Engineman - Eric Brown [7]
She glanced across the room, looking for the jar of pollen on the upturned crate which doubled as her dressing-table. She could see a bulb of toothpaste and a few buckled tubes of oil paint - but no bottled sunshine. Eddie, you cheating bastard... Thing was, she'd have gladly given him the stuff if only he'd asked. He'd been on a downer for the past week and probably needed the pollen to get him through.
She swung herself out of bed and pulled on a wrap. She gently back-handed the flower from her path, ducked beneath the gnarled vine and pushed her way through the tangle of vegetation which had invaded the balcony during the day. Before she'd gone to bed that morning she'd cleared the balcony, cut back the persistent fronds and vines and dumped them in the street below. Now, in just eight hours, they were back again, forceful and vital as ever. She leaned against the balcony rail and stared out over what could have been an exo-botanical garden.
The sun had set and the street was in darkness. As her eyes adapted, she made out the pale pastel colours of the luminous blooms strung out along the facade of the opposite buildings, like a replacement for the neon shop-fronts and the advertisements of a long-gone, prosperous Paris. Directly below, the Rue Chabrol was a dense riot of tropical vegetation, as if a strip of jungle had been laid down between the buildings. The occasional tall shoot arced above the mass, extending great green leaves like spinnakers, nodding in the breeze. At ground level, tunnels and runs had been forced through the undergrowth to connect the few inhabited buildings with the central, caged strip which ran the length of the street to the nearest cleared thoroughfare.
Over the past year, Ella had seen many friends and fellow squatters give in and move out, a combination of the fecund plant-life and the decline in services finally driving them away to the suburbs. At one time, about four years ago when Ella had moved here with Eddie, there had been a dozen other artists living and working in the street - a community of like-minded people doing their own thing in the face of the authorities' displeasure. They'd been good times, and Ella had accomplished some of her best work. Now she was the only artist in the area, and she didn't have too much to do with the freaks and weirdoes she had as neighbours. She liked eccentrics - real, hundred-proof kooks who were original and had something to say - but over the past few months the free accommodation along the street, and the fact that the law rarely patrolled this far into the ghetto, had attracted the kind of people usually only found on the inside of secure psychiatric units.
Increasingly, Paris was becoming rapidly depopulated, the exodus from the city indicative of a much more widespread exodus from Europe itself. Those that could afford to were fleeing the Union and moving to the prosperous haven of Oceania, or off-world entirely to the colonies which the interfaces were opening up in ever-increasing numbers. Only the poor were left - or sorry bastards like Eddie, Enginemen who were unable to tear themselves away from the once-proud centre of the space age - the poor and the very rich who, cushioned against the privations of a ruined Europe, built themselves magnificent strongholds in cultivated Babylons and lived like siege-lords... Ella wondered where she fitted in.
She leaned over the balcony rail and peered south. The interface at Orly, three kilometres away, was in its deactivated phase: a vast membrane of cobalt blue notched between the buildings on either side of the street. Ella shivered. The interface filled her with a strange crawling sensation of dread. She wondered if she should suggest moving