Free Blue Shifting by Eric Brown Page A

he got scared; the ineffable union with the infinite, with Nirvana, that all Enginemen attained when they fluxed, was draining reality of meaning and leaving him strung-out and crazy and in need of constant flux oblivion. He knew that if he went on fluxing for much longer he'd end up dead. So he did the brave thing and got out and started a third rate investigative agency in Montparnasse. He advertised for an assistant to do the leg-work, and I got the job.
    We got along fine for weeks, even though I was evasive and distant and didn't let him get too close. Then as I got to know him better I began to believe that we were both disabled, and that if I could accept the state of his head, then perhaps he could come to some acceptance of my body.
    Then one night he asked me back to his place, and like a fool I nodded yes. The usual scene, as far as I could gather from the tapes I'd watched: soft light, music, wine... And after a bottle of chianti I found myself close to him. His fingers mimed the shape of my face, centimetres away; it was as if he had difficulty believing my beauty and was afraid to let his fingertips discover a lie. But it was no lie, just reconstructed osseous underlay and synthi-flesh done with the touch of an artist. We kissed. He fumbled my buttons and I went for his zip, meaning to get him with my mouth before he discovered my secret. I didn't make it. He touched me where my right breast should have been, then ripped open my bodice. He gagged and tipped me to the floor, strode to the window and stared out while I gathered my stuff and ran.
    I stayed away for weeks, until he came for me and apologised. I returned to the office and we began again from the beginning, and it was as if we were closer, having shared our secrets – though never, of course, close enough.
    ~
    Soon after that night at his place he began experimenting. He claimed that he was doing it for me. By embracing illegal skull-tapes, second-hand Buddhism and the Bardo Thodol rewritten for the twenty-first century, he was attempting to come to some acceptance of my disfigurement. But he was also doing it for himself; he wanted the thrill of Nirvana without the threat of dependence.
    Now I stared at the mystical junk that littered the desk and the chesterfield: the pamphlets, the mandalas, the meditation vids and bootleg tapes. In a rage I picked up a great drift of the stuff and threw it the length of the room. When the desk and chesterfield were cleared, and my anger was still not exhausted, I ran across the office, fell to my knees and pitched tankas and tapes, magazines and effigies of Gautama through the window. I leaned out and laughed like a fool, then rushed down into the street and stomped on the useless relics and idols of mysticism, ground them into the sidewalk and kicked the debris into the storm drain. Then, as the rain poured down around me, I sat on the kerb and cried.
    Hell, real love rarely lasted; so what chance had our corrupted version of attraction, what chance had the relationship between a screwed up flux-junky attempting to rewire his head with bogus Buddhist tracts so that he could, in theory, ignore the physical, and someone whose body was no more than a puckered mass of raddled meat? It was unfair to both of us; it was unfair of myself to expect love and affection after so many years without hope, and it was unfair of me to keep Dan from other women who could offer him more than just companionship and a pretty face.
    ~
    The tape was running when I returned to the office.
    I lay on the chesterfield in the darkness and listened to the clink of glasses, the murmur of polite conversation. The Gastrodome was the de-commissioned astrodome of an old French bigship, amputated and welded atop the Eiffel tower. I'd been up there once, but the view had given me vertigo. Now I lay half asleep and listened to the dialogue that filled the room.
    All I wanted was for Dan to refuse to work for the woman, so that he would be free from