Harbinger (15 page)

“Amen.”

“Mock all you want.”

“Thanks, that one mock was enough to get it off my chest.”

“Funny, funny man.”

“Look,” I said. “I’m not a devil or a portent. I’m an anomaly. You don’t have to do this.”

“What you think you are doesn’t matter.”

As I talked to him I inched closer, sliding my feet. He might have been capable of shooting me in the back, but I doubted he had the balls to do it face to face. So I kept talking and inching, because I couldn’t afford to see the size of his friend’s balls.

I was pretty close, and the gun began to waver. It was an old model Smith & Wesson “blaster,” capable of incinerating my body with one discharge.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Never mind my name.”

“Come on. Just your first name. What’s the big deal?”

“Bernard.”

“Okay, Bernard, I want you to give this plan of yours a little extra thought.”

“I bet you do.”

Suddenly I pivoted on my left foot and kicked out with my right, a beautiful Jeet Kune Do move, executed with the fluid precision derived from countless repetitions. At the instant of contact, Bernard’s finger twitched on the trigger of the blaster. The charge went wide, streaking meteorically across the big open space of the dance studio. It hit the bank of windows and exploded. Glass and flame coughed outward over the sidewalk and Second Avenue. The rain blew in.

My kick had knocked the blaster out of Bernard’s hand, at least. Bernard stood holding his wrist. The gun lay on the floor. I scooped it up, dropped the load out of the pistol grip, and pitched the empty unit across the room.

I moved for the door. Bernard stood in my way.

“Bernard,” I said. “Come on.”

“I never saw them.”

“Who?”

“They aren’t there, they aren’t really there. The Harbingers. People are crazy who say they are.” He was practically in tears. “It’s all a lie and people are delusional.”

“I tend to agree.”

“You’ve ruined the whole country,” he added.

“I tend to
dis
agree.”

I shot my arm out and found his carotid artery with two rigid fingers. Bernard collapsed.

Back on the street I found a lot of rain, a lot of broken glass, and one dead body. The body lay sprawled half in the gutter, eyes open and staring. A spear of window glass protruded from its throat. Blood pumped into a silver and black river, staining it red before it gurgled down the storm drain. The man’s coat was open. He was wearing a holstered blaster, just like the one Bernard had discharged upstairs.

I stared at him, numb with shock. A siren started wailing in the distance and rapidly got louder. I looked up into the rain and opened my mouth. Someone shouted
He’s the one
! and I quit my chicken-in-a-rainstorm act and looked in the direction of the voice. Two men were running toward me. Not policemen.

I bent over the dead man and ripped the blaster out of his holster, came up with it, but didn’t fire. The two men, seeing the weapon, halted in the middle of the street, their hands up and open, palms out. Both men had shaved heads, except for skinny strips of hair—mini Mohawks bisecting their skulls. EC-ers. The hairline thing was supposed to symbolize something, I forget what. Right and left hemispheres?

“We’re friends!” one of them said. He was the more dapper of the pair in a nehru jacket, slacks and shiny boots. Okay, it wasn’t a “nehru” jacket, but it
looked
like one. In fashion everything that went around comes around. I ought to know.

His dumpier companion pointed at the body. “We were monitoring their cell implants. We got here just in time!”

“Actually you got here at least five minutes late. I could just as easily be a smelly pile of ashes right now.”

They looked at each other.

“You are The Herrick?” the dapper one asked.

“I’m Herrick.”

Relief relaxed the tenseness out of his face. They looked at each other again and smiled knowingly.

“Then that couldn’t have happened,” dumpy said.

“We have a vehicle,” dapper said. “We can get you away before the police arrive.”

The siren had become piercing. Blue light strobed through the rain.

“Let’s go,” I said.

They had a van. Dapper piloted us out of the city. We hooked a magnetic pulse line and the autodrive took over so the three of us could lounge in the back with cups of coffee and shortbread cookies. Dapper seemed generally more impressed with me than did his friend. He had the love light in his eyes.

“We knew you would return.”

“It’s nice to be back,” I said. “Except for the assassins and all.”

“They belonged to a Christian sect,” Dumpy said. “They’re mad.”

I nodded. “They seemed that way. I’ve run into their ilk before, but this is the first time they actually tried to incinerate me for Christ. What a difference a couple of years can make.”

“The world is changing,” Dapper said. “Humanity is evolving. Some people can’t tolerate that truth.”

“It’s only the truth if you believe it is,” I said.

They looked at each other, significantly. Dumpy pushed another shortbread cookie into his mouth.

“Relax,” I said. “That’s just me being profound.”

They stared at me.

“It’s a
joke
,” I said.

They smiled.

Dapper said, “You’re different from The Herrick they tell us about.”

“I’m bound to be,” I said.

“You’re  . . . more human, I think.”

“Yes,” Dumpy said.

“But I’m still The Herrick,” I said.

They both nodded enthusiastically.

Rain flooded the windshield. The wipers only functioned if someone was sitting in the front seat. It was getting dark outside. Oncoming traffic made yellow blurs on the rain-washed windshield. We were doing a hundred and ten, which meant we were on the Interstate pulse line, probably the 5 headed south.

“Where are you taking me?” I asked.

“A safe place,” Dapper said.

“Safe from those Christ bastards,” Dumpy said.

Dapper nudged his pal. “They aren’t bastards. They simply haven’t fully evolved.”

“What about you two,” I said.

They both looked question marks at me.

“Are you fully evolved?” I said.

“Oh, no,” Dapper said. “We haven’t even seen a Harbinger.”

“I might have seen one,” Dumpy said.

“You didn’t,” Dapper said.

“I
might
have.”

Dapper sighed, exasperated. “You’d
know
if you saw a Harbinger.”

“Maybe it’s more subtle than that,” Dumpy said.

Dapper rolled his eyes. “Please tell him,” he said, appealing to me.

“You’d know,” I said to Dumpy.

He looked at his hands, chastened by The Herrick.

“On the other hand,” I said. “These things
can
be rather subtly expressed.”

Dapper looked betrayed but tried not to show it.

“How much farther to this safe place?” I asked.

“An hour,” Dapper said. “I’ve already notified everybody we’re coming. There will be a gathering in preparation for your worldwide arrival.”

I absorbed that information for a minute, then said, “I need to take a leak.”

Dumpy pointed to a narrow closet in the back of the van.

“I prefer the great outdoors,” I said.

Dumpy resumed the driver’s seat. His hand moved over the auto-drive. At the next exit the van dropped off the pulse line and Dumpy took over manual control and steered us up a long, gradual loop of road.

“Anywhere is fine,” I said.

“There’ll be services a couple of miles up the road.”

“Stop here,” I said. “Now.”

He pulled over to the shoulder. I was sick of them both. I was sick to death of everything. Sick at heart. I kept seeing that dead man in the gutter. A True Believer. Just like these two. On the opposite side, but otherwise exactly the same.

I climbed out of the van, and Dapper stepped down after me.

“You going to hold my hand,” I said. “Or something else?”

“I—”

“Give me some privacy.”

He stood by the van in the steady rain and I slogged off into a field of sucking mud. I had no idea where I thought I was going. Somewhere isolated. I wanted no part of humanity. Humans struck me as an ignoble lot, of which I was a prime example.

“Mr. Herrick!”

Feet mud-clopping up behind me. I kept moving. A hand fell on my shoulder. I halted, removed the hand, gripping it in a precise and painful fashion, turning it in an unnatural way that forced Dapper to his knees in the mud.

“If you come after me again,” I said, “I’ll hurt you for real. Believe it.”

He looked up at me, injured—and not from my wrist twisting trick. Dumpy was watching us from the open door of the van. Unaccountably, my throat swelled closed with emotion and tears backed up in my eyes. This was some kind of good-bye. I turned and walked off into the field by myself. The Second Going.

The farther I walked, the darker, wetter and colder it got. My impatient revulsion at remaining with the EC-ers in their cozy van for another couple of miles began to appear, well, stupid. What I wouldn’t give for a cup of joe and a nice shortbread cookie.

I looked back. The van was still parked by the side of the road, only now it was tiny and lost in a dark night of my soul. Maybe they knew what I was only beginning to acknowledge: I needed a lift.

A screaming came out of the sky. Sun-intense cones of light probed the muddy field, churning and boiling with needles of rain. I looked up, shielding my eyes with an open hand. An orbital shuttle hovered a hundred meters over my head.

“Go away,” I said, but without much conviction.

The engine scream changed pitch, and the vehicle descended toward me, a port irising open in its belly.

Laird Ulin moved a knight and sat back, smugly
. I regarded the chessboard, Onyx and teak with cut-glass pieces, and attempted to anticipate his strategy—a mostly futile ambition, even after a hundred and sixteen years.

We were sitting at a game table in Central Park, or at least a more-than-reasonable facsimile of Central Park. The physical real estate encompassed a pie wedge of about thirty meters at its widest end. Squirrel and pigeon society existed only in the holographic scrim that enclosed a few benches and tables, the real grass and one Japanese Maple, in the dappled shade of which we played our weekly game.

The sky was dialed down to near-gloaming, in consideration of my eye re-gens, which were at a sensitive stage.

I pushed my bishop into a weak counter position. Laird blew air out of his nose.

“Contrary to rational expectations,” he said, “you’re presenting
less
of a challenge over time.”

“Maybe I’m bored.”

“Ridiculous.”

He took my bishop with his rook.

“Didn’t you
see
that?” he demanded.

I shrugged. A dull headache persisted behind my neo-eyes. I wanted to take a nap. Another nap.

“You’re becoming bad company, Ellis.”

I looked up from the board. My own blue eyes peered back at me from a face of elongated waxiness. When Laird talked his mouth moved like a ventriloquist dummy’s, stiffly, up and down, up and down. He had spent considerable time and resources building on his great grandfather’s experiments in life-prolongation based on the use of my genetic material and transplant techniques. Looking at him, I had to think his efforts had failed to yield substantial improvements. Young Frankenstein.

“I didn’t sign on to be good company,” I said.

“Perhaps not, but things evolve.”

That word.

“I suspect what you need is a vacation,” Laird said.

I yawned.

“When was the last time you visited The County?” he asked.

“I don’t know, but I didn’t like it, whenever it was.”

“I’ll tell you precisely how long it’s been,” Laird said. “One hundred and twelve years.”

“Gee, feels like yesterday.”

At the wide end of the wedge where we were sitting, a biomechanical man stepped through the scrim and into the “real” portion of the park. He sat down on a nearby bench, unrolled a reader, and began perusing it. His name was Norm. I knew that because the name was printed in big block letters right on his breastplate. NORM. Sitting there, NORM sounded like a coffee percolator about halfway to a full brewed pot. Kind of a nostalgic sound.

“I’ll arrange for a visa,” Laird said to me.

“No, thanks.”

“It will do you a world of good.”

“I’d rather nap.”

“And I’d rather you improve your disposition.”

“You’re so anxious to enjoy convivial conversation, why don’t you talk to NORM?”

The Biomech looked up. His features and physique were designed to make him appear male. What he actually looked like was a department store mannequin with ambitions. Somewhere inside of him were the uploaded memories and dreams of somebody or other named “Norm.” He gazed at me with his doll’s eyes, and I intuited envious contempt. We were all trying to get to the promised land. In The County, only third generation inhabitants would live to see Ulin’s World. On the Command Level Laird was gambling that he could survive the journey in his own body—with my help. The biomechs were uploaded puppets; they would make it to Ulin’s World, all right. But the great unanswered question about biomechanical uploads was: Who, if anyone, was really in there?

I’d make it to Ulin’s World, too. All I had to do was go on breathing.

“Your insults aren’t appreciated,” NORM said. When he spoke his mouth didn’t move. Not even up and down, like a ventriloquist dummy’s.

“Come on, you can only speak for yourself,” I said. “I bet somebody more sensitive to the nuances of my delivery would appreciate my insults just fine. Besides, I didn’t insult you. I merely suggested Mr. Ulin might like to converse with you. If you find that insulting I don’t know what to make of it.”

“Freak,” NORM said and lowered his gaze to the unrolled device in his lap, which from my angle looked like a sheet of deflected blue light.

I wanted to return to my quarters and read, perchance to nap. But I couldn’t seem to muster the necessary motivation even to stand up.