Last Year

by Robert Charles Wilson

“Does she come with the house?”

  “Not for sale. Not the girl, not the house. You have plenty of saloons, plenty of fuckhouses. This one is mine.”

  Cornered, Madame Chao has thrown down the gauntlet. But she’s not defenseless. She pays protection to one of the Six Companies. Roscoe Candy ought to know that.

  “Well, maybe I’m negotiating with the wrong person, in that case.”

  Roscoe stands up. He heads for the door. Jesse’s father steps aside to let him pass. But Roscoe pauses and walks to Jesse, stands in front of him. Roscoe is nearly as tall as Jesse and twice his weight. Roscoe puts his chin up and pouts out his lower lip. “I don’t appreciate the way you’ve been staring at me.”

  Jesse knows better than to argue. He says, “I’m sorry.”

  And then he is on the floor, his ears ringing and his vision uncertain. Roscoe has clubbed him with one of his big fists, and Jesse didn’t even see it coming.

  “Remember me,” Roscoe says.

  Jesse will. But what he will remember even more acutely is the casual way Roscoe Candy strides to the door, and the way Jesse’s father bows his head and opens it for him.

  * * *

  Jesse woke from the dream sweating.

  It wasn’t a dream so much as a memory—a memory enacted in the theater of his mind as if it were one of those moving pictures Ms. Baumgartner was so proud of. All of it had happened almost exactly as he had dreamed it. It was a memory refusing to be forgotten.

  Just like the other dream. The one that always made him scream.

  He glanced around the darkened room, still groggy. This wasn’t his old dormitory room in Tower Two, it was his new room in Tower One—only slightly different, the bathroom door here instead of there, the closet to the left rather than the right. Disorienting. For a split second he thought Elizabeth might be standing over his bed, as she had stood over him in their hotel room in Futurity Station. But of course she wasn’t. It was a silly thought.

  He put his head into the pillow and slept dreamlessly until morning. There was no sunlight in this windowless room to mark the dawn, only the insect buzz of the electrical alarm, followed by another buzz from his paging device: Barton, telling Jesse to come to his office ASAP.

  * * *

  Jesse arrived just behind Elizabeth. Barton was waiting inside, and so was August Kemp himself.

  Kemp was smiling, so the news would likely not be bad. Jesse reminded himself again that Kemp was a powerful businessman, though he lacked what Jesse thought of as a tycoon’s demeanor. He wore blue jeans and a shirt without a tie, and he addressed his employees as if they were his social equals. But the future people often behaved that way. To Jesse they seemed like children who had grown up without ever learning how to comport themselves as adults. But appearances were deceptive. Power was power, whether or not it wore a tie.

  Barton said, “There have been some developments in the investigation and we’d like to bring you up to speed.”

  Kemp seemed to find this declaration too abrupt. “Actually,” he said, leaning against the plate-glass window with his hands in his pockets and a God’s-eye view of the Illinois prairie at his back, “we want to thank you for your hard work. You were absolutely essential to our success here. Great job, both of you.”

  Barton said, “Here’s where we stand. Jesse, you sent us Doris Vanderkamp, who was hugely helpful. Doris admits she acted as a go-between for Isaac Connaught and Mick Finagle. She gave us Finagle, and when we called in Finagle he broke down and basically told us everything. The contraband has been coming through the Mirror concealed in shipments to the theatrical division. Baumgartner turned a blind eye in exchange for regular deliveries of cocaine from the pharmacy at Futurity Station, supplied by Connaught. The contraband itself was mostly personal electronics and solar chargers, but it included some weapons. That’s how a lunatic came to make an attempt on Grant’s life with an automatic pistol. As for the shooter, Grant’s people don’t want the event publicized—we turned Stedmann over to a U.S. marshal and a couple of Pinkerton men, to dispose of as they see fit. All that’s left is making sure none of this ever happens again. Questions about any of that?”

  “About Doris,” Jesse said. “I told her she wouldn’t be fired.”

  “We sent her to the City clinic for detox. There’ll be follow-up testing, of course, but if she can stay clean, she can keep her job.”

  “Thank you,” Jesse said.

  “Anything else?”

  “What about the rest of the contraband weapons?” Jesse couldn’t help thinking of the bag of Glocks he had lugged out of Onslow’s back room. “Apart from would-be assassins, who’s buying them?”

  “We’re looking into that,” Kemp said. “But now, today, this morning, we’re taking one of the ringleaders into custody, and we thought you and Elizabeth ought to be present.”

  Jesse said, “Where do we find this miscreant?”

  “He works at the Mirror,” Kemp said

  * * *

  In the corridor connecting Tower One and Tower Two there was an elevator operated by a red-and-yellow-striped card reader: for employees of Jesse’s status that meant NO ADMITTANCE. August Kemp, on the other hand, owned an all-pass card: The doors slid open for him as if operated by invisible servants. Jesse followed Elizabeth inside, where there were only three choices on the elevator’s push-button array: MIRROR LEVEL ONE, MIRROR LEVEL TWO, MIRROR LEVEL THREE.

  Kemp pushed ONE. “I assume,” he said, “you two have had the standard employee briefing about how the Mirror works.”

  “For what it’s worth,” Elizabeth said.

  Kemp smiled. “I don’t understand it, either. Maybe no one does. No one but the physicists, and they seem to have trouble explaining it in English. But if you have any questions, I’ll try to answer them.”

  After a long descent, the elevator slowed. The door opened on a vast space.

  Jesse’s father had once taught him a trick: if something confuses you, imagine describing it to a five-year-old. Jesse pictured Phoebe as a child, the quizzical expression she had so often worn. What’s the Mirror chamber look like?

  Well, he imagined telling her, it’s deep under the ground, for one thing. Like a cave or a coal mine. So it has no windows. But it’s not cramped or close or crude like a coal mine. Picture a room as big as two or three cathedrals and square as a box, bathed in artificial light. And clean—cleaner than a rich woman’s kitchen, despite the constant work that obviously goes on here. The floor is crowded with machines made for lifting and carrying and for less comprehensible functions. The men tending the machines wear white cotton pants and shirts, as if they’re about to whitewash a barn, and badges to identify them. The room has four walls, but one of them consists almost entirely of what they call the Mirror. Because it really does look just like a mirror. A mirror in the shape of a half circle, ten stories tall.

  “It reflects the light,” Jesse said, an observation that sounded simple-minded, but he was startled by the effect, as if the already enormous chamber of the Mirror were twice its actual volume.

  “It doesn’t always,” Kemp said. “It’s transparent when anything’s passing through, reflective when we maintain it at minimal power. There’s a scientific explanation—something to do with the energy gradient between conjoined universes—photons bounce right off the interface, apparently.”

  “Thank you,” Jesse said, not that Kemp’s words meant anything to him. “And the future’s on the other side?”

  “In a manner of speaking. The Mirror bridges a distance of approximately one hundred and forty-five eigenstate-years through ontological Hilbert space. What’s on the other side eventuated from a world identical to yours, but it’s not your future.”

  Whatever else it might be, Jesse thought, the land beyond the Mirror was Elizabeth’s home. The place she would go when she returned to her jailed husband and her daughter. A mere one hundred and forty-five eigenstate-years from here, as the crow flies.

  The room is
so huge it does peculiar things to sound, he imagined telling Phoebe. Voices and machine noises seem small and far away. But there’s a hum under all those other sounds, soft but powerful, like the drone of a gigantic bumblebee. The air smells of metal, the way a copper kettle smells if it’s been left out in the sun.

  “What’s important,” Kemp said, “isn’t what makes the Mirror work but what it does. The use we put it to. That’s what I’m proud of. I was on the other side when we opened it for the first time. And it didn’t open onto this room, I can tell you that. It opened onto pure black Illinois earth. Ancient silt and glacial till. Groundwater came pouring out. So the first thing we did was dig. We tunneled out a foundation for the entire resort, pumped it dry, stabilized it, began to build on it. Jesse, you were among the first local people to show up on our doorstep. But by then most of the work had already been done. Our people had already gone out to establish our claim to the land, to buy the property we needed to buy—to bribe the people we needed to bribe, where there was no other choice. How the Mirror works is a mystery to me. But what we built around it, that’s what I understand. That’s what I’m proud of. And that’s why it pisses me off when some asshole decides he can walk all over me just because he wants to sell iPhones to the locals.”

  There was real anger behind the words. Kemp wasn’t entirely the amiable mannequin he appeared to be. “Which greedy asshole are we taking into custody?”

  “Well, I’m not going to point at him. You see the forklift parked by the cargo elevators? He’s the guy tying down a palette of boxes.”

  Jesse identified the slablike white doors of the cargo elevators. It was hard to make any reliable judgment from this distance, but the smuggler was obviously a large man.

  “We have a security detail standing by on the second tier if anything goes wrong. But I thought you two might like to do the honors.”

  “Thank you,” Elizabeth said, sounding genuinely pleased.

  “We just need to escort him upstairs for interrogation. No big deal. But you might want to keep your flex cuffs handy. All right? Let’s do it.”

  Kemp strode across the floor with Barton beside him and Jesse and Elizabeth hurrying after. Jesse was careful to keep his eye on the smuggler, who went on loading cartons onto an aluminum skid until Kemp was within thirty feet of him. Then he looked up and froze in place.

  “He’s made us,” Elizabeth said.

  So he’ll stand or he’ll run, Jesse thought. Not that there was anywhere to run to.

  The gap closed to twenty feet. The smuggler stood upright, watching them approach. Then his eyes narrowed. Jesse saw it coming. The smuggler broke and ran. But he didn’t run away—he came at August Kemp, and he came at him head-on.

  Jesse and Elizabeth sprinted forward, trying to put themselves between Kemp and the smuggler. There wasn’t time for anything subtle. Jesse threw his body into the smuggler’s path, and the smuggler’s own momentum did the rest of the work—he tumbled headlong over Jesse, though not before planting a knee in Jesse’s ribs. Jesse rolled and managed to pin the man under him long enough for Elizabeth to lean in with her plastic cuffs and secure his hands behind his back.

  The smuggler’s attention remained focused entirely on Kemp. “Fuck you,” he said. Jesse stood and hauled the man to his feet as Kemp’s standby security detail came hustling down the stairs from the second tier, a belated thunder of booted feet on metal treads.

  Jesse brushed himself off and took stock. No harm done. He might have bruised a rib, but nothing was broken. “Good work,” Elizabeth said.

  “All I did was get in the way.”

  “No, you were great,” Kemp said, only slightly shaken. “Thank you, Jesse. One of the best hires we ever made. You too, Elizabeth.”

  Which was fine, but it left Jesse with an unanswered question. The smuggler had come at Kemp as if he hated him and no longer needed to conceal it—more like a partisan with a grievance than a guilty grifter. What had Kemp done to make an enemy of a man whose name he barely knew?

  He took a last look at the Mirror as they moved toward the elevators. All of the chamber was duplicated in that vast mirage, and his own reflection was part of the minutiae of it, a tiny figure in a cavernous space. Then a Klaxon sounded, and the workers in white suits began to clear the floor—preparing for a fresh shipment to come through, Kemp said. Jesse hoped to see the Mirror open onto the world beyond it: the fabled future. But the elevator door slid shut before that happened.

  * * *

  The investigation was over, Barton had said, nothing left but the tidying up. But some of that tidying had to be done at Futurity Station, and he wanted Jesse and Elizabeth to do it.

  So they traveled to the rail town with a convoy of departing guests late on a Wednesday afternoon. The crowds that had been drawn by Grant’s visit were gone now, which meant they could book adjoining rooms at the Excelsior. Elizabeth will have her privacy, Jesse thought as they checked in, and I’ll have mine. Come morning they would talk to the town’s druggist about reporting any future spike in the sale of coca or opiate compounds, and then they would attempt to recover any contraband that remained in Onslow’s back room.

  They arrived in time for a meal. The light of sunset through the curtained windows of the hotel’s dining room added a roseate glow to the gaslight, but Elizabeth seemed broody and distant over supper. Jesse guessed she was thinking about her home, and he tried to distract her. “August Kemp seems pleased with us.”

  “Good for August Kemp.”

  “So you don’t worship at his altar? Everyone else seems to.”

  “It’s not Kemp they worship, Jesse. It’s his bank account.”

  “I’m sure he’s a wealthy man.”

  “Multibillionaire, according to Forbes.”

  Jesse tried to imagine what that could possibly mean. What did a billionaire buy with his money, up there in the twenty-first century? Airplanes? Spaceships? Entire planets? “How did he make his fortune? Not exclusively from the City, I imagine.”

  “By inheriting a family business, first of all. Big holdings in the hospitality industry, high-end resorts and cruise ships mainly. But Kemp wasn’t some kind of trust-fund baby. His father groomed him to take control of the business, and he turned out to have a talent for it. He expanded into some really difficult markets, shouldered out some high-powered competition. There’s Kemp money in that orbital hotel they’re building, for instance. But the City is his personal obsession.”

  “Men such as that tend to make enemies.”

  “What he went through to build the City, of course he made enemies.”

  “What do you mean? What did he go through?”

  “There were all kinds of legal and regulatory obstacles he had to deal with. The safety of the Mirror. The whole question of people carrying things through and bringing things back. What Kemp brings back is mainly gold, so how is that regulated? From the legal point of view, is Kemp importing gold? Not from any recognized foreign country, no. So is Kemp pulling gold out of a hole in the ground—is the Mirror a kind of gold mine? None of the written regulations apply, and Kemp had to lobby hard for laws that would work to his advantage. And you can’t imagine the number of interest groups who want to piss in the pot, even over trivialities. Antique dealers, for instance—they didn’t want a flood of Duncan Phyfe sideboards and Currier and Ives prints driving down the market. That’s why anything a tourist brings back from 1876 gets an indelible stamp and a registry number. There are layers and layers of this bureaucratic stuff. Labor laws—Kemp hires a certain number of locals, like you, but does he pay them minimum wage? And is that calculated in our currency or yours? What’s the exchange rate? A fair wage by 1876 standards looks like a slave’s wage in twenty-first-century dollars.”

  “I guess all that kept him busy,” Jesse said.

  “That isn’t the half of it. Medical considerations. No offense, but you can’t visit 1876 without a shitload of vaccinations. The CDC argued for an enforced quarantine
on anyone coming back through the Mirror. Kemp dodged that one, but we still have to be careful—even a single case of smallpox or yellow fever would be enough to shut us down. One of the first things Kemp’s people did, even before the foundation of the City was laid down, was to send over an epidemiological team to sequence influenza viruses and prepare vaccines.”

  “I apologize for our diseases. We’d do without them if we could.”

  “Plus all the ethical considerations. The whole question of treating you guys as a tourist destination. And thereby fucking with your history, which might be morally objectionable. Or not fucking with it, which also raises moral questions. So yeah, Kemp ran into lots of opposition, including an entire political movement aimed at stopping him. Which he crushed, or marginalized, or simply ignored.”

  “The man we took into custody,” Jesse said. “The smuggler. Do you suppose he’s one of Kemp’s enemies?”

  Elizabeth hesitated. “Why do you ask?”

  “He came for Kemp as if he bore a grudge against him.”

  The hotel’s dining room was nearly empty now. A waiter trod softly between the tables, floorboards creaking under his feet. Beyond the window, a carriage passed in a gentle music of hoofbeats and harness reins. “Probably just some slacker,” Elizabeth said, “looking to make a little easy money.”

  But that wasn’t the whole story, Jesse thought. She knew more than she was saying.

  * * *

  Autumn was beginning to show its muscle. Jesse’s room in the Excelsior was chilly even with the windows shut and the curtains drawn, and he had piled the bed with blankets. Elizabeth, in the adjoining room, had left the connecting door ajar—in case of trouble, Jesse thought with some embarrassment: in case his demons visited during the night.

  He fell asleep quickly and woke an uncertain time later. He hadn’t been dreaming, or at least he didn’t think so. But here was Elizabeth, standing at his bedside. She had lit a lamp in her room, and its soft and uncertain light came through the open door, just enough to see that she was hardly dressed and that the expression on her face was solemn. He summoned his wits and said, “Did I wake you?”