Текст книги "A Bridge of Years"

Автор книги: Robert Charles Wilson

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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

He paused to bend over Ann Heath. Ann Heath was awake again and followed him with her one bright eye. Billy said, “Are you suffering?” and she answered in her toneless, bleak voice, “Yes.” Billy said, “Would you rather be alive or dead?” And when she answered, “Dead,” he did her the way he’d done Piper and Hallowell, but looking away, so he wouldn’t see the wedge of bloody glass fused into the new wound he’d made.

The cardiovascular machine faltered as her blood volume dropped. Billy turned off the machine before he left.

He remembered that bleak room, sitting in this one with Lawrence Millstein.

Billy had remembered a lot recently. Sometimes the memories came flooding out of him, a river mysterious in its source. Maybe he was getting old. Maybe some flaw in the armor (or in himself) allowed these freshets of remembrance. He had never been a particularly good soldier; he was what the infantry doctors had called an “anomalous subject,” prone to unpredictable chemistries and odd neural interactions. Most soldiers loved their armor, and so did Billy, but he loved it the way an addict loves his addiction: profoundly, bitterly.

He extracted from Lawrence Millstein the address of the apartment where his prey—Tom Winter—lived.

He considered going there directly, but the sun had come up now and the morning streets were fiercely bright. He looked through Lawrence Millstein’s back window over a landscape of iron fire escapes, across the enclosed courtyard where a gutted TV set glittered like a bottle washed up from the sea. Billy was fully armored now and it would be hard to move in daylight without drawing attention.

But he was comfortable here … at least for a while.

Lawrence Millstein had wrapped a wad of toilet paper around the stump of his finger. He sat in a chair staring at Billy. He had not stopped staring at Billy since the moment Billy switched on the bedroom light. “It’s going to be a hot day,” Billy said, watching Millstein flinch at the sound of his voice. “A scorcher.”

Millstein didn’t venture a response.

“It gets hot where I come from,” Billy said. “We had summers that made this look like Christmas. Not so humid, though.”

In a voice that sounded uncomfortably like Ann Heath’s voice, Lawrence Millstein said, “Where do you come from?”

“Ohio,” Billy said.

“There’s nothing like you in Ohio,” Millstein said.

“You’re right.” Billy smiled. “I live in the wind. I’m not even born yet.”

Lawrence Millstein, who was a poet, seemed to accept this.

An hour passed while Billy contemplated his options. Finally he said, “Do you know his number?”

Millstein was weary and not paying attention. “What?”

“His telephone number. Tom Winter.”

Millstein hesitated.

“Don’t lie to me again,” Billy cautioned. “Yes. I can call him.”

“Then do that,” Billy said. Millstein repeated, “What?”

“Call him. Tell him to come over. He’s been here before. Tell him you need to talk to him.”

“Why?”

“So I can kill him,” Billy said irritably.

“You evil son of a bitch,” Millstein said. “I can’t invite him to his death.”

“Consider the alternative,” Billy suggested.

Millstein did so, and seemed to wither before Billy’s eyes. He cradled his wounded hand against his chest and rocked back and forth, back and forth.

“Pick up the phone,” Billy said.

Millstein picked up the receiver and braced it against his shoulder while he dialed the number. Billy calculated the number and memorized it, listening to the clatter of the dial each time it spun home. He was a little surprised Millstein was actually doing this; he’d guessed the odds were fifty-fifty that Millstein would refuse and Billy would have to kill him. Millstein held the receiver to his ear, breathing in little sobs, eyes half shut, then hung up the phone with a triumphant slam. “Nobody’s home!”

“That’s all right,” Billy said. “We’ll try again later.”

Billy’s prediction was correct: the day was long and hot.

He opened the tiny window but the trickle of air it admitted was syrupy and stank of gasoline. Billy’s armor kept him cool, but Lawrence Millstein turned pale and began to sweat. The sweat ran down his face in glossy rivulets and Billy told him to drink some water before he fainted.

Sunset came late and Billy began to grow impatient. He felt the pressure of the armor; if he didn’t take some action soon he would have to power down. When he was up too long he grew edgy, nervous, a little unstable. He looked at Lawrence Millstein and frowned.

Millstein hadn’t moved from his chair all day. He sat upright by the phone, and every time he called Tom Winter’s apartment Billy pictured Millstein as Ann Heath, the wedge of glass driven in a little deeper with every number he dialed. Millstein was pretty much a wreck.

Billy thought about this.

He said, “Does Tom Winter live alone?”

Millstein regarded him with a dread so familiar it had become tiresome.

“No,” Millstein said faintly.

“Lives with a woman?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know where she might be?” The silence now was protracted.

“You could call her and just leave a message,” Billy suggested. “It wouldn’t be hard.”

“She might come here with him,” Millstein said, and Billy recognized this as a prelude to capitulation. Not that there was any question of it, really.

“I don’t care about her,” Billy said.

Millstein trembled as he picked up the phone.

It should have gone easily after that and Billy wasn’t sure why it didn’t: some flicker of his attention, maybe, or of the armor’s.

He waited with Lawrence Millstein through the long evening after sunset, while the air through the window turned cooler and the apartment tilled with shadows. He listened to the sound of voices from the courtyard. Not far away, a man was shouting in Spanish. A baby was crying. A phonograph played La Traviata.

Billy was distracted a moment by the lonesome sound of the music and by the stirring of the burlap curtains in the breeze. This was a kind of paradise, he thought, this old building where people lived without fighting over rice and corn, where nobody came and took children away and put them in golden armor. He wondered if Lawrence Millstein knew about living in paradise.

Then there was a knock at the door.

Billy turned, but Lawrence Millstein was already standing up, shouting.

He shouted, “No! Oh, fuck, Joyce, go away!”

Then Billy killed him. The door opened and a woman stood outlined in the light from the hallway, a huge brown-complexioned woman in a flower-print dress; she peered into the dark apartment through thick lenses. “Lawrence?” she said. “It’s Nettie—from next door!”

Billy killed Nettie with his wrist beam, but his hand shook and the beam cut not neatly but like a ragged knife, so that the blood went everywhere, and Nettie made a noise that sounded like “Woof!” and fell back against the faded wallpaper.

Then the hallway was full of voices and distress and although Billy had soothed his armor with these killings he knew his real business would have to wait.

Sixteen

A woman in the crowd tugged Joyce away from the doorway, away from the bodies. Tom understood by the look on her face that Lawrence was inside and that Lawrence was dead.

His first impulse was to comfort her. But the crush of tenants held him back, and the sirens were closer now … He edged down the stairwell and out to the sidewalk. He couldn’t allow himself to be questioned even casually, with a wallet full of ID from the future and no one to vouch for him but Joyce.

A crowd formed around him as the police cruisers pulled up. Tom stood discreetly back among them. He watched the cops erect a barricade; he watched two medics hustle from an ambulance into the building, then stroll out moments later to stand under a streetlight, smoking and laughing. The red rotary lights on the police cars made the street ominous and bleak. Tom stood a long time even after the crowd began to thin, waiting.

There was a hush when the bodies came out: two amorphous shapes under blankets.

Joyce emerged a little after that, a fat man in a brown suit escorting her toward an unmarked car. The fat man, Tom guessed, was a police detective. He must have asked her whether she knew either of the victims; yes, she would have said, that one … She would cooperate because she’d want to help find the killer.

But Tom knew by the way she looked at him, and then away, that she was confused about his role in all this.

A confusion he shared. Not that he might have committed the crime but that Millstein’s death might be connected somehow with his time-traveling. Too many possibilities, Tom thought. A world that contained doorways between decades might contain almost anything else … Any kind of evil monster might have tracked him to Millstein’s apartment.

The police cruisers began to pull away from the curb; the crowd dispersed. A raft of cloud had moved across the sky from the northwest and the night was suddenly cooler. A wind whipped around the corner from Avenue B.

Rain before morning, Tom thought.

He thought about the walk back to the apartment, dangerous in these night streets.

He felt a hand on his shoulder … and spun around, startled, expecting a cop or something worse, and was shocked again:

“Hey, Tom,” Doug Archer said. “We have to get out of here.”

Tom took a step back and drew a deep breath. Yes, anything was possible. Yes, this was Doug Archer, from Belltower in the state of Washington at the end of the 1980s, as incongruous in this dirty street as a Greek amphora or an Egyptian urn.

Doug Archer, who seemed to have some idea what was going on. Now there’s a neat trick, Tom thought.

He managed, “How did you find me?”

“Long story.” Archer tilted his head as if he were listening to something. “Tom, we have to leave now. We can talk in the car. Please?”

Tom took a last look at the building where Lawrence Millstein had died. An ambulance pulled away from the curb, headed uptown. Joyce was gone.

He nodded.

Archer drew an oversize Avis keytag out of his pocket.

Tom felt but didn’t understand the urgency as Archer hustled him into a boxy rental Ford and pulled away from the curb. The heat had broken and the rain came down in a sudden, gusty wash. Dawn was still hours away.

They drove to an all-night deli in the Village and ducked inside.

“A man was killed,” Tom said. He was still trying to grasp the fact of Millstein’s death. “Somebody I knew. Somebody I got drunk with.”

“Could have been you,” Archer said. “You’re lucky it wasn’t.” He added, “That’s why we have to go home.”

Tom shook his head. He felt too weary to frame a reasonable response. He looked at Archer across the table: Doug Archer in a crewcut and a starched shirt and black leather shoes, his sneakers presumably abandoned in 1989. “How do you know all this?” Millstein dead and Doug Archer in the street outside: not a coincidence. “I mean, what are you doing here?”

“I owe you an explanation,” Archer said. “I sure as hell hope we have time for it.”

An hour ticked by on the wall clock while Archer told him about Ben Collier, the time-traveling custodian.

Much of what Archer told him was barely plausible. Tom believed it, however. He had been numbed to the miraculous a long time ago.

At the end of it he cradled his head on his hands and struggled to put this information into some kind of order. “You came here to take me back?”

“I can’t ‘take’ you anywhere. But yeah, I think it would be the wise thing to do.”

“Because of this so-called marauder.”

“He knows about you and he obviously means to kill you.”

It was a hypothetical threat; Tom was impatient. “The tunnel was intact when I moved into the house on the Post Road. He could have walked in and killed me in my sleep, if he exists … if he’s still alive. I was in danger then, I’m in danger now—what’s the difference? As long as he can’t find me—

“But he can find you! Jesus, Tom, he very nearly did find you—tonight.”

“You think he’s the one who killed Lawrence?” Tom was dazed enough to be startled by the idea.

“It would be fucking near suicidal,” Archer said, “to doubt it.”

“It’s a supposition—”

“It’s a fact, Tom. He was there. He was close by when I found you. Another five minutes, ten minutes, the street empties out, you turn down some alley, he would have had a clean shot at you.”

“You can’t know that.”

“Well, but, that’s the thing. I can.”

Tom looked blank, felt apprehensive.

“Simple,” Archer said. “This guy took out three temporal depots, each one stocked with machine bugs eager to defend it. He killed the cybernetics with an EM pulse weapon. His armor was hardened against the pulse and the machine bugs weren’t. Hardly any cybernetics survived—unless they were also protected by his armor.”

“How could that be?”

“They were in the air he was breathing. Little bitty ones the size of a virus—you know about those?”

“I know about those,” Tom allowed. “But if they’re inside him, how come they can’t stop him?”

“They’re like drones without a hive. They’re lost and they don’t have instructions. But they send out a little narrow-bandwidth data squirt, a sort of homing signal. I can pick up on that.”

“You can?”

Archer turned to display a plug in one ear, something like a miniaturized hearing aid. “Ben had his cybernetics whip this up for me. I can tell when he’s inside a radius of eight, nine hundred yards … reception permitting. You too, by the way.”

“They’re inside me?”

“Completely benign. Don’t get your shorts in a knot, Tom. Maybe they saved your life. I drove around Manhattan for three days, Battery Park to Washington Heights, on the off chance I’d come within range.” He cocked his head. “You sound kind of like a telephone. A dial tone. The marauder sounds more like a dentist’s drill.”

“You’re telling me he was there at Larry Millstein’s apartment building.”

“That’s why I was in such an all-fired hurry to leave.”

“He must have known I was coming.”

“I suppose so. But—”

“No,” Tom said. “Let me think about this.”

It was hard to think at all. If Archer was correct, he had been standing a few yards away from a man who wanted to murder him. Who had murdered Millstein. And if the marauder had been waiting for him, had known he was coming, then Millstein must have cooperated with the marauder.

They had hurried to the apartment because Millstein phoned Joyce at Mario’s.

The marauder knew about Mario’s. The marauder knew about Tom. Maybe the marauder knew his address. Certainly the marauder knew about Joyce.

Who had left with a cop. Who might be headed home by now. Where the marauder might be waiting. Tom spilled his coffee, standing up.

Archer tried to soothe him. “What they’ll likely do is question her as long as she’s willing to sit still. She’s probably giving a statement to some sleepy cop as we speak. Safe and sound.”

Tom hoped so. But how long would she be willing to answer questions?

She might have a few questions of her own.

He couldn’t erase his memory of the hallway outside Lawrence Millstein’s door. All that blood.

“Drive me home,” he told Archer. “We’ll meet her there.”

Archer raised his eyebrows at the word “home” but fumbled in his pocket for the keys.

They drove into the narrow streets of the Lower East Side. The city looked abandoned, Tom thought, pavements and storefronts glazed with rain and steam rising out of the sewers. “Here,” he said, and Archer pulled up at the curb outside the building.

The rain was loud on the roof of this old car.

Tom reached for the door handle; Archer put a hand on his wrist.

Tom said, “Is he near here?”

“I don’t think so. But he could be around a corner, half a block away. Listen, what if she’s not home?”

“Then we wait for her.”

“How long?” Tom shrugged. “And if she is here?”

“We take her with us.”

“What—back to Belltower?”

“She’ll be safe there … safer, anyhow.”

“Tom, I don’t know if that’s a real good idea.” He opened the door. “I don’t have a better one.”

He rang the buzzer.

Nobody answered. Then he climbed the stairs—these old, dirty boards complaining under his feet. It must be four a.m., Tom calculated. The light from the incandescent bulb over the landing was stale and fierce.

He opened the door and knew at once the apartment was empty.

He switched on the lights. Joyce wasn’t home and he guessed—prayed—she hadn’t been. Nothing had been disturbed since this morning. Two coffee cups stood on the kitchen table, brown puddles inside. He walked into the bedroom. The bed was unmade. The rain beat against the window, a lonesome sound.

Yesterday’s paper lay open on the arm of the sofa, and Tom regarded it with a stab of longing: if he could step back even a day he could turn this around, keep Joyce safe, maybe even keep Lawrence Millstein alive—he would have a handle on what was happening.

But the thought was ludicrous. Hadn’t he proved that already? My God, here he was armed with nearly thirty years of foresight and he couldn’t even help himself. It had all been a dream. A dream about something called “the past,” a fiction; it didn’t exist. Nothing was predictable, nothing played the same way twice, every certainty dissolved at the touch.

History was a place where dramas were played out on a ghost stage, the way Joyce’s old boyfriend had imagined D-day. But that’s not true, Tom thought. This was history: an address, a locality, a place where people lived. History was this room. Not emblematic, merely specific; merely this vacant space, which he had come to love.

He thought about Barbara, who had never much cared about the past but had longed for the future … the uncreated future in which there were no certainties, only possibilities.

Everywhere the same, Tom thought. 1962 or 1862 or 2062. Every acre of the world littered with bones and hope. He was indescribably tired.

He stepped into the hallway and sealed the apartment, which had contained a fair portion of his happiness, but which was empty now. He would be better off waiting with Doug in the car.

He was leaving the building when a taxi pulled up at the curb.

He watched Joyce pay the driver and step out into the rain.

Her clothes were instantly wet and her hair matted against her forehead. Her eyes were obscure behind rain-fogged lenses.

It was raining when they met, Tom recalled, a couple of months ago in the park. She had looked different then. Less tired. Less frightened.

She regarded him warily, then crossed the pavement.

He touched her wet shoulders.

She hesitated, then came into his arms.

“He was dead, Tom,” she said. “He was just lying there dead.”

“I know.”

“Oh, God. I need to sleep. I need to sleep a long, long time.”

She moved toward the lobby; he restrained her with his hands. “Joyce, you can’t. It’s not safe in there.”

She pulled away. He felt a sudden tension in her body, as if she were bracing herself for some new horror. “What are you talking about?”

“The thing—the man who killed Lawrence—I believe he meant to kill me. He must know about this place by now.”

“I don’t understand this.” She balled her fists. “What are you saying, that you know who killed Lawrence?”

“Joyce, it’s too much to explain.”

“He wasn’t stabbed, Tom. He wasn’t shot. He was burned open. It’s indescribable. There was a big hole burned into him. Do you know about that?”

“We can talk when we’ve found a safe place.”

“There’s no end to this, is there? Oh, shit, Tom. I’ve seen way too much ugliness tonight. Don’t tell me this shit. You don’t have to go inside if you don’t want to. But I need to sleep.”

“Listen, listen to me. If you spend the night in that apartment you could come out like Lawrence. I don’t want it to be that way but that’s the way it is.”

She looked at him fiercely … then her anger seemed to subside, swallowed up in an immense exhaustion. She might have been crying. Tom couldn’t tell, with the rain and all.

She said, “I thought I loved you! I don’t even know what you are!”

“Let me take you somewhere.”

“What do you mean, somewhere?”

“A long way from here. I’ve got a car waiting and I’ve got a friend inside. Please, Joyce.”

Archer put his head out the window of the Ford, shouting against the hiss of the rain—the words were unintelligible– then ducked back inside and revved the engine.

Tom felt his heart bump in his chest. He pulled Joyce toward the car.

She resisted and would have turned back, but a smoking gash opened in the concrete stoop a few inches from her hand. Tom looked at the blackened stone for a few dumb seconds before its significance registered. Some kind of weapon had done this: some kind of ray gun. This was ludicrous but quite terrifying. Archer leaned over the seat and jacked open the rear door of the car; Tom pushed Joyce toward it. She didn’t push back this time but was too shocked to coordinate her legs. She tumbled inside with Tom behind her, a motion that seemed endless, and the rain came down on the metal roof with a sound like gunfire.

Archer lunged his rental Ford into the street before Tom could close the door. He committed a 180-degree turn that left V-shaped skids on the wet asphalt, tires shrieking.

As the car rotated Tom caught a glimpse of the man who had tried to kill him.

If “man” was the word.

Not human, Tom thought.

Or, if human, then buried under some apparatus, a snoutlike headpiece, an old cloth coat humped across his back, oily in the rain and the glare of a streetlight.

His eyes were aimed at Tom through the rear window of the car. Nothing showed of his face except a wide, giddy smile … gone a moment later as Archer fishtailed the Ford around a corner.

They abandoned the car on a desolate street near Tompkins Square.

The sky seemed faintly brighter. The rain had slackened a little but the gutters were running and dark water dripped from the torn awning over the lobby of the tenement building which contained the tunnel.

Tom touched his shoulder, where a ferocious pain had just begun: a reflection or glancing shot from the marauder’s weapon had blistered a wide patch of skin there.

The three of them stood a moment in the empty lobby.

Tom said, “The last time we came this way there was something in the tunnel—”

“A time ghost,” Archer said. “They’re not real dangerous. So I’m told.”

Tom doubted this but let it pass. “Doug, what if he comes after us? There’s nothing stopping him, is there?” He kept an arm around Joyce, who was dazed and passive against his shoulder.

“He might,” Archer admitted. “But we know what to expect now. He can’t take us by surprise. The house is a fortress; be prepared—you might not recognize it.”

“This isn’t over,” Tom interpreted.

“No,” Archer said. “It isn’t over.”

“Then we ought to hurry.”

Tom led the way into the basement, over the heaped rubble and down an empty space into the future.