Last Year

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “In any case, I doubt Grant wants a lengthy conversation. They say he’s a pretty tight-lipped kind of guy.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Don’t offend him, don’t volunteer information, and if he asks questions let him know his assigned host or hostess can answer them better than you can.”

  “Sir,” Jesse said.

  “And if he asks about the assailant, tell him our people are handling all that.”

  “All right.”

  “Okay, good,” Booking said. “One more thing, Jesse. If you carry this off the way we hope you will, the City will find a way to show its appreciation.”

  Jesse sensed an opening. “I broke my Oakleys,” he said, “in that scuffle.”

  “Oh? I’m sorry to hear that. Do this right, and we’ll get you a whole crate of Oakleys.”

  * * *

  Jesse showered and changed into his reserve uniform and took himself to the commissary for a meal. There was a line-up at every booth, but Jesse was patient. He spent his chits on fried chicken and French-fried potatoes and a cup of coffee.

  He sat at a table by himself. He could have joined friends, but he had been told not to say anything about his scheduled meeting with Grant, and under the circumstances it would have been hard to make small talk. In any case, the table where the security and housekeeping folks had gathered wasn’t as attractive a destination as it might have been. Doris Vanderkamp was there, paying obvious attention to a lanky, freckled security man named Mick Finagle. Jesse had lately extracted himself from a romantic entanglement with Doris, and he thought she might be trying to make him jealous by fawning over Mick. Jesse had a low opinion of Mick Finagle. And Doris, for all her posturing and covert glances in Jesse’s direction, clearly wasn’t at her best. She was sniffling as if her perennial head cold had come back, and her forehead was beaded with perspiration despite the machine-cooled air. He felt a little sorry for her, a sentiment that would have enraged her had he dared to express it.

  He made quick work of the fried chicken. The commissary’s portions were lamentably small, and he often went back for seconds, but it was getting near the end of the month, and if he spent all his food chits he would have to resort to cash, which he didn’t want to do. What he could afford was a second cup of coffee. He bought one and sipped it slowly, watching the clock above the elevator bank, until a City woman in trousers showed up to escort him to President Grant’s quarters.

  It was a well-known fact that women from the future often wore trousers. It had been remarked on in all the papers, especially since tour groups had begun visiting Manhattan and San Francisco. Visitors didn’t mingle with locals even there, but they were visible as they moved through the streets, and the presence of women in trousers was impossible to ignore. A few unctuous churchmen had condemned the practice. Victoria Woodhull, the notorious female-rights campaigner, had expressed her approval. Most commentators took the generous view that customs vary not just from place to place but from age to age, and that these novel forms of dress said more about changing customs than they did about morality or propriety. Jesse agreed, he supposed, though he had met enough City people to convince him that their morals might be almost as fluid as their fashion.

  What surprised him about this woman was not her trousers as such but the fact that she was wearing them in Tower Two. Tower Two employees were issued uniforms designed not to shock sensitive guests, including skirts for females. So this was someone from the other tower, dressed according to its rules. The woman’s name, her badge said, was Elizabeth DePaul.

  Whatever her assignment—and Jesse guessed it was more than just escorting him to Grant’s quarters—she seemed slightly bored by it. Her face was well formed but plain. Her dark hair was cut to a masculine length. She was nearly as tall as Jesse, thickset but not in any way ungainly. Nor was she demure. Her gaze was frank and unflinching. Her badge said CITY SECURITY.

  “Good work on the rope line this afternoon,” she said.

  Her accent was flat as well water and Jesse couldn’t gauge her sincerity. “Thank you,” he said.

  “Seriously. I saw the video. You had the weapon out of the bad guy’s hand before anyone noticed.”

  “Well, not quite. President Grant noticed.”

  “There’s that. Are you looking forward to meeting him?”

  “I expect we’ll exchange a few words, that’s all.” And then I can go back downstairs, Jesse thought, and have a beer. The commissary allowed the sale of beer to employees between the hours of six and ten. He wasn’t ordinarily a drinker, and the price of City beer had almost made a temperance man of him, but the occasion seemed to justify the expense. He asked Elizabeth DePaul whether she would be joining him for his conversation with Grant.

  “Me? No. Though I wouldn’t mind getting a look at him. See what he’s like when he’s not decorating a fifty-dollar bill.”

  Jesse failed to understand the reference but let it pass. “Have you talked to the gunman?”

  “Not my department.”

  “He’s just a lunatic with a grievance,” Jesse said, “I imagine.”

  “I wouldn’t care to speculate.”

  The elevator opened on the highest of the guest floors, where Grant had been assigned the biggest suite with the grandest view. Four City people waited in the corridor. Jesse recognized his boss, Mr. Booking. The others were unfamiliar to him. Prominent among them was a gray-haired man of maybe fifty years, wearing civilian clothes rather than a City uniform. The others seemed to defer to him. But no one bothered to make introductions. Elizabeth DePaul pointed in the opposite direction: “That way,” she said. There was only one door at the end of the corridor. “Go ahead and knock. He’s expecting you. We’ll be here when you come out.”

  * * *

  Grant’s second term as president would be ending soon, and Jesse wondered whether he might secretly be happy to leave office. It had been a rough seven years—rough years for everyone, especially since the crash of ’73; therefore politically difficult for Grant. The railroad scandals had reached all the way into the White House, and his tenure in office had not achieved all he had hoped or promised. He had promised a reconstructed South—what he got were serial lynchings and the Ku Klux Klan. He had promised peace with the Indians—what he got were Crazy Horse, trouble with the Nez Percé, and the Little Bighorn.

  But he was still the hero of Appomattox, the man who saved the Union, and Jesse could not imagine what to say to him or even how to address him. He knocked, and Grant opened the door. The two men stared at each other. Grant seemed speechless. Finally Jesse murmured, “Your Excellency, I was told you wanted to see me?”

  “Jesse Cullum.” Grant put out his hand, and Jesse shook it. “Please come in.” Jesse stepped into the room and Grant closed the door behind him. “Sit down. No need for formal address, Mr. Cullum. I’ve noticed strangers often prefer to call me ‘General,’ and it doesn’t displease me.”

  “Thank you, General.”

  The room was plush. Jesse’s duties had occasionally taken him into Tower Two guest rooms, so he knew how this one compared. The furniture was of the future: finely made but almost aggressively plain. The window was almost as large as the one in Booking’s office. Beyond the flawless glass, dusk had turned the western sky blood-red. Jesse imagined he could see as far as Montana by the fading light. Maybe the State of Oregon, if he stood on his tiptoes.

  “Mrs. Grant is out taking supper with one of our hosts. She knows nothing of the events in the courtyard, by the way. And given that no shot was fired, I prefer to keep it that way. You’ll forgive me for not introducing you to her. But I wanted to thank you personally for what you did on my behalf.”

  “I took away a man’s gun, that’s all.”

  “Your modesty is commendable. In any case, I think Mrs. Grant feels easier away from the window.”

  “The view makes some guests dizzy at first, but they usually grow accustomed to it.”

  “Yes, and I expect
she will, and I will, too, but just now I feel like a swallow nesting on a cliff.”

  “May I draw the drapes for you?”

  “Please, if you can—it’s not obvious to me how they operate. How long have you worked here, Mr. Cullum?”

  Jesse tugged the rod that rotated the vertical blinds. “Going on four years.”

  “From the earliest days, then. May I ask how you came to be employed at the City of Futurity?”

  “It was an accident, more or less. I was traveling east from San Francisco and I had to leave the train unexpectedly.” Because he had foregone the formality of buying a ticket, but he left that part out. “Futurity Station didn’t even have a name in those days. It was just another coaling depot out in the middle of nowhere. I meant to head toward Chicago on foot, but my directions were bad. The next day I saw a plume of dust from the construction site and showed up looking for food and water. The people here fed me and offered me work.”

  “Just like that?”

  “The City people weren’t looking for publicity until the major construction was finished. They figured I’d be more use to them as a hired hand than I would be spreading stories about what I’d seen. The road you came by from the station? I was part of the crew that laid it down.”

  “And a fine road it is, though it pales by comparison with what lies at the end of it. Of course I’ve read a great deal in the papers about the City of Futurity. The testimony is unimpeachable, but the reality of it is so much more…” Grant groped for a word and gave up: “Real. You must have seen many marvels in your time here.”

  Jesse tried to imagine how this room must seem to Grant. The electric lights and the switches that controlled them, the cool air flowing from ceiling vents, the thermostat to adjust the temperature. The explanatory notes printed on paper and affixed to the walls: how to lock and unlock the door, how to summon an elevator, the finer points of indoor plumbing. A button for summoning a City host or hostess, if the instructions proved inadequate. “What seems to impress visitors most,” Jesse said, “is the airship.”

  Grant winced. “I’ve seen photographs. And I’ve been invited to ride it. And not just me, but Julia as well, if she can be convinced. Is the thing as safe as they claim?”

  “I’ve seen it go up and down hundreds of times without any problem.”

  “Though I suppose the greatest marvel is that these things have come among us at all, from a place that is and isn’t the future. Do you understand it, Mr. Cullum, the story of where these people come from?”

  “I would never claim to understand it, General. They say there is a whole sheaf of worlds, and that the City people have learned to travel from one to another. They live on one stalk in the sheaf and journey to nearby stalks. But for the traveler, all those stalks look like the past.” Jesse felt himself blushing at his own incoherence. No, he did not understand it. “I imagine they’ll explain it to you better in the orientation session.”

  “We are their past, but they do not necessarily represent our future. That’s what the brochure says.”

  “I guess the brochure’s right.”

  “I value your opinion precisely because it’s not printed in a brochure. All these mechanical marvels are impressive, but I wonder about the nature of the people themselves. You must know many of them.”

  “They prefer to keep us separate. But some mixing does go on.”

  “As employers, have they treated you well?”

  “Yes, sir. They cured me.” He spoke without thinking, then realized with dismay that Grant was waiting for him to continue. “When they hired me on, you see, the first thing they did was send me to the City clinic—sort of a miniature hospital with a half dozen doctors on duty. At the time I was suffering from … well, it’s not easy to discuss. Being a military man, I guess you’ve had experience of camp sicknesses among your troops.”

  What Jesse could not bring himself to say was that he had arrived at the clinic barely able to pass urine without shrieking like a cat with its tail on fire. Grant cleared his throat and said, “I take your meaning.”

  “Sir, they cured that. And not with a syringe full of nitrate of silver. They gave me pills. They said I had other conditions that weren’t so obvious, and they cured those, too. They gave me injections to the arm that made me impervious to rubeola and smallpox and other diseases whose names I can’t recall. So, yes, I can testify that they treated me well. For all I know they may have saved my life.”

  Jesse wondered if he had said too much. For a few moments Grant seemed plunged in thought. “That is a marvel,” he said at last. “I hope they can be convinced to share the secret of these cures.”

  “They plan to do so. I’ve heard it discussed.”

  “Perhaps they should have shared it when they first arrived. Many lives might have been saved already.”

  “Yes, sir, but who would have believed them? Who believed the City was anything more than a trumped-up Barnum show, those first few months? Now that the skeptics are routed, it begins to become possible. You know 1877 is the last year of the City, before they close the Mirror and go home. They say, in the last year, they’ll be even more frank and forthcoming.”

  “Now that they’ve prepared the ground.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Grant tugged at the sleeve of his woolen suit. Even now, with all the weight he’d gained since Appomattox, he looked as if he’d be more comfortable in a Union uniform. Or maybe his restlessness meant Jesse had overstayed his welcome. But he couldn’t politely leave until he was dismissed.

  Grant said, “And have they made moral progress, too? Are they better than us, or just cleverer?”

  It was a dangerous question. “Hard to say, General. The ones I’ve met, they seem … I don’t know how to describe it. There’s a kind of bonelessness about them. The women in particular seem insolent, almost louche—I’ve heard them swear like infantrymen. But they’re capable of great tenderness and intelligence. The men aren’t dishonorable, but they don’t seem to think much of honor in general, as an abstraction I mean. When I first came here many of them struck me as effeminate or unserious.”

  “They struck you that way at first, but not any longer?”

  “Well, they have a saying: The past is a different country; they do things differently there. Which I figure cuts both ways. You don’t expect an Irishman to comport himself like a Chinaman, so why should we expect City people to behave just as we do?”

  “In matters of custom, surely, but in matters of moral duty…”

  “I’m not sure I’m qualified to render judgment in that department. They don’t seem especially better or worse than the rest of us.”

  “Not more generous?”

  “They’ve been generous to me, certainly. But visitors don’t get into the City for free, do they? The price is paid in gold and silver, and all that gold and silver goes straight to the so-called future, where it lines somebody’s pocket. How they came here is difficult to understand; what they want of us is not.”

  “Well.” Grant stood up. “Once again I thank you, Mr. Cullum. Not just for your conduct this afternoon but for your forthright conversation.”

  “You have a keen eye, sir, to have spotted the pistol.”

  “I saw it briefly and from a distance—more the reach than the gun itself, though I had the impression it was unusual.”

  “I only handled it a moment myself. But yes, it was one of theirs.”

  “Not a Colt?”

  “No, sir—whatever it was, it was not a Colt.”

  “That surprises me. Because your employers told me it was a Colt.”

  Jesse very carefully said nothing.

  “I suppose they were mistaken,” Grant said.

  “I suppose they were.”

  Jesse shook the president’s hand again and made his exit.

  * * *

  The next morning Jesse was scheduled to ride the perimeter fence. Fence-riding was lonely duty but he enjoyed it, at least when the weather was d
ecent.

  The City of Futurity possessed many walls and fences, many boundaries. The most significant and least visible of these boundaries was the Mirror itself, deep underground: a wall (and at times a doorway) between present and future. Then there were the walls that separated Tower One from Tower Two. And surrounding these, the massive concrete wall that enclosed the City itself.

  But the City was situated in a much vaster track of land, purchased by proxy and demarked by a fence of steel wire mesh. The fence served multiple purposes. It prevented curiosity-seekers from mobbing the City walls. It kept hucksters and frauds from setting up booths or buildings within sight of guests. It allowed the City to make the land available to visitors from the future as a specimen of “the untrammeled tallgrass prairie”—apparently all such landscapes would be “trammeled” in the years to come. And it enclosed a herd of American buffalo for the same reason: The buffalo were due for a trammeling, too.

  The attractions of the City were so great, and the price of admission so high, that it was not surprising that unscrupulous people occasionally attempted to climb or cut the fence. Which meant it had to be regularly inspected and repaired; which meant Jesse was up before dawn, signing out a mechanical cart from the horseless-vehicle barn. By the time the sun breached the horizon he was mounted on a three-wheeled self-propelled vehicle and passing through one of the gates in the City wall and out into the grassland.

  The chill of the morning was a reminder that autumn was approaching, but the lingering wisps of ground fog vanished at the first touch of sunlight. The sky was as blue as a robin’s egg, and when he reached the fence the air had grown warm, and grasshoppers flew from the wheels of the cart in brown flurries. From there Jesse followed a pressed-earth trail that followed the fence, humming a tune to himself, stopping occasionally to inspect a dubious weld or a suspicious gopher hole. He was orbiting the City at a radius of roughly a mile, and by noon he had not detected any irregularities worth reporting. He stopped the cart, stood to stretch his legs, pulled off his jacket and hung it on the handlebar of the three-wheeled vehicle. He took a bagged lunch from the carry-box at the back of the cart (a sandwich from the commissary, coffee in a thermos bottle) and ate sitting sidesaddle on the padded seat. It felt good to be out of the labyrinth of the City for a day, away from its tuneless hums and whispers. Out here, only the bugs were humming. His own breath sounded loud in his ears.