The house was full of a gray, cloying smoke but the cybernetics had extinguished all the fires. Ben Collier lay bloody and prostrate at the top of the stairs. Tom registered this fact but set it aside, something to be dealt with later.
He felt giddy going down the stairs. He was in pain, but the pain was distant from him; he worried about shock. Probably he was in shock. Whatever that meant or might later mean. It didn’t matter now. He made himself walk.
He found the marauder some yards into the tunnel.
The marauder had collapsed—probably for the last time, Tom thought—against the blank white wall. He was armorless, weaponless, naked, hurt. Tom felt his fingers open, heard the rattle of his own weapon as it fell to the floor. The marauder didn’t look.
Tom reached out a hand to support himself but the wall was too smooth; he lost his balance and sat down hard.
Two of us here on the floor, Tom thought.
He was at the brink of unconsciousness. The pain was very bad. He spared another glance at his ruined left side. His light-headedness lent him some objectivity. Singed meat, he thought. He had never thought of himself as “meat” before. Barbecued ribs. It made him want to laugh, but he was afraid of the sound his laughter might make in this empty tunnel.
This transit in time. Not a tunnel under the earth; something stranger. Strange place to be lying with what might be a mortal wound, next to the man who had wounded him.
He saw the marauder move. Dismayed, Tom raised his head. But the marauder was not hostile, only frightened, trying to back his broken body away from this:
This sudden apparition.
This halo of fight in the shape of a human being.
It came toward the marauder at a terrible speed.
Time ghost, Tom thought, too sleepy to be terrified. Doug had called it that. Ghost of what? Of something native to this fracture in the world. Of a kind of humanity uprooted from duration.
Something too big to be contained by his idea of it. He felt its largeness as it hovered a few feet away. It was large in some dimension he couldn’t perceive; it was many where it seemed to be singular.
He felt the heat of it wash over his face. He felt it consider him … and pass him by. He saw it hover over the marauder, saw it contain that frightened man in a veil of its own intolerable light. And then it disappeared, and the marauder was gone with it.
Tom heard voices calling his name, Joyce’s voice among them. He turned with a feverish gratitude toward the sound, would have stood up but for the darkness that took him away.
PART THREE — Time
Twenty-four
When he woke there was nothing left of his wound but pink, new skin and an occasional phantom pain. The cybernetics had healed him, Ben explained. He’d been asleep for three and a half weeks.
The house had been healed, too. No trace remained of the smoke and fire damage. The windows had been replaced and reputtied. The house was immaculate—spotless.
The way I found it, Tom thought. New and old. A half step out of time.
“There’s someone you need to meet,” Ben said.
She was waiting for him in the kitchen.
Dazed with his recovery and events that seemed too recent, he didn’t recognize her at first; felt only this powerful sense of familiarity, a sort of deja vu. Then he said, “You were in the car … driving the car that hit him.” He remembered this face framed in those lights.
She nodded. “That’s right.”
She was gray-haired, fiftyish, a little wide at the hips. She was dressed in jeans and a blue cotton blouse and thick corrective lenses that made her eyes seem big.
He looked again, and the world seemed to slip sideways. “Oh my god,” he said. “Joyce.”
Her smile was large and genuine. “We do meet under the most peculiar circumstances.”
He spent a few days at the house undergoing what Doug called “emotional decompression,” but he couldn’t stay. In effect, the building had been repossessed. The time terminus was repaired; Tom didn’t have a place here anymore.
He was homeless but not poor. A sum equivalent to the purchase price of the house had appeared in a Bank of America account in his name. Tom asked Ben how this happy event had occurred—not certain he wanted to know—and Ben said, “Oh, money isn’t hard to create. The right electronics and the right algorithms can work wonders. It can be done by telephone, amazingly enough.”
“Like computer hacking,” Tom said.
“More sophisticated. But yes.”
“Isn’t that unethical?”
“Do you own this house? Did you really take possession of the chattel goods to which you’re entitled under the contract? If not, would it be fair to leave you penniless?”
“You can’t just invent money. It has to come from somewhere.”
Ben gave him a pitying look.
The tunnel was repaired and the time travelers came through it from their unimaginable future: Tom was allowed a glimpse of them. He stood at the foot of the basement stairs as they emerged from the tunnel, a man and a woman, or apparently so—Ben said they changed themselves to seem more human than they really were. Their eyes, Tom thought, were very striking. Gray eyes, frankly curious. They looked at him a long time. Looked at him, Tom supposed, the way he might look at a living specimen of Australopithecus—with the peculiar affection we feel for our dim-witted ancestors.
Then they turned to Ben and spoke too softly for Tom to understand; he took this as his cue to leave.
Archer and Catherine made room for him in the Simmons house at the top of the hill. The bed was comfortable but he planned to leave; he felt too much like an intruder here. They made allowances for his disorientation, tiptoed around his isolation. It wasn’t a role he wanted to play.
The Simmons house was for sale, in any case. Archer had left his job with Belltower Realty but refused to employ another agent; the property was “for sale by owner.”
“It’s full of important memories,” Catherine said, “but without Gram Peggy this place would be a mausoleum. Better to let it go.” She gave him a curious half-sad little smile. “I guess we all came out of this with new ideas about past and future. What we can cling to and what we can’t.”
Archer said they were moving up to Seattle, where Catherine had a market for her painting. He could find some kind of work there—maybe even audit some college courses. Tom said, “Leaving Belltower after all these years?”
“Cutting that knot, yeah. It’s easier now.”
“It rained morning glories,” Tom said.
“All up and down the Post Road. Morning glories a foot deep.”
“Nobody knows it but us.”
“Nope. But we know it.”
August had ended. It was September now, still hot, but a little bit of winter in the air, colder these nights.
He took his car out of the garage and drove it down to Brack’s Auto Body for a tune-up. The mechanic changed the oil, cleaned the plugs, adjusted the choke, charged too much. He ran Tom’s Visa card through the slider and said, “Planning a trip?” Tom nodded.
“Where you headed?”
“Don’t know. Maybe back east. Thought I’d just drive.”
“No shit?”
“No shit.”
“That’s wild,” the mechanic said. “Hey, freedom, right?”
“Freedom. Right.”
He made a couple of phone calls from the booth outside.
He called Tony. It was Saturday; Tony was home and the TV was playing in the background. He heard Tricia crying, Loreen soothing her.