Harbinger

by Jack Skillingstead

  “Mrs. James has left the clinic.”

  “And when do I leave?”

  “As soon as you feel ready.”

  “Okay. I’m ready now.”

  “That’s wonderful,” Dr. Tamara said.

  “About Mrs. James . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “She—” I didn’t want to say it.

  “Go on.”

  “She reminded me of someone.”

  “Who did she remind you of, Ellis?”

  “My mother.” Something caught in my throat and I choked on it a little.

  Dr. Tamara moved closer to my bedside and put her hand on my shoulder.

  “Do you feel like talking about your mother, Ellis?”

  “No.”

  “Of course you don’t have to do anything that makes you uncomfortable.”

  “That’s good. What about these other patients of yours? Do they tell you about their mothers?”

  “Some of them do. It all depends.”

  “Oh what?” I said.

  “On where their pain lies and what they want to do about it.”

  “So when do I get out of here?”

  “It’s entirely up to you, Ellis. It always is.”

  Dr. Tamara blinked, turned her head aside, listening to something I couldn’t hear.

  “I have to go,” she said. “You think about what you’d like to do.”

  “I already know what I’d like to do,” I said. “Get out of here.”

  “That’s fine then,” she said. “I’ll be talking to you soon.”

  She turned to leave.

  “Hey, wait a minute—”

  “Sorry, I have to go. It’s an emergency.”

  The room was very quiet in her absence. Suddenly I wanted nothing more than to be gone. I got out of bed and looked in the bathroom and the closet. There were more hospital gown things, but no real clothes. I poked my head out into the hall, thinking I’d catch Dr. Tamara before she got too far, but the hallway was empty in both directions.

  “Doctor!”

  My voice echoed flatly.

  I felt as lonely as I’d ever felt in my life. There was something comforting about Dr. Tamara (even if she was too young to be a real doctor). She had something I needed badly. But even more than that I needed to get out of this clinic or whatever it was.

  I stepped out into the hall and started walking, bare feet slapping on the cold, institutional floor. There were doors on both sides of the hall, but they were shut. I tried a couple of them and found them locked. I kept moving. There had to be a nurse’s station.

  Other corridors branched off from the main one. None of them led anywhere. I trotted up and down these hallways to nowhere, my ass hanging out of the gown.

  There were no nurse’s stations.

  Finally I discovered a door that opened. It was at the end of one of the branching corridors and was bigger than the other doors.

  It opened onto a stairwell.

  I entered the stairwell but held the door open until I was sure the knob would turn the latch on the stairwell side. It did, and I let the door fall shut. Up or down? Down presumably led out, plus it would be easier than climbing stairs.

  I descended a couple of floors then paused to have a look. I opened the landing door and peered out. Hallways. Empty hallways. It figured.

  I started down again. The stairwell seemed to go on forever, like the god damn hallways. Every time I peeked out a landing door I saw the same thing.

  So I stopped, because there was some kind of disconnect occurring that I didn’t understand. I looked up the dimly lit stairwell. It ascended forever.

  I thought: I’m dreaming.

  I’d been counting flights since I entered the stairwell. It now seemed prudent to return to my room. So I began climbing. By the time I reached the right floor, my legs were trembling and my gown clung to the cold sweat on my body.

  I trudged back to my room. It was just as I’d left it, door open, bed unmade. I collapsed onto the mattress and dragged the covers over me. A feeling of peace and security settled upon me. I tried to reject it but couldn’t. It was a familiar feeling of retreat.

  Anyway, it didn’t matter, because I was dreaming.

  So I went to sleep to wake up—seemed logical. I opened my eyes to a slightly altered version of the room. Now I had a bedside table with a lamp I could turn on and off. There was also a call button on a cord. Moments after I pushed it a nurse type walked into the room, very starched and professional, just like the ones I used to know.

  “What can I do for you, Mr. Herrick?”

  “I was wondering when breakfast would be served.”

  She inclined her head curiously, and said, “The same time as every other morning, of course.”

  “And what time is that?”

  “Eight-thirty sharp.”

  “And what time is it now?”

  She glanced at the wall. A clock now hung there and it indicated eight oh seven.

  “It’s—” the nurse started to say.

  “Eight oh seven,” I said. “Thanks, I didn’t notice the clock.”

  “Of course,” she said, and smiled. Humor him, he’s a bit deranged. All those years in the stasis module, you know.

  After she left I got out of bed and poked my head out into the hallway. It had altered from my dream version, too. Many of the doors now stood open, and there was some kind of nurse’s station only thirty meters or so to my left. The nurse I’d just talked to was walking toward it. She had a nice swing in her backyard. I called out:

  “Nurse!”

  She stopped and turned around.

  “What is it, Mr. Herrick?”

  “I—”

  She walked back to me. “Is anything wrong?”

  “No. I mean, I don’t know, really. This is going to sound weird, but is there really a Dr. Tamara on staff?”

  I was afraid she had been part of my vivid dream or delusion, and I wanted her to be real. I needed her to be.

  The nurse looked puzzled. “Dr. Tamara?” Then understanding dawned. “You mean Dr. Roberts. Tamara Roberts.”

  Roberts. Same as Nichole’s last name. “I guess so. The one who’s been working with me since I got here. Some kind of psychologist?”

  “Yes, what about her?”

  “Nothing. I just wanted to know whether she’s real.”

  “She’s as real as I am,” the nurse said, which failed completely to put my mind at ease.

  *

  While I ate my breakfast I thought about Mrs. James and the Trau’dorian. I thought about what Dr. Tamara had said, about how I’d been helpless to interfere because of my weakened condition, and that in a way it had been a good thing, because the alien was really helping Mrs. James, not harming her. But the doctor had put it in a strange way, comparing me to a child, a helpless child.

  *

  “You’re looking well,” Dr. Tamara said.

  “You don’t look half bad yourself,” I said.

  She laughed. “And pretty feisty, too, I see.”

  “I want to ask you about Infinity.”

  “Go right ahead.”

  “There were a lot of people on board, not just me. Where are the others?

  Dr. Tamara looked sober, then said, “You were the only human survivor. The ship had deviated wildly from her intended course. Additional centuries had passed. Massive system failures had occurred. Recycling and reclamation capacities were exhausted.”

  This didn’t surprise me, but hearing it stated took the wind out of my sails anyway. Then I said:

  “The only human survivor?”

  “We also recovered one biomechanical.”

  “Just one?”

  “As I understand it,” Dr. Tamara said, “the SuperQuantum core had become corrupted. All the biomechanical beings were interfaced with the core and depended upon it for their equilibrium. Evidently the core wound up destroying all their memory matrixes.”

  “All but one.”

  “Yes
. Ident name is RODNEY. He’s here in the Dome, actually.”

  “Doctor, there’s something I really don’t understand. How could you people have reached Infinity at all, let alone brought me and RODNEY to this planet?”

  “You recall the Harbinger controversy before you left Earth? Of course you do, you were intimately involved beginning way back in the 1970s. At the time of Infinity’s departure from Earth orbit the Harbingers had begun manifesting to receptive portions of human society. To make this short, they eventually emerged fully into human consciousness. We were able to travel to the stars, colonize this planet, and even recover you from Infinity by using certain Harbinger methodologies.”

  “My God, so they were real.”

  “Very real, yes.”

  “Well I have a few questions for them. I don’t suppose you have one handy.”

  “There is a Harbinger on this planet. He’s sort of a hermit and not easily approached. In fact, humans don’t approach Harbingers as a general rule; Harbingers approach us, when it suits them. They rarely intervene, but sometimes take an interest if a species is both promising and perilously verging on self-destruction at the same time. Then they might appear, literally, as Harbingers of consciousness evolution. This is what happened on Earth.”

  “You seem to know a lot about them.”

  “Not so very much, really. Just what everyone else knows. And nobody knows ‘a lot’ about the Harbingers.”

  “Okay. How are you with dream interpretation?”

  “It’s not my specialty, but I can try. Do you have a particularly interesting one?”

  I told her about my long walk through the empty clinic, the endless hallways, the bottomless stairwells. I also told her about the oddly un-detailed aspect of my room and the rest of the clinic, even during her previous visits.

  “That’s a little disturbing,” Dr. Tamara said. “It indicates an overlapping between your dream logic and the real world we inhabit in common. I blame it on the stasis module. Now you’ve exhibited two classic symptoms of stasis damage. It amounts to a kind of mild psychosis.”

  “Wonderful. Will it pass?”

  “That’s impossible to predict.”

  “I feel tired all of a sudden,” I said.

  “Why don’t you have a rest then.”

  “I just woke up,” I said, yawning.

  “Ellis, you’re far from fully recovered, either mentally or physically. You go ahead and rest. Indulge yourself. Your body knows what it needs.”

  “Usually,” I said, settling back on my pillow.

  She stood up.

  “Hey, Dr. Tamara.”

  “Hmmm?”

  “You never interpreted my dream. I mean the part of it that really was a dream. All that wandering around searching for an exit out of this place.”

  “That one’s easy,” she said. “It means you weren’t ready to leave yet.”

  “I felt ready. More than ready. You said yourself that it was up to me. You said that before I had the dream. It was on my mind. That’s probably why I had the dream in the first place.”

  “Very possibly.”

  “Well, good night. Or good morning, or whatever it is.”

  “Have a nice rest. And Ellis?”

  “Yeah?”

  “It really is up to you. Everything is.”

  She went out. I closed my eyes. Something about that phrase was maddeningly familiar. I tried to fall asleep but couldn’t. It nagged at me. And there had been a companion phrase to go with it. So long ago and unreal, lost in my memory vaults.

  I drifted for a while, dozing. Then the urge to pee brought me reluctantly, groggily, back out of it, and I sat up. It was too dark in the room. I fumbled for the lamp switch but couldn’t find it. Irritated, I swung my legs out of bed, girding myself for the cold tile floor. But the floor was carpeted. I worked my toes in the nap. What the hell? Was I dreaming again? It was getting so I couldn’t trust my sense of reality from one hour to the next. Which was fairly disturbing. I wished I hadn’t tried to sleep again. I wished Dr. Tamara hadn’t gone. My heart was beating too fast. Fear surged though me like ice water in my veins. I started to rise.

  But stopped.

  Even in the dark, the room felt different, the unseen space was all wrong. My breath came shallowly, and I knew I wasn’t alone.

  chapter sixteen

  Somebody moved on the bed next to me, and a hand touched my bare back.

  I jerked away from it, startled.

  “Hey—” a female voice. Low register. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “I can’t find the damn light switch,” I said.

  “Fuck’s sake, you just turned them off yourself.” She moved on the bed. The lights came up slowly, like theater lights. Her arm, brown and smooth, reached past me to a wall sensor. Her fingers were short and inelegant, the nails too long, the red polish chipped.

  “You don’t have to jump out of your skin,” she said.

  “Sorry, I was having some kind of bad dream.”

  “You weren’t even asleep! We just fucked.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “That memorable, huh?”

  She snaked her arm around my waist, her hand settling on my deflated penis. I shrank away from her touch—literally. She wiggled my member as if it were a broken toy.

  “Golly, you talk a better time than you give,” she said.

  “I do tend to inflate my virtues,” I said. “Could you stop that now?” I removed her hand.

  “Well, excuse me,” she said.

  “Sorry. I’m having kind of a hard time.”

  “Like heck you are.”

  I still hadn’t turned around to look at her. I was afraid and had no idea how to articulate my fear.

  “Hey, are you having one of your episodes or whatever you call them, like you said you had?”

  “Tell me what I said.”

  “You said you were in a stasis module for a long time and it fucked with your brain, so you had these episode things where you forget what was going on. Like that?”

  I nodded. “That’s about it. Care to tell me your name?”

  “Helma. You really don’t remember it?”

  “And where are we, Helma?”

  “In your very nice apartment, which is on the rim of Dome Seven.”

  “Dome Seven?”

  “Oh, brother. You are far gone. Dome Seven is the newest dome on Planet X, that’s all.”

  “Planet X?”

  “They’re still arguing about what to name it.”

  “And everybody lives in domes?”

  “Naturally, while the terraforming is going on. Where else would everybody live, in caves like the Trau-dorians?”

  “At least I know what a Trau’dorian is,” I said. “Big devil-looking guys, right?”

  “Right!”

  Finally I scooted around to look at Helma. She was plain-faced, young, voluptuously curved. Her breasts were bound in some kind of S&M harness, blue-black nipples erect. She was kneeling on the mattress.

  “Helma, I’m a little scared.”

  Her face bunched up in an ugly way. “Scared of what?”

  “I don’t really know. It’s an off-balance feeling. I don’t remember anything since I was in the clinic.”

  “So what am I supposed to do about it?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “Good, because if you need a mommy to rock you to sleep, I’m not it.”

  “Thanks for telling me.”

  “Don’t go like I’m offending you,” she said. “I’m just saying I’m your girlfriend, not your mother or your damn head doctor.”

  “You know Dr. Tamara?”

  “Whoever. I don’t know her. But you talk about her, like she’s something good. I doubt if she’s better than me, though. One thing you never said, did you fuck her?”

  “I know what your favorite word is,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind. How long have you been my girlfriend?”

>   “Since tonight.”

  “And I already told you all that stuff about myself?”

  “Sure. You were Zinged. I couldn’t have shut you up. Besides you had plenty of nice things to say about me, too. I thought you had real personality. I like it when a guy has personality. Hey, are we going to go another one, or not?”

  She reached for my penis again.

  “Guess not,” she said.

  She bounced off the bed and pulled on a pair of shiny blue shorts and sleeveless top. It was warm in the room, almost too warm.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Back to work, since we’re done.”

  “Can’t—Can’t you stay?”

  “What for?”

  “I don’t know. We could talk. You could sleep here.”

  “Sleep? It’s the middle of the day, Ellis. And we can talk in the Zingbar.”

  “Right. I just thought . . .”

  She leaned over and grabbed my face in her blunt-fingered hand and kissed me wetly on the lips.

  “Sweetie, I have to go.”

  And she went.

  I heard the door of the apartment hiss shut. The silence she left in her wake was deafening. I felt weak and vulnerable and I definitely could have used a mommy to rock me to sleep.

  Fuck it. As Helma might have said.

  I got up and hunted for clothes. The room really was hot. The clothes I found were made out of some very light material, pants and short-sleeved shirt.

  I walked out of the bedroom and gaped at the view through a big curved window. A vast and barren landscape bathed in pumpkin light. Lightning zigzagged across the sky. Great plumes vented out of the tortured landscape outside the dome.

  I was up high, maybe twenty stories. The domes interconnected at double levels by fully enclosed sky bridges. The view became vaguely disturbing, and I found a dial that polarized the window down to a black, non-reflective sheet. That was better, but I could still have used my favorite headshrinker.

  I looked around the apartment, which consisted of four rooms: the bedroom, the small living room, the smaller kitchenette, and the smallest bathroom. I discovered nothing that looked even vaguely like a telephone. Even if I had found such a device, I wouldn’t have known how to call the doctor. And I didn’t know anybody else. I was alone.