They were not dead, but this was the place where they had left the sensible world, and that was why Abbie had wanted to come. She carried with her Jesse’s last letter, written under the letterhead of the City, on crisp white paper made soft as cloth by years of handling. She didn’t need to look at it. She had committed it to memory long ago.
Dear Aunt Abbie,
Please forgive my brevity. I have not much time to write. If you receive this letter it will be by the graces of a woman named Doris Vanderkamp. I have also given her a large number of gold eagles in the hope that she will deliver at least some fraction of them to you. Doris is kindhearted but of questionable reliability, so I cannot depend on her to do more than put this letter in the mail, care of your family in Boston in case you have sold the house on California Street. I hope my words, if nothing else, reach you safely.
Several carriages and an omnibus arrived in the courtyard inside the pitted wall of the City.
Abbie had arranged to join a guided group tour, organized by the Women’s Auxiliary of the Illinois Grange and consisting mainly of females. It was an end-of-autumn tour, at a discounted price. The weather was chilly, and low cloud obscured the heights of the two immense towers; but the summer crowds were absent, which Abbie considered a benefit. She left the carriage and joined the crowd of thirty or so women assembling around the hired guide, a young man who worked at the City on behalf of the Union Pacific Railroad, the nominal owner of the property.
Doris Vanderkamp had arrived on the doorstep of Abbie’s Boston family late in the summer of 1877, bearing the letter and three gold coins. Doris had impressed Abbie as less virtuous than Jesse wanted to believe, and those coins had once, quite obviously, had many companions, now absent. But a certain Christian charity of spirit prevented Abbie from resenting the theft, if it could be called that. Doris, an unmarried woman in a perilous world, had surely needed the money more than Abbie ever would. And Doris had faithfully delivered the letter itself, which was more precious than any coin.
“The towers are tall,” the guide said, “but you ladies needn’t worry that they might fall down. They are built around steel skeletons and are immensely sturdy. Buildings constructed in the same manner are rising in our big cities even now. Soon enough, structures tall as these may be commonplace in Chicago and New York! Join me as we enter the lobby of the nearest tower.”
The tower’s doors and windows were dark in the long October light. The buildings had been damaged by artillery fire in the long-ago siege, and a wind like the breath of Boreas blew through their many gaps and hollows.
Phoebe’s wound is being treated as I write. I am at the City of Futurity now. Its two great towers are under siege, and will soon be abandoned—I think they will make magnificent ruins, with time. But I must speak bluntly. If this letter is all that reaches you—if months or years have passed and neither Phoebe nor I have contacted you—you should think of us as lost. Just what that means I cannot at present say.
Abbie and Soo Yee hung back from the crowd as the guide began his work in earnest. First they passed into the grand lobby of what had once been Tower Two, a room as big as a cathedral but cold as the autumn prairie. In its heyday these spaces would have been heated and illuminated by electricity and filled with astonishing displays. The original contract, which Mr. August Kemp had signed with the railroad, had provided for fuel and spare parts to be left behind after the Mirror was closed, to allow the City to operate as a tourist attraction for a few years more. But that genial agreement had come to grief in the City’s final confrontation with the forces sent to arrest Mr. Kemp. Whatever had not already been stripped from the buildings by Kemp’s men had been looted or vandalized by the victorious troops, or shipped off to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.
Of course, the building was an astonishment even in its present condition. Its current owners had attempted to replicate some of its former glory, with recreated models of airships, crude wood and plaster dioramas, and murals, less than expertly painted, of the so-called world of futurity. “Not our futurity,” the guide was careful to point out, “as even our visitors were willing to admit.”
“Where were they from,” Soo Yee asked in a whisper, “if not the future?”
Supposedly, from another leaf in some great (perhaps infinite) Book of Worlds, a book in which each page was an instantiated moment. Which meant—Abbie had given the subject much thought—no moment every truly ceased to exist. Every “now” was inscribed in a vaster Now. “The mind of God?” Soo Yee asked.
Soo Yee had lately joined a church, at Abbie’s urging, and her question was in earnest. “Perhaps so,” Abbie said.
“And the people who built this City, all those adulterers and Sodomites, they knew how to travel through God’s mind?”
“Some say they learned the trick from others, wiser than themselves.”
I apologize again for the events that injured Phoebe and defiled the house you so generously shared with us. It is a consolation to me and I hope to you that you will never again be troubled by Mr. R. Candy.
I expect many hard things will be said about the people of the future and their presence among us. Much of this disapproval they have earned and richly deserve. But not all. Do not judge them by Mr. August Kemp’s behavior, no matter what the newspapers say. Remember that Elizabeth DePaul is one of them, and Elizabeth has adopted the cause of Phoebe’s welfare as her own, and has been invaluable in getting her the care she needs.
The tour did not include the high parts of the Towers. There had been attempts, the guide said, to restore or replace the original mechanical elevators, but not even Mr. Thomas Edison’s people (on loan from Menlo Park) had been able to find a safe way of doing so. The stairs were intact, and special tours were sometimes arranged for the physically fit, but such a climb would of course be too strenuous for the ladies. However, the guide said, photographs taken from the famous Observation Deck could be purchased at the conclusion of the tour.
Abbie supposed at least some of the fairer sex might have been willing to attempt the climb; but she was, admittedly, not one of them, not with the persistent dull pain that had lodged in her hip this last year. The views were said to be incomparable, but she would leave the Observation Deck to the athletes, the crows, and the four indifferent winds. It was the ruin of the Mirror she especially wanted to see.
Soo Yee wondered aloud, as they descended a lantern-lit stairway to an underground tunnel connecting the towers, how such a corrupt people could have built such astounding things.
“Engineering is not an art reserved exclusively to Christians,” Abbie said.
“What do you mean—were they Freemasons?”
“No, of course not. What are you learning at that church you attend? No, I mean they may have been great builders, as the ancient Egyptians were, even without the enlightenment of Scripture. And at least some of the visitors were Christians, or claimed to be.”
“Their Christianity isn’t like ours.”
“Shall we judge them on that basis? I don’t want to sound like a pagan philosopher,”—thinking of Heraclitus, about whom she had read in an article in Godey’s—“but all things change with time—perhaps even Christianity.”
“A truth is a truth forever,” Soo Yee declared, hurrying after the tour group, which threatened to disappear around a bend in the tunnel.