Engineman (50 page)

I found Lin on the floor.

Her naked body lay in a pool of her own blood. Choking, I dropped to my knees beside her. She had taken a laser and lacerated her left wrist almost to the point of amputation. She appeared far more beautiful in death than ever she had in life, and I knew that this was because of the expression on her face. I realised then that during all the time I had known her I had never seen her smile.

I cried something incomprehensible, lifted her body into my arms and began to rock, repeating the name, "Ana..." over and over.

A few weeks later I met Christianna Santesson at a party.

I had completed a dozen crystals since the first, and they were showing quite well. My last crystal had been an admission of the guilt I felt at consigning my colleagues to death, an expiation that stood in place of my own death. I hoped that soon I would be able to leave the psychologically crippling subject of the
John Marston
and move on to other things. Perhaps in fifty years I would be able to watch the nova of star Radnor B without the pain of guilt.

I had hired the services of a top medic and he had removed the computer and rebuilt my face. I was still no beauty, but at least people could look at me now without flinching. The scars still showed, physical counterparts of the mental scars that would take much longer to heal.

Christianna Santesson did not recognise me.

As I stood beside her in a group of artists and critics, I could not decide if she was evil or supremely good. My attitude towards her was ambivalent; I passed through phases of wanting to kill her and wanting to thank her for saving my life a second time.

Someone mentioned Lin Chakra.

"Her death was such a tragic loss," Santesson said. "But she will live on in her work. Her final trilogy,
Dying
, will be out this summer. I had arranged for her to make a definitive statement on the subject, but the piece was stolen soon after her death. As I was saying..."

I left the party early and returned to my studio.

The crystal lay in the centre of the room, sparkling in the starlight and still covered in blood. Lin had even titled it before she killed herself:
The Death of Lin Chakra
. I knelt before the console and passed a hand across the faceted surface. Agony and pain saturated each crystal, and they communicated the awful realisation that everything she had ever known was drawing to a close with the inevitable approach of death. Lin had achieved her final artistic goal; she had successfully transferred to crystal her ultimate experience. Soon, as she would have wished, I would give her masterpiece to the world, so that everyone might learn from Lin Chakra's bloody death how fortunate they were to be alive.

//The Phoenix Experiment

One month after the death of his daughter, Jonathon Fuller decided to leave the city. The life and energy of the place was too stark a contrast to the isolation he had imposed upon himself, too harsh a reminder of his daughter's passing. He needed the tranquillity of the countryside, where his desire to be alone would not be seen as perverse, in order to come to terms with his guilt and eventually, perhaps, to persuade himself to return. He shelved all his projects and told his agent that he was going away for a long holiday.

Early that summer he drove from the city and toured the southern coastline in search of a suitable retreat, somewhere isolated and idyllic, untouched by the technologies of contemporary life. Within a week he discovered a lonely village overlooking the channel, and made enquiries at a local property office. He was told that there were no houses for rent in the village itself, but there were chalets available in the Canterbury Rehabilitation Community, half a mile away.

He'd heard about the Community, but, far from being deterred by the nature of the place, it occurred to him that there he might be allowed the privacy he desired.

When he arrived at the enclosed estate later that afternoon he was met by a big, bulky man in an invalid carriage, who called himself the Captain and showed Fuller to one of a dozen identical A-frames that occupied a greensward beside the ocean. The view of the seascape, and the chalet's relative isolation, cheered him. He thought back to his depressive state in the city and told himself that this was exactly what he had been seeking.

That first night, as darkness fell and the stars appeared, he took a bottle of scotch onto the balcony, drank and stared up at the constellations. The Captain had told him that he would be made welcome by the rest of the patients - at this stage of their rehabilitation, he had said, they rarely had contact with outsiders. Fuller had been unable to bring himself to tell the Captain that he would not be requiring company for some time.

In one of the other A-frames on the gently sloping greensward, a party was in progress: the patients, he thought, doing their best to forget the present. Dark shapes passed across the lighted squares of windows like figures in an Indonesian shadow play, and laughter drifted across to him on the warm night air.

He decided to set up a camp bed on the balcony, in the hope that his dreams of late had been in part a product of the claustrophobia he had experienced in the city. But the open air, the mild sea breeze, could do nothing to alleviate the guilt, and in the early hours he awoke in a sweat and watched his daughter's smiling face vanish into the night.

Fuller took to going on long walks early in the mornings, so as to avoid the patients who were active mainly in the afternoons. He would spend the rest of the day reading, or drinking, or watching television. It was as if he was purposefully filling his head with trivia, and allotting only the two hours he spent walking for the serious consideration of his circumstances.

At the funeral, and its aftermath, he had been unable to show the slightest sign of grief. Many of his acquaintances assumed that he was still in shock, but his father had seen through his silent facade and called Fuller cold and emotionless, accused him of feeling nothing for his dead daughter.

Only later did he begin to experience the guilt - not so much at being unable to grieve at her death, rather at his inability to show her more affection during the short time that she had been alive. He had kept his distance, remained aloof, believing that by doing so he could insulate himself from the hurt that inevitably followed emotional involvement. He believed that with involvement came the fear of another's mortality, and from that the reminder of one's own - and more than anything else Fuller feared his own death. Over the years, he had succeeded in distancing himself from everyone with whom he had contact, his daughter included. He was rewarded by the inability to suffer anguish at his bereavement. Only now was he coming to realise that his apathy had affected the quality of his daughter's short life.

One morning, after a long walk, Fuller encountered a patient on the beach beneath the cliffs. Later, he came to think of the brief meeting as prophetic.

He saw the woman as he came around the headland, paused and considered retracing his steps so as to avoid meeting her. She was staring out to sea, with her back to him, and he decided to walk quickly past her towards the steps cut into the cliff-face.

She stood in the wet sand, her hands slotted into the back pockets of her denim cut-offs, a short white tee-shirt emphasising her tan. She was a crew-cut blonde with the figure of a small boy, and it occurred to Fuller, with mounting shock that, if she were so physically perfect, then her debilitation had to be cerebral.

Then he became aware of the subcutaneous network, the threads of gold that embroidered the surface of her arms and legs, the small of her back and belly between cotton shirt and the frayed waistline of her denims.

She turned and caught him staring. Her face was young and open. Fuller tried to hurry past, but her question stopped him.

"Are you one of them?" Her voice was transistorised, straight from the larynx, while her full lips smiled and her green eyes stared at him.

"I arrived here yesterday, from London." He stopped. "But aren't you-?" He gestured to the greensward.

"I'm a patient, but not of the Canterbury Line. We do not mix."

He saw that although she had followed him with her head, her stance in the wet sand had not altered. She stood with a torque to her spine that was at once awkward and becoming, her hands still pocketed behind her.

He gestured to the steps in the cliff-face, suggesting she might care to accompany him. "Why don't you mix?" he asked.

She walked with movements of such brittle care that she might at one time have broken every bone in her body, yet she was far from clumsy. She moved with the fluid grace, the deliberation of an actress in a Noh play.

She said simply in reply, "I scare them." And smiled at him.

At the top of the cliff he made an excuse and returned to his chalet. There, he turned and watched her as she moved off with laborious languor. Her perfection, despite whatever injuries she had sustained, filled him with wonder - and he suspected that it was her perfection that scared the other patients.

Two nights later he came close.

It was a contradiction that although for thirty years he had absented himself from emotional involvement, so that he might hold himself at some remove from the inevitability of death, now he was contemplating taking his life. A fear of death had made him what he was - and it was as if threatening himself with oblivion he was in fact presenting himself with an ultimatum: either change, and learn to live and give as others do, or kill yourself now in the full knowledge of the futility of your existence... So naturally he had flung aside the pistol with which he had intended to shoot himself through the heart.

Then, in lieu of fulfilling the directive of his ultimatum, he found the bottle of scotch and drank himself senseless.

Often, during the next few weeks, the patients invited him to join their gatherings, and Fuller could not bring himself to refuse. He attended picnics on the greensward, barbecues on the beach, late night parties at which the invalids would sit outside in groups and point to the stars where they had served.

His main concern in capitulating and joining their company, that he might have to explain himself and his presence here, proved unfounded. They had heard of Jonathon Fuller, the historical-scripter, and knew of the loss of his daughter. He found himself accepted without having to explain his past, and part of him - the part that had refused to end his life the other night - knew full well that he was cheating himself.

He soon spent almost every night at their gatherings, and it was ironic that they regarded him - the only fit and whole person among them - with the pity that they themselves deserved; they had come to accept their own injuries, but they found it hard to come to terms with Fuller's loss. They had passed so close to death that the mere thought of it terrified them.

They were daunting company, these survivors of starship burnouts, novae, alien pestilence, war and a hundred other far disasters. They spoke of their experiences with a gentle wisdom at odds with the enormity of their physical deformities. He had thought that, beside them, perhaps his own problems would come to appear slight, but such was not the case. Through their experiences they had come to know themselves with a thoroughness that emphasised his own uncertainty and lack of self-knowledge. All he had that they did not was a fully-functioning body.

He could not talk of himself without appearing superficial, so although he drank and laughed and partied with them, he remained aloof. To save himself he knew that he must accept the intimacies of others, and in turn give of himself, but he was not prepared to open himself to the pain and humiliation that that would entail.

One warm evening, at a party which had spilled from a chalet and across the greensward, Fuller sat on the grass with a bottle in his grip while he listened to the Captain recount the meltdown of his starship.

They were alone, and Fuller had ceased to be revolted by the Captain's extensive injuries. They were rebuilding him piece by piece; he would disappear for days on end, and reappear, at last, a little more human.

Fuller sat well beyond the crimson glow that encapsulated the Captain and his overdose of radiation. A Geiger counter on the spacer's belt churred like a cricket.

He came to the end of his story, and they regarded the star where it had happened. A silence came down between them, like the end of an act, and on the periphery of his vision Fuller was aware of a familiar movement. He turned to acknowledge her presence.

She crouched on the grass twenty metres away, hugging her bare shins and staring at them. Her epidermal network glowed in the gathering darkness like spun gold. She had the aspect of an angel.

In a bid to overcome his unease at her constant regard, he turned to the spacer. "Who's the woman?" he asked.

The carriage swung so that the gobbet of flesh and gristle that was the extent of the Captain's physical being now faced the perfect woman. "She's the Phoenix Line experiment," he said.

Her tragic isolation touched something deep within Fuller. "Why doesn't she join us?"

It was a while before the Captain replied. "She's not one of us," he said, and his carriage rose and hovered off towards the chalet.