by D. J. Butler
Even the open air lot where he had left the Jim Smiley had been fenced in by plascrete walls and lit with Franklin Poles and criss-crossed with walkways. It had felt more like a room than a field.
In the center of it all was a huge dome, sitting nestled among streets named South Tabernacle, North Tabernacle, East Tabernacle and West Tabernacle—Sam admired the mechanick’s sensibility embodied in the names of the streets. Radiating out beyond the Tabernacle streets, the other streets weren’t even named, just numbered. The sheer effronterous modernity of it cheered Sam’s heart.
Only it wasn’t a dome, Sam decided, not really. It was an egg. A big, rounded, bulbous tower of plascrete, steel, and glass, textured with windows and balconies and staircases and shorter, octagonal towers jutting even higher out of its sloping sides. Plants grew all over it, bright and dark green and rose-red and orange and blue, an explosion of color that was unnatural against the dusty green-brown backdrop of the Wasatch Mountains behind it. That was the Tabernacle, Sam knew, the spiritual and administrative heart of the City and the Kingdom, and right next to it sat the Lion House, where President Young lived and had his office.
The Lion House was where Sam was headed.
Salt Lake City’s great advantage over American cities was its newness, Sam thought. It had been built from scratch in the last ten years, and its builders could incorporate every advance they wanted from the works of men like Brunel, Whitney, Maxim, and Hunley, and in doing so they didn’t have to work around what had been built before. There were no old streets to dig up in order to lay down pipes for plumbing, steam, or electricks. There were no old property lines to contend with, no ancient by-laws, no rights-of-way, nothing. The bees had come to an empty desert and been able to build exactly the hive they had wanted.
The Tabernacle looked like a beehive, too, and reinforced Sam’s impression that he was himself shrunk and among the honey makers. It’s a Hive of Men, he corrected himself, a hive built and run by men of industry and surely, necessarily, designed and led by men of vision. Men like the President of the Kingdom of Deseret, Brigham Young, whom Sam was on his way to meet now, strolling among the towers on an open path.
Sam lit a Partagás to celebrate.
If only he didn’t have to have the Irishman with him. The red-headed sourpuss slunk in his wake like a bad smell. Specifically, like the smell of cheap liquor.
He didn’t need O’Shaughnessy for the mission, of course, not this part, not for a short stroll through a more or less civilized city and a first diplomatic contact, but Sam was afraid that if he left Tamerlane O’Shaughnessy in the hotel with two prisoners he’d come back and find the Irishman with two corpses and a story.
It’d probably be a good story, though.
Just not worth the death of the little boy.
Sam didn’t have a hat and he regretted it. The women he passed en route to the Lion House nodded, and the men all raised their hats to him. Some of the men had the rough, unshaven look of Hannibal or St. Louis or Kansas City about them, but many of them and, Sam thought, nearly all of the ladies, had some polish. Maybe not the polish of a Richmond or a New Orleans or a Boston, but they looked at least as sophisticated and elegant as, say, the burghers of Chicago. The men were also all armed; Sam had never seen so many pistols. He wondered if the ladies might be carrying guns, too, in their handbags.
He noticed that they all carried pocket watches, and seemed to look at them frequently. He’d never seen a crowd that looked more intent on being punctual.
He also noticed, idly and without thinking too much of it, that the distribution of ladies was uneven. Some men, especially older men, had two or even three women on their arms and he saw a lot of younger, less-bearded gents alone or in each other’s strictly manly company. There were more women than were usual in a frontier society, he thought, but they seemed to travel in clusters.
Lacking an apparatus of salutation equivalent to the bouncing hats, he took to plucking his cigar out of his mouth and swishing it in friendly circles at the passersby. O’Shaughnessy just grunted suspiciously and kept his porkpie screwed on tight.
A steam-truck passed, blue, armor-plated, and slow-moving, with Old Glory crisply flapping from a pole to the right of its wheelhouse and the flag bearing the blue and gold arms of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts offsetting it to the left. Behind it came a second, and then a third. Soldiers, Sam thought. A Northern regiment. They sat on the decks of the trucks and others might have been inside, a couple of dozen on each vehicle, with carbines and pistols and the well-worn boots and uniforms of men who knew their job. Sam waved his cigar at the soldiers too, doing his best to look like he wasn’t trying to appear nonchalant. I might not really be cut out for this secret agent stuff, he thought.
None of the soldiers waved back.
“Poor bastards,” Tamerlane O’Shaughnessy muttered bitterly. “Tomorrow could be war and them all blown to bloody bits.”
“Indeed,” Sam agreed, biting his cigar again. “Them or the other fellas.”
“Jesus and Brigit love ’em all.”
The Lion House was a large grey-painted building with white trim and dark green shutters on the windows to match the tall dark green junipers standing guard around it. Sam ran fingers through his thick hair, and examined it from the footpath for a minute. The building might have been a dormitory or a barracks or a boarding school, and in itself wasn’t remarkable. Its name came, Sam presumed, from a brass lion that crouched over a crenellated entrance hall on the south side of the building, where Sam now stood. It looked conspicuously like an official entrance.
In the garden between the Lion House and the Tabernacle squatted half a dozen installations. They looked like brass-bound glass bells resting among the azaleas, cherries, and plum trees, with wheezing accordion-like bellows inside each and wisps of steam curling from their bases at every whoomphing squeeze. The mechanick in Sam wondered what the glass bells did; they looked like they moved air, or maybe they built up pressure in some invisible system, something buried under the garden.
A crystalline lattice of the narrow glass tubes ran above the garden, connecting the Tabernacle to the Lion House, and the bells were connected by more glass tubes to the trellis overhead. From here, it looked like the network existed to shoot squirrel-sized bullets back and forth between the Tabernacle and the Lion House. The bells moved something, maybe.
“Is it true, then, that it’s full of the old man’s wives?” O’Shaughnessy asked in a titillated whisper.
The question seemed tawdry and trivial in the face of this gigantic puffing machinery, but Sam hadn’t recruited the Irishman for his sage perspective or his powers of incisive reasoning. “I hope so,” Sam ruminated out loud. “I quite like the idea that old Brigham’s man enough to attract twenty women.”
“Or thirty or forty,” O’Shaughnessy corrected him with rumored numbers.
“Or a hundred,” Sam agreed, “and that he’s civilized enough that he actually married them all.”
“Hell and begorra,” O’Shaughnessy swore. Sam didn’t know if that was meant to signify agreement or not.
“I’m also amused to think that in this case,” Sam continued, “as I find is only rarely so in the affairs of men, vice must be its own punishment.”
Under the lion and beyond the entrance stretched a long hall. Bulbs perched along the walls between the many doors.
Looking at the inside of the building, Sam could imagine that it might house a dozen of the patriarch’s famous wives, along with their concomitant children, but at the moment the movement he saw was muted and infrequent. Deep in the hall a woman in sturdy pioneer dress crossed from one side to the other without looking up.
The nearest door was open.
“Come in,” called a man’s voice, and they did.
The largest wall of the office they entered was entirely occupied by circular cubbyholes. They were made of brass-bound glass, with brass trap doors closing them, and in a constant, nearly steady,
thump-thump-rat-a-tat, the cubbies were filled with objects flying in from elsewhere, through the wall. Three men worked the device, opening the cubby doors and extracting cylindrical cases from the full ones, which they twisted open to extract strips of paper. They collated and examined the strips in light from floor-to-ceiling windows on a long, narrow table that ran parallel to the wall down its entire length. They then generated new strips with hand-printed messages on them, screwed them into empty cylinders, and then slammed them back into the cubbies. When the brass door shut on a cylinder-loaded cubby, it hissed sharply and the cylinder disappeared, sucked away into the ether.
This was one terminus, Sam realized, of the network of glass tubes he had seen above the City. It was some kind of communication system.
O’Shaughnessy took a step back and shuddered.
A fourth man oversaw the frenzied beavering of the three clerks. He was short and stocky, with a rounded face, strong nose and high forehead that combined to give him an intense and classical look. A square beard jutted off his chin only, trimmed and neat. His suit and waistcoat were sturdy but of fine wool, inclining slightly to the dandy in physical appearance.
He wheeled on one heel and dragged Sam in with a handclasp and a fierce grin. “Mr. Samuel Clemens,” he snapped. “We’ve been expecting you. I hope you haven’t had too much trouble on the road.” He spoke with an English accent. Northern English, Sam thought. Maybe Liverpudlian. “However much civilization we’ve brought to the Valley, the roads connecting us to the rest of the world remain rough and dangerous routes.”
“No trouble at all. You’ll find I’m duly credentialed,” Sam drawled, taking a wallet of official documents from his jacket pocket and pressing into the man’s hands. The man took them and set them aside on the long table without looking at them. “And now you have the advantage of me twice over.”
“George Cannon,” the other man presented himself. “I’m President Young’s Secretary. I know you’d like a meeting with the President, but he’s out of the office and—” Cannon gestured at the wall of tubes, “not otherwise reachable.”
“This is a communications network,” Sam observed. He nodded, admiring the tubes and the message slips, and Cannon nodded with him.
“And a good one,” Cannon agreed. “Only sometimes President Young is too big a man for the system. I understand you’re staying at the Deseret Hotel.”
“I was told it had the best bar,” Sam quipped. Of course the government had instructed him to stay at the biggest, fanciest hotel in town. He might be a spy, a saboteur, or even a thief by the end of this venture, but he was also a diplomat.
“It has the finest,” Cannon agreed. “Those looking for local color sometimes prefer the Hot Springs Hotel and Brewery at the Point of the Mountain. Rockwell’s place. But Brother Rockwell is further away and he won’t let us install a message tube, so you’ll be easier to reach at the Deseret.”
Sam cast another glance at Cannon’s three clerks, who hadn’t slowed or even looked up from their work since his arrival. “I see you’re a busy man. I take it you’ll inform the President of my arrival and send word to the Deseret when I can meet him? I hope I don’t need to impress upon you that the President of the United States regards my mission as critical.”
George Cannon smiled. “Rest assured, Mr. Clemens, that President Young feels the same.”
Then the interview was over and without further formalities Cannon turned around and dove back into the labors of his clerks. Sam and O’Shaughnessy showed themselves out.
“Jesus and all the bloody saints,” the Irishman muttered on the walkway outside the Lion House. “It isn’t human. It’s like insects, it’s like a herd of sheep, it’s like … something, but it isn’t human.”
Sam dug out a double eagle and pressed it into his aide’s hand. “You’ll feel better about everything with some whisky inside you. While you’re at it, check on the dwarf and the little boy. Mind you, though, O’Shaughnessy,” he said in his stern a voice as he could muster, “I’ll be right behind you and I aim to return that child to his family. Don’t cause me any trouble on that account.”
“Hell and begorra,” O’Shaughnessy objected, “when have I ever caused you any trouble, Sam Clemens?” The Irishman had enough self-awareness to wink at his own joke, but he didn’t wait around for further instructions.
Sam watched the other man go. He was right, of course, it was inhuman. The whole thing was like a device. Standing inside George Cannon’s office had been like sitting inside the clocksprung brain of one of Eli Whitney’s famous machines, a cotton harvester or a mechanical mule.
Only half the cogs were people.
When Tam had disappeared from sight, he turned to head out across the Great Salt Lake City in a different direction, away from the Hotel. He pulled out a Partagás as he went, but he didn’t light it; the real reason he put his hand in his pocket, under cover of retrieving a new cigar, was to check the lining of his coat.
The rubies were still there, safe and sound.
“Well, Mr. Pratt,” he muttered under his breath. “Here I come.”
The gate to the Kingdom of Deseret punched through a mighty wall built by the hand of God himself, Burton thought. How appropriate.
From the Bear River crossing, the mountains had risen around them and eventually they had found themselves barreling down a narrow canyon at the speed of Captain Dan Jones’s inexorable wrath. Burton was aware of that wrath keenly, because having got himself into Jones’s shadow at the collapse of the Bear River bridge, he had been careful not to leave it. The wheelhouse gave absolutely the best view of the entire journey and Burton wasn’t about to give it up unprompted. He didn’t know where Fearnley-Standish was and he didn’t much care. He was probably lying in a faint in their cabin, mooning over that Mormon girl he was daft for.
He didn’t know where Roxie was either. He told himself he also didn’t care about her whereabouts, but he knew in his heart that was a lie.
At a bend in the canyon, when Burton estimated that they must be within a few miles of the Great Salt Lake City, grey granite cliffs shot toward the sky on both sides of the road, creating a narrow stone gullet.
Just inside the near entrance to the narrow neck of land, men in buckskins and flannel shirts flagged the Liahona down. Near its far end, Burton saw a bank of earth and a glaring row of mismatched heavy artillery pieces. Above the canyon rifle muzzles peeped from among thick, dark green pine.
And this, he thought, is the welcome that a known craft receives. One of their own, even. The Mormons were as crazed and paranoid and dangerously violent as any Afghan tribe, even apart from the Madman Pratt and his flying ships.
A rangy young man in buckskins and a shapeless felt hat, apparently unarmed, came up the side of the Liahona and clasped arms with Captain Jones. His lean face bore the long, wispy beard of a young man who had never shaved but had no natural gift for the growing of facial hair.
“Come back around to the Cottonwood Fourth Ward Elders Quorum again, has it, boyo?”
The newcomer chuckled. “Yeah, Brother Cannon sent an inspector in disguise and he caught the High Priests napping. No more gate duty for the old boys, I’m afraid.”
“Shame, that. Some of the old boys, you know, Swenson, can shoot the whiskers off a squirrel.”
“Absolutely,” Swenson agreed. “And I feel greatly reassured that the Kingdom is safe from an incursion of squirrels, be it ever so large or be-whiskered. Just so long as the invasion ain’t planned for naptime. You got a manifest for me?”
“Aye.” Jones handed over a big logbook together with a single sheet of paper. “Original and a copy.”
Swenson reviewed them quickly. “Looks fine. Anything we need to go talk about in the wheelhouse?” He shot a quick sidelong glance at Burton, and Burton felt appraised.
“We were waylaid,” Jones growled, “but that’s a matter for Brother Brigham’s ears. Did you stop a fellow by the name of Clemens by any chance?”
Swenson shook his head. “He passed through. I didn’t know to stop him.”
Burton cleared his throat. “He would have had diplomatic papers, anyway,” he said, injecting himself into the conversation.
“Never yet saw diplomatic papers that’d stop the bullet out of a Henry.” Swenson shrugged. “Hell, I don’t care that he was driving that fancy new steam-truck, even. If I’d known the Captain here wanted the man stopped, he’d have been stopped.” He leveled frank blue eyes at Burton. “Who are you that I oughtta wind the crank on my give-a-damn machine?”
“He’s alright,” Jones muttered.
Burton extended a hand and smiled a rugged, manly grin. “Richard Burton,” he introduced himself. “That is to say, ahem, Captain Richard Burton, special envoy of Her Britannic Majesty Queen Victoria.”
Swenson shook it confidently. “Jerry Swenson, second counselor, Elders Quorum, Cottonwood Fourth Ward. President Williams is back up there with the artillery—he’s an old Battalion man and knows his big guns. First counselor’s fishing.”
“Fishing?” Jones spat, dismissive. “And war coming and all?”
Swenson shrugged. “He’s taken to shaving every day, too. He might be bucking for a release.”
Burton heard a sharp whistle. Swenson turned and sloped to the railing of the Liahona and Burton and Captain Jones trailed in his wake.
Below stood another buckskin-clad youth, his fingers in his mouth to whistle. Stretching beyond him, standing at still attention in faint curling jets of steam, was a brigade of American soldiers mounted on clocksprung horses. They had come up behind the Liahona—like Burton, they were entering the Kingdom.
The animals were majestic. Burton had seen clocksprung beasts before, in ones and twos and even, in the possession of one of England’s great peers, a team of four of them, perfectly matched and pulling a carriage together. But here he saw a couple of hundred. They shone like a dull sun through smoke, polished bronze cared for by soldiers and buffed to a high sheen to make an impressive entrance.
