Engineman - Eric Brown [40]
"It's been too long, Ralph - three, four years?"
"More like five." Mirren shrugged. "I always meant to drop by... You know how it is. Good to see you, anyway. You're looking well."
"Never better, Ralph," Dan said. "Wish I could say the same about you."
"I'll survive."
"Look, let's move into the loft. It's more comfortable. Care for a drink?"
He ushered Mirren from the office, through a second door and up a flight of steps. "Bought this last year, converted it and moved in. What do you think?"
Leferve stood on the threshold and indicated the room. It was long and low, with a large, semi-circular window affording an elevated view across Paris. Two hammocks slung at each end of the loft bracketed polished floorboards covered with Eastern rugs, two alien pot plants and plump foam-forms before the semi-circular window. Plasma-graphics decorated the walls, depicting alien panoramas and sunsets, deep spacescapes of nebulae and planetary systems. The scenes were slowly moving, changing gradually in real-time, so that in one the red super-giant sank infinitesimally towards a mountainous horizon, and in another the planets turned in orbit with the colossal majesty of all stellar objects.
Mirren saw, on a shelf across the room, several pix and holographs of the Perseus Bound and his Engine-team.
"Take a seat, Ralph. How about a cognac?"
Mirren sank into a ridiculously comfortable foam-form and admired the view across the city. He indicated the expensive graphics. "Business doing well?"
"I'm not complaining." He passed Mirren a large glass, took the opposite foam-form. "Salut. I've expanded over the past few years. Taken a junior partner." He smiled across at Mirren. "Things are okay, considering."
"What kind of work are you getting these days?"
"Much the same as ever, but a bit more of it. Missing persons, stolen property, surveillance. Routine stuff, but it pays. How about you? Still flying?"
"Still flying."
"And hating it?"
"And hating it. But then, I'd hate anything I did..." He was surprised at how easily he slipped into being open with Dan after so short a time in his company. The big man had this effect. They had flown together for almost ten years, after all, and a few years apart could do nothing to diminish the fact.
Mirren took a swallow of cognac. "So... you still a Disciple?"
"Your tone suggests disapproval," Dan smiled. "Don't tell me - you're still a disbeliever, after all the proof?"
Mirren laughed. "What proof?"
"Come on, Ralph. Haven't you read about Degrassi's latest findings? And what about the interface ghosts?"
"Degrassi's an ex-Engineman and a believer, so anything he comes up with 'proving' the existence of the nada-continuum is bloody suspect. As for ghosts, I've yet to see one, Dan. And even if I did, what would that prove?"
"You're one of the few Enginemen who hasn't seen one," Dan said. "I saw my first last year. I was in Buenos Aires on business and waiting in the 'port when I saw this silver-blue light flash from the deactivated 'face. No one else saw it but me and another Engineman."
"I don't disbelieve you saw something," Mirren said. "But it proves nothing."
"Isn't it odd that these things should emerge only when the screens are out of phase, resonating on the very same frequency that our occipitals use in the flux? And that only Enginemen see them?"
"Okay, it's odd. But it's certainly not conclusive proof of some ultimate one-state or afterlife."
Dan pursed his lips around a mouthful of cognac. He shook his head. "I've been among believers for so long that I find scepticism difficult to understand. After everything I've experienced, it seems somehow right that the nada-continuum is the ultimate."
Mirren smiled indulgently. The alcohol had gone to his head, anaesthetising the ache in his bones, the pain in his body. He was no longer sweating and tense. He felt comfortably heavy, lethargic.
He noticed that the subjects depicted on the plasma graphics had progressed. The M-type sun had set, leaving darkness