Last Year

by Robert Charles Wilson

“Boo how doy?”

  “A highbinder. A hatchetman. Do you understand? He carried a hatchet with its handle sawed short, hidden up his sleeve when he wore Chinese clothes—though Sonny knew how to dress American when he wanted to. Roscoe Candy respected those Dupont Gai knife men, because he was a knife man himself. Sonny’s tong was part of the See Yup Company, a faction called the Moon of Peace and Contentment Society, which did business on Dupont and Jackson, small-time gambling and opium dens mainly, though they operated one of the better Chinese theaters. As long as Moon of Peace and Contentment was looking after us, Roscoe kept his distance.”

  “So what went wrong?”

  “Well, Madame Chao wasn’t your run-of-the-mill bordello keeper. Among the Chinese in San Francisco, I doubt there’s even one female for ten men. A lot of those women came over as slaves, basically. Not Madame Chao. Madame Chao fought her way across half the known world before she got to California, at least according to the stories she liked to tell. She wasn’t from the same part of China as all those Canton men. She spoke a fancier brand of Chinese. The girls in her bordello were half-breeds, and she catered almost entirely to the white trade—the tong leaders treated her with a mix of respect and contempt, and she felt exactly the same about them. So whenever Roscoe started to make trouble, Moon of Peace and Contentment would raise the price of protection. And Madame Chao wasn’t shy about complaining. But from the tong’s point of view, Madame Chao was no bargain even when she paid in full. Much as they hated Roscoe Candy, there was always a risk involved in taking on a white man, especially a white man like Roscoe. And eventually Roscoe realized it would be easier to strike a deal with the See Yups than to fight them.”

  “You didn’t see that coming?”

  “It was always a possibility, but the only warning we got was from Sonny Lau, and it came too late.”

  Speaking about what came next was difficult, even in broad daylight. Watching Elizabeth’s face would only make it harder. Jesse turned to the window and fixed his eyes on the sun-shot haze that divided heaven from earth.

  “I was down in Chinatown when it happened. It was a Thursday night, hot, with a spit of rain coming down, just enough to wet the streets and slick your collar. Most nights, I worked at Madame Chao’s alongside my father. I was as big as him, about as strong, and quicker, though maybe not as intimidating. But the night started slow, and Madame Chao sent me out to deliver a payment to the See Yup man who supplied us with opium.”

  “So, not just a bordello but also an opium den?”

  “The white men who came to Madame Chao’s believed a proper Chinese whorehouse ought to serve opium on the side. But no, we weren’t a ‘den,’ strictly speaking. We were a cooch house that let the customers buy a bowl if they insisted on it. Most of the girls liked a smoke now and then themselves—it made their work easier—and Madame Chao wasn’t above smoking a pill after the last guests left.”

  “But not you?”

  “I had an idea that sobriety was a weapon. I thought it would give me an advantage over my enemies. I wasn’t sober for moral reasons—I was sober for the same reason a man carries a concealed pistol.”

  “Okay,” Elizabeth said.

  “So I’m headed back to Madame Chao’s when Sonny Lau pops out of an alley and pulls me in after him. His clothes are gaudy with blood. Some of it is his own—his face is cut in a couple of places, the sleeves of his shirt are open on a couple of bad gashes—but most of it’s someone else’s. He’s so worked up he can hardly talk. He’s begging me not to go back to Madame Chao’s. Sonny speaks English as well as the next man, but he’s mixing in Chinese words. Eyes rolling in his head like a mad dog. ‘Roscoe’s men,’ he says, and ‘there was too many of them!’ There’s more, but he can’t bring himself to say it, so I have to ask. What about my father, what about Phoebe? ‘I stood with your father,’ he says. ‘We killed some men. But there were too many! He’s still inside! Phoebe, too.’”

  Jesse felt a pressure on his shoulder, which was Elizabeth’s hand, and he appreciated the attempt to comfort him. But if he submitted to her compassion he wouldn’t be able to speak.

  High above the passing valley, a turkey buzzard circled and circled like a feral thought.

  “I leave him and run to the house. There’s a mob of Candy’s men milling around in front of it. These are white men who followed him from the mining camps for the most part, but they’re armed like highbinders, kitchen cleavers in their hands and pistols on their hips. I can see smoke coming from one of the upper windows of the house, one of the girls’ rooms, and I can smell it, a cindery stink. There’s no chance I can get past Candy’s men, but there are other ways inside. Down an alley, up a drainpipe, across the roof of a mercantile shop to an attic window. Inside, the first room I come to is Madame Chao’s. She’s dead, her throat cut. More blood than I’ve ever seen in one place, and I’m no stranger to blood. It’s a revenge killing pure and simple—revenge on all of us, for the sin of having put an obstacle in Candy’s way.

  “I have a Bowie knife up my own sleeve, because that’s how Sonny taught me to carry it; I’m nobody’s boo how doy, but I know better than to go out unarmed. I have a short blade, too, a little knife I keep in a leather sheath in my hip pocket, but that’s all, and it’s not enough to go up against even one of Candy’s mob. But it seems like the hatchetmen are all downstairs at the moment, and anyway I’m not in my right mind any longer, so I head for the attic room where Phoebe sleeps, the same room where my father keeps his possessions, such as they are, a few books and mementos, including his Gibbon and his Pilgrim’s Progress. Some of the rooms I pass on the way to the stairs, the doors are open. Some of them, I can see the girls inside. And they’re all dead, in ugly ways. I look because I can’t stop myself, but there’s nothing I can do for them.

  “The door to my father’s room is standing open, but I hear movement inside. So I slow down and come up on it quietly, or trying to be quiet, though I’m breathing like there’s not enough air in the world to fill my lungs. I put my head around to take look. But all that stealth was futile. Candy’s in there, and he has my father in a wrestler’s grip, and his flensing knife is at my father’s throat, and they’re both looking right at me.

  “It seems like the world goes silent and motionless. Then I see my father’s eyes darting left. I know him well enough to know he’s frightened, but he was never a man to panic in a tight place. He’s trying to tell me something.

  “Candy says, ‘You might as well step in, boy. You got nowhere else to go.’

  “So I step into the room. Candy’s wearing the kind of ridiculous clothing he favors, a vest as green as a beetle’s wing, a schoolboy cap, a clawhammer jacket half a size too small for him. All drenched in blood, and blood on his face like scarlet freckles. He knows me as my father’s son. He smiles.

  “I realize my father is gesturing with his eyes at the wardrobe in the corner of the room. I know better than to stare at it. The wardrobe, hardly bigger than a steamer trunk standing on end, is where Phoebe hides out whenever there’s trouble in the house. She must be in there now. In the dark, trying not to cry out.

  “‘Best put down that knife,’ Candy says to me.

  “The Bowie knife is in my right hand. I was foolishly about to take it in my left. I’m left-handed, but Candy doesn’t know that. There’s nothing useful I can do with the knife now that Candy’s seen it. So I put it on the floor. With my right hand.

  “‘Now step away from it,’ Candy says.

  “I take two sidelong steps away from the knife toward the only other real furniture in the room: a writing desk. The desk has a drawer. I know my father keeps a loaded pistol in the drawer. It might still be there.

  “The fire at the other end of the house is spreading, and a haze of smoke rolls along the ceiling. I hear myself telling Candy to let my father go. Candy says, ‘Well, why would I do that? I’m here to kill him! Watch.’ So he slides his flensing knife through my father’s throat. My father is still l
ooking at me as it happens, as the knowledge of his own death comes into his eyes. While the blood’s still gushing Candy makes another long slice, belly to rib cage, right through my father’s shirt. Three bone buttons drop to the floor and rattle like dice. My father’s insides also fall to the floor—as much of them as he can’t catch in his hands. Then he follows them down.

  “What I do next I do without thinking. I take my small knife from my pocket. With my right hand. And I hold it in front of me, point toward Roscoe Candy. Who’s delighted to see it. He can’t take his eyes off it. Like it’s the jolliest thing he’s ever seen. He wipes his bloody flensing blade on the tail of his blood-soaked vest and grins. ‘Come on, boy!’ he says. ‘Come on, then! Take me! Take me, while your old man’s lights are still warm—take me!’”

  Jesse realized he was shouting. But the passenger car was empty except for him and Elizabeth, and Elizabeth had only flinched.

  The train cornered a bend. Sunlight tracked along the rows of seats like a moving finger.

  “I wave that little knife as if I’m looking for the best way to cut him—and maybe I am—but my better hand is behind my back, and my better hand has ideas of its own. By the time Candy gets tired of waiting and rushes me, my left hand has opened the desk drawer and found the pistol there.

  “I don’t know for certain it’s loaded. But there’s no point just showing it to him. As I level it, he’s almost on me. I pull the trigger and the pistol jumps in my hand.”

  Elizabeth said, “You shot him.”

  “I shot him.”

  The emptiness of that declaration: It had felt the same way when it happened. A vulgar anticlimax. Roscoe grabbing his pendulous belly and screaming, falling to the floor next to Jesse’s father and writhing there, the flensing knife forgotten even as Jesse kicks it away from his flailing hands.

  “And Phoebe was in the wardrobe?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was she all right?”

  “No.” After a time he added, “She’d run away from Roscoe’s highbinders when they came into the house, but not before one of them cut her. Maybe Roscoe himself. Her face was—well. She lost an eye.”

  “But she was alive?”

  “She was alive.”

  “And Candy?”

  “The hatchetmen heard the gunshot and came boiling up the stairs, but I took Phoebe out a back window. The flames were spreading fast. I left Candy in a burning house with a bullet in his gut. I imagined there was no way he could survive.”

  “But he did.”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  “You think it’s true?”

  “I don’t see how. But I suppose stranger things have happened.”

  “And … Phoebe?”

  “I hope to see her soon.” He had no more words to offer, on this or any other subject, but he realized Elizabeth was staring at him. “What is it?”

  “Your hands.”

  His hands were in his lap, clenched so tightly the nails had drawn blood.

  * * *

  Jesse cleaned himself up in the passenger car’s absurdly luxurious bathroom. By the time he rejoined Elizabeth he was calm again.

  They moved to the club car for a meal. There were only a half dozen other diners present, all from Kemp’s security staff. The waiter, a local hire who must have been accustomed to serving crowds of well-heeled twenty-first-century tourists, greeted Jesse and Elizabeth with the nervous volubility of a man who knows he’s about to lose his job. Outside, the sun had retreated behind the mountain peaks. Jesse wasn’t especially hungry but he ordered what Elizabeth ordered, steak and a salad and a beer. She said, “This thing about you not drinking—”

  “You know I’m not a teetotaler. I never claimed to be. I just don’t drink to the point of stupidity.”

  “That’s reassuring.”

  “That I drink beer?”

  “It makes you seem a little more human.”

  “As opposed to?”

  “Never mind. You realize this is our last night on the train? We’ll be in San Francisco tomorrow morning.”

  “Yes.”

  “In the middle of an emergency evac procedure. And once we get this thing with Kemp’s daughter sorted out—”

  “You’ll go home. I know. But we don’t have to dwell on it.”

  “I guess we don’t.”

  “May I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “Back where you come from, someone like me must have lived and died. Exactly as I would have if the City had never appeared. Is that true?”

  She hesitated. “Actually, I Googled you a couple of times.”

  “I probably shouldn’t ask what that means.”

  “Historical records and all that. But your name never came up.”

  “There was no record of me?”

  “No. I’m sorry, Jesse. I guess that must feel weird.”

  “I’m flattered you thought to look. But no, I’m not sorry there was nothing to find. Better men than me have lived and died unnoticed. It’s not a bad company to be in.” Though it was a melancholy thing to contemplate, as the light faded from the sky.

  The waiter delivered their salads. “Another question,” he said.

  “Ask.”

  “I asked it once already. It’s the one about the Mirror and who invented it.”

  “Ah,” Elizabeth said. “Okay. Kemp doesn’t like us talking about it, but I guess we’re past that now. But it’s complicated, Jesse. There’s the official story. There’s the real story. And there’s the conspiracy theory.”

  “Tell me the real story.”

  “I would, but I don’t know what it is.”

  “Well, then what’s the official story? And who declared it official?”

  “The official story is that the Mirror technology came out of a research project at DARPA. DARPA’s an agency that does cutting-edge scientific research for the military. DARPA supposedly stumbled on a way of creating what the wonks call ‘material translations in ontological Hilbert space’ while working on ultra-high-energy lasers. No, I don’t know what that means any better than you do. The idea is that they discovered some weird new physics that, unfortunately from their point of view, turned out not to be weaponizable in any practical way. So the core concepts were farmed out for civilian research and potential commercial applications. So far, the only enterprise that’s managed to turn a profit with the technology is August Kemp’s. Kemp’s people patented a technique for scaling up the Hilbert translation, making it possible to send large objects from our own universe to one that resembles our past.”

  “The Mirror, that is to say.”

  “The Mirror.”

  “But not everyone accepts this story?”

  “Well, the Mirror looks pretty strange even by twenty-first-century standards. It’s not like rockets. People understand rockets—a moon rocket is just a Fourth of July rocket, scaled up. But the Mirror? Traveling into a past that isn’t actually our past? Basically unprecedented. So a bunch of alternative theories started to circulate, usually involving aliens or the Antichrist. But one story in particular got a lot of traction. It goes like this. Shortly after 9/11—you know about 9/11?”

  “An attack on New York City by Mussulman fanatics.” Jesse had overheard enough talk among the tourists to make that obvious deduction.

  “After 9/11, national and local security agencies start looking hard at anyone with suspicious ID or travel histories. Supposedly, two dudes with no fixed address get red-flagged by some such agency, and when they’re brought in for questioning they turn out to be not entirely human. They’re only a little over five foot tall, their IDs don’t check out, a medical examination reveals all kinds of weird physical anomalies, and when they’re questioned they clam up—even under torture, according to some accounts. But their movements are traced back to a house where investigators find something even stranger concealed in the basement: a version of the Mirror. In this story, DARPA is assigned the work of reverse-engineering
the technology, basically taking it apart and figuring out what it does and how it works. Amazingly, they succeed at that. You see where this is going?”

  Jesse said, “You were visited from some version of your own future. The visitors were arrested and their Mirror was impounded.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Do you think there’s any truth to it?”

  “Probably not, but how would I know? In some versions of the story the visitors died in captivity. In others, they’re being held in a secret government facility—Area 51 or like that. Like most of these fringe theories, there’s not much evidence you can pin down. The most plausible corroboration comes from a highly classified Defense Department memo, part of a batch of documents leaked by a whistleblower a few years ago. But the language is ambiguous. It might be talking about ordinary terrorist detainees, not post-human gnomes from the far reaches of Hilbert space.”

  “The story was never confirmed or disproved?”

  “Not as far as I know.”

  “Why, in that case, would a runner tell me to ask August Kemp who invented the Mirror?”

  “I guess to fuck with you. Or to fuck with Kemp. This runner you talked to, was he politically motivated?”

  “He was planning to prevent the conception of a man named Hitler, not yet born.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake. So yes, politically motivated. Like the anti-Mirror movement back home, most of these political runners take the conspiracy theory seriously. They think Kemp knows the truth and is hiding it so he can exploit the technology to his own advantage.”

  “The runner in San Francisco, Theo Stromberg—he shares these beliefs?”

  “He wants to be taken seriously, so he distances himself from the wacky stuff, but he doesn’t deny it altogether.”

  “And Mercy Kemp?”

  “She’s on record as a believer.”

  * * *

  After the meal Jesse followed Elizabeth to her stateroom. It was their last night on the train, and he thought he should say something more about the dangers that might be waiting in San Francisco. But she put her finger to her lips as she closed the door behind her. “No more talk. I want music. You have that iPod I gave you?”