Engineman

by Eric Brown

  We move outside and Spider and I slap palms and go our separate ways. Little Becky Kennedy will be alive again in a short while. Thirty minutes ago Spider rushed a medic-squad to the gym to retrieve her corpse, and soon she’ll be respiring normally in the resurrection ward, the attack edited from her memory, looking forward to whatever it is little girls look forward to nowadays. Her sub-orbital trip to Vienna, maybe.

  I ride the boulevard, one last time. In case Kennedy suspected anything and put a watch on me, I dodge clever. I alight on 5th and take a devious detour through the downtown quarter, lose myself in crowds and backtrack numerously. Then I hire a flier and mach uptown to the cryogenic-hive.

  After the formalities of payment and after-care instructions, I decant my shining knight from his sarcophagus and assist him to the flier. His head is hardly awake yet, barely thawed from the cryogenic state, and it’s his power-assisted Soma-Sim that walks him from the ziggurat.

  I think love at him to help the thaw.

  I programme the destination of Rio de Janeiro into the flier, but before we set off there’s the small matter of my indenture to sort out. I fly to the Satori Line towerpile, Joe immobile beside me. I leave the flier on the landing pad, drop to the twentieth level and enter the museum.

  I have to wait a while before a rich family decide they’ve had their fill of wonder, and when they leave I leap over the laser-guard surrounding the shimmering shield of the nada-continuum.

  I stand mesmerised, regardless of the danger should anyone enter and find me here. Before me is the ultimate, the primal state we all aspire to—the only thing ever to be wholly beyond my ability to grasp.

  My contemplation is interrupted by a glow at the end of my arm. My hand tingles. Gassner’s miniature portrait becomes animated. I hold up my arm, as if shielding my eyes from the nada-continuum, and stare at him. “What do you want, Gassner?”

  “Sita!” he cries, and he uses my real name only in times of stress. His regular pallor is suffused now with the crimson of rage, and he’s sweating. “Sita—where’s Kennedy? I thought you-”

  “I didn’t crack the case, Gassner. Spider Lo got there first. Kennedy owes the Massingberd Agency, not you.”

  “Sita!” He’s almost in tears. “Get back here!”

  I smile. “I’m sorry, Gassner. I’m through. I’ve had enough and I’m getting out. Goodbye-”

  He panics. He knows that without a telepath he’s nothing. “You can’t, Bangla-”

  I can, and the desk is lost as I thrust my hand into the nada-continuum/reality interface. The satisfaction of getting rid of Gassner dilutes the pain of losing my hand; my tele-ability repels the frenzied communications shooting up my arm and keeps the agony below the tolerance threshold. The wrist is neatly severed when I stagger back, the stump cauterised and blackened. I jump the barrier and stumble through the chamber.

  The hologram of the scientist stands beside the portal. Pedro Fernandez, discoverer of the nada-continuum and opener of the way. He seems to be smiling at me, and I know the smile. I give him a wink as I leave.

  Joe touches my hand as I climb into the flier and take off. We bank over the city and head towards the ocean. I probe him. His head is slowly coming to life, warming as if to the sunlight that shines through the screen. I read Joe’s need, his craving.

  Above the city, canted at an angle, the hologram screen pours morning news over a waking world. Did the Gassner Agency surrender to the take-over bids that must surely come now? Come on, an ending like that would be just too storybook. I can only wait until we reach Rio and find out then.

  Meantime, I hope.

  Weakly, Joe says, “You get the crystals?”

  I open the valise and shake them into his lap.

  “Pineal-z,” I tell him, and I open up and let him have the experience I had monthsback when I tripped on Pineal-z and lived.

  “It’s Pineal-z or me, kid,” I tell him. “Enlightenment or love. Take your pick.” And I withdraw, close up. I don’t want to influence his decision and I don’t want to eavesdrop on his infatuation with something I can never hope to understand.

  Old Pete? Yeah, he kidded me not. He was someone famous, onetime. He was probably the most famous person in the world. He was Pedro Fernandez yearsback, discoverer of the nada-continuum and opener of the way.

  I know for sure now that Old Pete is good, behind that shield of his...

  I glance across at Joe. He’s staring at the crystals in his hand, weighing the experience he had and lost against whatever I can give him. He drops the crystals back into the valise, looks at me. “We’ll sell them when we get to Rio, Sita. Find a cyber-surgeon to fix my leg and get you a new paw.”

  Enlightenment, or love? Perhaps they’re one and the same thing.

  Tears fill my eyes as I fly us away from the city and into the sunrise, one-handed.

  * * * *

  The Art of Acceptance

  I curled in the window and watched the crowds promenade down the lighted boulevard. It was spring again in Gay Paree and the streets were thronged with young lovers, poets and artists—my least favourite time of year.

  Dan sat lotus on the battered, legless chesterfield. Leads fell from the lumbar-socket under his shirt, and a bootleg tantric-tape zipped ersatz kundalini up his spinal column. He’d told me to go home at midnight, but I liked being around him, and anyway I had to be on hand in case the fountain of pleasure hit jackpot and blew the chakra in his cerebellum. I’d told him he was playing Tibetan roulette with his meatball—bootleg tapes had scoured the skulls of many a novice—but Dan just laughed and said he was doing it all for me. Which he was, in a way, but I still didn’t like it.

  When I got bored I tidied the office, stacked Zen vids, cleared away tankas and Confucian self-improving tracts. Then I wrote mahayanan aphorisms backwards on his forehead, the only part of his face free from beard and hair, and inscribed his arms and palms with that old number, “He who has everything has little, he who has nothing has much,” just to show him what I thought of all this transcendental malarky.

  I was getting bored again when the building began to shake and flakes of paint snowed from the ceiling. The clanking downchute signalled the approach of a customer.

  I yanked the jack from his socket and winced in anticipation of his wrath. He jerked once at the disconnection, then slumped. “Shit, Phuong-”

  “Visitor,” I said. I prised open his eye and peered in like a horse-doctor. “Jesus, you look wrecked.”

  He was all hair, blood-shot eyes and bad temper. I pulled him to the desk and sat him in the swivel chair, combing my fingers through his curls and arranging the collar of his sweat-soaked khaki shirt. The adage on his brow accused me, but there was no time to remove it. Footsteps sounded along the corridor. “Pull yourself together, Dan. We need the cash.”

  I switched on the desk-lamp, made sure my cheongsam was buttoned all the way up, and sat in the shadows beside the door.

  She strode in without knocking. I like style—being possessed of none of it myself—and everything, from her entry to the way she crossed her legs and lighted a cigarillo, whispered sophistication.

  “Leferve?” she enquired, blowing smoke.

  “How can I be of service?” It was his usual line. I was pleased to see that her elegance left him unaffected; he was doing his best to disdain all things physical.

  Even so, we needed this commission.

  The woman re-lighted her cigarillo and fanned the offending smoke. It crossed my mind that all this was an act.

  She was white, but throwback African genes gave her face the exaggerated length and beauty of the Masai. The lasered perfection of her features was familiar, too. I was sure, then, that I’d seen her somewhere before.

  “You charge by the hour?”

  “Five hundred dollars per.”

  She nodded. If she was aware of the ridiculous scrawl on his forehead she didn’t lose her cool and show surprise. She wore a silver lamé mackintosh, belted at the wai
st, and when she leaned forward to deposit ash in the tray on the desk with a single tap of a long-nailed finger, the lapels buckled outwards to reveal tanned chest and the white sickle scars of a double mastectomy, the latest thing in body fashion.

  “I want to hire you for one hour, for which I will pay you twenty-five thousand dollars.”

  “I’m not an assassin,” Dan said.

  “I assure you that I want no-one killed.”

  “Then what do you want?” He reached out to the chessboard on the desk and pushed white Bishop to Queen’s four: follow her.

  “That was a rash move, Leferve.” She advanced a pawn, and smiled.

  Dan toppled his king. “Now, perhaps you could supply me with a few details. Who are you, and what kind of work do you have in mind?”

  She glanced around the office. “This is hardly the place to do business. Perhaps we can discuss these points later, over lunch.”

  Below the level of the desk, Dan gestured for me to go. He saw the writing on his arm and, instead of showing anger, he smiled to himself at this childish exhibition of my affection and concern.

  I slipped from the office without the woman noticing me.

  * * * *

  I took the downchute to the boulevard, ran through the rain and rode up the outside of the opposite towerpile to the flier rank. I found Claude and slipped in beside him. Claude had been an ex-spacer with the Satori Line, and in his retirement he piloted a taxi-flier part-time. He sat back in the seat with his fingers laced behind his bulky occipital computer. “Action, Phuong?”

  “When it shifts, follow that flier.”

  I pointed across the gap to the landing stage. The woman’s flier was an ugly Soviet Zil, two tons of armoured, bullet-proof tank. No wonder the building had quaked when she landed. A uniformed chauffeur stood on the edge of the building and stared out at the lighted night.

  Three minutes later the woman emerged and strode across the landing stage. The chauffeur hurried to open the door and the woman slipped quickly inside.

  The Zil fired its ‘aft jets, and I experienced the sudden pang of physical pain and mental torture that always hit me whenever I forgot to close my eyes. Even the sound of burners filled me with nausea.

  I was fifteen when I took a short cut through a rank of fliers and the sudden ignition of twin Mitsubishi 500s roasted me alive. Only the skill of the surgeons and my parents’ life-savings had saved my life and financed the reconstruction of my face so that it was as pretty as the rest of my body was hideous. I’d been rushing to meet a young Arab I thought I loved. He’d dropped me not long after.

  The Zil lifted ponderously and inched out over the boulevard. The jets fired again and it banked with sudden speed into an air-lane, heading north.

  “Easy does it, Claude.”

  He flipped switches and growled to his on-board computer, and we lifted. He steered barefoot and I was forced into the cushioned seat as we accelerated in pursuit.

  Traffic was light, which had its advantages: although we had to keep our distance to remain inconspicuous, the Zil was easy to trace in the empty Paris sky. Lights spangled the city far below, but against the darkened dome our quarry’s burners glowed red like devils’ eyes.

  Three minutes later the flier swooped from the air-lane and banked around the silvered bends of the Seine. Claude touched my hand and pointed to one o’clock. A small air-car flew alongside the Zil in a parallel lane. “Been following her since we took off,” he told me.

  The Zil decelerated and went down behind the high iron railings of a riverside mansion. “Passy,” Claude commented. “Expensive. What now?”

  The one-man flier, having followed the woman to base, banked and fired off across Paris.

  “Move in, Claude. And when you’ve dropped me, follow that flier. I want everything you can get on it, okay?”

  The mansion was a large square building as old as the revolution. Antiquity, though, was not its most notable feature. Even from a distance of five hundred metres I recognised the colony world flora that was fast becoming the latest sensation with the hopelessly rich.

  “Now cut the jets and take us in low. I’m going to jump.”

  “Phuong-”

  “Do as I say!”

  He curled his lips and cut the flier across the corner of the extensive grounds at a height of ten metres. I swung the door open, picked my spot and jumped.

  I landed bullseye in a fungoid growth like a giant marshmallow. I bounced, rolled to the edge and fell from a height of a couple of metres, landing on my backside and jarring my spine.

  I was in a xeno-biological jungle. Through a lattice of vines and lianas I made out the lighted windows of the mansion. I picked myself up and began hacking a path through the alien salad. It was hard to imagine that I was on the banks of the Seine. I might have been an intrepid explorer trekking through the sweltering tropics of Delta Pavonis IV.

  Then I came to the lawn before the mansion and saw the smallship, sitting inside a red-and-white striped, open-ended marquee. The ship was a rusty, ex-Indian cargo ferry, a vintage antique at home in the alien environment of the garden. I recognised its type from the days of my childhood, when I’d skipped college and spent hours at the Orly spaceport; the reversed swastikas and hooked Hindi script brought back a flood of memories. I knew the structural schematics of the ferry inside out, and I was tempted to fulfil an old ambition by boarding the ship through the dorsal escape chute.

  Instead I sprinted across the lawn to a long verandah and climbed aboard. I crept along the wall of the mansion, came to a lighted window and peered inside. The room was empty. I moved along to the next window and found the woman.

  She stood with her back against the far wall, holding a drink in a long-stemmed glass. She’d changed her mac for a gown, cut low to reveal the scars of her fashionable mutilation. It struck me as sacrilege, like the desecration of a work of art.

  She was discussing the merits of various restaurants with someone on a vidscreen. I sat with my back against the brickwork and listened in for perhaps ten minutes, at the end of which I was none the wiser as to the identity of the woman—though I did know which restaurants to patronise next time I had five hundred dollars to blow.

  I was thinking about quitting the scene when I noticed movement to my right. I looked up in time to see the shape of the uniformed chauffeur. I jumped up and ran, but he hit me with a neural incapacitator and I jerked once and blacked out.

  When I came to my senses I found myself staring at a moving strip of parquet tiling, and felt a strong arm encircling my waist. The chauffeur’s jackboots marched at the periphery of my vision and I realised I was being carried through the mansion.

  I put up a feeble struggle, kicked out and yelled at him to put me down. We came to a large polished door and he used my head to push it open, then marched in with me under his arm like a prize.

  “And... what have we got here?” the woman exclaimed.

  “I found her on the verandah.”

  He stood me upright and gripped my elbow, and I played the idiot. I babbled in Kampuchean and made as if stuffing an invisible club sandwich into my mouth with both hands.

  The woman glanced at the chauffeur. “I do believe the girl is hungry.”

  I nodded. “Bouffe, merci, mademoiselle!”

  Then I saw the pix on the wall behind her.

  There were perhaps a hundred of them, all depicting the same woman, close-ups and stills from old films and others of her accepting awards—small, golden figures with bald heads—framed and displayed in a monomaniacal exhibition of vanity. I thought I recognised the woman in those shots, though the face was subtly different, the planes of her cheeks altered by cosmetics to conform to some bygone ideal of beauty. Also—but this was ridiculous—the woman on the wall seemed older than the woman who stood before me.

  She saw the scars on my neck that the collar failed to hide. She reached out, and I pulled my head away. Her lips described a moue, as if to calm a frightened ani
mal, and she unfastened the top three buttons of my cheongsam.

  She stared at me. I felt the weight of pity in her eyes that I came to understand only later—at the time I hated her for it. The usual reaction to my injuries was horror or derision, and I could handle that. But pity was rare, and I could not take pity from someone so beautiful.

  She said in a whisper, “Take her away.” And, before I could dive at her, the chauffeur dragged me from the silent room and frog-marched me through the mansion. I was holding back my tears as we hurried outside and through the grounds. He opened a pair of wrought iron gates, pushed me to the sidewalk and kicked me in the midriff. I gasped for breath and closed my eyes as his footsteps receded and the gate squeaked shut. Then, painfully, I pulled myself to my feet, fumbled with the buttons at my chest and limped back to the main drag.