He was obscurely pleased that Elizabeth didn’t have an easy answer for him. She sat in thoughtful silence for a moment. Then she said, “The Mirror is a machine. It has limitations. It won’t take you to last month, because it can’t do that kind of precision—a short jump is like threading a needle. And it won’t take you back much farther than a century or two, because a longer jump would require a ridiculous amount of energy. So we have a window of opportunity, and you’re in it.”
“But that’s not the only reason.”
“Well, no. And in a way you’re right—not everybody wants to visit. You notice we don’t get a lot of black tourists? Because a place with a recent history of slavery doesn’t seem like an ideal vacation spot to most African-Americans.”
“I’ve seen black people in the tour groups.”
“Sure, if they have an academic interest or a family history that matters to them. But think about what the City has to do to keep them safe. Armed escorts, gated hotels in San Francisco and New York.”
All that was true. Just last winter the New York Tribune had managed to place a reporter in a tour group, and the result had been such sensational headlines as NEGRO PRESIDENT ELECTED IN THE FUTURE and IN FUTURE AMERICA VICE RUNS RAMPANT. But City authorities refused to confirm or deny the stories, and since there was an apparently endless supply of lies and rumors—no fewer than fifteen books had been published this year alone, all claiming to reveal “secrets the City won’t tell,” all mutually contradictory—the controversy had amounted to nothing substantial.
“And yet you come,” Jesse said.
“Because you’re what we used to be. Or we like to think so. If I say ‘1876’ to somebody back home they’re going to picture, I don’t know, cowboys and Indians, or maybe a shady New England town with an ice cream parlor and fat politicians in waistcoats and celluloid collars, some kind of Disneyland-Main Street-Frontierland deal…”
“Dear God,” Jesse said.
“Of course it’s bullshit, and we kind of know that, but—look at it this way: If somebody in 1876 invents a time machine and offers you a trip to see the Crusades, say, or the building of the pyramids, wouldn’t you accept?”
“I suppose I might. As long as I was guaranteed protection from the Saracens or the pharaohs.”
“Well, yeah,” Elizabeth said. “Exactly.”
* * *
The convoy from the City of Futurity pulled into a long coach barn next to the rail depot at Futurity Station.
It wasn’t the depot Jesse remembered from his arrival here four years ago, when he had been unceremoniously evicted from the baggage car of a westbound express. Back then, it hadn’t even had a name. It had been a coaling station and a water tank then, not a locus of human habitation, but four summers of proximity to the City of Futurity had turned it into a boomtown with hundreds of permanent inhabitants.
The new train station had been constructed in partnership with the Central Pacific Railroad, and one of its purposes was to protect paying guests from the idly curious. Today’s paying guests were returning from the City to meet either the westbound train at six o’clock or the eastbound at seven; later, the same convoy of vehicles would carry fresh guests back to the City. Jesse and Elizabeth waited until the other conveyances were empty before leaving their coach. Their coachman, a local hire, handed down their luggage: a cloth valise apiece for Elizabeth and Jesse, each containing fresh clothes and sundry supplies, including a pistol and ammunition. Jesse exchanged a wave with the coachman before heading to the south end of the cavernous enclosed carriageway.
The rain had subsided to a drizzle. “Let me carry your bag,” Jesse said.
“I can carry it.”
“It’s better if I do. For the sake of appearances.”
Elizabeth gave him a hard look but handed over the valise.
The Excelsior Hotel across the street was fully occupied. Just one room had been reserved for them, and Jesse nodded at the desk clerk and signed the register as Jesse Cullum & wife. The Tower One security boss had warned Jesse of the necessity of the subterfuge. If he had a problem about sharing quarters, Barton had warned him, he needed to get over it. But Jesse didn’t anticipate any problem. Apart from a certain inevitable awkwardness.
A bellman escorted them to their room, three stories up. As soon as they were alone Elizabeth opened the window. A rising wind billowed the cloth curtains and seemed to mitigate the stench of the town. Unless, Jesse thought, we’re just growing accustomed to it.
In any case the daylight would be gone within hours. He cleared his throat and said, “You should know … I’m not a sound sleeper. Sometimes in the night…”
Elizabeth turned away from the window and gave him her full attention. “Sometimes in the night what?”
“I suffer from nightmares. Sometimes I wake up. In an agitated state. Possibly shouting.”
“This happens often?”
“I’m hoping it won’t happen at all. But I thought you should know. If it does happen, don’t be frightened. As soon as I’m fully awake, it stops.”
He was gratified that Elizabeth nodded as if he had said nothing surprising. “I’ll bear that in mind,” she said.
* * *
They shared an evening meal in the hotel’s dining room, then returned to their room and made a plan for the following day. Elizabeth used a device like a fancy pager to report back to Barton at the City. Then they went to bed.
There were two beds in the room. Jesse turned down the gaslights as Elizabeth undressed. She was unselfconscious about it. Her dress looked conventional, but the stays and buttons were false. It was held together with something called Velcro, which made a sound like a dog’s fart as she unfastened it. Underneath she wore briefs and a cotton halter.
Jesse’s clothes were more simply made. City-issue underwear for men came in two varieties, briefs and shorts. Jesse preferred the briefs. They kept everything in place without getting in the way. As he put his hand to the mantle of the lamp Elizabeth said, “You sure you’ve never been in a war?”
She was looking at the various scars on his body. “Not a war that was formally declared.”
The gaslight flickered down to nothing.
“Must have hurt like hell,” Elizabeth said.
He didn’t answer.
* * *
He put himself to sleep as he often did, by thinking about the complexities of time travel. It was a more reliable soporific than counting sheep.
The concept had been explained to him early in his tenure at the City. The City people had been careful to communicate the idea that time travel was not (as they said) linear—that there was not just one history but many histories, side by side. They talked about a philosophical problem called the Grandfather Paradox: if a time traveler killed his grandfather in the cradle, would the time traveler himself then cease to exist? But it didn’t apply, they said, because in this case past and future were different worlds. City people could kill all the grandfathers they liked—all it meant was that this world’s future would not perfectly replicate the future from which the City people came.
Jesse thought about all those threads of time laid side-by-side like fibers in a rope, each thread a world with an identical history. The Mirror was a device that braided histories together, so that human beings and physical objects could pass back and forth. It amounted to time travel because every accessible world was identical to the source, but less ancient. A nearby history might be only a few seconds or minutes less old, so that traveling to it would seem like traveling a few seconds or minutes into the past. More distant histories were separated by years, centuries, eons. But as Elizabeth had said, there were practical limits to what a Mirror could do. Traveling to a nearby history required relatively little energy but an impossible degree of precision. Traveling to a very distant history required little precision but an absurd amount of energy.