As the airship neared the port, Bushell spied half a dozen fat cigar shapes hanging in the sky, decked out in the varying bright colors of their airship lines. He wished desperately for them to disappear. A steward approached with two pots and some cups on a silver tray. “Would you like tea or coffee?” he asked the two RAMs.
“What I’d like is to land,” Bushell said. “Have you got that in a pot?” The steward beat a quick retreat. Land the Prairie Schooner did, at twenty past seven. By then, another handful of airships had queued up behind it. As soon as their feet hit the ground, Bushell and Stanley rushed for the transfer agent, who’d set up a podium near the tail of the dirigible. With his longer legs, Stanley got there first. “Do we still have time to catch the Six Nations Special?” he gasped, panting. The transfer agent gave him a bright, meaningless professional smile. “I’m afraid not, sir,” she said. “The Six Nations Special is the airship that departed from this mooring mast so the Prairie Schooner could land.”
Bushell and Stanley looked at each other in dismay. They would be late to Doshoweh after all.
VIII
The airship company and its representatives did everything they could for the RAMs. Later, Bushell would have admitted as much. At the time, converting airship tickets to ones for the railroad, making his way by cab from the O’Hare Airship Port to the La Salle Street Station in the middle of the morning rush hour, and then settling down to wait until the train pulled out at a quarter past twelve all aggravated his liver.
After loading his pockets with so much change that he jingled when he walked, he telephoned the RAM office and local constables in Doshoweh to warn them he’d been delayed. Making long-distance calls from public phones was an exasperating process at the best of times, too. You stood there drumming your fingers against the glass of the booth, waiting for your call to be transferred from one operator to another. Calling into the Six Nations added a new layer of frustration, for some of the operators seemed to have only an imperfect grasp of English. But at last he managed to leave his messages, one after the other. He fed shillings and florins and heavy silver crowns into the public telephone until the local operator pronounced herself satisfied.
The Twentieth-Century Limited rolled through the provinces of Tippecanoe and Miami. Doshoweh lay ten hours away. As soon as Bushell left the dining car after a luncheon of chicken pot pie and apricot and almond custard, he pulled out his pocket watch, glowered at it, and said, “If we’d caught the Six Nations Special, we’d be there by now.”
“I know,” Samuel Stanley said, and wisely let it go at that.
Bushell sat down and stayed in his seat, making himself hold still though he wanted to get up and pace. Every so often, the train rolled through another industrial town with smokestacks vomiting forth the waste of the factories that made the NAU one of the marvels of the world. To compensate for that smoke, almost every motorcar on the roads was a clean electric.
Stanley noticed that, too. “Good thing towns are packed so close together hereabouts,” he said.
“Electrics are fine for the short haul, but steamers have it all over them when it comes to going a long way.” He looked out the window, drummed his fingers on the table. “If it weren’t for all the electricity from the big grids in the coal-mining provinces, this part of the NAU would be too dirty for anyone to want to live here.”
“That’s true,” Bushell said. “But Pennsylvania and western Virginia and eastern Franklin are filthier than they would be otherwise, to make up for it.”
After cutting across the neck of the Huron Peninsula, they reached Toledo on the shore of Lake Erie a little before six o’clock. From then on, they had the lake on their left hand as they steamed east toward Doshoweh. After a brief pause there, the Twentieth-Century Limited would swing inland through the Six Nations and then into New York province, pulling into New York City twenty hours after leaving Astoria.
For supper, the dining car offered a lobster a la Newburg that would have done a Boston seaside restaurant proud. Cream and sherry and noodles and sweet chunks of lobster meat helped soften Bushell’s resentment at being delayed. When he lighted a cigar afterwards, he was, if not at peace with the world, at least willing to declare a temporary cease-fire.
Thanks to the lobster, the very good Le Montrachet that went with it, and, most of all, what seemed like an endless stream of days on the road, Bushell was yawning when the train pulled to a stop in Doshoweh a few minutes after eleven. The conductor announced the stop not only in English but also, reading from a card, in the Iroquois language. Most of the people who got up to leave the train along with Bushell and Stanley had straight black hair and coppery skins, though they dressed like anyone else. In most respects, the train station was a train station, and might have been in any part of the NAU or, indeed, in any part of the British Empire. But underneath the English-language signs directing passengers, people waiting to pick up passengers, and visitors were what Bushell guessed to be their equivalents in Iroquois.
Samuel Stanley nodded toward one of those signs. “Doesn’t seem quite right,” he remarked, his voice so low only Bushell heard him. “They’re part of the Empire; they should use English.”
“So long as they’re loyal, I don’t think the King-Emperor cares what language they speak,” Bushell answered.
“Can’t fault ‘em for that. The Iroquois Scouts rank right up there with the Gurkha Rifles,” Stanley said: a soldier’s assessment. His mouth twisted as he went on, “They aren’t like the Frenchies in Quebec, giving aid and comfort to the Holy Alliance every chance they get. Good thing the Sons of Liberty can’t stand the idea of Frenchies in their new, ever-so-free country; if the Sons would have ‘em, they’d sure as hell join, and make our lives even more miserable.”
He left off grumbling then. Two white men and an extraordinarily well dressed Iroquois stood together talking; one of the whites was holding up a cardboard sign that read, TOM SAM. Bushell nodded approval as he walked up to greet them: his last name had been bandied about in the newspapers altogether too much lately. Tom and Sam, though, might be anyone.
The two white men were local RAMs, a captain and a lieutenant named Sylvanus Greeley and Charles Lucas. Greeley, who wore a mustache waxed to handlebar perfection, said, “And let me introduce you to Major Shikalimo of the Doshoweh constabulary.” He noticed Bushell’s surprise at being presented to a local major instead of the other way around, and added, “Shikalimo here is nephew to Otetiani, the Tododaho - the Grand Sachem, you might say - of the Iroquois.”
As far as Bushell was concerned, that explained why Shikalimo had made major at such an early age he couldn’t have been much past twenty-five - but not much more. The Iroquois, though, accepted the order of the introductions as if he’d imagined nothing else.
He was gracious enough, saying, “Delight to make your acquaintance, gentlemen,” in an accent that shouted Oxford or Cambridge and made Bushell feel decidedly - and unexpectedly - colonial. Yet despite the cool elegance of his speech, his black homburg, and his pinstriped suit and waistcoat, he had a twinkle in his eye and a smile that flashed all the brighter because of his dark skin.
“You chaps will be about done in, I expect,” Greeley said when the introductions were done. “We’ve booked you into the Hotel Ahgusweyo, which is conveniently close to our headquarters, and also to the constabulary station.”