A Bridge of Years

by Robert Charles Wilson

  "But he hasn't tried it yet. Maybe he won't."

  "Maybe. I hope not. We do have to take precautions."

  Tom nodded; this was sensible. "How well protected are we?"

  Ben seemed to ponder the question. "There's no doubt we can stop him. What troubles me is that it might take too long."

  "I don't understand."

  "From what I can reconstruct, the man is an armored conscript soldier, a renegade from the territorial wars at the end of the next century. In a sense, he isn't really our enemy— the enemy is his armor."

  "I saw him in New York," Tom said. "He didn't look especially well armored."

  "It's a kind of cybernetic armor, Tom. Thin, flexible, very sophisticated, very effective. It protects him from most conventional weapons and interacts with his body to improve his reflexes and focus his aggression. When he's wearing the armor, killing is an almost sexual imperative. He wants it and he can't help wanting it."

  "Ugly."

  "Much worse than ugly. But in a way, his strength is his weakness. Without the armor he's more or less helpless; he might not even be inclined to do us harm. The fact that he took advantage of the tunnel to flee the war suggests his loyalty isn't as automatic as his surgeons might have liked. If we can attack the armor we can neutralize the threat."

  "Good," Tom said. He pulled at the beer. "Can we?"

  "Yes, we can, in a couple of ways. Primarily, we've been building specialized cybernetics—tiny ones, the size of a virus. They can infiltrate his bloodstream and attack the armor . . . dismantle and disconnect it from the inside."

  "Why didn't they do that in the first place?"

  "These aren't the units he was exposed to. They've been built expressly for the purpose. He had the advantage of surprise; he doesn't have that anymore."

  "So if he shows up here," Tom interpreted, "if he breathes the air—"

  "The devices go to work instantly. But he won't simply fall over and die. He'll be functional, or partly functional, for some time."

  "How much time?"

  "Unfortunately, it's impossible to calculate. Ten minutes? Half an hour? Long enough to do a great deal of damage."

  Tom thought about it. "So we should leave the machine bugs and clear out of here. If he shows up, they can deal with him."

  "Tom, you're welcome to do so if you like. I can't; I have an obligation to protect the premises and direct the repair work. Also, we have weapons that might slow down the marauder while the cybernetics work on him. It's important to keep him confined to the property. The machines inside him aren't entirely autonomous. They need direction from outside, and if he moves beyond a certain radius they'll lose the ability to communicate, might not be able to finish disarming him. He could cause a great deal of havoc if he wandered down to the highway."

  No doubt that was true. "Doug and Catherine—"

  "Have volunteered to help. They're armed and they know what to do if an alarm sounds."

  He asked the central question: "What about Joyce?"

  "Joyce is making a difficult adjustment. She's endured a great deal. But she volunteered her help as soon as she understood the situation."

  "Might as well make it unanimous," Tom said.

  He found Joyce in the back yard, in a lawn chair, reading the Seattle paper in the shade of the tall pines.

  It was a cool day for August; there was a nice breeze bearing in from the west. The air carried the smell of pine sap, of the distant ocean, a faint and bitter echo of the pulp mill. Tom stood a moment, savoring all this, not wanting to disturb her.

  He wondered what the headlines were. This wasn't precisely the present, not exactly the future; he had come here by a twisted path, a road too complex to make linear sense. Maybe some new country had been invaded, some new oil tanker breached.

  She looked up from the editorial page and saw him watching her. He came the rest of the way across the lawn.

  She was an anachronism in her harlequin glasses and straight hair, beautiful in the shade of these tall trees.

  Before he could frame a sentence she said, "I'm sorry about the way I behaved. I was tired and I was sick about Lawrence and I didn't know how you were involved. Ben explained all that. And thank you for bringing me here."

  "Not as far out of danger as I thought it would be."

  "Far enough. I'm not worried. How's your shoulder?"

  "Pretty much okay. Enjoying the news?"

  "Convincing myself it's real. I watched a little TV, too. That satellite news station, what's it called? CNN." She folded the paper and stood up. "Tom, can we walk somewhere? The woods are pretty—Doug said there were trails."

  "Is it a good idea to leave the house?"

  "Ben said it would be all right."

  "I know a place," Tom said.

  He took her up the path Doug Archer had shown him some months ago, past the overgrown woodshed—its door standing open and a cloud of gnats hanging inside—up this hillside to the open, rocky space where the land sloped away to the sea.

  The sea drew a line of horizon out beyond Belltower and the plume of the mill. In the stillness of the afternoon Tom heard the chatter of starlings as they wheeled overhead, the rattle of a truck out on the highway.

  Joyce sat hugging her knees on a promontory of rock. "It's pretty up here."

  He nodded. "Long way from the news." Long way from 1962. Long way from New York City. "How does the future strike you?"

  The question wasn't as casual as it sounded. She answered slowly, thoughtfully. "Not as gee-whiz as I expected. Uglier than I thought it would be. Poorer. Meaner. More shortsighted, more selfish, more desperate."

  Tom nodded.

  She frowned into the sunlight. "More the same than I thought it would be."

  "That's about it," Tom said. "But not as bad as it looks." "No?"

  She shook her head vigorously. "I talked to Ben about this. Things are changing. He says there's amazing things happening in Europe. The next couple of decades are going to be fairly wild."

  Tom doubted it. He had watched Tiananmen Square on television that spring. Big tanks. Fragile people.

  "Everything is changing," Joyce insisted. "Politics, the environment—the weather. He says we happen to be living on the only continent where complacency is still possible, and only for a while longer. That's our misfortune."

  "I suppose it is. What did he tell you, that the future is some kind of paradise?"

  "No, no. The problems are huge, scary." She looked up, brushed her hair out of her eyes. "The man who killed Lawrence, he's the future too. All the horrible things. Conscription and famine and stupid little wars."

  "That's what we have to look forward to?"

  "Maybe. Not necessarily. Ben comes from a time that looks back on all that as a kind of insanity. But the point is, Tom, it's the future—it hasn't happened yet and maybe it doesn't have to, at least not that way."

  "Not logical, Joyce. The marauder came from somewhere. We can't wish him out of existence."

  "He's a fact," Joyce conceded. "But Ben says anyone who travels into the past risks losing the place he left. Ben himself. If things happen differently he might be orphaned— might go home and find out it's not there anymore, at least not the way he remembers it. It's not likely, but it's possible."

  "So the future is unknowable."

  "I think the future is something like a big building in the fog—you know it's there, and you can grope your way toward it, but you can't be sure about it until it's close enough to touch."

  "Leaves us kind of in the dark," Tom observed.

  "The place you stand is always the present and that's all you ever really have—1 don't think that's a bad thing. Ben says the only way you can own the past is by respecting it— by not turning it into something quaint or laughable or pastel or bittersweet. It's a real place where real people live. And the future is real because we're building it out of real hours and real days."

  No world out of the world, Tom thought.

  No
Eden, no Utopia, only what you can touch and the touching of it.

  He took her hand. She gazed across the pine tops and the distant town site toward the sea. "I can't stay here," she said. "I have to go back."

  "I don't know if I can go with you."

  "I don't know if I want you to."

  She stood up and was beautiful, Tom thought, with the afternoon sun on her hair.

  "Hey," she said. "Don't look at me like that. It's just me. Just some fucked-up chick from Minneapolis. Nothing special."

  He shook his head, was mute.

  "I was a ghost for you," she said. "Ghost of some idea about what life used to be like or could be like or what you wanted from it. But I'm not that. But that's okay. Maybe you were a ghost too. Ghost of whatever I thought I'd find in the city. Somebody mysterious, wise, a little wild. Well, the circumstances are very strange. But here we are, Joyce and Tom, a couple of pretty ordinary people."

  "Not all that damn ordinary."

  "We hardly know each other."

  "Could change that."

  "I don't know," Joyce said. "I'm not so sure."

  These last few hours—before the marauder attacked, or the time machine was repaired, whichever apocalypse happened first—were a kind of Indian summer.

  Archer drove to the Burger King out along the highway and brought home dinner. They ate on the back lawn in the long sunlight; the alarms would sound, Ben said, if anything happened inside.

  Ben, who didn't eat prepared food, was an avuncular presence at the edge of the feast, periodically hobbling over to the redwood fence where he had marked a long rectangular patch with string. It was too late in the year to start a garden, he said, but this was where one ought to be. Tom wondered, but didn't ask, whether he planned to start one in the coming year or expected someone else to.

  After dark, Archer took Tom down into the basement—what remained of the basement. The false wall in front of the tunnel had been removed entirely, and so had one of the foundation walls—revealing a layer of what must be machinery, pale white and blue crystals swarming with cybernetics. This was the functional heart of the time terminal and the machine insects, he assumed, were repairing it. Periodically, bright sparks erupted from the work.

  "We're running a race," Archer said. "The longer that sonofabitch in Manhattan sits on his hands, the closer we come to shutting him out entirely."

  "How long until all this is finished?"

  "Soon, Ben says. Maybe by this time tomorrow. Here—" He opened a drawer under the workbench: Tom's woodworking bench, the one he'd moved from Seattle. "Ben said you should have one of these."

  Archer handed him a ray gun.

  No doubt about it, Tom thought, this was a ray gun. It weighed about a pound. It was made of red and black polystyrene plastic and the words space soldier were stenciled on the side.

  He looked at the gun, looked at Archer.

  "We had to make 'em out of something," Archer said. "I picked up a bunch of these at the K-mart at Pinetree Mall. The machine bugs worked them over."

  The trigger was made of what looked like stainless steel, and the business end featured a glassy protrusion too finely machined to match the rest of the toy. "You're telling me this is functional?"

  "It projects a focused pulse that might or might not slow down the gentleman's armor a little bit. Use it but don't depend on it. We all have one."

  "Jesus Christ, Doug, space soldier?"

  Archer grinned. "Looks kind of cool, don't you think?"

  Back upstairs, the sun was setting over the ocean and Catherine had turned on the living room lights.

  Tom helped Archer collect the dinner plates from the back yard. The sky was a deep evening blue; the stars and the crickets had come out.

  Archer hesitated a moment in the cooling air.

  "Everything's going to be different when this is over," he said. "Suddenly we're out of the picture. Bystanders. But we did something rare, didn't we, Tom? Took a long stroll into the past. Imagine that. I stood on those streets, nineteen sixty-two, Jesus, I was a toddler down at Pine Balm Pre-School! Hey, Tom, you know what we did? We walked straight up to Father Time and we kicked that miserly SOB right in the family jewels."

  Tom opened the screen door and stepped back into the warmth of the kitchen. "Let's hope he doesn't return the favor."

  Archer and Catherine shared a mattress in the spare bedroom. Ben spent the night in the basement—slept there, if he slept at all.

  Joyce had spent two nights on the living room sofa. She came into Tom's bed tonight with what he took to be a mixture of gratitude and doubt.

  When he rolled to face her she didn't turn away.

  It was a warm night in the summer of 1989, skies clear over most of the continent, oceans calm, the world on some brink, Tom thought, not yet explicit, a trembling of possibilities both dire and bright. Her skin was soft under his touch and she took his kiss with an eagerness that might have been greeting or farewell.

  Midnight passed in the darkness, an hour and another.

  They were asleep when the alarms went off.

  Eighteen

  Amos Shank, eighty-one years old, who had come from Pittsburgh to publish his poetry and who had lived for fifteen years amid the stained plaster and peeling wallpaper of this shabby apartment, rose from his bed in the deep of the night, still wrapped in dreams of Zeus and Napoleon, for the purpose of relieving his bladder.

  He walked to the bathroom, past his desk, past reams of bond paper, sharpened pencils, leatherbound books, in the stark light of two sixty-watt floor lamps which he kept perpetually lit. The rattle of water in the porcelain bowl sounded hollow and sinister: the clarion call of mortality. Sighing, Amos hitched up his boxer shorts and headed back to his bed, which folded out of the sofa, convolution of night inside day. He paused at the window.

  Once he had seen Death in the street outside. A sudden dread possessed him that if he looked he would see that apparition again. He had, in fact, kept vigil for several consecutive nights—ruining his sleep to no good effect. He was torn between temptations: oblivion, vision.

  He slatted the blinds open and peered into the street.

  Empty street.

  Amos Shank pulled his desk chair to the window and nestled his bony rear end into it.

  The older he got the more his bones seemed to protrude from his body. Everything uncomfortable. Nowhere to rest. He whistled out a long breath of midnight air and put his head on the windowsill, pillowed on his hands.

  Without meaning to, he slept again . . .

  And woke, aching and stiff. He moaned and peered into the street where—perhaps—the sound of footsteps had roused him: because here he was again, Death.

  No mistaking him.

  Amos felt his heart speed up.

  Death walked down the empty sidewalk in a dirty gray overcoat; paused and smiled up at Amos.

  Smiled through his leathery snout and the hood of his shirt.

  Then Death did a remarkable thing: he began to undress.

  He shrugged off the overcoat and dropped it in the gutter like a shed skin. Pulled the NYU sweatshirt over his head and threw it away. Stepped out of the pants.

  Death was quite golden underneath.

  Death shone very brightly under the streetlights.

  "I know you!" Amos Shank said. He was only dimly aware that he had said it aloud. "I know you—/"

  He had seen the picture. Which old book?

  Wars of Antiquity. The Court of the Sun King. Campaigns of Napoleon. Some ancient soldier in bright armor and cheap lithography.

  "Agamemnon," Amos Shank breathed.

  Agamemnon, Death, the soldier, masked and armored, entered the building, still smiling.

  Ashamed, Amos Shank double-checked the lock on the door, extinguished the lights for the first time in a month, and hid under the blankets of his bed.

  Nineteen

  Billy entered the tunnel with his armor fully powered and most of his fears behind him.

/>   He had lived too long with fear. He'd been running from things he couldn't escape. This visitation from the future was punishment, Billy thought, for a life lived in exile.

  After he killed Lawrence Millstein, after a failed attempt on his legitimate prey, Billy had retired for two days to his apartment; had powered down, hidden his armor, retreated to the shadows. Two days had been enough. He didn't feel safe. There was no security anymore, no anonymity . . . and the Need was deep and intense.

  So he took the armor out of its box and wore it with all its armaments and accessories here, to the source of his trouble, this unpatrolled border with the future.

  Where his prey had retreated—he knew that by the tangle of footprints amid the rubble.

  Here we begin some reckoning, Billy thought. The beginning or the end of something.

  He stepped through fallen masonry into the bright and sourceless light of the time machine.

  Fear had kept him out of this tunnel for years: fear of what he'd seen here.

  The memory was vivid of that apparition, huge and luminous. It had moved slowly but Billy felt its capacity for speed; had seemed immaterial but Billy felt its power. He had escaped it by a hairbreadth and was left with the impression that it had allowed him to escape; that he had been evaluated and passed over by something as potent and irresistible as time itself.

  Now—under the bravado of his armor, the courage pumped out by the artificial gland in the elytra—that fear remained fresh and intact.

  Billy pressed on regardless. The corridor was empty. Here in the depth of it, both exits out of sight, he felt suspended in a pure geometry, a curvature without meaningful dimension.

  Beyond these walls, Billy thought, years were tumbling like leaves in a windstorm. Age devoured youth, spines curved, eyes dimmed, coffins leapt into the earth. Wars flashed past, as brief and violent as thunderstorms. Here, Billy was sheltered from all that.

  Wasn't that all he had ever really wanted?

  Shelter. A way home.

  But these were vagrant, treasonous thoughts. Billy suppressed them and hurried ahead.