Harbinger

by Jack Skillingstead

  “You tell me.”

  “I’ve experienced your stupid environment. So the Harbingers made you, is that it? Environments can be tricked up, no matter what they say.”

  I kept my mouth shut.

  “I don’t believe in the Harbingers,” he said. “People say they can see them, but I don’t see them. I don’t see anything but some kind of Devil’s trick. You call it consciousness evolution, but it’s just plain blasphemy, Mr. Herrick.”

  “I don’t call it anything at all,” I said.

  “Sure you don’t. You’re right about one thing. I couldn’t kill you unless you made me. But there are others with purer faith than mine who will. The world is falling apart, Mr. Herrick. People are delusional. And you started it all. They think you can’t die. They think you can’t face judgment like an ordinary man. But we’re going to prove them wrong. It won’t end it. We know that. But it’s a beginning. People will begin to wake up, and when they do they just might turn to the Lord. We’re living in a Dark Age. But God’s light everlasting will shine through.”

  “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 disagree.”

  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. “Pl
ease 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.

  chapter nine

  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.

  “You shouldn’t taunt them,” Laird whispered.

  “Why not?”

  “They used to be human beings. And even if they aren’t anymore, they certainly remember being human. It’s only decent to treat them with
a certain amount of respect.”

  “So I’m not that decent.”

  “Shall we finish our game?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Very well.”

  Laird sniffed and began collecting his chess pieces, returning them to the velvet lined box. I watched him, his corpse hands of sinew and bone and waxen flesh. NORM sat on his bench percolating. I experienced a simple urge toward human company.

  “One hundred and twelve years is kind of a long time,” I said.

  Laird paused. “Shall I authorize the visa?”

  “Yeah.”

  *

  Strapped into a single passenger dropship, I fell out of a holographic lie and into real cloud cover. The vehicle piloted itself. I was engulfed, briefly, by a gray blanket. Droplets formed on the clear blister under which I sat. I watched the pretty display panels. Then the ship burst into clear air and banked steeply.

  The County rolled out below me. Lots of green space, the big Oxygen Forest, a few lakes—shiny pocket mirrors on the landscape. Three neatly laid-out town grids. Bedford Falls was almost directly below me. A wide main street cut through the middle. A pair of monorail lines threaded silver through the countryside, linking the towns. There was also a road winding in a leisurely fashion from Bedford Falls to distant De Smet, passing out of sight for a few kilometers in the Oxygen Forest.

  The sky was amazing. It was raining lightly where my dropship banked and plummeted, but sun shafts pierced into the Oxygen Forest. And beyond, some kind of idyllic spring was occurring. All around me little eyebrow arches of rainbows shimmered.

  The dropship picked up speed. The ground came up fast; so did my stomach. I skimmed the forest, the big poodle-puff tree tops engineered for maximum carbon dioxide to oxygen conversion. Then I was speeding like a ramjet at low altitude toward the town, engine noise ratcheting up. Without luck, I hunted for a manual override control.

  The town shot forward and then was under me, and then was behind me. Glimpse of people in the streets looking up. The dropship racketed.

  A steep bank, tightly controlled turn. Breaking vanes deployed. On the outskirts of the town I saw a landing pad bull’s-eye. The ship scaled toward it, slowing, nose up, then settled gently to rest. Shutdown.