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 reaclass="underline" 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 walclass="underline" 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?”