Engineman (68 page)

Ralph took the wheel and Bartholomew sat between us. We lurched from the car-park and along the straight, raised road after the battered Mercedes.

Bartholomew sat with his hands on his knees, staring into the shimmering heat haze ahead of us. I wanted to yell at him that he could show some sign of emotion, that we would fully understand.

"Why didn't the driver bring her back?" he said at last, as we bucketed over the uneven surface. "Even if she were dead, he should have returned with her body..."

In the driver's seat, Ralph gripped the wheel and stared grimly ahead. I said, "Roberts wouldn't be coming out here if she'd died..." I felt faint at the thought of what injuries Elegy might have sustained.

Ten minutes later the road began to climb into a range of low hills, no more than an outcropping of rocks and boulders, the only feature on the face of the flat, wind-sculpted desert. The surface of the road deteriorated and the truck lurched drunkenly from rut to pot hole and back again.

We rounded a bend. Ahead, the Mercedes had pulled into the side of the road. As Ralph eased the truck to a halt behind it, Roberts and the chauffeur climbed out, crossed the road and walked out onto a flat slab of rock. The chauffeur pointed to something below him.

"Christ," I said, unable to stop myself. "She's down there."

I jumped from the cab and ran across the road. The result of the Mercedes' prolonged skid was imprinted on the tarmac like double exclamation marks. Crystallised glass and flakes of paint littered the great anvil of rock across which the car had rolled.

Roberts was kneeling over a narrow fissure. The rock, perhaps the size of an Oasis dome, had split into two uneven sections. One section comprised the greater part, while the other was no more than a sliver, perhaps a metre thick.

I joined Roberts and the African and stared into the crevice. Ten metres down, wedged upright and illuminated by a bright shaft of sunlight, was Elegy Perpetuum. Her head was turned at an unnatural angle, clamped between the two great slabs. She was staring up at us with an expression that comprised both terror and entreaty.

Ralph and Bartholomew joined us.

Ralph, in a gesture of support, was gripping Bartholomew's arm just above the elbow. The latter stared into the fissure and, at the sight of his daughter, winced. It was his only concession to anguish, and seemed suitably in character.

Roberts was attempting to squirm down after the girl, and there was something faintly ludicrous, and at the same time terribly touching, about his futile efforts. He gave up at last and knelt, panting and staring down helplessly.

As my gaze adjusted to the sunlight and shadow in the well of the crevice, I made out greater detail. Elegy was wearing a red dress, and I saw that what I had at first taken to be torn strips of material hanging down her arms were in fact rivulets of blood. There was more blood on the slab of rock near the surface, splashed like patches of alien lichen.

"Elegy," Roberts called. "Can you hear me? Take deep breaths and try not to panic. We'll have you out in no time."

The girl stared up at us, blinked. If she'd heard, she gave no sign. She began to cry, a thin, pitiful whimpering reaching us from the depths.

Bartholomew knelt and peered down. He looked at Roberts. "Is there nothing you can do?" To his credit, there was a tremor in his voice.

"I contacted emergency services in Timbuktu as soon as I found out what had happened. They won't be here for another two, three hours." Roberts shook his head, went on under his breath, "But she might not last that long. She's bleeding badly and God knows what internal injuries she's received."

Bartholomew, down on one hand and knee like a dishevelled, ageing sprinter, just closed his eyes and kept them closed, in a gesture more demonstrative of despair than any amount of vocal bewailing.

Suddenly I could no longer bear to watch - either the little girl in agony, or Bartholomew in his own mental anguish. My redundancy, my utter inability to do a thing to help, only emphasised my fear that Bartholomew might resent my presence.

I strode over to the edge of the rock, taking measured breaths and trying to quell my shaking. Elegy's continual, plaintive whimpering, echoing eerily in the chasm, cut its way through the hot air and into our hearts.

There was a drop of perhaps ten metres to the shale-covered slope of the hillside. Elegy, pinned between the two planes, was positioned a little way above the surface of the hill. It occurred to me that if only we had the right tools to cut through the flake of rock...

I returned to the small group gathered around the dark crevice. "Are you sure there's nothing back at the Oasis? Drills, cutting tools - even a sledge hammer? The rock down there can't be more than a metre thick."

Roberts shook his head. "Don't you think I've considered that? We might have hammers, but we'd never smash through the rock before the emergency team arrives."

From down below, a pathetic voice called out, "Daddy!"

"Elegy, I'm here. We'll get you out soon. Try not to cry."

"I'm all bleeding!" she wailed. "My leg hurts."

As we watched, she choked, coughed, and blood bubbled over her lips and down her chin.

"Elegy..." Bartholomew pleaded, tears appearing in his eyes.

"We've got to do something," I said. "We can't just-"

Ralph was squatting beside Bartholomew, holding him. He looked up at me then and stared, and it was as if the idea occurred to both of us at the same time.

"Christ," he said, "the continuum-frame..."

I felt suddenly dizzy at the thought.

Ralph looked from me to Bartholomew. "It might just work, Perry..."

"We could position it down there on the hillside," I went on. "If we took the truck we could have it back here in twenty minutes."

I knelt beside Bartholomew, who was staring down at his daughter, his expression frozen as if he had heard not a word we had said. I said, "It's the only way to save her. We need the frame!"

He slowly turned his head and stared at me, stricken. Some subconscious part of me might have been aware of the incredible irony of what I was asking Bartholomew to sanction, but all I could think of at the time was the salvation of Elegy Perpetuum.

"It would never survive the journey," he said in almost a whisper. "Everything would be lost."

Roberts exploded. "Jesus! That's your daughter down there. If we don't get her out of that bloody hole she won't survive much longer!"

Bartholomew peered down the crevice at Elegy, who stared up at him mutely with massive, beseeching eyes and blood bubbling from between her lips. "You don't know what it cost me to create the piece," he said. "It's unique, irreplaceable. I could never do another quite like it..."

In rage I gripped his arm and shook him. "Elegy's unique, for chrissake! She's irreplaceable. Are you going to let her bleed to death?"

Something snapped within him, and his face registered a terrible capitulation. He closed his eyes and nodded. "Very well..." he said. "Very well, use the frame."

I hauled him to his feet and we hurried across the road. With Ralph's help I assisted Bartholomew into the back of the truck, where we stood side by side clutching the bulkhead. Roberts and the chauffeur climbed into the cab and started the vehicle, and we rumbled off down the road at breakneck speed, Bartholomew rocking impassively from side to side between us. He stared into the never-ending sky and said not a word as the desert sped by.

Ten minutes later we roared through the gates of the Oasis, manoeuvred through the concourse and backed up to the continuum-frame. We enlisted the aid of two attendants and for the next five minutes, with Bartholomew looking on and pleading with us to be careful, jacked the frame level with the back of the truck and dragged it aboard. Bartholomew insisted on travelling with it, as if his presence might ease its passage, and Ralph and I joined him in the back. We accelerated from the concourse and through the gates, leaving a posse of on-lookers gaping in amazement.

As the truck raced along the desert road and into the hills, Bartholomew clung to the great rusting frame and gazed into the radiance at its centre, its veined depths reflecting in his bright blue eyes. We lurched over pot-holes and the frame rocked back and forth. Bartholomew stared at me, mute appeal in his eyes. "It's going!" he called out. "I'm losing it!"

I stared into the swirling cobalt glow. As I watched, the marmoreal threads of white luminance began to fade. I could only assume that these threads were the physical manifestation of Bartholomew's sick, psychic contribution to the piece, the phenomena I had experienced as tortured flesh and acute mental anguish. Over a period of minutes the white light dissolved and the bright glow waned to sky blue, and Bartholomew simply closed his eyes as he had at the plight of his daughter.

Before we arrived at the scene of the accident, the truck turned off the road, crossed the desert and backed up to the great slab in which Elegy was imprisoned. We halted a metre away from the face of the rock and Bartholomew, like a man in a trance, touched the controls and extended the blue beam into the boulder.

Then we jumped from the truck and scrambled up the hillside. We gathered around the crevice, peering down to judge how near the beam was to the girl. I stood beside Bartholomew as he stared at his daughter, his expression of compassion tempered by terrible regret, and I felt an inexpressible pity for the man.

"We'll have you out in no time!" I called down to her.

She was staring up at us, blinking bravely. We were not so far off with the beam. It penetrated the rock one metre to her left; all that was required was for the beam to be shifted a little closer to the girl.

When I looked up, Ralph, Roberts and the chauffeur were no longer with us. I assumed they had returned to the frame. I took Bartholomew's arm in reassurance and turned my attention to the girl.

I stared down into the crevice...

I thought at first that my eyesight was at fault. I seemed to be looking through Elegy's crimson dress, through her round brown face and appealing eyes. As I watched, the girl became ever more indistinct, insubstantial - she seemed to be dematerialising before our very eyes. And then, along with all the blood, her image flickered briefly like a defective fluorescent and winked out of existence.

I had seen an identical vanishing act somewhere before - in Ralph's studio, just yesterday.

I looked at Bartholomew, and saw his face register at first shock, and then sudden understanding.

He stood and turned. "Standish..." he cried, more in despair than rage at the deception. "Standish!"

But by this time Ralph, along with the other flesh-and-blood actors in his little drama, had taken the Mercedes and were speeding along the road towards Sapphire Oasis.

Which was not quite the end of the affair.

I drove Bartholomew back in the truck, and we unloaded the continuum-frame and set it among the other works of art on the concourse. Evidently word had got back that something had happened in the desert. A crowd had gathered, and artists watched from the balconies of the domes overlooking the concourse.

Bartholomew noticed nothing. He busied himself with the keyboard set into the frame. "There still might be something in there I can salvage," he told me. "Something I can build on..."

I just smiled at him and began to walk away.

I was stopped in my tracks by a cry from a nearby dome.

"Daddy!"

Bartholomew turned and stared. Elegy Perpetuum, radiant in a bright blue dress and ribbons, walked quickly across the concourse towards her father, as upright as a little soldier. She ran the rest of the way and launched herself into his arms, and Bartholomew lifted her off the ground and hugged her to his chest.

She was followed by a tall, olive-skinned woman in a red trouser-suit. I recognised her face from a hundred art programmes and magazines - the burning eyes, the strong Berber features: Electra Perpetuum.

I was aware of someone at my side.

"Ralph!" I hissed. "How the hell did she get here?"

"I invited her, of course - to judge the contest." He smiled at me. "I've told her about everything that happened out there."

Electra paused at the centre of the concourse, three metres from Bartholomew. He lowered his daughter to the ground and the little girl ran back to her mother's side.

"I know what you did, Perry," Electra said in a voice choked with emotion. "But what I want to know is, do you think you made the right decision?"

I realised, as I watched Perry Bartholomew regard Electra and his daughter for what seemed like minutes, that what Ralph Standish had created before us was either the last act of a drama in the finest of romantic traditions - or a tragedy.

It seemed that everyone in the Oasis was willing Bartholomew to give the right reply. Beside me, Ralph clenched his fist and cursed him under his breath.

Bartholomew stared at Electra, seemingly seeing through her, as he considered his past and contemplated his future.

And then, with a dignity and courage I never expect to witness again, Perry Bartholomew stepped forward, took the hands of his wife and daughter and, between Electra and Elegy, moved from the concourse and left behind him the destitute monument of his continuum-frame.