Engineman - Eric Brown [143]
She was now, or was soon likely to be, in a better place than this illusion. Her essence would exist in a state of eternal vitality, for which he should rejoice.
Selfishly, he could only mourn the fact that he had never been able to show Ella, in this life, the love she deserved.
He sat down on the embankment and took a small silver book from his jacket pocket. He leafed through Ella's diary, the pages falling open where he had inserted the half dozen photographs of his daughter.
At random, he read entries written in her big, looping hand-writing, and it pained him to realise that this would be as close as he would come to knowing the mind of his daughter. It pained him also - though it came as no surprise - that all the entries concerning him were detrimental.
'Last day of holidays, and I haven't seen H once. Good. Back to college tomorrow.'
He turned the page.
'Jay's father is coming with us on the summer trip - that should be good. Mrs T asked me if H could come along to lend a hand, but I said he was off-planet working for the Organisation. I couldn't imagine it! H coming on the trip!'
He let the diary fall open to a later entry, one he had read so many times over the years that he knew it verbatim.
'Yesterday the alien saved my life! I was watching it from the rocks when he saw me and I lost my balance and fell into the water, on the way down hitting my head on some rock. When I came to my senses I was on the flat rock, thinking I should have drowned. Then I saw him looking at me and I knew he had saved me. I was frightened - I mean, he was so alien, so different. I ran. H has stopped me from going out for one week for not being at the party. I want to see the alien again, to apologise (does he speak English?) I'm planning to make him something, a present. I sit and think that if it wasn't for the alien I'd be dead, and I try to think what being dead is like.'
Hunter looked up, saw nothing but his daughter as she was then. He turned a couple of pages, read on.
'Today I saw L'Endo on his death-bed, and instead of it being a sad occasion (he was dying of a plague) it was joyous. L'Endo was actually celebrating the fact that he was dying. In five days he has his passing ceremony, and I am invited. He was so certain an afterlife awaited him - I felt his certainty in the air! - that I felt almost at one with my dying friend. I can't begin to explain it. The old Lho said that the only humans who understand what the Lho believe are the Enginemen and Enginewomen. If the Lho are right, then when I die I will experience the afterlife, which is what the Disciples believe.'
One of Ella's last entries read, 'As soon as I can I'm leaving the reach and going to Earth, to Paris to paint and live and convert...'
Hunter closed the diary, a sharp knot of pain in his chest.
He considered the beautiful irony of the situation.
Ten years ago, an alien had saved his daughter's life; as a result of this, she had experienced something in the cave where the alien lay on his death-bed that had changed her life, given her the desire to convert and become a Disciple. Three years later she did so, and sent photographic evidence of the fact to Hunter, and he had looked into the religion himself and in due course was converted. Then he was contacted by the Lho and commissioned with the duty to see through the scheme which would not only save the remaining Lho-Dharvon people, but ensure the continuance of what humans knew as the nada-continuum.
How wondrous a notion it was that the salvation of the Lho people, and much more