Last Year

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “Rule one, don’t be a tourist. Don’t rubberneck. You don’t want to be staring at everything like a newb. Whatever you see, pretend to be unimpressed.”

  He wasn’t entirely ignorant of what went on in Tower One. It was common knowledge among local hires that when workers from Tower One took meals at the commissary in Tower Two, a person at an adjoining table might overhear a few words of their conversation. By that method Jesse had discerned some interesting truths about the forbidden parts of the City, including the Mirror. The Mirror, people said, was as tall as a five-story building, and it had been given its name because its surface reflected light, except when objects or people were passing through, at which time it became transparent. It opened a passage between filaments of time—but what engine could power such a machine, what furnaces were stoked to drive it? It was never discussed.

  He saw a sign that said ACCESS TO ALL MIRROR LEVELS, but Elizabeth passed it without turning.

  “Rule two,” Elizabeth said, “don’t ask for explanations and don’t speak unless you’re spoken to.”

  They reached a concrete bulkhead in which a steel door had been set. A sign said, OBSERVE ALL TOWER ONE PROTOCOLS BEYOND THIS POINT. Elizabeth dipped her pass card in a slot and the door sighed open.

  “And stay with me,” she said. “Don’t wander off. We have a meeting in exactly one hour with August Kemp.”

  August Kemp: a man whose name was familiar to everyone at the City, even low-status locals like Jesse. Kemp was the twenty-first-century financier who controlled the company that had built the City of Futurity. Kemp crossed the Mirror at will, and he had made himself familiar to the powerful and the wealthy of this world—just this summer he had dined in Manhattan with Jay Gould and John D. Rockefeller, and in San Francisco with Leland Stanford and Mark Hopkins. The idea of a personal meeting with August Kemp seemed as implausible to Jesse as the prospect of shaking hands with the king of the moon.

  “Okay?” she said. “Is that copacetic?”

  He had no idea what she was talking about. “Yes,” he said.

  * * *

  He followed Elizabeth to another bank of elevators and up a couple of levels to the staff commissary of Tower One. At first glance it could have been mistaken for the commissary of Tower Two. Same windowless enclosed space, many tables, plastic chairs. Similar booths housing similar food vendors, though there seemed to be a greater variety of them. “I’m due for lunch,” she said. “Are you hungry?”

  He was. But the booths appeared to be set up for cash, not chits. And the cash changing hands was a specie not familiar to him. “I guess I’ll do without.”

  “Are you sure? It’s on my dime.”

  “Well, that’s generous. Thank you—I’ll have whatever you’re having.”

  “Bento box and a Coke?”

  He nodded, though he wasn’t sure she was actually speaking English. She ordered from a booth called California Sushi, and the box she gave him contained contrivances of rice and fish, mainly. He carried his tray to an empty table, and Elizabeth sat opposite him.

  He unwrapped his utensils. “Chopsticks,” he said, surprised.

  “You can get a fork if you want.”

  “No need.” He sampled a ball of rice.

  “Where’d you learn to handle chopsticks?”

  “I’m from San Francisco. We don’t lack for Chinamen or chopsticks. Is this supposed to be Chinese food?”

  “Japanese. Sort of. Fast-food sushi. And ‘Chinamen’ is offensive, FYI.” She mixed soy sauce with a green paste and dipped a rice roll in it. Jesse did the same. The paste was a kind of mustard, apparently. He managed to chew and swallow without breaking into tears.

  He apologized for “Chinamen”—he knew better; it had been covered in his orientation course. The word was commonplace, but it risked offending visitors from the future.

  “So,” Elizabeth said, “maybe you can guess why we’re going to see August Kemp.”

  He was distracted by an overhead video screen. Several such screens were suspended from the ceiling of the commissary, and all of them were showing a baseball game. At least, Jesse guessed it was baseball. The diamond looked right, though the catcher wore a mask and the game was played in a stadium that dwarfed the Roman Colosseum.

  Elizabeth sighed theatrically. “What did I tell you about staring?”

  “Sorry.” He was tempted to call her ma’am, just to antagonize her.

  “I was saying, maybe you can guess what this is all about.”

  “It’s about the attempt on Grant.”

  “Right. You handled the incident really well. If the guy had pulled the trigger, we would have had a major shitstorm on our hands. Worst case, a dead president, federal investigators knocking at the gate, a major hit to the revenue stream, maybe even an early shutdown. As it stands, no shots were fired and we have the shooter in custody. He’s a local, by the way. Some douchebag who’s still angry at Grant for taking Richmond. The important thing is, you saved Kemp a boatload of money and rescued him from a potential scandal. Which makes you a very shiny object in his eyes. You know about Kemp, right? Majority shareholder and CEO, the big boss, you came to his attention, he’s favorably disposed toward you, and that’s why you’re moving up in the world. All good, except for one detail.”

  “The pistol,” Jesse said. “They told Grant it was a Colt. But it wasn’t.”

  “The weapon was a Glock 19 with a full clip, most definitely not local.”

  “And why is that a problem?”

  “Because the shooter came into the City with the most recent batch of local guests, only a few hours before Grant himself. We have him on camera for pretty much every second after he passed through the gate. He didn’t interact with anybody, didn’t go anywhere unusual. So the question is, where did he get the gun? As far as we can tell, it was already in his possession. But they don’t sell Glocks in Shitstain, Missouri, or wherever he hails from. So we need to know how he obtained it.”

  “You’re saying the pistol was smuggled out of the City somehow, delivered to the gunman, and the gunman carried it back in.”

  “That’s one possibility.”

  “So he must have had collaborators.”

  “Most likely, yes. I’ve been asked to find out. The investigation will have to look both ways, inside the City and outside of it. And in the conduct of the investigation, it could be useful to have help from someone who’s both reliable and native to 1876. Specifically, you.”

  “I see. Well, I appreciate your confidence.”

  “I’m kind of agnostic on the subject, to be honest. In other words, yeah, if we set foot outside the gate you might be helpful to me. But until then—and especially here in Tower One—I need to be the one calling the shots. That’s the arrangement, and I hope you’re okay with it.”

  “I’m okay with it.”

  Jesse guessed she had said everything she had meant to say at that point, because the conversation lapsed into an awkward silence. He went to work on the remaining contents of his bento box. After a while Elizabeth looked at her watch. And Jesse looked at his. Their appointment with Kemp was still a half hour away. She said, “So, uh, you’re from San Francisco?”

  “Yes.” Because she seemed to expect more from him, he said, “I was born in New Orleans, but my father took me west at a young age.” She nodded and said nothing. If this was supposed to be polite conversation, she was no better at it than he was. “So where do you hail from, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “Born in Minneapolis, but my folks moved to North Carolina. I joined the army when I turned nineteen. After I left active duty I settled in Charlotte and started working private security.”

  “You were a soldier?”

  “Yeah.”

  “A soldier in a war?”

  “I’m not sure how much I ought to say about that. The rules are kind of relaxed between us, but … well, okay, yeah. In a war. What about you?”

  “I was eight years old at the time of Fi
rst Manassas. My father was eligible but didn’t like to pick sides. That’s why he headed for San Francisco, where he couldn’t be called up.”

  “How did you end up working for the City?”

  “I was thrown off a train,” he said.

  Up on the television screen, a batter wearing a Red Sox jersey hit a ball into a fielder’s enormous glove. Third out. The teams traded places. The game, Jesse discerned from fleeting captions, was being played in Boston. It was a cloudy day in the Boston of the future. Elsewhere in that world, perhaps, female soldiers were riding helicopters and firing Glock 19s. But Boston seemed peaceable enough.

  “Oh, shit,” Elizabeth said (and it was certainly true, Jesse reflected, that she had a soldier’s vocabulary). He looked away from the baseball game and saw two men in security uniforms approaching from the direction of the elevator banks. “Castro and Dekker,” she said, scowling.

  “Enemies of yours?”

  “Not enemies so much as just assholes.”

  The man in front, Elizabeth said, was Castro—he was big and well-fed, and he filled his uniform to capacity. Dekker was even bigger. His head was shaved to stubble, and his grin suggested he was the ringleader of the two. “Liz!” Dekker called out. “Is this your new partner?”

  Elizabeth showed him the middle finger of her right hand.

  “So your partner’s a local,” Dekker said, undaunted. He turned to Jesse. “Is this your first time in Tower One?”

  Jesse met the man’s eyes. “It is.”

  “I saw you looking at the game. You like baseball?”

  “I’ve never played it.”

  “They got fiber-optic cables strung through the Mirror so we can watch in real time. Red Sox versus the Orioles. Hey, Castro, you’re a baseball geek. Do they have baseball here in 1876?”

  “Sure,” Castro said. “But different leagues and shit. Teams like, you know, the White Stockings or the Red Caps. Knickerbocker rules. No night games.”

  “No instant replays,” Dekker said. “Right, chief?”

  Jesse shrugged.

  “So how do you like Tower One?”

  “I haven’t seen much more of it than this table.”

  “I bet you wish you could see the real thing, though. Step through the Mirror into the glorious future, am I right?”

  No, you are not right, Jesse thought. For one thing, it never happened. A wealthy local could buy a ticket to Tower Two for a peek at things to come, but that was as far as he’d get. A few local hires found their way into Tower One, usually as entertainers or servants. But cross the Mirror into their world? No one had ever managed such a feat—as far as Jesse knew, no one had ever tried. “I don’t give it much thought.”

  “Bullshit,” Dekker said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Bullshit you don’t give it much thought. I never met a local who didn’t lie awake wondering about it.”

  “Like wetbacks,” Castro said. “Sneak into the twenty-first century, get a job at Swift or Tyson.”

  “Mirrorbacks,” Dekker said, laughing. “Except we have a perfect fence. Sorry, bro, but this is as close as you’ll ever get to the World of the Future.”

  “My name’s not bro.”

  “I don’t really give a shit about your name.”

  Jesse stood up.

  “Whoa,” Dekker said. “You’re pretty big for a local, but you don’t want to be getting in my face here.”

  Jesse put out his open right hand. “My name’s Jesse Cullum.”

  Dekker was clearly startled. It took him a moment to comprehend that he was being offered a handshake. Then his grin came back. He accepted the offer. Enthusiastically. More than enthusiastically. Jesse felt as if he’d put his hand into a laundry mangle, but he managed not to show it. He squeezed Dekker’s hand in return. “Elizabeth,” Jesse said, “do you think I’d lose my job if I knocked Mr. Dekker down?”

  “Unfortunately, yes.”

  “In that case, Mr. Dekker, I’ll just ask you to excuse us. Ms. DePaul and I have business to conduct elsewhere.”

  Dekker’s grin had become an outright sneer. His friend Castro was trying not to laugh.

  Elizabeth stood up. “He’s right, Dekker. We have to go. You can compare dicks some other time.”

  Dekker released Jesse’s nearly lifeless hand and leaned toward Jesse’s ear. “We’ll see who gets knocked down.”

  “At your pleasure,” Jesse said. “Chief.”

  “And by the way, your partner? It’s not ‘Ms. DePaul.’ It’s Mrs. DePaul. She’s married, didn’t she tell you that?”

  “Dekker, you’re such an asswipe,” Mrs. DePaul said.

  * * *

  They took a staff elevator from the commissary level. As soon as the doors closed, Elizabeth said, “Dekker never fails to mention my husband.”

  “It’s none of my business.”

  “Because my husband’s in prison. Five years on a trafficking charge.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. But it’s still none of my business.”

  “Dekker likes to use it against me, like it’s some big secret or something.”

  “Your husband’s crimes, whatever they may have been, surely don’t reflect on you.”

  “Why did you offer to shake his hand, by the way? Dekker’s completely steroidal. He could have broken bones.”

  “It seemed like the gentlemanly thing.”

  “You might want to save that behavior for actual gentlemen.”

  The elevator stopped at one of the guest levels. A half dozen women in identical cuirass bodices and ruffled skirts stepped inside, probably waitresses or barmaids. Locals, by the sound of their voices. Jesse knew that such employees were well paid, often hired away from places like Thompson’s Restaurant in Chicago or Delmonico’s in New York City. “Afternoon, ladies,” he said.

  Some of them giggled, not especially politely. They scorned his western vowels, he guessed, or the way he carried himself. “You’re a long way from Tower Two,” a redheaded one said.

  About a thousand yards. But she was right. It was a long thousand yards.

  “Is it true,” the woman asked, “General Grant’s visiting?”

  “Yes, ma’am, he is. I saw him myself.”

  “Enjoying a taste of the future. Where women and niggers can vote and gal-boys can marry each other.” She winked at Jesse. “You may be an old hand in Tower Two, but you’re just a pie-eater over here. Be careful till you get your bearings.”

  The waitresses left the elevator at another level.

  “Is that true?” Jesse asked.

  “Which part?”

  “Who can vote and all. Where you come from.”

  “Women vote. African-Americans vote. And you don’t have to be straight to get married.”

  “Straight?”

  “Heterosexual. Boy-girl.”

  Jesse was still pondering that when they reached the administration floor.

  * * *

  Something about Elizabeth DePaul made Jesse think of horses.

  Not in an insulting way. She wasn’t big or ugly, though she wasn’t small, nor was she pretty in the polished manner of the waitresses he had encountered in the elevator. But she had the dignity of a well-bred horse. A certain horsey implacability. Brown eyes that seemed to express a cynicism born of bitter experience. And beneath that, a pride that was neither false nor self-flattering. He had seen that combination of traits before, in some of the Tenderloin women among whom he had grown up, and he had learned to recognize it even in the faces of strangers, especially the strangers who eked out a living in the streets south of Broadway and north of Market. It was a survivor’s look. Such people were useful and dangerous, often in equal parts.

  And she was a soldier. According to the dioramas of Tower Two, the twenty-first century was a land of marvels. But, by inference, it was also a world that contained wars. And prisons, if Elizabeth was to be believed; and prisoners; and prisoners’ wives.

  Like the commissary, the admini
stration level of Tower One was a replica of the same level in Tower Two: the same tiled floors and subdivided offices, the same gentle sound of tapped keyboards and cool air hissing from concealed ducts. Clerical workers looked up as Jesse and Elizabeth passed, and a few of them were startled enough to look twice, though they were too well trained to stare. What exactly was it, Jesse wondered, that made him so conspicuously a local? He felt like a belled cat.

  He followed Elizabeth to the office where August Kemp and the Tower One security administrator were waiting. It was a big office, and it housed a big desk, and several plush chairs and a sofa. The window was like the window in Tower Two, except that it looked east. Outside, ominous clouds tumbled across the sky. Far below, in a sward of mottled green, the City’s captive buffalo huddled in anticipation of rain.

  Both men stood up as Elizabeth and Jesse entered. The man behind the desk was the Tower One security chief, Elizabeth’s boss. He was a dark-skinned man of middle age with a hawkish face and fiercely observant eyes, and his name was Barton. “Please sit,” he said crisply.

  Jesse and Elizabeth stationed themselves on the sofa. August Kemp remained standing.

  Kemp was not what Jesse had expected. In Jesse’s experience wealthy men tended to wear their authority in plain sight, an expectation of obedience as conspicuous as a Sunday hat. August Kemp was the right age for such a man: hard to tell with future people, but Jesse pegged him at fifty years or more by the grain of his skin. But he was lean as a whippet hound and tan as a cowherd, and his clothes seemed not only informal but unserious: denim trousers and a shirt on which pictures of tropical fruit were printed. His white hair was abundant, and he wore it loosely. His teeth were conspicuously perfect. He displayed them in a broad smile.

  “Mr. Cullum, I don’t want to embarrass you with praise for your handling of the apparent attempt on President Grant’s life. I understand the president has already thanked you, and you know you have the gratitude of the City of Futurity.”

  “Yes, sir, I appreciate that,” Jesse said.

  “The gunman is in custody, and we’ve had time to interrogate him. Mr. Barton can fill you in on the details.”