“What, like stage magic? So you’re a magician?”
“No. Nor was my father … but he learned a few card tricks in his youth.”
“And that’s how you lifted Dekker’s pass without anyone noticing, including Dekker?”
“I imagine, if I had done such a thing, I might be reluctant to admit it.” In fact he was angry at himself for having done it at all. It had been an intolerable risk for a trivial act of revenge.
“Your secret’s safe with me. Dekker can’t prove anything, and everyone in Tower One security except Dekker thinks it’s pretty funny.” She thought for a moment. “It’s important to you to keep your job.”
“Yes, ma’am. I mean, yes.”
“Any particular reason?”
“None that I care to discuss.”
“Okay. That’s interesting, though, about your father being a magician.”
“He wasn’t a magician. He earned his keep by opening doors. Do you come from a family of soldiers, Elizabeth?”
She laughed. “No. My father was an electrical engineer until he smoked himself into a premature coronary. My mother worked as a beautician, but these days she mostly watches Fox News and goes to church.”
“I’m sure they’re fine people.”
“I’m glad somebody’s sure.” Moisture in the air had made the windows opaque, and Elizabeth scrubbed the glass with the heel of her hand. “But you know the saying? ‘All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’”
“Who said that? Some wise man from your century?”
She shrugged. “I think I heard it on Oprah.”
Futurity Station was a smudge on the northern horizon now, as if someone had run a sooty finger across the wet Illinois plains. If Jesse craned his head he could see the rest of this convoy of coaches and horse buses bending toward the rail town like ants to a cabbage. And when the veils of rain parted he could see a skyline of wooden structures, the largest and tallest of which was the three-story Excelsior Hotel, where they would be spending the night.
The depot’s smell preceded it. Jesse saw Elizabeth wrinkle her nose. Two years ago the City had installed waste disposal amenities for Futurity Station, but the town had rapidly outgrown those niceties. The weather could only have made it worse, Jesse imagined; the streets would be flooded and wet air would enclose the stench like a dome. “Sometimes I wonder why you’re here at all.”
“I’m here to make sure you don’t screw up.”
He smiled at what she probably intended as a witticism. “Not you personally. You twenty-first-century people. The guests in Tower One. What do you come here for? I don’t see the attraction. I understand well enough how it works for my people: the wonders of the future, a better draw than anything Barnum ever dreamed up. We pay to see your moving pictures and swim in your heated pools and ride in your helicopter, and if we can’t afford a week in the City we can come to Futurity Station to buy trinkets and catch a glimpse of the airship. But your people, the people who leave the twenty-first century to come here—what’s the draw? I don’t see it. People are still out of work from the Panic of ’73. We’re little more than a decade gone from a war that filled the streets with widows and legless veterans. The Indians are in rebellion, and the South is proving as difficult to reconstruct as a broken egg. It’s a little surprising to me that so many guests should care to drop in and visit just now.”
He was obscurely pleased that Elizabeth didn’t have an easy answer for him. She sat in thoughtful silence for a moment. Then she said, “The Mirror is a machine. It has limitations. It won’t take you to last month, because it can’t do that kind of precision—a short jump is like threading a needle. And it won’t take you back much farther than a century or two, because a longer jump would require a ridiculous amount of energy. So we have a window of opportunity, and you’re in it.”
“But that’s not the only reason.”
“Well, no. And in a way you’re right—not everybody wants to visit. You notice we don’t get a lot of black tourists? Because a place with a recent history of slavery doesn’t seem like an ideal vacation spot to most African-Americans.”
“I’ve seen black people in the tour groups.”
“Sure, if they have an academic interest or a family history that matters to them. But think about what the City has to do to keep them safe. Armed escorts, gated hotels in San Francisco and New York.”
All that was true. Just last winter the New York Tribune had managed to place a reporter in a tour group, and the result had been such sensational headlines as NEGRO PRESIDENT ELECTED IN THE FUTURE and IN FUTURE AMERICA VICE RUNS RAMPANT. But City authorities refused to confirm or deny the stories, and since there was an apparently endless supply of lies and rumors—no fewer than fifteen books had been published this year alone, all claiming to reveal “secrets the City won’t tell,” all mutually contradictory—the controversy had amounted to nothing substantial.
“And yet you come,” Jesse said.
“Because you’re what we used to be. Or we like to think so. If I say ‘1876’ to somebody back home they’re going to picture, I don’t know, cowboys and Indians, or maybe a shady New England town with an ice cream parlor and fat politicians in waistcoats and celluloid collars, some kind of Disneyland-Main Street-Frontierland deal…”
“Dear God,” Jesse said.
“Of course it’s bullshit, and we kind of know that, but—look at it this way: If somebody in 1876 invents a time machine and offers you a trip to see the Crusades, say, or the building of the pyramids, wouldn’t you accept?”
“I suppose I might. As long as I was guaranteed protection from the Saracens or the pharaohs.”
“Well, yeah,” Elizabeth said. “Exactly.”
The convoy from the City of Futurity pulled into a long coach barn next to the rail depot at Futurity Station.
It wasn’t the depot Jesse remembered from his arrival here four years ago, when he had been unceremoniously evicted from the baggage car of a westbound express. Back then, it hadn’t even had a name. It had been a coaling station and a water tank then, not a locus of human habitation, but four summers of proximity to the City of Futurity had turned it into a boomtown with hundreds of permanent inhabitants.
The new train station had been constructed in partnership with the Central Pacific Railroad, and one of its purposes was to protect paying guests from the idly curious. Today’s paying guests were returning from the City to meet either the westbound train at six o’clock or the eastbound at seven; later, the same convoy of vehicles would carry fresh guests back to the City. Jesse and Elizabeth waited until the other conveyances were empty before leaving their coach. Their coachman, a local hire, handed down their luggage: a cloth valise apiece for Elizabeth and Jesse, each containing fresh clothes and sundry supplies, including a pistol and ammunition. Jesse exchanged a wave with the coachman before heading to the south end of the cavernous enclosed carriageway.
The rain had subsided to a drizzle. “Let me carry your bag,” Jesse said.
“I can carry it.”
“It’s better if I do. For the sake of appearances.”
Elizabeth gave him a hard look but handed over the valise.
The Excelsior Hotel across the street was fully occupied. Just one room had been reserved for them, and Jesse nodded at the desk clerk and signed the register as Jesse Cullum & wife. The Tower One security boss had warned Jesse of the necessity of the subterfuge. If he had a problem about sharing quarters, Barton had warned him, he needed to get over it. But Jesse didn’t anticipate any problem. Apart from a certain inevitable awkwardness.