Deseret by D. J. Butler Page A

certain that it had
only been a moment or two.   A
Foreign Office man always practices discretion .   He knew when he wasn’t wanted.
    He’d turned on his heel and left her to her eavesdropping in
the corridor.
    Rotten little tease, he reflected, nursing his solitary
lemonade in the afternoon sunshine.   Well, this was the Great Salt Lake City, anyway, and really, he had no
time for women.   They could only
distract him from his mission.   From his two missions, he reminded himself.
    A cavalcade of American soldiers overtook them and continued
on ahead.   Their horses were
clocksprung, which in itself was fascinating; clockwork was still a relatively
new technology, and very exciting.   Absalom had seen clocksprung curiosities in London—a clocksprung
rector and church choir at a fair in the little London borough of Wetwick, and
a clocksprung violinist in a private salon exhibition one evening—but it
was in the American South that the technology had flowered.   First under Eli Whitney, and then
driven by Horace Hunley and his team, southern inventors and engineers had
revolutionized their agriculture on its basis.
    Absalom had a desire to see the horses.   He wondered for a moment whether he
should care about their presence from a professional point of view or observe
it very carefully, but he let it drop when he saw Dick Burton glued to the
rail, staring at the cavalrymen.   On the one hand, he knew Burton would properly observe and note anything
that mattered to the success of their joint diplomatic mission—Burton’s
mission, really, though Absalom would never tell him that.   On the other hand, he resented Burton’s overbearing manner and his
presence generally and he didn’t want to be seen paying attention to anything
Burton was interested in.
    He let the horses pass and sipped his lemonade.
    Burton turned away from his observation and saw him.   “Be careful of the sun, Abigail,” he
growled.   “You may get wrinkles.”
    “Ambassador Fearnley-Standish, blast you!” Absalom
snapped.   He dug into his jacket
pocket to pull out his Patent Metallic Note-Paper-Book, and then felt a little
foolish for it.   His notes for
future memoranda of reprimand seemed petty in light of all the drawn guns and
knives he’d seen in the last twenty-four hours.   “Look, if you must know, I have a sister.   Her name is Abigail, as it
happens.   Last night I… I was
excited…”
    Burton sneered at him.   The scars running up both sides of his face looked like horns, giving
his face a devilish aspect to it that frightened Absalom—just a
bit—even in the noonday sun.   “Yes,” he said, “I saw just how excited you were, Abby!”
    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