Last Year

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Elizabeth said, “You’re telling us you’re willing to go back?”

  “We don’t want to be stranded here. That was never part of the plan. So when we heard the news—”

  “What news?”

  Theo looked at Mercy, Mercy looked at Theo. Theo pointed at a copy of the Chronicle lying on a chair, pages askew. Jesse took his eyes off his nominal captives long enough to spot the pertinent headline at the top of a long column of dense type:

  FEDERAL TROOPS BESIEGE CITY OF FUTURITY

  Elizabeth didn’t trust the apparent docility of the captives—if Theo had offered even a hint of resistance she would have been happy to put him in wrist restraints—but she left them under Jesse’s surveillance and took the radio into an adjoining room.

  She pictured her signal bouncing from Montgomery Street to Oakland, flying across the bay like a weightless bird, outstripping the ferries and freight boats. Radio before Marconi. She guessed Marconi was just an Italian kid in short pants circa 1877, if he had even been born yet. Something else she could Google at her leisure, if she ever got home.

  A voice she didn’t recognize answered her call and told her to stay on the air. Then there was an interval of noise, cosmic rays crackling down from distant stars, until Kemp’s voice drowned it out. “Elizabeth? What’s your status?”

  “We have her.”

  A pause. Then, “Thank God. Oh, Christ. It was a close thing, Elizabeth, I won’t shit you about that.”

  “We have Theo, too. They both say they’re willing to come back. No argument.”

  “Theo’s a liar. Don’t take him at his word. Especially not as long as my daughter is under his influence.”

  “Understood. But I’m assuming you want us to bring them both in.”

  “Obviously, but it’s Mercy who matters. Keep that in mind.”

  “We will.”

  “Okay. Things are a little chaotic here—”

  “It was in the papers,” Elizabeth said, “about the siege.”

  “We’re dealing with it. It’s not as bad as it sounds. Fucking reporters, half the time they’re just making shit up. It’s true Hayes has an infantry brigade at the gate. Some laid-off local employee told the Chicago papers about the attempt on Grant’s life—Congress and the press are making a big deal of it, on top of everything else. But we still have a few friends in high places. We’ll make it back safely, I promise, but time is tight.”

  “So what happens next?”

  “We’re dealing with local hostility here on the Oakland side. The City’s docks and property are more or less under police control right now, so we’re working out of private facilities the authorities don’t know about. Getting you out of San Francisco is going to be a little tricky. We should be able to have an unmarked boat for you at the Market Street wharf by nine tonight, but we’re still working out the details. Can you stay where you are for another few hours?”

  Elizabeth wasn’t sure how to answer that. Jesse might have stirred up a hornets’ nest by bartering with the tongs. But it was hard to imagine hired killers storming the Royal Hotel. “I guess we can sit tight.”

  “Stay by the radio and be ready to move when you get the word. How far are you from the docks?”

  “Jesse would know better than I do, all this horse traffic, but maybe half an hour, three-quarters of an hour?”

  “Okay, noted. As for Jesse, tell him he’ll be paid when you deliver Mercy to the boat. He doesn’t need to come across the bay with her. Once I have my daughter back, his work is done. And that’s the last you’ll see of him. Understood?”

  “Understood,” she said, hating him for making her say it.

  * * *

  Jesse didn’t like the idea of waiting in the hotel for orders from Kemp. This was a place known to his enemies, and every instinct he had learned as a bouncer’s boy told him to keep moving and stick to the shadows.

  But orders were orders. He was only hired help, and he would be hired help for a few hours more, until Kemp, or someone from the City, paid him off with a bag of double eagles and a handshake. Then he would be his own man again. And Elizabeth would go home to her daughter. And the rest of his life, which seemed to Jesse like an ominous void waiting to be filled, could begin.

  In the meantime there was nothing to do but sit at the window of the hotel room and watch the sun creep down behind a billboard advertising Kopp’s Pills for Cough and Grippe. It was the time of day when San Francisco’s respectable citizens began heading for their comfortable homes and lockable doors, while everyone else—that is to say, the city’s majority—prepared to conduct the kind of business that thrives after dark. Elizabeth, seated across the room from Theo and Mercy and cradling her pistol in her lap, seemed not to want to talk. But Jesse was bored and saw no reason to suppress his curiosity about the two runners. He’d talked to many runners in the course of his work, and he didn’t despise them as a class. So when Theo ventured to ask a question—“How exactly did you find us?”—Jesse said, “The City tracked you to San Francisco. There must have been postmarks on some of those letters you sent.”

  “That’s not surprising. And we weren’t exactly hiding. But how’d you track us to the Royal?”

  “Talked to one of the Six Companies. They like to know the whereabouts of the people they do business with.”

  “Okay, I get that, but how did you connect us to the Six Companies?”

  “The weapons you’ve been giving away tend to end up in the hands of people with grievances. Hereabouts, that’s one of two groups—Chinamen and wage workers. I happen to know some people in Chinatown, so that’s where we started. If that didn’t pan out I would have talked to the Kearneyites.”

  “What if I hadn’t given pistols to either group?”

  “Then we wouldn’t have found you so quick, and you wouldn’t be going home.”

  “Well,” Theo said in his piping voice, “you’re wrong on two counts. One, I would never put a weapon in the hands of the Kearneyites. Denis Kearney talks a lot about the working man, but he’s a fucking racist. The way it worked out where I come from, Kearneyite mobs attacked the Chinese and a lot of innocent people got killed. It seems likely to happen here just the same. Second, I have no desire to stay behind after the Mirror closes. If that’s what August Kemp thinks, he has no idea what I’m all about.”

  “He thinks you’ll face legal trouble if you go home.”

  “He can bring charges, sure, but on fairly trivial grounds—transporting dangerous goods, trespassing on City property. The weapons I arranged to smuggle through the Mirror were legally purchased, and there’s no law about what I can do with them on this side. I mean, Kemp imported weapons, too, in the hands of his security people. They say a local was killed by City agents at Futurity Station last year. Is Kemp going to answer for that? No—not back home, not in a court of law. Given that, does he really want to initiate a lawsuit that’ll put my testimony into the public record? I hope he does, but I doubt he’s that stupid.”

  Jesse didn’t react when Theo mentioned the man killed at Futurity Station. Nor did Elizabeth. But it raised a question. He said, “Some of those Glocks ended up in the wrong hands, didn’t they?”

  The glow of moral certainty vanished from Theo’s face. “Not everyone in my supply chain was reliable. I had to work with locals and low-level City employees. The guns were never supposed to be more than symbolic. One pistol, one clip, a dramatic way of proving to the people I wrote to that the warnings I sent them really came from the future. But more weapons came across than I ever intended.”

  “A piece or two got sold that shouldn’t have, in other words.”

  “Apparently.”

  “Private buyers.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Including the man who tried to shoot Ulysses S. Grant. Which is another reason you might be eager to get out of 1877.”

  Theo didn’t have an answer for that.

  Out on the street, the shadows had grown and merged. The air
was still, the sky the color of blue ink. A horse car rattled up Montgomery. From time to time, passing men glanced up at the hotel. Jesse said to Elizabeth, “Too many people know this room number. We already rented a room upstairs—we should go there.”

  He was afraid she might accuse him of paranoia, a twenty-first-century word for unreasonable fear (and apparently a common malady in that world). But she nodded curtly. “Good thought.”

  Mercy Kemp looked at her bag. “I can finish packing—”

  Jesse said, “You won’t need all that, and we’ll travel lighter without it.”

  She gave it a moment’s thought and shrugged. Sensible attitude, Jesse thought. Moments later they were in a nearly identical room one floor up. According to his pocket watch, another hour had passed without further word from August Kemp.

  It seemed to Jesse that Mercy had a little of her father about her. It was nothing obvious, just her quick brown eyes, a sort of economy of motion, a hint of the elder Kemp’s natural authority. Jesse knew she was a woman who had once been made to feel special and permitted to expect obedience from others, but there was something chastened in her, too—a humility she must have learned, not inherited. He asked how she had come to join Theo in the adventures that had landed her in a hotel south of Market.

  She shrugged. “I believe in the cause.”

  It sounded like a well-rehearsed answer to a foolish question. “The cause of bankrupting your father?”

  “The cause of letting people know what he’s doing here and stopping him from doing it again.”

  “By ‘here,’ you mean San Francisco?”

  “I mean your whole world.”

  “And what’s he doing to it, in your opinion?”

  “Exploiting it, corrupting it, deceiving it, and abandoning it as soon as he’s extracted enough gold to turn a profit.”

  “He might say he’s given as much as he’s taken.”

  “I’m sure he would. But that would be a lie.”

  “Do you hate your father, Ms. Kemp? Did he raise you badly?”

  “That’s a People magazine kind of question.” She gave him an impatient look, then sighed and said, “I don’t hate my father. I mean, he wasn’t around a lot, so maybe I have some issues. But that’s not why I joined the movement, and it’s not why I’m here.”

  She seemed reluctant to say more. “Well, I won’t press—”

  “She’s a truther,” Elizabeth said.

  Mercy sat upright. “That’s an insulting word.”

  Elizabeth said, “Truthers are conspiracy theorists. Mercy’s a time-travel truther. She thinks the government’s covering up the real source of the Mirror technology.”

  “It was invented by gnomes from the far reaches of Hilbert space,” Jesse said. “Isn’t that what you told me?”

  Mercy’s indignation turned her face a brickish shade of red. “They weren’t ‘gnomes.’ They were normal for where they came from. They were kept in captivity for a couple of years before they died.”

  “No one’s ever proved that,” Elizabeth said.

  “Because the evidence has been suppressed. But the facts are coming out piece by piece, and it makes the elites nervous.”

  Jesse said, “What facts are those?”

  “The fact that our entire political and economic system is driving us into a lethal dead end.” Mercy turned to Elizabeth. “The people you call ‘gnomes’ came from almost a thousand years in our future. They’re small because, where they come from, everybody’s small. Their bodies are unusual in a lot of ways, according to the autopsies, which were never officially released. They process food more efficiently than we do. They’re built for survival in a hot, depleted environment. That’s an uncomfortable truth for anyone who wants to go on doing business as usual, given that business-as-usual is cooking the planet. But it gets worse, for people like my father. The visitors’ economic system is different, too—egalitarian in a way that makes wealthy and powerful people uncomfortable.”

  Jesse turned to Theo. “Do you believe this as well, about the utopian gnomes?”

  Theo looked uncomfortable. “I haven’t seen the kind of evidence Mercy’s seen. But I agree that there needs to be a whole lot more transparency. And, you know, the irony is pretty inescapable.”

  “What irony is that?”

  “That we suppress information about the future on the grounds that making it public might create chaos. But somehow it’s okay for us to come here and stir up the exact same shit. It’s a double standard.”

  “My father’s doing things here that are inexcusable,” Mercy said. “You should be angry at him.”

  I may yet work myself up to it, Jesse thought.

  * * *

  By the time it was fully dark, two fire wagons had gone rattling and clanging down Montgomery Street. There was nothing else the window view could tell him, but it was a safe bet that there was trouble in Chinatown, just as Theo had predicted. Jesse was relieved, then, when the radio emitted a chirp that indicated an incoming message. Elizabeth put the device to her ear and said “yes” or “okay” at various intervals; then she tucked the radio into the calico travel bag and said, “We’re supposed to be at the Market Street wharf by ten o’clock. An unmarked boat will take us across the bay to Oakland.”

  Jesse checked his pocket watch. Ample time to make the deadline. “All right,” he said. To Mercy and Theo: “We have a carriage big enough to carry us all. If anyone’s watching they’ll see us leave the hotel, but I can’t do anything about that—we only have to get to the stable around the corner on Market. Once we’re in the carriage we should be safe enough, though we might need to take the long way around if there’s trouble between here and the wharfs. Understood?”

  Nods all around.

  “Downstairs, out the door, up Montgomery to Market. I’ll reclaim the carriage, then we head for the docks. All right?”

  No objections. The ladies put on their hats.

  Jesse opened the door of the room and surveyed the hallway beyond. The Royal Hotel wasn’t a complicated building. He could see the entire corridor from the north end to the stairway on the south, and there was no motion but the flicker of the gaslights. “Come ahead,” he said.

  They made it to the third-floor landing before they encountered anyone else. In this case it was a man in a top hat, escorting a woman who looked too furtive to be his wife. The man was clutching a room key in his right hand.

  The couple walked past the door marked 316, Mercy and Theo’s old room. Jesse wouldn’t have given it a second thought, save that the woman tugged her companion’s sleeve and said, “What kind of hotel is this? This door’s had its lock broken.”

  Elizabeth guided Mercy and Theo a little ways down the stair, out of sight. Jesse waited for the top-hatted man to convince his female friend to continue on to their own room. Once they were out of the corridor he made a cautious approach to 316.

  The door was ajar. And yes, the lock had been forced—with a crowbar, it looked like. The wood of the jamb was splintered and broken.

  Jesse pushed the door open and stepped inside.

  The room was empty. Nothing had been disturbed except Mercy’s suitcase, the contents of which had been dumped on the floor. All else was as they had left it earlier in the day. The thieves had not found what they had come for.

  Because what they came for, Jesse thought, was us.

  * * *

  The break-in wasn’t entirely surprising. The question was, who was behind it? Little Tom or some other tong boss, looking for more City weapons? Or Roscoe Candy, looking for revenge?

  They passed through the lobby of the Royal into the street, where the evening air smelled of refuse and wood smoke. The pedestrians on Montgomery were mostly male and mostly respectable, none obviously threatening. Haphazard light and deep shadow provided cover but made it harder to spot potentially hostile strangers. Jesse walked a little ahead of Mercy and Theo; Elizabeth walked a pace behind them, as if she were afraid they might dart
away into the crowd.

  The traffic on Market Street was denser and even more lively, but the livery stable where he had left the carriage bore a crude sign that said CLOSED. There was no visible light from inside. Jesse pounded his fist on the barn-sized door, but no one came. Which was worrying. There were animals inside—he could hear the nervous whinnying that followed his knock—and at this hour there should have been a hostler there to tend them. He looked at Elizabeth, who shrugged.

  The big door wasn’t chained, so he pushed it open. The reek of horses and fouled straw wafted out of the darkness, along with the sound of the animals shuffling in place. There was no lantern at hand. Jesse had been carrying his pistol on his belt under his shirt; now he took it in his hand and kept it at his side. “Stay by the door,” he told Elizabeth. “Keep Mercy and Theo where you can see them.” She nodded and drew her own pistol from a pocket sewn into her day dress.

  Jesse hugged the shadows as he began to move deeper into the building. On his right was a row of stalls; on his left an assortment of carts, wagons, and carriages. A tall window at the rear of the shed admitted enough reflected light to allow him to navigate without bumping into anything. As he passed a small alcove he spotted an oil lamp resting on an anvil, as if it had been left there in haste, and he paused long enough to lift the mantle and light the wick with a paper lucifer of the futuristic kind. The lamp gave off an acrid glare that penetrated into the dark places of the shed and made it instantly obvious why no one had answered his knock.

  The stable hand who had accepted Jesse’s horse and carriage only a few hours ago lay motionless, sprawled behind a quenching barrel in the blacksmith’s alcove. The blacksmith in his apron lay facedown on a drift of urine-soaked straw, arms akimbo. The throats of both men had been cut. Their blood had collected in rusty pools. It had been there long enough to begin congealing.

  Jesse felt himself grow cold—a literal coldness, a winter wind that seemed to travel from his heart to his extremities.

  Some years ago, a knife-wielding Placer County miner had assaulted one of Madame Chao’s girls because she couldn’t make his pecker stand up. Jesse had helped his father evict the man. It hadn’t been easy, and he had taken a few cuts in the process, but the miner got the worst of it. Later, Jesse had tried to describe to his father the feeling that had come over him during the fight, a radiant chill that didn’t make him weaker but made him strong. I know all about that, his father had said: It was a Cullum trait, a blessing and a curse. Helpful in a fight because it numbed the nerves and left the mind cool and clear; dangerous because it made you less likely to turn and flee—almost always the wisest course of action.