A Bridge of Years

He had lived in New York City for ten years now, but hot nights like this still reminded him of Ohio.

Hot nights like this, he couldn’t sleep. Hot summer nights, he left his tiny apartment and moved like a shadow into the streets. He liked to ride the subway; when the subway was crowded, he liked to walk.

Tonight he rode a little, walked a little.

He had left his shiny golden armor safe at home.

Billy seldom wore the armor, but he often thought about it. The golden armor was at home, in the tenement apartment where he had lived for the last decade. He kept the armor in his closet, behind a false wall, in a box no one else could open.

He wore the golden armor seldom; but the golden armor was a part of him, profoundly his own—and that was troublesome. He had left a great many things behind when he came to New York. Many ugly, many shameful things. But some ugly and shameful things had come with him. The armor itself was not ugly or shameful—in its own way it was beautiful, and when Billy wore it he wore it with pride. But he had come to suspect that his need for it was shameful … that the things he did when he wore it were ugly.

This wasn’t entirely Billy’s fault, or so he told himself. The Infantry had performed certain surgeries on him. His need for the armor was real, physical; he wasn’t whole without it. In a sense, Billy was the armor. But the armor wasn’t entirely Billy: the armor had its own motives, and it knew Billy better than any other creature in the world.

It sang to him sometimes.

Most often, it sang about death.

Billy emerged from the roaring machine caves of the subway into the night wilderness of Forty-second Street and Broadway. Midnight had come and gone.

Now as ever, he was startled by the wild exuberance of the twentieth century. All these lights! Colored neon and glaring filaments, powered, he had learned, by mechanical dams spa

He paced through Times Square, where the lights were so bright he could hear them sizzle and spit.

Where Billy came from—back on the farm—this frivolous use of electricity would have been called promiscuous. A very bad word. But the word meant something else here … a dissipation of some other energy entirely.

Words had troubled him from the day he arrived in New York.

He had arrived in a fury of blood and noise, disgorged into the sub-basement of an old building through a fracture in the firmament of time—frightened of what he had seen there; frightened of what might be waiting for him. He detonated EM pulses, brought a wall tumbling down, and killed the man (a time traveler) who tried to stop him.

When the dust settled, he crouched in a corner and considered his options.

He thought about the monster he’d encountered in the tu

The monster was called a “time ghost”—A

The fiery apparition had terrified Billy even through the haze of chemical courage pumped into him by his armor. The time ghost was like nothing he had ever seen and Billy sensed—he couldn’t say how—that its interest in him was particular, personal. Maybe it knew what he’d done. Maybe it knew he had no place in this maze of time; that he was a deserter, a criminal, a refugee.

The monster had appeared as he reached the end of the tu

Nevertheless, Billy was still frightened.

He had a rough idea where he was. Mid-twentieth century. Some urban locus. He had killed the custodian of this place and a few more pulse detonations would sweep it clean of cybernetics. But Billy crouched in the corner of the dimly fit sub-basement—in the stench of fused plaster and cinder-block and a fine gray dust from the damaged tu

He powered down his armor and performed a private inventory.

Things he had run away from:

The Infantry.

The Storm Zone.

Murder.

The woman A

Ohio.

His father, Nathan. A town called Oasis.

Miles of kale and green wheat and a sky empty of everything but heat and dust.

Things he couldn’t leave behind: His armor.

And, Billy realized, this place. This building, whatever it was. This tu

What had seemed at the time like inspiration, this feverish escape into the past, troubled him now. He had tampered with mechanisms he didn’t understand, mechanisms more powerful than he could imagine. His encounter with the time ghost had been disturbing enough; who else might he have angered? There was so much Billy didn’t understand. He believed he was safe here … but the belief was tempered with fresh new doubts.

But here you are. That was the plain fact of it. Here he was and here he would stay. At least no Infantry; at least no Storm Zone. A place away from all that. Not Ohio with its deserts and canals and the miracle of the harvest, but at least a safe place.

A city in the middle years of the twentieth century.

That night, his first night in the city of New York, Billy undressed the body of the time traveler and used a fan beam to turn the corpse into a dune of feathery white ash.

The clothes were bloodstained and a poor fit, but they allowed Billy to move without attracting attention. He explored the corridors of the tenement building above the sub-basement chamber which contained the tu

He slept in the dead man’s bed. He appropriated a fresh suit of clothes. He marveled at the dead man’s calendar: 1953.

He found cash in the dead man’s wallet, more cash in a drawer of his desk. Billy understood cash: it was an archaic form of credit, universal and interchangeable. The denominations were confusing but simple in principle: a ten-dollar bill was “worth” two fives, for instance.

He stayed in the apartment a week. Twice, someone knocked at the door; but Billy was quiet and didn’t answer. He watched television at night. He ate regular meals until there was nothing left in the refrigerator. He sat at the window and studied the people passing in the street.

He kept his armor hidden under the bed. As vulnerable as Billy felt without the armor, he would have been grotesquely conspicuous in it. He supposed he could have worn the body pieces under his clothing and looked only a little peculiar, but that wasn’t the point; he hadn’t come here to wear the armor. He pla

When there was nothing left to eat Billy gathered up his cash and left the building. He walked three blocks to a “grocery” and found himself in a paradise of fresh fruit and vegetables, more of these things than he had ever seen in one place. Dazzled, he chose three oranges, a head of lettuce, and a bunch of bright yellow speckled bananas. He handed the checkout clerk a flimsy cash certificate and was nonplussed when the man said, “I can’t change that! Christ’s sake!” Change it to what? But Billy rooted in his pocket for a smaller denomination, which proved acceptable, and he understood the problem when the cashier handed him a fresh selection of bills and coins: his “change.”