Harbinger (16 page)

“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.

I unstrapped and popped the blister. The air was fresher than anything I’d breathed on the Command Level, even allowing for the scorched under-smell from the dropship’s hot engine. I stood up and stretched in the misting rain.

Two guys on bicycles were pedaling toward me from the town. A third rider lagged some distance behind them. Mentally, I whipped the dust cloth off my people skills. When the two nearer riders coasted up to the landing pad and dismounted, letting their bikes fall, I said:

“Howdy.”

“Just who the hell do you think you are,” the first guy said. He was about fifty years old, fit, gray at the temples, his hairline in slow retreat. He was wearing an outfit that looked like a cross between nineteenth century business attire and a jumpsuit. The tie pulled it all together, I guess. His friend was much younger and dressed in similar fashion, and though he hadn’t yet uttered a word, his vibe was even more hostile than the older man’s.

“So you guys are the welcoming committee?”

They exchanged a look. Then the younger one stepped forward, chin out, glaring at me.

“You’re human,” he said.

“Usually.”

“I don’t know you,” the older one said. “What town are you from?”

“I’m from the Command Level.”

They looked at each other again.

“Come down from there. Let’s see some identification.”

“Are you always this friendly to strangers, or am I a special case?”

“There aren’t any strangers,” the young guy said. “And the only things that ever ride in these contraptions are mechanical men from overhead. You’re different.”

“I am that,” I said, climbing down. I offered my hand first to the old man. “My name’s Ellis Herrick.”

He shook my hand tepidly. “Niels Bradshaw.”

I turned to the younger guy, who ignored my proffered hand.

“Where’s your identification?” he demanded.

I took a breathing moment, then said, “It’s in my steamer trunk.”

“What?”

“The porters will lug it out eventually. Which way to food?”

“You don’t leave this pad until we see your paperwork, Mr. Herrick.”

I nodded, then very deliberately stepped off the landing pad. “Uh oh,” I said. “Now what are we going to do?”

His face tried to imitate plum skin. His hands balled into fists. He might as well have been sending me detailed telepathic messages:
Get ready, I am about to swing a cloddish right hook at your jaw.

I waited for the move. It came. I stepped into it, caught his wrist, twisted his arm back and came up under it with my shoulder, hearing and feeling the satisfying pop of his ball and socket joint doing something it wasn’t normally supposed to do. He cried out. Who wouldn’t? And I pulled him around by his newly gimped arm, kicked his feet out from under him, and dumped him on the wet grass.

“My God,” Niels Bradshaw said, “are you out of your mind?”

“No, just patience.” Laird had been correct. This vacation was already doing me a world of good.

The third rider, whom I’d all but forgotten about, arrived on her bicycle. She wore a yellow form-fitting body suit, which was a good thing. Her hair was short and blonde, her eyes a striking violet. She could really straddle a bicycle. I’d never seen her before, but strangely something inside of me responded to her as to a familiar and cherished presence. Or maybe I was just horny.

“What’s going on here?” she said. Then, addressing the guy moaning on the grass but barely taking her eyes off me, she said:

“Gerry, are you all right?”

I answered for him. “His shoulder is slightly dislocated. He’ll live.”

“They’ll lock you up,” Gerry snarled.

“I doubt that.”

“Violence of any type is not tolerated,” Bradshaw said.

“Why’d you do it?” the girl asked.

I said, “He wanted to see this, but he didn’t know how to ask for it politely.”

I slipped a wafer-thin card out of my breast pocket and started to hand it to her, but Bradshaw snatched it out of my hand and glowered at it first.

“You might have shown us this in the first place,” he said.

“I might have.”

The blonde took the card and looked at it. “Visa signed by Laird Ulin himself,” she said. “Very impressive.”

“No, not very,” I said. “You haven’t met Laird.”

She smiled on one side of her mouth, half-dimpling. Then she flipped the card over and saw my name. That gave her an O mouth and eyes to match, briefly. I found all her facial expressions beautiful and charming.

“You’re Ellis Herrick?”

“Yeah.”

She handed the card back to me. I could almost see the electric spark jump between our fingers.

“Amazing,” she said.

“What’s amazing, you know him somehow?” Gerry said.

“Of course not,” she said, swinging her leg off the bike frame. She let the bike tip over like the others and then crouched beside Gerry and said:

“Your poor arm.”

He ate it up. To me he said, “I don’t care who issued your visa, we don’t appreciate you buzzing our town. We have children in school. They aren’t used to that kind of noise. It frightens them.”

“Gerry’s the primary school principal for Bedford Falls,” the girl said.

“Oh. Sorry about the buzzing thing,” I said. “The dropship was preprogrammed and I couldn’t override it. Probably Ulin’s idea of a good time.”

“Nobody’s fault then,” she said. “My name’s Delilah, by the way.”

“Nice to meet you, Delilah-by-the-way. Is it an Indian name?”

Nobody laughed, but Delilah dimpled on both sides.

“Delilah Greene,” she said.

Gerry groaned a little, to bring the attention back where it belonged. Delilah was kind of propping him up, and he had his good arm around her and his naughty hand on her hip.

“Excuse me,” I said. I hunkered behind him, crowding Delilah out of the way. Quickly, I hooked my left arm across Gerry’s chest, to hold him still. Then, before he could figure out what I was up to and object, I pretzeled my right arm around his and popped his shoulder back the way God had intended it to be. Gerry only screamed a little, which was very manful of him.

I stood, offering to help him up, but he was pissy about it and refused.

“I have to get back to school,” he said, martyrishly. He picked up his bicycle, wiped the seat with his sleeve, and mounted, making a good show of awkwardness because of his famously popped-unpopped shoulder. “Delilah?” he said.

“What?” she said, which I liked and Gerry didn’t.

“We’ll all be getting back,” Niels Bradshaw said. “I hope you’ll enjoy your visit, Mr. Herrick, but I also hope you will be able to restrain yourself from further acts of provocation. One thing you will notice about The County is that we have a very low tolerance for violence of any sort. This is an orderly place. It has to be, I’m sure you understand. And we are especially orderly here in Bedford Falls.”

“I promise to be good,” I said.

“In my opinion he should be detained,” Gerry said. “Then expelled.”

“You can’t expel me,” I said. “I don’t go to your school.”

“Niels?” Gerry said.

“Nobody’s being detained,” Bradshaw said. “I trust that Mr. Herrick will behave himself.”

Gerry grunted unhappily.

“Stop by the mayor’s office later,” Bradshaw said to me. “I’d like to talk with you. I was unaware that any normal human beings lived on the Command Level. I think you’ve caught us all by surprise.”

“I’ll stop by. Mr. Mayor?”

“That’s me,” he said.

The three of them rode off. I retrieved my duffel bag out of the dropship. When I turned I saw Delilah Greene pedaling back to me. I stood on the grass and she rode around me, wobblingly.

“I wanted to apologize for Gerry,” she said.

“He’s a big boy, he could do it himself, if he was so inclined, which I doubt. He was about to punch me when I popped his arm.”

“Oh, my. Gerry’s a little high-strung, I’m afraid. He and I were having kind of an argument when you flew over. Also, he was supposed to be at the school and wasn’t, so  . . .”

“Let’s just forget it.”

She wobbled in close and charming in a dimplish way. “You’ll need a place to stay,” she said. “Try the Bedford Falls Hotel. You are staying overnight, aren’t you?”

“I am and I will,” I said.

The misting rain ceased abruptly, the sky clearing with remarkable rapidity, and false sunlight blossomed over us, gemming the grass and Delilah’s violet eyes.

“Good,” she said, and rode away.

I liked to watch her pedal.

I walked down the middle of Main Street with my bag slung over my back. It was a pedestrian and bicycle thoroughfare, and there were plenty of both. On either side of the street the building facades suggested quaint early twentieth century architecture. The three communities that comprised The County were modeled after idealized notions of small town America, circa 1920. Nice places to raise the kids. I was, of course, the one living man to have actually seen the real Waukegan and De Smet, having visited those towns on a quest for literary nostalgia; forget Bedford Falls, which existed only in the imagination of Frank Capra. But The County was more Main Street Disneyland than an authentic reproduction. The settings were as artificial as the engineered PerfectWood out of which the towns were mostly constructed. By which I don’t mean to detract from the genuine soothing effect. All I’m saying is I missed Mickey and Donald.

In the center of Bedford Falls there stood a gazebo. It was a pretty thing, with lattice walls and a rooster weathervane on top. There was a pretty thing
in
the gazebo, too, and her name was Delilah Greene.

“Hi,” she said, leaning above me on the white-painted rail.

“Hi yourself.”

“We meet again.”

“I guess we were bound to. The day sure cleared up fast, huh?”

“The weather is strictly controlled, you know,” she said.

“I know.”

“The Quantum Core makes sure everybody gets enough moisture, but it occurs on a random cycle, so things don’t get too God awfully predictable.”

“April randomly-dealt-moisturizing-cycles bring May flowers,” I said. “Are we going to talk about the weather much longer?”

“Not much,” she said.

“Good. Ah, this is going to sound dumb, but haven’t we met before? I mean prior to the ruckus out by the landing pad.”

“You know we haven’t,” she said. “I’ve never been Overhead, and I’m sure I’ve never seen you around here. I would have remembered.”

“I
have
been here once before,” I said. “About a hundred years ago.”

She took a few moments to appraise me, then said, “You really are
The
Herrick, aren’t you?”

It was my turn to groan.

“Please,” I said. “Can we stick with plain old Ellis and dump the ‘The?’”

“I experienced your Environment when I was a kid.”

“Join the club. Promise me you’re not a consciousness evolutionary type.”

“I’m not. As far as I know there aren’t any EC-er’s in The County. Laird Ulin’s using you to live out the duration of the voyage, isn’t he?”

“Yep.”

“Wow. I thought you were so familiar.”

“That explains your side of it, but why do I feel I already know you?”

“Ellis, I can’t say. And to be honest, I don’t really think it’s the Herrick Environment that makes me think I know you. It’s deeper than that. Wanna go on a picnic?”

I laughed. “Right now?”

“Sure, why not? You got another girl in Bedford Falls?”

“Nope. Let’s go.”

“Wait here a minute, okay?”

She ran across the street and entered a building with the words BEDFORD FALLS HOTEL painted in large forest green letters over the porch. A few minutes later she came around the side of the building on a tandem bicycle with a picnic basket in the carrier attached to the handlebars.