A Bridge of Years Read online

  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.

  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.

  He dropped the wallet in a trash bin on Eighth Street. The money—five dollars in ones—he took home and flushed down the toilet.

  Soothed and sweetly alive in the dark of his apartment, Billy relaxed his armor and folded it into its box. By dawn, the clouds had rolled away. A winter sun rose over the snowbound city. Billy showered and raided the refrigerator. He had lost a lot of weight in the last few months, but now his appetite had returned with a vengeance. Now he was very hungry indeed.

  He went to bed at noon and woke in the dark. Waking, he discovered something new in himself. He discovered remorse.

  He found his thoughts circling back to the man he'd killed. Who had he been? Had he lived alone? Were the police investigating the murder?

  Billy had watched police investigations on TV. On TV, the police always found the killer. Billy knew this was a social fiction; in real life the opposite was probably nearer to the truth. Still, fiction or not, the possibility nagged at him.

  He developed new phobias. The tunnel in the sub-basement was suddenly on his mind. He had sealed that tunnel at both ends: according to Ann Heath, the dead woman with the wedge of glass in her skull, that act would guarantee his safety. No one would come hunting him from the future; no time ghost would carry him off. The tunnel, after all, was only a machine. A strange and nearly incomprehensible machine, Billy admitted privately, but a powerless machine, too —inaccessible.

  Nevertheless, it made him nervous.

  He patrolled the sub-basement daily. He thought of this as "checking the exits." The city of New York and the meridian of the twentieth century had become in Billy's mind a private place, a welcoming shelter. The natives might be a nuisance, but they weren't gravely dangerous; the real dangers lay elsewhere, beyond the rubble where the tunnel had been. Billy piled the rubble higher and installed a door at the foot of the stairs; on the door he installed an expensive padlock. If—by some magic—the tunnel repaired itself, any intruder would have to disturb these barricades. If Billy found the lock broken or the door splintered it would mean his sanctuary had been invaded ... it would mean the twentieth century wasn't his own anymore.

  The effort reassured him. Still, his proximity to the gateway made him nervous. It was hard to sleep some nights with the thought of that temporal fracture buried in the bedrock some few yards under the floor. By the summer of 1953 Billy decided that this building didn't need his nightly presence— that he could move a few streets away without harming anything.

  He rented an apartment on the other side of Tompkins Square, three streets uptown. It was not much different from his first apartment. The floor was a crumbling, ancient parquet; Billy covered it with a cheap rug. The windows were concealed by yellow roll blinds and dust. Cockroaches lived in the gaps in the wallboard and they came out at night. And there was a deep closet, where Billy kept his armor in its box.

  His life fell into a series of simple routines. Every week, sometimes more often, Billy walked the short distance between the two buildings—or, when he was restless, took a long night walk uptown and back—to collect his rent money and check the exits.

  The rent was often late and sometimes his few tenants failed to pay at all. But that didn't matter. What mattered was that the padlock in the basement was never disturbed—a fact more reassuring as the years began to stack up behind him.

  Time, Billy often thought, tasting the word in his mind. Time: small circles of days and the great wheel of the seasons. Seasons passed. Engrossed in television news—watching his small Westinghouse TV set the way Nathan had monitored the immensely larger screen in the civic center— he learned a parade of names: Eisenhower, Oppenheimer, Nixon; and places: Suez, Formosa, Little Rock. He numbered the years although the numbers still seemed implausible, one-nine-five-four, one-nine-five-five, one thousand nine hundred and fifty-six years in the wake of a crucifixion which seemed to Billy just as ludicrously unreal as the fall of Rome, the treaty of Ghent, or the Army-McCarthy hearings.

  His armor continued to call to him from its hiding place, a small voice which sometimes grew shrill and unbearable. The need seemed to follow the seasons, an irony Billy failed to appreciate: if time was a wheel then in some sense he had been broken on it. Two killings per annum, winter and summer, dark nights or moonlit, as irresistible as the tides. And each killing was followed by a grinding remorse, then numbness, then weeks of dull torpor . . . and the Need again.

  Nineteen fifty-eight, 'fifty-nine, 'sixty.

  Nixon in Moscow, sit
-ins in Greensboro, Kennedy in the White House by a fraction of the vote.

  Billy grew older. So did the armor—but he tried not to think about that.

  Tried not to think about a lot of things, especially tonight, as he was checking the exits: early summer of Anno Domini 1962, a hot night that reminded him of Ohio.

  Billy entered the groaning front door of the old building near Tompkins Square where the time traveler had once lived and where nobody lived now except a few aging relics.

  He had developed a perverse fondness for these people, human detritus too fragile or tenacious to abandon a building he had allowed to crumble around them. Two of them had been there long before Billy arrived—an arthritic old man named Shank on the fourth floor and a diabetic pensioner on the second. Mrs. Korzybski, the pensioner, sometimes forgot her medication and would stumble out to the street in insulin-shock delirium. This had happened once when he was checking the exits, and Billy had helped the woman inside, using his passkey to open the apartment door she had somehow locked behind her. He didn't like the police or an ambulance coming to the building, so he rummaged in the kitchen drawers among her cat-food cans and cutlery and fading photographs until he found her diabetic kit. He used the syringe to inject a measured dose of insulin solution into the crook of her flabby arm. When she came to, she thanked him. "You're nice," she said. "You're nicer than you look. How come you know how to use that needle?"

  "I was in the army," Billy said.

  "Korea?"

  "That's right. Korea."

  He had seen Korea on television.

  She said she was glad now that she paid her rent on time, and how come nobody had moved in for such a long while? "Since that Mr. Allen was the manager. It gets kind of lonely these days."