Engineman - Eric Brown [15]
He charged a stein of lager to his tab and carried it through the gloom to a booth beside the wrap-around viewscreen. He sat hunched over his beer and massaged the base of his skull above his occipital console. His head throbbed, forewarning him that another flashback was on the way. Three days ago, as he'd climbed into his flier for the short flight home, he had flashbacked for the first time. He'd suddenly found himself reliving his last flight aboard the Perseus Bound. He had flashed twice since then, each time experiencing consecutive episodes from his last flight. He knew where it would end: a decade ago, the 'ship had crashlanded on an uncharted planet, and though he had survived the accident unscathed, he had suffered extensive amnesia. He recalled nothing at all of the journey, and knew of the crash and his subsequent memory loss from what the medics of the Line had told him. He was regaining his recollection of the events, now, in a most singular fashion.
He took a long swallow of lager and sat back, and it was then that he saw her. She was sitting on a high-stool at the bar. Evidently she had just arrived, as he hadn't seen her earlier. He pushed his drink across the table, then slid around the u-shaped couch so that his back was to her.
She was wearing the light blue uniform of the Orly security team, so perhaps her presence here had nothing to do with him, but he found that hard to believe. A month ago she had called, but he'd ignored her message. "Hi, Ralph. I'm in Paris for a few months - security work for various companies in the city. I thought I'd look you up. Perhaps we could go out for a meal? Call me at the Excelsior, any time." And she had smiled and cut the connection.
What had disturbed him so much was the fact that she had changed so little in twenty years. She was still the elfin-faced, spike-haired twenty-one year-old he had walked out on in Sydney with all those years ago. Except she was over forty now, and her breezy confidence and self-assurance told him that she had grown in the interim.
He had not returned her call.
He was about to quickly finish his drink and escape, hopefully without being seen, when he heard footsteps on the tiles, heading his way.
She paused before the booth, arms folded across her chest, leaning forward slightly. "Ralph? It is you?"
He knew that her uncertainty had nothing to do with the low lighting. He had changed a lot in twenty years.
He sat up. "Caroline."
She hugged her shoulders and gave a kind of shrug, a gesture he recognised from years ago which indicated she was nervous. "Carrie, please. Not so formal."
Mirren gestured across the booth, and Caroline slipped along the seat with a quick wan smile at him. She was, he knew, shocked at how the years had treated him.
He had met Caroline Bishop when he was twenty, studying aeronautics at the Jet Propulsion labs in Sydney. She'd worked there one day a week, on release from the college of the Australian Internal Security bureau. Until then he'd thought that love at first sight was nothing more than a concept dreamed up in retrospect by incurable romantics, but when he first saw Caroline in the student canteen he'd experienced an inexplicable surge of desire to possess and protect - which years later he rationalised cynically as the tyranny of biology to gain its own ends.
A year later they had married - a declining institution in the latter half of the century, but Caroline's parents were Catholic, and although Mirren was atheist he'd not objected to the ceremony.
Mirren had joined the Canterbury