Jesse didn’t react when Theo mentioned the man killed at Futurity Station. Nor did Elizabeth. But it raised a question. He said, “Some of those Glocks ended up in the wrong hands, didn’t they?”
The glow of moral certainty vanished from Theo’s face. “Not everyone in my supply chain was reliable. I had to work with locals and low-level City employees. The guns were never supposed to be more than symbolic. One pistol, one clip, a dramatic way of proving to the people I wrote to that the warnings I sent them really came from the future. But more weapons came across than I ever intended.”
“A piece or two got sold that shouldn’t have, in other words.”
“Apparently.”
“Private buyers.”
“I suppose so.”
“Including the man who tried to shoot Ulysses S. Grant. Which is another reason you might be eager to get out of 1877.”
Theo didn’t have an answer for that.
Out on the street, the shadows had grown and merged. The air was still, the sky the color of blue ink. A horse car rattled up Montgomery. From time to time, passing men glanced up at the hotel. Jesse said to Elizabeth, “Too many people know this room number. We already rented a room upstairs—we should go there.”
He was afraid she might accuse him of paranoia, a twenty-first-century word for unreasonable fear (and apparently a common malady in that world). But she nodded curtly. “Good thought.”
Mercy Kemp looked at her bag. “I can finish packing—”
Jesse said, “You won’t need all that, and we’ll travel lighter without it.”
She gave it a moment’s thought and shrugged. Sensible attitude, Jesse thought. Moments later they were in a nearly identical room one floor up. According to his pocket watch, another hour had passed without further word from August Kemp.
It seemed to Jesse that Mercy had a little of her father about her. It was nothing obvious, just her quick brown eyes, a sort of economy of motion, a hint of the elder Kemp’s natural authority. Jesse knew she was a woman who had once been made to feel special and permitted to expect obedience from others, but there was something chastened in her, too—a humility she must have learned, not inherited. He asked how she had come to join Theo in the adventures that had landed her in a hotel south of Market.
She shrugged. “I believe in the cause.”
It sounded like a well-rehearsed answer to a foolish question. “The cause of bankrupting your father?”
“The cause of letting people know what he’s doing here and stopping him from doing it again.”
“By ‘here,’ you mean San Francisco?”
“I mean your whole world.”
“And what’s he doing to it, in your opinion?”
“Exploiting it, corrupting it, deceiving it, and abandoning it as soon as he’s extracted enough gold to turn a profit.”
“He might say he’s given as much as he’s taken.”
“I’m sure he would. But that would be a lie.”
“Do you hate your father, Ms. Kemp? Did he raise you badly?”
“That’s a People magazine kind of question.” She gave him an impatient look, then sighed and said, “I don’t hate my father. I mean, he wasn’t around a lot, so maybe I have some issues. But that’s not why I joined the movement, and it’s not why I’m here.”
She seemed reluctant to say more. “Well, I won’t press—”
“She’s a truther,” Elizabeth said.
Mercy sat upright. “That’s an insulting word.”
Elizabeth said, “Truthers are conspiracy theorists. Mercy’s a time-travel truther. She thinks the government’s covering up the real source of the Mirror technology.”
“It was invented by gnomes from the far reaches of Hilbert space,” Jesse said. “Isn’t that what you told me?”
Mercy’s indignation turned her face a brickish shade of red. “They weren’t ‘gnomes.’ They were normal for where they came from. They were kept in captivity for a couple of years before they died.”
“No one’s ever proved that,” Elizabeth said.
“Because the evidence has been suppressed. But the facts are coming out piece by piece, and it makes the elites nervous.”
Jesse said, “What facts are those?”
“The fact that our entire political and economic system is driving us into a lethal dead end.” Mercy turned to Elizabeth. “The people you call ‘gnomes’ came from almost a thousand years in our future. They’re small because, where they come from, everybody’s small. Their bodies are unusual in a lot of ways, according to the autopsies, which were never officially released. They process food more efficiently than we do. They’re built for survival in a hot, depleted environment. That’s an uncomfortable truth for anyone who wants to go on doing business as usual, given that business-as-usual is cooking the planet. But it gets worse, for people like my father. The visitors’ economic system is different, too—egalitarian in a way that makes wealthy and powerful people uncomfortable.”
Jesse turned to Theo. “Do you believe this as well, about the utopian gnomes?”
Theo looked uncomfortable. “I haven’t seen the kind of evidence Mercy’s seen. But I agree that there needs to be a whole lot more transparency. And, you know, the irony is pretty inescapable.”
“What irony is that?”
“That we suppress information about the future on the grounds that making it public might create chaos. But somehow it’s okay for us to come here and stir up the exact same shit. It’s a double standard.”
“My father’s doing things here that are inexcusable,” Mercy said. “You should be angry at him.”
I may yet work myself up to it, Jesse thought.
* * *
By the time it was fully dark, two fire wagons had gone rattling and clanging down Montgomery Street. There was nothing else the window view could tell him, but it was a safe bet that there was trouble in Chinatown, just as Theo had predicted. Jesse was relieved, then, when the radio emitted a chirp that indicated an incoming message. Elizabeth put the device to her ear and said “yes” or “okay” at various intervals; then she tucked the radio into the calico travel bag and said, “We’re supposed to be at the Market Street wharf by ten o’clock. An unmarked boat will take us across the bay to Oakland.”
Jesse checked his pocket watch. Ample time to make the deadline. “All right,” he said. To Mercy and Theo: “We have a carriage big enough to carry us all. If anyone’s watching they’ll see us leave the hotel, but I can’t do anything about that—we only have to get to the stable around the corner on Market. Once we’re in the carriage we should be safe enough, though we might need to take the long way around if there’s trouble between here and the wharfs. Understood?”
Nods all around.
“Downstairs, out the door, up Montgomery to Market. I’ll reclaim the carriage, then we head for the docks. All right?”
No objections. The ladies put on their hats.
Jesse opened the door of the room and surveyed the hallway beyond. The Royal Hotel wasn’t a complicated building. He could see the entire corridor from the north end to the stairway on the south, and there was no motion but the flicker of the gaslights. “Come ahead,” he said.
They made it to the third-floor landing before they encountered anyone else. In this case it was a man in a top hat, escorting a woman who looked too furtive to be his wife. The man was clutching a room key in his right hand.
The couple walked past the door marked 316, Mercy and Theo’s old room. Jesse wouldn’t have given it a second thought, save that the woman tugged her companion’s sleeve and said, “What kind of hotel is this? This door’s had its lock broken.”