by Eric Brown
She dragged open the cubby door beneath the stairs and hauled out her bike, an old Suzuki turbo she took on long rides into the country when she was feeling low. She pushed it down the hall and through the gaping front door. A tangle of vines and brambles, not cleared for a day or more, barred the way. Using the bike as a battering ram, she charged ahead, thorns catching her clothing on the way through. She came to the caged run down the centre of the street, mounted the bike and kicked it into life. She shot forward, fish-tailing on the slime that slicked the tarmac, then accelerated. The headlamp illuminated the narrow corridor ahead.
She came to the cleared intersection and turned right, down a wide avenue lined by derelict buildings. A street gang on the corner jeered as she passed, hurling insults and beer bottles. The avenue took a bend and straightened up, and Ella opened the throttle. If she could get to the ‘port before Eddie, warn the authorities of what he intended... The disadvantage was that, while her bike was faster than his beat-up flier, she was restricted to following the roads, while Eddie could fly directly across Orly to the ‘port.
He might want to kill himself now, she told herself -but that’s because he’s low. He’ll snap out of it in a day or two, return to his normal stoic self, look back and realise how close he came...
If only she could get there before him.
She cut down side-streets and alleys, zigzagging between derelict tenements in what she calculated was a short-cut to the massive ‘port complex. Her heart surged when, up ahead, she made out the ponderous shape of the Peugeot, flying low, and beyond it the bright blue halation of the screen in the night sky to the south.
“Eddie!” she screamed, the wind chapping her cheeks where her tears had coursed.
Almost as if her subconscious was acknowledging the fact that she’d lost him, the image of Eddie when she’d first met him appeared in her mind’s eye. In his thirties, not yet run to fat or greying; kind, gentle, haunted by his loss and yet amazed by his good fortune at being the recipient of all her affection...
She skidded around the bend of the approach road to the ‘port, perhaps half a kilometre away. As she straightened up and increased speed, she realised that she had lost the race. Eddie had lifted his flier and accelerated over the perimeter fence. The security guards were firing at the vehicle, bright tracer hosing through the night sky. The flier took a hit and lurched, but continued on towards the screen. Ella screeched the bike to a halt and it skidded out from under her. She rolled, fetched up in a sitting position on the grass verge. She watched the flier limp pathetically towards the brilliant membrane of the interface.
She climbed to her knees, then to her feet, and limped towards the fence. She hooked her fingers through the mesh and hung there, her face pressed up against the diamonds.
“Eddie, stop. Please stop...”
Six metres away, through the fence, a uniformed security guard turned and stared at her.
“Please... please stop him.”
The guard was young, in his late teens, and later, when Ella went over and over the sequence of events, one of the inconsequential images that would enter her mind would be that of the guard’s young face, his stricken expression as he looked from Ella to the flier, and back to Ella again, unable to do anything to halt the flier, and prevented by regulations from leaving his post and trying to console her.
She watched as Eddie approached the interface. Even at this late stage she maintained the ludicrous hope that the authorities would activate the screen, open the portal to some colony planet, so that Eddie would pass through unharmed. She should have realised, though, that the expense of opening the ‘face would far exceed the worth of one crazed Engineman.
The flier hit the interface and vanished in a blinding white explosion. The detonation travelled across the ‘port, reaching her a second later, followed by the patter of shrapnelled debris raining down across the tarmac. Ella closed her eyes, and the explosion bloomed again in the darkness.
When she opened her eyes, the guard was running towards the terminal building, and before he could summon medical assistance for her, or whatever he intended, Ella stumbled across to where her bike lay on the grass embankment next to the fence. Dry-sobbing, she hauled it upright, kick-started it and raced off at high speed away from the ‘port. As the blue light of the interface sent her shadow sprawling ahead, Ella tried to convince herself that Eddie had not heard her telling him to fly into the screen...
She raced around Paris at breakneck speed, as if tempting fate to take her where it had taken Eddie. The wind in her face, she circled the Eiffel tower, phantasmagorically adorned, tore across the traffic island and through the Arc De Triomph, then accelerated down the Champs-Elysées. Beside the majestic silver dome which covered the tourist quarter of central Paris, she came to a halt. She sat astraddle the stilled engine of her Suzuki, aware of the bike ticking beneath her in the quiet morning air, aware of the pain in her chest, and the fact that she was still alive.
By the time she arrived back at her apartment, dawn was touching the eastern horizon, and she knew what she was going to do.
From beneath the mattress in her bedroom she took the photograph of her father, and the disc he had sent. She dropped the photo on the bed without looking at it, and played the disc. .
“I have seen the light, Ella. I need to see-”
The rest was music. Three weeks ago, on receiving and playing the disc, the sound of his voice had caused her so much pain that she had stopped the disc instantly and recorded over the rest of the message.
He had seen the light...? By which, did he mean that he realised and acknowledged all the mistakes of his past?
Surely not...
She dropped the disc on top of the picture, obscuring his face. She changed, found one of Eddie’s silversuits. As she pulled it on, the material shrank, nestled around her thin body. She considered the irony of wearing an E-man’s silversuit where she was going. She packed a bag and pocketed her savings. She looked around the bedroom, at her work bearing silent testimony to her lack of success. As she stood on the threshold, she was tempted to leave the bedroom door unlocked, let fate take away her past. But something, some deep and abiding belief in her ability, made her turn the key in the lock.
She turned at a sound from the hall window. Sabine was crouching on the sill, watching her. “You leaving, Ella?”
“Going out to the Rim, Sabby,” she told the urchin. “Going to look up my father.”
The kid glanced around. “Where’s Eddie?”
Ella smiled through her tears. “Eddie’s gone. He won’t be coming back.”
“So you want me to look after the place, make sure the bastards don’t trash your work?”
Ella dug in her pocket for loose creds. “Sure, Sabby. You do that.”
Then she made her way to an Agency and arranged passage to the Reach.
* * * *
Chapter Three
Dawn was a uniform grey pallor above the eastern horizon as Mirren garaged the grab-flier and walked across the tarmac to the circular bar annexe of the terminal building. It was Thursday morning, the start of his three day break, and he always made a habit of calling into the bar for a couple of beers to celebrate. He was feeling dead on his feet and even more depressed than usual. He could not shake from his mind the death of Macready yesterday, or the suicide of the Engineman who’d flown his flier straight into the interface a couple of hours ago.
He pushed through the swing doors and entered the bar. The room was furnished with cheap moulded tables and chairs, fitted originally to cater for the hordes of vacationing civilians who had visited Earth in the days when the port catered for bigships. Since the installation of the KV interface, however, and the downgrading of the ‘port to the status of commercial/ industrial, the only patrons of the bar were site workers: security guards, engineers and fliers. The plastic furnishings of the circular room had been sprayed matt black, as if in mourning, and the lighting turned low. The funereal atmosphere
of the bar suited its function as the place to come for a quiet drink after a long shift. Here, Mirren could be guaranteed the luxury of privacy without hassle. In many of the bars around the city he would have been recognised as an ex-Engineman—the occipital console was a give away—and regarded with curiosity, pity or even envy. Any one of which he could do without, especially if the party-doing the regarding had no qualms about demanding to know if it were true that he—as the representative of Enginemen, everywhere—had looked upon the face of God.
He charged a stein of lager to his tab and carried it through the gloom to a booth beside the wrap-around viewscreen. He sat hunched over his beer and massaged the base of his skull above his occipital console. His head throbbed, forewarning him that another flashback was on the way. Three days ago, as he’d climbed into his flier for the short flight home, he had flashbacked for the first time. He’d suddenly found himself reliving his last flight aboard the Perseus Bound. He had flashed twice since then, each time experiencing consecutive episodes from his last flight. He knew where it would end: a decade ago, the ‘ship had crashlanded on an uncharted planet, and though he had survived the accident unscathed, he had suffered extensive amnesia. He recalled nothing at all of the journey, and knew of the crash and his subsequent memory loss from what the medics of the Line had told him. He was regaining his recollection of the events, now, in a most singular fashion.
He took a long swallow of lager and sat back, and it was then that he saw her. She was sitting on a high-stool at the bar. Evidently she had just arrived, as he hadn’t seen her earlier. He pushed his drink across the table, then slid around the u-shaped couch so that his back was to her.
She was wearing the light blue uniform of the Orly security team, so perhaps her presence here had nothing to do with him, but he found that hard to believe. A month ago she had called, but he’d ignored her message. “Hi, Ralph. I’m in Paris for a few months—security work for various companies in the city. I thought I’d look you up. Perhaps we could go out for a meal? Call me at the Excelsior, any time.” And she had smiled and cut the connection.
What had disturbed him so much was the fact that she had changed so little in twenty years. She was still the elfin-faced, spike-haired twenty-one year-old-he had walked out on in Sydney with all those years ago. Except she was over forty now, and her breezy confidence and self-assurance told him that she had grown in the interim.
He had not returned her call.
He was about to quickly finish his drink and escape, hopefully without being seen, when he heard footsteps on the tiles, heading his way.
She paused before the booth, arms folded across her chest, leaning forward slightly. “Ralph? It is you?”
He knew that her uncertainty had nothing to do with the low lighting. He had changed a lot in twenty years.
He sat up. “Caroline.”
She hugged her shoulders and gave a kind of shrug, a gesture he recognised from years ago which indicated she was nervous. “Carrie, please. Not so formal.”
Mirren gestured across the booth, and Caroline slipped along the seat with a quick wan smile at him. She was, he knew, shocked at how the years had treated him.
He had met Caroline Bishop when he was twenty, studying aeronautics at the Jet Propulsion labs in Sydney. She’d worked there one day a week, on release from the college of the Australian Internal Security bureau. Until then he’d thought that love at first sight was nothing more than a concept dreamed up in retrospect by incurable romantics, but when he first saw Caroline in the student canteen he’d experienced an inexplicable surge of desire to possess and protect—which years later he rationalised cynically as the tyranny of biology to gain its own ends.
A year later they had married—a declining institution in the latter half of the century, but Caroline’s parents were Catholic, and although Mirren was atheist he’d not objected to the ceremony.
Mirren had joined the Canterbury Line as an Alpha Engineman six months later, and a year after that, with no explanation to Caroline and without being able to explain his motivations even to himself, he had kissed his wife and daughter good-bye and never returned. He’d set up home in Paris, made sure Caroline was financially secure with monthly cheques, and from that day until her call a month ago had never set eyes on her.
He had returned unread the dozens of letters she’d sent him care of the Canterbury Line over the first couple of years.
He tried to find in himself some scintilla of conscience for what he had done, but he felt nothing other than a distant regret that, but for circumstances which in retrospect seemed inevitable, it could all have been so different.
He tried to speak now. His mouth was dry, making words impossible. He took a swallow of lager. “How are you, Carrie?” The cliché was so obvious he thought she might laugh.
Instead she smiled. “I’m fine. You know, working hard...” She was either a very fine actress, hiding her hurt, or the years had worked to heal her wounds. “You?”
He shrugged. “Okay. I have regular work, an apartment.” He could look objectively at the situation and see that she would be quite justified in hating him. “What a coincidence this is...”
She shook her head. “I’ve been looking for you. I’m here on business.”
She pulled the front of her jacket open and looked down as she fingered through papers in an inside pocket. Her frown of concentration, her pursed lips, brought back memories. A characteristic of hers had been to exaggerate her facial expressions; she had a theatrical mask for happy and sad and the many grades of sentiment in between, all manner of quirks and tics to express her feelings. He had found it very becoming, years ago.
He wondered if by ‘business’ she meant legal business, a demand for more payment. “You came all the way to Paris looking for me...?” he began.
She looked up, frowning. “I’m in Paris because I wanted to work in Europe for the experience, and I’m working here because Orly wanted a top security executive.”
She pulled something from her pocket and looked at it.
“A guy came to the ‘port this morning, looking for you. Recognise?”
She pushed a photograph across the table-top. Mirren picked it up. It was a head and shoulders shot of a man around sixty, with a distinguished mane of silver hair and a tanned face—or rather, half a tanned face. The right side, from his hair-line to his chin, right around to his ear, was covered with a scaled, crimson growth like half a mask.
Mirren was reminded of The Phantom of the Opera.
He shook his head. “What did he want?”
“He approached my second-in-command, asking for you. He was referred to me. He had a security clearance from KVO. I thought it best to get a pix and see if you recognised him. He said he’ll be back at eight this morning, if you want to meet him.”
“Never seen him before in my life. He didn’t say what he wanted?”
Caroline bit her bottom lip, shook her head.
Mirren tapped the picture. “What’s that?”
With one finger she turned the pix to face her. “I don’t know. It’s even more striking in the flesh. I guessed he’s an off-worlder. He spoke with a very correct accent, like a Brit from a hundred years ago. And he had a couple of tough-looking bodyguards with him.”
For the past ten years, Mirren had kept pretty much to himself, hardly going out and shunning personal contact. He wondered if he’d met the off-worlder years ago, on one of the planets he’d taken leave on. But surely he’d recognise someone so disfigured?
“He didn’t give his name?”
“He called himself Jaeger. But it wasn’t his real name.”
Mirren looked up. “How do you know?”
She smiled. “I’m trained in things like that. I know when someone’s lying.”
Uneasy, he picked up the pix. “Mind if I keep it?”
“Be my guest.”
He wondered, for a fleeting second, if the picture was nothing more than an excuse to talk to him, the
opening gambit in her scheme to pay him back for what he had done all those years ago.
It was a possibility, but then Caroline had never been a person to bear grudges. Of course, she could have changed a lot in twenty years.
He looked across at her. “Can I get you a drink?”
“Mmm, please. That’d be nice. A lager.”
Mirren signalled to the bar for two more lagers, wishing that he’d made some excuse, got up and left, returned home to him room and his safe, insulated solitude.
The drinks arrived and Caroline lifted her stein with both hands and peered at him over the rim.
