Engineman - Eric Brown [205]
I stayed away for weeks, until he came for me and apologised. I returned to the office and we began again from the beginning, and it was as if we were closer, having shared our secrets - though never, of course, close enough.
Soon after that night at his place he began experimenting. He claimed that he was doing it for me. By embracing illegal skull-tapes, second-hand Buddhism and the Bardo Thodol rewritten for the modern era, he said he was attempting to come to some acceptance of my disfigurement - but I knew he was also doing it for himself.
Now I stared at the mystical junk that littered the desk and the chesterfield: the pamphlets, the mandalas, the meditation pins and bootleg tapes. In a rage I picked up a great drift of the stuff and threw it the length of the room. When the desk and chesterfield were cleared, and my anger was still not exhausted, I ran across the office, fell to my knees and pitched tankas and pins, magazines and effigies of Gautama through the window. I leaned out and laughed like a fool, then rushed down into the street and stomped on the useless relics and idols of mysticism, ground them into the sidewalk and kicked the debris into the storm drain. Then, as the rain poured down around me, I sat on the kerb and cried.
Hell, real love rarely lasted; so what chance had our corrupted version of attraction, what chance had the relationship between a screwed up Engineman attempting to rewire his head with bogus Buddhist tracts so that he could, in theory, ignore the physical, and someone whose body was no more than a puckered mass of raddled meat? It was unfair to both of us; it was unfair of myself to expect love and affection after so many years without hope, and it was unfair of me to keep Dan from other women who could offer him more than just companionship and a pretty face.
The tape was running when I returned to the office.
I lay on the chesterfield in the darkness and listened to the clink of glasses, the murmur of polite conversation. The Gastrodome was the de-commissioned astrodome of an old French bigship, amputated and welded atop the Eiffel tower. I'd been up there once, but the view had given me vertigo. Now I lay half asleep and listened to the dialogue that filled the room.
All I wanted was for Dan to refuse to work for the woman, so that he would be free from the danger of whatever it was she wanted him to do. Then, when he returned, I could tell him that I was leaving, and that this time there was nothing he could say to make me return.
"Tell me about when you worked for the Canterbury Line," the woman said. "Is it true that in flux you experience Nirvana?"
"Some Enginemen claim that."
"Did you?"
"Do we have to talk about this?" he said, and I knew that his hands would be trembling.
In my mind's eye I could see the woman giving an unconcerned shrug. "Very well, but I hope you don't mind discussing your occipital implant-"
Dan, "Why?" suspicious.
"Because I'm interested." Her tone was hard. "What kind is it, Leferve?"
"Standard Sony neo-cortical implant-"
"With a dozen chips in the pre-frontal lobe, sub-cortex, cerebellum, etc...?"
"You've done your homework," Dan said. "Why the interest?"
"When was the last time you fluxed?"
I cried out.
It took Dan aback, too. The silence stretched. Then: "Almost two years ago..."
"Would you consider doing it just one more time," she asked, "for twenty-five thousand dollars?"
I balled my fists and willed him to say no...
"I have a smallship I need taking on a short haul," she said.
There was a brief moment of silence, then Dan spoke.
"Insystem