A Bridge of Years (44 page)

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.

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.

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.

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 many 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.

"Billy
Gargullo," the marauder said, and fired a beam weapon from his
wrist.

But
the marauder was slow and Ben, augmented, anticipated the move
and ducked away.

He
fired his own weapon. The focused pulse, invisible, seemed to pull
Billy Gargullo forward and down; his armor clenched around him like a
fist. He toppled, convulsed once . . . then used his momentum as the
armor relaxed to swing his arm forward.

This
was a gesture Ben had
not
anticipated.
He dodged the beam weapon but not quickly enough; it cut a charred
canyon across his abdomen.

Ben
dropped and rolled to extinguish his burning clothing, then
discovered he couldn't sit up. He had been cut nearly in half.

Precious
moments ticked away. Ben felt his awareness ebb. A wave of
cybernetics poured out from the walls, covered the wound, sealed it;
severed arteries closed from within. For a brief and unsustainable
moment his blood pressure rose to something like normal; his vision
cleared.

Ben
pushed himself up on his elbows and fumbled for his weapon.

He
found it, raised it . . .

But
Billy had left the room.

By
the time he reached the foot of the basement stairs Billy assumed he
was dying.

He
knew his armor was crumbling away, somehow, inside him. His eyepiece
displayed bright red numerals and emergency diagnostics. He felt
cut loose from himself, afloat, hovering over his own body like
a bird.

This
was very sudden, very strange, unmistakably hostile. He didn't let it
slow him down.

He
came up the stairs still operational but awash in strange emotions:
vivid lightnings of panic; blue threads of guilt. Billy was coherent
enough to understand that he'd walked into a trap; that his prey, the
time traveler, someone, had interfered with his armor. There was a
perpetual high-pitched keening in his ears and the diagnostics in his
eyepiece read him a catalogue of major and minor malfunctions. So
far, the gland in the elytra was still pumping—though fitfully—and
his weapons were functional. But he was vulnerable and he was slow
and before long he might be altogether helpless.