Last Year

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “No. Couldn’t sleep. Can I sit?”

  On the bed, she meant. He nodded and shifted his legs to make room for her. The bed frame creaked as she settled onto the mattress. He waited for her to speak. After a long moment she said, “Tell me what you think of me.”

  “I’m sorry—I don’t know what you mean.”

  “What do you think of me? Simple question.”

  No, it was not. It was far from a simple question. He said, “I think you’re a brave and competent woman. Why do you ask?”

  “You said City women reminded you of prostitutes.”

  “Only in their frankness.”

  “Only that?”

  She must consider the question important or she wouldn’t have come to him in this state of undress. He tried to answer honestly. “There was a time when I thought your men had no conception of honor and your women had no conception of decency. But that’s not true. It’s that you hold these ideas differently. You’re not afraid to say what you think. And you don’t hold out chastity as a virtue.” He hesitated, feeling foolish. “Is that correct?”

  “As far as it goes.”

  She shivered and drew up her shoulders until the tremor passed. “You’re cold,” he said.

  “Uh-huh. Can I come in?”

  He opened the blanket for her. She couldn’t have missed seeing the aroused state of his masculinity, even in this subtle light. But the sight seemed not to shock or offend her. She pulled the blanket over herself and pressed herself against him.

  After a few silent moments she said, “Do you have a condom?”

  One of those French letters they sold by the box at the City pharmacy. “No.”

  “Then it’s a good thing I brought one.”

  Once again she astonished him. And she went on to astonish him some more.

  * * *

  By the long light of morning the town seemed transformed. Or maybe I’m the one transformed, Jesse thought. The season’s last tourists moved through the streets in chattering clusters, men in straw hats and women in bustles with sun umbrellas (“Like an impressionist painting,” Elizabeth said, whatever that meant), the summer making its last faint show, a fragile warmth fretted with wood smoke. He could have walked all day with Elizabeth on his arm. But they had work to do, even though the events of last night, of which they were careful not to speak, made the duty seem trivial by comparison.

  Futurity Station’s pharmacist was a small, round man, easily cowed: The merest hint that they represented the City’s interests was enough to reduce him to fawning cooperation. Yes, he had sold coca powder in significant quantities to Mr. Isaac Connaught, but only because Connaught had told him the City dentists were suffering a shortage. Yes, he had found the claim plausible. Yes, he had taken a profit on these exchanges; why would he not? Yes, he would report any such future transactions to an agent of the City. And no, he was not aware of any arrangement Connaught may have made with Onslow. The pharmacist’s obvious nervousness tended to belie the last statement. But the rest was all more or less in accord with what City security had deduced, so Jesse simply shook the breathless man’s moist hand and left.

  They walked toward Onslow’s, making no particular haste. “I know so little about where you come from,” Jesse said.

  “You’ve seen the movies.”

  “I wonder if the movies don’t hide more than they reveal. Before the City ever came, some people thought the future might be a place where everyone was wealthy and happy. And when I first came to the City, I thought that might be true. The nations at peace, the poorest men richer than our own captains of industry.”

  “Kind of true,” Elizabeth said. “Kind of not. Mostly not.”

  “What about you? Are you wealthy, where you come from?”

  “I wish I could say yes.”

  “Are you poor, then?”

  “I wouldn’t say so. But a lot of my neighbors are what’s called working poor. Single moms holding down two McJobs and maxing out their credit to pay for day care. My neck of the woods, a lot of us are one paycheck away from the trailer park. I’m a little better off than that—I get paid pretty well for the time I spend on this side of the Mirror, which helps. Why do you ask?”

  “So many things I don’t know about you.”

  “I’m pretty average.” She glanced at him from under her sun bonnet, which she had neglected to tie: the strings dangled fetchingly over her shoulders. “There’s a lot I don’t know about you, either.”

  “Such as?”

  “Like what you do with your money. City wages are pretty good by contemporary standards, right? But you don’t seem to spend much.”

  “Most of it goes to support my sister.”

  “You mentioned her before. Phoebe, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “You support her?”

  He hesitated. He said, “It’s a long story. Maybe best not told by daylight—not on a pleasant day like this.”

  Lookout Street had the aspect of a midway at the end of the season, underpopulated and sad despite its declarations of gaiety. A board had been nailed across the door to Onslow’s shop. The words OUT OF BUSINESS were chalked on it. Onslow himself had probably left town. He’d been tight with the local business leaders, but attracting the wrath of the City would have made him persona non grata. “Keep walking,” Jesse said. They could get into the building more easily from the rear.

  It was his second time in the alley behind Lookout: It was uglier but less threatening by daylight. Elizabeth muttered a few curses as they stepped past trash barrels overflowing with encyclopedic examples of everything that met the definition of “waste.” Most noxious was the carcass of a horse, picked to bone and sinew by dogs, from which a thrumming cloud of flies arose when Jesse kicked a stone at it. “Oh, God,” Elizabeth said, covering her mouth.

  “Do animals never die where you come from?”

  “Of course they do. We try not to let them decay in public places.”

  “That must make city life more pleasant,” Jesse said.

  The back door of Onslow’s had also been boarded over, but it wasn’t much work to pry off the barrier. The broken hasp still dangled free. Jesse pulled the door open and propped it with a loose plank. He stood on the threshold a moment, listening for any sound that might indicate that the building was occupied. There was only silence.

  He stepped inside, Elizabeth behind him. “It’s been cleaned out,” she said.

  As expected. All the shelves were empty, nothing on the crude table but the dusty oil lamp Jesse had lit on his last visit. Nothing to see, he thought. At least until Elizabeth spotted the hinged door under the table.

  The little door was two feet square and equipped with a simple rope handle, and he had missed it in the darkness during his last visit. Jesse shifted the table and yanked the rope. The door clattered open. There was darkness underneath.

  “Should have brought a flashlight,” Elizabeth said.

  “Light the lamp and hand it to me.”

  He crouched on the floor. When Elizabeth handed him the lamp he hovered it over the hole. A sour-smelling plume of air rose from the dimness. “It’s not a cellar,” he said. “Just a space somebody dug out of the clay.”

  “Is there anything in it?”

  “Boxes.”

  “Boxes of what?”

  “Empty boxes. Lots of empty pasteboard boxes.” He grabbed a few samples and hauled himself to his feet.

  He put the boxes on the table. Elizabeth picked one up and inspected it. It was a twenty-first-century box, as colorful as a lithograph and about the size of a brick. GOLD DOT, it said in bold lettering. PERSONAL PROTECTION. It also said 9MM LUGER and 147 GR.

  “Hollow points,” Elizabeth said appreciatively. “Twenty rounds to a box. How many empty boxes down there?”

  “Well, I don’t know how deep the hole goes.”

  “Jesus! And you think it was just gun collectors buying this stuff?”

  “Collectors, souvenir hunters,
wealthy curiosity-seekers—anybody with money, I imagine, up to and including our would-be assassin. A Glock is the perfect item of contraband, in some ways. Much of what you people bring with you is incomprehensible to us, but everybody knows how a pistol works. And the Glock takes these specialty rounds, so Onslow’s customers would have had to come back to him from time to time, if they were using their pistols in earnest.”

  Jesse might have discussed it further, but he was distracted by a noise from the alley. Someone stumbling over something metallic, followed by a low and urgent “Hush.”

  He exchanged a look with Elizabeth. No need for words: She was good that way. She stepped into a corner of the room where she wouldn’t be immediately visible to anyone coming through the door. Jesse looked around for anything he might use as a weapon. He took up the oil lamp and held it behind his back. There was time for nothing more.

  Two men came into the room from the alley, one after the other. Both were big men, cheaply dressed. Jesse recognized neither of them. The one in the lead—barrel-chested, almost six feet tall—carried a handgun. Not the futuristic kind. It looked like an ordinary Colt. Lethal enough, Jesse thought. The man behind him was armed with a leather cosh.

  Jesse held out his empty right hand in a warding gesture. One advantage to being left-handed was that his opponents tended to watch the wrong hand. Misdirection: a useful skill his father had taught him. The gunman gave him a scornful smirk. Jesse kept his eyes focused on that grin as he took a half step forward and swung the lamp out from behind his back.

  He caught the gunman’s pistol hand in a square blow, shattering the lamp’s glass mantle and carving bloody gashes in the gunman’s forearm, but the man kept his grip on the weapon. So Jesse stepped inside the gunman’s reach and clutched his damaged wrist and twisted until the Colt clattered to the floor. He was vaguely conscious of a ripping sound as he did this—that was Elizabeth, separating the Velcro folds of her skirt to gain access to the pistol she kept tucked inside it. And he was aware of the second man, right arm raised to bring the cosh down on him—he was in no position to do anything about it—and he was aware of the thunderous discharge of Elizabeth’s gun, the sudden reek of hot powder, a ringing in his ears as loud as a fire siren. And then nothing at all.

  7

  Much later, he woke up.

  It wasn’t as bad as waking from one of his nightmares, but it wasn’t a pleasant process. There was a feeling of foreboding attached to it, a sense of emerging from a comfortable darkness to some unpleasant and onerous duty, even if it was only the duty of opening his eyes.

  “Much later” was a mere intuition, but he felt as if some substantial amount of time had passed. He was in a clean white room populated with sleek, chiming machines—a City room. He was in bed. His right arm was connected by a flexible tube to a transparent bag of liquid, and there was a throbbing pressure in the general neighborhood of his face.

  He closed his eyes for another moment or hour. When he opened them again there was a stranger hovering over him, a woman in white. Jesse parted his gummed lips and said, “Are you a nurse?”

  “I’m your doctor, Mr. Cullum.”

  “Am I back in the City?”

  “Yes. Lie still, please. We’ve been keeping you under sedation. Are you in pain?”

  He was, now that she mentioned it. He nodded, which made it worse. “What happened to me?”

  “Linear fracture of the skull. But you’re doing fine.” The female doctor tapped the keyboard of an electronic device she held in her hands. “If the discomfort becomes difficult to tolerate, don’t be shy about letting us know—we can adjust your meds. We want to keep you here for a couple more days to monitor your recovery.”

  Jesse felt recalled to sleep before he could ask any questions of his own. The meds, he thought: medications. Some twenty-first-century anodyne. Sleep, distilled and bottled. Sleep delivered directly into his veins, as soft and pure as winter snow.

  * * *

  He woke again, and this time his first question to the female doctor was about Elizabeth: Was she all right?

  “Elizabeth DePaul? We had a look at her when you both came in, but she wasn’t injured.”

  “Does she know I’m here?”

  “I can’t answer that question. A Mr. Barton in security said he’d come down and explain everything once you’re awake. Do you think you’re ready to see him?”

  “I surely am.”

  “I’ll let him know.”

  * * *

  But it wasn’t Barton who showed up at Jesse’s bedside that afternoon. It was August Kemp himself, August Kemp the billionaire, teeth as perfect as ivory dominoes and a smile like a squire conferring a knighthood. “Jesse! Good to see you awake. Are they keeping you well fed?”

  The lunch cart had just been by. “They gave me tuna salad. And something called Jell-O.” Which was neither solid nor liquid but came in interesting colors.

  “Well, fuck that. You can get yourself a steak if you like, as soon as the doctor signs your release form. You put your life on the line for us, and that earned you a big bonus.”

  “I thank you,” Jesse said. “What about Elizabeth?”

  “She wasn’t hurt. She shot and killed one of your assailants. Elizabeth made an emergency call from Onslow’s store, and we had people on site pretty quick—we keep a response team and a couple of vehicles at the railway depot. It was a huge deal for the locals, seeing you carried away in an armored vehicle. We could have charged admission.”

  “Who were the gunmen?”

  “According to the survivor, they were hired by a curio dealer in Chicago who had been fencing Onslow’s surplus inventory. The storefront at Futurity Station was just a fraction of Onslow’s business. The Chicago middleman had wealthy customers all across the country—not just for guns but all kinds of contraband: electronics, books and magazines, even clothing. Onslow had been paid for a shipment he failed to deliver—he skipped town as soon as you started to pressure him—and the Chicago dealer sent a couple of men to enforce the agreement. You and Elizabeth just happened to get in the way.”

  “The dealer is out of business now?”

  “Our people shut him down. You would not believe the kind of stock he was holding. Shoes alone—he could have opened a fucking New Balance store. I had to fire half the inspection staff down at the Mirror and more than a few senior managers in a bunch of divisions. Complete housecleaning.”

  “Sorry to have caused such a fuss.”

  “You have nothing to apologize for, my friend.”

  “Did you give Elizabeth a bonus, too?”

  “Better than that. We gave her three months’ paid leave.”

  “Paid leave from the City?”

  “She’s in North Carolina now.”

  North Carolina of the twenty-first century, he meant. “Did she say anything about me before she left?”

  “She was down here a few times when you were unconscious and sedated. That was quite a blow to the head you sustained. She was worried about you, but she was also anxious to get back to her family.”

  “Naturally so.”

  “As for you, you’re not just getting a bonus, you’re getting a permanent pay raise. You’ll be housed in Tower Two again, now that the investigation is over, but you’ll have a lot to show for it.”

  “And will Elizabeth be coming back, when her leave is finished?”

  “That’s up to her,” Kemp said.

  * * *

  He moved back into his old dormitory room in Tower Two. The room was unchanged since he had left it. What had changed was his social standing.

  More than a few Tower Two employees had lost their jobs or been reprimanded for their role in the smuggling operation, even if all they had done was turn a blind eye to a dubious transaction. Many of them blamed Jesse for that. He was treated to cold stares along with his breakfast coffee; former friends were suddenly reluctant to exchange words with him. So he volunteered for night duty and fence-riding, both
solitary jobs.

  Riding the fence was thankless work, but he liked the open air and the company of his own thoughts. As the seasons changed and the mornings grew cold, the supply room equipped him with a plastic overcoat stuffed with goose down and a balaclava hat like the knitted hats British soldiers had worn to keep their heads from freezing during the Crimean War. In early December a storm blanketed the prairie with snow, deep enough that Jesse exchanged his three-wheeled cart for a vehicle with tracks and skis. Riding the fence took longer under such circumstances and seemed even more pointless: Any would-be trespasser who managed to trek all the way from the Union Pacific depot to the City’s borders in the heart of winter ought to be given a medal for perseverance, in Jesse’s opinion. Often during his work he saw the tracks of wolves. Once, a palsied old cougar met his eyes through the steel mesh of the fence.

  During these expeditions Jesse had ample time for thought. He thought about Phoebe, and in his mind he composed the letters he would later scribble on paper (his handwriting was a schoolboy’s scrawl; he had never had much opportunity to practice it) and mail to her along with his bonus money. He thought about the guns and ammunition that had passed through Futurity Depot, and he wondered where they had gone, and who had paid for them, and whether the weapons had ever been fired. And he thought about Elizabeth. And tried not to think about her.

  Most days, the sun was at the horizon by the time he headed back to the City, the last light obscured by clouds or diffused into bleak, brilliant prairie sunsets. He worked hard enough to exhaust himself, which ought to have helped him sleep but often did not. On those nights when his terrors woke him, he switched on his electric lamp and sat up—roused to an involuntary vigilance by his traitorous imagination—and waited for the deliverance of dawn.

  After Christmas some of the animosity toward Jesse began to wane, and he joined the rest of the Tower Two staff for a New Year’s Eve party in the commissary. All the local employees not on holiday duty were there, every security person, every cook and housekeeper, every waiter and waitress and towel-holder and coat-check clerk, and there was much drinking and a great deal of singing. The hilarity and talkativeness of some of the partiers hinted that the influx of coca powder from Futurity Station might not have entirely ceased. But Jesse didn’t care about that. Some irregularities were to be expected, because everyone knew the new year, 1877, wasn’t just new. For the City of Futurity, it would be the last year. Twelve months from now there would no bunting, no confetti, no party hats or lewd songs. By the time 1878 rolled around, this circus would have pulled up stakes and moved on.