Harbinger Read online

  Table Of Contents

  Part One: Regeneration

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Part Two: Infinity

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Part Three: Evolution

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Epilogue

  Praise for Jack Skillingstead and for Harbinger

  “Jack Skillingstead takes the reader on an acid-induced trip through a place where the many-worlds theory and quantum entanglement collide with new age mysticism at the far edge of the world.”

  —Brenda Cooper, author of Reading the Wind

  “Jack Skillingstead is fearless. No one in SF writes about death, sex, loneliness, and love with such searing honesty. In Harbinger he does something astonishing: In a story that spans hundreds of years, multiple planets, and shifting realities, he somehow renders an intensely personal portrait of one man struggling to understand himself. The effect is like reading classic Vonnegut or Dick, but with an emotional punch that is uniquely Skillingstead.”

  —Daryl Gregory, author of Pandemonium

  “Jack Skillingstead’s fiction always delights and surprises.”

  —Kristine Kathryn Rusch, author of The Disappeared

  “Jack Skillingstead plays with big ideas, Olaf Stapledon big, but he plays with them on a personal scale. Harbinger is like reading the life of a huge oak by taking one, thin slice out of the middle, but the whole tree is there. This is a book that blew me away.”

  —James Van Pelt, author of Summer of the Apocalypse

  “Jack Skillingstead shines a floodlight into the writhing hollows of the human condition.”

  —Ted Kosmatka

  “What Hemingway did for bull-fighting, Skillingstead is doing for SF tropes. He makes them truer than they have been by showing that they were false. Harbinger makes SF “conceits” like immortality and the search for self authentic and painful — tools of trauma and rarefied beauty. Skillingstead’s protagonists, Ellis Herrick perhaps more than any other, seem to spend most of their lives in the tercio de muerte of a corrida, entering the ring of their experiences alone save for a muleta of disarming, almost lunatic charm and a sword of honesty that cuts inwards as often as it swings out. Skillingstead is the matador of our field.”

  —New York Review of Science Fiction

  “When Jack Skillingstead turns to the novel in Harbinger, he mingles elements of the genres we tend to call SF and mainstream so fluently it’s clear they’re all parts of a single language: one that subverts cliche and probes under the surface to find both humanity and “singularity” in everything from family traumas to a far future of artificial reality and long-distance space travel. . . .In Harbinger, Skillingsstead takes his reluctantly remarkable protagonist from Earth to space, from awkward youth in the past to survival in a post-human yet unidealized future, until the entire concept of time becomes meaningless. Could everything be simultaneous? Once we have lived long enough with Ellis Herrick, even that freaky concept starts to make sense.”

  —Locus

  Also by Jack Skillingstead

  Are You There and Other Stories

  harbinger

  A Fairwood Press Book

  September 2009

  Copyright © 2009 by Jack Skillingstead

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Fairwood Press

  21528 104th Street Court East

  Bonney Lake, WA 98391

  www.fairwoodpress.com

  Cover and book design by Patrick Swenson

  ISBN: 0-9820730-3-8

  ISBN13: 978-0-9820730-3-2

  First Fairwood Press Edition: September 2009

  Second Edition: April 2010

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Nancy

  Everything is Simultaneous

  part one:

  regeneration

  “The process of evolution can only be described as

  the gradual insertion of more and more freedom into matter . . . ”

  —T.E. Hulme

  chapter one

  A soap bubble the size of a Volkswagen Beetle drifted over my bedroom. I opened my eyes in the dark. Strange how I knew it was there. But I was a strange boy back in 1974, the year I graduated from high school.

  Jeepers, my Border Collie, was standing erect at the foot of my bed. And he wasn’t the only erect thing. My body tingled, my skin was coated with sweat. An intense, longing arousal possessed me. I stripped off my pajama top (canary yellow with red piping; don’t ask). My heart thudded alarmingly.

  I was scared. It was as though I would die if I didn’t somehow complete the suddenly urgent equation of my biology. The room tilted when I stood. I fell against the cheap bookcase packed with science fiction paperbacks. The Sirens of Titan hit the floor face up. I closed my eyes and tried to calm down. Dad was snoring in the next room. My mom used to nudge him awake and make him stop. But Mom had been gone for years. Just like my big brother Jeremy. At the time of the accident he had been seven years older than me and on leave from the Army. I missed him badly, because sometimes I needed a nudge, too.

  There was a scrabbling sound, and I opened my eyes. Jeepers was chasing his tail in a tight circle, reminding me of the Tasmanian Devil cartoon character.

  “Jeepers, sit!”

  Jeepers didn’t sit. He kept running around in that circle, like something wound up and let go. The moon streamed through the cherry tree outside my window and cast a bony shadow over him. It was kind of horrible. In the winter, without its blossoms—all gnarled and black in the night—that tree used to scare me. I mean when I was a little kid.

  But it wasn’t winter; it was June.

  Staggering from leg to leg, I yanked on a pair of jeans. My brother’s US Army duffel coat hung from a hook on the door, and I grabbed it and shrugged it on over my bare shoulders. As I said: I was a weird kid, and constantly wearing my dead brother’s army coat was just one of the weird things I did to prove it.

  I felt better outside in the fresh air. The dizziness retreated and my heart settled down to a lugging rhythm. Some power had changed me that night, made me unlike any human being in history. But all I knew at the moment was that I felt different in an indefinable way. Also, for the first time in my life I had a destination, though I didn’t know what it was.

  The cherry tree was in full leaf. I stared at it as if it were an optical illusion, then I started walking the night streets. At first I looked frequently into the sky, which was a pale wash of moonlight over a dim star field. The day would arrive, some hundred and eighty years hence, when I would find myself sailing outbound toward one of those stars, in the belly of a vehicle so incomprehensibly immense that it would have boggled my easily boggled seventeen-year-old mind. But I had no inkling of any such journey on that June night in 1974.

  Clouds blotted the stars in the near distance, but the sky was devoid of giant soap bubbles. After a while I ceased looking for them. My feet stopped walking at about the same time, and I found myself standing in front of a green frame
house with a big madrona tree in the yard.

  Blue television light pulsed behind one curtained window on the first floor. Big white moths fluttered around the porch light, making shadows ten sizes too big. I knew whose house it was because I walked by it practically every day. I even knew which of the dormer windows belonged to Nichole Roberts. Passing by, I’d once caught an unforgettable glimpse of white bra and creamy breasts. Now some kind of groaning urgency compelled me toward her, but what the hell? We knew each other, had lived within a couple of blocks of each other most our lives, but she wasn’t my girlfriend. Far from it. She was dating a guy named Roy Hathaway, who was on the wrestling team. I’d never even kissed a girl. So I was a late bloomer, which turned out not to matter in the extremely long run of things.

  I’d seen a guy on TV throw pebbles at a girl’s bedroom window to get her attention. So I looked around on the shoulder of the road for some pebbles of my own (our neighborhood had no sidewalks; Nichole’s two story house was almost grand by local standards, even if it did need a paint job). I hunkered and came up with a handful. The window opened before I could pitch even one.

  “Ellis?”

  I crossed the lawn and stood under her window, face upturned.

  “How’d you know it was me?”

  “I recognized the coat. What are you doing out there? And where’s your shirt?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “To both questions?” She chuckled.

  “Just the first one,” I said and dropped the pebbles, slipped my hands in the pockets of my brother’s duffel coat, and pulled it closed in front.

  “Hey, it’s like that play,” Nichole said.

  “Death of a Salesman?”

  We had an English Lit class together, and Mrs. Forslof was hell on plays. We read them out loud in class, and most of the kids thought they were idiotic. But not Nichole. She had real intelligence and sensitivity, and she wasn’t afraid to acknowledge those qualities in herself.

  “Romeo And Juliet, silly,” she said.

  I nearly made the egregious error of trying to quote Shakespeare, but stifled myself.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Ellis?”

  “Yes?”

  “I feel strange. I mean I woke up feeling strange.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Why don’t you come in?”

  “Up there?”

  She nodded.

  “Okay.” It was like some kind of dream. Or waking up, finally, from another kind of dream. Nichole wasn’t my girlfriend but I was in love with her in that way of virginal teenage boys who know they don’t have a chance. “Is the door locked?”

  “Climb up.”

  “What?”

  “Come on, climb up, Romeo.”

  I looked at the madrona tree. A limb bent like a flexing arm within hopping distance of the roof, if I stood in the elbow crux. Or so it appeared. Probably I wasn’t such a great judge of distance at the moment, though. Or of anything else, for that matter.

  I monkeyed up into the tree, a feat that required my full attention for a minute or two. When I was on a level with the roof I noticed the gap was greater than I’d estimated from the ground.

  “Come on,” Nichole said.

  She had lighted a candle. Her face was lovely, almost angelic in the glow. Auburn highlights gleamed in her long hair. Her mouth was broad, full-lipped, inviting. I jumped—borne up by some kind of ethereal vision—and missed the roof by a foot.

  Flat on my back on the lawn, I waited for the wind to find its way back into my lungs. Presently Nichole’s face leaned over me.

  “God, are you all right?”

  When I could inhale I said, “I’m excellent.”

  We entered the house by the front door, which required less acrobatic skill. There was a weirdly herbal smell.

  “Where’s your mom and dad?” I whispered.

  “My mom doesn’t really live here. She’s staying with a friend or something. My dad. I guess he’s asleep.”

  We were creeping up the stairs.

  “What if he wakes up?”

  “He won’t.”

  “He might.”

  We reached the top of the stairs. She stopped and looked at me. She was only about five foot one to my five eleven. She was wearing an oversized blue T-shirt and no bra.

  “Ellis, he’s kind of drunk? Passed out on the sofa. That’s why my mom isn’t ever here.”

  “Oh.”

  “So it’s safe.”

  “I wasn’t scared. I just wondered.”

  “Okay.”

  In her bedroom she closed the door and locked it. The walls were mauve, and the ceiling wasn’t flat like mine but had quirky angles and was sprinkled with hand-painted silver stars. She had a Gerard turntable and a shelf of record albums as long as my arm. A Madman Across The Water poster was thumbtacked over the turntable. It was basically the graphic from the album cover. I liked it that she didn’t have a picture of Elton John doing some flamboyant shit. I thought the poster was classy.

  “Wow, you’re really sweating,” she said. “You want to take your coat off?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She reached out and pushed the coat off my shoulders, and I let it slip to the floor.

  “You’re all flushed.”

  “Yeah,” I replied.

  We sat on the bed, which had the rumpled look of having recently been slept in. Nichole smoothed her hand over the white bedspread between us. I could smell her. My hand floated up to her face. I touched her cheek and then I took her hair in my fingers.

  “Do you want to kiss me?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  She tilted her head, lips slightly parted. I leaned forward and kissed her mouth, just as if I’d been doing it my whole life. Oh, she was sweet. Lie back, I think she said, though it might have been my blood speaking. She stood up and removed the big T-shirt. I continued to breathe, but just barely. Her breasts were perfect, the nipples like pink eraser heads. She wore sheer beige panties, damp over a pubic shadow.

  She straddled me and began moving her hips.

  “What’s in here?” she said, playful.

  “My sock monkey?”

  She giggled. “Let’s take him out,” she said.

  “—”

  The zipper, the tugging down, the cool air, her hand firmly squeezing, thumb caressing. She stood long enough to slip out of her panties, and then she straddled me again, only this time I was inside her, where I belonged.

  Time unwound, infinitely—for about fifty seconds. Afterwards we held each other while I fought a contradictory impulse to be away from her. Gradually that impulse retreated, and I thought I’d never want to be away from her again.

  “It was your first time, wasn’t it?” she said.

  “Sort of.”

  “How can it be ‘sort of’?”

  “Well, it was my first time with another person in the room.”

  “Ellis, can I ask you something?”

  “Sure, as long as it’s not a personal question.”

  “What?”

  “I’m kidding.”

  “Very funny, boy. Do you believe in stuff, like reincarnation?”

  We were lying side by side, facing each other, and I had begun to caress her hip.

  “Sure,” I said, having not really listened to the question.

  “I mean for real, Ellis.”

  “Okay.”

  “My mom knows all about it,” she said.

  “All about what?”

  “Fortune telling and channeling and past life stuff.”

  “That’s cool.”

  “My dad hates it.”

  “That’s bad.”

  She rolled onto her back. I couldn’t stop touching her. I stroked her belly and thighs; it was like being in a hypnotic trance, the whole thing, the whole night since I woke from the soap bubble dream, or whatever it had been.

  “Because,” Nichole said, “it’s like I already know you.”

&nbs
p; “You do already know me.”

  “I mean from before we met.”

  “What?”

  “Ellis, keep doing that. Right there. It’s perfect. God.”

  I kept doing what I was doing. She moved against my hand, and I brought her up, up, up.

  A little while later I felt a cool puff of air on my back from the open window, then the rain started, and the thunder. She held me tight with her legs, and I was inside of her and outside of myself—outside in a way I’d never been before.

  Afterwards we lay on top of the covers, not talking. The rain whispered and ticked against the partially open window, the curtains swayed, and the spring sky rumbled. I smelled our sex and the scented candle and the rain, and we lay there a long time. Once in a while the sky flickered, as if it had a short.

  “What did you mean about knowing me before we met?” I asked.

  “Like in a past life.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  “I don’t know, Ellis. Everything’s so strange tonight.”

  “What do you want to do tomorrow?”

  “And tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow?” She was more confident than I about bard-quoting.

  “Just tomorrow.”

  “Nothing, I guess.”

  “Really, nothing? Why not?”

  “I have a date with Roy.”

  “Come on.”

  “He’s my boyfriend, Ellis. I have to sleep now. Okay? I’m sorry.”

  Her eyes closed with a kind of drugged suddenness, and it was over. I watched her breathing for a while then I shut her window (the sill was wet) and let myself out the front door. Nichole’s father was still slumped on the sofa, the TV gone to white noise.

  That was Friday.

  Weekends she worked at the Arctic Circle on 148th Street in Burien. She’d told me so in class one day, and I’d taken that as an invitation and started hanging out there, hoping she’d notice me. She never did, and I quit going. But the Saturday after our inexplicable liaison I drove over to the A.C. in my beater Plymouth. The left front quarter panel was junkyard salvage, primer black. I parked it next to Nichole’s yellow Nova.