A Bridge of Years (23 page)

The
Infantry doctors had told Billy he'd die without his armor—that he
would go mad without the essential neurochemicals generated in the
elytra. Billy was frankly aware that without the armor he was slow,
languorous, sleepy, and sexless. But he endured that—in a way, the
condition was even sedating. For six months he moved through the
city with his eyelids heavy and his mouth turned up in an empty
narcotic smile.

Then
came the Need.

At
first it was only a tingling dissatisfaction, pins and needles
in his fingers and toes. Billy ignored it and went about his
business.

Then
the tingling became an itch, the itch a fiery burning. The skin of
his face felt drawn tight, as if it had been clamped and sutured to
his hairline. He woke up in the bitter late winter of that year with
the disquieting sensation that he could feel the gaps and contours of
his own skull under the skin, the grinding of bones and ligaments
like dry chalk inside him. He was thirsty all the time, but tap water
tasted sour in his mouth and burned his throat when he swallowed. He
felt sudden blooms of panic, irrational fears: of heights, open
spaces, disease.

He
knew what this was all about.

The
armor,
Billy
thought.

The
sleek and deadly armor.

He
wanted it, or
it
wanted
him
.
.
. Billy was inclined to the latter belief.

This
discomfort, this pain, this vertigo: it was the sound of the armor
calling to him from its box under the bed.

Billy
resisted it.

He
was afraid of what the armor might want.

Well,
he
knew
what
it wanted. It wanted motion, light, heat. It wanted to be brought
alive. It wanted to be the creature that Billy was when he wore
it, a powerful nightmare-Billy to be summoned and let loose.

He
dreamed he was a dog chasing rabbits through a field of wheat by the
bone-white light of a harvest moon. He dreamed of cracking the
rabbit's spine with his sharp teeth and of the gush of warm rabbit
blood on his muzzle.

He
dreamed of the armor. The armor was a presence in all his dreams now,
the flash of it like something dazzling at the periphery of his
vision. He couldn't bear to look directly at it;

like
the sun, it might blind him—but, like the sun, it was always there.

Some
nights, sweating and shivering, he dreamed of Ohio.

In
the main, Billy's childhood memories were sunny. He had grown up in a
farm town called Oasis, one of the soil reclamation collectives
that had sprung up along the diversion canals drawing water south
from the Great Lakes. Founded in a mood of optimism during the Dry
Fifties, operated by a consortium of food distributors out of
Detroit, the town had lost some of its civic spirit in the hard
decades after. But if you grew up there, you didn't notice. For
Billy, it was only a place.

He
carried a few vivid memories of that time. He remembered the
sky, a hazy blue vastness that had seemed as big as time itself. He
remembered the miracle of water, water gushing up from sprinkler
heads embedded in the dust-dikes that ran in lazy whorls through the
fields—water raining down over a thousand acres of new green
leaves. The town grew wheat and cabbage and kale and alfalfa and a
patchwork of minor crops. Twice, Billy had been allowed to ride out
on the big tending machines; and it made him proud and giddy to sit
beside his father in the crow's-nest seat, emperor of all this
fragrant green foliage and dusty blue sky. He remembered one
scorching summer when a work battalion from AgService came to install
what they called "UV screens"—huge banners of some nearly
invisible film, tethered on poles and anchored with fat steel cables.
For a few days it was cooler in the fields, and the clinic reported
exposure trauma down a percentile. But then—pretty much as Billy's
father had predicted—a hot wind came blowing from the west and the
UV film broke free of its tethers. It balled up and tangled in the
crops like so much cellophane discarded by a thoughtless giant. Acres
of winter wheat were bent and broken. Nathan, surveying the battered
fields, had startled Billy by falling on his knees.

Billy
remembered Nathan as a large man—large, bearded, generous, often
quiet, and deeply unhappy. His father always followed the news on the
big screen in the civic center; and Billy gleaned that it was Nathan
who received the
other
news,
microwave databursts not sanctioned by the federal information
services—news, especially, on the movement of conscription
battalions across the Midwest.

Every
two or three years the recruiters swept into Oasis. Nathan said they
were like the locusts in the Bible, a plague. They would bunk in the
labor barracks, stay a few days, maybe leave some of the more
impressionable young girls with a new baby inside them; and when they
rode away in their huge hovertrucks they would take a few
draftees—boys barely old enough to shave, mainly.

Nathan
and the town council usually had some warning when the battalions
were coming, time enough to tamper with the town's birth records—to
delete or alter certain documents. The likeliest young recruits
would be hidden away in a supply cellar under the machine shed and
the women would sneak them food. The battalions complained about the
slim pickings, and sometimes they ran crude tamper-check routines on
the civic computers . . . but if you got them drunk enough, Nathan
said, they'd leave happy.

But
if they came without warning—if they had destroyed the pirate relay
towers on their way west—then they took what they wanted.

Billy
remembered a summer when the news from the Storm Zone was very bad,
tremendous loss of life all through the Caribbean and the occupation
forces scattered. That summer, the Infantry came without warning.
They arrived in a phalanx of black hovercraft, raising a cloud of
dust that must have reddened sunsets all the way to Sandusky. Billy
remembered his father's face when he climbed an embankment and
saw that gray-black line approaching from the west —dismay as
substantial as a weight on his shoulders.

He
turned to Billy and said, "Go to the machine shed. Hurry."

It
was the first time Billy had been old enough to hide with the other
boys. It might have been exciting . . . but this time things were
different. This time, he had seen his father's fear.

The
cellar was hot and smelled of ancient cottonseed and burlap. He
crouched there with a dozen other boys. "I'll come get you,"
Nathan had said, "when the Infantry are gone," and the
words had reassured him a little. But it wasn't Nathan who came.

He
never saw Nathan again.

It
was a soldier who came.

An
Infantryman. Billy woke blinking and bewildered in the clockless
depths of cellar night, startled awake by the sound of footsteps. The
Infantryman smiled down from the doorway. His name, he said, was
Krakow. He was wearing his armor—a command breastplate, radiantly
golden. Billy gazed up with no little awe as Krakow touched his
chest. "This is my armor," he said. "This is the part
of it you can see. Some of it is inside me. My armor knows who I am,
and I know my armor. My armor is a machine, and right now it isn't
fully powered. But if I switched it on I could kill you all before
there was time enough to blink. And I would enjoy it."

Billy
didn't doubt the truth of this. Krakow ran his fingers over the
mirror-bright surface of the breastplate and Billy wondered exactly
how
you
turned the armor on—he hoped Krakow wouldn't do it by mistake.

"My
armor is my best friend." Krakow's voice was gentle, confiding.
"An Infantryman's armor is always his best friend. Your armor
will be your best friend."

Billy
knew what that meant. It meant he was leaving home.

Curled
in the womb of his apartment, Billy ate canned tuna and watched
television and sat up nights shivering, listening to the snow rattle
on the window. His temperature crept upward; his joints ached; his
body felt as if the skin had been flayed from it. Billy endured this
until it was unbearable. He was surprised at how distinct that moment
was: the tick of a second hand on the wheel of a clock, a single
thought.
No
more.

He
took the box from under the bed and opened it. The golden armor was
inside—all the large and small pieces of it.

Billy
recalled the catechism of his training. Sir, this is my armor, sir.

Sir,
these are the body pieces, which are called the
elytra.
(Like
cloth, quite golden, rigid only when impacted at high velocity.
Bulging here and there with instrumentation, power packs, processing
units.)

These
are the arm pieces, sir, which are called the
halteres.
(Molding
to the contour of his skin. They feel warm.)

Sir,
these are the leg pieces, which are called the
setae.
(Snug
against his thighs.)

Sir,
this touchplate controls the
stylet
and
the
lancet,
which
connect the armor to my body. (To the liver, to the spine, to the
lumen of the aorta.)

Hollow
micropipettes burrowing in, wet with contact anesthetic.

Motion
under his skin.

It
felt funny.

Sir,
this touchpiece activates the lancet.

Ah.

He
moved in the snowbound night streets like a ghost.

He
wore loose clothes over his armor, a long gray coat and a
broad-brimmed hat to shadow his face.

He
moved among the snowy lamp standards and the blinking traffic
fights. Past midnight, before dawn, 1953.

He
was supple and powerful and quite invincible.

He
was intoxicated with his own hidden strength and dizzy with the need
to kill a human being.

He
did not resist the urge but he tantalized himself with it. The
streets were empty and the snow came down in dry, icy granules. Wind
flapped at the hem of his chalk-gray overcoat and erased his
footprints behind him. The few pedestrians he saw were bent against
the wind, scurrying like beetles for shelter. He followed one,
maintaining a discreet distance, until the man vanished into a
tenement building. Billy reached the stoop . . . paused a long moment
in the winter darkness . . . then walked on.

He
chose another potential victim, a small man spotlit by the beam of an
automobile headlight; Billy followed him two blocks east but allowed
this one, too, to vanish behind a door.

No
hurry. He was warm in his armor. He was content. His heart beat
inside him with the happy regularity of a finely tuned machine.

He
smiled at a man who stepped out of an all-night delicatessen
with a paper bag tucked under his arm. This one? Tall man, sleepless,
red-eyed, suspicious, a cheap cloth coat: not a rich man; bulk of
arms and chest: maybe a strong man.

"Hell
of a night," Billy said.

The
man shrugged, smiled vaguely, and turned to face the wind.

Yes,
this one, Billy thought.

Billy
took him with his wrist beam in an alley half a block away.

The
killing took all of twenty seconds, but it was the nearest thing
to an orgasm Billy had experienced since he came through the tunnel
from the future. A brief and blissful release.

He
mutilated the body with a knife, to disguise the cauterization
of the wounds; then he took the man's wallet, to make the death seem
like a robbery.