Last Year

by Robert Charles Wilson

  He unscrewed the lid of the thermos bottle. The lid did double-duty as a cup. It was made of plastic, the City people’s material of choice for trivial things. The lid was small in Jesse’s large hands, as if he were drinking from a thimble. But the coffee was pleasant and hot.

  At this distance the City dominated the horizon. Its towers sparkled like twin escarpments of mica-flecked granite, the wall a varicolored reef at the foot of them. He watched an omnibus full of tourists exit the City on a paved road, headed for the eastern pastures where the buffalo were corralled and Wild West shows were sometimes staged. The paved road paralleled Jesse’s trail at a distance of a few hundred yards, and as the bus passed he saw the passengers peering out. Wealthy people from the future. Men and women with complexions of all hues, sitting companionably with one another as the amplified voice of the driver droned out facts about the prairie. If the tourists noticed Jesse they would have registered only his uniform. Just another City employee, to be ignored—although had they known a little more about him, they might have considered him an artifact almost as interesting as the buffalo. Step up, all you ladies in short pants, you beardless men. Bring your squabbling, spoiled children, too. See the Man from the Past. See the untrammeled syphilitic drifter of the Golden West.

  The bus rolled on and out of sight. Jesse savored the silence once more, until the pager on his belt chimed, a sound that never failed to startle him.

  The message on the screen was another summons to Mr. Booking’s office.

  Jesse sighed and called his shift supervisor to report his position so another man could come out and finish riding the fence. Then he poured out his coffee on the untrammeled prairie, brushed a ladybug off the seat of the motor cart, and drove back to the City.

  * * *

  Booking’s office hadn’t changed, except that the woman who had escorted Jesse to Grant’s room last night, Elizabeth DePaul, occupied one of the spare chairs. She gave Jesse a long, indecipherable stare.

  “Have a seat,” Booking said. “President Grant spoke to us about his meeting with you last night.”

  Jesse searched his memory for any gaffe or revelation that might have provoked this summons or even cost him his job. He could think of a few likely candidates.

  “The president was pleased,” Booking said. “He called you amiable and intelligent. He said he was glad to have had an opportunity to thank you for what you had done for him.”

  “That was good of him.”

  “Well, we happen to agree. You have a fine record, Jesse. This incident has made us wonder whether you aren’t being underutilized in Tower Two. We think it’s time for you to take a step up.”

  “Kind of you to say so. What sort of step up?”

  “Specifically, we’re going to need experienced security personnel for next year’s tours. Hard work but major rewards. Are you interested?”

  Tour security was a coveted job. It might nearly double his income. He nodded.

  “There’s a learning curve, of course, but we’ll have you up to speed by the new year. In the meantime I have a temporary duty assignment for you.”

  “Sir?”

  Booking reached into a desk drawer, took out a small wedge of plastic, and handed it to Jesse.

  Jesse stared at it. It was a pass card, visually identical to the one he already possessed.

  “We’ll need your old card back. You’ll find this one opens a lot more doors. Tower Two and Tower One—the job involves some crossover. Ms. DePaul can explain it to you.”

  “Can she?”

  “She’ll be your supervisor from now on.”

  Everything comes at a price, Jesse thought.

  “Oh, and I put in a call to the supply room. You can pick up a new pair of Oakleys next time you stop by.”

  2

  “I’ll contact you when I need you,” Elizabeth DePaul had told him. “In the meantime, keep your pager handy.”

  Jesse waited the rest of the day. No page. He went to his dormitory room and slept. The bedside clock woke him at six the next morning. No page. He lingered over breakfast in the commissary. Nothing. By ten o’clock he had breezed through a second breakfast and enough coffee to call forth Lazarus. Boredom set in.

  He went to the bank of elevators that serviced the guest floors and slid his new pass card into the slot. His old card would have been instantly rejected. His new one caused the small red light on the card reader to turn green. The elevator door slid open. Jesse stepped inside and touched the button marked MEZZANINE. A recorded female voice said, “You have selected mezzanine.”

  Technically speaking, with the new card, he was permitted to do this. But he had been systematically excluded from the guest zones for years, and it felt like he was committing a trespass. Which made it even more interesting.

  The mezzanine level of Tower Two was a vast rotunda. Its ceiling was three stories tall, a pale blue dome that glowed with the light of hidden electric lamps. In the center of the rotunda was a sort of desk or counter under an illuminated sign that said VISITOR INFORMATION. Other City employees were positioned throughout the rotunda. The employee nearest the elevator banks was a young woman with an immaculately crisp uniform and a fixed smile. She glanced at Jesse as he stepped out, registered his security badge, and lost all interest in him. She was here for guests, not staff.

  The rotunda wasn’t crowded, but it was busier than Jesse had ever seen it. He had visited the mezzanine before—once just before the City opened for business, on a walk-through arranged for employees so they might know what the guests were paying to see, and a few other times on after-hours guard duty. The security personnel who worked the rotunda by daylight were from the future and bunked in Tower One; the same was true of the night shift, but when they were shorthanded they sometimes called up local hires like him. Jesse had taken night duty three times in four years. But the rotunda and the guest galleries were different after business hours, when the lights were dimmed and the gallery displays switched off. By night, this echoing chamber had seemed to Jesse as dark and ominous as a pharaoh’s tomb; by day, it buzzed with life and color.

  The rotunda was the hub of a wheel. Four galleries projected from it like fat spokes: the Gallery of Science and Industry, the Gallery of Twenty-first Century Life, a Gallery of the Arts, and a Guests’ Gallery, which housed food vendors and souvenir shops.

  It hadn’t taken Jesse long to figure out that the mezzanine was really just a sort of inside-out museum. A museum, in that it collected and displayed artifacts of another time; inside out, because its collections depicted the future rather than the past. He had been told the Galleries, with their soft lighting and genial atmosphere, were a way of acclimating guests. Anyone wealthy enough to buy a ticket for a week’s stay at the City would have known at least roughly what he was getting for his money—a glimpse of the future—but the details could be dismayingly strange. It had been a full year after the City’s founding before respectable publications began to admit that people from the twenty-first century had actually contrived to build a kind of vertical resort city on the plains of Illinois—a notion so expansive it barely fit within the compass of a human skull. Skepticism was natural. Derision would have followed, had the City not provided evidence of its claims.

  The City itself was evidence. The Galleries were evidence, a way to ease the passage between the clashing rocks of awe and incredulity. An even more convincing demonstration waited at the far end of the Gallery of Science and Industry. Jesse headed in that direction.

  Grasping the concept of travel in time wasn’t the last hurdle a visitor had to surmount, merely the first. The future represented here was so strange as to be intimidating, and guests were introduced to it one marvel at a time. Once you were comfortable with the mezzanine you could proceed to other levels of the City, where theaters presented moving pictures, where a heated swimming pool made its own waves, where acrobats and musicians imported from the twenty-first century performed on a nightly schedule. It was a lot to a
bsorb, but the guests shuffling through the mezzanine seemed eager enough to absorb it. Jesse moved among them, insulated by his uniform. They were wealthy, and he was not. The women in the crowd wore fine silk bodices with bustles (and Jesse had once lived among women who would have killed, perhaps not just in the figurative sense, to own such things); the men wore waistcoats, frock coats, plain or checkered trousers, wing collars, elegantly knotted ties. Most of the guests appeared to be from the east, but the wealthy of Chicago were prominently represented, and Jesse saw a few less carefully dressed gentlemen who might have made their fortunes out west. There was a sprinkling of likely Englishmen and Frenchmen, too, and one conspicuous southerner in a white cutaway sack coat. City hosts guided visitors in groups through the various galleries, and Jesse followed one of these groups as it entered the Gallery of Science and Industry, hanging back so as not to make himself conspicuous.

  The displays, dioramas, and mounted exhibits were eye-widening but vague on details. That was by design, Jesse knew. The rationale had been explained to him in one of the seminars local employees were required to attend. Too much explicit information about the future would be disorienting; it might also be unfair. In the world today men were laboring to invent a practical electric light, for instance, and the existence of the City of Futurity suggested that their labors weren’t futile; but if the City handed out engineering details, the native inventor of such a light would be made instantly irrelevant; geniuses would die unhallowed and impoverished simply because the City had revealed too much too soon.

  So the Gallery of Science and Industry spoke in generalizations, and the history it portrayed was a shadow in a shadow. Here were horseless carriages, depicted in photographs and displayed behind glass, and claims that these devices would one day dominate the roadways of America, but no hint of whose fortunes might be made or broken by the use of them. Similarly the flying machine: soon to fill the heavens with commerce; soon to transform the art of war. A huge diorama depicted “Aircraft in the Great Wars of the Twentieth Century.” Winged airships hung in motionless combat against a painted sky full of smoke and fire. Guests were free to infer that there would be world-consuming wars in the coming century—but when, or with whom, or with what result, the gallery was careful not to say.

  Static in their displays, the airships looked wonderfully strange but not quite plausible. Jesse walked a circle around something called a jet engine, a full-scale model with sections cut away to display its internal works. Wires, ducts, tubules, rotors; steel, rubber, copper, aluminum. It looked as complex as a Swiss watch, heavy enough to crush a millstone, and about as likely to fly through the air as a blacksmith’s anvil.

  “Might as well be a carnival show,” Jesse heard a guest whisper to his wife. Patience, friend, he thought.

  The group approached the end of the Gallery of Science. One of the final dioramas depicted what looked like a sheet-metal hut on a desert landscape under a black sky, men in white diving suits posed next to it. Men on the moon, supposedly. Next to it was a panoramic photograph of the plains of the planet Mars. The skeptics in the crowd became increasingly vocal, and Jesse understood the sentiment. But he knew what was coming next. These tours were carefully timed.

  “Step this way,” the guide said. The guide wore a City uniform; she was from the future, and judging by the sly smile on her face she enjoyed her work. She used her pass card to open the door at the end of the gallery. A flock of guests followed her onto the outdoor deck of the mezzanine level of Tower Two. Jesse joined them, trying to look as if he had some official business here. The deck—a sort of wide balcony, like the porch of a plantation house—overlooked what City people called the helipad.

  Four stories below and some few hundred yards away, the City helicopter rested on a concrete platform, poised to take flight. The airship flew on a strict schedule, every morning at eleven forty-five, weather permitting. Jesse had seen it fly many times before, but never from this vantage point.

  “Unlike the gallery displays,” the tour guide said, “this is the real thing. Ladies and gentlemen, the marvel of manned flight. Please don’t be frightened by the noise, and please don’t crowd the railing. You’ll be perfectly safe here.”

  She wasn’t joking about the noise. It began almost at once. It was two noises in one, Jesse thought, a bass note that beat in the chest and a metallic whine that rose to a scream. The air around the machine quivered with the heat of its engines. Ponderously, slowly, the airship’s enormous rotary blades began to turn.

  Jesse had learned a few things about the City helicopter from the descriptive plaques in the gallery and from the conversation of Tower One repairmen who occasionally bought meals at the commissary. The airship was called a Sikorsky S-92. The crystalline bubble at the front of it was called the cockpit, and that was where the pilot sat. Behind it was a passenger compartment, which seated twenty. The helicopter was painted blue and white, with the words CITY OF FUTURITY emblazoned in gaudy red letters on the hull. On the near side of the machine was a row of small windows from which the faces of anxious guests peered out.

  Every guest who bought admission to the City was eager to see the famous flying machine, but only a minority ever volunteered to climb inside it.

  “Surely,” a woman said, “it must be too heavy…”

  If she said anything further it was lost in the roar. Heavy the machine undoubtedly was. More than ten tons, loaded. Fifty-six feet stem to stern. The top rotors spanned the same diameter. A team of horses couldn’t pull it. It was frankly absurd to imagine such a thing rising into the air.

  But that was exactly what it did. The rotors grew invisible with the speed of their rotation, raising hurricanes of dust. Even at this distance the wind caused men to put their hands to their hats and women to flatten their skirts. The guests stepped back from the rails, momentarily terrified. Then, engines roaring at maximum pitch, the machine at last parted company with the earth—awkwardly at first; then decisively, ferociously, beating its way into the sky by brute force.

  Jesse guessed this was what the tourists found so dismaying: the unexpected violence of it. The helicopter was a cousin to weapons of war, not birds or kites. It was no more delicate than an artillery emplacement. It leaped on legs of fire and iron. It was a factory for manufacturing elevation, and if its furnaces were banked for even a moment it would plummet from the sky like a monstrous aerolite.

  Jesse felt a hand on his shoulder and turned. The hand belonged to Elizabeth DePaul, who must have come over from Tower One. She was wearing a security uniform with trousers. Her expression was solemn.

  Now that the flying machine was airborne it moved with startling speed. It was already crossing the western properties of the City, and it would fly for forty-five minutes more, darting across the low hills like a steel damselfly before it returned to its base. “We need to talk,” Ms. DePaul said.

  Her face was long and just missed being handsome, but her eyes were unnerving, brown as sand and just as implacable. “You could have paged me.”

  “A little private conversation before we head over to the other tower, all right?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And you don’t need to call me ‘ma’am.’”

  “I don’t know what else to call you.”

  “It’s not the fucking army. Since we’re working together, Elizabeth is fine.”

  A guest overheard the curse and turned to stare at her with slack-jawed astonishment.

  “Maybe we ought to step inside,” Jesse said. “Where we won’t offend the paying customers.” He added, “You can call me Jesse.”

  She nodded at the now-distant helicopter: “You must have seen it fly before.”

  “Often. Never from this angle.”

  “Think you’d like to ride it?”

  “I’d be a whole lot happier not to. I suppose, Elizabeth, where you come from, you rode helicopters like they were horses.”

  “I’ve ridden a few,” she said.

 
; * * *

  Jesse had first seen the City of Futurity when the towers were still under construction. At the time he had been less impressed by the buildings themselves—as impressive as they undoubtedly were—than by the tower cranes that roosted on their steel frames like skeletal birds, lofting buckets of Portland cement with their beaks. The scale of the work was dreamlike, a mechanical ballet across the vault of the sky, but the work itself, he soon learned, was brutally physical. The City men had trained him to help with the simpler tasks, and for months he had hauled lumber and boiled tar, his face burned brown by the Illinois sun, as the towers rose to completion.

  But the most impressive miracle had been in place before he arrived. It was underground, located at the midpoint beneath both towers, and it was called the Mirror. The Mirror was the boundary between present and future. As a local hire he had never been allowed to see it, had never been close to it, had never expected he would see it; but he wondered, with his new pass card, if that had changed.

  “Here’s the deal,” Elizabeth said. “We have to work together, and that’s fine. Booking says you’re a smart guy, and you did a good job with Grant. But once we cross into Tower One, you’re on my turf. So we need to lay down some rules.”

  They rode a service elevator from the mezzanine to a floor below the dormitory level, another part of the City Jesse’s original pass card would never have allowed him to enter. The elevator opened onto a corridor, crude by comparison with the guest floors—pipes and ducts had been plumbed in plain sight along the ceiling—but wide enough for vehicular traffic. A cart adorned with a flashing red light passed by as Elizabeth spoke.