Engineman (37 page)

-- You of the five of us were the only one to escape when the militia came after us. We were rounded up and taken to a garrison town a hundred kilometres away, where we underwent the mem-erase treatment. You were brought in a day later, beaten and haggard. We heard you being questioned about the aliens. Something about a mountain stronghold of the aliens which the Organisation was intent on discovering.

Before the link was lost completely, Mirren asked,
What was the name of the planet we crashlanded on?

-- The planet was Hennessy's Reach, a Danzig-run world on the Rim. Do you see now why I had to contact you? To warn you...

The signal faltered, crackled.

Warn us about what?
Mirren almost cried with his mind.

Fekete responded, the words faint almost beyond comprehension. -- I accessed the
Sublime's
programming, Ralph, and discovered your destination. The
Sublime
is headed for Hennessy's Reach.

Mirren asked,
But why?

-- I know as much as you. Perhaps... even less.

The signal was breaking up.

-- Take care... Contact me when you return.

And the whispered thoughts in his head were extinguished like the dying flame of a candle.

Without a reference point to determine the parameters of his existence in the tank, Mirren once again experienced the full wonder of the
nada
-continuum. Then, a timeless duration later, he was suddenly teetering on the very edge of the vastness. With part of his mind he apprehended the magnificence of the realm as it faded, became distant.

Dan trolleyed out the slide-bed and Mirren emerged into the blue light of the engine-room. Physically, he might have been withdrawn from the continuum, but mentally he was still suffused with the wonder of the flux: it was as if his circulatory system was filled not with blood but with some effervescent fluid instead - a champagne rush which surged with his heartbeat and filled him with a sublime, light-headed sensation of well-being.

He sat up and Dan unjacked the leads from his occipital console, then assisted him from the slide-bed. He wanted to compare notes with Dan about what Fekete had told him in the tank, discuss the repercussions of what they had learned from the digitalised Nigerian, but he was too blitzed to speak. He knew that this rapturous state of being was what persuaded most Enginemen that they had experienced union with the ultimate, but even now the rationalist in Mirren told him that what he had in fact experienced was no more than a massive over-stimulation of his brain's pleasure cells. Later, the high would ebb away, leaving him to come to terms with mundane reality and craving his next bout of flux.

The
Sublime
was becalmed in the continuum, awaiting motive power. Pacific blue light flooded the engineroom as Bobby climbed carefully onto the slide-bed. Dan inserted the jacks, murmuring some Disciples' mantra, and Bobby's expression became rapturous.

Mirren took his brother's hand. He was filled with an inexpressible sadness, and at the same time he felt the residue of the wonder of the continuum within him, and he knew he had no right to resent his brother's decision to experience that wonder for himself.

Chapter Twenty

Bobby felt the padded surface of the slide-bed beneath him. Dan Leferve adjusted his occipital console preparatory to inserting the jacks. Ralph took his hand.
Good luck, Bobby
, he signed.

"Don't fear for me, Ralph," Bobby said. "I want this. More than anything, I want this."

He was seeing the delayed vision of his room, and recalled that he had been thinking about his brother at this time yesterday, about Ralph's illness. Then, as now, he was ambivalent about the fact that Ralph had Heine's; as far as he was concerned, Ralph was bound for a better place, but that was no consolation to Ralph, and Bobby felt for him. He was aware also of what effect this giving of himself to the continuum, and possible death, would be having on his brother.

While Dan readied his console, Bobby looked at a Buddhist
tanka
on the wall of his room, a cyclic depiction of the cosmos. It was not quite right philosophically, he reflected, but it was perhaps the most appropriate symbol to be taking with him into the flux-tank.

Dan slipped the jacks home one by one, with a care that was almost reverent. Bobby felt their solid, satisfying contact conducted through his skull. For years he had sustained himself with meditation, his tenuous contact with the continuum staving off the craving which affected other Enginemen. Now he was about to achieve total union, and the fact was almost inconceivable.

Gentle hands forced him backwards so that he was lying on the slide-bed. Ralph took his hand, squeezed one last time as the bed drew him into the tank.

He felt the bed beneath him, the padded surface under his fingertips. His vision flittered around the far wall of his room. He could smell the incense burning from the day before. Seconds elapsed. Soon he would be pushing the 'ship through the
nada
-continuum.

He had expected to wait twenty-four hours before experiencing the wonder of the continuum. He would be in the tank, reliving the day before in his room, and only twenty-four hours later would the experience of the union begin, and flood his senses with an ineffable tide of wonder.

He was reconciling himself to the delay when he became aware of some subtle difference... At first he could not specify what had happened, and then realised that he could hear nothing from the day before. He had been listening to the occasional flier passing overhead, and the low, muted hum of distant traffic. Now these had ceased. He could hear nothing. All was silence. Similarly, he could no longer smell the incense.

Then his vision of the room, the
tankas
on the far wall, began to dissolve, fade out, to be replaced by darkness.

He was in the sensory limbo he knew so well from his days pushing bigships for the Javelin Line. Any second now...

It happened. He felt himself drawn from his body, his consciousness teeter on the edge of the continuum in a sudden overwhelming rush of wonder. Then he slipped over the edge, melded with the very fabric of the sublime, the infinite, and the sensation was so much greater than his periods of contact through meditation. He was one with the continuum, he
was
the continuum, and he knew that he had never before in any of his previous pushes achieved this degree of union, never felt quite this joyous flood of wonder, this total affirmation of being. He felt all his human attributes slough from him, along with his ego, his anxiety and emotions. He was aware of himself, but himself as a being transcended, no longer human but something far more, far greater. He knew, then, that he would never be returned to the limited, restricted prison of his body, that he had left it behind when he had transcended - yet at the same time he knew that his body still existed, was still living... He was aware too - some tiny part of him intuited - that he, his body, was no longer in the tank, that he, it, had finished its push. A part of him perceived his former self as a point of light, and around it were other points of light, which he knew to be Ralph, Dan and the co-pilot.

Then the being who had been Bobby Mirren heard the calling. He moved towards it - yet didn't move as he was already part of it - he
became
towards it, was aware then of a teeming multitude of other beings or essences like himself, all the many lifeforms that had ever existed in the physical realm and then passed on, a trillion trillion points of coloured light.

He joined the benign source of the calling, six beings or essences, and they accepted him as one of them.

Chapter Twenty-One

Mirren was drawn from sleep by the sound of voices. He came to his senses slowly, disoriented, unable to tell how long he'd been unconscious. He opened his eyes. He was lying on a foam-form in the engine-room, washed by the blue light of the continuum, where he'd collapsed after his stint in the tank. With sudden panic he recalled Bobby. As he swung from the foam-form, heart racing, he noticed two things almost at once: the view through the screen was of the
nada
-continuum as seen from a becalmed 'ship, and the wall chronometer revealed that he had slept for just two hours.

Dan was in the far corner of the engineroom, speaking with Miguelino in his command-web. The two men were conducting a heated exchange, as if in argument or debate. The co-pilot communicated with the pilot on the flight-deck, at the same time hurriedly striking keys on the console before him.

Mirren staggered across to the flux-tank and peered through the viewplate in the hatch. Bobby was still in there, his head surrounded by a nimbus of blue light. The subject-integration indices on the flank were sequencing in perfect harmony.

"He's still alive!" Mirren yelled.

"We're bringing him out," Dan called. "He's defluxing now."

"But he's only been in there two hours!"

"Check!" Miguelino yelled at something relayed to him from the pilot. "This I don't believe."

Dan hurried from the command web, tapped the keys on the side of the tank. As Mirren watched, the great silver column of the hatch withdrew itself, swung open, and the slide-bed rolled out bearing his brother.

"Confirmed!" Miguelino called. "Just under two hours."

The expression on Bobby's face was beatific; he was so transformed that for a second Mirren hardly recognised him. His eyes were closed with the devotion of a saint in prayer.

Mirren gripped his hand, too overcome to recall the relevant signs with which to express his relief. He hoped the pressure of his grasp would be enough to communicate his feelings.

Dan hauled a diagnostic scanner on its boom from the ceiling, swept it the length of the recumbent figure. The screen in its globular head glowed green with its report. Dan shook his head. "He's fine, Ralph. He's as well as when he entered the tank, but how the hell did he do it?" He batted away the diagnostic device, glanced at Mirren. "His surviving is miracle enough. But his performance..."

Mirren stared, bewildered. "What?"

"He's been in the tank just under two hours," Dan went on, "but he's pushed us all the way to the Rim. We'll be phasing-in in just over fifteen minutes."

"That's impossible..."

Dan spoke to Miguelino, who swung himself around in his web. "Check, Dan. We've traversed twenty thousand light years. We're on the Rim, and no mistake."

Dan said, "He pushed the 'ship to the Rim in just two hours, Ralph. It should have taken over twenty-five..."

Mirren looked down on his brother. It was usual to remain in a trance immediately following defluxing - the wonder they experienced left some Enginemen blitzed for hours - but something about Bobby's total lack of response worried Mirren.

"Dan?"

"After that performance I'm not surprised he's a little out of it." He checked the Engineman's pulse, thumbed his eye-lids. The smile on Bobby's face never wavered. "He seems okay. Let's get him to his berth."

Between them they eased Bobby into a sitting position, then chair-lifted him across the chamber to the up-plate. They rose to the lounge, Bobby limp between them, carried him to his berth and laid him out on the bunk.

"I'll leave you with him," Dan said. "I'll probe the tank, try to work out what happened." He closed the door quietly as he left.

Mirren drew up a seat and sat staring at Bobby.

Almost as if afraid to do so, he took his brother's hand and, after some deliberation signed,
Can you feel this? Can you feel anything Bobby!
- and, though he had meant to end the communication with an appropriate question mark, he mistakenly signed an exclamation instead.

There was no response.

In all his years as an Engineman he had never witnessed this degree of post-flux bodily dysfunction; but then he'd never witnessed the feat of pushing that Bobby had just achieved.

Something flickered on his brother's face - a lessening in the degree of his rapture.

Mirren grabbed his hand again.
Bobby, it's me, Ralph. Can you feel this?

Mirren watched the wall-chronometer flick away the minutes. He found it ironic that, a few hours ago, he would have been overjoyed if Bobby had survived his stint in the tank. All he wished for now was the return of the brother he could communicate with, even if only through the restricted medium of touch-signing.

Bobby said, "Ralph... Ralph... I know you're there, somewhere..."

Mirren signed,
I'm here. You're okay. You survived
.

Five minutes passed. It was as if Bobby was oblivious to Mirren's signing.

"Ralph... Ralph," he said at last. "This is truly wonderful..."

What is? What's happening?

Mirren cried out loud as Bobby failed to respond.

Five minutes later: "Ralph... When I entered the tank and fluxed, something very strange happened." Bobby fell silent. Mirren told himself that he should be grateful for this sign of animation from his brother, but what he said, and the eerie, removed manner in which he relayed it, sent a chill down his spine. "Something very strange and wonderful, Ralph. I should have gone another twenty-four hours before experiencing the flux, viewing everything that had happened leading up to the time I was tanked, but I didn't... Instead, as soon as I was jacked in, I lost the sights and sounds, tastes and smells of the preceding day and experienced the wonder of the flux immediately. Only... only I experienced it - I'm
still
experiencing it - like never before. I am closer to the immanence, the vastness. It's as if I'm part of that vastness. I am spread across and through the infinite, the sublime nexus of the continuum, sensing every particle of the ultimate reality which underlies the illusion of the mundane, human perceived version of reality. I am in contact with the essence of everyone and every being that ever was..." He lapsed again into silence, and though the sceptic in Mirren tried to explain away his brother's vision as the illusion of a dysfunctioning mind, that part of him aware of his own mortality ached for the wonder that Bobby had described.