by D. J. Butler
“I wonder if you would enjoy another lemonade, Annie,” he’d said, and then, to avoid any misunderstanding, he’d added, “I mean, with me, on the deck, and perhaps together with a little conversation. I’m not just a man of action, you know.” That should have reminded her of his courage in standing up to Lee and Hickman. Then he’d given her his best Harrovian smile. “I think you’ll find I can be quite charming.”
She had looked him in the eye in the sputtering light of the hallway electricks and said, without missing a beat, “If you don’t get out of here right now, Absalom Fearnley-Standish, I’ll stick my boot so far up your backside you’ll be picking leather out from between your teeth for a week.”
He liked to think he had reacted decisively.
It was not a situation his father had prepared him for, nor the Foreign Office. Competing norms milled about in his head and collided. A real lady doesn’t talk like a sailor, he remembered his mother saying to him, preparing him to meet a female second cousin who was decidedly not an acceptable match. A gentleman doesn’t strike a lady, he’d heard from a schoolteacher when as a young man he’d been badly beaten by a larger, older girl, and was silently congratulating himself on landing at least one good blow to her nose. A man never backs down from a fight, they’d told him at Harrow. More than once. His professional training won out over the lessons of his childhood traumas and, though it seemed to him that a stuttering eternity might have passed, he was reasonably certain that it had only been a moment or two. A Foreign Office man always practices discretion. He knew when he wasn’t wanted.
He’d turned on his heel and left her to her eavesdropping in the corridor.
Rotten little tease, he reflected, nursing his solitary lemonade in the afternoon sunshine. Well, this was the Great Salt Lake City, anyway, and really, he had no time for women. They could only distract him from his mission. From his two missions, he reminded himself.
A cavalcade of American soldiers overtook them and continued on ahead. Their horses were clocksprung, which in itself was fascinating; clockwork was still a relatively new technology, and very exciting. Absalom had seen clocksprung curiosities in London—a clocksprung rector and church choir at a fair in the little London borough of Wetwick, and a clocksprung violinist in a private salon exhibition one evening—but it was in the American South that the technology had flowered. First under Eli Whitney, and then driven by Horace Hunley and his team, southern inventors and engineers had revolutionized their agriculture on its basis.
Absalom had a desire to see the horses. He wondered for a moment whether he should care about their presence from a professional point of view or observe it very carefully, but he let it drop when he saw Dick Burton glued to the rail, staring at the cavalrymen. On the one hand, he knew Burton would properly observe and note anything that mattered to the success of their joint diplomatic mission—Burton’s mission, really, though Absalom would never tell him that. On the other hand, he resented Burton’s overbearing manner and his presence generally and he didn’t want to be seen paying attention to anything Burton was interested in.
He let the horses pass and sipped his lemonade.
Burton turned away from his observation and saw him. “Be careful of the sun, Abigail,” he growled. “You may get wrinkles.”
“Ambassador Fearnley-Standish, blast you!” Absalom snapped. He dug into his jacket pocket to pull out his Patent Metallic Note-Paper-Book and then felt a little foolish for it. His notes for future memoranda of reprimand seemed petty in light of all the drawn guns and knives he’d seen in the last twenty-four hours. “Look, if you must know, I have a sister. Her name is Abigail, as it happens. Last night I … I was excited …”
Burton sneered at him. The scars running up both sides of his face looked like horns, giving his face a devilish aspect to it that frightened Absalom—just a bit—even in the noonday sun. “Yes,” he said, “I saw just how excited you were, Abby!”
Absalom knocked over his lemonade in his haste to start scribbling in his Note-Paper-Book and Burton stomped away. Impertinence. Insubordination. Woman’s name. His pencil shattered and Absalom snorted in impotent rage as he threw it over the side of the steam-truck.
The Liahona burst out of the canyon like a mouse racing out of a hole in the wall. The mountains fell away in cliffs, dropping thousands of sheer, snow-mantled feet into short, rolling foothills. Ahead, beginning already in the foothills, lay a gleaming city of brass and glass and sparkling plascrete broken only by the green of parks and plazas, and beyond it all a vast lake the same color as the sky.
It was pretty. It was all pretty, it was huge and impressive and shiny and new and it all worked, clean white steam rising up into the pale blue sky rather than the thick black murk that hung like a rag over central London. There was something about the plascrete here as well that made it prettier, Absalom thought, even prettier than what he’d seen in London or Paris or New York. It sparkled, like it had bits of china ground up into it or something. Maybe it was the mountain air.
The big steam-truck wheezed to a stop at a crossroads, right at the edge where the foothills flattened into valley floor. He didn’t think they could have arrived yet and, out of curiosity, Absalom stood and walked to the rail. To the left and right, tar-paved roads curled around the circumference of the enormous valley, punctuated by brass towers, brick farmhouses, and irrigated fruit orchards. Ahead, the road plunged directly into the city, swallowed immediately by the steel, brick, brass and plascrete of tall buildings. In the center of the crossroads stood a small hut with a man hanging out of its doorway, waving a little red flag at the Liahona.
“What is it? Don’t you know I’m badly behind schedule as it is?” Captain Dan Jones bellowed from the rail at the man. Burton stuck to the man like his own shadow. Absalom kept his distance, but stayed within earshot.
“You’re diverted!” the semaphorist yelled back, and he waved something in his other hand that looked like it might be a glass tube with a bit of paper inside. “Everyone is, they even sent riders around to the farms!”
“Is it Indians?” Jones roared. He looked like he didn’t care if it was Indians or not, and if the flag-waver told him that the Great Salt Lake City was being invaded by the Ute, Paiute, Gosiute, Shoshone, Navajo, Blackfoot, Crow, and Apache peoples simultaneously, he still wasn’t going to change his course. “Fire? Crickets?”
“I don’t know!” The gateman tossed his flag inside the little booth and shut the door. “All I know is it’s got something to do with the Twelve and you’re the last traffic I’m expecting down the Canyon. Can I get a ride to the Tabernacle?”
The Liahona crawled to the center of the Great Salt Lake City. The problem was that all the traffic—or very nearly all of it, anyway—was going the same direction. Horse-drawn carriages and wagons competed with steam-trucks and even the occasional clocksprung beast for the same space on the tar and Absalom thought that the pedestrians walking (again, in the same direction) on the sparkling plascrete walkways would arrive before he did. They walked with a sense of urgency and constantly looked at pocket watches.
He looked ahead for the brigade of American cavalrymen, but they were nowhere in sight. A slow tide of top hats, frock coats, buckskin jackets, boots, wheels, buckles, horseshoes, and gears seeped along, bearing him with it, disappearing into something that looked like a giant plascrete egg, a vast bald genius skull sprouting patches of green vegetable hair in zigzagging rows and propped up with a wild whirl of pipes running straight out from it in every direction. He looked down side streets and saw that all the traffic everywhere was bound for the same place.
Good, he thought. No, excellent. If everyone in the Great Salt Lake City is in the same place, it should be very easy to find Abigail, or at least figure out how to find her. And her husband, that scoundrel Orrin Porter Rockwell, was a famous man.
Unexpectedly, the Liahona lumbered right, dropped down a steep ramp, and went underground. Absalom, along with all the other passengers o
n the deck other than that obstinate ruffian Dick Burton, ducked, but the top of the entrance was several feet over the top of the wheelhouse and the sudden collective cringe was unnecessary. It was an enormous gate, and the space it opened into was a mammoth Avernian shed full of steam-trucks of every size and description.
The Liahona shuddered to a slow halt. “Get everybody off!” Captain Jones shouted to crewmen on the deck and then he was first down the ladder. Anxious to find the little boy, Absalom thought, and he admired the man’s doggedness and integrity.
The big steam-truck had come to rest in a vast plascrete hangar, surrounded by smaller craft. A gleaming brass arch gave egress, two lines of inlaid brass text pounded into the stone above it presumably both identifying the same place. SALT LAKE CITY TABERNACLE, said the line in English. Above it, about the same length, was a row of squiggly gibberish that Absalom couldn’t decipher.
Burton went over the side close on the Captain’s heels. Absalom waited until Burton had disappeared into the building, before he, too, joined the trickling migration off the ship and into the bowels of the Great Salt Lake City. He had clambered down awkwardly, reminding himself that the fact that he didn’t climb like a monkey was evidence of progress in his family tree, and nodding and smiling patiently at the stopped and frustrated flow of exiting persons waiting for him to finish and get out of the way.
He was still among the earlier of the departing passengers; none of them had any idea why they had been diverted from the station they expected to arrive at and the crew couldn’t seem to explain it to them. Absalom worried for a moment for Annie’s safety in the event of a passenger riot, until he remembered her promise to fill the gaps in his teeth with boot leather. He decided he was sure she could take care of herself, straightened his hat and his dignity, and headed for the Tabernacle.
Down and then up, past some heavily-trafficked side corridors, and then Absalom stepped out onto a plascrete landing and froze, astonished.
The Tabernacle was immense.
The building must consist almost entirely of a single room. It was a vast auditorium: an amphitheater with a dozen—no, thirty—no, fifty?—rows of seating in wide, scalloped brass alcoves, climbing up into dark shadows out of view, all looking down on a large stage. Around the rim of the stage were a dozen brass Franklin Poles, each sprouting up into a blue-shimmering globe of electricks. Three further Poles, of the same shape only taller, rose up on the center of the stage itself, over a row of fine-looking stuffed chairs and a tall, stair-mounted pulpit.
Absalom’s heart sank. There must be thirty thousand people in the room, crawling along plascrete ledges, greeting each other calmly, moving serenely into seats. He saw Captain Jones a hundred feet away, plowing with strong arms through the crowd, calling out queries whether anyone had seen his midshipman, John Moses.
Even if Abigail were here, and he had no idea if she would be, he’d never be able to find her.
“Absalom!” a female voice shouted.
He whirled, half-hoping it might be Annie, half hoping it might be Master Sergeant Jackson—
—and was astonished to see that it was his sister Abigail. She was dressed in a man’s waistcoat, a voluminous skirt and pointy-toed leather boots like a vaquero might wear. He almost laughed out loud at the incongruous sight of her.
“Abby!” he shouted. He tried to embrace her despite her clownish appearance and his sister slapped him in the face.
“Didn’t Port find you on the trail?” she demanded. She looked furious.
“Port?” He felt flushed, his cheek stung. “Porter? Do you mean Rockwell, the man who abducted you?”
“You poor fool,” she said, and she really seemed to pity him, “don’t you know you’re in danger?” She grabbed Absalom’s elbow and tried to drag him back in the direction from which he’d come, but he resisted. He’d been pushed around by enough women in the last twenty-four hours; he was going to take a stand. “I only came to check the passengers of the Liahona just in case. Port was supposed to stop you from ever getting this far.”
“Yes, I know I’m in danger!” he hissed. He wanted to yell, but he was conscious of the crowd all around him, farmers and tradesmen and merchants, all dressed like they’d put down their occupation at a moment’s notice and come to the Tabernacle, all asking each other what was going on and all denying any knowledge. He was an outsider here and this was not the time or place to make a figure of himself. “I’ve had a knife at my throat—that was your Port, I’d like to add—and I’ve had guns pointed at me and been kidnapped by red Indians and … and … threatened with a boot in my posterior!” He cringed inwardly, feeling that he had organized his rant poorly, from a rhetorical point of view. He should have kept his list to three, and should have saved the most impressive of his complaints for last … he realized he’d run out of steam and stopped talking. “Yes,” he said. “You’re in danger, too. I’ve come to rescue you.”
His sister looked puzzled and a little annoyed. She was younger than he was and they shared a naturally fair complexion, but the sun had darkened and hardened and aged her, and her furrowed eyebrows shot out the hard, angry stare of a frontier woman. He tried not to cringe under it.
“Port said you were a diplomat.” Her accent was changing, too. She still sounded English, but a little less so—her vowels were flattening out, her voice was hardening. “He said the Queen was sending you with that explorer, Captain Burton.”
“Yes,” Absalom agreed. “Your Mr. Rockwell tried to frighten me off, but I came, anyway. He did this.” He pointed to the ruined brim of his hat. “I had to call in every favor I was owed and promise more than one favor myself, but I arranged to have the Foreign Office send me, so I could take you away.” He faltered a bit under the stare. “Take you back … home. Back home to England.”
“I don’t want to go back.”
“But … you were kidnapped.” This was not how he had imagined the conversation going. He felt a little indignant at her resistance.
“No, I wasn’t.”
“I went to a lot of trouble, you know.”
“That’s not my fault.”
“You disappeared. You had been seen with that scoundrel, that wild man Rockwell, and then you disappeared and you said nothing at all to anyone in the family, and nothing to any young lady of our acquaintance. I know because I asked them all.”
She shrugged, an unladylike, American, and vaguely vulgar gesture. “I eloped. Are you armed?”
“Eloped?” He could scarcely credit the idea. This was not the girl he had grown up with. “Were you mad? Are you mad now?”
She shrugged again. “It seemed romantic at the time and besides, no one in the family was going to approve my marriage to a wild mountain man. Least of all Father.” She squinted at him. “You should be armed.”
“Why should I be armed?” Absalom felt off-balance, surprised, stranded. “You used to be a very reserved young woman, I remember. What happened to you?”
Abby laughed. “Life happened, dear brother. Marriage happened. I came West, I learned to run a tavern, I grew up.”
“You run a tavern?”
“A hotel and saloon. One of the most famous in the Kingdom.” Her face relaxed for a moment into happiness and pride, then hardened again. “Now you must leave.” She pulled a dull, long-barreled six-shooter from under her skirt and pressed it into his hands. It was a much bigger gun than his, less sophisticated, less delicate, more likely, he knew, to kill a man.
“What are you afraid of?” he asked, refusing the gun. “I already have a gun, thank you very much. And I can’t go. I am an emissary of Her Majesty.” He sighed. “I suppose I should be grateful it isn’t a brothel.”
“Yes, dear brother,” she said, and forced the heavy pistol into his hand, wrapping his fingers around its smooth grip. “You should be grateful. And you should take a second gun—it can’t hurt to be too well armed in this country. And yes, I know you have a mission. That’s the problem. Port thinks you
’re being set up. Port thinks something terrible is going to happen and you’re going to be blamed for it.”
“Brothers and Sisters, thank you very much for your attendance. I’m afraid it is my duty to burden you with the weight of a terrible announcement.”
The speaker was a burly fellow, with a round face, a square little chin-beard, and the accent of a man from the English industrial midlands. He held a speaking tube pulled up to his mouth that threw his words out through enormous brass cones hanging high in the ceiling, and his voice was calm but strained. He was dwarfed by the pulpit at which he stood, but any man would have been and Poe couldn’t tell whether he was tall or broad or a midget from his vantage point up in the scalloped terraces of the Tabernacle.
Thinking of midgets, he wondered again where Jedediah Coltrane had ended up. He hadn’t seen the little man since the hypocephalus debate aboard the Liahona. That in itself was troubling. Coltrane could be dead, somewhere out on the sandy soil of the Wyoming Territory with an electro-blade in his back. Add to that the fact that the scarab beetles had disappeared with him, that Poe had missed his scheduled meeting with the Madman Pratt, and that Poe’s cover had been blown, he felt that, if disaster had not already struck, it was looming. Now he badly wanted to salvage whatever he could of it.
Also, he wanted to get away from Roxie.
“The news is distressing enough that in the interest of time, we will dispense with an opening hymn and prayer.” The burly man almost cracked a smile, though the expression was fleeting. “And there will not be refreshments.”
Poe looked over his shoulder and saw only the milling sheepskin jackets, waistcoats, and hats of the crowd. How to find Orson Pratt? He scanned the multitude. It was vast and he would never pick the needle of his man out of such a haystack. Was there any way to make Pratt come to him? He couldn’t think of any, short of seizing the speaking tubes and asking for the fellow directly. Was there any way to calculate where in the building he might find his man?
