Engineman Part 44

"La.s.solini residence?" I asked.

"The doctor sees no-one without an appointment."

"Then I'll make an appointment - for now now."

I tried to push past him. When he barred my way I showed him my pistol and said that if he didn't sit down and keep quiet I'd blow a hole in his head. He sat down quickly, hands in the air.

I tiptoed down a pa.s.sage and came to a vast ballroom with a chequerboard floor of marble and onyx tiles, and a dozen scintilating chandeliers. There was no sign of La.s.solini; I would have called out, but the weight of the silence intimidated me.

I opened the first door on the right.

It took me about fifteen seconds to recognise the woman who this morning had visited the office, who I had followed to the mansion, and who, less than thirty minutes ago, had been dining with Dan.

She was hanging by the neck and her torso had been opened with something sharp from sternum to stomach; the contents of her abdomen had spilled, and the weight of her entrails anch.o.r.ed her to the floor.

I heard a sound behind me and turned. A tall, Latin guy looked down on me. He wore a white suit and too much gold. I did mental arithmetic and decided that he looked good for sixty.

"Sam La.s.solini?" I asked.

He didn't deny it. "Who are you, and what do you want?"

I drew my pistol and aimed at his chest. Next to it I hung my identification. "Phuong Li Xian," I said. "I have the power of arrest." I indicated the woman. "Why did you do it, La.s.solini?"

He looked past me at the the body and smiled. "If I may answer a question with a question: why your interest?"

I hesitated. "I'm working on her case."

He threw his head back and laughed.

My fist tightened on the pistol. "I don't see what's so funny."

He indicated another door along the hall. "Follow me."

He opened the door and entered the room. He turned to face me, his laughter mocking my shock.

Behind him, spread across the floor and the far wall, were the remains of what once might have been a human being. It was as if the wall and the floor had suddenly snapped shut to create a grotesque Rorschach blot of flesh and blood. The only part of the body that had survived the mutilation was the head. It sat beside La.s.solini's right foot, staring at me.

It was the head of the same woman...

La.s.solini left the room and strode to the next door. He paused on the threshold. "My dear..." I stumbled after him, amenable with shock.

Another atrocity. This time the woman had been lasered into b.l.o.o.d.y chunks and arranged on plinths around the room after the fas.h.i.+on of Dali.

"You're mad!" I cried.

"That did occur to me, my dear. Though what you see here is not the cause or symptom of it, but an attempt to cure myself. A catharsis, if you like."

"But... but which one is Stephanie Etteridge?"

"None of them is Stephanie," he said. "She is alive and well and living in Paris. And yet... all of them were were Stephanie." Stephanie."

I took control of my shock, levelled the pistol and said with determination: "Look, La.s.solini, I want answers. And if I don't get them..."

He bowed. "Very well, my dear. This way - and I a.s.sure you, no more horrors."

He strode down a long corridor. I had to run to keep up. We came to a pair of swing doors with circular portholes, and La.s.solini pushed through. Another surprise: after the luxury of the ballroom, the stark and antiseptic utility of what looked like a hospital ward. Then I remembered that this place was once the city morgue.

We stopped at a line of horizontal silver tanks, and with an outstretched hand La.s.solini invited me to inspect their contents.

I peered through the first frosted faceplate and made out the young, beautiful face of Stephanie Etteridge. In a daze I moved on to the next one, and the next: Etteridge, again, and again. Each tank contained a flawless replica of the actress.

I stared at him, and he smiled.

"Clones..." I murmured, and I experienced a curious vacuum within my chest.

"Perspicacious of you, my dear."

"But I thought the science was still in its experimental stages. I thought the Kilimanjiro Corporation had the rights..."

La.s.solini laughed. "The science is is still in its experimental stages," he said. "And I still in its experimental stages," he said. "And I am am the Kilimanjiro Corporation." the Kilimanjiro Corporation."

I gestured in the direction of the ritually slaughtered Etteridge clones. "But you still murdered human beings," I said. "Even clones are-"

La.s.solini was shaking his head. "By no stretch of the imagination can they be considered human - as of yet. They are grown from DNA samples taken from the original Stephanie Etteridge, and their minds remain blank until the encoded ident.i.ty of the subject is downloaded into them."

"So those...?"

"Merely so much dead meat. But it pleased me to sacrifice Stephanie, if only in effigy. These bodies were the ones I kept in supply for the time when she aged and required her youth again."

I looked into his youthful face. "So both you, and and the Stephanie Etteridge I met, are clones?" I was beginning to understand. the Stephanie Etteridge I met, are clones?" I was beginning to understand.

He regarded me, as if calculating how much to divulge.

"We were married for five happy years," he said. "When her career came to an end, and she began to show signs of age, I promised her a new lease of life. Virtual immortality. Perhaps only this kept her with me, until my scientists perfected the technique of cloning, and the more difficult procedure of recording and downloading individual ident.i.ty from one brain to another.

"She was nearly seventy when we downloaded her into the body of her twenty year old clone. Then... and then she left me, and nothing I could do or say would make her return. I had such plans! We could have toured the Expansion together in eternal youth." He seemed to deflate at the recollection of her betrayal.

"I considered hiring an a.s.sa.s.sin to kill the man she left me for, but as events transpired that proved unnecessary. She divorced me, and a matter of days before she was due to marry her lover he was arrested by the German police and charged with conspiring to sabotage a European military satellite. He was jailed for life."

He paused there and licked his lips. When he spoke next it was in barely a whisper. "You mentioned that you were on her 'case'?"

"That's right."

"Then... you're in contact with her?"

I was guarded. "I might be."

"Then bring her to me!" And I was shocked by the intensity of his emotion. And I was shocked by the intensity of his emotion.

I glanced at the Etteridge clones, then back at the surgeon who had performed this miracle.

"I have a price," I said.

"Name it!"

With trembling fingers I fumbled with the b.u.t.tons of my cheongsam cheongsam and revealed my body. and revealed my body.

Claude was snoozing in his flier when I jumped aboard and yelled at him to take off. I checked my watch. It was five-forty, and Etteridge and Dan were due to phase-out at six. We burned across Paris towards Pa.s.sy.

Ten minutes later we sailed in over the Seine. Claude slowed and we cut across the corner of the Etteridge estate. I opened the hatch and prepared to jump. "See you later, Claude."

His reply was lost as I dived.

This time I missed the marshmallow and fell through a bush with leaves like sabres. I picked myself up, bleeding from a dozen cuts, and limped through the jungle. It was three minutes to six when I emerged from the trees, and the smalls.h.i.+p was still berthed inside the marquee. I ducked back into the vegetation and ran along the side of the tent. Once behind it I left the cover and dodged guy ropes.

I lifted the tarpaulin wall of the tent, squirmed through the gap and ran over to the dorsal escape chute. I palmed the sensor and waited for the hatch to cycle - ten seconds, though it seemed like as many minutes. I checked my watch: one minute to go. Then the hatch slid open and I jumped inside and curled in the darkness. Above me, the computerised locking system of the interior hatch rumbled away to itself and finally opened. I pulled myself into the carpeted, semi-lighted corridor. And I'd realised a childhood ambition: I was inside a smalls.h.i.+p.

I could see along the corridor and into the bridge. Etteridge sat in a swivel-seat between the arms of a V-shaped instrument console, speaking to a soft-voiced computer. Beside her was the sen-dep tank, the hatch dogged and the alpha-numerics pulsing a countdown sequence. Dan was already in there.

I drew my pistol and started towards the bridge. If I could untank Dan before he fluxed- Seconds later the 's.h.i.+p phased into the nada nada-continuum.

The 's.h.i.+p pitched, knocking me off my feet. I fell against a bulkhead, striking my head. I was out for only a matter of minutes, and when I came to my senses we were no longer flying through the nada nada-continuum.

I stared through the forward viewscreen and made out the concrete expanse of a penitentiary exercise yard. We were there for less than ten seconds. I heard the hatch wheeze open, and Stephanie's cries as a prisoner ran towards the s.h.i.+p and scrambled aboard. Laser bolts ricocheted from the concrete and hissed across the skin of the 's.h.i.+p. Then the hatch slammed shut the 's.h.i.+p slipped again from this reality.

I giggled like a lunatic. If only my younger self, the kid who'd haunted the Orly star terminal just to get a glimpse of phasing stars.h.i.+ps, could see me now: stowaway on the craziest jailbreak of all time.

Three minutes became as many hours; time elasticated - then snapped back to normal as we re-emerged in the real world of the red-and-white striped marquee on the lawn of the riverbank mansion.

Through the viewscreen I could see Claude, waiting for me in his flier.

I ran.

The Etteridge clone and the escapee were in each others' arms when I reached the bridge; they had time to look round and register surprise and shock before I raised my pistol and fired, sending them sprawling stunned across the deck.

I stood over the woman, smiling at the future she represented...

When I delivered Stephanie Etteridge, La.s.solini would take from me the DNA which in four years, when cloned, would be a fully grown nineteen year-old replica of myself - with the difference that whereas now my body was a ninety percent ma.s.s of slurred flesh and scars, my new cloned body would be pristine, unflawed, and maybe even beautiful.

While Etteridge and her lover twitched on the deck, their motor neurone systems in temporary dysfunction, I untanked Dan. I hauled out the slide-bed, pulled the jacks from his occipital implant and helped him upright.

Of course, La.s.solini had said nothing about what he intended to do with his ex-wife - and at the time I had hardly considered it, my mind full of the thought that in four years I would be whole again, an attractive human being, and the shame and regret would be a thing of the past.

Now I thought of Stephanie Etteridge in the clutches of La.s.solini. I imagined her dismembered corpse providing the sick surgeon with his final cathartic tableau, a s.a.d.i.s.tic arrangement of her parts exhibited beneath the chandeliers of the ballroom in the ultimate act of revenge.

Etteridge crawled across the deck to the man she had saved. She clung to him, and all I could do was stare as the tears coursed down my cheeks.

What some people will do for love...

I pulled Dan away from the tank. He was dazed and physically blitzed from his union with the infinite, his gaze still focused on some ineffable vision granted him in the nada nada-continuum.

"Phuong...?"

"Come on!" I cried, taking his weight as he stumbled legless across the bridge. I kicked open the hatch and we staggered from the smalls.h.i.+p and out of the marquee. I had to be away from there, and fast, before I changed my mind.

Claude helped Dan into the flier. "I thought you said we were taking the woman?" he said.

"I'm leaving her!" I sobbed. "Just let's get out of here."

I sat beside Dan on the back seat and closed my eyes as the burners caught and we lifted from the lawn. We banked over the Seine and Dan fell against me, his body warm and flux-spiced from the tank.

As we sped across Paris, I thought of Etteridge and her lover - and the fact that she would never realise the fate she had been spared. I wished them happiness, and gained a vicarious joy I often experience when considering people more fortunate than myself.

I a.s.sisted Dan into the darkened office and laid him out on the chesterfield. Then I sat on the edge of the cus.h.i.+on and stared at the tape on the desk, set up two hours ago to record my last farewell.

I picked up the microphone, switched it on and began in a whisper. "I've enjoyed working for you, Dan. We've had some good times. But I'm getting tired of Paris. I need to see more of the world. They say Brazil's got a lot going for it. I might even take a look at Luna or Mars. They're always wanting colonists..." And I stopped there and thought about wiping it and just walking out. Even nothing seemed better than this bland goodbye.

Then Dan cried out and his arm snared my waist. I looked into his eyes and read his need, his fear after his confrontation with the infinite. And something more...

His lips moved in a whisper, and although I was unable to make out the words, I thought I knew what he wanted.

I reached out and wiped the tape, then lay on the chesterfield beside Dan and listened to his breathing and the spring rain falling in the boulevard outside.

//Elegy Perpetuum It began one warm evening on the cantilevered, clover-leaf patio of the Oasis bar.

There were perhaps a dozen of us seated around the circular onyx table - fellow artists, agents and critics, enjoying wine and pleasant conversation. Beneath the polite chatter, however, there was the tacit understanding that this was the overture to the inevitable clash of opinions, not to say egos, of the two most distinguished artists present.

The artists' domes, hanging from great arching scimitar supports, glowed with the pale l.u.s.tre of opals in the quick Saharan twilight. The oasis itself caught the sunset and turned it into a million coruscating scales, like silver lame made liquid.

This was my first stay at Sapphire Oasis, and I was still somewhat out of my depth. I feared being seen as an artist of little originality, who had gained admittance to the exclusive colony through the patronage of the celebrated Primitivist, Ralph Standish. I did not want to be known as an imitator - though admittedly my early work did show his influence - a novice riding on the coat-tails of genius.

I sat next to the white-haired, leonine figure of Standish, one of the last of the old romantics. As if to dissociate himself totally from the Modernists, he affected the aspect of a Bohemian artist of old. He wore a s.h.i.+rt splashed with oils, though he rarely worked in that medium, and the beret by which he was known.

Seated across from him was Perry Bartholomew.

The Modernist - he struck me more as a businessman than an artist - was suave in an impeccably cut grey suit. He lounged in his seat and twirled the stem of his wine gla.s.s. He seemed always to wear an expression of rather superior amus.e.m.e.nt, as if he found everything that everyone said fallacious but not worth his effort to correct.

I had lost interest in the conversation - two critics were airing their views on the forthcoming contest. I turned my attention to the spectacular oval, perhaps a kilometre in length, formed by the illuminated domes. I was wondering whether I might slip away unnoticed, before Ralph and Bartholomew began their inevitable sniping, when for the first time that night the latter spoke up.

He cleared his throat, and this seemed to be taken by all present as a signal for silence. "In my experience," Bartholomew said, "contests and compet.i.tions to ascertain the merit of works of art can never be successful. Great art cannot be judged by consensus. Are you submitting anything, Standish?"

Ralph looked up, surprised that Bartholomew was addressing him. He suppressed a belch and stared into his tumbler of whisky. "I can't. I'm ineligible. I'm on the contest's organising committee."

"Ah..." Bartholomew said. "So you are responsible?" His eyes twinkled.

Ralph appeared irritated. "The Sapphire Oasis Summer Contest is a long-standing event, Perry. I see nothing wrong in friendly compet.i.tion. The publicity will help everyone. Anyway, if you're so against the idea, why have you submitted a piece?"