Engineman - Eric Brown [3]
Mirren had considered, in the early days after the shutdown of the Lines, having his recollections of the flux wiped from his consciousness through the process of mem-erase. He'd even approached a consultant about the treatment, but before he could undergo the process which would have done away with great chunks of his memory, mem-erase was withdrawn as unsafe - tests revealed that the erased memories could resurface years later in bouts of trauma or psychosis - and Mirren was condemned to a life-time of craving.
Macready took a long swallow of scotch and passed the bottle. He laid back his head and exhaled in alcoholic relief. Whisky trickled from his lips, beading in the tangle of his beard.
Mirren indicated the spaceport. "Look."
On the tarmac, before the interface, was a bigship. Both men stared down at it with a kind of silent wonder tinged with despair. It was as if the 'ship had been rolled out before them as a final insult.
It was as big as a towerblock laid on its side - a bull-nosed behemoth moving with agonising slowness towards the screen. The 'ship was like some proud and magnificent animal, blinded or lamed. It had had its flux-tank and logic-matrix ripped out, and all it was now was a feeble husk, a shell ferrying goods through the interface, powered by auxiliary engines and steered by drivers.
The bigship fed its colossal length into the 'face, and there was something horribly symbolic about the 'ship's submitting itself to the very device which had brought about its downfall.
Mirren recalled times, on the many spaceports across the Expansion, when bigships phased rapidly from this reality to the nada-continuum and back again, creating a stroboscopic effect like the image on a spinning coin. There had been times when the Lines were so busy that some spaceports had a hundred bigships phasing out simultaneously. To witness this was to be given a foretaste of the flux, as if the flickering 'ships, shuttling between realities, granted mundane reality the tantalising miasma of the nada-continuum.
Mirren was brought back to earth by a question from Macready.
"Why did you come after me down there?" There was grievance in the Engineman's tone.
"To tell the truth, I thought you were a ghost."
"A KVI ghost?" Macready spluttered a laugh. "I was a kay from the 'face!"
"Does that make any difference?"
Macready took a slug. "Ghosts are manifestations of the continuum," he said. "They come through the interfaces because the 'faces are the only link between the continuum and this... this reality. They're the souls of the departed and exist only briefly."
Mirren stared at the interface. "To be honest I don't believe-"
"But you thought I was one?"
"Just for a second."
Macready was shaking his head. "But you're an Engineman! Didn't the flux do anything for you?"
"Of course, but..." How could he explain to a believer that he had no belief?
"I pity you, Mirren. I really do. Listen, I've seen ghosts - dozens of them. When I left the Line I worked for a time as a driver on Deliniquin. I piloted 'ships like that one down there. No substitute for the real thing, but at least I was working on a bigship. I could convince myself that entering the interface was the next best thing to experiencing the nada-continuum. Some nights on the field we'd see flashes of light streak out from the 'face and approach us, then fade in seconds. Not really human in shape, just bolts of light. Souls..."
Mirren had heard hundreds of stories about Enginemen witnessing the so-called 'ghosts', and although they all claimed to see the same phenomena there was one aspect of the stories that made Mirren sceptical: only Enginemen ever saw the ghosts. It was as if they and only they were granted special audiences with the spectres as recompense for being deprived of the flux. Mirren assumed that the compensatory phenomena was nothing more than a product of the Enginemen's psyches - they wanted to believe, they wanted to see the ghosts, outriders from the continuum that Enginemen were now denied, and they did.
"Here..." Macready was rooting