A Bridge of Years

by Robert Charles Wilson

  The cybernetics had entered the tunnel as a fine dust of polymers and metal and long, fragile molecules. They began to infiltrate Billy almost at once.

  Billy was unaware of it. Billy simply breathed. The nanomechanisms, small as viruses, were absorbed into his bloodstream through the moist fabric of his lungs. As their numbers increased to critical levels, they commenced their work.

  To the cybernetics Billy was a vast and intricate territory, a continent. They were isolated at first, a few pioneers colonizing this perilous hinterland along rivers of blood. They read the chemical language of Billy's hormones and responded with faint chemical messages of their own. They crossed the difficult barrier between blood and brain. They clustered, increasingly numerous, at the interface of flesh and armor.

  Billy inhaled a thousand machines with every breath.

  The exit loomed ahead of him now, an open doorway into the year 1989.

  Billy hurried toward it. He had already begun to sense that something was wrong.

  Twenty

  Tom was out of bed as soon as the alarm registered. Joyce reached the door ahead of him.

  The machine bugs had assembled these alarms from a trio of hardware-store smoke detectors. The noise was shrill, penetrating. Tom and Joyce had slept in their clothes in anticipation of this; but the actual event, like a fire or an air raid, seemed unanticipated and utterly unreal. Tom stopped to fumble for his watch, working to recall what Ben had told him: If the alarm sounds, take your weapon and go to the perimeter of the property, but mainly he followed Joyce, who was waving impatiently from the door.

  They hurried through the dark of the living room, through the kitchen and out into a blaze of light: fifteen sodium-vapor security lights installed in the back yard, also courtesy of Home Hardware.

  Beyond the lights, in the high brush and damp ferns at the verge of the forest, he crouched with Joyce—and Doug and Catherine, who had beaten them out of the house.

  The alarms ceased abruptly. Cricket calls revived in the dark of the woods. Tom felt the racing of his own pulse.

  The house was starkly bright among pine silhouettes and a scatter of stars. A night breeze moved in the treetops. Tom flexed his toes among the loamy, damp pine needles: his feet were bare.

  He looked around. "Where's Ben?"

  "Inside," Archer said. "Listen, we should spread out a little bit . . . cover more territory."

  Archer playing space soldier. But it wasn't a game. "This is it, isn't it?"

  Archer flashed him a nervous grin. "The main event." Tom turned to the house in time to see the windows explode.

  Glass showered over the lawn, a glittering arc in the glare of the lights.

  He took a step back into the shelter of the woods. He felt Joyce do the same.

  But there was no real retreating.

  Here was the axis of events, the absolute present, Tom thought, and nothing to do but embrace it.

  Twenty-One

  Ben stood calmly in the concussion of the grenade. It was an EM pulse grenade, less useful to the marauder than it had been; the cybernetics were hardened against it. The blast traveled up the stairway from the basement and exploded the windows behind him. Ben felt the concussion as a rush of warm air and a pressure in his ears. He stood with his back to the door, braced on his one good leg, watching the stairs.

  He didn't doubt that the marauder could kill him. The marauder had killed him once and was quite capable of doing so again—perhaps irreparably. But he wasn't afraid of death. He had experienced, at least, its peripheries: a cold place, lonesome, deep, but not especially frightening. He was afraid of leaving his life behind . . . but even that fear was less profound than he'd expected.

  He'd left behind a great many things already. He had left his life in the future. He had buried the woman he had lived with for thirty years, long before he dreamed the existence of fractal, knitted time. He wasn't a stranger to loss or abandonment.

  He had been recruited at the end of a life he'd come to terms with: maybe that was a requirement. The time travelers had seemed to know that about him. Ben recalled their cool, unwavering eyes. They appeared in human form as a courtesy to their custodians; but Ben had sensed the strangeness under the disguise. Our descendants, he had thought, yes, our children, in a very real sense . . . but removed from us across such an inconceivable ocean of years.

  He listened for the sound of footsteps up the stairs. He hoped Catherine Simmons and the others had deployed outside the house . . . fervently hoped they wouldn't be needed. He had volunteered to defend this outpost; they had not, except informally and in a condition of awe.

  But the nanomechanisms were already doing their work, deep in the body of the marauder: Ben felt them doing it.

  Felt them as the marauder came up the carpeted stairs. Ben watched him come. The marauder moved slowly. His eyepiece tracked Ben with oiled precision.

  He was an amazing sight. Ben had studied the civil wars of the twenty-first century, had seen this man before, knew what to expect; he was impressed in spite of all that. The hybridization of man and mechanism was mankind's future, but here was a sterile mutation: a mutual parasitism imposed from without. The armor was not an enhancement but a cruel prosthetic. Infantry doctors had rendered this man incapable of unassisted pleasure, made his daily fife a gray counterfeit, linked every appetite to combat.

  The marauder, not tall but quite golden, came to the top of the stairs with small swift movements. Then he did a remarkable thing:

  He stumbled.

  Dropped to one knee, looked up.

  Ben felt the nanomechanisms laboring inside this man. Vital connections severed, relays heating, redundancies overwhelmed . . . "Tell me your name," Ben said gently.

  "Billy Gargullo," the marauder said, and fired a beam weapon from his wrist.

  But the marauder was slow and Ben, augmented, anticipated the move and ducked away.

  He fired his own weapon. The focused pulse, invisible, seemed to pull Billy Gargullo forward and down; his armor clenched around him like a fist. He toppled, convulsed once . . . then used his momentum as the armor relaxed to swing his arm forward.

  This was a gesture Ben had not anticipated. He dodged the beam weapon but not quickly enough; it cut a charred canyon across his abdomen.

  Ben dropped and rolled to extinguish his burning clothing, then discovered he couldn't sit up. He had been cut nearly in half.

  Precious moments ticked away. Ben felt his awareness ebb. A wave of cybernetics poured out from the walls, covered the wound, sealed it; severed arteries closed from within. For a brief and unsustainable moment his blood pressure rose to something like normal; his vision cleared.

  Ben pushed himself up on his elbows and fumbled for his weapon.

  He found it, raised it . . .

  But Billy had left the room.

  Twenty-two

  By the time he reached the foot of the basement stairs Billy assumed he was dying.

  He knew his armor was crumbling away, somehow, inside him. His eyepiece displayed bright red numerals and emergency diagnostics. He felt cut loose from himself, afloat, hovering over his own body like a bird.

  This was very sudden, very strange, unmistakably hostile. He didn't let it slow him down.

  He came up the stairs still operational but awash in strange emotions: vivid lightnings of panic; blue threads of guilt. Billy was coherent enough to understand that he'd walked into a trap; that his prey, the time traveler, someone, had interfered with his armor. There was a perpetual high-pitched keening in his ears and the diagnostics in his eyepiece read him a catalogue of major and minor malfunctions. So far, the gland in the elytra was still pumping—though fitfully—and his weapons were functional. But he was vulnerable and he was slow and before long he might be altogether helpless.

  None of this affected Billy's resolve. Sensing his panic, Billy's armor flushed potent new molecules into his blood. The killing urge, which had seemed so powerful in the past, blossomed into
something new and even more intense: an agony of necessity.

  At the top of the stairs he faced a man he had killed once before, a time traveler. Billy didn't question this resurrection, merely resolved to kill the man again, to kill him as often as necessary. Some momentary fluctuation caused him to topple forward; he fell, looked up, and the time traveler asked him his name. Billy answered without thinking, startled by the sound of his own voice.

  Then he raised his wrist weapon. But the chaos inside him had made him slow and the time traveler was able to aim and fire his own weapon, a beam device that seemed to lock Billy's armor into a momentary rictus, so that Billy toppled forward in a parody of movement, like a statue tumbling off a pedestal.

  He didn't waste time regretting his vulnerability; only waited for it to pass. As soon as his arm was mobile he brought it up and forward with all the precision his failing neural augmentation was able to calculate and burned open the time traveler's belly.

  The result was impressive. The walls seemed to crumble. Machine bugs rivered across the carpet. A stab of primitive revulsion made Billy leap to his feet and back away. He detonated another pulse grenade—his last—and it slowed the bugs but didn't stop them.

  Detonated aboveground, the pulse did have a profound effect on the local electrical grid. The houselights flickered and dimmed, brightened and flickered again. Down the length of the Post Road, three different families would wake to find their television sets fused and useless. In a dozen homes in the east end of Belltower groggy individuals stumbled but of bed to pick up ringing telephones, nothing on the other end but an ominous basso hum.

  The cybernetics churned around the body of the fallen time traveler—healing him or devouring him. Billy didn't know which, didn't care.

  Dying, Billy hurried for the door.

  Twenty-three

  Tom had circled to the front of the house when the last intact window—north wall, master bedroom—was blown out by a second concussion.

  The floodlights dimmed, brightened, dimmed again. So did the streetlights down along the Post Road.

  He cut through the front yard and across the open width of the road to the gully on the far side. Ben was supposed to be covering the front door of the house; but it had occurred to Tom that Ben was not an impenetrable barrier and that the front door was handy to the basement stairs. He left Doug out back with Joyce and Catherine and prayed the three of them would be safe there.

  The shock of being roused out of a deep sleep had nearly worn off. He was as awake now as he had ever been, clearheaded and frightened and acutely aware of his own peculiar position: barefoot and carrying a space soldier ray gun from K-mart, modified. Every window in his house had been blown out and he was tempted to reconsider the logic of this adventure. What kept him moving was Joyce—her vulnerability overriding his own—and the single glimpse he had caught of the marauder in an empty street in Manhattan. Those eyes had contained too many deaths, including Lawrence Millstein's. Eyes not vengeful or even passionate, Tom thought; the look had been passive, the distracted stare of a bus passenger on a long ride through familiar territory. Tom had not especially liked Lawrence Millstein, but it hurt to think that Millstein's last sight had been that leathery muzzle, those thousand-mile eyes.

  He's already dying, Tom thought. Dying or being dismantled from inside. All we have to do is slow him down.

  He was thinking this when the front door opened, spilling light down the gravel driveway and across the road.

  Tom ducked into the roadside ditch opposite his front yard.

  For the space of three breaths he pressed his face into the wet grass and dewy spiderwebs, no thought possible beyond the panicky need not to be seen, to make himself small among the Queen Anne's lace and goldenrod, small in the starlight, let this apparition pass him by.

  Then he took a fourth and deeper breath and raised his head.

  The marauder walked out of the house with the queasy deliberation of a drunk. One step, two step, three step. Then he tottered and fell.

  Tom rose into a crouch with the zap gun ready. The marauder was obviously disabled but probably still dangerous. But Ben: where was Ben? A thread of blue smoke rose from the open doorway past the moth-cluttered light . . . Something bad had happened in there.

  He chose a Douglas fir growing in the wild lot south of his property as good cover and began a spring back across the Post Road, still crouched, a posture he'd seen on TV: supposed to make him a smaller target though that didn't seem likely under the circumstances. He had just cleared the gravel margin of the road and felt blacktop under the soles of his feet when the marauder began to move and Tom did a stupid thing in response: turned to watch. He didn't stop running but he slowed down. Couldn't help it. This was some kind of spectacle, this golden man lifting himself to one knee, like a Byzantine icon come creaking to life, like some upscale version of the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, now standing up, bent back straightening, head swiveling in sudden oiled motion. Tom didn't begin to feel appropriately terrified until those eyes lit on him.

  Even in the starlight, the dim glow of a streetlight down the Post Road, dear God, he thought, those eyes! Maybe not even the eyes, Tom thought, just some reflection or refraction in the goggles, the illusion of eyes, but he felt pinned by them, trapped here on the tarmac.

  The marauder raised his hand, a casual gesture.

  Tom remembered his own weapon. He raised it, felt himself raising it, and it was like hoisting an anchor from the bottom of the sea, cranking it up through the weight of the water link by agonizing link. Why was everything so slow? He realized he'd never fired this device, not even once, as an experiment; that he had thumbed back the little switch marked Safety without being absolutely sure it was part of the weapon and not part of the toy. There were questions he had neglected to ask: questions about range, for instance; was the weapon effective from this distance?

  But there was only time to commit an approximation of aim and pull the trigger. Showdown on the Post Road. Some part of him insisted that the whole thing was too ludicrous to take seriously. Only dreams were conducted like this.

  He was hit before he could finish. His shot went wide.

  The marauder's shot had gone a little wide, too, a stitch of flame from Tom's hip to his armpit and across the biceps of his left arm. There was no impact, only a sudden numbness and the alarming realization that his clothes were on fire. He fell down without meaning to. Rolled like a dog in the dirt at the verge of the Post Road until the flames were extinguished, though this provoked the first stab of a deep, paralyzing pain.

  What kind of burns? First degree? Third degree? He looked down at himself. Under the ashen shirt was a peninsula of charred and blackened skin. He closed his eyes and decided he wouldn't look at the wound again because the sight of that blistered flesh was too scary, not useful.

  He felt a little drunk now, a little dizzy.

  He hauled himself up with his good arm and looked for the marauder. The marauder had fallen down, too. Tom's shot had missed but the encounter had slowed him. That's why I'm here, Tom recalled. Slow him down so the machine bugs can work inside him. Maybe he was already dead.

  It was a faint hope, extinguished at once.

  The marauder stood up.

  There was some kind of heroism in the act, Tom thought. It was a faltering, tormented motion that reeked of malfunction, of stripped gears, overheated engines, buckled metal. The marauder stood up and moved his head as if the goggles had clouded, a querulous and birdlike gesture. Then he stripped off the headpiece and looked at Tom.

  Tom couldn't discern much of his features in the dim light, but it seemed to him this was even worse than the mask had been, the revelation of a human face underneath. With what expression on it? Something like despair, Tom thought. He felt a dizzy urge to call time-out. I'm hurt. You're hurt. Let's quit.

  But the marauder took aim, a little raggedly, with his deadly right hand.

  Oh shit, Tom thought. What happened to m
y gun? He'd left it in the road.

  Inadequate lump of polystyrene and impossibility. It hadn't done him much good anyhow. It was yards away. The yards might have been miles.

  The marauder aimed but held his fire, advancing from Tom's gravel driveway in a crippled but steady lope. If I move, Tom thought, he'll kill me. If I go for the gun or roll into the gully, he'll kill me. And if I stay here—he'll kill me.

  He had pretty much decided to go for the gun anyhow, count on surprise and the work of the cybernetics to give him a chance against that deadly right hand—when the miraculous event occurred.

  The miracle was heralded by a light.

  The light made strange, wide shadows on the pines and the shadows swayed like something huge and alive. Then he heard the sound of the engine, the sound of a car coming down the Post Road from the highway, high beams probing the slow curve south of the Simmons house.

  The car was traveling fast.

  Tom turned toward it as the marauder did. The lights were blinding. Tom took the opportunity to pitch himself left, into the ditch at the side of the road. He put his head up and saw the marauder dodge toward him as the car seemed at first to veer away . . . Then tires squealed against blacktop, the car swerved again, and the marauder was fixed in the glare of its lights like a fragment of a dream, motionless until the impact lifted him like a strange, broken bird into the air.

  □ □

  □ □

  Ordinarily Billy's armor would have protected him from the impact—at least in part. Maybe it had protected him: the collision hadn't killed him. Not quite.

  But he was broken. Broken inside. Armor broken, body broken.

  Blood oozed out of his armor at the broken joints. The gland in the elytra had been crushed, the last of its stimulants dissolved. Billy was only Billy.

  Nevertheless, he stood up.

  Felt the shifting of ribs inside his chest.