A Bridge of Years

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Catherine looked dazed. Archer said, "I think so . . . but you could still leave a message, seems to me. A warning of some kind."

  "Conceivably. But the time travelers wouldn't, and the custodians have sworn not to. It would create a direct causal loop, possibly shutting down both terminals permanently."

  " 'Possibly'?"

  "No one really knows," Ben said. "The math is disturbing. No one wants to find out."

  Archer shrugged: he didn't understand this, Ben interpreted, but he would take it on faith. "That's why nobody came to help. That's why the house was empty."

  "Yes."

  "But you survived."

  "The cybernetics rebuilt me. It was a long process." He gestured at the stump of his leg under the blanket. "Not quite finished."

  Catherine said, "You were out there for ten years?"

  "I wasn't suffering, Catherine. I woke out of a long sleep, the day you opened the door."

  "Then how do you know all this?"

  This was easier to demonstrate than explain. He made a silent request and one of the cybernetics climbed the bed-sheets and sat a moment in the palm of his hand—a glittering, many-legged jewel.

  "My memory," he said.

  "Oh," Catherine said. "I see."

  □ □

  □ □

  This was an awful lot to accept all at once, Archer thought. Time as a fragmented structure, like sandstone, riddled with crevices and caverns; twenty-first-century marauders; insect memories . . .

  But Ben made it plausible. Plausible not because of his exoticisms—his strange injuries or his tiny robots—but because of his manner. Archer had no trouble at all believing this guy as a twenty-second-century academic recruited into an odd and secret business. Ben was calm, intelligent, and inspired trust. This could, of course, be a clever disguise. Maybe he was a Martian fifth columnist out to sabotage the planet—given recent events, it wouldn't be too surprising. But Archer's instinct was to trust the man.

  Questions remained, however.

  "Couple of things," Archer said. "If your marauder did such a thorough job at the Manhattan end, why did he screw up here?"

  "He must have believed I was dead beyond reclamation. Probably he thought all the cybernetics were dead, too."

  "Why not come back and check on that?"

  "I don't know," Ben said. "But he may have been afraid of the tunnel."

  "Why would he be?"

  For the first time, Ben hesitated. "There are other . . . presences there," he said.

  Archer wasn't sure he liked the sound of this. Presences? "I thought you said nobody could get through."

  The time traveler paused, as if trying to assemble an answer.

  "Time is a vastness," he said finally. "We tend to underestimate it. Think about the people who opened these tunnels— millennia in the future. That's an almost inconceivable landscape of time. But history didn't begin with them and it certainly didn't end with them. The fact is, when they created these passages they found them already inhabited."

  "Inhabited by what?"

  "Apparitions. Creatures who appear without warning, vanish without any apparent destination. Creatures not altogether material in constitution."

  "From an even farther future," Archer said. "Is that what you mean?"

  "Presumably. But no one really knows."

  "Are they human? In any sense at all?"

  "Doug, I don't know. I've heard speculation. They might be our ultimate heirs. Or something unrelated to us. They might exist—somehow; I find it difficult to imagine—outside our customary time and space. They seem to appear capriciously, but they may have some purpose, though no one knows what it is. Maybe they're the world's last anthropologists—collecting human history in some unimaginable sense. Or controlling it. Creating it." He shrugged. "Ultimately, they're indecipherable."

  "The marauder might have seen one of these?"

  "It's possible. They appear from time to time, without warning."

  "Would that frighten him?"

  "It might have. They're impressive creatures. And not always benign." "Come again?"

  "They almost always ignore people. But occasionally they'll take one." Archer blinked. "Take one?"

  "Abduct one? Eat one? The process is mysterious but quite complete. No body is left behind. In any case, it's very rare. I've seen these creatures and I've never felt threatened by them. But the marauder may have been told about this, maybe even witnessed it—I don't know. I'm only guessing."

  Archer said, "This is very bizarre, Ben."

  "Yes," Ben said. "I think so too."

  Archer tried to collect his thoughts. "The last question—" "Is about Tom."

  Archer nodded.

  "He discovered the tunnel," Ben said. "He used it. He should have known better." "Is he still alive?" "I don't know."

  "One of these ghost things might have eaten him?"

  Ben frowned. "I want to emphasize how unlikely that is. 'Ghost' is a good analogy. We call them that: time ghosts. They're seldom seen, even more seldom dangerous. No, the more present danger is from the marauder."

  "Tom could be dead," Archer interpreted.

  "He might be."

  "Or in danger?"

  "Very likely."

  "And he doesn't know that—doesn't know anything about it."

  "No," Ben said, "he doesn't."

  □ □

  □ □

  This talk worried Catherine deeply.

  She had accepted Ben Collier as a visitor from the future; as an explanation it worked as well as any other. But the future was supposed to be a sensible place—a simplified place, decorated in tasteful white; she had seen this on television. But the future Ben had described was vast, confusing, endless in its hierarchies of mutation. Nothing was certain and nothing lasted forever. It was scary, the idea of this chasm of impermanence yawning in front of her.

  She was worried about Doug Archer, too.

  He had crawled into her bed last night with the bashful eagerness of a puppy dog. Catherine accepted this as a gesture of friendship but worried about the consequences. She had not slept with very many men because she tended to care too much about them. She lacked the aptitude for casual sex. This was no doubt an advantage in the age of AIDS, but too often it forced her to choose between frustration and a commitment she didn't want or need. For instance, Archer: who was this man, really?

  She stole a glance at him as he sat beside her, Levi's and messy hair and a strange little grin on his face, listening to Ben, the porcelain-white one-legged time traveler: Douglas Archer, somehow loving all this. Loving the weirdness of it.

  She wanted to warn him. She wanted to say, Listen to all these frightening words. A renegade soldier from the twenty-first century, a tunnel populated with time ghosts who sometimes "take" people, a man named Tom Winter lost in the past . . .

  But Doug was sitting here like a kid listening to some Rudyard Kipling story.

  She looked at Ben Collier—at this man who had been dead for ten years and endured it with the equanimity of a CEO late for a meeting of his finance committee—and frowned.

  He wants something from us, Catherine thought.

  He won't demand anything. (She understood this.) He won't threaten us. He won't beg. He'll let us say no. He'll let us walk away. He'll thank us for all we've done, and he'll really mean it.

  But Doug won't say no. Doug won't walk away.

  She knew him that well, at least. Cared that much about him.

  Doug was saying, "Maybe we should break for lunch." He looked at Ben speculatively. "How about you? We could fix up some of those steaks. Unless you prefer to eat 'em raw?"

  "Thank you," Ben said, "but I don't take food in the customary fashion." He indicated his throat, his chest. "Still undergoing repairs."

  "The steaks aren't for you?"

  "Oh, they're for me. And thank you. But the cybernetics have to digest them first." "Ick," Catherine said. "I'm sorry if this is disturbing."

&
nbsp; It was, but she shrugged. "They fed my aunt Lacey through a tube for two years before she died. This isn't any worse, I guess. But I'm sorry for you."

  "Strictly temporary. And I'm not in any pain. You two have lunch if you like. I'm quite happy here."

  "Okay," Catherine said. Meekly: "But I have a couple of questions of my own."

  "Surely," Ben said.

  "You told us you were a sort of custodian. A caretaker. You said you were recruited.' But I don't know what that means. Somebody knocked at your door and asked you to join up?"

  "I was a professional historian, Catherine. A good one. I was approached by another caretaker, from my own near future, also a historian. Think of us as a guild. We recruit our own."

  "That puts a lot of power in your hands." Custodian was a modest word, Catherine thought; maybe too modest.

  "It has to be that way," Ben said. "The tunnel-builders are journeying into their own distant past. Their records of this time are sketchy; that's why they're here. The custodians act as their buffer in a sometimes hostile environment. We provide them with contemporary documents and we help to integrate them into contemporary culture on the rare occasions when they choose to make a physical visit. Could you, for instance, walk into a Cro-Magnon encampment and expect to pass for one of the tribe?"

  "I see. You agreed to this?"

  "When it was explained to me."

  "Just like that?"

  "Not without some soul-searching."

  "But you must have had a life of your own. It must have meant giving something up."

  "Not as much as you might think. I was old, Catherine. An old man. And longevity is something of an art in my time; I was more than a century old. And failing. And quite alone."

  He said this with a wistfulness that made Catherine believe him. "They made you young again?"

  "Passably young," Ben said. "Young enough to begin another life when I leave here."

  "Are you allowed to do that?"

  "I'm an employee, not a slave."

  "So what you want," Catherine surmised, "is to fix up all this damage. Make the tunnel work again. And eventually go home."

  "Yes."

  "Is that possible? Can you fix it?"

  "The cybernetics are repairing as much of the physical damage as they can. Then we can close the connection to Manhattan, isolate it until it can be repaired as well. But that will take some time. Weeks, at least."

  "And until then," Catherine interpreted, "the problem is Tom Winter."

  "He may be perfectly safe. He may not. The cybernetics tried to warn him, but they were working across a tremendous information barrier—I'm afraid they weren't very specific. He may have alerted the marauder, which puts us at risk; or he may do so if he hasn't yet."

  Catherine bit her lip. Here was the crux of it. "You want us to bring him back."

  Ben looked very solemn. "That may not be possible at this stage. The cybernetics can help, and they might provide some defense against the marauder, but the danger is obvious. I won't ask you to go—either of you."

  You don't have to ask, Catherine thought sadly. She looked at Doug Archer and knew.

  Archer grinned.

  "Tom is a likable sonofabitch," he said. "I expect I can drag his ass back here."

  Doug went to the kitchen, leaving Catherine alone with Ben.

  She hesitated in the doorway, unnerved by Ben's expressionless patience. Finally she said, "Is this necessary? If you don't get Tom Winter back . . . would the world end?" She added, "Doug is risking his life, I think."

  "I'll do everything I can to minimize the risk. Some risk remains. The world won't end if Tom Winter stays in Manhattan . . . but there might be other consequences I can't calculate." He paused. "Catherine, Doug knows the doorway is open. Do you think he'd stay away from it if I told him to?"

  "No ... I don't suppose he would." Catherine resented this but understood that it was true. "This way, at least he's serving a purpose. Is that it?"

  "This way," Ben said, "he'll come back."

  Fourteen

  Tom slept for three hours and woke with Joyce beside him, already feeling as if he'd lost her.

  He phoned Max to say he wouldn't be in. "Maybe I can come in Saturday to make up for it."

  "Are you sick," Max inquired, "or are you jerking me around?"

  "It's important, Max."

  "At least you're not lying to me. Very important?"

  "Very important."

  "I hope so. This is bothersome."

  "I'm sorry, Max."

  "Take care of your trouble soon, please. You do nice work. I don't want to break in a new person."

  The trouble wasn't Joyce. The trouble was in the space between them: that fragile connection, possibly broken.

  She was asleep in bed, stretched out on her side with one hand cupping the pillow. The cotton sheet was tangled between her legs. Her glasses were on the orange crate next to the bed; she looked naked without them, defenseless, too young. Tom watched from the doorway, sipping coffee, until she uttered a small, unhappy moan and rolled over.

  He couldn't begin to imagine what all this might mean to her. First the interesting news item that the man she'd been living with was a visitor from the future . . . followed by an encounter with something strange and monstrous in a tunnel under the earth. These were experiences nobody was supposed to have. Maybe she would hate him for it. Maybe she ought to.

  He was turning over these thoughts when she staggered out of the bedroom and pulled up a chair at the three-legged kitchen table. Tom tilled her coffee cup and was relieved that the look she gave was nothing like hateful. She yawned and tucked her hair away from her shoulders. He said, "Are you hungry?" and she shook her head: "Oh, God. Food? Please, no.

  Nothing hateful in the way she looked at him, Tom thought, but something new and disquieting: a bruised, wounded awe.

  She sipped her coffee. She said she had a gig tonight at a coffeehouse called Mario's, "but I don't know if I can face it." "Hell of a night," Tom observed.

  She frowned into her cup. "It was all real, wasn't it? I keep thinking it was some kind of dream or hallucination. But it wasn't. We could go back to that place and it would still be there."

  Tom said, "It would be. We shouldn't." She said, "We have to talk." He said, "I know."

  They went out for breakfast in the late-morning sunlight and the hot July smell of road tar and sizzling concrete.

  The city had changed, too, Tom thought, since last night.

  It was a city lost in a well of time, magical and strange beyond knowing, subterranean, more legend than reality. He had come here from a world of disappointment and miscalculation; in its place he had discovered a pocket universe of optimists and cynical romantics—people like Joyce, like Soderman, like Larry Millstein. They said they hated the world they lived in, but Tom knew better. They loved it with their outrage and their poetry. They loved it with the conviction of their own newness. They believed in a future they couldn't define, only sense—used words like "justice" and "beauty," words that betrayed their own fundamental optimism. They believed without shame in the possibility of love and in the power of truth. Even Lawrence Millstein believed in these things: Tom had found a carbon copy of one of his poems, abandoned by Joyce in a kitchen drawer; the word "tomorrow" had been printed with fierce pressure—"Tomorrow like a father loves his weary children and gathers them up" —and yes, Tom thought, you're one of them, Larry, brooding and bad tempered but singing the same song. And of all these people Joyce was the purest incarnation, her eyes focused plainly on the wickedness of the world but seeing beyond it into some kind of salvation, undiscovered, a submerged millennium rising like a sea creature into the light.

  All in this hot, dirty, often dangerous and completely miraculous city, in this nautilus shell of lost events.

  But I've changed that, Tom thought.

  I've poisoned it.

  He had poisoned the city with dailiness, poisoned it with boredom. The conclusion
was inescapable: if he stayed here this would become merely the place where he lived, the morning paper and the evening news not miraculous but predictable, as ordinary as the moving of his bowels. His only consolation would be a panoramic, private window on the future, thirty years wide. And Joyce.

  Consolation enough, Tom thought . . . unless he'd poisoned her, too.

  He tried to remember what he'd said last night, a drunken recital of some basic history. Too much, maybe. He understood now what he should have understood then: that he wasn't giving her the future, he was stealing it. Stealing the wine of her optimism and leaving in its place the sour vinegar of his own disenchantment.

  He ordered breakfast at a little egg and hamburger restaurant where the waitress, a tiny black woman named Mirabelle, knew their names. "You look tired," Mirabelle said. "Both of you."

  "Coffee," Tom said. "And a couple of those Danishes."

  "You don't need Danishes. You need something to build you up. You need aigs."

  "Bring me an egg," Joyce said, "and I'll vomit."

  "Just Danishes, then?"

  "That'll be fine," Tom said. "Thank you."

  Joyce said, "I want to be alone a little bit today."

  "I can understand that."

  "You're considerate," Joyce said. "You're a very considerate man, Tom. Is that a common thing where you come from?" "Probably not common enough."

  "Half the men around here are doing a Dylan Thomas thing—very horny and very drunk. They recite the most awful poetry, then get insulted if you don't go all weak-kneed and peel off your clothes."

  "The other half?"

  "Are lovable but queer. You're a nice change." "Thank you."