Engineman - Eric Brown [154]
Then, quite by accident, I had come across the method by which to change the nature of the crystals so that they could store emotions or thoughts forever. Hence my sudden popularity.
A guest, fancying his chances, parted the curtain and stepped on to the balcony. He returned immediately. "She's gone."
I moved unnoticed from the bar and slipped into the adjacent room. Lin Chakra was waiting for me on the balcony. She had leapt across, and now sat on the rail hugging her shins. I paused by the shimmer-stream curtain. "Hey..."
"I have a fabulous sense of balance," she reassured me.
"I get vertigo just thinking about the drop," I admitted.
"An ex-Engineman shouldn't be afraid of heights," she mocked, jumping down and leaning against the rail.
Behind me, pressure on the communicating door made it rattle.
She glanced at me.
"I locked it," I said. "As you instructed. What do you want?"
"I really meant what I said about your crystal. I like it."
"It's crude," I said. "Honest in what it portrays, but incompetently executed. A kid with six months' practice could do better."
"You'll improve as you master the form," she told me.
I would have smiled, but that was impossible.
"A lot of people would give both arms to know how you fuse those crystals," she said now. "Do you think you can keep it to yourself forever?"
I shrugged. "Maybe I can," I said, and tried not to laugh at my sick secret.
Lin Chakra nodded, considering. "In that case, would you contemplate selling a crystal console already fused, so that other artists might create something?"
"So that's why you're here tonight. You want a crystal?"
"I came," she said, "to see your crystal. But-"
"Forget it," I snapped. "I don't sell them."
"Don't you think that's rather selfish?"
I laughed, though the sound came out as a strangled splutter. "I like that! I'm the one who discovered the process, after all. Aren't I entitled to be just a little selfish?"
She frowned to herself, turned and stared into the night sky, at the stars spread above the lighted towerpiles. A long silence came between us. "Which one?" she asked at last.
I stood beside her and found the Pole star, then charted galactic clockwise until I came to the blue-shift glimmer of star Radnor 66. A couple of degrees to the right was Radnor B, where the accident had happened. The star no longer existed, and the light we saw tonight was a lie in time, the ghost of the sun before it went nova. In fifty years it would flare and die, reminding the people of Earth of the time when a smallship from the Canterbury Line was incinerated, with the loss of all aboard but one.
I pointed out the star.
She gazed up in silence, and as I watched her I was reminded again of her frailty. I wanted suddenly to question the wisdom of her living in the radioactive sector. She seemed so fragile that even something as innocuous as influenza might kill her; but that was ridiculous. No-one died nowadays from flu, or cancer. The freaks in the penthouse were merely exhibitionists; as soon as their pet cancers showed the first signs of turning nasty they would be excised, their owners given a clean bill of health. And anyway, Lin Chakra seemed cancer free.
Her request interrupted my thoughts. "Tell me about the accident," she said.
I stared at her. "Wasn't the crystal enough?"
"I haven't experienced everything," she said shrewdly. "And I want to hear the way you tell it."
"For any particular reason?"
"Oh... let's just say that I want to clarify a point."
So I gave her the full story.
It had been a regular long haul from star Canopus to Sigma Draconis, carrying supplies for the small colony on Sigma D IV. The John Marston had a crew of ten; three Enginemen, two pilots, and five service mechanics, the regular complement for a smallship like ours. After the slowburn out of Canopus we phased into the nada-continuum with one of my colleagues in the flux-tank. We were due for a three-month furlough at the end of the run, and perhaps that was what gave the voyage its air of light-heartedness. We were in good spirits