Harbinger

by Jack Skillingstead

  The door opened and I ducked inside the Bus. I would have tripped over RODNEY, but he wasn’t there. Why not? Anything goes in my scrambled world, including three hundred pound doorstops. Then I thought: Who did the flashing and honking?

  Dr. Tamara swiveled around in the driver’s seat. Except . . . for a moment my brain stuttered and I thought it was Nichole Roberts. And in that moment my heart stopped, then resumed, beating.

  “Hello, Ellis. Now that you’ve come this far I’m glad you didn’t turn back. You’re doing wonderfully.”

  “Am I? Is this one of the more entertaining psychosis you’ve witnessed?”

  She smiled. “I’m not witnessing a psychosis. I’m witnessing Evolution.”

  I groaned.

  “Are you ready to see the Harbinger now?” she said. “I think you should drive.”

  She vacated the driver’s seat for me. I didn’t take it. “No, thanks.”

  “It’s all right, Ellis.” Her hand rested on the back of the seat, offering it to me.

  I shook my head. “Nope. This is what I’ve been doing since I woke up out of stasis—if I ever did wake up out of it, or even go into it in the first place.”

  “What do you mean, Ellis?”

  “I mean I’ve been treating every shift of my cognitive reality as if it were reality. Every time the rules change, I quickly figure out what the new ones are and start obeying the hell out of them.”

  “You’re very adaptive. That’s an essential trait of the Evolved.”

  I laughed, sat down in an empty passenger seat, crossed my legs. I held my open hands up, palms outward. “I’m not playing anymore. You want to know what I think?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think I’m still interfaced with Infinity’s SuperQuantum Core. I think the Core was already corrupted and none of us realized it. That was bad enough, but then I made the mistake of insisting the SQC immerse me in my old Environment. It naturally created a paradox between my fluid memories and the established, outdated Environment. After that all bets were off. My mind is experiencing some kind of weird fugue. Everything that has occurred since I began the interface has occurred only in my brain. A series of vivid dreams. Quantum dreams. And like regular dreams they’ve been knitted out of the minutia and fragmentary images and memories of my waking experience. My past, my fears, my wishes, terrors, fantasies, thoughts. All of it recombining to keep my little dioramic funhouse going. Only lately the dreams are getting a little thin. The logic is slipping. My various so-called realities are overlapping, contaminating each other. I’m not sure what this means. Maybe my mind is breaking under the strain. Maybe the Core is dissolving in some exotic fashion. Or perhaps I’m coming to the end. A piece of me has been trying to withdraw from the interface since the beginning. Maybe it’s about to succeed. All that I remember may have occurred within the span of a few seconds outside my subjective experience. That’s why no one has forcibly disengaged me from the interface. Nobody knows. It’s kind of interesting. I even spun out a little story about Laird getting similarly trapped. Bits and pieces. The dripping faucet. Everything gets integrated into the vivid dreams of the SuperQuantum Core.”

  Dr. Tamara listened to all this with a knowing smile on her lips. “Is that all?” she said.

  “Pretty much, except what I said about the whole thing taking place in a second or two of objective time?”

  “Yes?

  “What if I’m wrong about that? What if it’s more like what happened to Laird in my vivid dream? It could be I’ve become completely integrated into the Core. Hell, Laird might have even planned it that way! He doesn’t require my memories or my grating personality, just my ever replenishing body, its organs and excretions. If that’s the case, I’m fucked. While I’m inhabiting these SuperQuantum dreams he could be harvesting me at will. What do you think, Dr. Figment?”

  “I think it’s very imaginative. Shall we go see the Harbinger now? It will clear a lot of things up for you, Ellis.”

  “Damn it, Dr. Figment, you haven’t been listening. I’m not a participant anymore. I’m opting out, submitting my resignation, quitting. I’m thinking maybe my active gullibility is a factor that keeps me stuck in this thing. So I’m through. If I stop engaging with the Core it might lose some of its grip on my psyche, and that will help me withdraw from the interface.”

  “You’re not interfacing, Ellis.”

  I folded my arms and refused to look at her.

  “It’s all been real,” she said. “You’re on the brink of total consciousness evolution. Actually you’re over the brink already and don’t realize it. Sitting there won’t change anything.”

  “You might as well stop talking, Dr. Figment. I’m not listening.”

  Something clanged against the door of the Bus. It startled me.

  “We’d better get rolling,” Dr. Tamara said.

  The Bus rode high on its suspension. No one of normal stature could take a close up look into the cab. But there were people out there, and sirens winding down, and flashing red and blue lights splashing the windshield.

  Stubbornly, I said: “None of it’s real.”

  “It is, though,” Dr. Tamara said. “It’s as real as that cut on your shoulder. Remember you did that on Planet X. Why carry it over with you to this place if these are nothing but a series of quantum dreams?”

  “Anybody in there?” someone with an authoritative voice demanded, and then he clanged on the door again, probably using his nightstick. A cop.

  “It can’t be real,” I said. But I fingered the tender wound under my ripped shirt. “It makes no sense. You’re asking me to accept time travel and instantaneous teleportation. Plus, what would this Bus be doing here? No, I like my explanation better.”

  “Think of it as mixing metaphors, Ellis. As for travel though time and space . . . that’s a misconception. In a true sense there is no time and space. Not once you’re unshackled from the limiting idea of those concepts. Remember: Everything is simultaneous. You’re Evolved and don’t even realize it. You inhabit all worlds. You can even create your own, when you need to. Now let’s get out of here, okay? Unless you want to explain to these officers who we are.”

  Reluctantly, I came forward and assumed the driver’s seat. Vivid dream or not, I couldn’t ignore the seeming urgency of the situation.

  “What am I supposed to do?” I said. “Just run them over?”

  “It’s up to you, but I wouldn’t recommend it.”

  “So . . .?

  “Think about where you want to go.”

  “Where do I want to go?”

  “To make it easy, how about the road beyond the seven domes, where you just were.”

  “But how?”

  “Imagine it strongly, then step on the gas.”

  I pictured the road on Planet X, the blowing dust storm, pudding sky, the crashed Bus and Trau’dorian machine. But I didn’t touch the accelerator.

  “Go ahead, Ellis. It’s all right.”

  A couple of Highway Patrol officers pointed their flashlights at my face and waved at us to come out. Behind them firemen and paramedics swarmed over the car wreck that had killed my mother and brother.

  “I can’t,” I said. “I’ll run them over.”

  “You won’t. Believe.”

  She reached over and nudged the accelerator, and the Bus ground forward. The cops fell back, one of them reaching for his gun. Instantly, involuntarily, my mind focused on that other road in that other place.

  And we were there.

  I braked hard. The Bus jerked nose down and rocked back, halted a couple of meters away from the Planet X wreck. No cognitive lapse, no gray time, no blackout, no fucking nap in-between.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said.

  Dr. Tamara laughed.

  “That’s unbelievable,” I said.

  “Don’t be so surprised,” she said. “You’ve been doing it unconsciously for a long time.”

  “I thought you said Time wasn’t real.”

/>   “Don’t turn into a smartass. A sense of time is relativistic. Let’s say you’ve been “doing” it for a great long stretch of personal relativistic time perception.”

  I stared at the window. At it, not out it. Raindrops from a long lost October night on Earth quivered on the thick glass. Mixing metaphors again. I turned to Dr. Tamara.

  “This planet is real or not?”

  “It’s real,” she said.

  “The domed cities?”

  “Also real, but you added them. You have to get past the idea of real.”

  “I added them?”

  “It’s your saucepan lid city, Ellis.”

  I felt a swoon coming on but repulsed it. I didn’t want anymore lapses or blackouts. I intended to cling fiercely to the present moment, no matter what.

  “Why would I do a thing like that?” I asked, referring to the domes.

  “You needed a place to work out some of your more persistent intimacy issues. You had to find a way to be human, to let at least one other soul touch you in a meaningful way. If you allow one past your barriers then you can eventually allow them all, which is necessary for Evolution. You had to surmount your fear and anger so you could become what you are, Ellis.”

  “So I let Laird in.”

  “Yes. But ultimately it wasn’t about Laird. It was about that boy. The boy who killed your mother and brother. Laird gave you a step up, that’s all. Shall we go see the Harbinger now?”

  After a while I said, “How do I do that?”

  “Let’s take it slow. We’ll drive.”

  “Which way?”

  “Pick a direction. If you want to find him you will.”

  I backed the Bus up, then accelerated off the road, and we went bucketing over the scoured terrain of the Deadlands.

  *

  We drove for a long time (subjective, of course). The ceaseless dust storms churned and billowed. I couldn’t see much out of the windshield so I concentrated on the imaging screen, worried that we would smash into a boulder or plunge off an unseen cliff.

  “How much farther is it?” I said.

  “Up to you, Ellis.”

  Dr. Tamara was rocked back in the shotgun seat with a cup of coffee.

  “I wish you’d quit saying that,” I said.

  “Ellis, it’s your show. Probably you’re still afraid. Let all that go, if you can.”

  “I’m not afraid. Unless you mean afraid of crashing this thing.”

  “Maybe it would be better if the storm cleared up.”

  I laughed shortly. “Good idea.”

  “Clear your mind and clear the air, then.”

  “You mean ‘wish’ it away? Come on. Am I supposed to be able to control the weather, too?”

  “It’s not a matter of wishing or controlling. It’s a matter of subtracting. You added the dust storms, positing them as a consequence of the terraforming machines. You added them, so you can subtract them. Try it.”

  “How?”

  “Allow the planet to be. That’s all.”

  I tried to let that sink in, but I wasn’t feeling too porous. Then I referred back to the meditative techniques I’d learned adjunctly during my study of Jeet Kun Do. First I stopped the Bus but left the engine idling. Then I began consciously to control my breathing. I methodically relaxed my body, starting with the big toe on my left foot and working my way up. My eyes were open, and I could see the raging dust storm out the window, and I began to relax that, too, and when I’d sufficiently relaxed the tension out of it the damn thing disappeared! This jolted me out of my meditative trance, and I leaned forward over the console, nose to the window.

  “Holy shit.”

  Outside a landscape very much resembling the Earthly badlands of South Dakota spread out.

  “Feel better now?” Dr. Tamara asked.

  “I feel like Alice In Wonderland.”

  But I put the Bus in gear and we rolled on.

  “Is there only the one Harbinger on this whole planet?” I asked.

  “That’s a trickier question than you might think.”

  The landscape was monotonously “bad.” One tortured rock formation pretty much resembled the next. Frustration and impatience began building in me. I recognized them, tried to consciously relax them away, like the dust storm. And poof! They were gone. Almost immediately an arched formation of red rock loomed up before us.

  “That’s it,” I said. “Isn’t it?”

  Dr. Tamara shrugged.

  I rolled in close and stopped. “This is it,” I said. “I know it is. Will you come with me?”

  “Yes, this time I’ll stay with you.”

  I stood up but hesitated. “Wait a minute. If the storms ceased that might mean the terraforming machines ceased, too.”

  I sat back down and ran a check on the atmospheric conditions. It was cold out there, and the air was poisonously rich with carbon dioxide.

  “We’re going to require Breathers,” I said.

  “If you say so.”

  I fetched insulated suits out of the garment locker then grabbed a couple of masks with oxy conversion filters built in. My hand hesitated over a fresh sidearm. Dr. Tamara watched me impassively. I left the weapon.

  “Okay, I’m ready.”

  *

  Outside it was cold, even through the insulated suit. The terrain was Martian red, the sky its familiar pastel pudding. We crunched over a brittle crust of frozen soil to the arched opening in the hillside. There I stopped, Dr. Tamara at my side.

  “It sits in this cave meditating?” I said.

  She nodded.

  “I’m not sure I want to go in there. I don’t even know why I’m not sure.”

  “It’s all right, Ellis.”

  I looked around barren rust-colored hills.

  Dr. Tamara touched my arm. “Do you want to go back to the Bus?”

  “No.”

  “Okay.”

  Standing outside the mouth of that cave I didn’t know what I believed, or even what I could believe. Tears welled in my eyes for no reason and I blinked them away.

  “What would you like to do, Ellis?”

  “Go in. I think I want to go in.”

  She let me lead the way. Darkness soon enclosed us. I switched on my flashlight. The deeper in we penetrated the narrower the tunnel became. The rock walls were rough and dry. My breath sounded labored, rasping inside the mask. After a while I began to hear something else, too. Distant, muted voices. And music.

  The floor of the tunnel changed. It creaked with the weight of our footfalls. I pointed the flashlight down. The bright oval fell on a patch of scuffed hardwood. And the walls had changed, too, from rock to textured plaster, painted light green. I stopped walking, and Dr. Tamara stood behind me.

  Directly in front of us a horizontal crack of light had appeared at floor level.

  “What is this?” I said.

  Dr. Tamara removed her breathing mask and pushed her hair back off her forehead. She didn’t collapse, gasping and heaving, so I removed my mask as well.

  “Remember,” she said. “Time and space are illusions. You are every self you have ever been, not only the Ellis Herrick who stopped aging in 1983. Everything is simultaneous.”

  I nodded, barely listening. I knew this hallway. It was a piece of hallway, actually. The living rock of the tunnel blended seamlessly into the textured plaster of the wall. Reaching up with my gloved hand I touched the popcorn ceiling. Then I pointed the flashlight at the cheap door slab which stood between us and the muted voices and music.

  The Harbinger was in there.

  “Go ahead,” Dr. Tamara said. “You’re ready now.”

  I reached for the tarnished doorknob and turned it. The voices and music were so familiar. I pushed and released the knob, letting the door swing inward. The music swelled.

  It was the family room of my old North Hill house, where I’d grown up. There was the beat-to-shit sofa and matching armchairs, the paper-thin carpet. The TV volume was cranked up loud,
to close out the world. On the screen was The Wizard Of Oz. The Good Witch Glinda ascended in a bubble, leaving Dorothy behind. A boy huddled in one of the armchairs, which he had dragged up close to the set. He was still wearing his homemade Star Trek costume. He had been wearing it for days. A ten-year-old boy trying to shut out the real world of car wrecks and death and weeping, drunken adults. When the door opened, he turned away from the movie, expecting to see his father or his crazy aunt Sarah. But it wasn’t either of those people; it was an introduction to a whole new paradigm of reality. I was with him even as he began to turn his head, and I felt a weird overlapping of perspectives, a fluid exchange, an expansion of self-conscious ego awareness, so that when I came up out of the chair a moment later I was all Ellis Herricks folded into one gestalt personality.

  I was my Harbinger.

  epilogue

  You know,” I said, “I used to haunt this place, hoping you would notice me. But you never did. I ate so many greasy French fries and drank so many milkshakes, I hold you personally responsible for the lousy complexion that kept all the other girls away from me.”

  We were standing in the parking lot of a certain Arctic Circle burger joint in Burien, Washington. It was a June night in 1974. But it could have been any place on any night in any year. When I’d come up out of the armchair Nichole Roberts had been standing in place of Dr. Tamara, and she’d taken my hand and we’d walked out of there, back down the Narnia tunnel, until our shoes gritted on black asphalt and another world had opened, just that easily.

  “You idiot,” she said. “I always noticed you.”

  I looked at her. She was sweetly, perfectly, eighteen years old. So was I—only maybe not as sweet.

  “You’re just saying that now because we’re having this happy ending.”

  “True,” she said.

  “It is happy, isn’t it?”

  Nichole kissed me on the mouth, lingeringly, then said: “You tell me.”

  “So far so good,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Death is illusion,” I said.

  “That’s right. We walk between and through all worlds.”