Engineman - Eric Brown [66]
Dan was watching him. "You okay?"
Mirren wondered whether to tell him about the flashbacks. "Well..."
Dan stared. "Don't tell me you're getting them too?"
Mirren laughed. "The flashbacks? You too? Fernandez, I thought I was going mad."
"We might be," Dan grunted. "I don't understand it. For ten years I've remembered nothing about that last trip, and then suddenly I'm reliving, not just remembering, but reliving the events again."
In the early days after their discharge, when he'd seen more of Dan, they'd both commented on how odd it was that they should all be afflicted with an identical memory loss.
"So what the hell's going on, Dan?" he asked.
"You tell me... I've always wanted to know what happened during and after the crash-landing, and now I suppose I'll find out."
They paid the bill and left the cafe.
A warm breeze sprang up from nowhere, lapping over them. Mirren shivered, overtaken suddenly by the bone-wearying ache he'd awoken to the evening before. He wondered if this bout was no more than a psychosomatic reaction to his dilemma over Bobby.
They continued through the streets in silence.
The Church of the Disciples of the Nada-Continuum was an old, converted smallship anchored to an area of wasteground between a burnt-out mosque and a derelict warehouse. It squatted on its belly amid overgrown mounds of bricks, its hydraulic rams long since amputated and its shell a patchwork of rust and old paint. The rear auxiliary engines had been removed and replaced by a set of double doors approached by a rickety flight of wooden steps. The viewscreens along its flanks, and the delta screen above its nose-cone, were concealed by bulky metal units which looked for all the world like refrigerators.
Mirren pointed them out as they crossed the street. "What are they?"
Dan smiled to himself. "You'll see when we get inside."
They were not the only Enginemen attending the Church that morning. Others approached from along the street, stood on the steps awaiting entry. Mirren and Dan joined the queue at the foot of the wooden construction. "It's not usually this busy," Dan said. "There must be a service on."
They passed inside. Mirren was surprised first by the size of the place, and then by the atmosphere of reverence that permeated what was, after all, nothing more than a junked spaceship. The surprising dimensions were easily accounted for: the ceiling which had formerly divided the body of the ship into the engineroom and, on the second level, the crews' lounge, had been removed to create a yawning cavern reminiscent of the nave of a cathedral. In pride of place at the front of the church was a flux-tank - or rather a reasonable facsimile. Above it, the pilot's cabin had been opened up and fronted with rails to form a gallery for the choristers: six cowled Disciples in gowns of light blue chanted in a language Mirren guessed was Latin. The measured, dolorous tone established the ecclesiastical atmosphere, and other religious appurtenances like pews and burning incense left no doubt that this was a place of worship. Above the altar, affixed to the rails of the gallery, was a blue fluorescent infinity symbol. The pews were steadily filling with the devoted who knelt, heads bowed in prayer or contemplation.
Mirren slipped into a pew at the rear, while Dan stood in the aisle and conducted a whispered conversation with a tall, robed figure. As he took his seat he began to wonder what he was doing here, and considered the irony of the fact that in all his years as an Engineman he'd prided himself on never entering any of the similar establishments on the many colony worlds serviced by the Canterbury Line. The Church of the Disciples had been in existence for as long as the starship Lines themselves. Most of the Enginemen he had worked with down the years had been believers, and he had often wondered why he could not believe that what he experienced in the tank was Nirvana. Was it just a cussed streak that would not allow him to follow the majority, even though he secretly knew the truth of their faith; some