A Bridge of Years

by Robert Charles Wilson

  "I owe you an explanation," Archer said. "I sure as hell hope we have time for it."

  An hour ticked by on the wall clock while Archer told him about Ben Collier, the time-traveling custodian.

  Much of what Archer told him was barely plausible. Tom believed it, however. He had been numbed to the miraculous a long time ago.

  At the end of it he cradled his head on his hands and struggled to put this information into some kind of order. "You came here to take me back?"

  "I can't 'take' you anywhere. But yeah, I think it would be the wise thing to do."

  "Because of this so-called marauder."

  "He knows about you and he obviously means to kill you."

  It was a hypothetical threat; Tom was impatient. "The tunnel was intact when I moved into the house on the Post Road. He could have walked in and killed me in my sleep, if he exists ... if he's still alive. I was in danger then, I'm in danger now—what's the difference? As long as he can't find me—

  "But he can find you! Jesus, Tom, he very nearly did find you—tonight."

  "You think he's the one who killed Lawrence?" Tom was dazed enough to be startled by the idea.

  "It would be fucking near suicidal," Archer said, "to doubt it."

  "It's a supposition—"

  "It's a fact, Tom. He was there. He was close by when I found you. Another five minutes, ten minutes, the street empties out, you turn down some alley, he would have had a clean shot at you."

  "You can't know that."

  "Well, but, that's the thing. I can."

  Tom looked blank, felt apprehensive.

  "Simple," Archer said. "This guy took out three temporal depots, each one stocked with machine bugs eager to defend it. He killed the cybernetics with an EM pulse weapon. His armor was hardened against the pulse and the machine bugs weren't. Hardly any cybernetics survived—unless they were also protected by his armor."

  "How could that be?"

  "They were in the air he was breathing. Little bitty ones the size of a virus—you know about those?"

  "I know about those," Tom allowed. "But if they're inside him, how come they can't stop him?"

  "They're like drones without a hive. They're lost and they don't have instructions. But they send out a little narrow-bandwidth data squirt, a sort of homing signal. I can pick up on that."

  "You can?"

  Archer turned to display a plug in one ear, something like a miniaturized hearing aid. "Ben had his cybernetics whip this up for me. I can tell when he's inside a radius of eight, nine hundred yards . . . reception permitting. You too, by the way."

  "They're inside me?"

  "Completely benign. Don't get your shorts in a knot, Tom. Maybe they saved your life. I drove around Manhattan for three days, Battery Park to Washington Heights, on the off chance I'd come within range." He cocked his head. "You sound kind of like a telephone. A dial tone. The marauder sounds more like a dentist's drill."

  "You're telling me he was there at Larry Millstein's apartment building."

  "That's why I was in such an all-fired hurry to leave."

  "He must have known I was coming."

  "I suppose so. But—"

  "No," Tom said. "Let me think about this."

  It was hard to think at all. If Archer was correct, he had been standing a few yards away from a man who wanted to murder him. Who had murdered Millstein. And if the marauder had been waiting for him, had known he was coming, then Millstein must have cooperated with the marauder.

  They had hurried to the apartment because Millstein phoned Joyce at Mario's.

  The marauder knew about Mario's. The marauder knew about Tom. Maybe the marauder knew his address. Certainly the marauder knew about Joyce.

  Who had left with a cop. Who might be headed home by now. Where the marauder might be waiting. Tom spilled his coffee, standing up.

  Archer tried to soothe him. "What they'll likely do is question her as long as she's willing to sit still. She's probably giving a statement to some sleepy cop as we speak. Safe and sound."

  Tom hoped so. But how long would she be willing to answer questions?

  She might have a few questions of her own.

  He couldn't erase his memory of the hallway outside Lawrence Millstein's door. All that blood.

  "Drive me home," he told Archer. "We'll meet her there."

  Archer raised his eyebrows at the word "home" but fumbled in his pocket for the keys.

  They drove into the narrow streets of the Lower East Side. The city looked abandoned, Tom thought, pavements and storefronts glazed with rain and steam rising out of the sewers. "Here," he said, and Archer pulled up at the curb outside the building.

  The rain was loud on the roof of this old car.

  Tom reached for the door handle; Archer put a hand on his wrist.

  Tom said, "Is he near here?"

  "I don't think so. But he could be around a corner, half a block away. Listen, what if she's not home?" "Then we wait for her." "How long?" Tom shrugged. "And if she is here?" "We take her with us." "What—back to Belltower?" "She'll be safe there . . . safer, anyhow." "Tom, I don't know if that's a real good idea." He opened the door. "I don't have a better one."

  He rang the buzzer.

  Nobody answered. Then he climbed the stairs—these old, dirty boards complaining under his feet. It must be four a.m., Tom calculated. The light from the incandescent bulb over the landing was stale and fierce.

  He opened the door and knew at once the apartment was empty.

  He switched on the lights. Joyce wasn't home and he guessed—prayed—she hadn't been. Nothing had been disturbed since this morning. Two coffee cups stood on the kitchen table, brown puddles inside. He walked into the bedroom. The bed was unmade. The rain beat against the window, a lonesome sound.

  Yesterday's paper lay open on the arm of the sofa, and Tom regarded it with a stab of longing: if he could step back even a day he could turn this around, keep Joyce safe, maybe even keep Lawrence Millstein alive—he would have a handle on what was happening.

  But the thought was ludicrous. Hadn't he proved that already? My God, here he was armed with nearly thirty years of foresight and he couldn't even help himself. It had all been a dream. A dream about something called "the past," a fiction; it didn't exist. Nothing was predictable, nothing played the same way twice, every certainty dissolved at the touch.

  History was a place where dramas were played out on a ghost stage, the way Joyce's old boyfriend had imagined D-day. But that's not true, Tom thought. This was history: an address, a locality, a place where people lived. History was this room. Not emblematic, merely specific; merely this vacant space, which he had come to love.

  He thought about Barbara, who had never much cared about the past but had longed for the future ... the uncreated future in which there were no certainties, only possibilities.

  Everywhere the same, Tom thought. 1962 or 1862 or 2062. Every acre of the world littered with bones and hope. He was indescribably tired.

  He stepped into the hallway and sealed the apartment, which had contained a fair portion of his happiness, but which was empty now. He would be better off waiting with Doug in the car.

  He was leaving the building when a taxi pulled up at the curb.

  He watched Joyce pay the driver and step out into the rain.

  Her clothes were instantly wet and her hair matted against her forehead. Her eyes were obscure behind rain-fogged lenses.

  It was raining when they met, Tom recalled, a couple of months ago in the park. She had looked different then. Less tired. Less frightened.

  She regarded him warily, then crossed the pavement.

  He touched her wet shoulders.

  She hesitated, then came into his arms.

  "He was dead, Tom," she said. "He was just lying there dead."

  "I know."

  "Oh, God. I need to sleep. I need to sleep a long, long time."

  She moved toward the lobby; he restrained her with his hands. "Joyc
e, you can't. It's not safe in there."

  She pulled away. He felt a sudden tension in her body, as if she were bracing herself for some new horror. "What are you talking about?"

  "The thing—the man who killed Lawrence—I believe he meant to kill me. He must know about this place by now."

  "I don't understand this." She balled her fists. "What are you saying, that you know who killed Lawrence?"

  "Joyce, it's too much to explain."

  "He wasn't stabbed, Tom. He wasn't shot. He was burned open. It's indescribable. There was a big hole burned into him. Do you know about that?"

  "We can talk when we've found a safe place."

  "There's no end to this, is there? Oh, shit, Tom. I've seen way too much ugliness tonight. Don't tell me this shit. You don't have to go inside if you don't want to. But I need to sleep."

  "Listen, listen to me. If you spend the night in that apartment you could come out like Lawrence. I don't want it to be that way but that's the way it is."

  She looked at him fiercely . . . then her anger seemed to subside, swallowed up in an immense exhaustion. She might have been crying. Tom couldn't tell, with the rain and all.

  She said, "I thought I loved you! I don't even know what you are!"

  "Let me take you somewhere."

  "What do you mean, somewhere?"

  "A long way from here. I've got a car waiting and I've got a friend inside. Please, Joyce."

  Archer put his head out the window of the Ford, shouting against the hiss of the rain—the words were unintelligible— then ducked back inside and revved the engine.

  Tom felt his heart bump in his chest. He pulled Joyce toward the car.

  She resisted and would have turned back, but a smoking gash opened in the concrete stoop a few inches from her hand. Tom looked at the blackened stone for a few dumb seconds before its significance registered. Some kind of weapon had done this: some kind of ray gun. This was ludicrous but quite terrifying. Archer leaned over the seat and jacked open the rear door of the car; Tom pushed Joyce toward it. She didn't push back this time but was too shocked to coordinate her legs. She tumbled inside with Tom behind her, a motion that seemed endless, and the rain came down on the metal roof with a sound like gunfire.

  Archer lunged his rental Ford into the street before Tom could close the door. He committed a 180-degree turn that left V-shaped skids on the wet asphalt, tires shrieking.

  As the car rotated Tom caught a glimpse of the man who had tried to kill him.

  If "man" was the word.

  Not human, Tom thought.

  Or, if human, then buried under some apparatus, a snoutlike headpiece, an old cloth coat humped across his back, oily in the rain and the glare of a streetlight.

  His eyes were aimed at Tom through the rear window of the car. Nothing showed of his face except a wide, giddy smile . . . gone a moment later as Archer fishtailed the Ford around a corner.

  They abandoned the car on a desolate street near Tompkins Square.

  The sky seemed faintly brighter. The rain had slackened a little but the gutters were running and dark water dripped from the torn awning over the lobby of the tenement building which contained the tunnel.

  Tom touched his shoulder, where a ferocious pain had just begun: a reflection or glancing shot from the marauder's weapon had blistered a wide patch of skin there.

  The three of them stood a moment in the empty lobby.

  Tom said, "The last time we came this way there was something in the tunnel—"

  "A time ghost," Archer said. "They're not real dangerous. So I'm told."

  Tom doubted this but let it pass. "Doug, what if he comes after us? There's nothing stopping him, is there?" He kept an arm around Joyce, who was dazed and passive against his shoulder.

  "He might," Archer admitted. "But we know what to expect now. He can't take us by surprise. The house is a fortress; be prepared—you might not recognize it."

  "This isn't over," Tom interpreted.

  "No," Archer said. "It isn't over."

  "Then we ought to hurry."

  Tom led the way into the basement, over the heaped rubble and down an empty space into the future.

  Seventeen

  He slept for twelve hours in a bed he had never really thought of as his own and woke to find a strange woman gazing down at him.

  At least, Tom thought, an unfamiliar woman—he had grown a little stingy with the word "strange."

  She occupied a chair next to the bed, a paperback Silhouette romance in her hands; she put the book splayed open on the knee of her jeans. "You're awake," she said.

  Barely. "Do I know you?"

  "No—not yet. I'm your neighbor. Catherine Simmons. I live in the big house up by the highway."

  He collected his thoughts. "Mrs. Simmons, the elderly woman—you're what, her granddaughter?"

  "Right! You knew Gram Peggy?"

  "Waved to her once or twice. Delivered her paper when I was twelve years old."

  "She died in June ... I came down to take care of business."

  "Oh. I'm sorry."

  He took a longer look around the room. Same room, same house, not much changed, at least this corner of it. He didn't remember arriving here. The shoulder wound had gone from painful to incapacitating and he had crossed the last fifty yards of the tunnel with his eyes squeezed shut and Doug Archer propping him up.

  The shoulder felt better now ... He didn't check for blisters but the pain was gone.

  He focused his attention on Catherine Simmons. "I guess this isn't the business you meant to take care of."

  "Doug and I sort of stumbled into it."

  "I guess we all did." He sat up. "Is Joyce around?"

  "I think she's watching TV. But you'll need to talk to Ben, I think."

  He supposed he would. "The TV's working?"

  "Oh, Ben was very apologetic about that. He says the cybernetics managed to scare you without warning you off. They were dealing with a situation way outside their expertise; they went about it all wrong. He made them fix the TV for you."

  "That's very thoughtful of Ben."

  "You'll like him. He's a nice guy." She hesitated. "You slept a long time . . . Are you sure you're all right?" "My shoulder—but that's better now." "You don't seem too pleased to be back." "Friend of mine died," Tom said.

  Catherine Simmons nodded. "I know how that is. Gram Peggy was pretty important in my life. It leaves a vacuum, doesn't it? Let me know if there's something I can do."

  "You can bring me my clothes," Tom said.

  He reminded himself that he had climbed back out of the well of time and that this was the summer of 1989—the last hot summer of a hot decade, hovering on the brink of a future he couldn't predict.

  The house was a fortress, Archer had told him, and some of that showed in the living room: the furniture had been pushed back against the walls and the walls themselves were covered with a mass of gemlike machine bugs. It looked like a suburban outpost of Aladdin's Cave.

  Tom followed Catherine to the kitchen, where the machine bugs—a smaller mass of them—were dismantling the stove.

  A man, evidently human, sat at the kitchen table. He stood up clumsily when Tom entered the room. "This is Ben," Catherine said.

  Ben the time traveler. Ben who had risen, like Lazarus, from the grave. Ben the custodian of this malfunctioning hole in the world.

  He stood with one hand propped against a cane. His left leg was truncated, the denim tied shut between his knee and the place where his ankle should have been. He was pale and his hair was a faint, fine stubble over his scalp.

  He offered his hand. Tom shook it.

  "You're the time traveler," he said.

  Ben Collier smiled. "Let's sit down, shall we? This leg is still awkward. Tom, would you like a beer? There's one in the refrigerator."

  Tom wasn't thirsty. "You lived here ten years ago."

  "That's right. Doug must have explained all that?"

  "You were hurt and you were
in that shed out in the woods. I think I owe you an apology. If I hadn't gone haring off down the tunnel—"

  "Nothing you've done or haven't done is anybody's fault. If everything had been working correctly the house would never have been for sale. You walked into a major debacle; you didn't create it."

  "Doug said you were—he used the word 'dead.' Buried out there for some years."

  "Doug is more or less correct."

  "It's hard to accept that."

  "Is it? You seem to be doing all right."

  "Well . . . I've swallowed a fair number of miracles since May; I suppose one more won't choke me."

  He gave Ben a closer look. A ray of sunlight from the big back window had fallen across the time traveler and for a moment Tom imagined he saw the outline of the skull under the skin. An optical illusion. He hoped. "Maybe I'll have that beer after all. You want one?"

  "No, thank you," Ben said.

  Tom took a beer from the refrigerator and twisted off the cap. Welcome to the future: throw away that clumsy old bottle opener.

  A stove grill clanked against the floor behind him and a brigade of machine bugs began hauling it toward the basement stairs.

  Life, Tom thought, is very strange.

  "They're using the metal," Ben explained. "Making more of themselves. It's hard on the appliances, but we're in fairly desperate straits at the moment."

  "They can do that? Duplicate themselves?"

  "With enough raw material, certainly."

  "They're from the future," Tom said.

  "Somewhat in advance of my own time, as a matter of fact. I found them a little repellent when I was introduced to the concept. But they're extremely useful and they're easy to conceal."

  "They can repair the tunnel?"

  "They're doing precisely that—among many other things."

  "But you said we were in 'dire straits.' So nothing is repaired yet and this so-called marauder—"

  "Might choose to follow you here. That's what we're on guard against, yes."