Engineman Part 1

Engineman.

by Eric Brown.

Chapter One.

It was another hot night out on the tarmac of the old Orly s.p.a.ceport when Ralph Mirren saw what he thought was a KVI ghost.

He was tired and uncomfortable. The base of his skull throbbed painfully, a sure sign that he was due another flashback. The darkened cab of his grab-flier was like an oven. He couldn't win: with the sidescreens down, the breeze blowing across the 'port carried the alien spores which had drifted in through the interface two days ago from Chenowith. The spores caused respiratory complaints, and word had gone out to all 'port workers at the start of the shift to protect themselves. With the sidescreens sealed, the temperature inside the cab climbed into the high nineties. It was a basic design fault of these old Citroen grab-fliers that the cab was situated between the twin jet engines.

He killed the electro-magnet. The container he was carrying dropped into place beside the dozen others like the penultimate piece of a giant mosaic. He was turning to collect the last container when something flashed in the corner of his eye. He snapped his head around. The electric-blue spectre darted down an alley between the stacked containers. Shaken, Mirren lost control of his vehicle. It lurched for a second like a sea-borne vessel rocked by a wave. He gathered himself, righted the flier and brought it to rest on the tarmac. The dying whine of the jets gave way to a sudden silence. If his senses were to be trusted, then what he'd seen was the manifestation of what some Enginemen called a KVI ghost - hard though that was to believe. Mirren had always treated stories of the fleeting banshees, which came screaming from the nada nada-continuum via the portals of the Keilor-Vincicoff interfaces, with a healthy degree of scepticism.

He sat for seconds in the silence of the cab before cracking the hatch and climbing out. He knew he wouldn't find anything. The image he thought he'd seen was no more than a hallucination, the product of too much work and not enough sleep.

He stepped from the flier towards the containers, their corrugated flanks washed by the blue light of the interface across the s.p.a.ceport. He turned sideways and edged into the gap down which he'd seen the spectre disappear. There was no sign of anything untoward. A hallucination - it could be nothing else.

He turned a corner in the maze of containers, and there it was again. The ghost stood ten metres from him, its human form giving off a dazzling electric-blue glow. Cautiously he stepped towards it and the ghost took flight, disappearing between two containers. Mirren gave chase. When he reached the corner he turned and stared. The ghost had pa.s.sed down the length of the container and emerged on the tarmac beside the flier. It paused there, as if regarding him. He approached the shape, the sound of his heart loud in his ears. As he stepped from between the containers, the scene before him was transformed. At first he thought it was a trick of his eyes; then he realised that the out-fall of light from the Keilor-Vincicoff Interface, towering over the s.p.a.ceport, had downshifted from the brilliant cobalt of its deactivated phase to pastel shades of blue and green: through the 'face could be seen the hills and sky of a distant colony world. Instantly, the figure before Mirren was dispossessed of its burning vestments and stood revealed for what it was. Mirren stared at the frail old man garbed in a s.p.a.cer's silversuit, clutching a bottle before him like a leper with a bell.

"Stay clear and allow me on my way!" He was obviously terrified. There was something at once pathetic about the plea, and yet dignified.

Mirren held out a hand and stepped forward.

"You can't stop me!" the old man called, swinging the bottle in a crazy sweep.

Hard on the realisation that he was dealing with flesh and blood, and not ectoplasm, Mirren a.s.sumed that the man was an old drunk who had wandered onto the s.p.a.ceport by mistake. Then it came to him that, a drunk though the oldster might be, he once had been something more - and that his presence on the 'field was intentional. He recognised the look of bewildered abandonment in the oldster's eyes, heightened by the wild grey hair and straggling beard. His physical enfeeblement spoke of a similar state of mental disorientation. Mirren looked for and found the bulky spar of an occipital console spanning the oldster's shoulders beneath his silversuit like a miniaturised yoke.

"No closer! Leave me be!" He swayed, swinging the bottle in his fist. It slipped from his fingers and shattered at his feet. A dark stain spread across the tarmac and the reek of cognac rose in the hot night air.

"Mirren. An Alpha with the Canterbury Line on the Martian Epiphany Martian Epiphany for five years. Then five on the for five years. Then five on the Perseus Bound Perseus Bound. Take it easy, I'm on your side."

The old Engineman looked up from the broken bottle. Something in his gaze softened. "An Alpha with the Canterbury Line?" Their eyes met, and more was communicated in the silence than either man could possibly have spoken.

"Macready," the oldster whispered. "Beta. Javelin Line. Twenty years on the Pride of Idaho Pride of Idaho."

Their hands locked in a shake. Mirren felt as if he were crushing the fragile bones of a small bird.

He noticed, tattooed on the crepe-textured skin of Macready's right bicep, the infinity symbol of the Church of the Disciples of the Nada Nada-Continuum. Aware of what the old Engineman had planned to do here tonight, Mirren felt both awe and horror at his certainty, his faith.

It was as if Macready had read his thoughts. "You can't stop me," he said softly. "I've thought long and hard about it. I have my reasons. I'm old, and ill. Now, if you'd kindly let me by."

Mirren indicated the alien landscape through the distant interface. The 'face stood as high as a towerblock and twice as long, braced in an arc-lighted girder frame. The juxtaposition of a daylight scene set against the backdrop of the Paris night was like something from a surreal work of art.

"It's activated, Macready. You'd end up on that world - even if you managed to evade security. And one planet is much like any other without the flux."

"If you'd not come after me-"

"You still wouldn't have made it in time."

"When does it close again?"

Mirren shrugged. "One hour, two. Whenever they're through with the deliveries." He stepped past Macready, opened the hatch of his flier and pulled out a half litre of scotch from the dash.

"I've almost finished here. We could sit and watch the transfer...?"

"And when it's finished, I can go on my way?"

"How can I stop you?" Mirren asked. In an hour or two, Macready would be in no fit state to go anywhere.

As he helped the frail old man into the pa.s.senger seat, Mirren asked himself what right he had to deny the ex-Engineman his destiny. Macready had faith - which was more than he had - and all he wanted was a return to the One.

Mirren engaged the up-thrusters. He banked away from the containers, sped across the 'field and collected the last unit. It hung from the magnet on the base of his vehicle, projecting fore and aft, fully three times as long as the flier. Mirren returned to the stack, dropped the last container and mach'd away on a parabolic course around the periphery of the 'port.

"Where we going?" Macready asked.

"I know where we'll get a good view."

They approached a crescent of abandoned mansions overlooking the 'port. The buildings were three centuries old, ornate and foursquare. Alien creepers shrouded their facades, bearing blood-red orchid-like blooms and other spectacular flowers.

Macready screwed round in his seat. "You said you were Mirren?" He paused. "Surely not Bob Mirren?"

Mirren stiffened, as if liquid nitrogen had replaced his spinal fluid. "I'm Ralph," he said. "Bobby's my brother."

"I knew Max Thorn," Macready said. "Second man to go down with the Syndrome."

Mirren said nothing. He hoped Macready would drop the subject. The silence stretched in the darkness, and as if Macready had sensed Mirren's distress, he said, "I'm sorry."

Mirren cut the thrust and the flier settled on the flat rooftop of a central mansion. He climbed out and helped Macready down. The old man was weak with an infirmity that could not be wholly the result of his advanced years.

Mirren pulled an old chesterfield from beneath a polythene awning and positioned it at the edge of the roof, where the roots of an extraterrestrial vine gripped the edge like clinging fingers. He a.s.sisted Macready to the thick, sprung cushion and sat down beside him.

Macready whistled in appreciation. "Fernandez!" he said, invoking the name of the physicist who'd discovered the nada nada-continuum.

They had a grandstand view of that area of the 'port directly beneath the rearing interface. Down below, giant container-hovercraft and juggernauts approached the hazy membrane of the 'face and were processed through, their shapes giving off sparkling coronas of ball-lightening. Instantly they were light years away, trundling across the tarmac of the distant colony planet.

Mirren fumbled with the cap on the scotch, took a slug and pa.s.sed the bottle to Macready.

He came up here when there was no other way to vent his rage. He'd drink his scotch and hurl the empty bottle and curse the invention which had ended his affair with the numinous flux.

The interface did its job with disdainful ease and precision, opening portals to worlds separated by light years so that they were connected for periods of up to six hours. Goods could be driven - driven driven - from world to world. Alien planets no longer had mystique; the stars had lost their romance. s.p.a.ce travel was a thing of the past, and so were Enginemen. - from world to world. Alien planets no longer had mystique; the stars had lost their romance. s.p.a.ce travel was a thing of the past, and so were Enginemen.

Mirren spent a lot of time on the rooftop of the Rivoli mansions. He'd watch the bright points of familiar constellations wheel over the interface; Sagittarius, Virgo, Orion... He'd relived his time among the stars, his travels from one colony world to the next. For ten years all he'd lived for was his stint in the tank every twelve days, when his pineal bloomed and he pushed a 'ship through the realm which underlay the physical universe. The time spent in the tank, the sensation of the flux, had been a thing of wonder, which had left him blitzed for hours after de-tanking and craving more more. Many of his colleagues held the belief that in flux they were finally conjoined with the One, Nirvana, Afterlife. Mirren held a more materialistic rationale for what he'd experienced. He considered it nothing more than a psychological side-effect of having the logic-matrix of a bigship plugged into his brain. He might have felt at one with the nada nada-continuum through which he pushed the 'ship, but there was no actual concrete proof that the continuum was anything more than the null-s.p.a.ce its founder Pedro Fernandez had christened it. Nevertheless, Mirren had lived for the ecstasy of the flux, and even nowadays the wonder of it was a tantalising memory on the edge of his consciousness - like a moving pa.s.sage of music which resisted recollection, but at others flooded him with a hint of transcendence, and the sadness of knowing that he would never again experience such joy... Always he would leave the rooftop before dawn in tears, garage the grab-flier at the 'port, pick up his own vehicle and head home to his darkened rooms. Like all Enginemen, everywhere, Mirren abhorred the day.

Mirren had considered, in the early days after the shutdown of the Lines, having his recollections of the flux wiped from his consciousness through the process of mem-erase. He'd even approached a consultant about the treatment, but before he could undergo the process which would have done away with great chunks of his memory, mem-erase was withdrawn as unsafe - tests revealed that the erased memories could resurface years later in bouts of trauma or psychosis - and Mirren was condemned to a life-time of craving.

Macready took a long swallow of scotch and pa.s.sed the bottle. He laid back his head and exhaled in alcoholic relief. Whisky trickled from his lips, beading in the tangle of his beard.

Mirren indicated the s.p.a.ceport. "Look."

On the tarmac, before the interface, was a bigship. Both men stared down at it with a kind of silent wonder tinged with despair. It was as if the 'ship had been rolled out before them as a final insult.

It was as big as a towerblock laid on its side - a bull-nosed behemoth moving with agonising slowness towards the screen. The 'ship was like some proud and magnificent animal, blinded or lamed. It had had its flux-tank and logic-matrix ripped out, and all it was now was a feeble husk, a sh.e.l.l ferrying goods through the interface, powered by auxiliary engines and steered by drivers.

The bigship fed its colossal length into the 'face, and there was something horribly symbolic about the 'ship's submitting itself to the very device which had brought about its downfall.

Mirren recalled times, on the many s.p.a.ceports across the Expansion, when bigships phased rapidly from this reality to the nada nada-continuum and back again, creating a stroboscopic effect like the image on a spinning coin. There had been times when the Lines were so busy that some s.p.a.ceports had a hundred bigships phasing out simultaneously. To witness this was to be given a foretaste of the flux, as if the flickering 'ships, shuttling between realities, granted mundane reality the tantalising miasma of the nada nada-continuum.

Mirren was brought back to earth by a question from Macready.

"Why did you come after me down there?" There was grievance in the Engineman's tone.

"To tell the truth, I thought you were a ghost."

"A KVI ghost?" Macready spluttered a laugh. "I was a kay from the 'face!"

"Does that make any difference?"

Macready took a slug. "Ghosts are manifestations of the continuum," he said. "They come through the interfaces because the 'faces are the only link between the continuum and this... this reality. They're the souls of the departed and exist only briefly."

Mirren stared at the interface. "To be honest I don't believe-"

"But you thought I was one?"

"Just for a second."

Macready was shaking his head. "But you're an Engineman! Didn't the flux do anything for you?"

"Of course, but..." How could he explain to a believer that he had no belief?

"I pity you, Mirren. I really do. Listen, I've seen ghosts - dozens of them. When I left the Line I worked for a time as a driver on Deliniquin. I piloted 'ships like that one down there. No subst.i.tute for the real thing, but at least I was working on a bigship. I could convince myself that entering the interface was the next best thing to experiencing the nada nada-continuum. Some nights on the field we'd see flashes of light streak out from the 'face and approach us, then fade in seconds. Not really human in shape, just bolts of light. Souls..."

Mirren had heard hundreds of stories about Enginemen witnessing the so-called 'ghosts', and although they all claimed to see the same phenomena there was one aspect of the stories that made Mirren sceptical: only Enginemen ever saw the ghosts. It was as if they and only they were granted special audiences with the spectres as recompense for being deprived of the flux. Mirren a.s.sumed that the compensatory phenomena was nothing more than a product of the Enginemen's psyches - they wanted to believe, they wanted to see the ghosts, outriders from the continuum that Enginemen were now denied, and they did.

"Here..." Macready was rooting about in an inside pocket of his silvers. He withdrew a glowing card and pa.s.sed it to Mirren. The card advertised the Church of the Disciples of the Nada Nada-Continuum, situated on Rue Bresson, Montparna.s.se. Mirren had seen pictures of the Church, an old smallship converted into a chapel for believers.

"If you're in doubt, Mirren, go to a service. They'll put you right."

Mirren decided not to argue. He returned the card and smiled at the old Engineman. They drank in silence for a while, watching the activity on the tarmac far below. The bigship had returned through the interface, and now the column of------- fliers and trucks drove through like a column of ants. They unloaded their cargo on the distant world, then made their way back, traversing the light years in seconds. Later, the arc-lights around the frame of the interface winked out one by one, signalling the imminent closure of the link.

Mirren stared past the interface at the great sprawl of the city. The avenues and boulevards of some districts were illuminated like rigorous constellations, while other areas were plunged into darkness. Paris was the spiritual capital of the universe for the hopeless, disaffected guild of ex-Enginemen. The city had been home to generations of s.p.a.cers, and when the Enginemen found themselves out of work it seemed the natural thing to do to make the pilgrimage to the shrine of Orly s.p.a.ceport and the icon of the Keilor-Vincicoff Interface. Some Enginemen came to Paris because it was the city they knew best; others, mainly the more religious, because they believed that by being close to an interface they were also close to the nada nada-continuum.

Mirren counted himself among the former. He had made his home in the city whenever he'd docked on Earth, and rather than start a new life on one of the colony worlds or elsewhere on Earth, he'd decided to return to Paris and try for work at the 'port. He was successful - fliers, indeed workers of all types, were in short supply. But the Paris to which he returned was not the Paris he had left. The city no longer had the monopoly on interstellar trade - the Keilor-Vincicoff Organisation had opened interface 'ports in Kuala Lumpur and Buenos Aires, and investment had moved away from the West and to the richer countries of the South. Also, in the first year that the interface was open, it had admitted a host of breeze-born viruses, spores and seeds. The city had been transformed from the carefree European capital Mirren had known and loved into a sultry alien backwater; plagues and epidemics had ravaged Paris, and as the seeds took hold the city had become a phantasmagorical floral wonderland. The banks of the Seine were overrun by a riot of exotic alien vegetation, so that the river resembled more the jungle-fringed stretches of the Zambesi. Lianas, vines and virulent lichens gained purchase on old buildings and monuments. The girders of the Eiffel Tower were enwrapped by a creeper which sprouted giant sousaphone blooms so that it resembled a radio mast from the nightmare of a crazed surrealist. Plant-life was not the only invader; animals had taken the opportunity to migrate. In the early days, never a week had gone by without Mirren spotting some animal or bird that was not native to Earth. Rodents the size of dogs roved the deserted streets of the Latin Quarter, and exotic, winged creatures, half-bird, half-bat, had the freedom of the skies.

Macready cradled the empty bottle in his lap. He stared into the interface with unseeing eyes.

All activity had ceased on the tarmac below. The fliers and trucks were parked up on the perimeter of the 'port and the bigship had returned to its hangar, a sad animal at the end of its life.

The broad screen of the interface no longer showed the distant alien landscape. Now, deactivated, it coruscated cobalt blue. Rumour among Enginemen, especially those who believed that the nada nada-continuum represented Nirvana, was that in its deactivated state the 'face provided a portal to the infinite, a shortcut to eternity. They could have taken their lives in the privacy of their own homes, of course - and over the years many had - but there was a certain esteem to be had, a status gained in the hierarchy of martyrs, when one single-mindedly and with intent aforethought rendezvoused with the screen and destroyed oneself in a spectacular blaze of glory.

As Mirren watched, a suicide prepared his exit. He came in from the south, slung horizontal beneath the triangular wing of a power glider. Arc-lights dazzled off the propeller and the silver struts. There was about the suicides an element of the innovative that had less to do with the theatrical than the practical: suicides had to find new ways to evade the guards and fry themselves.

The drunken Macready, with his bottle of cognac and desire for oblivion, would have tried to dodge the guards and leap into the 'face in an act as humble as it was ill-planned. Mirren had saved the oldster, if temporarily: if Macready wished to end his life, then sooner or later he would succeed.

Macready had seen the glider. The oldster was leaning forward in the chesterfield, his attention fixed on the small, emerald triangle as it banked over the mansion and dived for the 'port. He wore an expression of fascination, as if he knew he would not make the 'face tonight and was vicariously sharing the pilot's final approach.

The glider arrowed towards the interface and slammed into the screen. Contact was brief and blinding. For a fraction of a second the outline of the glider and its spread-eagled pilot remained etched in silver on the blue screen, then dissolved and vanished. Mirren fancied he could hear the suicide's scream, diminishing, and smell his roasted corpse on the night air. He was at once appalled by the wanton forfeit of life, and awe-struck. He marvelled at the faith of the suicide, his certainty that absorption into the nada nada-continuum was the reward for so spectacular and beauteous an incineration.

Beside him on the chesterfield, Macready attempted to climb to his feet. Mirren restrained him, and the old man was too insensate with drink to resist.

"Let me go, d.a.m.n you!" He slumped back into the cushions, exhausted.

"You'd never make it down there," Mirren said. "And even if you did, you wouldn't get past the guards-"

"Then I'll die trying!"

Mirren gripped the stringy, tattooed bicep. "Why?" he asked. "Why not just jump off the d.a.m.ned building and have done!"

Macready tipped back his head and cried at the stars. "When I was discharged I... I swore to myself that an interface death was the only way-" He struggled to stand again, but was too weak and fell back, crying. "Life's h.e.l.l, Mirren. If only you could feel the pain."

"d.a.m.n you - and you think I don't miss the flux, too?"

The oldster cackled. "I mean I'm ill, Mirren. I'm dying."

Mirren stared at him.

Macready went on, "It's a terminal condition, Mirren. There's no cure. No cure at all. Only..." His head fell back, as if the fight had drained from him, and his breath came in ragged spasms.

Mirren averted his eyes, aware of the slow thump of his heartbeat.

Down on the tarmac, the guards were clearing up what remained of the kamikaze pilot and his glider - a few charred spars, sc.r.a.ps of clothing, larger chunks of what might have been charcoaled flesh. They disposed of the remains with little ceremony, scooping them up in the shovel of a tractor.

In the quiet aftermath of the spectacular suicide, Mirren found himself saying, "I was married before I became an Engineman. I had a child, a daughter in Australia. I thought I loved them both... Then I signed on the Canterbury Line, experienced the flux. When I came back - you know how it is. Nothing's the same. I lived only for the flux..." He wondered whether to add that his wife had come looking for him recently, but decided that the oldster wouldn't want to hear about his problems.

He glanced at Macready. He tried to remember the last time he'd spoken to someone about his life before the flux.

Macready sat unmoving. His head rested against the back of the chesterfield and his mouth hung open. Mirren reached out and touched the withered cheek. The old man's head fell forward, chin on chest. He felt Macready's frail wrist for a pulse.

He returned his gaze to the interface. He closed his eyes. Even the darkness was tinged with the blue light that glowed through his eyelids. If the Disciple's theology was to be believed, then right now Macready was being absorbed into the vastness which underlay everything, the infinite realm of the nada nada-continuum.

Silently he cursed the flux and its terrible consequences.

He heard the vehicle before he saw it.

When he opened his eyes and turned his head, the police cruiser was settling on the rooftop beside his flier. The cop climbed out, stretching after a long shift. Mirren knew the officer from the nightly patrols he made around the 'port. He'd even joined Mirren on the chesterfield, sharing a drink and appreciating the dawn view.