Engineman (58 page)

"There we are," the nurse said, proffering him a last corner of toast. He wanted to tell her to stop treating him like a child, but that was the big disadvantage of his present condition: what he experienced now had happened six hours ago. The nurse would be elsewhere, the bacon and egg digested, the sounds and aromas dissolved into the ether.

Over the next few days he remained awake into the early hours, watching the happenings of the previous day. At four in the morning, then six, darkness would descend, and Thorn would settle down to sleep. Around noon he would wake, spend several hours in darkness, then watch the sun rise eight hours late. If the delay between occurrence and perception continued to increase by two hours every three days, as it was doing, then Thorn foresaw a time when he would be spending more time in darkness than in light.

He would be able to cope. There had been many a long period in the past, between shifts, when he had locked himself in his darkened apartment, with drink and fleeting memories of flux.

After almost two weeks in hospital Thorn began to weaken. He passed through periods of physical nausea and mental confusion. He hallucinated once that he was fluxing again, this time without the usual euphoria of the union.

The day following this hallucination he awoke early and felt the warmth of sunlight on his skin. Eight hours later he was aware of the sun coming up over the sea. He would have liked to watch it, but his eyes of eight hours ago were fixed on the foot of his bed. The frequency of his 'waking' blinks gave the scene the aspect of an ancient, flickering movie. At least it wasn't silent: he could hear the hospital waking around him, the distant crescendo of a starship's burners.

Later, after someone had spoon-fed him a tasteless lunch, he felt a soft hand on his arm. He moved his head, as if by doing so he might see who it was. But all he saw was the same old far wall of eight hours ago; all he heard was his own breathing. He recalled the touch of the other nurse, but that had been light, platonic, reassuring him like a child that everything was alright. There was nothing platonic about this touch. As he lay there, helpless, whoever it was pulled back the sheets and divested him of hospital garb. He shouted out in silence, tried to fend her off - 'her' because his flailing arm caught the softness of a breast. But he could not see the woman and he was unable to prevent the ludicrous rape. He felt a warm, soft weight straddle him, her breasts loose against his chest, and the sensation was what he imagined it might be like to be taken by a succubus.

Caroline?
he said. He moved his arms in the clumsy description of an embrace, touched her familiar warm and slender body. He was aroused now despite himself. She found him and he moaned without a sound, ran his fingers through her black invisible hair. He recognised Caroline's brand of love-making from the past, went along with it as though they had never parted, and when climax came it was as he remembered it from many years ago, a brief ecstasy soon gone - like a second in flux but not as satisfying. Even the unusual circumstances of the union, the fact that he could not see Caroline, that the source of his pleasure was as it were disembodied, could only intimate a greater rapture and not fulfil in itself.

The invisible weight of her lay against him now, heavy and sated after orgasm, which Thorn had experienced through the silent contractions of her body. She kissed him, and he felt salt tears fall on his face.

Caroline...Why...?

Her lips moved against his cheek, her breath hot as she formed words. It was like being kissed by a ghost, bestowed silent prophecy.

In the calm aftermath of the act, Thorn began to feel revulsion. The bizarre nature of their love-making sickened him. He felt a return of the old guilt which he thought he had long since banished. It was as if the union was a symbol of their relationship to date; for years Thorn had played at loving someone whose essence was invisible to him, while Caroline for her part had wasted her life chasing someone who was emotionally forever elsewhere.

He cried out now and pushed her from the bed. He felt her fall and almost heard her cry of pain.
Get out, Caroline! Go away!
He faced where he thought she might be, but could not be sure.
I don't want you, for Godsake! All I want-

She attacked him then. She came at him with painful blows and slaps, and no doubt cries and accusations. Thorn was aware only of the physical violence, the punches that struck from nowhere without warning. And he was aware, too, that he deserved the assault.

He lay on the bed, battered and exhausted. Caroline had ceased her attack. He had no way of knowing whether she was still in the room, but he sensed her continued presence.
I don't know why you came here
, he said.
I don't know what you want from me...

He half-expected another hail of blows, and flinched in anticipation. But none came.

When he thought he was alone he dragged the bedsheets around him protectively, lay back and recalled Caroline's tears on his cheeks.

There could only be one explanation for her visit.

Thorn felt himself weaken further during the hours that followed.

He waited with mounting apprehension, his body covered in chill sweat. Visually it was four o'clock in the afternoon, but the real time was around midnight. It seemed a lot longer than the delayed eight hours before Caroline entered his line of sight.

She moved out of it quickly as she came to the side of his bed. She reached out and touched his arm, and Thorn expected to feel her now, but of course her touch had startled him eight hours ago. Then, Thorn had turned his head abruptly, and now he saw Caroline full on. She wore only a white gown and nothing beneath, and she was crying.

He watched as she undressed him, and the sight of her doing this now brought a hot flush of shame and resentment to his cheeks. The sensation of her touch had passed, but as he saw her slip from her gown and climb onto him he experienced a resurgence of the desire that had overwhelmed him eight hours earlier.

The Thorn-of-now lay still in his bed. He was making love to Caroline, but, with his memories of the physical act already eight-hours old, he felt like a voyeur in the head of his former self. He could see her, frenzied blurs of flesh and hair and tongue; he could smell her, the perfume she used and the sweat of sex that overcame it; and he could hear her small moans of pleasure, her repeated cry of his name as she approached climax.

He heard his slurred question: "Caroline... Why...?"

They had finished their loving-making and she lay in his arms. "Because I loved you, Max," she had said. "Because I
still
love you."

He knew what happened next. Again he experienced that overwhelming sense of revulsion, brought about by guilt. He watched helplessly as he pushed her from the bed. "Get out, Caroline!" he heard himself cry. "Get away!" He saw her expression of pain, the acceptance of rejection in her eyes, and had it been possible he would have stopped himself saying what he said next. "I don't want you, for Godsake! All I want-"

She came at him and hit him again and again.

The Thorn-of-now flinched, as if the blows he could see coming might indeed inflict pain upon him; he raised his arms as if to protect himself.

Caroline backed off and yelled at him.

He heard himself say: "I don't know why you came here...I don't know what you want from me..."

Caroline was crying. "I came because I loved you, Max. I came to say goodbye."

She lowered her gaze and murmured, more to herself than to Thorn: "Black died two days ago."

Eight hours later Thorn lay quite still.

He deteriorated rapidly over then next few days.

The knowledge of Black's death robbed him of any will he might have had to fight. In his final hours he experienced a gradual diminution of his senses. His hearing left him first - then his taste and sense of smell, though he hardly noticed their absence. Later his vision dimmed and went out, and he was aware of himself only as a small, blind intelligence afloat in an infinite ocean.

Soon even the awareness of his physical self diminished, and then the last sense of all, the cerebral intuition of his own identity, left him too. A familiar euphoria flooded him, and the man who had been Thorn knew, before he died, that he was being absorbed into the vastness of the cosmos he had known until then as the
nada
-continuum.

//The Pineal-Zen Equation

I'm dropping acid shorts in the Supernova slouchbar when the call comes through. Gassner stares from the back of my hand, veins corrugating his mugshot. Gassner's white - fat and etiolated like a monster maggot - but my Bangladeshi metacarpus tans him mulatto. He's a xenophobic bastard and the fact that he comes over half-caste on the handset never fails to make me smile.

I like irony almost as much as I dislike Gassner.

He's muttering now, some stuff about young junkies.

"You wrecked?" he queries, peering.

"I'm fine," I lie.

He wants me in ten. He has customers coming. Distraught parents who have evidence their daughter was butchered. "This is big-time, girl. Some high-up in the Wringsby-Saunders outfit. Don't screw it." I feel like telling him to auto-fellate on a cannibal personatape, but I resist the urge. Maybe later, when I have the funds to fly. He still owns me, still has his fat face stamped on the back of my hand, good as any brand.

But it's only a matter of time now.

I've been out for hours. What I did earlier needed a good hit to help me forget. My head's dead and so are my legs. I stagger through a battlescene of prostrate bodies and make it to the chute.

Outside it's night, and the crowds are beginning to hit the streets. I brazen my way across a packed sidewalk, earning taunts on three counts. I'm a telepath and a junkie - the two go together - and I have no crowd-sense. I admit everything with an insolent yeah-yeah to whoever's complaining and climb aboard the moving boulevard. A breeze, fresh onetime but polluted now with city stench, does its best to revive me. I ride the slide a block and alight at 3rd. Feeling better already, I dodge touts and beggars and home in on the Union towerpile.

"Bangladesh!" The legless oldster grins in my direction, dumped like garbage by the entrance. How does he do it? He gouged his eyes out yearsback and still he knows when I'm coming. Could be he's on to the scent of my hair oil, or even my crotch. His tag's Old Pete, and he's my regular. I slip him creds and he makes sure I'm stocked with 'gum when I see Gassner. "Any nearer?" he asks now.

I try a probe. All I get is jumblefuzz. He's shielded. We have a game, me and him. He reckons he was someone famous, onetime, and I have to guess who. His face is certainly familiar, disregarding the absent nose and evacuated eye-sockets. He went Buddhist, yearsback. Quit the race and mutilated himself to indicate his repudiation of this illusion. I often wonder what it was that drove him to such extreme action. Maybe he was seeking enlightenment, or perhaps he'd found it. Once again I concede ignorance, pass him ten and chew 'gum in the upchute.

I'm feeling great when I hit the 33rd. Gassner has his office shelved this level, though 'office' is a grand title for his place of work. It's little more than a cubby filled with Batan II terminals and link-ups and however much of his blubber isn't spilling through the hatch. I enter bright, my metabolism pumping ersatz adrenalin. It doesn't do to let him see me any other way. He'd gloat if he knew how low I was at being his slave.

A metal desk-top, the bonnet of a pre-fusion automobile, pins his fat up against the floor-to-ceiling window. He's scanning case notes and his grunt acknowledges the fact that I got in with about three seconds to spare. The only light in the place is the silver glow from the computer screen. I clamber over this and sit cross-legged in the hammock where Gassner slings his meat between shifts. Every ten seconds the chiaroscuro gloom is relieved from outside by the electric blue sweep of a misaligned photon display, strobing sub-lim flashes of 'Patel's Masala Dosa' into our forebrains.

I slip my ferronniere from its case and loop it around my head. And instantly all the minds in the building, previously mere distant flickering candles, torch painfully. I strain out the extraneous mindmush, editing the occasional burst of brainhowl from psychopathic individuals, and work at keeping my head together.

Gassner, of course, is shielded. It wouldn't be good policy for someone who employed a telepath to go about with his head open. I'm shut out,
persona non grata
in his meatball. Times are when I'd love to read my master. Then again, times are when I'm glad I'm barred entry. I read too many screwballs in the course of a day without Gassner opening up.

Seconds later Mr and Mrs distraught roll in.

The guy is Kennedy, and he's playing it cool. I'll be lying if I call him distraught; on the Richterscale of personal upheaval he'd hardly register. He's chewing
djamba
to calm himself and he carries his bonetoned body with a certain hauteur. Or call it arrogance. Under one arm he has the silver envelope containing the evidence, and under the other his wife. She's Scandinavian, beautiful in better circumstances, but grief plays havoc with good looks and right now Mrs Kennedy is ugly. I get the impression that Mr Kennedy is embarrassed by the degree of his wife's distress.