“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.”