I went home and took a shower. When I came out Helma was sitting in the living room smoking a joint.
“Hi,” I said. “How did you get in here?”
She narrowed her eyes at me. “How do you think?”
“I have no idea, that’s why I asked.”
“Fuck,” she said, and shook her head. “You added me to your pass code weeks ago.”
“I just met you yesterday.”
“Fuck.”
Uh oh.
But how could I have suffered an episode? I had a full and unbroken memory path of the preceding hours leading up to my stepping out of the shower and discovering Helma on my sofa. It must have occurred in the shower, the stall billowing with steam. Two showers on two different days. A coincidence.
“You look like you could use a Zing,” Helma said.
“I gave that up.”
She laughed.
“I did,” I said.
“When, this morning?”
“Yes. I mean, no, not if it’s weeks later.”
“You’re confused, poor baby.” She held the joint out to me, a thread of pungent smoke unwinding from its tip.
“No, thanks.”
She gave me a knowing up-from-under look and continued to proffer the joint. I obeyed my nature and took it from her. But I didn’t bring it to my lips. I wanted to, but instead I walked into the tiny kitchenette, ran water over its burning end, then dropped the soggy thing into the garbage.
Helma watched me from the sofa.
“You’re serious,” she said.
I nodded. I sat down beside her and held her hand. But it didn’t feel natural so I let go. She was a stranger to me. Still, I’d given her access to my apartment. She was here, and that indicated a relationship existed between us.
“Helma,” I said. “I’m not myself. I haven’t been since I entered the stasis module back on Infinity. I keep losing big tracks of time, and even when I’m here it feels off, somehow strange, like a dream. I . . . I don’t have anyone. Maybe I have you, I don’t know. Right now, more than anything else, I need a friend. A real friend.”
“Not this again,” she said.
“What?”
“How can you be so much fun most of the time and then turn all gooey?”
“Forget it.”
“Look. Are we going to do it? I was thinking about you all morning. Let’s do it, then you’ll feel like yourself, baby. I guarantee it.”
She stripped her shirt off and started kissing me. Herrick the object. Again. Maybe it was better than nothing, and I tried to take it for what it was and derive some comfort. She pulled open my robe.
“Fuck. What happened to your chest?”
“A cat scratched me.”
“Big cat,” she said, and began to kneed my balls, painfully.
“You been sniffing around other pussies?” she said.
“I—”
“What’s the matter now?”
I pulled away from her. My head hurt, not just my balls.
“What?” she said.
“How can you just now be noticing my scratches if you’re my girlfriend and I got them weeks ago? It doesn’t make sense.”
“Fuck’s sake, what scratches?”
“You just—”
I looked down, touched my bare chest. It was unmarked. I began to tremble uncontrollably.
“There goes the party,” Helma said, frowning at my wilted penis. She stood up and put her shirt back on.
“Wait, don’t go,” I said.
“Why not? You look like you’re going to cry like a baby. You don’t need me for that.”
“Please don’t go.”
She went, and I cried like a baby.
*
Night hours arrived and the interior lights cycled down automatically, and I remained on the sofa. How could I live like this, unable to trust my own mind from one moment to the next?
I got up and went into the kitchen for water. In the dark I kicked something metallic that skittered across the floor and banged into other metallic objects, loudly.
“Lights,” I said. “Lights.”
The lights came up. The first thing I noticed was yellow linoleum.
Linoleum?
A half dozen or so cooking pot lids, stainless steel with black knobs on the top, lay scattered over the yellow floor. I stared at them in dumb incomprehension.
It wasn’t a kitchenette anymore but a full-sized kitchen of an era centuries past but still fresh in my wounded memory. A doorway presented itself on the other side of the kitchen. Someone out of sight was walking toward that door. I could hear her footfalls on the carpet. Someone I knew. A shadow preceded the person.
“Lights off!” I yelled, and darkness took over the kitchen again. The footsteps dimmed away, too.
Those damn lids.
*
I needed to talk to Tamara. I’d discovered there were no phones in the dome city. Everybody used the same telepathic trick the noodleman had shown me. Lying on my bed with the door shut tight against intrusive memory ghosts, I blinked like a Tourette’s victim and tried to conjure up the directory by sheer force of will. This got me nowhere. So I huddled in my room until morning, then dressed and left the apartment.
I had to ask six different people before I encountered someone who thought he knew what I meant by a “hospital clinic.” Apparently citizens of the dome never got sick, although there was the occasional injury caused by accident.
From the outside the clinic looked like a giant upside-down ice-cream cone. Lemon sherbet. It had a dissolving door, like many of the shops and nightclubs. As I approached it, Dr. Tamara appeared before me.
“Ellis, hello.”
“Hello. How’d you know I was coming?”
“I think you tried to call me,” she said. “It came across as an Ellis vibration, but you didn’t really know what you were doing, so we couldn’t talk. I knew you would come here, so I watched for you.”
“I need you,” I said. “Professionally, I mean. I need your professional counsel. I don’t know what went on between us since I blanked out, so I can’t apologize for that. But I’m asking you, one human being to another, for help.”
She sighed.
“Let’s go for a walk,” she said.
We descended the nearest spiral then wound our way through the streets until we came to a city park. Along the way I told her about my more frequent time dilations and of the vision of the cooking pot lids.
She put her hand on my arm and we stopped walking. We stood on the edge of a serene pond. The air, as always, was too warm for comfort. My comfort, anyway.
“Ellis, tell me what you think of the scratches and the cooking pot lids.”
“I just did,” I said.
“No. You described what happened and how you felt. Now tell me what you think about them.”
“I think it’s what you said before, about my mind suffering some kind of cognitive rift as a result of prolonged exposure to the stasis module.”
She shook her head, frustrated. “I’m asking it wrong.”
“Asking what wrong?”
“Tell me what you feel right now.”
“Scared.”
“Why?”
“Because I can’t trust my own perceptions, which means I can’t trust anything. I’m afraid I’m going to lose my mind completely and won’t even know it. And I will live a very long time as a madman. The idea terrifies me.”
She watched me closely while I talked. She looked serious and thoughtful and indecisive. Then the indecisive part dropped away and she said:
“The stasis module didn’t harm you.”
“What?”
“There’s nothing wrong with your mind as a result of stasis. Nothing.”
“I’m not following you.”
“Look around you and think,” she said. “Don’t you find it strange that we should be terraforming this inhabited planet? Don’t you wonder exactly how we came to be here in the first place?”
/>
“The Harbingers—”
“The Harbingers are non-technological.”
“I’m a big boy, Tamara; just tell me what you’re getting at.”
“All right. Listen to me, Ellis. You are responsible for this whole world, everything in it, and—almost—everyone in it.”
I stared at her.
“What do you mean I’m responsible?”
“This is hard to explain.”
“Evidently.”
“You may not be ready. In fact, you probably aren’t. But it isn’t fair to keep you in the dark, either, even if it’s you keeping yourself there.”
My head was starting to ache again.
“Look at me, Ellis. Study my face.”
“Why?”
“Just do it, please.”
“Okay.” I looked at her, concentrating on her features.
“Now close your eyes and describe me.”
“I don’t—”
“Please. Humor me.”
I closed my eyes, began to describe her—and couldn’t. Because I couldn’t see her in my mind’s eye. I tried to call up a mental picture but there wasn’t one. Only a blank space where Dr. Tamara’s face should have been. My heart started beating faster. I felt nauseous. Quickly, I opened my eyes and looked at her, and immediately felt steady again. Grounded.
“God, what was that about?” I said.
“I’m not Dr. Tamara,” she said. “There is no Dr. Tamara.”
“Then who are you?”
“I’m Nichole.”
I stared at her. “You’re not.”
“I am.”
She didn’t look anything like Nichole. Maybe I couldn’t describe her with my eyes shut, but I could see her plainly with them open, and she wasn’t Nichole; Nichole was dead.
She said, “Do you remember what my mother said about the Harbingers altering you to be some kind of pointer? An ‘impossible thing?’”
“She wasn’t your mother, but I remember what Mrs. Roberts said.”
“Stay with me, Ellis. The Harbingers are real. They did use you to help nudge human consciousness towards transmaterialistic evolution. They introduced the undeniable, scientifically verified impossible into general human awareness. You weren’t the only pointer, of course. Just one of the biggest, most widely known. You were a wedge designed to open minds. For over two centuries there was a steady accretion of evidence towards a breakdown of the conventional human paradigm of rational consciousness. By the end of the twentieth century people generally accepted ideas and phenomenon that would have been dismissed as ridiculous earlier. It occurred simultaneously, on multiple dimensions of time and space, wherever human ego consciousness thrived.
“And it worked. Of course not everyone evolved. But enough did. Logical materialism had been carrying the human race towards self-destruction. That won’t happen now. There are enough of us. Shepherds. And gradually every individual ego consciousness will get it, will evolve until we all join the broader community of sentient beings. The only faster-than-light vehicle is a self-aware ego consciousness.”
“Take it easy,” I said.
“Ellis it’s so damned exciting. It’s freedom.”
“But you said I was making all this up, that it wasn’t real.”
“No, it’s real. This world has material substance. But you are altering it and populating it in your mind to suit your need.”
“What need?”
“When the Harbingers changed you it was for a specific purpose. Once that purpose was fulfilled they abandoned you to your fate. You’ve been left behind. They don’t care, but I do. I wouldn’t abandon you.”
“Why not?”
“Because I love you.”
Suddenly I wanted to pull her into my arms, but didn’t. “That’s the craziest bunch of bullshit I’ve ever heard.”
“You’re almost there, Ellis. But you’re so afraid. All this is about your fear. You have to work it out.”
“Don’t leave me again,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s all up to you.”
*
There was a break, and I was alone again. I remembered the conversation the way you remember a conversation in a dream, the details fuzzy. And it seemed to have no more substance than a dream.
*
Strangely I didn’t seek out Dr. Tamara again. When I thought about her at all it was with embarrassment and a kind of relief. Though I couldn’t remember what depths our relationship had reached beyond those of patient-doctor, I knew from past experience that I had been responsible for derailing our intimacy. And as lonely as I became under the seventh dome of planet X, I was unwilling to resume that intimacy which led inevitably to separation and grief.
However I returned to the park many times, finding the pond like some kind of homing instinct. I didn’t know why. It somehow felt like a safe place. It felt like Nichole.
I was there one day when I noticed RODNEY sitting by himself on a park bench. At first I started to slip away, praying he hadn’t noticed me. Then I stopped. He appeared so inanimate with his arms slack at his sides and his painted stare, I wondered whether his batteries had run down after all.
I approached him. He gave no sign that he was aware of me. When I was standing before him I said:
“Laird?”
No response.
Tucked between his right hand and his thigh was a rectangular box. I snapped my fingers in front of RODNEY’S face but he remained statue still.
“Rodney?” I said.
I sat beside him on the bench and turned my head to read the words on the box. It was a chess set. Leaning over, I put my ear to his breastplate and listened. There was a faint percolating sound. He was powered down but not shut off entirely.
I got up and started walking away, but stopped when the thing said:
“Wait. Ellis, wait.”
I went back. “That you in there, Laird?”
“A piece of me.”
His face came up, still void of expression, but that’s how it was with biomechs.
I pointed at the box. “Let’s have a game.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“I’d like that, Ellis.”
I sat back down on the bench and we set up the board between us. I was rusty, and within a half hour he had me in check.
“Just like old times,” he said.
“Don’t count on it.”
I managed to avoid checkmate for a few more moves but his counter moves were flawless and he beat me without breaking a sweat.
“Another?” he said.
“Not today.”
“Very well.”
*
I began walking through the park every couple of days. For the exercise, I told myself. Laird was always sitting by himself on the same bench with his chess set. This went on for a few weeks before I approached him again.
“Laird?”
He nodded. There was a ragged tear in the synthetic skin stretched across his forehead.
“What happened there?” I asked, pointing.
“RODNEY stuck our head into a giant fan blade.”
I winced. “I bet that hurt.”
“Not really,” Laird said. “There aren’t any neuro pain transmitters built into the biomechanical matrix. If the engineers were that clever they would have given these things penises that work.”
An awkward silence fell between us. I gazed around at the trees, which looked exactly as they always did.
“I see you have your chess set.”
He didn’t reply.
“Do you want to play a game?”
“If you wish.”
I sat down and we set up the board. Laird beat me again, but I didn’t get bitchy about it this time.
“Another?” I said.
“Very well.”
We didn’t chat while we played, and it was quiet in the park. The biomechanical body made its standard percolating noises, but they were louder than usual. An
d periodically there was a strangled blatting sound, like air squeezing through a torn gasket, or a fart. This sound occurred a few times during the course of our games. I pretended not to notice. Finally Laird said:
“Sorry. That’s because of RODNEY again.”
“Something he ate?” I said, thinking I was being funny.
“Something he drank. RODNEY tried to kill our body by swallowing a powerful solvent. He did accomplish a certain amount of damage. The artificial digestive track is a ruin, so no more beverages. The solvent also burned off our rudimentary taste buds, so it doesn’t matter.”
“I’m sorry, Laird.”
“It’s hell living in here with a madman,” he said. “You can’t imagine.”
I thought I could imagine, but didn’t bother saying so.
“Best two out of three?” I said, tapping a pawn on the chessboard.
“I’ve already won two.”
“Do you want to play, or not?”
He began setting up the pieces.
chapter eighteen
I withdrew. I quit seeing Helma and stopped frequenting Zingbars, too. I felt no desire for women or mind-altering inhalants. It could be said that I was depressed. Time unwound before me like a long gray path through miasmic fog. Occasionally I blanked out and lost a month, or a year, or even ten years. It didn’t matter. I found menial employment changing oxygen filters and tried to do as little thinking as possible.
I continued to meet Laird Ulin in the park for our chess games. It was the one activity I took any interest in. I had eschewed human society, but Laird was not human. He was an ageless constant. Ironically, the only companion I could tolerate. Together we rode that bench into the future, while the mortals around us transformed with age and died off, and the vast terraforming machinery outside the domes never ceased their labors to transform Planet X.
Once, I accidentally saw Dr. Tamara. Many years had passed. I could not even estimate how many. I saw her in the same park where Laird and I played our games. She was old, and she was walking with a man who was also old. Strange that I even knew it was her. In all the years I had been unable to call up her face in memory.
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