A Bridge of Years
Robert Charles Wilson
Woe is me, woe is me!
The acorn's not yet fallen from the tree
That's to grow the wood
That's to make the cradle
That's to rock the babe
That's to grow a man
That's to lay me to my rest.
—Anonymous, "The Ghost's Song"
Prologue: April 1979
Soon, the time traveler would face the necessity of his own death.
He had not taken that decision, however, or even begun to contemplate its necessity, on the cool spring morning when Billy Gargullo burst through the kitchen door into the back yard, heavily armed and golden in his armor.
The time traveler—whose name was Ben Collier—had begun the slow, pleasant labor of laying out a garden at the back of the lawn. He had hammered down stakes and marked the borders with binding twine. Next to this patch of grass and weed he had placed a shovel, a rake, and a tilling device called a "garden weasel," which he had found in a Home Hardware store in the Harbor Mall. Ben was looking forward to the adventure of the garden. He had never gardened before. He understood the fundamentals but wasn't certain what might thrive in this sunny, damp patch of soil. Therefore he had purchased a random selection of seeds from the hardware store rotary rack, including corn, radishes, sunflowers, and night-blooming aloe. In his right hand he held a packet of morning glories, reserved for a space by the fence, where they'd have something to climb on.
He had lived alone on this property—two acres of uncultivated woodland and a three-bedroom frame house—for fifteen years now. A tiny chunk of time by any reasonable scale, but substantial when you lived it in sequence. He had arrived at this outpost in August of the year 1964 and since then he had not held a conversation more prolonged than the necessary hellos and thank yous directed at store clerks and delivery people. Occasionally someone would move into the house down the road, would climb the long hill to introduce himself, and the time traveler would be friendly in return . . . but there was something in his manner that discouraged a second visit. He was an ordinary seeming, round-faced, genial young man (not as young as he seemed, of course; quite the contrary) who smiled and wore Levi's and check shirts and short hair and who, on recollection, would remind you of something superficially pleasant but somehow disturbing: a pool of water in a forest clearing, say, where something old and strange might at any moment rise to the surface.
He had lived alone all this time. For Ben, it was not an especial hardship. He had been chosen for his solitary nature and he possessed hidden resources in advance of contemporary technology: slave mnemonics, tactile memory, a population of tiny cybernetics. He wasn't lonely. Nevertheless he was, in a very real sense, alone. He was a careful and dedicated custodian; but the serenity of the house and the property occasionally seduced him into lapses of attention. Sometimes he caught himself daydreaming.
Now, for instance. Peering into this deep tangle of weeds, he imagined a garden. Gardening is a kind of time travel, he thought. One invested labor in the expectation of an altered future. Blank soil yielding flowers. A trick of time and water and nitrogen and human hands. These seeds contained their own blooms.
He looked at the package in his hand. Heavenly Blue, it said. The picture was impossibly gaudy, a riot of turquoise and purple Technicolor. As a species, the morning glory had been endangered for years before his birth. He imagined these flowers rising along the old, fragrant cedar planks of the fence (cedar: another casualty). He imagined their blooms in the summer sunlight. He would step out onto the back porch in the last glimmer of a hot, dry day, and there they would be, laced into the wood like bright blue filigree. In the future.
He was gazing at the package—filled with these thoughts —when the marauder burst through the kitchen door.
He had had some warning, subliminal and brief, enough to start him turning toward the house. He felt it as a disturbance among the cybernetics, and then as their sudden silence.
The marauder was dressed in what Ben recognized as military armor of the late twenty-first century, an armor rooted deep into the body, a prosthetic armor tied into the nervous system. The marauder would be very fast, very deadly.
Ben was not without his own augmentation. As soon as the peripheral image registered, emergency auxiliaries began to operate. He ducked into the meager cover of a lilac bush growing at the edge of the lawn, some few feet from the forest. He had time to wish the lilacs were in bloom.
He had time for a number of thoughts. His reflexes were heightened to the inherent limits of nerve and muscle. His awareness was swift and effortless. Events slowed to a crawl.
He looked at the intruder. What he saw was a blur of golden movement, the momentary shadow of a wrist weapon poised and aimed. Ben couldn't guess what had brought this man here, but his hostility was obvious, the threat unquestionable.
Ben was weaponless. There were weapons hidden in the house, but he would have to pass by the marauder to reach them.
He stood up and dodged left, beginning a zigzag course that would take him to the side of the house and then around to the front, a window or a door there. As he stood, the marauder fired his weapon.
It was a primitive but utterly lethal beam weapon, common for its era. Ben recalled photographs of bodies burned and dismembered beyond recognition, on a battlefield years from here. As he stood, the beam scorched air inches from his head; he imagined he could taste the bright, sour ionization.
Still, the right sort of armor would have protected him. He possessed such an item—in the house.
This was a sustaining thought; but the house was too far, the lawn an unprotected killing ground. He glimpsed the marauder crouching to take aim; he ducked and rolled forward, too late. The beam intersected his left leg and severed it under the knee.
He felt a brief, terrible burst of pain . . . then numbness as the damaged nerves shut themselves down. Crippled, Ben fetched up against a birch stump projecting from the grass. He had been meaning to pull that stump for years now. The severed portion of his leg—now a barely recognizable tube of flayed meat—rolled past him. Absurdly, he wanted to pull it back to himself. But the leg was gone now—past recovery. He would need a new one.
He felt briefly dizzy as opened arteries clamped themselves shut. The gushing of blood from the blackened wound slowed to a trickle.
Clever programs had been written into the free sequences of his DNA. For Ben, this was not a deadly injury. A grave impediment, however, it most certainly was.
He was helpless here. The birch stump was no cover at all and the marauder was primed for another shot. Ben lurched forward, grinding his bloody knee-end into the dirt, hopped two paces and then rolled again in a drunken tumble that might have succeeded if the marauder had been aiming by line of sight; but the weapon was equipped with a target-recognition device and the beam cut twice across Ben's body—first severing his right hand at the wrist and then slicing deep into his abdominal cavity. Blood and flame flowered across his shirt, which he had bought at the Sears in the Harbor Mall.
Now Ben began to consider dying.
Probably it was unavoidable. He understood how profoundly damaged he was. He experienced waves of dizziness as major arteries locked or dilated in a futile attempt to maintain blood pressure. Numbness spread upward from his hip to his collarbone: it was like slipping into a warm bath. He lay on the grass where his momentum had carried him, loose-jointed and faint.
He turned his head.
The marauder stood above him.
His armor was quite golden, blinding in the sunlight.
The intruder gazed down at Ben with an expression so absolutely neutral of emotion that it provoked a puls
e of surprise. He doesn't much care that he's killed me, Ben thought.
The marauder leveled his wrist weapon one more time, now at Ben's head.
The weapon was unimpressive, built into the curiously insect-jointed machinery of the armor. Ben looked past it. Saw a flicker of a smile.
The marauder fired his weapon.
Most of the time traveler's head vanished in a steam of bone and tissue.
Billy Gargullo regarded the time traveler's body with a new and sudden distaste. Here was not an enemy any longer but something to be disposed of. A messy nuisance.
He took the corpse by its good arm and began to drag it into the wooded land behind the house. This was a long, hot process. The air was cool but the sun bore down mercilessly. Billy followed a narrow path some several yards, unnerved by the lushness of this forest. He stopped where the path curved away to the left. To the right there was a clearing; in the clearing was a slatboard woodshed, ivy-choked and abandoned for years.
He probed the door of the shed. One hinge was missing; the door sagged inward at a cockeyed angle. Sunlight played into the damp interior. There were stacks of mildewed newspapers, a few rusty garden tools, a hovering cloud of gnats.
Billy wrestled the time traveler—the lacerated meat of his body—into the sour, earthy shade of the building. His motion caused a tower of newspapers to tumble over the corpse. The papers thumped wetly down and Billy grimaced at the sudden reek of mold.
He stepped back from the door, satisfied. Possibly the body would be found, but this would deter suspicion at least for a while. He wasn't planning to spend much time here.
He paused with one hand on the sun-hot wall of the shed.
There was a sound behind him, faint but unsettling—a rustle and chatter in the darkness.
Mice, Billy thought.
Rats.
Well, they can have him. He closed the door.
Billy's first shot had blown the package of morning glory seeds out of the time traveler's hand.
A stray corner of his beam sliced into the package and scattered its contents across the lawn. The charred paper— the words Heavenly Blue still brownly legible—drifted to earth not far from the birch stump where the time traveler lost his leg. The seeds were dispersed in a wide curve between the stump and the fence.
Most were eaten by birds and insects. A few, moistened by the next night's rainfall, rooted in the lawn and were choked by crabgrass before the shoots saw light.
Four of them sprouted in the rich soil alongside the cedar fence.
Three survived into the summer. The few blossoms they produced were gaudy by August, but there was no one to see. The grass had grown tall and the house was empty.
It would be empty for a few summers more.
PART ONE - The Door in the Wall
One
It was a modest three-bedroom frame house with its basement dug a little deeper than was customary in this part of the country, pleasant but overgrown with bush and ivy and miles away from town.
It had been empty for years, the real estate agent said, and the property backed onto a cedar swamp. "Frankly, I don't see a lot of investment potential here."
Tom Winter disagreed.
Maybe it was his mood, but this property appealed at once. Perversely, he liked it for its bad points: its isolation, lost in this rainy pinewood—its blunt undesirability, like the frank ugliness of a bulldog. He wondered whether, if he lived here, he would come to resemble the house, the way pet owners were said to resemble their pets. He would be plain. Isolated. Maybe, a little wild.
Which was not, Tom supposed, how he looked to Doug Archer, the real estate agent. Archer was wearing his blue Bell Realty jacket, but the neat faded Levi's and shaggy haircut betrayed his roots. Local family, working class, maybe some colorful relative still logging out in the bush. Raised to look with suspicion on creased trousers, which Tom happened to be wearing. But appearances were deceptive. Tom paused as they approached the blank pine-slab front door. "Didn't this used to be the Simmons property?"
Archer shook his head. "Close, though. That's a little ways up the hill. Peggy Simmons still lives up there—she's nearly eighty." He raised an eyebrow. "You know Peggy Simmons?"
"I used to deliver groceries up the Post Road. Came by here sometimes. But that was a long while ago."
"No kidding! Didn't you say—"
"I've been in Seattle for most of twelve years."
"Any connection with Tony Winter—up at Arbutus Ford?"
"He's my brother," Tom said.
"Hey! Well, hell! This changes things."
In the city, Tom thought, we learn not to smile so generously.
Archer slid the key into the door. "We had a man out here when the property went up for sale. He said it was in fairly nice shape on the inside, but I'd guess, after it's been closed up for so long—well, you might take that with a grain of salt."
Translated from realty-speak, Tom thought, that means it's a hellacious mess.
But the door eased open on hinges that felt freshly oiled, across a swatch of neat beige broadloom.
"I'll be damned," Archer said.
Tom stepped over the threshold. He flicked the wall switch and a ceiling light blinked on, but it wasn't really necessary; a high south-facing window allowed in a good deal of the watery sunshine. The house had been built with the climate in mind: it would not succumb to gloom even in the rain.
On the right, the living room opened into a kitchen. On the left, a hallway connected the bedrooms and the bath.
A stairway led down to the basement.
"I'll be damned," Archer repeated. "Maybe I was wrong about this place."
The room they faced was meticulously clean, the furniture old but spotless. A mechanical mantel clock ticked away (but who had wound it?) under what looked like a Picasso print. Just slightly kitschy, Tom thought, the glass-topped coffee table, the low Danish Modern sofa; very sixties, but immaculately preserved. It might have popped out of a time capsule.
"Well maintained," he said.
"You bet. Considering it wasn't maintained at all, far as I know."
"Who's the owner?"
"The property came up for state auction a long time ago. Holding company in Seattle bought it but never did anything with it. They've been selling off packets of land all through here for the last year or so." He shook his head. "To be honest, the house was entirely derelict. We had a man out to evaluate these properties, shingles and foundation and so on, but he never said—I mean, we assumed, all these old frame houses out here—" He put his hands in his pockets and frowned. "The utilities weren't even switched on till late last week."
How many cold winters, hot summers had this room been closed and locked? Tom paused and slid his finger along a newel post where the stairs ran down into darkness. His finger came away clean. The wood looked oiled. "Phantom maid service?"
Archer didn't laugh. "Jack Shackley's the listed agent on this. Maybe he was in to tidy up. Somebody did a phenomenal job, anyway. The listing is house and contents and it looks like you have some nice pieces here—maybe a little dated. Shall we have a look around?"
"I think we should."
Tom circled twice through the house—once with Archer, once "to get his own impression" while Archer left his business card on the kitchen counter and stepped outside for a smoke. His impression was the same both times. The kitchen cupboards opened frictionlessly to spotless, uniformly vacant interiors. The linen closet was cedar-lined, fragrant and bare. The bedrooms were empty except for the largest, which contained a modest bed, a chest of drawers, and a mirror— dustless. In the basement, high windows peeked out at the rear lawn; these were covered with white roller blinds, which the sun had turned brittle yellow. (Time passes here after all, he thought.)
The building was sound, functional, and clean.
The fundamental question was, did it feel like home?
No. At least, not yet.
But that might change.
Did he want it to feel like home?
But it was a question he couldn't answer to his own satisfaction. Maybe what he wanted was not so much a house as a cave: a warm, dry place in which to nurse his wounds until they healed—or at least until the pain was bearable.
But the house was genuinely interesting.
He ran his hand idly along a blank basement wall and was startled to feel . . . what?
The hum of machinery, carried up through gypsum board and concrete block—instantly stilled?
Faint tingle of electricity?
Or nothing at all.
"Tight as a drum."
This was Archer, back from his sojourn. "You may have found a bargain here, Tom. We can go back to my office if you want to talk about an offer." "Why the hell not," Tom Winter said.
The town of Belltower occupied the inside curve of a pleasant, foggy Pacific bay on the northwestern coast of the United States.
Its primary industries were fishing and logging. A massive pulp mill had been erected south of town during the boom years of the fifties, and on damp days when the wind came blowing up the coast the town was enveloped in the sulfurous, bitter stench of the mill. Today there had been a stiff offshore breeze; the air was clean. Shortly before sunset, when Tom Winter returned to his room at the Seascape Motel, the cloud stack rolled away and the sun picked out highlights on the hills, the town, the curve of the bay.
He bought himself dinner in the High Tide Dining Room and tipped the waitress too much because her smile seemed genuine. He bought a Newsweek in the gift shop and headed back to his second-floor room as night fell.
Amazing, he thought, to be back in this town. Leaving here had been, in Tom's mind, an act of demolition. He had ridden the bus north to Seattle pretending that everything behind him had been erased from the map. Strange to find the town still here, stores still open for business, boats still anchored at the marina behind the VFW post.
The only thing that's been demolished is my life.
But that was self-pity, and he scolded himself for it. The quintessential lonely vice. Like masturbation, it was a parody of something best performed in concert with others.