A Bridge of Years (36 page)

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 frightening 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." "Ick," Catherine said. "I'm sorry if
this is disturbing."

It
was, but she shrugged. "They fed my aunt Lacey through a tube
for two years before she died. This isn't any worse, I guess. But I'm
sorry for you."

"Strictly
temporary. And I'm not in any pain. You two have lunch if you like.
I'm quite happy here."

"Okay,"
Catherine said. Meekly: "But I have a couple of questions of my
own."

"Surely,"
Ben said.

"You
told us you were a sort of custodian. A caretaker. You said you were
recruited.' But I don't know what that means. Somebody knocked at
your door and asked you to join up?"

"I
was a professional historian, Catherine. A good one. I was approached
by another caretaker, from my own near future, also a historian.
Think of us as a guild. We recruit our own."

"That
puts a lot of power in your hands."
Custodian
was
a modest word, Catherine thought; maybe too modest.

"It
has to be that way," Ben said. "The tunnel-builders are
journeying into their own distant past. Their records of this time
are sketchy; that's why they're here. The custodians act as their
buffer in a sometimes hostile environment. We provide them with
contemporary documents and we help to integrate them into
contemporary culture on the rare occasions when they choose to make a
physical visit. Could you, for instance, walk into a Cro-Magnon
encampment and expect to pass for one of the tribe?"