Last Year

by Robert Charles Wilson

  It is no doubt flattering to Mrs. Blackwell that the author of the letters, who signs himself only as “an American citizen who wants to speak honestly,” thinks of her and other radicals as harbingers of the future condition of humanity. This is no doubt what has moved Mrs. Blackwell to expose these communications to the public. We cannot view their contents with equanimity, however, for the letters are incendiary. Our nation has survived a great conflict, and we have no wish to see old wounds reopened, yet the anonymous “American citizen” would do exactly that. By denouncing home rule for Southern states as a “Jim Crow” regime that exchanges slavery for serfdom, the letters threaten to reignite racial tensions and stoke the embers of sectional discord. By holding up female suffrage as a moral ideal that ought to be enacted into law, they threaten to pit husbands against wives and daughters against fathers. By their endorsement of the broadest possible conception of the territorial rights of Indians, they repudiate our army and would push the former president’s ill-advised “peace policy” beyond the point of absurdity. And even these horrifying assertions pale next to the claim that our nation will one day become one in which men may enter into marriage with men, and women with women. It is, we are inclined to say, so grotesque a proposition that it simply cannot be true, though observation of the behavior of visitors from the future does little to dispel our fears.

  Similar letters are rumored to have been mailed to other prominent or notorious persons, including Mr. Frederick Douglass and Mrs. Woodhull, but only Mrs. Blackwell has admitted to receiving them, and perhaps we should thank her for doing so. If the claims are not true, we hope Mr. Kemp or his representatives will say so. In the event the claims are verified, we may take solace in Mr. Kemp’s oft-repeated declaration that the future he represents need not be our own. Indeed, that knowledge would serve a tutelary purpose, in that we would then labor mightily to avoid such an outcome.

  Jesse took a sip of orange juice, spilling a drop on the folded page of the newspaper. The word “outcome” became an illegible blot.

  He was still not entirely accustomed to taking breakfast in the restaurant of the Electric Grand, where the morning meal was presented twenty-first-century style: a buffet table offering eggs, miniature sausages, thinly sliced bacon, and various breads, along with juice and coffee dispensed by luminous machines. He had chosen juice because the dispenser was simple to operate, but he kept an eye on the coffee machine as the tourists used it, planning to make an approach as soon as the crowd thinned. He dabbed the spot of juice from the newspaper with a napkin, which caused an entire paragraph to disappear. When he looked up, Elizabeth DePaul was standing at his table.

  “We meet again,” she said.

  Jesse stood, banging a knee on the table edge. “Elizabeth!”

  “Don’t freak out. Do you mind if I sit?”

  “No! Please. I mean, of course.” He added, “I looked for you last night.”

  She was dressed twentieth-century-civilian style, denim trousers and a white shirt, no Velcro bustle, no City jacket. Apart from that, she hadn’t changed much since she had pulled her gun on Jesse’s would-be assailant in the back room of Onslow’s curiosity shop. Her hair had grown out a little. Six months, he thought. Three months back in her own time, three more here, doing City work far from Jesse’s runner hunts. He had almost despaired of seeing her again.

  She was carrying a plate, which she set down in front of herself. Pineapple wedges and a crescent roll. “Yeah,” she said, settling into the chair opposite him, “the desk guy mentioned it, but I was in a meeting with Kemp’s people until late. All this trouble, which I guess you’re reading about.”

  Getting down to business pretty quickly, but Elizabeth had never been one for small talk. She seemed to want to pretend she had never been away. He tried to accommodate her. “The papers love a scandal. Are the Blackwell letters really so ominous?”

  “Potentially very bad for us, sure. Whoever mailed those letters—some fucking runner, according to Kemp—is making it hard to conduct business. Did you see the crowd in front of the Grand last night? The only good news is, they weren’t carrying torches.”

  “So the letters are truthful?”

  “I haven’t seen them, but it sounds like it. And that’s the problem. Do you think we’d be welcome here if the average person knew even the stuff you know about us? There’s a reason we’re careful about what we say. The past is another country, and there’s no guarantee of cordial diplomatic relations.”

  “So Kemp chose to hide the unsettling details. I understand, but maybe it was a mistake. People will think you’re ashamed of what you are, now that the truth’s out.”

  “We don’t have anything to apologize for. We don’t have to apologize for our superior hygiene or our flashy technology, and we sure as hell don’t have to apologize because we come from a place where women can vote and black people can hold political office and LGBT people can walk down the street with their heads held high.”

  Jesse nodded. He had learned about these things when he first came to the City, in a training course aimed at preventing local hires from inadvertently insulting visitors—and, not incidentally, weeding out any employees who were too well-bred or bigoted to endorse a principle of tolerance. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of, but it won’t win you friends.”

  “Tell me about it. Maybe we have Walt Whitman or Robert Ingersoll on our side. Otherwise, we’re being denounced from every pulpit in the country and in most of these ink-smeared tabloids you guys call newspapers. Which is why Kemp’s been so careful about holding this stuff back until the last year, preferably until the end of the last year—this is exactly what we hoped to avoid.”

  A lot of ‘we’ and ‘you’ in these statements, Jesse thought. “The letters are premature.”

  “The letters are deliberate sabotage. Obviously the work of a runner trying to stir up trouble.”

  “A political radical.”

  Elizabeth’s look became guarded. “Probably.”

  “Someone who imagines he has a moral obligation to intervene in our history,” Jesse said, thinking of Weismann.

  “Someone who hates what Kemp is doing. Someone who wants to warn African-Americans and Indians and so forth about what’s coming.”

  “And what exactly is coming?”

  “Well, like the compromise Congress enacted to let Hayes take office. The end of Reconstruction. Southern blacks turned into sharecroppers, handed over to chain gangs, worked to death in iron mines or turpentine camps. Legal apartheid that won’t be dismantled until the 1950s. Native Americans pushed onto dwindling reservations or killed outright, because ‘the only good Indian is a dead Indian’—you know who said that? Philip Sheridan, buddy of U. S. Grant and major general in the old Army of the Potomac, soon to be general of the army.” A tourist at a nearby table turned his head, and Elizabeth lowered her voice. “I could go on.”

  “I guess that’s all true,” Jesse said, “if you say so, but how are these letters supposed to help?”

  “Probably whoever wrote them thinks they’ll give some courage to the victims, by saying out loud that this stuff is wrong and that history won’t look kindly on it. Failing that, they’ll discredit the City and cast doubt on Kemp’s official history.”

  “Seems like a slender victory.”

  “They’re only letters. The world’s cheapest weapon. But we don’t know what else the writer might have in mind.”

  Jesse thought again of Weismann, whose idealism required the murder of an Austro-Hungarian customs clerk. I’m more radical than some, but I’m not the only one. “Elizabeth?”

  She took a bite from a pineapple wedge. “What?”

  “It’s good to see you again.”

  “You too, Jesse.”

  At least she had used his name. “How are things back where you come from?”

  “More or less okay.”

  “Your daughter Gabriella is doing well?”

  “She’s fine. I mean, she’s heal
thy and she remembered me. I guess that counts as fine.” It sounded a degree short of fine. Jesse remembered a word he had learned from his employers at the City: suboptimal. “How about you?”

  “I recovered from the blow to the head I received at Onslow’s.”

  “I know. I kept tabs, even from the other side of the Mirror.”

  “Since then, I’ve been busy.” Riding the fence. Hunting runners.

  “Busy is good, right?”

  “It helps. Seeing you again is good.”

  She checked her watch. “Speaking of busy, I’m doing a ride-along with the Manhattan tour in about fifteen minutes—”

  “A ride-along?”

  The Manhattan tour was part of the so-called Springtime in New York package: dozens of tourists packed into a big horse-drawn omnibus and paraded up Broadway to Longacre Square and around the city’s more respectable streets. “Kemp was thinking of canceling it. We have to guarantee the safety of the visitors, but that’s hard to do if there are racist mobs following us everywhere.”

  “Is it as bad as that?”

  “Not yet, and Kemp’s letting the tour go ahead, but he’s laying on extra security. Including me. And I need to check a weapon out of the armory, so…”

  “Will I see you tonight?”

  She hesitated longer than Jesse liked. “You know, what happened between us back at Futurity Station … that’s not something I can jump back into. I thought about it a lot when I was home. What happened between us can never be anything but temporary. Do you understand?”

  “I guess I understand it well enough.”

  “But we can have dinner tonight if you want. Maybe they haven’t told you yet, but Kemp’s reassigning you to his personal security detail. Along with me. And we’ll be leaving New York before long.”

  The news rang in his head like a bell, too loud to make sense of, but what he said was, “Partners again?”

  “Kind of.”

  “Back at the City?”

  “No. They’re sending us to San Francisco.”

  * * *

  The summons to Kemp’s penthouse lodgings came that afternoon, by way of Jesse’s pager. He rode the elevator to the top floor of the Electric Grand, standing next to a tourist couple who were arguing, in the lazy way of the long married, over who was currently president of the United States. “Grant,” the man said, “I’m pretty sure it’s Grant, his picture was in the brochure,” while his wife insisted, “But that was last year. There was an election, I think it’s Hayes? Does Hayes ring a bell?”

  Should have been Tilden, Jesse thought. Congress had given the contested election to Rutherford Hayes in exchange for letting the so-called Redeemers have their way down South—one of the things the letter-writing runner had complained about. Big victory for the White League and the Red Shirts, big setback for freed slaves, and apparently one reason the City failed to attract many dark-skinned tourists from the future. Grant himself was currently in England, an ocean away from domestic politics.

  Jesse got off at the penthouse and passed by three armed guards, each of whom examined his credentials, on his way to August Kemp’s suite. It was a pleasant suite, equipped with futuristic amenities including a machine for making coffee and a video screen the size of a door. A window overlooked Broadway, but the curtains were drawn. Kemp stood in front of a mirror, adjusting his tie. He was formally dressed, twenty-first-century style.

  “Jesse Cullum,” he said to Jesse’s reflection. “Good to see you again. Thank you for coming up. You talked to Elizabeth already? She told you I want you for some special duty?”

  “She mentioned it in general terms.”

  “General terms might have to do for now. I don’t want to be late for dinner. We’re bringing Edison in from New Jersey.”

  “Edison?”

  “Yeah, Edison, Thomas Edison, you’ve heard of him?”

  “The inventor? I read something about him in Leslie’s.”

  “Electric light, recorded sound, the movies—we more or less stole his thunder, the poor fuck. Half the stuff we have, he invented, but it’s going to be hard for him to get patents for any of it. So I want to make sure he knows how much we owe him, that the world knows it. It’s only fair. Also, I’m hoping he’ll agree to come to the City for an appearance. I’m picturing an interview with, I don’t know, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, one of those guys. Wouldn’t that be great?”

  “I’m sure it would.”

  “You don’t have the faintest idea what I’m talking about, do you?”

  This was Kemp in a more brittle mood than Jesse had seen before. “As far as I can tell, you’re talking about using Mr. Edison to make some money.”

  Kemp’s we’re-all-friends-here manner had gone the way of the morning dew, but after a chilly pause he smiled. “Okay, yes. On a no-bullshit basis, you’re correct. In part. But I also feel an ethical obligation to Edison. Right?”

  “Right,” Jesse said.

  “For the record.”

  “I understand.”

  “So here’s the thing. I’ve put together a group of people doing high-level security, mostly traveling with me, but not just protecting me personally—I need people who can go out into the community when I want them to, people who are loyal to the City but know how to conduct themselves in the world as we find it. I think you might be one of those people. Am I right about that?”

  “I guess I know my way around. I’ve tracked down a few runners, if that’s the business you have in mind.”

  “You’ll be briefed about your duties when the time comes. Are you comfortable carrying a gun?”

  “I’ve done it before.”

  “At Futurity Station you carried a weapon, but you didn’t fire it.”

  “I didn’t have an opportunity to fire it. I’m not what you’d call a gunslinger, Mr. Kemp, but I do know how to use a pistol.” His father had taught him the basics, and he had learned marksmanship from a Six Companies hatchetman named Sonny Lau.

  “We’ll make sure you get a little extra training. Also, we’re heading west. You hail from San Francisco, right?”

  “It’s where I grew up.”

  “Which could be an advantage. You know the city pretty well?”

  “I did, at one time.”

  “You feel comfortable there?”

  “I’m not sure I understand the question.”

  “Any problems with the law?”

  “Are you asking whether I’m a criminal?”

  “I’m asking whether I’ll have to bail you out of jail if a cop recognizes you. Anything like that in your past?”

  Much in his past, but no outstanding warrants. As far as he knew. “Nothing like that.”

  “Okay. Good.” Kemp’s necktie had apparently achieved a satisfactory state. He turned away from the mirror and put his hand on Jesse’s shoulder. “Welcome to the team. Elizabeth can get you set up with a handset and whatever else you need. We’ll be leaving Manhattan this week, maybe as soon as Thursday or Friday if I can get Edison to commit to an appearance.”

  “The runner we’ll be looking for,” Jesse said. “Is he the author of those letters in the press?”

  “When you need to know,” Kemp said, “I’ll tell you.”

  * * *

  Elizabeth returned unscathed from her afternoon protecting twenty-first-century tourists from the indignation of angry locals. There had been no real problem, she told Jesse. A few disapproving stares, but no one was throwing bricks. “Seems like most people don’t really care how morally compromised we are.”

  “Well, this is New York,” Jesse said. “They tolerated Boss Tweed for years. People here are hard to shock.”

  They took supper in the hotel dining room, as opposed to the staff room in the basement. Twenty-first-century cuisine. The waiter handed Jesse a menu as long as his forearm, which contained a great many words not recognizably English. “Does any of this translate into mutton?”

  “Live a little,” Elizabeth said. “Let me
order for you.”

  “Is that customary?”

  “Your manhood won’t wilt.”

  She told the waiter to bring them two California chipotle burgers and various ancillary dishes. And beer of a particular brand, which came chilled, in a bottle with a lime wedge stuck in its neck. “Cheers,” she said.

  “How were things back home?” he asked for the second time in as many days, because he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “You really want to know?” She shrugged. “It was good to spend time with Gabby. She’s a big girl now. Smart. And independent, which is a good thing. My mom does a great job looking after her, and I’m grateful to her…”

  “But?”

  “But mom got religion after my dad died. Not in a good way. Joined a fundie church, and she won’t keep quiet about it around Gabby.”

  “You’re not a churchgoer?”

  “No. I mean, I don’t have strong opinions about how the universe was created or any of that stuff. I’m not a raging atheist. But I don’t think Noah’s ark was a real thing, and I don’t think God hates gays and heathens. If Gabby ever decides to join a church, that’s up to her, but I don’t want my mom teaching her stuff she’ll have to unlearn in biology class. So the arguments start as soon as Gabby’s down for the night—my mom’s all you need to get her baptized, and I’m like, she’s only four, what’s religion to her? Plus Gabby never fails to ask about her father. She knows he did some bad things, that he’s in prison for it. But it’s like an abscessed tooth, she won’t let it alone. ‘What did he do that was wrong? Does he want to hurt us? Why can’t I see him?’”