Eric Brown - Star of Epsilon

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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

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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."

A flash of emerald anger. "I said I liked your show."

"And I said-"

"Abe," she smiled, serious. "I know you want to flux again..."

I looked at her, guarded. She had it wrong, but only just.

So I said, "How...?"

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She grinned at me. "I experienced your show good, Abe. Your need was in there. Those fools might

not have read it, but I did."

Then I saw the teflon protuberance at the base of her skull. I lifted a tress of hair, fingered

sockets worn smooth through use.

"Who are you?" I whispered.

"I'm just another German-Turk from Dusseldorf," she shrugged, "with a taste for sick theatrics."

I smiled and shook my head.

"You still don't recognize? How about if I wore a pierrot suit and a big tear," she said, "here."

"Jo?"

"Jodie Schimelmann."

I felt a tremor inside. This was the kid who'd rocked me with haunting visions of death. She was

fifteen years-old and she'd stared oblivion in the face and she was still here.

I'd be ninety in a month and I felt a burning sense of shame at the injustice.

"I need your help," she said.

I shook my head. "How can I possibly help you?"

So she told me why she was dying.

Until six months ago Jodie worked in the spaceyards at Orly. She was a flux-monkey, an engineer

whose job it was to crawl inside the exhaust ventricles of bigships and carry out repairs on the

auxiliary burners. It was hard work, but she didn't complain; she lived well and saved enough

creds to send home to her mother in Germany.

Then one check-up she was found to have contracted some complicated virus that had lodged as

spores in the flux-vent of a bigship she had worked on. She was given a year to live, paid off and

discharged. Jodie was rotting inside with some alien analogue of carcinoma that had attacked her

marrow, lymph glands, lungs and trachea... It was a miracle she was still alive and active, but

she loaded herself with analgesics every day and went on fighting.

The disease explained her voice, of course, and the fact that she wore a wig. Ironic that that

which was killing her also gave her the appearance of someone much older, while in her head she

had matured as well.

I said, "Isn't there a cure?"

"Yeah, sure there is. But a cure costs creds, Abe. And not even my pay off was enough."

I recalled her words. "How can I help you?"

"I need creds. I want the cure. I also want to be beautiful-"

I laughed.

Then she realised how funny that was and she laughed too.

"See that beautiful woman at the bar?" she asked. "The one zonked on jugular-juice and out of it."

"So?"

"So she's dead ugly - honest."

"I thought you just said she was beautiful?"

Jo smiled, "You ever seen here before?"

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Eric Brown - Star of Epsilon

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