A Bridge of Years

by Charles Robert Wilson

  A rat, Billy thought. He looked like some kind of leathery, robotic sewer rat attempting to pass for human. I look like someone’s nightmare.

  The thought was disquieting. It troubled him until he activated the armor’s lancet; then everything was simple, everything was clear.

  He kept to the shadows.

  He tuned his eyepiece to the radiant frequency of the tunnel dust. He was able to follow his own footprints—a faintly blue, faintly luminous path—back to the building near Tompkins Square.

  The lobby of the building was alive, starry with ghostlight.

  But the intruder had come through here long ago and there was no clear trail to follow. Well, Billy had expected that. There had been rain since then; there had been wind, air pollution, foot traffic, a thousand scatterings and adulterations.

  He stood in the street outside the building. Faint blue light glimmered here and there. A brush of it adhered to a lamppost. A scatter of it stood like snow crystals along the filthy curb.

  No trail, only clues: dim, ambiguous.

  He looked up at the building, dark except for Mr. Shank’s apartment. Amos Shank chose that moment to pull back his blinds—awake in some delirium of creativity—and Billy gazed up calmly at him. Mr. Shank returned his look for one long breathless moment … then pulled away from the window; and the blinds slashed down again.

  Billy smiled.

  What did you see, Mr. Shank? What do you think I am, out here in the lonely dark?

  Billy imagined himself old and senile in 1962, lost in a dream of antiquity and Napoleonic Europe, peering from his slum apartment into a nighttime world inhabited by monstrosities.

  Why, Billy thought, I must look like Death.

  Good guess, Mr. Shank.

  Billy laughed quietly and turned away.

  He moved in a crude spiral away from the tunnel, avoiding Fifth Avenue and the late-night crowds in the Village, hoping for some substantial clue, an arrow of blue light, that would lead him to the intruder.

  He found none. He found traces of the dust here and there almost at random—a big deposit clinging to an oil slick at Ninth and University Place, a smaller one smudged into the yellow grass at the foot of a bench in Washington Square Park. Billy lingered at the bench a moment, but there was nothing coherent, only a suggestion that his prey had passed this way. He frowned and decided to move south, avoiding the west side of the park where a few hustlers and homosexuals still lingered in the darkness. That part of the park was a familiar hunting ground when his armor needed a killing— like Times Square and Union Square at night, places where disposable nonpersons gathered. Billy’s armor wanted a killing now; but there wasn’t time and he suppressed the urge.

  He paused a moment, adjusted his opticals and gazed up at the sky.

  Ordinarily the city sky was featureless, but Billy’s opticals showed him too many stars to count. It was like an Ohio sky, Billy thought.

  He felt a sudden pang of longing, so intense it worried him. The armor was pumping out complex neurochemicals to make him alert, to help him hunt—to keep him alive. There shouldn’t have been room for nostalgia. Unless the elytra or the lancet or the strange, false gland in the armor had begun to fail.

  But they hadn’t, really; or if they had, the effect was purely transient. Billy sat on a park bench until the pang of homesickness faded. Then the sky was only the sky, clean and blank of meaning. He retuned his opticals and crossed the empty space of Washington Square South at Sullivan, hunting.

  And came up empty. And sweated through another day.

  In the early evening he went out without his armor to wander the busy streets of the Village. He sat for a time on the terrace at the Cafe Figaro, mistaken by its regulars for one more middle-aged tourist, wondering whether the intruder had strolled past him in the crowd or might even be sitting at the next table, smug with thirty years’ worth of cheap prescience. Or might after all have left the city: that was still a real possibility. In which case Billy’s prey would be hopelessly beyond reach, no trace of him but a residue of fading phosphorescence.

  But Billy hadn’t given up yet.

  He went home, donned the armor, wandered toward mid-town in a ragged pattern for three hours without result.

  He finished the night without killing anything—a profound disappointment.

  And dreamed of blue light.

  Three nights later, ranging west along Eighth Street, he discovered a smoky luminescence around the doorway and interior of a tiny retail shop called Lindner’s Radio Supply. Billy smiled to himself, and went home, and slept.

  He woke in the heat of the afternoon.

  He put on his golden armor, activated the lancet, and dressed to conceal himself. He didn’t wear the headset; today he didn’t need it.

  He felt a little strange, going outside in daylight.

  He walked to Lindner’s in his overcoat, attracting a few stares but nothing more. He paused on the sidewalk in front of the store and pressed his face against the window.

  It wasn’t a big store, but business seemed reasonably good. There was a hi-fi set in the window bristling with vacuum tubes, a hand-lettered card announcing the word STEREOPHONIC! Beyond that, in the dimness, an old man stood patiently behind a wooden counter. Billy felt a tinge of disappointment: was this feeble thing his prey?

  Maybe. Maybe not. It was too soon to say.

  He crossed the street to a delicatessen, ordered a ham sandwich and coffee, and occupied a table by the window.

  Lindner’s was moderately busy. People came, people went. Any of them might be the intruder. But Billy guessed from the smoky nimbus of the glow last night that the man had come here often. The dust—by this time a few motes still clinging to his shoes or cuffs—could only have been deposited by repeated traffic. Probably he’s an employee, Billy thought. A deliveryman, say, or a sales assistant.

  The sandwich was very good. He hadn’t eaten much for days. He bought a second one, a second coffee. He ate slowly and watched the traffic in and out of Lindner’s.

  He counted fifteen individuals in and fifteen individuals out, all of them customers, Billy guessed. Then a truck pulled up to the curb and a sweating man in a blue shirt unloaded three cardboard boxes on a dolly. Billy watched with heightened interest: here was a possibility. There was no way to follow the truck, but he made a note of the license number and the name of the distribution company.

  And continued to watch.

  A little after four o’clock the counterman at the deli approached his table. “You can’t just sit here. This is for paying customers.”

  The place was nearly empty. Billy slid a ten-dollar bill across the table and said, “I’d like another coffee. Keep the change.” Thinking, If I wanted to kill you I could do it right now.

  The counterman looked at the money, looked at Billy. He frowned and came back with the coffee. Cold coffee in a greasy cup.

  “Thank you,” Billy said. “You’re welcome. I think.”

  The last customer left Lindner’s at five-fifteen; the store was scheduled to close at six. Billy divided his attention between the storefront and the clock on the deli wall. By six, his focus was intense and feverish.

  He watched as the old man—the proprietor, Billy guessed —ambled to the door with a key ring in his hand and turned the sign around to show the word CLOSED.

  Billy left his table at the deli and moved into the street.

  Warm, sunny afternoon. He shielded his eyes.

  At Lindner’s, the proprietor—gray-haired, balding, fat— stepped through the door and pawed at his keys. Then paused, turned back, pronounced some word into the shadow of the store, closed the door, and walked off.

  Billy’s interest was immediate: the old man had left someone inside.

  It was hardly likely the fat proprietor was his target, in any case. He looked too much at home here: too bored, too mindlessly familiar. Bide your time, Billy thought. Wait, watch.

  He stood at a newsstand and pretended to ex
amine a copy of Life.

  The second man stepped through the door a moment later and locked it with his own key.

  This man, Billy thought. His heart speeded up in his chest.

  Billy followed at a discreet distance.

  He was working on intuition, but he didn’t really doubt this was his prey. Here was a reasonably young man in pale blue jeans, cotton shirt, a pair of sneakers that looked suspiciously anachronistic. Dust in the tread of those shoes, Billy thought. Some dust, maybe, still trapped in the weave of his pants. In the dark, this man would light up like a neon tube. Billy was sure of it.

  He lagged back a block or two, following.

  The man sensed Billy’s presence. Sometimes this happened with prey. Sometimes it didn’t; there were people who simply didn’t pick up the clues. You could sit next to them on the subway, follow them up an escalator, read over their shoulders; they didn’t notice. More often, a victim would feel some warning instinct; he would walk a little faster, cast a nervous glance over his shoulder. In the end, of course, it didn’t matter; prey was prey. But Billy wanted to be careful now. He couldn’t use the armor too conspicuously and he didn’t want to lose this trail.

  He crossed the street, came parallel with his prey, then ducked into a liquor store and paid for a bottle—a squat fifth of whiskey, but any bottle would have done; it was only a prop. He put the paper bag under his arm and hurried out. He spotted his target a block away, heading into a seedy neighborhood on the border of the warehouse district.

  The target paused once, turned, and gazed back at Billy.

  And what do you see, Billy wondered. Not what Mr. Shank had seen, certainly. Not naked death, not on a sunny afternoon. Billy crossed at the corner and examined his own reflection in a window. Here was a gray-haired man in a dirty gray overcoat carrying a bottle in a brown paper bag. Ugly but hardly conspicuous. He smiled a little.

  The prey—the time traveler—nearly walked into the path of a taxi (Billy contemplated this possibility with a mixture of regret and relief); stepped back at the last minute (Billy felt a different mixture of relief, regret); then hurried into the lobby of a tenement building.

  Billy noted the address.

  Follow him, was Billy’s next thought. Follow him into whatever shabby little room he occupies. Kill him there. Finish with this. His armor wanted a killing.

  Then Billy hesitated—

  And the world dimmed.

  Dimming was how he thought of it later. It felt like a dimming —literally, as if someone had switched off a lightbulb in his head.

  He was suddenly Billy Gargullo, farmboy, standing on a dirty street on the Lower East Side in the antiquated past, the words kill him still echoing in his head like the chorus of an obscene song. He thought of the man he had followed and felt a hot rush of guilt.

  Suddenly Billy wasn’t a killer. He wasn’t a hunter; his senses weren’t keen. He felt opaque, thick, frightened, leaden-footed. His clothes were too heavy; he started to sweat.

  His armor had malfunctioned.

  Billy fled.

  It wasn’t a problem he could run away from. But running was his first instinct. He ran until he was breathless, bent double and gasping for air, then walked in a cold daze until the streetlights blinked on.

  He sought shelter in a movie theater on Forty-second Street, where lonely men masturbated in the balconies or gratified each other in the toilet stalls. Other nights, he had come here looking for victims. But that irony was lost on him now. Billy huddled into a torn seat, terrified in the flickering movie light.

  His life might be over.

  Maybe it had been a bad bargain all along. Billy had seized the opportunity when it was offered: leap back into the fabulous past, out of the Storm Zone, battle zone, Infantry, mortal fear; seal the exits and check them; live a modest, concealed life with his armor a private and occasional indulgence.

  Oh, but Billy (some fraction of himself had objected even then), the armor won’t last forever, there are no replacements where you’re going, no parts no labor no repair. He envisioned a searing, unquenchable, and ultimately deadly Need.

  But that might not come (Billy had told himself). Who could tell how long the golden armor might last? Out of combat, preserved, groomed, polished, maintained, diagnosed, coddled—maybe it would last forever. Or as long as Billy lived. The power packs were good for that.

  So he told himself.

  It hadn’t seemed like a fairy tale, then.

  It was a calculated risk. Maybe this optimism was a flaw in his mental equipment; maybe some slip of the scalpel at the military hospital had left him too independent of mind or too vulnerable to imagination. Billy had huddled against the noise and fury of the combat zone and told himself, You don’t have to stay here—and that meant a great deal, with the wind outside, the constant lightning, furtive combat in ruined buildings, in this nightmare wasteland a thousand miles from Ohio.

  He remembered that time without wanting to.

  Three of them had discovered the time traveler.

  Billy killed the two infantrymen while they slept. Then he killed the time traveler herself, the so-called custodian, whose name was Ann Heath.

  And journeyed back. And sealed his exits. And checked them.

  Exhausted and afraid, Billy fell asleep in the movie theater.

  The film—an “art film,” mainly of people fucking—droned on around him.

  In his dream he unreeled private movies.

  Billy didn’t know much history.

  After his conscription, in the tedious hours at training camp, he sometimes picked up the popular novels his buddies read—illustrated historicals about the wild days of the twentieth century. Billy enjoyed these books. There was always a pointed moral about the sins of gluttony or pride; but Billy could tell the writers took as much prurient pleasure in their stories as he did. Some of these books had been banned in California for their frank depiction of tree-burning forest barons, of greedy politicians zooming around the world in gasoline-powered aircraft. As a conscript Billy relished the promiscuity of his ancestors. They had danced on their cliff-edge, he thought, with great style.

  These were his first coherent thoughts about the past.

  The rest of Billy’s knowledge was commonplace. The climate had begun to change long before he was born. In school they’d made him sing pious songs about it. Sun and water, wind and tree, what have these to do with me? Sun and water, tree and wind, against these, Father, I have sinned. But climate was Billy’s destiny. Long before his birth, a fierce curl of tropical air had formed and stabilized over the waters of the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. The Storm Zone ebbed and strengthened; some years it was hardly more than a knot in the Jetstream, some years it generated hurricane after hurricane, battering coastlines already devastated by the rising of the world’s oceans and the melting of the poles. And every decade—as the atmosphere warmed another degree or two— the trend was unmistakable: the Storm Zone had become a stable new climatic feature.

  By the time Billy was five anyone who could afford to had migrated out of the southeastern coastal states. But the poor stayed behind, joined by refugees from the Caribbean and Central America seeking the relative safety of these ruined American cities. There were food riots, secession riots. Washington dispatched troops.

  By the time he was conscripted the war had been going on for nearly a decade. It had turned into one of those festering conflicts all but ignored by the prestigious European news cartels. A senseless effort, some said, to preserve as American territory a swath of land rapidly growing uninhabitable. But the war went on. Billy didn’t much care about it, not at first. Recruited at the age of twelve, he was shipped around to various training and indoctrination bases, mainly out west. He spent a couple of years guarding the transcontinental railway tracks where they passed through insurgent territory in Nevada, where water-poor locals had tried to dynamite the trains a couple of times. Billy didn’t see any action, but he loved to watch the trains
go by. Big silver bullets shimmering in the sun haze, loaded with grain, ingots, armaments, liquid hydrogen. The trains levitated soundlessly from horizon to horizon and left dust-devils dancing in their wake. Billy imagined himself riding one of those trains to Ohio. But it was impossible. He’d be AWOL; there were travel restrictions. He’d be shot. But it was a lovely thing to think about.

  He was lonely in Nevada. He lived in a stone barracks with three other recruits and an aging, armored CO named Skolnik. Billy wondered whether he would ever see a woman, hold a woman, marry a woman, have children with a woman. Billy was technically assigned to an armored division of the 17th Infantry, but he hadn’t been issued his armor yet; privately, he hoped he never would. Some recruits did a term of menial labor and were released back into their communities. Maybe that would happen to him. Billy was careful to do everything he was asked to do—but slowly, ploddingly. It was a form of silent rebellion.

  It didn’t work. On his seventeenth birthday, Billy was shipped east for treatment.

  They gave him his armor and they posted him to the Zone.

  He woke in the movie theater on Forty-second Street and shuffled outside into a miserably humid night.

  Walking home, he felt a surge of energy, like needlepricks on his skin—a trickle from the gland in his elytra, Billy presumed. That was a good sign and it made him optimistic. Maybe the malfunction was temporary.

  His thoughts were more coherent, at least.

  Home, he attached the headgear to his armor and prayed the diagnostics were still working.

  His eyepiece bled graphs and numbers into his field of vision. A complete diagnostic sequence took more than an hour, but Billy knew what all the numbers ought to be. He ran down his electrical systems, then started on the biologicals. Everything came up normal or near normal except for two items: a local blood pressure and the temps on a tiny circulatory pump. Billy finished the general diagnostic, then called back those numbers for a closer look. He asked the armor for a complete sequence on the abdominals and waited nervously for the results.