Engineman - Eric Brown [34]
A trap-door behind the bar gave access to a flight of steps, descending into the darkness. Ella was pushed down after the first Disciple, and the two others followed. By the light of an ancient paraffin lamp she made out a stretch of water and a small fishing boat. She was bundled over the gunwale. A hand gripped her chin and her head was pulled back. Something cold and metallic touched her temple.
"One word, one wrong movement... the slightest sign that you work for them, senorita..."
Chapter Six
Bobby Mirren was the Time-Lapsed Man, or the Man Who Lived in Two worlds, according to the headlines of some of the trashier journals which ran stories on him a decade ago. In fact, Bobby liked to think of himself as the man who lived in four worlds. He lived nominally in the present, and more substantially a day in the past; he lived a rich life in his memories, and an even richer life anticipating the future. Some part of him was in contact with the numinous reality of the nada-continuum, a tenuous and subtle contact like two spheres touching but never interpenetrating, a contact which promised that some day he would merge, become one, and in so doing totally fulfil himself. On the edge of his consciousness when he meditated he was aware of a sweet calling.
Now - though the word was largely meaningless to Bobby - now he sat in his armchair in his bed-sitting room. What he could feel, the threadbare arm of the chair beneath his hand, was out of context with what he was experiencing from yesterday. One day ago he had an open book on his lap and was finger-reading the Braille translation of a Buddhist tract. Now he could see the great tome spread across his lap, could see his hand speeding along the dotted lines, but he could not feel the weight of the book on his lap nor the raised pointillism of the Braille beneath his fingertips. His lap was empty and he could feel the material of the armchair beneath his fingers. He laid back his head and closed his eyes, and he continued to see what his eyes had been directed at yesterday, the book, the carpet before his feet, the far wall... He heard the sound of a flier passing overhead, but knew that the vehicle had passed by a day ago and would be long gone by now.
Bobby Mirren's every sense, with the exception of his sense of touch, was lapsed by almost twenty-four hours. What he saw today he had looked at yesterday; what he heard now first came to his ears a day ago. Similarly with his senses of taste and smell; he would eat a meal today, and, although he would be aware of the texture of the food filling his mouth, it would be tasteless - until the following day when its taste would flood his mouth. He compensated by taking his meals at the same time each day, so that he could taste yesterday's meal while eating today's. In the early days he had experimented - eating steak and then the following day at the same time eating strawberries, so that he would taste the bloody meat while having the sensation of chewing the soft fruit. He had experimented too with the other odd phenomena of his unique condition. He would set off and walk thorough the streets of Paris, feeling his way around the masonry and railings and glass shop-fronts like a blind man - the difference being that, although in his fumbling hesitation he might have appeared blind, he was in fact seeing what he had looked upon the day before: the interior of his room, a vid-documentary, a meal he had eaten... The following day Bobby would remain in the apartment and finger-read a religious tract, while visually and aurally experiencing his trip outside the day before. The dichotomous sense of experiencing two different realities, both just as unreal, had given him, after the initial, nauseous surge of disorientation, a cerebral thrill, an intellectual high, which he tied in with his wide reading in Buddhist philosophy: simply, that this life with an illusion