Harbinger (21 page)

“Ben’s my gene dad,” Alice piped up. “He’s old.”

Kids say the darndest things.

“I bet I’m older than your gene daddy,” I said to Alice.

“He’s the mayor,” she said back, not sounding too impressed.

“What a guy.”

“He’s a water farmer, too.”

“Now I’m getting all tingly.”

Alice giggled.

We were in the apartment behind the front desk of the hotel. A window looked out on the promenade. The light through that window suddenly dimmed, as if a giant shroud had been drawn over the town. There was a roaring. I closed the shades.

“Hang on!”

Something monstrous moved over us. The building shuddered. A woman screamed in the next room. My ears popped. Delilah’s face was tense and frightened. She hugged Alice against her breast, and I couldn’t see the child’s face. Then the window exploded. Sucked out the opening, the shade rattled and danced. I felt the breath drawn from my lungs. Outside in the weird purple-green light, a raggedy man swept by, arms and legs flailing like the limbs of a boneless doll.
Son of a bitch!

In a minute or two it was over.

The light turned buttery, and shadows fled across the courtyard. I stepped to the window and ripped down what remained of the shade. The sky was blowing clear. Above the shredded clouds a holographic lie of serenity persisted. My hands were trembling, and I made them into fists. There had been nothing in my virus that could have given birth to this.
Nothing.

I climbed through the window frame and went to the man. He lay sprawled and twisted. The grass was as vividly green as his blood was red. My hand unsteady, I touched the place on his neck that should have been pulsing and found it wasn’t.

Behind me, Delilah said, “Ellis—?”

“This is my fault,” I said.

Then the man’s eyes fluttered, and I jerked my hand back. Hearts can be tricky things.

What a nice day for a bicycle ride. Delilah Greene (with Alice riding tandem) pedaled ahead of me on the winding, swooping path through the Oxygen Forest. With George running amok and the monorails dependent on the centralized computer system, it seemed best to take the scenic route. Also, I wanted to avoid being observed.

It was an odd-looking forest, the trees engineered for maximum carbon dioxide-to-oxygen conversion, bulgy on top like big green cartoon poodle puffs. Whimsical. But I wasn’t feeling too whimsical myself. Not like the way I’d felt when I concocted a harmless little thunderstorm.

We were on our way to Waukegan. There was an old water farmer in town who also happened to be mayor—and in the office of the mayor was a Core Access Interface. The one in Bedford Falls had exploded, unfortunately (Core interface, not water farmer/mayor). A lot of other things had, too. We left behind us a debris field of PerfectWood flinders but—luckily—no bodies. A black pillar of smoke, wind-smudged, climbed over the roofs of Bedford Falls. Whimsy.

And George was already busy rearranging the atmosphere for round two. Before entering the forest we saw an impressive cell of mini thunderheads, gorgeously mauve and dimly aflicker from within, standing on the phony horizon like purple-robed clerics of doom.

Suddenly darkness fell. Like a guillotine. One moment it was afternoon, the next deepest midnight. We stopped riding. I didn’t even bother holding my hand in front of my face, because I already knew I wouldn’t be able to see it. Riding was too dangerous, and even walking was problematical. We left the bicycles and blundered around until we found a soft spot to sit and wait.

Eventually the stars come on, erratically, in clusters, through the branch tangle and cloud tatter. Then the clouds thickened, and the stars were lost. Above the clouds, the moon dialed up, preternaturally bright. Moonlight shot through the clouds like milk poured through India ink. It wasn’t enough light to ride by, but we could see well enough to walk. For safety’s sake we held hands. I let it feel good, Delilah’s hand in mine. The first time I let Delilah feel good to me she had been twenty and I had been twenty-nine (two hundred and seventy-four). Now she was pushing thirty. This knowledge tweaked my urge towards isolation, but I held on tight to that hand.

There was a distant roll of thunder, and Delilah said, “Why a storm? I know you didn’t intend for it to be violent. But why a storm at all?”

I felt embarrassed but said the truth anyway: “My first night with Nichole, there was a thunderstorm.”

“I remember from the Environment,” Delilah said. “But—”

“Listen,” I said. “The way around serial grieving is to stop living fully. Withdraw. Which I did, back on Earth. Then I came out here so I could do it even better. Then I slipped up and got involved with you. And ten years ago, when Laird Ulin sent his henchmen to take me away I didn’t even
try
to come back—not for a long while did I try. Because it was safer to hang out with a bunch of ageless mechanical men and one waxy bastard who could play chess. Then it occurred to me that I missed you, and everybody grieves. Maybe it had something to do with being locked up in the Command Level, having my choice denied. Whatever. So now I’m the Dr. Manette of the stars, recalled to life. And, for me,
you
equal life. Capital L. I wanted to whip something up for you, to show you how I feel. I can’t bake worth a damn, but I’m evidently hell on storms.”

“I thought it was nine years,” Delilah said, and squeezed my hand. Some people just aren’t equipped to appreciate a beautiful speech rife with Dickensian allusions.

Alice said, “I have to pee.”

So she squatted in the bushes while Delilah held her hand and I held Delilah’s hand. That’s how it gets when you don’t want to lose anybody in the dark.

Delilah said, “I’m glad you came back.” And she leaned over and kissed me.

“I’m glad I did, too,” I said and kissed her mouth.

A breeze freshened through the forest, rustling things. The atmosphere felt charged and smelled wet. Then it
was
wet. Very. Lightning forked across the sky, followed closely by a big rolling boom of thunder.

Suddenly Delilah collapsed. I was still holding her hand, and her weight pulled me off-balance as she went down. A brilliant beam of light fell on us, churning with silver rain. The shiny tranq dart in Delilah’s neck flashed. Her hand was loose in mine. Her other hand was empty; Alice was gone.

I squinted into the light, held my free hand up, and felt the second dart punch into my shoulder. Instantly I snatched it out, but my legs turned to rubber anyway and dumped me on my ass. My body’s super metabolism immediately began rushing the tranquilizer through my system.

Cold rain pounded down. I felt woozy and wanted to lie back but resisted. When I put my hands down to prop myself up I felt the smooth shape of a rock under my fingers. I pried it out of the mud as the drone approached.

It was Laird Ulin—his proxy, anyway. The drone was shaped like a big watermelon, with a small but powerful searchlight attached to a gimbal on its bottom, skeletal manipulator arms, and a ten inch screen that displayed Laird’s mug behind a haze of static.

“Ready to come home, Ellis?”

The inside of my mouth was cottony. I worked up some juice and replied, “How’d you find me?”

Laird winked grotesquely (everything about him was grotesque, as far as I could tell). “I’ve always got an eye on you, Ellis,” he said, and laughed. Grotesquely. “Come along now.”

One of the manipulator arms extended towards me. I shoved away from it, sliding in the mud.

“I think I’ll stay,” I said.

“But they hate you down here now,” Laird said. “Everybody knows you’re the bringer of storms. You aren’t
ever
going to want to come back.”

“Now I get it,” I said.

The wooziness had passed out of me. A locus of pain throbbed behind my eyes. I tightened my grip on the rock. The wind and rain intensified. There was a lurid light under the clouds. Fire?

The drone swayed closer.

A giant spider leg of sizzling blue lightning stomped down, missing us by only a few meters. My skin suddenly felt too tight. Fried ozone crisped the little hairs in my nostrils. An oxygen tree erupted in flame. Laird’s face disappeared in a surge of static. The drone wobbled, and I came up under it with the rock and smashed at it. The drone’s manipulator arms flailed around me. I jerked out of its reach, and it bobbled erratically, undirected. Which probably had more to do with the proximity of the lightning strike than it did with my caveman routine.

Delilah wouldn’t wake up. I hunkered beside her. In the firelight I saw Alice huddled under a tree not fifty meters away. I shouted over the wind and rain, and she ran to me.

Alice was scared, but she knew something important and was able to tell me. Having previously traveled the forest path, she remembered that midway along there was a rest-stop shelter.

We proceeded there. I carried Delilah fireman style, and held onto Alice’s little hand, which was clammy and wet and soft. The wind tore at our sopping clothes. The air smelled of ozone and smoke. For now I was
glad
of the rain, since it was keeping who knew how many fires under control.

By the time we reached the rest-stop the only unquenched blaze I was aware of was the one in my lower back. I lay Delilah down on a bench and pushed her eyelids open one at a time with my thumb. She had nice pupils. I checked her pulse, too, which was slow but steady. The storm rattled on the roof like a shower of bones. There were PerfectWood benches, a lavatory, fresh water, a rack of personal traveler’s packs and first-aid kits.

Alice stood in a corner, shivering. I gave her a hug and advised her not to be scared.

“I’m not scared,” she said. “Why doesn’t my mom wake up?”

“She will,” I said. “But probably not for a while. You’re going to sit here with her and make sure
she’s
not scared when she does wake up.”

“All by myself?” Alice said.

“Sure. You’re a big girl, aren’t you?”

“I want you to stay, too.”

“I can’t, honey. But I’ll come back, then we’ll all three be together, okay?”

She looked at her feet. “Okay.”

“Good girl.”

There was one more thing to do before I left. The traveler’s kits contained, among other things, a vacuum sealed “fruit” paste snack and a little spoon. I told Alice not to freak out if I got loud. She made her worried mouth, that sour pucker of pale lips. I kissed the top of her wet head, then took my spoon into the lavatory and locked the door.

My eye offended me, but I sure as hell didn’t want to pluck out the wrong one. To be on the safe side I could have done both, but that would have left me blind for a week or so. Not a good idea. I did eenie-meeny, but my intuition suggested one more miney after the final mo. Left eye.

I did some Zen rigmarole, breathing myself into a kind of auto-hypnotic trance while I sat on the jakes. Then I waited for a particularly loud thunder clap and scooped my left eye out with the spoon. Zen breathing techniques are wonderful; I barely screamed at all before fainting.

When I came to on the floor, the eye was staring at me, trailing a spaghetti string of optic nerve. My left orbit throbbed like mad but had already filled in with a damp membrane that signaled the beginning of regeneration.

I brought my hand down flat on the severed eye. I’d miney-moed wisely. Threaded into the goo was an organic transponder with, I’d bet, about a ten year life span. Laird must have been seeding these things into my eye re-gens for decades. That bastard.

I used the little scissors from one of the first-aid kits to cut an oval of black fabric from my shirt. A fastidious traveler had left a partial roll of dental floss on the shelf over the sink. I poked holes on two sides of the patch and used a length of the floss to hold the patch in place.

When I emerged from the lavatory Alice stared at the eye patch and said, “I don’t like it here.”

The light was stark. Delilah looked like a wet corpse on the bench. Rain blew against the shelter’s walls. I checked Delilah’s pulse again and found it steady. I’m hell on pulse-checking, I thought, remembering the not-dead man behind the Bedford Falls Hotel.

“Is my mom okay?” the kid said.

“She’s doing fine.”

Alice chewed on her lip, waiting for the only conscious adult in the vicinity to make the next decision. So I did that.

“You want to come along with me?”

She nodded. “But what about Mom?”

“She’s going to sleep for a long time,” I said. “And when she wakes up we’ll probably be back. You don’t have to worry about her.”

She still looked doubtful, so I told her we’d write Delilah a note, letting her know where we went. That seemed to relieve some of the tension in the kid’s face.

“Okay,” she said. Her face lit up with a smile, and I recognized her for what she was: an anchoring strand in the web of human attachments I’d recklessly begun to spin from my guts.

Daytime dialed up hot after the brief and violent night
. Steam rose off everything, even our clothes. An exploded curbside terminal burned merrily on a Waukegan street corner, the flames nearly invisible in the glare of the false sun. Broken glass glittered in the street, trash hustled around in hot little whirlwinds. The air had thickened, and I almost had to swallow every breath like thin soup. Alice had taken hold of my hand again and was squeezing it hard. A couple of times during the long walk from the Oxygen Forest my stomach had moved in queasy undulations. Which could have been guilt, or—much worse—an indication George had begun to tamper with The County’s gravity field.

“Here,” Alice said, tugging me toward the double doors of a chalk-white and very official-looking building, like maybe the place where Mickey Mouse planned all the parades and stuff. On our way to the stairs I drew some unfriendly looks from people who appeared wrung out and pissed off. One guy did more than look. He seized my arm and spun me around to face him. “You bastard,” he said. Bared teeth, blood crusted on flared nostril. I braced myself for a blow I probably deserved. But a couple of other men pulled him off, and Alice pulled urgently at my hand. I didn’t bother telling her not to be scared.