Engineman

by Eric Brown

  Caroline? he said. He moved his arms in the clumsy description of an embrace, touched her familiar warm and slender body. He was aroused now despite himself. She found him and he moaned without a sound, ran his fingers through her black invisible hair. He recognised Caroline’s brand of love-making from the past, went along with it as though they had never parted, and when climax came it was as he remembered it from many years ago, a brief ecstasy soon gone—like a second in flux but not as satisfying. Even the unusual circumstances of the union, the fact that he could not see Caroline, that the source of his pleasure was as it were disembodied, could only intimate a greater rapture and not fulfil in itself.

  The invisible weight of her lay against him now, heavy and sated after orgasm, which Thorn had experienced through the silent contractions of her body. She kissed him, and he felt salt tears fall on his face.

  Caroline... Why... ?

  Her lips moved against his cheek, her breath hot as she formed words. It was like being kissed by a ghost, bestowed silent prophecy.

  In the calm aftermath of the act, Thorn began to feel revulsion. The bizarre nature of their love-making sickened him. He felt a return of the old guilt which he thought he had long since banished. It was as if the union was a symbol of their relationship to date; for years Thorn had played at loving someone whose essence was invisible to him, while Caroline for her part had wasted her life chasing someone who was emotionally forever elsewhere.

  He cried out now and pushed her from the bed. He felt her fall and almost heard her cry of pain. Get out, Caroline! Go away! He faced where he thought she might be, but could not be sure. I don’t want you, for Godsake! All I want-

  She attacked him then. She came at him with painful blows and slaps, and no doubt cries and accusations. Thorn was aware only of the physical violence, the punches that struck from nowhere without warning. And he was aware, too, that he deserved the assault.

  He lay on the bed, battered and exhausted. Caroline had ceased her attack. He had no way of knowing whether she was still in the room, but he sensed her continued presence. I don’t know why you came here, he said. I don’t know what you want from me...

  He half-expected another hail of blows, and flinched in anticipation. But none came.

  When he thought he was alone he dragged the bedsheets around him protectively, lay back and recalled Caroline’s tears on his cheeks.

  There could only be one explanation for her visit.

  * * * *

  Thorn felt himself weaken further during the hours that followed.

  He waited with mounting apprehension, his body covered in chill sweat. Visually it was four o’clock in the afternoon, but the real time was around midnight. It seemed a lot longer than the delayed eight hours before Caroline entered his line of sight.

  She moved out of it quickly as she came to the side of his bed. She reached out and touched his arm, and Thorn expected to feel her now, but of course her touch had startled him eight hours ago. Then, Thorn had turned his head abruptly, and now he saw Caroline full on. She wore only a white gown and nothing beneath, and she was crying.

  He watched as she undressed him, and the sight of her doing this now brought a hot flush of shame and resentment to his cheeks. The sensation of her touch had passed, but as he saw her slip from her gown and climb onto him he experienced a resurgence of the desire that had overwhelmed him eight hours earlier.

  The Thorn-of-now lay still in his bed. He was making love to Caroline, but, with his memories of the physical act already eight-hours old, he felt like a voyeur in the head of his former self. He could see her, frenzied blurs of flesh and hair and tongue; he could smell her, the perfume she used and the sweat of sex that overcame

  it; and he could hear her small moans of pleasure, her repeated cry of his name as she approached climax.

  He heard his slurred question: “Caroline... Why...?”

  They had finished their loving-making and she lay in his arms. “Because I loved you, Max,” she had said. “Because I still love you.”

  He knew what happened next. Again he experienced that overwhelming sense of revulsion, brought about by guilt. He watched helplessly as he pushed her from the bed. “Get out, Caroline!” he heard himself cry. “Get away!” He saw her expression of pain, the acceptance of rejection in her eyes, and had it been possible he would have stopped himself saying what he said next. “I don’t want you, for Godsake! All I want-”

  She came at him and hit him again and again.

  The Thorn-of-now flinched, as if the blows he could see coming might indeed inflict pain upon him; he raised his arms as if to protect himself.

  Caroline backed off and yelled at him.

  He heard himself say: “I don’t know why you came here...I don’t know what you want from me...”

  Caroline was crying. “I came because I loved you, Max. I came to say goodbye.”

  She lowered her gaze and murmured, more to herself than to Thorn: “Black died two days ago.”

  Eight hours later Thorn lay quite still.

  * * * *

  He deteriorated rapidly over then next few days.

  The knowledge of Black’s death robbed him of any will he might have had to fight. In his final hours he experienced a gradual diminution of his senses. His hearing left him first—then his taste and sense of smell, though he hardly noticed their absence. Later his vision dimmed and went out, and he was aware of himself only as a small, blind intelligence afloat in an infinite ocean.

  Soon even the awareness of his physical self diminished, and then the last sense of all, the cerebral intuition of his own identity, left him too. A familiar euphoria flooded him, and the man who had been Thorn knew, before he died, that he was being absorbed into the vastness of the cosmos he had known until then as the nada-continuum.

  * * * *

  The Pineal-Zen Equation

  I’m dropping acid shorts in the Supernova slouchbar when the call comes through. Gassner stares from the back of my hand, veins corrugating his mugshot. Gassner’s white—fat and etiolated like a monster maggot—but my Bangladeshi metacarpus tans him mulatto. He’s a xenophobic bastard and the fact that he comes over half-caste on the handset never fails to make me smile.

  I like irony almost as much as I dislike Gassner.

  He’s muttering now, some stuff about young junkies.

  “You wrecked?” he queries, peering.

  “I’m fine,” I lie.

  He wants me in ten. He has customers coming. Distraught parents who have evidence their daughter was butchered. “This is big-time, girl. Some high-up in the Wringsby-Saunders outfit. Don’t screw it.” I feel like telling him to auto-fellate on a cannibal personatape, but I resist the urge. Maybe later, when I have the funds to fly. He still owns me, still has his fat face stamped on the back of my hand, good as any brand.

  But it’s only a matter of time now.

  I’ve been out for hours. What I did earlier needed a good hit to help me forget. My head’s dead and so are my legs. I stagger through a battlescene of prostrate bodies and make it to the chute.

  Outside it’s night, and the crowds are beginning to hit the streets. I brazen my way across a packed sidewalk, earning taunts on three counts. I’m a telepath and a junkie—the two go together—and I have no crowd-sense. I admit everything with an insolent yeah-yeah to whoever’s complaining and climb aboard the moving boulevard. A breeze, fresh onetime but polluted now with city stench, does its best to revive me. I ride the slide a block and alight at 3rd. Feeling better already, I dodge touts and beggars and home in on the Union towerpile.

  “Bangladesh!” The legless oldster grins in my direction, dumped like garbage by the entrance. How does he do it? He gouged his eyes out yearsback and still he knows when I’m coming. Could be he’s on to the scent of my hair oil, or even my crotch. His tag’s Old Pete, and he’s my regular. I slip him creds and he makes sure I’m stocked with ‘gum when I see Gassner. “Any nearer?” he asks now.

&nb
sp; I try a probe. All I get is jumblefuzz. He’s shielded. We have a game, me and him. He reckons he was someone famous, onetime, and I have to guess who. His face is certainly familiar, disregarding the absent nose and evacuated eye-sockets. He went Buddhist, yearsback. Quit the race and mutilated himself to indicate his repudiation of this illusion. I often wonder what it was that drove him to such extreme action. Maybe he was seeking enlightenment, or perhaps he’d found it. Once again I concede ignorance, pass him ten and chew ‘gum in the upchute.

  I’m feeling great when I hit the 33rd. Gassner has his office shelved this level, though ‘office’ is a grand title for his place of work. It’s little more than a cubby filled with Batan II terminals and link-ups and however much of his blubber isn’t spilling through the hatch. I enter bright, my metabolism pumping ersatz adrenalin. It doesn’t do to let him see me any other way. He’d gloat if he knew how low I was at being his slave.

  A metal desk-top, the bonnet of a pre-fusion automobile, pins his fat up against the floor-to-ceiling window. He’s scanning case notes and his grunt acknowledges the fact that I got in with about three seconds to spare. The only light in the place is the silver glow from the computer screen. I clamber over this and sit cross-legged in the hammock where Gassner slings his meat between shifts. Every ten seconds the chiaroscuro gloom is relieved from outside by the electric blue sweep of a misaligned photon display, strobing sub-lim flashes of ‘Patel’s Masala Dosa’ into our forebrains.

  I slip my ferronniere from its case and loop it around my head. And instantly all the minds in the building, previously mere distant flickering candles, torch painfully. I strain out the extraneous mindmush, editing the occasional burst of brainhowl from psychopathic individuals, and work at keeping my head together.

  Gassner, of course, is shielded. It wouldn’t be good policy for someone who employed a telepath to go about with his head open. I’m shut out, persona non grata in his meatball. Times are when I’d love to read my master. Then again, times are when I’m glad I’m barred entry. I read too many screwballs in the course of a day without Gassner opening up.

  Seconds later Mr and Mrs distraught roll in.

  The guy is Kennedy, and he’s playing it cool. I’ll be lying if I call him distraught; on the Richterscale of personal upheaval he’d hardly register. He’s chewing djamba to calm himself and he carries his bonetoned body with a certain hauteur. Or call it arrogance. Under one arm he has the silver envelope containing the evidence, and under the other his wife. She’s Scandinavian, beautiful in better circumstances, but grief plays havoc with good looks and right now Mrs Kennedy is ugly. I get the impression that Mr Kennedy is embarrassed by the degree of his wife’s distress.

  They sit down while Gassner murmurs pleasantries, then jerks a thumb up at me. “Bangladesh,” he says. “My assistant.”

  My name’s Sita, but ever since the invasion I got the national tag. Here in the West they reckon it’s kinda cute. I’m just glad I wasn’t born in Bulgaria.

  My presence, perched aloft, surprises Mrs Kennedy. She flickers a timid smile, then sees the connected-minds symbol on my cheek. She recoils mentally; she has no wish to have her grief made any more public than she can allow. I think reassurance at her, telling her that I have no intention of prying—at least, not too much. There’s no way I’m probing deep into the angst-ridden maelstrom of her psyche. Grief and regret and self-pity boil down there, and I have my own quota of these emotions to contend with at the best of times.

  As for Mr Kennedy... He’s shielded, so I don’t waste sweat trying to probe. And anyway I already know enough about him, everything I want to know, and even things his little Oslo-born third wife doesn’t know.

  He nods at me, his gaze coolly observant.

  I give him my best wink.

  And my presence here is token, now. Gassner questions them and they answer, and I probe Mrs Kennedy to ensure veracity, not that I really need to. I had the facts of the case even before she crossed the threshold.

  Becky Kennedy was snatched inside an uptown gymnasium at ten this morning, her bodyguard taken out with a neural-incapacitator. Their assailant came and went so fast that the bodyguard saw nothing. Around noon the Kennedys, waiting anxiously in their suburban ranch, received a silver envelope.

  Kennedy glances at Gassner, who nods. He lays the envelope on he desk and amid fresh whimperings from his wife slides out a glossy photograph. I lean forward. It isn’t pretty. The still shows a young girl, spread-eagled in a leotard, with a massive bullet wound in her pubescent chest. Here dead eyes stare at the camera, frozen with terror.

  “No note or message of any kind?” Gassner wheezes.

  Kennedy replaces the photograph in the envelope. “Nothing. Just this,” he says, and adds, without the slightest hint of appeal in his tone, “Can you get my daughter back, Mr Gassner?”

  My boss fingers the folds of fat at his neck. “I’m almost certain we can, Mr Kennedy.”

  “Within the three-day limit? She’s due on the Vienna sub-orbital next month. We’d like her to make it.”

  And Mrs Kennedy breaks down again. She knows that the majority of missing kids are never found, except after the three-day limit. Despite Gassner’s reassurances, she can’t believe she’ll ever see her little Becky again.

  Gassner is saying, “The fact that your daughter’s abductor sent you this photograph indicates to me that what we have here is no ordinary abduction.” By which he means that Becky might not end up as the meat in a necrophilic orgy.

  “My guess is that you’ll receive a ransom demand for your daughter pretty soon. My Agency will handle the negotiations. On top of whatever ransom demand is made, my fee for the case is two million creds.”

  Kennedy waves. “Just get my daughter back, Mr Gassner. And you’ll get your fee.”

  “Excellent. I’m glad to see that someone appreciates how dangerous our line of work can be. We are dealing with criminal psychopaths, Mr Kennedy. No price can fully compensate for the dangers involved.”

  But two million creds will do nicely, thanks... Two millions that Gassner needs desperately. Trade is bad nowadays, and Gassner is struggling to keep his fat head above the choppy water-level of Big-City business.

  He arranges to keep in touch and the Kennedys quit. I jump down and squat by the hatch, watching them go. “You got everything?” Gassner wheezes.

  I nod. “Everything I need.”

  Gassner catches my eye as I’m about to leave. “Hey—and if you find the body before they get the ransom demand, you know how to work it, girl.”

  I wink, point a blaster made out of fingers to show that I’m on his wavelength—but his instructions worry me. Does he suspect?

  “I’m flying, Gassner,” I say.

  “Hey, how’s Joe? I haven’t seen him around.”

  The bastard sure knows how to land a cruel one. “Joe’s just fine,” I lie. I pray Allah give me strength to make minestrone of his meatball. But what the hell? “Ciao,” I call, blow him a kiss and quit.

  * * * *

  Drifting...

  I was drifting monthsback when I found Joe Gomez. Drifting? It’s a state of mind as well as a physical act. You can’t have one without the other; they’re sort of mutually inter-dependent. To drift, get high on whatever’s-your-kick, fill your head with some sublime and unattainable goal, and hit the night. Ride the moving boulevard a-ways, alongside the safe-city civvies out for the thrill of slumming, and when their mundane minds become just too much, quit the boulevard and try out the mews and alleyways. Drift forever and lose track of time. There’s something for everyone down there; was even something for me.

  Back then I was a screwed up, neurotic wreck. My past was a time in my head I tried to forget about, and my present wasn’t so strawberries-and-cream, either. A second-grade telepath indentured to a fifth-rate, one-man investigative Agency. I worked a twelve-hour shift and the work was hard: try probing a mind seething with evil sometime. I had another ten years of this han
d-to-mouth, mind-to-mind existence ahead of me, and there were times when I thought I could take no more. If I survived the ten years I could leave the Agency, discard my ferronniere and let my telesense atrophy—but even then I’d always be aware that taken as a race we weren’t up to much... So I had no hopes for the future and the only way I could take the present was to chew my ‘gum and live from day to day. Even so, I neglected myself. I’d go days without eating; I was never fat, but after a stretch of working and drifting and starving- I’d be famine-thin, wasted.

  I suppose the drifting helped, though. It was part of the day to day routine. My goal? You’d laugh—but they say if you seek long enough, you’ll find. And I found. My goal was someone.

  I had no idea who. I sometimes kid myself I was looking for Joe all along, that I knew he existed out there among the millions and it was just a matter of time before I found him. But that’s just old retrospect, playing tricks. Truth is, I was looking for a good and pure mind to prove to myself that we weren’t all bad, that hope existed.