Engineman Part 36

I laugh. "No? You sure about that? Think again, girl. In our disguises we were safe among all the other characters - then we're seen by the Andy. He's the only person who knows we're in this get-up."

"But the fire came from the opposite direction," she complains, reasonably.

"So the Andy has an accomplice, yes?"

That silences her.

Belatedly I realize that we're on the set of Frankenstein Frankenstein. The scientist's lab is caught in flickers of electric blue, revealing eerie contraptions, improbable machines. The monster is on the slab, awaiting reanimation.

"And I don't know why we're wearing these stupid things," I say, unzipping the head and flinging it back. Out there, the killer is busy frying every Mickey and Minnie in sight.

Da Cruz says: "But why should he want to...?"

"Slipped cog?" I suggest facetiously. I kick my suit away and it shivers against the wall like an animated jelly. "Take yours off," I tell her. "You're a marked mouse if you don't ditch that suit."

I waste no time and get through to Ma.s.singberd.

"Is! You okay?"

"I'm fine, Ma.s.s. Look, I need some info. You ready?"

I look at Da Cruz. She gives me the Andy's tag and cla.s.sification, and I relay this to Ma.s.s with the rider, "Not that he's filed under that. Check wide. You know where to find me." I cut the link.

"You not out of that thing yet?" I stare at her. "Hey, you got something to hide?" Which, considering I have access to her head, is cruel.

I peep over masonry. I can't see the Andy or his boat from here, but his accomplice is still junking robot rodents. Bolts hail continuously from the far side of the complex.

"Come on!" I say.

She's out of the suit and staring defiantly at me.

The right side of her face is disfigured by a long scar more suited to Frankenstein's monster. Even in the flickering light I can see that it was once far worse, before plastic surgery. And it's still ugly. She's a nice kid, too - a small, dark Peruvian with skin like Aztec gold.

The scar's much deeper, of course. The surface damage is superficial; it's the scar inside her head that causes all the pain.

I give her my hand. "There must be a service hatch somewhere," I say. "We can approach the killer from below without being seen."

She leads me to a concealed swing door and we hit the underside. Less attention has been paid to illumination and glitz down here. Glo-tubes rationed to every ten metres st.i.tch the gloom. The thunder of machinery is deafening. We jog along a vast, curving gallery, mirror image of the corridor top-side where I met Da Cruz.

And I'm scanning all the time for the killer.

My hand bleeps and we stop to take the call.

"You're right, Is," Ma.s.singberd rapps. "The 'droid isn't on our files - under that tag. I came up with a likely candidate, though. A B-grade Andy manufactured in the Carnival clinic twenty-five years ago. It was employed for the first ten years as an extra in kids' films. It applied for up-grading several times but got nowhere. It was transferred to Disneyworld Shanghai, where it worked for another decade. Then - get this, Is - five years ago this 'droid was reported rogue. It dropped out and disappeared. We have a few reports on file as to its alleged activities during the next five years. Apparently it joined the outlawed Supremacy League, that crackpot band of 'droids who demand the rule over humanity. It was involved in the bombings of '65, but was never apprehended. We have a number of reports that it underwent a programme of training as a cyber-surgeon so that the League could expand its up-grading of all the 'droids who joined them. We lost trace of it earlier this year, Is - around the time that your 'droid joined the Carnival outfit. It's quite feasible that it gave itself new retina-, finger- and voice-prints, doctored certificates and became the actor who played Dr Frankenstein. The 'droid returned home, Is-"

"To do a little counter publicity for the largest manufacturers of B-grade Androids," I finish.

"You got it."

"I'll keep you posted, Ma.s.s."

We set off again.

Da Cruz is murmuring to herself. "And he seemed so genuine at the audition..."

I ignore her and concentrate on the sudden flare of sentience that's just appeared a kilometre up-front. I've never before scanned anything like it. As we draw closer I realise that I'm not dealing with a normal human being. The thing up there overwhelms me with fear and pain and regret and guilt.

I go for the killer's ident.i.ty, but I'm either too far away or the signal is weakening. I get the impression, then, that the killer is losing his strength, dying...

We're almost underneath the place where the maniac made his stand. To our right is a viewscreen, showing s.p.a.ce and the quiet Earth. On our left we pa.s.s a pair of green swing doors, marked with heiroglyphs: the representation of a man and what might be an icicle.

It doesn't hit me for another five paces.

There's something in the head of the killer above us that has no right to be there... something that's keeping him alive.

I retrace my steps and regard the swing doors.

"Isabella?" Da Cruz says.

"Christ," I murmur. "Jesus Christ..."

I push through the doors at a run.

"Isabella!" Da Cruz rushes in after me.

We're in an operating theatre, and the only way it differs from the one in Dr Frankenstein's castle is in the modern fittings; the overhead halogens and the angle-poise operating table. They've both seen the same deed accomplished, one in fiction and one in fact.

I move towards a green, vertical tank as if in a trance.

"Isabella?" Da Cruz is staring at me. "Didn't you know? We brought him up here years ago, equipped this place for when the time is right to bring him back to-"

I open the tank and it's empty.

"Where is he?" she screams at me as I run from the theatre and through the nearest hatch to the upper hemisphere.

I've never really credited Androids with any of the more complex human emotions, like love or hate...

Or even irony.

By playing his role of Dr Frankenstein to the full, this Andy has proved me wrong.

Back in the twentieth century, the king of the greatest entertainment industry on Earth was corpsicled. Put on ice and stacked away until such time as his cancer could be fixed. And now...

Now Walt stands on the balcony of a fairytale castle. Ten metres separate him from where I crouch on the gallery that circles the complex. He rests his weight on a laser-rifle, crutchlike, and sways. His shaven head bulges at the left temple with a dark ma.s.s like some morbid extra-cranial tumour: it's a cyber-auxiliary, wired in there by the Android. It's this that is powering him, that motivated him to commit the slaying of the innocents. He's so feeble now, so near death a second time, that it has little control over his body or his mind. For the first time since his resurrection, he is himself.

He sees me and smiles sadly.

His skin, blanched with more than a hundred years of death, is puckered and loose, maggotlike. He is barely conscious, yet a flicker of tragic awareness moves within him. The chemical that is keeping him alive is almost spent.

"Is this a nightmare?" he asks in a voice so frail it barely reaches me.

"A dream," I say.

"Where am I?" I read his lips. "In h.e.l.l?"

I almost reply: "In your Heaven, Walt," but stop myself.

I follow his gaze to the deck, as he surveys the carnage of his own doing.

"Watch out!" Da Cruz appears beside me and drags me to the ground. Walt is making one last feeble attempt to lift and aim the laser; it wavers in our direction. I can read in his eyes that he has no desire to kill us, but the choice is not his. The Frankenstein Android controls the cyber-auxiliary.

I close my eyes.

In the nightmare of Walt's failing brain I open the floodgates of anger. I motivate him into action, give him the will to revenge himself.

And while I'm doing this I realise something. How can I ever again use my ability to induce love after using it to promote so much hate?

Da Cruz clutches my arm. "What--?"

I concentrate. "Just call it black magic, Maria." And as I speak, Walt swings his laser-rifle, the desire for revenge overcoming the Android's final command.

He cries out and fires.

The s...o...b..at disintegrates in a million shards of synthi-timber, and Dr Frankenstein explodes like a grenade in a brilliant white starburst.

Walt lets the laser fall and slips quietly into his second death, smiling with induced euphoria all the way.

Three hours later and we're surfing down the helix of the gravity-well. Back on the Sat, Walt is being returned to ice, the slaughter mopped up. Maria is taking time off, dirtside.

I break the silence. "Were you orphaned, Maria?" Gently.

She looks at me, suspicious. "How do you know?"

I reach out and touch her head. "Big trouble upstairs," I say. Then: "We're very much alike, you and me."

She gives me the story that I know already, but it helps for her to talk about it. Her mother died when she was ten, and she was taken from her father following the attack that left her scarred.

"And you?" she asks. "Were you orphaned?"

"Something like that-" And stop.

My parents' tribe was hungry and poor. I was their third and youngest daughter, and I checked out psi-positive. A hundred thousand credits bought a lot of cattle, back then.

So the Telescan Unit wasn't exactly slave labour...

But try telling that to a lonely nine year-old.

"Perhaps you'd like to tell me about it?" Maria asks, with affection.

Get that- Genuine Affection.

I smile. "I think perhaps I might," I say.

//Star of Epsilon Paris was in again and summer found me on the left bank, playing to crowds in the Blue Shift slouchbar. I blitzed 'em with cosmic visions. I sub-circuited direct, employed slo-mo, ra-ta-tat shots, even visual cut-ups, in homage. G.o.ddard and Burroughs were back in, too. Had to do with nostalgia, the harking back to supposedly better times. h.e.l.l... Didn't I know that? Wasn't I cashing in on the fact that we all love to live a lie? Wasn't I giving the crowds what they wanted because they'd never get it otherwise?

I met her after a night performance.

The Blue Shift was the the scene that month. scene that month.

It wasn't just the drugs they pumped but the live acts, I liked to think. I alternated nights with a cute fifteen year-old sado-m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.t on sensitised feedback. It wasn't my kick, but off-nights I'd sneak downstairs and jack-in. And jack-out again, fast. Three minutes was all I could take of this kid - my opposition. The management had it sussed. They played us counterpoint: one night this weird little girl giving out intimations of death and id-grislies like no kid should, and the next old Abe Santana with his visions of Nirvana-thru-flux, the glories of the s.p.a.ce-lanes.

The girl intrigued me. The neon-glitz out front billed her as Jo, and that was enough to pull the freaks. Her act was simple. On stage a sudden spotlight found a small cross-legged figure in a Pierrot suit, white-powdered face a paragon of melancholy complete with stylised tear. She'd come on easy at first, slipping fear sub-lim at the slouched crowd. Her head was shaven, but a tangle of leads snaking from her cortical-implant gave her the aspect of a par-shorn Medusa. The leads went down inside her suit and into the stage, coming out by the cushions. Freaks jacked-in and got fear first, subtle unease. Then the kid shifted her position, sitting now with outstretched legs together, arms stanchioned behind her, palms down. The nursery pose contradicted the horror coming down the leads, the hindbrain terror of mortality. She tapped into us and found our fear of death and gave it back, redoubled - turning us to stone.

First time I jacked-in I wondered how she did this, what magic she worked to show us that which we tried to deny, even to ourselves. So the next night I stayed with it a while longer, and I found out. Little Jo was dying. She was fifteen and she'd never see sixteen and the gut-kick I experienced when I realised this was zero zero compared with her angst. That's when I jacked-out, sickened, got loaded and tried to forget. compared with her angst. That's when I jacked-out, sickened, got loaded and tried to forget.

Over the next few weeks I was lured back again and again. I knew what I wanted: not the o.r.g.a.s.m of terror the rest of the crowd got high on, but the futile rea.s.surance that Jo was not really dying, that her performance was just a death-a.n.a.logue recorded from some terminal patient, encoded on Jo's computer and used cynically to thrill.

But the more I experienced her act, the more I knew I was dreaming. Jo was dying, okay. She gave out death, and when the audience were convinced that they they were dying she reversed the feed and drank it back, and you could almost hear the gasp of her soul as its need was quenched. The kid's in love with death, I told myself, as if hoping this might ease my heartache: perhaps, if she were, then I could pity her a little less. were dying she reversed the feed and drank it back, and you could almost hear the gasp of her soul as its need was quenched. The kid's in love with death, I told myself, as if hoping this might ease my heartache: perhaps, if she were, then I could pity her a little less.

Then I realised the truth. The only reason she reversed the feed was to take from the crowd the knowledge that they too would some day die, to rea.s.sure herself that she was not alone in the dying process we all call living.

After that I avoided the club on my nights off. I couldn't go near the place, and those freaks in there - I thought many a time over a drink in some darkened, nondescript bar - they stayed jacked-in for hours! And that brought me back to what I was running from, the fear of death and the terrible realisation that Jo was plugged into that weltschmerz weltschmerz for the rest of her life. for the rest of her life.

And my act?

How many of the crowd who freaked out on Jo's act came to mine? Their diametric content would suggest none, but I hoped some people needed antidote.

I'd start simple. I'd give them the experience of an Engineman emerging from the flux; the elusive ghost of rapture that haunted his mind; the drone of auxiliary burners; the knowledge that we were lighting into the Nilakantha Stardrift on a mission of rescue. Then I'd hold this sensory input under and come in with the voice-over: "Fifty years ago I mind-pushed bigships for the Canterbury Line..."

I'd take them at hyper-c through the nada nada-continuum, coming out places they'd only dreamed about or seen in travel brochures. Black holes were a favourite, and I took them on a tour of a giant nicknamed Kolkata, courting disaster on the hazardous event horizon, the bigship a surfer on the math of Einstein-Fernandez physics. Then I'd sling the 'ship at a blistering tangent off across uncharted s.p.a.ce, on the trail of new and more wondrous adventure... The main theme was always wonder - the hint of Nirvana that every Engineman experiences in the flux.

My customers left satisfied, uplifted.

Then one night after her performance Jo was stretchered off comatose, and I didn't know whether to feel relief that at last she had died, or sadness at the pa.s.sing of someone I had hardly known. Later the manager told me that Jo was fine, she'd recover. Would I fill in for her this week? And I said yes, relieved that I might have the opportunity to get to know her, after all, and hating myself because of that.

We're quark-harvesting a long, long way from Earth. I step from the flux-tank, as we are coasting now. I look through the viewscreen, behold the sweeping sickle sponsons reaping fiery quarks. The 'aft scene is even more spectacular, a panoramic miracle. The converted energy is fired from the bigship in blinding c-velocity bolts, streaking away on a multi-billion light year bend that describes the inner curve of the universe. And I'm moved almost to tears, along with my audience, though for different reasons.

For a long time after the performance I sat yogi-fashion. The crowd cheered and applauded, then moved back to the bar or out into the night. And I was ashamed, like a preacher who has convinced his congregation but does not himself believe.

Technicians dismantled the rig, unplugged me and wound in the leads. A few tourists tried to get to me, to say how much they'd enjoyed the performance. They were stopped by the heavies, who knew how low I felt after my act.

The club never closed, but trade hit a low around four in the morning. I was still there then, in the darkness of the stage, thinking back and regretting the events of all those years ago, the pretence of the present. A few junkies slouched at the bar, getting their fix jugularwise.

As I sat, a kid crawled from a cushioned bunker between the bar and the stage. She headed my way on all fours, galumphing over cushions and the wraparound membranes in the floor. I a.s.sumed she was a fan who wanted to rap about how it was to flux on the bigships.

She climbed aboard the stage and sat before me cross-legged, like a mirror-image of myself. She had long black hair, too luxuriant for a kid her age, too sensual.