Harbinger

by Jack Skillingstead

I recalled very little about our last meeting, but I did remember the experiment she had me perform and how I’d even then failed to “see” her when I wasn’t looking right at her. But this old woman, I knew immediately she was Dr. Tamara. The white hair and soft chin and roadmap of lines didn’t matter.

  They walked right past me on the path. I stopped dead on my feet. Neither Tamara or her man appeared to notice. Then when they were past I looked over my shoulder, and she had stopped, still holding her companion’s hand but looking at me.

  “Remember, Ellis, it’s up to you. It always has been.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “You know.”

  “I don’t.”

  “All right, then.”

  They continued on their way, and it was the last time I saw her. Sort of.

  Laird was waiting, as usual, and we began to play. But I was distracted by the encounter and couldn’t concentrate.

  “That was a stupid move,” Laird said.

  “So what? I’m entitled to an occasional lapse. I’ve beat you enough times.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “I think we’re about even,” I said.

  Laird continued to study the board. His face was completely devoid of expression, of course, but I could tell something was up with him.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “Nothing.”

  “Tell me.”

  “You haven’t actually won any of our matches.”

  “Of course I’ve won,” I said. “I’ve won so many games I couldn’t keep count. At least as many as you’ve won.”

  “I let you win.”

  “What?”

  “I let you win those games.”

  “Oh, that’s bullshit.” I stared at him. “Isn’t it?”

  “No. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have told you.”

  “You let me win.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why the hell would you do that?”

  “I was afraid you would stop coming if all you ever did was lose.”

  I stood up without even intending to. I guess my pride was injured.

  “Don’t go,” Laird said.

  “I don’t see any point in playing if you’re going to cheat.”

  “It’s not cheating if I let you win.”

  “It is too cheating. It’s reverse cheating, but it’s still cheating.”

  Laird blinked his doll’s eyes. “Reverse cheating?”

  “Yeah. Cheating or reverse cheating—either way it’s not fair. Besides, if you’d just played your best game every time eventually I would have caught on to all your strategies and started beating you legitimately.”

  Laird didn’t say anything.

  “Right?” I said. “Doesn’t that make sense?”

  “It makes sense. But . . .”

  “But what?”

  “I still would have won. You aren’t as good as I am.”

  I tried to stifle my response but it got out anyway: “So play with yourself and have a jolly time.”

  “It’s not my fault,” he said. “The biomech’s brain can process—”

  “Whatever.”

  I started walking away. I got pretty far before I heard him stumping over the grass to catch up.

  “Wait, Ellis. Wait.”

  I stopped.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “Letting you win. It wasn’t the only deceit I’ve practiced.”

  “What are the others?”

  “Just one other.”

  He stood stock still and his messed up internal mechanisms percolated and farted.

  “Well?” I said.

  “It’s about RODNEY.”

  I waited.

  “He didn’t swallow the solvent,” Laird said. “And he didn’t jump off the spiral or do any of the other things. He couldn’t. He barely exists. His few remaining engrams are too weak and disassociated to exert control over this body.”

  “So . . .?”

  “I did those things myself,” Laird said.

  “Why?”

  “I’m lonely,” he said. “And sometimes I can’t fully bear it.”

  God damn it. I said, “Listen. I want to keep playing. But no more of your fucking reverse cheating, okay?”

  “I promise, Ellis.”

  “And no more suicide bullshit.”

  “No more,” he said.

  We returned to our bench and set up the board. Laird beat me in ten moves.

  *

  The next day I was working by myself, replacing air filters on “D” Level, and I thought: Elton John.

  My mind had been wandering as usual. The dull repetitiveness of my job invited daydreaming. I was in a kind of tunnel made of green metal. The light was poor, and the smell of saturated filters was thick in the air. It was an ugly place, unpleasant to crouch in with my tools. So for no particular reason I started thinking about clouds. If you pick a word and let your imagination run with it, you can find yourself ruminating about some fairly unexpected things.

  I thought about looking at clouds when I was a little kid, the way they suggested ships and elephants and dragons. And that led to a time when I’d accessed my own “Herrick” Environment, back on Infinity. I’d been presented with a Rorschach cloud and the choice of creating a new Environment based on my present memory matrix. It was dangerous for me to visit the existent Environment, since it had been created from my own deepest memory wells from an earlier age. But I went there anyway. And I had seemed to emerge from the experience unscathed.

  But had I really?

  The danger in visiting one’s own Environment was in causing a psychosis to occur, one that could permanently disassociate a man from the reality around him. What, I asked myself, if that had happened to me and I didn’t even know it?

  Elton John.

  Nichole had hung a poster of Elton John’s Madman Across The Water on the wall above her stereo. I’d seen it on the one occasion I’d visited her bedroom. And I’d noticed approvingly that it depicted the album cover graphic and not a picture of John in one of his flamboyant stage outfits with pink feathered boa, etc. Back then I’d found the image of the performer at odds with the music. The point is, I knew that poster on Nichole’s wall was an album graphic and not a picture of Elton John. But when I visited the old Environment it had been Elton John in a costume.

  Which was supposed to be impossible.

  It indicated a serious corruption of the recorded Quantum Environment. Which in turn might indicate a serious corruption of my personal psyche.

  Fucking Elton John.

  I sat down in the green tunnel below Dome Seven and wiped the sweat out of my eyes.

  I was afraid.

  Leaving my tools and filters behind, I climbed out of the tunnel and returned to my apartment. I looked into the kitchen and it appeared normal. Everything appeared normal. But I wondered. Now I wondered.

  I dialed clear the long curving window. The sky was the palest blue, and across the landscape brushstrokes of green vegetation had begun to appear. After one hundred plus years, the terraforming of Planet X was finally bearing results.

  But I remembered the pumpkin light that had until recently suffused the sky. And I remembered my vision of pumpkin light from long, long ago, in the living room of my little rambler in Mill Creek. But was that a real memory, or one manufactured to fit the current state of my corrupted psyche?

  Was I on Planet X, really? Did Planet X even exist?

  What if I was still back on board Infinity, still interfacing with the Quantum Core, my mind spinning fantasy futures and pasts? I thought of the way dreams integrate into reality, or what passes for reality. The dripping faucet, the alarm bell, the wind blowing a loose shutter—sounds and the images they carry become part of the dream and the cord that pulls us out of the dream and back to the waking world. So if I were still locked into a corrupted interface, perhaps I would project that into a dream future in which Laird Ulin was similarly trapped. And I’d always known my
fatal flaw was a tendency to withdraw from the comforts and griefs of human relationships. Laird in the RODNEY biomech, and my unlikely friendship with him re-enforcing the theme.

  And Dr. Tamara.

  Tamara/Delilah/Nichole.

  I could remember a few shreds of her speech that day by the pond. She’d told me I was responsible for the world. I was creating it, populating it. My unconscious offering a direct explanation for Planet X?

  My head ached, pounded. I dialed down the window, shutting out the view.

  In the dim room, I lay back on the sofa and imagined myself reclined on the barber chair couch in the Bedford Falls mayor’s office. I tried to picture myself there in absolute detail. Because now I believed I was there, and had been all this time. Only time was irrelevant to the speculation. A few minutes in that chair could spin out to a subjective eternity.

  I concentrated, but nothing happened, except my headache got worse.

  I kept trying. I did the little mental retraction that you do when you want to withdraw from an interface.

  Nothing.

  I tried again, really straining.

  Still nothing. I gave up and attempted to nap. That came easier.

  I woke with a dry mouth and a dull throb behind my eyes. It was still dim in the room and I felt disoriented and strange.

  Too strange.

  The sofa was wrong. So was the room. I turned my head. My gaze fell upon a box with a big glass eye on the side facing me. The box stood on four stubby legs, each booted with a brassy sleeve. This ancient thing was a TV, of a type fairly standard in most American households back in the 1960s. A big console television set.

  The blank glass eye reflected the room, or a dim suggestion of it. I could see myself lying on the sofa. The distorting mirror of the tube might have made me look smaller than I really was, but not that much smaller.

  Let it go.

  I didn’t want to move or think. I closed my eyes. In the dark behind my lids I listened to my short, anxious breaths. It was a dream. A real one. That’s all. I tried to will myself awake, but that was no more effective than had been my earlier attempts to withdraw from the SuperQuantum interface. So maybe it wasn’t a real dream. Maybe it was another Environment produced in response to some dripping faucet of my wounded psyche.

  I decided to face the fear head-on.

  I opened my eyes.

  Yes, it was the living room of the house in which I had grown up. I recognized it easily, even in the wan twilight. And it was so quiet. I got off the sofa. Looking down at myself, I realized I had the body of a ten-year-old boy.

  Let that go, too.

  I pressed on. There was something I needed to see, only I didn’t know what it was.

  The house was not perfectly quiet. Down the hall, someone was softly snoring. I walked toward the sound. I wasn’t wearing shoes, just a pair of argyle socks. The bare floorboards creaked familiarly.

  When I came to my parent’s bedroom I stopped. The door was open. My father lay face down on the queen-sized bed. He was wearing his dark green work pants and a blue cotton shirt. He was also wearing his thick black shoes, though his feet hung off the end of the bed. Too enervated to remove them, but nevertheless conscious of not getting them on Mom’s bedspread. Because of this, his head didn’t reach the pillow and his face was pushed into the bedspread.

  I didn’t like seeing him that way. I wondered if he had been drinking. My ten-year-old dream self remembered hearing him cry—another thing I hadn’t liked. In fact, it had scared the hell out of me. He was drunk, all right. Drunk on grief. but it wasn’t his sleeping form I was supposed to see.

  I wandered back down the hall. Was I really on Infinity projecting all this through a SuperQuantum magic mirror? Maybe I was still in the stasis module experiencing a series of vivid dreams, even though you weren’t supposed to dream while in stasis.

  Or maybe I really was ten years old, and all that had transpired in my life had never yet occurred.

  Maybe I didn’t exist at all.

  It was in the kitchen—the important thing. Dishes filled the sink. The kitchen felt as cold as a tomb. Colder. I remembered my mother, cooking odors, laughter.

  The thing was on the kitchen table. It was a family scrapbook. I remembered it. The pages were big and weighty. On each one there were pictures, announcements, Christmas and birthday cards, newspaper clippings.

  My dad had cut out an article from a recent edition of The Seattle Times. He had cut it out but hadn’t taped it into the scrapbook yet.

  HALLOWEEN DRINKING CLAIMS FIVE LIVES.

  This under a grainy photograph of two mangled cars. One of the cars was my mother’s.

  There were other pictures and a few paragraphs of text. Two of the other pictures were of my mother and brother. Jeremy’s was his army boot camp picture. I had never seen the one of my mother.

  Another picture had been taken a week before the Halloween party that its subjects had attended. Three teenage boys grinning into the camera lens, holding up their masks. All three masks were the same. I could only glance at this picture, it upset me so much.

  The rest of the newspaper had fallen to the floor. The front page headline—of moon landing / Pearl Harbor proportions —proclaimed:

  EVERYTHING IS SIMULTANEOUS

  *

  “Laird, you’re the only friend I have.”

  “Checkmate,” Laird said.

  I glanced at the board. Damn it.

  “Listen,” I said. “Have you heard of the Harbinger that supposedly lives out in the Deadlands someplace?”

  “Yes I have.”

  “You said you’ve wandered all over the planet. Have you wandered over to see the Harbinger?”

  “Perhaps.”

  I hated his poker face.

  “Come on, Laird.”

  “What are you asking me, Ellis?”

  “I’m asking if you know how to find the Harbinger.”

  “Yes, I know how.”

  “Will you show me?”

  “Let’s have another game, and I will think on it.”

  “No. Think on it now.”

  He went rigidly still. A couple of minutes passed, then several more minutes passed. Then he started setting up the board again.

  “Well?” I said.

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

  “Why not?”

  “You aren’t ready.”

  “Come on. What are you talking about?”

  “I believe I won the last game, so you may make the first move.”

  “Fuck the game, Laird. Tell me why I’m not ready to meet the Harbinger.”

  “Your mind is too fragile.”

  “Wasn’t your mind too fragile to meet him?”

  “No, it wasn’t an issue in my case.”

  “So why should it be with me?”

  “Ellis, I am not a living being anymore. My identity is not in question because in a human sense I have no identity. You’ve told me about your memory breaks, your dissociative episodes. You’ve told me about your dreams and visions and your doubts about this reality. Your mind is too fragile.”

  “In your opinion—an opinion which I’ve restrained myself from requesting, by the way.”

  “Yes, in my opinion.”

  “Look. The Harbingers made me what I am. If there’s an answer to my life, they have it.”

  “The Harbinger of the Deadlands has chosen to live apart in meditative isolation. He will not welcome you. He may actively oppose it.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Your sanity could be in jeopardy.”

  “My sanity is already in jeopardy.”

  “If I refuse to take you, you will never find him.”

  “If you refuse to take me,” I said, “you’re no friend of mine.”

  “Don’t say that, Ellis.”

  “You’re no friend of mine,” I repeated.

  “You don’t mean it. You’re distraught.”

  I flung the chessboard off the b
ench, scattering pieces in the grass. “You’re god damned right I’m distraught. I’m going out of my mind. I don’t know where I am, or even who I am. And I can’t take it anymore. I’m cracking up. I wouldn’t be in this position except for the Harbingers, so I want to talk to the only one I can get to. And you’re going to lead me to him, or you’re no fucking friend of mine!”

  Laird was still holding a castle in his fingers. “You were mellower when you were Zinged,” he said.

  “Laird.”

  “All right. Very well.”

  “Very well what?”

  “I’ll take you to the Harbinger of the Deadlands.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t thank me. At this stage it is the worst course you could choose.”

  “I appreciate your concern.”

  “Your appreciation is of little moment, if your mind is shattered.”

  “That would make a good t-shirt,” I said.

  Laird farted.

  chapter nineteen

  White gold ring on a fine link chain. I hung it around my neck and tucked it inside my bodysuit. An object with a history and emotional significance to ground me in some kind of reality. I hoped.

  We departed the Seventh Dome in an overland vehicle with an armored cab and big balloon mesh tires. Outside the domes the air was breathable, though humid and desert-hot. A few crude roads crisscrossed the planet’s surface. The human population had begun venturing into the open environment, laying down the first preparatory infrastructure for a broader-based colonization. The day would arrive when humanity would swarm the surface, but for now the world was far too unstable to risk en masse movements out of the Domes.

  The sky was yellow and white and blue: a pudding sky. And it could turn deadly within moments. Upper and lower air currents were highly erratic, blowing ceaseless hurricanes. That’s why we weren’t flying.

  Our vehicle was called a Bus, but it was more like a tank, referring back to those treaded fighting machines built to withstand concentrated assaults of war. We didn’t have treads or weapons, but you could certainly call the weather a concentrated assault.

  At forty kilometers per hour we soon left the Domes behind, lost in billowing spumes of wind-whipped dust. Laird drove and I drank coffee. It was an okay arrangement, but I wished I had more to do besides think.