She circled the bed and took his pulse, and then felt his forehead. «You are on the mend, though. That is the good news. But now, we must warn the Army base of the message we intercepted. We must tell them to have the men standing at the ready, not drunk in the kife.»
Bantam started to get up. «No. If they know where we are, they'll arrest us --»
Rachelle pushed him back down. «I am not daft! Yes, we would be nibbed and quick. I had thought of that. That's why we'll need a nose instead.»
«A … what?»
«An intermediary.»
«Who?»
«I was thinking that Mr. Hardin's friend from the Cape and Cane would be suitable. That dodgy DionySYS fellow. I can send him a p-mail from here.»
«What, what? There can't be pneumatic tubes that reach up here! They'd snap in the wind!»
Rachelle laughed. «Have you forgotten the Volzstrang Pin so easily? Of course there are.»
«Oh. Right," Bantam said tapping his forehead. «That's me, still not thinking with my top hat.»
«In any event, I will ask him to kindly relay the message to Mr. Volzstrang, who can attend to it on that end. I will send the message in such a species of mathematics that Mr. Volzstrang will know at once that it could not be a forgery, and that I must be its author.»
«And then Volzstrang will raise the alarm. Keep everyone on their toes.»
«Yes," Rachelle said, pushing him down. «Now. You must rest.»
It was accidental, of course, but she was tantalizingly close. In the act of pushing him back down, she'd overextended just a bit more than she had anticipated, and her weight now was on his chest.
Their eyes met. She didn't pull away.
The curve of her waist, the line of her neck … these things were immediate and palpable in new ways he had not considered.
Normally, this would be the moment Ben Bantam would certainly not miss. But this was different. Rachelle was different from any girl he'd known before. Something held him back.
She seemed to sense this and pushed herself back up. «Sleep, Mr. Bantam. Rest. And when you awake, the message will have been accomplished.»
Bantam watched her as she moved away. Gracefully, she sat at the ornate desk across the room. She pulled stationary from the drawer and began to compose her message.
WHEN BANTAM AWOKE again it was midday.
Rachelle lay next to him, on top of the covers and still fully dressed except for her hat. She was curled up breathing softly.
He resisted the urge to sweep her hair away from her eyes.
Gently, he rose. He pulled his suspenders on, and adjusted the various buttons and things. Damn weird clothes, he thought.
He went to the open air balcony. A sea of cloud stretched in every direction. A wide staircase of marble stood just before him, descending down into mist as though one could simply walk across the sky.
It should have been ferociously windy and cold. But it wasn't. It was strangely peaceful.
Above him were three massive propellers, continuously making small adjustments, rotating this or that was every so slightly, in an effort to keep the Phlogistonian in a perfectly stable hover above New York City.
Ah, and possibly the propellers also worked against the wind as well, balancing it breath for breath. Bantam wasn't sure exactly how the sky had been tamed, but it had been.
Then Rachelle was suddenly beside him. «How did you sleep?»
«Like a dead man. That Pinion …» He shook his head.
«Yes," she said quietly. «The message has been sent, as I promised. There is nothing more we can do now. And you must eat. Here. Let me order room service. The firepit on the balcony is quite marvelous. We can have a salon of our own, just the two of us.»
A TRAY OF meats and cheeses and wine was set up for them on the balcony. Bantam could hardly stop himself from consuming it in a rude and ravenous fashion, looking up at Rachelle with apologetic eyes — but she seemed not notice. Instead, she ate with the dainty grace of a woman of this age.
As the day wore on into evening, she asked him many questions about his world. Bantam spent most of the time telling her about the Beatles and Facebook and iPhones and television and airplanes and even the moon landing in his own 1969. She could not get enough of these details, and he barely had any time to ask her more about her own world.
But then conversation drifted to their beliefs in supernatural phenemenon, and she offered a tale of a medium that caused him to visibly sit up and listen.
«It's quite strange, really. You see, a number of years ago, I went to see a spiritualist. It was kind of on a lark, a dare, you know, with a friend. I didn't take it seriously at all. I thought it all flim-flam: you know, tricks done with ropes and confederates in the dark, designed to elicit wonder with the sudden ringing of bells and shaking of tambourines.
«But this was nothing like that. Instead, it took place fully in the light of day. The woman — a didikko, a gypsy, darkly beautiful — she was confident and strong. There was nothing about her that bespoke a charlatan. As you know, I am a scientist, and I am no flat: I am very confident in my knowledge. Likewise, she displayed the same confidence, the same fire in her eye about her occult art.
«She bid me to sit down and she looked at my palm. She looked for a long time. She seemed to descry some puzzlement there, a conundrum that she could not solve. Finally she said, 'You were meant to have one true love, but fate has given you two. And yet your fate is double: you have two lives, and they intertwine over one another. I have never seen anything like this. I do not know what it means. But it is clear that in both lives, you are quite important. You alleviate the suffering of billions. That is your fate, that is your truest purpose. Astonishingly, you manage it not once but twice, though in wholly different ways both times.'"
«This woman," Bantam said, his throat tight. «What was her name?»
«Yes. I will never forget it. Madame Europa Romani.»
Bantam felt like he'd just been socked in the gut.
«What is it?» asked Rachelle.
«I met her granddaughter," Bantam said. «Before I came back. She read my fortune and she told me something odd as well.» The encounter had been disturbing to Bantam; she had thrown him out, horrified. But for Rachelle's sake, he kept that to himself. «She told me I would meet my soulmate.»
Rachelle smiled broadly at this. «That is most peculiar. You see, Madame Romani told me something else along those lines. She said that a man would come from far away, further than I could imagine. This man would be my true love. And I would know him by this sign: that upon our first meeting, he would notice a fascinator in my hair. And he would take it from me and perform an illusion with it.»
His heart jack-hammered in his chest. Rachelle's eyes burned into his soul just then. They moved closer.
«And do you believe her?»
«I never used to believe in such things," Rachelle said. «I was a scientist. But now … now, I must confess: I do. How else can one explain what you did with the fascinator?
«No one else has ever thought to do something like that?»
«No. You must understand that here, such a thing is not done. Men are not so forward. Oh, I know you didn't understand that, being from your world, where I suspect such things are much more … liberated.» She smiled at him and pulled the fascinator from her hair — causing it to drop in a waterfall of auburn down her shoulders. «Being from a liberated world, you are educated in the arts of love, are you not Mr. Bantam?»
He nodded, not able to take his eyes off her and coming fully awake now. «Uh huh. And you? I mean … like Hendrix said: are you … experienced?»
She didn't answer directly. «Whoever this 'Hendrix' is, I suspect he would instruct you to follow me inside this very instant.»
Bantam did so.
Once inside, she leaped forward into his arms and they both collapsed into the bed, mouths clamped on one another, as Bantam tried to figure out how, exactly, a woman's clothes were removed in this world.