Engineman - Eric Brown [4]
"If you're in doubt, Mirren, go to a service. They'll put you right."
Mirren decided not to argue. He returned the card and smiled at the old Engineman. They drank in silence for a while, watching the activity on the tarmac far below. The bigship had returned through the interface, and now the column of------- fliers and trucks drove through like a column of ants. They unloaded their cargo on the distant world, then made their way back, traversing the light years in seconds. Later, the arc-lights around the frame of the interface winked out one by one, signalling the imminent closure of the link.
Mirren stared past the interface at the great sprawl of the city. The avenues and boulevards of some districts were illuminated like rigorous constellations, while other areas were plunged into darkness. Paris was the spiritual capital of the universe for the hopeless, disaffected guild of ex-Enginemen. The city had been home to generations of spacers, and when the Enginemen found themselves out of work it seemed the natural thing to do to make the pilgrimage to the shrine of Orly spaceport and the icon of the Keilor-Vincicoff Interface. Some Enginemen came to Paris because it was the city they knew best; others, mainly the more religious, because they believed that by being close to an interface they were also close to the nada-continuum.
Mirren counted himself among the former. He had made his home in the city whenever he'd docked on Earth, and rather than start a new life on one of the colony worlds or elsewhere on Earth, he'd decided to return to Paris and try for work at the 'port. He was successful - fliers, indeed workers of all types, were in short supply. But the Paris to which he returned was not the Paris he had left. The city no longer had the monopoly on interstellar trade - the Keilor-Vincicoff Organisation had opened interface 'ports in Kuala Lumpur and Buenos Aires, and investment had moved away from the West and to the richer countries of the South. Also, in the first year that the interface was open, it had admitted a host of breeze-born viruses, spores and seeds. The city had been transformed from the carefree European capital Mirren had known and loved into a sultry alien backwater; plagues and epidemics had ravaged Paris, and as the seeds took hold the city had become a phantasmagorical floral wonderland. The banks of the Seine were overrun by a riot of exotic alien vegetation, so that the river resembled more the jungle-fringed stretches of the Zambesi. Lianas, vines and virulent lichens gained purchase on old buildings and monuments. The girders of the Eiffel Tower were enwrapped by a creeper which sprouted giant sousaphone blooms so that it resembled a radio mast from the nightmare of a crazed surrealist. Plant-life was not the only invader; animals had taken the opportunity to migrate. In the early days, never a week had gone by without Mirren spotting some animal or bird that was not native to Earth. Rodents the size of dogs roved the deserted streets of the Latin Quarter, and exotic, winged creatures, half-bird, half-bat, had the freedom of the skies.
Macready cradled the empty bottle in his lap. He stared into the interface with unseeing eyes.
All activity had ceased on the tarmac below. The fliers and trucks were parked up on the perimeter of the 'port and the bigship had returned to its hangar, a sad animal at the end of its life.
The broad screen of the interface no longer showed the distant alien landscape. Now, deactivated, it coruscated cobalt blue. Rumour among Enginemen, especially those who believed that the nada-continuum represented Nirvana, was that in its deactivated state the 'face provided a portal to the infinite, a shortcut to eternity. They could have taken their lives in the privacy