I sat down and tried to think. It would be good if I could recover some of my most recently misplaced memory. A few glimpses occurred. Faces I couldn’t put names to. Some kind of bar, loud music. But was I remembering these things or imagining them? The last Zingcup I could recall enjoying was the one I’d had back on Earth before abandoning my city apartment. I vividly remembered the wonderful mind-clearing sensation of the junk wind. That was too damn long ago. Helma had mentioned a Zingbar. How hard could it be to find? I had to clear the junk out of my head.
Leaving the apartment I found myself on a spiraling walkway under the Seventh Great Dome of Planet X. Here was a multilayered urban landscape, crowds of pedestrians, airborne vehicles buzzing above and below my level, the noise and riot of any big city. I stopped a random pedestrian and asked him which way to the nearest Zingbar. He pointed me in the right direction and never evinced a scintilla of recognition at the sight of my face; I hadn’t known what to expect, and breathed an inward sigh of relief. Perhaps I wouldn’t be burdened with the dubious celebrity of being “The Herrick.” Thank God for that, at least.
I found the bar.
A stylized squiggle of crimson neon depicting a Zingcup with inhaler attached. Zone Seven. I stood on the sidewalk and stared at it but didn’t go in. A Zing wouldn’t really clear my head; it would just temporarily displace a plethora of anxieties. In the process of displacing them it would also fuck me up, in the grand tradition of all mind-altering anxiety displacers. And all of a sudden I wanted my faculties fully intact. So for now I walked away, making a mental note of the bar’s location.
A number of people in the passing crowds were talking on their implanted cells, just like their progenitors on Earth had centuries before. The lack of progressive communication technology struck me as odd but I didn’t think about it too much.
I came upon a street vendor dispensing steaming bowls of noodles. Wiping the sweat off my forehead, I approached his cart.
“Bowl for you?” he said.
“No, thanks. I’m new around here. If I wanted to find someone, how would I do it? Can you tell me?”
“You’re not new around here, Mr. Herrick.”
“You know me?”
“Like a brother! What’s the matter, aren’t you feeling well?”
“I’m a little off,” I said. “Ah, how long have you known me?”
He was a fat man with big, red jowls and a wispy black beard on his chin. His face suddenly acquired a serious expression.
“I’ve known you as long as you’ve been here,” he said.
I smiled and nodded. The aroma of the noodles was getting to me a little. I wasn’t hungry but felt a compulsion to have a bowl, like it was something I was used to doing. I resisted the impulse and said:
“And how long have I been here, exactly?”
“In Building 42?”
“Sure. In Building 42.”
“About a year, I guess.”
A year! “I don’t think that’s possible.”
“Don’t think what’s possible? You’ve been buying my noodles for about a year, and you always come out of that building right over there. And that building is number 42. Am I a liar?”
I pinched the bridge of my nose between thumb and forefinger, squeezing my eyes tightly shut. When I opened them, the fat man was looking worriedly at me, holding a slotted spoon over a fragrant cauldron of bubbling noodles.
“You’re not a liar,” I said. “I’m a little messed up. I need to talk to my doctor.”
“Sure, I understand. You want some noodles, Mr. Herrick?”
“No, I’m really not hungry. How can I call my doctor?”
“You want to borrow my phone?”
“Yeah.” I held my hand out.
“Here,” he said, tapping a finger by the corner of his eye. “Look here. You are messed up, aren’t you?”
I looked at his eye.
“Straight into the eyes,” he said.
I looked straight into his eyes.
“Don’t blink,” he said.
I didn’t, and after a moment a kind of head’s-up display appeared in the air between us. It was a directory, minute columns of white-lettered names.
“Just think the person’s name without anything else around it, no other thoughts.”
Tamara, I thought, forgetting to add her last name. Nevertheless her first name isolated itself, bright blue. The other names disappeared. A thumbnail picture of her appeared beside the number. I breathed out, relieved.
“You can blink now,” the noodle man said.
I blinked and the name and picture disappeared.
“I lost it,” I said.
“No, you’re connected now. Just talk. She’ll hear you all right. If she doesn’t answer it’s because she doesn’t want to. You want privacy, just walk away.”
“But I don’t have an implant.”
“It’s not implants. It’s mental. There’s no device. The eye thing and the directory, that was just to fulfill your expectation of a technology. Go ahead, talk. By the way, you could talk in your mind, but most people still have a problem with that.”
“Uh, thanks.”
“You’re welcome. Sure you don’t want a bowl?”
“Yeah, thanks.”
I turned away and, feeling like a fool, said, “Dr. Tamara?”
Ellis, I’m surprised to hear from you.
I looked around. People passed me by without a glance. Some of them were talking to invisible friends, too. I sat on a bench overlooking the city.
“I think I’m having one of my . . . episodes,” I said.
Oh, dear.
“Jesus, this is weird,” I said. “Somebody told me this is like telepathy. Is it something the Harbingers gave us?”
In a way. They didn’t give it to us, though. They allowed us to understand we could do it. The Harbingers are not a technological race in the usual sense. Ellis, tell me what’s happening with you.
I told her about my tremendous memory lapse. “I can’t believe it’s been a year,” I said.
It’s been a little over a year.
“I need to see you,” I said. “I feel kind of shaky. You—You tend to calm me down. I don’t know how you do that.”
There was a long pause, and I was beginning to think the connection was broken. Of course, I had no idea how to reestablish it. Then, in my mind, Dr. Tamara said: I don’t think that’s a good idea right now, Ellis.
“I thought I’d lost you. Why isn’t seeing me a good idea?”
Another pause.
Ellis, I’m sorry. I know you don’t remember, but you and I have had a serious relationship. It was serious for me, at least. After a while you couldn’t seem to deal with the intimacy. You hurt me, Ellis. I wanted to help you, but you hurt me in a cruel way. That was months ago.
“But I don’t remember any of it!”
I’m sorry.
“What did I do?”
I’d rather not discus it. This conversation is making me sad. I have to go now, Ellis.
“Wait!”
But there was nothing in my mind but the usual windy vacancy.
*
I spent the rest of the afternoon concentrating and talking to myself, trying to find Dr. Tamara again, but I didn’t have the knack or whatever it took to perform the telepathic hat trick on my own.
Finally, in despair, I wound up back at the noodleman’s cart. He looked at me as though he knew exactly why I was there. I felt a little surge of anger and impatience with myself.
“Give me a bowl,” I said.
“On the house!” he said.
Inevitably I returned to Zone Seven. The black rectangle of the doorway dissolved at my approach, admitting me to a cavern-like din of retro electronica. A jostling crowd immediately absorbed me and moved me, by diastolic undulations, to the long bar. I elbowed my way into a narrow space. Presently a beak-nosed bartender leaned toward me, ear cocked, and I ordered the house Zing. Whatever was cold. He nodded, start
ed to turn away, and I said, “Damn it, wait. I don’t have any money.”
The bartender winked. “You know you’re on a tab here, Mr. Herrick.”
“Oh, yeah. I forgot.”
He brought me a Zingcup so cold little whiffs of condensed air smoked off it, and there was a rime of frost covering the bright green slashes of a Kanji character. I caressed the cup with my thumb, leaving a streak in the rime, then fitted the inhaler to my nose and breathed deep. The junk wind blew. Oh, man! I inhaled again, emptying the cup. The lights and music acquired a crystalline quality.
Before I could put the empty down, the bartender had already placed a fresh Zingcup in front of me. I was a regular, all right, and he knew how to keep me happy. I leaned over the bar and shouted at him:
“Do I come here often?”
He laughed. “Not often, just every night!”
I raised the fresh Zingcup and emptied it up my nose. A fucking hurricane blew through my mind, sweeping away my junk fears and insecurities. The next time the bartender came within hailing distance I motioned him over and said:
“I’m looking for a girl.”
“Naturally!”
“I mean a specific girl. Her name’s Helma. Do you know her?”
“Who doesn’t? She was here a while ago. You missed her. She’ll be back, though. She always is. Or you could call her.”
“I’ll just wait,” I said.
“Okey dokey.”
He put a fresh Zingcup in front of me. I inhaled it.
And so on.
At some point I found myself crowded into a booth with a lot of people, on the edge of the dance floor. Wild-eyed denizens of Zone Seven cavorted, more or less naked, on the floor, their bodies sweated and slick under the kaleidoscopic lights. If it had been too warm in my apartment it was positively roasting in Zone Seven.
The table was covered with empty and half empty Zingcups. A woman with cat’s-eyes handed me a commercially rolled joint. Her hand stroked between my legs while I lit up. She said something in my ear, but I was mostly deaf from the music. Her tongue probed wetly around the same ear, no doubt re-enforcing her unheard suggestion.
A girl on the other side of the table watched us. She held her Zingcup in both hands, occasionally raising it to her nose. Her leather vest was untied and her breasts hung out, pimpled with sweat. She had kitty eyes, too. They appeared genetically altered. She leaned across the table, breasts pendent, and I noticed the Zing frost ringing her nostrils. She kissed me hard. When I moved my tongue inside her lips, she bit down on it. I couldn’t pull away; blood seeped into my mouth, a copper taste.
Then I was being dragged through the crowd, the joint dangling from my lips. Catgirl One led the way, holding my hand. The sweaty breasted girl was behind me, her fingers hooked into the waist of my pants. We got outside, but it wasn’t much cooler. Catgirl One pulled eagerly at my hand. I staggered but kept up with her.
Some kind of alley. The buildings seemed to lean and sway drunkenly. I fell back against one of the unstable walls. Somehow my head was full of junk again. It was so god damn hot.
The girls came at me. One of them slapped the joint out of my mouth. They had claw-like fingernails, filed to points. They ripped my clothes with them and tossed the shreds.
One of them pulled on my half-flaccid penis, like she was milking a cow. “Come on, come on, what’s wrong with you?” she said.
“I don’t know,” I said.
A sharp-nailed finger pushed into my anus.
“You like that, right?”
“No, stop it.” I tried to push her away. I could smell my own fear. I was dripping with sweat, violated, scared.
“Stop,” I said, and shoved her hard.
“You’re useless!” she screeched.
Clawnails raked across my chest and belly. It was the sweaty-breasted girl. She started biting me. Fears roared through my head. There was too much junk in my mind, piled to the rafters, junk everywhere.
“Stop it, stop it,” I said.
I was weak as a baby and they were eating me alive. I tried to detach from them in my mind, tried to float above the junk, but I couldn’t manage it.
I screamed, struck out with my fists, connected with nothing; they were gone, the Weird Sisters of Planet X. Whatever.
Blood and sweat on my torso. Blood in my mouth. I found my clothes, flayed rags, and pulled the pants on for modesty’s sake. Then I sat with my back against the wall, weeping. Herrick the object. Desire and fury. Graffiti scrawled across the opposite wall: EVERYTHING IS SIMULTANEOUS!
Huh?
I wiped my eyes and tried to focus.
BUILDING FIVE / BLOCK TWO.
There was no graffiti.
My head lolled over. A figure stood motionless at the end of the alley, tall and alien, a devil of my mind. A Trau’dorian. It began to stalk toward me. I sat up, then stood up, shakily. It came on, a silhouetted monster. Behind it air vehicles traversed the sky inside of Dome Seven and pedestrians thronged the spiral walkway. But nobody even glanced in my direction; nobody cared about me.
The thing came on. I remembered what Dr. Tamara had said about them helping Mrs. James. Their empathetic powers. But I didn’t believe it.
I looked around for a weapon. There was nothing. I assumed a fighting stance. I couldn’t manage anything fancy, no Bruce Lee flying kicks. But I was capable of some basics, even in my wasted condition. Or hoped I was.
The Trau’dorian was almost within striking distance.
“Let’s have a game, Ellis!” it said.
I dropped my fists. Some of my terror dropped away, too, and the scales fell from my eyes. Not a Trau’dorian Devil. A biomechanical man. The scored nameplate said: RODNEY.
“Laird?” I said.
“Sometimes,” it replied.
chapter seventeen
We sat in a coffee bar two levels down from Zone Seven. I had mine iced. RODNEY poured it hot and black into his immobile mouth. My head was pounding.
“I’m swearing off Zing,” I said. “And dope.”
“I don’t zing so.”
I stared. “Did you just make a joke, Laird?”
“No, that was RODNEY. We’re both in here, unfortunately.”
“How does that work?”
“Not very well. I became desperate back in The County. I was The County. You remember, Ellis.”
“I remember.”
“No one would break my body from the interface, and I had no powers outside of the infected sphere. So I conceived the idea of downloading into the one biomech trapped and at my disposal. It was a risk, but I didn’t care. Once I’d freed my body from the interface I posited two possibilities. First: my body, emptied of its ego consciousness, might cease to live. Second was the possibility that my downloaded ego consciousness would be a duplicate, that the “me” in the biomech would merely be a memory imprint. If that were true then as soon as my corporeal body was separated from the quantum interface the real me would once again inhabit my real body.”
“And there would have been two of you.”
“At which point I could have deactivated RODNEY. Or, more intriguing, I could have allowed the other me to persist. It would have produced some interesting chess matches.”
“Anyway, it didn’t work.”
“No, it didn’t. In the first place, not all of RODNEY’s memory and ego engrams were wiped. So now he’s woven throughout my own ego consciousness. If it is my ego consciousness and not merely a duplicate.”
“And in the second place your body was already long dead.”
“Yes. A miscalculation. My time sense was not entirely reliable.”
“I can relate to that.”
Laird poured the rest of his coffee into his mouth, dribbling some on his chin. A black bead of coffee rolled down and dripped onto his breastplate.
“Sometimes,” he said, “I don’t feel like I’m anywhere at all, Ellis.”
“I can relate to that, too.”
“Can I com
e home with you?”
“What?”
“I’m lonely.”
“Who’s talking, Laird or RODNEY?”
“Ellis, it’s me.”
“Laird?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re lonely.”
The RODNEY biomech sat across from me, a statue, expressionless, stiff.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“I can’t stay with you?”
“No.”
“You’re cold, Ellis.”
“And you’re a murderer.”
“No!”
“Even forgetting the Calamity, I know you deliberately crushed twenty people.”
Laird was silent a long while, then said: “I was quite mad, but I’m better now. Being cut off from the corrupted core has allowed my ego engrams to settle into a more orderly arrangement, despite RODNEY’s presence. Believe me, Ellis, I’m not the man I used to be.”
“You’ve been here as long as me. Where have you been staying up till now?”
“Nowhere. I wander. I’ve been all over. Even outside the seven domes. My energy cells are down to fifty percent, but they will keep me going for years.”
“Well, you can’t stay with me.”
“Very well.”
He stood up, turned, and stumped out of the coffee shop. I experienced a faint twinge of guilt, but it was extremely faint. I was about to leave, too, when I saw the biomech climb up on the wall of the spiral walkway and drop over the side.
I ran to the wall. It was about five stories to ground level. He was there, flat on his face, limbs crooked into an inverted swastika. A small crowd had already gathered around him.
By the time I arrived he was standing up and the crowd had dispersed. His nose appeared slightly flattened. Otherwise he seemed undamaged.
“Why the hell did you do that?” I said.
“It wasn’t me. It was Rodney. He periodically tries to terminate the body. He’s unhappy and insane. Only some of his engrams persist, and they are insufficient to organize a rational template.”
“What can be done about that?”
“Nothing. Good-bye, Ellis.”
He walked away again
*
Harbinger Page 22
