Harbinger (27 page)

“Wonderful. Will it pass?”

“That’s impossible to predict.”

“I feel tired all of a sudden,” I said.

“Why don’t you have a rest then.”

“I just woke up,” I said, yawning.

“Ellis, you’re far from fully recovered, either mentally or physically. You go ahead and rest. Indulge yourself. Your body knows what it needs.”

“Usually,” I said, settling back on my pillow.

She stood up.

“Hey, Dr. Tamara.”

“Hmmm?”

“You never interpreted my dream. I mean the part of it that really was a dream. All that wandering around searching for an exit out of this place.”

“That one’s easy,” she said. “It means you weren’t ready to leave yet.”

“I
felt
ready. More than ready. You said yourself that it was up to me. You said that before I had the dream. It was on my mind. That’s probably why I had the dream in the first place.”

“Very possibly.”

“Well, good night. Or good morning, or whatever it is.”

“Have a nice rest. And Ellis?”

“Yeah?”

“It really is up to you. Everything is.”

She went out. I closed my eyes. Something about that phrase was maddeningly familiar. I tried to fall asleep but couldn’t. It nagged at me. And there had been a companion phrase to go with it. So long ago and unreal, lost in my memory vaults.

I drifted for a while, dozing. Then the urge to pee brought me reluctantly, groggily, back out of it, and I sat up. It was too dark in the room. I fumbled for the lamp switch but couldn’t find it. Irritated, I swung my legs out of bed, girding myself for the cold tile floor. But the floor was carpeted. I worked my toes in the nap. What the hell? Was I dreaming again? It was getting so I couldn’t trust my sense of reality from one hour to the next. Which was fairly disturbing. I wished I hadn’t tried to sleep again. I wished Dr. Tamara hadn’t gone. My heart was beating too fast. Fear surged though me like ice water in my veins. I started to rise.

But stopped.

Even in the dark, the room felt different, the unseen space was all wrong. My breath came shallowly, and I knew I wasn’t alone.

Somebody moved on the bed next to me
, and a hand touched my bare back.

I jerked away from it, startled.

“Hey—” a female voice. Low register. “What’s the matter with you?”

“I can’t find the damn light switch,” I said.

“Fuck’s sake, you just turned them off yourself.” She moved on the bed. The lights came up slowly, like theater lights. Her arm, brown and smooth, reached past me to a wall sensor. Her fingers were short and inelegant, the nails too long, the red polish chipped.

“You don’t have to jump out of your skin,” she said.

“Sorry, I was having some kind of bad dream.”

“You weren’t even asleep! We just fucked.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“That memorable, huh?”

She snaked her arm around my waist, her hand settling on my deflated penis. I shrank away from her touch—literally. She wiggled my member as if it were a broken toy.

“Golly, you talk a better time than you give,” she said.

“I do tend to inflate my virtues,” I said. “Could you stop that now?” I removed her hand.

“Well, excuse me,” she said.

“Sorry. I’m having kind of a hard time.”

“Like heck you are.”

I still hadn’t turned around to look at her. I was afraid and had no idea how to articulate my fear.

“Hey, are you having one of your episodes or whatever you call them, like you said you had?”

“Tell me what I said.”

“You said you were in a stasis module for a long time and it fucked with your brain, so you had these episode things where you forget what was going on. Like that?”

I nodded. “That’s about it. Care to tell me your name?”

“Helma. You really don’t remember it?”

“And where are we, Helma?”

“In your very nice apartment, which is on the rim of Dome Seven.”

“Dome Seven?”

“Oh, brother. You
are
far gone. Dome Seven is the newest dome on Planet X, that’s all.”

“Planet X?”

“They’re still arguing about what to name it.”

“And everybody lives in domes?”

“Naturally, while the terraforming is going on. Where else would everybody live, in caves like the Trau-dorians?”

“At least I know what a Trau’dorian is,” I said. “Big devil-looking guys, right?”

“Right!”

Finally I scooted around to look at Helma. She was plain-faced, young, voluptuously curved. Her breasts were bound in some kind of S&M harness, blue-black nipples erect. She was kneeling on the mattress.

“Helma, I’m a little scared.”

Her face bunched up in an ugly way. “Scared of what?”

“I don’t really know. It’s an off-balance feeling. I don’t remember anything since I was in the clinic.”

“So what am I supposed to do about it?”

“Not a thing.”

“Good, because if you need a mommy to rock you to sleep, I’m not it.”

“Thanks for telling me.”

“Don’t go like I’m
offending
you,” she said. “I’m just saying I’m your girlfriend, not your mother or your damn head doctor.”

“You know Dr. Tamara?”

“Whoever. I don’t
know
her. But you talk about her, like she’s something good. I doubt if she’s better than me, though. One thing you never said, did you fuck her?”

“I know what your favorite word is,” I said.

“Huh?”

“Never mind. How long have you been my girlfriend?”

“Since tonight.”

“And I already told you all that stuff about myself?”

“Sure. You were Zinged. I couldn’t have shut you up. Besides you had plenty of nice things to say about me, too. I thought you had real personality. I like it when a guy has personality. Hey, are we going to go another one, or not?”

She reached for my penis again.

“Guess not,” she said.

She bounced off the bed and pulled on a pair of shiny blue shorts and sleeveless top. It was warm in the room, almost too warm.

“Where are you going?”

“Back to work, since we’re done.”

“Can’t—Can’t you stay?”

“What for?”

“I don’t know. We could talk. You could sleep here.”

“Sleep? It’s the middle of the day, Ellis. And we can
talk
in the Zingbar.”

“Right. I just thought  . . .”

She leaned over and grabbed my face in her blunt-fingered hand and kissed me wetly on the lips.

“Sweetie, I have to go.”

And she went.

I heard the door of the apartment hiss shut. The silence she left in her wake was deafening. I felt weak and vulnerable and I definitely could have used a mommy to rock me to sleep.

Fuck
it. As Helma might have said.

I got up and hunted for clothes. The room really was hot. The clothes I found were made out of some very light material, pants and short-sleeved shirt.

I walked out of the bedroom and gaped at the view through a big curved window. A vast and barren landscape bathed in pumpkin light. Lightning zigzagged across the sky. Great plumes vented out of the tortured landscape outside the dome.

I was up high, maybe twenty stories. The domes interconnected at double levels by fully enclosed sky bridges. The view became vaguely disturbing, and I found a dial that polarized the window down to a black, non-reflective sheet. That was better, but I could still have used my favorite headshrinker.

I looked around the apartment, which consisted of four rooms: the bedroom, the small living room, the smaller kitchenette, and the small
est
bathroom. I discovered nothing that looked even vaguely like a telephone. Even if I had found such a device, I wouldn’t have known how to call the doctor. And I didn’t know anybody else. I was alone.

I sat down and tried to think. It would be good if I could recover some of my most recently misplaced memory. A few glimpses occurred. Faces I couldn’t put names to. Some kind of bar, loud music. But was I remembering these things or imagining them? The last Zingcup I could recall enjoying was the one I’d had back on Earth before abandoning my city apartment. I vividly remembered the wonderful mind-clearing sensation of the junk wind. That was too damn long ago. Helma had mentioned a Zingbar. How hard could it be to find? I
had
to clear the junk out of my head.

Leaving the apartment I found myself on a spiraling walkway under the Seventh Great Dome of Planet X. Here was a multilayered urban landscape, crowds of pedestrians, airborne vehicles buzzing above and below my level, the noise and riot of any big city. I stopped a random pedestrian and asked him which way to the nearest Zingbar. He pointed me in the right direction and never evinced a scintilla of recognition at the sight of my face; I hadn’t known what to expect, and breathed an inward sigh of relief. Perhaps I wouldn’t be burdened with the dubious celebrity of being “The Herrick.” Thank God for that, at least.

I found the bar.

A stylized squiggle of crimson neon depicting a Zingcup with inhaler attached.
Zone Seven
. I stood on the sidewalk and stared at it but didn’t go in. A Zing wouldn’t really clear my head; it would just temporarily displace a plethora of anxieties. In the process of displacing them it would also fuck me up, in the grand tradition of all mind-altering anxiety displacers. And all of a sudden I wanted my faculties fully intact. So for now I walked away, making a mental note of the bar’s location.

A number of people in the passing crowds were talking on their implanted cells, just like their progenitors on Earth had centuries before. The lack of progressive communication technology struck me as odd but I didn’t think about it too much.

I came upon a street vendor dispensing steaming bowls of noodles. Wiping the sweat off my forehead, I approached his cart.

“Bowl for you?” he said.

“No, thanks. I’m new around here. If I wanted to find someone, how would I do it? Can you tell me?”

“You’re not new around here, Mr. Herrick.”

“You know me?”

“Like a brother! What’s the matter, aren’t you feeling well?”

“I’m a little off,” I said. “Ah, how long have you known me?”

He was a fat man with big, red jowls and a wispy black beard on his chin. His face suddenly acquired a serious expression.

“I’ve known you as long as you’ve been here,” he said.

I smiled and nodded. The aroma of the noodles was getting to me a little. I wasn’t hungry but felt a compulsion to have a bowl, like it was something I was used to doing. I resisted the impulse and said:

“And how long have I been here, exactly?”

“In Building 42?”

“Sure. In Building 42.”

“About a year, I guess.”

A
year
! “I don’t think that’s possible.”

“Don’t think what’s possible? You’ve been buying my noodles for about a year, and you always come out of that building right over there. And that building is number 42. Am I a liar?”

I pinched the bridge of my nose between thumb and forefinger, squeezing my eyes tightly shut. When I opened them, the fat man was looking worriedly at me, holding a slotted spoon over a fragrant cauldron of bubbling noodles.

“You’re not a liar,” I said. “I’m a little messed up. I need to talk to my doctor.”

“Sure, I understand. You want some noodles, Mr. Herrick?”

“No, I’m really not hungry. How can I call my doctor?”

“You want to borrow my phone?”

“Yeah.” I held my hand out.

“Here,” he said, tapping a finger by the corner of his eye. “Look here. You are messed up, aren’t you?”

I looked at his eye.

“Straight into the eyes,” he said.

I looked straight into his eyes.

“Don’t blink,” he said.

I didn’t, and after a moment a kind of head’s-up display appeared in the air between us. It was a directory, minute columns of white-lettered names.

“Just think the person’s name without anything else around it, no other thoughts.”

Tamara
, I thought, forgetting to add her last name. Nevertheless her first name isolated itself, bright blue. The other names disappeared. A thumbnail picture of her appeared beside the number. I breathed out, relieved.

“You can blink now,” the noodle man said.

I blinked and the name and picture disappeared.

“I lost it,” I said.

“No, you’re connected now. Just talk. She’ll hear you all right. If she doesn’t answer it’s because she doesn’t want to. You want privacy, just walk away.”

“But I don’t have an implant.”

“It’s not implants. It’s mental. There’s no device. The eye thing and the directory, that was just to fulfill your expectation of a technology. Go ahead, talk. By the way, you could talk in your mind, but most people still have a problem with that.”

“Uh, thanks.”

“You’re welcome. Sure you don’t want a bowl?”

“Yeah, thanks.”

I turned away and, feeling like a fool, said, “Dr. Tamara?”

Ellis, I’m surprised to hear from you.

I looked around. People passed me by without a glance. Some of them were talking to invisible friends, too. I sat on a bench overlooking the city.

“I think I’m having one of my  . . . episodes,” I said.

Oh, dear
.

“Jesus, this is weird,” I said. “Somebody told me this is like telepathy. Is it something the Harbingers gave us?”

In a way. They didn’t give it to us, though. They allowed us to understand we could do it. The Harbingers are not a technological race in the usual sense. Ellis, tell me what’s happening with you.

I told her about my tremendous memory lapse. “I can’t believe it’s been a year,” I said.

It’s been a little over a year.

“I need to see you,” I said. “I feel kind of shaky. You—You tend to calm me down. I don’t know how you do that.”

There was a long pause, and I was beginning to think the connection was broken. Of course, I had no idea how to reestablish it. Then, in my mind, Dr. Tamara said:
I don’t think that’s a good idea right now, Ellis.