Harbinger (28 page)

“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, started 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.

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 come 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

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.”