Engineman - Eric Brown [179]
"Why can't you do it, Abe!" Jo yelled at me. "What do you fear?"
"I might not survive, Jo," I lied. "It might kill me." But what I feared was far, far worse than this.
"Abe - it might save me!"
So then, shaking with fear, I slipped into the slide-bed and jacked-in, like I'd done a thousand times before in analogue. Sobbing with tears of relief now, Jo leaned all her weight against the 'bed and pushed it home. She slammed the hatch shut and total darkness encapsulated me, then silence. The ship's computer slipped anaesthetic into my skull and soon all physical feeling departed. I sensed a quick, blurred vibration as Jo, up in the pilot's berth, fired the burners.
Then I fluxed.
What I feared, of course, was that the promise of Nirvana-thru-flux would turn out to be no more than a myth - a romantic fabrication to enhance the mystique of the Enginemen. For so long I had lived with the hope that Nirvana was real, the ultimate state at which each one of us eventually arrived. I was an old man with not long left, and to have experienced nothing in the flux would have destroyed me.
I sensed a strange timelessness to begin with, and I was still aware of myself as a single human entity. And then... something happened. I was no longer myself, no longer human, but part of something larger and infinite. I had a vast understanding of everything - I was everything - and the petty human concerns that had filled my life to date were revealed for what they were. I had often wondered at the faraway attitudes of the many Enginemen I had met, and now I understood the reason for their aloof otherness: how could anyone be the same, or like any other human being, after experiencing this? With one part of my mind I knew that The Pride of Baghdad no longer existed in the real and physical universe. We were surging through the nada-continuum now, on a mission to save the life of Jodie Schimelmann.
After what seemed like an eternity, though in fact was a matter of minutes only, the sensation of physicality returned to me. I felt hands on me and I was pulled upright and dragged forward, and all I could think of was the ecstasy of the union in the flux. I could see nothing, hear nothing, and I was aware only of my bodily progress from the ship and out on to what seemed to be sand. I felt the warmth of sunlight on my skin and collapsed.
I came to my senses again and again, and always Jo was kneeling beside me, smiling, trying to impress upon me the success of the venture.
Then I came fully to my senses and elbowed myself into a sitting position. I looked around. I was on a beach, an endless golden crescent with the blue sea metres away. The Pride of Baghdad was buried in a dune behind me, and only the hatch was visible like the entrance to some mysterious underground kingdom.
I called out and seconds later Jo emerged from the ship and closed the hatch behind her. "Abe! You're okay?"
"Never felt better," I said, touched by her concern. "Where are we?"
"Brazil, Abe. Ten kays south of Rio."
She passed me a vid-board, tuned to world news. The headlines ran: 'Louvre raided... The Star of Epsilon missing... Chamber of Light destroyed in mysterious raid...'
She held out the diamond, scintillating in her callused palms. "You did it, Abe. You saved my life."
I wanted to tell her that there was nothing to fear from death - that, after life, something more wondrous and magical awaited us. But how could I tell her that? Jo was a young girl with all her life ahead of her, and I was an old man at the end of mine.
"Okay," I said, "let's get you into a hospital."
"And you?"
Me? First, I'd get the occipital computer wiped clean of all the dreams of space that belonged to other men. I had my own experience of flux now, and I no longer needed analogues.
"I'll tell you as we walk," I said.
Jo pulled me to my feet and we left The Pride of Baghdad and set off along the road to Rio.
//The Time-Lapsed Man
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