Engineman (27 page)

Dr Nahendra's calm, oval face turned to Mirren. "I'll have to take a blood and tissue sample from you and I'll be back in... oh, about fifteen, twenty minutes. And cheer up, both of you. The virus is weakened in a carrier close to death." She gave Mirren a smile so bright he didn't want to disappoint her.

"I feel terrible, feverish..."

"Ever heard of psychosomatic symptoms? If you had only superficial contact with the carrier, then you've probably escaped infection-"

"I drank from the same bottle," Mirren said.

She pointedly ignored the admission, her expression set. "Roll up your sleeve, Ralph."

For the next ten minutes she took blood and skin samples from the two men, working quickly and efficiently and without a word. She smiled and hurried from the room with the same breezy confidence as when she had entered.

"Need she be so damned cheerful?" Mirren asked.

Dan forced a smile. "Maybe it's how she keeps her sanity, Ralph. Who'd be a doctor in a place like this?"

Mirren stood and crossed the room to the window. A grey dawn was seeping steadily out of the east, chasing away the patches of darkness in the streets around the hospital and revealing detail: workers leaving their homes, birds both Terran and alien, wind-borne rubbish. Mirren opened the window and felt the breeze in his face, hot and laden with the stench of exhaust emissions and rotting vegetation.

He recalled what Dan had said earlier about still being able to push the 'ship, but the threat of oblivion overwhelmed even the desire to flux again. Why crave ecstasy, when after it there would be no continuation of life against which to measure the experience?

A flier banked over the Seine and settled in front of the hospital, and only then did Mirren notice the ten storey drop to the parking lot below. He looked over his shoulder. Dan was slumped in the chair at the far end of the room, staring at the floor. So why not? He had nothing to lose. Rather instant death than weeks of agony and mental debilitation. He had considered taking his life before, in the years following the closure of the Lines, but always the thought of an eternity of oblivion, and the hope that things might get better - that by some miracle the Lines might be reinstated - had stopped him from going through with the act.

What he faced now was imminent oblivion, or painful weeks or months with the knowledge of his inevitable end...

Then, before he had time to steel himself, the door opened at the far end of the room. Dr Nahendra strode in. Dan was on his feet. Mirren started, and despite himself felt a surge of guilt.

Dan and the doctor seemed not to have noticed his discomfort. They spoke in lowered tones. Dan was nodding. Nahendra looked stern-faced. Mirren felt his stomach tighten.

Dr Nahendra smiled. "Ralph, please - take a seat."

He fumblingly pulled a chair from beneath the table. The doctor sat across from him, consulting a small screen in her hand. Dan remained standing.

Nahendra looked up. "The news is both good and bad, Ralph. The bad first - I'm afraid it is Heine's. The good news is that it's Heine's III, a mutated form of the disease, which means it can be treated."

Mirren experienced a sudden sense of stomach-churning weightlessness, like the sensation of hitting an air-pocket in flight.

"Like they treated Macready?" he wanted to say.

He thought of the oldster he had watched dying.

Nahendra went on, "Heine's is a strange virus, Ralph. In many cases it mutates in the carrier. You contracted Heine's from Macready, but the Heine's you have is not the same as the one which killed him. For one thing, it's not contagious-"

"So Dan and the others-?" Mirren began.

"Dan's fine, Ralph - as is everyone else you've had contact with over the past couple of days. Another 'benefit', if you like, of Heine's III is that it responds to treatment, as I've said." She paused, then continued, "It's still a fatal disease, but with the drugs we have available nowadays it can be controlled."

He felt sick. "How long have I got?"

Nahendra nodded, as if acknowledging his need to be told the truth. "In similar cases of Heine's III, life expectancy is calculated at between four and five years."

Mirren felt their eyes on him. He experienced an ambiguous reaction to the news. He had fully expected Nahendra to tell him that he would be dead in a month, and now he felt as though he had been granted a reprieve, a stay of execution.

Then, as her words sank in, that part of Mirren which considered himself immortal was rocked by the fact that in four years, certainly five, he would be dead. The enormity of the concept was too much to comprehend. Death was what happened to other people, never oneself, however inevitable he knew the fact to be. Intellectually he could grasp the abstract concept that one day he would die - one day in the not too distant future - but on a visceral level it was impossible for him to understand that within five years his viewpoint on existence would be shut down.

He reflected with sudden bitterness that he did not even have the benefit of belief to fall back on.

He felt dazed. He could think only of the obvious questions. "What about pain?" he asked. "How disabled will I be?"

"I can put you on a course of tablets immediately which will control the symptoms and ease the pain. There might be side-effects, but these will be negligible. You'll be active right up to the last couple of weeks. But you never know, by that time, in a few years from now, there might be a comprehensive cure for all forms of Heine's."

Easy words. "There
might
be..." He could only stare blindly at the far wall, too numbed to respond.

"I'll give you these for the time being," Nahendra said. She passed him a bulb of tiny white capsules and a print-out of instructions. "They're analgesics, temperature suppressants. If you can come back say... this time next week, then we can begin the real treatment."

He wanted to ask what the 'real' treatment consisted of, how painful or prolonged it might be, but the coward in him shied from such questions.

Nahendra reached across the table and squeezed his hand. "People with Heine's III are leading full and active lives, Ralph. There's no reason why you shouldn't do the same."

Dan walked Mirren from the surgery and into the upchute. As he left the building in a daze, and crossed the roof to the air-taxi rank, he felt Dan's hand on his shoulder. "Ralph, I can stay with you for a while if you like. If you want to talk..."

Mirren tried to smile. "I'll be fine... I'll call if I need anything."

They boarded the air-taxi. Mirren sat in the back seat and stared through the window as the flier rose and banked away from the hospital. Five minutes later, before Mirren realised where they were, the taxi landed on the rooftop of his apartment. He climbed out, waved abstractedly at Dan and took the downchute to his rooms. He unlocked the front door and switched on the hall light, and then stopped.

Bobby was in the hall, leaving his room. Within two seconds of the light going on, he halted and turned to the door. He cocked his head to one side, his face expressionless. His ultra-sensitive skin had detected the heat of the light.

"Ralph?" he said, slurring the word like a recording played at too slow a speed.

The sight of his brother, his slight body made childlike by the dimensions of the hall, filled him with the urge to reach out and hold Bobby to him, to confess, tell him everything.

Bobby wore his old radiation silvers - not those of the Javelin Line with whom he'd last worked, but of the Satori Line, with its distinctive Bo tree emblem embroidered on the chest. The torso of the suit was regulation silver, the arms and leggings saffron orange.

"Ralph?" he asked again, his face twitching with concern.

His oversized eyes looked straight at Mirren, then moved on around the hallway. The size of his eyes gave his thin, hollowed face a starved, emaciated look, and his unkempt shock of black hair emphasised the pallor of his cheeks.

Bobby turned and moved to the kitchen, walking with the air of calm circumspection characteristic of the blind. Mirren remained by the door, watching his brother.

In the kitchen, Bobby opened the door of the cooler and took out a plastic container of mineral water. Mirren watched as Bobby seated himself carefully and drank, then moved to place the container on the table beside him.

His hand struck the beer bottle that Mirren had left there by mistake yesterday. "Damn!" his brother said. He patted the table-top until he located the upturned bottle, then picked it up and placed it in the wastechute.

Bobby sat very still, taking the occasional mouthful of water. His features remained inert, relatively composed, though etched with basic lines of angst which made his expression, even in repose, seem tortured. Over the years Mirren had come to realise that his brother's physical appearance was no indication of his psychological state. Inwardly, Bobby had come to accept his situation - more, to feel contentment - which one came to understand only in conversation. Outwardly, he forever gave the impression, to strangers and sometimes to Mirren himself, that he was a soul in despair: both the strange nature of his affliction, and his belief, made him dismissive of his appearance and its effect on others.

Bobby replaced the water in the cooler and left the kitchen, his head held upright, staring forward. As he passed beneath the light he stopped, held up his hand to the source of the radiation, and frowned. He reached for the switch and turned it off, clearly troubled by the suspicion that the light had been turned on in his presence. He entered his room and closed the door.

Mirren released a breath and moved to the kitchen. He sat at the seat his brother had vacated and pulled a carton of fruit juice from the cooler. He washed down a couple of the pills Dr Nahendra had given him and considered the events of the night, and then Bobby.

He recalled the day sixteen years ago when he'd learned that his younger brother had graduated from the training college on Mars. He'd felt pride that Bobby would be following in his footsteps, and over the years watched him gain promotion from Gamma to Alpha. There had always been a certain friendly rivalry between them. At home in Australia they had competed evenly at swimming and surfing, skyball and para-gliding: their careers as Enginemen followed a similar course. They had seen each other rarely while Bobby pushed for the Satori Line, then fifteen years ago Bobby transferred to the Paris-based Javelin Line, and when their leaves had coincided they spent a lot of time together - Ralph finding in the company of his Engineman brother a degree of understanding that was lacking in his civilian acquaintances.

Mirren had been working at Orly spaceport nearly ten years ago when he received a call from the Javelin Line. Bobby, on the very last push before the Line closed down, had contracted Black's Syndrome. He was the sixth Engineman to go down with the neurological disorder, and not one of the others had survived. Bobby pulled through, but at the end of the process Mirren wondered if for Bobby's sake he should have died. Later, when Bobby moved in with him, and when Mirren came to some acceptance of his brother's situation, he realised that even the circumscribed life Bobby now led was preferable to no life at all.

Mirren finished the juice, tossed the carton down the chute and sat absorbed in thought. At last he stood and crossed the hall to Bobby's room. He raised his hand to knock - after all these years he still made the same mistake - realised the stupidity of the gesture and opened the door. Bobby was sitting in his large armchair, his eyes closed. Music played, a classical piece Mirren could not place. It was almost nine o'clock. He thought back a day and recalled hearing the Tibetan mantra.

Bobby laid his head against the rest, his expression as contented as Mirren had ever seen it. His right hand tapped a beat - not in time to the concerto that filled the room now, but to the mantra of yesterday.

A low red light burned in one corner, illuminating a sparsely furnished room: a bed, an armchair and vid-screen; shelves full of music discs and many images of Buddha. The walls were draped with tankas and depictions of scenes from the
Bardo Thodol
. It was more like a far eastern shrine or temple than a bedroom in Paris.

Mirren knelt before his brother and tapped his moccasin - their pre-arranged signal - then took Bobby's thin hand.

Bobby smiled. "I thought you would come," he said, his words protracted. He would hear them for the first time in a little under twenty-four hours.

He had moved his head, was staring over Mirren's right shoulder. "Were you in the hall earlier?"

With the forefinger of his right hand, Mirren traced a symbol on his brother's palm:
Yes-

"Then why didn't you-?"

Mirren felt a constriction in his throat. He adjusted himself so that he was sitting cross-legged on the rug, and so that coincidentally his face was out of Bobby's line of sight. He hesitated, then signed:
Sorry
.

"You should have let me know it was you, Ralph," Bobby admonished.

You know how it is
. He was glad, then, that he had to sign to make himself understood: he felt sure that he would have been unable to speak.

Bobby twisted off a wry grin. "Too busy even to make the effort to communicate, Ralph?"