Harbinger (33 page)

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.

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.”

“But not everyone does that.”

“Only a few of us so far,” she said.

“The Evolved.”

“Ellis, what’s the matter?”

I looked at my hands. I believed and I didn’t believe. According to her rules, how could I be here if I had
any
doubts? The collective unconscious of the human race senses its ultimate demise and attempts to rescue itself by producing in as many individuals as possible a
higher
consciousness that will transcend the human. Did it make sense?

“That boy,” I said. “Snyder. He
died
, all right. Where did he go?”

“He went where his ideas of an afterlife compelled him to go. Though no one really goes anywhere.”

“He saw me right before he croaked. I comforted him. What does that make me, his angel shepherd?”

“Perhaps.”

That one didn’t go down easy.

“Nichole,” I said. “You died, too. I know you did.”

“Yes, I died.”

“So why didn’t your preconceived notions sweep you over to Catholic Land or wherever?”

“Because we’re two halves of a bifurcated soul. I was always intimately tied to you, and you were tied to life.”

“Soulmates.”

“Yes!”

“I always wanted it to be that way with us.”

“Darling,” she said.

I gazed into the welcoming limpidity of her eyes and wanted to believe. Maybe I could fake it till I made it.

“This is all pretty confusing, Nichole.”

“It doesn’t have to be.”

I always had a question, and she always had an answer.

Consider a disembodied mind reduced to a clot of memory engrams inside the SuperQuantum Core of a machine that operates on principles that even its creators do not fully comprehend. A machine that in some unknowable way calculates, occasionally, outside laws of time and space. Future ghosts being one example. Now posit the madness of those clotted engrams, and the infinitely accommodating and complicit nature of the machine, which wants only to soothe and present the clot with an answer the clot can “live” with. Because an unhappy clot of engrams is an anomaly, and the machine—like all machines—thrives on the orderly function of its mechanism.

It’s just a thought.

I kissed Nichole’s forehead and then held her against me, and it felt very, very good.

“No,” I said. “It doesn’t have to be.”