A Bridge of Years

by Charles Robert Wilson

  Ben paused, a little breathless. How long since these mysteries had been explained to him? Years, he thought—no matter how you measure it. “Catherine,” he said, “would you open the window? There’s a nice breeze outside.” A little dazedly, she rolled back the blinds and lifted the window. “Thank you,” Ben said. “Very pleasant.”

  Archer was frowning. “These new creatures,’ these are the folks who travel in time?”

  “Who built the machine that operates in this house, yes. You have to understand what time travel means, in this case. They discovered what might be called crevices in the structure of space and time—fractures, if you like, with a shape and duration outside the definable bounds of this universe but intersecting it at certain points. A ‘time machine’ is a sort of artificial tunnel following the contour of these crevices. In the local environment of the earth, a time machine can only take you certain places, at certain times. There are nodes of intersection. This house—an area surrounding it for some hundreds of yards—is one of those nodes.”

  Archer said, “Why here?”

  “It’s a meaningless question. The nodes are natural features, like mountains. There are nodes that intersect the crust of the earth under the ocean, nodes that might open in thin air.”

  “How many places like this are there, then?”

  Ben shrugged. “I was never told. They tend to cluster, both in space and in time. The twentieth century is fairly rich in them. Not all of them are in use, of course. And remember: they have duration as well as location. A node might be accessible for twenty years, fifty years, a hundred years, and then vanish.”

  Catherine had been sitting in patient concentration. She said, “Let me understand this. People a long way in the future open a pathway to these nodes, yes?”

  Ben nodded.

  “But why? What do they use them for?”

  “They use them judiciously for the purpose of historical reclamation. This century—and the next, and my own—are the birthing time of their species. For them, it’s the obscure and distant past.”

  “They’re archaeologists,” Catherine interpreted.

  “Archaeologists and historians. Observers. They’re careful not to intervene. The project has a duration for them, also. Time passes analogously at both ends of the link. They’re conducting a two-hundred-year-long project to restore their knowledge of these critical centuries. When they’re finished, they mean to dismantle the tunnels. They’re nervous about the mathematics of paradox—it’s a problem they don’t want to deal with.”

  Catherine said, “Paradox?”

  Archer said, “A time paradox. Like if you murder your own grandfather before you’re born, do you still exist?”

  She regarded him with some astonishment. “How do you know that?”

  “I used to read a lot of science fiction.”

  Ben said, “I’m told there are tentative models. The problem isn’t as overwhelming as it seems. But no one is anxious to put it to the test.”

  Archer said, “Even the presence of somebody from the future might have an effect. Even if they just crush a plant or step on a bug—”

  Ben smiled. “The phenomenon isn’t unique to time travel. In meteorology it’s called ‘sensitive dependence on original conditions.’ The atmosphere is chaotic; a small event in one place might generate a large effect in another. Wave your hand in China and a storm might brew up in the Atlantic. Similarly, crush an aphid in 1880 and you might alter the presidential election of 1996. The analogy is good, Doug, but the connection isn’t precisely causal. There are stable features in the atmosphere that tend to recur, no matter what—”

  “Attractors,” Archer supplied.

  Ben was pleased. “You keep up with contemporary math?”

  Archer grinned. “I try.”

  “I’ve been told there are similar structures in historical time—they tend to persist. But yes, the possibility for change exists. It’s an observer phenomenon. The rule is that the present is always the present. The past is always fixed and immutable, the future is always indeterminate—no matter where you stand.”

  “From here,” Archer said, “the year 1988 is unchangeable”

  “Because it’s the past.”

  “But if I traveled three years back—”

  “It would be the future, therefore unpredictable.”

  “But there’s your paradox already,” Archer said. “It doesn’t make sense.”

  Ben nodded. He had struggled with this idea himself … then submitted to it, a Zen paradox which happened to be true and therefore inarguable. “It’s the way time works,” he said. “If it doesn’t make sense, it’s because you haven’t made sense of it.”

  “You said there was a math for this?”

  “So I’m told.”

  “You don’t know it?”

  “It’s not twenty-second-century math. It’s several millennia beyond that. I doubt you or I could contain it without a certain amount of neural augmentation.”

  Catherine said, “This is awfully abstract.”

  Archer nodded and seemed to struggle a moment with his thoughts.

  Ben looked out the window. There was something wonderfully calming about all these Douglas firs. The sound they made when the wind moved through them.

  Archer cleared his throat. “There’s another obvious question.”

  The painful question. “You want to know what went wrong.”

  Archer nodded.

  Ben sighed and took a breath. He didn’t relish these memories.

  He had reconstructed this from his own experience, from the fragmentary memories of the cybernetics, from the evidence of the tunnel itself.

  There was a house like this house, he told Archer and Catherine, a temporal depot, in the latter half of the twenty-first century, in Florida—in those days a landscape of fierce tropical storms and civil war.

  The custodian of that house was a woman named Ann Heath.

  (Ann, he thought, I’m sorry this had to happen. You were kind when you recruited me and I never had a chance to repay that kindness. Time may be traversed but never mastered: the unexpected happens and in the long run we are all mortal.)

  The Florida house had been scheduled for shutdown. Its environment was growing too unpredictable. But something unexpected happened prior to that closing. As nearly as Ben could deduce from the available clues, the house had been invaded by forces of the American government.

  The house had possessed some defenses and so did Ann Heath, but perhaps these had been partially dismantled prior to shutdown; in any case, the soldiers of the grim last decades of that century were formidable indeed, with weapons and armor rooted deep into their bodies and nervous systems.

  One of these men must have occupied the house, overpowered Ann, and forced her to reveal some of the secrets of the tunnel. The man had used this information to escape into the past.

  (She must he dead, Ben thought. They must have killed her.) The marauder had invaded Ben’s domain without warning, disabled the cybernetics with an electromagnetic pulse, destroyed much of Ben’s body, and dumped his corpse in the woodshed. The attack had been quick and successful.

  Then the marauder had opened a tunnel some thirty years long, to a nodal point in New York City, where he had committed the same sort of attack but more thoroughly; another custodian and all his cybernetics were irretrievably destroyed.

  Finally—as a last, shrewd defense—the marauder had disabled the tunnel’s controls so that the connection between Belltower and Manhattan was permanently open.

  Catherine said, “Permanently open? Why is that such a great idea?”

  Ben was lost a moment in temporal heuristics, then hit on a simple analogy: “Imagine the nodal points as terminals in a telephone network. Simultaneous connections are impossible. I can call a great number of destinations from one phone— but only one at a time. As long as the connection with Manhattan is open, no other connection can be made.”

  “The phone is off
the hook,” Catherine said, “at both ends.”

  “Exactly. He’s sealed himself off. And us along with him.”

  “But a phone,” Catherine said, “if it doesn’t work, you can always go knock on the door. Somebody from another terminal somewhere else could have shown up and helped. Better yet, they could warn you. Leave a message in 1962: In seventeen years, watch out for a bad guy.”

  Oh dear, Ben thought. “I don’t want to get too deeply into fractal logistics, but it doesn’t work like that. Look at it from the perspective of the deep future. Our time travelers own a single doorway; its duration governs duration in all the tunnels. From their point of view, Belltower 1979 and Manhattan 1952 disappeared simultaneously. Since that disappearance, approximately ten years have elapsed—here, and in the New York terminus, and in the future. And there are no overlapping destinations. The portal in this house was created in 1964, twenty-five years ago, when its valency point with Manhattan was the year 1937 … Are you following any of this?”

  Catherine looked dazed. Archer said, “I think so … but you could still leave a message, seems to me. A warning of some kind.”

  “Conceivably. But the time travelers wouldn’t, and the custodians have sworn not to. It would create a direct causal loop, possibly shutting down both terminals permanently.”

  “ ‘Possibly’?”

  “No one really knows,” Ben said. “The math is disturbing. No one wants to find out.”

  Archer shrugged: he didn’t understand this, Ben interpreted, but he would take it on faith. “That’s why nobody came to help. That’s why the house was empty.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you survived.”

  “The cybernetics rebuilt me. It was a long process.” He gestured at the stump of his leg under the blanket. “Not quite finished.”

  Catherine said, “You were out there for ten years?”

  “I wasn’t suffering, Catherine. I woke out of a long sleep, the day you opened the door.”

  “Then how do you know all this?”

  This was easier to demonstrate than explain. He made a silent request and one of the cybernetics climbed the bed-sheets and sat a moment in the palm of his hand—a glittering, many-legged jewel.

  “My memory,” he said.

  “Oh,” Catherine said. “I see.”

  * * *

  This was an awful lot to accept all at once, Archer thought. Time as a fragmented structure, like sandstone, riddled with crevices and caverns; twenty-first-century marauders; insect memories …

  But Ben made it plausible. Plausible not because of his exoticisms—his strange injuries or his tiny robots—but because of his manner. Archer had no trouble at all believing this guy as a twenty-second-century academic recruited into an odd and secret business. Ben was calm, intelligent, and inspired trust. This could, of course, be a clever disguise. Maybe he was a Martian fifth columnist out to sabotage the planet—given recent events, it wouldn’t be too surprising. But Archer’s instinct was to trust the man.

  Questions remained, however.

  “Couple of things,” Archer said. “If your marauder did such a thorough job at the Manhattan end, why did he screw up here?”

  “He must have believed I was dead beyond reclamation. Probably he thought all the cybernetics were dead, too.”

  “Why not come back and check on that?”

  “I don’t know,” Ben said. “But he may have been afraid of the tunnel.”

  “Why would he be?”

  For the first time, Ben hesitated. “There are other … presences there,” he said.

  Archer wasn’t sure he liked the sound of this. Presences? “I thought you said nobody could get through.”

  The time traveler paused, as if trying to assemble an answer.

  “Time is a vastness,” he said finally. “We tend to underestimate it. Think about the people who opened these tunnels— millennia in the future. That’s an almost inconceivable landscape of time. But history didn’t begin with them and it certainly didn’t end with them. The fact is, when they created these passages they found them already inhabited.”

  “Inhabited by what?”

  “Apparitions. Creatures who appear without warning, vanish without any apparent destination. Creatures not altogether material in constitution.”

  “From an even farther future,” Archer said. “Is that what you mean?”

  “Presumably. But no one really knows.”

  “Are they human? In any sense at all?”

  “Doug, I don’t know. I’ve heard speculation. They might be our ultimate heirs. Or something unrelated to us. They might exist—somehow; I find it difficult to imagine—outside our customary time and space. They seem to appear capriciously, but they may have some purpose, though no one knows what it is. Maybe they’re the world’s last anthropologists—collecting human history in some unimaginable sense. Or controlling it. Creating it.” He shrugged. “Ultimately, they’re indecipherable.”

  “The marauder might have seen one of these?”

  “It’s possible. They appear from time to time, without warning.”

  “Would that frighten him?”

  “It might have. They’re impressive creatures. And not always benign.”

  “Come again?”

  “They almost always ignore people. But occasionally they’ll take one.” Archer blinked. “Take one?”

  “Abduct one? Eat one? The process is mysterious but quite complete. No body is left behind. In any case, it’s very rare. I’ve seen these creatures and I’ve never felt threatened by them. But the marauder may have been told about this, maybe even witnessed it—I don’t know. I’m only guessing.”

  Archer said, “This is very bizarre, Ben.”

  “Yes,” Ben said. “I think so too.”

  Archer tried to collect his thoughts. “The last question—”

  “Is about Tom.”

  Archer nodded.

  “He discovered the tunnel,” Ben said. “He used it. He should have known better.”

  “Is he still alive?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “One of these ghost things might have eaten him?”

  Ben frowned. “I want to emphasize how unlikely that is. ‘Ghost’ is a good analogy. We call them that: time ghosts. They’re seldom seen, even more seldom dangerous. No, the more present danger is from the marauder.”

  “Tom could be dead,” Archer interpreted.

  “He might be.”

  “Or in danger?”

  “Very likely.”

  “And he doesn’t know that—doesn’t know anything about it.”

  “No,” Ben said, “he doesn’t.”

  * * *

  This talk worried Catherine deeply.

  She had accepted Ben Collier as a visitor from the future; as an explanation it worked as well as any other. But the future was supposed to be a sensible place—a simplified place, decorated in tasteful white; she had seen this on television. But the future Ben had described was vast, confusing, endless in its hierarchies of mutation. Nothing was certain and nothing lasted forever. It was scary, the idea of this chasm of impermanence yawning in front of her.

  She was worried about Doug Archer, too.

  He had crawled into her bed last night with the bashful eagerness of a puppy dog. Catherine accepted this as a gesture of friendship but worried about the consequences. She had not slept with very many men because she tended to care too much about them. She lacked the aptitude for casual sex. This was no doubt an advantage in the age of AIDS, but too often it forced her to choose between frustration and a commitment she didn’t want or need. For instance, Archer: who was this man, really?

  She stole a glance at him as he sat beside her, Levi’s and messy hair and a strange little grin on his face, listening to Ben, the porcelain-white one-legged time traveler: Douglas Archer, somehow loving all this. Loving the weirdness of it.

  She wanted to warn him. She wanted to say, Listen to all these frightenin
g words. A renegade soldier from the twenty-first century, a tunnel populated with time ghosts who sometimes “take” people, a man named Tom Winter lost in the past …

  But Doug was sitting here like a kid listening to some Rudyard Kipling story.

  She looked at Ben Collier—at this man who had been dead for ten years and endured it with the equanimity of a CEO late for a meeting of his finance committee—and frowned.

  He wants something from us, Catherine thought.

  He won’t demand anything. (She understood this.) He won’t threaten us. He won’t beg. He’ll let us say no. He’ll let us walk away. He’ll thank us for all we’ve done, and he’ll really mean it.

  But Doug won’t say no. Doug won’t walk away.

  She knew him that well, at least. Cared that much about him.

  Doug was saying, “Maybe we should break for lunch.” He looked at Ben speculatively. “How about you? We could fix up some of those steaks. Unless you prefer to eat ’em raw?”

  “Thank you,” Ben said, “but I don’t take food in the customary fashion.” He indicated his throat, his chest. “Still undergoing repairs.”

  “The steaks aren’t for you?”

  “Oh, they’re for me. And thank you. But the cybernetics have to digest them first.”