Engineman (36 page)

Mirren rubbed the back of his neck, hoping to ease the pulsating ache at the base of his skull. He had tried to ignore it for the past thirty minutes, but he knew what it meant.

Dan and Miguelino, the Gamma Engineman who would be the co-pilot on this mission, rode the downchute and stepped into the engineroom. Miguelino moved to his web and strapped himself in. Dan joined them before the viewscreen.

"Ready, Ralph?"

Mirren nodded. Earlier, he'd drawn first push in the tank, Bobby the second and Dan the third.

In the cathedral, the techs monitoring their consoles turned and regarded the smallship. The pilot up in the nose-cone radioed to the co-pilot that phase-out was imminent. As Mirren watched, Hunter stepped forward from a group of scientists, his halved face bright in the wash of light from the 'ship. He raised his arm in a salute of farewell. Mirren and Dan returned the gesture.

"We're phasing," Bobby murmured. "We're phasing, I can feel it!"

As he spoke, the
Sublime
phased out. A low-pitched hum filled the air. Seen from within the 'ship, it was the outside world which seemed to undergo the vanishing process. Reality flickered with ever-increasing frequency: the tableau of Hunter and the technicians in the nave alternated with the cobalt light of the continuum, the effect stroboscopic in the final stages before full integration was achieved. Then the scene inside the cathedral vanished finally and all that could be seen was the deep blue of the
nada
-continuum, shot through with opalescent streaks which flowed like streamers.

Dan withdrew the slide-bed from the flux-tank. The low humming cut out, and the resulting silence was eerie, as if the surrounding continuum soaked up every sound. Mirren experienced a feeling of familiar euphoria as he sat on the padded slide-bed and underwent the process of entankment he had dreamed about for so long. He removed his jacket and touched a command on his occipital-console, opening the dozen sockets of the spar which spanned his shoulders. Dan pulled the first input lead from within the tank, then the next, and jacked them in. They slotted home with solid, satisfying clunks. With the access of each jack he seemed to lose touch with ever more reality until, as the twelfth and final lead connected him to the matrix of the smallship, he was in a trance-like state. He was only half-aware of Dan's strong hands on him as he was laid out on the slide-bed and inserted into the tank. The hatch closed beyond his feet, plunging him into darkness. Outside, Miguelino began the process of easing him into full matrix-integration.

Seconds passed and Mirren became increasingly unaware of his physical self as his senses, one by one, abdicated their responsibility of relaying an outside reality to his disconnected sensorium. He was blind and deaf, his sense of touch diminished. Soon all awareness of his corporeal self fled as his consciousness teetered on the edge of the vastness of the
nada
-continuum. He knew then the infinite wonder of the immanence which underlay the everyday universe. Rapture sluiced through him in a glorious tide of joy.

He fluxed.

The period spent in flux was a timeless duration for Enginemen. Robbed of their senses, they had no awareness of the passage of time. A shift spent pushing a 'ship between the stars might have been over in an instant, or an eternity. Only when they detanked, anything from six to ten hours later, were they able to recollect the instant of the flux and relive the experience of pushing.

Then, Mirren became aware that something was wrong. At first, for a split second, he assumed he was defluxing. But that entailed a gradual return of sensory awareness, a final teetering on the edge of the vastness. Very definitely Mirren had no sensory awareness - no sense of sight or touch, hearing, taste or smell.

He was suddenly aware of an anomalous phenomenon. Deep within his head, on the very periphery of his consciousness, there was a voice, calling to him.

He willed himself to concentrate. The communication became stronger, a definite presence; he was tempted to call it a voice, though it was more a thought.

It was calling his name.

-- Ralph, Ralph...

He found he could reply by
thinking
the words:
Who are you?
"

-- Ralph, it's me, Caspar.

Mirren was shaken to the core. His mind raced. Caspar Fekete? But that was impossible! He could only assume he was dreaming. The notion that the voice in his head had an external source was too staggering to contemplate.

He thought: Caspar?

-- Can you... hear me, Ralph? The link is very weak. I can only just make you out...

Then Mirren knew he was not hallucinating - or whatever one did when imagining sounds. The voice in his head was real. His initial shock was overcome by cautious wonder, though at the same time the sceptic in him would not acknowledge the import of this communication. It went against everything in which he believed. And yet that deep, buried part of him, terrified at the thought of his premature death, cried out for Fekete's communiqué to be what he thought it was.

I can hear you - what the hell-?
His thoughts became a chaotic scramble of questions.

-- I'm dead, Ralph. They got me in my flier eight hours ago-

You're in the continuum
, Mirren thought in disbelief.
You've transcended?

Even as he said this he was so overcome by the marvel of the concept that he hardly thought to ask himself why, on his many shifts in the past, he had not been contacted by the souls, or whatever, of the people he had known in life.

Then Mirren was aware of what might have been a chuckle, like a subtle itch, within his head.

-- No, Ralph. I have not transcended - though in a manner of speaking I have. That is, I am not part of the
nada
-continuum or Nirvana or whatever they call it.

Disappointment coursed through Mirren.

Then what?

-- Upon my bodily demise, an encoded personality analogue was removed from my occipital console. In simple terms, a recording of my identity, of my thoughts and memories, hopes and desires, a simulacrum of my very self - if, like me, you believe that the mind is the seat of everything that makes us human. Over the years my company developed a means by which to make individuals virtually immortal through cerebral translation into digital analogues. I exist as an information matrix based in my Paris mansion but stretching to the very boundaries of the Expansion. I thought at first that I might feel enclosed, a captive, without the physical freedom endowed by a body, but the reverse is true. I have never been as free in my life...

But where are you now?

-- I am transmitting this from my Paris base via a satellite link, accessing the shipboard logic matrix of the
Sublime
. I am also communicating with Dan Leferve in his berth.

Mirren questioned how Fekete could be communicating with two people at the same time.

Again the chuckle. -- I am now, in effect, a machine. I can replicate myself
ad infinitum
. I could even, if I so wished, communicate with a million people simultaneously. I am speaking to you via your occipital leads.

A thought occurred to Mirren.

Do you realise that Dan and others of his persuasion will deny that you are any longer human?

Mirren was aware of humour in the reply. -- Ralph, I myself doubt whether I am any longer human, as you would define the term. I am, however, a thinking, feeling, morally conscious entity. Call me transhuman, if you wish. I have already had this argument with Dan. We have moved on from that, to the reason for my communicating with you. My time is limited; with each passing second you move farther from the solar system, and my signal weakens-

Why
have
you contacted us?
Mirren asked, unable to work out why Fekete, loath to accompany them on this mission himself, should instigate what was surely the most bizarre dialogue in the history of star travel.

There was a pause.

-- Upon my death and resurrection in this realm, Fekete began, I learned of Olafson and Elliott's deaths, and investigated. I had unlimited resources open to me, and access to vast amounts of information. I naturally assumed that we, the Enginemen selected by Hunter for this mission, were being targeted and killed because someone did not want the mission to succeed. Coincidental as it may seem, we were targeted for altogether another reason.

So Hunter was right,
Mirren thought.

Fekete paused. Mirren thought he had lost the link. Then he continued. -When I discovered the real reason, I attempted to contact Dan and yourself to warn you to abandon the mission. Of course I failed, until my sensors detected the
Sublime
. Now I can but warn you to take care.

The
real
reason?
Mirren asked.

-- In the days before my death I relived three sudden and involuntary flashbacks of our last voyage and the crashlanding of the
Perseus Bound.
These flashbacks were strange in that with each one I was given an increasing amount of information: I recalled nothing of the journey to begin with, and then with each flashback I recalled more and more... But I suspect I need not go on: you no doubt have undergone the same?

Mirren assented.

-- Leferve and Elliott, and Olafson also; which I found out while investigating Olafson's movements before her death. I spoke to her husband, and he mentioned that Christiana too experienced these attacks. He told me that she had contacted her doctor at the firm for which she worked, a subsidiary of the Danzig Organisation. I decided to investigate further. I insinuated probes into the medic's information matrices and discovered a communiqué he despatched to the head of the Organisation.

Fekete paused. The signal was growing appreciably weaker. Mirren was aware that, when Fekete continued, the voice in his head was little more than a whisper.

-- What Olafson and the rest of us witnessed in the jungle after the crashlanding was enough to have the Danzig Organisation, when they found out about our flashbacks, order our extermination. For we all witnessed what occurred and we all, if we lived, would eventually recall it.

-- I scoured what were now my memory banks. So much - unconscious and subconscious memories, desires, terrors of childhood that made me what I am - is stored in files I rarely access. What happened after the crashlanding had been shunted away into one of these files.

-- I found that my recollections of the journey, the crashlanding and the subsequent events had been wiped from my mind by the Danzig Organisation after they picked us up all those years ago; our memories had been edited by the process known as mem-erase. This system was in its prototype stages then, and its faults and flaws were not known. We now know that no memory can ever be truly erased. If they do not resurface as trauma or psychosis, then they return in the form of regular flashbacks. We all suffered these flashbacks of information in increments because that was how, in the days we were quarantined by the psychologists of the Organisation, our memories of what we had witnessed were taken from us, from our first recollections of the journey out, to what we saw later in the jungle. That is the order in which they returned to us. I discovered also that the name of the planet on which we crashlanded had been excised from our memories. We were told that the world was unnamed and unexplored.

There was a pause.

For a timeless duration Mirren considered what Fekete had told him. Then he asked:
Why didn't they just kill us and claim we had died in the accident, if what we saw was so...?

-- From my memory banks I found out that we released a rescue beacon shortly after the crashlanding, and this probably saved our lives. It contained information on survivors, our position and where we were heading. The signal was picked up by a passing bigship of a rival Line, and the Danzig crowd couldn't very well kill us then without it looking suspicious. So they did the next best thing.

Mirren asked the all important question: What did we see, Caspar?

When Fekete replied, his words reached Mirren as if from a great distance. He had to concentrate to make them out.

-- When we left the crash sight we headed through the jungle to a settlement fifteen kilometres distant. A few hours later we came upon the village and discovered... Here Fekete hesitated, as if either the signal had been broken, or the machine which he had become found the recollection too painful to relate. -- We found that Danzig militia-men had massacred over a hundred aliens. In the next settlement, a short distance away, the massacre was still in progress.

Mirren looked into his mind and tried to find a memory of the massacre. He recalled nothing.

-- We were discovered when Elliott, unable to bear any more, ran from cover and tried to attack a militia-man. She was knocked unconscious and the militia came after us.

Why? Why were they killing the aliens?

-- I don't know, Ralph. There is, of course, no information available on the subject. Officially, the Danzig Organisation reported that the aliens known as the Lho had succumbed to a devastating plague... However, if anyone can tell us why, it is you.

Mirren expressed his surprise. Me?