Abbie and Soo Yee hung back from the crowd as the guide began his work in earnest. First they passed into the grand lobby of what had once been Tower Two, a room as big as a cathedral but cold as the autumn prairie. In its heyday these spaces would have been heated and illuminated by electricity and filled with astonishing displays. The original contract, which Mr. August Kemp had signed with the railroad, had provided for fuel and spare parts to be left behind after the Mirror was closed, to allow the City to operate as a tourist attraction for a few years more. But that genial agreement had come to grief in the City’s final confrontation with the forces sent to arrest Mr. Kemp. Whatever had not already been stripped from the buildings by Kemp’s men had been looted or vandalized by the victorious troops, or shipped off to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.
Of course, the building was an astonishment even in its present condition. Its current owners had attempted to replicate some of its former glory, with recreated models of airships, crude wood and plaster dioramas, and murals, less than expertly painted, of the so-called world of futurity. “Not our futurity,” the guide was careful to point out, “as even our visitors were willing to admit.”
“Where were they from,” Soo Yee asked in a whisper, “if not the future?”
Supposedly, from another leaf in some great (perhaps infinite) Book of Worlds, a book in which each page was an instantiated moment. Which meant—Abbie had given the subject much thought—no moment every truly ceased to exist. Every “now” was inscribed in a vaster Now. “The mind of God?” Soo Yee asked.
Soo Yee had lately joined a church, at Abbie’s urging, and her question was in earnest. “Perhaps so,” Abbie said.
“And the people who built this City, all those adulterers and Sodomites, they knew how to travel through God’s mind?”
“Some say they learned the trick from others, wiser than themselves.”
I apologize again for the events that injured Phoebe and defiled the house you so generously shared with us. It is a consolation to me and I hope to you that you will never again be troubled by Mr. R. Candy.
I expect many hard things will be said about the people of the future and their presence among us. Much of this disapproval they have earned and richly deserve. But not all. Do not judge them by Mr. August Kemp’s behavior, no matter what the newspapers say. Remember that Elizabeth DePaul is one of them, and Elizabeth has adopted the cause of Phoebe’s welfare as her own, and has been invaluable in getting her the care she needs.
The tour did not include the high parts of the Towers. There had been attempts, the guide said, to restore or replace the original mechanical elevators, but not even Mr. Thomas Edison’s people (on loan from Menlo Park) had been able to find a safe way of doing so. The stairs were intact, and special tours were sometimes arranged for the physically fit, but such a climb would of course be too strenuous for the ladies. However, the guide said, photographs taken from the famous Observation Deck could be purchased at the conclusion of the tour.
Abbie supposed at least some of the fairer sex might have been willing to attempt the climb; but she was, admittedly, not one of them, not with the persistent dull pain that had lodged in her hip this last year. The views were said to be incomparable, but she would leave the Observation Deck to the athletes, the crows, and the four indifferent winds. It was the ruin of the Mirror she especially wanted to see.
Soo Yee wondered aloud, as they descended a lantern-lit stairway to an underground tunnel connecting the towers, how such a corrupt people could have built such astounding things.
“Engineering is not an art reserved exclusively to Christians,” Abbie said.
“What do you mean—were they Freemasons?”
“No, of course not. What are you learning at that church you attend? No, I mean they may have been great builders, as the ancient Egyptians were, even without the enlightenment of Scripture. And at least some of the visitors were Christians, or claimed to be.”
“Their Christianity isn’t like ours.”
“Shall we judge them on that basis? I don’t want to sound like a pagan philosopher,”—thinking of Heraclitus, about whom she had read in an article in Godey’s—“but all things change with time—perhaps even Christianity.”
“A truth is a truth forever,” Soo Yee declared, hurrying after the tour group, which threatened to disappear around a bend in the tunnel.
“I’m sure you’re right.”
A gentle lie. Abbie was sure of no such thing.
I lived among the City people for most of five years, and I must admit some of them were smug and self-satisfied in their attitude toward us. Others revered us, and saw us as the beau ideal of rugged self-reliance, but this too I have come to think of as a kind of condescension—as if we should be admired for our deadly diseases, the mortal vulnerability of our children, or our makeshift laws and customs.
In any case, their foolish admiration rankles less than their disdain. We don’t like to be found abhorrent on the grounds that we will not share a meal with a Negro or allow a woman to enter into marriage with another woman. And we’ve retaliated by denouncing the City people as race-mixers, or feminists, or Sodomites—I have heard all these hateful words applied, and worse.
“We must not denounce what we do not understand,” Abbie said, “simply because we do not understand it.”
Here at the entrance to the Hall of the Mirror, one successful restoration had been achieved. The shafts that had once contained the City elevators had been excavated and the machinery replaced with the sort of commonplace lift that carried coal miners to their work. Soo Yee was reluctant to enter the wooden cage at the top of the shaft; she said it made her think of the entrance to Hell. “You take too literally the things your pastor tells you,” Abbie said irritably. “We’re only going a few yards under the earth. I’m sure Hell lies much deeper.”
Abbie had postponed this pilgrimage for too long, out of a vain and unspoken hope that Jesse and Phoebe might yet appear on her doorstep. Much had happened since 1877. James Garfield had served two terms as president, despite a prophecy (in one of Mr. Theo Stromberg’s letters to Lucy Stone, which the press insisted on calling the Blackwell letters) that he would be assassinated—or perhaps the prophecy had prevented its own fulfillment. Prophecies had been fulfilled or overthrown on many fronts as the influence of the City continued to ripple through the world. August Kemp’s gift of practical knowledge had effected huge advances. Scientific hygiene, vaccination against disease, electric lighting, even gasoline-driven motor cars, all were becoming commonplace … though one also had to take into account Theo Stromberg’s warning about the profligate use of what he called “fossil fuels.”
But labor had not thrived under Garfield, the Negro of the South had been reduced to a peonage almost indistinguishable from slavery, the vote for women was no nearer than it had ever been. Kemp had told a pretty lie, Abbie thought, that in the future we would be ruled by the better angels of our nature; and Theo Stromberg had told a harder truth, that such angels do not arrive on clouds of glory but are born of travail and, too often, blood. (And did we not already learn that lesson at Fort Sumter, Appomattox, Richmond? Have we forgotten it so completely and so soon?)
The Hall of the Mirror, deep underground, could have enclosed two cathedrals and a shipyard. In its original state (the tour guide said as they stepped out of the lift, his voice disappearing into the cavernous space like a penny dropped into well), the chamber had been brightly illuminated. The current owners had installed a dynamo to produce alternating current, but it could bring the bank of ceiling lights to little more than a tepid glow, and lanterns were necessary to supplement it. “Allow your eyes to accommodate to the darkness,” the guide advised.