Deseret (10 page)

Absalom knocked over his lemonade in his haste to start
scribbling in his Note-Paper-Book, and Burton stomped away.
 
Impertinence.
 
Insubordination.
 
Woman’s name.
 
His
pencil shattered, and Absalom snorted in impotent rage as he threw it over the
side of the steam-truck.

The
Liahona
burst out
of the canyon like a mouse racing out of a hole in the wall.
 
The mountains fell away in cliffs,
dropping thousands of sheer, snow-mantled feet into short, rolling
foothills.
 
Ahead, beginning
already in the foothills, lay a gleaming city of brass and glass and sparkling
plascrete broken only by the green of parks and plazas, and beyond it all a
vast lake the same color as the sky.
 

It was pretty.
 
It was all pretty, it was huge and impressive and shiny and new and it
all worked, clean white steam rising up into the pale blue sky rather than the
thick black murk that hung like a rag over central London.
 
There was something about the plascrete
here as well that made it prettier, Absalom thought, even prettier than what
he’d seen in London or Paris or New York.
 
It sparkled, like it had bits of china ground up into it or something.
 
Maybe it was the mountain air.

The big steam-truck wheezed to a stop at a crossroads, right
at the edge where the foothills flattened into valley floor.
 
He didn’t think they could have arrived
yet and, out of curiosity, Absalom stood and walked to the rail.
 
To the left and right, tar-paved roads
curled around the circumference of the enormous valley, punctuated by brass
towers, brick farmhouses and irrigated fruit orchards.
 
Ahead, the road plunged directly into
the city, swallowed immediately by the steel, brick, brass and plascrete of
tall buildings.
 
In the center of
the crossroads stood a small hut with a man hanging out of its doorway, waving
a little red flag at the
Liahona
.

“What is it?
 
Don’t you know I’m badly behind schedule as it is?” Captain Dan Jones
bellowed from the rail at the man.
 
Burton stuck to the man like his own shadow.
 
Absalom kept his distance, but stayed within earshot.

“You’re diverted!” the semaphorist yelled back, and he waved
something in his other hand that looked like it might be a glass tube with a
bit of paper inside.
 
“Everyone is,
they even sent riders around to the farms!”

“Is it Indians?” Jones roared.
 
He looked like he didn’t care if it was Indians or not, and
if the flag-waver told him that the Great Salt Lake City was being invaded by
the Ute, Paiute, Gosiute, Shoshone, Navajo, Blackfoot, Crow and Apache peoples
simultaneously, he still wasn’t going to change his course.
 
“Fire?
 
Crickets?”

“I don’t know!”
 
The gateman tossed his flag inside the little booth and shut the
door.
 
“All I know is it’s got
something to do with the Twelve, and you’re the last traffic I’m expecting down
the Canyon.
 
Can I get a ride to
the Tabernacle?”

The
Liahona
crawled
to the center of the Great Salt Lake City.
 
The problem was that all the traffic—or very nearly
all of it, anyway—was going the same direction.
 
Horse-drawn carriages and wagons competed with steam-trucks
and even the occasional clocksprung beast for the same space on the tar, and
Absalom thought that the pedestrians walking (again, in the same direction) on
the sparkling plascrete walkways would arrive before he did.
 
They walked with a sense of urgency,
and constantly looked at pocket watches.

He looked ahead for the brigade of American cavalrymen, but
they were nowhere in sight.
 
A slow
tide of top hats, frock coats, buckskin jackets, boots and wheels and buckles
and horseshoes and gears seeped along, bearing him with it, disappearing into
something that looked like a giant plascrete egg, a vast bald genius skull
sprouting patches of green vegetable hair in zigzagging rows and propped up
with a wild whirl of pipes running straight out from it in every
direction.
 
He looked down side
streets and saw that all the traffic everywhere was bound for the same place.

Good, he thought.
 
No,
excellent
.
 
If everyone in the Great Salt Lake City
was in the same place, it should be very easy to find Abigail, or at least
figure out how to find her.
 
And
her husband, that scoundrel Orrin Porter Rockwell, was a famous man.
 

Unexpectedly, the
Liahona
lumbered right, dropped down a steep ramp and went underground.
 
Absalom, along with all the other
passengers on the deck other than that obstinate ruffian Dick Burton, ducked,
but the top of the entrance was several feet over the top of the wheelhouse and
the sudden collective cringe was unnecessary.
 
It was an enormous gate, and the space it opened into was a
mammoth Avernian shed full of steam-trucks of every size and description.

The
Liahona
shuddered
to a slow halt.
 
“Get everybody
off!” Captain Jones shouted to crewmen on the deck and then he was first down
the ladder.
 
Anxious to find the
little boy, Absalom thought, and he admired the man’s doggedness and integrity.

The big steam-truck had come to rest in a vast plascrete
hangar, surrounded by smaller craft.
 
A gleaming brass arch gave egress, two lines of inlaid brass text
pounded into the stone above it presumably both identifying the same
place.
 
SALT LAKE CITY
TABERNACLE
, said the line in English.
 
Above it, about the same length, was a
row of squiggly gibberish that Absalom couldn’t decipher.

Burton went over the side close on the Captain’s heels.
 
Absalom waited until Burton had
disappeared into the building before he, too, joined the trickling migration
off the ship and into the bowels of the Great Salt Lake City.
 
He had clambered down awkwardly,
reminding himself that the fact that he didn’t climb like a monkey was evidence
of progress in his family tree, and nodding and smiling patiently at the
stopped and frustrated flow of exiting persons waiting for him to finish and
get out of the way.

He was still among the earlier of the departing passengers;
none of them had any idea why they had been diverted from the station they
expected to arrive at, and the crew couldn’t seem to explain it to them.
 
Absalom worried for a moment for
Annie’s safety in the event of a passenger riot, until he remembered her
promise to fill the gaps in his teeth with boot leather.
 
He decided he was sure she could take
care of herself, straightened his hat and his dignity, and headed for the
Tabernacle.

Down and then up, past some heavily-trafficked side
corridors, and then Absalom stepped out onto a plascrete landing and froze,
astonished.

The Tabernacle was immense.

The building must consist almost entirely of a single
room.
 
It was a vast auditorium, an
amphitheater with a dozen—no, thirty—no, fifty?—rows of
seating in wide, scalloped brass alcoves, climbing up into dark shadows out of
view, all looking down on a large stage.
 
Around the rim of the stage were a dozen brass Franklin Poles, each
sprouting up into a blue-shimmering globe of electricks.
 
Three further Poles, of the same shape
only taller, rose up on the center of the stage itself, over a row of fine-looking
stuffed chairs and a tall, stair-mounted pulpit.
 

Absalom’s heart sank.
 
There must be thirty thousand people in the room, crawling along
plascrete ledges, greeting each other calmly, moving serenely into seats.
 
He saw Captain Jones a hundred feet
away, plowing with strong arms through the crowd, calling out queries whether
anyone had seen his midshipman John Moses.
 

Even if Abigail were here, and he had no idea if she would
be, he’d never be able to find her.

“Absalom!” a female voice shouted.

He whirled, half-hoping it might be Annie, half-hoping it
might be Master Sergeant Jackson—

and was astonished to see that it was his sister
Abigail.
 
She was dressed in a
man’s waistcoat, a voluminous skirt and pointy-toed leather boots like a
vaquero might wear.
 
He almost
laughed out loud at the incongruous sight of her.

“Abby!” he shouted.
 
He tried to embrace her despite her clownish appearance, and his sister
slapped him in the face.

“Didn’t Port find you on the trail?” she demanded.
 
She looked furious.

“Port?” he felt flushed, his cheek stung.
 
“Porter?
 
Do you mean Rockwell, the man who abducted you?”

“You poor fool,” she said, and she really seemed to pity
him, “don’t you know you’re in danger?”
 
She grabbed Absalom’s elbow and tried to drag him back in the direction
from which he’d come, but he resisted.
 
He’d been pushed around by enough women in the last twenty-four hours;
he was going to take a stand.
 
“I
only came to check the passengers of the
Liahona
just in case.
 
Port was
supposed to stop you from ever getting this far.”

“Yes, I know I’m in danger!” he hissed.
 
He wanted to yell, but he was conscious
of the crowd all around him, farmers and tradesmen and merchants, all dressed
like they’d put down their occupation at a moment’s notice and come to the
Tabernacle, all asking each other what was going on and all denying any
knowledge.
 
He was an outsider
here, and this was not the time or place to make a figure of himself.
 
“I’ve had a knife at my throat—that
was your Port, I’d like to add—and I’ve had guns pointed at me and been
kidnapped by red Indians and… and… threatened with a boot in my
posterior!”
 
He cringed inwardly,
feeling that he had organized his rant poorly, from a rhetorical point of
view.
 
He should have kept his list
to three, and should have saved the most impressive of his complaints for last…
he realized he’d run out of steam and stopped talking.
 
“Yes,” he said.
 
“You’re in danger, too.
 
I’ve come to rescue you.”

His sister looked puzzled and a little annoyed.
 
She was younger than he was, and they
shared a naturally fair complexion, but the sun had darkened and hardened and
aged her, and her furrowed eyebrows shot out the hard, angry stare of a
frontier woman.
 
He tried not to
cringe under it.
 
“Port said you
were a diplomat.”
 
Her accent was
changing, too.
 
She still sounded
English, but a little less so—her vowels were flattening out, her voice
was hardening.
 
“He said the Queen
was sending you with that explorer, Captain Burton.”

“Yes,” Absalom agreed.
 
“Your Mr. Rockwell tried to frighten me off, but I came, anyway.
 
He did this.”
 
He pointed to the ruined brim of his hat.
 
“I had to call in every favor I was
owed and promise more than one favor myself, but I arranged to have the Foreign
Office send me, so I could take you away.”
 
He faltered a bit under the stare.
 
“Take you back… home.
 
Back home to England.”

“I don’t want to go back.”

“But… you were kidnapped.”
 
This was not how he had imagined the conversation
going.
 
He felt a little indignant
at her resistance.
 

“No, I wasn’t.”

“I went to a lot of trouble, you know.”

“That’s not my fault.”

“You disappeared.
 
You had been seen with that scoundrel, that wild man Rockwell, and then
you disappeared and you said nothing at all to anyone in the family, and
nothing to any young lady of our acquaintance.
 
I know because I asked them all.”

She shrugged, an unladylike, American and vaguely vulgar
gesture.
 
“I eloped.
 
Are you armed?”

“Eloped?”
 
He
could scarcely credit the idea.
 
This was not the girl he had grown up with.
 
“Were you mad?
 
Are you mad
now?
”

She shrugged again.
 
“It seemed romantic at the time and besides, no one in the family was
going to approve my marriage to a wild mountain man.
 
Least of all Father.”
 
She squinted at him.
 
“You
should be armed.”

“Why should I be armed?”
 
Absalom felt off-balance, surprised, stranded.
 
“You used to be a very reserved young
woman, I remember.
 
What happened
to you?”

Abby laughed.
 
“Life happened, dear brother.
 
Marriage happened.
 
I came
west, I learned to run a tavern, I grew up.”