Engineman - Eric Brown [63]
"I give in. Go your own way." He sighed and checked his watch. "I must be going. I'll leave you to your celebrations." He looked from Dan to Mirren. "You two take care, okay? And keep me posted." He left the booth and hurried around the gallery.
Mirren glanced up at Dan and saw his smile reflected as if in a mirror. He leaned back and sank into the soft membrane of the dome. He recalled spending hours in free-fall aboard the Perseus Bound, colliding with the trampoline-like inner dermis of the astrodome, as if attempting to merge with the cobalt blue of the enveloping nada-continuum outside. He felt euphoria rise in him at the thought.
They took Fekete's advice and celebrated with half a bottle of cognac.
"Here's to Hunter." Dan raised his glass. "To Hunter and the flux - and screw Caspar!"
Mirren smiled. He was considering how his fortune had changed in just one day. Twelve hours ago his life had stretched ahead in a monotonous round of work and sleep; he'd lived so much in the past that the present was an endless time to be endured, the future an abstraction without hope. Now he was on the verge of realising a dream made possible by a disfigured millionaire off-worlder, and it was almost too fantastic to believe.
"Ralph!" Dan cried. "I feel like giving thanks."
Mirren peered at the Frenchman. It seemed like a good idea. He shrugged. "Fine. How? Where?"
"Where else?" Dan laughed. "The Church! The Church of the Disciples!"
Mirren was too drunk, too elated, to voice any philosophical objections. He recalled that the Church was an old smallship - a smallship similar to the one he'd soon be pushing through the nada-continuum.
So why the hell not?
Chapter Eleven
They left the restaurant and made their way to the perimeter of the dome. Mirren was too drunk to pilot his flier; it would have detected the alcohol in his system and shut itself down. Otherwise, buoyed up as he was, he might have taken the risk. He considered the irony of dying in a flier accident mere days before he was due to flux again.
They passed through the arched exit and walked into the heat of unprotected Paris. It was four o'clock in the morning and the temperature was still in the eighties. The Church was two kilometres away, in the run-down Montparnasse district, but for once Mirren didn't mind the walk. They passed through the respectable, well-kept streets bordering the centre, but the farther they progressed towards the outskirts, the more neglected and disreputable the streets became. They passed shop-fronts at first barred, then boarded up - though the premises were still in use - then derelict and vandalised, and finally given over to the alien creepers which marked a district as beyond redemption. In one area, as they progressed down an avenue whose buildings on either side were solid banks of vegetation, he and Dan were the only things visibly of Earth in the landscape. They stopped in the middle of the street, a layer of lichen slippery underfoot, and stared at the strip of night sky between the high canyon walls. There, rising slowly beneath the stars of Orion, were the red and white lights of an orbiting industrial satellite.
At one point the undergrowth, which so far had restricted itself to the sidewalks, flowed across the street and became so dense that they stumbled and fell. They proceeded by holding each other like drunks wending their way home over treacherous ice. Mirren clutched Dan's shoulder, feeling the hard ridge of his occipital console.
He pulled his hand away and halted, swaying in the tropical night. "Dan, last... last year I thought of having it removed."
Dan peered at him. "What?"
He touched his shoulder, felt the light alloy spar beneath his flying suit. "My console."
They continued walking, leaving the lichen and the creepers behind as they entered a plasma-lighted district of bars and bistros. Prostitutes stood in groups on the kerb. Garishly lighted shops clearing cheap African electronics belted out the latest popular music; revellers danced. It was as if they had stumbled from a jungle and into