Engineman - Eric Brown [119]
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