A bellman escorted them to their room, three stories up. As soon as they were alone Elizabeth opened the window. A rising wind billowed the cloth curtains and seemed to mitigate the stench of the town. Unless, Jesse thought, we’re just growing accustomed to it.
In any case the daylight would be gone within hours. He cleared his throat and said, “You should know … I’m not a sound sleeper. Sometimes in the night…”
Elizabeth turned away from the window and gave him her full attention. “Sometimes in the night what?”
“I suffer from nightmares. Sometimes I wake up. In an agitated state. Possibly shouting.”
“This happens often?”
“I’m hoping it won’t happen at all. But I thought you should know. If it does happen, don’t be frightened. As soon as I’m fully awake, it stops.”
He was gratified that Elizabeth nodded as if he had said nothing surprising. “I’ll bear that in mind,” she said.
They shared an evening meal in the hotel’s dining room, then returned to their room and made a plan for the following day. Elizabeth used a device like a fancy pager to report back to Barton at the City. Then they went to bed.
There were two beds in the room. Jesse turned down the gaslights as Elizabeth undressed. She was unselfconscious about it. Her dress looked conventional, but the stays and buttons were false. It was held together with something called Velcro, which made a sound like a dog’s fart as she unfastened it. Underneath she wore briefs and a cotton halter.
Jesse’s clothes were more simply made. City-issue underwear for men came in two varieties, briefs and shorts. Jesse preferred the briefs. They kept everything in place without getting in the way. As he put his hand to the mantle of the lamp Elizabeth said, “You sure you’ve never been in a war?”
She was looking at the various scars on his body. “Not a war that was formally declared.”
The gaslight flickered down to nothing.
“Must have hurt like hell,” Elizabeth said.
He didn’t answer.
He put himself to sleep as he often did, by thinking about the complexities of time travel. It was a more reliable soporific than counting sheep.
The concept had been explained to him early in his tenure at the City. The City people had been careful to communicate the idea that time travel was not (as they said) linear—that there was not just one history but many histories, side by side. They talked about a philosophical problem called the Grandfather Paradox: if a time traveler killed his grandfather in the cradle, would the time traveler himself then cease to exist? But it didn’t apply, they said, because in this case past and future were different worlds. City people could kill all the grandfathers they liked—all it meant was that this world’s future would not perfectly replicate the future from which the City people came.
Jesse thought about all those threads of time laid side-by-side like fibers in a rope, each thread a world with an identical history. The Mirror was a device that braided histories together, so that human beings and physical objects could pass back and forth. It amounted to time travel because every accessible world was identical to the source, but less ancient. A nearby history might be only a few seconds or minutes less old, so that traveling to it would seem like traveling a few seconds or minutes into the past. More distant histories were separated by years, centuries, eons. But as Elizabeth had said, there were practical limits to what a Mirror could do. Traveling to a nearby history required relatively little energy but an impossible degree of precision. Traveling to a very distant history required little precision but an absurd amount of energy.
What kind of energy it required Jesse could not begin to guess. But he knew, intuitively, that the Mirror was the most remarkable thing the City people had produced—more remarkable than a helicopter, more remarkable even than a photograph of the icy plains of Mars. It was more than a machine—it was a metaphysical machine. It was a steamship that plied the winding rivers of heaven itself.
Phoebe was crying.
That was unusual. Phoebe was twelve years old, and she took pride in her maturity. She had taught herself not to cry when she was unhappy. But she was crying now, and Jesse was frustrated because he couldn’t locate the source of the sound.
The walls were on fire.
The walls were on fire, and his father stood in the center of the room, cupping blood in his hands. His father’s expression was sorrowful. He bowed at the waist like a man at prayer.
“I tried to stop it,” Jesse said, or tried to say.
Phoebe was inside a steamer trunk, he realized. He went to the trunk to open it. But it was locked, the key was nowhere to be found, and the brass fittings were too hot to touch.
“I’m sorry,” Jesse’s father said.
He opened his hands. Blood and unspeakable things dropped to the floor.
In the trunk, Phoebe screamed.
“You’re safe,” someone said.
Jesse became aware of the room, the stink of his own sweat, the rawness of his throat, the cotton sheet coiled around him like a rope.
“You’re safe.”
It was Elizabeth who spoke. And she was holding his hand. Or at least compressing his hands against his body in a kind of wrestling grip, so that he couldn’t lash out at her. “Thank you, I’m awake now,” he managed to say, and she released him and took a wary step back.
He was profoundly embarrassed. “Elizabeth, I’m sorry…”
“Nothing to be sorry for.” She was a dark presence in a room lit only by moonlight. “You okay now?” Her voice was soft and had no anger in it.
“Yes.”
“All right then.”
She went back to her own bed.
No further words were spoken. Outside, the rain had stopped. A cooling wind came through the window. Elizabeth’s bed creaked as she turned on her side. Jesse pulled his blanket around his shoulders and stared into the darkness and waited for morning.
4
He woke at dawn. He dressed and washed and waited while Elizabeth did the same, then escorted her to the hotel’s dining room. She insisted on taking all her meals here, where City officials periodically inspected both the food and the kitchen. Jesse objected that this would anchor them to the Excelsior, but Elizabeth wouldn’t be moved: “You people don’t have practical refrigeration. You put lead oxide in your milk and God knows what in your sausages. You call dysentery ‘the summer complaint.’ So this is where we eat, period, full stop.”
He didn’t argue. He was still ashamed that he had troubled her with his nightmare, but he couldn’t bring himself to speak about it, and she didn’t raise the subject. Which was just as well, since they had the day’s work ahead of them.
Futurity Station was more circus than town, Jesse thought. Like a circus, it had an air of impermanence and expedience. And like a circus, its main sources of revenue were dreams, deception, sex, and theft.