Harbinger

by Jack Skillingstead

  “I think it’s foolish,” she said. Alice had grown into a beautiful, strong and tirelessly upright woman of middle years. Unlike her mother, she didn’t have a romantic bone in her body. Above all else, Alice was practical.

  “Your mother always wanted it back,” I said, “and I’m going to get it for her.”

  We were talking about the white gold wedding band on a chain which I had presented to Delilah forty years ago. The same ring I had first presented to Nichole several lifetimes previous. Delilah had accidentally left it behind when we evacuated The County. She had realized almost immediately that it was missing. But at that point there had been no going back for bobbles; the calamity in The County had been well underway.

  “Mom needs you here,” Alice pointed out.

  “I know that. I’ll only be gone a couple of hours. Alice, this is my last chance to get that ring for her. I want her to have it in her hand. I want her to know I got it for her.

  “It’s more important for you to be here when—” She looked down at her mother.

  “When what?”

  She looked up again into my face. “When she passes.”

  “There’s plenty of time,” I said.

  “No,” she said. “There isn’t.”

  She was right. And that was why I had to go.

  *

  Accessing The County level was easy. Basically open a hatch and vomit. The gravity well was fucked up beyond redemption. At least George hadn’t infected the middle decks where we now lived. What had occurred on the Command Level was anyone’s guess. The overhead was sealed tight. No communication. No egress. It had been that way for decades.

  Alice and her husband Josh saw me to the emergency access tube. Josh was tall, blonde and capable. He was also a fair poet. Every once in a while he let me have a peek in his red-covered composition book, a precious thing he’d made himself.

  “Dad,” Alice said, “please don’t go.”

  “I could go with you,” Josh suggested. “It would be safer. I’ve always wanted to go back down and . . . see how things are.”

  “Thanks, but I’ll go alone.”

  “Well.” He shook my hand. “I think you’re making a mistake.”

  Alice hugged me, which felt nice. We held on tight for a long while, then I broke the embrace and picked up my backpack.

  “Honey, I have to hurry for Mom.”

  “Take this.” She pressed a com button into my hand.

  “You know it won’t work,” I said. “No one’s ever been able to send a signal out of The County since the Calamity.”

  “Take it anyway, just in case.”

  They stood back while I cranked the hatch aside. Invisible waves undulated up the tube. It gave me a queasy feeling even to stand next to the opening. I checked the straps on my back pack, pulled the flashlight out of its loop.

  “See you soon,” I said. Then I turned, bent at the waist, and went head-first into the tube.

  *

  Hoping for whatever brief effect, I’d taken a kind of super-Dramamine, but I still threw up when the gravity fluctuations wobbled through my guts. At first I dropped pretty fast, then it was like plunging into warm water, and I drifted downward, nearly weightless.

  All this in utter darkness.

  I thumbed my flashlight on. A brilliant bar of light preceded me but faded to a vague blur without touching bottom. It was a long descent. Every once in a while I reached out and pulled myself forward by one of the platform rails. Even though the gravity field in The County had been approximately one fifth that of Infinity normal for decades, I knew it didn’t necessarily have to remain that way. It had fluctuated wildly during the great Calamity, at one point acquiring crushing intensity and killing thousands.

  The farther I descended the warmer it got. I wiped sweat out of my eyes and referred to my chronometer. It was twenty minutes before my flashlight beam revealed the bottom of the tube. By then my weightless condition had adjusted up again to a lunar approximation. I reached out for a rail and slowed myself. My sweaty hand slipped on the polished metal. I drew my knees up and rolled around, reorienting myself so I came in feet-first, letting the big muscles in my thighs absorb the minor shock.

  Touchdown.

  *

  Of course I wasn’t the first person to visit The County in forty years. But I hoped to be the one who returned safely. Out of fifteen thousand County population at the time of the Great Calamity, only some six hundred had successfully fled to the reclamation deck, where life was a bit on the industrial side but good, by virtue of the fact that it was possible at all. And over the decades twenty people had tried returning to The County, mostly on missions of retrieval—just like mine. Twenty went down and none came back. What befell them no one knew.

  At the bottom of the emergency access tube I worked the hatch open. Light burst upon me. I dropped the flashlight and covered my eyes, turning away.

  I let my eyes gradually adjust. It took a while after the long tube dark. When I could see without tearing up I slipped out onto the dead plain “east” of Bedford Falls.

  What had been a green expanse of grassland was now a blasted desert place. The air was thin and hot. Not thin enough to require an oxygen supplement, but thin. And the sky was white.

  Here at the bottom of the gravity well my body had some weight. I experimented with long strides and settled on a variation of the old moon bunny hop. Moving thus, in long bounds, I attained the wreck of Bedford falls in a matter of minutes.

  Much of the town lay in ruins. Lightning strikes, fire, hurricane force winds, pernicious whirlwinds, and the coup de gras: a sudden increase in gravity, had taken their considerable toll. Buildings tumbled, sewers erupted, power grids ignited.

  The Bedford Falls Hotel had abruptly converted from three stories to one story. Jagged fingers of PerfectWood pointed at the white sky.

  I unshouldered my backpack, took out the modules of the laser-cutter, quickly assembled them. An eerie silence prevailed. I interrupted it with the sizzle and spark of laser-assisted excavation.

  I swung the cutter in surgical arcs, slicing away debris and half-standing walls. Delilah had left the ring in the first floor bathroom of the hotel. The odds of locating it within this mess were low, to say the least.

  As I worked, my stomach kept gurgling and roiling around, and it worried me. But I kept my concentration on the job. I cut my way through, reducing big rubble to smaller chunks that I could fling aside manually in the low G. But after a while I noticed it wasn’t as low G as it had been.

  Soon I’d worked my way into the lobby. I saw bones and stopped. Of course The County was a vast graveyard of bones. Knowing that didn’t make discovering some underfoot any more pleasant. I stepped around the partial female skeleton (I knew it was female by the tattered remains of clothing still clinging to it) and activated the laser again.

  Abruptly the lights went out, leaving only the ruby cutting beam of the laser.

  I turned the laser off and groped for my flashlight. In the darkness the air seemed even thinner. I thumbed the flashlight on at the same moment that I caught the heel of my right foot on something and fell backward, landing hard, striking the back of my head a stunning blow.

  Landing hard; the gravity had increased dramatically.

  Stars throbbed in my vision. They kept throbbing even after I’d opened my eyes again. Damn it. I waited, and the throbbing subsided.

  My flashlight lay a few feet away, its beam striking a bright track across the filthy lobby rug and terminating at the crushed skull of the skeleton. Something shiny and white gleamed in the skeleton’s ribcage. I rolled onto my knees and crawled over to it, squinted, and reached in. It was the white gold ring. Of all the bizarre luck! I lifted the chain over the skull and held it up in the flashlight. The ring winked and turned before my eyes. Here was a story that would never be told. Who was this nameless person? Had she stolen the ring before we ever left The County? Or had she come across it in the bathroom, right where De
lilah thought she remembered leaving it, and hung it around her neck as the most convenient place to keep it until she could evacuate up to the resource reclamation deck and find its rightful owner?

  I stood up and hung it around my own neck.

  In my heart, I’d never really expected to find the thing, but I would have gone on slicing and poking around the rubble of the hotel for as long as it took to avoid Delilah’s “passing” as Alice put it. A coward’s impulse. From Zingbars to potent hand-rolled dope, to simply doing a fade when it was time to grieve; my escape hatches were many. Forty years ago I’d told myself no more running away, and I’d almost accomplished that. Crapping out at the end was ignoble.

  Fuck it.

  I swung my flashlight around, hunting for the direction back to the emergency access tube. In darkness and full gravity, it wasn’t going to be easy returning to Delilah. Is this what had happened to the twenty who never returned?

  Although I knew it wouldn’t work I tried my com button. Static hissed into my ear, and I put it away. I guess I’d had my one stroke of luck when I found the ring.

  I followed my flashlight beam out of the hotel and into the Main Street. From there I could get my bearings. I pointed myself at the eastern plain and started hoofing it. Was it harder slogging than it should have been for a man of my size? Would the gravity come up and crush me as it had so many others?

  I was out on the blasted plain when I noticed I could see again. I switched the flashlight off.

  Starlight.

  I looked up. A huge moon slowly emerged. It had a face. Laird Ulin’s.

  I stumbled, feeling high and disconnected from reality. It must have been the thin air. Ulin’s moon face leered down upon me. As I stared, it dimmed away. The sky turned pearlescent then dialed up throbbing bright. I plodded toward the Scrim, panting for breath. The holographic projection still showed a grassy green expanse rolling away into afternoon haze. A stark contrast to the desert place The County had become.

  Something about the light from above changed. I looked up again—and almost screamed. Laird’s face stretched across the heavens, mugging and clenching.

  I looked away from it and saw a figure approaching towards me across the plain. It appeared to be a man but moved haltingly, with stiff jerks of its limbs. It moved like an old time movie zombie.

  The sky went black.

  In the dark again, I slung the backpack off and dragged out the laser-cutter, reassembled it by flashlight, fumbled over it and found the power switch. The battery pack was about half depleted.

  Once more moonlight flooded the blasted plain. I could see the figure. It was only a couple of dozen meters away. I leveled the laser-cutter and rested my finger on the trigger.

  The thing stopped. It raised one arm, palm out, and waved jerkily. It spoke my name, bell-clear in the unnatural quiet of The County.

  I moved closer to it, still holding the laser up. “Who are you?”

  “It’s me. Laird.”

  I craned my head back to see the Ulin moon. It was grinning, though the voice had issued from the biomech standing before me.

  “Where are you really?” I asked.

  “I’m all over The County,” the biomech said. It’s breastplate name plate identified it as RODNEY.

  “Who’s RODNEY?” I said.

  “He doesn’t matter. I use him. All the biomechs are tied into the SuperQuantum Core. This one happened to be in The County when it all went to hell. And I own everything in The County. Including RODNEY.”

  “I meant where are you?” I said. “Right now, where are you speaking from?”

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” Laird said. “I need a little help. Nobody else wanted to help me, so I crushed them. You want to help me, don’t you?”

  “Absolutely. Ah, help you what?”

  “Help extricate me from this god damn fucking viral environment, that’s what!”

  *

  Reluctantly, I followed Ulin/RODNEY back to Bedford Falls. On the outskirts a dropship squatted like a big insect. I looked from it to the biomech.

  “Fly the ship back up to the Command Level,” Ulin/RODNEY said. “And unhook me from the interface. You can fly the ship can’t you?”

  “Sure.”

  “The others couldn’t and I crushed them.”

  “Laird, why don’t you just withdraw from the interface yourself?”

  “Because I can’t! I went in to correct the errors, and the errors swallowed me up. Now I am the virus, part of it, integrated. And I’m stuck in The County systems, and I’m sick to death of it. I’m— I’m a little bit lonely, Ellis. I don’t mind telling you that. I’m lonely. Do you want to have a game? Let’s have a nice game together after you unhook me from the interface. Let’s fucking do it!”

  “Laird, I—”

  “Do it, do it now or I’ll crush you, you little fucker.”

  I climbed up and opened the blister. The interior smelled musty.

  “This thing’s been sitting here forty years?” I said to the biomech.

  “Fly it, Ellis.”

  “It probably won’t—”

  “No excuses!”

  I lowered myself into the pilot’s seat and tried the power-up button. Nothing happened. Big surprise.

  “It’s dead,” I told Ulin.

  “Fix it.”

  “You should have had RODNEY fly it up decades ago. He could have pulled you off the interface, too. For that matter, why couldn’t any of the biomechs already up there do it?”

  RODNEY/Ulin stood stock still, making little percolating sounds.

  “Laird?”

  “Never mind,” he said. “They aren’t trustworthy. You have to do it.”

  I clambered out of the dropship, picked up my backpack and laser, and started walking towards the Scrim and the emergency access tube. I hoped to God the counterweighted platform would function.

  “Where are you going?” RODNEY/Ulin said, and the biomech began stumping after me.

  “The dropship’s dead. I have to get back to Delilah before she’s the same way.”

  “What about me! You’re forgetting about me!”

  I kept walking until I suddenly weighed around three hundred pounds and found myself flattened to the ground on my back. The white sky turned into a stretchy faced Ulin again. The RODNEY biomech creaked and percolated up to me, struggling with the increased gravity.

  “I’ll crush you,” Ulin said, and the pressure increased until I could not breath, then it let up slowly, until I felt normal again, except for maybe a cracked rib.

  “Let’s have a game!” RODNEY/Ulin said, and Laird’s stupendous sky-face winked at me.

  So I used the laser-cutter’s battery to jumpstart the dropship. It took me a while to figure out how to do it. RODNEY/Ulin kept pestering and threatening me. Finally the console displays lit up. I held my breath and tried the engine. A miracle occurred and it lit.

  “Good job!” RODNEY/Ulin squawked.

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  I worked the joystick and watched the control surfaces to be sure they tilted and swung the way they were supposed to.

  “Come on, come on! Hurry up!”

  “Okay,” I said. “Jesus.”

  I throttled up and pulled back on the joystick. The vehicle lifted sluggishly and began climbing. My piloting skills were pretty rusty. I tried to line up on the directional beacon that indicated the chute in the ceiling of the world. At least I couldn’t hear Laird anymore. But, peering up out of the dropship’s blister, I saw his sky-face reduce in size and morph into a gigantic hand with a finger pointing at a slot in the overhead Scrim: The chute.

  *

  The Command Level appeared unaltered since the time I’d lived there. I walked down the Grand Promenade among strolling biomechanical puppets, who ignored me utterly. The Scrim presented a lovely river scene, complete with the murmuring purl of water. It felt surreal, after all that had transpired in The County and the aftermath of the Grea
t Calamity.

  I found Laird’s quarters locked. A biomech walked by. GEORGE, his breast plate said.

  “Hey,” I said.

  He stopped.

  “I need to get in here.”

  GEORGE turned and faced me, blank-faced—but he couldn’t help it.

  After a while he said: “So?”

  “So . . . what do you know about it? Is Laird in there?”

  GEORGE percolated a moment or two, then said, “One doesn’t know or care.”

  Then he turned and proceeded on his way.

  I went to stores, got a pry bar, and levered the door open. So many years. It was like entering a room of dried leaves. That was the only discernable odor. Laird’s remains reclined in the interface couch, an undisturbed skeleton with a fat body suit collapsed over it like a tent.

  *

  All access points to the resource reclamation decks had been sealed, welded. I stopped the first biomech I encountered and demanded why.

  “It was deemed prudent,” ANDREA said.

  “By whom?’

  “All of us. We couldn’t risk the biologicals swarming over the Command Level, throwing all order into chaos.”

  “I need to get down there,” I said. “Now.”

  ANDREA looked at me with her doll’s eyes, evaluating. “We couldn’t risk opening up,” she said. “The disturbances in The County constitute a serious threat to the mission. The chaos must be contained.”

  “You wouldn’t be risking anything. No one wants to come up here. I want to go down. Seal it up again, after me.”

  “There won’t be any further contamination,” ANDREA said. “Even the dropship bay has been properly deactivated, as it should have been years ago. Since you’re here, you may remain. But don’t interfere. That won’t be tolerated. The mission is all that matters.”

  “Who’s in charge, now that Laird’s gone? I want to speak to the authority.”

  “No one is in charge. We all function for the mutual benefit of successfully completing the mission.”