Read Online A Bridge of Years by Robert Charles Wilson - Free Book Online
Authors: Robert Charles Wilson
Tags: Science-Fiction
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have tidied
away the empty box. A robot would not. But a robot wouldn't care
whether it was caught in the act; a robot wouldn't wait for the small
hours of the night.
The
video recorder was still running, still minutes away from eight
o'clock. Tom bent past the camera lens and switched it off.
He
ejected the tape and discovered his hand was trembling. It took
him a good fifteen minutes to hook up the VCR to his TV set ... a
minute more to rewind the cassette.
He
switched on the monitor and when the screen brightened he
punched the Play button of the VCR. An image formed and
stabilized—the kitchen, rendered odd and sterile by the static
camera angle. The phantom numbers at the top left of the screen
ticked off 12:01,
12:02 — he
had still been awake then and when he turned up the sound he could
hear the Carson show playing in the background. Somewhere behind
the picture tube he was watching the "Tonight" show in his
bathrobe. A sort of time loop— but
then they'd know all about that.
This
was another phantom thought, unbidden and peculiar. He shook it
off.
He
punched the Fast Forward key.
A
noise bar rolled up the screen; the picture flickered. Minutes rolled
by too fast to read. But it was the same messy kitchen he had
abandoned last night.
1:00 a.m .
blinked past.
2:00.
3:00.
Nothing happened. Then—
3:45.
He
stabbed the Pause key, too late, and backed up.
3:40:01.
3:39:10.
3:38:27.
At
exactly 3:37:16 a.m .,
the kitchen lights had gone off. "Goddamn!" Tom
said.
The
camera was built to function in ordinary house light but not absolute
darkness. The screen remained a gray, impenetrable blank. It was
so obvious as to be painful. They had fucking turned
the lights out.
He
hit Rewind and watched the sequence in real time. But there was
nothing to see: only the static picture . . . and, faintly, the sound
of the switch being thrown.
Tock.
Darkness.
And
in the background . . . buried in tape hiss, elusive and barely
audible . . . something that might have been their sound.
A
chitinous whisper. The brush of metallic cilia on cold linoleum. The
sound of a razor blade stroking a feather.
He
didn't even try to call Archer. He was already late; he locked the
front door and climbed into his car.
Leaving
the house was like shaking off the influence of a long, hypnotic
dream. It lingered at the edge of perception and it influenced his
decisions. Because he was late he attempted a shortcut through
Belltower, only to discover that the through street he remembered
(Newcastle down past Brierley) had been widened and diverted to the
highway. He hadn't come this way before and the trip was
disorienting, a journey through the familiar to the jarringly new.
Here was Sea View Elementary on its green hillside, and the high
school a quarter mile south, similar buildings of salmon-colored
brick so substantial and so immediate in memory that it would not
have surprised him to see nine-year-old Doug Archer rush out to
launch a fusillade at the car. But the neighborhood newsstand had
become a video arcade and the Woolworth's had evolved into a
Cineplex. Once again, the world had changed while his back was
turned.
Declined, his
father might have said. Like the earth itself, Barbara would have
reminded him. Debris clouding the atmosphere and melting the
icecaps. Barbara was one of the few individuals Tom had met who both
believed in the greenhouse effect and believed it could be
stopped: the precarious balance of the activist. Bad thermodynamics,
his father would have told her. You can delay a death but not make a
man immortal. The same was surely true for a planet: it didn't
improve with use. Things decline; the evidence was all around him.
The evidence was his life.
Maybe
so, Barbara
would have said, but
we can go down fighting. She
had believed that half measures were better than none; that even an
ineffectual morality was useful in the decade of Reaganomics, the
homeless, and the video church. Her voice rang out in his
away the empty box. A robot would not. But a robot wouldn't care
whether it was caught in the act; a robot wouldn't wait for the small
hours of the night.
The
video recorder was still running, still minutes away from eight
o'clock. Tom bent past the camera lens and switched it off.
He
ejected the tape and discovered his hand was trembling. It took
him a good fifteen minutes to hook up the VCR to his TV set ... a
minute more to rewind the cassette.
He
switched on the monitor and when the screen brightened he
punched the Play button of the VCR. An image formed and
stabilized—the kitchen, rendered odd and sterile by the static
camera angle. The phantom numbers at the top left of the screen
ticked off 12:01,
12:02 — he
had still been awake then and when he turned up the sound he could
hear the Carson show playing in the background. Somewhere behind
the picture tube he was watching the "Tonight" show in his
bathrobe. A sort of time loop— but
then they'd know all about that.
This
was another phantom thought, unbidden and peculiar. He shook it
off.
He
punched the Fast Forward key.
A
noise bar rolled up the screen; the picture flickered. Minutes rolled
by too fast to read. But it was the same messy kitchen he had
abandoned last night.
1:00 a.m .
blinked past.
2:00.
3:00.
Nothing happened. Then—
3:45.
He
stabbed the Pause key, too late, and backed up.
3:40:01.
3:39:10.
3:38:27.
At
exactly 3:37:16 a.m .,
the kitchen lights had gone off. "Goddamn!" Tom
said.
The
camera was built to function in ordinary house light but not absolute
darkness. The screen remained a gray, impenetrable blank. It was
so obvious as to be painful. They had fucking turned
the lights out.
He
hit Rewind and watched the sequence in real time. But there was
nothing to see: only the static picture . . . and, faintly, the sound
of the switch being thrown.
Tock.
Darkness.
And
in the background . . . buried in tape hiss, elusive and barely
audible . . . something that might have been their sound.
A
chitinous whisper. The brush of metallic cilia on cold linoleum. The
sound of a razor blade stroking a feather.
He
didn't even try to call Archer. He was already late; he locked the
front door and climbed into his car.
Leaving
the house was like shaking off the influence of a long, hypnotic
dream. It lingered at the edge of perception and it influenced his
decisions. Because he was late he attempted a shortcut through
Belltower, only to discover that the through street he remembered
(Newcastle down past Brierley) had been widened and diverted to the
highway. He hadn't come this way before and the trip was
disorienting, a journey through the familiar to the jarringly new.
Here was Sea View Elementary on its green hillside, and the high
school a quarter mile south, similar buildings of salmon-colored
brick so substantial and so immediate in memory that it would not
have surprised him to see nine-year-old Doug Archer rush out to
launch a fusillade at the car. But the neighborhood newsstand had
become a video arcade and the Woolworth's had evolved into a
Cineplex. Once again, the world had changed while his back was
turned.
Declined, his
father might have said. Like the earth itself, Barbara would have
reminded him. Debris clouding the atmosphere and melting the
icecaps. Barbara was one of the few individuals Tom had met who both
believed in the greenhouse effect and believed it could be
stopped: the precarious balance of the activist. Bad thermodynamics,
his father would have told her. You can delay a death but not make a
man immortal. The same was surely true for a planet: it didn't
improve with use. Things decline; the evidence was all around him.
The evidence was his life.
Maybe
so, Barbara
would have said, but
we can go down fighting. She
had believed that half measures were better than none; that even an
ineffectual morality was useful in the decade of Reaganomics, the
homeless, and the video church. Her voice rang out in his
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