The clothes were bloodstained and a poor fit, but they allowed Billy to move without attracting attention. He explored the corridors of the tenement building above the sub-basement chamber which contained the tunnel; he explored the nearby streets of the night city. He deduced from the contents of the dead man’s wallet that the time traveler had occupied an “apartment” in this building. Billy located the entrance, one numbered door among many, and fumbled keys into the primitive lock until the door sprang inward.
He slept in the dead man’s bed. He appropriated a fresh suit of clothes. He marveled at the dead man’s calendar: 1953.
He found cash in the dead man’s wallet, more cash in a drawer of his desk. Billy understood cash: it was an archaic form of credit, universal and interchangeable. The denominations were confusing but simple in principle: a ten-dollar bill was “worth” two fives, for instance.
He stayed in the apartment a week. Twice, someone knocked at the door; but Billy was quiet and didn’t answer. He watched television at night. He ate regular meals until there was nothing left in the refrigerator. He sat at the window and studied the people passing in the street.
He kept his armor hidden under the bed. As vulnerable as Billy felt without the armor, he would have been grotesquely conspicuous in it. He supposed he could have worn the body pieces under his clothing and looked only a little peculiar, but that wasn’t the point; he hadn’t come here to wear the armor. He planned not to wear the armor at all … at least, only to wear it when he had to, when the peculiar needs of his altered body demanded it. In a month, say. Two months. Six months. Not now.
When there was nothing left to eat Billy gathered up his cash and left the building. He walked three blocks to a “grocery” and found himself in a paradise of fresh fruit and vegetables, more of these things than he had ever seen in one place. Dazzled, he chose three oranges, a head of lettuce, and a bunch of bright yellow speckled bananas. He handed the checkout clerk a flimsy cash certificate and was nonplussed when the man said, “I can’t change that! Christ’s sake!” Change it to what? But Billy rooted in his pocket for a smaller denomination, which proved acceptable, and he understood the problem when the cashier handed him a fresh selection of bills and coins: his “change.”
Words, Billy thought. What they spoke here was English, but only just.
He acquired his new life by theft.
The custodian, a time traveler, had owned the block of tenement flats above the sub-basement which concealed the tunnel. The deeds were stored in a filing cabinet in the bedroom. For years the time traveler had operated the building strictly as, a formality and most of the apartments were empty. Billy passed himself off as “new management” and accepted the monthly rent checks. The charade was almost ridiculously easy. There was no family to mourn the dead man, no business partners to inquire about his health. By reviewing the documents he learned that the time traveler had registered his business under the name Hourglass Rentals, and Billy was able to discern enough of the local financial customs to manipulate bank deposits and withdrawals and pay the tax bills on time. Hourglass Rentals didn’t generate enough revenue to cover its debts, but the amount of money banked in the company name was staggering—enough to keep Billy in food and shelter for the rest of his life. Not only that, but the management of these fiscal arcana had been streamlined for a single individual to operate without help— an hour of paperwork an evening, once Billy mastered the essentials of bookkeeping and learned which lies to tell the IRS, the city, and the utility companies. By the end of 1952, Billy was Hourglass Rentals.
It suited him to commandeer the life of a loner. Billy was a loner, too.
He guessed the armor had made him that way. He knew the Infantry surgeons had made him dependent on the armor —that without it he was less than a normal human being. Sexually, Billy was a blank slate. He remembered a time when he had wanted the touch of a woman—back in his brief adolescence, before he was prepped, when the physical need had burned like a flame—but that was long ago. Nothing burned in him now but his need for the armor. Now he saw women all the time: women on television, women on city streets, bank tellers, secretaries, women available for money. Occasionally they looked at him. Their looks seldom lingered. Billy guessed there was something about him they could sense—a blankness, a deferral, an inertia of the soul.
It didn’t matter. By the snowy January of 1953 Billy had established a life he was content to lead.
He was far from the Infantry, the Storm Zone, and the prospect of imminent death or court martial. He wasn’t hungry and he wasn’t in physical danger. When he stopped to think about it, it felt a little bit like paradise.
Was he happy here? Billy couldn’t say. Most days passed in blissful oblivion, and he was grateful for that. But there were times when he felt the pangs of a brittle, piercing loneliness. He woke up nights in a city more than a century away from home, and that impossible distance was like a hook in his heart. He thought about his father, Nathan. He tried to remember his mother, who had died when he was little. He thought about his life in exile here, stranded on this island, Manhattan, among people who had been dead a hundred years when he was born. Thought about his life among these ghosts. He thought about time, about clocks: clocks, like words, worked differently here. Billy was accustomed to clocks that numbered time and marked it with cursors, linear slices of a linear phenomenon. Here, clocks were round and symbolic. Time was a territory mapped with circles.
Time and words. Seasons. That January, Billy was caught in a snowstorm that slowed the buses to a crawl. Tired and cold, he decided to check into a hotel rather than walk the distance home. He found an inexpensive boarding hotel and asked the desk clerk for a room with a slut; the clerk showed him a strange smile and said he would have to arrange that himself—he recommended a bar a few blocks away. Billy disguised his confusion and checked in anyway, then realized that in 1953 the word “slut” must have some other meaning —he didn’t need a heated bed; the entire room, the entire hotel was heated. Probably every room in the city was heated, even the vast public spaces of banks and the cavernous lobbies of skyscrapers, all through the bitter winter. He had a hard time grasping this simple fact; when he did, the sheer arrogant monstrosity of it left him dazed and blinking.
Asleep in the snowbound hotel, Billy dreamed of all that heat … a hundred summers’ worth, bubbling up from this city and a dozen cities like it, hovering for decades in invisible cloudbanks and then descending all at once in a final obliteration of the seasons.
He dreamed about Ohio, about a farm in the desert there.
His need for the armor was quiet at first, a barely discernible tickle of desire, something he could ignore—for a time.
The armor, with its power off and its tensor fields collapsed, lay in the box Billy had found for it like yardcloth from some fairy-tale haberdashery. It looked like spun gold, though of course it wasn’t really gold; it was woven of complex polymolecules grown in the big East Coast armaments collectives. Parts of it were electronic and parts of it were vaguely alive.
The Infantry doctors had told Billy he’d die without his armor—that he would go mad without the essential neurochemicals generated in the elytra. Billy was frankly aware that without the armor he was slow, languorous, sleepy, and sexless. But he endured that—in a way, the condition was even sedating. For six months he moved through the city with his eyelids heavy and his mouth turned up in an empty narcotic smile.
Then came the Need.
At first it was only a tingling dissatisfaction, pins and needles in his fingers and toes. Billy ignored it and went about his business.
Then the tingling became an itch, the itch a fiery burning. The skin of his face felt drawn tight, as if it had been clamped and sutured to his hairline. He woke up in the bitter late winter of that year with the disquieting sensation that he could feel the gaps and contours of his own skull under the skin, the grinding of bones and ligaments like dry chalk inside him. He was thirsty all the
time, but tap water tasted sour in his mouth and burned his throat when he swallowed. He felt sudden blooms of panic, irrational fears: of heights, open spaces, disease.
He knew what this was all about.
The armor, Billy thought.
The sleek and deadly armor.
He wanted it, or it wanted him … Billy was inclined to the latter belief.
This discomfort, this pain, this vertigo: it was the sound of the armor calling to him from its box under the bed.
Billy resisted it.
He was afraid of what the armor might want.
Well, he knew what it wanted. It wanted motion, light, heat. It wanted to be brought alive. It wanted to be the creature that Billy was when he wore it, a powerful nightmare-Billy to be summoned and let loose.
He dreamed he was a dog chasing rabbits through a field of wheat by the bone-white light of a harvest moon. He dreamed of cracking the rabbit’s spine with his sharp teeth and of the gush of warm rabbit blood on his muzzle.
He dreamed of the armor. The armor was a presence in all his dreams now, the flash of it like something dazzling at the periphery of his vision. He couldn’t bear to look directly at it;
like the sun, it might blind him—but, like the sun, it was always there.
Some nights, sweating and shivering, he dreamed of Ohio.
In the main, Billy’s childhood memories were sunny. He had grown up in a farm town called Oasis, one of the soil reclamation collectives that had sprung up along the diversion canals drawing water south from the Great Lakes. Founded in a mood of optimism during the Dry Fifties, operated by a consortium of food distributors out of Detroit, the town had lost some of its civic spirit in the hard decades after. But if you grew up there, you didn’t notice. For Billy, it was only a place.
He carried a few vivid memories of that time. He remembered the sky, a hazy blue vastness that had seemed as big as time itself. He remembered the miracle of water, water gushing up from sprinkler heads embedded in the dust-dikes that ran in lazy whorls through the fields—water raining down over a thousand acres of new green leaves. The town grew wheat and cabbage and kale and alfalfa and a patchwork of minor crops. Twice, Billy had been allowed to ride out on the big tending machines; and it made him proud and giddy to sit beside his father in the crow’s-nest seat, emperor of all this fragrant green foliage and dusty blue sky. He remembered one scorching summer when a work battalion from AgService came to install what they called “UV screens”—huge banners of some nearly invisible film, tethered on poles and anchored with fat steel cables. For a few days it was cooler in the fields, and the clinic reported exposure trauma down a percentile. But then—pretty much as Billy’s father had predicted—a hot wind came blowing from the west and the UV film broke free of its tethers. It balled up and tangled in the crops like so much cellophane discarded by a thoughtless giant. Acres of winter wheat were bent and broken. Nathan, surveying the battered fields, had startled Billy by falling on his knees.
Billy remembered Nathan as a large man—large, bearded, generous, often quiet, and deeply unhappy. His father always followed the news on the big screen in the civic center; and Billy gleaned that it was Nathan who received the other news, microwave databursts not sanctioned by the federal information services—news, especially, on the movement of conscription battalions across the Midwest.
Every two or three years the recruiters swept into Oasis. Nathan said they were like the locusts in the Bible, a plague. They would bunk in the labor barracks, stay a few days, maybe leave some of the more impressionable young girls with a new baby inside them; and when they rode away in their huge hovertrucks they would take a few draftees—boys barely old enough to shave, mainly.
Nathan and the town council usually had some warning when the battalions were coming, time enough to tamper with the town’s birth records—to delete or alter certain documents. The likeliest young recruits would be hidden away in a supply cellar under the machine shed and the women would sneak them food. The battalions complained about the slim pickings, and sometimes they ran crude tamper-check routines on the civic computers … but if you got them drunk enough, Nathan said, they’d leave happy.
But if they came without warning—if they had destroyed the pirate relay towers on their way west—then they took what they wanted.
Billy remembered a summer when the news from the Storm Zone was very bad, tremendous loss of life all through the Caribbean and the occupation forces scattered. That summer, the Infantry came without warning. They arrived in a phalanx of black hovercraft, raising a cloud of dust that must have reddened sunsets all the way to Sandusky. Billy remembered his father’s face when he climbed an embankment and saw that gray-black line approaching from the west —dismay as substantial as a weight on his shoulders.
He turned to Billy and said, “Go to the machine shed. Hurry.”
It was the first time Billy had been old enough to hide with the other boys. It might have been exciting … but this time things were different. This time, he had seen his father’s fear.
The cellar was hot and smelled of ancient cottonseed and burlap. He crouched there with a dozen other boys. “I’ll come get you,” Nathan had said, “when the Infantry are gone,” and the words had reassured him a little. But it wasn’t Nathan who came.
He never saw Nathan again.
It was a soldier who came.
An Infantryman. Billy woke blinking and bewildered in the clockless depths of cellar night, startled awake by the sound of footsteps. The Infantryman smiled down from the doorway. His name, he said, was Krakow. He was wearing his armor—a command breastplate, radiantly golden. Billy gazed up with no little awe as Krakow touched his chest. “This is my armor,” he said. “This is the part of it you can see. Some of it is inside me. My armor knows who I am, and I know my armor. My armor is a machine, and right now it isn’t fully powered. But if I switched it on I could kill you all before there was time enough to blink. And I would enjoy it.”
Billy didn’t doubt the truth of this. Krakow ran his fingers over the mirror-bright surface of the breastplate and Billy wondered exactly how you turned the armor on—he hoped Krakow wouldn’t do it by mistake.
“My armor is my best friend.” Krakow’s voice was gentle, confiding. “An Infantryman’s armor is always his best friend. Your armor will be your best friend.”
Billy knew what that meant. It meant he was leaving home.
Curled in the womb of his apartment, Billy ate canned tuna and watched television and sat up nights shivering, listening to the snow rattle on the window. His temperature crept upward; his joints ached; his body felt as if the skin had been flayed from it. Billy endured this until it was unbearable. He was surprised at how distinct that moment was: the tick of a second hand on the wheel of a clock, a single thought. No more.
He took the box from under the bed and opened it. The golden armor was inside—all the large and small pieces of it.
Billy recalled the catechism of his training. Sir, this is my armor, sir.
Sir, these are the body pieces, which are called the elytra. (Like cloth, quite golden, rigid only when impacted at high velocity. Bulging here and there with instrumentation, power packs, processing units.)
These are the arm pieces, sir, which are called the halteres. (Molding to the contour of his skin. They feel warm.)
Sir, these are the leg pieces, which are called the setae. (Snug against his thighs.)
Sir, this touchplate controls the stylet and the lancet, which connect the armor to my body. (To the liver, to the spine, to the lumen of the aorta.)
Hollow micropipettes burrowing in, wet with contact anesthetic.
Motion under his skin.
It felt funny.
Sir, this touchpiece activates the lancet.
Ah.
He moved in the snowbound night streets like a ghost.
He wore loose clothes over his armor, a long gray coat and a broad-brimmed hat to shadow his face.
He move
d among the snowy lamp standards and the blinking traffic fights. Past midnight, before dawn, 1953.
He was supple and powerful and quite invincible.
He was intoxicated with his own hidden strength and dizzy with the need to kill a human being.
He did not resist the urge but he tantalized himself with it. The streets were empty and the snow came down in dry, icy granules. Wind flapped at the hem of his chalk-gray overcoat and erased his footprints behind him. The few pedestrians he saw were bent against the wind, scurrying like beetles for shelter. He followed one, maintaining a discreet distance, until the man vanished into a tenement building. Billy reached the stoop … paused a long moment in the winter darkness … then walked on.
He chose another potential victim, a small man spotlit by the beam of an automobile headlight; Billy followed him two blocks east but allowed this one, too, to vanish behind a door.
No hurry. He was warm in his armor. He was content. His heart beat inside him with the happy regularity of a finely tuned machine.
He smiled at a man who stepped out of an all-night delicatessen with a paper bag tucked under his arm. This one? Tall man, sleepless, red-eyed, suspicious, a cheap cloth coat: not a rich man; bulk of arms and chest: maybe a strong man.
“Hell of a night,” Billy said.
The man shrugged, smiled vaguely, and turned to face the wind.
Yes, this one, Billy thought.
Billy took him with his wrist beam in an alley half a block away.
The killing took all of twenty seconds, but it was the nearest thing to an orgasm Billy had experienced since he came through the tunnel from the future. A brief and blissful release.
He mutilated the body with a knife, to disguise the cauterization of the wounds; then he took the man’s wallet, to make the death seem like a robbery.
He dropped the wallet in a trash bin on Eighth Street. The money—five dollars in ones—he took home and flushed down the toilet.
A Bridge of Years Page 14