Black Pockets

by George Zebrowski

  What shall I do with myself, and with this humanity that gave birth to me? Napoleon asks himself as he gazes at the Pyramids. How much must I impress myself upon my fellow beings? How much must I teach myself to become capable of teaching them? I suspect that this humanity around me will bring me down one day. I will be humiliated, and my heart will be torn out.

  And to this tragic sense of fatality within himself, to the foreshadowings written into his character by dramatic, technical elements belonging to the accretions of commentary, Napoleon answers:

  I must hurry ahead of my humanity.

  The British were readying to burn his fleet, to trap him in Ægypt. What was there to do?

  “Conquest wrested from ignorance is the only true conquest,” he whispers to himself as he gazes out over the ocean. “But what am I to do?”

  He hates the balance of powers that is Europe, that has always been Europe: it is inherently unstable. Chaos always waits to throw Europe into the abyss. Only a universal peace bestowed by a final conquest can remedy the instability of tottering balances...

  Even now the fleet might be burning. Evening would bring the glow.

  A Europe of dictators awaited, the historian inside Napoleon thought, rule based not on the divine right of kings, but on personal will, ready to go just as wrong. Of the study of history there could be no end. Factuals, counterfactuals, converse, inverse, obverse, analogous—all would take hold of minds attempting to stop the fleeing past...

  There was a mistake in the scale-gauge settings of the framework, but the historian noticed this too late. A happy accident, he thought, as Napoleon stepped into the water and waded out across the waves. His massive feet stirred the bottom, his head nearly brushed the clouds. The French fleet was just ahead, helpless for lack of men and supplies before the approaching British squadron.

  Gradually, Napoleon comes between the two groups of ships, but the British vessels are not deterred by the titanic figure. They come on as if he were not there.

  Tiny cannon point at him. Puffs of smoke bloom. Explosions pop distantly in his ears. Small depressions appear in the legs of his uniform, as if stiff fingers are touching him. He remembers his mother’s soft hands searching his bare body for imperfections, then wrapping him against the infections of the Corsican night.

  He leans forward and picks up a ship. Tiny figures fall screaming into the brine. Their cries are like bird calls. He waits a moment, then throws the vessel at two warships that are sailing side by side. Wood splinters, masts fall and crash, fires flower, hulls bob and struggle to turn away from his colossal legs.

  Why am I able to do this? Napoleon asks himself. Boyhood fantasies rendered real as my ambition wills it. He looks around the ocean, imagining the tabletop of toys on which this war game is being played; but there is only the sea, sky, and the ruination of ships below his knees. He recalls his mother’s soup pot coming to boil.

  With the British fleet no longer a threat to his own, the little corporal wades back ashore and lays his titanic body on the beach. He knows now what he has to do.

  His mind turns eastward from Ægypt, glorying in the conquest of Syria, Iraq, and Palestine. He will open the great prison at Acre and gain new followers. He will rebuild the Temple of Solomon and draw all the Jews out of an undeserving Europe. He will secure Mecca and Medina against the European infidels, and gain still more allies. He will build Alexander’s dream of one world.

  Then, all of this will be at his back when he turns back toward Europe, and cleans out the nests of oppressive royalties that had for so long turned the peoples of the world against each other, and who had no champion to stand with them.

  Why these thoughts? he asks himself. Does a god instruct me? He cherishes the thoughts, but wonders about their provenance. I have gone mad, he tells himself. But how to tell the difference? I have no other instrument with which to judge except myself.

  A vision of the future flashes through him, stirring his deepest needs. The French Revolution runs its authentic but mad course. He finds the crown of France in the gutter and picks it up with his sword. He puts it on his head with his own hands, but they are the hands of his people, whose yearnings are the ultimate legitimacy. Reason, it becomes clear to him, will not by itself govern his fellow man. He includes himself in the problem, sees it clearly, and tells himself that if he can see it, then he might just be able to step outside its imprisoning circle. It is his obligation to do so.

  As Emperor, he tries to dig the grave of a previous world, and is buried with it. He knew that outcome well, it seems, as he knew the branches of an infinite tree growing toward the light.

  And yet... and yet, what is there to aspire to except everything? Less? One cannot run from mistakes.

  He walks in the sky over Waterloo, reviewing the battle, noting the dead. It has been a foolishly close thing, as Wellington had also confessed. Countless Waterloos waited, or could be sidestepped, if he now turned to the East.

  As he lies on the sands under the clear Mediterranean sky, he knows how his futures had gone wrong. I was contaminated by the royal mold of my enemies. They crept into my soul, and made their faults my own. My very humanity contaminated the soul I had made for myself, and then had to defend for lack of a better one. All was lost when my health failed. Josephine’s seduction of Wellington, my escape from Elba to lead the Old Guard, was nothing before my body’s betrayal of a malleable future forever waiting to be shaped.

  And always I loved my family too much.

  I should have quietly and swiftly killed all the royal families of Europe, before those nests of spiders sent out their killers to get me. I waited too long, grew too weak, lived through too many defeats. I should have killed them first, as we did in France. That is what Europe feared most, and I waited too long, and they killed me slowly, so the youth of Europe would not have a hero to stand at their side, to remember and cherish.

  He recalls his deaths.

  There was arsenic in the wallpaper of the house on St. Helena, and in my hair.

  My body betrayed me at Waterloo, imprisoning my mind. I could not move to command.

  His many deaths were outflows of blood into the sea, draining away the hopes and dreams of possibilities.

  But all this will not happen, because I will turn East, to a richer culture that needs me even more than France. I see history plain, as a general sees his battlefield in a clear glass. I will not question the sight given to me. I will act the part I had always wished to play. There will be no revisions of my visions, because I know my lost battles.

  Battles... to seek a plan of battle, complete, is to blind one’s brain. One must have a general idea, then discover its method and its means only well after the plunge into the fray, and see it whole nearest to victory or defeat. A battle is a work of art, made with a fatal love or it is unmade, seeking its ways to a hidden end...

  How am I able to see these things—to imagine and then find myself doing them? Am I God’s dream? Is my disbelieved-in God mocking me? How many gods fashion the world?

  Napoleon stands in the new Temple of Solomon. He stands in Baghdad, in Mecca and Medina. Poetry flows through his brain in Damascus, and he summons a just conquest of Europe. The joys! The joys of battle—from when I first had proof that my inspirations brought victories written on the skies!

  And then his role is revealed to him. He learns who and what he is, as the historian’s somewhat apologetic voice says to him:

  “In the virtuals of the history machine’s cliometricon, everything may happen, because all of the past has been stored as information, fluid and malleable. Even the greatest unlikelies may happen.”

  As the revelations pierce him, Napoleon recalls his pre-fluid self, lodged in a single likelihood, only dreaming of others. He freezes at the realization of what he has been, and what he might be now. He is still himself, but his eagle’s wings are opening to carry him farther, across the sea of probabilities, carrying his truth...

  Time stops within him, w
hile his thoughts hurtle across time, free of the dying body.

  “But why are you telling me all this?” he cries out to the blue Mediterranean sky.

  The answer hangs upon the light.

  “To see if a creature’s possibilities might be increased through self knowledge,” a voice says within him.

  “A creature?” Napoleon asks. His mind had been foreshadowed, but the sudden fact was a beast rushing in to devour him.

  “Yes—you are a cloud of electrons in a box. No less real than I am, mind you.”

  “And who are you?” he asks, wondering at the meaning of the terms—which he suddenly understands as if they were old friends.

  “A kind of historian, by your understanding.”

  “Which you have increased. I know what electrons are, also by your grace.” The hand of a god was reaching out to him across the blue sky.

  “Shall we continue?”

  “Yes!”

  A database overwhelmed him, flanking his doubts with joy.

  The Channel Tunnel was being built. Napoleon watched his army enter the brick-lined passage. From under England his forces burrowed up into the daylight and swarmed across the countryside, his Old Guard and the Heroes from Acre. London surrendered in a day, and the British Crown fled to the American Colonies—and the probabilities proliferated from that transplanted tree.

  In Napoleon’s great soul, history found a new, swaying freedom, that of a pendulum moving from infinity to infinity, dancing to permit his every heart’s desire, every justice, every forgotten, lost moment to be redeemed. He remembered his futures, and visited his revised pasts, lying in the light of that Mediterranean beach. He was everywhere, melding his fantasies with possibilities. Poetry flowed through him, and was writ large in the charged particles of his box:

  I know sanity, and when to

  depart from it.

  I know chains

  and when to break them.

  Chains are good, they give form,

  but one cannot live shackled.

  Freedom is a terror,

  but brings new things.

  To shun one or the other

  is to embrace a living death.

  I like to live where I live.

  I go everywhere there.

  Nothing sings sweeter

  than pure possibility.

  “But keep in mind,” said the historian, “that you are not the original Napoleon, but only a gathering from all the vast libraries of recorded materials, including his own works. If you doubt this, then search your memory for what is missing. Details of a childhood, for example.”

  I am a scarecrow, Napoleon thinks, but then rebels, and answers:

  “No! He is my brother, out of the same sea of time! I am his image, and all that is left of him. I feel that I am myself, and that is real! I can do anything!”

  “You cannot reenter history,” said the historian, experimenting with cruelty. “You are a ghost.”

  He went to his abode in Cairo and told Josephine her true nature.

  “What?” she cried out. “Are you insane? What are you saying? I don’t understand.”

  He tried to explain their new form of existence, as he had learned it from the historian. She struggled to comprehend.

  “I’m quite real,” she insisted. “I hope none of these lunacies mean we have to go back to France. It’s so warm here, and I can wear the skimpy dresses that were killing me in Paris. I am Josephine of Ægypt! I will show anyone who doubts it my wardrobe.” She came up to him and took his face in her soft hands. “Touch me and you’ll know I am real,” she said, smiling. “Here, look at all these endless long letters you wrote to me from Italy!”

  “Oh, you’re real enough, such as you are,” he said, thinking to ask her about her son and daughter, but held back. The detail was missing. Were they here or in France?

  They are not in this history, said the historian within him.

  “Real... enough?” Josephine asked. “Such as I am?”

  “Yes. To feel that you are... you. That is enough.” He would not press the matter further with her.

  But Josephine’s denial of her state rooted in his mind, and as he began to examine his newly revealed form of existence, he saw its horrors. We feel, we are real, but only we can know it.

  I was the hope of the world, he told himself. I slept on a hard cot. Now these endless worlds, all to choose from, and none. A universe that cannot make up its mind!

  And I am inside.

  Out there, which gave me birth, is lost to me. Yet I am myself. I feel myself to be myself. But there was another one, outside, from whom I sprang.

  My brother was a god in the true world! And I am not he. I was not there at Waterloo, even though I remember the mud, the endless mud at Waterloo! It was everywhere, there and in all the infinities—the same mud in all the many kinds of infinities. I was always a good mathematician, but I did not know about differing infinities, until now. The mud and my ailing stomach. Always the same. I should have won at Waterloo! I would have won if I had watched my rear. If I had bloodied the royals earlier, I might not have needed so many cannon, so many dead. Much earlier. The alliances that brought me down represented an armed minority interest in the world.

  “Your virtues,” said the historian, “—you forgot your ideals. Beethoven dedicated his Eroica Symphony to the memory of a great man. You were that man.”

  “All my failings I learned from the past, from my humanity.”

  He remembered his mother’s knife, the one she always wore in waiting for vendetta. I am not he who saw that knife. I have only the memory. Yet that knife is real in my brain!

  The historian, seeing his agony, said, “The worlds are myriad, even outside the cliometricon.”

  “But you have taken me from myself,” Napoleon cried across the probabilities, “by subtracting all the difference between dreams and reality. It’s all dreams now, all lies. Dreams that are fulfilled, then erased. I am a shadow wondering about shadows. I’m weary of being everything anyone has ever imagined or thought I was!”

  The database of implications fell in on him, as the idea of an infinite, real world preyed upon his mind. Insights rushed into him like sharks, eating at his reason. This world of endless dreams was part of that first world, and so was also subject to infinite variations, as well as subject to its own deliberately sought variants. His great brother’s reality had been different in kind from all the copies. He felt the darkness closing in, and wept into great Pascal’s abyss. Infinities hurtled overhead.

  “What would you have?” asked the historian.

  “At least give me one! You have taken me from myself, by taking me from my world. You have stolen the soul I made for myself!”

  “That man died centuries ago. You are what has happened to all history. As soon it was recorded, it was revised, dramatized, storied and shaped, and lost forever. Primary history comes only once, as it is now coming in this very dialogue. Accept what you are.”

  “You should never have told me!”

  “Truly?”

  “The cruelty of your miracle suspends natural law! You have raided the game. Raiding an honest game is cruelty.”

  “An honest game?”

  “Yes! It had the honesty of infinite difficulty, of transcendent problems to be attacked!”

  “And it had your tyranny,” said the historian.

  “Yes. But tyranny doesn’t express the truth. I fell into tyranny out of frustration with my enemies, with human nature. And with myself. Something more direct was needed. Time runs out on democracy much too quickly. We would have to live very long to have the luxury of practicing it. I wanted to reshape the world, and myself. It was impossible to have changes without cannon, so I began to rage.” He sighed into the clouds. “My ideals were one thing. What I had to do daily was another. One has to survive before one can do anything. Besides, I was not the tyrant. He was the tyrant. I only remember, so you tell me. I was a good artillery officer.”

&nb
sp; “That you were. I should never have told you,” said the historian.

  “It is better to know.”

  “Consider this,” said the historian. “What you wanted for Europe—an end to its warring and bickering—you did not have the human instruments to accomplish. And the character of your primary brother failed, physically and mentally. I cannot revise him. Of new injustices there is no end, or the killing of heroes. Goodness never had a lasting strength. It was without armies or power. It had none. And whenever it started to have the means, it disgraced itself. All reforms, religious, political, and military, sooner or later always disgraced themselves. Every time was like every other time. People found themselves in situations made for them by previous people.

  But you had some effect, in the laws, the schools, the secular ideals. You were a great administrator. You vaccinated your troops.”

  “Alas, I know all that,” Napoleon said as he went everywhere and lived every possibility. A great attractor drew him, ever calling him toward a myriad Waterloos... all of them beloved mirages, because the conquest of Europe was a need of justice, a redemption of the past, even though he now understood that it could never be final. Here and there in the currents of possibility, yes; but the rest, he knew, would always haunt him, as he suffered on Elba and returned from near-death, then was exiled and died on St. Helena.

  Once, long ago, he had imagined that he would save Corsica from the French; but they had been only the latest vultures to have feasted on his beautiful island home.

  Then, when he had become France, he had wanted to save the world from itself. He did not imagine that the world would want to save itself from him.

  Of course it was not the world, but only its royal masters. That was why they had not dared to kill me. The world’s people, when they saw that I might be defeated, chose once again to be fleas on the elephant, living their lives. I do not blame them. To do so was only practical. But their hearts were with me, despite my faults, so the British dared not kill me openly. The love of the world saved my life. Then, like a toy soldier, I was put back in my box. Too many cannon!