Last Year

by Robert Charles Wilson

  * * *

  Mercy Kemp’s clothes were bloody from the first-aid work she’d done—the entire cabin of the helicopter reeked of blood and hot metal and spent gunpowder—and she had exchanged fewer than ten words with her father since the rescue. Instead she had elected to sit with Theo and let herself drift in and out of sleep.

  She was still shaking off her fatigue when she stepped onto the landing pad and was surrounded by a phalanx of security people in City uniforms who separated her from Theo and the others. Theo began to object, loudly, and Jesse Cullum looked ready to attempt a rescue if she needed it, but her father stepped out in front of the procession and said, “I want to have a word with my daughter in private. There’s a fixed-wing aircraft being fueled, and in a few minutes we’ll all be on it, all of us, so calm the fuck down. Nobody’s being left behind.”

  So he said. But Mercy was inclined to believe him. Abandoning employees and runners wasn’t his style, especially when he knew she’d carry the story back home. “It’s all right,” she called back to Theo.

  She followed her father to a windowless room in a concrete-box building, where she sat in an office chair while he received a verbal report from the station’s radio operator. The news was all bad. Pitched battles between railroad workers and federal troops had turned Baltimore into an inferno. There was rioting in Charleston, for reasons as yet unclear. In the South, dozens of black towns and neighborhoods had been burned by hooded vigilantes. The coal miners of Schuylkill County were on strike; Pinkerton men hired as strikebreakers had killed fourteen men and three women in the town of Shenandoah. Documents seized at certain banks had substantiated charges of counterfeiting and financial fraud against the City. John D. Rockefeller and Jay Gould—prominent men who had been dining with her father and bragging about it only a few months ago—had publically called for the arrest and trial of August Kemp.

  Which obviously wasn’t going to happen, at least not in this slice of Hilbert space. As soon as they were alone in the room, Mercy said, “This is worse than last time, isn’t it?”

  Her father stared at her. His eyes looked sunken, as if he hadn’t slept for days. “I’m not prepared to discuss that with you.”

  Not that he had ever been a heavy sleeper. As a child Mercy had often heard him moving around their Long Island house after midnight, a comforting sound once she learned to recognize it. Five bells, all’s well, Daddy’s making his rounds. She was a light sleeper herself. As a teenager she had occasionally played the game of being awake when he was awake and moving from room to room without revealing her presence—watching TV in the basement while he plodded around the kitchen; fixing a snack in the kitchen when he was at work in his study. On rare occasions, important people visited; when that happened, and especially when conversation continued into the small hours, Mercy had amused herself by pretending to be a spy, eavesdropping from the top of the stairs or the nook behind the basement door.

  Mercy’s mother had been wholly uninterested in August Kemp’s business affairs, but Mercy had been ardently curious about them, if only because business was never discussed in her presence. She knew her father was a wealthy man and that he owned many hotels and resorts and other properties around the world; she knew he had been married more than once, and she had met, if not especially liked, most of her step-siblings. And she knew he had friends in high places, including the high places of national politics. (A Democratic Speaker of the House had once spent the night in the guest bedroom. He turned out to be an obese and hilariously flatulent but otherwise perfectly ordinary man: The most interesting thing about him had been his job description.) It was during a late-night conversation between her father and two solemn-looking men in business suits that Mercy had first heard him mention the visitors from Hilbert space.

  Much of what he said was incomprehensible to her, and not only because she heard it through the grate in the bedroom above her father’s study. But in those days she had been keeping a diary (saved to a thumb drive she hid on her bookcase behind a copy of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets), and she recorded in it what she believed she had heard. So, years later, when the truth began to leak out, either through rumors or by way of certain documents published by Wikileaks, it had only confirmed what Mercy had already guessed.

  She was a first-year student at Stanford when the Department of Defense documents were published on the Internet. By that time it had become obvious to everyone in the family that Mercy was not the purse-dog-bearing Upper East Side fashion clone some of her half-sisters had become. She often talked to her father about current affairs, and he had seemed vaguely proud of her precocity, but any attempt to engage him about the Mirror—his first paratemporal resort had just opened—was met with a wall of platitudes and generalizations.

  So she had formed her own ideas about the so-called visitors, presumed to have died in custody in 2003 or 2004. Wikileaks and her diary agreed: Where the visitors came from, humanity had survived a massive global die-back in which population numbers had plummeted to eighteenth-century levels. The survivors had responded by modifying not only the terrestrial environment but the human genome. Arguably, although they were descended from Homo sapiens, they had made themselves a distinct species. And they regarded twenty-first-century humanity with a combination of sympathy and contempt.

  As they should, Mercy thought. But her father and his powerful friends didn’t see it that way. What her father saw was the catastrophic ascendance of an effete, genetically engineered socialism. Hijacking the visitors’ technology to build the City of Futurity had been his cry of defiance and denial.

  She had said all that to him, back when he closed down the first of his Gilded Age resorts and before he opened the current City. He had told her she was foolish, that she had fallen under the influence of radicals, that she could believe such nonsense only because his money had sheltered her from what he called “the real world.” (She wondered: Which one?)

  The argument had turned into an angry mutual repudiation. They hadn’t spoken since then. But he had worked hard to track her down and bring her to safety, now that the City of Futurity was sinking like an ocean liner gored by an iceberg, and she appreciated that, even if his motives were more calculated than sentimental. On some level, August Kemp still cared about her. Duly noted.

  “I’ll have a Beechcraft ready to take off inside of ten minutes,” he said.

  “The sooner the better, for Phoebe’s sake.”

  “That’s the name of the injured girl?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is she to you?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “I was hoping she could be treated here—”

  “And what, abandoned? What’s she supposed to do, pick up her saline drip and hike across the Sierra Nevada?”

  “We’re not far from a rail spur. I could make arrangements. I’m not heartless. But neither am I in the business of rescuing random locals.”

  “We’re not talking about random locals. We’re talking about one particular person.”

  “I know that. Drop the condescending tone, Mercy. You’re not on any moral high ground here. Your boyfriend is the one who smuggled in weapons. Like dropping matches into a barrel of gunpowder.”

  She refused to be drawn into an argument. “Phoebe needs to go to the City.”

  “If that’s the case, I won’t object.”

  “And I’ll stay with her until she’s stabilized.”

  “We’re closing the Mirror. There are time limits.”

  “This isn’t a negotiation. If you want to take me home in cuffs, you might as well call the guards now.”

  He stared at her. “Be careful what you ask for.”

  * * *

  Jesse, Elizabeth, and Theo followed Phoebe as the City doctor wheeled her to the more distant of two concrete blockhouses, this one set up as a makeshift hospital. The doctor wore a plastic name tag announcing him as A. TALBOT, and he took Phoebe into an adjoining room Jesse and the others were
not allowed to enter.

  Minutes passed. A guard—a local hire with an automatic rifle lax in his hands—blocked the exterior door, but there was only one of him, and he looked more sleepy than dangerous. Jesse exchanged a few desultory words with Theo Stromberg, who kept hitching up a pair of trousers he had been allowed to borrow from Randal’s quarters back at the Nob Hill mansion, until Talbot came out of the back room and said, “She’s stabilized for travel—which one of you is her family?”

  Jesse stood up. “I’m her brother.”

  “Can you tell me her name?”

  “Phoebe Cullum.”

  “And you are?”

  “Jesse Cullum.”

  “Okay. Well, here’s how it stands. We’ve stabilized Phoebe, but she needs surgery, so we’ll transport her to the City. If the infirmary is intact, she can be treated there. But getting the bullet out of her and patching the internal damage isn’t the end of it. Far from it. She’s going to need post-surgical care. And that’s going to be a problem, given that the City is about to be evacuated and abandoned. Am I correct in assuming she’s a local?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then she’ll have to stay on this side of the Mirror, and you’ll have to care for her.”

  “As long as there’s life in me,” Jesse said.

  “I can set you up with antibiotics, sterile bandages, and some basic instructions, including how to handle a surgical drain. But after that, you’ll be on your own. If there are complications—”

  “Is that likely?”

  “It’s a real possibility. Infection, renal failure—you won’t have the resources to deal with that.”

  “You mean she might die.”

  “I want to give you the tools and knowledge to prevent that. But she’s going to have a long recovery even under the best circumstances, and you should be prepared for all possible outcomes.”

  “That’s a gentle way of putting it.”

  “I’m sorry I can’t be more positive. We’ll do everything we can for her, Jesse. Right now we need to get her on the plane for the next leg of the trip.”

  Theo spoke up: “You said something about the infirmary maybe not being intact?”

  “It was fine when I left there two days ago. But there were already federal troops with artillery caissons outside the wall.” Talbot hesitated. “You’re Theo Stromberg, aren’t you?”

  “Why, did Kemp put up a wanted poster?”

  “No. I saw you speak at a rally. Chicago, summer of 2016.”

  “You attended a rally and then went to work for August Kemp?”

  “I’m an old army medic, Mr. Stromberg. I like field work, and saving lives isn’t political. Given how Mr. Kemp’s first resort turned out, I took the job when it was offered it to me. I thought this one might need my services.”

  “Looks like you weren’t wrong,” Theo said.

  * * *

  Talbot wheeled Phoebe out of the blockhouse toward the new airship, and Jesse followed behind Elizabeth and Theo.

  The guard at the door gave a little contemptuous sniff as they passed. Jesse turned back. “You have something to say?”

  “No sir. Not to you.”

  “Last day on the job?”

  “It looks that way. I was hired out of Carson City six months ago. Just to sit around this patch of nowhere in case I’m needed. Which I never was. I told them I’ll make my own way to the railhead after they turn the lights out. As for the City of Futurity, those goddamned towers can fall down for all of me. Better if they do. You’re one of us, you must know what these people are.”

  “And what are they?”

  The guard spat a plug of tobacco into the darkness. “Whores, fancy boys, Chinamen, niggers…”

  “They pay your salary, friend.”

  “Not much longer they don’t.” The guard shouldered his rifle. “Nor yours, either.”

  He walked away without looking back. Abandoning his post, Jesse thought, but that didn’t seem to matter anymore. All sorts of things were being abandoned. It seemed like everyone was going home, or leaving it.

  19

  The next leg of the flight was faster but more terrifying, more terrifying because faster: The fixed-wing airship flew more like a bullet than a bird. It was probably the largest single thing to have been imported through the Mirror, and Jesse was not surprised Kemp had kept it hidden from local tourists and the press. One did not, in this vehicle, float. One hurtled.

  He closed his eyes and gave himself over to his fatigue. The pain in his wounded right arm had become a hot rhythmic pulse, Morse code stuttering a single letter, but he managed a few rounds of dream-haunted sleep despite it. He dreamed of the days of his life divided into leaves and bound into a book that could be read only backward. He dreamed of those gnomes Mercy believed in, visitors from a century even more distant than the twenty-first, and in his dream they marched out of the frame of a vanity mirror, pale and serene as clouds, and one of them (it might have been male or female or both or neither) stood before Jesse and told him that all things change and in the end nothing endures but change itself.

  After an incalculable time the airship landed at another remote strip, somewhere in Illinois but west of the City, where he helped transfer Phoebe to another helicopter for the last leg of the flight. Jesse was tempted to sleep again, and he dozed a little, until a band of daylight struck his eyes as the helicopter made a banking turn: Morning had come. He tried to make himself alert as he glanced around the cabin. Mercy Kemp and Theo Stromberg were safety-belted next to Elizabeth and the dark-skinned physician, Talbot. Phoebe was strapped to a gurney—alive, though she looked as pale as death—and August Kemp rode near the front of the airship, wearing a headset that allowed him to communicate with the pilot.

  Reluctantly, Jesse steeled his nerve and looked out the window.

  The view by daylight was as disorienting as it had been by night. The sun had just cleared a reef of cloud on the eastern horizon. Empty prairie scrolled beneath the airship, green with wild grass and stitched with the silver thread of rivers and creeks; a flock of passenger pigeons wheeled over a blue-green bog in the shadow of a low hill. Ahead, two distant needles caught the rake of the sunlight: the twin towers of the City of Futurity. Talbot had taken a digital device from his pocket and was holding it to the window—recording video, Jesse assumed, just as the twenty-first-century tourists habitually did.

  Elizabeth left her seat and moved next to Jesse. She had been talking to Mercy and Theo—more like shouting at them, given the unrelenting noise of the engines—and sparing occasional sour glances for August Kemp. Jesse’s understanding of the argument between Kemp and his daughter had deepened over the past day. His first impression—of Mercy Kemp as a pampered daughter who needed rescuing from the consequences of her fashionable radicalism—had been too hasty. Mercy wasn’t stupid or obviously foolish, and her presence here was more than an act of petulant rebellion. It was a disagreement about money and power and purpose, imported (like so many other bewildering things) from the age of the Mirror. Mercy believed her father was extracting profits shamelessly while dodging responsibility for the crisis he left in his wake. And as far as Jesse could tell, that was true.

  But it had ceased to matter to him. His business now was with Phoebe, saving her life by any means possible. After that, Phoebe, if she lived, would go back to Aunt Abbie, and Jesse would revert to what he had been before he ever stumbled into the City of Futurity: a drifter, without employment or prospects, but generally sober and good with his fists. Maybe he would go back to San Francisco, now that Roscoe Candy was truly dead; maybe he would live and die where God had put him, in the gap between Pike Street and Dupont.

  Elizabeth leaned into his shoulder. “Something’s going on!” she shouted. “Kemp’s talking to someone at the City, and he doesn’t look happy!”

  Jesse glanced forward. She was right. There was no way to know what Kemp was saying, but he looked like a Thomas Nast caricature of an infuriated Irishma
n.

  “Probably about that,” Elizabeth said, nodding at the window. Jesse turned to take a second look just as Talbot crossed the aisle, aiming his phone in a new direction.

  They were close enough to the City now to see that the newspaper stories had not been exaggerated. A small army was arrayed before the wall, with what looked like caissons and supply wagons enough to fight another Bull Run. Smoke rose from cooking fires as men in blue uniforms milled about, treading the prairie grass to bare earth. The airship made a sweeping turn, revealing powder scars on the City’s gaudily painted wall where it had been struck by cannon fire. Struck, but not breached—the wall was massive, and the City had its own small army of uniformed men arrayed along the top of it.

  From this altitude it all looked peaceful enough, until a federal cannon gouted flame and a canister exploded just short of the gate.

  The City’s soldiers fired a volley in response, and the troops at the vanguard hastily pulled back, but their artillery emplacements were beyond range of the wall-top gunners, and now they began to fire in earnest. Smoke and dust rose from the battleground as if a giant had pounded the earth with his fist.

  Kemp shouted into his mouthpiece again, and the airship veered toward its landing pad outside Tower Two.

  * * *

  They touched ground with a bounce that suggested the pilot’s haste. Outside, a committee of grim-faced security personnel waited for the rotors to slow. All other open space within the boundary of the City walls was empty. Jesse had seen the City grounds deserted during snowstorms, or in the hours before dawn, but never on a sunny morning like this, and the reason was as obvious as it was shocking: at least a couple of artillery rounds had overshot the walls and struck the north face of Tower Two, shattering windows and scarring the concrete façade.

  He waited until Phoebe’s wheeled bed had been hoisted out of the airship, then followed Elizabeth and the others to the lobby doors. The medical facilities were in Tower One, where visitors from the future customarily stayed, so Kemp’s security team hustled everyone down an inclined ramp to the underground tunnel connecting the buildings. A pair of junior medics took charge of Phoebe, one at each end of the gurney, with Talbot following close behind, as Elizabeth came up beside Jesse and said in a low voice, “This is worse than I expected.”