Engineman - Eric Brown [204]
I was re-running that last film when Dan came back.
He'd washed and changed; he wore a smart, side-fastening blue suit with a high collar. I preferred him in casuals - but perhaps that was because I knew where he was going.
"You dining with that woman, Dan?" I asked.
He nodded. "The Gastrodome at twelve."
"I wish you wouldn't," I whispered, and I was unable to tell whether I was jealous, or scared at what the woman might want Dan to do.
"Like you said earlier, we need the dollars." He mussed my hair. "Did you find out who she is?"
I told him that I'd followed her to a mansion on the left bank, but I said nothing about my capture.
"There were tons of blown-up stills on the walls," I said, "all of the old film actress Stephanie Etteridge. I know you're going to call me dumb, but the resemblance is remarkable. Not only her face, but the way she moves. Look..."
I turned the screen to him while Etteridge played the spurned lover with a bravura performance of venom and spite. "Recognise?"
He leaned close and whispered in my ear. "You're dumb."
"I know, I know. But you must admit, the resemblance..."
Dan nodded. "Okay, the woman does look like Etteridge. But that film's what...? Thirty years old? I'd say that Etteridge was about forty there. That'd make her seventy now... Are you trying to tell me that the woman we saw here today was that old?"
"But why all the pictures?"
He shrugged. "Beats me. Perhaps she's the daughter of the actress. Or a fan. Or some fruit-cake who thinks she's Etteridge. Have you accessed her? A hundred to one you'll find her dead."
So I turned back to the Batan and called up the information on Stephanie Katerina Etteridge. We scanned her life story in cold, documentary fact. Date of birth, education, professional status, the four marriages, her involvement with an American businessman jailed for an unspecified misdemeanour a matter of days before they were due to marry - though the documentary had said nothing about this. And her death...?
I threw the nearest thing to hand - a tape cartridge - at Dan. "You owe me!"
He fielded the cartridge and waved it. "Okay, so she's still alive - a crotchety old dame somewhere living on caviar and memories. She's over seventy, Phuong."
I turned away in a huff.
Dan readied the tape on the desk. He slipped a small mic into his pocket so that I'd be able to monitor his conversation with the woman over dinner.
"Catch you later."
I came out of my sulk. "Dan, take care. Okay?"
I ran to the door and tried to pull him to me, but he stiffened and kissed the top of my head as if I were a kid. Despite all the Zen he'd been pumping into his skull, he still could not accept me. From needing to show affection, my feelings polarised and I wanted suddenly to hit him, to hurt him as much as he hurt me. He murmured goodbye and took the downchute to the boulevard.
Two years ago Dan had been an Engineman with the Canterbury Line, a spacer who mind-pushed bigships through the nada-continuum. Then the Keilor-Vincicoff Organisation developed the interfaces, and the bigships Lines went out of business, leaving thousands of Engineman and -women strung out and in need of the flux. Denied union with the bliss of the nada-continuum, Dan drank too much and got into Buddhism and to feed himself started a third rate investigative Agency based in Bondy. He advertised for an assistant to do the leg-work, and I got the job.
We got along fine for weeks, even though I was evasive and distant and didn't let him get too close. Then as I got to know him better I began to believe that we were both disabled, and that if I could accept the state of his head, then perhaps he could come to some acceptance of my body.
Then one night he asked me back to his place, and like a fool I nodded yes. The usual scene, as far as I could gather from the films I'd watched: soft light, music, wine... And after a bottle of chianti I found myself close to him. His fingers mimed the shape of my face, centimetres away; it was as if he had difficulty believing my beauty and