"starofep" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brown Eric)

Star of Epsilon

By Eric Brown.


Paris was in again, a hundred years on: '68 found me on the left bank, playing to crowds in the Blue Shift slouchbar. I blitzed 'em with cosmic visions. I sub-circuited direct, employed slo-mo, ra-ta-tat shots, even visual cut-ups, in homage. Goddard and Burroughs were back in, too. Had to do with nostalgia, the harking back to supposedly better times. Hell... Didn't I know that? Wasn't I cashing in on the fact that we all love to live a lie? Wasn't I giving the crowds what they wanted 'cos they'd never get it otherwise?

I met her after a night performance.

The Blue Shift was the scene that month.

It wasn't just the drugs they pumped but the live acts, I liked to think. I alternated nights with a cute fifteen year-old sado-masochist on sensitized feedback. It wasn't my kick, but off-nights I'd sneak downstairs and jack-in. And jack-out again, fast. Three minutes was all I could take of this kid - my opposition. The management had it sussed. They played us counterpoint: one night this weird little girl giving out intimations of death and id-grislies like no kid should, and the next old Abe Santana with his visions of Nirvana-thru-flux, the glories of the space-lanes.

The girl intrigued me. The neon-glitz out front billed her as Jo, and that was enough to pull the freaks. Her act was simple. On stage a sudden spotlight found a small cross-legged figure in a pierrot suit, white-powdered face a paragon of melancholy complete with stylized tear. She'd come on easy at first, slipping fear sub-lim at the slouched crowd. Her head was shaven, but a tangle of leads snaking from her cortical-implant gave her the aspect of a par-shorn Medusa. The leads went down inside her suit and into the stage, coming out by the cushions. Freaks jacked-in and got fear first, subtle unease. Then the kid shifted her position, sitting now with outstretched legs together, arms stanchioned behind her, palms down. The nursery pose contradicted the horror coming down the leads, the hindbrain terror of mortality. She tapped into us and found our fear of death and gave it back, redoubled - turning us to stone.

First time I jacked-in I wondered how she did this, what magic she worked to show us that which we tried to deny, even to ourselves. So the next night I stayed with it a while longer, and I found out. Little Jo was dying. She was fifteen and she'd never see sixteen and the gut-kick I experienced when I realised this was zero compared with her angst. That's when I jacked-out, sickened, left and got loaded and tried to forget.
Over the next few weeks I was lured back again and again. I knew what I wanted: not the orgasm of terror the rest of the crowd got high on, but the futile reassurance that Jo was not really dying, that her performance was just a death-analogue recorded from some terminal patient, encoded on Jo's computer and used cynically to thrill.

But the more I experienced her act, the more I knew I was dreaming. Jo was dying, okay. She gave out death and when the audience were convinced that they were dying she reversed the feed and drank it back, and you could almost hear the gasp of her soul as its need was quenched. The kid's in love with death, I told myself, as if hoping this might ease my heartache: perhaps, if she was, then I could pity her a little less...

Then one time I stayed in for ten minutes, and I found out the truth. The only reason she reversed the feed was to take from the crowd the knowledge that they too would some day die, to reassure herself that she was not alone in the dying process we all call living.

That ten minutes was the last I took. I avoided the club on my nights off. I couldn't go near the place, and those freaks in there - I thought many a time over a drink in some darkened, nondescript bar - they stayed jacked-in for hours! And that brought me back to what I was running from, the fear of death and the terrible realization that Jo was plugged into that weltschmerz for the rest of her life...
*
And my act?

How many of the crowd who freaked out on Jo's act came to mine? Their diametric content would suggest none, but I hoped some people needed antidote.

I'd start simple. I'd give them the experience of an Engineman emerging from the flux; the elusive ghost of rapture that haunted his mind; the drone of auxiliary burners; the knowledge that we were lighting into the Nilakantha Stardrift on a mission of rescue. Then I'd hold this sensory input under and come in with the voice-over: "Fifty years ago I mind-pushed bigships for the Canterbury Line..."
I'd take them at hyper-c through the Nada-continuum, coming out places they'd only dreamed about or seen in travel brochures. Black holes were a favourite, and I took them on a tour of a giant nicknamed Calcutta, courting disaster on the hazardous event horizon, the bigship a surfer on the math of Einstein-Fernandez physics. Then I'd sling the 'ship at a blistering tangent off across uncharted space, on the trail of new and more wondrous adventure... The main theme was always wonder - the hint of Nirvana that every Engineman experiences in the flux.
My customers left satisfied, uplifted.

Then one night after her performance Jo was stretchered off comatose, and I didn't know whether to feel relief that at last she had died, or sadness at the passing of someone I had hardly known. Later the manager told me that Jo was fine, she'd recover. Would I fill in for her this week? And I said yes, relieved that I might have the opportunity to get to know her, after all, and hating myself because of that.

We're quark-harvesting a long, long way from Earth. I step from the flux-tank, as we are coasting now. I look through the viewscreen, behold the sweeping sickle sponsons reaping fiery quarks. The 'aft scene is even more spectacular, a panoramic miracle. The converted energy is fired from the bigship in blinding c-velocity bolts, streaking away on a multi-billion light year bend that describes the inner curve of the universe. And I'm moved almost to tears, along with my audience, though for different reasons.

For a long time after the performance I sat yogi-fashion. The crowd cheered and applauded, then moved back to the bar or out into the night. And I was ashamed, like a preacher who has convinced his congregation but does not himself believe.
Technicians dismantled the rig, unplugged me and wound in the leads. A few tourists tried to get to me, to say how much they'd enjoyed the performance. They were stopped by the heavies, who knew how low I felt after my act.

The club never closed, but trade hit a low around four in the morning. I was still there then, in the darkness of the stage, thinking back and regretting the events of all those years ago, the pretence of the present. A few junkies slouched at the bar, getting their fix jugularwise.

As I sat, a kid crawled from a cushioned bunker between the bar and the stage. She headed my way on all fours, galumphing over cushions and the wraparound membranes in the floor. I assumed she was a fan who wanted to rap about how it was to flux on the bigships...

She climbed aboard the stage and sat before me cross-legged, like a mirror-image of myself. She had long black hair, too luxuriant for a kid her age, too sensual.
"I loved your performance," she said in a husky voice which, like her hair, belonged to a thirty year-old.

She had a triangular, coffee-brown face and large green eyes. She should have been a nice-looking kid, but there was some disunity in the planes of her cheeks which made her almost ugly.

"Hey," I said, weary. "Go home. Get some sleep."