Free Engineman by Eric Brown Page B

travellers waited patiently for the interface to open on their destinations.
    "Ms Schwartz." A tanned, blonde woman was crouching before her. She wore a bright two-piece uniform in the blue and yellow national colours of Sweden.
    "Oh..." Ella looked up, too tired to realise the mistake the woman had made.
    "We'll be processing travellers to Carey's Sanctuary in fifteen minutes."
    The courier's gaze lingered on the Schwartz name-tag stitched to the chest of Ella's silversuit. The tags were much sought after among those who held Enginemen and Enginewomen in high esteem.
    Christ, Ella thought, yawning and stretching. The courier obviously thought she looked old enough to have been an Enginewoman.
    The courier was still smiling, as if expecting words of wisdom from someone she thought had communed with the ultimate. Ella smiled uneasily in return. She recalled Eddie's frustration, sometimes anger, at how he was often regarded. Civilians held E-men in awe, and Eddie had found that this misplaced respect served only to emphasise the fact of his redundancy.
    "I think you're very brave," the courier said, "using the 'face. I've met some E-women who can't do it."
    Ella shrugged. "I need to travel," she murmured.
    The courier appraised her. "You're obviously feeling the strain. Good luck, anyway." She tapped Ella's knee, stood and scanned the lounge for other travellers in her tour group.
    Ella pulled her feet onto the seat and sat cross-legged, hanging her head. She was touched by the Swede's sympathy, mistaken though it was. She closed her eyes, and the afterimage of the explosion bloomed in her mind's eye. She was aware of Eddie's body odour in the material of the silversuit.
    She had watched Eddie kill himself just ten hours ago, though it seemed like much longer. It felt like a week ago when she had hung on the fence at Orly, watching the slow progress of his flier towards the interface. Even now Eddie's death was an abstract concept. She wondered if the curious absence of feeling was due to the fact that his suicide was too much to comprehend, or that she comprehended it all too well and was unable to grieve over someone she had never really loved, and who had ultimately deserted her. Was what she felt now nothing more than self-pity, the fear of the future without the reassuring and familiar presence of Eddie around to give her life a centre?
    She opened her eyes and stared through the sheer crystal viewscreen that fronted the terminal complex. She certainly was, she thought, a long way from home. So far she had made three jumps out towards the Rim - from Earth to Addenbrooke, to Rousseau, and then to the Swedish colony world. Each step she had taken through the interfaces had carried her approximately three thousand light years through space, though, of course, the concept was just too much to grasp. She told herself that the journey so far, nine thousand light years across the spiral arm to the threshold of the Rim, which had taken just six hours with medical examinations and identity checks, would in the old days of the bigships have taken the better part of a standard month. The advent of interface technology, invented and developed on Mars twenty years ago and installed in stages throughout the Expansion over the following ten years, had had the effect of shrinking the human-populated quadrant galaxy to the size of a single planet. In the time it took a traveller to get from London to Sydney by sub-orbital jet - ten hours - the interstellar traveller could pass from Earth, via the junction planets, to the outermost colony on the Rim. Far-flung outposts settled in the Galactic Core, which had been lucky to see a 'ship from Earth once a year, now enjoyed a monthly influx of goods and tourists. Among the hundred densely-populated worlds in the vicinity of Earth, the portals were often opened on a daily basis. The Keilor-Vincicoff Organisation ran the interfaces in the more populated sectors of the Expansion, but in the Core and