contrasted with the total lack of animation on the face of the Engineman. The Disciple’s tattoo on Ella’s forearm was prominent.

  He took the snap from the wall, sat down on the bed and stared at it. He thought back to the time he had received the photograph from Ella, seven years ago. That year had proved a turning point in his life. During that long, hot summer, events had occurred which made him question the morality of the Organisation and his position within it. Danzig militia had put down a rebellion on Esperance, imposed a puppet dictator, and proceeded to rule the planet with brutal efficiency. Thousands of innocent civilians were interrogated and never heard from again. Over the years, Hunter had risen to a position in the Danzig hierarchy from which he could form a historical overview, thanks to records and data hitherto unavailable to him, of the success and failure of the Organisation’s political regimes around the Rim. Propaganda had suggested that they were hard but fair, bringing prosperity to the planets they pacified. In fact, Hunter learned that the Organisation’s record on the planets they had taken over was abysmal: they ruled with terror; their human rights record was appalling, and the only prosperity they brought was to the ruling elite on the planets they took over—the vast majority of the citizens lived well below the poverty level. Hunter rapidly became discontent and dissatisfied; his position of power and privilege was soured, came to mean nothing. And then, to end it all, he discovered that the plague that had very nearly wiped out the Lho-Dharvon people had been manufactured, in retaliation for the aliens’ armed opposition, by the Organisation itself.

  In the middle of this plethora of discovery, Ella’s photograph had arrived, the declaration of her independence and conversion. Over the months, it had worked slowly on him... More and more he became curious as to why exactly his daughter had converted, and at the same time, perhaps even subconsciously, he was seeking a philosophy to replace his shattered faith in the Danzig Organisation. He had read books, spoken to Enginemen and Disciples, made contacts with heads of the Church. He was duly initiated, after a rigorous vetting by a naturally suspicious jury of Disciples, while still a Danzig executive. For a couple of years he’d remained with the Organisation, and then dropped quickly from sight and worked actively for the resistance.

  Soon after that, the Lho had contacted him.

  He sat on the bed and stared at the photograph. He ached to talk to her, to explain himself. He placed the picture on the bed beside him, and only then noticed the disc. Beneath it was the small photograph of himself he had sent along with the disc. He picked up the photo; it had been screwed up—worn, white lines crisscrossed his face—but then meticulously straightened and flattened out, as if Ella had had a change of heart following her initial reaction of anger. He picked up the disc, curious as to how his message sounded a month after making the recording. He found the activate slide on its base and thumbed it on.

  “I’ve seen the light, Ella,” his voice boomed around the room. “I need to see you-” There was a second of static, and then loud music; Mahler’s fifth. Hunter forwarded the disc, played it again—still music. He ran it to the end, but still his words were lost beneath the symphony. She had heard his voice, and quickly obliterated it with the integral recording facility tuned to a classical channel.

  Which, he guessed, pretty much summed up her feelings on hearing his voice again after ten years. But what about the photograph? Surely she would not have bothered to straighten it out if her feelings towards him were purely ones of hatred? Perhaps her recording over his message had been an impulsive response, like her screwing up the photo, but one which she could not undo, and which maybe later she regretted?

  Or was he being baselessly optimistic?

  He was startled by a noise from the hall. Ella, returning? He jumped up and moved to the door, his pulse quickening. At first he thought it was an animal perched on the sill of the open window—an escaped primate—but in the light spilling past his from the bedroom he made out the figure of a small girl, staring at him.

  “What do you want?” she cried in rapid French.

  Hunter said, “I might ask the same of you.” The girl was perhaps ten or twelve, tiny, bird-boned and filthy.

  “I’m looking after the apartment for Ella! Who are you?”

  He gestured to the paintings in the room. “I’m an art dealer. I buy her work.”

  She looked at him, suspicious. “Ella feeds me, gives me creds.”

  “Do you know where she is?”

  The girl cocked her head. “Might do.”

  Hunter pulled out his wallet, counted fifty credit notes. The girl stared, open-mouthed. He held out the notes, just beyond her reach. “Where’s Ella?” he asked.

  “She left Earth,” the girl said. She made a grab for the credits and almost fell from her perch.

  Hunter was aware of his increased heartbeat. “Where did she go?” he heard himself asking.

  “To the Rim. Don’t know which planet. Went to see her father. She told me.”

  Hunter considered the irony of it, the cruelty. He felt himself rocking on his feet. “When did she go? How long ago?”

  The girl shrugged. “Two, three days ago. Gimme the creds!” She made a grab, snatched them this time, and leapt from the sill and down the fire-escape.

  Two or three days ago...

  Hunter ran from the apartment and down the stairs. Only when he was halfway down the last flight did he remember Sassoon. He slowed his pace, resumed his dignity. />
  Sassoon was kicking his heels in the hall. “Find what you wanted?”

  Hunter brushed past him without replying. He turned to say. “On the top floor you’ll find a room full of paintings. Tomorrow I want you to ensure they are safely taken into storage.”

  Sassoon looked at him oddly. “Very good, sir.”

  Hunter hurried back to the car, his mind a confusion of ugly thoughts. He felt like one of Ella’s diffracted, annihilated subjects. He sat in brooding silence as the Mercedes purred at speed through the darkened Paris streets.

  Once back at the morgue he told his team that on no account was he to be disturbed, and retreated to his room. He sat in the darkness and stared through the window at the infrequent points of light.

  Ella had left for the Reach two or three days ago. Yesterday the interface had been sabotaged, isolating the planet... His only hope was that they had turned her back as a Disciple, but he knew that this was unlikely. As the daughter of Hirst Hunter, the most wanted man on the Rim, Ella would have been allowed entry and followed, in the hope that she might lead them to him... And when she failed to do so, they would take her in for questioning.