ReVISIONS
Page 3
The ruby beam, however, was too low in power to have any useful effect. For his needs, he had made a much larger apparatus, working upon the same principle of concentrating light by resonance, but this one using an electrical discharge in a blown-glass tube of rarified gas. The more powerful beam would, he told me, actually break down the air itself, turning it from an insulator into a conductor.
“And so?”
He pointed behind him. I had seen high-voltage generators before, of course, in his laboratory in New York, but had not paid attention to the fact that he had set one up in his chambers here. “Ten million volts,” he said. “It will discharge along the path of the beam.”
And at this, I had nothing at all to say.
It dawned a clear, cloudless day.
Tesla had spent the night and the morning working on his apparatus, adjusting and tuning every piece. I had hoped against hope that something would go wrong, that the day would be gray with fog shrouding the city, or the Tsar would change his mind, but exactly on schedule, the Tsar, in a blue military uniform bespeckled with gilt and medallions, appeared on his balcony to address his generals.
The generators whined like dogs eager to be unleashed, and the air was filled with the bite of ozone from the high-voltage generator and the smell of the heated oil from the transformers. My hands were trembling so much I could barely hold a pencil, and I sought desperately for something to say.
But Tesla was ice steady. He watched the spectacle across the river for a minute, judging exactly where the Tsar stood. Tsar Nicholas moved forward to grasp the brass railing and my heart went still, but Tesla did not move. Why, why didn’t he fire his machine? Had he had a sudden change of heart?
Then a pigeon sitting on the brass railing spread its wings and flew off. As if this were his signal, Tesla said, very softly, “Now.”
He fired the beam. An instant later, the high voltage triggered, and a horizontal lightning stroke reached out across the river in a dazzling blue-white flash, followed instantly by a clap of thunder.
Rather than following the straight path of the beam, the lightning stroke at the last furlong diverged, curving upward in a jagged arc, reaching over the green copper sheeting of the summer palace roof to strike a gold cupola above. A golden eagle on the point of the cupola exploded into a shower of sparks, spraying molten droplets of gold, and then the copper roof began to burn.
The Tsar looked around for a moment, puzzled, but then turned back to continue addressing the generals.
My ears were ringing from the thunderclap. “Failure!” Tesla cried. “Again!”
It took nearly a minute for the generator to recharge the condensers, and in that long minute we agonized. The crowd was clearly distraught, half of them still watching the Tsar, who continued to talk, oblivious, while the other half had craned their necks upward to watch as the flames on the rooftop of the summer palace slowly died out. Tesla frantically adjusted the apparatus.
“Now,” Tesla shouted, and again the beam of light shot out, and a moment later the electrical arc, a blue-white lightning and a clap of thunder. The lightning bolt curved across the river, flashing down a dozen secondary strokes into the river, each of which puffed up in a small cloud of steam. The lightning crackled up and down, dancing now toward the bridge, now playing over a huge statue of some ancient Tsar mounted on a horse.
The living Tsar, untouched, stopped speaking to stare at the spectacle.
Behind us, with a great snap, the overloaded condensers burst into flames, and the lightning faded to nothing. Tesla, cursing in his own language, turned to beat the flames out with a blanket before they set us on fire.
I turned back to gaze at the spectacle across the river. The beam and its ten-million-volt generator were dead. He should have tested it first, I thought. But it was too late to offer him that advice now.
The air was stinking of vaporized copper wire and burned wax insulation.
Sitting on the workbench beside me I saw the small ruby beam apparatus, which Tesla had long ago demonstrated for me. There was no trick to operating it, once it had been set up, and Tesla had set it up earlier to check the alignment of his mirrors. I turned the rheostat to set the ruby to flashing. The beam went out across the room, and I took my hand mirror out of my pocketbook, and carefully angled it, as I had seen Tesla do, to direct the beam across the river, and to the Tsar.
The beam was harmless, as I well knew from having put my hand in it. A toy, Tesla had called it.
The glowing crimson spot appeared on the Tsar. The beam jittered up and down, looking almost alive, for I was unable to hold the hand mirror perfectly steady, and flashes of impossibly bright light from the medals that bedecked the Tsar’s chest threw dancing glints in all directions. Even from across the river, I could hear the awed voices of the crowd. The Tsar moved left, and then right, but I followed him with minute motions of the mirror, and the crimson spot stayed fixed to his chest.
And then the Tsar knelt down, and stared directly into the beam.
Tesla destroyed his gas-discharge tubes, pounding the glasswork into sand until he was convinced that there would be no possibility of anyone ever reconstructing his work. The electrical generator and its equipment he donated to the Academy of Sciences, for he believed that they would have no visible connection to the events of July, and the Russian engineers, he judged, would benefit from the equipment.
The Tsar was blinded. The monk Rasputin proclaimed that the events of the day had clearly been a sign of God’s wrath. A horizontal lightning bolt from a clear sky, a fire of no known origin in the palace, a glowing blood spot upon the Tsar’s chest: these miracles could signify nothing other than the anger of God with the Tsar’s warlike nature, and the fact that the Tsar had merely been blinded, and not killed, was an indication of God’s mercy.
The Tsar postponed his plans to mobilize his army. And then, remarkably, over the next few days his eyesight returned, although for the rest of his life he would complain of a missing spot in his vision. The monk Rasputin declared the return of his vision to be a sign of God’s pleasure at the Tsar turning from war.
Tesla took out his pocket notebook and wrote a note: “Flash blindness: temporary in effect. Apparently clears up in two days.” Then he looked at the note, ripped the page out of his notebook, and burned it.
Faced with the undivided might of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and with no allies, Serbia acceded to the ultimatum, and eventually allowed itself to be peacefully absorbed into the empire. As Tesla had predicted, once war had been averted, the forces of commerce eventually overrode the dissections of Europe, and a new union of all of Europe emerged, rivaling the United States in its size and power, a great force for world peace. Even Germans and Frenchmen, once the greatest of enemies, now sit together at a common table in perfect peaceful conversation, and together make business plans for the greater prosperity of all mankind.
Would peace have come if, as we had planned, we had killed the Tsar of all the Russias? I have turned this thought over and over in my head, pondering every aspect of the question, and come to no certain conclusion. But on the whole, I think not. I think that a murder, no matter by what good intentions motivated, would have led the world into an even greater war than the one that had been impending. I now believe that the monk Rasputin, although he did not know it, had been right, and it was the hand of Providence directly that prevented us from murder, and saved Europe from war.
Before he smashed it, Tesla removed the tiny ruby cylinder from his apparatus and presented it to me. “You are fond of jewels,” he said. “Perhaps this mineral specimen could be cut into gems. I have no further use for it.”
I did not cut it up, however, but kept it to remind me forever of the day. I had it strung on a silver chain, so I could hang it from my neck to replace the ruby pendant.
I have it still.
Revision Point
Nikola Tesla, the mad Serbian inventor (and genius rival to Thomas Edison) could very well ha
ve invented the laser. By the end of the nineteenth century, he was experimenting with flashlamp stimulation of ruby crystals and with electrical discharges in rarified gases, researches that could, if aimed in the right direction, have resulted in production of a laser. Perhaps he even did (in his later years, Tesla talked ceaselessly about his researches in creating “needle-point beams of energy”), but if he ever made a working model, he never revealed it in public nor left a detailed description of a laser in his writings.
The origins of the first World War, and the question of whether the war could have been prevented, have been a matter of great debate among historians. The war seemed both inevitable, a huge and powerful machinery of destruction that was waiting only for a trigger that must invariably occur—and yet at the same time it seemed a result of a haphazard chance, the product of a handful of rash actions and ill-considered choices that fanned a spark in Bosnia into a worldwide conflagration. Some historians claim that with even one or two days more time, the diplomats might have managed to salvage the situation, and prevent the war, if only Russia had not mobilized its forces, setting into motion the chain of action and preemption.
Could the war have been prevented? Could Tesla, with his crude laser, have had any effect? Or, absent one cause, would the inevitable cataclysm have been started by another? These questions are beyond the realm of historical study: the stuff of speculation, and alternate history.
In our world, the first ruby laser was demonstrated in 1960 by Theodore Maiman, and the gas discharge by Ali Javan later the same year.
G.L.
OUT OF CHINA
by Julie E. Czerneda
A village in Yunnan, China, 1301 A.D.
THEY say the surface of a clear lake is an aperture into another world, another time, an other reality.”
The rat, unimpressed, lapped at the aperture under consideration, ripples from its tiny tongue distorting the reflection of leaf, bamboo, and stone. The scholar smiled and shook his head. “You show as much respect for philosophy as our present chancellor.” He scooped the rodent back into its place within his coat. “Or perhaps yours is more in tune with the times.” His heavy sigh was met with a squeak of protest and the scrabble of claws. “My apologies, Little Blossom.”
He watched the last ripple reach the pond edge, then reflect back through the first, and so on, each fading with every encounter until the pond was still once more. His garden was full of metaphors this afternoon, Xuai Chi decided, fighting an inclination toward bitterness. He was too young for the life of a recluse, too proud of his learning and sure of his purpose to isolate himself from the world. But the Mongols and their semuran lackeys had rejected older and more educated men. Confucian scholars were presently unwelcome in public service and Chi’s tactful absence from Kunming City served his family best.
“Our time will come again,” Chi assured his garden. “When the canals clog and no one remembers how to count taxes. Barbarians.”
It would help if his garden needed work, but it was perfect. Nothing missing, nothing superfluous. Without the presence of an insolent rat for scale, Chi could believe he gazed down at the “Pearl on the Plateau” of his home, missing only the rose-tinged clouds of sunset.
Chi was loath to lose what tranquillity he’d gained in some household squabble, but the youngest servant girl had been standing between the red-lacquered pillars of his garden gate for some time. She appeared anxious. Probably nothing. Still. A summons from his family, at last? Chi acknowledged her presence. “What is it?”
He might have opened floodgates. The servant sprang forward, bowing, hands wringing the muted gray cloth of her coat, words spilling out almost as quickly as the tears down her cheeks. “Master Chi! The rats—the rats are dying in the streets. It is as you warned. The villagers have left for the Stone Forest. We must go, too. We must run for our lives! Haste, Master Chi!”
Chi rested one hand over the warm lump inside his coat as he stood, glancing down to be sure his favorite trousers hadn’t collected stray leaves. “Which streets? Be thoughtful in your answer, girl. I need to know exactly where these rats have appeared.”
“Yes, Master.” A hiccup, but her face lost its rictus of fear. Not one of the brighter lights among his small household if a stern voice and question stemmed her tears. Anyone who’d survived the recurring plagues in this region knew the only hope was to outrun the death that emptied so many homes and filled so many graves. Anarchy and famine were lesser evils than the Disease of the Rats.
“The magistrate’s house,” she gulped. “More, by the temple gates and through the market.” Her voice rose. “They’ll be here next, Master!”
He hoped so, with all the fervor of a man kept from his calling until this moment—but kept the wish to himself. If this was truly the last of his servants, he’d need her calm, not fearing for his sanity as well as her life. “You are true to your duty,” Chi complimented. “What is your name?”
Her eyes turned downward and she gave a deep bow. “Xiao Li, Master Chi.”
“Xiao Li. Go to my chamber and fetch me the small baskets you will find there. They are covered in red silk—you will not mistake them. Quickly now.”
She ran to the house and disappeared within. Chi knew she believed he’d come to his senses and the baskets were for his belongings.
They were not.
The village streets carried silence. People, carts, and pigs might never have rung music from their tiles or drummed across their wooden bridges. The red-roofed buildings sheltered emptiness. They might never have been the site of commerce, personal and business, for generations. And corruption, the curse of more modern times.
“Hurry, girl.”
Chi could have sped her pace by taking one or both of the baskets, but only her burdens kept her following. As it was, she stumbled often, her eyes wide and staring, flinching at the touch of a breeze as if it was the outstretched finger of death coming to claim her.
Chi kept his hands within his sleeves and walked at his accustomed pace. The possibility of success made him as nervous inside as his servant was outside. He licked dry lips and checked the landscape around them.
A ball of frenzied movement burst from beneath an ornate gateway. It appeared made of tails, fur, and blood. Even as Chi froze in place, the ball broke apart to reveal itself rats, biting at one another and themselves, writhing as if they were miniature demons.
He shouted: “Quickly! A basket—” only to have both land at his feet, their silk covers drifting to the road as his servant took to her heels.
Chi wasted no breath calling her back. Instead, he swallowed the gorge rising in his throat, glanced around to be sure there were no witnesses, and picked up the nearest basket.
The rats looked exhausted. A few bit and clawed at one another, but the rest lay limp on the tiles, their fur blood-streaked and covered in filth. Some of the filth moved, like crawling pepper.
Fleas.
Disgusted, Chi put the basket down and picked up one of the squares of silk his servant had dropped. He tore it in two, wrapping a piece around each hand. It was soiled from the street, but, like the fabric of his trousers and coat, had been steeped in essence of chrysanthemum. Any flea that touched the silk would be stunned or killed.
Would he could so easily protect himself from the Disease of the Rats.
True to the writings Chi had studied, the afflicted animals were insensitive to his presence. He had raised his own rats for three years and his experienced eye could see these were more than starved. Their fur was coming loose, revealing sores and boils upon the skin. Their abdomens were bloated and a crust had formed around eyes and nostrils.
They were sickness personified. Chi shuddered as he scooped up three with his basket, covering the top with the remaining square of silk.
He turned and hurried back to his home, hunched over the basket and its miserable contents. The ball of rats might have been a signal. Everywhere he looked, limp brown bodies clogged the drains and filled th
e shadows of open doors. Hundreds. Probably thousands. The hedge lining the road rustled with the dying. Their desperate squeaks seemed to echo sobs from the distant hills. Chi concentrated on his task. This wasn’t his home; it wasn’t his family fleeing for their lives through the labyrinth of limestone pillars that gave name to the Stone Forest.
It could be soon. Just because the Disease of the Rats had struck this rural village didn’t mean it spared cities, no matter how civilized or distant. He could only refuse to believe it had already reached Kunming City.
The basket might have been empty, except for its weight. Perhaps the rats inside were already dead. By contrast, Little Blossom shifted restlessly within his coat, tickling his ribs. Could she smell what he carried? He’d observed the sensitivity of her tiny nose, watched it twitch ever so delicately to discover which of his hands held her evening treat. “Hush. Hold still,” he told her.
Xuai Chi had planned for this day. Within his courtyard, safe from passersby, within his garden, safe from even servants, he had fitted his pavilion with cages of the finest workmanship, originally crafted to house nightingales. As he entered, each cage rocked on its hanger as its occupant rushed to peer down at him with dark bright eyes, tiny paws tapping softly at the bars as if asking to play or for a treat. The sweetness of apple bark and fresh grass filled the air.
Although descended from wild stock, his rats were healthy and sleek, their fur as soft and rich as any ermine’s. Even Chi found it hard to credit these were the same beasts the servants chased from the kitchens with their brooms.
The same beasts that lay quiescent within his basket. Chi checked the silk was still covering the top before going to where a pair of cages, as fine as the rest, stood empty and waiting. He put the basket down gently, then lifted his hands, watching them tremble in their wrapping like leaves in the wind.