Engineman - Eric Brown [81]
He quickly slipped Marie's picture into the inside pocket of his jacket, and shuffled to a photograph showing Ella standing on a rock in the centre of a lagoon at Zambique. He wondered who had taken it, for he knew for certain that he had not. It showed her with her arms held outstretched behind her, her head back, but the serious posture was belied by her expression: she was laughing despite her best efforts not to, and her resemblance to her mother was painful.
Fernandez, he had so much to make up for, so much irrational hatred in the early years, so much apathy as she was growing up, so much disaffection that must have seemed to her like casual cruelty, which perhaps it was.
He had been happily, madly, in love with Marie and looking forward to the birth of a son... and then in the space of minutes Marie was dead and he was presented with the cause of it - a disgustingly healthy baby girl - and though he found it hard to imagine now, looking back with shame, he'd been unable to feel anything but resentment towards his daughter.
He had mellowed, or so he thought, in his later years, when his grief for Marie abated and Ella grew into a person in her own right; an attractive, intelligent teenager, even personable when in company, but always mistrustful and reluctant when alone with him. Around the time of her fifteenth birthday, before she'd left the Reach, he began to recognise the mistakes he'd made; though he was totally unable to open up to Ella and apologise or make amends. He had tried to treat her with more understanding, even compassion, hard though that was after so many years of resentment.
Hunter recalled the time when Conway had suspected that Ella was consorting with the alien tribe which had encamped that summer on the plateau. On reluctantly reading her diary, he had discovered her friendship with a certain alien, and knew that he'd have to end the liaison. The Lho were going down with a devastating plague, and at the time he had not known that humans were unaffected. He felt he had to send her away for her own good, and he recalled the scene in his study when he broke the news to her, relived again his inability to express sympathy or regret.
He had so, so much to make up for...
He selected half a dozen photographs of Ella and slipped them into his jacket beside the one of Marie.
He left the lounge and made his way down the hall. He came to the open door of a small bedroom, so bereft of personal possessions he guessed it must belong to the Engineman. The next door was locked. It could only be Ella's bedroom. He knocked. "Ella?" he called, his heart racing. "Ella!"
The timber jamb was rotten. He leaned his shoulder against the door. On the third shove it gave and he entered the room. He found a switch on the wall and turned on the light.
The was no sign of Ella in the bedroom, but there was every sign of her work. Canvasses and plasma-graphic boards in various stages of completion leaned against the walls, stacked so deep in some places that there was hardly room to move around the bed. Hunter flipped through the paintings and graphics, pulling out those that caught his eye. He experienced a strange sensation of pride in his daughter's accomplishments, and at the same time the guilt of a voyeur: looking through Ella's opus was like reading her mind. In canvas after canvas,