“Everything is changing,” Joyce insisted. “Politics, the environment—the weather. He says we happen to be living on the only continent where complacency is still possible, and only for a while longer. That’s our misfortune.”
“I suppose it is. What did he tell you, that the future is some kind of paradise?”
“No, no. The problems are huge, scary.” She looked up, brushed her hair out of her eyes. “The man who killed Lawrence, he’s the future too. All the horrible things. Conscription and famine and stupid little wars.”
“That’s what we have to look forward to?”
“Maybe. Not necessarily. Ben comes from a time that looks back on all that as a kind of insanity. But the point is, Tom, it’s the future—it hasn’t happened yet and maybe it doesn’t have to, at least not that way.”
“Not logical, Joyce. The marauder came from somewhere. We can’t wish him out of existence.”
“He’s a fact,” Joyce conceded. “But Ben says anyone who travels into the past risks losing the place he left. Ben himself. If things happen differently he might be orphaned— might go home and find out it’s not there anymore, at least not the way he remembers it. It’s not likely, but it’s possible.”
“So the future is unknowable.”
“I think the future is something like a big building in the fog—you know it’s there, and you can grope your way toward it, but you can’t be sure about it until it’s close enough to touch.”
“Leaves us kind of in the dark,” Tom observed.
“The place you stand is always the present and that’s all you ever really have—1 don’t think that’s a bad thing. Ben says the only way you can own the past is by respecting it— by not turning it into something quaint or laughable or pastel or bittersweet. It’s a real place where real people live. And the future is real because we’re building it out of real hours and real days.”
No world out of the world, Tom thought.
No Eden, no Utopia, only what you can touch and the touching of it.
He took her hand. She gazed across the pine tops and the distant town site toward the sea. “I can’t stay here,” she said. “I have to go back.”
“I don’t know if I can go with you.”
“I don’t know if I want you to.”
She stood up and was beautiful, Tom thought, with the afternoon sun on her hair.
“Hey,” she said. “Don’t look at me like that. It’s just me. Just some fucked-up chick from Minneapolis. Nothing special.”
He shook his head, was mute.
“I was a ghost for you,” she said. “Ghost of some idea about what life used to be like or could be like or what you wanted from it. But I’m not that. But that’s okay. Maybe you were a ghost too. Ghost of whatever I thought I’d find in the city. Somebody mysterious, wise, a little wild. Well, the circumstances are very strange. But here we are, Joyce and Tom, a couple of pretty ordinary people.”
“Not all that damn ordinary.”
“We hardly know each other.”
“Could change that.”
“I don’t know,” Joyce said. “I’m not so sure.”
These last few hours—before the marauder attacked, or the time machine was repaired, whichever apocalypse happened first—were a kind of Indian summer.
Archer drove to the Burger King out along the highway and brought home dinner. They ate on the back lawn in the long sunlight; the alarms would sound, Ben said, if anything happened inside.
Ben, who didn’t eat prepared food, was an avuncular presence at the edge of the feast, periodically hobbling over to the redwood fence where he had marked a long rectangular patch with string. It was too late in the year to start a garden, he said, but this was where one ought to be. Tom wondered, but didn’t ask, whether he planned to start one in the coming year or expected someone else to.
After dark, Archer took Tom down into the basement—what remained of the basement. The false wall in front of the tunnel had been removed entirely, and so had one of the foundation walls—revealing a layer of what must be machinery, pale white and blue crystals swarming with cybernetics. This was the functional heart of the time terminal and the machine insects, he assumed, were repairing it. Periodically, bright sparks erupted from the work.
“We’re running a race,” Archer said. “The longer that sonofabitch in Manhattan sits on his hands, the closer we come to shutting him out entirely.”
“How long until all this is finished?”
“Soon, Ben says. Maybe by this time tomorrow. Here—” He opened a drawer under the workbench: Tom’s woodworking bench, the one he’d moved from Seattle. “Ben said you should have one of these.”
Archer handed him a ray gun.
No doubt about it, Tom thought, this was a ray gun. It weighed about a pound. It was made of red and black polystyrene plastic and the words SPACE SOLDIER were stenciled on the side.
He looked at the gun, looked at Archer.
“We had to make ’em out of something,” Archer said. “I picked up a bunch of these at the K-mart at Pinetree Mall. The machine bugs worked them over.”
The trigger was made of what looked like stainless steel, and the business end featured a glassy protrusion too finely machined to match the rest of the toy. “You’re telling me this is functional?”
“It projects a focused pulse that might or might not slow down the gentleman’s armor a little bit. Use it but don’t depend on it. We all have one.”
“Jesus Christ, Doug, SPACE SOLDIER?”
Archer grinned. “Looks kind of cool, don’t you think?”
Back upstairs, the sun was setting over the ocean and Catherine had turned on the living room lights.
Tom helped Archer collect the dinner plates from the back yard. The sky was a deep evening blue; the stars and the crickets had come out.
Archer hesitated a moment in the cooling air.
“Everything’s going to be different when this is over,” he said. “Suddenly we’re out of the picture. Bystanders. But we did something rare, didn’t we, Tom? Took a long stroll into the past. Imagine that. I stood on those streets, nineteen sixty-two, Jesus, I was a toddler down at Pine Balm Pre-School! Hey, Tom, you know what we did? We walked straight up to Father Time and we kicked that miserly SOB right in the family jewels.”
Tom opened the screen door and stepped back into the warmth of the kitchen. “Let’s hope he doesn’t return the favor.”
Archer and Catherine shared a mattress in the spare bedroom. Ben spent the night in the basement—slept there, if he slept at all.
Joyce had spent two nights on the living room sofa. She came into Tom’s bed tonight with what he took to be a mixture of gratitude and doubt.
When he rolled to face her she didn’t turn away.
It was a warm night in the summer of 1989, skies clear over most of the continent, oceans calm, the world on some brink, Tom thought, not yet explicit, a trembling of possibilities both dire and bright. Her skin was soft under his touch and she took his kiss with an eagerness that might have been greeting or farewell.
Midnight passed in the darkness, an hour and another.
They were asleep when the alarms went off.
Eighteen
Amos Shank, eighty-one years old, who had come from Pittsburgh to publish his poetry and who had lived for fifteen years amid the stained plaster and peeling wallpaper of this shabby apartment, rose from his bed in the deep of the night, still wrapped in dreams of Zeus and Napoleon, for the purpose of relieving his bladder.
He walked to the bathroom, past his desk, past reams of bond paper, sharpened pencils, leatherbound books, in the stark light of two sixty-watt floor lamps which he kept perpetually lit. The rattle of water in the porcelain bowl sounded hollow and sinister: the clarion call of mortality. Sighing, Amos hitched up his boxer shorts and headed back to his bed, which folded out of the sofa, convolution of night inside day. He paused at the window.
Once he had seen Death in the street outs
ide. A sudden dread possessed him that if he looked he would see that apparition again. He had, in fact, kept vigil for several consecutive nights—ruining his sleep to no good effect. He was torn between temptations: oblivion, vision.
He slatted the blinds open and peered into the street.
Empty street.
Amos Shank pulled his desk chair to the window and nestled his bony rear end into it.
The older he got the more his bones seemed to protrude from his body. Everything uncomfortable. Nowhere to rest. He whistled out a long breath of midnight air and put his head on the windowsill, pillowed on his hands.
Without meaning to, he slept again …
And woke, aching and stiff. He moaned and peered into the street where—perhaps—the sound of footsteps had roused him: because here he was again, Death.
No mistaking him.
Amos felt his heart speed up.
Death walked down the empty sidewalk in a dirty gray overcoat; paused and smiled up at Amos.
Smiled through his leathery snout and the hood of his shirt.
Then Death did a remarkable thing: he began to undress.
He shrugged off the overcoat and dropped it in the gutter like a shed skin. Pulled the NYU sweatshirt over his head and threw it away. Stepped out of the pants.
Death was quite golden underneath.
Death shone very brightly under the streetlights.
“I know you!” Amos Shank said. He was only dimly aware that he had said it aloud. “I know you—!”
He had seen the picture. Which old book?
Wars of Antiquity. The Court of the Sun King. Campaigns of Napoleon. Some ancient soldier in bright armor and cheap lithography.
“Agamemnon,” Amos Shank breathed.
Agamemnon, Death, the soldier, masked and armored, entered the building, still smiling.
Ashamed, Amos Shank double-checked the lock on the door, extinguished the lights for the first time in a month, and hid under the blankets of his bed.
Nineteen
Billy entered the tunnel with his armor fully powered and most of his fears behind him.
He had lived too long with fear. He’d been running from things he couldn’t escape. This visitation from the future was punishment, Billy thought, for a life lived in exile.
After he killed Lawrence Millstein, after a failed attempt on his legitimate prey, Billy had retired for two days to his apartment; had powered down, hidden his armor, retreated to the shadows. Two days had been enough. He didn’t feel safe. There was no security anymore, no anonymity … and the Need was deep and intense.
So he took the armor out of its box and wore it with all its armaments and accessories here, to the source of his trouble, this unpatrolled border with the future.
Where his prey had retreated—he knew that by the tangle of footprints amid the rubble.
Here we begin some reckoning, Billy thought. The beginning or the end of something.
He stepped through fallen masonry into the bright and sourceless light of the time machine.
Fear had kept him out of this tunnel for years: fear of what he’d seen here.
The memory was vivid of that apparition, huge and luminous. It had moved slowly but Billy felt its capacity for speed; had seemed immaterial but Billy felt its power. He had escaped it by a hairbreadth and was left with the impression that it had allowed him to escape; that he had been evaluated and passed over by something as potent and irresistible as time itself.
Now—under the bravado of his armor, the courage pumped out by the artificial gland in the elytra—that fear remained fresh and intact.
Billy pressed on regardless. The corridor was empty. Here in the depth of it, both exits out of sight, he felt suspended in a pure geometry, a curvature without meaningful dimension.
Beyond these walls, Billy thought, years were tumbling like leaves in a windstorm. Age devoured youth, spines curved, eyes dimmed, coffins leapt into the earth. Wars flashed past, as brief and violent as thunderstorms. Here, Billy was sheltered from all that.
Wasn’t that all he had ever really wanted?
Shelter. A way home.
But these were vagrant, treasonous thoughts. Billy suppressed them and hurried ahead.
The cybernetics had entered the tunnel as a fine dust of polymers and metal and long, fragile molecules. They began to infiltrate Billy almost at once.
Billy was unaware of it. Billy simply breathed. The nanomechanisms, small as viruses, were absorbed into his bloodstream through the moist fabric of his lungs. As their numbers increased to critical levels, they commenced their work.
To the cybernetics Billy was a vast and intricate territory, a continent. They were isolated at first, a few pioneers colonizing this perilous hinterland along rivers of blood. They read the chemical language of Billy’s hormones and responded with faint chemical messages of their own. They crossed the difficult barrier between blood and brain. They clustered, increasingly numerous, at the interface of flesh and armor.
Billy inhaled a thousand machines with every breath.
The exit loomed ahead of him now, an open doorway into the year 1989.
Billy hurried toward it. He had already begun to sense that something was wrong.
Twenty
Tom was out of bed as soon as the alarm registered. Joyce reached the door ahead of him.
The machine bugs had assembled these alarms from a trio of hardware-store smoke detectors. The noise was shrill, penetrating. Tom and Joyce had slept in their clothes in anticipation of this; but the actual event, like a fire or an air raid, seemed unanticipated and utterly unreal. Tom stopped to fumble for his watch, working to recall what Ben had told him: If the alarm sounds, take your weapon and go to the perimeter of the property, but mainly he followed Joyce, who was waving impatiently from the door.
They hurried through the dark of the living room, through the kitchen and out into a blaze of light: fifteen sodium-vapor security lights installed in the back yard, also courtesy of Home Hardware.
Beyond the lights, in the high brush and damp ferns at the verge of the forest, he crouched with Joyce—and Doug and Catherine, who had beaten them out of the house.
The alarms ceased abruptly. Cricket calls revived in the dark of the woods. Tom felt the racing of his own pulse.
The house was starkly bright among pine silhouettes and a scatter of stars. A night breeze moved in the treetops. Tom flexed his toes among the loamy, damp pine needles: his feet were bare.
He looked around. “Where’s Ben?”
“Inside,” Archer said. “Listen, we should spread out a little bit … cover more territory.”
Archer playing space soldier. But it wasn’t a game. “This is it, isn’t it?”
Archer flashed him a nervous grin. “The main event.” Tom turned to the house in time to see the windows explode.
Glass showered over the lawn, a glittering arc in the glare of the lights.
He took a step back into the shelter of the woods. He felt Joyce do the same.
But there was no real retreating.
Here was the axis of events, the absolute present, Tom thought, and nothing to do but embrace it.
Twenty-One
Ben stood calmly in the concussion of the grenade. It was an EM pulse grenade, less useful to the marauder than it had been; the cybernetics were hardened against it. The blast traveled up the stairway from the basement and exploded the windows behind him. Ben felt the concussion as a rush of warm air and a pressure in his ears. He stood with his back to the door, braced on his one good leg, watching the stairs.
He didn’t doubt that the marauder could kill him. The marauder had killed him once and was quite capable of doing so again—perhaps irreparably. But he wasn’t afraid of death. He had experienced, at least, its peripheries: a cold place, lonesome, deep, but not especially frightening. He was afraid of leaving his life behind … but even that fear was less profound than he’d expected.
He’d left behind a great man
y things already. He had left his life in the future. He had buried the woman he had lived with for thirty years, long before he dreamed the existence of fractal, knitted time. He wasn’t a stranger to loss or abandonment.
He had been recruited at the end of a life he’d come to terms with: maybe that was a requirement. The time travelers had seemed to know that about him. Ben recalled their cool, unwavering eyes. They appeared in human form as a courtesy to their custodians; but Ben had sensed the strangeness under the disguise. Our descendants, he had thought, yes, our children, in a very real sense … but removed from us across such an inconceivable ocean of years.
He listened for the sound of footsteps up the stairs. He hoped Catherine Simmons and the others had deployed outside the house … fervently hoped they wouldn’t be needed. He had volunteered to defend this outpost; they had not, except informally and in a condition of awe.
But the nanomechanisms were already doing their work, deep in the body of the marauder: Ben felt them doing it.
Felt them as the marauder came up the carpeted stairs. Ben watched him come. The marauder moved slowly. His eyepiece tracked Ben with oiled precision.
He was an amazing sight. Ben had studied the civil wars of the twenty-first century, had seen this man before, knew what to expect; he was impressed in spite of all that. The hybridization of man and mechanism was mankind’s future, but here was a sterile mutation: a mutual parasitism imposed from without. The armor was not an enhancement but a cruel prosthetic. Infantry doctors had rendered this man incapable of unassisted pleasure, made his daily fife a gray counterfeit, linked every appetite to combat.
The marauder, not tall but quite golden, came to the top of the stairs with small swift movements. Then he did a remarkable thing:
He stumbled.
Dropped to one knee, looked up.
Ben felt the nanomechanisms laboring inside this man. Vital connections severed, relays heating, redundancies overwhelmed … “Tell me your name,” Ben said gently.
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