Engineman - Eric Brown [92]
The others had unstrapped themselves and climbed down. Fekete was picking through the debris with what looked like disdain, his natural arrogance shaken and reduced to a fastidious appraisal of the fate which had befallen them. Dan joined Mirren and stared at the wreckage. Olafson sat on a nearby log and massaged her shoulder. Some distance away, Elliott wept and vomited.
"Dan, go get the navigator. Let's find out where the hell we are."
"What do you think happened, boss?" Fekete asked. Mirren always thought he detected a note of insubordination in Fekete's use of the honorific.
"We crashed," he replied.
"What an appropriate way of ending our time as E-men," Fekete went on. "I for one will certainly never forget it."
"Fekete," Mirren warned. "Just shut it, okay? This tour of duty isn't over yet, and until it is you're still under my command - got that?" He stared at the Nigerian until Fekete turned away.
Then, the vision became distant, began to fade-
He was back in the hallway of his apartment. The beer bottle completed its flight towards the wastechute and rattled through the swing lid.
He moved to his room and sat on the edge of the bed, fumbled three sleeping pills into the palm of his hand, and washed them down with a tumblerful of stale water.
He remained sitting for a long while, going over the events of the day. He considered the promise of the flux, and tried to persuade himself that four years was a long time, really.
Chapter Fifteen
Twenty-four hours ago Bobby had turned his armchair to face the window, then sat and stared straight ahead - seeing not the night-time scene of Paris, but the Network Francais nine o'clock documentary about Mars which he had 'watched' on the vid-screen the day before. Now, as nine o'clock approached, he turned his chair and settled himself before the window, and seconds later his time-lapsed vision swung to show him yesterday evening's twilight descend on the city. His physical circumstances and visual vector were synchronised. He stared out across the roof-tops, south towards the bright blue light of the interface at Orly, the scene interrupted momentarily by his fraction-of-a-second blinks of a day ago. He reached out and touched the window sill, felt the ripple-effect of the ill-applied paint beneath his fingertips. It was a strange sensation still, after all these years, to be able to see something, actually touch it, feel its detail with his fingers while his vision corroborated that detail, but be unable to see his hand, his fingers: it was as if his physical reality had been edited out of existence, as if he were already halfway towards absorption into the nada-continuum.
He sat back in his seat and stared at the delayed scene his senses were relaying to him, the opposite buildings and the skyline beneath the indigo night. He thought about Ralph, and their conversation that morning. He experienced a pang of intense sadness for his brother. More than anything he wanted to find some way to convince Ralph of the truth, of the fact of continued existence after this one. He recalled a period about five years ago when Ralph had seem particularly down; Bobby had made enquiries through his contacts in the Church - the communications laborious and complex because of his condition - and tried to hire flux-time from a pusher for his brother. His contacts had come up with nothing, and Bobby had consoled himself with the fact that Ralph had pushed bigships for ten years, experienced the rapture of the flux, without succumbing to belief, so who was to say that the experience of the flux now would be any different?
Bobby considered trying again. Even if it didn't bring about the desired belief in his brother, it might make his day to day life worth living, help take his mind off the fact of his illness.
Yesterday at this time, Bobby had closed his eyes, anticipating that his future self would have