Last Year

8

The town was called Stony Creek, but the name didn’t matter. Jesse guessed he’d forget it sooner or later, as he would forget the town itself. Stony Creek was a New England town like every other New England town he had ridden through by rail or buckboard in the last six months, not that he knew much about New England towns except by reputation: dour Yankees, whitewashed houses, teetotaling Congregationalist churches. And maybe that was the case; but the towns, as towns went, seemed pleasant enough from the perspective of an outsider. This one surely did, by the light of a late spring morning.

He stepped off the Pullman car into a chorus of birdsong. The trees on the north side of the tracks were full of birds, all vocalizing. It made Jesse wish he knew something about birds or their calls. He guessed some of the birds might be sparrows. He asked the uniformed stationmaster about it. “Sparrows,” the stationmaster said, looking him up and down, “bluebirds, goldfinches, ovenbirds, uh-huh—the whole choir.”

Stony Creek was a one-street town surrounded by smallhold farms, with a brickworks and a pottery factory on its outskirts, cut through by a river that turned all the requisite mill wheels. The train depot smelled of sun-warmed lumber, creosote, coal smoke, wildflowers. The stationmaster was a squat box of a man maybe ten years older than Jesse. His uniform was dusty black wool trimmed with gold braid, and he looked at Jesse’s canvas bag with an undisguised, almost avaricious curiosity. Jesse asked him about a residential hotel in town.

“Staying long?”

“Probably not more than a day or two.”

“For that, the Morgan House. For a longer stay, Coretta Langstaff rents rooms by the week. Depends on your business, I suppose.”

Yankee manners ruled out a direct question, and the stationmaster was clearly chafing under that constraint. Jesse said, “As a matter of fact, I’m looking for someone. Maybe you can help me.”

“I guess that depends on who it is you’re looking for. Do you represent the law?”

“No, sir, I don’t. But I don’t mean anyone any harm. There’s a family trying to find their daughter.” This much was almost true. “Not a child but a grown woman. They think she might have arrived here around this time last year. Unaccompanied.”

“This woman have a name?”

“She probably isn’t using her family name.”

“Is she in some kind of trouble?”

“I’m not at liberty to say what drove her from her family. I’m to tell her they hold nothing against her and want to see her again, if she’s agreeable. I have a letter to deliver. That’s all.”

“Are you some kind of Pinkerton man they hired?”

“Not Pinkerton, but hired by the family, yes.”

“Well, it’s none of my business,” the stationmaster said.

“And I shouldn’t have asked. I thank you for your time.” Jesse tipped his hat and made as if to walk away.

“It’s an unusual situation,” the trainman called after him, “a woman traveling unescorted.”

Jesse turned back. “Maybe the kind of thing folks remember?”

“I don’t know anything about it. But a woman from out of town has been staying at Widow Langstaff’s for most of a year now.”

“And which way is Widow Langstaff’s?”

“East. Just this side of the millpond. There’s a sign in the window.”

New Englanders weren’t such bad people, Jesse thought. More generous than they were given credit for. Back in San Francisco he would have had to pay for information like that.

He thanked the stationmaster and set out to walk. Stony Creek’s main street was pressed earth, white with dust. The birds kept up their chorus, the breeze was soft as cotton. Passing strangers glanced at Jesse; curious faces peered at him from the sun-silvered window of a barber shop, the shaded porch of a dry-goods store. Jesse ignored them all. His bag was heavy in his hand. The bag contained a change of clothes and a pistol, and in his pocket was money enough for two fares to New York City. Of these, he expected he would require all but the pistol.

After a walk long enough to draw out a light sweat on his forehead, he came within sight of Widow Langstaff’s house. The house resembled its neighbors: heavy cornices, gabled roof, a long porch furnished with wicker chairs. Bookending the chairs, two tall ceramic vases with dried cattails sticking out of them. A sign in the window offered ROOMS TO LET. Jesse stepped onto the creaking porch and knocked at the door.

The door opened, wafting out a scent of dusty carpets and wood polish. A gray-haired woman gave him a long up-and-down look, just as the stationmaster had. Maybe it was a New England custom. “Yes?”

“Mrs. Langstaff? My name is Jesse Cullum.”

“You want to rent a room?”

“No, ma’am, I’m sorry but I don’t. I want to speak to one of your guests.”

“Anyone in particular?”

The true name of the woman he was looking for was Mrs. Standridge, Claire Standridge. She wouldn’t be using Standridge, in all likelihood. But she might have stuck by her given name. Runners often did. “Her name is Claire.”

“Are you a relative?”

“No. I have business to discuss with her.”

“Well, she’s upstairs. I’ll see if she’s available. You said your name was Cullum?”

“Tell her I represent her people from the City.”

“Which city?”

“She’ll understand.”

“Well—you can wait in the parlor if you like.”

“Thank you, but it’s such a nice day I’d rather sit out here, if it’s all the same to you.” For the kind of conversation he hoped to conduct with Mrs. Standridge, the porch was likely to be more private.

“Suit yourself,” the widow Langstaff said.

Jesse wedged himself into a wicker chair and watched the street. The life of the town rolled by, what there was of it. A cargo truck drawn by two scrawny dray horses. A man on horseback. Another young man in creased trousers and a straw hat came quick-striding along, in a hurry to get somewhere—love or money was involved, Jesse guessed.

Then the door creaked open and a dark-haired woman stepped out onto the veranda. She looked at Jesse closely, more sadness than curiosity in her eyes. She was tall, of an indeterminate age somewhere north of thirty, and she wore a white day dress and a small, ridiculous hat. “Don’t get up.” She settled into the chair beside Jesse. “I thought someone like you might show up sooner or later. Mrs. Langstaff said your name is Cullum?”

“Jesse Cullum.”

“And you’re from the City.” A deliberately ambiguous statement, on the off chance she had misunderstood.

“I work for the City, yes.”

“A local hire?”

“Yes, ma’am. I’ve been in the City’s employ almost four years now.”

“And you’ve come to take me back?”

“It’s not in my power to compel you to do anything at all, Mrs. Standridge. I’m just a messenger.”

She flinched when he said her name. “And the message is?”

“Eighteen seventy-seven is the last year the City will operate, as I’m sure you know. August Kemp means to shut down the Mirror as soon as winter sets in. And once that door is closed, no power on Earth can open it up again. The City discourages runners, obviously, but there’s no penalty for changing your mind, and we’d be happy to pay your way and protect your anonymity, should you make that choice. But the time has come. It’s a choice you have to make.”

“So this is Kemp doing due diligence? Covering his ass in case my family tries to bring a lawsuit against him for losing me?”

Mrs. Standridge had lived in New England for a while now, according to what Jesse had been told, but apparently she hadn’t lost her futuristic habits of speech. (At least not for the purposes of this conversation—Jesse hoped she was more careful when she spoke to her Yankee neighbors.) “I don’t know anything about Mr. Kemp’s motives, but the offer is genuine.”

And now she’ll send me away, Jesse thought, and that’ll be the end of it. Or she’ll begin to talk. If she began to talk, chances were good that she would leave with him.

She looked across the rooftops of the houses across the street, to the peak of a wooded hill and the small clouds that drifted lazily beyond it.

“Last summer,” she said softly, “a lightning-rod salesman came through town.”

Jesse knew better than to prompt her with a question. He let her silent thoughts play out against the homely sound of birdcalls, a barking dog, children playing somewhere out of sight. Wind chimes were suspended from the ceiling of the porch, but the breeze was so gentle that they gave out only the occasional bright ting.

“I don’t know if you can understand how it seemed to me, Mr. Cullum. How it was for me before I came here. I was raised in a relatively wealthy family. My father owns a chain of automotive-supply stores. And I married a man who is even more successful. So my life has been good, by conventional standards. Home in Manhattan, a vacation house in Malibu. My husband was a decent man, is a decent man—often out of town, maybe something of a philanderer, sometimes photographed with women he refuses to talk about, but we liked each other well enough. It’s just that he didn’t understand my … nostalgia.”

“Nostalgia?”

“That’s the word I use. Can you be nostalgic for a place you’ve never really been? Well, I was. Strange as it sounds. It started after we were married. I began to read history compulsively—I guess you could say obsessively—long before August Kemp started selling tickets to it. American history, I mean; America before the Internet, before television, before cars, before electric lights. I read history books and old novels, books out of print for a century and half.” She smiled, not happily. “I collected stereoscopes and daguerreotypes. Scenic views of New York and Boston. My husband called it unhealthy—I made the mistake of wondering out loud whether I was actually channeling a past life. I thought about seeing a psychic; he wanted me to see a shrink.”

“And did you?”

“I looked up my family genealogy instead. What I found was the usual assortment of European immigrants, most too recent to be interesting. But my maternal grandfather’s line went way back. Like a golden thread. Old New England stock. The names of people, the places they lived—it all seemed familiar to me, like something I had once known and forgotten. Sometimes, when I closed my eyes, I could see it perfectly clearly. Another world. Church steeples and wooden sidewalks and women in bustle skirts, all clean and simple and bright and new. Do you have even the faintest idea what I mean?”

Jesse’s father had once given him a children’s book—probably left behind by one of Madame Chao’s inebriated clients—in which there was a fanciful drawing of a pirate’s cave strewn with jewels. On more than a few nights Jesse had imagined himself into that cave, a private kingdom where rubies rubbed shoulders with emeralds and no one was ever startled awake by the simulated ecstasies of hardworking whores. The cave had seemed real enough in his mind, occasionally more real than the world around him. “I think I understand.”

“Of course I was fascinated by the idea of August Kemp’s resort when I heard of it. The idea seemed so compelling and at the same time so implausible. I still don’t understand how it works. Leaves of the past pressed together like the pages of a book. Absurd. But true.”

Jesse nodded. The nation’s newspapers had reacted to the advent of the City with the same incredulity. The claims made on the City’s behalf could not possibly be genuine, but reporters sent to debunk the fraud had come back converted, bearing photographs of the flying machine in which they had been permitted to ride.

“I tried to put it out of my mind. The cost of a week at Kemp’s resort wasn’t trivial, even for us. Almost like flying into orbit for a vacation. Which was what my husband said when I raised the question. It would be a titanic waste of money. I was disappointed, but I could hardly contradict him. So we flew to Switzerland that winter. An awkward trip. There were arguments. Skiing bores me. The time passed slowly, as it does in marriages that have decayed into friendships. I think Terrence sensed that.”

“Terrence is your husband?” Is or was or will be, Jesse thought: time travel caused those ordinary words to tangle up like shoestrings.

“Yes. And he genuinely wanted to make me happy, and he knew he wasn’t succeeding at it. So for my thirty-sixth birthday he conceded the point and booked us the full tour. It was a wonderful surprise … though I knew, even then, that I wanted to leave him. And not just him but the world we lived in. I knew I’d take the chance if the opportunity presented itself. I knew it without ever really admitting it to myself, if that makes any sense.”

“It makes perfect sense.”

“We signed on to the ‘Springtime in New York’ package. Very exciting, going through the Mirror, and especially when we left Futurity Station on the special train, watching the old America slide by the window, all those sleepy depots and smoky little towns, cities without skyscrapers. New York, of course. They took us to see Adelina Patti at the Academy of Music. Dinner at Delmonico’s. That was the night I made my run. Delmonico’s invented Lobster Newburg, did you know that? But as it happens, I hate lobster. So I excused myself and found my way out of the building. It was the Delmonico’s on Broad Street, a fine June evening, and there I stood on the street corner, all by myself, dressed in my period clothes, the kind they give us so we don’t shock the locals, Velcro instead of buttons and stays—do you know what I’m talking about?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And money in my purse, because I had made preparations. And a whole world in front of me. It felt … wonderful. For a short time. I learned better very quickly. An unchaperoned woman in New York is liable to be mistaken for a prostitute. Renting a room, buying a train ticket, even shopping for clothes, all much more difficult than I had anticipated. I learned to pass myself off as a widow. Because, God knows, the Civil War left no shortage of widows. But it’s a difficult lie to maintain. So I refined the story. I told people I had been engaged when my betrothed was killed at Waynesboro. Or I said I’d been traveling with my brother when he was taken ill. I told all sorts of lies, a lie for every occasion. Eventually I arrived here. I had convinced myself that this town would be different. I chose it because I have relatives—I suppose you could say ancestors—here. Not that I would dare introduce myself to them. I planned to make my own home here, on my own merits. I would join the church, I would be absorbed into the community. I had no better plan that that. It seemed sufficient.” She gave Jesse another smile with no discernible trace of happiness in it. “Do you know the story of the painted bird?”

“No, ma’am.”

“I read about it in a book. A man catches a bird and paints it different colors and releases it. The painted bird tries to go back to its flock, but the flock doesn’t recognize it anymore—the other birds turn on it, kill it. Well, I haven’t been killed. But otherwise, Mr. Cullum, I am that bird. I dress incorrectly, no matter how hard I try. I’ve been told I have a peculiar accent, that I talk like a sodbuster or a Negro. I don’t defer to men exactly as I should. I stare when I ought to cast my eyes down. I say the wrong words at the wrong time. In a thousand subtle ways, I am that painted bird. Which is why I live alone in a rented room. Which is why I’ve nearly run out of money and can’t find decent work. Which is why I have no friends to speak of.”

Jesse waited for her to go on. Three women strolled past the house, twirling sun umbrellas. Their conversation was a tangle of tenor voices fading in the warm spring air.

“One of the tenants here has a tumor on his face. It covers most of his right eye. Where I come from, it would have been treated and removed. So I find myself thinking, what if I get sick? Something as simple as appendicitis could kill me. A fever could kill me. I’ve had all the shots, but what happens when the vaccines wear off? As for the charm and innocence I hoped to find—it exists, it really does, but consider what it’s buried in. Racism. Misogyny and homophobia so absolute as to be nearly universal. Hatred of the Irish, the Italians, the Chinese—not that many of them are seen in these parts. Europe is as far away as the moon, Asia might as well be Mars. And—did I mention the lightning-rod salesman?”

“Just briefly.”

“Late last summer I was standing at my window when a lightning-rod salesman came down the road. A lightning-rod salesman! You won’t understand this, but it was exciting to me—it was like something out of those old stories I loved so much. He was pulling a cart with his name painted on the side in bright red circus writing: PROFESSOR ELECTRO. A crowd of children following after him. A perfect day for it, too, sullen and hot, storm clouds swelling on the horizon. So I ran down to see him—I couldn’t help myself. But you know what Professor Electro was? Professor Electro was an old Jew with yellow eyes and a smelly blue Union jacket, hardly more than a beggar—so drunk or demented he could barely mumble his pitch, and the children were mocking him obscenely, and he looked as if he had endured so much serial humiliation that he would have been grateful if a bolt of lightning had struck him dead on the spot.”

“Disappointing,” Jesse said, though he couldn’t imagine what else she had expected from an itinerant peddler.

Mrs. Standridge turned in her chair and looked at Jesse as if he were the one who had disappointed her. “The point is, I accept your offer. Yes, you can escort me back to the City. The sooner the better.”

Jesse had been hunting runners for the first few months of 1877.

His bosses at the City had given him the assignment, ostensibly as a reward for his work with Elizabeth, also as a way to make profitable use of his skills and to get him away from Tower Two, where he was still viewed with suspicion. As it turned out, he liked the work. In those few months he had seen more of the country than he had ever expected to, and the constant travel was usefully distracting. It tired him out and helped him sleep.

“Runners” were people from the future who booked passage on one of the City’s excursions and jumped ship, generally with the aim of staying permanently in this century. Such people couldn’t be compelled to return—the City had no such legal authority in the America of 1877—but they could be offered a last chance at a ticket home without sanction, if they could be found. Most runners were like Mrs. Standridge, imaginative individuals acting out of romantic illusions; most, like Mrs. Standridge, were happy to accept a reprieve from the reality they had been forced to confront. That was true even of the less idealistic runners, the ones who planned to make a fortune by “inventing” some device they had read about in a history book or investing in a commercial stock they knew would improve. As a rule, the practical aspects of the question confounded them. Or they came to understand that the money they had hoped to earn wouldn’t buy them, in this century, anything they really wanted.

There were rare exceptions. In the weeks before he set off to retrieve Mrs. Standridge, Jesse had been sent after a runner named Weismann who had been frequenting saloons in the Germantown district of New York City. Weismann was a man in his fifties, older than most runners, grim-faced and morbidly serious, and according to the City’s hired detectives he had been haunting these dives for the purpose of suborning a murder.

Jesse tracked him to a barroom near the Stadt Theater, where he went to Weismann’s table and introduced himself as a City agent. Weismann merely nodded. “All right,” he said. “Sit down, Mr. Cullum. I won’t go back to the City with you, but I can buy you a beer.”

“Thank you,” Jesse said, sitting. The saloon was a basement establishment, lit with old nautical lanterns that did little more than insult the darkness, and the sawdust scattered on the floor reeked of hops and urine. “But you might want to change your mind about what you’ve been doing lately.”

Weismann had been drinking, not enough to make him properly drunk but enough to put a hitch in his motions. He turned his head to Jesse as if the hinges of his neck needing oiling. “And what is it you think I’ve been doing?”

“Endangering yourself, for one thing.”

“Endangering myself how?”

“By approaching immigrants who have criminal connections and attempting to arrange the killing of a man in Austria-Hungary, cash on delivery of evidence that the man in question is dead.”

To his credit, Weismann didn’t try to deny it. “It’s not a risk-free enterprise, true.”

“Such men are more likely to steal your money than trust you as an employer. You ought to have figured that out by now.”

“I know what I’m doing. I don’t threaten easily, and I don’t carry cash.”

“Maybe so. But you’ve been discovered, and you have to stop, so you might as well go home. Free ticket to the City, Mr. Weismann, and no questions asked. It’s a generous offer.”

“What makes you think I have to stop?”

“Suborning a murder is against the law even in the Bowery. We have witnesses who will go to the police if you don’t give it up.”

Weismann nodded, still neither surprised nor intimidated. “I guess Kemp can afford to buy himself some Tammany justice, if that’s what he really wants. But I don’t see any police here—do you?”

“There’s the door,” Jesse said. “You can walk out and go into hiding, and I have no power to stop you. But there won’t be any murder. We’ve seen to that.”

For a moment it seemed as if Weismann might actually call Jesse’s bluff, stand up and leave the saloon without looking back. Then his eyes took on a harder focus. “You’re a local hire, obviously. How much did they tell you about the man I want killed?”

“He’s a customs agent in a town called Braunau am Inn. An innocent man. Whose offspring will commit monstrous crimes, if history unfolds in our world as it did in yours.”

“A man who’ll be the father of a monster. I’d rather kill the monster himself, but he won’t be born for twelve more years. Given that, it doesn’t seem like such a bad deal. One innocent life against the death of many millions. If killing him is a sin, no one has to go to hell for it but me. So I cordially invite you to fuck off and leave me to my business.”

“But it won’t work,” Jesse said patiently. “Kemp wrote to the Austrian officials to warn them. And even in Austria, August Kemp’s name rings bells.” An Austrian envoy had been among a delegation of European dignitaries who had toured the City of Futurity last year, with only a little less fanfare than President Grant himself. A more querulous, contrarian group of people Jesse had never encountered. But they had been as impressed by the City as all the other visitors. An English lord had fainted aboard the helicopter. “They’ll intercept your man, if you succeed in hiring one, before he can get close to his target.”

“Maybe,” Weismann said. “Maybe not.”

“And Kemp did something else. Something you might approve of.”

“I doubt it.”

“When he warned the Austrians about your hired killer, he warned them about the target at the same time—including enough detail about this man’s philandering that the customs service will likely fire him to head off a scandal. They were also warned that he was a potential danger to his household servant, one Klara Pölzl.”

“So?”

“Well, think about it. You’re trying to prevent an act of conception by killing this”—Jesse recalled the name from his briefing—“Alois Hitler. But the conception can’t happen if Alois never marries Klara. And even if he does marry her, the circumstances of their marriage will be altered. Bluntly speaking, the fucking will happen differently, producing a different result.”

“It’s possible,” Weismann admitted. “I’ve thought of that myself. And maybe Kemp’s right. But he could be wrong. Alois Hitler is a genetic gun, cocked and loaded and aimed at six million human beings. It’s not enough to just hope the gun misfires.”

It was becoming clear to Jesse that Weismann wouldn’t be talked out of his project, perhaps for good reasons. Many millions dead, up there in the unimaginable future. Something the educational dioramas at the City neglected to mention. “All right,” Jesse said.

“What?”

“All right. I’m not going to pull a pistol on you and drag you back to Illinois by main force. Do what you think is best. Will you answer a question, though, before I leave you to it?”

Weismann shrugged suspiciously.

“According to the City, there are more worlds and histories than can ever be counted. A world next door to this one and a world next door to that, and so on, like grains of sand on a beach. And there’s an Alois Hitler in each of them. At best, you can only kill one. What’s the point?”

“That sounds like something August Kemp would say. But it’s a bullshit argument. This world has a twin, one Planck second away in Hilbert space. And that world has a twin. And so on. Hall of mirrors. But each one is as real as any other, and they’re interconnected. If I stick a pistol in your mouth and blow your brains out, that act is reflected in every domain of Hilbert space that follows from it.”

“But there’s the 1877 in your history books, where you didn’t blow my brains out.”

“And that’s also real and unchangeable. So there are Hilbert vectors where you live, Hilbert vectors where you die. Does that make it okay if I kill you now?”

“No. That does not make it okay.”

“Because right now, right here, for moral and ethical purposes, there’s only one of you. You’re not a shadow or a reflection or a possibility. You’re as real as I am. And this world is real. Back home, back in what you call the future, some of us understand that. We think Kemp is doing something immoral by turning this version of 1877 into a tourist attraction, as if it were some colonial backwater where you can lie in the sun and drink mai tais while the natives die of cholera. Some of us refuse to look the other way while Kemp monetizes an entire fucking universe.” Weismann drained the stein that had been sitting in front of him. “Maybe I’m more radical than some, but I’m not the only one. I’m just willing to make a bigger sacrifice.”

“Shall I say that to Kemp?”

Weismann stood up, his chair teetering behind him. “Tell August Kemp to bend over and fuck himself,” he said. “Or, better yet, ask him who invented the Mirror.”

A week later, the City’s Pinkerton men reported that Weismann had bought passage to Hamburg on the steamship Frisia. If you want a thing done right, Jesse supposed, better to do it yourself. He wasn’t sure whether he should hope for the success of Weismann’s project. One relatively innocent life in exchange for millions sounded reasonable, but it was a hard bargain for poor old Alois. Maybe, if Weismann got close enough, he could effect a compromise by shooting off the man’s balls instead of killing him.

Mrs. Standridge was quiet, almost melancholic, on the train back to New York, which gave Jesse ample time to contemplate the unanswered questions her story had raised. “You said you left New York with enough cash to buy clothes and transportation and to rent a room for a year?”

She nodded abstractedly. The Hudson River valley rolled past the window, dimming into sunset. The passenger car was foggy with cigar smoke. “It seemed like enough, at any rate.”

“Banknotes or specie?”

“Banknotes.”

“May I ask where you got them?”

“I told you, my family back home is more or less wealthy.”

“Yes, ma’am, I understand that. And I figured the money must be paper, because your husband would have noticed if you were carrying bags of coins through the Mirror.”

“Not just my husband. Going through the Mirror is like getting on a plane: You have to pass through security screening, including metal detectors. A bag of gold would have set off all the alarms, literally and figuratively.”

“Paper is more portable.”

“It would have been. But I didn’t carry paper, either.”

“Then where did your money come from?”

She hesitated. “I’d rather not say.”

“Then I apologize for asking. It’s just that I’m curious.”

“If it were up to me I’d tell you all about it. But I don’t want to get anyone else in trouble.” She hesitated. “I will say that a greenback isn’t hard to duplicate with twenty-first-century technology.”

“Your money was counterfeit?”

“My money was in every practical way indistinguishable from money issued by your banks, let’s put it that way.”

“You’re inflating the national currency.”

“The country’s in a recession, if you haven’t noticed. The goldbugs might disagree, but a little inflation isn’t a bad thing under the circumstances.”

Which left the question of who had slipped her the fake paper. But she refused to talk about that.

He watched from the window as the river came into sight: the Hudson, grown dark and turbulent as daylight drained from the sky. Not far to go now. “One other thing if you don’t mind. From when you first heard about August Kemp’s resort to when you crossed the Mirror, how much time passed?”

“Terrence barely paid attention when Kemp’s first resort opened. It took years for him to come around.”

“You said, Kemp’s first resort.”

“Ah.” She nodded. “They warned us not to talk about that with locals. But the rules are different between us, aren’t they?”

“I expect so,” Jesse said. “Really, it’s an open secret. Rumors get around.” Which was almost true. Back at the City, some claimed Kemp had opened other Mirrors into other times, other places. Those who knew the truth of the matter would neither confirm nor deny it.

“The problem is historical drift,” Mrs. Standridge said. “Kemp is selling tickets to history as we know it, but as soon as the City is constructed, that history begins to mutate. So he closes after five years, before the drift becomes too obvious. Then he opens the Mirror on a new 1872—or 1873, or 1874—all fresh and unsuspecting and completely virginal. The City in Illinois is the second one he’s built. Next year he’ll open a third.”

So—if this was true—there had already been another City, in one of those next-door worlds Kemp talked about … and had some other version of Jesse been hired to work at it? He guessed not; the Mirror was said to be imprecise; that other City might have arrived months after Jesse passed the spot, or might have been fully staffed months before he reached it. Still, it was an eerie thought. “I suppose he learns from experience.”

“I’m sure he does. And so do his enemies.”

“And who might they be?”

“I don’t really know a lot about it.” Ms. Standridge turned her head and closed her eyes as if she wanted to sleep, or wanted Jesse to think she wanted to sleep. “Will you be traveling with me all the way to the City?”

“Maybe, maybe not,” Jesse said. “I go where they send me.”

Once they had passed through the bustle of the Grand Central Depot at 42nd Street and Vanderbilt, Jesse hired a coach to carry them to the Broadway Central Hotel.

The hotel had been considered one of the finest in the city when August Kemp’s men took it over and refurbished it. Kemp had reportedly offered the building’s owners a deal they could hardly refuse: He would install elaborate new amenities—electric lights powered by a dedicated generator, improved heating and fire protection, a twenty-first-century kitchen—in exchange for exclusive use of the facilities by City tourists for a four-year period. At the end of that time the hotel would revert to its owners, who would be supplied with enough spare parts and diesel gasoline to keep the amenities running for another decade. Newspapers had since taken to calling the hotel the “Electric Grand” for the way its electric lights shone through the many windows of the eight-story building; gawkers came from miles around to see it, and on pleasant summer evenings the crowds were thick enough to block traffic on Broadway.

Tonight the crowd seemed unusually dense despite the cool spring weather, and Jesse directed the coach driver to a gated side entrance to avoid the press of bodies. He showed his City identification to the gate guard, who examined it methodically before waving him through. In the lobby of the hotel Jesse handed off Mrs. Standridge to the night clerk, a man named Amos Creagh. Creagh was a local hire, a beefy veteran of the Army of the Potomac who owed his stiff right leg to an injury he’d suffered at Chancellorsville. Creagh had not yet forgiven General Lee for the insult. Jesse sometimes took meals with him. He stood by now as Creagh welcomed Mrs. Standridge—there was no mention of her being anything other than a valued guest arriving at an odd hour—and summoned a bellboy to escort her to the elevator.

“Strange night,” Jesse said once Mrs. Standridge had gone to her room. “Big crowd on Broadway.”

“That ain’t the half of it,” Creagh said.

“Why, what’s up?”

“I guess you haven’t seen the papers? Big trouble. Oh, and that City woman you’re always asking about? The big-shouldered gal?”

Elizabeth DePaul. “What about her?”

“Arrived by train this morning, along with a whole raft of City bosses, including August Kemp himself.”

9

The advent of the City of Futurity on the Illinois plains southwest of the city of Chicago four years ago has inspired intense curiosity among all those who have heard of it. It is a curiosity about the years to come, a curiosity the operators of the City have exploited, but have been reluctant to entirely satisfy. The City’s spokesmen, including its founder Mr. August Kemp, eagerly boast of scientific and mechanical wonders, but they have reserved comment on political and social subjects until a comprehensive written account can be prepared and formally presented to the president of the United States. That document was handed to President Hayes last week, on the condition that its contents remain private until a general publication to take place at the end of 1877. Two other documents, said to contain useful advice for medical practitioners and mechanical engineers, are already being brought to press.

Absent these disclosures from Mr. Kemp, rumors have proliferated. Citizens of Manhattan have had ample opportunities to observe the behavior of individuals visiting from Mr. Kemp’s “future,” and many peculiarities have been noted. It is not a secret that Negroes, Orientals, and women in masculine dress mingle freely with white men in these crowds. Some have understood that observation as evidence that the world of the future is blind to distinctions of race or sex, as in a radical dream-vision of universal egalitarianism. Others take it as a token of the sort of haphazard morality too often associated with great wealth and aristocratic excess.

Until now it has been impossible to know the truth of these matters, but certain letters sent to Mrs. Lucy Stone Blackwell of the American Woman Suffrage Association and lately published in the Woman’s Journal appear to be genuine, and, if authentic, constitute a shocking indictment of “the world of futurity.” According to Mrs. Blackwell, she began receiving these anonymous letters on a monthly basis beginning in September of 1876 and continuing until March of this year. The author of the letters claims to be an unnamed visitor from the future, and his communications contained predictions of both near and distant events. Mrs. Blackwell naturally dismissed these missives as fabrications, but as the nearer prophecies seemed to come true, including detailed statements about the controversy between Mr. Tilden and Mr. Hayes, and the compromise that eventually resolved it, she gradually became convinced of the letters’ authenticity.

It is no doubt flattering to Mrs. Blackwell that the author of the letters, who signs himself only as “an American citizen who wants to speak honestly,” thinks of her and other radicals as harbingers of the future condition of humanity. This is no doubt what has moved Mrs. Blackwell to expose these communications to the public. We cannot view their contents with equanimity, however, for the letters are incendiary. Our nation has survived a great conflict, and we have no wish to see old wounds reopened, yet the anonymous “American citizen” would do exactly that. By denouncing home rule for Southern states as a “Jim Crow” regime that exchanges slavery for serfdom, the letters threaten to reignite racial tensions and stoke the embers of sectional discord. By holding up female suffrage as a moral ideal that ought to be enacted into law, they threaten to pit husbands against wives and daughters against fathers. By their endorsement of the broadest possible conception of the territorial rights of Indians, they repudiate our army and would push the former president’s ill-advised “peace policy” beyond the point of absurdity. And even these horrifying assertions pale next to the claim that our nation will one day become one in which men may enter into marriage with men, and women with women. It is, we are inclined to say, so grotesque a proposition that it simply cannot be true, though observation of the behavior of visitors from the future does little to dispel our fears.

Similar letters are rumored to have been mailed to other prominent or notorious persons, including Mr. Frederick Douglass and Mrs. Woodhull, but only Mrs. Blackwell has admitted to receiving them, and perhaps we should thank her for doing so. If the claims are not true, we hope Mr. Kemp or his representatives will say so. In the event the claims are verified, we may take solace in Mr. Kemp’s oft-repeated declaration that the future he represents need not be our own. Indeed, that knowledge would serve a tutelary purpose, in that we would then labor mightily to avoid such an outcome.

Jesse took a sip of orange juice, spilling a drop on the folded page of the newspaper. The word “outcome” became an illegible blot.

He was still not entirely accustomed to taking breakfast in the restaurant of the Electric Grand, where the morning meal was presented twenty-first-century style: a buffet table offering eggs, miniature sausages, thinly sliced bacon, and various breads, along with juice and coffee dispensed by luminous machines. He had chosen juice because the dispenser was simple to operate, but he kept an eye on the coffee machine as the tourists used it, planning to make an approach as soon as the crowd thinned. He dabbed the spot of juice from the newspaper with a napkin, which caused an entire paragraph to disappear. When he looked up, Elizabeth DePaul was standing at his table.

“We meet again,” she said.

Jesse stood, banging a knee on the table edge. “Elizabeth!”

“Don’t freak out. Do you mind if I sit?”

“No! Please. I mean, of course.” He added, “I looked for you last night.”

She was dressed twentieth-century-civilian style, denim trousers and a white shirt, no Velcro bustle, no City jacket. Apart from that, she hadn’t changed much since she had pulled her gun on Jesse’s would-be assailant in the back room of Onslow’s curiosity shop. Her hair had grown out a little. Six months, he thought. Three months back in her own time, three more here, doing City work far from Jesse’s runner hunts. He had almost despaired of seeing her again.

She was carrying a plate, which she set down in front of herself. Pineapple wedges and a crescent roll. “Yeah,” she said, settling into the chair opposite him, “the desk guy mentioned it, but I was in a meeting with Kemp’s people until late. All this trouble, which I guess you’re reading about.”

Getting down to business pretty quickly, but Elizabeth had never been one for small talk. She seemed to want to pretend she had never been away. He tried to accommodate her. “The papers love a scandal. Are the Blackwell letters really so ominous?”

“Potentially very bad for us, sure. Whoever mailed those letters—some fucking runner, according to Kemp—is making it hard to conduct business. Did you see the crowd in front of the Grand last night? The only good news is, they weren’t carrying torches.”

“So the letters are truthful?”

“I haven’t seen them, but it sounds like it. And that’s the problem. Do you think we’d be welcome here if the average person knew even the stuff you know about us? There’s a reason we’re careful about what we say. The past is another country, and there’s no guarantee of cordial diplomatic relations.”

“So Kemp chose to hide the unsettling details. I understand, but maybe it was a mistake. People will think you’re ashamed of what you are, now that the truth’s out.”

“We don’t have anything to apologize for. We don’t have to apologize for our superior hygiene or our flashy technology, and we sure as hell don’t have to apologize because we come from a place where women can vote and black people can hold political office and LGBT people can walk down the street with their heads held high.”

Jesse nodded. He had learned about these things when he first came to the City, in a training course aimed at preventing local hires from inadvertently insulting visitors—and, not incidentally, weeding out any employees who were too well-bred or bigoted to endorse a principle of tolerance. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of, but it won’t win you friends.”

“Tell me about it. Maybe we have Walt Whitman or Robert Ingersoll on our side. Otherwise, we’re being denounced from every pulpit in the country and in most of these ink-smeared tabloids you guys call newspapers. Which is why Kemp’s been so careful about holding this stuff back until the last year, preferably until the end of the last year—this is exactly what we hoped to avoid.”

A lot of ‘we’ and ‘you’ in these statements, Jesse thought. “The letters are premature.”

“The letters are deliberate sabotage. Obviously the work of a runner trying to stir up trouble.”

“A political radical.”

Elizabeth’s look became guarded. “Probably.”

“Someone who imagines he has a moral obligation to intervene in our history,” Jesse said, thinking of Weismann.

“Someone who hates what Kemp is doing. Someone who wants to warn African-Americans and Indians and so forth about what’s coming.”

“And what exactly is coming?”

“Well, like the compromise Congress enacted to let Hayes take office. The end of Reconstruction. Southern blacks turned into sharecroppers, handed over to chain gangs, worked to death in iron mines or turpentine camps. Legal apartheid that won’t be dismantled until the 1950s. Native Americans pushed onto dwindling reservations or killed outright, because ‘the only good Indian is a dead Indian’—you know who said that? Philip Sheridan, buddy of U. S. Grant and major general in the old Army of the Potomac, soon to be general of the army.” A tourist at a nearby table turned his head, and Elizabeth lowered her voice. “I could go on.”

“I guess that’s all true,” Jesse said, “if you say so, but how are these letters supposed to help?”

“Probably whoever wrote them thinks they’ll give some courage to the victims, by saying out loud that this stuff is wrong and that history won’t look kindly on it. Failing that, they’ll discredit the City and cast doubt on Kemp’s official history.”

“Seems like a slender victory.”

“They’re only letters. The world’s cheapest weapon. But we don’t know what else the writer might have in mind.”

Jesse thought again of Weismann, whose idealism required the murder of an Austro-Hungarian customs clerk. I’m more radical than some, but I’m not the only one. “Elizabeth?”

She took a bite from a pineapple wedge. “What?”

“It’s good to see you again.”

“You too, Jesse.”

At least she had used his name. “How are things back where you come from?”

“More or less okay.”

“Your daughter Gabriella is doing well?”

“She’s fine. I mean, she’s healthy and she remembered me. I guess that counts as fine.” It sounded a degree short of fine. Jesse remembered a word he had learned from his employers at the City: suboptimal. “How about you?”

“I recovered from the blow to the head I received at Onslow’s.”

“I know. I kept tabs, even from the other side of the Mirror.”

“Since then, I’ve been busy.” Riding the fence. Hunting runners.

“Busy is good, right?”

“It helps. Seeing you again is good.”

She checked her watch. “Speaking of busy, I’m doing a ride-along with the Manhattan tour in about fifteen minutes—”

“A ride-along?”

The Manhattan tour was part of the so-called Springtime in New York package: dozens of tourists packed into a big horse-drawn omnibus and paraded up Broadway to Longacre Square and around the city’s more respectable streets. “Kemp was thinking of canceling it. We have to guarantee the safety of the visitors, but that’s hard to do if there are racist mobs following us everywhere.”

“Is it as bad as that?”

“Not yet, and Kemp’s letting the tour go ahead, but he’s laying on extra security. Including me. And I need to check a weapon out of the armory, so…”

“Will I see you tonight?”

She hesitated longer than Jesse liked. “You know, what happened between us back at Futurity Station … that’s not something I can jump back into. I thought about it a lot when I was home. What happened between us can never be anything but temporary. Do you understand?”

“I guess I understand it well enough.”

“But we can have dinner tonight if you want. Maybe they haven’t told you yet, but Kemp’s reassigning you to his personal security detail. Along with me. And we’ll be leaving New York before long.”

The news rang in his head like a bell, too loud to make sense of, but what he said was, “Partners again?”

“Kind of.”

“Back at the City?”

“No. They’re sending us to San Francisco.”

The summons to Kemp’s penthouse lodgings came that afternoon, by way of Jesse’s pager. He rode the elevator to the top floor of the Electric Grand, standing next to a tourist couple who were arguing, in the lazy way of the long married, over who was currently president of the United States. “Grant,” the man said, “I’m pretty sure it’s Grant, his picture was in the brochure,” while his wife insisted, “But that was last year. There was an election, I think it’s Hayes? Does Hayes ring a bell?”

Should have been Tilden, Jesse thought. Congress had given the contested election to Rutherford Hayes in exchange for letting the so-called Redeemers have their way down South—one of the things the letter-writing runner had complained about. Big victory for the White League and the Red Shirts, big setback for freed slaves, and apparently one reason the City failed to attract many dark-skinned tourists from the future. Grant himself was currently in England, an ocean away from domestic politics.

Jesse got off at the penthouse and passed by three armed guards, each of whom examined his credentials, on his way to August Kemp’s suite. It was a pleasant suite, equipped with futuristic amenities including a machine for making coffee and a video screen the size of a door. A window overlooked Broadway, but the curtains were drawn. Kemp stood in front of a mirror, adjusting his tie. He was formally dressed, twenty-first-century style.

“Jesse Cullum,” he said to Jesse’s reflection. “Good to see you again. Thank you for coming up. You talked to Elizabeth already? She told you I want you for some special duty?”

“She mentioned it in general terms.”

“General terms might have to do for now. I don’t want to be late for dinner. We’re bringing Edison in from New Jersey.”

“Edison?”

“Yeah, Edison, Thomas Edison, you’ve heard of him?”

“The inventor? I read something about him in Leslie’s.”

“Electric light, recorded sound, the movies—we more or less stole his thunder, the poor fuck. Half the stuff we have, he invented, but it’s going to be hard for him to get patents for any of it. So I want to make sure he knows how much we owe him, that the world knows it. It’s only fair. Also, I’m hoping he’ll agree to come to the City for an appearance. I’m picturing an interview with, I don’t know, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, one of those guys. Wouldn’t that be great?”

“I’m sure it would.”

“You don’t have the faintest idea what I’m talking about, do you?”

This was Kemp in a more brittle mood than Jesse had seen before. “As far as I can tell, you’re talking about using Mr. Edison to make some money.”

Kemp’s we’re-all-friends-here manner had gone the way of the morning dew, but after a chilly pause he smiled. “Okay, yes. On a no-bullshit basis, you’re correct. In part. But I also feel an ethical obligation to Edison. Right?”

“Right,” Jesse said.

“For the record.”

“I understand.”

“So here’s the thing. I’ve put together a group of people doing high-level security, mostly traveling with me, but not just protecting me personally—I need people who can go out into the community when I want them to, people who are loyal to the City but know how to conduct themselves in the world as we find it. I think you might be one of those people. Am I right about that?”

“I guess I know my way around. I’ve tracked down a few runners, if that’s the business you have in mind.”

“You’ll be briefed about your duties when the time comes. Are you comfortable carrying a gun?”

“I’ve done it before.”

“At Futurity Station you carried a weapon, but you didn’t fire it.”

“I didn’t have an opportunity to fire it. I’m not what you’d call a gunslinger, Mr. Kemp, but I do know how to use a pistol.” His father had taught him the basics, and he had learned marksmanship from a Six Companies hatchetman named Sonny Lau.

“We’ll make sure you get a little extra training. Also, we’re heading west. You hail from San Francisco, right?”

“It’s where I grew up.”

“Which could be an advantage. You know the city pretty well?”

“I did, at one time.”

“You feel comfortable there?”

“I’m not sure I understand the question.”

“Any problems with the law?”

“Are you asking whether I’m a criminal?”

“I’m asking whether I’ll have to bail you out of jail if a cop recognizes you. Anything like that in your past?”

Much in his past, but no outstanding warrants. As far as he knew. “Nothing like that.”

“Okay. Good.” Kemp’s necktie had apparently achieved a satisfactory state. He turned away from the mirror and put his hand on Jesse’s shoulder. “Welcome to the team. Elizabeth can get you set up with a handset and whatever else you need. We’ll be leaving Manhattan this week, maybe as soon as Thursday or Friday if I can get Edison to commit to an appearance.”

“The runner we’ll be looking for,” Jesse said. “Is he the author of those letters in the press?”

“When you need to know,” Kemp said, “I’ll tell you.”

Elizabeth returned unscathed from her afternoon protecting twenty-first-century tourists from the indignation of angry locals. There had been no real problem, she told Jesse. A few disapproving stares, but no one was throwing bricks. “Seems like most people don’t really care how morally compromised we are.”

“Well, this is New York,” Jesse said. “They tolerated Boss Tweed for years. People here are hard to shock.”

They took supper in the hotel dining room, as opposed to the staff room in the basement. Twenty-first-century cuisine. The waiter handed Jesse a menu as long as his forearm, which contained a great many words not recognizably English. “Does any of this translate into mutton?”

“Live a little,” Elizabeth said. “Let me order for you.”

“Is that customary?”

“Your manhood won’t wilt.”

She told the waiter to bring them two California chipotle burgers and various ancillary dishes. And beer of a particular brand, which came chilled, in a bottle with a lime wedge stuck in its neck. “Cheers,” she said.

“How were things back home?” he asked for the second time in as many days, because he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“You really want to know?” She shrugged. “It was good to spend time with Gabby. She’s a big girl now. Smart. And independent, which is a good thing. My mom does a great job looking after her, and I’m grateful to her…”

“But?”

“But mom got religion after my dad died. Not in a good way. Joined a fundie church, and she won’t keep quiet about it around Gabby.”

“You’re not a churchgoer?”

“No. I mean, I don’t have strong opinions about how the universe was created or any of that stuff. I’m not a raging atheist. But I don’t think Noah’s ark was a real thing, and I don’t think God hates gays and heathens. If Gabby ever decides to join a church, that’s up to her, but I don’t want my mom teaching her stuff she’ll have to unlearn in biology class. So the arguments start as soon as Gabby’s down for the night—my mom’s all you need to get her baptized, and I’m like, she’s only four, what’s religion to her? Plus Gabby never fails to ask about her father. She knows he did some bad things, that he’s in prison for it. But it’s like an abscessed tooth, she won’t let it alone. ‘What did he do that was wrong? Does he want to hurt us? Why can’t I see him?’”

“What do you tell her?”

“As much of the truth as I think a four-year-old can understand. But the worst of it? My last day at home, we were taking a walk around the neighborhood, the three of us, me and my mom and Gabby, and Gabby tripped over the curb and skinned her knee. The usual kid crisis, but the thing is, she ran crying to my mom. Not to her mother—to her grandmother.”

“It was probably just—”

“Oh, I ran through all the probably just excuses. Probably she isn’t used to me being around, is what it boils down to. And that’s exactly the problem. Rock and a hard place. I need this job to make a real home for Gabby, but I can’t make a real home for Gabby while I have this job.”

Their meals arrived. Ground beef on a bun, fried potatoes, and salad, better than the fast-food equivalents Jesse had grown accustomed to at the City. The beef tasted like actual beef, for one thing.

“It’s the last year,” Jesse said. “You’ll be back with her soon.”

“But who’s to say another six months isn’t six months too many? How long does it take to lose that mother-daughter connection? Which is another reason why—”

“What?”

“Nothing. How’s your burger?”

“Good,” he said. “Hearty. A little complicated, what with the avocado and onions and all.”

“Best of both worlds, in a way—1877 American beef, grain fed and pharmaceutical free, butchered and stored to twenty-first-century standards. The hotel’s chef has an arrangement with a local slaughterhouse. Kobe beef’s got nothing on it, if you ask me.”

“Why, are your cattle anemic?”

“Two words: factory farm. Not that I have much experience with high-end beef. Half the time, at our house, we do McDonald’s like everybody else. My mom’s a Doritos-and-Coke kind of gal when she isn’t praying. But I try to make sure Gabby gets enough veggies.”

“If she lacks for anything,” Jesse said, “it’s not a mother’s love.”

Maybe it was the wrong thing to say. Elizabeth stared at him for an awkward moment. He hoped he hadn’t offended her. But she changed the subject: “I guess Kemp told you about San Francisco.”

“Not much about it. That we’ll be hunting a runner. Maybe or maybe not the infamous letter-writer.”

“Are you okay with San Francisco? Because I don’t know what happened to you there, but it was obviously bad enough to leave you traumatized.”

“Do you want me to tell you about it?”

She frowned. “I’m not asking you to.”

“I know.”

“I guess the question is, whatever happened, will it affect your work?”

He had lied to Kemp when Kemp asked a less well-informed version of the same question. But this was Elizabeth. “I don’t know. It’s possible.”

“You have enemies there?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. I appreciate the honesty. This is strictly between us. But if I need to know something, you’ll tell me, right?”

“I give you my word.”

An hour had passed, and their plates were as empty as they were going to get. Elizabeth said, “My room is on the third floor.”

“The one they gave me is on the fourth.”

“And I think we should keep it that way. Like I said, what happened at Futurity Station—”

“When we shared a bed, you mean? Speaking bluntly, which you usually prefer to do.”

He had not thought she was capable of blushing, that obligatory act of females in popular fiction. But she came close. “Okay, well, I don’t know if we should do it again. Not because I don’t want to, necessarily. But because there’s no future in it.”

Future: How many meanings could such a simple word have?

“The thing is,” Elizabeth went on, not meeting his eyes, “I thought about this a whole lot when I was back home. Told myself it was a mistake and unfair to both of us. Unprofessional conduct. Do you know what I’m saying?”

“Yes.”

“And we’ve been apart long enough that being with you now seems kind of overwhelming.”

“All right.”

“That’s it? Just, all right?”

“I don’t know what else to say. I know I’m not entitled to expect anything. What happened at the depot is a memory I treasure, but I’m not so vain as to think it means I have a claim on you.”

The waiter arrived to clear their table. The rattle of plates and cutlery was the sound of empires falling. They folded their napkins and signed for their meals and walked in silence to the elevators. Jesse got a wave and a wink from Amos Creagh at the reception desk, which he pretended not to see. The elevator door rolled open; they punched their respective destinations into the panel of illuminated numbers.

The elevator rose to the third floor. The doors slid open. The doors slid closed.

“You missed your stop,” Jesse said.

“I changed my mind,” she said.

10

The Blackwell letters were a problem, but Kemp’s declaration to the press that he would publish the true story next December created enough ambiguity for the City to continue conducting its business more or less unmolested. Jesse supposed most folks thought of the visitors from the future as near-mythical beings—like the moon-men the New York Sun famously claimed to have discovered back in 1835—and mythical beings were expected to do shocking or unusual things. You’d be disappointed if they didn’t. The clergy and the columnists might disapprove, but that counted for little, barring further trouble.

The City train laid over for a week at Futurity Station. Ordinarily it would have dropped off passengers from New York and picked up a new load of tourists bound for San Francisco, all within a span of hours, but Kemp needed more time than that to confer with his managers and make contingency plans. Which left Jesse and Elizabeth with very little to do, not altogether a bad thing. Kemp gave everyone on his personal security team passes to the live shows in both Towers, and on their first night back at the City Jesse had the pleasure of sitting next to Elizabeth for the final performance of a week-long concert series by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, who had been lured home from a European tour with the promise of a substantial donation to the Negro college they represented.

Jesse enjoyed the music well enough, and the audience of mostly white twenty-first-century visitors rewarded the ensemble’s performance with a rapturous standing ovation. After that Kemp himself came onstage to present a bank draft for an implausibly large amount of money to one of the group’s bass singers, a man named Loudin—enough to sustain Fisk for decades, Jesse imagined. It seemed like a magnanimous gesture, though Elizabeth said sales of recordings of tonight’s performance would generate vastly larger sums for Kemp’s corporation, far in excess of what he had donated. As they filed out of the auditorium, Elizabeth said, “So you like gospel music?”

“Is that what you call what we just heard? I guess I like it all right.”

“I don’t know much about your taste in music.”

“There isn’t much to know. I like to hear a brass band every once in a while. I don’t play an instrument, but I guess I can sing as well as the next man. What about you?”

“I download all kinds of things,” she said obscurely.

Jesse got a taste of twenty-first-century music at the Cirque du Soleil show in Tower Two the following night. But the show was primarily an acrobatic exhibition, and he was too dazzled by the leaping and the colored lights to pay attention to the score. Much of the music was generated electronically, Elizabeth said, and it sounded to Jesse as if it had been produced by an orchestra of enormous, enthusiastically buzzing insects.

On their third night in the City they attended the much-anticipated Tower One event in which Thomas Edison spoke with a scientific celebrity of the future, whose name Jesse promptly forgot. Edison seemed intimidated by the stage lights and the audience’s enthusiasm, while the interviewer’s attempts to describe the devices that had evolved from Edison’s experiments left him looking bewildered and uncomfortable. But the inventor’s mood improved when Kemp came on stage with another bank draft, this one intended “to underwrite Mr. Edison’s further research.”

No mention was made of any patents that might have been preempted by the publication of Advice for Engineers from the City of Futurity. That book and its companion, Advice for Physicians and Medical Practitioners from the City of Futurity, had been hurried into print by a Boston publisher just days ago, in the hope that the prospect of safer bridges and more effective anodynes would subdue any incipient moral panic. As a result Kemp convinced his advisors that an immediate evacuation was uncalled for and that the City’s tours could safely continue, at least for now. The journey to San Francisco would resume, though any setbacks might make it the last.

On the day the train was due to leave Jesse took a pensive walk around Tower Two, through the ground-floor galleries and high tiled lobbies, the restaurants and theaters on the mezzanine level, the gymnasium and the heated swimming pool, the concrete pad where the Sikorsky airship squatted like a burnished steel damselfly. This was the labyrinth he had inhabited for four years, an illusion he had helped to create and sustain. Once Kemp closed the Mirror, ownership of all remaining City property would revert to the Union Pacific Railroad. The City would still be a tourist attraction. But its new proprietors would not be able to maintain these buildings indefinitely. The machines that made them habitable would wear out, irreplaceable parts would break. One day, Jesse thought, sooner rather than later, this whole vast palace would be a ruin. Barn owls would roost in the rafters of the Gallery of Manned Flight, and mice would nest under the chairs in the Theater of Tomorrow.

These thoughts haunted him as he rode the coach through the main gates toward Futurity Station and the westbound train, looking back at the towers where they stabbed the twilight like alabaster knives. He wanted to fix the image in his memory, to possess it as his own.

“Cheer up,” Elizabeth said. “I got you something.”

He turned away from the window and stared at her in amazement. She held a small box in her hand. He said, “A gift?”

“I’m a giving it to you, so yeah, you can call it a gift. Here.” She thrust the box at him as if it embarrassed her.

“What is it?”

“Nothing, really. It’s just an old iPod, plus a solar charger and some decent headphones. I loaded it with tunes from the Apple Store.”

“Tunes?”

“Music. Songs.”

“Music from the twenty-first century?”

“And the twentieth. I tried to be eclectic.”

“You brought this with you from the future?”

“Well, yeah. Once we have some privacy I can show you how it works.”

“Elizabeth … I don’t know how to thank you.”

“It’s not such a big deal.”

“I think it is.”

“Okay, I’m glad you like it.”

I was on her mind, Jesse thought. Out there in her unimaginable shadow of a future, I was on her mind. Just as she had been on his. And that was both a good and a bad thing.

The City train was a special train, pulled by one of the special engines Kemp had brought from the future—a coal-burning steam engine constructed with materials and expertise far in advance of anything available at the Schenectady Locomotive Works. The engine’s blunt, rounded lines and glossy black finish attracted gawkers wherever it passed, and the passenger cars behind it were almost as astonishing: heated or cooled as the weather required, fully electrified. The sleeping cars were expansive, the dining cars served hot meals at all hours, and all the windows were fashioned of a special glass that would repel bullets in case of an attack. The threat of violence was small but real: The Sioux had ceased hostilities for the most part, and some of the Pawnee had even been hired to stage mock attacks at scheduled hours for the entertainment of tourists, but banditry was always possible, and labor troubles were commonplace. Just days ago a strike against the B&O Railroad in West Virginia had spread to Maryland, shutting down freight and passenger traffic through Cumberland. These same events had happened in Elizabeth’s history, but weeks later—an example of what the experts called historical drift.

But at least for now, all these threats seemed a world away. For two days the train sped across the western prairies (fast as a bullet, Jesse thought, though Elizabeth seemed to find it quaintly slow), and Kemp summoned them each morning for a brief conference but made no other demands on their time. Jesse and Elizabeth had been assigned separate sleeping compartments but they spent their nights in Elizabeth’s room, where there was a sort of folding bed attached to the wall: hardly big enough even for one, but they found ways to make it accommodate two as the train rocked through the western darkness.

They talked, when they weren’t otherwise entangled. It seemed to Jesse that their talk became a kind of ethereal lovemaking, a subtler and more complex way of undressing each other. He tried to tell her—on the third night of the trip, rattling through Wyoming under stars as bright as pirate treasure—that the talk meant as much to him as what she casually called “the fucking.” But it was hard to explain. He said, “When I was younger—”

“Back in the whorehouse, you mean?”

The light came from an electrical fixture turned to its dimmest setting. Elizabeth sat cross-legged at the far end of the bed, dressed in nothing but the cotton shorts she called “panties” and a white cotton T-shirt. Jesse was down to his City-issue briefs, the kind with a loose flap in front, where his lax manhood was even now threatening to make a reappearance. “Back at Madame Chao’s,” he said, “I saw more of women’s bodies than most boys my age. I got to know cooch the way a farm boy knows chickens.”

“Uh-huh.”

“The girls at Madame Chao’s had a captive boy to scandalize, and they scandalized me until I couldn’t be scandalized any longer. The female body held no mysteries for me. The men who came to the door, I knew what they paid for, and I knew how much they paid for it. My father made sure I understood how the business worked, on the grounds that ignorance would be more dangerous to me than knowledge. But there were still mysteries.”

Elizabeth nodded, waiting for him to go on. The train ticked and muttered against the tracks. Between the rounds of their lovemaking Jesse had lost all sense of time. It was long past midnight, certainly. A sky like ink behind the bulletproof glass of the window. He said, “Those girls, none of them was born in China. Lots of Chinamen were brought over to work the mines and railroads, hardly any women. Madame Chao was born in Pekin, or so she told us, and she came to California by way of New Zealand, but most of her girls were native to the Tenderloin, born to white whores in the houses that served the Six Companies. Madame Chao dressed them up in cheap silks and gave them music-hall names and taught them the kind of Chinatown patois that impressed the customers, but they mostly spoke English on their own time. Some of them weren’t even partly Chinese. We had one girl who was some kind of mestiza from Churubusco, passing herself off under the name Lotus Blossom. Sunday afternoons, or any time the house wasn’t open for business, I might walk past an open door and see Lotus and Mei-Ling in nothing but their underclothes, darning socks or playing cards—laughing at some joke, talking the way they never talked during business hours. Times like that, they never invited me in. I think it was because those moments were all they really owned. They didn’t own what they had between their legs—they’d show that to a curious twelve-year-old if he asked nicely and didn’t take liberties, because it wasn’t intimate to them and showing it off wasn’t an intimacy—do you understand?”

“I guess so.”

“What they wouldn’t share were those private moments. And it was the very thing they refused to share that I began to crave—I craved it the way some men crave the fucking. I didn’t just want what those women sold, though it would be a lie to say I didn’t want it. I wanted the kind of intimacy a woman can’t be paid or forced to give.”

Elizabeth’s face had grown somber. “And did you get it?”

“No. Nor did I expect to. But I think it’s why—”

“Why what?”

“Why all this”—the darkened train compartment, the frankness of their bodies—“feels like such a gift.”

Elizabeth was silent, and Jesse was afraid he had embarrassed or insulted her. It was the first time he had tried to talk about these things, and he had done it clumsily. But the women he had known best were all whores or widows or working girls. Apart from his aunt Abbie, who lived on Nob Hill, there had been no Boston matrons in his social circle. He was about to apologize when she said, “Those girls—”

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have talked about them.”

“No, it’s the way you talk about them. Jesse … are any of those girls still alive?”

Elizabeth had a disconcerting talent for hearing all the words he was careful not to speak. He said, “A few of them survived.”

“We should talk about that.”

Maybe so. It was a subject Jesse wasn’t eager to discuss—Roscoe Candy and Madame Chao’s whores and what had happened to his sister—in part because he could hardly bear the thought of dragging Elizabeth into the sordid history of San Francisco’s Tenderloin. But there were things she needed to know, and maybe this was the best place to discuss them, here on a sleek train barreling through a desert night.

But the window had turned more blue than black, a horizon had begun to emerge from the darkness. The high Laramie plains. Purple mountains ahead, fruited plains behind. And before Jesse could frame a word, their pagers, buried under mounds of hastily discarded clothing, began to chime, and the train began to slow, and Elizabeth scrambled to dress herself.

11

“Change of plans,” Kemp said. “I’m ordering a full evacuation, beginning right now.”

The sun had just risen over the long Wyoming plains, visible through the bulletproof windows of the train as he and Elizabeth hurried forward to Kemp’s private car. Blue sky and brown earth, each streaked with red. But he could see none of that now, because Kemp’s car was windowless. It was a single undivided chamber, its walls lined with electrical devices and display screens. Jesse knew the train was connected by radio to the City and to the City’s outposts in San Francisco and New York, and he guessed Kemp had received some bad news by way of these machines. All of Kemp’s traveling security crew had crowded into the car, some twenty people, most in uniform, most with automatic pistols strapped to their hips. Most were male, and tall, and Jesse had to crane his head to see Kemp through a forest of shaved heads and black duck-billed caps.

“We’re putting the train on a siding at the nearest depot,” Kemp said. “We’ve got another train returning with a tour group from San Francisco. This afternoon we’ll be transferring passengers from our train to the eastbound train, and I need you to help with that. I don’t want any kind of panic breaking out. Anybody asks what’s up, you can say it’s some kind of legal dispute with Union Pacific. We’re printing up explanatory handouts—everybody will be getting a full refund, no questions asked. If people grumble I want you to be gracious about it, but we need everybody on the train back to Illinois by sundown. Any questions?”

One large and obvious one, Jesse thought. But no one was bold enough to ask it.

“Okay,” Kemp said. “We’re also recovering some gear from this depot, so we’ll need able bodies to lift and carry. Chavez and Epstein have already been briefed on all this and they’ll be forming you into teams. From here you head on over to the common room at the depot for duty assignments. Clear?” The security crew began filing toward the exit. Kemp said, “Jesse and Elizabeth, please stick around.”

When the car was empty but for the three of them, Kemp slumped into a chair. He looked exhausted, as if he had been awake all night. So had Jesse, of course, but for less onerous reasons. Elizabeth said, “We can lift and carry with the rest of them.”

“That’s not what you’re here for. Only the tourists are going back to the City. An evacuation takes time and work. We’re still bound for San Francisco.”

Jesse said, “Do you want to tell us why this is happening?”

“It’s not a secret, or at least it won’t be much longer. The papers published another fucking Blackwell letter. This one claims we arrived in 1873 with a fortune in counterfeit financial instruments, and it says we used these instruments as collateral to acquire two failing banks, the Union Trust Company and E. W. Clark. It says everything we’ve done since, building hotels, improving railroads, acquiring property, we did with what was basically fraudulent money.”

“Is that true?”

Kemp gave Jesse a long stare. “As a demonstration of the degree to which I trust you, I will tell you the answer is, to a certain extent, yes. The question I would ask is, so what? There’s nothing we’ve done I can’t defend. But I won’t be given the chance. In a few hours, everybody with deposits at Clark or Union Trust will be lining up to cash in their accounts. We’ll be lucky if it doesn’t trigger another financial crisis. And we won’t be forgiven for that. Coming on top of everything else, this is pretty much the definition of a nonrecoverable clusterfuck. And it gets worse.”

“Hard to see how.”

“Rail workers in Buffalo went on strike a couple of days ago—they pulled switch lights, greased the tracks, and fought a pitched battle with state militia. A police raid on the home of a ringleader turned up dozens of Glocks and a stash of ammunition. At least one Glock was used in an ambush that killed fifteen soldiers.”

“Onslow’s guns?”

“Probably purchased through the Chicago connection. But the City is being blamed for it.”

“So we’re going to San Francisco to speed up the evacuation?”

“Yeah, but I want you two for something more specific. We need to recover a couple of runners.”

“Is one of them the author of the Blackwell letters?”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself. One of the people I want you to find is the asshole who’s writing these letters, but that damage is done—at this point, I don’t care about stopping him. He can live or die on this side of the Mirror as far as I’m concerned. But he has someone with him. Someone who’s under his influence.” Kemp looked like he was about to lapse into another broody silence. “It’s my daughter,” he said. “I need you to help me find my daughter.”

The depot where they stopped had been built to supply water and fuel for City trains exclusively, and the City people had driven their spur line far enough into the hinterlands of Wyoming that few curiosity-seekers were likely to follow. The land here was spectacularly empty and, Jesse thought, beautiful. A high rolling plain, some of it sandstone-red, much of it a calico print of green buffalo grass and yellow wildflowers. Astride the horizon was a tumbled mountain range, hazy as a faded daguerreotype, and the air was cold even in the sharp spring sunlight, as if it had dallied over glaciers on its journey from the west.

The City people had put a building here, but it was nothing like the Illinois towers. It was little more than a wide, low bunker, next to a tin-roofed wooden outbuilding and a high steel tower on which was mounted something Elizabeth called a “microwave relay repeater.” There was also a paved road, hundreds of yards long but leading nowhere—it was a landing strip, Elizabeth said, but she didn’t know or wouldn’t say whether any airship had ever used it. Kemp sent Jesse and Elizabeth to a room in the bunker with dossiers to read: mainly information about Kemp’s daughter. But the raucous sound of men dismantling equipment for removal proved impossible to ignore, and at Elizabeth’s suggestion they carried their documents away from the building to a quieter place, a grassy mound in the lee of a sandstone outcrop.

Jesse read and reread the pages for most of an hour before he confessed to Elizabeth that there was much in them he simply didn’t understand.

“Okay,” she said. “Well, it’s not really complicated. Mercy Seraphina Kemp, twenty-eight years old. August Kemp’s daughter by his third wife—”

“Kemp seems to have divorced his spouses fairly freely.”

“Rich guy, multiple marriages, trophy wives, old story. He has five kids, but Mercy was the only one from his most recent marriage. It doesn’t say so in the dossier, but according to what I’ve read in People magazine he always doted on her. Private schools, an attempt at a medical degree before she dropped out of Stanford. Bright, athletic, bookish, and since her teen years, political. Spotted at various left-wing demos. She spent a month in Canada lending her name and celebrity status to some aboriginal protest movement.”

“Aboriginal?”

“Indians. The point is, she’s idealistic and she sides with the folks who don’t shop at Hermès or Net-a-Porter. The rebellious aristocrat who embraces the common people. You understand that trajectory?”

“She’s a reformer. Maybe for the purpose of annoying her father?”

“Maybe. They obviously had some kind of falling-out. But that doesn’t mean she’s not sincere.”

Jesse nodded.

“For our purposes,” Elizabeth said, “the important thing is that her activism put her in contact with a man named Theo Stromberg.”

“A Dutchman?”

“Born in Cleveland, so no.”

“And this Theo is suspected of being the author of the Blackwell letters?”

“There’s an appendix to the dossier—”

“I didn’t get that far.”

“Theo Stromberg is a guy in his late thirties with a long history of political activism. He has a poli-sci degree and taught for a while at a community college in California. Wrote a book called The New Hegemony, started a grassroots lobbying collective around campaign finance and regulatory issues. Arrested for civil disobedience more than once. Pretty ballsy guy, actually, with a following well outside the academic left. Maybe a bit of a martyr complex, but not a complete flake. Are you processing all this?”

“More or less.”

“Theo Stromberg’s history intersected with August Kemp’s a few years back. Theo agitated against licensing Mirror technology to private businesses even before Kemp started selling tickets. And Theo wasn’t content to walk a picket line or write an angry blog post. When Kemp opened his first Mirror resort, Theo tried to smuggle himself through.”

“And failed?”

“He got through the Mirror, but they intercepted him while he was still on City property. He was charged with trespassing and reckless endangerment, for which he received a suspended sentence. And when Kemp opened his second resort, our City, apparently Theo tried again.”

“Wouldn’t security have been even more diligent the second time around?”

“They were, but Theo’s not stupid, and he has backers with money. He came through the Mirror as a paying customer with credible credentials. Along with Mercy Seraphina Kemp.”

“They crossed together?”

“Mercy’s been in sporadic contact with Theo Stromberg since she dropped out of college. The relationship is off-and-on but maybe not purely platonic.”

“How long has Kemp known about this?”

“The dossier doesn’t say. Kemp hasn’t had regular contact with Mercy for almost a decade, so not hearing from her wouldn’t have set off any immediate alarms. And nobody identified Theo Stromberg as a runner until fairly recently. I’m guessing the gun-smuggling investigation turned up evidence pointing at Theo and Mercy, who may have been peripherally involved.”

Jesse nodded. “So it’s a dire revelation for Kemp. His rebellious daughter is a runner, and there’s not much time to bring her home.”

“He obviously thinks Mercy is in San Francisco, and he seems to believe we can find her before it’s too late. But yeah, she’s on the wrong side of a closing door.”

“Do you think she means to stay here?”

“Based on her history, I doubt it. But Theo might want to stay. And she might want to stay with Theo.”

“You think it’s her fondness for Theo Stromberg that’s driving her? Or her need to defy her father?”

Elizabeth was slow to reply. Jesse sensed something deeper in the narrative, some implication not recorded in the papers Kemp had been willing to show them, something even Elizabeth was reluctant to discuss.

“She might have other motives,” Elizabeth allowed. “Not all idealism is fake.”

“Back east,” Jesse said, “a runner once told me I ought to ask Kemp a question. He said I ought to ask him who invented the Mirror.” He waited, but Elizabeth didn’t speak. “Is the answer to that question pertinent to Mercy’s motives?”

“I don’t know. It might be. I’m not really supposed to talk about it.”

“But will you?”

She stood up, brushing dust from her trousers. “Maybe later. And you can tell me what you’re so afraid of in San Francisco.”

The eastbound train arrived at the siding as the sun was crossing the meridian. Jesse and Elizabeth helped escort passengers to their assigned cars, Jesse moving through the crowd of nervous twenty-first-century tourists as he had been taught to move among them back at the City: quietly, wordlessly. Kemp had already spoken to them about the need to return to Illinois, had promised refunds and compensation, but it wasn’t enough to suppress a current of uneasiness. “Like they just figured out this isn’t a giant theme park,” Elizabeth said.

“Is that what they come here for?”

“Some, sure. People come here for all kinds of reasons. Curiosity, bragging rights, boredom, who knows. If people want to think of 1877 as unspoiled America, Kemp is happy to let them. But reality tends to get in the way. Little things, like the horseshit in the streets. Or big things, like child labor and people dying of tuberculosis and yellow fever. Speaking of yellow fever, you might want to stay away from New Orleans next year.”

“Next year?”

“More than twenty thousand dead in the Mississippi River Valley. At least, that’s what happened where I come from. I looked it up on Wikipedia.”

In the depot’s rail yard, trainmen in orange vests supervised the noisy coupling and decoupling of passenger cars. The eastbound train grew longer; the train that would carry Kemp and his crew to San Francisco grew shorter.

Jesse considered the compound’s bunker, now stripped of electronic gear and machinery. “What happens to this place when the Mirror closes?”

“It becomes the property of Union Pacific, like every other spur line and microwave repeater along the line.”

“Is Kemp wealthy enough to just throw these things away?”

“It’s a concrete box and a steel tower, basically. And he’s not really throwing them away. The railroad is supposed to pay him a transfer fee when they take possession.”

“In gold, I suppose.”

“Gold’s negotiable, even in the future.”

“Unlike counterfeit specie.”

“Well, maybe that’s the real business of the City,” Elizabeth said. “Turning paper into gold.”

The long train full of tourists left the yard at sunset, stirring up whirlwinds of dust. Kemp ordered the westbound voyagers aboard the shorter train as soon as the engine had brought its boiler up to pressure, and Jesse followed Elizabeth aboard as the air grew cool and a legion of stars took possession of the sky.

The next day, as the train rolled through the western wilderness, Jesse resolved to tell Elizabeth about the killer Roscoe Candy.

There was plenty of time for talk. August Kemp had retreated to his private car, ostensibly to work his radio but also, Jesse suspected, to get enough liquor inside him to render the prospect of losing his daughter more bearable. Kemp wasn’t an obvious drinker, but he showed signs of being a sly and careful one. As Jesse’s father had been.

“Your father was a drunk?” Elizabeth asked.

They sat alone in an empty passenger car, in the plush seats ordinarily reserved for the paying customers. The valley of the Humboldt had given way to alkali desert, which had yielded in turn to the elevations of the Sierra Nevada: rock cuts and tunnels that plunged the train into momentary darkness, lakes that trapped sunlight in lenses of blue water.

All that, Jesse thought, and the weight of what lay ahead. “My father was a lot of things. He was a big man, he was a brawler when he needed to be, but he was an educated man. He taught me to read and made sure I practiced the skill. But he drank, yes. He tried not to let it make him weak, but it was wearing him down by the time of his last encounter with Roscoe Candy.”

Elizabeth said, “Tell me about Roscoe Candy.”

“He’s—a criminal.”

“Maybe you can expand on that?”

“In a way, there’s nothing unusual about Candy. Nobody knows for certain where he came from, but he was working the placer mines before he ever grew a beard. In that kind of life, there are only two ways of getting ahead: luck or intimidation. Roscoe took the second road. He had a talent for it. People were afraid of him from an early age. Afraid of his fearlessness, afraid of his henchmen, afraid of the knives he started to carry. By the time he turned twenty-five he owned a pair of hydraulic mines up around Placerville, deeded to him by the previous owner under suspicious circumstances. But Roscoe wasn’t content to lay back and let the money roll in. He was ambitious. He came into San Francisco with a fearsome reputation and a fat bankroll. Such men often gamble or drink their money away. Roscoe didn’t have those vices, at least not to excess. His real interest wasn’t the money, it was the power he gained from it. He used to say money beat a pistol any day, for the purpose of making a fool dance.” Jesse took a sip of water from a bottle he had bought in the dining car. DASANI, it said on the label. “Are there people like that where you come from?”

“Violent narcissistic assholes? Oh yeah.”

“What do you do about them?”

“Lock them up, if they get out of hand.”

“I don’t doubt Roscoe Candy should have been locked up. Maybe in Boston or New York he would have been—unless they elected him mayor instead—but San Francisco’s not that kind of town. It was built on a principle of lawlessness.”

“Wild frontier gold-rush town, I get it.”

“In San Francisco, for all practical purposes, the only law is the difference between what you can get away with and what you can enforce. Roscoe Candy learned pretty soon that he was too coarse in his manners to gain leverage with the opera-house crowd, but he could rule quite neatly in other kingdoms. He used his cash to buy himself into the whore business. Pretty soon half the bawdy houses and cooch dens on Jackson Street were either owned by Roscoe or paying tribute to him. He came up against plenty of rough men in the process, and he used them without mercy. His vanquished enemies usually turned up in the back alleys of the Tenderloin with their throats cut and their tongues pulled out through the slit.”

“Sicilian necktie,” Elizabeth said, grimacing.

“Roscoe’s no Sicilian. They say his father was a Polish forty-niner with a bad leg.”

“It’s just a name for it.”

Jesse looked out the window as the train traversed a mountain pass. Below, narrow valleys of ponderosa pine and brown chaparral. Above, a sky like blue vitreous enamel. “At Madame Chao’s we bought protection from a Dupont Street tong. Real protection, not just extortion. They protected us from Roscoe Candy.”

“Didn’t your father do that?”

“Roscoe wasn’t afraid of my father. My father could wrestle a rowdy sailor out the door any night of the week, but he wasn’t an army. But Roscoe was afraid of the Six Companies. So when Roscoe started making moves on the cooch trade, the tongs sent a man to Madame Chao’s to keep an eye on things. I say ‘man’—his name was Sonny Lau, and he was a boy not much older than myself, but he was already a seasoned boo how doy.”

“Boo how doy?”

“A highbinder. A hatchetman. Do you understand? He carried a hatchet with its handle sawed short, hidden up his sleeve when he wore Chinese clothes—though Sonny knew how to dress American when he wanted to. Roscoe Candy respected those Dupont Gai knife men, because he was a knife man himself. Sonny’s tong was part of the See Yup Company, a faction called the Moon of Peace and Contentment Society, which did business on Dupont and Jackson, small-time gambling and opium dens mainly, though they operated one of the better Chinese theaters. As long as Moon of Peace and Contentment was looking after us, Roscoe kept his distance.”

“So what went wrong?”

“Well, Madame Chao wasn’t your run-of-the-mill bordello keeper. Among the Chinese in San Francisco, I doubt there’s even one female for ten men. A lot of those women came over as slaves, basically. Not Madame Chao. Madame Chao fought her way across half the known world before she got to California, at least according to the stories she liked to tell. She wasn’t from the same part of China as all those Canton men. She spoke a fancier brand of Chinese. The girls in her bordello were half-breeds, and she catered almost entirely to the white trade—the tong leaders treated her with a mix of respect and contempt, and she felt exactly the same about them. So whenever Roscoe started to make trouble, Moon of Peace and Contentment would raise the price of protection. And Madame Chao wasn’t shy about complaining. But from the tong’s point of view, Madame Chao was no bargain even when she paid in full. Much as they hated Roscoe Candy, there was always a risk involved in taking on a white man, especially a white man like Roscoe. And eventually Roscoe realized it would be easier to strike a deal with the See Yups than to fight them.”

“You didn’t see that coming?”

“It was always a possibility, but the only warning we got was from Sonny Lau, and it came too late.”

Speaking about what came next was difficult, even in broad daylight. Watching Elizabeth’s face would only make it harder. Jesse turned to the window and fixed his eyes on the sun-shot haze that divided heaven from earth.

“I was down in Chinatown when it happened. It was a Thursday night, hot, with a spit of rain coming down, just enough to wet the streets and slick your collar. Most nights, I worked at Madame Chao’s alongside my father. I was as big as him, about as strong, and quicker, though maybe not as intimidating. But the night started slow, and Madame Chao sent me out to deliver a payment to the See Yup man who supplied us with opium.”

“So, not just a bordello but also an opium den?”

“The white men who came to Madame Chao’s believed a proper Chinese whorehouse ought to serve opium on the side. But no, we weren’t a ‘den,’ strictly speaking. We were a cooch house that let the customers buy a bowl if they insisted on it. Most of the girls liked a smoke now and then themselves—it made their work easier—and Madame Chao wasn’t above smoking a pill after the last guests left.”

“But not you?”

“I had an idea that sobriety was a weapon. I thought it would give me an advantage over my enemies. I wasn’t sober for moral reasons—I was sober for the same reason a man carries a concealed pistol.”

“Okay,” Elizabeth said.

“So I’m headed back to Madame Chao’s when Sonny Lau pops out of an alley and pulls me in after him. His clothes are gaudy with blood. Some of it is his own—his face is cut in a couple of places, the sleeves of his shirt are open on a couple of bad gashes—but most of it’s someone else’s. He’s so worked up he can hardly talk. He’s begging me not to go back to Madame Chao’s. Sonny speaks English as well as the next man, but he’s mixing in Chinese words. Eyes rolling in his head like a mad dog. ‘Roscoe’s men,’ he says, and ‘there was too many of them!’ There’s more, but he can’t bring himself to say it, so I have to ask. What about my father, what about Phoebe? ‘I stood with your father,’ he says. ‘We killed some men. But there were too many! He’s still inside! Phoebe, too.’”

Jesse felt a pressure on his shoulder, which was Elizabeth’s hand, and he appreciated the attempt to comfort him. But if he submitted to her compassion he wouldn’t be able to speak.

High above the passing valley, a turkey buzzard circled and circled like a feral thought.

“I leave him and run to the house. There’s a mob of Candy’s men milling around in front of it. These are white men who followed him from the mining camps for the most part, but they’re armed like highbinders, kitchen cleavers in their hands and pistols on their hips. I can see smoke coming from one of the upper windows of the house, one of the girls’ rooms, and I can smell it, a cindery stink. There’s no chance I can get past Candy’s men, but there are other ways inside. Down an alley, up a drainpipe, across the roof of a mercantile shop to an attic window. Inside, the first room I come to is Madame Chao’s. She’s dead, her throat cut. More blood than I’ve ever seen in one place, and I’m no stranger to blood. It’s a revenge killing pure and simple—revenge on all of us, for the sin of having put an obstacle in Candy’s way.

“I have a Bowie knife up my own sleeve, because that’s how Sonny taught me to carry it; I’m nobody’s boo how doy, but I know better than to go out unarmed. I have a short blade, too, a little knife I keep in a leather sheath in my hip pocket, but that’s all, and it’s not enough to go up against even one of Candy’s mob. But it seems like the hatchetmen are all downstairs at the moment, and anyway I’m not in my right mind any longer, so I head for the attic room where Phoebe sleeps, the same room where my father keeps his possessions, such as they are, a few books and mementos, including his Gibbon and his Pilgrim’s Progress. Some of the rooms I pass on the way to the stairs, the doors are open. Some of them, I can see the girls inside. And they’re all dead, in ugly ways. I look because I can’t stop myself, but there’s nothing I can do for them.

“The door to my father’s room is standing open, but I hear movement inside. So I slow down and come up on it quietly, or trying to be quiet, though I’m breathing like there’s not enough air in the world to fill my lungs. I put my head around to take look. But all that stealth was futile. Candy’s in there, and he has my father in a wrestler’s grip, and his flensing knife is at my father’s throat, and they’re both looking right at me.

“It seems like the world goes silent and motionless. Then I see my father’s eyes darting left. I know him well enough to know he’s frightened, but he was never a man to panic in a tight place. He’s trying to tell me something.

“Candy says, ‘You might as well step in, boy. You got nowhere else to go.’

“So I step into the room. Candy’s wearing the kind of ridiculous clothing he favors, a vest as green as a beetle’s wing, a schoolboy cap, a clawhammer jacket half a size too small for him. All drenched in blood, and blood on his face like scarlet freckles. He knows me as my father’s son. He smiles.

“I realize my father is gesturing with his eyes at the wardrobe in the corner of the room. I know better than to stare at it. The wardrobe, hardly bigger than a steamer trunk standing on end, is where Phoebe hides out whenever there’s trouble in the house. She must be in there now. In the dark, trying not to cry out.

“‘Best put down that knife,’ Candy says to me.

“The Bowie knife is in my right hand. I was foolishly about to take it in my left. I’m left-handed, but Candy doesn’t know that. There’s nothing useful I can do with the knife now that Candy’s seen it. So I put it on the floor. With my right hand.

“‘Now step away from it,’ Candy says.

“I take two sidelong steps away from the knife toward the only other real furniture in the room: a writing desk. The desk has a drawer. I know my father keeps a loaded pistol in the drawer. It might still be there.

“The fire at the other end of the house is spreading, and a haze of smoke rolls along the ceiling. I hear myself telling Candy to let my father go. Candy says, ‘Well, why would I do that? I’m here to kill him! Watch.’ So he slides his flensing knife through my father’s throat. My father is still looking at me as it happens, as the knowledge of his own death comes into his eyes. While the blood’s still gushing Candy makes another long slice, belly to rib cage, right through my father’s shirt. Three bone buttons drop to the floor and rattle like dice. My father’s insides also fall to the floor—as much of them as he can’t catch in his hands. Then he follows them down.

“What I do next I do without thinking. I take my small knife from my pocket. With my right hand. And I hold it in front of me, point toward Roscoe Candy. Who’s delighted to see it. He can’t take his eyes off it. Like it’s the jolliest thing he’s ever seen. He wipes his bloody flensing blade on the tail of his blood-soaked vest and grins. ‘Come on, boy!’ he says. ‘Come on, then! Take me! Take me, while your old man’s lights are still warm—take me!’”

Jesse realized he was shouting. But the passenger car was empty except for him and Elizabeth, and Elizabeth had only flinched.

The train cornered a bend. Sunlight tracked along the rows of seats like a moving finger.

“I wave that little knife as if I’m looking for the best way to cut him—and maybe I am—but my better hand is behind my back, and my better hand has ideas of its own. By the time Candy gets tired of waiting and rushes me, my left hand has opened the desk drawer and found the pistol there.

“I don’t know for certain it’s loaded. But there’s no point just showing it to him. As I level it, he’s almost on me. I pull the trigger and the pistol jumps in my hand.”

Elizabeth said, “You shot him.”

“I shot him.”

The emptiness of that declaration: It had felt the same way when it happened. A vulgar anticlimax. Roscoe grabbing his pendulous belly and screaming, falling to the floor next to Jesse’s father and writhing there, the flensing knife forgotten even as Jesse kicks it away from his flailing hands.

“And Phoebe was in the wardrobe?”

“Yes.”

“Was she all right?”

“No.” After a time he added, “She’d run away from Roscoe’s highbinders when they came into the house, but not before one of them cut her. Maybe Roscoe himself. Her face was—well. She lost an eye.”

“But she was alive?”

“She was alive.”

“And Candy?”

“The hatchetmen heard the gunshot and came boiling up the stairs, but I took Phoebe out a back window. The flames were spreading fast. I left Candy in a burning house with a bullet in his gut. I imagined there was no way he could survive.”

“But he did.”

“So I’ve been told.”

“You think it’s true?”

“I don’t see how. But I suppose stranger things have happened.”

“And … Phoebe?”

“I hope to see her soon.” He had no more words to offer, on this or any other subject, but he realized Elizabeth was staring at him. “What is it?”

“Your hands.”

His hands were in his lap, clenched so tightly the nails had drawn blood.

Jesse cleaned himself up in the passenger car’s absurdly luxurious bathroom. By the time he rejoined Elizabeth he was calm again.

They moved to the club car for a meal. There were only a half dozen other diners present, all from Kemp’s security staff. The waiter, a local hire who must have been accustomed to serving crowds of well-heeled twenty-first-century tourists, greeted Jesse and Elizabeth with the nervous volubility of a man who knows he’s about to lose his job. Outside, the sun had retreated behind the mountain peaks. Jesse wasn’t especially hungry but he ordered what Elizabeth ordered, steak and a salad and a beer. She said, “This thing about you not drinking—”

“You know I’m not a teetotaler. I never claimed to be. I just don’t drink to the point of stupidity.”

“That’s reassuring.”

“That I drink beer?”

“It makes you seem a little more human.”

“As opposed to?”

“Never mind. You realize this is our last night on the train? We’ll be in San Francisco tomorrow morning.”

“Yes.”

“In the middle of an emergency evac procedure. And once we get this thing with Kemp’s daughter sorted out—”

“You’ll go home. I know. But we don’t have to dwell on it.”

“I guess we don’t.”

“May I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Back where you come from, someone like me must have lived and died. Exactly as I would have if the City had never appeared. Is that true?”

She hesitated. “Actually, I Googled you a couple of times.”

“I probably shouldn’t ask what that means.”

“Historical records and all that. But your name never came up.”

“There was no record of me?”

“No. I’m sorry, Jesse. I guess that must feel weird.”

“I’m flattered you thought to look. But no, I’m not sorry there was nothing to find. Better men than me have lived and died unnoticed. It’s not a bad company to be in.” Though it was a melancholy thing to contemplate, as the light faded from the sky.

The waiter delivered their salads. “Another question,” he said.

“Ask.”

“I asked it once already. It’s the one about the Mirror and who invented it.”

“Ah,” Elizabeth said. “Okay. Kemp doesn’t like us talking about it, but I guess we’re past that now. But it’s complicated, Jesse. There’s the official story. There’s the real story. And there’s the conspiracy theory.”

“Tell me the real story.”

“I would, but I don’t know what it is.”

“Well, then what’s the official story? And who declared it official?”

“The official story is that the Mirror technology came out of a research project at DARPA. DARPA’s an agency that does cutting-edge scientific research for the military. DARPA supposedly stumbled on a way of creating what the wonks call ‘material translations in ontological Hilbert space’ while working on ultra-high-energy lasers. No, I don’t know what that means any better than you do. The idea is that they discovered some weird new physics that, unfortunately from their point of view, turned out not to be weaponizable in any practical way. So the core concepts were farmed out for civilian research and potential commercial applications. So far, the only enterprise that’s managed to turn a profit with the technology is August Kemp’s. Kemp’s people patented a technique for scaling up the Hilbert translation, making it possible to send large objects from our own universe to one that resembles our past.”

“The Mirror, that is to say.”

“The Mirror.”

“But not everyone accepts this story?”

“Well, the Mirror looks pretty strange even by twenty-first-century standards. It’s not like rockets. People understand rockets—a moon rocket is just a Fourth of July rocket, scaled up. But the Mirror? Traveling into a past that isn’t actually our past? Basically unprecedented. So a bunch of alternative theories started to circulate, usually involving aliens or the Antichrist. But one story in particular got a lot of traction. It goes like this. Shortly after 9/11—you know about 9/11?”

“An attack on New York City by Mussulman fanatics.” Jesse had overheard enough talk among the tourists to make that obvious deduction.

“After 9/11, national and local security agencies start looking hard at anyone with suspicious ID or travel histories. Supposedly, two dudes with no fixed address get red-flagged by some such agency, and when they’re brought in for questioning they turn out to be not entirely human. They’re only a little over five foot tall, their IDs don’t check out, a medical examination reveals all kinds of weird physical anomalies, and when they’re questioned they clam up—even under torture, according to some accounts. But their movements are traced back to a house where investigators find something even stranger concealed in the basement: a version of the Mirror. In this story, DARPA is assigned the work of reverse-engineering the technology, basically taking it apart and figuring out what it does and how it works. Amazingly, they succeed at that. You see where this is going?”

Jesse said, “You were visited from some version of your own future. The visitors were arrested and their Mirror was impounded.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Do you think there’s any truth to it?”

“Probably not, but how would I know? In some versions of the story the visitors died in captivity. In others, they’re being held in a secret government facility—Area 51 or like that. Like most of these fringe theories, there’s not much evidence you can pin down. The most plausible corroboration comes from a highly classified Defense Department memo, part of a batch of documents leaked by a whistleblower a few years ago. But the language is ambiguous. It might be talking about ordinary terrorist detainees, not post-human gnomes from the far reaches of Hilbert space.”

“The story was never confirmed or disproved?”

“Not as far as I know.”

“Why, in that case, would a runner tell me to ask August Kemp who invented the Mirror?”

“I guess to fuck with you. Or to fuck with Kemp. This runner you talked to, was he politically motivated?”

“He was planning to prevent the conception of a man named Hitler, not yet born.”

“Oh, for God’s sake. So yes, politically motivated. Like the anti-Mirror movement back home, most of these political runners take the conspiracy theory seriously. They think Kemp knows the truth and is hiding it so he can exploit the technology to his own advantage.”

“The runner in San Francisco, Theo Stromberg—he shares these beliefs?”

“He wants to be taken seriously, so he distances himself from the wacky stuff, but he doesn’t deny it altogether.”

“And Mercy Kemp?”

“She’s on record as a believer.”

After the meal Jesse followed Elizabeth to her stateroom. It was their last night on the train, and he thought he should say something more about the dangers that might be waiting in San Francisco. But she put her finger to her lips as she closed the door behind her. “No more talk. I want music. You have that iPod I gave you?”

He took it from his kit bag. She used a cable to connect the device to a port on the wall of the room. Jesse said, “Are there loudspeakers?”

“Built into the ceiling.”

“Are all trains so luxurious where you come from?”

“Hardly. We’re living like the one percent tonight.”

A drumbeat began. Elizabeth turned up the volume. Jesse said, “Music from your time.”

“From before my time. I have an uncle in New Hampshire who teaches a course on the theory and history of popular music. Very cool guy. When I was younger he used to send me CDs and downloads, so I got to hear all kinds of things.”

“What we’re hearing, is it something you like?”

She unbuttoned her shirt. “It’s a classic album. Hendrix, Axis Bold as Love.”

“It’s very loud.”

“It’s supposed to be.”

“Axes? Bold as love?”

“Axis.”

“Is love bold?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Shut up and take off your clothes, let’s find out.”