Harbinger

by Jack Skillingstead

  “My God. You’re Langley Ulin, aren’t you.”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you want?”

  “To . . . live. More.”

  “Why?”

  “Con-sider . . . the—Alternative.”

  In his case the alternative appeared infinitely preferable, but I didn’t say so. I got out of bed and pulled on a pair of pants. Ulin was like a waxworks thing, a minor figure forgotten in Trousseau’s storeroom where heat and neglect had softened him toward thin shapelessness. His hair was gone but for a few tenacious wisps. His face was too narrow, cheeks sunken together. His neck wobbled out of his shirt collar like a stick covered with chicken wattle.

  “I’m out of the donation business,” I said.

  “Don’t need. Your organs. We’ve worked the bugs out. Maybe just your eyes. These are no good anymore. So long. But your pit-oo-itary. That.”

  A whiff of rotten eggs. His body devouring itself from the inside, expelling gas.

  “No,” I said.

  “Please, El-lis.”

  I looked out the window. A black Mercedes van with smoked windows was parked in front of my building. A goonish man stood next to the passenger door in a dark suit and white shirt. Five a.m. and the streets were otherwise empty.

  “How’d you get in here?”

  He made a distressed sound, coughing and spluttering, wheezing and gasping. I panicked a little until I realized he was laughing.

  “You can’t. Re-fuse. Me. It’s in-human, El-lis.”

  I needed to clear the junk out of my head. There were a couple of Zingcups in the refrigerator. The bedroom door was ajar already. When I swung it wider I saw a man standing in my hallway. Big. Black suit, cool demeanor, hands folded in front of him. Goon two. I blinked at him then closed the door in his face, softly, and turned.

  “You can’t just come in here,” I said to Ulin.

  “Do you. Know. How old. I am, El-lis?”

  “Roughly.”

  “One hundred and forty-six. Think. Of it.”

  “If you had a plug I’d recommend pulling it,” I said. “I’d even do it myself.”

  “Nonsense. I am pre-pared. To offer you more. Money than you. Can imagine.”

  “Not interested.”

  He subsided into a long, gaseous wheeze. His head drooped, his long preying mantis arms dangled.

  I opened the bedroom door again. Goon Two was still there. “Your boss is ready to leave,” I said.

  After a long unresponsive pause, he said, “Mr. Ulin will tell me that himself when he’s ready.”

  “Mr. Ulin is in a coma.”

  “He’s resting.”

  “Like a poleaxed dog.”

  Goon Two leaned to see around me then resumed his original stance. “He’s okay.”

  I shut the door again.

  After a few minutes, Ulin lifted his head, cleared his throat, and said, “I never bothered you. In all. These years. I’ve been good to. You. Now I need. Please. I. Won’t grovel. Ellis. I’m afraid.”

  I was slightly tempted to surrender some of my precious bodily fluids. But only slightly. Looking at the thing in the chair I wondered how much more “life” it could endure under any circumstances. Besides, I’d made a bargain with myself many years previous. No more donations. The only one for whom I would have gladly made an exception was gone. Now I didn’t feel charitable.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  It had become incrementally lighter in the room. Ulin’s eyes were like a pair of milky blue marbles. For the first time I noticed he was holding a device in his right hand. That and the goon in the hall gave me a bad vibe.

  I opened my top dresser drawer and rummaged out my handgun. Old habits die hard. So do old industrialists. Really old ones. I lifted the gun out of the drawer. It was illegal as hell. Gun permits were a thing of the past. Like Ulin himself was a thing of the past.

  “I’m sorry, too,” Ulin said. “You can’t. Be-gin to. Imagine.” His thumb twitched over the device. A little green light blinked. I raised my weapon at the same time the bedroom door opened.

  “Trust me,” I said. “Mr. Ulin is more than ready to go.”

  Goon Two stared at my gun. “What’s that for?”

  “I’m the paranoid type.”

  He lifted Langley Ulin in his big arms, like a frail waxen baby.

  When I was alone again I checked the door. The genetic lock was perfectly intact. It pissed me off. Ulin could do any damn thing he pleased by virtue of his wealth. Even defeat a security system that was supposedly undefeatable.

  I yanked open the refer—and groaned. I’d been mistaken. There were no Zingcups left. I’d inhaled the last two and neglected to replenish my supply. Damn it.

  I got on the cell. After a few rings a sleepy and highly feminine voice said:

  “Bar’s open, honey.”

  I dressed and went to her and lost myself in Zing and red hair and the comforts of young living flesh. Meaningless and repetitious, which was the whole point. The junk wind blew and blew, but it couldn’t blow out Nichole’s dead face or two of Langley Ulin’s last words to me: I’m afraid.

  part two:

  infinity

  “To Infinity . . .and beyond!”

  —Buzz Lightyear

  chapter eight

  Add a hundred and fifty years and see what you get.

  It was visible even in the daylight sky; the thing was big. Ulin’s Folly. Okay, its real name was Infinity. I sat smoking on the back porch of my little mountain retreat and watched it compete with the ghostly moon. My joint wasn’t one of the packaged and heavily taxed brands. Call me old-fashioned, but I preferred growing my own and rolling it myself—which, weirdly, was still illegal.

  Inhaling dope, I observed in the high blue sky a pin scratch of fire. Regular shuttle run returning from Infinity. They were prettier at night. I picked up my book (Dickens again) and lost myself in it until a keening penetrated my concentration. And I was hell on concentration, so that was some very intense keening.

  I laid the book down. Up here in the Cascades it was mostly birds, wind in the trees, and other assorted natural occurrences that made noise. I’d learned to be wary of any unnatural intrusions.

  This unnatural intrusion came shrieking out of the sky, a silver needle riding a blue fire tail. It kept falling and falling then finally nosed up and slowed and the shrieking changed pitch, and it came to hover almost directly over my cabin. I hate that. I flipped it off, resisting the urge to plug my ears. I didn’t want to give the bastards the satisfaction. There was no place to land. If they wanted me they’d have to return by some old-fashioned mode of transport.

  I picked up my book and resumed Bleak House. I should have been more observant. With all the racket I failed to hear the canister drop into my yard and sprout antenna.

  The ship withdrew. I didn’t bother glancing up. My ears throbbed with its departure.

  I finished the chapter then got up out of my chair to fetch a cold drink from the cabin, thumb in the middle of the book to mark my place. I noticed the broadcaster in the grass but my instinct to halt lagged about a step and a half, and I found myself within an interactive SuperQuantum Environment. Damn it.

  I stood on a scaffolding about a kilometer high. Below, a verdant terrain spread out. I could see, at intervals, the organized sprawl of human habitations. It was like the view over Ohio from the Goodyear Blimp—a view I’d actually enjoyed once upon a time.

  A man appeared on the scaffolding beside me.

  “Hello, Ellis.”

  “Hello yourself, Laird. I don’t appreciate this.”

  “Well, you’re a difficult man to reach. I thought a little tour might persuade you to my point of view.”

  “You would think that. But don’t count on it.”

  “What you’re looking at is real time,” Laird said. At age fifty he had begun to resemble the version of his great grandfather that I’d first become acquainted with back in 1974. Tall, projecting voic
e, gray templed. Distinguished in a soap opera-ish way.

  He pointed a patrician finger. “The County. The living heart of Infinity. That’s Bedford Falls almost directly below us. In the middle distance is Waukegan, and out on the horizon there is De Smet. Idealized small town communities, circa early twentieth century America.”

  “Yeah, I’ve read the brochures.”

  At this point I’m sure Laird would have enjoyed laying a fatherly hand on my shoulder. Fortunately, broadcast Environments didn’t allow for that sort of thing.

  “Consider the wonder of it,” Laird said.

  I guffawed.

  He smiled indulgently, letting me enjoy my little outburst, then he looked up.

  “Of course it’s a little raw without the sky.”

  Above our narrow platform a vastly beamed interior ceiling was hung with great trunks of holographic projectors, still under construction.

  “Here’s what it will be like once we are outbound.”

  He shut his eyes theatrically. I kept mine open. In this place my eyes weren’t real anyway. They were figments. What my subconscious allowed my eyes to be.

  In a moment, the vast industrially beamed space above us vanished, and I was peering (squinting) into a cornflower blue sky adrift with puffy sheep clouds. One of them drifted right over us, momentarily shrouding us in damp white fog. I couldn’t feel the dampness, of course, but I observed water droplets on the backs of my hands.

  Grinning like a boy, Laird said, “That’s right. This cloud is real. Infinity produces her own limited weather patterns in The County, as well as the holographic facsimiles. From the ground you can’t tell the difference. Total environmental immersion for the population. We’re talking three generations, Ellis.”

  “Three generations of sardines.”

  “That’s not quite fair.”

  “Sure it is. What you’ve constructed is a larger than usual sardine tin.”

  I wouldn’t let Laird know it, but I was impressed. Slightly. If nothing else, I was peering down upon a world that, after a generation or so, would forget I ever existed as a “Pointer.” Infinity wasn’t about consciousness evolution; it was about Laird’s ego evolution. And it was also about spreading the human seed beyond our solar system. In a fundamental way it was about escape. And I was all about escape. Except not this time. The price was too high.

  “Anyway,” I said, “have a nice trip.”

  “Ellis—”

  I did something that only looked brave if you happened to be weak-minded. Still, I was grateful for the cloud engulfing us. Heights tended to make me queasy.

  I stepped forward off the scaffolding—

  —and stumbled out of the broadcast environment and fetched up against the side of my cabin.

  I worked my mouth, which was dry. The broadcaster squatted on my patch of lawn like a little robotic insect, filamentous antenna quivering in the mountain breeze. I glanced skyward. The shuttle was nowhere in sight. Infinity hung up there like a mirage. Big.

  Carefully avoiding the insect’s broadcast range, I made my way around the cabin to my wood pile. A big double-bladed ax was buried in a stump. I gripped the handle with both hands and jerked it out and carried it back to the front. The broadcaster squatted and quivered, cute as a bug. I hurled the ax at it and the thing shattered like a Christmas ornament. Inside, I made a glass of iced tea.

  Then I started packing.

  I had plenty of money. When Langley Ulin finally died, in 2144, I had been shortly thereafter visited by an attorney representing Ulin Industries. The legal department had discovered an abnormality and wished to correct it. Legal departments and machines are like that. All my ten year’s worth of fat wages which had accrued during my sojourn in Blue Heron had been invested in secure bonds on my behalf. After nearly seventy years I was a fairly rich man in my own right. Sign here, please. I did, time and distance having bleached the stench of blood off the money. At least that’s how I justified it. Then I hired a long term investment brokerage of my own and gave them most of what Ulin Industries had transferred to me. The secret to retiring in style is practical immortality. Invest well and live forever. It should be on a t-shirt.

  Add another eighty years or so, and even when they start calling money “cheets” (debit + chit) you’ve got yourself a nest egg bigger than the nest.

  I rode my carbon-frame mountain bike down from the cabin, a few personal things in a backpack strapped over my shoulders. In Goldbar I picked up the solarpod that I’d paid to have garaged there. The cells were fully charged. I swiveled the joystick and rolled to the 90 where I let the magnetic pulse take over. And at one hundred and ten miles per hour I was on my way back to civilization, which is a place I’d had to relinquish years previous—thanks, inadvertently, to Laird Ulin’s genius. At the time SuperQuantum had been in its nascent stages at some UI lab in Arizona. Laird had made me a proposal and I’d accepted, even without the flowers and ring. He wanted to use my memory engrams to create the first fully realized “Environment.” He wanted me because I’d been alive longer than anyone else and, presumably, my memory stuff was that much richer. Beyond that, I believe even then Laird was nurturing his Young Frankensteinian ambitions and wanted to make contact with his granddaddy’s former organ bank.

  So, after years of blessed obscurity, the EC (Evolutionary Consciousness) movement had gotten hold of my SuperQuantum Environment and placed me squarely back in the public mind. People “experienced” my history, and the EC-ers provided context and the scientific proof. Millions visited the Environment. It created a sensation. Never mind that by the advent of the 22nd century the world was filled with impossible things that everyone more or less accepted. I rapidly became the object of religious fervor—and hatred.

  I kept an apartment in Seattle, rented under a false name and unvisited by me in more than two years. I exited the magnetic 90, let the cells resume power, and guided my canary yellow solar pod through a rain squall to my building.

  Which turned out to be a bad idea.

  It was an old brick building with minimum security. I pressed my thumb over the smudged reader a couple of times before the door clicked open and allowed me into the damp-smelling lobby. Immediately I felt a bad vibe. A tired schefflera drooped in a terracotta pot. An old man slouched on a purple sofa, reading something on a flat display he’d unrolled on his lap. Now would have been a good time to leave, but I didn’t.

  In the hall outside my apartment on the fourth floor I paused, then thumbed the lockpad, stepped into a dark entry, reached for the light switch—and froze.

  Deeper inside the apartment, a couch spring creaked. Before I could fully retreat, a voice in the dark said:

  “Stop.”

  I stopped. Not because of the voice but because of the laser targeting dot that had appeared on my chest.

  He approached me. I wanted him to. I wanted him to get real close. In the many decades following my scuffle with detective Stone I’d dedicated myself to learning various hand-to-hand defensive and offensive techniques. I was hell on pressure points. But none of that was any good against a gun.

  The man in my apartment halted well out of my reach and directed me to turn around.

  “We’re going outside,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  “If you try to alert anyone, or if you try to run, I’ll kill you. I want to kill you. So give me an excuse, please.”

  “Why would you want to kill me?” I already knew the answer, but it never hurts to ask.

  “No questions. Move.”

  I moved. And I strove to provide him with no excuse to pull the trigger.

  Outside I walked a few yards in front of him. The rain came down in dark curtains. The sidewalks were virtually empty of pedestrians. The rain plastered my hair to my head, saturated my clothes, made my shoes squelch. I looked over my shoulder a couple of times. The man behind me was dressed for the weather, with hood pulled up and both hands out of sight in his trench coat pockets, the right one p
resumably gripping the gun, business end pointed at my back. He could have been bluffing. Out here in the open I was tempted to break and run. But my instincts advised against it.

  He started talking in a low voice — not to me but to his cellular implant. I walked by a door situated between a vintage CD store and a laundry, both closed. My abductor said: “Stop” in a voice loud enough to make it plain he was addressing me and not the party on his implant. Flaking gilt lettering on the glass paneled door read: Arthur Murray Dance Studio.

  A steep and badly lit flight of stairs, the air close and stale. The man’s heavy tread climbing the stairs behind me. Smell of our wet clothes. If I was going to make a move, now would be a good time, while I had the high ground. But he was still too far back.

  We entered the studio at the top of the stairs. The hardwood dance floor was covered with unscuffed dust. Watery daylight filtered through a wall of dirty windows.

  I turned. “Now what?”

  “We wait for somebody.”

  “Okay. Then what?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “We’ll see.” He didn’t look at me. Rain shadows flowed down his face like melting wax.

  “I have to warn you,” I said, “if you got me up here in order for me to teach you guys how to waltz you’re going to be sorely disappointed. I’m hell on the foxtrot, but waltzing is beyond me.”

  “I own the lease on this property,” he said. “It’s not a froggin’ dance studio anymore. It’s going to be a meeting place.”

  “For your super secret club?”

  “Never mind.”

  He had the gun leveled at me again. He didn’t look like the type to actually pull the trigger, this chubby, soft-jawed guy of about thirty.

  “When’s your friend arrive?”

  “Soon enough.”

  “You wouldn’t really shoot me with that thing, would you?”

  He pursed his lips. “Kill you? I thought you were supposed to be immortal. Isn’t that the froggin’ idea?”