Last Year

by Robert Charles Wilson

  He took it from his kit bag. She used a cable to connect the device to a port on the wall of the room. Jesse said, “Are there loudspeakers?”

  “Built into the ceiling.”

  “Are all trains so luxurious where you come from?”

  “Hardly. We’re living like the one percent tonight.”

  A drumbeat began. Elizabeth turned up the volume. Jesse said, “Music from your time.”

  “From before my time. I have an uncle in New Hampshire who teaches a course on the theory and history of popular music. Very cool guy. When I was younger he used to send me CDs and downloads, so I got to hear all kinds of things.”

  “What we’re hearing, is it something you like?”

  She unbuttoned her shirt. “It’s a classic album. Hendrix, Axis Bold as Love.”

  “It’s very loud.”

  “It’s supposed to be.”

  “Axes? Bold as love?”

  “Axis.”

  “Is love bold?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Shut up and take off your clothes, let’s find out.”

  PART THREE

  The Siege of Futurity

  —1877—

  12

  Jesse woke to a pounding on the stateroom door.

  He had slept as soundly as he had slept in months, and it took him a moment to place himself. The train was motionless. End of the line, he thought, which would be the terminal at the Oakland Long Wharf. There was nothing to see beyond the window but a tangle of telegraph wires, a billboard advertising vinegar bitters, and a flat gray sky. But he knew by some animal instinct that the train had brought him home, or close to home: to the shores of San Francisco Bay, a ferry ride away from Market Street.

  It wasn’t a good feeling.

  Beside him, Elizabeth sat up and said, “What the hell?”

  The pounding continued. Jesse had just succeeded in pulling on his briefs when the door flew open. The impatient party in the corridor was August Kemp. In his hand Kemp held a newspaper, which he threw at Jesse’s feet. “We’re fucked!”

  It was outrageous behavior. Kemp had burst in on a woman while she was in a state of undress. Jesse suppressed an impulse to throw him out of the room—Elizabeth put a restraining hand on his shoulder—and picked up the paper, a spindled copy of yesterday’s Examiner “What’s this about?”

  “Read it and weep. Both of you. Conference in the terminal cafeteria at eight. And Jesse? I want a word with you after that.”

  * * *

  Four years ago this wing of the terminal building had been refurbished by City architects, who had turned it into a glittering arcade with plate-glass skylights and a forest of electrified signage. Ordinarily, the arrival of a City train would have filled it with twenty-first-century tourists. Today it was a ghost town, nobody present but a skeleton crew of nervous-looking City employees and the few dozen passengers and security people Kemp had brought along with him. Jesse settled at one of the empty tables in the cafeteria and unfurled the newspaper Kemp had thrown at him. The story that had alarmed Kemp was on the front page. GUNS OF FUTURITY DISCOVERED, the headline said. Jesse read the article carefully, then offered the paper to Elizabeth.

  She gave the close-set columns of type an unhappy glance. “Is it about the Glocks they recovered in Buffalo?”

  “In part. But other guns have turned up.”

  “Turned up where?”

  “Well, the post office found a futuristic pistol in a seized package bound for Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé. The Nez Percé are restive—they’re due to be removed to a reservation in Idaho, but they don’t want to give up their tribal lands. How did that play out, back where you come from?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not really a history buff. I’m guessing it ended badly.”

  “It was only one Glock, with a single clip, but apparently it came with a letter warning of an attack on a Nez Percé camp on the Clearwater River.”

  “Like the Blackwell letters.”

  “Written in the same hand, some say. One pistol doesn’t amount to much, but the warnings in the letter could have given the Nez Percé a real advantage in a fight. Does that sound like something that might interest Theo Stromberg?”

  “Forcing an entire native population to move from its ancestral land is considered a human rights offense where I come from, so yeah. Is that all?”

  “Not by half. A similar weapon was found in the hands of a group of Negro Republicans in Caddo County, Louisiana. The pistol was confiscated before it could be loaded or fired, but Congress is making a scandal of it. No one knows whether the gun also came with a letter, because the Negros were lynched before they could be questioned.”

  “Jesus,” Elizabeth said.

  “Added to that, the labor troubles. There’s been discontent among rail workers ever since the Baltimore and Ohio cut wages. The Cumberland line’s been shut down for days. The Governor of Maryland called in the National Guard, and the troops were fired on in Baltimore. Another Futurity gun was involved, according to some accounts. The facts are still muddy, but politicos are rushing to blame the City for all of this. There’s talk of issuing a warrant for the arrest of August Kemp, though it’s not clear who has the jurisdiction to do that.”

  Kemp came into the cafeteria as if summoned by the mention of his name. Jesse and Elizabeth shouldered into the crowd that formed as Kemp stepped up onto a cafeteria bench to address them. He started with a summary of the current situation, not much different from what Jesse had distilled from the pages of the Examiner. “We’re in no immediate danger,” he said, “but this is a problem that’s only going to get worse, and the situation could deteriorate quickly. Our New York site got the evacuation order two days ago—everybody east of the Mississippi is either back at the City or on their way—but we still have vulnerable personnel in San Francisco, and securing their safe return is our highest priority right now.”

  The most direct route from San Francisco to Oakland was by water, either via the regularly scheduled ferries or the City’s own steam ferry, Futurity. Ordinarily, tourists were ferried into San Francisco and accommodated at a City hotel on the Point Lobos toll road. All such tourists had been evacuated as of yesterday, but there were City employees still stationed at the Folsom Street docks, and they needed to be at the Oakland terminal by Wednesday morning—because, Kemp said, “that’s when the last train’s leaving.”

  Two days from now. An absurdly short span of time in which to locate and recover Kemp’s daughter. Jesse looked at Elizabeth, who shook her head in disbelief.

  Kemp went on to parcel out duties to various factions of his security crew and declare the meeting over. He approached Jesse as the crowd dispersed. “I’ve set up a temporary office in one of the function rooms off the east corridor. Follow me there.”

  Elizabeth said, “Sir, I—”

  “No. Not you. Just Jesse. You can wait here for us. This won’t take long.”

  * * *

  Jesse followed Kemp to a room furnished with a desk and a single chair. Both the desk and the chair were twenty-first-century items, unadorned and bluntly functional. Both men remained standing. Kemp said, “You’ve been drawing a paycheck for what, four years now?”

  “About,” Jesse said.

  “And you understand your term of employment is about to come to an end?”

  “Yes, sir. Obviously.”

  “We’ve been generous to you in terms of salary, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you saved some of that? You won’t be left penniless when we shut down the Mirror?”

  “I expect I’ll do all right.”

  “Your contract specifies severance pay if you’re employed to the end of the City’s tenure. Are you worried about getting that payment?”

  In truth, Jesse hadn’t given it much thought. Given the questions surrounding the City’s banking practices, maybe he should have. “You’ve always been as good as your word.”

  “I’m sending you and Elizabeth i
nto San Francisco to find my daughter. Right now that’s your one and only job. I know Elizabeth won’t have a problem with it. She’s a loyal employee and she wants to go home with a commendation and money in her pocket. I trust her because I know where her interests lie. But you’re in a different position. This is your home. And right now it could be dangerous for you to be identified with the City of Futurity. So you might be thinking how easy it would be to just walk away, especially with the trouble at the sandlots.”

  The sandlots were a patch of unimproved ground outside City Hall, favored territory for rabble-rousers. “Has there been trouble?”

  “Last night there was a big rally. Assholes with torches and pick handles, basically, but they stopped short of marching on Chinatown. There might be worse tonight or tomorrow.”

  “A few Kearneyites don’t scare me.”

  “I believe you, and that’s why I chose you for this assignment. But human nature is human nature. So I want to show you something.” Kemp went to the desk and opened a drawer and extracted a leather drawstring bag. He hefted it to demonstrate its weight and loosened the string to expose a glitter of coins. Eagles and double eagles, mainly. “Gold,” Kemp said. “Not specie. Not bank drafts. This is your severance pay, Jesse. This is what you get when you bring Mercy back. Do you understand?”

  Jesse looked at Kemp and the bag and tried to decide whether he was being bribed or insulted or both. Most likely both. “I understand perfectly.”

  “Good. Because the rules for runners don’t apply right now. I need you to be absolutely clear on that. Find Mercy, bring her back. Willing or unwilling. I don’t care what laws you break and I don’t care who you hurt. I want her unharmed and on board the last train to the City when it leaves. Do you accept that commission?”

  “What about Theo Stromberg? Under the rules, I’m obliged to offer him the chance to go home.”

  “I don’t give a shit. Was I unclear about that? Fuck the rules! The rules were made to protect the paying customers, not Theo fucking Stromberg.”

  Jesse heard a faint ticking in the ensuing silence. He guessed the sound came from Kemp’s wristwatch. Like the double eagles in the leather bag, the watch appeared to be made of gold. “I understand,” Jesse said.

  “Okay. We’re on the same page? Good. Then let’s get you outfitted. There’s no time to waste.”

  * * *

  An hour later Jesse was aboard the ferry Futurity with Elizabeth beside him, standing at the rail as the vessel drew away from the Oakland docks.

  He had been given a calico travel bag containing two Glocks with ammunition, a pair of Tasers, a portable radio, and a selection of stun grenades—Kemp seemed to feel Theo might put up a fight. Jesse felt conspicuous in his City-issued trousers and cotton shirt, which seemed too crisp and unsullied to be entirely plausible, and Elizabeth plucked at her Velcro-fitted day dress as if she found it binding. She turned to him and said, “Does this bustle make my ass look fat?”

  “No.”

  She laughed. “It’s a joke. Sorry.”

  “Is it? I’ve seen those magazines tourists leave behind. Women as bony as tubercular mules.”

  “Fashion models.”

  “You’re not like that.”

  “Okay, yeah.”

  “You’re much more wholesome and … rounded.”

  “Right, thank you. Sorry I mentioned it.”

  The sun was bright and a spring breeze kicked up chop in the water. Futurity sounded its whistle and began to move through the traffic of other vessels, a motley assortment of crowded ferries and cargo boats laden with produce, but the only passengers aboard Futurity were Jesse and Elizabeth and a few local hires headed for San Francisco to recover what remained to be recovered from various City-held sites. Elizabeth grew moody, clutching her hat as the vessel passed through scrims of coal smoke toward the scalloped hills. At one point she turned to him and said, “Do you think we can do this? Find Mercy, I mean?”

  “Probably we can find her. Whether we can find her before the last train leaves is another question entirely.”

  “Do you know where to start? Because I don’t.”

  “I have an idea or two,” he said.

  Elizabeth lapsed into silence, though she was briefly excited when a humpback whale surfaced off the starboard side of the ferry. Maybe whales were as scarce as bison or passenger pigeons where she came from. Jesse rummaged in his bag and found the iPod she had given him. He put the earpieces in his ears and tried to remember how to instruct the machine to play music. He wanted Axis Bold as Love but ended up with an entirely different suite of songs by the same composer, Electric Ladyland. A song called “Crosstown Traffic” was grinding away like a cakewalk for steam engines and steel barrels by the time the Futurity docked at its Folsom Street mooring. The strange and raucous music seemed perfectly suited to the crowded wharf, but Jesse was careful to remove the earbuds and conceal the device before any locals spotted him with it.

  Ashore, they were met by a harried-looking City employee who escorted them through the busy terminal to the street, where a horse and a two-person buggy had been procured for them. Jesse took the reins, and before long they were fighting for a place in a merciless roil of carriages and carts. Elizabeth said, “Where are we headed?”

  “California Street Hill.”

  “What’s there?”

  “The house where my sister lives.”

  “We’re going to see your sister?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know we’re working a deadline, right?”

  “I know.”

  “So is your sister going to help us find Theo and Mercy?”

  “She might,” Jesse said. “One way or another.”

  13

  Elizabeth knew Jesse well enough to expect an explanation from him. She also knew he wouldn’t give it to her until he was ready. So she relaxed, as much as it was possible to relax while clinging to the seat of a loosely sprung buggy as it was dragged up steep grades by an enthusiastically farting dray horse, and tried to enjoy the ride. There was architecture to look at. Weird old San Francisco architecture, especially as they worked their way from the tobacco-spit districts to the fancier environs of Nob Hill: big houses with stone turrets and what looked like minarets, window’s walks, gabled roofs. Things architectural students would know about. The question she wanted to ask was: How had Jesse’s sister, raised in a whorehouse, come to live in a wealthy neighborhood like this?

  Jesse brought the rig to a stop near one of these grandiose stone piles, humming what sounded like a version of Hendrix’s “Crosstown Traffic.” Jesse had taken to Hendrix in a big way, surprisingly. Elizabeth would have put him down for country and western, maybe classic Dylan, but his tastes seemed more adventurous than that. Fortunately, the playlist she’d downloaded for him was eclectic: For all she knew he might develop a fondness for Kanye West or Taylor Swift. There was no predicting. Nor would she ever find out, given that tomorrow or the next day would be the last of their time together.

  She didn’t like to think about that, not least because it reminded her how precarious her own position was. She was going to be one of the last people to leave Kemp’s 1877, no matter how well or badly this expedition turned out, which increasingly felt like being the last person out of a burning building. The road home was long, and it ran through an obstacle course of mountains, deserts, and hostile locals. Home, where Gabriella was waiting for her. Or forgetting about her.

  She recalled something her drill instructor used to say: One foot at a time. Which meant, Don’t think too far ahead. Work the problem that’s in front of you. Let other people worry about strategy. So fine: The problem in front of her was Mercy Kemp. Or maybe the problem in front of her was Jesse, who had decided to pay a visit to his San Francisco relations instead of getting on with the search.

  He said, “This house is where Phoebe lives. She lives with a woman named Hauser. Abigail Hauser. Have I mentioned her?”

  “Obviously n
ot.”

  “Abbie is my father’s sister. My aunt.”

  “You have a wealthy aunt?”

  “Aunt Abbie’s a widow. Mr. Hauser was a partner in Hauser, Schmidt and Odette, a Washoe Valley mining firm. Very wealthy man. He was inspecting a dig near Virginia City when a steam pipe burst and scalded him to death. That was 1866. Aunt Abbie inherited his fortune, but most of it evaporated in the crash of ’73. She still has the house, and she keeps up appearances, but don’t be deceived. She’s only a few pennies better off than the Tenderloin crowd. After my father was killed, this is where I brought Phoebe.”

  “I don’t mean to pry or anything, but if your father was related to a wealthy family, how come he was working as a bouncer in a whorehouse?”

  “My father and Aunt Abbie weren’t on speaking terms back then. But my father sent us up here for visits, sometimes for as much as a month at a time. It was his way of showing us that life that wasn’t always hard and unforgiving. Aunt Abbie tried to give us an education, which I didn’t always appreciate. But she has a big library, and I took advantage of it.”

  “Which I guess explains why your grammar is better than most of the local hires. You always did seem a little too polished for somebody who was raised on skid row.”

  “My father didn’t neglect our education. We were raised decently enough.”

  “I’m not trying to insult anyone.”

  “Abigail Hauser is a Christian woman. A little stiff, but forward thinking and kind at heart. She has principles. I’ve told her a little about you—try not to shock her.”

  * * *

  Jesse drove the buggy up to the front of the house and set the brake, and Elizabeth managed to climb down without snagging her ridiculous clothing on anything. She watched as he walked to the door and raised his fist to knock. It was hard to read his mood. Catch him at the right moment and he was one big human emoji, all joy or rage. But right now his face was blank. He knocked five times. A minute or more went by. Elizabeth adjusted her hat and tried to appreciate the breeze, which was blissfully free of the reek of the city below.