Last Year
by Robert Charles Wilson
Calm as that second summer which precedes
The first fall of the snow,
In the broad sunlight of heroic deeds,
The City bides the foe.
PART ONE
The City of Futurity
—1876—
1
Two events made the first of September a memorable day for Jesse Cullum. First, he lost a pair of Oakley sunglasses. Second, he saved the life of President Ulysses S. Grant.
The part about saving Grant’s life was speculative. Even without Jesse’s intervention, the pistol might have misfired or the bullet missed its mark. Jesse felt uneasy about taking credit for an act of purely theoretical heroism. But the loss of the Oakleys, that was a real tragedy. He had loved those Oakleys. The way they improved his vision on sunny days. The way they made him look.
Grant’s visit had been carefully planned. That was how City people liked it: the fewer surprises, the better. Grant and his wife had arrived at Futurity Station in a special Pullman car, where they had endured a reception, complete with bands and a speech by the governor of Illinois, before a plush carriage carried them five miles down the paved road from the train depot to the steel gates of the City of Futurity. Jesse had ridden that absurdly smooth and perfect road many times—he had helped build it—and he knew exactly what Grant would have seen: a first glimpse of the City’s impossibly tall white towers across the rolling Illinois plains, massifs of stone and glass; then the enormous concrete wall with gaudy words and pictures painted on it; the gleaming gates, opening to admit his carriage; finally the crowd, both locals and visitors, jostling in the courtyard for a glimpse of him.
Policing the crowd was Jesse’s job. He had been assigned to the task by his boss, a man named Booking—the same Booking who had issued him the Oakleys six months ago. Today Jesse wore a freshly laundered City security uniform: white shirt, blue necktie, blue blazer with the words CITY OF FUTURITY / STAFF sewn in yellow thread across the pocket, a soft blue cap with the same legend above the bill—and, at least outdoors, the Oakley sunglasses, which Jesse believed lent him an air of sinister authority. When he wore his Oakleys, his reflection in the City’s plate-glass windows looked like a prizefighter with the eyes of a gigantic beetle. Newcomers invariably gave him startled, deferential looks.
Jesse and three other security people had been assigned to the viewing line. The way it was supposed to work: Grant’s carriage would enter through the gates; Grant and his wife would disembark; they would be escorted across the courtyard to the lobby of Tower Two in view of the guests already present. Post-and-rope stanchions had been set up to maintain a distance between the crowd and the president, and Jesse was assigned to patrol that boundary and make sure no one jumped the line.
It should have been easy duty. The weather was sunny but not unpleasantly warm, the current crop of guests seemed well behaved. Jesse was eager to get his own look at Grant, not that he had ever paid much attention to politics. So he watched attentively as the carriage came in and the gate rolled closed behind it. A valet took charge of the horses, and Grant and his wife, Julia, stepped into the sunlight. Mrs. Grant stared without embarrassment at the fantastically broad and tall buildings of the City, but General Grant himself appeared calm and measured—not as fierce in this last year of his presidency as the images of him that had been published in newspapers during the Rebellion, but just as sternly observant. He ignored the marvels of the City and surveyed the crowd. Jesse imagined the president’s gaze caught and lingered on him a moment—because of the Oakleys, perhaps.
Then Jesse had to give his whole attention to the job he had been assigned to do. He began a slow walk along the rope line, keeping a careful vigil. All the people on this side of the courtyard were local guests of the City. That meant they were well-heeled enough to afford the entrance fee, which implied a certain standard of gentlemanly and ladylike behavior to which, alas, they did not necessarily conform. Today, however, the crowd was mindful, and there was very little pushing or crowding of the ropes. Jesse told one couple to keep their children back of the stanchions, please, and he scolded another man for shouting out mocking references to Grant’s role in the Crédit Mobilier scandal. Otherwise it was simply a matter of keeping his eyes open as Grant progressed from the courtyard to the Reception Center.
Had Jesse not been wearing the Oakleys he might have been too sunstruck to catch sight of the man at the rope line who reached into his overcoat with a purposeful motion. Long ago, in circumstances far from the City and vastly less congenial, Jesse had learned to recognize that gesture, and he broke into a run without thinking. Some in the crowd stared at Jesse, but no one had yet noticed the man in the overcoat, whose movements were deliberate and whose attention was entirely focused on Grant. The man’s hand emerged, bearing a pistol. The pistol looked peculiar, but Jesse didn’t think about that. He was racing now, closing the gap between himself and the would-be assassin, thinking: a pistol was a bad choice at this range. Odds were, a hasty shot would miss Grant altogether. But Jesse hadn’t been hired to play the odds. He had been hired to make the most effective use of his size and skills. He came at the gunman like a rolling caisson.
Jesse had been taught that the two overriding principles of City security were protection and discretion. The first and most important of these was protection—of the president, in this case—and it was Jesse’s priority as he made contact with his opponent. He grabbed the assailant’s gun arm at the wrist, isolating the weapon, and let his momentum carry his shoulder into the assailant’s chest. The gunman was taken by surprise, and the air was forced from his lungs in a startled grunt as both men fell to the ground. Jesse let his weight immobilize the assailant’s body as he dealt with the weapon. The assailant’s finger was out of the trigger guard and his hand was at an angle to his arm that suggested Jesse had successfully broken or dislocated the wrist. Nearby guests, still more puzzled than alarmed, stepped back to form a kind of perimeter. Jesse took the pistol from the assailant’s hand and quickly tucked it into the pocket of his now-soiled blue blazer. Then he twisted the assailant’s arm behind him and wrestled him to his feet.
The daylight seemed suddenly brighter, which was how Jesse discovered that his Oakley sunglasses had flown off during the altercation. He spotted them on the ground just as a female guest took a step backward, crushing one lens under her heel and bending the arms out of shape. Jesse’s sense of loss was immediate and aggravating.
But the second rule of City security was discretion, and he kept quiet. The gunman began to utter sharp obscenities. Jesse murmured apologies to the ladies present and hustled the miscreant through the crowd, away from Grant and toward the staff door of the Reception Center. The man was four or five inches shorter than Jesse and a few years older. Jesse was in an excellent position to observe his pomaded black hair, thin at the crown, and to register the tang of his body odor, salty and sour.
The staff door flew open as Jesse came within a couple of yards of it. Two City security men rushed out—security men from the future, Tower One men, which meant they outranked Jesse, who had been born in this century. They were staring hard at the assailant and spared almost no attention for Jesse himself.
Like most of the Tower One security people, they were as tall as Jesse and at least as muscular. One was a white man, one was brown-skinned. They braced the gunman and secured his arms behind him with flexible ties. “Thanks, chief,” the white man said to Jesse. “We’ll take it from here.”