Deseret (3 page)

In the garden between the Lion House and the Tabernacle
squatted half a dozen installations.
 
They looked like brass-bound glass bells resting among the azaleas,
cherries and plum trees, with wheezing accordion-like bellows inside each and
wisps of steam curling from their bases at every
whoomphing
squeeze.
 
The mechanick in Sam wondered what the glass bells did; they looked like
they moved air, or maybe they built up pressure in some invisible system,
something buried under the garden.

A crystalline lattice of the narrow glass tubes ran above
the garden, connecting the Tabernacle to the Lion House, and the bells were
connected by more glass tubes to the trellis overhead.
 
From here, it looked like the network
existed to shoot squirrel-sized bullets back and forth between the Tabernacle
and the Lion House.
 
The bells
moved something, maybe.

“Is it true, then, that it’s full of the old man’s wives?”
O’Shaughnessy asked in a titillated whisper.

The question seemed tawdry and trivial in the face of this
gigantic puffing machinery, but Sam hadn’t recruited the Irishman for his sage
perspective or his powers of incisive reasoning.
 
“I hope so,” Sam ruminated out loud.
 
“I quite like the idea that old
Brigham’s man enough to attract twenty women.”

“Or thirty or forty,” O’Shaughnessy corrected him with
rumored numbers.

“Or a hundred,” Sam agreed, “
and
that he’s civilized enough that he actually
married
them all.”

“Hell and begorra,” O’Shaughnessy swore.
 
Sam didn’t know if that was meant to
signify agreement or not.

“I’m also amused to think that in this case,” Sam continued,
“as I find is only rarely so in the affairs of men, vice must be its own
punishment.”

Under the lion and beyond the entrance stretched a long
hall.
 
Bulbs perched along the
walls between the many doors.
 
Looking at the inside of the building, Sam could imagine that it might
house a dozen of the patriarch’s famous wives, along with their concomitant
children, but at the moment the movement he saw was muted and infrequent.
 
Deep in the hall, a woman in sturdy
pioneer dress crossed from one side to the other without looking up.

The nearest door was open.
 

“Come in,” called a man’s voice, and they did.

The largest wall of the office they entered was entirely
occupied by circular cubbyholes.
 
They were made of brass-bound glass, with brass trap doors closing them,
and in a constant, nearly steady
thump-thump-rat-a-tat
, the cubbies were filled with objects flying in from
elsewhere, through the wall.
 
Three
men worked the device, opening the cubby doors and extracting from the full
ones cylindrical cases, which they twisted open to extract strips of
paper.
 
They collated and examined
the strips in light from floor-to-ceiling windows on a long, narrow table that
ran parallel to the wall down its entire length; they generated new strips with
hand-printed messages on them, screwed them into empty cylinders, and then
slammed them back into the cubbies.
 
When the brass door shut on a cylinder-loaded cubby, it
hissed
sharply and the cylinder disappeared, sucked away
into the ether.

This was one terminus, Sam realized, of the network of glass
tubes he had seen above the City.
 
It was some kind of communication system.

O’Shaughnessy took a step back and shuddered.
 

A fourth man oversaw the frenzied beavering of the three
clerks.
 
He was short and stocky,
with a rounded face, strong nose and high forehead that combined to give him an
intense and classical look.
 
A
square beard jutted off his chin only, trimmed and neat.
 
His suit and waistcoat were sturdy but
of fine wool, inclining slightly to the dandy in physical appearance.
 
He wheeled on one heel and dragged Sam
in with a handclasp and a fierce grin.
 
“Mr. Samuel Clemens,” he snapped.
 
“We’ve been expecting you.
 
I hope you haven’t had too much trouble on the road.”
 
He spoke with an English accent.
 
Northern English, Sam thought.
 
Maybe Liverpudlian.
 
“However much civilization we’ve
brought to the Valley, the roads connecting us to the rest of the world remain
rough and dangerous routes.”

“No trouble at all.
 
You’ll find I’m duly credentialed,” Sam drawled, taking a wallet of
official documents from his jacket pocket and pressing into the man’s
hands.
 
The man took them and set
them aside on the long table without looking at them.
 
“And now you have the advantage of me twice over.”

“George Cannon,” the other man presented himself.
 
“I’m President Young’s Secretary.
 
I know you’d like a meeting with the
President, but he’s out of the office and—” Cannon gestured at the wall
of tubes, “not otherwise reachable.”

“This is a communications network,” Sam observed.
 
He nodded, admiring the tubes and the
message slips, and Cannon nodded with him.

“And a good one,” Cannon agreed.
 
“Only sometimes President Young is too big a man for the
system.
 
I understand you’re
staying at the Deseret Hotel.”

“I was told it had the best bar,” Sam quipped.
 
Of course the government had instructed
him to stay at the biggest, fanciest hotel in town.
 
He might be a spy, a saboteur or even a thief by the end of
this venture, but he was also a diplomat.

“It has the finest,” Cannon agreed.
 
“Those looking for local color
sometimes prefer the Hot Springs Hotel and Brewery at the Point of the
Mountain.
 
Rockwell’s place.
 
But Brother Rockwell is further away
and he won’t let us install a message tube, so you’ll be easier to reach at the
Deseret.”

Sam cast another glance at Cannon’s three clerks, who hadn’t
slowed or even looked up from their work since his arrival.
 
“I see you’re a busy man.
 
I take it you’ll inform the President
of my arrival, and send word to the Deseret when I can meet him?
 
I hope I don’t need to impress upon you
that the President of the United States regards my mission as critical.”

George Cannon smiled.
 
“Rest assured, Mr. Clemens, that President Young feels the same.”

Then the interview was over, and without further formalities
Cannon turned around and dove back into the labors of his clerks.
 
Sam and O’Shaughnessy showed themselves
out.

“Jesus and all the bloody saints,” the Irishman muttered on
the walkway outside the Lion House.
 
“It isn’t human.
 
It’s like
insects, it’s like a herd of sheep, it’s like… something, but it isn’t human.”

Sam dug out a double eagle and pressed it into his aide’s
hand.
 
“You’ll feel better about
everything with some whisky inside you.
 
While you’re at it, check on the dwarf and the little boy.
 
Mind you, though, O’Shaughnessy,” he
said in his stern a voice as he could muster, “I’ll be right behind you, and I
aim to return that child to his family.
 
Don’t cause me any trouble on that account.”

“Hell and begorra,” O’Shaughnessy objected, “when have I
ever caused you any trouble, Sam Clemens?”
 
The Irishman had enough self-awareness to wink at his own
joke, but he didn’t wait around for further instructions.

Sam watched the other man go.
 
He was right, of course, it was inhuman.
 
The whole thing was like a device.
 
Standing inside George Cannon’s office
had been like sitting inside the clocksprung brain of one of Eli Whitney’s
famous machines, a cotton harvester or a mechanical mule.
 

Only half the cogs were people.
 

When Tam had disappeared from sight, he turned to head out
across the Great Salt Lake City in a different direction, away from the
Hotel.
 
He pulled out a Cohiba as
he went, but he didn’t light it; the real reason he put his hand in his pocket,
under cover of retrieving a new cigar, was to check the lining of his coat.

The rubies were still there, safe and sound.

“Well, Mr. Pratt,” he muttered under his breath.
 
“Here I come.”

*
  
*
  
*

The gate to the Kingdom of Deseret punched through a mighty
wall built by the hand of God himself, Burton thought.
 
How appropriate.

From the Bear River crossing, the mountains had risen around
them and eventually they had found themselves barreling down a narrow canyon at
the speed of Captain Dan Jones’s inexorable wrath.
 
Burton was aware of that wrath keenly, because having got
himself into Jones’s shadow at the collapse of the Bear River bridge, he had
been careful not to leave it.
 
The
wheelhouse gave absolutely the best view of the entire journey, and Burton
wasn’t about to give it up unprompted.
 
He didn’t know where Fearnley-Standish was, and he didn’t much
care.
 
He was probably lying in a
faint in their cabin, mooning over that Mormon girl he was daft for.

He didn’t know where Roxie was either.
 
He told himself he also didn’t care
about
her
whereabouts, but he knew in
his heart that was a lie.

At a bend in the canyon, when Burton estimated that they
must be within a few miles of the Great Salt Lake City, grey granite cliffs
plummeted out of the sky on both sides of the road, creating a narrow stone
gullet.
 

Just inside the near entrance to the narrow neck of land,
men in buckskins and flannel shirts flagged the
Liahona
down.
 
Near its far end, Burton saw a bank of earth and a glaring row of
mismatched heavy artillery pieces.
 
Above the canyon rifle muzzles peeped from among thick, dark
green pine.

And this, he thought, was the welcome that a
known
craft got.
 
One of their own, even.
 
The
Mormons were as crazed and paranoid and dangerously violent as any Afghan
tribe, even apart from the Madman Pratt and his flying ships.

A rangy young man in buckskins and a shapeless felt hat,
apparently unarmed, came up the side of the
Liahona
and clasped arms with Captain Jones.
 
His lean face bore the long, wispy
beard of a young man who had never shaved but had no natural gift for the
growing of facial hair.

“Come back around to the Cottonwood Fourth Ward Elders
Quorum again, has it, boyo?”

The newcomer chuckled.
 
“Yeah, Brother Cannon sent an inspector in disguise and he caught the
High Priests napping.
 
No more gate
duty for the old boys, I’m afraid.”

“Shame, that.
 
Some of the old boys, you know, Swenson, can shoot the whiskers off a
squirrel.”

“Absolutely,” Swenson agreed.
 
“And I feel greatly reassured that the Kingdom is safe from
an incursion of squirrels, be it ever so large or be-whiskered.
 
Just so long as the invasion ain’t
planned for nap time.
 
You got a
manifest for me?”
 

“Aye.”
 
Jones
handed over a big logbook together with a single sheet of paper.
 
“Original and a copy.”

Swenson reviewed them quickly.
 
“Looks fine.
 
Anything we need to go talk about in the wheelhouse?”
 
He shot a quick sidelong glance at
Burton, and Burton felt appraised.

“We were waylaid,” Jones growled, “but that’s a matter for
Brother Brigham’s ears.
 
Did you
stop a fellow by the name of Clemens by any chance?”

Burton took that as his cue and stepped closer.

Swenson shook his head.
 
“He passed through.
 
I didn’t know to stop him.”

Burton cleared his throat.
 
“He would have had diplomatic papers, anyway,” he said,
injecting himself into the conversation.
 

“Never yet saw diplomatic papers that’d stop the bullet out
of a Henry,” Swenson shrugged.
 
“Hell, I don’t care that he was driving that fancy new steam-truck,
even.
 
If I’d known the Captain
here wanted the man stopped, he’d have been stopped.”
 
He leveled frank blue eyes at Burton.
 
“Who are you that I oughtta wind the
crank on my give-a-damn machine?”

“He’s alright,” Jones muttered.

Burton extended a hand and smiled a rugged, manly grin.
 
“Richard Burton,” he introduced
himself.
 
“That is to say,
ahem
, Captain Richard Burton, special envoy of Her
Britannic Majesty Queen Victoria.”

Swenson shook it confidently.
 
“Jerry Swenson, second counselor, Elders Quorum, Cottonwood
Fourth Ward.
 
President Williams is
back up there with the artillery—he’s an old Battalion man, and knows his
big guns.
 
First counselor’s
fishing.”