Last Year

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Jesse told his aunt and his sister he’d be back to see them soon. Probably he would. But first he had to find Miss Mercy Kemp and deliver her to her wealthy father. And after that—unless he wanted to live the rest of his life in abject fear—he would have to come to terms with Mr. Roscoe Candy.

  Only then could he consider the future. Not the City future, not the flying-machine future. His own future.

  Should he have one.

  * * *

  He had arranged to meet Sonny Lau at noon in a trinket shop off Dupont Street.

  Jesse adjusted his slouch hat to shade his face, but he felt vulnerable and exposed holding the reins as the carriage rattled down California Street. After four years at the City of Futurity, the streets of San Francisco seemed both utterly strange and intimately familiar. As they approached Chinatown he half expected to see his younger self darting through the crowds, all the red-painted doorways once again known to him, the cellar cigar-rollers, the eating houses with smoked ducks and pigs’ heads hanging in their windows, the houses where you could buy a bit’s worth of twice-laid opium, the noisy Chinese theaters, the gambling houses with their spring-lock doors: a foreign land that was simultaneously his native land. San Francisco defied geography the way the City of Futurity defied time.

  Editorial writers liked to play up its squalor, but by daylight the Chinese quarter was safe enough to walk through and attracted plenty of white tourists. Jesse braked the rig at a curb not far from the trinket shop where he was supposed to meet Sonny. He wished now that they had arranged to meet at a place where Jesse was less likely to be recognized—Cliff House, say, or Woodward’s Gardens. But the trinket shop was busy and there were enough tourists in it to make the presence of another white man and woman unremarkable. The proprietor, an old man with a queue that dangled below his waist, nodded at Jesse, exchanged a few words with his equally ancient wife in what Jesse recognized as Dupont Gai dialect, then disappeared behind a beaded curtain. Moments later the curtain parted again, just long enough for Sonny Lau to beckon Jesse and Elizabeth inside.

  Beyond the curtain was a small room furnished with a simple table and a few scuffed chairs. Sonny was courteous enough to pull out one of those chairs for Elizabeth, though he gave her the same puzzled look he had given her yesterday. “I talked to Little Tom,” he said.

  His See Yup boss. “About the pistols?”

  “Yes. He owns one. And he knows where it came from. Each of the heads of the Six Companies received one, along with a letter saying the Companies need to unite because we’re going to be attacked by Kearneyite mobs and the police.”

  This was the connection Jesse had come to the city hoping to discover. His hope had rested on three established facts. The first fact was that Theo Stromberg was physically present in San Francisco. The second fact was that Theo liked to send Glocks to parties he considered oppressed and endangered. The third fact was that San Francisco’s Chinese population fell into that category. Kearneyites and others had been stirring up mob warfare against the Chinese for years. So, Jesse had reasoned, there was at least a chance Theo had sent weapons to the Six Companies.

  But none of that would matter if Theo had been careful enough to cover his tracks. “Is that all?”

  “You think Little Tom would waste his time talking to me if there wasn’t more to it? I told him there’s a man from the City who wants to find out who mailed the guns.”

  “You mentioned me?”

  “Not by name, but I had to tell him something. Little Tom is curious by nature, and the pistol aroused his curiosity as soon as it came into his hands. Like you, he wanted to know where it came from.”

  “And did he find out?”

  “Yes.”

  “He knows how to find Theo Stromberg?”

  “Yes. And it didn’t take him long to make a connection between Theo Stromberg and those letters the newspapers have been publishing. But that was as far as he took it. Little Tom doesn’t see anything to be gained by involving himself in the business of the City of Futurity.”

  “I don’t care about Little Tom. It’s Theo we want. Can you give us a street address?”

  “Make an offer.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you want this man, offer us something in return.”

  “What’s the going price for that kind of information?”

  “Make an offer, I’ll take it to Little Tom, and if it’s acceptable he’ll tell you what you want to know.”

  “I can’t dicker at one remove. I don’t know anything about Company bosses or what they want. The only Chinamen I know are highbinders and sing-song girls—no offense.”

  Elizabeth spoke up: “This Little Tom, does he like his Glock?”

  Sonny gave her a condescending stare. “I believe he does.”

  “Would he like another one? Suppose we offered him another pistol from the future, a different kind. You think he might take that in trade?”

  “You have such a thing?”

  “Yes.”

  Sonny Lau looked at Jesse. Jesse thought about the contents of the calico travel bag and guessed she was talking about a Taser. Jesse had taken Taser training when he was hired as City security. It was an unimpressive weapon, in his opinion. “Tell Little Tom we’ll give him an X3 handheld electroshock weapon in exchange for the whereabouts of Mr. Theo Stromberg. Tell him it’s the only X3 in the state of California.”

  Sonny looked skeptical. “Is there really such a pistol?”

  “Yes.”

  “When can you bring it?”

  “Whenever he’s willing to make the exchange. The sooner the better, from our point of view.”

  “Better for us, too. All this talk about mobs, it’s not just talk. Last night there was a big crowd at the sandlots, screaming about burning down Chinatown. Tonight it might be more than talk. Meet me back here, two hours.”

  * * *

  Jesse’s pocket watch had been given to him by August Kemp especially for this job. The watch looked like any other cheap pocket watch, but its inner workings were digital, meaning the watch didn’t tell time so much as calculate it. It was more reliable than a conventional watch, but it ticked just as loudly, for the sake of verisimilitude. Jesse took note of the time as he left the trinket shop. Two hours. He wondered if Sonny owned a reliable watch.

  Elizabeth climbed aboard the carriage, still struggling against the bulk of her counterfeit dress, and Jesse drove them from Dupont Street to a place near Market, a nameless alley next to a draper’s warehouse. The alley wasn’t much wider than the carriage itself, but it was usefully private. Brick walls blocked the sunlight and kept the air cool, as if the morning’s fog had lingered in the shadows. It was a place where no one would see them, a place where they could speak freely. He said, “It’s like that double exposure you told me about.”

  “What?”

  “You once told me about a double exposure—two photographs developed on one paper.”

  “I know what a double exposure is. What about it?”

  “All this neighborhood seems like a double exposure to me. Familiar but strange. Do you take my meaning? But maybe it isn’t the neighborhood. Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m the double exposure. That boy who lived in a Tenderloin parlor house, and whatever the City of Futurity made of me.”

  “We’re both double exposures, in that case.”

  “Are we?”

  “That’s what the City does to you. Last time I was home, back in North Carolina, it felt like I was the one out of place. I mean, God knows I don’t belong here—no offense—but it was like I didn’t belong there, either.”

  “What you said at the table last night, about the future—is it really so bad?”

  “I was just tired of Abbie looking at me like I’m the ambassador from Utopia. I should have kept my mouth shut.”

  “But is it as bad as you said?”

  “I don’t know. It depends. Not necessarily. But it’s definitely not paradise.”

  �
�I figured that out quite a while ago. If the world you come from was paradise, you wouldn’t be such a cool hand with a pistol.” He tried to think of a way to speak his thoughts that wouldn’t seem sentimental or maudlin or offensive. “So you’re not the ambassador from Utopia, and Dupont Street sure as hell isn’t paradise lost. But I’m glad you could see a little of the place where I grew up. We’re what the world makes us, Elizabeth. Two cities made me, Futurity and San Francisco. And it pleases me that you exist in both of them.”

  Her expression made Jesse suspect he had not entirely avoided sentimentality. “You know,” she said, speaking softly but startling him nonetheless, “it’s going to burn.”

  “What?”

  “San Francisco. All these buildings, Jesse. All of them. First an earthquake, then the fire.”

  “Truly?”

  “Truly.”

  “When?”

  “In 1906. April, I think, but I’m not absolutely sure. I should have Googled it when I was back home. But if you’re still here, twenty-nine years from now? Take a spring vacation.”

  He looked away. There was a Kearneyite handbill plastered to the brick wall beside him, one of many such he had seen this afternoon. It advertised tonight’s mass meeting at the sandlots. Beside it was another handbill, written in Chinese letters. He couldn’t read it, but he recognized it as a chung hong—an announcement of impending war. “We might not have to wait thirty years,” he said, “to see it burn.”

  * * *

  Back at the trinket shop, the owner waved Jesse and Elizabeth through the beaded curtain to the room where Sonny Lau was already waiting. Sonny’s expression was somber, and Jesse wondered whether he ought to expect bad news.

  Sonny said, “Do you have the pistol?”

  Elizabeth took the Taser from the calico bag. The Taser was an awkward weapon and not a lethal one—both drawbacks, in Jesse’s opinion. It would incapacitate a man briefly but make an enemy of him for life. But he didn’t share these reservations with Sonny, whose eyes widened at the sight of the thing. It had a suitably intimidating appearance: black and yellow, fang-toothed, ready to spit venom.

  Sonny weighed the Taser in his hands as Jesse explained how to operate it. It required no ammunition, he said, but what he did not say was that it would need recharging, which would be impractical for another half century or so. Sonny said, “I’m instructed by my employer to make the exchange if the weapon seems authentic.”

  “It’s authentic, all right. They don’t come any more authentic than this one.”

  “All right,” Sonny said. “If you say so.”

  “So you can tell me where to find Theo Stromberg?”

  “Little Tom traced the package containing the pistol to its source, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  Elizabeth spoke up: “How do you trace a package in this day and age?”

  “Bribery,” Sonny said, giving her his by now familiar look of bewildered condescension, “and the threat of violence. How else?”

  “Where is he, then?” Jesse asked.

  “Little Tom was surprised to discover that the package had been sent by a man living in a hotel on Montgomery Street south of Market. Not the worst hotel in the city by a long stretch, but nothing like the best. The man has been living there for more than a year, along with a woman he calls his wife.”

  “Did Tom or any of his men approach him?”

  “My employer kept this knowledge to himself. At first he assigned men to watch the hotel, hoping to learn something more revealing. But the man and his wife spend most of their time in each other’s company. They leave the hotel for meals, or to take long aimless walks, or to attend the theater. The man often mails letters, though he never seems to receive any. He pays his rent promptly. Little Tom saw no advantage and much risk in attempting to contact him. Does that sound like the man you’re looking for?”

  “Close enough. All we need is an address.”

  Sonny Lau passed over a folded slip of paper, and Jesse put it in his pocket.

  The business was done. Sonny tucked the Taser into a leather carry-all. “I’d lay low for a while after this, if I were you. Little Tom asked a lot of questions.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Only as much as I had to. I told him someone I knew had been hired by the City of Futurity to hunt for a fugitive. That you had approached me and asked me to negotiate this exchange. I invented a name for you. But curiosity has been aroused. I may have been followed here. You ought to know that.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Or so Jesse hoped. “I thank you for taking the risk.”

  “There’s always risk. Risk is unimportant, as long as the house won’t be endangered.” The house on California Street, Sonny meant: Phoebe and Aunt Abbie and Randal and Soo Yee.

  “Good,” Jesse said, standing.

  “You’re happy with what I brought you?”

  The address on the paper might be fraudulent, though Jesse doubted Little Tom would stoop to hustling a City agent. Or it could be a trap. Roscoe Candy had business connections with the See Yups, though they didn’t love him. But if anyone could be trusted, it was Sonny Lau. “I’m in your debt.”

  They shook hands then, more as old friends than to seal the bargain, but Sonny still looked troubled. Jesse said, “Are you in danger?”

  “No more than any of us. Today the highbinders are tying up their queues and sharpening their hatchets. Try to be somewhere else after dark.”

  The handshake ended. Sonny turned to Elizabeth and made a curt bow. “Pleased to have made your acquaintance.”

  “Likewise,” Elizabeth said.

  * * *

  Jesse left the carriage at a livery stable on Market and walked with Elizabeth to the address they had been given. It was a three-story hotel on Montgomery near Market, just as Sonny Lau had said: not the plush Grand Hotel, which had impressed a younger Jesse as probably the finest hotel in all creation, or the even plusher Palace, which had been constructed in his absence. The Royal, as it was called, was older, less elegant, not exactly shabby but as close as it could get to that description while justifying the price of its rooms. The lobby smelled of oiled wood and boiled cabbage, halfway between a church and a cookhouse. The clerk behind the desk was a bald man with a vast gray beard and pitiless eyes. He looked at Jesse and Elizabeth, and at the calico travel bag in Jesse’s hand, and seemed to find their presence in his domain plausible if not entirely convincing. “A room for you and your lady, sir?”

  The price he quoted seemed high, but renting a room was the easiest way to gain access to the upper floors, and in any case it was Kemp’s money they were spending, not their own. Jesse didn’t want to put his true name on the register, so he signed as “John Comstock and Wife.” He was aware of the tension in Elizabeth’s body as she waited, the way she scanned the empty lobby as if it might at any moment fill up with hostile forces, wary as a lioness closing in on her prey.

  “So do we knock on the door?” she asked as they climbed the stairs, having waved off a disappointed elderly bellboy. According to Sonny’s information, the room in which Theo and Mercy were staying was on the third floor. Number 316. “Or do we knock the door down?”

  “Might as well knock first,” Jesse said. “See where it goes from there. Assuming anybody’s home.”

  At the third-floor landing he took a pistol from the travel bag and made sure it was loaded and ready to fire. Elizabeth did the same, keeping the weapon in her hand but concealing it against the billow of her day dress. Outside the door marked 316, Jesse put the bag on the floor within easy reach. He glanced at Elizabeth, who nodded her readiness. Now we come to the cusp of the thing, Jesse thought. He kept the pistol in his left hand and knocked on the door with the knuckles of his right. Four sharp raps.

  Long seconds passed. Then the latch rattled and the door opened inward, revealing a young woman. Mercy Kemp. She fit the description and matched all the pictures in the dossier. She was tall, like so many of these twen
ty-first-century women. She wore a pale yellow dress of no particular distinction. Her blond hair was shorter than most women wore it. Her face was flawlessly symmetrical and her skin was almost supernaturally unblemished. “Yes?”

  Jesse said, “Miss Mercy Kemp?”

  “You must be from the City.” She turned away and called out, “Theo! They’re here.”

  * * *

  It seemed prudent, as they came inside and closed the door behind them, to keep their weapons visible. But Theo Stromberg offered no resistance. “What were you expecting,” he asked, nodding at Jesse’s pistol, “a fire fight? You won’t need that.”

  “I hope not. But I’ll hang on to it for the time being.”

  Mercy and Theo stood together by the room’s long window as if framed in a photograph. Theo Stromberg, for all the deviltry he had committed, looked about as menacing as a hummingbird. He was a wiry man, and he gave the impression that there wasn’t quite enough of him to fill his clothes. He was clean-shaven and dark-haired and nervous. Like Mercy, Theo would not have seemed remarkable if you passed him on the street. But put these two together and they looked unmistakably like visitors from the future—unformed, too perfectly made, lacking all the scars and marks that distinguish real people from store-window mannequins.

  On top of a bureau was a leather travel bag, open but almost fully packed. Most of what it contained was women’s clothing, presumably Mercy’s wardrobe. “Getting ready to go somewhere?”

  “Yeah,” Theo said amicably. “Home.”

  It wasn’t clear what he meant by that. Elizabeth said, “We’re here to take you into custody.”

  “Fine, good,” Theo said.

  Mercy added, “We expected my father to send someone. I’m surprised it took so long. We’re finished here. We’re ready to go with you.”

  “Another day and you’d have missed us,” Theo said. “We figured we should head east before the strikes shut down rail service west of the Mississippi.”