Engineman (55 page)

The disease explained her voice, of course, and the fact that she wore a wig. Ironic that that which was killing her also gave her the appearance of someone much older, while in her head she had matured as well.

I said, "Isn't there a cure?"

"Yeah, sure there is. But a cure costs creds, Abe. And not even my pay-off was enough."

I recalled her words. "How can I help you?"

"I need creds. I want the cure. I also want to be beautiful-"

I laughed.

Then she realised how funny that was and she laughed too.

"See that beautiful woman at the bar?" she asked. "The one zonked on jugular-juice and out of it."

"So?"

"So she's dead ugly - honest."

"I thought you just said she was beautiful?"

Jo smiled, "You ever seen her here before?"

"She doesn't come in here when I'm on. I'd recognise her."

"Yeah? Ever noticed an old woman, maybe a hundred and ten? All bags and wrinkles? It's the same woman. She has the latest sub-dermal capillary electro-cosmetics. What you see there is a clever light show, a laser display to deceive the eye into beholding beauty. I want one."

"But you aren't ugly, Jo."

"I'm not beautiful."

"So you want me to get you the creds to buy this device?" I said. I thought I saw her logic. She was almost as terrified by her physical deterioration as she was by the thought of death, and she wanted to die looking good.

But I was wrong.

She said, "That
and
a cure. I want to live, and I want looks. Think I'm greedy?"

I shrugged. "Why live a lie?" I asked her, hypocritical.

"I want both, and you can help me get them."

So I asked, "How?"

"I've got a ship I want you to flux," she said simply.

Why live a lie? I had asked.

Sure I live a lie...

"Tell me about it," I said.

So Jo took me to the Louvre.

I protested that art wasn't my kick, but she insisted. When I tried to find out what she had planned, she clammed up. She stomped along the boulevard, pulling me after her. We made an odd couple, even among countless odd couples. She wore callipers to assist her wasted leg muscles, unadorned leg-irons without automation.

We did the Louvre.

We saw the Mona Lisa and a hundred other art treasures of Earth. Then we strolled around the hall of alien artifacts and came at last to the Chamber of Light, a circular room containing the Star of Epsilon VII. Jo just stared, open-mouthed.

The diamond burned as bright as any primary, filling the chamber with golden light. It stood on a pedestal, protected by a hexagon of high-powered lasers.

"Do you know its story?" Jo whispered. "They call it the 'Healing Stone'."

Thirty years ago... An expedition to the Lyra in Beta cluster... A bigship made touchdown on a new world, an Earth-norm planet never before explored. The spacers mapped and charted and came up with another world fit for colonisation, and lifted off. And after three days in space the crew came down with a potentially lethal viral infection, and they re-routed and headed to the nearest Terran base with adequate medical facilities to deal with the hundred-plus dying spacers... And the ship hit trouble, crashlanded on Epsilon VII, uncharted and hostile, light years from anywhere and months away from help... So the crew set to work concocting a cure from the resources at hand on the planet... And on the day that a spacer found a giant diamond, the Star of Epsilon, the drugs administered to the dying crew began to take effect... And they pulled through with no casualties... And the spacers, a superstitious lot at the best of times, put it down to the luck of the largest diamond ever discovered.

The Healing Stone.

"Do you believe that?" I asked Jo.

She smiled. "Do you?"

We drank champagne on a patio overlooking the Seine, and Jodie told me of her dream.

"How long have you had it planned?" I asked.

"Oh... well before they paid me off. I knew I was dying, that I had to have the creds."

"Then why the cabaret?"

"I need the feedback, the knowledge that sooner or later all those fuckers are going with me. Of course, if it works..." She smiled at me. "Abe... do you believe in happy endings?"

I just smiled at her, unable to reply.

She finished her champagne. "C'mon. It's time we were getting there..." And as she rose clumsily from the table I noticed that she was shaking with fear and anticipation and pain.

I wanted to tell her, then - I wanted nothing more than to tell her the truth.

I was desperate two months back, before the Paris run.

I contacted my agent. "I need more material! My repertoire's getting stale, all the same old stuff. The competition has everything I've got, and more-"

"I thought you had that black hole original, the Kolkata show?"

I sighed. "I have. It's original now, but how long will that last? How long before someone finds an Engineman willing to sell another event horizon fly-by?"

"So what do you suggest?"

I told him. He said he'd be in touch, and rang off. I spent a tense hour in my room above the club, dreaming of far stars. Then the vid chimed and I dived at it.

"I've found him," he said. "The rest is up to you."

The Engineman emeritus received me in his penthouse suite. A big wall-window overlooked night-time Paris and valuable starscapes adorned the walls.

He wore charisma that scintillated like silver lamé. He was a tall, grizzled African in his early eighties, muscular still despite his age, his years in flux.

"Your agent called. What he proposed I find quite novel. I've never heard of it before."

"It's common," I told him. "The process has been around for years. Space is especially popular now - people need what they've never had."

He poured stiff drinks and we sat on foamforms before the view.

"You pushed a bigship for the Cincinnati Line," I said.

He smiled in recollection. "The bigship
Hanumati
on ten year runs to the farthest reaches of the Out-there."

"They say the flux is ecstasy," I said.

He chuckled. "Ecstasy? More like Heaven, man..." And he described the sensation as best he could.

Then he stopped and looked at me. "Your agent said you wanted to
buy
the
Hanumati
run?"

"I'd like to make an analogue for my show. I'd be able to pay you fifty thousand creds-"

"I don't want your creds!" he snapped. "What do you think creds mean to me?"

"But I couldn't possibly-"

"I'll give you the run," he said. "Or you don't get it at all..."

I had brought along a holdall full of jacks and leads and monitoring equipment.

He jacked the leads into his occipital computer and bled images and sensations of the
Hanumati
run into the monitor. I edited it, strung together the highlights, then interfaced and downloaded the synthesis into my occipital. As always, the analogue didn't include the experience of fluxing - that was impossible, something only Enginemen could get
in situ
- but the rest of the analogue was pure high-powered wonder. The data detonated my synapses in a series of explosions until my cerebellum nova'd.

I couldn't recall leaving. I staggered through the nighttime streets in a daze. When I made it to my room I collapsed in my cot, blasted. I was on a high for twenty-four hours, then came down slow on waves of self-pity and regret.

Orly spaceport...

It took me back. As a kid I'd watched wide-eyed, fingers hooked through the diamond mesh, as the Bigships trundled home from interstellar runs. And I'd dreamed...

It was a long time to wait for a dream to come true. But, as this dream was likely to be a nightmare, perhaps that was just as well.

Jo had the fence pre-cut, and we crawled through quick, the snipped wire clawing at our clothing. Once inside Jo clank-stomped, stiff-legged, towards a parked mini-roller, and I limped after her. We climbed aboard, Jo took the controls and we jolted off across the lighted tarmac. We passed through the inner fence under the bored gaze of a security guard, who waved us through when Jo flashed her old authorisation pass. We trundled towards a hangar and Jo brought us to a halt outside.

She was about to climb down when I caught her arm. "Jo - I don't think-"

She glared at me. "You can't back out now, Abe! You promised-"

So I swallowed my protest and climbed down after her.

She ran clumsily to the vast, sliding doors, plugged a lead into her implant and jacked into the lock's computer socket. She closed her eyes, summoning codes, and the door clicked and rolled open a metre. We slipped inside.

"
The Pride of Baghdad
," Jo told me, playing a flashlight over the squat bulk of an old Smallship. "Ex-Iraqi space fleet. They sold it to Europe for scrap, but there's one more run in the old tub yet."

We climbed a welded ladder and Jo used her lead again on the hatch. It sprang open and the interior of the
Baghdad
lit up, exuding the aroma of stale sweat and flux.

We dropped into the engineroom.

"You know how to pilot this crate?" I asked, delaying the inevitable.

"I worked on the
Baghdad
last job," she told me. "I shunted her across the 'port once or twice. I know how to pilot her. I got
everything
measured down to the last centimetre." She looked at me. "What you waiting for, Abe?" She had discarded her wig along the way and, bald, she looked thinner and more vulnerable than ever.

I paused by the sen-dep tank that I had experienced only in the memories of other men. I lifted the hatch and stared at the slide-bed, the complication of leads.

"Abe...?"

In a whisper: "I'm not an Engineman, Jo."

She stared at me. "
What?
"

"I've never fluxed before, Jo. I can't do it."

Her expression was more than just horrified. She seemed to die before me, to age. She slumped, a hand going to the tank for support.

Her voice trembled with the imminence of tears. "But... but I jacked into your performance, Abe. I could feel your
need
to flux."

"The performance was just that, Jo. A performance. I used analogues, cerebral recollections from real Enginemen and spacers. My need to flux was just a futile yearning to do what I'd never done, but had always wanted to do."

Jo just shook her head. "Abe...?"

"I was turned down by the Rousseau Line when I was twenty-one," I said. "So I took up cabaret. It was the only way I could experience starflight, convince people that I'd once been a spacer... Sometimes I even managed to convince myself that I'd been up there."

"Can't you do it just this once, Abe?" She was in tears. "Just for me?"

I stared at the tank. "That's one thing I never experienced," I said, more to myself than to Jo. "Even in analogue. The actual experience of flux can't be reproduced. Enginemen say it's almost religious, a foretaste of Nirvana. I've tried to simulate it in my shows, but I don't really know what it's like."

"Why can't you do it, Abe!" Jo yelled at me. "What do you fear?"

"I might not survive, Jo," I lied. "It might kill me." But what I feared was far, far worse than this.

"Abe -
it might save me!
"

So then, shaking with fear, I slipped into the slide-bed and jacked-in, like I'd done a thousand times before in analogue. Sobbing with tears of relief now, Jo leaned all her weight against the 'bed and pushed it home. She slammed the hatch shut and total darkness encapsulated me, then silence. The ship's computer slipped anaesthetic into my skull and soon all physical feeling departed. I sensed a quick, blurred vibration as Jo, up in the pilot's berth, fired the burners.

Then I fluxed.

What I feared, of course, was that the promise of Nirvana-thru-flux would turn out to be no more than a myth - a romantic fabrication to enhance the mystique of the Enginemen. For so long I had lived with the hope that Nirvana was real, the ultimate state at which each one of us eventually arrived. I was an old man with not long left, and to have experienced
nothing
in the flux would have destroyed me.

I sensed a strange timelessness to begin with, and I was still aware of myself as a single human entity. And then... something happened. I was no longer myself, no longer human, but part of something larger and infinite. I had a vast understanding of everything - I
was
everything - and the petty human concerns that had filled my life to date were revealed for what they were. I had often wondered at the faraway attitudes of the many Enginemen I had met, and now I understood the reason for their aloof otherness: how could anyone be the same, or like any other human being, after experiencing
this
? With one part of my mind I knew that
The Pride of Baghdad
no longer existed in the real and physical universe. We were surging through the
nada
-continuum now, on a mission to save the life of Jodie Schimelmann.