A Bridge of Years (19 page)

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 brain 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.

In
time,
the
nanomechanisms responded. He had made great progress but he wasn't
ready to assume his former status. For that, he would need to be
entirely healed.

Sleep
now,
they
said. He was grateful, and slept.

The
next time he woke he woke instantly, alert and buzzing with concern.

Someone
is here,
the
nanomechanisms told him.

Ben
knew where he was. He was in the ancient woodshed in the forest
behind the house. The cybernetics had restored his memory, including
the memory of his own murder and beyond: really, their memories were
his memories. The cybernetics had been designed for Ben as his
personal adjuncts —appendages—and he was pleased at how well they
had functioned without him. For a moment much briefer than a second
he savored the details of his own reconstruction.

Which
was miraculous but unfortunately not complete. His mind was almost
fully functional, but his body needed work. His skull was still
partial, large chunks of it replaced with a gluey, transparent caul;
his left leg was a venous flipper; muscle tissue stood exposed
over large parts of his body where the skin and decay had been
stripped and sterilized.

At
least his eyes were functional. He opened them.

He
was supine in the rotted mass of newsprint. Sunlight glimmered
through gaps in the southern wall of the shed. Everything was green
here, the color of moss and lichen. The air was full of dust motes,
pollen and spores.

He
looked at the door of the shed, a crudely hinged raft of barnboards
held together with rusty iron nails.

His
ears worked. He was able to hear the rasp of his own breathing . . .
the faint scuttle of cybermechanisms in the detritus around him.

The
sound of footsteps in the high meadow weeds beyond the door.

Now,
the sound of a hand on the primitive latch that held the door closed.
The sound of the latch as it opened. The door as it squealed inward.

Ben
couldn't move. He drew a deep breath into his raw lungs and hoped he
would be able at least to speak.

Greenwich
Village, Manhattan, in the gathering heat and tidal migrations of the
summer of 1962: by the end of June Tom Winter had learned a few
things about his adopted homeland.

He
learned some of its history. "The Village," named
Sapokanican by the Indians and Greenwich by the British, had been a
fashionable section of Manhattan until its prestige migrated north
along Broadway at the end of the nineteenth century. Then an
immigrant population had moved in, and then radical bohemians drawn
by low rents in the years before the First World War. If his
time machine had dropped him off in the 1920s he could have walked
into Romany Marie's in one of its several incarnations—on Sheridan
Square or later on Christopher Street—and found Eugene O'Neill
making notes for a play or Edgard Varese dining on a
ciorba
aromatic
with leeks and dill. Or he might have arrived in 1950 and encountered
Dylan Thomas drunk in the White Horse or Kerouac at the Remo
considering California—these public lives only an eddy of the
deeper current, a counterpoint to American life as it was
understood in the movies.

Rents
had climbed since then; a slow gentrification had been proceeding
ever since the subway linked the Village to the rest of the city in
the 1930s. Genuinely poor artists were already being shouldered into
the Lower East Side. Nevertheless, it was 1962 and the scent of
rebellion was strong and poignant.

He
learned that he liked it here.

Maybe
that was odd. Tom had never considered himself a "bohemian."
The word had never meant much to him. He had gone to college in the
seventies, smoked marijuana on rare occasions, worn denim and long
hair in the last years that was fashionable. None of this had seemed
even vaguely rebellious—merely routine. He moved into a
white-collar job without anxiety and worried about his income like
everybody else. Like everybody else, he ran up his credit debt and
had to cut back a little. He was troubled—like everybody else—
when the stock market tottered; he and Barbara had never set aside
enough for an investment portfolio, but he worried about the economy
and what it might mean for their budget. Barbara was deeply committed
to ecological activism but she was hardly bohemian about it, despite
what Tony thought— her approach, he sometimes thought, was brutal
enough to put a hard-nosed corporate lawyer to shame. She told him
once that if she had to wear a Perry Ellis skirt to be credible,
she'd fucking wear it: it wasn't an issue.

And
when the structure of life and job collapsed around him, it didn't
occur to Tom that the system had failed; only that he had failed it.