A Bridge of Years (22 page)

Most
often, it sang about death.

Billy
emerged from the roaring machine caves of the subway into the night
wilderness of Forty-second Street and Broadway. Midnight had
come and gone.

Now
as ever, he was startled by the wild exuberance of the twentieth
century. All these lights! Colored neon and glaring filaments,
powered, he had learned, by mechanical dams spanning rivers hundreds
of miles away. And most of this— astonishingly—in the name of
advertising.

He
paced through Times Square, where the lights were so bright he could
hear them sizzle and spit.

Where
Billy came from—back on the farm—this frivolous use of
electricity would have been called
promiscuous.
A
very bad word. But the word meant something else here ...
a
dissipation of some other energy entirely.

Words
had troubled him from the day he arrived in New York.

He
had arrived in a fury of blood and noise, disgorged into the
sub-basement of an old building through a fracture in the firmament
of time—frightened of what he had seen there; frightened of what
might be waiting for him. He detonated EM pulses, brought a wall
tumbling down, and killed the man (a time traveler) who tried to stop
him.

When
the dust settled, he crouched in a corner and considered his
options.

He
thought about the monster he'd encountered in the tunnel.

The
monster was called a "time ghost"—Ann Heath had warned
him about it before she died.

The
fiery apparition had terrified Billy even through the haze of
chemical courage pumped into him by his armor. The time ghost was
like nothing he had ever seen and Billy sensed—he couldn't say
how—that its interest in him was particular, personal. Maybe it
knew what he'd done. Maybe it knew he had no place in this maze of
time; that he was a deserter, a criminal, a refugee.

The
monster had appeared as he reached the end of the tunnel, and Billy
felt the heat of it and the subtler weight of its hostility; and he
had run from it, a terrified sprint through the terminal doorway to
this place, a safe place where the monster couldn't follow—or so
Ann Heath had told him.

Nevertheless,
Billy was still frightened.

He
had a rough idea where he was. Mid-twentieth century. Some urban
locus. He had killed the custodian of this place and a few more pulse
detonations would sweep it clean of cybernetics. But Billy crouched
in the corner of the dimly fit sub-basement—in the stench of fused
plaster and cinder-block and a fine gray dust from the damaged
tunnel—and understood that his exile was permanent.

He
powered down his armor and performed a private inventory.

Things
he had run away from:

The
Infantry.

The
Storm Zone.

Murder.

The
woman Ann Heath with a wedge of glass in her skull and a hemotropic
tube embedded in her chest.
Things
he had left behind:

Ohio.

His
father, Nathan. A town called Oasis.

Miles
of kale and green wheat and a sky empty of everything but heat
and dust.

Things
he couldn't leave behind:
His
armor.

And,
Billy realized, this place. This building, whatever it was. This
tunnel entrance, which he had sealed but which he could not
trust:
because
it contained monsters, because it contained the future.

What
had seemed at the time like inspiration, this feverish escape into
the past, troubled him now. He had tampered with mechanisms he didn't
understand, mechanisms more powerful than he could imagine. His
encounter with the time ghost had been disturbing enough; who
else
might
he have angered? There was so much Billy didn't understand. He
believed he was safe here . . . but the belief was tempered with
fresh new doubts.

But
here you are.
That
was the plain fact of it. Here he was and here he would stay. At
least no Infantry; at least no Storm Zone. A place away from all
that. Not Ohio with its deserts and canals and the miracle of the
harvest, but at least a safe place.

A
city in the middle years of the twentieth century.

That
night, his first night in the city of New York, Billy undressed
the body of the time traveler and used a fan beam to turn the corpse
into a dune of feathery white ash.

The
clothes were bloodstained and a poor fit, but they allowed Billy to
move without attracting attention. He explored the corridors of
the tenement building above the sub-basement chamber which contained
the tunnel; he explored the nearby streets of the night city. He
deduced from the contents of the dead man's wallet that the time
traveler had occupied an "apartment" in this building.
Billy located the entrance, one numbered door among many, and fumbled
keys into the primitive lock until the door sprang inward.

He
slept in the dead man's bed. He appropriated a fresh suit of clothes.
He marveled at the dead man's calendar: 1953.

He
found cash in the dead man's wallet, more cash in a drawer of his
desk. Billy understood cash: it was an archaic form of credit,
universal and interchangeable. The denominations were confusing
but simple in principle: a ten-dollar bill was "worth" two
fives, for instance.

He
stayed in the apartment a week. Twice, someone knocked at the door;
but Billy was quiet and didn't answer. He watched television at
night. He ate regular meals until there was nothing left in the
refrigerator. He sat at the window and studied the people
passing in the street.

He
kept his armor hidden under the bed. As vulnerable as Billy felt
without the armor, he would have been grotesquely conspicuous in it.
He supposed he could have worn the body pieces under his clothing and
looked only a little peculiar, but that wasn't the point; he hadn't
come here to wear the armor. He planned not to wear the armor at all
...
at
least, only to wear it when he had to, when the peculiar needs of his
altered body demanded it. In a month, say. Two months. Six
months. Not now.

When
there was nothing left to eat Billy gathered up his cash and left the
building. He walked three blocks to a "grocery" and
found himself in a paradise of fresh fruit and vegetables, more
of these things than he had ever seen in one place. Dazzled, he chose
three oranges, a head of lettuce, and a bunch of bright yellow
speckled bananas. He handed the checkout clerk a flimsy cash
certificate and was nonplussed when the man said, "I can't
change that! Christ's sake!" Change it to
what?
But
Billy rooted in his pocket for a smaller denomination, which proved
acceptable, and he understood the problem when the cashier handed him
a fresh selection of bills and coins: his "change."

Words,
Billy
thought. What they spoke here was English, but only just.

He
acquired his new life by theft.

The
custodian, a time traveler, had owned the block of tenement flats
above the sub-basement which concealed the tunnel. The deeds were
stored in a filing cabinet in the bedroom. For years the time
traveler had operated the building strictly as, a formality and most
of the apartments were empty. Billy passed himself off as "new
management" and accepted the monthly rent checks. The charade
was almost ridiculously easy. There was no family to mourn the dead
man, no business partners to inquire about his health. By reviewing
the documents he learned that the time traveler had registered his
business under the name Hourglass Rentals, and Billy was able to
discern enough of the local financial customs to manipulate bank
deposits and withdrawals and pay the tax bills on time. Hourglass
Rentals didn't generate enough revenue to cover its debts, but the
amount of money banked in the company name was staggering—enough to
keep Billy in food and shelter for the rest of his life. Not only
that, but the management of these fiscal arcana had been streamlined
for a single individual to operate without help— an hour of
paperwork an evening, once Billy mastered the essentials of
bookkeeping and learned which lies to tell the IRS, the city, and the
utility companies. By the end of 1952, Billy
was
Hourglass
Rentals.

It
suited him to commandeer the life of a loner. Billy was a loner, too.

He
guessed the armor had made him that way. He knew the Infantry
surgeons had made him dependent on the armor —that without it he
was less than a normal human being. Sexually, Billy was a blank
slate. He remembered a time when he had wanted the touch of a
woman—back in his brief adolescence, before he was prepped, when
the physical need had burned like a flame—but that was long ago.
Nothing burned in him now but his need for the armor. Now he saw
women all the time: women on television, women on city streets, bank
tellers, secretaries, women available for money. Occasionally they
looked at him. Their looks seldom lingered. Billy guessed there was
something about him they could sense—a blankness, a deferral, an
inertia of the soul.

It
didn't matter. By the snowy January of 1953 Billy had established a
life he was content to lead.

He
was far from the Infantry, the Storm Zone, and the prospect of
imminent death or court martial. He wasn't hungry and he wasn't
in physical danger. When he stopped to think about it, it felt a
little bit like paradise.

Was
he happy here? Billy couldn't say. Most days passed in blissful
oblivion, and he was grateful for that. But there were times when he
felt the pangs of a brittle, piercing loneliness. He woke up nights
in a city more than a century away from home, and that impossible
distance was like a hook in his heart. He thought about his father,
Nathan. He tried to remember his mother, who had died when he
was little. He thought about his life in exile here, stranded on this
island, Manhattan, among people who had been dead a hundred years
when he was born. Thought about his life among these ghosts. He
thought about time, about clocks: clocks, like words, worked
differently here. Billy was accustomed to clocks that numbered time
and marked it with cursors, linear slices of a linear phenomenon.
Here, clocks were round and symbolic. Time was a territory mapped
with circles.

Time
and words. Seasons. That January, Billy was caught in a snowstorm
that slowed the buses to a crawl. Tired and cold, he decided to check
into a hotel rather than walk the distance home. He found an
inexpensive boarding hotel and asked the desk clerk for a room with a
slut; the clerk showed him a strange smile and said he would have to
arrange that himself—he recommended a bar a few blocks away. Billy
disguised his confusion and checked in anyway, then realized that in
1953 the word "slut" must have some other meaning —he
didn't
need
a
heated bed; the entire room, the entire hotel was heated. Probably
every room in the
city
was
heated, even the vast public spaces of banks and the cavernous
lobbies of skyscrapers, all through the bitter winter. He had a
hard time grasping this simple fact; when he did, the sheer arrogant
monstrosity of it left him dazed and blinking.

Asleep
in the snowbound hotel, Billy dreamed of all that heat ...
a
hundred summers' worth, bubbling up from this city and a dozen cities
like it, hovering for decades in invisible cloudbanks and then
descending all at once in a final obliteration of the seasons.

He
dreamed about Ohio, about a farm in the desert there.

His
need for the armor was quiet at first, a barely discernible tickle of
desire, something he could ignore—for a time.

The
armor, with its power off and its tensor fields collapsed, lay
in the box Billy had found for it like yardcloth from some fairy-tale
haberdashery. It looked like spun gold, though of course it wasn't
really gold; it was woven of complex polymolecules grown in the
big East Coast armaments collectives. Parts of it were electronic and
parts of it were vaguely alive.