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Interesting questions.
He stood in the tu
He took a step forward, his heart pounding. This was not a place, he reminded himself. It was a time machine. Each step carried him a measured distance forward: a week? a month? And what am I doing out there? Take a step: February? March? Is it snowing? Am I out in the snow? Am I hunting? Is the armor alive? Am I?
Suppose he ran a hundred yards forward. 1963? 1964? Had the elytra failed? The gland dried up? Have I convulsed and died somewhere? Suppose he went even farther. Suppose he stood in some sheltered part of this tu
He felt a sudden weightlessness, a kind of vertigo.
It was better not to think about these things.
Home, he showered away all the dust still clinging to him; then he washed and shined the armor. He disliked taking the armor off. He hadn’t powered up entirely and the physical need was still urgent and unsatisfied. The lancet had left a painful sore on the right side of his abdomen; without the hormone drip he felt small, vulnerable, and nervous. But he needed to sleep. And it would be wasteful to sleep in his armor.
Tomorrow, he promised himself. In the night.
He dreamed of the Storm Zone, of armored combat, in the future, where he had once lived; and then of Ohio, the fierce summers and cold, snowless winters there. He dreamed of the bed he had slept in as a child, with a heater he was allowed to switch on in January and February; of bitter nights walking from the common store to the housing plex, frost on the ground and a horned moon overhead.
He dreamed these things with a clarity so absolute and a sadness so piercing they could be sustained only in a dream. And then, finally, he dreamed the face of Nathan, his father.
He woke wanting the armor.
Even in New York City—even in 1962, in a city that was the axis around which much of the world revolved—the night was quieter than the day.
Billy chose the stillest hours of the night, between three a.m. and dawn, to begin his search.
He wore the armor snug to his body. He pulled on loose, filthy pants over the leggings. Over the elytra and the halteres he wore a torn athletic sweatshirt marked NYU, which he had found in a bin at a secondhand shop. He pulled up the hood to help disguise the headset; the headset was conspicuous but he needed its eyepiece. Over the sweatshirt Billy wore a slate-gray, threadbare coat that reached to his knees, the high collar turned up at his throat.
Before he left the apartment he looked at himself in the chipped bathroom mirror.
The black headset with its calibrated goggles projected from the hood of his sweatshirt like the muzzle of an animal.
A rat, Billy thought. He looked like some kind of leathery, robotic sewer rat attempting to pass for human. I look like someone’s nightmare.
The thought was disquieting. It troubled him until he activated the armor’s lancet; then everything was simple, everything was clear.
He kept to the shadows.
He tuned his eyepiece to the radiant frequency of the tu
The lobby of the building was alive, starry with ghostlight.
But the intruder had come through here long ago and there was no clear trail to follow. Well, Billy had expected that. There had been rain since then; there had been wind, air pollution, foot traffic, a thousand scatterings and adulterations.
He stood in the street outside the building. Faint blue light glimmered here and there. A brush of it adhered to a lamppost. A scatter of it stood like snow crystals along the filthy curb.
No trail, only clues: dim, ambiguous.
He looked up at the building, dark except for Mr. Shank’s apartment. Amos Shank chose that moment to pull back his blinds—awake in some delirium of creativity—and Billy gazed up calmly at him. Mr. Shank returned his look for one long breathless moment … then pulled away from the window; and the blinds slashed down again.
Billy smiled.
What did you see, Mr. Shank? What do you think I am, out here in the lonely dark?
Billy imagined himself old and senile in 1962, lost in a dream of antiquity and Napoleonic Europe, peering from his slum apartment into a nighttime world inhabited by monstrosities.
Why, Billy thought, I must look like Death.
Good guess, Mr. Shank.
Billy laughed quietly and turned away.
He moved in a crude spiral away from the tu
He found none. He found traces of the dust here and there almost at random—a big deposit clinging to an oil slick at Ninth and University Place, a smaller one smudged into the yellow grass at the foot of a bench in Washington Square Park. Billy lingered at the bench a moment, but there was nothing coherent, only a suggestion that his prey had passed this way. He frowned and decided to move south, avoiding the west side of the park where a few hustlers and homosexuals still lingered in the darkness. That part of the park was a familiar hunting ground when his armor needed a killing— like Times Square and Union Square at night, places where disposable nonpersons gathered. Billy’s armor wanted a killing now; but there wasn’t time and he suppressed the urge.
He paused a moment, adjusted his opticals and gazed up at the sky.
Ordinarily the city sky was featureless, but Billy’s opticals showed him too many stars to count. It was like an Ohio sky, Billy thought.
He felt a sudden pang of longing, so intense it worried him. The armor was pumping out complex neurochemicals to make him alert, to help him hunt—to keep him alive. There shouldn’t have been room for nostalgia. Unless the elytra or the lancet or the strange, false gland in the armor had begun to fail.
But they hadn’t, really; or if they had, the effect was purely transient. Billy sat on a park bench until the pang of homesickness faded. Then the sky was only the sky, clean and blank of meaning. He retuned his opticals and crossed the empty space of Washington Square South at Sullivan, hunting.
And came up empty. And sweated through another day.
In the early evening he went out without his armor to wander the busy streets of the Village. He sat for a time on the terrace at the Cafe Figaro, mistaken by its regulars for one more middle-aged tourist, wondering whether the intruder had strolled past him in the crowd or might even be sitting at the next table, smug with thirty years’ worth of cheap prescience. Or might after all have left the city: that was still a real possibility. In which case Billy’s prey would be hopelessly beyond reach, no trace of him but a residue of fading phosphorescence.
But Billy hadn’t given up yet.
He went home, do
He finished the night without killing anything—a profound disappointment.
And dreamed of blue light.
Three nights later, ranging west along Eighth Street, he discovered a smoky luminescence around the doorway and interior of a tiny retail shop called Lindner’s Radio Supply. Billy smiled to himself, and went home, and slept.
He woke in the heat of the afternoon.