Engineman Part 41

Joe was on a three-week furlough, and we spent every day together. We were inseparable, cute lovers like you see on the boulevard Sunday afternoons. The girl from Chittagong and the boy from Seville... I got better quick, saned-up and began enjoying life. I stopped drifting and phased out the 'gum. I didn't need them, now. Joe was my kick, and I overdosed.

We explored the city together. I saw life through his eyes, and what I saw was good. We tried personatapes. He'd be an Elizabethan dandy for a day, and I'd be Bo Ventura, latest hologram movie queen. Once we even s.e.xed as Sir Richard Burton and Queen Victoria, just for the h.e.l.l of it. We made straight love often, and sometimes we'd exchange bodies; I'd become him and he'd become me. I'd move into him, pushing into his central nervous system and transferring him to mine. I'd experiment with the novelty of a male body, in control of slabs of muscle new to me, and Joe would thrill to the sensation of v.a.g.i.n.a and b.r.e.a.s.t.s. At climax we'd be unable to hold on any longer and the rapture of returning, our disembodied personas tw.a.n.ging back to base, left us wiped out for hours.

Then one day towards the end of his furlough Joe pulled me out of bed and dressed me in my black skinsuit like a kid. We boarded a flier and mach'd uptown. "Where to?" I asked, sleepy 'gainst his shoulder.

"I'm a s.p.a.cer-" he said, which I'd figured already. He was an Engineman, a fluxer whose shift was three months in a tank pushing a Satori Line bigship through the nada nada-continuum. "And I want to show you something."

We decanted atop the Satori Line towerpile that housed the s.p.a.ce museum, and entered a triangular portal flanked by company militia. The chamber inside corresponded to the shape of the portal, a steel grey wedge, and we were the only visitors that day. By the entrance was the holographic sculpture of a man, vaguely familiar; the scientist who discovered the nada nada-continuum and opened the way for the starships.

Through Joe I had experienced everything that he'd experienced. His past was mine, his every sensation a shared event. I'd travelled with him to Timbuktu - and as far as Epsilon Indi. But there was one experience of his that defied my comprehension. When he entered the flux-tank of a bigship I could not go with him; I had no idea what it was to flux. Joe knew, of course, but he was unable to describe the sensation. He likened it to a mystical experience, but when I pressed him he could draw no real a.n.a.logues. To flux was an experience of the soul, he said, and not of the mind - which was perhaps why I floundered.

We walked down the ringing aisle of the s.p.a.ce museum. At the far end, on the plinth and cordoned by a low-powered laser-guard, was a trapezoid of blackness framed in a stasis-brace. What we had here, according to the inscription, was a harnessed chunk of the nada nada-continuum.

It did nothing to impress a sleepy Bangladeshi, until she saw the expression on the face of her lover. Gomez was a goner; even transfer-s.e.x had failed to wipe him like this. "Joe...?"

He came to his senses and glanced over his shoulder at the entrance. Then he vaulted over the laser-guard and lifted me quickly after him. "This is it, Sita. Take a look."

After a time the blackness became more than just an absence of light. It swirled and eddied in a mystical vortex like obsidian made fluid. I too became mesmerised, drawn towards a fathomless secret never to be revealed.

"What is it?" I asked, stupidly. I leaned forward. Joe held me back. He warned me that the interface could decapitate me as neat as any guillotine.

"It's the essence of nothing, Sita. That which underpins everything. It's Heaven and Nirvana and Enlightenment. The ultimate Zen state..."

His voice became inaudible, and then he said, "I've been there..." And I recalled something - the ineffable blackness I'd scanned a while back. My mind reached out for something just beyond its grasp, a mental spectre as elusive as the wind... Then the spell was broken.

Joe laughed, pulled himself away and smiled at me. He jumped back over the laser-guard and plucked me out. We held each other then, and merged. His period of furlough was coming to an end. Soon he would be leaving me, drawn away to another rendezvous with the nada nada-continuum. I should have been jealous, perhaps. But instead I was grateful to whatever it was that made him... himself himself.

Hand in hand we ran through the chamber like kids.

Allah, those three weeks...

They had to end, and they did.

And it happened that Joe died a fluxdeath pushing his boat through the Out-there beyond star Groombridge. That which had nourished him kicked back and killed him, with just three days to go before he came home to me.

I quit Ga.s.sner's and drop to the boulevard, my head full of Becky Kennedy and her loving parents. As I leave the towerpile a shadow latches on to me and tails, keeping a safe distance. I ride the boulevard to the coast.

Carnival town is a lighted parabola delineating the black bite of the bay. I choose myself a quiet jetty away from the sonic vibes and photon strobes, fold myself into the lotus position and wait.

Overhead, below a million burning stars, bigships drift in noiseless, clamped secure in phosph.o.r.escent stasis-grids. Ten kilometres out to sea the s.p.a.ceport pontoon is a blazing inferno, with a constant flow of starships arriving and departing. Joe blasted out from here on his last trip, and for weeks after his departure the dull thunder of the ships, phasing out of this reality, brought tears to my eyes. Back then I came out here often, sat and contemplated the constellations, the stars where Joe might've been. He's back now, but I still like to stare into s.p.a.ce and try to figure out just where the accident happened.

A noise along the jetty, the clapping of a sun-warped board, indicates my shadow has arrived. I sense his presence, towering over me. "Spider," I say. "Sit down. I've been expecting you." And I have - he's one of the few people I can rely on to help me.

Spider Lo is a first-grade telepath and he works for the biggest Agency in the West. He's about as thin as me, but twice as tall. He earned enough last year to buy himself a femur-extension, and I was the first to admit he looked really impressive riding the boulevard, especially in a crowd. He's a c.h.i.n.k, and I should hate him for that, but he's a gentle guy and we get along fine.

"Ga.s.sner sent me, Sita."

"That much I figured."

"He told me to make sure you did your stuff. To me, it doesn't look like you're doing that out here."

He hesitates, watching me. "I'll let you into a secret, Sita. Ga.s.sner's in big trouble. Business is bad and a few of the bigger Agencies are going for the take-over. They'd buy Ga.s.sner out for peanuts and employ him as a nothing b.u.t.ton-pusher. As for you - you'd be taken on by whichever Agency buys. You'd be on longer shifts for less pay. You're a second-grader, remember..."

I let him mouth-off. His secret secret is no secret at all. He's telling me nothing I don't already know. I let my lazy posture describe apathy, and stare at the stars. is no secret at all. He's telling me nothing I don't already know. I let my lazy posture describe apathy, and stare at the stars.

Spider tries again. "This case is worth two million to Ga.s.sner. It would mean solvency for him, and who knows even a rise for you. But you're blowing it."

"And won't Mr Ga.s.sner be angry with me," I say.

"Sita... this is the biggest case you've ever had to crack. You don't seem to be trying..."

Languid, I give him a look, long and cool. "Maybe I don't need to try," I say.

"Sita..." His Oriental features pantomime despair.

"I'm serious, Spider. Hasn't it occurred to you that maybe the reason I'm lazing around here is because I've got the case wrapped up?"

His eyes glint with quick respect, then suspicion.

"No s.h.i.t," I say. "I know where Becky Kennedy's meat is hidden."

"You just this minute left the office, Sita."

I shrug. "How would you like to earn your Agency the two million riding on this case?" I ask him.

He tries a probe. I feel it p.r.i.c.kle my head like a mental porcupine in a savage mood. But my shield is up to it.

"You don't have to probe, Spider. I'm honest - I'll tell you. Your Agency can pick up the creds from Kennedy when you find the body and deliver it to the resurrection ward-"

"But Ga.s.sner..." Understanding hits him.

"Yeah," I say. "You've got it."

Spider looks at me.

"Why you doing this, Sita? If Ga.s.sner folds, you get transferred, and that won't be a picnic for you."

"Listen, Spider. I'm getting out of it altogether. No more probing for this kid after tomorrow."

"You're not-" Alarm in his voice.

I laugh. "No, I'm not. I'm getting out and I want to see Ga.s.sner sink..." But there's an easier way than this to tell him.

I take my shield and toss it to him. He catches it, holds it for a second, then throws it back. That's all it takes for him to read what I'm planning. And he reads everything: my love for Joe and the reason I need big money, what I did yesterday and why I did it. He reads what I want him to do, and he slowly nods his head. "Very well, Sita. fine..." We finalise the arrangements, and then slap on it. We sit for a while, watching the starships and chatting, until Spider's handset calls him away on a case. He cranes himself upright and strides off down the jetty like someone on stilts.

I stay put a while. Above the city a hologram projection, like a stage in the sky, is beaming out world news. I watch the pictures but can't be bothered with the sub-t.i.tles. Only when the business review comes on do I take an interest. After five minutes the take-over bids are flashed up. Multi-Tec International today made bids for a dozen small-fry - one of them, I learn, Ga.s.sner's Investigative Agency. But the bid didn't make it and Ga.s.sner is still independent. I smile to myself. By the time I finish with Ga.s.sner he'll be wishing he never bought me, all those years ago.

I leave the coast and ride back into the city. I stop off at a call booth and get through to the Kennedys, using the teleprinter to make the demand. Then, instead of going straight to the Union towerpile, I make a detour to take in the cryogenic hive-complex, uptown. I ride the chute to the seventh level and squat beside Joe's pod. If I concentrate I can just make out his thoughts, deep down and indistinct. Even diluted, crystallised and fragmented by the freeze, his emotions are still as good and pure as always. I tell him that soon it'll all be over, and he responds with a distant, mental smile.

I'm tearful when I leave the hive and ride across town.

After I heard about Joe's death I began drifting again.

I got back on the 'gum and stopped eating and hit the darktime quarter. When I wasn't working I got high and drifted without sleep for nights, probing, seeking... It was impossible, of course. What I was seeking I had found and lost, and there could be no subst.i.tutes, however good. There were no more Joes, and it was no good telling myself that there had to be. It was too soon after his death and I was still too close to him to accept anyone else.

Then I got it into my head that Joe was still alive. I thought I could feel his brainvibes in the air, as if he existed somewhere in the world and was trying to get through to me. I concentrated and struggled to contact him, to prove to myself that he was still alive. Crazy, I know...

But I was right.

It was a month after the accident and I spent more and more time tripping on acid shorts and trying to forget. I reckoned that if maybe I could lose my ident.i.ty, then the pain wouldn't be so bad.

Joe called a couple of nights later.

I was laid out on my bunk, coming down after a week of crazy, crazy nights drifting and tripping. My head was alive with vivid nightmares and Joe played a starring role.

When his face appeared on the vidscreen I knew it was a hallucination. "Sita!" it shouted. "It's me - Joe!"

I giggled. "I know you're dead, Joe. You died Out-there. You can't kid me."

"Sita..." His arms were braced on either side of the screen, and his head hung close. It looked like Joe, but there was something wrong with the geometry of the features. They were too clean-cut and perfect to be Joe's, even though they resembled his. Some effect of the acid, obviously...

"Sita, please - listen!" He was near to tears. "I know I died a fluxdeath. But they got me out in time. They saved me. They put me back together in a Soma-Sim and-"

"Where are you?" But I didn't believe. I was still hallucinating. Joe was dead, and what I saw on the screen was a phantom of my imagination.

"That's why I called. I need your help. I'm at the city sub-orb station. I just got in. I need your help..." He looked over the screen, then behind him. When he stared at me again I saw that he was swaying, holding the set for support.

I crawled across the bunk and sat on the edge. I could not bring myself to believe, however much I wanted to. If I rested all my hope on what turned out to be cruel illusion...

"Joe... What's wrong, Joe?"

"They're after me, Sita. The pirates. They almost had me. I got away. Please... come and get me." He grinned then, a wry quirk of the lips I knew so well and loved. "I can't move. They hit me and I can't move. I managed to get this far..."

I staggered around the room and collected my clothes. I struggled into the bare minimum required for decency and dropped to the street. I hailed a flier, gave the destination and collapsed in the back seat. I knew there'd be no Joe when I got there; already our dialogue was becoming dreamlike. It was too much to hope that I could save him a second time...

At the station I told the flier to wait and stumbled into the crowded foyer. I wasn't wearing my ferronniere and the absence of brainhowl was a relief. The call-booths were ranked at the far end beside a Somalian fast-food joint. I pushed through the crowd and collapsed against the first crystal pod. The caller inside gestured me away. I staggered from booth to booth, my desperation increasing when each one turned out to be empty. With three to go and still no sign of Joe I gave up and went berserk. I crashed against them one after the other, flailing at the doors with my fists. The last door remained stubbornly shut, as if pinned by a weight on the inside. I peered over the privacy screen and my heart went nova. Joe had slipped to the floor with his cyber-legs folded beneath him at crazy angles. He grinned when he saw me and reached out his arms...

I managed somehow to get him into the flier and back to my pad.

Once inside he collapsed on the bunk, the Joe Gomez I knew and loved, but different different. The only part of him that had survived the fluxdeath was his brain, and the rest of him was a power-a.s.sisted Somatic-Simulation with all the s.e.x bits and the latest Nikon optics. It was impossible to tell that the body was a Soma-Sim; the surgeons had been faithful to Joe's old appearance, if anything making him even more good looking than the original version.

I thought maybe I was still hallucinating...

"They were waiting at the port," he said. "They waited till I got in from the medic-base and they shot me, Sita. But I got away..." And he indicated his leg.

There was a hole in his thigh big enough to contain my fist. Charred strands of microcircuitry fuzzed the circ.u.mference, and the synthetic flesh had melted and congealed in dribbles like cold wax.

"It doesn't hurt," Joe rea.s.sured me, peering down. "I don't feel a thing. It's just that I can't walk..."

"We'll get you fixed up," I said.

"You've got a spare half million?"

"Surely the Line-?"

He laughed. "They took all my savings to put me in this."

"We'll find some way," I said. "Can't you go back-?"

His hand moved to touch the hole, with just the faintest whirr of servo-motors. "The Line's fired me, Sita. I'm in no condition to flux and I'm out of a job..." Tears were beyond the expertise of 21st-century cyberneticists, or Joe would have cried, then.

"Can you remember anything about the attack?" I asked.

"Not much. Three guys piled out of an air-car and called out to me. When I began to run, they opened fire-"

"Did you get the flier's plate?"

"I was too busy trying to survive, Sita."

I probed. I relived the attack and saw the same three guys I'd seen outside the Yin-Yang. The subconscious mind forgets nothing, and the quick glance Joe had taken at the air-car had lodged the plate code in his head. I memorised the code and came out. It was a slim lead, but perhaps a valuable one.

Joe reached out and pulled me to him. "You haven't said how good it is to have me back, Sita."

"No?" I opened up, and we merged. Beyond his relief at being with me I saw a dark shadow in the background, a sharp regret that he would never flux again. He was like a junkie deprived his fix, and the withdrawal symptoms were craving and melancholia. I shouldn't have felt jealous, but I did.

The following day I decided that my pad was not a safe place for Joe. Too many people had seen his arrival, and all it would take was for the sc.r.a.pe-tape pirate's telepath to send out a chance probe in the vicinity.

I had a contact in the cryogenic-hive complex uptown, and Joe agreed that this would be the best place for him until I came up with the creds to buy the services of a cyber-surgeon. I had a few ideas I wanted to think over during the next couple of days. I installed him in the hive, then left for Ga.s.sner's office.

I told my boss I was using the Batan II to check detail on the current case, and instead tapped into the city plate file. I found the number of the flier Joe had seen, and I was in luck. The flier was a company vehicle belonging to the Wringsby-Saunders Corporation. I looked them up and found they were into everything, but their biggest turnover was in the personatape market...

So I dropped to the boulevard and rode uptown.

The Wringsby-Saunders Corporation had a towerpile all to themselves, a hundred storey obelisk with a flashy WS entwined and rotating above the penthouse suit.

I marched in, exuding bravura.

I roamed. I was looking for company personnel with faces that matched those I carried around in my head. I took in every level and a couple of hours later found what I wanted. A tall executive left his office and strode along the corridor towards me. He wore silvered shades and an arrogant expression. He was shielded, of course - as he was on the last occasion I had encountered him. In the defective fluorescent lighting outside the Yin-Yang bar.

The glow-tag on the door of his office told me: Martin Kennedy. He was the marketing director of the personatape division, one of the top jobs in the Corporation. And not satisfied with a director's fat salary, Kennedy dirtied his fingers with illegal sc.r.a.pe-tape dealings. Some people...

Over the next few days I neglected my duties for Ga.s.sner and followed Kennedy. It was my intention to blackmail him; his superiors at Wringsby-Saunders would not be amused that one of their top executives was dealing in death...

Then something happened to make me change my mind. There was a better way of extracting what I wanted from Kennedy, one that did away with the risk to myself.

It came to me as I watched him arrive home one evening and meet his daughter in the drive. It was one of the few occasions when he was unshielded, and I learned that the only pure and unsullied emotion in Kennedy's head was the love he had for his daughter, Becky.

While Kennedy was unshielded I slipped him the sly, subliminal suggestion than Ga.s.sner's Investigative Agency was the best in town, specialising in murders, kidnappings, missing persons... The first place he'd think of when he found his daughter gone would be Ga.s.sner's.