Dan Simmons - Black Hills

Paha speaks without thinking.

— No, in the Palace of Fine Arts, Miss de Plachette. Almost certainly there.

She smiles at him, knowing that she is being flattered (but not knowing his deep sincerity) but not seeming to mind. Her old gaiety flows back as they get farther from the Cold Storage Building, but Paha Sapa bites the inside of his lip until he tastes blood. He dislikes men who flatter women with compliments.

Four days later, on July 10, 1893, there will be a fire in the upper reaches of the tall tower at the rear of the Cold Storage Building. Firemen will arrive almost at once and rush up the wooden stairs to fight the fire blazing in the cupola atop that tower, but the fire will already have crept down the inside of the walls and beneath that stairway and will trap most of those firemen above. Two will survive by leaping to a rigid hose and sliding down it sixty feet to the ground. Thirteen other firemen, including the fire chief, will die horribly in the Cold Storage Building Fire, as will four workers.

But none of this is known to them at the time—at least not to Paha Sapa, for all his thought of being a sensitive wičasa wakan whose role will be to predict the future for his people—and it is a hot, sunny day where thoughts of fire and death have no place.

For a moment they do not talk as they walk northeast down the wide avenue that runs to the left of almost a dozen pairs of railroad lines that terminate in the Central Railroad Station. There are trains leaving and arriving, but most do so in that odd, steamless muting of usual train sounds that is a mark of these new electric trams.

In a sense, Paha Sapa and Miss de Plachette have come in through one of the “back doors” of the Fair; the designers specified the formal entrance to be at the opposite end of this west-east corridor, at the grand Peristyle that opens onto and from the Casino Pier that runs almost half a mile out into Lake Michigan. Arriving from a ship at the far end of the pier, one can, for the price of ten cents, take the Moving Sidewalk (complete with chairs) the full 2,500-foot length of the pier directly to the Peristyle. The World’s Columbian Exposition was always meant by its designers to be first seen and entered from the Lake Michigan side, through the Peristyle and into the Court of Honor.

Back here, Paha Sapa feels as if he’s in a stone canyon. To their left is the incredible mass of the Transportation Building (not the largest building in the world, that honor falls to the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building that dominates the eastern end of this grand concourse now visible ahead on their right, but larger than anything in Paha Sapa’s imagination, much less experience), and straight ahead is the white wall of the huge Mines and Mining Building. Miss de Plachette’s arm still linked in his, Paha Sapa guides them diagonally to the right so that they emerge into the dazzling afternoon brilliance of the broad Grand Court of Honor that runs straight past the impressive domed Administration Building and along either side of the Grand Basin all the way to the Peristyle. Arrayed on both sides of this Grand Court are the incredible buildings: the tall and endless Machinery Hall to their right, the gigantic Agriculture Building farther east, the roaring Electricity Building to their left beyond Mines and Mining, and beyond it the behemoth, the leviathan of all buildings on earth, the Manufactures and Liberal Arts hall.

Miss de Plachette pauses and tucks a strand of her copper-tinted brown hair under her straw boater. Paha Sapa is grateful for a breeze blowing down the long Grand Court from the lake that begins to dry his soaked shirtfront. The lady with him takes a step away, puts a gloved finger to her chin as if considering options, and turns to look in each direction of the compass. She closes her parasol and lets it dangle from her wrist by yet another hidden strap or string.

— Do you know what I think, Mr…. ah… I mean, Billy? Do you know what I think, Billy?

— What do you think, Miss de Plachette?

The young woman smiles, and it is almost a girl’s smile—unaffected, easy, seemingly prompted only by happiness.

— Well, first of all, I think that this informality I proposed shall never work out. You will never call me Rain, will you?

Paha Sapa does not actually shuffle his feet, but mentally he does.

— It is difficult for me to be so… ah… informal with so elegant a young lady, Miss de Plachette. It is simply outside my experience.

— Fair enough, then. I know that my brazen informality, while quite the thing in a Boston women’s college, takes people aback elsewhere. So I shall be Miss de Plachette and you shall be… I can’t remember. Did you tell me that it was Mr. Slow Horse or Mr. Horse?

— Actually, my name is Paha Sapa, which means Black Hills in Lakota.

Paha Sapa hears himself saying this to the woman but cannot believe he has said it.

Rain de Plachette stops all other motion and looks at him with great intensity. Paha Sapa notices that there is the slightest flaw of black in the hazel iris—it now looks green—of her beautiful left eye.

— I apologize for addressing you by the wrong name. When we were introduced… and Mr. Cody also referred to you as…

— No white person has ever known my real name, Miss de Plachette. And very few Lakota. I don’t know why I just told you. Somehow, it felt… wrong… for you not to know.

She smiles again, but it is a grown woman’s hesitant smile now, meant only for the two of them. She actually presses his scarred and calloused right hand with her gloved left hand, and he is glad for the gloves.

— I’m honored that you told me and I shall share the information with no one, Mr…. Paha Sapa. Did I pronounce it correctly? The first A has almost a long sound, does it not?

— It does.

— Well, you have honored me with your secret, Paha Sapa, so before our walk is over today, I shall tell a secret that very few people know about me… why my mother, who was also a Lakota, you know, decided to name me Rain.

— That would do me a great honor, Miss de Plachette.

He has heard rumors in the Indian tent that the Reverend de Plachette’s daughter is “half Indian.” Everyone has. But each of the four Indian nations represented in the Wild West Show has claimed her.

— But later. In the meantime, Paha Sapa, would you like to know what I have decided that we should do?

— Very much.

She clasps her hands together and for a second, in her smiling enthusiasm, looks like a very young girl indeed. The strand of copper-tinted-by-the-sun hair has escaped from her boater again.

— I believe we should walk over to the Midway Plaisance and take a ride on Mr. Ferris’s huge Wheel.

Paha Sapa makes a noncommittal noise and fumbles his cheap watch out of his pocket.

Miss de Plachette has already checked her watch—a tiny, round little thing, no larger than a cavalryman’s red sharpshooter badge, that hangs from her blouse by a gold ribbon—and she waves away his look of anxiety.

— Not to worry, Mr…. Paha Sapa, my friend. It’s not even quarter after four. Father will not be at the Grand Basin to meet me until six o’clock, and as much as Father demands punctuality from everyone else, he himself is almost always late. We have oodles and oodles of time. And I have been trying to work my nerve up to go on the Wheel for weeks now. Oh, please!

Oodles ? thinks Paha Sapa. This is a wasichu word he has not encountered in his seventeen years of wrestling with the language.

— Very well, we shall go ride Mr. Ferris’s Wheel. But I insist on purchasing our tickets. It’s a long walk to the Midway, Miss de Plachette. Would you care to ride in one of those wheeled carriages that are pushed from behind?