Dan Simmons - Black Hills

Closer in, the Midway Plaisance stretches east beneath them, filled with happy dark specks. Below and to their left are the red roofs and forested grounds of the German Village. To the right of the Midway rise the domes and minarets and odd spires of the Turkish Village. Beyond the Turkish Village on the right is the large, round, strange structure that holds the simulated Burmese Alps exhibit, and opposite that across the Midway is the Javanese Village known as the Dutch Settlement, across the street from the main Dutch Settlement.

Beyond these structures are the Irish Village on the left, with its popular Donegan Castle and Blarney Stone; the round amphitheater on the right for the animal show; and—farther down, marking the east end of the Midway—the twin and opposing glasswork buildings, Murano on the right and Libby on the left.

As he thinks the word Libby , Paha Sapa feels a dull stirring in his skull and wonders if General Custer’s ghost is watching through his, Paha Sapa’s, eyes, listening through his ears. Damn him if he is.

It is while they are stopped next, waiting for another six cars below them to load quickly, that the little boy, no older than five, breaks away from his grandparents and comes running around the car, waving his arms as if he is flying. The boy’s fingers brush Paha Sapa’s bare wrist above his gloves as the child flaps and flutters by.

He realizes then what an attuned state of sensitivity he is in, for at once there is an into-the-person vision flash of images and thoughts from the child. Paha Sapa has to clutch the railing at the window and close his eyes as vertigo assails him again.

The elderly couple at the other end of the car, even now calling the wayward child back to them, are named Doyle and Rheva. They are from Indiana. Paha Sapa noticed that the man has a droopy left eye and a strangely downturned mouth, and now—through the little boy’s unfocused memory—he learns of the stroke the year before that caused it. Doyle has a long, thin nose, and Rheva, a slightly plump former beauty with full, flushed cheeks, kind eyes, and shorter-than-the-fashion wavy silver hair, has always been embarrassed by her behind. Everyone in the family—even the little boy—calls it the “DeHaven Butt.” It is Rheva’s greatest secret, known only by the entire family, that she has never had to purchase or wear a bustle in order to be seen as wearing a bustle. The little boy does not know what a “bustle” is.

The boy’s name is Alex and he has been so inspired by the exhibits at the Fair—especially Mr. Tesla’s and Mr. Edison’s—that his new goal in life is to grow up to invent a mechanical adding machine that can think.

Paha Sapa shakes his head to rid himself of these unwanted, swirling images and words and names and child-memories. His sensitivity to inward-seeing visions right now is as heightened as he’d feared, all because of his proximity to Miss de Plachette… and all the more reason to avoid any possible skin-to-skin contact with Miss de Plachette. He does not want to see into her mind or memories. It is very important to him that he does not do that. Not now. Not yet. With luck, never.

He realizes that she is whispering to him.

— Paha Sapa, are you all right?

He opens his eyes and sees that her gloved hand hovers too near his wrist.

He moves his arm away and smiles.

— Perfect. Wonderful. I just discovered that I’m afraid of heights, is all.

The guard-conductor with the waxed mustache, Kovacs, looks over at Paha Sapa suspiciously, as if this nonwhite passenger with the long braided hair may go berserk and begin battering the walls, shattering glass, and bending the iron of the door in his wild effort to escape, even though they are a hundred feet up, just as another height-crazed passenger was reported to have done just a week earlier. In that incident, so the newspaper accounts went, a woman finally stopped the crazy man by removing her skirt and throwing it over the man’s head, immediately causing him to become docile.

Paha Sapa knows that such a blinding hood works with panicked horses. Why not with crazed Ferris Wheel passengers? More effective than the sap filled with shot purportedly in the guard’s pocket.

Brakes release, the car wobbles again, and they resume their rise.

It is at the apogee of their circle— apogee being a word Paha Sapa learned when the three Jesuits at the tiny tent school on the mountain above Deadwood attempted for a year to drive Greek into his unwilling head—that Miss de Plachette does something… extraordinary. And changes his life forever.

The car stops suddenly at the top of the Wheel and begins rocking more noticeably than at their previous two stops. Rheva and her granddaughter let out moans. Little Alex shouts with joy at what he probably thinks to be their imminent destruction. Long-nosed Granddad Doyle pats the boy on the head.

The conductor’s mouth slacks open. He cries out—

— Miss!

The shout is due to the fact that Miss de Plachette has suddenly moved to the center of the car, gathered her long skirt, jumped up onto one of the low, round plush velvet chairs, and is now standing there, balancing easily, very straight, arms full out from her sides, palms down, head back, eyes closed.

— Miss, please… you mustn’t, ma’am!

The guard, Kovacs, sounds sincerely alarmed, but when he moves toward Rain, Paha Sapa instinctively steps forward to come between them. No man is going to touch Miss de Plachette while he is around.

Smiling broadly, head still far back as if tasting ocean air, Rain seems ready to leap forward and begin soaring out—magically, because of the glaze and wire mesh—through the windows into the blue Illinois sky. Instead, she lowers both arms and offers her right hand to Paha Sapa.

— Your hand, please, dear sir?

Paha Sapa takes it—grateful for his gloves and hers so that there can be no contact of skin on skin that might trigger any into-vision—and she steps down lightly and gracefully. The guard, Kovacs, returns to his post at the bolted south door and literally saves face by stroking his waxed mustache.

Miss de Plachette speaks softly, no apology audible in her voice.

— I just wanted to be the highest person in Illinois—perhaps in the country—for a few seconds. I’ve got that out of my system now.

The Wheel begins to move again.

Paha Sapa realizes in that second that he is going to love this woman for the rest of his life.

Paha Sapa says nothing. The two move to the west-facing windows now—the grandparents Rheva and Doyle and little Alex and the other two children giving the madwoman room, but also smiling.

Below them to the west, Paha Sapa and Miss de Plachette look down on the pretend turrets and towers of the Old Vienna attraction. Music from the multiple-domed Algerian Theater filters up to them. Farther up the Midway, a string of ostriches and reindeer from the Laplander Village mingle in wonderful but obscure mixed metaphor. To the north, there is a dark smudge above the city of Chicago and Paha Sapa realizes it must be from all the industry and smokestacks and locomotives and other machines there. He wonders how dark the sky gets in the winter with the hive-city’s tens or hundreds of thousands of coal fires burning. Chicago, he has already seen, is the Black City to the Fair’s pretend White City.

Miss de Plachette smiles and points to the captive balloon farther west along the Midway Plaisance and to their right. The balloon is at least a hundred feet up on its thick tether, but it’s below them. (Three days later, on July 9, Paha Sapa will watch from the Wild West Show grounds as dark clouds gather, a funnel cloud appears, and then cyclone winds of more than 100 miles per hour lash the Midway, the Ferris Wheel, and all the buildings and exhibits. Huge glass panes will blow off the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building and a forty-foot segment of roof will be torn off the dome of the Machinery Building. The sudden winds will catch the empty captive balloon before it can be hauled down and the beautiful mushroom of colored silk he and Miss de Plachette are looking at now will be ripped into nine thousand yards of silk rags, many scattered more than a half mile away. Mr. Ferris’s Wheel, on the other hand, filled almost to capacity when the storm strikes it, will weather the wind’s impact without a problem.)