Engineman (11 page)

As she watched, an engineer took a cutting tool and sliced through the statue's thin left ankle. A noose suspended from the crane was slipped around the alien's noble head.

A noise on the other side of the square, behind Ella, made her turn. A flier descended and landed on the cobbles. Someone - in the descending twilight it was impossible to tell whether it was a man or a woman - climbed out and stared across at the statue's removal.

Cautiously, Ella approached the engineers. She stood beside a sergeant who seemed to be in charge of the operation.

She gestured at the statue as its left leg was severed with a shriek of tortured metal. Now only its staff secured the statue to its plinth. The hawser around its neck tightened, drawing the alien off-centre.

"Why...?" she asked, shaking her head.

The sergeant glanced at Ella. He was a tall, grey-haired and patriarchal European, as noble in his own way as the statue.

"I wish I knew," he said in a Scandinavian accent. "It's rather beautiful, isn't it? But I have my orders."

They watched together as the staff was severed. Released from its final mooring, the alien hung from the noose and rotated absurdly. Half a dozen soldiers steadied the statue and directed it towards the hover-truck.

Unable to find the words to express the sense of loss that was like a cavity within her, Ella turned and hurried off across the square.

Someone stepped from the shadow of the fountain. For a second, she thought it was the driver of the flier, but then she saw that the figure was short, dumpy: an old woman.

"Ssst!
Senorita
!" the woman hissed. "A hotel, yes?" She pointed along the harbour to a white-washed building overlooking the sea. She smiled, a gold tooth gleaming in the light of the sun.

Ella hesitated. She had wanted to revisit the Santa Rosa, to stir old memories.

The old woman caught her arm, not unkindly. "
Senorita
, it is almost curfew!" she said in Spanish. "They will take great delight in shooting you in the head at the first stroke of eight! Please, this way..."

Ella judged that there was nothing mercenary in the old woman's concern; she seemed genuinely concerned for Ella's safety. She gestured towards the hotel, taking Ella by the hand and dragging her from the square.

As they turned the corner, the woman looked back over her shoulder at the tall figure standing beside the flier. She hissed something under her breath, then hauled Ella up three steps and through the timber door of a small whitewashed building.

Two old men were bent over a board-game in the bar-room. Wooden chairs and tables stood on a polished timber floor, and supporting the ceiling were what looked like genuine oak beams. Ella reminded herself that she was on the Reach now, a relatively young colony world with abundant natural resources. The use of timber would not be regarded as profligate here, as it would on Earth.

The woman ordered an old man behind the bar to pour Ella a drink, then all but pushed her into a chair beside an open hearth. Ella took off her jacket, and the woman stared with round eyes at the revealed silversuit. Then she saw the infinity symbol on Ella's arm.

"Mama mia! No wonder they follow you!"

"Follow
me
? Who?"

The woman gestured with her thumb. "Who else? The bastard in the flier. Here, drink!"

The woman took a small glass of colourless liquid from the rough-grained timber bar and passed it to Ella. Hesitantly, she took a sip, gagged and coughed. She regained her breath, her eyes watering.

While she was recovering, the old woman was speaking to the man behind the bar in Spanish so rapid that Ella had no hope of following what was being said.

The woman smiled. "Your taxi driver. He called five minutes ago to tell me that you had been followed from the 'port. He thought you needed help. He was a brave man to even call me,
senorita
. One month ago his son was arrested by the military on suspicion of assisting the Disciples. The following day he was found in an alley with his throat cut." The woman shook her head. "But you cannot stay here, little one. It is not safe. Costa Julliana swarms with the military. My husband will arrange for your people to come and take you away-"

"My people?"

The old woman slapped Ella's arm with her meaty hand. "Disciples, who else? Now come this way."

She took Ella through to a back room. Sheep skins were draped over armchairs and old photographs and images of Christ covered the walls. Ella sat in a comfortable chair. She was still clutching her drink. She took a mouthful, the alcohol helping to calm her.

The woman drew up a three-legged stool. "Now - you need not tell me if you so wish - but why did you come to the Reach? Surely you have heard about the troubles?"

Ella shook her head. "We've had no news on Earth-"

The woman closed her eyes. "I hoped at least that help might arrive from somewhere, if what was happening here was known. So you came here in all innocence?"

Ella hesitated, deciding to tell only half the truth. "I came for a holiday. I lived here as a child. I wanted to revisit-"

"I'm truly sorry. You might have been allowed onto the Reach, but let me tell you, little one, that there's no way they would let you leave the planet. We are under military command. Many citizens have fled south, down the coast."

"But what's happening? Why should they be persecuting the Disciples?"

"Something is happening in the mountains - don't ask me what. For weeks, convoys have been heading north. All over the Reach, Ex-Enginemen and -women, their families and friends, are being rounded up, interrogated. Most are never seen again. I am an old woman - it is a mystery to me. But I know on whose side I stand! Ever since the organisation came to the Reach - no good. Have you heard of the Nazis, little one?"

"Of course - fascists who ruled Germany in the middle of the twentieth century and again in the twenty-first."

The old woman was nodding. "Well, these people are every bit as evil."

Ella raised the glass to her lips. This time, the tequila went down as smooth as honey.

The door from the bar swung open, startling her. Three men entered the room. They wore peasant's jackets and their faces were blackened. Ella noticed that the left sleeve of the first Disciple's jacket was empty, flattened and pinned to his side.

"There she is," the old man said, coming in behind them.

The one-armed Disciple regarded Ella, then grabbed her arm and roughly turned it over to reveal her tattoo. Far from acting as she might have expected a rescue party to behave, these men seemed nervous, suspicious - perhaps with good reason, if half the things the old woman had told her were true.

The Disciple nodded. "Very well. This way." They turned and hurried through the door. The old woman hugged Ella. "You will be well with them, little one. Do not be scared!"

A trap-door behind the bar gave access to a flight of steps, descending into the darkness. Ella was pushed down after the first Disciple, and the two others followed. By the light of an ancient paraffin lamp she made out a stretch of water and a small fishing boat. She was bundled over the gunwale. A hand gripped her chin and her head was pulled back. Something cold and metallic touched her temple.

"One word, one wrong movement... the slightest sign that you work for them,
senorita
..."

Chapter Six

Bobby Mirren was the Time-Lapsed Man, or the Man Who Lived in Two worlds, according to the headlines of some of the trashier journals which ran stories on him a decade ago. In fact, Bobby liked to think of himself as the man who lived in four worlds. He lived nominally in the present, and more substantially a day in the past; he lived a rich life in his memories, and an even richer life anticipating the future. Some part of him was in contact with the numinous reality of the
nada
-continuum, a tenuous and subtle contact like two spheres touching but never interpenetrating, a contact which promised that some day he would merge, become one, and in so doing totally fulfil himself. On the edge of his consciousness when he meditated he was aware of a sweet calling.

Now - though the word was largely meaningless to Bobby -
now
he sat in his armchair in his bed-sitting room. What he could feel, the threadbare arm of the chair beneath his hand, was out of context with what he was experiencing from yesterday. One day ago he had an open book on his lap and was finger-reading the Braille translation of a Buddhist tract. Now he could see the great tome spread across his lap, could see his hand speeding along the dotted lines, but he could not feel the weight of the book on his lap nor the raised pointillism of the Braille beneath his fingertips. His lap was empty and he could feel the material of the armchair beneath his fingers. He laid back his head and closed his eyes, and he continued to see what his eyes had been directed at yesterday, the book, the carpet before his feet, the far wall... He heard the sound of a flier passing overhead, but knew that the vehicle had passed by a day ago and would be long gone by now.

Bobby Mirren's every sense, with the exception of his sense of touch, was lapsed by almost twenty-four hours. What he saw today he had looked at yesterday; what he heard now first came to his ears a day ago. Similarly with his senses of taste and smell; he would eat a meal today, and, although he would be aware of the texture of the food filling his mouth, it would be tasteless - until the following day when its taste would flood his mouth. He compensated by taking his meals at the same time each day, so that he could taste yesterday's meal while eating today's. In the early days he had experimented - eating steak and then the following day at the same time eating strawberries, so that he would taste the bloody meat while having the sensation of chewing the soft fruit. He had experimented too with the other odd phenomena of his unique condition. He would set off and walk thorough the streets of Paris, feeling his way around the masonry and railings and glass shop-fronts like a blind man - the difference being that, although in his fumbling hesitation he might have appeared blind, he was in fact seeing what he had looked upon the day before: the interior of his room, a vid-documentary, a meal he had eaten... The following day Bobby would remain in the apartment and finger-read a religious tract, while visually and aurally experiencing his trip outside the day before. The dichotomous sense of experiencing two different realities, both just as unreal, had given him, after the initial, nauseous surge of disorientation, a cerebral thrill, an intellectual high, which he tied in with his wide reading in Buddhist philosophy: simply, that this life with an illusion - and he had been vouchsafed, for some reason, the condition that made this obvious. The strange sensory anomaly, which most people would consider a curse, Bobby from the outset looked upon as a blessing, a sign from beyond this reality that he was special, even chosen.

He was the only time-lapsed man to have survived. There had been five beside himself in the last couple of years before the closure of the bigship Lines. The first two Enginemen, Black and Thorn, had died after just a few days of hospitalisation and observation. The following three had lasted months. All five had drifted irrevocably into comatose states, and then passed from this existence to the next.

But Bobby Mirren had survived.

He recalled his final shift in the flux-tank as if it were yesterday. It would have been his last push anyway, even if he had not succumbed to Black's Syndrome. The Javelin Line had been bought out by an interface organisation, and portals were to replace bigships in the sector of the Expansion served by his Line. He, along with every other Engineman, had been at first incredulous and outraged at the news that the 'ships were being phased out, and then when the fact and its implications sank in, psychologically devastated. Enginemen lived for the flux; it was what made their lives worthwhile, a contact with the infinite that nothing - no amount of worship, prayer or study - could replace. Bobby had gone into the tank for the last time hoping that he would die a flux-death, so as to be spared the years of terrible deprivation. In the event, he almost got his wish.

It was a haul like any other, a three day push from Earth to Reqa-el-Sharif along the spiral arm. He had jacked-in and laid on the slide-bed with the usual reverence that the ritual called for, but with a sense of poignancy also that this time would be the last. He had slipped into a trance as he entered the tank, suddenly aware of the vast, numinous infinity of the
nada
-continuum, and his part in it; a tiny, insignificant speck of life. He wanted nothing more then than to cross the cusp all the way and become one with the sublime.

Then - and he had been sure that some part of him experienced it at the time, sure that it was not a retrospective illusion - he was conscious of a
presence
within his mind, a crawling, probing heat that seemed to be investigating the many layers that made up his being. He felt areas of his brain closing down, becoming stagnant - and he received the distinct impression that he was being stripped down to his essence, his basic animal self, before being accepted more fully than ever before into the continuum. He was dimly aware of a consciousness at work within him, a guiding intelligence behind what was happening, which was benign and had only his well-being at heart.

On the very edge of his awareness he heard the intelligence, calling to him...