Harbinger (19 page)

“Things could get dicey,” I said, “once Laird figures out what I’m up to. You might want to consider cutting me loose right now.”

Delilah kissed me. “We’re together,” she said.

“Yes, we are,” I said, and meant it, but a piece of me started rattling his tin cup against the bars of the door before it was even shut all the way. The trouble with practical immortality is that it necessitates serial grieving. Nichole had figured I wasn’t up to it, and I’d spent a lot of years proving she was right. Was that going to change now?

A high, spiraling whine over De Smet interrupted my thoughts and our packing. Delilah at the window said:

“Dropships.”

“Your friend called the truant officer,” I said, and believed it was true. Years later I discovered Ulin had other more reliable ways of keeping track of me.

They were in the town square when we bolted from the lobby of the hotel. Biomechs. A half dozen of them, their dropships squatting on scorched rings in the middle of the street. One of them had crushed and partially melted somebody’s bicycle.

“Oops,” I said. Back door would have been a smarter choice.

One of the biomechs approached us. He was a seven-footer (they were all outsized; you needed room in which to cram all the gizmos that gave them “life”). His name was TONY B. He was holding a stun gun in his right hand. His perpetual smile was like a men’s wear sale at Nordstrom’s. He and the others were far from stylish, however, in their Nazi black body suits and caps.

“It appears you’ve lost track of time, Mr. Herrick,” he said.

“Nothing like it,” I said.

“We have a ship waiting to take you up.”

“I’m extending my stay in The County.”

“You’ll have to discuss that with Mr. Ulin.”

“I’ll call him next week. Or the week after, or something.”

TONY B started to raise the stun gun. I shoved Delilah out of harm’s way and dove back into the hotel. I made it all the way to the rear entrance before it hit me. The stun blast felt like a gust of hot wind blowing
through
me. My insides joggled, which was weird, and the blast carried me forward, stumbling out the door and down steps on rubber legs. Then I went sprawling.

I struggled to drag myself forward, but I was the Rubber Man of Borneo and had no strength in my arms. I stopped struggling and lay with my face in the grass. Then Delilah was there, her voice close.

“Ellis—”

Abruptly she was gone, and something was lifting me up as if I were stuffed with feathers. My silly head dangled all woozy. I vomited and saw the nice lunch I’d just eaten with my girl splattered on the green grass. I couldn’t raise my head to see what had happened to Delilah.

They strapped me into a dropship. By then the effects of the stun blast were wearing off. My whole body ached.

The engine wound up. I felt the vibration through my bones. Then we reared off the ground and accelerated toward the blameless deception of a summer sky.

Time is a process, a wheel, an illusion, an invention
, a vapor in the mind of Man.

Time just
is
.

Everywhere except the Command Level of the starship
Infinity
, where a society of puppets stalked around wondering if they were who they thought they were, and Laird Ulin had acquired a habit of obesity.

I lived in a gilded prison in a world above the sky. Mostly I read (I was back onto Hemingway), smoked herb (I cultivated the plants under special grow lights and harvested the leaves as my needs moved me, which was all too frequently), practiced Tai Chi and plotted sabotage. In between these activities I endured Laird Ulin’s invasive medical procedures, not to mention his lugubrious presence.

One day nine years after my unceremonious removal from The County it occurred to me that I missed Delilah Greene. I came to this realization while reclining in my quarters smoking a fat joint of my home grown and reading that passage in
A Farewell To Arms
in which the American Tenente is blown up and discovers himself rushing bodily out of himself and out and out and out, and all the time bodily out, and it was all a mistake to think that you just died, etc.

My mind followed this image out and out and out, the way a mind will when it’s floating in a fog of dope, and I was reminded of my visions of Oz bubbles and the dead and the Harbingers. Ironic that about the time that a significant portion of the human race began claiming to see them I
stopped
seeing Harbingers. If I’d ever seen them in the first place. It’s a lonely feeling when your visions abandon you. And it becomes easy to abandon
them
, in return. By the way, that goes for people, too. You abandon them, or let them abandon you. It hurts, then it fades, then you stay high and remote—and safe. Time is also an escape hatch. Especially for someone like me.

But it wasn’t the existential dilemma that really appealed to me about
A Farewell To Arms
. I went for the love story, which should have been mawkish but wasn’t.

I went for Catherine.

All this, lying back, the novel open in my lap (I’d insisted on real books made out of real paper when I signed on for the voyage), the room hazed with smoke—like my mind. And I conjured up Nichole, whom I could never entirely un-conjure, and that first night in her bedroom. And visions, and Fate, and, well, the love story.

And I thought perhaps it was time I stopped getting high and started getting serious. But it was hard to uphold the love story of my own life, especially with the latest volunteer lying naked on our recently shared bed. She was nineteen, with hair so black it was almost blue, and cut boyishly short. The dim lighting in my quarters fell softly on the swell and curve of her hips and bottom, which weren’t in the least bit boyish. In my case dope generally inflamed desire while inhibiting function, however, and I had become mostly a window shopper since my return to the Command Level.

Nine years. I dragged on my joint—the one with the hot coal on the tip. Time’s clock spring unwound up here on the Command Level and floated by like a pretty ribbon discarded from the package of immortality. It was easy to remain floating. All I had to do was wait and eventually the long voyage would be over. And by then the entire population of The County would have cycled into a new generation. The lovely girl now purring through sleep on my bed would be either a very old woman or a very dead one.

Nineteen.

And I was twenty-nine. Two hundred and fourteen in Herrick years.

I thought about that, and my jaded armor slipped a little. Damn it. I ground the joint out and sat up. I reached over and touched the girl’s ankle. She stirred, stretched, rolled over, smiled. I must have touched the right spot. I started to say her name, then realized I’d forgotten it. My armor slipped a little more, and something like shame moved sluggishly inside my heart. It was an unusual name, I remembered that much. It had reminded me of something, but what? Pumpkins?

“Hi,” the girl said, in just the right way. “Are you ready to try again?”

I hoped I was, but not for what this child had in mind.

“Uh, I thought we’d go have a drink or something.”

She came off the bed in one sinuous movement and was kneeling by my chair.

“That sounds fun,” she said. “Unless you want to do something else.”

I did. I wanted to shoot myself. But that would have been rude.

“Let’s try Paris,” I said. “Ever tasted Pernod?”

The Seine was blue, like the hour. Naturally. And the Pernod was synth, but you can’t have everything. We sat under an awning on a sidewalk café. The other tables were empty. Holographic scrims suggested a City of Light bustling with romantic humanity, but really there was nothing out there but the horror of the biomechs puttering around. Okay, they weren’t all that horrible. But creepy, definitely creepy.

“How’s your drink?” I asked The Girl With No Name.

“It’s wet but tastes dry.”

“It isn’t too much like the real thing,” I said.

“Have you tasted the real thing?”

“Back on Earth, sure. On the other hand I never tried it until after my body changed, so for all I know my taste buds were mutated along with my biochemistry and I have no idea what it’s ‘supposed’ to taste like.”

She smiled and sipped, very self-possessed for a kid. Then she said, “My name’s Autumn. Autumn Janklow. You forgot it, didn’t you?”

“Sort of. I’m sorry.” Shit, I knew it was seasonal.

We returned to my quarters. She picked up her few things, and I escorted her to the dropship bay. She presented her visitor’s pass and visa, and a biomech strapped her in.

“Good-bye, Autumn,” I said into a speaker grill on the other side of a thick window. I wasn’t allowed in the dropship bay. Ever.

She twiddled her fingers as the blister closed over her. The biomech retreated to an enclosure, and moments later the dropship fell out of the bay and was gone.

When I turned, Laird was standing there.

“She didn’t last long,” he observed.

“Time is relative.”

“Your eyes,” he said.

“My eyes?”

“Yes.”

Laird was not fun to look at. Not that he’d ever been a movie star. But in the last decade, perhaps driven by the cadaverous specter that used to peer back out at him from his shaving mirror, he had been indulging in a high-caloric diet and bulking on fat at a feverish pace. His skin still appeared shiny and waxen, but now his jowls sagged and his neck was bulging and seamed. Also, like his great grandfather before him, he suffered mental lapses, stutters in cognitive organization that pointed toward eventual madness.

“Didn’t you just take my eyes ten years ago?” I said.

“They’re worn out. All your third and fourth re-gen organs wear out too quickly.”

He coughed and wheezed, and clapped a sausage-fingered hand on my shoulder. I thought of his (my!) heart lugging away under layers of blubber in his great chest cavity. We were still almost a hundred years from Ulin’s World.

“See you in surgical prep tomorrow at nine,” he said. “And as long as you’re coming in anyway, we’ll do a pituitary extraction, too. Kill two birds.”

God.

I nodded dully and watched him waddle off. Pituitary extractions were bad. But eyes were the worst.

I walked the Grand Promenade, trying to shake off the residue of dope. My mouth felt sticky. Biomechs strode stiffly by me. Their bodies were partly organic, maybe fourteen percent. Enough to allow them a limited range of human sensation. Exercise was good for their fluid circulation.

The overhead Scrim presented a mackerel sky dyed rose with sunset. I walked the length of the promenade, three point one kilometers. My mind felt marginally sharper. Probably fear-bursts of adrenaline had replaced the vapors of herb. I made a decision and allowed my thoughts to crystallize around it.

It was time to revisit George.

Sabotage? George was the name of the virus I’d been tinkering with for years. When I’d first been dragged back to the Command Level and forbidden from ever leaving again, I’d immediately begun plotting. Over time my plot grew diffuse and became more of a hobby. A “some day I’m gonna—” And then I didn’t.

Now I departed the Grand Promenade and made my way circuitously, by ladder and maintenance corridors, to the Orbital Flight Operations Center. The Oh Fuck wasn’t suppose to be online until that far-flung day when
Infinity
would establish itself in orbit over Ulin’s World. It was a fairly small deck space, packed with equipment of exactly zero usefulness while the ship was in deep space transit.

Except for one item: a Quantum Interface Terminal.

I’d figured out a way to fool the power use monitors by making it appear as though insignificant energy surges were occurring throughout the holo projection system, when in fact the additional drain was caused by my occasional use of the quantum interface. Stealthy as hell.

The Oh Fuck was dark, except for a few panel lights. I seated myself in an operations couch and fitted the transdermal leads to my temples, performing a limited interface with the quantum core.

I touched a green pad and a data Environment sprang up around me. I shuffled through it, seeking my disguised entry point, found it, and opened a gate into my partially constructed virus.

I’d named it “George” after a junior high school geography teacher whose class I’d had to endure once upon a distant time. He had been an eminently fair and eminently dull teacher. Probably the last person you would have suspected of any devious acts.

I remained installed in the operations couch for hours, meticulously completing George. I didn’t want to cripple
Infinity
, merely disrupt a few routines, make it possible for me to escape back to The County and create the kind of minor havoc that would make Laird’s efforts to retrieve my ass an exercise in futility—at least for a while.

I was going all the way this time, determined to elude Ulin for as long as it took. My harvest days were over. I was pulling the plug.

I set George on a short timer and then withdrew from the interface. A few white lights blinked in the dark of the Oh Fuck. I started to get up from the couch, and a panicky impulse seized me. I could still go back in and stop the timer, dismantle George. I hesitated a moment longer, then levered myself out of the couch and returned to my quarters.

It was safe in there with my books and barriers. Barriers against emotional involvement. Barriers around that most vulnerable organ—my heart.

I had an hour to kill before George began screwing with
Infinity
in a noticeable way. Whenever there was an open space I tended to fill it with dope. So I started preparing my usual answer to any uncomfortable possibility. Standing before my plant collection I picked up the little shears and started snipping likely buds. My hands moved slowly, then stopped, and I thought: The hell with it. I dropped the shears and switched off the grow lights. That closed my most reliable escape hatch. I could still feel the heat on the backs of my hands.