A Bridge of Years

by Robert Charles Wilson

  He rinsed his face and shook off a little sleep. Three forty-five in the morning, according to the digital watch he'd bought at a Kresge's a quarter century or so in the future. He leaned against the tiled wall and listened to the rain beat against a narrow window. He was full of thoughts he hadn't allowed himself for a long, long time.

  How much he missed sharing his home with a woman, for instance.

  He liked Joyce and he liked the sensation of being in her apartment, of seeing—for the first time in nearly a year—a bathroom shelf stocked with Midol and a tampon box; seeing her hairbrush, her toothpaste (neatly rolled from the bottom), a Sloan Wilson novel splayed open on the back of the toilet tank. Sharing these small, quotidian intimacies reminded him how thirsty he had been for intimacy in general. This tiny oasis. Such a dry and formidable desert.

  "Thank you, Joyce," he said—aloud, but not loud enough that she might hear him in her bedroom. "Shelter from the storm. That's really nice."

  Cold rain spattered against the window. The radiator clanked and moaned. Outside, in the dark, the wind was picking up.

  In the morning he found his way home.

  "I might be back," he told Joyce. It wasn't a promise, but it startled him when he said it. Would he be back? This was a miracle; but was it possible to inhabit a miracle? Miracles, like Brigadoon, had a way of disappearing.

  Later, he would think that perhaps it had been a promise, if only to himself . . . that he had known the answer to these questions all along.

  □ □

  □ □

  His last day in Belltower. His last day in the 1980s.

  He drove to work prepared to quit, but Klein finessed that by handing him a pink slip. "You're a fuck-up in general," Klein informed him, "but what made up my mind was that deal you wrote on Wednesday."

  The Wednesday deal had been a retired County Court judge. The customer might have had an illustrious career on the bench, but he suffered from what Tom had learned to recognize as a common malady: big-purchase panic. The judge regarded the offer form as if it were a writ of execution and offered full sticker price for a car he'd barely looked at. "Let's write up a lower offer," Tom said, "and see what the sales manager has to say."

  He told Klein, "We made money on that deal."

  "I know the son of a bitch," Klein said. "He comes in every other year. He just toddles in and pays list."

  "Nobody pays list"

  "If they're giving away money," Klein said, "it's not your job to turn it down. But I don't want to argue with you. I just want you off the lot." He added, "I cleared this with your brother, so don't go running off to him and expect any help. He told me, 'Hey, if Tom fucked up, he's history. That's all there is to it.' "

  Tom couldn't help smiling. "I guess that's right," he said. "I guess I'm history."

  He phoned Tony and said he was going away for a while. Tony wanted to talk—about the job, about the future. Tom said, "I have to get things sorted out by myself. Thank you for everything, though, Tony. Don't expect to hear from me for a while."

  "You're acting crazy," Tony said.

  "This is something I have to do."

  He packed a change of clothes into his knapsack. Money was a problem, but he was bringing along some items he thought he might be able to pawn: the guitar he'd owned since college (bulky but potentially valuable, a Gibson); a set of silver spoons. By Friday noon he was ready to go.

  He hesitated when he noticed the TV had been plugged in again. It seemed to sense his presence; as he watched, it flickered to life.

  "You're too late," he said. "I'm leaving."

  tom winter, we don't think you should go.

  Their punctuation had improved. He considered the statement, considered its source. "You can't stop me," he said. Probably this was true.

  it's not safe where you're going.

  "It's not safe where I am."

  you want it too badly. it isn't what you think.

  "You don't know what I want. You don't know what I think."

  Of course, maybe they did—it was entirely possible. But they didn't contradict him.

  you can help us.

  "We talked about that."

  we need proteins.

  "I don't know what you mean by that."

  meat.

  "Meat?" Here was an unforeseen development. "Ordinary meat? Grocery store meat?"

  yes, tom.

  "What are you building out in the woods that needs meat?"

  we're building us.

  He wanted to dismiss the whole disturbing notion; but it occurred to him that he owed these creatures something. It was their territory he was about to trespass through. And more than that: he'd been in their power for a long time. They had implied that they could have changed him; if they'd wanted a slave they could have made him one. They hadn't. He owed them.

  Nevertheless—"building us"? And they wanted meat?

  He said, "I have some steaks in the freezer—"

  that would be fine, tom.

  "Maybe I can leave them on the counter."

  thank you.

  "How come you can talk so much better now?"

  we're almost repaired. things are much clearer.

  the end of the work is very close.

  Something ominous about that, Tom thought. When the sleeping giant woke, this might not be a safe place to be. The implication? Get out now.

  He tried to pull the plug on the TV set but it wouldn't come out of the wall—they must have welded it there. But the screen remained blank. He hurried to the kitchen, left a stack of frozen steaks and ground beef on the countertop—a little queasy at the thought of them wanting it—then gathered up his baggage.

  The phone rang once more. He debated letting it ring, then relented and picked up the handset. He expected Tony with some last-minute badgering, but it was Doug Archer's voice he heard.

  "I heard you got fired."

  "News travels fast," Tom said.

  "It's a small town. I've done business with a lot of these people. Yeah, everybody talks." "Keeping tabs on me?"

  "Hell, no. If I had been, I would have noticed you aren't looking for another job. So are you taking a vacation, Tom, or just bugging out?"

  "The property's not for sale."

  "I'm not calling as your fucking realtor. Are things okay up there?"

  "Things are okay."

  "You know what I'm talking about."

  He sighed. He liked Doug, he didn't want to hurt Doug's feelings—but he didn't want Doug involved, not at this stage. "I'll be out of town for a while."

  "Son of a bitch," Archer said. "You found something, didn't you? You don't want to talk about it, but you found something."

  Or something found me. "You're right ... I don't want to talk about it." "How long are you gone for?" "I honestly don't know."

  "The guy who lived there before—you're going where he went, right?" "No, I don't think so."

  "When you come back," Archer said, "will you talk to me about this?"

  Tom relented a little. "Maybe I will."

  "Maybe I should drive by while you're gone—make sure the place is in reasonable shape."

  "I don't think that's necessary." A thought occurred. "Doug, promise me you won't try to get in." He lied, "I had the locks changed."

  "I promise I won't try to get in if you promise you'll explain this one day."

  "Deal," Tom said. "When I get back." If I get hack.

  "I mean to hold you to that," Archer said. There was a pause. He added, "Well, good luck. If you need luck."

  "I might need a little," Tom admitted.

  He hung up the phone, pulled the shades, turned off the lights, and left the world behind.

  PART TWO - Ghosts

  Seven

  For a long, lost span of years, the time traveler was dead.

  Ben Corner's death was not absolute, but it was nothing less than death. The marauder's weapon had opened his skull and scattered much of his brain matter in a bloody rain ac
ross the lawn. His heart had given one final, convulsive pump, fibrillated for thirty seconds as wild impulses radiated from his traumatized brainstem, then fallen silent, a lump of static tissue in the cooling cavern of his chest.

  Throughout his body emergency repair systems stuttered and shut down. Auxiliary circulatory pumps responded to his failing heart, then failed in turn as blood pressure dropped below maintainable levels. He continued to take huge, ratcheting breaths—like yawns—for nearly a minute. The lungs were the last major system to give up their independent life, and they did so with a final sigh of resignation. By then the body had begun to cool.

  Nanomechanisms were trapped in his arteries by clotting blood. Oxygen-starved, they radiated emergency signals and shut themselves off one by one.

  Billy Gargullo dragged the body into the woods and left it in an abandoned woodshed under a scatter of mildewed newspaper. Decay organisms—thick in the rainy forest—began to attack the corpse at once.

  Billy hurried back to the house. When he arrived here he had disoriented the cybernetics with a pulse of electromagnetic radiation; now he triggered a second burst to keep them out of his way. He paused a moment in the kitchen and consulted his auxiliary memories for a rough estimate of his whereabouts. America, the Pacific Northwest—distinguished by the fiercely dense biomass of the forest, which appalled and frightened him—sometime after 1970: too close to the nightmare he'd left behind. He wanted a more effective buffer, even if it meant greater risk. He moved back to the basement and operated the tunnel's hidden controls the way the dying woman had taught him. Destination was relatively unimportant: he wanted a place to hide. He would run, he would hide, he would never be found and he would never go back.

  That was all of his plan. His only plan. The only plan he needed.

  Billy's EM pulses interrupted TV and radio reception throughout the town of Belltower and two neighboring counties. Along the Post Road the effect was most violent and startling. Peggy Simmons, the widow who lived a quarter mile from the house Tom Winter would eventually inhabit, was astonished to see her Zenith color television emit a vivid blue spark while the picture tube turned an ominous, fractured gray. Repairs, that summer of 1979, cost her almost three hundred dollars—the set was just out of warranty. She paid the repair bill but reminded the man at Belltower Audio-Video that the Crosley set she'd bought in 1960 lasted her fifteen years with only a tube to replace now and then, and perhaps standards of manufacture had fallen while the price of repairs had zoomed up, which was precisely the sort of thing you'd expect to happen, wouldn't you—the world being what it was. The repairman nodded and shrugged. Maybe she was right: he'd been out on a lot of calls just recently.

  The rash of electrical failures became a brief sensation in Belltower, reported in the local paper, discussed to no conclusion, and finally forgotten.

  Many of the cybernetics died or were rendered hopelessly dysfunctional by the EM burst; but many survived. They were disoriented for days afterward. Severed paths of information needed to be patched and restored; a comprehensible memory of the day's events had to be assembled.

  Most damaging was the loss of Ben Collier. For the cybernetics, he had combined the functions of clearinghouse, lawmaker, and God. Without him they were forced to fall back on primitive subroutines. This was unavoidable but limiting. Without Ben, and with their numbers greatly reduced, they possessed only a rudimentary intelligence. They were able to perform routine tasks; all else was groping in the dark.

  Many of the nanomechanisms intimately associated with the time traveler's body had been destroyed by the impact of Billy's weapon or the physical shutdown that followed. Some had been scattered to the winds; damaged or swept out of the range of collective mentation, they died. A few—following subroutines of their own—managed an orderly escape; in time, they made their way back to the house. They transferred their significant memory to the larger cybernetics in the manner of bees feeding pollen to the hive. The community of machines, sharing this new wisdom, understood that there were measures to be taken.

  Armies of insect-sized cybernetics, following vectors the nanomechanisms described, delved into the forest behind the house. This was risky and had been the subject of debate; territory beyond the perimeter of the house had been forbidden to them—until this emergency. But their first priority (they reasoned) was the restoration of Ben Collier; other issues could be deferred until he was in a position to clarify his wishes.

  Restoration was no simple task, however. Cybernetic emissaries found the body in a state of decomposition. Great numbers of microorganisms, mainly bacteria and fungi, had established themselves on the wounds, in the extremities, throughout the body. The putrefaction was extensive and would be impossible to reverse if allowed to continue much longer. Work began at once. Old nanomechanisms were enlisted and new ones created to enter the body as sterilants. The heart was isolated and meticulously restored to a potentially functional state. Open veins and arteries were sealed. Old, infected skin was sloughed off and replaced with extruded synthetics.

  What they preserved in this fashion was not the time traveler's body, precisely, but the rough core of it—the skeletal system (minus a leg and most of the skull); crude reductions of the major organs; some sterile meat. An observer walking into the woodshed would have seen what looked like a freshly flayed, naked, and brutally incomplete corpse. It was not in any sense functional.

  It never would have been, except that the cybernetics maintained among themselves a blueprint of the time traveler's body and had shared a map of his brain and its contents. This information was shared among them holographically; some detail had been lost in the EM pulse, but it was nothing they couldn't infer from genetic data still preserved in the body. They had salvaged what parts they could and they were ready to begin rebuilding the rest.

  The problem was raw material: raw material for the reconstruction and raw material for their own maintenance. Much needed to be done. For now, they simply sterilized the corpse and sealed its perimeters. They maintained a watch over the body of Ben Collier to guarantee the continued viability of his meat; but the main phalanx of the cybernetics retreated to the house to consider their resources and rebuild their material base.

  Many new nanomechanisms would be needed. These could be assembled—albeit slowly—from material in the house and surrounding soil. The nanomechanisms were intricate but very nearly massless; this was their advantage. With this new army, work could proceed on the restoration of the body ... a task unfortunately much more massive.

  Their sole ally was the body itself. Once primitive cardiovascular function had been restored, the time traveler's own digestive functions could begin to work. In effect, he could be nourished, and the nourishment directed into building and healing. The problem was that he would require a vast amount of protein for maintenance alone.

  The cybernetics had established a broad path between the house and the woodshed, and within this space they taught themselves to scavenge food. Much acceptable protein was available in this temperate rain forest. Much that was not acceptable could be rendered so, with modification. They learned how to harvest the forest without denuding it. They took deer fern and horsetail, red huckleberries, bracket fungus from a tall, mossy hemlock. They competed with the frogs and the thrushes for insects. On one occasion they discovered the fresh body of a raccoon. This was a banquet, skinned and liquefied with enzymes. They could have killed a deer and speeded their task immensely; but the cybernetics were deeply inhibited against the taking of vertebrate life. They acquired most of their meat by theft—a mouse or frog stolen from the beak of an owl on moonlit summer nights.

  If their numbers had been greater this might have sufficed. Restrained by their material base, they were able to preserve the time traveler but only occasionally to upgrade a major function. In July 1983 he regained an operational kidney. In October 1986 he took his first real breath in seven years.

  Consciousness was the last great hurdle—so much br
ain tissue had been destroyed. The reconstruction was more delicate and required more raw material. Consequently it was slow.

  The work was painstaking but the cybernetics were infinitely patient. Nothing intruded on their labor until the arrival of Tom Winter—a complication that was not merely distracting but possibly dangerous. Since they couldn't evict him they attempted to use him to their advantage . . . but there was so much they didn't know, so much wisdom that had been lost, and working with Tom Winter culled away too many of their essential nanomechanisms. For a time, the work was slowed . . . but it hastened once again when Tom Winter donated several packages of proteins from his freezer; hastened again when a cougar killed a deer within range of the woodshed. The cougar was easily frightened away and the deer was a vast, warm repository of useful food.

  The work hurried toward completion.

  Ben Collier experienced odd moments of wakefulness.

  His awareness, at first, was tenuous and small, like the flickering of a candleflame in a vast, dark room.

  The first experience strong enough to linger in his memory was of pain—a scalding pain that seemed to radiate inward from all the peripheries of his body. He tried to open his eyes and couldn't. The eyes weren't functional and the lids felt sutured shut. He tried to scream and lacked this function also.

  The nanomechanisms inside him sensed his distress and alleviated it at once. They closed his sensorium, blocking nerve signals from his raw and mending skin. They triggered a flood of soothing endorphins. Almost immediately, Ben went back to sleep.

  The next time he was allowed to wake, the fundamental mechanisms of self and thought were more nearly healed. He knew who he was and what had happened to him. He was paralyzed and blind; but the nanomechanisms reassured him and monitored his neurochemicals for panic.

  Ben was mindful of his custodial duties, doubtless neglected during the period of his death. He had one overriding thought: Tell me what's happened at the house.