Engineman (54 page)

Back in the twentieth century, the king of the greatest entertainment industry on Earth was corpsicled. Put on ice and stacked away until such time as his cancer could be fixed. And now...

Now Walt stands on the balcony of a fairytale castle. Ten metres separate him from where I crouch on the gallery that circles the complex. He rests his weight on a laser-rifle, crutchlike, and sways. His shaven head bulges at the left temple with a dark mass like some morbid extra-cranial tumour: it's a cyber-auxiliary, wired in there by the Android. It's this that is powering him, that motivated him to commit the slaying of the innocents. He's so feeble now, so near death a second time, that it has little control over his body or his mind. For the first time since his resurrection, he is himself.

He sees me and smiles sadly.

His skin, blanched with more than a hundred years of death, is puckered and loose, maggotlike. He is barely conscious, yet a flicker of tragic awareness moves within him. The chemical that is keeping him alive is almost spent.

"Is this a nightmare?" he asks in a voice so frail it barely reaches me.

"A dream," I say.

"Where am I?" I read his lips. "In Hell?"

I almost reply: "In your Heaven, Walt," but stop myself.

I follow his gaze to the deck, as he surveys the carnage of his own doing.

"Watch out!" Da Cruz appears beside me and drags me to the ground. Walt is making one last feeble attempt to lift and aim the laser; it wavers in our direction. I can read in his eyes that he has no desire to kill us, but the choice is not his. The Frankenstein Android controls the cyber-auxiliary.

I close my eyes.

In the nightmare of Walt's failing brain I open the floodgates of anger. I motivate him into action, give him the will to revenge himself.

And while I'm doing this I realise something. How can I ever again use my ability to induce love after using it to promote so much hate?

Da Cruz clutches my arm. "What--?"

I concentrate. "Just call it black magic, Maria." And as I speak, Walt swings his laser-rifle, the desire for revenge overcoming the Android's final command.

He cries out and fires.

The showboat disintegrates in a million shards of synthi-timber, and Dr Frankenstein explodes like a grenade in a brilliant white starburst.

Walt lets the laser fall and slips quietly into his second death, smiling with induced euphoria all the way.

Three hours later and we're surfing down the helix of the gravity-well. Back on the Sat, Walt is being returned to ice, the slaughter mopped up. Maria is taking time off, dirtside.

I break the silence. "Were you orphaned, Maria?" Gently.

She looks at me, suspicious. "How do you know?"

I reach out and touch her head. "Big trouble upstairs," I say. Then: "We're very much alike, you and me."

She gives me the story that I know already, but it helps for her to talk about it. Her mother died when she was ten, and she was taken from her father following the attack that left her scarred.

"And you?" she asks. "Were you orphaned?"

"Something like that-" And stop.

My parents' tribe was hungry and poor. I was their third and youngest daughter, and I checked out psi-positive. A hundred thousand credits bought a lot of cattle, back then.

So the Telescan Unit wasn't exactly slave labour...

But try telling that to a lonely nine year-old.

"Perhaps you'd like to tell me about it?" Maria asks, with affection.

Get that-

Genuine Affection
.

I smile. "I think perhaps I might," I say.

//Star of Epsilon

Paris was in again and summer found me on the left bank, playing to crowds in the Blue Shift slouchbar. I blitzed 'em with cosmic visions. I sub-circuited direct, employed slo-mo, ra-ta-tat shots, even visual cut-ups, in homage. Goddard and Burroughs were back in, too. Had to do with nostalgia, the harking back to supposedly better times. Hell... Didn't I know that? Wasn't I cashing in on the fact that we all love to live a lie? Wasn't I giving the crowds what they wanted because they'd never get it otherwise?

I met her after a night performance.

The Blue Shift was
the
scene that month.

It wasn't just the drugs they pumped but the live acts, I liked to think. I alternated nights with a cute fifteen year-old sado-masochist on sensitised feedback. It wasn't my kick, but off-nights I'd sneak downstairs and jack-in. And jack-out again, fast. Three minutes was all I could take of this kid - my opposition. The management had it sussed. They played us counterpoint: one night this weird little girl giving out intimations of death and id-grislies like no kid should, and the next old Abe Santana with his visions of Nirvana-thru-flux, the glories of the space-lanes.

The girl intrigued me. The neon-glitz out front billed her as Jo, and that was enough to pull the freaks. Her act was simple. On stage a sudden spotlight found a small cross-legged figure in a Pierrot suit, white-powdered face a paragon of melancholy complete with stylised tear. She'd come on easy at first, slipping fear sub-lim at the slouched crowd. Her head was shaven, but a tangle of leads snaking from her cortical-implant gave her the aspect of a par-shorn Medusa. The leads went down inside her suit and into the stage, coming out by the cushions. Freaks jacked-in and got fear first, subtle unease. Then the kid shifted her position, sitting now with outstretched legs together, arms stanchioned behind her, palms down. The nursery pose contradicted the horror coming down the leads, the hindbrain terror of mortality. She tapped into us and found our fear of death and gave it back, redoubled - turning us to stone.

First time I jacked-in I wondered how she did this, what magic she worked to show us that which we tried to deny, even to ourselves. So the next night I stayed with it a while longer, and I found out. Little Jo was dying. She was fifteen and she'd never see sixteen and the gut-kick I experienced when I realised this was
zero
compared with her angst. That's when I jacked-out, sickened, got loaded and tried to forget.

Over the next few weeks I was lured back again and again. I knew what I wanted: not the orgasm of terror the rest of the crowd got high on, but the futile reassurance that Jo was not really dying, that her performance was just a death-analogue recorded from some terminal patient, encoded on Jo's computer and used cynically to thrill.

But the more I experienced her act, the more I knew I was dreaming. Jo was dying, okay. She gave out death, and when the audience were convinced that
they
were dying she reversed the feed and drank it back, and you could almost hear the gasp of her soul as its need was quenched. The kid's in love with death, I told myself, as if hoping this might ease my heartache: perhaps, if she were, then I could pity her a little less.

Then I realised the truth. The only reason she reversed the feed was to take from the crowd the knowledge that they too would some day die, to reassure herself that she was not alone in the dying process we all call living.

After that I avoided the club on my nights off. I couldn't go near the place, and those freaks in there - I thought many a time over a drink in some darkened, nondescript bar - they stayed jacked-in for hours! And that brought me back to what I was running from, the fear of death and the terrible realisation that Jo was plugged into that
weltschmerz
for the rest of her life.

And my act?

How many of the crowd who freaked out on Jo's act came to mine? Their diametric content would suggest none, but I hoped some people needed antidote.

I'd start simple. I'd give them the experience of an Engineman emerging from the flux; the elusive ghost of rapture that haunted his mind; the drone of auxiliary burners; the knowledge that we were lighting into the Nilakantha Stardrift on a mission of rescue. Then I'd hold this sensory input under and come in with the voice-over: "Fifty years ago I mind-pushed bigships for the Canterbury Line..."

I'd take them at hyper-c through the
nada
-continuum, coming out places they'd only dreamed about or seen in travel brochures. Black holes were a favourite, and I took them on a tour of a giant nicknamed Kolkata, courting disaster on the hazardous event horizon, the bigship a surfer on the math of Einstein-Fernandez physics. Then I'd sling the 'ship at a blistering tangent off across uncharted space, on the trail of new and more wondrous adventure... The main theme was always wonder - the hint of Nirvana that every Engineman experiences in the flux.

My customers left satisfied, uplifted.

Then one night after her performance Jo was stretchered off comatose, and I didn't know whether to feel relief that at last she had died, or sadness at the passing of someone I had hardly known. Later the manager told me that Jo was fine, she'd recover. Would I fill in for her this week? And I said yes, relieved that I might have the opportunity to get to know her, after all, and hating myself because of that.

We're quark-harvesting a long, long way from Earth. I step from the flux-tank, as we are coasting now. I look through the viewscreen, behold the sweeping sickle sponsons reaping fiery quarks. The 'aft scene is even more spectacular, a panoramic miracle. The converted energy is fired from the bigship in blinding c-velocity bolts, streaking away on a multi-billion light year bend that describes the inner curve of the universe. And I'm moved almost to tears, along with my audience, though for different reasons.

For a long time after the performance I sat yogi-fashion. The crowd cheered and applauded, then moved back to the bar or out into the night. And I was ashamed, like a preacher who has convinced his congregation but does not himself believe.

Technicians dismantled the rig, unplugged me and wound in the leads. A few tourists tried to get to me, to say how much they'd enjoyed the performance. They were stopped by the heavies, who knew how low I felt after my act.

The club never closed, but trade hit a low around four in the morning. I was still there then, in the darkness of the stage, thinking back and regretting the events of all those years ago, the pretence of the present. A few junkies slouched at the bar, getting their fix jugularwise.

As I sat, a kid crawled from a cushioned bunker between the bar and the stage. She headed my way on all fours, galumphing over cushions and the wraparound membranes in the floor. I assumed she was a fan who wanted to rap about how it was to flux on the bigships.

She climbed aboard the stage and sat before me cross-legged, like a mirror-image of myself. She had long black hair, too luxuriant for a kid her age, too sensual.

"I loved your performance," she said in a husky voice which, like her hair, belonged to a thirty year-old.

She had a triangular, coffee-brown face and large green eyes. She should have been a nice-looking kid, but there was some disunity in the planes of her cheeks which made her almost ugly.

"Hey," I said, weary. "Go home, kid. Get some sleep."

A flash of emerald anger. "I said I liked your show."

"And I said-"

"Abe," she smiled, serious. "I know you want to flux again."

I looked at her, guarded. She had it wrong, but only just.

So I said, "How...?"

She grinned at me. "I experienced your show good, Abe. Your need was in there. Those fools might not have read it, but I did."

Then I saw the teflon protuberance at the base of her skull. I lifted a tress of hair, fingered sockets worn smooth through use.

"Who are you?" I whispered.

"I'm just another German-Turk from Dusseldorf," she shrugged, "with a taste for sick theatrics."

I smiled and shook my head.

"You still don't recognise? How about if I wore a Pierrot suit and a big tear," she said, "just here."

"Jo?"

"Jodie Schimelmann."

I felt a tremor inside. This was the kid who'd rocked me with haunting visions of death. She was fifteen years-old and she'd stared oblivion in the face and she was still here.

I'd be ninety in a month and I felt a burning sense of shame at the injustice.

"I need your help," she said.

I shook my head. "How can I possibly help you?"

So she told me why she was dying.

Until six months ago Jodie worked in the Orly spaceport. She was a flux-monkey, an engineer whose job it was to crawl inside the exhaust ventricles of bigships and carry out repairs on the auxiliary burners. It was hard work, but she didn't complain; she lived well and saved enough creds to send home to her mother in Germany.

Then one check-up she was found to have contracted some complicated virus that had lodged in the flux-vent of a bigship she'd worked on. She was given a year to live, paid off and discharged. Jodie was rotting inside with some alien malignancy that had attacked her marrow, lymph glands, lungs and trachea... It was a miracle she was still alive and active, but she loaded herself with analgesics every day and went on fighting.