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Words, Billy thought. What they spoke here was English, but only just.
He acquired his new life by theft.
The custodian, a time traveler, had owned the block of tenement flats above the sub-basement which concealed the tu
It suited him to commandeer the life of a loner. Billy was a loner, too.
He guessed the armor had made him that way. He knew the Infantry surgeons had made him dependent on the armor —that without it he was less than a normal human being. Sexually, Billy was a blank slate. He remembered a time when he had wanted the touch of a woman—back in his brief adolescence, before he was prepped, when the physical need had burned like a flame—but that was long ago. Nothing burned in him now but his need for the armor. Now he saw women all the time: women on television, women on city streets, bank tellers, secretaries, women available for money. Occasionally they looked at him. Their looks seldom lingered. Billy guessed there was something about him they could sense—a blankness, a deferral, an inertia of the soul.
It didn’t matter. By the snowy January of 1953 Billy had established a life he was content to lead.
He was far from the Infantry, the Storm Zone, and the prospect of imminent death or court martial. He wasn’t hungry and he wasn’t in physical danger. When he stopped to think about it, it felt a little bit like paradise.
Was he happy here? Billy couldn’t say. Most days passed in blissful oblivion, and he was grateful for that. But there were times when he felt the pangs of a brittle, piercing loneliness. He woke up nights in a city more than a century away from home, and that impossible distance was like a hook in his heart. He thought about his father, Nathan. He tried to remember his mother, who had died when he was little. He thought about his life in exile here, stranded on this island, Manhattan, among people who had been dead a hundred years when he was born. Thought about his life among these ghosts. He thought about time, about clocks: clocks, like words, worked differently here. Billy was accustomed to clocks that numbered time and marked it with cursors, linear slices of a linear phenomenon. Here, clocks were round and symbolic. Time was a territory mapped with circles.
Time and words. Seasons. That January, Billy was caught in a snowstorm that slowed the buses to a crawl. Tired and cold, he decided to check into a hotel rather than walk the distance home. He found an inexpensive boarding hotel and asked the desk clerk for a room with a slut; the clerk showed him a strange smile and said he would have to arrange that himself—he recommended a bar a few blocks away. Billy disguised his confusion and checked in anyway, then realized that in 1953 the word “slut” must have some other meaning —he didn’t need a heated bed; the entire room, the entire hotel was heated. Probably every room in the city was heated, even the vast public spaces of banks and the cavernous lobbies of skyscrapers, all through the bitter winter. He had a hard time grasping this simple fact; when he did, the sheer arrogant monstrosity of it left him dazed and blinking.
Asleep in the snowbound hotel, Billy dreamed of all that heat … a hundred summers’ worth, bubbling up from this city and a dozen cities like it, hovering for decades in invisible cloudbanks and then descending all at once in a final obliteration of the seasons.
He dreamed about Ohio, about a farm in the desert there.
His need for the armor was quiet at first, a barely discernible tickle of desire, something he could ignore—for a time.
The armor, with its power off and its tensor fields collapsed, lay in the box Billy had found for it like yardcloth from some fairy-tale haberdashery. It looked like spun gold, though of course it wasn’t really gold; it was woven of complex polymolecules grown in the big East Coast armaments collectives. Parts of it were electronic and parts of it were vaguely alive.
The Infantry doctors had told Billy he’d die without his armor—that he would go mad without the essential neurochemicals generated in the elytra. Billy was frankly aware that without the armor he was slow, languorous, sleepy, and sexless. But he endured that—in a way, the condition was even sedating. For six months he moved through the city with his eyelids heavy and his mouth turned up in an empty narcotic smile.
Then came the Need.
At first it was only a tingling dissatisfaction, pins and needles in his fingers and toes. Billy ignored it and went about his business.
Then the tingling became an itch, the itch a fiery burning. The skin of his face felt drawn tight, as if it had been clamped and sutured to his hairline. He woke up in the bitter late winter of that year with the disquieting sensation that he could feel the gaps and contours of his own skull under the skin, the grinding of bones and ligaments like dry chalk inside him. He was thirsty all the time, but tap water tasted sour in his mouth and burned his throat when he swallowed. He felt sudden blooms of panic, irrational fears: of heights, open spaces, disease.
He knew what this was all about.
The armor, Billy thought.
The sleek and deadly armor.
He wanted it, or it wanted him … Billy was inclined to the latter belief.
This discomfort, this pain, this vertigo: it was the sound of the armor calling to him from its box under the bed.
Billy resisted it.
He was afraid of what the armor might want.
Well, he knew what it wanted. It wanted motion, light, heat. It wanted to be brought alive. It wanted to be the creature that Billy was when he wore it, a powerful nightmare-Billy to be summoned and let loose.
He dreamed he was a dog chasing rabbits through a field of wheat by the bone-white light of a harvest moon. He dreamed of cracking the rabbit’s spine with his sharp teeth and of the gush of warm rabbit blood on his muzzle.
He dreamed of the armor. The armor was a presence in all his dreams now, the flash of it like something dazzling at the periphery of his vision. He couldn’t bear to look directly at it;
like the sun, it might blind him—but, like the sun, it was always there.
Some nights, sweating and shivering, he dreamed of Ohio.
In the main, Billy’s childhood memories were su