Chapter Seven.

It was eight in the evening when Mirren awoke. The setting sun showed as a square of rouge filaments around the drawn blinds. He rolled onto his back and stared at the cracked ceiling. The air of the room was oppressive, sultry with the heat of the dying day. He became aware of two things almost at once: he'd slept in his flying suit which was saturated in sweat, and every muscle in his body ached as if with the onset of flu.

Then he recalled Hunter, and what he suspected the off-worlder was offering to him and his team, and his aches and pains became bearable.

He showered and changed into a new flying suit, then fixed himself breakfast: coffee and a mango-like fruit from one of the colonies. As he ate, he heard the recording of a Tibetan mantra seeping from the front room, a ba.s.s monotone interspersed with the jangle of bells. He left the kitchen and paused by the bedroom door, staring at the blistered paintwork and listening to the music. He hurried out.

He took the upchute to the landing stage, climbed into his flier and hauled it into the air. The sun had gone down and Paris was illuminated. From the air, the ground-plan of the city resembled a defective pin-ball machine with the lower scores ripped out, leaving only the high scores of the more prosperous quarters in bright halations of light. Dan Leferve had his offices on the Rue Malle, Bondy, a once-fashionable district now falling street by street to the gradual advance of the ghetto.

As he mach'd across the city, he admitted that he was not exactly looking forward to calling on Dan Leferve. Over the past five years he had neglected their friendship, allowed messages to go unanswered, failed to turn up at arranged meetings - not so much out of any active disinclination to see Leferve, but from an inertia and apathy that had its roots in depression. There had been times when he had wanted nothing more than to share too many lagers with his old colleague, but feared the shadow into which his life would be thrown by the energy and bonhomie of the ex-Engineman. Over the years he had become content with his lifestyle of privacy and isolation, and only occasionally wished it otherwise.

He could find no rooftop landing area, which was always a bad sign. He was forced to leave his flier in the street beneath overhanging palms and trust that thieves and vandals were elsewhere tonight. He locked the hatch and crossed the empty street. The social standing of an area in the city these days was indicated by the degree to which alien vegetation had taken hold. Munic.i.p.al authorities had only limited funds to spend on clearances, and the commercial districts and more exclusive residential areas received preferential treatment. The Rue Malle was going under: soon it would be part of the swathe of jungle which had invaded the districts to the east. The facades of the tall buildings on each side of the street were hung with luminous vines and creepers displaying broad waxy-green leaves, and the sidewalk underfoot was tacky with mould. The building in which Dan had his Agency was the only one occupied; the windows and doors of the others along the street were either boarded up or smashed.

He took the upchute to the top floor, located the appropriate door and knocked. A yellow light burned behind the pebbled pane of gla.s.s. A woman's voice called out, and hesitantly Mirren entered. He was in a small waiting room, shabby but comfortable. An Oriental receptionist sat behind a desk. She looked up from a computer screen.

"I'm afraid we closed at eight," she said. "But I can make you an appointment for tomorrow."

"I was hoping to see Dan Leferve. I'm a friend."

She smiled. "You're in luck. I think he might still be in-" She stopped and looked at him. "Are you okay?"

He was aware that he'd broken into a sweat which had less to do with the thought of meeting Dan again than with the illness he'd awoken with. "I'll be fine."

"I'll just check." She spoke into a handset.

"Your name, sir?"

"Mirren. Ralph Mirren."

She repeated it. "Please go right through." She indicated a door.

Dan Leferve was on his feet, open-mouthed with surprise when Mirren stepped into the adjacent room. "h.e.l.l, Ralph. You should've told me you were coming. I'd've thrown a party!" He rounded his desk and took Mirren in a bear-hug. Mirren did his best to return it, embarra.s.sed. Dan pulled away and regarded him at arm's length, all beard and black mane.

"It's been too long, Ralph - three, four years?"

"More like five." Mirren shrugged. "I always meant to drop by... You know how it is. Good to see you, anyway. You're looking well."

"Never better, Ralph," Dan said. "Wish I could say the same about you."

"I'll survive."

"Look, let's move into the loft. It's more comfortable. Care for a drink?"

He ushered Mirren from the office, through a second door and up a flight of steps. "Bought this last year, converted it and moved in. What do you think?"

Leferve stood on the threshold and indicated the room. It was long and low, with a large, semi-circular window affording an elevated view across Paris. Two hammocks slung at each end of the loft bracketed polished floorboards covered with Eastern rugs, two alien pot plants and plump foam-forms before the semi-circular window. Plasma-graphics decorated the walls, depicting alien panoramas and sunsets, deep s.p.a.cescapes of nebulae and planetary systems. The scenes were slowly moving, changing gradually in real-time, so that in one the red super-giant sank infinitesimally towards a mountainous horizon, and in another the planets turned in orbit with the colossal majesty of all stellar objects.

Mirren saw, on a shelf across the room, several pix and holographs of the Perseus Bound Perseus Bound and his Engine-team. and his Engine-team.

"Take a seat, Ralph. How about a cognac?"

Mirren sank into a ridiculously comfortable foam-form and admired the view across the city. He indicated the expensive graphics. "Business doing well?"

"I'm not complaining." He pa.s.sed Mirren a large gla.s.s, took the opposite foam-form. "Salut. I've expanded over the past few years. Taken a junior partner." He smiled across at Mirren. "Things are okay, considering."

"What kind of work are you getting these days?"

"Much the same as ever, but a bit more of it. Missing persons, stolen property, surveillance. Routine stuff, but it pays. How about you? Still flying?"

"Still flying."

"And hating it?"

"And hating it. But then, I'd hate anything I did..." He was surprised at how easily he slipped into being open with Dan after so short a time in his company. The big man had this effect. They had flown together for almost ten years, after all, and a few years apart could do nothing to diminish the fact.

Mirren took a swallow of cognac. "So... you still a Disciple?"

"Your tone suggests disapproval," Dan smiled. "Don't tell me - you're still a disbeliever, after all the proof?"

Mirren laughed. "What proof?"

"Come on, Ralph. Haven't you read about Degra.s.si's latest findings? And what about the interface ghosts?"

"Degra.s.si's an ex-Engineman and a believer, so anything he comes up with 'proving' the existence of the nada nada-continuum is b.l.o.o.d.y suspect. As for ghosts, I've yet to see one, Dan. And even if I did, what would that prove?"

"You're one of the few Enginemen who hasn't seen one," Dan said. "I saw my first last year. I was in Buenos Aires on business and waiting in the 'port when I saw this silver-blue light flash from the deactivated 'face. No one else saw it but me and another Engineman."

"I don't disbelieve you saw something," Mirren said. "But it proves nothing."

"Isn't it odd that these things should emerge only when the screens are out of phase, resonating on the very same frequency that our occipitals use in the flux? And that only Enginemen see them?"

"Okay, it's odd. But it's certainly not conclusive proof of some ultimate one-state or afterlife."

Dan pursed his lips around a mouthful of cognac. He shook his head. "I've been among believers for so long that I find scepticism difficult to understand. After everything I've experienced, it seems somehow right that the nada nada-continuum is the ultimate."

Mirren smiled indulgently. The alcohol had gone to his head, anaesthetising the ache in his bones, the pain in his body. He was no longer sweating and tense. He felt comfortably heavy, lethargic.

He noticed that the subjects depicted on the plasma graphics had progressed. The M-type sun had set, leaving darkness and a plethora of strange stars in its wake. The view of the solar system had moved on, revealing strange new planets and moons. The pieces were like windows upon the Expansion, showing scenes that Mirren knew he would never behold again.

A dozen snapshots were taped to the nearby wall: Olafson, Elliott and Fekete in a bar on some distant colony world. Dan and himself, standing before the nose-cone of the Martian Epiphany Martian Epiphany. The other snaps showed various permutations of the five, taken on the many planets they had visited.

"Do you see much of the others?" Mirren asked.

"I haven't seen Olafson or Elliott for years. Olafson's married and working at a flier factory in Hamburg, last I heard. Elliott's somewhere in Paris."

"What about Caspar?"

"Caspar I see about once a month on business. I do a bit of work for him, checking up on potential employees, investigating industrial spies."

"But socially?"

"A couple of times a year. It's strange, but we were never close back then. His rationalism angered me. I couldn't take his smugness. You held the same views as him, but you didn't push them down our throats."

"As the leader of you lot I had to be impartial."

"Caspar never let an opportunity pa.s.s to ridicule my belief, argue his reductionist viewpoint."

"How do you get on with him now?"

"Surprisingly well. If anything, our views have become even more radical. Caspar's company is working on Artificial Intelligence. He's involved in trying to record the contents of the human mind. The last time I saw him he did his best to persuade me that the process was a way of achieving virtual immortality at the subject's bodily death. Of course I wasn't having any of it." Dan shrugged. "The odd thing is, he's lost his youthful arrogance. As much as I disagree with him philosophically, I quite enjoy his company."

"Does he ever mention the Line? Does he admit to missing the flux?"

"Not in so many words. But I once argued that he must crave the flux and he said that very occasionally he did feel the need for another fix, but that these periods were infrequent and short-lived."

Mirren grunted. "I obviously wasn't sceptical enough."

He stared through the semi-circular window. To the north, he could see the faint blue glow of the interface at Orly. He recalled the many times in the past when he and Dan had shared drinks in his own rooms and watched the bigships phase-in and out all night long - the silence between them something like the silence that existed now; a remembrance of the wonders of the flux, and the antic.i.p.ation of it.

Dan stared across at him. "There's not a day goes by when I I don't recollect, relive, the actual transcendence." Then he corrected himself, "Or should I say, don't recollect, relive, the actual transcendence." Then he corrected himself, "Or should I say, try try to relive it? What I do recall is a pale subst.i.tute. Even the Church is no compensation. There's still a gap somewhere in here." He thumped his chest. to relive it? What I do recall is a pale subst.i.tute. Even the Church is no compensation. There's still a gap somewhere in here." He thumped his chest.

Mirren thought of the disfigured off-worlder, and understood then why he felt so reluctant to tell Dan about him. What if the flux that Hunter promised - if he did indeed promise it - was too expensive for the Enginemen to afford? He'd hate to build up Dan's hopes, just to have them cruelly dashed. Then again, his own hopes were sky high - and there was no way he could possibly afford to pay for a couple of hours in a flux-tank without the financial a.s.sistance of the others.

"You recall Zinkovsky, that engineer there were all those rumours about a few years back?"

"Zinkovsky? The flux-pusher? Sure. I followed all the leads like a madman. Came up with nothing."

Mirren stared at the disc of his drink. "I keep hearing stories about other pushers in the city."

"I've heard the same rumours. But I think they're mostly just that. Now and again I get the word from a reliable source that there's a genuine dealer on the make, but I've never come across anything concrete."

Mirren cleared his throat. "I was approached by this guy today - rich-looking off-worlder. He had a couple of bodyguards. He came looking for me at the 'port."

From his slouched position on the foam-form, Dan tipped his head forward and peered at Mirren over his barrel chest. "What did he want?"

Mirren shrugged. "Asked me about my team. If I'd kept in touch. He asked how we'd fared without the flux."

"Does Paris stink!" Dan snorted.

"Exactly. He said enough to make me think he was selling flux-time."

Dan sat up.

"He arranged to meet me tonight. He wants to see us all. I said I'd contact you."

"I don't know whether to believe this."

"I'm not sure we should, just yet. A lot could go wrong. s.h.i.t, I don't even know how much he's asking, or if he's legit. Or even if he is selling flux-time. If he is, have you thought about this: we might be able to afford the first flux, but what then? We'll be craving like crazy - and back where we started from." The thought opened an abyss of depression within him.

"At the moment, I'm thinking no further than the first flux." Dan said. "Thing is, I always cursed these b.a.s.t.a.r.ds as stinking opportunists, living off the dependencies of others. But every time I heard a rumour... I was out there searching with the rest of them."

"I just hope he's on the level."

Dan replenished his gla.s.s liberally from the bottle on the floor. "Who's the guy, anyway? He give you his name?"

Mirren withdrew the pix of the off-worlder from his inside jacket pocket, pa.s.sed it across to Dan. "He called himself Hirst Hunter. Like I said, he had a couple of heavies with him. He drove a Mercedes roadster. Do you know how much those things cost to keep running?"

Dan regarded the pix, frowning. He looked across at Mirren. "But he didn't say for sure that he had a tank?"

"Not in so many words, no. But what else could he want from us? That's probably how he made all his money - fleecing Enginemen like us."

"He didn't tell you anything about himself, where he was from?"

"He mentioned he was from Fairweather, in the Drift."

Dan was nodding. "That'd figure. On some of the worlds in the Drift the settlers are born with viral epidermal infections."

"He said little about himself, other than that he'd trained and failed as an Engineman in his younger days. He told me he regretted the closure of the Lines. He knew a bit about our team - he'd read Mubarak's book."

"Have you contacted the others?"

"Not yet."

"I'll do it." He pulled a handset from his breast pocket, got through to his secretary and asked her to contact Fekete, Elliott and Olafson.

He handed the pix back to Mirren. "Have you any idea how much these guy's charge for just an hour in a tank?"

"I dread to think."

"I heard rumours it's a thousand an hour."

Mirren whistled. A thousand credits was what he was paid for two month's work at Orly.

Dan's handset buzzed. A small voice said, "No reply from Elliott and Olafson, Dan. But I did reach Fekete. He's on line now. I'll put him through."

The wallscreen flared. The three-dimensional screen gave the impression that Caspar Fekete was in the room with them. He was seated in a gold chair - more like a throne - in a plush lounge illuminated by a chandelier. He wore a zebra-striped djellaba, and his face suggested that the rest of him was running to fat: his cheeks on either side of his flattened nose were full, almost cherubic.

He leaned forward, peering. "Dan, is that Ralph you have with you? My word, this is a surprise. Long time no see, Ralph! I trust you are keeping well, sir?"

Mirren suspected that the honorific was sarcastic. He smiled. "Surviving, Cas. I thought you'd be rid of that thing by now." He indicated Fekete's occipital console, bulky beneath the shoulders of his djellaba.

"Get rid of it! Why, it comes in useful from time to time!"