Engineman - Eric Brown [173]
There's something in the head of the killer above us that has no right to be there... something that's keeping him alive.
I retrace my steps and regard the swing doors.
"Isabella?" Da Cruz says.
"Christ," I murmur. "Jesus Christ..."
I push through the doors at a run.
"Isabella!" Da Cruz rushes in after me.
We're in an operating theatre, and the only way it differs from the one in Dr Frankenstein's castle is in the modern fittings; the overhead halogens and the angle-poise operating table. They've both seen the same deed accomplished, one in fiction and one in fact.
I move towards a green, vertical tank as if in a trance.
"Isabella?" Da Cruz is staring at me. "Didn't you know? We brought him up here years ago, equipped this place for when the time is right to bring him back to-"
I open the tank and it's empty.
"Where is he?" she screams at me as I run from the theatre and through the nearest hatch to the upper hemisphere.
I've never really credited Androids with any of the more complex human emotions, like love or hate...
Or even irony.
By playing his role of Dr Frankenstein to the full, this Andy has proved me wrong.
Back in the twentieth century, the king of the greatest entertainment industry on Earth was corpsicled. Put on ice and stacked away until such time as his cancer could be fixed. And now...
Now Walt stands on the balcony of a fairytale castle. Ten metres separate him from where I crouch on the gallery that circles the complex. He rests his weight on a laser-rifle, crutchlike, and sways. His shaven head bulges at the left temple with a dark mass like some morbid extra-cranial tumour: it's a cyber-auxiliary, wired in there by the Android. It's this that is powering him, that motivated him to commit the slaying of the innocents. He's so feeble now, so near death a second time, that it has little control over his body or his mind. For the first time since his resurrection, he is himself.
He sees me and smiles sadly.
His skin, blanched with more than a hundred years of death, is puckered and loose, maggotlike. He is barely conscious, yet a flicker of tragic awareness moves within him. The chemical that is keeping him alive is almost spent.
"Is this a nightmare?" he asks in a voice so frail it barely reaches me.
"A dream," I say.
"Where am I?" I read his lips. "In Hell?"
I almost reply: "In your Heaven, Walt," but stop myself.
I follow his gaze to the deck, as he surveys the carnage of his own doing.
"Watch out!" Da Cruz appears beside me and drags me to the ground. Walt is making one last feeble attempt to lift and aim the laser; it wavers in our direction. I can read in his eyes that he has no desire to kill us, but the choice is not his. The Frankenstein Android controls the cyber-auxiliary.
I close my eyes.
In the nightmare of Walt's failing brain I open the floodgates of anger. I motivate him into action, give him the will to revenge himself.
And while I'm doing this I realise something. How can I ever again use my ability to induce love after using it to promote so much hate?
Da Cruz clutches my arm. "What--?"
I concentrate. "Just call it black magic, Maria." And as I speak, Walt swings his laser-rifle, the desire for revenge overcoming the Android's final command.
He cries out and fires.
The showboat disintegrates in a million shards of synthi-timber, and Dr Frankenstein explodes like a grenade in a brilliant white starburst.
Walt lets the laser fall and slips quietly into his second death, smiling with induced euphoria all the way.
Three hours later and we're surfing down the helix of the gravity-well. Back on the Sat, Walt is being returned to ice, the slaughter mopped up. Maria is taking time off, dirtside.
I break the silence. "Were you orphaned, Maria?" Gently.
She looks at me, suspicious. "How do you know?"
I reach out and touch her head. "Big trouble upstairs," I say. Then: "We're very much alike, you and me."
She gives me the story that I know already, but it helps for her to talk about it. Her mother died when she was ten, and she was taken from her father following