Harbinger

by Jack Skillingstead

  Eventually the stars come on, erratically, in clusters, through the branch tangle and cloud tatter. Then the clouds thickened, and the stars were lost. Above the clouds, the moon dialed up, preternaturally bright. Moonlight shot through the clouds like milk poured through India ink. It wasn’t enough light to ride by, but we could see well enough to walk. For safety’s sake we held hands. I let it feel good, Delilah’s hand in mine. The first time I let Delilah feel good to me she had been twenty and I had been twenty-nine (two hundred and seventy-four). Now she was pushing thirty. This knowledge tweaked my urge towards isolation, but I held on tight to that hand.

  There was a distant roll of thunder, and Delilah said, “Why a storm? I know you didn’t intend for it to be violent. But why a storm at all?”

  I felt embarrassed but said the truth anyway: “My first night with Nichole, there was a thunderstorm.”

  “I remember from the Environment,” Delilah said. “But—”

  “Listen,” I said. “The way around serial grieving is to stop living fully. Withdraw. Which I did, back on Earth. Then I came out here so I could do it even better. Then I slipped up and got involved with you. And ten years ago, when Laird Ulin sent his henchmen to take me away I didn’t even try to come back—not for a long while did I try. Because it was safer to hang out with a bunch of ageless mechanical men and one waxy bastard who could play chess. Then it occurred to me that I missed you, and everybody grieves. Maybe it had something to do with being locked up in the Command Level, having my choice denied. Whatever. So now I’m the Dr. Manette of the stars, recalled to life. And, for me, you equal life. Capital L. I wanted to whip something up for you, to show you how I feel. I can’t bake worth a damn, but I’m evidently hell on storms.”

  “I thought it was nine years,” Delilah said, and squeezed my hand. Some people just aren’t equipped to appreciate a beautiful speech rife with Dickensian allusions.

  Alice said, “I have to pee.”

  So she squatted in the bushes while Delilah held her hand and I held Delilah’s hand. That’s how it gets when you don’t want to lose anybody in the dark.

  Delilah said, “I’m glad you came back.” And she leaned over and kissed me.

  “I’m glad I did, too,” I said and kissed her mouth.

  A breeze freshened through the forest, rustling things. The atmosphere felt charged and smelled wet. Then it was wet. Very. Lightning forked across the sky, followed closely by a big rolling boom of thunder.

  Suddenly Delilah collapsed. I was still holding her hand, and her weight pulled me off-balance as she went down. A brilliant beam of light fell on us, churning with silver rain. The shiny tranq dart in Delilah’s neck flashed. Her hand was loose in mine. Her other hand was empty; Alice was gone.

  I squinted into the light, held my free hand up, and felt the second dart punch into my shoulder. Instantly I snatched it out, but my legs turned to rubber anyway and dumped me on my ass. My body’s super metabolism immediately began rushing the tranquilizer through my system.

  Cold rain pounded down. I felt woozy and wanted to lie back but resisted. When I put my hands down to prop myself up I felt the smooth shape of a rock under my fingers. I pried it out of the mud as the drone approached.

  It was Laird Ulin—his proxy, anyway. The drone was shaped like a big watermelon, with a small but powerful searchlight attached to a gimbal on its bottom, skeletal manipulator arms, and a ten inch screen that displayed Laird’s mug behind a haze of static.

  “Ready to come home, Ellis?”

  The inside of my mouth was cottony. I worked up some juice and replied, “How’d you find me?”

  Laird winked grotesquely (everything about him was grotesque, as far as I could tell). “I’ve always got an eye on you, Ellis,” he said, and laughed. Grotesquely. “Come along now.”

  One of the manipulator arms extended towards me. I shoved away from it, sliding in the mud.

  “I think I’ll stay,” I said.

  “But they hate you down here now,” Laird said. “Everybody knows you’re the bringer of storms. You aren’t ever going to want to come back.”

  “Now I get it,” I said.

  The wooziness had passed out of me. A locus of pain throbbed behind my eyes. I tightened my grip on the rock. The wind and rain intensified. There was a lurid light under the clouds. Fire?

  The drone swayed closer.

  A giant spider leg of sizzling blue lightning stomped down, missing us by only a few meters. My skin suddenly felt too tight. Fried ozone crisped the little hairs in my nostrils. An oxygen tree erupted in flame. Laird’s face disappeared in a surge of static. The drone wobbled, and I came up under it with the rock and smashed at it. The drone’s manipulator arms flailed around me. I jerked out of its reach, and it bobbled erratically, undirected. Which probably had more to do with the proximity of the lightning strike than it did with my caveman routine.

  Delilah wouldn’t wake up. I hunkered beside her. In the firelight I saw Alice huddled under a tree not fifty meters away. I shouted over the wind and rain, and she ran to me.

  Alice was scared, but she knew something important and was able to tell me. Having previously traveled the forest path, she remembered that midway along there was a rest-stop shelter.

  We proceeded there. I carried Delilah fireman style, and held onto Alice’s little hand, which was clammy and wet and soft. The wind tore at our sopping clothes. The air smelled of ozone and smoke. For now I was glad of the rain, since it was keeping who knew how many fires under control.

  By the time we reached the rest-stop the only unquenched blaze I was aware of was the one in my lower back. I lay Delilah down on a bench and pushed her eyelids open one at a time with my thumb. She had nice pupils. I checked her pulse, too, which was slow but steady. The storm rattled on the roof like a shower of bones. There were PerfectWood benches, a lavatory, fresh water, a rack of personal traveler’s packs and first-aid kits.

  Alice stood in a corner, shivering. I gave her a hug and advised her not to be scared.

  “I’m not scared,” she said. “Why doesn’t my mom wake up?”

  “She will,” I said. “But probably not for a while. You’re going to sit here with her and make sure she’s not scared when she does wake up.”

  “All by myself?” Alice said.

  “Sure. You’re a big girl, aren’t you?”

  “I want you to stay, too.”

  “I can’t, honey. But I’ll come back, then we’ll all three be together, okay?”

  She looked at her feet. “Okay.”

  “Good girl.”

  There was one more thing to do before I left. The traveler’s kits contained, among other things, a vacuum sealed “fruit” paste snack and a little spoon. I told Alice not to freak out if I got loud. She made her worried mouth, that sour pucker of pale lips. I kissed the top of her wet head, then took my spoon into the lavatory and locked the door.

  My eye offended me, but I sure as hell didn’t want to pluck out the wrong one. To be on the safe side I could have done both, but that would have left me blind for a week or so. Not a good idea. I did eenie-meeny, but my intuition suggested one more miney after the final mo. Left eye.

  I did some Zen rigmarole, breathing myself into a kind of auto-hypnotic trance while I sat on the jakes. Then I waited for a particularly loud thunder clap and scooped my left eye out with the spoon. Zen breathing techniques are wonderful; I barely screamed at all before fainting.

  When I came to on the floor, the eye was staring at me, trailing a spaghetti string of optic nerve. My left orbit throbbed like mad but had already filled in with a damp membrane that signaled the beginning of regeneration.

  I brought my hand down flat on the severed eye. I’d miney-moed wisely. Threaded into the goo was an organic transponder with, I’d bet, about a ten year life span. Laird must have been seeding these things into my eye re-gens for decades. That bastard.

  I used the little scissors from one of the first-aid kits to cut an o
val of black fabric from my shirt. A fastidious traveler had left a partial roll of dental floss on the shelf over the sink. I poked holes on two sides of the patch and used a length of the floss to hold the patch in place.

  When I emerged from the lavatory Alice stared at the eye patch and said, “I don’t like it here.”

  The light was stark. Delilah looked like a wet corpse on the bench. Rain blew against the shelter’s walls. I checked Delilah’s pulse again and found it steady. I’m hell on pulse-checking, I thought, remembering the not-dead man behind the Bedford Falls Hotel.

  “Is my mom okay?” the kid said.

  “She’s doing fine.”

  Alice chewed on her lip, waiting for the only conscious adult in the vicinity to make the next decision. So I did that.

  “You want to come along with me?”

  She nodded. “But what about Mom?”

  “She’s going to sleep for a long time,” I said. “And when she wakes up we’ll probably be back. You don’t have to worry about her.”

  She still looked doubtful, so I told her we’d write Delilah a note, letting her know where we went. That seemed to relieve some of the tension in the kid’s face.

  “Okay,” she said. Her face lit up with a smile, and I recognized her for what she was: an anchoring strand in the web of human attachments I’d recklessly begun to spin from my guts.

  chapter thirteen

  Daytime dialed up hot after the brief and violent night. Steam rose off everything, even our clothes. An exploded curbside terminal burned merrily on a Waukegan street corner, the flames nearly invisible in the glare of the false sun. Broken glass glittered in the street, trash hustled around in hot little whirlwinds. The air had thickened, and I almost had to swallow every breath like thin soup. Alice had taken hold of my hand again and was squeezing it hard. A couple of times during the long walk from the Oxygen Forest my stomach had moved in queasy undulations. Which could have been guilt, or—much worse—an indication George had begun to tamper with The County’s gravity field.

  “Here,” Alice said, tugging me toward the double doors of a chalk-white and very official-looking building, like maybe the place where Mickey Mouse planned all the parades and stuff. On our way to the stairs I drew some unfriendly looks from people who appeared wrung out and pissed off. One guy did more than look. He seized my arm and spun me around to face him. “You bastard,” he said. Bared teeth, blood crusted on flared nostril. I braced myself for a blow I probably deserved. But a couple of other men pulled him off, and Alice pulled urgently at my hand. I didn’t bother telling her not to be scared.

  “This one,” she said, once we’d attained the second floor, and she pushed her finger against a door marked by a simple plaque: “Mayor.”

  I knocked.

  The old man who answered was short and stooped. What little hair remaining on his pate was wispy as cobwebs. The wrinkly face brightened slightly at the sight of Alice. He kissed her cheek, then rubbed her head with a palsied hand. She put up with it.

  When he turned his attention to me all he said was, “You’re Herrick.” And his eyes were like a pair of peeled grapes staring moistly from nests of papyrus skin. I didn’t hold my breath for a kiss.

  “And you’re—”

  “Ben Roos. Alice’s father.”

  “Gene father,” Alice said.

  Roos scowled at her. “Where’s Delilah?”

  Alice looked at me. Delilah had called Roos before we departed Bedford Falls. She had assured him that I could put things right if given a chance.

  “We had to split up,” I said.

  He grunted. “You can fix this mess?”

  “Possibly.”

  He grunted again, eloquently, and turned his back. We followed him into the office. He pointed at the Core Access Interface, another big barber chair version, like the one I’d once used in Bedford Falls. At the sight of it a queer sensation passed through me. Something like fear. Then it was gone.

  “There you go,” Roos said. “People could die, Mr. Herrick. I hope when you say ‘possibly’ you’re just being coy.”

  “Me, too.”

  I sat down and performed a soft interface with the CAI. The old man and Alice and the room and the world slipped away. The SuperQuantum environment read me and produced an analog. George. Mr. George, my seventh grade history teacher was an Ichabod Crane knock-off, only not as handsome. I’d left him in an empty classroom “correcting” student papers with a liar’s red pen, disbursing a stickman army of D’s and F’s to papers deserving of better. This was my unconscious symbolic language for the smidgen of chaos I’d intended to introduce and which, apparently, had morphed into something much more serious.

  I looked over George’s shoulder. He was drawing smiley faces on the endlessly replenishing stack of papers. Huh?

  “You can’t outfox me with my own toys,” Laird Ulin said, speaking through the mouth of Ichabod George, not looking up from his endless scribble of smilies.

  I backed away. The room lacked windows and doors. Laird had isolated my virus and was letting me know as much. I pressed into a corner and found myself folded over to my parent’s bedroom, the way it had looked when I was an eight-year-old boy. There was another analog: Me, this time. I was rummaging through my mother’s purse. I came up with Mom’s wallet and started plucking bills out while sneaking looks over my shoulder. Sneaky. Repeat.

  I fled from that scene and passed through a complex chain of interconnected vandalisms. My various analog selves set fires, kicked some kid in the balls, tortured insects and small animals, etc. Anyone else seeking problems in the SuperQuantum environment would witness their own versions of various malicious acts—but my individual stamp would be on every single one.

  “It’s quite out of control,” Laird Ulin said.

  I turned. He was sitting behind a free-floating ebony slab the thickness of a sheet of paper, fiddling with cut glass chess pieces.

  “I thought George would catch you off guard,” I said.

  “You forgot about shadows,” Laird said. “Or gambled one wouldn’t occur.”

  “Shit. I gambled.”

  Ulin grinned.

  A quirk of SuperQuantum technology is the occasional quantum shadow—a future ghost in the machine. Laird must have seen my tampering before I even did it, which gave him time to do a little tampering of his own and stamp it with my personal signature—conferring upon me instant persona non grata status in The County.

  I felt a weird combination of relief and resignation.

  “So now I’ll come back to surgery and you’ll make things right,” I said.

  Laird smiled.

  The chessboard turned into a crystal display of complex quantum language: the reality behind the dramatic analogs.

  “The errors are self-perpetuating,” Laird said, pointing. “I constructed it that way. Couldn’t help myself, Ellis. You made me mad this time.” He waved his hand and the chessboard returned.

  “Definitely mad,” I said, picking up a knight. It was slightly tempting. Retreat was my fatal flaw and I knew it. Besides, there was nothing I could do about the quantum errors Laird had unleashed. Only he could spare The County. Hell, returning to my emotionally remote cocoon on the Command Level was practically an act of noble self-sacrifice.

  “Maybe we should skip the game for now,” I said.

  “Nonsense,” Laird said, taking the knight from my fingers and replacing it in its proper position on the chessboard.

  “Shouldn’t you be getting busy? I nodded toward my delinquent analogs.

  “There’s plenty of time,” he said. “All the time in the world. Besides, correcting these errors will be very difficult, and I’m not inclined to do it. The more miserable life is in The County, the less likely you will be to find safe haven. Ever. There will be no more running away, Ellis. Now why don’t we relax and have a game while the Environment sustains?”

  I quoted Ben Roos: “People could die.”

  Laird shrugged. He
tapped a pawn on the chessboard. “Shall we play?”

  “We shall not.”

  Laird scowled. I inhaled deeply, withdrew from the interface, and leaned forward in the chair, rubbing my good eye. The patch had slipped a little on the other one, and I adjusted it.

  Alice was gone. Ben Roos sat on the small sofa by himself with a cup of tea or something that he didn’t appear inclined to drink.

  Two men flanked me. They didn’t look friendly. Something ticked against the window. The ticking increased and subsided, in waves. Rain. Wind. I looked up at the man on my right and said, “Not guilty.” He pulled a frown.

  Ben Roos was staring daggers at me from the sofa. He was a pretty good dagger starer, too. Welcome back to the land of the living. Actually, I was glad to be there. No more running away.

  “Where’s Alice?” I asked.

  “She’s gone off,” he said. “And if anything happens to her it will be on your head, like the rest of this mess.”

  “I can explain some things,” I said.

  Roos snorted. “Save your explanations.” He stood. “I’ll check the uplink. Keep Herrick here until they arrive.”

  He went out.

  I got up but my flankers crowded me.

  “I’ll just be on my way,” I said. “I have uplinks to check, and miles to go before I sleep.”

  The slightly older man shook his head. “You’re staying right here until the Command Authority comes for you.”

  “Hmmm,” I said.

  When I started for the door, the younger guy stood in front of me, rather beefishly.

  “Have a seat, Mr. Herrick.” He grinned. “What are you supposed to be, anyway, a pirate?”

  “Yo ho ho,” I said. “And what are you supposed to be, an idiot?”

  He scowled impressively, and I moved into his space, held the back of his head as if I intended to kiss him, found his carotid artery with two rigid fingers, and invited him to unconsciousness. He looked surprised, then slack, then he fell.