ftp.ee.pdx.edu/2014.02.ftp.ee.pdx.edu.tar/ftp.ee.pdx.edu/pub/frp/stories/harrison/har14

Text File | 1992-05-07 | 26KB | 538 lines

               Copyright 1992 by Jim Vassilakos.
                      All Rights Reserved.
           Permission is hereby granted by the copyright
           holder to copy and freely redistribute copies
          of this work, such that no commercial or barter
       consideration is obtained in exchange for such copies.





                            Fourteen




"Well?"
   Vlep crossed the front room again. The flat was still in
chaos, furniture and personal belongings scattered haphazardly,
but he was sure it was not because of the quarry. Sule stood
in the doorway, sharp eyes transfixed upon her servant as soft,
blue rays of pre-dawn light fell silently along her icy, white
mane. Vlep ignored her while she stood there contaminating the
mental space with frustration.
   Frustration, definitely, and yet there was something
underneath it.
   "Nothing?!"
   He shook his head, "It is as I told you before."
   "You ran us into a dead end, before."
   Vlep turned, cautiously. Her patience was like a strip of
rubber ready to snap.
   "Is it my fault that your quarry decided to go to the
Runyaelin during the ceremony of sacrifice? How am I supposed to
trace him from such a place of death?"
   "No excuses, psyche. I need information now."
   He shrugged. She understood very little about the second
sight. Explaining the difficulties would earn few favors. He
decided to shovel out the few answers he had rather than bank on
her dwindling hope.
   "I will be plain Sule. I don't think this mess was caused by
the quarry."
   "You said Harrison was here."
   "He was. I am certain of it. But I don't believe he did this."
   "Why didn't you tell me this before.
   "I was not sure before," he lied. "Beside, would you have
believed me?"
   "Come here, Vlep... closer."
   She smacked the sheepish grin off his face before he even
noticed her hand in motion. By the sting it left, he guessed that
there would be blisters.
   "When you have permission to think, I'll let you know. Until
then you do as you're told. Clear?"
   "Ah, very," he replied, surprised that he hadn't seen it
coming.
   "Who is this person who is with Harrison?"
   "I don't know. A man, I think."
   "And he didn't follow Harrison to the Runyaelin?"
   Vlep shook his head, "I'm not sure. I was keying on Harrison
only."
   "Get me answers," Sule commanded, stepping back from the
doorway.
   Vlep rubbed the side of his face, looking again around the
flat.
   "He was looking for something."
   "Obviously. Did he find it?"
   Vlep stepped into the hallway, crossing the threshold into the
bedroom. The impressions were mixed and strong as before.
   "The girl Harrison was with... it is difficult to see past
her."
   Red twill hung silent in the still morning air. Somewhere up
above, a bird was singing.
   "Try harder, Vlep."
   He put his hand on the window sill. A mixture of anxiety upon
anxiety, fresh and unpolluted. Vlep crossed back to the front
door, this time almost running.
   "What is it?"
   Outside, the sidewalk lay empty except for the clutter of dead
leaves and the white, government car.
   "What is it, Vlep?"
   "He sees something, yet it isn't there."
   "What does he see?"
   He descended the steps, looking at the pavement directly in
front of the flat. From the corner of his eye, he could see an
alley cat cross the sidewalk and hide underneath the car, its two
occupants oblivious to the intrusion, and in the back of his mind
he heard the whine of a chemical engine.
   "Vlep!"
   Vlep felt his arm extending to point down the street, "He was
running from something."
   "Get in the car. You're going to take us where he went."
   "No. I have to be on foot."
   "Okay. Come people! Vlep's taking us for a walk."


                          *     *     *


Soft voices crossed within the fog like knotted strands of hair,
pulling taut and then snapping as they spiraled and blurred
beyond recognition. The lumpy terrain seemed familiar, but the
wispy, white haze swirled his recollection into a befuddled mass
of disarranged static. Below, a small girl with long, sandy hair
and wide, hazel eyes stood screaming, her voice lost within
the vacant space between. Then the old city rose cautiously to
its feet, a museum of looming statues, gargantuan and hollow, all
abandoned except for the rush of tattered echoes, voices of
bogeymen, or so he was told.
   He'd occasionally see them, their skin drab and mottled. They
kept a distance, eyes webbed with curiosity, daring to look but
not to touch as he snapped images like a tourist at the zoo.
Sometimes he pretended to be some famous archeologist searching
for relics of the past, sneaking home later to bury his trophies
before anyone should discovered his absence. The bogey-people
didn't seem to mind. They would sometimes even leave him gifts
which he would collect with a gravitic net and boil before
handling.
   They had only become angry once, and then they poured out
enough anger to sate the frustration of an entire lifetime. Mobs
of them had stormed the Naval Hospital, the one safe place in the
old city or barrens as it became known. The underground routes to
the suburbs were caved-in, and the overland barriers were laced
with mines. After the battle, the hospital stood alone, the
buildings around it reduced to rubble by explosive detonations.
Hours were counted within by the number of corpses incinerated on
the 40th floor. Volunteers, they were called.
   "Put on the slickersuit, or you'll be next," his father had
warned. Mike spent a week just learning how to secure the plastic
helmet. Righty-tighty... clip, tighten, tie... swivel, clip,
tighten, tie, check. Or was it tighten, clip? "My son, the space
cadet." He accepted his father's recognition with a sense of
accomplishment, holding the memory with a youthful pride which
bordered on the pompous. A year would pass before he learned that
the comment wasn't meant as a compliment.
   He cheeks wore a rosy hue that day, somewhat brighter than the
burnt brown of the doctor's whose thick, blue veins and patchy
tufts of white hair blew back and forth in the ventilating stink.
Dirty beads of perspiration glistened on his brows, flowing in
trickles from the wrinkles between his eyes, as he stacked small
metallic cylinders into the small, silver box.
   "Here boy," he offered in a soft but desperate voice. "Take
this to your mother. And watch yourself while you're out there.
Lei got away; crafty, little runt."
   Outside, sunbeams bathed the asphalt in a bellowing heat, and
the dust of the dead fell about him like a summer shower,
clogging the filter as he unfastened the helmet and gulped for
air. The buildings stood about him in various states of
disrepair, the tall communications tower rising like a lone palm
tree amidst a rocky and deserted beach. Memories of her running
along the flat, wet sands sparked to mind. She'd been crying. Her
brother destroyed the house she'd built for the small, white,
kitten crabs. He couldn't remember why.
   Somewhere in the distance he heard her voice, sweat
accumulating in his eyebrows as he searched the hillside. She
stood near the top beside the old cathedral, its tall, stained
glass windows once polished and beautiful before people came and
painted graffiti on the saints. Now, instead of reading from
scrolls, they played long violins and wore red and black
headbands. The big guy in the dome window no longer smiled, and
his chalice and loaf were replaced with a straight-backed snake
and a bulging phallus.
   They'd visited it several times. The few who attended sat in
sparse clusters, their moods somber and suspicious. She'd once
gone wandering, greeting people as they came in. His father
grabbed her by the shoulder and put her over his knee. Later she
asked him why, but he wouldn't explain. He just looked up at the
dome, muttering something under his breath.
   "Does Jesus sing, Daddy?"
   "He snaps the sticks, sweetheart. Can you hear him?"
   They never went back after that, but his mother told them
stories about how people used to pray there, especially after
what had happened. He didn't understand what she meant by
praying, but it seemed like a serious business. It had something
to do with the guys in the windows. She often showed him her
favorite.
   "Michael!?"
   She started running down the hill, her bony legs quaking with
each hop until a moist patch suddenly gave way and she blundered
into the thickets, her legs falling away from underneath,
hurtling her into the dense brush below. He felt a cold lump of
cotton form in his throat, stealing his voice. Then she crawled
out, tears streaming down her cheeks as patches of blood showed
through the knees of her white stockings.
   "Mike, don't leave me. I'm afraid."
   A shaft of stark red cascaded from the dome, its bright,
pulsing heat joining with the perspiration in his brows.
Together, they splashed into his eyes, blinding him within in a
warm veil of brine. For a moment he was aware only of the sun's
broad cymbals clashing on his skull and of his pounding heartbeat
and the sprinting sound of his feet touching the ground and
leaving again in quick succession.
   "Michael!"
   The pounding grew louder, like a sledgehammer crushing a block
of marble, all the splinters shattering in all different
directions, jumping out at people, bodies imploding in a
maelstrom of hydrogen and fire, and then the blurry ground rising
as he skidded and slid down the loamy slope, skipping over
brambles and thrush as large stones protruded from the path to
strike him. A dew-laden carpet of grass and twigs lay before his
feet, the small, crooked trees emerging sporadically from the
dense brush as birds scattered from their branches, the squashing
noise of his sprint splashing dirty water toward either side.
   He'd dropped the metal box somewhere far behind and kept
running until her wails were only a thin whisper in the distance,
the sound reverberating against the walls of his conscience, a
texture soft and familiar but which he could never seem to reach.
   "Namarie, nilimo, ve firnuvan hior."
   And then it faded until it was too quiet to distinguish as
more than random noise.
   "Mike..."
   His whole body tingled, a fluttering sensation as though he
were chopped into pieces and frozen. He tried to move his
fingers, yet his hands couldn't find them, nor could his arms
find his hands, and so forth, all the way to his spirit,
unshackled and floating free, ready to draw away with the gentle
barrens wind.
   "Son of a bitch is giving up... five more cee-cees."
   "C'mon Mike, pull out..."
   A thin man stood over him, watching Mike as though he were
some spectacle at a freak show. Mike imagined the tall spokes
jutting from his skull to be the long fronds of a palm, it's
stalk swaying in the coastal wind. Thin, brown eyebrows danced
like frolicking caterpillars, the soft eyes beneath shimmering a
placid blue.
   "Did you hear me? Five more!"
   "Got it..."
   With the sudden jolt in pulse-rate, Mike's fingers gripped at
the null field for something to squeeze.
   "Well... that worked..."
   Johanes pulled back the syringe as the convulsions began, a
rattling of bones against flesh all suspended in air.
   "Is he gonna make it?"
   "Of course he will... although..."
   "Although?"
   "What's left when he gets back...." Spokes shrugged his
shoulders apathetically, "Unhook him."
   Beneath a canopy of skull, thin fibers pulled taunt and
disappeared, the throbbing hum echoing into the silence of an
invisible rhyme. Johanes quickly cleaned the connections before
replacing their caps, and Spokes bent over Mike, checking the
pupil reflex with a bright penlight.
   "How ya feeling, Harrison?"
   Mike felt the grid solidify as he involuntarily rotated toward
the cheery voice. His eyes overcompensated for the distance
making the figured blur in and out of focus, and he could hear a
steady pounding in his head. Spokes slapped him on the cheek and
watched as the sensation tingled slowly across the gatherer's
face.
   "Huh?"
   "You need to talk to me, Harrison. How many fingers do I have
up?"
   "Uh... three."
   "Excellent. You don't mind if I check out a few reflexes, do
you?" A crisp bolt of electricity arced from somewhere above, its
touch like icy fire upon his forehead. Mike winced at the shock.
   "Good. Now, try saying something intelligent for us."
   Mike paused, finally blurting out the first thing that came to
mind: "Where am I?"
   Spokes beamed, apparently impressed.
   "Tyberian compound. How much do you remember?"
   Mike pictured Vilya sitting under the ventilation shaft, her
dark hair shuffling gently in the damp current. From the corner
of his vision he could barely discern the outline of her shadow
amidst the yellow rays of sunshine which scattered evenly through
an open doorway and onto the cold cement floor. All the while
Spokes kept trying to make conversation, threatening to test a
few more reflexes if Mike didn't mumble a response every so
often.
   "You folding up on me, Harrison?"
   Mike yanked his head to the side but the field re-solidified,
closing him within a tight bubble of gravitational force. Spokes,
looking vaguely apologetic, readjusted the controls as the field
gently settled Mike to the floor.
   The shadow and a pair of legs crossed the chamber in
synchronous step, finally meeting like twin V's at a pair of
quagga-hide loafers beside the bio-monitor's tall, metallic
frame. Mike watched his own pulse rate in the electronic display
for several seconds before he realized that it matched the faint
pounding noise in his head. A pair of electronic pinchers still
wavered carelessly in the gravitic null. The densest objects were
always the last to fall due to over-compensation on the part of
the computer. Johanes snatched them on their slow descent as he
watched Spokes unplug the inertial modules. Then he looked toward
Mike, his sweaty face the color of a rotten egg.
   "Anybody home in there?"
   Mike considered the question carefully, but Johanes seemed
impatient for a response.
   "What's the matter? Can't he understand?"
   "Of course he understands; he's just a little whomped."
   Spokes finished stowing the equipment and turned around, a
white plastic tube in one hand and a pair of silicon adapters in
the other. He knelt down beside Mike, cautiously extracting a
thread of optifiber from the tube and uncapping two of the jack's
on Mike's skull.
   "This is going to feel sorta funny, but we figure it's better
to zap you while you're still dead to the world."
   Spokes worked both ends of the thread into the adapters,
finally plugging them into Mike's skull so that the optifiber
seemed to emerge at one point and sink back at another. Mike felt
a tingling sensation within his joints which spread along
his skin as Spokes sat back to admire his handiwork. The tingling
slowly grew into a strange, blazing sort of itch, as though
hundreds of electrical spiders were crawling within his stomach,
head, and limbs. Spokes and Johanes held him down as the floor
seemed to wrap itself around his body in a vain attempt to
extinguish the fire. Johanes was talking in a worried tone, but
Spokes kept shaking his head as if everything was normal.
   Mike listened to the sound of the voices, finally accepting
the burning sensation which swept back and forth along his spine
and through his legs like the icy Aeluin on the gentle, sloping
shores beside Erfalas. Then, it slowly began to transform itself
into a numbing, almost paralytic massage, the tingling returning,
and the entire series of sensations beginning anew and repeating,
over and over. After more iterations than he cared to count, Mike
noticed that the familiar hands which held him down during the
burning periods had mysteriously disappeared. He waited for
awhile to see if they would return, finally observing that the
yellow rays were also gone, and the room was bathed in dim blue
and pink, most of it generated by the bio-monitor's video display
and small glowbeads scattered about the walls.
   Reaching to his head almost instinctively, he carefully
unscrewed the adapters, allowing the sensations to leave him like
a decent lover: sweaty, sore and thirsty. A sluice-stick lay
conscientiously beside him on the floor, and he chewed it open
and sucked out the syrupy contents while righting himself into a
sitting position. Something sharp bumped into his head, and he
crouched back down, squinting toward the ceiling. A flimsi-leaf
seemed to dangle in mid-air, "try me" scrawled across it in dim,
glowing pink. Mike tugged it free from two long black cords which
hung from one of the many ceiling cables, curling it and himself
into a tight ball. The cold cement felt strangely comforting, the
wet, sticky sluice still coating his numb lips as he watched the
cords swing gently back and forth, beckoning in the dim light.
   He reached toward them, propping himself up with one elbow as
he tugged himself back into a sitting position. Mike examined
them, cautiously, the dim pink light changing in intensity as the
flimsi slowly stretched itself out. The cords ended in adapters
not unlike those he had recently unscrewed. Shrugging, he screwed
the new ones into where they seemed to fit. At first he could just
hear voices, but from the shadows around him, ghosts seemed to
emerge.
   "Well look who's here."
   "Hey, Harrison. How ya feeling?"
   "Who is he?"
   "Must be a novice. He doesn't seem to be very talkative."
   Mike felt a sudden jolt of static like an electric slap across
his senses.
   "Hey, cut it out. He's my guest."
   "Sorry."
   "Hey Mike. That was pretty quick. You okay?"
   "Spokes?" Mike gulped down, blinking his eyes to refocus. It
didn't seem to matter whether his eyes were open or closed. They
were still there, all the same.
   "Yeah, it's me. Cecil's here too."
   "Hi there, little one."
   Cecil's image seemed to have yellow eyes, shining faintly
through an acidic smog like the sun on Tyber. Mike nodded, still
contemplating whether or not to tear the twin cords from his
skull.
   "You seem a little uneasy."
   Mike shrugged, "I've having a weird day."
   "I zapped him after we installed his output," Spokes
explained.
   "So soon?!" The yellow eyes flared brightly.
   "Easy Cecil. Johanes said they were in a hurry."
   The eyes dulled and tilted slightly.
   "So how did you like the jitters, Michael?"
   Mike frowned, "What's he talking about?"
   "Technical stuff. In order to stick in the outputs, we have to
go all the way to the amygdala, and that means that we have to
get close to the hippocampus."
   "The butcher speaks." It was a voice from the crowd.
   "Shut-up; I didn't do him," Spokes retaliated.
   "I'm lost," Mike confessed.
   "Whenever you go that deep, anything can happen. The mind has
a tendency to flip-out sometimes. We talked about it before the
operation."
   "We did?"
   "Yeah. You don't remember, but we did. That's another problem
with getting too close to the hippocampus. It tends to scramble
short-term memory."
   "The last thing I can remember it talking to Johanes."
   "He brought you in this morning. We took you to the doc."
   Yellow eyes seemed to dance in circles.
   "The doc?"
   "The butcher," Cecil interrupted. "I felt that I still owed
you a favor."
   "Some favor," Mike mumbled, except that his voice carried
across the ether loud and clear, much to the amusement of several
electronic loiterers. Even Spokes seemed to get a good snort out
of it. Then he turned serious, as though perfectly able to jump
from one emotion to the other without crossing the intervening
space.
   "It was time to join the club, Mike."
   "Is that why you're helping me now? Because you wanted a new
member for your sick society?"
   "No, actually I'm getting paid."
   "Johanes?"
   "Yep."
   "So where's he been while I've been twitching on the floor all
day?"
   Mike heard a few more snorts, exact replicas of the earlier
ones, except this time some vague maniacal laughter seemed to
hover in the distance, yellow eyes swirling excitedly.
   "You can stop talking with your mouth now, Harrison. Everybody
can hear you. Use your head. Just look at me and focus."
   "Like this?!"
   "Hey...."
   "What were you doing to me today, Spokes?!"
   "What are you talking about?"
   "I'm talking about the funny feeling you said I'd have. Can
you see how much I'm laughing?!"
   Mike felt an on-rush of static block the way between them.
Cecil stopped laughing and stared intently.
   "What are you two fighting about?"
   "He's pissed 'cause I zapped him," Spokes confided.
   The yellow eyes nodded, knowingly.
   "It had to happen eventually, old friend. Spokes let your mind
get to know itself. Auto-feedback was all it was. The pathways
have to build-up mental calluses, and you have to learn to deal
with pain. Spokes here is surprised you came out as quickly as
you did. For many people, it takes much longer."
   Mike straightened, "I don't understand."
   "Johanes wants you to go into the dodec," Spokes interrupted.
"If it tries to nail you in any way, the only chance you're going
to have is if you have some resistance. You understand?"
   "No."
   "Well don't worry about it. It was for your own good."
   "Where is Johanes, and where is the dodec?"
   "He went back to the Arien Mansion. He took the dodec with
him, Mike."
   "Shit. Where are you?"
   "At the Sintrivani."
   "You mean you guys got done with me and just left me here to
rot?"
   Spokes sort of shook his head and nodded at the same time,
"Johanes said that ISIS has some psyche bloodhound sniffing your
trail but hard. He went for help to smear the scent, but neither
of us are yearning to be around you right now. Is that so hard to
understand?"
   "I've heard enough."
   "Johanes said he'd be coming back for you, so don't go any..."
   Mike unscrewed the cords from his jacks and watched the
electric apparitions evaporate into darkness as graciously as
they had appeared. Outside, a chilly breeze flapped across the
streets, lifting loose dirt and leaves into the sky and inducing
the hairs on his bare chest to prickle and tense in rows. With a
fuzzy warm ambience enshrouding his senses, he ambled along the
side of the road, waving down a taxi before the main gates.
   "Where to?"
   The driver was middle-aged, his sparse, greying hair combed
straight back, eyes sunken and tired in the rear-view mirror.
Mike dipped his hands into his pockets, the emptiness sparking an
image of Cecil's money in a pool of blood. Sighing, he mumbled an
apology and shuffled himself out of the car.
   "Is okay. Where you want to go?"
   "I'm broke."
   "Get in."
   The driver opened the front door to prove his sincerity, and
Mike climbed in, unsure whether to thank him or just do as he was
told, and the driver looked sympathetic.
   "You know where you're going?"
   "Erfalas."
   Mike felt his back and shoulders affix themselves to the
plastic seat covers, a sticky noise resulting every time the car
hit a bump in the road. The driver either didn't notice, didn't
mind, or was just being polite.
   "So what the name of you?"
   "Michael; my friends call me Mike. You?"
   "Pateras; my friends call me Pat," he qualified with a smirk.
   "Why the charity?"
   "You look like you need it. You know the output of you
bleeds?"
   Mike reached to his skull, withdrawing a smear of pasty orange
puss.
   "Here, use this."
   "A towel?"
   "Hitch-hiker must never forget it."
   Mike draped it over his head, catching the ullage as it tried
to drip down his neck. The rest began to dry into a sticky crust.
   "The daughter of me was a chiphead. She tell me which is input
and which is output. That all I know."
   "She was a chiphead? What is she now?"
   The man half smiled, half winced. He dug out his wallet and
extracted the image plate. Mike leafed through those in memory,
several of his little girl, first as a baby and finally as a
teenager with all the years in between. The last one showed a
bald kid in a hospital bed.
   "They burn out head of her, you know. She not know which way
was up."
   Mike handed back the plate.
   Erfalas was cold and windy, and the driver offered him the
towel.
   "What have I need of it? Is blood of you. You clean, yes?"
   "Yeah. Thanks for the ride."
   He stood, watching, as the tail-lights ebbed into the
distance. The beach was soft and sandy, and moonlight sparked
along the watery horizon, however, the hooks on the cliffs were
no longer to be seen. Only rarely would one emerge from the
pounding waves, and then it would sparkle like a diamond across
the dim, lavender seaside.
   Mike winced as the cold water stung his scalp and the bleeding
renewed. Though he couldn't smell any salt, the nerves around the
wound told him that some was there. He finally staggered out of
the water, throwing the towel around his body as he curled up
between two tall rocks. The cold breeze continued to blow airy
waves of fine white dust over his still form. Sticking to his
skin, the tiny particles bonded together in the darkness and
slowly dried until he found himself wearing clothing made of sand
that cracked and flaked away when he shifted in half-slumber.
   Faint violet rays warily peeked over the eastern horizon,
glinting across the smooth, narrow stretch of sand which teased
the incoming waves. Beneath the noise of water grasping toward
shore, Mike heard the distant gurgle of a chemical engine. At
first, he thought it was the final illusory fragment of a dream,
but the sound grew steadily, until it resided at the top of the
cliff where Vilya had shown him the eyehooks and so splendidly
demonstrated their use. Several people were climbing out of a
white, government car, each peering toward the dim violet
horizon. Half-buried by the sand, Mike watched them from his
shadowy lair between the two tall rocks. He tried to make out
their features in the faint, shifting light, but it was difficult
even to count them. Then he glimpsed the white mane, its owner
allowing the breeze's gentle tendrils to reshuffle her hair to
its own liking, and for a silent moment his eyes widened with
fear.


           _   /|
           \`o_O'          Jim Vassilakos
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