A Bridge of Years

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Billy was the youngest but he read a lot; Piper and Hallowell always asked him questions like that. This time he was stumped. "Sir, I don't," Billy said.

  Brother Hallowell shrugged and said, "Well, we walked into something peculiar for sure. You know there's a lady in the next room?"

  Billy was reluctant to take a step forward; he didn't relish the sound of the machine bugs crunching under his feet. "A lady?"

  "That's right," Brother Hallowell said, "but your concussion grenade just about took her out, Brother Billy. She has a wedge of plate glass in her head. She's not dead, and her eyes are open, but—well, come look."

  Billy was dazed but his armor kept him functioning. Even Brother Piper was beginning to calm down. The elytra came back up to full function and Billy felt as if his blood had cooled by two or three degrees. Maybe this place was a weapons dump; maybe they'd get a commendation for discovering it. This was a pleasant idea but Billy disbelieved it even as he thought it—the machine bugs were too strange a product even for the Brazilian ordinance makers.

  He followed Brother Hallowell to the next room, where the woman lay slumped in a corner between two boxes. The concussion grenade had slivered a glass dividing wall and driven one long green-tinted wedge into the woman's head between her right ear and her right eye. There was blood, but not as much as Billy had expected. The sight of this young woman with the shank of plate glass projecting from her cranium like a ghastly party hat took Billy strangely; he reached down to touch the glass—a gesture of awe—and as he touched it the woman blinked and gasped . . . not in pain, Billy thought, but as if the tremor of his touch had ignited some pleasant memory, long forgotten. She looked up at Billy with one eye, the left. The right eye, bloodshot, gazed indifferently at some vision not physically present.

  "What's your name?" Billy asked.

  "Ann Heath," the woman said plainly.

  "Back off now." Billy stepped away as Brother Hallowell took a medical package out of his pack and selected a cardiovascular unit. He tore away the woman's shirt, then clamped the wound unit between her breasts. When he switched it on Billy heard the hemotropic tubes crunch into Ann Heath's body, a terrible sound. "Oh," she said calmly, as the wound unit began to regulate her breathing. Now she wouldn't die even if her heart and lungs gave out, though she still might become comatose. Billy understood the purpose of this maneuver: to keep her interrogatable for a little while longer.

  Brother Hallowell gave the machine a moment to stabilize, then bent down over Ann Heath. "Ma'am," he said, "can you tell me exactly what this place is?"

  Ann Heath responded obediently, as if the shard of glass had severed the part of her brain governing caution and left only obedience:

  "A time machine," she said.

  Brother Hallowell looked almost comically perplexed. "A what?"

  "A time machine," Ann Heath said. The cardiovascular machine put a tremor in her voice, as if she had a bad case of the hiccups.

  Brother Hallowell sighed. "She's scrambled," he said.

  "She's brain dead." He straightened and flexed his back.

  "Brother Billy, will you interrogate the prisoner? See if you can get anything coherent out of her. Meanwhile Brother Piper and I will reconnoiter and try to get some power going.

  Wind rocked the building. Billy sat down next to the injured woman and pretended not to see the wedge of green glass in her head. He waited until Brother Hallowell and Brother Piper had left the room.

  Ann Heath didn't look like a liar to him. In her condition, Billy thought, it might not be possible to tell a lie.

  He said, "Is this building really a time machine?" "There's a tunnel in the basement," Ann Heath said, tonelessly, except for the hiccupping. "Where does it go?" Billy asked. "The future," she said. "Or the past."

  "Tell me about it," Billy said.

  The storm penned them in the house for two days. Ann Heath grew steadily less intelligible; but in that time, while Brother Hallowell and Brother Piper were cleaning their armor, or heating rations over the building's thermopump, or playing card games, Billy did as he was told: he interrogated the prisoner. He explained to Piper and Hallowell that she was incoherent but he hoped she might still say something useful. Piper and Hallowell didn't really care what she said. They had swept aside the dead machine bugs and seemed to have written them off as some Storm Zone aberration, something the research corps might be interested in—later. Neither Piper nor Hallowell enjoyed mysteries. Nor did Billy; but Billy believed what Ann Heath told him.

  What Ann Heath told him was a catalogue of miracles. She told it without passion and with great clarity, as if a door had come unlocked in her head, the answers to Billy's questions spilling out like hoarded treasure.

  Late on the third night of their occupation, while the storm plucked at the edges of the house and Brother Hallowell and Brother Piper dozed in the placid heat of their armor, Billy took Ann Heath down to the basement. Ann Heath couldn't walk by herself, the left side of her body curling out from under her as if the joints wouldn't lock, so Billy put an arm around her and half carried her, getting his hands all bloody on the mess of her shirt. He was disappointed by the basement, because it was as plain a cell as the upstairs rooms —no miracles here that he could see. Billy had retained the edge of his skepticism throughout this interrogation and the basement seemed to confirm all his doubts. But then she showed him the control panel set into the blank wall, invisible until she spoke a word in a language Billy didn't recognize; then he held his own hand against the panel while she spoke more words until the panel knew Billy's touch. She taught him which words to say to operate the machine, and Billy and his armor memorized the peculiar sounds. Then her head dropped and she started to drool and Billy put a pillow of wadded rags behind her so she could sleep—if this was sleeping—while the cardiovascular unit bumped steadily against her breastbone. Billy opened the tunnel—it appeared at once, white and miraculous, his final assurance that these miracles were genuine—then he closed it again. Ann Heath had told him how she was getting ready to close this tunnel forever, and Billy wondered what it would have been like if he and Brother Piper and Brother Hallowell had passed by this place and found some other shelter: he would never have guessed, never imagined, lived out his life never knowing about tunnels between time and time. He thought about this and about Ohio and about the Infantry and how much he hated it. He thought about his armor; then he powered his armor up and moved upstairs to the place where Brother Piper and Brother Hallowell were sleeping, and he put his gloved hand down close to Brother Piper's exposed head and beamed a smoky corridor through Brother Piper's skull, then turned and did the same to Brother Hallowell before he was altogether awake; then he ran back downstairs, hurrying because he was afraid this peculiar, mutinous courage might evaporate and leave him weeping.

  He paused to bend over Ann Heath. Ann Heath was awake again and followed him with her one bright eye. Billy said, "Are you suffering?" and she answered in her toneless, bleak voice, "Yes." Billy said, "Would you rather be alive or dead?" And when she answered, "Dead," he did her the way he'd done Piper and Hallowell, but looking away, so he wouldn't see the wedge of bloody glass fused into the new wound he'd made.

  The cardiovascular machine faltered as her blood volume dropped. Billy turned off the machine before he left.

  He remembered that bleak room, sitting in this one with Lawrence Millstein.

  Billy had remembered a lot recently. Sometimes the memories came flooding out of him, a river mysterious in its source. Maybe he was getting old. Maybe some flaw in the armor (or in himself) allowed these freshets of remembrance. He had never been a particularly good soldier; he was what the infantry doctors had called an "anomalous subject," prone to unpredictable chemistries and odd neural interactions. Most soldiers loved their armor, and so did Billy, but he loved it the way an addict loves his addiction: profoundly, bitterly.

  He extracted from Lawrence Millstein the address of the apartment where his prey—
Tom Winter—lived.

  He considered going there directly, but the sun had come up now and the morning streets were fiercely bright. He looked through Lawrence Millstein's back window over a landscape of iron fire escapes, across the enclosed courtyard where a gutted TV set glittered like a bottle washed up from the sea. Billy was fully armored now and it would be hard to move in daylight without drawing attention.

  But he was comfortable here ... at least for a while.

  Lawrence Millstein had wrapped a wad of toilet paper around the stump of his finger. He sat in a chair staring at Billy. He had not stopped staring at Billy since the moment Billy switched on the bedroom light. "It's going to be a hot day," Billy said, watching Millstein flinch at the sound of his voice. "A scorcher."

  Millstein didn't venture a response.

  "It gets hot where I come from," Billy said. "We had summers that made this look like Christmas. Not so humid, though."

  In a voice that sounded uncomfortably like Ann Heath's voice, Lawrence Millstein said, "Where do you come from?" "Ohio," Billy said.

  "There's nothing like you in Ohio," Millstein said.

  "You're right." Billy smiled. "I live in the wind. I'm not even born yet."

  Lawrence Millstein, who was a poet, seemed to accept this.

  An hour passed while Billy contemplated his options. Finally he said, "Do you know his number?"

  Millstein was weary and not paying attention. "What?"

  "His telephone number. Tom Winter."

  Millstein hesitated.

  "Don't lie to me again," Billy cautioned. "Yes. I can call him." "Then do that," Billy said. Millstein repeated, "What?"

  "Call him. Tell him to come over. He's been here before. Tell him you need to talk to him."

  "Why?"

  "So I can kill him," Billy said irritably.

  "You evil son of a bitch," Millstein said. "I can't invite him to his death."

  "Consider the alternative," Billy suggested.

  Millstein did so, and seemed to wither before Billy's eyes. He cradled his wounded hand against his chest and rocked back and forth, back and forth.

  "Pick up the phone," Billy said.

  Millstein picked up the receiver and braced it against his shoulder while he dialed the number. Billy calculated the number and memorized it, listening to the clatter of the dial each time it spun home. He was a little surprised Millstein was actually doing this; he'd guessed the odds were fifty-fifty that Millstein would refuse and Billy would have to kill him. Millstein held the receiver to his ear, breathing in little sobs, eyes half shut, then hung up the phone with a triumphant slam. "Nobody's home!"

  "That's all right," Billy said. "We'll try again later."

  Billy's prediction was correct: the day was long and hot.

  He opened the tiny window but the trickle of air it admitted was syrupy and stank of gasoline. Billy's armor kept him cool, but Lawrence Millstein turned pale and began to sweat. The sweat ran down his face in glossy rivulets and Billy told him to drink some water before he fainted.

  Sunset came late and Billy began to grow impatient. He felt the pressure of the armor; if he didn't take some action soon he would have to power down. When he was up too long he grew edgy, nervous, a little unstable. He looked at Lawrence Millstein and frowned.

  Millstein hadn't moved from his chair all day. He sat upright by the phone, and every time he called Tom Winter's apartment Billy pictured Millstein as Ann Heath, the wedge of glass driven in a little deeper with every number he dialed. Millstein was pretty much a wreck.

  Billy thought about this.

  He said, "Does Tom Winter live alone?"

  Millstein regarded him with a dread so familiar it had become tiresome.

  "No," Millstein said faintly.

  "Lives with a woman?"

  "Yes."

  "Do you know where she might be?" The silence now was protracted.

  "You could call her and just leave a message," Billy suggested. "It wouldn't be hard."

  "She might come here with him," Millstein said, and Billy recognized this as a prelude to capitulation. Not that there was any question of it, really.

  "I don't care about her," Billy said.

  Millstein trembled as he picked up the phone.

  It should have gone easily after that and Billy wasn't sure why it didn't: some flicker of his attention, maybe, or of the armor's.

  He waited with Lawrence Millstein through the long evening after sunset, while the air through the window turned cooler and the apartment tilled with shadows. He listened to the sound of voices from the courtyard. Not far away, a man was shouting in Spanish. A baby was crying. A phonograph played La Traviata.

  Billy was distracted a moment by the lonesome sound of the music and by the stirring of the burlap curtains in the breeze. This was a kind of paradise, he thought, this old building where people lived without fighting over rice and corn, where nobody came and took children away and put them in golden armor. He wondered if Lawrence Millstein knew about living in paradise.

  Then there was a knock at the door.

  Billy turned, but Lawrence Millstein was already standing up, shouting.

  He shouted, "No! Oh, fuck, Joyce, go away!"

  Then Billy killed him. The door opened and a woman stood outlined in the light from the hallway, a huge brown-complexioned woman in a flower-print dress; she peered into the dark apartment through thick lenses. "Lawrence?" she said. "It's Nettie—from next door!"

  Billy killed Nettie with his wrist beam, but his hand shook and the beam cut not neatly but like a ragged knife, so that the blood went everywhere, and Nettie made a noise that sounded like "Woof!" and fell back against the faded wallpaper.

  Then the hallway was full of voices and distress and although Billy had soothed his armor with these killings he knew his real business would have to wait.

  Sixteen

  A woman in the crowd tugged Joyce away from the doorway, away from the bodies. Tom understood by the look on her face that Lawrence was inside and that Lawrence was dead.

  His first impulse was to comfort her. But the crush of tenants held him back, and the sirens were closer now . . . He edged down the stairwell and out to the sidewalk. He couldn't allow himself to be questioned even casually, with a wallet full of ID from the future and no one to vouch for him but Joyce.

  A crowd formed around him as the police cruisers pulled up. Tom stood discreetly back among them. He watched the cops erect a barricade; he watched two medics hustle from an ambulance into the building, then stroll out moments later to stand under a streetlight, smoking and laughing. The red rotary lights on the police cars made the street ominous and bleak. Tom stood a long time even after the crowd began to thin, waiting.

  There was a hush when the bodies came out: two amorphous shapes under blankets.

  Joyce emerged a little after that, a fat man in a brown suit escorting her toward an unmarked car. The fat man, Tom guessed, was a police detective. He must have asked her whether she knew either of the victims; yes, she would have said, that one . . . She would cooperate because she'd want to help find the killer.

  But Tom knew by the way she looked at him, and then away, that she was confused about his role in all this.

  A confusion he shared. Not that he might have committed the crime but that Millstein's death might be connected somehow with his time-traveling. Too many possibilities, Tom thought. A world that contained doorways between decades might contain almost anything else . . . Any kind of evil monster might have tracked him to Millstein's apartment.

  The police cruisers began to pull away from the curb; the crowd dispersed. A raft of cloud had moved across the sky from the northwest and the night was suddenly cooler. A wind whipped around the corner from Avenue B.

  Rain before morning, Tom thought.

  He thought about the walk back to the apartment, dangerous in these night streets.

  He felt a hand on his shoulder . . . and spun around, startled, expecting a cop o
r something worse, and was shocked again:

  "Hey, Tom," Doug Archer said. "We have to get out of here."

  Tom took a step back and drew a deep breath. Yes, anything was possible. Yes, this was Doug Archer, from Belltower in the state of Washington at the end of the 1980s, as incongruous in this dirty street as a Greek amphora or an Egyptian urn.

  Doug Archer, who seemed to have some idea what was going on. Now there's a neat trick, Tom thought.

  He managed, "How did you find me?"

  "Long story." Archer tilted his head as if he were listening to something. "Tom, we have to leave now. We can talk in the car. Please?"

  Tom took a last look at the building where Lawrence Millstein had died. An ambulance pulled away from the curb, headed uptown. Joyce was gone.

  He nodded.

  Archer drew an oversize Avis keytag out of his pocket.

  Tom felt but didn't understand the urgency as Archer hustled him into a boxy rental Ford and pulled away from the curb. The heat had broken and the rain came down in a sudden, gusty wash. Dawn was still hours away.

  They drove to an all-night deli in the Village and ducked inside.

  "A man was killed," Tom said. He was still trying to grasp the fact of Millstein's death. "Somebody I knew. Somebody I got drunk with."

  "Could have been you," Archer said. "You're lucky it wasn't." He added, "That's why we have to go home."

  Tom shook his head. He felt too weary to frame a reasonable response. He looked at Archer across the table: Doug Archer in a crewcut and a starched shirt and black leather shoes, his sneakers presumably abandoned in 1989. "How do you know all this?" Millstein dead and Doug Archer in the street outside: not a coincidence. "I mean, what are you doing here?"