by D. J. Butler
No, not all of them. Three of them, and they gave the impression of being pushed free of the tower and into space by the electricity itself. The fourth, the ship nearest the lift and stairwell exits, almost behind them, did a queer little St. Vitus’ dance of a rattling motion, shaking against its anchor pole but not pulling free of it.
Then one of the three departing ships reversed course and sank back down toward the platform. “That’s Pratt!” Roxie shouted, and Tam saw the frayed old man standing against the airship’s railing with one of the big Pinkertons. The old fellow shouted at the Pinkertons on the platform, they shouted back, and Tam couldn’t hear any of their words over the crackle of the electricity.
But he saw that Pratt’s companion was carrying a queer-looking gun.
Bang! Bang!
A bullet snapped past the Irishman and into the open night air like a rocket-powered mosquito. Behind Tam, Roxie fired into the stairwell and the muzzle flash stuttered white in the corner of his vision.
“Go!” she shouted. “Out!”
Poe blew silently on his whistle and lurched out onto the platform, leaning on Tam (though Tam hadn’t really invited that again, had he?) and Burton both. He reeked of illness and death. Pratt’s ship touched down and the big man next to him dropped onto the platform, gun held high. It was that damned man from the Deseret Hotel, Herman or Hardison or whatever his name was.
“Duck!” Tam yelled, but the Pinkerton wasn’t aiming at them.
Poe blew—
—the Seth-Beast wheeled away from its assault on the Pinkertons in the center shed and charged the big man—
—Zottt!—
—a bright red ray lanced through the center of the mechanical animal-thing, slicing it into two pieces in a single shot. As if a magnetic force holding together a box of springs had suddenly been shut off, the creature sprang to pieces, bits rolling and rattling away across the plascrete.
Poe dropped the whistle from his mouth and yelled something high, strangled and wordless, a cry like a paid mourner’s that ended in a strangled cough. The man with the ray-gun heard him, stopped and looked in their direction. Pratt heard too, looked up at them, and then disappeared from the airship’s railing.
Herbertson, or whetever, looked up for Pratt, didn’t apparently see him, then turned and advanced on Tam and the others.
“Get into the other ship!” Burton barked, and began shooting at the Pinkerton.
“It isn’t flying for a reason,” Roxie protested. “There’s no point.”
“It should have phlogiston guns,” Poe coughed. “At least we can fire at the others.”
“England!” Burton yelled, and charged left across the platform, shooting at Harrison.
“Shite!” Tam cursed, and then ran right, firing his Smith & Wesson at the Pinkerton. He’d never charged to a war cry before in his life.
It was satisfying.
Behind him he heard shooting and he looked over his shoulder as he ran, to see Roxie emptying a pistol into the stairwell and then dragging the pale, sweating, trembling, bent Edgar Allan Poe, hacking his lungs up at every step, toward the fourth airship.
At the sound of footsteps in the doorway Sam grabbed his pistol.
It was George Q. Cannon, the stubble on his fleshy jaw taking some of the punch out of his square beard. He was in his shirtsleeves, suspenders askew and the tail of his shirt hanging down over the seat of his britches. The short hair he had was pulled this way and that, like a haystack after a dry storm.
“George!” Young snapped, finishing another scrawled signature and setting aside the finished message into the stack with the others, a dozen already completed by the impromptu communiqué production line, the ink still drying on the first ones.
“What’s going on?” Cannon asked. “Where have you been? We … I thought you were dead!”
“I would have been, too, if Bill Hickman had an ounce of integrity!” Brigham Young snorted.
“I don’t understand.” Cannon’s eyes narrowed. “Was Hickman part of the plot against you? Did Bill Hickman kidnap you? Is he in league with the Massachusetts men?”
“Massachusetts men?” Young laughed, a sound like rolling thunder. “Heavens no, George, the Massachusetts men have nothing to do with the plotting against the Kingdom! It was John Lee who ordered my killing, and Hickman was to have done it!”
All the talk of killing and plots made Sam nervous, especially since the gunfire outside continued unabated. “Only Hickman gaffed the game in his own favor,” he offered, and then realized that his whispered conversations with the dwarf Coltrane had lured him into carny slang. “I mean, he was playing his own game against Lee,” he explained. “He held us hostage as chips to play when he made his own demands.”
Where was Coltrane, anyway?
“And by the grace of God you escaped Hickman,” George Cannon said. His accent sounded wrong when he looked this rumpled, Sam decided. The Liverpudlian tones went better with a starched collar and necktie.
“Exactly!” Young snapped out another signature.
“Well,” Sam reckoned, “exactly how much God has to do with our escape has been a subject of some discussion.”
“Mr. Clemens is a skeptic,” Young snorted, “and a cynic. He’s a thoroughly modern man, George, you’d like him.”
“I’m only as skeptical as the facts force me to be,” Sam said in his defense. “It tells a sad truth about our universe that I find the facts generally compel me to be a misanthrope.”
“Get over here and operate this machine of yours, George, you and Lindemuth both,” Young barked, signing another slip. “You know I was never any good with Orson’s devices.”
Cannon walked around the table, looking at the message slips being written. John D. Lee is a traitor, Sam printed carefully, making sure to use his best legible copperplate hand—who knew who was going to have to read these messages and just how literate they would be? He blew on the slip and set it beside the others awaiting signature.
“No, your gifts have always been the classic ones,” George Cannon agreed. “You’ve inspired the hearts and minds of men, and sometimes known them, but this age of steam-powered machinery and electricks is a bit beyond you. You’d have been a good Nephite, Brother Brigham, or a good Hebrew patriarch, or a good Spartan, even.”
“Are you saying I’m not a good Mormon?” Young growled, inadvertently crumpling a message slip in his hand. “That I’m old-fashioned, a relic?” He held the pen in his hand like a dagger.
George Cannon stood by the wall of cylindrical message tubes and rubbed his fingers over a series of brass hatches. “Not really a man of the nineteenth century, perhaps,” he admitted. “That’s not entirely a bad thing.”
“Only a fool focuses on his own century!” Young gnashed his teeth. “God’s work is eternal, the prize is eternal, a life and all things that make one eternal round, George! Why should I care about steam-trucks and message tubes and … and …” his eye roved the room looking for other examples, “fornication pants, when God has commanded me to focus on the eternal salvation and progression of his family!”
“Are they so incompatible, Brigham?”
“Load the machine!” Young shouted, red in the face, and he thrust a handful of slips at Cannon. “Stake Presidents first!”
Cannon dutifully put each slip into a canister and loaded a series of message tubes, chosen apparently at random from the gleaming bank.
“Help me understand, Brigham,” George Cannon continued. “Why are you so convinced that a man can’t drive a steam-truck and wear Levi-Strauss’s trousers and still be in God’s good graces?”
“Let’s not get too personal,” Sam objected. He wrote again that Brigham Young was alive and John D. Lee was a traitor.
“Distractions!” Young huffed. “Temptations! The frivolities of this world, the putting of pleasure and convenience before the daily necessities of prayer, introspection and obedience to the commandments of God!”
“A man c
an be tempted to fornication no matter what pants he’s wearing, Brigham.” Cannon smiled the smile of a salon wit. “He’s probably worst tempted when he’s wearing no pants at all.”
“You’ve seen England!” Young raged. “You’ve seen the United States, damn it all! Do you really believe that those societies live the way God wants His children to live? In squalor and desperation and sin and pollution of every kind, cutting each other’s throats and stealing each other’s virtue?”
“England isn’t perfect,” Cannon admitted, closing the brass doors almost, but not quite all the way. “Neither are the United States, nor the Southern states that feel bullied by the North and want to secede. Nor is the Kingdom of Deseret.”
“Not yet!” Young snarled. “But we will perfect the Saints, in time! That’s God’s work, to bring about our immortality and eternal life, and I thought you were my fellow-worker, George!”
“Have you considered the possibility,” George Cannon said mildly, “that John D. Lee’s uprising was not an attack against the Kingdom, but only against yourself?”
“What are you talking about?” Young asked.
Sam’s heart sank. Where was Coltrane? He tried to keep his eyes from jumping to the room’s windows. The gunfire outside seemed to be dying down now, and even that felt ominous to him.
“Have you considered the possibility that Lee might not be alone?” Cannon continued. “That there might be others, a sizable group of men, even, who worry that your leadership, inspired as it may have been in the past, may be leading the Kingdom of Deseret in the wrong direction?”
“Any man fool enough to reach out his hand to steady the Ark will suffer Uzzah’s fate!” Young thundered.
“Instant death?”
“Smitten by the hand of God!”
“Have you considered the possibility that such a movement might have a leader and it might not even be John D. Lee?”
“Send the messages!” Young shouted. The President of the Kingdom of Deseret grabbed a pistol off the table he was working at and pointed it at his clerk, pulling back the hammer with his thumb.
George Cannon shut one of the trapdoors. Sam expected to hear a hiss and see the canister inside the tube disappear, but nothing happened.
“Another!” Sam grunted, involuntarily. The President of the Kingdom glared at him, then spun back to Cannon.
“Another!” Brigham Young himself shouted.
George Cannon closed another tube, then another, then another. No hiss, no canisters disappeared.
“Are the tubes broken?” Sam asked. He remembered standing with Tamerlane O’Shaughnessy outside the Lion House and watching the network of glass tubes radiating outwards from this office. “The device must work by pressure, right? If any of those tubes is broken, it might stop the cylinder from going through. Try a different tube.”
“Try a different tube!” Young waved his pistol around vaguely.
“None of them will work,” Cannon said. He was calm, despite the pistol in his face, and Sam had to admire the man. “Don’t waste your time.”
“You’re the traitor!” Young bellowed.
Cannon shook his head slowly. “I love the Kingdom,” he said, “and I would never betray it. That’s why I recruited John D. Lee and made him part of my plans to save Deseret.”
“Lee!” Young gasped.
Sam felt like a fool.
“That’s why I had Lee’s men smash up the pneumatic bells in the yard,” Cannon added. “When he told me you were alive, I knew you’d have to come here and you’d want to get word out that you were still alive. But until those bells are repaired, no message will get in or out of the Great Salt Lake City, unless it goes by hand.”
“Then I’ll get them out by hand!” Young shot back. “Like a hundred Paul Reveres in the desert, I’ll send out a single Elders Quorum and warn the entire Kingdom in an hour!” Sam wondered if he was bluffing.
“And that’s why,” Cannon’s voice rose higher in pitch and became more nasal. He sounded emotional, like he was coming to the climax of a real stem-winder of a sermon. His body, though, looked relaxed and unthreatening, standing in his shirttails with his arms at his sides. “That’s why, I’m afraid, you simply cannot be allowed to leave this room alive, Brother Brigham.”
“Ha!” Young roared. He still looked like a lion, towering over the smaller man. Cannon looked neater and more composed than the President, somehow, despite his dishabille. “You’re forgetting that I’m the one with the pistol and the armed men at my back!”
“No,” Cannon said. “I’m not.”
CLICK.
It wasn’t one click that he heard, really, but a whole series of simultaneous clicks that all together were so loud they sounded like an ax sinking into a tree trunk. Sam turned slowly.
John D. Lee, bruised and beaten about the face but holding himself upright with cold fury in his eyes, stood inside the room. He held a cocked pistol in one hand and his other arm hung limp at his side. Five men stood with him, in the room, in the doorway and in the hallway beyond, all with guns aimed at Brigham Young and his companions.
“Lee!” Young roared.
“Drop it, Brigham,” Lee drawled slowly, and for the first time Sam could hear a little Virginia in his voice. “Or Welker and Lindemuth get to see the great eternal round before you do.”
Lee kept his gun on Young but his men pointed their firearms at the message clerk and the bodyguard.
“Don’t do it,” Sam said, but he wasn’t sure who he was saying it to, or what he meant.
Young gritted his teeth. “Wraaagh!” He tossed his pistol heavily to the ground.
Sam raised his hands, as did Brigham.
“Port,” Young said, and his voice was almost gentle.
The shaggy frontiersman stood gripping the table with white knuckles, right beside his two large pistols. An ink-blotched, crumpled message slip in front of him bore the poignant message, scrawled in large, child-like capital letters, I EM A LYVE. JON LEE IS A SUMBICH SNAYK.
“It ain’t right, Brigham,” Rockwell grunted, and shook his long-haired head.
“Porter, do as I say,” Brigham Young said.
“No bullet or blade,” Rockwell reminded him.
Lee swiveled one of his pistols and pointed it at Welker’s head.
“Port!” Welker cried.
“Please,” said Brigham Young.
Rockwell gritted his teeth and slowly raised his hands.
“Get their guns,” Lee said.
Welker and Lindemuth scooped up all the pistols lying on the table and George Cannon bent to pick up the pistol Young had dropped onto the floor. Then the clerk and the bodyguard stepped away from the table—and turned, pointing their guns at Young, Rockwell, and Sam.
“Dammit!” Rockwell roared.
“You see what I mean about the facts compelling me to misanthropy.” Sam joked but he felt sick to his stomach.
“I do indeed,” Cannon agreed.
“Can I smoke?” Sam asked. He didn’t know what to do but he wanted to buy time, for himself and, if the poor bastard wasn’t already dead somewhere or in Danite hands, for Jedediah Coltrane.
“Be my guest.”
Sam struck a lucifer on the snaps of his jeans and lit a Partagás from his pocket. He imagined the action as a clever signal to the dwarf that he was in trouble and needed help, needed something like the electrified Jim Smiley to come to his rescue. Of course, if the dwarf was watching through the windows and couldn’t figure out that all the guns pointed at his head meant that Sam needed help, then he was an idiot and was going to be useless in any case.
He sucked a puff of smoke but it didn’t really calm him. “Now what?”
“Now, Mr. Clemens,” George Cannon said, “I make you and your government an offer.”
Sam was caught off guard. “Me?” was all he managed to spit out.
Cannon nodded. “There’s a war coming. Don’t you want the Kingdom of Deseret on your side?”
Sam chewed his cigar and tried to think. “Why the change of heart, Mr. Cannon? Only yesterday, I was being framed for a murder so that you could go to war against my government. What happened between then and now?”
“You won is what happened, Mr. Clemens. You’re here with Brigham Young, and the Southerners and the Englishmen are not. Your craft, the Jim Smiley, is an impressive and ultra-modern piece of engineering and it has conquered my heart. And Captain Everett’s Virginians, though they remain in the field, have done a surprisingly poor job against the men from Massachusetts, and the Mexicans.”
“You don’t care whose side you’re on,” Sam realized.
“Correction,” Cannon said. “I don’t care whose side I’m on, as long as Deseret is with me and it’s the winning side.”
“You’re going to hell!” Rockwell spat on the floor.
“Why, George?” Young asked.
“For Deseret, of course,” Cannon explained. His eyes and mouth were earnest, even pious in their expression. “Deseret needs the war and it needs to be on the winning side.”
“You’re insane,” Sam judged. “Nobody needs war, except undertakers.”
“You’re wrong,” Cannon insisted. “We need the war. We need a winning ally who will need us, share with us, take us in, and love us, and then after the war, trade and mingle with us. We need to be part of the world, in and of it and not sequestered away in some godforsaken corner like dervishes. The United States drove us out once, but if it is the cost of winning this inevitable war, they will take us in their red, white, and blue arms again. It will be a gain for the United States and it will be a gain for the Kingdom.”
“Fool,” Young cursed him.
“The modern world is inevitable, Brigham,” Cannon told him. “It’s already here and knocking at our door. We can’t run and we can’t hide, and if we fight it we’ll be destroyed. We must embrace the world, and it must embrace us.”
Sam hesitated. Wasn’t Cannon offering him exactly what he’d come here for? With Pratt’s airships and the phlogiston guns, whatever war there was would be short. Lives would be saved, the Union would be saved. “President Buchanan’s offer to the Kingdom of Deseret is the gift of a transcontinental railroad,” he said, “and sundry supporting materials.”