Last Year

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “Disappointing,” Jesse said, though he couldn’t imagine what else she had expected from an itinerant peddler.

  Mrs. Standridge turned in her chair and looked at Jesse as if he were the one who had disappointed her. “The point is, I accept your offer. Yes, you can escort me back to the City. The sooner the better.”

  * * *

  Jesse had been hunting runners for the first few months of 1877.

  His bosses at the City had given him the assignment, ostensibly as a reward for his work with Elizabeth, also as a way to make profitable use of his skills and to get him away from Tower Two, where he was still viewed with suspicion. As it turned out, he liked the work. In those few months he had seen more of the country than he had ever expected to, and the constant travel was usefully distracting. It tired him out and helped him sleep.

  “Runners” were people from the future who booked passage on one of the City’s excursions and jumped ship, generally with the aim of staying permanently in this century. Such people couldn’t be compelled to return—the City had no such legal authority in the America of 1877—but they could be offered a last chance at a ticket home without sanction, if they could be found. Most runners were like Mrs. Standridge, imaginative individuals acting out of romantic illusions; most, like Mrs. Standridge, were happy to accept a reprieve from the reality they had been forced to confront. That was true even of the less idealistic runners, the ones who planned to make a fortune by “inventing” some device they had read about in a history book or investing in a commercial stock they knew would improve. As a rule, the practical aspects of the question confounded them. Or they came to understand that the money they had hoped to earn wouldn’t buy them, in this century, anything they really wanted.

  There were rare exceptions. In the weeks before he set off to retrieve Mrs. Standridge, Jesse had been sent after a runner named Weismann who had been frequenting saloons in the Germantown district of New York City. Weismann was a man in his fifties, older than most runners, grim-faced and morbidly serious, and according to the City’s hired detectives he had been haunting these dives for the purpose of suborning a murder.

  Jesse tracked him to a barroom near the Stadt Theater, where he went to Weismann’s table and introduced himself as a City agent. Weismann merely nodded. “All right,” he said. “Sit down, Mr. Cullum. I won’t go back to the City with you, but I can buy you a beer.”

  “Thank you,” Jesse said, sitting. The saloon was a basement establishment, lit with old nautical lanterns that did little more than insult the darkness, and the sawdust scattered on the floor reeked of hops and urine. “But you might want to change your mind about what you’ve been doing lately.”

  Weismann had been drinking, not enough to make him properly drunk but enough to put a hitch in his motions. He turned his head to Jesse as if the hinges of his neck needing oiling. “And what is it you think I’ve been doing?”

  “Endangering yourself, for one thing.”

  “Endangering myself how?”

  “By approaching immigrants who have criminal connections and attempting to arrange the killing of a man in Austria-Hungary, cash on delivery of evidence that the man in question is dead.”

  To his credit, Weismann didn’t try to deny it. “It’s not a risk-free enterprise, true.”

  “Such men are more likely to steal your money than trust you as an employer. You ought to have figured that out by now.”

  “I know what I’m doing. I don’t threaten easily, and I don’t carry cash.”

  “Maybe so. But you’ve been discovered, and you have to stop, so you might as well go home. Free ticket to the City, Mr. Weismann, and no questions asked. It’s a generous offer.”

  “What makes you think I have to stop?”

  “Suborning a murder is against the law even in the Bowery. We have witnesses who will go to the police if you don’t give it up.”

  Weismann nodded, still neither surprised nor intimidated. “I guess Kemp can afford to buy himself some Tammany justice, if that’s what he really wants. But I don’t see any police here—do you?”

  “There’s the door,” Jesse said. “You can walk out and go into hiding, and I have no power to stop you. But there won’t be any murder. We’ve seen to that.”

  For a moment it seemed as if Weismann might actually call Jesse’s bluff, stand up and leave the saloon without looking back. Then his eyes took on a harder focus. “You’re a local hire, obviously. How much did they tell you about the man I want killed?”

  “He’s a customs agent in a town called Braunau am Inn. An innocent man. Whose offspring will commit monstrous crimes, if history unfolds in our world as it did in yours.”

  “A man who’ll be the father of a monster. I’d rather kill the monster himself, but he won’t be born for twelve more years. Given that, it doesn’t seem like such a bad deal. One innocent life against the death of many millions. If killing him is a sin, no one has to go to hell for it but me. So I cordially invite you to fuck off and leave me to my business.”

  “But it won’t work,” Jesse said patiently. “Kemp wrote to the Austrian officials to warn them. And even in Austria, August Kemp’s name rings bells.” An Austrian envoy had been among a delegation of European dignitaries who had toured the City of Futurity last year, with only a little less fanfare than President Grant himself. A more querulous, contrarian group of people Jesse had never encountered. But they had been as impressed by the City as all the other visitors. An English lord had fainted aboard the helicopter. “They’ll intercept your man, if you succeed in hiring one, before he can get close to his target.”

  “Maybe,” Weismann said. “Maybe not.”

  “And Kemp did something else. Something you might approve of.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “When he warned the Austrians about your hired killer, he warned them about the target at the same time—including enough detail about this man’s philandering that the customs service will likely fire him to head off a scandal. They were also warned that he was a potential danger to his household servant, one Klara Pölzl.”

  “So?”

  “Well, think about it. You’re trying to prevent an act of conception by killing this”—Jesse recalled the name from his briefing—“Alois Hitler. But the conception can’t happen if Alois never marries Klara. And even if he does marry her, the circumstances of their marriage will be altered. Bluntly speaking, the fucking will happen differently, producing a different result.”

  “It’s possible,” Weismann admitted. “I’ve thought of that myself. And maybe Kemp’s right. But he could be wrong. Alois Hitler is a genetic gun, cocked and loaded and aimed at six million human beings. It’s not enough to just hope the gun misfires.”

  It was becoming clear to Jesse that Weismann wouldn’t be talked out of his project, perhaps for good reasons. Many millions dead, up there in the unimaginable future. Something the educational dioramas at the City neglected to mention. “All right,” Jesse said.

  “What?”

  “All right. I’m not going to pull a pistol on you and drag you back to Illinois by main force. Do what you think is best. Will you answer a question, though, before I leave you to it?”

  Weismann shrugged suspiciously.

  “According to the City, there are more worlds and histories than can ever be counted. A world next door to this one and a world next door to that, and so on, like grains of sand on a beach. And there’s an Alois Hitler in each of them. At best, you can only kill one. What’s the point?”

  “That sounds like something August Kemp would say. But it’s a bullshit argument. This world has a twin, one Planck second away in Hilbert space. And that world has a twin. And so on. Hall of mirrors. But each one is as real as any other, and they’re interconnected. If I stick a pistol in your mouth and blow your brains out, that act is reflected in every domain of Hilbert space that follows from it.”

  “But there’s the 1877 in your history books, where you didn’t blow my b
rains out.”

  “And that’s also real and unchangeable. So there are Hilbert vectors where you live, Hilbert vectors where you die. Does that make it okay if I kill you now?”

  “No. That does not make it okay.”

  “Because right now, right here, for moral and ethical purposes, there’s only one of you. You’re not a shadow or a reflection or a possibility. You’re as real as I am. And this world is real. Back home, back in what you call the future, some of us understand that. We think Kemp is doing something immoral by turning this version of 1877 into a tourist attraction, as if it were some colonial backwater where you can lie in the sun and drink mai tais while the natives die of cholera. Some of us refuse to look the other way while Kemp monetizes an entire fucking universe.” Weismann drained the stein that had been sitting in front of him. “Maybe I’m more radical than some, but I’m not the only one. I’m just willing to make a bigger sacrifice.”

  “Shall I say that to Kemp?”

  Weismann stood up, his chair teetering behind him. “Tell August Kemp to bend over and fuck himself,” he said. “Or, better yet, ask him who invented the Mirror.”

  * * *

  A week later, the City’s Pinkerton men reported that Weismann had bought passage to Hamburg on the steamship Frisia. If you want a thing done right, Jesse supposed, better to do it yourself. He wasn’t sure whether he should hope for the success of Weismann’s project. One relatively innocent life in exchange for millions sounded reasonable, but it was a hard bargain for poor old Alois. Maybe, if Weismann got close enough, he could effect a compromise by shooting off the man’s balls instead of killing him.

  Mrs. Standridge was quiet, almost melancholic, on the train back to New York, which gave Jesse ample time to contemplate the unanswered questions her story had raised. “You said you left New York with enough cash to buy clothes and transportation and to rent a room for a year?”

  She nodded abstractedly. The Hudson River valley rolled past the window, dimming into sunset. The passenger car was foggy with cigar smoke. “It seemed like enough, at any rate.”

  “Banknotes or specie?”

  “Banknotes.”

  “May I ask where you got them?”

  “I told you, my family back home is more or less wealthy.”

  “Yes, ma’am, I understand that. And I figured the money must be paper, because your husband would have noticed if you were carrying bags of coins through the Mirror.”

  “Not just my husband. Going through the Mirror is like getting on a plane: You have to pass through security screening, including metal detectors. A bag of gold would have set off all the alarms, literally and figuratively.”

  “Paper is more portable.”

  “It would have been. But I didn’t carry paper, either.”

  “Then where did your money come from?”

  She hesitated. “I’d rather not say.”

  “Then I apologize for asking. It’s just that I’m curious.”

  “If it were up to me I’d tell you all about it. But I don’t want to get anyone else in trouble.” She hesitated. “I will say that a greenback isn’t hard to duplicate with twenty-first-century technology.”

  “Your money was counterfeit?”

  “My money was in every practical way indistinguishable from money issued by your banks, let’s put it that way.”

  “You’re inflating the national currency.”

  “The country’s in a recession, if you haven’t noticed. The goldbugs might disagree, but a little inflation isn’t a bad thing under the circumstances.”

  Which left the question of who had slipped her the fake paper. But she refused to talk about that.

  He watched from the window as the river came into sight: the Hudson, grown dark and turbulent as daylight drained from the sky. Not far to go now. “One other thing if you don’t mind. From when you first heard about August Kemp’s resort to when you crossed the Mirror, how much time passed?”

  “Terrence barely paid attention when Kemp’s first resort opened. It took years for him to come around.”

  “You said, Kemp’s first resort.”

  “Ah.” She nodded. “They warned us not to talk about that with locals. But the rules are different between us, aren’t they?”

  “I expect so,” Jesse said. “Really, it’s an open secret. Rumors get around.” Which was almost true. Back at the City, some claimed Kemp had opened other Mirrors into other times, other places. Those who knew the truth of the matter would neither confirm nor deny it.

  “The problem is historical drift,” Mrs. Standridge said. “Kemp is selling tickets to history as we know it, but as soon as the City is constructed, that history begins to mutate. So he closes after five years, before the drift becomes too obvious. Then he opens the Mirror on a new 1872—or 1873, or 1874—all fresh and unsuspecting and completely virginal. The City in Illinois is the second one he’s built. Next year he’ll open a third.”

  So—if this was true—there had already been another City, in one of those next-door worlds Kemp talked about … and had some other version of Jesse been hired to work at it? He guessed not; the Mirror was said to be imprecise; that other City might have arrived months after Jesse passed the spot, or might have been fully staffed months before he reached it. Still, it was an eerie thought. “I suppose he learns from experience.”

  “I’m sure he does. And so do his enemies.”

  “And who might they be?”

  “I don’t really know a lot about it.” Ms. Standridge turned her head and closed her eyes as if she wanted to sleep, or wanted Jesse to think she wanted to sleep. “Will you be traveling with me all the way to the City?”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” Jesse said. “I go where they send me.”

  * * *

  Once they had passed through the bustle of the Grand Central Depot at 42nd Street and Vanderbilt, Jesse hired a coach to carry them to the Broadway Central Hotel.

  The hotel had been considered one of the finest in the city when August Kemp’s men took it over and refurbished it. Kemp had reportedly offered the building’s owners a deal they could hardly refuse: He would install elaborate new amenities—electric lights powered by a dedicated generator, improved heating and fire protection, a twenty-first-century kitchen—in exchange for exclusive use of the facilities by City tourists for a four-year period. At the end of that time the hotel would revert to its owners, who would be supplied with enough spare parts and diesel gasoline to keep the amenities running for another decade. Newspapers had since taken to calling the hotel the “Electric Grand” for the way its electric lights shone through the many windows of the eight-story building; gawkers came from miles around to see it, and on pleasant summer evenings the crowds were thick enough to block traffic on Broadway.

  Tonight the crowd seemed unusually dense despite the cool spring weather, and Jesse directed the coach driver to a gated side entrance to avoid the press of bodies. He showed his City identification to the gate guard, who examined it methodically before waving him through. In the lobby of the hotel Jesse handed off Mrs. Standridge to the night clerk, a man named Amos Creagh. Creagh was a local hire, a beefy veteran of the Army of the Potomac who owed his stiff right leg to an injury he’d suffered at Chancellorsville. Creagh had not yet forgiven General Lee for the insult. Jesse sometimes took meals with him. He stood by now as Creagh welcomed Mrs. Standridge—there was no mention of her being anything other than a valued guest arriving at an odd hour—and summoned a bellboy to escort her to the elevator.

  “Strange night,” Jesse said once Mrs. Standridge had gone to her room. “Big crowd on Broadway.”

  “That ain’t the half of it,” Creagh said.

  “Why, what’s up?”

  “I guess you haven’t seen the papers? Big trouble. Oh, and that City woman you’re always asking about? The big-shouldered gal?”

  Elizabeth DePaul. “What about her?”

  “Arrived by train this morning, along with a whole raft of City
bosses, including August Kemp himself.”

  9

  ALARMING TRUTHS ABOUT “FUTURITY” EXPOSED

  The advent of the City of Futurity on the Illinois plains southwest of the city of Chicago four years ago has inspired intense curiosity among all those who have heard of it. It is a curiosity about the years to come, a curiosity the operators of the City have exploited, but have been reluctant to entirely satisfy. The City’s spokesmen, including its founder Mr. August Kemp, eagerly boast of scientific and mechanical wonders, but they have reserved comment on political and social subjects until a comprehensive written account can be prepared and formally presented to the president of the United States. That document was handed to President Hayes last week, on the condition that its contents remain private until a general publication to take place at the end of 1877. Two other documents, said to contain useful advice for medical practitioners and mechanical engineers, are already being brought to press.

  Absent these disclosures from Mr. Kemp, rumors have proliferated. Citizens of Manhattan have had ample opportunities to observe the behavior of individuals visiting from Mr. Kemp’s “future,” and many peculiarities have been noted. It is not a secret that Negroes, Orientals, and women in masculine dress mingle freely with white men in these crowds. Some have understood that observation as evidence that the world of the future is blind to distinctions of race or sex, as in a radical dream-vision of universal egalitarianism. Others take it as a token of the sort of haphazard morality too often associated with great wealth and aristocratic excess.

  Until now it has been impossible to know the truth of these matters, but certain letters sent to Mrs. Lucy Stone Blackwell of the American Woman Suffrage Association and lately published in the Woman’s Journal appear to be genuine, and, if authentic, constitute a shocking indictment of “the world of futurity.” According to Mrs. Blackwell, she began receiving these anonymous letters on a monthly basis beginning in September of 1876 and continuing until March of this year. The author of the letters claims to be an unnamed visitor from the future, and his communications contained predictions of both near and distant events. Mrs. Blackwell naturally dismissed these missives as fabrications, but as the nearer prophecies seemed to come true, including detailed statements about the controversy between Mr. Tilden and Mr. Hayes, and the compromise that eventually resolved it, she gradually became convinced of the letters’ authenticity.