Teancum (9 page)

“Fookin’ hell,” he called back to Edgar Allan Poe.
 
“It’s eerie how that thing of yours
doesn’t make a noise, even while it’s chewing men to pieces.”

“You’d prefer it to say
woof
, I suppose?”

“I’d prefer it to do
something
, is all I’m saying.
 
Besides generate minced Pinkerton, I mean.
 
Not that I object to the mincing at all.”
“Yes, well,” Poe mumbled dryly, “I promise to take your criticism to Mr. Hunley
next time I see him, though I can’t make any representations about the
likeliness or imminence of that possibility.”
 
He spat a quid of thick blood against the wall.

Bang!
 
Bang!

“If you’re quite finished chatting,” Roxie snapped, “we’re
about to have company by the tradesmen’s entrance.”

“Hell and begorra!” Tam shouted, and pointed with his Model
1.
 
The others crowded into the
stairwell exit with him and looked.
 
The air-ships, all of them, were sliding up the metal antennae that
rooted them to the tower.
 

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 towards the platform.
 
“That’s Pratt!” Roxie shouted, and Tam saw the frayed old man standing
against the air-ship’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 air-ship’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, towards the fourth air-ship.

*
  
*
  
*

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 can 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, or 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.”