Black Hills

by Dan Simmons

  Admission to the World’s Columbian Exposition is fifty cents, and those at the ticket counters like to tell grumpy fairgoers that if Mayor Harrison or Daniel Hudson Burnham, the man most responsible for the Fair, or President Cleveland presented himself at their gates, the gentleman would have to fork over fifty cents.

  Paha Sapa pulls out a dollar, far too large a percentage of his monthly salary, but Miss de Plachette has freed her arm and is wrestling with a cloth purse hanging from her wrist by a string.

  —No, no, Mr…. Billy… my father left me money to cover the price of both our admissions. After all, you would not be attending the Fair today were it not for your gallant offer to escort me.

  Paha Sapa pauses, knowing that he hates the idea of her paying for the two of them, or even her paying for herself, but not knowing how to explain this important fact to her. While he dithers, the young woman pays, hands him one of the two tickets, and leads the way through the metal turnstiles. Paha Sapa grumbles, the dollar bill still dangling absurdly in his hand, but follows.

  It is immediately after they enter the grounds and are passing a white towered building set near the western fence of the fairgrounds that something occurs that Paha Sapa is to think of many times in the coming years.

  Suddenly Miss de Plachette whirls, looks at the windowless white building with its tall tower, and her demeanor changes completely. From being one of delighted, almost girlish animation, her expression has become one of alarm, almost horror.

  —What is it, Miss de Plachette?

  She hugs herself and, accidentally, hugs Paha Sapa’s arm closer, but it is no act of coquetry. He can feel her trembling through the layers of his wool coat and her silk sleeves.

  —Do you feel that, sir? Do you hear that?

  —Feel what, Miss de Plachette? Hear what?

  He looks back at the nondescript white building just within the fairgrounds fence that they’ve just passed. The structure has a series of black blind arches near the top, short white towers on the eastern corners, and a higher tower with perhaps an observation deck on the far, western side.

  She squeezes his arm more tightly and there is no melodrama in her terrified expression. The lady’s white teeth are chattering.

  —That awful coldness flowing from the place? The awful screams? Can’t you feel the cold? Can’t you hear the terrible cries?

  Paha Sapa laughs and pats her arm.

  —That’s the Cold Storage Building, Miss de Plachette. I don’t feel the icy air to which you’re so sensitive, but it only makes sense it would be coming from the Exposition’s main repository for ice. And I do hear the cries—very faint—but they also have a benign cause. There’s an ice-skating rink inside, and I can just make out the happy cries of children or young couples on skates.

  But Miss de Plachette’s expression does not change for a moment and she cannot seem to be able to take her eyes off the blocky white building. Then she turns away from it, but Paha Sapa can still feel the trembling of her body so close to his as they resume walking into the Fair.

  —I apologize, Mr…. I apologize, Mr. Slow Horse. From time to time I get these odd, dark feelings. You must think me a terribly silly goose. Women are a strange species, Mr. Slow Horse, and I am one of the stranger members of that species. I have no idea where in this grand Exposition they would choose to exhibit so strange a non-fish, non-fowl, non-sensible specimen such as myself. Almost certainly in a jar of alcohol or formaldehyde on the Midway.

  Paha speaks without thinking.

  —No, in the Palace of Fine Arts, Miss de Plachette. Almost certainly there.

  She smiles at him, knowing that she is being flattered (but not knowing his deep sincerity) but not seeming to mind. Her old gaiety flows back as they get farther from the Cold Storage Building, but Paha Sapa bites the inside of his lip until he tastes blood. He dislikes men who flatter women with compliments.

  Four days later, on July 10, 1893, there will be a fire in the upper reaches of the tall tower at the rear of the Cold Storage Building. Firemen will arrive almost at once and rush up the wooden stairs to fight the fire blazing in the cupola atop that tower, but the fire will already have crept down the inside of the walls and beneath that stairway and will trap most of those firemen above. Two will survive by leaping to a rigid hose and sliding down it sixty feet to the ground. Thirteen other firemen, including the fire chief, will die horribly in the Cold Storage Building Fire, as will four workers.

  But none of this is known to them at the time—at least not to Paha Sapa, for all his thought of being a sensitive wičasa wakan whose role will be to predict the future for his people—and it is a hot, sunny day where thoughts of fire and death have no place.

  For a moment they do not talk as they walk northeast down the wide avenue that runs to the left of almost a dozen pairs of railroad lines that terminate in the Central Railroad Station. There are trains leaving and arriving, but most do so in that odd, steamless muting of usual train sounds that is a mark of these new electric trams.

  In a sense, Paha Sapa and Miss de Plachette have come in through one of the “back doors” of the Fair; the designers specified the formal entrance to be at the opposite end of this west-east corridor, at the grand Peristyle that opens onto and from the Casino Pier that runs almost half a mile out into Lake Michigan. Arriving from a ship at the far end of the pier, one can, for the price of ten cents, take the Moving Sidewalk (complete with chairs) the full 2,500-foot length of the pier directly to the Peristyle. The World’s Columbian Exposition was always meant by its designers to be first seen and entered from the Lake Michigan side, through the Peristyle and into the Court of Honor.

  Back here, Paha Sapa feels as if he’s in a stone canyon. To their left is the incredible mass of the Transportation Building (not the largest building in the world, that honor falls to the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building that dominates the eastern end of this grand concourse now visible ahead on their right, but larger than anything in Paha Sapa’s imagination, much less experience), and straight ahead is the white wall of the huge Mines and Mining Building. Miss de Plachette’s arm still linked in his, Paha Sapa guides them diagonally to the right so that they emerge into the dazzling afternoon brilliance of the broad Grand Court of Honor that runs straight past the impressive domed Administration Building and along either side of the Grand Basin all the way to the Peristyle. Arrayed on both sides of this Grand Court are the incredible buildings: the tall and endless Machinery Hall to their right, the gigantic Agriculture Building farther east, the roaring Electricity Building to their left beyond Mines and Mining, and beyond it the behemoth, the leviathan of all buildings on earth, the Manufactures and Liberal Arts hall.

  Miss de Plachette pauses and tucks a strand of her copper-tinted brown hair under her straw boater. Paha Sapa is grateful for a breeze blowing down the long Grand Court from the lake that begins to dry his soaked shirtfront. The lady with him takes a step away, puts a gloved finger to her chin as if considering options, and turns to look in each direction of the compass. She closes her parasol and lets it dangle from her wrist by yet another hidden strap or string.

  —Do you know what I think, Mr…. ah… I mean, Billy? Do you know what I think, Billy?

  —What do you think, Miss de Plachette?

  The young woman smiles, and it is almost a girl’s smile—unaffected, easy, seemingly prompted only by happiness.

  —Well, first of all, I think that this informality I proposed shall never work out. You will never call me Rain, will you?

  Paha Sapa does not actually shuffle his feet, but mentally he does.

  —It is difficult for me to be so… ah… informal with so elegant a young lady, Miss de Plachette. It is simply outside my experience.

  —Fair enough, then. I know that my brazen informality, while quite the thing in a Boston women’s college, takes people aback elsewhere. So I shall be Miss de Plachette and you shall be… I can’t remember. Did you tell me that it was Mr. Slow Horse or
Mr. Horse?

  —Actually, my name is Paha Sapa, which means Black Hills in Lakota.

  Paha Sapa hears himself saying this to the woman but cannot believe he has said it.

  Rain de Plachette stops all other motion and looks at him with great intensity. Paha Sapa notices that there is the slightest flaw of black in the hazel iris—it now looks green—of her beautiful left eye.

  —I apologize for addressing you by the wrong name. When we were introduced… and Mr. Cody also referred to you as…

  —No white person has ever known my real name, Miss de Plachette. And very few Lakota. I don’t know why I just told you. Somehow, it felt… wrong… for you not to know.

  She smiles again, but it is a grown woman’s hesitant smile now, meant only for the two of them. She actually presses his scarred and calloused right hand with her gloved left hand, and he is glad for the gloves.

  —I’m honored that you told me and I shall share the information with no one, Mr…. Paha Sapa. Did I pronounce it correctly? The first A has almost a long sound, does it not?

  —It does.

  —Well, you have honored me with your secret, Paha Sapa, so before our walk is over today, I shall tell a secret that very few people know about me… why my mother, who was also a Lakota, you know, decided to name me Rain.

  —That would do me a great honor, Miss de Plachette.

  He has heard rumors in the Indian tent that the Reverend de Plachette’s daughter is “half Indian.” Everyone has. But each of the four Indian nations represented in the Wild West Show has claimed her.

  —But later. In the meantime, Paha Sapa, would you like to know what I have decided that we should do?

  —Very much.

  She clasps her hands together and for a second, in her smiling enthusiasm, looks like a very young girl indeed. The strand of copper-tinted-by-the-sun hair has escaped from her boater again.

  —I believe we should walk over to the Midway Plaisance and take a ride on Mr. Ferris’s huge Wheel.

  Paha Sapa makes a noncommittal noise and fumbles his cheap watch out of his pocket.

  Miss de Plachette has already checked her watch—a tiny, round little thing, no larger than a cavalryman’s red sharpshooter badge, that hangs from her blouse by a gold ribbon—and she waves away his look of anxiety.

  —Not to worry, Mr…. Paha Sapa, my friend. It’s not even quarter after four. Father will not be at the Grand Basin to meet me until six o’clock, and as much as Father demands punctuality from everyone else, he himself is almost always late. We have oodles and oodles of time. And I have been trying to work my nerve up to go on the Wheel for weeks now. Oh, please!

  Oodles? thinks Paha Sapa. This is a wasichu word he has not encountered in his seventeen years of wrestling with the language.

  —Very well, we shall go ride Mr. Ferris’s Wheel. But I insist on purchasing our tickets. It’s a long walk to the Midway, Miss de Plachette. Would you care to ride in one of those wheeled carriages that are pushed from behind?

  —Not at all! I love walking. It is a short way to the Midway, and I have trod it a hundred times already in the three weeks that Father and I have been visiting our aunt in Evanston. Come, I will lead the way!

  She sets a brisk pace, her arm still locked in Paha Sapa’s, as they walk quickly north past the looming Transportation Building and then around a slight curve and then north again past the endless Horticulture Building on their left, with its domes and arches and bright pennants. All this time to their right is the huge lagoon, quite separate from the Grand Basin on the Court of Honor, in which the sixteen-acre Wooded Island (with its tinier, satellite Hunter’s Camp Island to the south of it) holds center place.

  Miss de Plachette is chattering away, although Paha Sapa does not hear it or think of it as chattering. He finds her voice melodic and delightful.

  —Have you been on the Wooded Island? No? Oh, you must go there, Paha Sapa! It is best at night, with all of its fairy lanterns glowing. I love the maze of little paths—there are benches to sit on—a wonderful place to bring one’s lunch and sit in the shade and relax, especially near the south end, where the view of the grand dome of the Administration Building is truly inspiring. I admit that the landscaping is not quite up to the high standards they set for it—the exotic trees they planned, the irregular flower gardens, the mosses and other low plants appearing as if they had been there for centuries—but it is still far superior to the small, rigid plantings of the Paris Exposition four years ago. Did you go to that, by any chance? No. Well, I was only fortunate enough to attend that exposition because Father was invited to speak at a theological gathering in Paris, and although I was only sixteen, he happily saw fit to bring me along for those weeks and the tower that Mr. Eiffel built! Many thought it vulgar, but I thought it grand. They had planned to tear it down as soon as the exposition there was finished—they called it an eyesore—but I do not believe they have as yet and sincerely hope they do not. All that iron! But Mr. Eiffel’s Tower, as impressive as it is, does not move, and Mr. Ferris’s Wheel, which we shall reach in only a few minutes, most assuredly does move. Oh, I can smell the lilacs there on the northern plantings of the Wooded Island. Isn’t that breeze from the lake wonderful? And did I mention that Father knows Mr. Olmsted, who is the landscape architect responsible not only for the Wooded Island’s plantings but for the landscape design for most of the Fair? For this Fair, I mean, not for those rigidly planted and quite inferior little gardens at the Paris fair—such a disappointment!—as wonderful as Mr. Eiffel’s Tower was and, of course, the foods there. French food is always marvelous. Are you hungry by chance, Paha Sapa? It is late for lunch, of course, and rather early for dinner, but there are some wonderful lunch counters here in the Women’s Building, although some of them are set almost embarrassingly close to the large corset exhibit that… Why Paha Sapa! Are you blushing?

  Paha Sapa is indeed blushing—furiously—but he smiles and shakes his head as they turn left past the Women’s Building. Miss de Plachette has not paused after her question but is informing him that the Women’s Building was designed by a female architect and that the dimensions of the Women’s Building are one hundred and ninety-nine by three hundred and eighty-eight feet, sixty feet or two stories high, and its cost was $138,000. One of the smaller buildings among the Exposition’s architectural behemoths, it is still a massive thing, with its many arches and columns and winged statuary bedecking the upper walls.

  She squeezes his left arm now with her free hand.

  —Have you seen the Fair at night, with all the thousands of electric lights illuminated and the dome of the Administration Building all outlined in lights and with the searchlights playing back and forth?

  —No, I haven’t been here on the grounds at night, but I see the constant glow and the searchlights from the Wild West Show’s arena and tents.

  —Oh, Paha Sapa, you must see the Exposition at night. That’s when the White City comes alive. It becomes the most beautiful place on earth. I’ve seen it from a ship out on Lake Michigan and from the Alley L coming down from the city, and I want to see it from the captive balloon here on the Midway, but it doesn’t make ascensions at night. The observation walkways atop the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, or atop the Transportation Building, are extraordinary viewpoints at night—the searchlights stab out and around from those very rooftops!—but the best place is on the Wooded Island, with all the soft-glowing electrical lanterns and the fairy lanterns and the clear view of the White City, especially the outlined domes to the south. But think how wonderful it must be to see all the blazing lights at night from high atop the Ferris Wheel!

  —We need to ride it in the daytime first, Miss de Plachette. To see if one can survive at such altitudes.

  Her laughter is quick and rich.

  PAHA SAPA WONDERS if this young lady would—possibly could—understand why he has spent almost all of his time during eleven of his twelve visits to the Exposition standing or sitting rigidly i
n front of only two displays. He realizes that it would be folly to discuss it with her, and he watches his tongue more carefully than he has with her to this point.

  The two hundred cavalry and Indians, not to mention Annie Oakley and her husband and the small army of workers for the Wild West Show, arrived here in Jackson Park in late March, and Mr. Cody staged his first show on April 3, long before most of the actual Exposition’s exhibits or Midway attractions were ready.

  In May, President Clevelandand huge gaggles of more illustrious royal foreigners and local dignitaries officially declared the World’s Columbian Exposition open for business by closing a circuit that started up the gigantic Allis steam engine and its thirty subsidiary engines in the Machinery Building, thus sending electricity to everything at the Fair that ran on electricity. Not long after that, Mr. Cody paid the way for all of his more than 200 employees—Indian, cavalry, sharpshooters, and tent-raising roughnecks—who wanted to see the Fair.

  That one day of general fairgoing was a blur in Paha Sapa’s memory: the taste of a new caramel-coated popcorn treat they were calling Cracker Jack; lightning leaping from Nikola Tesla’s head and hands; a glimpse of an optical telescope larger than most cannon; a longer, more lingering glimpse—the other Lakota and Cheyenne were appalled—of a real cannon, of the ultimate cannon, the largest cannon ever cast: the 127-ton, fifty-seven-foot-long (from breech to muzzle) Krupp’s Cannon, displayed in its own Krupp Gun Pavilion (which looked to Paha Sapa as foreboding as any real German castle, even though his experience with German castles was limited to picture books), a gun capable of throwing a shell larger and heavier than a bull buffalo some sixteen miles and penetrating eighteen inches of steel armor at the end of that screaming death arc.