Engineman - Eric Brown [176]
I looked at her, guarded. She had it wrong, but only just.
So I said, "How...?"
She grinned at me. "I experienced your show good, Abe. Your need was in there. Those fools might not have read it, but I did."
Then I saw the teflon protuberance at the base of her skull. I lifted a tress of hair, fingered sockets worn smooth through use.
"Who are you?" I whispered.
"I'm just another German-Turk from Dusseldorf," she shrugged, "with a taste for sick theatrics."
I smiled and shook my head.
"You still don't recognise? How about if I wore a Pierrot suit and a big tear," she said, "just here."
"Jo?"
"Jodie Schimelmann."
I felt a tremor inside. This was the kid who'd rocked me with haunting visions of death. She was fifteen years-old and she'd stared oblivion in the face and she was still here.
I'd be ninety in a month and I felt a burning sense of shame at the injustice.
"I need your help," she said.
I shook my head. "How can I possibly help you?"
So she told me why she was dying.
Until six months ago Jodie worked in the Orly spaceport. She was a flux-monkey, an engineer whose job it was to crawl inside the exhaust ventricles of bigships and carry out repairs on the auxiliary burners. It was hard work, but she didn't complain; she lived well and saved enough creds to send home to her mother in Germany.
Then one check-up she was found to have contracted some complicated virus that had lodged in the flux-vent of a bigship she'd worked on. She was given a year to live, paid off and discharged. Jodie was rotting inside with some alien malignancy that had attacked her marrow, lymph glands, lungs and trachea... It was a miracle she was still alive and active, but she loaded herself with analgesics every day and went on fighting.
The disease explained her voice, of course, and the fact that she wore a wig. Ironic that that which was killing her also gave her the appearance of someone much older, while in her head she had matured as well.
I said, "Isn't there a cure?"
"Yeah, sure there is. But a cure costs creds, Abe. And not even my pay-off was enough."
I recalled her words. "How can I help you?"
"I need creds. I want the cure. I also want to be beautiful-"
I laughed.
Then she realised how funny that was and she laughed too.
"See that beautiful woman at the bar?" she asked. "The one zonked on jugular-juice and out of it."
"So?"
"So she's dead ugly - honest."
"I thought you just said she was beautiful?"
Jo smiled, "You ever seen her here before?"
"She doesn't come in here when I'm on. I'd recognise her."
"Yeah? Ever noticed an old woman, maybe a hundred and ten? All bags and wrinkles? It's the same woman. She has the latest sub-dermal capillary electro-cosmetics. What you see there is a clever light show, a laser display to deceive the eye into beholding beauty. I want one."
"But you aren't ugly, Jo."
"I'm not beautiful."
"So you want me to get you the creds to buy this device?" I said. I thought I saw her logic. She was almost as terrified by her physical deterioration as she was by the thought of death, and she wanted to die looking good.
But I was wrong.
She said, "That and a cure. I want to live, and I want looks. Think I'm greedy?"
I shrugged. "Why live a lie?" I asked her, hypocritical.
"I want both, and you can help me get them."
So I asked, "How?"
"I've got a ship I want you to flux," she said simply.
Why live a lie? I had asked.
Sure I live a lie...
"Tell me about it," I said.
So Jo took me to the Louvre.
I protested that art wasn't my kick, but she insisted. When I tried to find out what she had planned, she clammed up. She stomped along the boulevard, pulling me after her. We made an odd couple, even among countless odd couples. She wore callipers to assist her wasted leg muscles, unadorned leg-irons without automation.
We did the Louvre.
We saw the Mona Lisa and a hundred other art treasures of Earth. Then we strolled around the hall of alien artifacts and came at last to the Chamber of Light, a circular room containing the Star of Epsilon