“The runner in San Francisco, Theo Stromberg—he shares these beliefs?”
“He wants to be taken seriously, so he distances himself from the wacky stuff, but he doesn’t deny it altogether.”
“And Mercy Kemp?”
“She’s on record as a believer.”
* * *
After the meal Jesse followed Elizabeth to her stateroom. It was their last night on the train, and he thought he should say something more about the dangers that might be waiting in San Francisco. But she put her finger to her lips as she closed the door behind her. “No more talk. I want music. You have that iPod I gave you?”
He took it from his kit bag. She used a cable to connect the device to a port on the wall of the room. Jesse said, “Are there loudspeakers?”
“Built into the ceiling.”
“Are all trains so luxurious where you come from?”
“Hardly. We’re living like the one percent tonight.”
A drumbeat began. Elizabeth turned up the volume. Jesse said, “Music from your time.”
“From before my time. I have an uncle in New Hampshire who teaches a course on the theory and history of popular music. Very cool guy. When I was younger he used to send me CDs and downloads, so I got to hear all kinds of things.”
“What we’re hearing, is it something you like?”
She unbuttoned her shirt. “It’s a classic album. Hendrix, Axis Bold as Love.”
“It’s very loud.”
“It’s supposed to be.”
“Axes? Bold as love?”
“Axis.”
“Is love bold?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Shut up and take off your clothes, let’s find out.”
PART THREE
The Siege of Futurity
—1877—
12
Jesse woke to a pounding on the stateroom door.
He had slept as soundly as he had slept in months, and it took him a moment to place himself. The train was motionless. End of the line, he thought, which would be the terminal at the Oakland Long Wharf. There was nothing to see beyond the window but a tangle of telegraph wires, a billboard advertising vinegar bitters, and a flat gray sky. But he knew by some animal instinct that the train had brought him home, or close to home: to the shores of San Francisco Bay, a ferry ride away from Market Street.
It wasn’t a good feeling.
Beside him, Elizabeth sat up and said, “What the hell?”
The pounding continued. Jesse had just succeeded in pulling on his briefs when the door flew open. The impatient party in the corridor was August Kemp. In his hand Kemp held a newspaper, which he threw at Jesse’s feet. “We’re fucked!”
It was outrageous behavior. Kemp had burst in on a woman while she was in a state of undress. Jesse suppressed an impulse to throw him out of the room—Elizabeth put a restraining hand on his shoulder—and picked up the paper, a spindled copy of yesterday’s Examiner “What’s this about?”
“Read it and weep. Both of you. Conference in the terminal cafeteria at eight. And Jesse? I want a word with you after that.”
* * *
Four years ago this wing of the terminal building had been refurbished by City architects, who had turned it into a glittering arcade with plate-glass skylights and a forest of electrified signage. Ordinarily, the arrival of a City train would have filled it with twenty-first-century tourists. Today it was a ghost town, nobody present but a skeleton crew of nervous-looking City employees and the few dozen passengers and security people Kemp had brought along with him. Jesse settled at one of the empty tables in the cafeteria and unfurled the newspaper Kemp had thrown at him. The story that had alarmed Kemp was on the front page. GUNS OF FUTURITY DISCOVERED, the headline said. Jesse read the article carefully, then offered the paper to Elizabeth.
She gave the close-set columns of type an unhappy glance. “Is it about the Glocks they recovered in Buffalo?”
“In part. But other guns have turned up.”
“Turned up where?”
“Well, the post office found a futuristic pistol in a seized package bound for Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé. The Nez Percé are restive—they’re due to be removed to a reservation in Idaho, but they don’t want to give up their tribal lands. How did that play out, back where you come from?”
“I don’t know. I’m not really a history buff. I’m guessing it ended badly.”
“It was only one Glock, with a single clip, but apparently it came with a letter warning of an attack on a Nez Percé camp on the Clearwater River.”
“Like the Blackwell letters.”
“Written in the same hand, some say. One pistol doesn’t amount to much, but the warnings in the letter could have given the Nez Percé a real advantage in a fight. Does that sound like something that might interest Theo Stromberg?”
“Forcing an entire native population to move from its ancestral land is considered a human rights offense where I come from, so yeah. Is that all?”
“Not by half. A similar weapon was found in the hands of a group of Negro Republicans in Caddo County, Louisiana. The pistol was confiscated before it could be loaded or fired, but Congress is making a scandal of it. No one knows whether the gun also came with a letter, because the Negros were lynched before they could be questioned.”
“Jesus,” Elizabeth said.
“Added to that, the labor troubles. There’s been discontent among rail workers ever since the Baltimore and Ohio cut wages. The Cumberland line’s been shut down for days. The Governor of Maryland called in the National Guard, and the troops were fired on in Baltimore. Another Futurity gun was involved, according to some accounts. The facts are still muddy, but politicos are rushing to blame the City for all of this. There’s talk of issuing a warrant for the arrest of August Kemp, though it’s not clear who has the jurisdiction to do that.”
Kemp came into the cafeteria as if summoned by the mention of his name. Jesse and Elizabeth shouldered into the crowd that formed as Kemp stepped up onto a cafeteria bench to address them. He started with a summary of the current situation, not much different from what Jesse had distilled from the pages of the Examiner. “We’re in no immediate danger,” he said, “but this is a problem that’s only going to get worse, and the situation could deteriorate quickly. Our New York site got the evacuation order two days ago—everybody east of the Mississippi is either back at the City or on their way—but we still have vulnerable personnel in San Francisco, and securing their safe return is our highest priority right now.”
The most direct route from San Francisco to Oakland was by water, either via the regularly scheduled ferries or the City’s own steam ferry, Futurity. Ordinarily, tourists were ferried into San Francisco and accommodated at a City hotel on the Point Lobos toll road. All such tourists had been evacuated as of yesterday, but there were City employees still stationed at the Folsom Street docks, and they needed to be at the Oakland terminal by Wednesday morning—because, Kemp said, “that’s when the last train’s leaving.”
Two days from now. An absurdly short span of time in which to locate and recover Kemp’s daughter. Jesse looked at Elizabeth, who shook her head in disbelief.
Kemp went on to parcel out duties to various factions of his security crew and declare the meeting over. He approached Jesse as the crowd dispersed. “I’ve set up a temporary office in one of the function rooms off the east corridor. Follow me there.”
Elizabeth said, “Sir, I—”
“No. Not you. Just Jesse. You can wait here for us. This won’t take long.”
* * *
Jesse followed Kemp to a room furnished with a desk and a single chair. Both the desk and the chair were twenty-first-century items, unadorned and bluntly functional. Both men remained standing. Kemp said, “You’ve been drawing a paycheck for what, four years now?”