"I'm not sure yet." Huw licked his left index finger and held it up to feel the breeze. "Yes, it's still going. Hmm."
"What is it?"
"I'm not sure," Huw said slowly, "but I'll tell you what I think. It was behind the door, sealed in until Yul broke something. It's got hard vacuum on the other side. like a, a hole in space. Not a black hole, there's no gravitational weirdness, but like-imagine a wormhole leading into yet another world? Like the thing we do when we world-walk, only static rather than dynamic? And the universe it leads to is one where there's no planet Earth. You'd come out in interplanetary space."
"But why- "
Huw rolled his eyes. "Why would anyone want such a thing? How would I know? Maybe they used to keep a space station there, as some kind of giant pantry? You put one of those doors in your closet, build airtight rooms on the other side of it, and you'll never have to worry about where to keep your clothes again-it gives a whole new meaning to wardrobe space. But you keep an airtight door in front of the-call it a portal-just in case."
He gestured around the dome. "Something bad happened here, a long time ago. Centuries, probably. The guy with the perfect teeth was trying to hide in the closet, but didn't make it. Over time, something went wrong on the other side-the space station or whatever you call it drifted off site-leaving the portal pointing into interplanetary space. And then we came along and fucked with the protective door."
Elena's eyes widened. "But won't it suck all the air out?"
Huw shrugged. "Not our problem. Anyway, it'll lake thousands of years, at a minimum. There's plenty of time for us to come back and drop a concrete hatch over it." He brightened: "Or an airlock! Get some pressure suits and we can go take a look at it! A portal like that, if we can figure out how it works-" he stopped, almost incoherent with the sudden shock of enlightenment. "Holy Sky Father, Lightning Child, and Crone," he whispered.
"What is it, bro?" Yul looked concerned. "Are you feeling alright?"
"Eve got to get back to base and report to the duke right now." Huw took a deep breath. "This changes everything."
After two days aboard the Northern Continental, Miriam was forced to reevaluate her opinion of railroad travel- even in luxury class. Back when she was newly married she and Ben had taken a week to go on a road trip, driving down into North Carolina and then turning west and north. They'd spent endless hours crawling across Illinois, the landscape barely changing, marking the distance they'd covered by the way they had to tune the radio to another station every couple of hours, the only marker of time the shifting patterns of the clouds overhead.
This was, in a way, worse: and in another way, much better. Travel via the Northern Continental was like being sentenced to an enforced vacation in a skinny luxury hotel room on wheels. Unfortunately, New British hotels didn't sport many of the necessities a motel back home would provide, such as air-conditioning and TV, much less luxuries like a health suite and privacy. Everything was kept running by a small army of liveried stewards, bustling in and out-and Miriam hated it. "I feel like I can't relax," she complained to Burgeson at one point: "I've got no space to myself!" And no space to plug her notebook computer in. for that matter.
He shrugged. "Hot and cold running service is half of what first-class travel is all about," he pointed out. "If the rich didn't surround themselves with armies of impoverished unfortunates, how would they know they were well off?"
"Yes, but that's not the point..." Back in Baron Henryk's medieval birdcage she'd at least been able to shunt the servants out of her rooms. Over here, such behavior would draw entirely the wrong kind of attention. She waved a hand in wide circles, spinning an imaginary hamster wheel. "I feel like I'm acting in a play with no script, on a stage in front of an audience I can't see. And if I step out of character-the character they want me to play-the reviewers will start snarking behind my back."
"Welcome to my world." He smiled lopsidedly. "It doesn't get any better after a decade, let me assure you."
"Yes, but-" Miriam stopped dead, a sarcastic response on the tip of her tongue, as the door at the carriage end opened and a bellboy came in, pushing a cart laden with clean towels for the airliner-toilet-sized bathroom. "You see what I mean?" she asked plaintively when he'd gone.
The train inched across the interior at a laborious sixty miles per hour, occasionally slowing as it rattled across cast-iron bridges, hauling its way up the long slope of the mountains. Three or four limes a day it wheezed to a temporary halt while oil and water hoses dropped their loads into the locomotive's bunkers, and passengers stretched their legs on the promenade platform. Once or twice a day it paused in a major station for half an hour. Often Miriam recognized the names, but as provincial capitals or historic towns, not as the grand cities they had become in this strange new world. But sometimes they were just new to her.
On the first full day of the voyage (it was hard to think of anything so protracted as a train journey) she left the train for long enough to buy a stack of newspapers and a couple of travel books from the stand at the end of the platform at Fort Kinnaird. The news was next to impenetrable without enlisting Erasmus as an interpreter, and some of the stuff she came across in the travel books made her skin crawl. Slavery was, it seemed, illegal throughout the empire largely because hereditary indentured servitude was so much more convenient; one particular account of the suppression of an uprising in South America by the Royal Nipponese Ronin Brigade left her staring out of the window in a bleak, reflective trance for almost an hour. She was not surprised by the brutality of the transplanted Japanese soldiers, raised in the samurai tradition and farmed out as mercenaries to the imperial dynasty by their daimyo; but the complacent attitude to their practices exhibited by the travel writer, a middle-aged Anglican parson's wife from Hanoveria, shocked her rigid. Crucifying serfs every twenty feet along the railway line from Manaus to Sao Paulo was simply a necessary reestablishment of the natural order, the correction of an intolerable upset by the ferocious but civilized and kindly police troops of the Brazilian Directorate. (All of whose souls were in any case bound for helclass="underline" the serfs because they were misguided papists and the samurai because they were animists and Buddhists, the author felt obliged to note.)
And then there was the other book, and the description of the French occupation of Mesopotamia, which made the New British Empire look like a bastion of liberal enlightenment...
What am I doing here? she asked herself. I can't live in this world! And is there any point even trying to make it a better place? I could be over in New York getting myself into the Witness Protection Program...
On the second day, she gave in to the inevitable. "What's this book you keep trying to get me to read?" she asked, after breakfast.
Erasmus gave her a long look. "Are you sure?" he asked. "If you're concerned about your privacy-"
"Give." She held out a hand. "You want me to read it, right?"
He looked at her for a while, then nodded and passed her a book that had been sitting on the writing desk in full view, all along. "I think you'll find it stimulating."
"Let's see." She turned to the flyleaf. "Animal husbandry?" She closed it and glared at him. "You're having me on!"
"Why don't you turn to page forty-six?" he asked mildly.
"Huh?" She swallowed acid: breakfast seemed to have disagreed with her. "But that's-"she opened it at the right page"-oh, I see." She shook her head. "What do I do if someone steals it?"