Engineman

by Eric Brown

  “Just that he wanted to see me.”

  “Nothing more—on a thirty minute disc?”

  Ella looked up at Forster, tried to hold her tears back. “I wiped the rest of the disc without listening to it. I just heard him say... say that he wanted to see me. Then I wiped it. We never got on... we were never that close.”

  Forster paced the room, stroking the line of his jaw. “Did he tell you where you were to meet him? Was it here, on the Reach?”

  “I don’t know. I told you, I wiped the disc.”

  “Hunter...”

  “It’s true! I don’t know. All he said was... he wanted to see me.” She heard then the sound of her father’s voice, strong, confident...

  Forster considered, tapping his pursed lips. “Did he tell you that he’d converted, joined the Disciples?”

  “No—I mean, not in so many words.” To hear from Forster’s lips that her father had defected, gone over to the other side, made her heart race with joy. “He told me that he’d seen the light. That’s all. I thought maybe he’d converted, but I wasn’t sure.”

  More to himself, Forster said, “He’s converted, all right.” He ceased his pacing and paused before Ella. “Who are your father’s contacts on Earth?”

  Ella stared, open-mouthed. “I don’t know! I haven’t seen or spoken to him for ten years!”

  “We know he’s in contact with Terran Enginemen, Hunter. I want their names!”

  “Enginemen? I don’t know. I’ve no idea. Please...”

  Forster rushed to the window, hammered on the glass, then signalled. The guards by the blast-barrier motioned for Conchita and Maria to kneel. Ella watched the women lower herself slowly to her knees, her daughter clinging to her.

  “Please, no...” Ella wept.

  Forster rushed back to her. “Now, answers! Has your father left for Earth?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Who are his contacts on Earth?”

  Ella was shaking her head, her eyes streaming. She swore that if they killed Conchita and the girl, she’d dive at Forster, tear out his eyes.

  “I don’t know! Please, listen to me...”

  “Corporal!” Forster snapped. The guard appeared. “Take her out. Shoot the three of them.”

  The guard took her arm, almost gently, and brought her to her feet. He escorted her from the room and down the corridor, following Forster.

  They passed outside, into the sunlight.

  “Please,” Ella wept. “Not the girl. Kill me, but not Maria.”

  Still pacing, Forster turned. “Answers, Hunter!”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t know...” She looked up, then, and saw a line of fliers advancing across the tarmac.

  Forster began, “Then the three of you-”

  He never finished the sentence.

  The explosion knocked them off their feet. Ella hit the tarmac painfully. Dazed, battered by the blast, she rolled over and pushed herself onto her hands and knees. She gazed about her in disbelief. One of the guards was dead, blood trickling from his nose and mouth. The other rolled on the ground, moaning. Forster was groggily picking himself up. Ella screamed and dived across the tarmac to the dead guard. She grabbed the incapacitator from the ground where he’d dropped it, staggered to her feet and ran at Forster. He was drawing his pistol, caught by surprise, when Ella slammed the weapon into his face. He yelled, fell to the ground. She collapsed with him, and brought the incapacitator down again and again on the side of his head. Forster spasmed, his back arching as he convulsed. Sobbing, Ella rolled away from him.

  Explosions shattered the air. Across the airbase, the squad of militia beside the blast-barrier lay dead or dying. Ella looked desperately for Conchita and her daughter. She saw them huddling together behind the barrier. As she watched, a flier swooped down and two men bundled the girl and her mother aboard.

  Vehicles burned all around the base, and everywhere Danzig militia-men fell. Fliers advanced across the tarmac, hitting anything that moved with shell-fire and grenades.

  Ella hugged her legs and curled against the wall of the control tower, watching with terror and disbelief as Forster rolled onto his belly and clawed his way across the tarmac towards her. She looked around desperately for the incapacitator, and saw it—beyond Forster—where she’d dropped it. She tried to move, to summon the energy to pick herself up and run, but she was paralysed by exhaustion and the look on Forster’s face as he crawled towards her. Ella screamed.

  A battered, turbo-driven flier surged around the corner, came down heavily. At the wheel, a black Engineman casually raised a rifle, one-handed.

  He fired, the shot opening a gaping hole in Forster’s back. He spasmed, staring at Ella with wide, dead eyes.

  “Get in, girl,” the Engineman said. “Move it!”

  Dazed, she picked herself up and staggered towards the flier. She threw herself over the side and onto the back seat. The flier sped off across the base, swerving erratically to avoid explosions and pockets of Danzig resistance.

  A grenade detonated beneath them, bucking the flier. “Hold on tight back there,” the Engineman said calmly. “This might be a rough ride.”

  They accelerated over the perimeter fence, leaving the airbase behind them, and screamed into the jungle. The E-man weaved his way through the trees, trunks flicking by on either side with a sound like rotor-blades.

  “You sure don’t say much, girl,” the Engineman called to her. “You feeling okay?”

  Ella wanted to tell him that she’d never felt better.

  Instead she passed out.

  * * * *

  Chapter Nineteen

  Mirren stood with Bobby in the engine-room, an arm around his brother’s shoulders. He had showered and changed and felt refreshed, though aware of his bruised and battered body. He was experiencing also a return of the Heine’s symptoms: hot sweats, nausea and bone-aching weariness. He had left his medication back at the apartment, though his concern was cancelled out by the thought of the flux. Right now, he told himself, he would gladly die in four years just to be able to mind-push again.

  Beyond the triangular viewscreen, the technicians were making final preparations for the phase-out. The irony of the situation was not lost on Mirren. The techs, with their head-mikes and monitors, going about their business in the hallowed chambers of Notre-Dame, were the subjects in a frieze signifying the triumph of science over superstition. He acknowledged another paradox inherent in the situation: that the event towards which the scientists were working would itself be transformed into superstition by credulous believers like his brother and Dan.

  Behind them, the engine-room was in the semi-darkness that Enginemen found conducive to their pre-flux preparations. Even a materialist like Mirren had to admit that a darkened room was requisite to proper contemplation of the task at hand. Other Enginemen, believers and Disciples, went in for a long and complex series of rituals, involving prayers, mantras and incense: the engine-rooms on some of the ‘ship’s he’d pushed were like Eastern shrines and temples. He was pleased to see that this chamber was wholly functional. Alpha-numerics sequenced along the flank of the flux-tank, a tubular silver catafalque on a raised stage against the bulkhead. Beside it was the co-pilot’s auxiliary command web, a cat’s-cradle slung between a horseshoe console. Black, padded foam-forms and couches gave the engineroom the appearance of an exclusive, hi-tech bar.

  Mirren rubbed the back of his neck, hoping to ease the pulsating ache at the base of his skull. He had tried to ignore it for the past thirty minutes, but he knew what it meant.

  Dan and Miguelino, the Gamma Engineman who would be the co-pilot on this mission, rode the downchute and stepped into the engineroom. Miguelino moved to his web and strapped himself in. Dan joined them before the viewscreen.

  “Ready, Ralph?”

  Mirren nodded. Earlier, he’d drawn first push in the tank, Bobby the second and Dan the third.

  In the cathedral, the techs monitoring their consoles turne
d and regarded the smallship. The pilot up in the nose-cone radioed to the co-pilot that phase-out was imminent. As Mirren watched, Hunter stepped forward from a group of scientists, his halved face bright in the wash of light from the ‘ship. He raised his arm in a salute of farewell. Mirren and Dan returned the gesture.

  “We’re phasing,” Bobby murmured. “We’re phasing, I can feel it!”

  As he spoke, the Sublime phased out. A low-pitched hum filled the air. Seen from within the ‘ship, it was the outside world which seemed to undergo the vanishing process. Reality flickered with ever-increasing frequency: the tableau of Hunter and the technicians in the nave alternated with the cobalt light of the continuum, the effect stroboscopic in the final stages before full integration was achieved. Then the scene inside the cathedral vanished finally and all that could be seen was the deep blue of the nada-continuum, shot through with opalescent streaks which flowed like streamers.

  Dan withdrew the slide-bed from the flux-tank. The low humming cut out, and the resulting silence was eerie, as if the surrounding continuum soaked up every sound. Mirren experienced a feeling, of familiar euphoria as he sat on the padded slide-bed and underwent the process of entankment he had dreamed about for so long. He removed his jacket and touched a command on his occipital-console, opening the dozen sockets of the spar which spanned his shoulders. Dan pulled the first input lead from within the tank, then the next, and jacked them in. They slotted home with solid, satisfying clunks. With the access of each jack he seemed to lose touch with ever more reality until, as the twelfth and final lead connected him to the matrix of the smallship, he was in a trance-like state. He was only half-aware of Dan’s strong hands on him as he was laid out on the slide-bed and inserted into the tank. The hatch closed beyond his feet, plunging him into darkness. Outside, Miguelino began the process of easing him into full matrix-integration.

  Seconds passed and Mirren became increasingly unaware of his physical self as his senses, one by one, abdicated their responsibility of relaying an outside reality to his disconnected sensorium. He was blind and deaf, his sense of touch diminished. Soon all awareness of his corporeal self fled as his consciousness teetered on the edge of the vastness of the nada-continuum. He knew then the infinite wonder of the immanence which underlay the everyday universe. Rapture sluiced through him in a glorious tide of joy.

  He fluxed.

  The period spent in flux was a timeless duration for Enginemen. Robbed of their senses, they had no awareness of the passage of time. A shift spent pushing a ‘ship between the stars might have been over in an instant, or an eternity. Only when they detanked, anything from six to ten hours later, were they able to recollect the instant of the flux and relive the experience of pushing.

  Then, Mirren became aware that something was wrong. At first, for a split second, he assumed he was defluxing. But that entailed a gradual return of sensory awareness, a final teetering on the edge of the vastness. Very definitely Mirren had no sensory awareness—no sense of sight or touch, hearing, taste or smell.

  He was suddenly aware of an anomalous phenomenon. Deep within his head, on the very periphery of his consciousness, there was a voice, calling to him.

  He willed himself to concentrate. The communication became stronger, a definite presence; he was tempted to call it a voice, though it was more a thought.

  It was calling his name.

  — Ralph, Ralph...

  He found he could reply by thinking the words: Who are you?”

  — Ralph, it’s me, Caspar.

  Mirren was shaken to the core. His mind raced. Caspar Fekete? But that was impossible! He could only assume he was dreaming. The notion that the voice in his head had an external source was too staggering to contemplate.

  He thought: Caspar?

  — Can you... hear me, Ralph? The link is very weak. I can only just make you out...

  Then Mirren knew he was not hallucinating—or whatever one did when imagining sounds. The voice in his head was real. His initial shock was overcome by cautious wonder, though at the same time the sceptic in him would not acknowledge the import of this communication. It went against everything in which he believed. And yet that deep, buried part of him, terrified at the thought of his premature death, cried out for Fekete’s communiqué to be what he thought it was.

  I can hear you—what the hell-? His thoughts became a chaotic scramble of questions.

  — I’m dead, Ralph. They got me in my flier eight hours ago-

  You’re in the continuum, Mirren thought in disbelief. You’ve transcended?

  Even as he said this he was so overcome by the marvel of the concept that he hardly thought to ask himself why, on his many shifts in the past, he had not been contacted by the souls, or whatever, of the people he had known in life.

  Then Mirren was aware of what might have been a chuckle, like a subtle itch, within his head.

  — No, Ralph. I have not transcended—though in a manner of speaking I have. That is, I am not part of the nada-continuum or Nirvana or whatever they call it.

  Disappointment coursed through Mirren.

  Then what?

  — Upon my bodily demise, an encoded personality analogue was removed from my occipital console. In simple terms, a recording of my identity, of my thoughts and memories, hopes and desires, a simulacrum of my very self—if, like me, you believe that the mind is the seat of everything that makes us human. Over the years my company developed a means by which to make individuals virtually immortal through cerebral translation into digital analogues. I exist as an information matrix based in my Paris mansion but stretching to the very boundaries of the Expansion. I thought at first that I might feel enclosed, a captive, without the physical freedom endowed by a body, but the reverse is true. I have never been as free in my life...

  But where are you now?

  — I am transmitting this from my Paris base via a satellite link, accessing the shipboard logic matrix of the Sublime. I am also communicating with Dan Leferve in his berth.

  Mirren questioned how Fekete could be communicating with two people at the same time.

  Again the chuckle. — I am now, in effect, a machine. I can replicate myself ad infinitum. I could even, if I so wished, communicate with a million people simultaneously. I am speaking to you via your occipital leads.

  A thought occurred to Mirren.

  Do you realise that Dan and others of his persuasion will deny that you are any longer human?

  Mirren was aware of humour in the reply. — Ralph, I myself doubt whether I am any longer human, as you would define the term. I am, however, a thinking, feeling, morally conscious entity. Call me transhuman, if you wish. I have already had this argument with Dan. We have moved on from that, to the reason for my communicating with you. My time is limited; with each passing second you move farther from the solar system, and my signal weakens-

  Why have you contacted us? Mirren asked, unable to work out why Fekete, loath to accompany them on this mission himself, should instigate what was surely the most bizarre dialogue in the history of star travel.

  There was a pause.

  — Upon my death and resurrection in this realm, Fekete began, I learned of Olafson and Elliott’s deaths, and investigated. I had unlimited resources open to me, and access to vast amounts of information. I naturally assumed that we, the Enginemen selected by Hunter for this mission, were being targeted and killed because someone did not want the mission to succeed. Coincidental as it may seem, we were targeted for altogether another reason.

  So Hunter was right, Mirren thought.

  Fekete paused. Mirren thought he had lost the link. Then he continued. –When I discovered the real reason, I attempted to contact Dan and yourself to warn you to abandon the mission. Of course I failed, until my sensors detected the Sublime. Now I can but warn you to take care.

  The real reason? Mirren asked.

  — In the days before my death I relived three sudden and involuntary flashbacks of our last voyage an
d the crashlanding of the Perseus Bound. These flashbacks were strange in that with each one I was given an increasing amount of information: I recalled nothing of the journey to begin with, and then with each flashback I recalled more and more... But I suspect I need not go on: you no doubt have undergone the same?

  Mirren assented.

  — Leferve and Elliott, and Olafson also; which I found out while investigating Olafson’s movements before her death. I spoke to her husband, and he mentioned that Christiana too experienced these attacks. He told me that she had contacted her doctor at the firm for which she worked, a subsidiary of the Danzig Organisation. I decided to investigate further. I insinuated probes into the medic’s information matrices and discovered a communiqué he despatched to the head of the Organisation.