evity. Steve had no proof of this

since he had never met an old super-straight.

Or had he? Could he have Shaken the hand of one in the Oval Office?

Why else would the Family be so different from their loyal

soldier-citizens? How else could people like Malone and other mexicans

like Side-Winder operate for so long on the overground without pulling

a trick?

It would also explain why the President-General took the Talisman

Prophecy so seriously - along with Mute magic. A real true-blue

Tracker, raised from birth in a hi-tech society where the physical

sciences provided an answer for everything, would never, for one

moment, have entertained the idea that some things happened 'by

magic'.

In the Federation, there was a total ban on the discussion of such

intangible concepts, and if ordinary Trackers so much as mentioned the

idea it could earn them a trip to the wall.

More important still was the fact that the President-General knew

something Steve had yet to discover-his true origins and the

circumstances surrounding his birth. They knew he was a Mute and yet

they had condoned the unthinkable: they had allowed him to jack up

Franklynne Delano Jefferson. Not just once, but on a regular basis,

sometimes notching up three or four ball-breaking sessions a night.

There was only one set of circumstances which would permit such a

relationship. Fran was also a Mute. They all were - or had enough

Mute blood in them for it not to matter. Which meant - in theory there

was nothing to stop him from becoming the next but one

President-General...

George Washington Jefferson the 33rd.

It was a mind-blowing notion, and the historical perspective it opened

up was equally disturbing. At what point had Mute blood entered the

veins of the First Family? Or had it always been there?

Mr Snow had told him that Mute and Tracker shared a common ancestry

whose roots ran back to the Old Time - the pre-Holocaust era that the

Iron Masters called the World Before. Super-straights like Clearwater

and Cadillac were living proof of that- and so, it would seem, was

he.

Their existence supported Mr Snow's claim that the Mutes had not

unleashed the Holocaust but were, instead, its principal victims.

If so, the bone and skin deformations and mental impairment that caused

the Federation to classify them as sub-human did not precede the

Holocaust; it was part of its dreadful legacy. Mutes did not exhale

the poisonous elements that filled the air, and it was not exuded

through the sweat glands on their multi-coloured skins. And touching

that skin did not cause Trackers to develop gangrene. According to Mr

Snow, that was another of the great lies invented by the Federation.

In the oral history of the Mutes, it was the servants of Pent-Agon,

Lord of Chaos, who had unleashed The War of a Thousand Suns by

launching countless numbers of iron birds into the air. Iron birds

which rose into the sky-on plumes of fire, flew in a great arch towards

the stars then returned to earth as falling suns.

Many of these birds, said Mr Snow, had been caged deep in the earth in

underground cities - like those of the Federation; others had burst

free from the bodies of great iron-snakes that travelled on shining

hard-ways. Not the crumbling remains that marked the routes once used

by the giant, man-carrying beetles, but endless ribbons of polished

iron which glittered in the sun like the flawless blades of the

samurai.

In the last six weeks, Steve had seen those shining hard-ways, and a

new kind of iron-snake whose fiery breath was used not to kill, but to

power its massive wheels.

Steam trains, lovingly restored and maintained by the First Family,

running on rails - two ribbons of rolled steel pinned to wooden

'sleepers'. They were part of a grandiose project still several

decades from completion - the rebuilding of the Atchison, Topeka and

Santa Fe railroad which, when eventually connected to rebuilt sections

of the pre-H Southern, and Southern Pacific routes, would link the east

and west coasts of America.