Last Year

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “Change of plans,” Kemp said. “I’m ordering a full evacuation, beginning right now.”

  The sun had just risen over the long Wyoming plains, visible through the bulletproof windows of the train as he and Elizabeth hurried forward to Kemp’s private car. Blue sky and brown earth, each streaked with red. But he could see none of that now, because Kemp’s car was windowless. It was a single undivided chamber, its walls lined with electrical devices and display screens. Jesse knew the train was connected by radio to the City and to the City’s outposts in San Francisco and New York, and he guessed Kemp had received some bad news by way of these machines. All of Kemp’s traveling security crew had crowded into the car, some twenty people, most in uniform, most with automatic pistols strapped to their hips. Most were male, and tall, and Jesse had to crane his head to see Kemp through a forest of shaved heads and black duck-billed caps.

  “We’re putting the train on a siding at the nearest depot,” Kemp said. “We’ve got another train returning with a tour group from San Francisco. This afternoon we’ll be transferring passengers from our train to the eastbound train, and I need you to help with that. I don’t want any kind of panic breaking out. Anybody asks what’s up, you can say it’s some kind of legal dispute with Union Pacific. We’re printing up explanatory handouts—everybody will be getting a full refund, no questions asked. If people grumble I want you to be gracious about it, but we need everybody on the train back to Illinois by sundown. Any questions?”

  One large and obvious one, Jesse thought. But no one was bold enough to ask it.

  “Okay,” Kemp said. “We’re also recovering some gear from this depot, so we’ll need able bodies to lift and carry. Chavez and Epstein have already been briefed on all this and they’ll be forming you into teams. From here you head on over to the common room at the depot for duty assignments. Clear?” The security crew began filing toward the exit. Kemp said, “Jesse and Elizabeth, please stick around.”

  When the car was empty but for the three of them, Kemp slumped into a chair. He looked exhausted, as if he had been awake all night. So had Jesse, of course, but for less onerous reasons. Elizabeth said, “We can lift and carry with the rest of them.”

  “That’s not what you’re here for. Only the tourists are going back to the City. An evacuation takes time and work. We’re still bound for San Francisco.”

  Jesse said, “Do you want to tell us why this is happening?”

  “It’s not a secret, or at least it won’t be much longer. The papers published another fucking Blackwell letter. This one claims we arrived in 1873 with a fortune in counterfeit financial instruments, and it says we used these instruments as collateral to acquire two failing banks, the Union Trust Company and E. W. Clark. It says everything we’ve done since, building hotels, improving railroads, acquiring property, we did with what was basically fraudulent money.”

  “Is that true?”

  Kemp gave Jesse a long stare. “As a demonstration of the degree to which I trust you, I will tell you the answer is, to a certain extent, yes. The question I would ask is, so what? There’s nothing we’ve done I can’t defend. But I won’t be given the chance. In a few hours, everybody with deposits at Clark or Union Trust will be lining up to cash in their accounts. We’ll be lucky if it doesn’t trigger another financial crisis. And we won’t be forgiven for that. Coming on top of everything else, this is pretty much the definition of a nonrecoverable clusterfuck. And it gets worse.”

  “Hard to see how.”

  “Rail workers in Buffalo went on strike a couple of days ago—they pulled switch lights, greased the tracks, and fought a pitched battle with state militia. A police raid on the home of a ringleader turned up dozens of Glocks and a stash of ammunition. At least one Glock was used in an ambush that killed fifteen soldiers.”

  “Onslow’s guns?”

  “Probably purchased through the Chicago connection. But the City is being blamed for it.”

  “So we’re going to San Francisco to speed up the evacuation?”

  “Yeah, but I want you two for something more specific. We need to recover a couple of runners.”

  “Is one of them the author of the Blackwell letters?”

  “Don’t get ahead of yourself. One of the people I want you to find is the asshole who’s writing these letters, but that damage is done—at this point, I don’t care about stopping him. He can live or die on this side of the Mirror as far as I’m concerned. But he has someone with him. Someone who’s under his influence.” Kemp looked like he was about to lapse into another broody silence. “It’s my daughter,” he said. “I need you to help me find my daughter.”

  * * *

  The depot where they stopped had been built to supply water and fuel for City trains exclusively, and the City people had driven their spur line far enough into the hinterlands of Wyoming that few curiosity-seekers were likely to follow. The land here was spectacularly empty and, Jesse thought, beautiful. A high rolling plain, some of it sandstone-red, much of it a calico print of green buffalo grass and yellow wildflowers. Astride the horizon was a tumbled mountain range, hazy as a faded daguerreotype, and the air was cold even in the sharp spring sunlight, as if it had dallied over glaciers on its journey from the west.

  The City people had put a building here, but it was nothing like the Illinois towers. It was little more than a wide, low bunker, next to a tin-roofed wooden outbuilding and a high steel tower on which was mounted something Elizabeth called a “microwave relay repeater.” There was also a paved road, hundreds of yards long but leading nowhere—it was a landing strip, Elizabeth said, but she didn’t know or wouldn’t say whether any airship had ever used it. Kemp sent Jesse and Elizabeth to a room in the bunker with dossiers to read: mainly information about Kemp’s daughter. But the raucous sound of men dismantling equipment for removal proved impossible to ignore, and at Elizabeth’s suggestion they carried their documents away from the building to a quieter place, a grassy mound in the lee of a sandstone outcrop.

  Jesse read and reread the pages for most of an hour before he confessed to Elizabeth that there was much in them he simply didn’t understand.

  “Okay,” she said. “Well, it’s not really complicated. Mercy Seraphina Kemp, twenty-eight years old. August Kemp’s daughter by his third wife—”

  “Kemp seems to have divorced his spouses fairly freely.”

  “Rich guy, multiple marriages, trophy wives, old story. He has five kids, but Mercy was the only one from his most recent marriage. It doesn’t say so in the dossier, but according to what I’ve read in People magazine he always doted on her. Private schools, an attempt at a medical degree before she dropped out of Stanford. Bright, athletic, bookish, and since her teen years, political. Spotted at various left-wing demos. She spent a month in Canada lending her name and celebrity status to some aboriginal protest movement.”

  “Aboriginal?”

  “Indians. The point is, she’s idealistic and she sides with the folks who don’t shop at Hermès or Net-a-Porter. The rebellious aristocrat who embraces the common people. You understand that trajectory?”

  “She’s a reformer. Maybe for the purpose of annoying her father?”

  “Maybe. They obviously had some kind of falling-out. But that doesn’t mean she’s not sincere.”

  Jesse nodded.

  “For our purposes,” Elizabeth said, “the important thing is that her activism put her in contact with a man named Theo Stromberg.”

  “A Dutchman?”

  “Born in Cleveland, so no.”

  “And this Theo is suspected of being the author of the Blackwell letters?”

  “There’s an appendix to the dossier—”

  “I didn’t get that far.”

  “Theo Stromberg is a guy in his late thirties with a long history of political activism. He has a poli-sci degree and taught for a while at a community college in California. Wrote a book called The New Hegemony, started a grassroots lobbying collective around campai
gn finance and regulatory issues. Arrested for civil disobedience more than once. Pretty ballsy guy, actually, with a following well outside the academic left. Maybe a bit of a martyr complex, but not a complete flake. Are you processing all this?”

  “More or less.”

  “Theo Stromberg’s history intersected with August Kemp’s a few years back. Theo agitated against licensing Mirror technology to private businesses even before Kemp started selling tickets. And Theo wasn’t content to walk a picket line or write an angry blog post. When Kemp opened his first Mirror resort, Theo tried to smuggle himself through.”

  “And failed?”

  “He got through the Mirror, but they intercepted him while he was still on City property. He was charged with trespassing and reckless endangerment, for which he received a suspended sentence. And when Kemp opened his second resort, our City, apparently Theo tried again.”

  “Wouldn’t security have been even more diligent the second time around?”

  “They were, but Theo’s not stupid, and he has backers with money. He came through the Mirror as a paying customer with credible credentials. Along with Mercy Seraphina Kemp.”

  “They crossed together?”

  “Mercy’s been in sporadic contact with Theo Stromberg since she dropped out of college. The relationship is off-and-on but maybe not purely platonic.”

  “How long has Kemp known about this?”

  “The dossier doesn’t say. Kemp hasn’t had regular contact with Mercy for almost a decade, so not hearing from her wouldn’t have set off any immediate alarms. And nobody identified Theo Stromberg as a runner until fairly recently. I’m guessing the gun-smuggling investigation turned up evidence pointing at Theo and Mercy, who may have been peripherally involved.”

  Jesse nodded. “So it’s a dire revelation for Kemp. His rebellious daughter is a runner, and there’s not much time to bring her home.”

  “He obviously thinks Mercy is in San Francisco, and he seems to believe we can find her before it’s too late. But yeah, she’s on the wrong side of a closing door.”

  “Do you think she means to stay here?”

  “Based on her history, I doubt it. But Theo might want to stay. And she might want to stay with Theo.”

  “You think it’s her fondness for Theo Stromberg that’s driving her? Or her need to defy her father?”

  Elizabeth was slow to reply. Jesse sensed something deeper in the narrative, some implication not recorded in the papers Kemp had been willing to show them, something even Elizabeth was reluctant to discuss.

  “She might have other motives,” Elizabeth allowed. “Not all idealism is fake.”

  “Back east,” Jesse said, “a runner once told me I ought to ask Kemp a question. He said I ought to ask him who invented the Mirror.” He waited, but Elizabeth didn’t speak. “Is the answer to that question pertinent to Mercy’s motives?”

  “I don’t know. It might be. I’m not really supposed to talk about it.”

  “But will you?”

  She stood up, brushing dust from her trousers. “Maybe later. And you can tell me what you’re so afraid of in San Francisco.”

  * * *

  The eastbound train arrived at the siding as the sun was crossing the meridian. Jesse and Elizabeth helped escort passengers to their assigned cars, Jesse moving through the crowd of nervous twenty-first-century tourists as he had been taught to move among them back at the City: quietly, wordlessly. Kemp had already spoken to them about the need to return to Illinois, had promised refunds and compensation, but it wasn’t enough to suppress a current of uneasiness. “Like they just figured out this isn’t a giant theme park,” Elizabeth said.

  “Is that what they come here for?”

  “Some, sure. People come here for all kinds of reasons. Curiosity, bragging rights, boredom, who knows. If people want to think of 1877 as unspoiled America, Kemp is happy to let them. But reality tends to get in the way. Little things, like the horseshit in the streets. Or big things, like child labor and people dying of tuberculosis and yellow fever. Speaking of yellow fever, you might want to stay away from New Orleans next year.”

  “Next year?”

  “More than twenty thousand dead in the Mississippi River Valley. At least, that’s what happened where I come from. I looked it up on Wikipedia.”

  In the depot’s rail yard, trainmen in orange vests supervised the noisy coupling and decoupling of passenger cars. The eastbound train grew longer; the train that would carry Kemp and his crew to San Francisco grew shorter.

  Jesse considered the compound’s bunker, now stripped of electronic gear and machinery. “What happens to this place when the Mirror closes?”

  “It becomes the property of Union Pacific, like every other spur line and microwave repeater along the line.”

  “Is Kemp wealthy enough to just throw these things away?”

  “It’s a concrete box and a steel tower, basically. And he’s not really throwing them away. The railroad is supposed to pay him a transfer fee when they take possession.”

  “In gold, I suppose.”

  “Gold’s negotiable, even in the future.”

  “Unlike counterfeit specie.”

  “Well, maybe that’s the real business of the City,” Elizabeth said. “Turning paper into gold.”

  The long train full of tourists left the yard at sunset, stirring up whirlwinds of dust. Kemp ordered the westbound voyagers aboard the shorter train as soon as the engine had brought its boiler up to pressure, and Jesse followed Elizabeth aboard as the air grew cool and a legion of stars took possession of the sky.

  * * *

  The next day, as the train rolled through the western wilderness, Jesse resolved to tell Elizabeth about the killer Roscoe Candy.

  There was plenty of time for talk. August Kemp had retreated to his private car, ostensibly to work his radio but also, Jesse suspected, to get enough liquor inside him to render the prospect of losing his daughter more bearable. Kemp wasn’t an obvious drinker, but he showed signs of being a sly and careful one. As Jesse’s father had been.

  “Your father was a drunk?” Elizabeth asked.

  They sat alone in an empty passenger car, in the plush seats ordinarily reserved for the paying customers. The valley of the Humboldt had given way to alkali desert, which had yielded in turn to the elevations of the Sierra Nevada: rock cuts and tunnels that plunged the train into momentary darkness, lakes that trapped sunlight in lenses of blue water.

  All that, Jesse thought, and the weight of what lay ahead. “My father was a lot of things. He was a big man, he was a brawler when he needed to be, but he was an educated man. He taught me to read and made sure I practiced the skill. But he drank, yes. He tried not to let it make him weak, but it was wearing him down by the time of his last encounter with Roscoe Candy.”

  Elizabeth said, “Tell me about Roscoe Candy.”

  “He’s—a criminal.”

  “Maybe you can expand on that?”

  “In a way, there’s nothing unusual about Candy. Nobody knows for certain where he came from, but he was working the placer mines before he ever grew a beard. In that kind of life, there are only two ways of getting ahead: luck or intimidation. Roscoe took the second road. He had a talent for it. People were afraid of him from an early age. Afraid of his fearlessness, afraid of his henchmen, afraid of the knives he started to carry. By the time he turned twenty-five he owned a pair of hydraulic mines up around Placerville, deeded to him by the previous owner under suspicious circumstances. But Roscoe wasn’t content to lay back and let the money roll in. He was ambitious. He came into San Francisco with a fearsome reputation and a fat bankroll. Such men often gamble or drink their money away. Roscoe didn’t have those vices, at least not to excess. His real interest wasn’t the money, it was the power he gained from it. He used to say money beat a pistol any day, for the purpose of making a fool dance.” Jesse took a sip of water from a bottle he had bought in the dining car. DASANI, it said on the label. “Ar
e there people like that where you come from?”

  “Violent narcissistic assholes? Oh yeah.”

  “What do you do about them?”

  “Lock them up, if they get out of hand.”

  “I don’t doubt Roscoe Candy should have been locked up. Maybe in Boston or New York he would have been—unless they elected him mayor instead—but San Francisco’s not that kind of town. It was built on a principle of lawlessness.”

  “Wild frontier gold-rush town, I get it.”

  “In San Francisco, for all practical purposes, the only law is the difference between what you can get away with and what you can enforce. Roscoe Candy learned pretty soon that he was too coarse in his manners to gain leverage with the opera-house crowd, but he could rule quite neatly in other kingdoms. He used his cash to buy himself into the whore business. Pretty soon half the bawdy houses and cooch dens on Jackson Street were either owned by Roscoe or paying tribute to him. He came up against plenty of rough men in the process, and he used them without mercy. His vanquished enemies usually turned up in the back alleys of the Tenderloin with their throats cut and their tongues pulled out through the slit.”

  “Sicilian necktie,” Elizabeth said, grimacing.

  “Roscoe’s no Sicilian. They say his father was a Polish forty-niner with a bad leg.”

  “It’s just a name for it.”

  Jesse looked out the window as the train traversed a mountain pass. Below, narrow valleys of ponderosa pine and brown chaparral. Above, a sky like blue vitreous enamel. “At Madame Chao’s we bought protection from a Dupont Street tong. Real protection, not just extortion. They protected us from Roscoe Candy.”

  “Didn’t your father do that?”

  “Roscoe wasn’t afraid of my father. My father could wrestle a rowdy sailor out the door any night of the week, but he wasn’t an army. But Roscoe was afraid of the Six Companies. So when Roscoe started making moves on the cooch trade, the tongs sent a man to Madame Chao’s to keep an eye on things. I say ‘man’—his name was Sonny Lau, and he was a boy not much older than myself, but he was already a seasoned boo how doy.”