The City train laid over for a week at Futurity Station. Ordinarily it would have dropped off passengers from New York and picked up a new load of tourists bound for San Francisco, all within a span of hours, but Kemp needed more time than that to confer with his managers and make contingency plans. Which left Jesse and Elizabeth with very little to do, not altogether a bad thing. Kemp gave everyone on his personal security team passes to the live shows in both Towers, and on their first night back at the City Jesse had the pleasure of sitting next to Elizabeth for the final performance of a week-long concert series by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, who had been lured home from a European tour with the promise of a substantial donation to the Negro college they represented.
Jesse enjoyed the music well enough, and the audience of mostly white twenty-first-century visitors rewarded the ensemble’s performance with a rapturous standing ovation. After that Kemp himself came onstage to present a bank draft for an implausibly large amount of money to one of the group’s bass singers, a man named Loudin—enough to sustain Fisk for decades, Jesse imagined. It seemed like a magnanimous gesture, though Elizabeth said sales of recordings of tonight’s performance would generate vastly larger sums for Kemp’s corporation, far in excess of what he had donated. As they filed out of the auditorium, Elizabeth said, “So you like gospel music?”
“Is that what you call what we just heard? I guess I like it all right.”
“I don’t know much about your taste in music.”
“There isn’t much to know. I like to hear a brass band every once in a while. I don’t play an instrument, but I guess I can sing as well as the next man. What about you?”
“I download all kinds of things,” she said obscurely.
Jesse got a taste of twenty-first-century music at the Cirque du Soleil show in Tower Two the following night. But the show was primarily an acrobatic exhibition, and he was too dazzled by the leaping and the colored lights to pay attention to the score. Much of the music was generated electronically, Elizabeth said, and it sounded to Jesse as if it had been produced by an orchestra of enormous, enthusiastically buzzing insects.
On their third night in the City they attended the much-anticipated Tower One event in which Thomas Edison spoke with a scientific celebrity of the future, whose name Jesse promptly forgot. Edison seemed intimidated by the stage lights and the audience’s enthusiasm, while the interviewer’s attempts to describe the devices that had evolved from Edison’s experiments left him looking bewildered and uncomfortable. But the inventor’s mood improved when Kemp came on stage with another bank draft, this one intended “to underwrite Mr. Edison’s further research.”
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—”