Dan Simmons - Black Hills

Paha Sapa had staggered to the closest chair and collapsed into it. There he sat for the next three hours, and to that chair he would return for almost all of his next eleven visits to the Fair.

It was not just the noise and motion and whiff of alien ozone in the air that so mesmerized Paha Sapa (and, evidently, so many other males, white and foreign and one Indian, of all ages who gathered in the Machinery Building to watch the pistons drive up and down and the rotary belts whirl and the great wheels turn). Most women couldn’t seem to stand most of the Machinery Hall, but especially not this southern end, where the coal-fed furnaces and steam engines and larger dynamos clustered—the so-called Boiler-house Extension area—and it was true that the noise in much of the hall was truly deafening. On his later visits, Paha Sapa solved the noise problem with two wads of wax that he kneaded until they were the proper softness and shape and then pressed into his ear canals. It was not the noise that drew him here.

This , Paha Sapa realized and knew in his heart, was the center and core of the wasichus’ power and secret soul.

Oh, not just the steam and electricity, which Paha Sapa knew were both relatively new to the wasichus’ culture and list of commandable technologies (although he’d seen the fifteen-foot-high statue of Benjamin Franklin holding his key and kite cord and umbrella at the entrance to the Electricity Building), but it was this demonstrated ability to harness the universe’s hidden energies and secret powers—like children playing with the forbidden toys of God—that made the Wasicun so successful and so dangerous, even to themselves.

Since his three years of education at the hands of Father Francisco Serra and the other Jesuit monks at their failed monastery-school near Deadwood, Paha Sapa had understood both how important religion could be to most wasichus and how the majority of them could set aside their religion for everyday life. But these furnaces, these howling engines, this Holy Ghost of steam, this ultimate Trinity of motor and magnet and armature of miles upon miles of coiled copper wire, this was where the real gods of the Wasicun race dwelt.

Signs around the giant iron Westinghouse engine and its smaller acolytes informed Paha Sapa that “power from these dynamos and generators runs the elevators in the tall Administration Building and elsewhere, furnishes thousands of Exposition exhibitors with motive force, sets in motion countless other machines here in the Machinery Hall, and, not of the least importance, drives the sewage of the Fair toward Lake Michigan.”

Paha Sapa had laughed at that last part… laughed until he wept. How perfect that the wasichus used the power of their secret gods, the secret powers of the Wasicun universe itself, to drive their sewage “toward” the lake a few hundred yards away. He wondered if and how the sewage made it the rest of the way, beyond the push of all these tens and hundreds of thousands of combined horsepower and volts and amperes of electromagnetism. And then Paha Sapa laughed again and found that he was weeping in earnest.

It was about this time that a blue-clad Fair guide of some sort, wearing a brimless little red cap, approached him and shouted at him.

— And these ain’t even the largest dynamos at the Exposition!

Paha Sapa found this hard to believe.

— No? Where would the largest be found?

— Not too far from here, in the Intramural Railroad Company Building. You readum signums, chief?

— Yessum, sir, I cannum.

The man squinted, not sure if he was being made fun of, but continued shouting.

— Well, just look for the sign that says IRC or Power Plant. It’s behind the Machinery Hall, back near the south fence of the whole Fair. Not many people find it or want to go there.

— Thank you.

Paha Sapa was most sincere.

The Power Plant was indeed tucked back close to the fence, beyond the Convent of LaRabida (which actually had something to do with Christopher Columbus) and beyond the totem poles and south of the Anthropology Building (in which Paha Sapa could have studied an exhibit of phrenology showing why American Indians were a less-developed race in Darwinian terms).

When he finally entered the IRC Power Plant building, which was all but empty except for a few bored attendants in coveralls and one old man with three children in tow, Paha Sapa had to find a chair quickly or collapse to the floor.

Here was the world’s largest and most powerful dynamo. A yellowed placard announced— “When it is considered that this railroad is six and a half miles long, has sixteen trains of cars in constant movement and this aggregate of sixty-four cars [is] frequently crowded with passengers, some idea may be formed of the energy sent forth by this revolving giant.”

And revolving giant it was, its largest wheel half-buried in its cement trough but the top of that wheel almost touching the rafters beneath the ceiling. The whir and roar here were deafening, the smell of ozone constant. The few hairs on Paha Sapa’s arms stood on end and stayed on end. Rather than moving sewage toward the lake, this single dynamo moved every electric-powered train and car on the intramural railway that shuttled visitors around the perimeter of the Fair and from one end to the other. But, Paha Sapa knew, the purpose to which this invisible energy was being put mattered little; it was the ability to harness and direct it that changed the universe.

So each time Paha Sapa returned to the Fair after this, he would explore new sights for a while, spend a few minutes in the Electricity Building, spend hours standing near the roaring engines and dynamos of the Machinery Hall, and celebrate his last hour or two by sitting here in the remote IRC Power Plant building, watching and feeling this single dynamo. This last was like a forgotten cathedral, and the workers and attendants there soon came to know Paha Sapa and to tip their hats to him.

There was also another man there whom Paha Sapa saw several times during his visits—an older man in rumpled, expensive clothes and with a neatly trimmed beard and a bald head (which Paha Sapa saw gleaming in the light of the naked overhead bulbs when the gentleman removed his boater to mop at his pink scalp with an embroidered handkerchief). Even the man’s walking stick looked expensive. Most of the time there were only the dynamo’s attendants, as silent as acolytes serving a High Mass, and Paha Sapa standing or sitting in his chair, and the bearded gentleman standing or sitting in his chair some five yards away.

The third time the two saw each other there that May, the older gentleman came over, leaned on his walking stick, and cleared his throat.

— I beg your pardon. I do not mean to disturb you and I realize that my question must be presumptuous, if not actively offensive, but are you, by any chance, an American Indian?

Paha Sapa looked up at the man (who wore a soft, rumpled linen jacket on this exceptionally warm May day, while Paha Sapa sweated in his black suit). He could see the intelligence behind the older man’s eyes.

— Yes, I am. I belong to the tribe we call Lakota and which others call the Sioux.

— Marvelous! But I’ve compounded my presumptuousness by forgetting my manners. My name is Henry Adams.

The man held out his small, finely formed hand. It was as pink as his scalp and cheeks above his beard.

Paha Sapa got to his feet, returned the handshake, and gave his false name of Billy Slow Horse. The bearded man nodded and said how delightful it was to meet a member of the Sioux Nation here, in a World’s Fair dynamo room of all places. Suddenly Paha Sapa was filled with a great sense of old sorrow—not his own—but thankfully no other memories or impressions came through the contact of hands. With Custer babbling through his nights and the memories of Crazy Horse confusing him during the days, Paha Sapa did not think his sanity could survive another set of memories.