Engineman - Eric Brown [41]
A dozen snapshots were taped to the nearby wall: Olafson, Elliott and Fekete in a bar on some distant colony world. Dan and himself, standing before the nose-cone of the Martian Epiphany. The other snaps showed various permutations of the five, taken on the many planets they had visited.
"Do you see much of the others?" Mirren asked.
"I haven't seen Olafson or Elliott for years. Olafson's married and working at a flier factory in Hamburg, last I heard. Elliott's somewhere in Paris."
"What about Caspar?"
"Caspar I see about once a month on business. I do a bit of work for him, checking up on potential employees, investigating industrial spies."
"But socially?"
"A couple of times a year. It's strange, but we were never close back then. His rationalism angered me. I couldn't take his smugness. You held the same views as him, but you didn't push them down our throats."
"As the leader of you lot I had to be impartial."
"Caspar never let an opportunity pass to ridicule my belief, argue his reductionist viewpoint."
"How do you get on with him now?"
"Surprisingly well. If anything, our views have become even more radical. Caspar's company is working on Artificial Intelligence. He's involved in trying to record the contents of the human mind. The last time I saw him he did his best to persuade me that the process was a way of achieving virtual immortality at the subject's bodily death. Of course I wasn't having any of it." Dan shrugged. "The odd thing is, he's lost his youthful arrogance. As much as I disagree with him philosophically, I quite enjoy his company."
"Does he ever mention the Line? Does he admit to missing the flux?"
"Not in so many words. But I once argued that he must crave the flux and he said that very occasionally he did feel the need for another fix, but that these periods were infrequent and short-lived."
Mirren grunted. "I obviously wasn't sceptical enough."
He stared through the semi-circular window. To the north, he could see the faint blue glow of the interface at Orly. He recalled the many times in the past when he and Dan had shared drinks in his own rooms and watched the bigships phase-in and out all night long - the silence between them something like the silence that existed now; a remembrance of the wonders of the flux, and the anticipation of it.
Dan stared across at him. "There's not a day goes by when I don't recollect, relive, the actual transcendence." Then he corrected himself, "Or should I say, try to relive it? What I do recall is a pale substitute. Even the Church is no compensation. There's still a gap somewhere in here." He thumped his chest.
Mirren thought of the disfigured off-worlder, and understood then why he felt so reluctant to tell Dan about him. What if the flux that Hunter promised - if he did indeed promise it - was too expensive for the Enginemen to afford? He'd hate to build up Dan's hopes, just to have them cruelly dashed. Then again, his own hopes were sky high - and there was no way he could possibly afford to pay for a couple of hours in a flux-tank without the financial assistance of the others.
"You recall Zinkovsky, that engineer there were all those rumours about a few years back?"
"Zinkovsky? The flux-pusher? Sure. I followed all the leads like a madman. Came up with nothing."
Mirren stared at the disc of his drink. "I keep hearing stories about other pushers in the city."
"I've heard the same rumours. But I think they're mostly just that. Now and again I get the word from a reliable source that there's a genuine dealer on the make, but I've never come across anything concrete."
Mirren cleared his throat. "I was approached by this guy today - rich-looking off-worlder. He had a couple of bodyguards. He came looking for me at the 'port."
From his slouched position on the foam-form, Dan tipped his head forward and