Last Year

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “Well, yeah,” Elizabeth said. “Exactly.”

  * * *

  The convoy from the City of Futurity pulled into a long coach barn next to the rail depot at Futurity Station.

  It wasn’t the depot Jesse remembered from his arrival here four years ago, when he had been unceremoniously evicted from the baggage car of a westbound express. Back then, it hadn’t even had a name. It had been a coaling station and a water tank then, not a locus of human habitation, but four summers of proximity to the City of Futurity had turned it into a boomtown with hundreds of permanent inhabitants.

  The new train station had been constructed in partnership with the Central Pacific Railroad, and one of its purposes was to protect paying guests from the idly curious. Today’s paying guests were returning from the City to meet either the westbound train at six o’clock or the eastbound at seven; later, the same convoy of vehicles would carry fresh guests back to the City. Jesse and Elizabeth waited until the other conveyances were empty before leaving their coach. Their coachman, a local hire, handed down their luggage: a cloth valise apiece for Elizabeth and Jesse, each containing fresh clothes and sundry supplies, including a pistol and ammunition. Jesse exchanged a wave with the coachman before heading to the south end of the cavernous enclosed carriageway.

  The rain had subsided to a drizzle. “Let me carry your bag,” Jesse said.

  “I can carry it.”

  “It’s better if I do. For the sake of appearances.”

  Elizabeth gave him a hard look but handed over the valise.

  The Excelsior Hotel across the street was fully occupied. Just one room had been reserved for them, and Jesse nodded at the desk clerk and signed the register as Jesse Cullum & wife. The Tower One security boss had warned Jesse of the necessity of the subterfuge. If he had a problem about sharing quarters, Barton had warned him, he needed to get over it. But Jesse didn’t anticipate any problem. Apart from a certain inevitable awkwardness.

  A bellman escorted them to their room, three stories up. As soon as they were alone Elizabeth opened the window. A rising wind billowed the cloth curtains and seemed to mitigate the stench of the town. Unless, Jesse thought, we’re just growing accustomed to it.

  In any case the daylight would be gone within hours. He cleared his throat and said, “You should know … I’m not a sound sleeper. Sometimes in the night…”

  Elizabeth turned away from the window and gave him her full attention. “Sometimes in the night what?”

  “I suffer from nightmares. Sometimes I wake up. In an agitated state. Possibly shouting.”

  “This happens often?”

  “I’m hoping it won’t happen at all. But I thought you should know. If it does happen, don’t be frightened. As soon as I’m fully awake, it stops.”

  He was gratified that Elizabeth nodded as if he had said nothing surprising. “I’ll bear that in mind,” she said.

  * * *

  They shared an evening meal in the hotel’s dining room, then returned to their room and made a plan for the following day. Elizabeth used a device like a fancy pager to report back to Barton at the City. Then they went to bed.

  There were two beds in the room. Jesse turned down the gaslights as Elizabeth undressed. She was unselfconscious about it. Her dress looked conventional, but the stays and buttons were false. It was held together with something called Velcro, which made a sound like a dog’s fart as she unfastened it. Underneath she wore briefs and a cotton halter.

  Jesse’s clothes were more simply made. City-issue underwear for men came in two varieties, briefs and shorts. Jesse preferred the briefs. They kept everything in place without getting in the way. As he put his hand to the mantle of the lamp Elizabeth said, “You sure you’ve never been in a war?”

  She was looking at the various scars on his body. “Not a war that was formally declared.”

  The gaslight flickered down to nothing.

  “Must have hurt like hell,” Elizabeth said.

  He didn’t answer.

  * * *

  He put himself to sleep as he often did, by thinking about the complexities of time travel. It was a more reliable soporific than counting sheep.

  The concept had been explained to him early in his tenure at the City. The City people had been careful to communicate the idea that time travel was not (as they said) linear—that there was not just one history but many histories, side by side. They talked about a philosophical problem called the Grandfather Paradox: if a time traveler killed his grandfather in the cradle, would the time traveler himself then cease to exist? But it didn’t apply, they said, because in this case past and future were different worlds. City people could kill all the grandfathers they liked—all it meant was that this world’s future would not perfectly replicate the future from which the City people came.

  Jesse thought about all those threads of time laid side-by-side like fibers in a rope, each thread a world with an identical history. The Mirror was a device that braided histories together, so that human beings and physical objects could pass back and forth. It amounted to time travel because every accessible world was identical to the source, but less ancient. A nearby history might be only a few seconds or minutes less old, so that traveling to it would seem like traveling a few seconds or minutes into the past. More distant histories were separated by years, centuries, eons. But as Elizabeth had said, there were practical limits to what a Mirror could do. Traveling to a nearby history required relatively little energy but an impossible degree of precision. Traveling to a very distant history required little precision but an absurd amount of energy.

  What kind of energy it required Jesse could not begin to guess. But he knew, intuitively, that the Mirror was the most remarkable thing the City people had produced—more remarkable than a helicopter, more remarkable even than a photograph of the icy plains of Mars. It was more than a machine—it was a metaphysical machine. It was a steamship that plied the winding rivers of heaven itself.

  * * *

  Phoebe was crying.

  That was unusual. Phoebe was twelve years old, and she took pride in her maturity. She had taught herself not to cry when she was unhappy. But she was crying now, and Jesse was frustrated because he couldn’t locate the source of the sound.

  The walls were on fire.

  The walls were on fire, and his father stood in the center of the room, cupping blood in his hands. His father’s expression was sorrowful. He bowed at the waist like a man at prayer.

  “I tried to stop it,” Jesse said, or tried to say.

  Phoebe was inside a steamer trunk, he realized. He went to the trunk to open it. But it was locked, the key was nowhere to be found, and the brass fittings were too hot to touch.

  “I’m sorry,” Jesse’s father said.

  He opened his hands. Blood and unspeakable things dropped to the floor.

  In the trunk, Phoebe screamed.

  * * *

  “You’re safe,” someone said.

  Jesse became aware of the room, the stink of his own sweat, the rawness of his throat, the cotton sheet coiled around him like a rope.

  “You’re safe.”

  It was Elizabeth who spoke. And she was holding his hand. Or at least compressing his hands against his body in a kind of wrestling grip, so that he couldn’t lash out at her. “Thank you, I’m awake now,” he managed to say, and she released him and took a wary step back.

  He was profoundly embarrassed. “Elizabeth, I’m sorry…”

  “Nothing to be sorry for.” She was a dark presence in a room lit only by moonlight. “You okay now?” Her voice was soft and had no anger in it.

  “Yes.”

  “All right then.”

  She went back to her own bed.

  No further words were spoken. Outside, the rain had stopped. A cooling wind came through the window. Elizabeth’s bed creaked as she turned on her side. Jesse pulled his blanket around his shoulders and stared into the darkness and waited for morning.

 
4

  He woke at dawn. He dressed and washed and waited while Elizabeth did the same, then escorted her to the hotel’s dining room. She insisted on taking all her meals here, where City officials periodically inspected both the food and the kitchen. Jesse objected that this would anchor them to the Excelsior, but Elizabeth wouldn’t be moved: “You people don’t have practical refrigeration. You put lead oxide in your milk and God knows what in your sausages. You call dysentery ‘the summer complaint.’ So this is where we eat, period, full stop.”

  He didn’t argue. He was still ashamed that he had troubled her with his nightmare, but he couldn’t bring himself to speak about it, and she didn’t raise the subject. Which was just as well, since they had the day’s work ahead of them.

  * * *

  Futurity Station was more circus than town, Jesse thought. Like a circus, it had an air of impermanence and expedience. And like a circus, its main sources of revenue were dreams, deception, sex, and theft.

  Their plan was to pose as a married couple, not quite well-heeled enough to afford admission to the City, who had come to Futurity Station for a glimpse of the flying machine and to buy any futuristic contraband they could lay their hands on. This morning they would get the lay of the land by way of a leisurely stroll, and the weather was ideal for it: vivid sunlight and a pleasant warmth, the town’s gaudy signs and wooden sidewalks all washed clean by last night’s rain.

  The town had two main streets, one parallel to the train tracks and one perpendicular to them. The first street was called Depot, the second was called Lookout. Most of the respectable establishments—hotels, a barber, an apothecary shop, a Methodist church—were situated on Depot, west of the train station. Lookout Street was home to saloons, pawn shops, penny theaters, music halls dedicated to burlesque shows and minstrelsy, and, at its southernmost extremity, rows of bleachers where customers could buy a “guaranteed best” view of the regularly scheduled fly past of the City airship.

  Jesse and Elizabeth began by dawdling along Depot Street. Any hour before noon was early for a town like Futurity Station, but the sidewalks were far from empty, and daylight hours were especially suited for the respectable tourists they were pretending to be. It was the element of pretense that worried Jesse. He had reminded Elizabeth as tactfully as possible that she must not swear or swagger or express her opinions too freely or do any of the ten thousand other things City women did without thinking and which might, in the year 1876, raise eyebrows or start riots. Her response had been to roll her eyes and say, “So they tell me,” which had not entirely reassured him.

  But she carried herself convincingly enough as they strolled, taking his arm and keeping to his side. Her skirt and bodice must have made her uncomfortable in the warm weather, but the City outfitters had also provided her with a straw hat with a flat brim and blue ribbons, which disguised her short hair and gave her some protection from the sun. They stopped briefly at an apothecary shop with a soda fountain, and she put on a plausible show of interest in the patent medicines on the shelves and the array of red and blue bottles of all sizes, but when the druggist asked whether he could serve them she smiled and said, “No, thank you, maybe we’ll stop by on our way back to the hotel.”

  At the western end of Depot Street they passed a shop offering novelty items and curios—it looked too respectable to be a source of contraband weapons, but something in the window caused Elizabeth to pause and tug him toward the door. A table inside was stocked with books claiming to be guides to the City or fictional accounts of future history, most with stamped covers featuring lurid or fantastical illustrations. Elizabeth picked up a novel that gloried under the title America’s War with Mars. “I guess H. G. Wells is screwed,” she murmured.

  He didn’t know what that meant, but he smiled in response to her smile.

  The proprietor of the shop, a skinny man with a mustache and a striped shirt, bustled out from behind his counter. “Is there anything I can help you with?”

  Elizabeth said, “There’s a book in your window … at least, I think it’s a book.” She pointed. “May I see it?”

  The shopkeeper made a tragic face. “I’m not sure you would like to, frankly.”

  The book in question was made of paper without boards, like a pamphlet. But it was thick. The title of the book was The Shining. “It sounds as if it might be religious,” Elizabeth said.

  “Quite the contrary, I’m sorry to say. It’s an authentic book of the future, left behind by a visitor, but the contents aren’t suitable for a female reader. If it weren’t such a significant artifact I should be ashamed to sell it.”

  “Are such books typical reading material for the people of the future?”

  “I wouldn’t care to speculate, ma’am. But if you’re interested in the future, we have many other publications that discuss it. Our hand-colored lithographs are popular with the ladies, and we also offer engraved spoons, decorative mugs—”

  “Thank you, I’ll look,” Elizabeth said.

  Which gave Jesse an opportunity to take the shopkeeper aside and ask about the price of the book, which was predictably astronomical. He said, “Don’t you have any less expensive editions?”

  The shopkeeper glanced at Elizabeth, who feigned interest in a display of commemorative ribbons, and leaned toward Jesse’s ear. “That’s an astute question. You’re right, the book has been copied to a contemporary edition.” He tipped open a drawer to show Jesse a crudely bound volume on which the words The Shining were stamped in flaking gilded letters. “Completely unexpurgated—you understand the need for discretion. If you’re interested—” He quoted a number, less than half the price of the original but still startling.

  “I am interested,” Jesse said. “If I can come back for it later.”

  “The edition is nearly sold out, and it’s not available at other vendors.”

  “Well, in that case.” Jesse took out his wallet. “Will you hold a copy for me?”

  The proprietor nodded knowingly and scribbled a receipt. Jesse accepted it and said, “Can you tell me whether there are other items like this for sale in town? I don’t mean books exclusively. Any artifact or object. But authentic ones.”

  “City people don’t approve of such transactions, so that’s a ticklish question. Such items do come up for sale from time to time. Mainly on the south side of town. More than that I’m reluctant to say.”

  Did he want to be bribed? Jesse had been supplied with enough cash to appear convincingly prosperous, and more was available if they needed it. But if the shopkeeper had any sense he would have negotiated an arrangement with the other clandestine sellers in town. “Any recommendation would be welcome,” Jesse said flatly.

  “Well … there’s a certain vendor on Lookout Street. The shop is called Onslow’s. Onslow might be willing to show you his private stock. But his goods aren’t cheap, and he only deals with genuinely interested buyers.”

  * * *

  “This whole town,” Elizabeth said, “is August Kemp’s nightmare.”

  They followed Depot Street until the sidewalk ended in a clutter of squatters’ shacks, then crossed the street and turned back toward Lookout, dodging a flock of female tourists with sun umbrellas and bright calico day dresses. “What does Kemp have against Futurity Station? It hardly seems to threaten him.”

  “Kemp tries to keep a strict wall of separation between our guys and your guys. Guests from the twenty-first century get a guided tour of 1876, and guests from 1876 get a sanitized glimpse of the twenty-first century. But they’re not supposed to mix, except when Kemp arranges it. Policing the wall between them is how he makes his money.”

  “Looks like there’s plenty of money being made here.”

  “But it’s not Kemp who’s making it. It’s diluting his product. Authenticity is everything when it comes to the revenue stream. People who pay to see the Old West don’t want some kind of theme park where ersatz cowboys kick back in the ranch house with Netflix and a bag of Doritos. They
want the real thing.”

  “Or so they think.” Jesse had met a few cattlemen. He did not despise them, as a class, but he couldn’t imagine spending money for the privilege of looking at one of them.

  “That’s why Tower One guests coming from the City go directly to the tour trains, no dallying at Futurity Station. Kemp won’t give them more than a glimpse of this town, because it reeks of—well, lots of things, but from Kemp’s point of view it reeks of inauthenticity. And authenticity is what he sells.”

  “I suppose I see what you mean. But Kemp gave up true authenticity as soon as he built the City, didn’t he? It changes everything just by being there.”

  “That’s why the City has a limited life span. Five years as a tourist resort in what still plausibly resembles the past, then he hands over the buildings and the land to Union Pacific and turns off the Mirror for good and all.”

  “Because beyond that point it becomes too obvious that our histories differ.”

  “Right.”

  “But there’s money to be made mingling past and future.” He was thinking of the price tag on that Shining book.

  “Well, yeah, and Kemp knows that. That’s why, come January, we stop being so coy about where we come from, we start handing over our medical and scientific knowledge—we turn the country into one big Futurity Station, and Kemp milks it for twelve months before he switches off the lights and hands over the keys. But not until then.”

  “You make Kemp sound mendacious.”

  “I don’t know what that word means. But it’s not such a bad bargain if you think about it. You guys get a jump on things like electricity and the combustion engine, plus all the lessons we learned by doing that stuff crudely and badly. You also get a better look at the way we really live up there in the twenty-first century, which might make your pastors blush and your matrons clutch their pearls, but are you going to turn it down?”

  They reached the intersection of Lookout and Depot. Turning south onto Lookout was like stepping onto the midway of a traveling carnival, Jesse thought. Here, every commercial establishment had been hung with yard-lengths of bunting—to celebrate both the centennial year and Grant’s visit—and painted with fanciful illustrations of flying machines and ringed planets. What was offered inside these buildings appeared to be random collations of pamphlets, mounted tintypes of the City, toy helicopters carved in wood, festive whirligigs, fried sausages, steamed corn, pickled eggs, and doughnuts. Jesse cast a wistful glance at the sausage sellers. He was a big man. He liked to eat plentifully and regularly. He wasn’t sure Elizabeth understood that about him.