A Bridge of Years

by Charles Robert Wilson

  Step by step, she thought. One thing at a time. She heated the frying pan, located a chicken breast she’d been thawing since morning, took a second one from the freezer and quick-defrosted it in the microwave—she would eat this one herself; Catherine didn’t believe in nuked food, especially for guests. She didn’t much believe in pan-fried chicken, either, but it was quick and available.

  She set two places at the dinner table. The dining room was large and Victorian, Gram Peggy’s cuckoo clock presiding over a cabinet stocked with blue Wedgwood. Catherine started coffee perking and served dinner on the Petalware she’d picked up at a thrift shop in Belltower—because it seemed somehow wrong or impertinent to be eating from Gram Peggy’s china when Gram Peggy wasn’t home. Archer carried his two souvenirs, the notebook and the New York Times, to the table with him. But he set them aside and complimented her on the food.

  Catherine picked at her chicken. It tasted irrelevant.

  She said, “Well, what have we got ourselves into?”

  Archer managed a smile. “Something absolutely unexpected. Something we don’t understand.”

  “You sound pleased about that.”

  “Do I? I guess I am, in a way. It kind of confirms this suspicion I’ve had.”

  “Suspicion?”

  “That the world is stranger than it looks.”

  Catherine considered this. “I think I know what you mean. When I was eighteen, I took up jogging. I used to go out after dark, winter nights. I liked all the yellow lighted-up windows of the houses. It felt funny being the only person out on the street, just, you know, running and breathing steam. I used to get an idea that anything could happen, that I’d turn a corner and I’d be in Oz and nobody would be the wiser—none of those people sleepwalking behind those yellow windows would have the slightest idea. I knew what kind of world it was. They didn’t.”

  “Exactly,” Archer said.

  “But there was never Oz. Only one more dark street.”

  “Until now.”

  “Is this Oz?”

  “It might as well be.”

  She supposed that was true. “I guess we can’t tell anyone.”

  “I don’t think we should, no.”

  “And we have to go back in the morning.”

  “Yes.”

  “We can’t forget about it and we can’t walk away. He needs our help.”

  “I think so.”

  “But what is he?”

  “Well, I think maybe he told us the truth, Catherine. I think he’s a time traveler.”

  “Is that possible?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I’m past making odds on what’s possible and what isn’t.”

  She gestured at the notebook, the newspaper. “So what did you find?”

  “They belonged to Tom Winter, I believe. Look.” She pushed aside her chicken and examined the paper. Sunday, May 13, 1962. The Late City Edition.

  U.S SHIPS AND 1,800 MARINES ON WAY TO INDOCHINA AREA; LAOS DECREES EMERGENCY … DOCTORS TRANSPLANT HUMAN HEART VALVE … CHURCH IN SPAIN BACKS WORKERS ON STRIKE RIGHTS

  The front page had yellowed—but only a little.

  “Check out the notebook,” Archer prompted.

  She leafed through it. The entries were brief scrawls and occupied the first three pages; the rest of the book was blank.

  Troubling Questions, it said at the top.

  You could walk away from this, it said.

  This is dangerous, and you could walk away.

  Everybody else on the face of the earth is being dragged into the future an hour at a time, but you can walk out. You found the back door.

  Thirty years ago, she read. They have the Bomb. Think about it. They have industrial pollution. They have racism, ignorance, crime, starvation—

  Are you really so frightened of the future?

  I’ll go back one more time. At least to look. To really be there. At least once.

  She looked up at Doug Archer. “It’s a sort of diary.”

  “A short one.”

  “Tom Winter’s?”

  “I’d bet on it.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Walked into a shitload of trouble, it looks like. But that remains to be seen.”

  Only later did the obvious next thought occur to Catherine: Maybe we walked into a shitload of trouble, too.

  Archer slept on the sofa. In the morning he phoned the Belltower Realty office and told them he was sick—“Death’s door,” he said into the phone. “That’s right. Yup. I know. I know. Yeah, I hope so too. Thanks.”

  Catherine said, “Won’t you get into trouble?”

  “Lose some commissions, for sure.”

  “Is that all right?”

  “It’s all right with me. I have other business.” He grinned —a little wildly, in Catherine’s opinion. “Hey, there are miracles happening. Aren’t you a little bit excited by that?”

  She allowed a guilty smile. “I guess I am.”

  Then they drove down to the Safeway and bought five frozen T-bone steaks for Ben, the time traveler.

  * * *

  Archer visited the house every day for a week, sometimes with Catherine and sometimes without her. He brought food, which the time traveler never ate in his presence—maybe the machine bugs absorbed it and fed it to him in some more direct fashion; he didn’t care to know the details.

  Every day, he exchanged some words with Ben.

  It was getting easier to think of him as “Ben,” as something human rather than monstrous. The bedclothes disguised most of his deformities; and the white, sebaceous caul where his skull should have been had acquired enough pigmentation, by the third day, to pass for human skin. Archer had been scared at first by the machine bugs all over the house, but they never approached him and never presented any kind of threat. So Archer began to ask questions.

  Simple ones at first: “How long were you in the shed?”

  “Ten years, more or less.”

  “You were injured all that time?”

  “I was dead most of that time.”

  “Clinically dead?”

  Ben smiled. “At least.” .

  “What happened to you?”

  “I was murdered.”

  “What saved you?”

  “They did.” The machine bugs.

  Or he asked about Tom Winter: “What happened to him?”

  “He went somewhere he shouldn’t have gone.” This was ominous. “He traveled in time?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is he still alive?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Brief questions, brief answers. Archer let it rest at that. He was trying to get a sense of who this person really was—how dangerous, how trustworthy. And he sensed Ben making similar judgments about him, perhaps in some more subtle or certain way.

  Catherine didn’t seem surprised by this. She let Archer sleep in her living room some nights; they ate dinner and breakfast together, talked about these strange events sometimes and sometimes not. Like Archer, she stopped by the Winter house every day or so. “We’re like church deacons,” Archer said. “Visiting the sick.” And she answered, “That’s what it feels like, doesn’t it? How strange.”

  It was that, Archer thought. Very strange indeed. And the strangeness of it bolstered his courage. He remembered telling Tom Winter about this, his conviction that one day the clouds would open and rain frogs and marigolds over Belltower. (Or something like that.) And now, in a small way, that had happened, and it was a secret he shared only with Catherine Simmons and perhaps Tom Winter, wherever Tom had gone: absolute proof that the ordinary world wasn’t ordinary at all … that Belltower itself was a kind of mass hallucination, a reassuring stage set erected over a wild, mutable landscape.

  “But dangerous, too,” Catherine objected when he told her this. “We don’t really know. Something terrible happened to Ben. He was almost killed.”

  “Probably dangerous,” Archer admitted. “You can get out of this if you want. Sell the
house, move on back to Seattle. Most likely, you’ll be perfectly safe.”

  She shook her head with a firmness he found charming. “I can’t do that, Doug. It feels like a kind of contract. He asked me for help. Maybe I could have walked away then. But I didn’t. I came back. It’s like saying, Okay, I’ll help.”

  “You did help.”

  “But not just carrying him back to the house. That’s not all the help he needs. Don’t you feel that?”

  “Yes,” Archer admitted. “I do feel that.”

  He let her fix him a meal of crab legs and salad. Archer hated crab legs—his mother used to buy cheap crab and lobster from a fishing boat down by the VFW outpost—but he smiled at the effort she made. He said, “You should let me cook for you sometime.”

  She nodded. “That would be nice. This is kind of weird, you know. We hardly know each other, but we’re nursemaiding this—person out of a time machine.”

  “We know each other all right,” Archer said. “It doesn’t take that long. I’m a semi-fucked-up real estate agent living in this little town he kind of loves and kind of hates. You’re a semisuccessful painter from Seattle who misses her grandmother because she never had much of a family. Neither of us knows what to do next and we’re both lonelier than we want to admit. Does that about sum it up?”

  “Not a bad call.” She smiled a little forlornly and uncorked a bottle of wine.

  The night after that she went to bed with him.

  The bed was a creaky, pillared antique in what Catherine called the guest room, off the main hall upstairs. The sheets were old, thin, delicate, cool; the mattress rose around them like an ocean swell.

  Catherine was shy and attentive. Archer was touched by her eagerness to please and did his best to return the favor. Archer had never much believed in one-night stands; great sex, like great anything, required a little learning. But Catherine was easy to know and they came together with what seemed like an old familiarity. It was, in any case, Archer thought, a hell of an introduction.

  Now Catherine drifted to sleep beside him while Archer lay awake listening to the silence. It was quiet up here along the Post Road. Twice, he heard a car pass by outside—one of the locals, home late; or a tourist looking for the highway.

  There were big questions that still needed answering, he thought. Archer thought about the word “time” and how strange and lonely it made him feel. When he was little his family used to drive down to his uncle’s ranch outside Santa Fe in New Mexico, dirt roads and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in the distance, scrub pines and sage brush and ancient pueblos. The word “time” made him feel the way those desert roads used to make him feel: lost in something too big to comprehend. Time travel, Archer thought, must be like driving those roads. Strange rock formations and dust devils, and an empty blank horizon everywhere you look.

  When he woke, Catherine was dressing herself self-consciously by the bed. He turned away politely while she pulled on her panties. Archer sometimes wondered whether there was something wrong with him, the doubtful way women always looked at him in the morning. But then he stood up and hugged her and he felt her relax in his arms. They were still friends after all.

  But something was different today and it was not just that they had gone to bed last night. Something in this project was less miraculous now, more serious. They knew it without talking about it.

  After breakfast they hiked down to the Winter house to visit Ben Collier.

  The steaks from the Safeway had been doing him good. Ben was sitting up in bed this morning, the blankets pooled around his waist. He looked as cheerful as a Buddha, Archer thought. But it was obvious from the he of the bedclothes that his leg was still missing.

  Archer believed the stump was a little longer, though. It occurred to him that he expected the time traveler to grow a new leg—which apparently he was doing.

  “Morning,” Archer said. Catherine stood beside him, nodding, still a little frightened.

  Ben turned his head. “Good morning. Thank you for coming by.”

  Archer began to deliver the speech he’d been rehearsing: “We really have to talk. Neither of us minds coming down here. But, Ben, it’s confusing. Until we know what’s really going on—”

  Ben accepted this immediately and waved his hand: no need to continue. “I understand,” he said. “I’ll answer all your questions. And then—if you don’t mind—I’ll ask you one.”

  Archer said that sounded fair. Catherine brought in two chairs from the kitchen, on the assumption this might take a while.

  * * *

  “Who are you really,” Archer asked, “and what are you doing here?”

  Ben Collier wondered how to|respond to this.

  Confiding in these people was a radical step … but not entirely unprecedented, and unavoidable under the circumstances. He was prepared to trust them. The judgment was only partially intuitive; he had watched them through his own eyes and through the more discerning eyes of his cybernetics. They showed no sign of lying or attempting to manipulate him. Archer, in particular, seemed eager to help. They had weathered what must have been a frightening experience, and Ben credited that to their favor.

  But they would need courage, too. And that quality was harder to judge.

  He meant to answer their questions as honestly and thoroughly as he could. He owed them this, no matter what happened next. Catherine could have made things infinitely more difficult when she discovered him in the shed—if she had called the police, for instance. Instead, his recovery had been hastened by a significant margin. It would have been pointless and unkind to lie about himself.

  He was born (he explained) in the year 2157, in a small town not far from the present-day site of Boulder, Colorado. He had lived there most of his professional life, doing research for a historical foundation.

  All this begged the definition of “small town,” of “professional life,” and of “historical foundation” as these things would be understood by Archer and Catherine—but they were close enough to the truth.

  Catherine said, “That’s how you became a time traveler?”

  He shook his head. “I was recruited. Catherine, if you visited the twenty-second century you would find a lot of marvelous things—but time travel is not among them. Any reputable physicist of my own era would have rejected the idea out of hand. Not the idea that time is essentially mutable and perhaps nonlinear, but the idea that it could be traversed by human beings. The water in the ocean is like the water in a swimming pool, but you can’t swim across it. I was recruited by individuals from my own future, who were recruited by others from their future—and so on.”

  “Like stepping stones,” Archer supplied.

  “Essentially.”

  “But recruited for what?”

  “Primarily, as a caretaker. To live in this house. To maintain it and protect it.”

  “Why?” Catherine asked, but he imagined she had already surmised the answer.

  “Because this house is a sort of time machine.”

  “So you’re not a real time traveler,” Archer said. “I mean, you come from the future … but you’re only a kind of employee.”

  “I suppose that’s a good enough description.”

  “The machine in this building isn’t working the way it’s supposed to—am I right?” He nodded.

  “But if it was, and you were the custodian, who would come through here? Who are the real time travelers?”

  This was a more serious question, more difficult to answer. “Most of the time, Doug, no one would come through. It’s not a busy place. Mainly, I collect contemporary documents —books, newspapers, magazines—and pass them on.”

  “To whom?” Catherine asked.

  “People from a time very distant from my own. They look human, but they aren’t entirely. They created the tunnels— the time machines.”

  He wondered how much sense they would make of this. The real time travelers,’ Archer had said: as good a description as any. Ben alwa
ys trembled a little on the occasions when he was required to interact with these beings. They were kindly and only somewhat aloof; but one remained conscious of the evolutionary gulf. “Please understand, much of this is as far beyond my comprehension as it may be beyond yours. All I really know are legends, passed down by people like myself—other custodians, other caretakers. Legends of the future, you might say.”

  “Tell us some,” Archer said.

  What this concerns (Ben explained) is life on earth.

  Look at it in the context of geologic time.

  In the primeval solar system the earth is fused into coherent shape by the collisions of orbiting planetesimals. It has a molten core, a skin of cooler rock. It exudes gases and liquids —carbon dioxide, water. In time, it develops an atmosphere and oceans.

  Over the course of millions of years, life of a sort arises as vermiform crystalline structures in the porous rock of hot mineral-dense undersea vents. In time, these crystalline structures adapt to a cooler environment by incorporating proteins into themselves—so successfully that the crystalline skeleton is discarded and purely proteinoid life comes to dominate the primitive biosphere. RNA and DNA are adopted as a genetic memory and evolution begins in earnest.

  An almost infinite diversity of structures compete against the environment. There will never again be such complexity of life on earth—the rest of evolution is a narrowing, a winnowing out.

  The climate changes. Prokaryotic cells poison the atmosphere with oxygen. Continents ride tectonic plates across the magma. Life flows and ebbs in the long intervals between cometary impacts.

  Mankind arises. It turns out that mankind, like the grasses, like the flowering plants, is one of those species capable of transforming the planet itself. It alters the climatic balance and might well have drowned in its own waste products, except for an extraordinary new ability to modify itself and to create new forms of life. These are parallel and complementary technologies. Mankind, dying, learns to make machines in its own image. It learns to change itself in fundamental ways. The two capabilities combine to generate a new form of life, self-reproducing but only marginally biological. It can be called human because there is humanity in its lineage; it’s the legitimate heir of mankind. But it’s as different from mankind as crystalline life from the rocks it was born in, or protein life from the rocky structures that preceded it. These new creatures are almost infinitely adaptable; some of them live in the ocean, some of them live in outer space. In their diaspora they occupy most of the planets of the solar system. They are very successful. They begin to comprehend, and eventually manipulate, some fundamental constants of the physical universe. They visit the stars. They discover hidden structures in the fabric of duration and distance.