Engineman

by Eric Brown

  She took me into her workroom overlooking the arching membrane of the outer dome. The contents of the room were scattered; hologram frames and benches in disarray, indicating the artist in the throes of production. Three completed holograms stood against the wall, and others in various stages of completion occupied benches or were piled on the floor.

  “These three are finished and okay. The others-” She indicated those on the floor with a sweep of her hand. “I think I’ll scrap them and release these three later this year.”

  I stared into the three-dimensional glass sculptures. The imprisoned images were grotesque and disturbing, grim forebodings and prophesies of darkness. I was horrified, without really knowing why. “Dying,” I whispered.

  Lin Chakra nodded. “Of course. The ultimate mystery. What better subject for the artist who has done everything else?”

  I moved to the next hologram. This one was more graphic; inside great baubles and bubbles of glass I made out the shrunken image of Lin herself, her small body contorted in angles of pain and suffering. “You?”

  “I contracted leukaemia six months ago,” she said. “The medics give me another three.”

  “And when you’ve finished you’ll go for a cure...” I began.

  She averted her gaze, stared at the floor.

  “You can’t let it kill you, Lin!” I cried. “You’re still young. You have all your life ahead of you. All your art-”

  “Listen to me, Dan. I have done everything. I’ve been everywhere and experienced everything and put it all into holograms and there is nothing else for me to do.”

  “Can’t you simply...” I shrugged. “Retire? Quit holograms if you’ve said all you can?”

  She was slowly shaking her head; sadly, it seemed. “Dan... You don’t understand. You’re no artist, really. Not a true artist. If you were you’d understand that artists live for what they can put into holograms, or on paper or canvas, whatever. When that comes to an end, their lives are finished. How can I go on when I have nothing more to say?” She stared at me. “Death is the final statement. I want to give the world my death.”

  “Does Santesson know about this?” I asked.

  “I told her, of course. She’s an artist, Dan. She understands.”

  I moved around the studio in a daze. At last I said, “But these holograms aren’t your death, Lin. These are your dying.”

  Her eyes brimmed with tears, and she nodded. “Don’t you think I realise that? Why do you think I’ve scrapped all these?” She flung out her arm at the half-completed holograms scattered about the room. “They’re imperfect, Dan. Impressions of dying, that’s all. These three are the closest in dying that I’ve come to death.”

  I thought of Ana, who had died when she had most wanted to live. Lin’s slow suicide was an affront to her memory, and it was this knowledge that burned in me with anger. “You can’t do it, Lin.”

  “You don’t understand!”

  I’d had my fill of pain and could take no more. I left her standing by the entrance and without a word took the downchute. The music had stopped and I walked quickly through the empty streets towards the safe sector of the city.

  For the next couple of days I remained in my studio, drank acid shorts and stared morosely at the crystal I had started but could not finish. My old need to create art from the tragedy of the John Marston was overcome by apathy; it was as if what Lin Chakra was doing had reminded me that nothing, not even art, could ease the agony of my being without Ana.

  Lin called repeatedly, perhaps in a bid to explain herself, to make me understand. But I always cut the connection the second her face appeared on the screen.

  I considered killing myself before my time was due.

  A few days after my meeting with Lin I stood before a crystal I’d completed months before. It failed as a work of art, but as a statement of my pain and my love for Ana it was wholly successful. I ran my hand over the crystals, reliving again the experience of being with her; reliving the horror of her absence.

  Next to the crystal I had placed a laser-razor...

  Christianna Santesson saved my life.

  The screen chimed and I ran to it, intending to scream at Lin Chakra that I resented her intrusion. I punched the set into life.

  Santesson smiled out at me. “Daniel... How are you?”

  “What do you want?” I snapped, venting anger on her.

  “Business, Daniel.” She chose to ignore my rudeness. “Your crystal is showing very well. I’m delighted with the response of the public. I was wondering... How would you feel about producing a sequel to exhibit beside it?”

  Her commercialism sickened me.

  I told her that that was out of the question, that in fact I’d stopped working.

  She frowned. “That’s unfortunate, Daniel,” she said; then, with an air of calculation, “I don’t suppose you’ve considered telling me how you produce your crystals, Daniel? After all, you did promise that you would, one day.”

  I nodded. “One day, yes.”

  “Then perhaps I could persuade you to sell me one single fused console, instead?” There was a look of animal-like entreaty in her eyes.

  I laughed as an idea occurred to me. “Very well, I will. But I want a million credits for it.”

  To my surprise she smiled. “That sounds reasonable, Daniel. You have yourself a deal. One million credits. I’ll pay it into your account as soon as the crystal is delivered.”

  In a daze I said, “I’ll do it right away.”

  She smiled goodbye and cut the connection.

  Later, I wired myself up and arranged a crystal console, induced a nova-nightmare and channelled the firepower into the alien stones. As always it took immense concentration and energy to sustain the power required to fuse an entire console without leaching my emotions into it, and I was exhausted by the time I finished. I sealed the slab in a lead-lined wrap and hired a flyer to take it to Santesson. Then I returned to my studio and sprawled across the foamform. All thoughts of pre-emptive suicide had fled. With the million credits I would offer Lin Chakra the stars, buy her passage aboard a starship to give her that which she had yet to experience. I slept.

  I dreamed of Ana. We were making love in the astro-nacelle, our bodies joined at the pelvis and spinning as the stars streaked around the dome. Ana moaned in Hindi as orgasm took her, eyes turned up to show only an ellipse of pearly white. Our occipital computers were tuned to each others’ frequency, and our heads resonated with ever-increasing ecstasy. Around our spinning bodies cast-off sweat hung weightless like miniature suns, each droplet catching the light of the genuine suns outside. Then, with a surreal rearrangement of fact common to dreams, the nova blew while I was still with Ana, and burned in my arms, though I remained strangely uninjured. Her flesh shrivelled and her bones exploded, and through our computer link she screamed her hate at me.

  The horror pushed me to a shallower level of sleep, though I didn’t awake. I tossed and turned fitfully, and then began to dream a second time. Again I was in the astro-nacelle, and again I was making love—but this time not to Ana. I held Lin Chakra to me, distantly aware of this anomalous transposition, and she stared in wonder at the starlight wrapped like streamers around the dome.

  It was dark when I awoke. I had slept for almost twenty-four hours. Through the slanting glass roof of the studio, star Radnor, B winked at me. I got up feebly and staggered across to the vid-screen. I called Lin Chakra, but she was either out or not answering; the screen remained blank. I paced around for an hour, going through the contents of my dreams. Then I tried to reach her again, and again there was no response. I decided to go to her place with my offer of the stars, dressed and left the studio.

  I walked through the deserted streets of the radioactive sector and rode the upchute to her suite. I called her name as I passed through the large white rooms, but there was no reply. The words I had rehearsed were a jumble in my head as the time approached for me to use them. I think I realised that she would
refuse my offer, point out quite simply that she could have bought the experience of starflight herself, if she had thought it might afford her new insights. In the event I had no need to make the offer. I entered her room. .

  I found Lin on the floor.

  Her naked body lay in a pool of her own blood. Choking, I dropped to my knees beside her. She had taken a laser and lacerated her left wrist almost to the point of amputation. She appeared far more beautiful in death than ever she had in life, and I knew that this was because of the expression on her face. I realised then that during all the time I had known her I had never seen her smile.

  I cried something incomprehensible, lifted her body into my arms and began to rock, repeating the name, “Ana...” over and over.

  * * * *

  A few weeks later I met Christianna Santesson at a party.

  I had completed a dozen crystals since the first, and they were showing quite well. My last crystal had been an admission of the guilt I felt at consigning my colleagues to death, an expiation that stood in place of my own death. I hoped that soon I would be able to leave the psychologically crippling subject of the John Marston and move on to other things. Perhaps in fifty years I would be able to watch the nova of star Radnor B without the pain of guilt.

  I had hired the services of a top medic and he had removed the computer and rebuilt my face. I was still no beauty, but at least people could look at me now without flinching. The scars still showed, physical counterparts of the mental scars that would take much longer to heal.

  Christianna Santesson did not recognise me.

  As I stood beside her in a group of artists and critics, I could not decide if she was evil or supremely good. My attitude towards her was ambivalent; I passed through phases of wanting to kill her and wanting to thank her for saving my life a second time.

  Someone mentioned Lin Chakra.

  “Her death was such a tragic loss,” Santesson said. “But she will live on in her work. Her final trilogy, Dying, will be out this summer. I had arranged for her to make a definitive statement on the subject, but the piece was stolen soon after her death. As I was saying...”

  I left the party early and returned to my studio.

  The crystal lay in the centre of the room, sparkling in the starlight and still covered in blood. Lin had even titled it before she killed herself: The Death of Lin Chakra. I knelt before the console and passed a hand across the faceted surface. Agony and pain saturated each crystal, and they communicated the awful realisation that everything she had ever known was drawing to a close with the inevitable approach of death. Lin had achieved her final artistic goal; she had successfully transferred to crystal her ultimate experience. Soon, as she would have wished, I would give her masterpiece to the world, so that everyone might learn from Lin Chakra’s bloody death how fortunate they were to be alive.

  * * * *

  The Phoenix Experiment

  One month after the death of his daughter, Jonathon Fuller decided to leave the city. The life and energy of the place was too stark a contrast to the isolation he had imposed upon himself, too harsh a reminder of his daughter’s passing. He needed the tranquillity of the countryside, where his desire to be alone would not be seen as perverse, in order to come to terms with his guilt and eventually, perhaps, to persuade himself to return. He shelved all his projects and told his agent that he was going away for a long holiday.

  Early that summer he drove from the city and toured the southern coastline in search of a suitable retreat, somewhere isolated and idyllic, untouched by the technologies of contemporary life. Within a week he discovered a lonely village overlooking the channel, and made enquiries at a local property office. He was told that there were no houses for rent in the village itself, but there were chalets available in the Canterbury Rehabilitation Community, half a mile away.

  He’d heard about the Community, but, far from being deterred by the nature of the place, it occurred to him that there he might be allowed the privacy he desired.

  When he arrived at the enclosed estate later that afternoon he was met by a big, bulky man in an invalid carriage, who called himself the Captain and showed Fuller to one of a dozen identical A-frames that occupied a greensward beside the ocean. The view of the seascape, and the chalet’s relative isolation, cheered him. He thought back to his depressive state in the city and told himself that this was exactly what he had been seeking.

  That first night, as darkness fell and the stars appeared, he took a bottle of scotch onto the balcony, drank and stared up at the constellations. The Captain had told him that he would be made welcome by the rest of the patients—at this stage of their rehabilitation, he had said, they rarely had contact with outsiders. Fuller had been unable to bring himself to tell the Captain that he would not be requiring company for some time.

  In one of the other A-frames on the gently sloping greensward, a party was in progress: the patients, he thought, doing their best to forget the present. Dark shapes passed across the lighted squares of windows like figures in an Indonesian shadow play, and laughter drifted across to him on the warm night air.

  He decided to set up a camp bed on the balcony, in the hope that his dreams of late had been in part a product of the claustrophobia he had experienced in the city. But the open air, the mild sea breeze, could do nothing to alleviate the guilt, and in the early hours he awoke in a sweat and watched his daughter’s smiling face vanish into the night.

  * * * *

  Fuller took to going on long walks early in the mornings, so as to avoid the patients who were active mainly in the afternoons. He would spend the rest of the day reading, or drinking, or watching television. It was as if he was purposefully filling his head with trivia, and allotting only the two hours he spent walking for the serious consideration of his circumstances.

  At the funeral, and its aftermath, he had been unable to show the slightest sign of grief. Many of his acquaintances assumed that he was still in shock, but his father had seen through his silent facade and called Fuller cold and emotionless, accused him of feeling nothing for his dead daughter.

  Only later did he begin to experience the guilt—not so much at being unable to grieve at her death, rather at his inability to show her more affection during the short time that she had been alive. He had kept his distance, remained aloof, believing that by doing so he could insulate himself from the hurt that inevitably followed emotional involvement. He believed that with involvement came the fear of another’s mortality, and from that the reminder of one’s own—and more than anything else Fuller feared his own death. Over the years, he had succeeded in distancing himself from everyone with whom he had contact, his daughter included. He was rewarded by the inability to suffer anguish at his bereavement. Only now was he coming to realise that his apathy had affected the quality of his daughter’s short life.

  * * * *

  One morning, after a long walk, Fuller encountered a patient on the beach beneath the cliffs. Later, he came to think of the brief meeting as prophetic.

  He saw the woman as he came around the headland, paused and considered retracing his steps so as to avoid meeting her. She was staring out to sea, with her back to him, and he decided to walk quickly past her towards the steps cut into the cliff-face.

  She stood in the wet sand, her hands slotted into the back pockets of her denim cut-offs, a short white tee-shirt emphasising her tan. She was a crew-cut blonde with the figure of a small boy, and it occurred to Fuller, with mounting shock that, if she were so physically perfect, then her debilitation had to be cerebral.

  Then he became aware of the subcutaneous network, the threads of gold that embroidered the surface of her arms and legs, the small of her back and belly between cotton shirt and the frayed waistline of her denims.

  She turned and caught him staring. Her face was young and open. Fuller tried to hurry past, but her question stopped him.

  “Are you one of them?” Her voice was transistorised, straight from the larynx, whil
e her full lips smiled and her green eyes stared at him.

  “I arrived here yesterday, from London.” He stopped. “But aren’t you-?” He gestured to the greensward.

  “I’m a patient, but not of the Canterbury Line. We do not mix.’’

  He saw that although she had followed him with her head, her stance in the wet sand had not altered. She stood with a torque to her spine that was at once awkward and becoming, her hands still pocketed behind her.