Текст книги "A Bridge of Years"

Автор книги: Robert Charles Wilson

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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

Archer said that sounded fair. Catherine brought in two chairs from the kitchen, on the assumption this might take a while.

* * *

“Who are you really,” Archer asked, “and what are you doing here?”

Ben Collier wondered how to|respond to this.

Confiding in these people was a radical step … but not entirely unprecedented, and unavoidable under the circumstances. He was prepared to trust them. The judgment was only partially intuitive; he had watched them through his own eyes and through the more discerning eyes of his cybernetics. They showed no sign of lying or attempting to manipulate him. Archer, in particular, seemed eager to help. They had weathered what must have been a frightening experience, and Ben credited that to their favor.

But they would need courage, too. And that quality was harder to judge.

He meant to answer their questions as honestly and thoroughly as he could. He owed them this, no matter what happened next. Catherine could have made things infinitely more difficult when she discovered him in the shed—if she had called the police, for instance. Instead, his recovery had been hastened by a significant margin. It would have been pointless and unkind to lie about himself.

He was born (he explained) in the year 2157, in a small town not far from the present-day site of Boulder, Colorado. He had lived there most of his professional life, doing research for a historical foundation.

All this begged the definition of “small town,” of “professional life,” and of “historical foundation” as these things would be understood by Archer and Catherine—but they were close enough to the truth.

Catherine said, “That’s how you became a time traveler?”

He shook his head. “I was recruited. Catherine, if you visited the twenty-second century you would find a lot of marvelous things—but time travel is not among them. Any reputable physicist of my own era would have rejected the idea out of hand. Not the idea that time is essentially mutable and perhaps nonlinear, but the idea that it could be traversed by human beings. The water in the ocean is like the water in a swimming pool, but you can’t swim across it. I was recruited by individuals from my own future, who were recruited by others from their future—and so on.”

“Like stepping stones,” Archer supplied.

“Essentially.”

“But recruited for what?”

“Primarily, as a caretaker. To live in this house. To maintain it and protect it.”

“Why?” Catherine asked, but he imagined she had already surmised the answer.

“Because this house is a sort of time machine.”

“So you’re not a real time traveler,” Archer said. “I mean, you come from the future … but you’re only a kind of employee.”

“I suppose that’s a good enough description.”

“The machine in this building isn’t working the way it’s supposed to—am I right?” He nodded.

“But if it was, and you were the custodian, who would come through here? Who are the real time travelers?”

This was a more serious question, more difficult to answer. “Most of the time, Doug, no one would come through. It’s not a busy place. Mainly, I collect contemporary documents —books, newspapers, magazines—and pass them on.”

“To whom?” Catherine asked.

“People from a time very distant from my own. They look human, but they aren’t entirely. They created the tunnels– the time machines.”

He wondered how much sense they would make of this. The real time travelers,’ Archer had said: as good a description as any. Ben always trembled a little on the occasions when he was required to interact with these beings. They were kindly and only somewhat aloof; but one remained conscious of the evolutionary gulf. “Please understand, much of this is as far beyond my comprehension as it may be beyond yours. All I really know are legends, passed down by people like myself—other custodians, other caretakers. Legends of the future, you might say.”

“Tell us some,” Archer said.

What this concerns (Ben explained) is life on earth.

Look at it in the context of geologic time.

In the primeval solar system the earth is fused into coherent shape by the collisions of orbiting planetesimals. It has a molten core, a skin of cooler rock. It exudes gases and liquids —carbon dioxide, water. In time, it develops an atmosphere and oceans.

Over the course of millions of years, life of a sort arises as vermiform crystalline structures in the porous rock of hot mineral-dense undersea vents. In time, these crystalline structures adapt to a cooler environment by incorporating proteins into themselves—so successfully that the crystalline skeleton is discarded and purely proteinoid life comes to dominate the primitive biosphere. RNA and DNA are adopted as a genetic memory and evolution begins in earnest.

An almost infinite diversity of structures compete against the environment. There will never again be such complexity of life on earth—the rest of evolution is a narrowing, a winnowing out.

The climate changes. Prokaryotic cells poison the atmosphere with oxygen. Continents ride tectonic plates across the magma. Life flows and ebbs in the long intervals between cometary impacts.

Mankind arises. It turns out that mankind, like the grasses, like the flowering plants, is one of those species capable of transforming the planet itself. It alters the climatic balance and might well have drowned in its own waste products, except for an extraordinary new ability to modify itself and to create new forms of life. These are parallel and complementary technologies. Mankind, dying, learns to make machines in its own image. It learns to change itself in fundamental ways. The two capabilities combine to generate a new form of life, self-reproducing but only marginally biological. It can be called human because there is humanity in its lineage; it’s the legitimate heir of mankind. But it’s as different from mankind as crystalline life from the rocks it was born in, or protein life from the rocky structures that preceded it. These new creatures are almost infinitely adaptable; some of them live in the ocean, some of them live in outer space. In their diaspora they occupy most of the planets of the solar system. They are very successful. They begin to comprehend, and eventually manipulate, some fundamental constants of the physical universe. They visit the stars. They discover hidden structures in the fabric of duration and distance.

Ben paused, a little breathless. How long since these mysteries had been explained to him? Years, he thought—no matter how you measure it. “Catherine,” he said, “would you open the window? There’s a nice breeze outside.” A little dazedly, she rolled back the blinds and lifted the window. “Thank you,” Ben said. “Very pleasant.”

Archer was frowning. “These new creatures,’ these are the folks who travel in time?”

“Who built the machine that operates in this house, yes. You have to understand what time travel means, in this case. They discovered what might be called crevices in the structure of space and time—fractures, if you like, with a shape and duration outside the definable bounds of this universe but intersecting it at certain points. A ‘time machine’ is a sort of artificial tunnel following the contour of these crevices. In the local environment of the earth, a time machine can only take you certain places, at certain times. There are nodes of intersection. This house—an area surrounding it for some hundreds of yards—is one of those nodes.”

Archer said, “Why here?”

“It’s a meaningless question. The nodes are natural features, like mountains. There are nodes that intersect the crust of the earth under the ocean, nodes that might open in thin air.”

“How many places like this are there, then?”

Ben shrugged. “I was never told. They tend to cluster, both in space and in time. The twentieth century is fairly rich in them. Not all of them are in use, of course. And remember: they have duration as well as location. A node might be accessible for twenty years, fifty years, a hundred years, and then vanish.”

Catherine had been sitting in patient concentration. She said, “Let me understand this. People a long way in the future open a pathway to these nodes, yes?”

Ben nodded.

“But why? What do they use them for?”

“They use them judiciously for the purpose of historical reclamation. This century—and the next, and my own—are the birthing time of their species. For them, it’s the obscure and distant past.”

“They’re archaeologists,” Catherine interpreted.

“Archaeologists and historians. Observers. They’re careful not to intervene. The project has a duration for them, also. Time passes analogously at both ends of the link. They’re conducting a two-hundred-year-long project to restore their knowledge of these critical centuries. When they’re finished, they mean to dismantle the tunnels. They’re nervous about the mathematics of paradox—it’s a problem they don’t want to deal with.”

Catherine said, “Paradox?”

Archer said, “A time paradox. Like if you murder your own grandfather before you’re born, do you still exist?”

She regarded him with some astonishment. “How do you know that?”

“I used to read a lot of science fiction.”

Ben said, “I’m told there are tentative models. The problem isn’t as overwhelming as it seems. But no one is anxious to put it to the test.”

Archer said, “Even the presence of somebody from the future might have an effect. Even if they just crush a plant or step on a bug—”

Ben smiled. “The phenomenon isn’t unique to time travel. In meteorology it’s called ‘sensitive dependence on original conditions.’ The atmosphere is chaotic; a small event in one place might generate a large effect in another. Wave your hand in China and a storm might brew up in the Atlantic. Similarly, crush an aphid in 1880 and you might alter the presidential election of 1996. The analogy is good, Doug, but the connection isn’t precisely causal. There are stable features in the atmosphere that tend to recur, no matter what—”

“Attractors,” Archer supplied.

Ben was pleased. “You keep up with contemporary math?”

Archer grinned. “I try.”

“I’ve been told there are similar structures in historical time—they tend to persist. But yes, the possibility for change exists. It’s an observer phenomenon. The rule is that the present is always the present. The past is always fixed and immutable, the future is always indeterminate—no matter where you stand.”

“From here,” Archer said, “the year 1988 is unchangeable”

“Because it’s the past.”

“But if I traveled three years back—”

“It would be the future, therefore unpredictable.”

“But there’s your paradox already,” Archer said. “It doesn’t make sense.”

Ben nodded. He had struggled with this idea himself … then submitted to it, a Zen paradox which happened to be true and therefore inarguable. “It’s the way time works,” he said. “If it doesn’t make sense, it’s because you haven’t made sense of it.”

“You said there was a math for this?”

“So I’m told.”

“You don’t know it?”

“It’s not twenty-second-century math. It’s several millennia beyond that. I doubt you or I could contain it without a certain amount of neural augmentation.”

Catherine said, “This is awfully abstract.”

Archer nodded and seemed to struggle a moment with his thoughts.

Ben looked out the window. There was something wonderfully calming about all these Douglas firs. The sound they made when the wind moved through them.

Archer cleared his throat. “There’s another obvious question.”

The painful question. “You want to know what went wrong.”

Archer nodded.

Ben sighed and took a breath. He didn’t relish these memories.

He had reconstructed this from his own experience, from the fragmentary memories of the cybernetics, from the evidence of the tunnel itself.

There was a house like this house, he told Archer and Catherine, a temporal depot, in the latter half of the twenty-first century, in Florida—in those days a landscape of fierce tropical storms and civil war.

The custodian of that house was a woman named Ann Heath.

(Ann, he thought, I’m sorry this had to happen. You were kind when you recruited me and I never had a chance to repay that kindness. Time may be traversed but never mastered: the unexpected happens and in the long run we are all mortal.)

The Florida house had been scheduled for shutdown. Its environment was growing too unpredictable. But something unexpected happened prior to that closing. As nearly as Ben could deduce from the available clues, the house had been invaded by forces of the American government.

The house had possessed some defenses and so did Ann Heath, but perhaps these had been partially dismantled prior to shutdown; in any case, the soldiers of the grim last decades of that century were formidable indeed, with weapons and armor rooted deep into their bodies and nervous systems.

One of these men must have occupied the house, overpowered Ann, and forced her to reveal some of the secrets of the tunnel. The man had used this information to escape into the past.

(She must he dead, Ben thought. They must have killed her.) The marauder had invaded Ben’s domain without warning, disabled the cybernetics with an electromagnetic pulse, destroyed much of Ben’s body, and dumped his corpse in the woodshed. The attack had been quick and successful.

Then the marauder had opened a tunnel some thirty years long, to a nodal point in New York City, where he had committed the same sort of attack but more thoroughly; another custodian and all his cybernetics were irretrievably destroyed.

Finally—as a last, shrewd defense—the marauder had disabled the tunnel’s controls so that the connection between Belltower and Manhattan was permanently open.

Catherine said, “Permanently open? Why is that such a great idea?”

Ben was lost a moment in temporal heuristics, then hit on a simple analogy: “Imagine the nodal points as terminals in a telephone network. Simultaneous connections are impossible. I can call a great number of destinations from one phone– but only one at a time. As long as the connection with Manhattan is open, no other connection can be made.”

“The phone is off the hook,” Catherine said, “at both ends.”

“Exactly. He’s sealed himself off. And us along with him.”

“But a phone,” Catherine said, “if it doesn’t work, you can always go knock on the door. Somebody from another terminal somewhere else could have shown up and helped. Better yet, they could warn you. Leave a message in 1962: In seventeen years, watch out for a bad guy.”

Oh dear, Ben thought. “I don’t want to get too deeply into fractal logistics, but it doesn’t work like that. Look at it from the perspective of the deep future. Our time travelers own a single doorway; its duration governs duration in all the tunnels. From their point of view, Belltower 1979 and Manhattan 1952 disappeared simultaneously. Since that disappearance, approximately ten years have elapsed—here, and in the New York terminus, and in the future. And there are no overlapping destinations. The portal in this house was created in 1964, twenty-five years ago, when its valency point with Manhattan was the year 1937 … Are you following any of this?”

Catherine looked dazed. Archer said, “I think so … but you could still leave a message, seems to me. A warning of some kind.”

“Conceivably. But the time travelers wouldn’t, and the custodians have sworn not to. It would create a direct causal loop, possibly shutting down both terminals permanently.”

“ ‘Possibly’?”

“No one really knows,” Ben said. “The math is disturbing. No one wants to find out.”

Archer shrugged: he didn’t understand this, Ben interpreted, but he would take it on faith. “That’s why nobody came to help. That’s why the house was empty.”

“Yes.”

“But you survived.”

“The cybernetics rebuilt me. It was a long process.” He gestured at the stump of his leg under the blanket. “Not quite finished.”

Catherine said, “You were out there for ten years?”

“I wasn’t suffering, Catherine. I woke out of a long sleep, the day you opened the door.”

“Then how do you know all this?”

This was easier to demonstrate than explain. He made a silent request and one of the cybernetics climbed the bed-sheets and sat a moment in the palm of his hand—a glittering, many-legged jewel.

“My memory,” he said.

“Oh,” Catherine said. “I see.”

* * *

This was an awful lot to accept all at once, Archer thought. Time as a fragmented structure, like sandstone, riddled with crevices and caverns; twenty-first-century marauders; insect memories …

But Ben made it plausible. Plausible not because of his exoticisms—his strange injuries or his tiny robots—but because of his manner. Archer had no trouble at all believing this guy as a twenty-second-century academic recruited into an odd and secret business. Ben was calm, intelligent, and inspired trust. This could, of course, be a clever disguise. Maybe he was a Martian fifth columnist out to sabotage the planet—given recent events, it wouldn’t be too surprising. But Archer’s instinct was to trust the man.

Questions remained, however.

“Couple of things,” Archer said. “If your marauder did such a thorough job at the Manhattan end, why did he screw up here?”

“He must have believed I was dead beyond reclamation. Probably he thought all the cybernetics were dead, too.”

“Why not come back and check on that?”

“I don’t know,” Ben said. “But he may have been afraid of the tunnel.”

“Why would he be?”

For the first time, Ben hesitated. “There are other … presences there,” he said.

Archer wasn’t sure he liked the sound of this. Presences? “I thought you said nobody could get through.”

The time traveler paused, as if trying to assemble an answer.

“Time is a vastness,” he said finally. “We tend to underestimate it. Think about the people who opened these tunnels– millennia in the future. That’s an almost inconceivable landscape of time. But history didn’t begin with them and it certainly didn’t end with them. The fact is, when they created these passages they found them already inhabited.”

“Inhabited by what?”

“Apparitions. Creatures who appear without warning, vanish without any apparent destination. Creatures not altogether material in constitution.”

“From an even farther future,” Archer said. “Is that what you mean?”

“Presumably. But no one really knows.”

“Are they human? In any sense at all?”

“Doug, I don’t know. I’ve heard speculation. They might be our ultimate heirs. Or something unrelated to us. They might exist—somehow; I find it difficult to imagine—outside our customary time and space. They seem to appear capriciously, but they may have some purpose, though no one knows what it is. Maybe they’re the world’s last anthropologists—collecting human history in some unimaginable sense. Or controlling it. Creating it.” He shrugged. “Ultimately, they’re indecipherable.”

“The marauder might have seen one of these?”

“It’s possible. They appear from time to time, without warning.”

“Would that frighten him?”

“It might have. They’re impressive creatures. And not always benign.”

“Come again?”

“They almost always ignore people. But occasionally they’ll take one.” Archer blinked. “Take one?”

“Abduct one? Eat one? The process is mysterious but quite complete. No body is left behind. In any case, it’s very rare. I’ve seen these creatures and I’ve never felt threatened by them. But the marauder may have been told about this, maybe even witnessed it—I don’t know. I’m only guessing.”

Archer said, “This is very bizarre, Ben.”

“Yes,” Ben said. “I think so too.”

Archer tried to collect his thoughts. “The last question—”

“Is about Tom.”

Archer nodded.

“He discovered the tunnel,” Ben said. “He used it. He should have known better.”

“Is he still alive?”

“I don’t know.”

“One of these ghost things might have eaten him?”

Ben frowned. “I want to emphasize how unlikely that is. ‘Ghost’ is a good analogy. We call them that: time ghosts. They’re seldom seen, even more seldom dangerous. No, the more present danger is from the marauder.”

“Tom could be dead,” Archer interpreted.

“He might be.”

“Or in danger?”

“Very likely.”

“And he doesn’t know that—doesn’t know anything about it.”

“No,” Ben said, “he doesn’t.”

* * *

This talk worried Catherine deeply.

She had accepted Ben Collier as a visitor from the future; as an explanation it worked as well as any other. But the future was supposed to be a sensible place—a simplified place, decorated in tasteful white; she had seen this on television. But the future Ben had described was vast, confusing, endless in its hierarchies of mutation. Nothing was certain and nothing lasted forever. It was scary, the idea of this chasm of impermanence yawning in front of her.

She was worried about Doug Archer, too.

He had crawled into her bed last night with the bashful eagerness of a puppy dog. Catherine accepted this as a gesture of friendship but worried about the consequences. She had not slept with very many men because she tended to care too much about them. She lacked the aptitude for casual sex. This was no doubt an advantage in the age of AIDS, but too often it forced her to choose between frustration and a commitment she didn’t want or need. For instance, Archer: who was this man, really?

She stole a glance at him as he sat beside her, Levi’s and messy hair and a strange little grin on his face, listening to Ben, the porcelain-white one-legged time traveler: Douglas Archer, somehow loving all this. Loving the weirdness of it.

She wanted to warn him. She wanted to say, Listen to all these frightening words. A renegade soldier from the twenty-first century, a tunnel populated with time ghosts who sometimes “take” people, a man named Tom Winter lost in the past …

But Doug was sitting here like a kid listening to some Rudyard Kipling story.

She looked at Ben Collier—at this man who had been dead for ten years and endured it with the equanimity of a CEO late for a meeting of his finance committee—and frowned.

He wants something from us, Catherine thought.

He won’t demand anything. (She understood this.) He won’t threaten us. He won’t beg. He’ll let us say no. He’ll let us walk away. He’ll thank us for all we’ve done, and he’ll really mean it.

But Doug won’t say no. Doug won’t walk away.

She knew him that well, at least. Cared that much about him.

Doug was saying, “Maybe we should break for lunch.” He looked at Ben speculatively. “How about you? We could fix up some of those steaks. Unless you prefer to eat ’em raw?”

“Thank you,” Ben said, “but I don’t take food in the customary fashion.” He indicated his throat, his chest. “Still undergoing repairs.”

“The steaks aren’t for you?”

“Oh, they’re for me. And thank you. But the cybernetics have to digest them first.”

“Ick,” Catherine said. “I’m sorry if this is disturbing.”

It was, but she shrugged. “They fed my aunt Lacey through a tube for two years before she died. This isn’t any worse, I guess. But I’m sorry for you.”

“Strictly temporary. And I’m not in any pain. You two have lunch if you like. I’m quite happy here.”

“Okay,” Catherine said. Meekly: “But I have a couple of questions of my own.”

“Surely,” Ben said.

“You told us you were a sort of custodian. A caretaker. You said you were recruited.’ But I don’t know what that means. Somebody knocked at your door and asked you to join up?”

“I was a professional historian, Catherine. A good one. I was approached by another caretaker, from my own near future, also a historian. Think of us as a guild. We recruit our own.”

“That puts a lot of power in your hands.” Custodian was a modest word, Catherine thought; maybe too modest.

“It has to be that way,” Ben said. “The tunnel-builders are journeying into their own distant past. Their records of this time are sketchy; that’s why they’re here. The custodians act as their buffer in a sometimes hostile environment. We provide them with contemporary documents and we help to integrate them into contemporary culture on the rare occasions when they choose to make a physical visit. Could you, for instance, walk into a Cro-Magnon encampment and expect to pass for one of the tribe?”

“I see. You agreed to this?”

“When it was explained to me.”

“Just like that?”

“Not without some soul-searching.”

“But you must have had a life of your own. It must have meant giving something up.”

“Not as much as you might think. I was old, Catherine. An old man. And longevity is something of an art in my time; I was more than a century old. And failing. And quite alone.”

He said this with a wistfulness that made Catherine believe him. “They made you young again?”

“Passably young,” Ben said. “Young enough to begin another life when I leave here.”

“Are you allowed to do that?”

“I’m an employee, not a slave.”

“So what you want,” Catherine surmised, “is to fix up all this damage. Make the tunnel work again. And eventually go home.”

“Yes.”

“Is that possible? Can you fix it?”

“The cybernetics are repairing as much of the physical damage as they can. Then we can close the connection to Manhattan, isolate it until it can be repaired as well. But that will take some time. Weeks, at least.”

“And until then,” Catherine interpreted, “the problem is Tom Winter.”

“He may be perfectly safe. He may not. The cybernetics tried to warn him, but they were working across a tremendous information barrier—I’m afraid they weren’t very specific. He may have alerted the marauder, which puts us at risk; or he may do so if he hasn’t yet.”

Catherine bit her lip. Here was the crux of it. “You want us to bring him back.”

Ben looked very solemn. “That may not be possible at this stage. The cybernetics can help, and they might provide some defense against the marauder, but the danger is obvious. I won’t ask you to go—either of you.”

You don’t have to ask, Catherine thought sadly. She looked at Doug Archer and knew.

Archer grinned.

“Tom is a likable sonofabitch,” he said. “I expect I can drag his ass back here.”

Doug went to the kitchen, leaving Catherine alone with Ben.

She hesitated in the doorway, unnerved by Ben’s expressionless patience. Finally she said, “Is this necessary? If you don’t get Tom Winter back … would the world end?” She added, “Doug is risking his life, I think.”

“I’ll do everything I can to minimize the risk. Some risk remains. The world won’t end if Tom Winter stays in Manhattan … but there might be other consequences I can’t calculate.” He paused. “Catherine, Doug knows the doorway is open. Do you think he’d stay away from it if I told him to?”

“No … I don’t suppose he would.” Catherine resented this but understood that it was true. “This way, at least he’s serving a purpose. Is that it?”

“This way,” Ben said, “he’ll come back.”