A Bridge of Years

PART TWO - Ghosts


Seven


For a long, lost span of years, the time traveler was dead.

Ben Corner's death was not absolute, but it was nothing less than death. The marauder's weapon had opened his skull and scattered much of his brain matter in a bloody rain across the lawn. His heart had given one final, convulsive pump, fibrillated for thirty seconds as wild impulses radiated from his traumatized brainstem, then fallen silent, a lump of static tissue in the cooling cavern of his chest.

Throughout his body emergency repair systems stuttered and shut down. Auxiliary circulatory pumps responded to his failing heart, then failed in turn as blood pressure dropped below maintainable levels. He continued to take huge, ratcheting breaths—like yawns—for nearly a minute. The lungs were the last major system to give up their independent life, and they did so with a final sigh of resignation. By then the body had begun to cool.

Nanomechanisms were trapped in his arteries by clotting blood. Oxygen-starved, they radiated emergency signals and shut themselves off one by one.

Billy Gargullo dragged the body into the woods and left it in an abandoned woodshed under a scatter of mildewed newspaper. Decay organisms—thick in the rainy forest—began to attack the corpse at once.

Billy hurried back to the house. When he arrived here he had disoriented the cybernetics with a pulse of electromagnetic radiation; now he triggered a second burst to keep them out of his way. He paused a moment in the kitchen and consulted his auxiliary memories for a rough estimate of his whereabouts. America, the Pacific Northwest—distinguished by the fiercely dense biomass of the forest, which appalled and frightened him—sometime after 1970: too close to the nightmare he'd left behind. He wanted a more effective buffer, even if it meant greater risk. He moved back to the basement and operated the tunnel's hidden controls the way the dying woman had taught him. Destination was relatively unimportant: he wanted a place to hide. He would run, he would hide, he would never be found and he would never go back.

That was all of his plan. His only plan. The only plan he needed.




Billy's EM pulses interrupted TV and radio reception throughout the town of Belltower and two neighboring counties. Along the Post Road the effect was most violent and startling. Peggy Simmons, the widow who lived a quarter mile from the house Tom Winter would eventually inhabit, was astonished to see her Zenith color television emit a vivid blue spark while the picture tube turned an ominous, fractured gray. Repairs, that summer of 1979, cost her almost three hundred dollars—the set was just out of warranty. She paid the repair bill but reminded the man at Belltower Audio-Video that the Crosley set she'd bought in 1960 lasted her fifteen years with only a tube to replace now and then, and perhaps standards of manufacture had fallen while the price of repairs had zoomed up, which was precisely the sort of thing you'd expect to happen, wouldn't you—the world being what it was. The repairman nodded and shrugged. Maybe she was right: he'd been out on a lot of calls just recently.

The rash of electrical failures became a brief sensation in Belltower, reported in the local paper, discussed to no conclusion, and finally forgotten.



Many of the cybernetics died or were rendered hopelessly dysfunctional by the EM burst; but many survived. They were disoriented for days afterward. Severed paths of information needed to be patched and restored; a comprehensible memory of the day's events had to be assembled.

Most damaging was the loss of Ben Collier. For the cybernetics, he had combined the functions of clearinghouse, lawmaker, and God. Without him they were forced to fall back on primitive subroutines. This was unavoidable but limiting. Without Ben, and with their numbers greatly reduced, they possessed only a rudimentary intelligence. They were able to perform routine tasks; all else was groping in the dark.

Many of the nanomechanisms intimately associated with the time traveler's body had been destroyed by the impact of Billy's weapon or the physical shutdown that followed. Some had been scattered to the winds; damaged or swept out of the range of collective mentation, they died. A few—following subroutines of their own—managed an orderly escape; in time, they made their way back to the house. They transferred their significant memory to the larger cybernetics in the manner of bees feeding pollen to the hive. The community of machines, sharing this new wisdom, understood that there were measures to be taken.

Armies of insect-sized cybernetics, following vectors the nanomechanisms described, delved into the forest behind the house. This was risky and had been the subject of debate; territory beyond the perimeter of the house had been forbidden to them—until this emergency. But their first priority (they reasoned) was the restoration of Ben Collier; other issues could be deferred until he was in a position to clarify his wishes.

Restoration was no simple task, however. Cybernetic emissaries found the body in a state of decomposition. Great numbers of microorganisms, mainly bacteria and fungi, had established themselves on the wounds, in the extremities, throughout the body. The putrefaction was extensive and would be impossible to reverse if allowed to continue much longer. Work began at once. Old nanomechanisms were enlisted and new ones created to enter the body as sterilants. The heart was isolated and meticulously restored to a potentially functional state. Open veins and arteries were sealed. Old, infected skin was sloughed off and replaced with extruded synthetics.

What they preserved in this fashion was not the time traveler's body, precisely, but the rough core of it—the skeletal system (minus a leg and most of the skull); crude reductions of the major organs; some sterile meat. An observer walking into the woodshed would have seen what looked like a freshly flayed, naked, and brutally incomplete corpse. It was not in any sense functional.

It never would have been, except that the cybernetics maintained among themselves a blueprint of the time traveler's body and had shared a map of his brain and its contents. This information was shared among them holographically; some detail had been lost in the EM pulse, but it was nothing they couldn't infer from genetic data still preserved in the body. They had salvaged what parts they could and they were ready to begin rebuilding the rest.

The problem was raw material: raw material for the reconstruction and raw material for their own maintenance. Much needed to be done. For now, they simply sterilized the corpse and sealed its perimeters. They maintained a watch over the body of Ben Collier to guarantee the continued viability of his meat; but the main phalanx of the cybernetics retreated to the house to consider their resources and rebuild their material base.

Many new nanomechanisms would be needed. These could be assembled—albeit slowly—from material in the house and surrounding soil. The nanomechanisms were intricate but very nearly massless; this was their advantage. With this new army, work could proceed on the restoration of the body ... a task unfortunately much more massive.

Their sole ally was the body itself. Once primitive cardiovascular function had been restored, the time traveler's own digestive functions could begin to work. In effect, he could be nourished, and the nourishment directed into building and healing. The problem was that he would require a vast amount of protein for maintenance alone.

The cybernetics had established a broad path between the house and the woodshed, and within this space they taught themselves to scavenge food. Much acceptable protein was available in this temperate rain forest. Much that was not acceptable could be rendered so, with modification. They learned how to harvest the forest without denuding it. They took deer fern and horsetail, red huckleberries, bracket fungus from a tall, mossy hemlock. They competed with the frogs and the thrushes for insects. On one occasion they discovered the fresh body of a raccoon. This was a banquet, skinned and liquefied with enzymes. They could have killed a deer and speeded their task immensely; but the cybernetics were deeply inhibited against the taking of vertebrate life. They acquired most of their meat by theft—a mouse or frog stolen from the beak of an owl on moonlit summer nights.

If their numbers had been greater this might have sufficed. Restrained by their material base, they were able to preserve the time traveler but only occasionally to upgrade a major function. In July 1983 he regained an operational kidney. In October 1986 he took his first real breath in seven years.

Consciousness was the last great hurdle—so much brain tissue had been destroyed. The reconstruction was more delicate and required more raw material. Consequently it was slow.

The work was painstaking but the cybernetics were infinitely patient. Nothing intruded on their labor until the arrival of Tom Winter—a complication that was not merely distracting but possibly dangerous. Since they couldn't evict him they attempted to use him to their advantage . . . but there was so much they didn't know, so much wisdom that had been lost, and working with Tom Winter culled away too many of their essential nanomechanisms. For a time, the work was slowed . . . but it hastened once again when Tom Winter donated several packages of proteins from his freezer; hastened again when a cougar killed a deer within range of the woodshed. The cougar was easily frightened away and the deer was a vast, warm repository of useful food.

The work hurried toward completion.



Ben Collier experienced odd moments of wakefulness.

His awareness, at first, was tenuous and small, like the flickering of a candleflame in a vast, dark room.

The first experience strong enough to linger in his memory was of pain—a scalding pain that seemed to radiate inward from all the peripheries of his body. He tried to open his eyes and couldn't. The eyes weren't functional and the lids felt sutured shut. He tried to scream and lacked this function also.


The nanomechanisms inside him sensed his distress and alleviated it at once. They closed his sensorium, blocking nerve signals from his raw and mending skin. They triggered a flood of soothing endorphins. Almost immediately, Ben went back to sleep.



The next time he was allowed to wake, the fundamental mechanisms of self and thought were more nearly healed. He knew who he was and what had happened to him. He was paralyzed and blind; but the nanomechanisms reassured him and monitored his neurochemicals for panic.

Ben was mindful of his custodial duties, doubtless neglected during the period of his death. He had one overriding thought: Tell me what's happened at the house.

In time, the nanomechanisms responded. He had made great progress but he wasn't ready to assume his former status. For that, he would need to be entirely healed.

Sleep now, they said. He was grateful, and slept.



The next time he woke he woke instantly, alert and buzzing with concern.

Someone is here, the nanomechanisms told him.

Ben knew where he was. He was in the ancient woodshed in the forest behind the house. The cybernetics had restored his memory, including the memory of his own murder and beyond: really, their memories were his memories. The cybernetics had been designed for Ben as his personal adjuncts —appendages—and he was pleased at how well they had functioned without him. For a moment much briefer than a second he savored the details of his own reconstruction.

Which was miraculous but unfortunately not complete. His mind was almost fully functional, but his body needed work. His skull was still partial, large chunks of it replaced with a gluey, transparent caul; his left leg was a venous flipper; muscle tissue stood exposed over large parts of his body where the skin and decay had been stripped and sterilized.

At least his eyes were functional. He opened them.

He was supine in the rotted mass of newsprint. Sunlight glimmered through gaps in the southern wall of the shed. Everything was green here, the color of moss and lichen. The air was full of dust motes, pollen and spores.

He looked at the door of the shed, a crudely hinged raft of barnboards held together with rusty iron nails.

His ears worked. He was able to hear the rasp of his own breathing . . . the faint scuttle of cybermechanisms in the detritus around him.

The sound of footsteps in the high meadow weeds beyond the door.

Now, the sound of a hand on the primitive latch that held the door closed. The sound of the latch as it opened. The door as it squealed inward.

Ben couldn't move. He drew a deep breath into his raw lungs and hoped he would be able at least to speak.