The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 17

by Gardner Dozois

  Bryan began to speak, and his voice, louder than a mountain, boomed out across the square like the voice of God. By gum, Sam thought, damned if Tesla hasn’t found a way to electrically magnify the human voice. The crowd subsided into a moment of awed silence.

  But the electrical voice magnification was the least of Tesla’s surprises. Behind the candidate, the giant matrix of Tesla lamps dawned into fluorescence. Ten thousand tiny electrical lamps glowed, and waves of color rippled across the screen. The crowd gasped with one voice, thinking that this was itself an electrical miracle, but in a moment the swirling colors settled down, and a fuzzy shape was visible in the patterns of dark and light made by the glowing lamps.

  It was impossible to make out at first. The eye had no standards by which to measure such an image; nothing like it had ever been seen in the world. Was that a face? Yes, a face, definitely a face. The face of William Jennings Bryan! The murmur of the crowd grew to a rumble, and then a roar of delight. Yes, yes, now it was clear indeed, clear as any picture; it was a picture painted from ten thousand points of light! It was the candidate, and it moved! The electrically magnified voice spoke, and the lips on the picture of light moved with it, almost as if the image itself spoke!

  “Does this contraption work?” the voice said. “By Goodness, I can hear myself! Mr. Tesla, you are indeed a genius.”

  Not great first words for such a marvelous occasion, Sam thought. Mr. Bryan has missed a chance; he should have had something prepared, like perhaps, “What hath God wrought?” But the crowd laughed and roared its approval, and Bryan continued stolidly on.

  “Ladies of the choir and gentlemen of the band, veterans of the war and people of the great State of New Jersey,” the magnified voice said, and above him, the portrait of light moved and spoke. “I come to you a humble supplicant, asking for only one thing, one small thing. Give me but your vote, your one vote, and we shall bring this nation to the greatness which God above in his infinite wisdom has decreed and intended.”

  And every single eye was transfixed, every living brain mesmerized, by the flickering illusion of life.

  Tesla’s moving images were instantly the talk of the nation. “An artwork of light unprecedented in history,” the Herald said. “Mr. Tesla states that soon he will be able to beam these images across the ether,” the story continued. “These broadcast images, which he names tele-videon, or ‘distance sight’ – ”

  Horovitz threw down the newspaper. “If Tesla can beam these images on electrical waves, Bryan will campaign in towns where he’s never even been,” Horovitz declared. “That will beat the talking dolls and even the kinetoscope to hell and gone. He’ll outcampaign us ten to one. A hundred to one! How many of these tele-videon screens can he make?”

  “Surely each tele-videon screen is expensive,” Hanna said, waving his cigar dismissively. “I hear tell each of those rarefied-gas lamps costs ten cents. How many are there in a screen, ten thousand? That would mean a tele-videon screen must cost a thousand dollars! At that price, they won’t afford very many.”

  “Don’t put it beyond Mr. Westinghouse,” Horovitz said. “It’s no secret that he’s backing Tesla. And he’s a cunning one, no naif to manufacturing. If anybody will find a way to lower the cost, Westinghouse will.”

  And, indeed, in factories in the Lower East Side, Westinghouse was putting women to work manufacturing the miniature Tesla lamps, and next to them children worked with nimble fingers to string them together into the screens. The idea of broadcasting tele-videon images using Marconi telegraphy was crazy, one of Tesla’s endless supply of utopian speculations, but Westinghouse had long ago decided to ignore Tesla’s more speculative flights of fancy. He had a better idea anyway; one that would work. America was crisscrossed with telegraph lines, and they could send the tele-videon signals across the telegraph lines to every city and every village, every railroad stop in America.

  Campaigning in Wisconsin, Thomas Edison found out about it with the morning newspapers. Edison was surprised, but nobody could get one up on Edison, not for long. He sent a long telegram to his West Orange laboratory, with a series of investigations that he wanted done on cathode-ray phosphors, and followed it up by cutting short his upcoming campaign stops and, within the week, headed back for the West Orange laboratory to work. He normally slept for two, sometimes even three hours a day, but when he was challenged, and his gumption was up, he didn’t waste time sleeping. On the train east, he studied the tele-videon fiercely and pondered hard on the workings of it. Before long, he had set his ideas in order for how he would improve on it. If his ideas bore out, he could use his fluoroscope technology together with electron beams to make an Edison-effect ray-tube. It would have far better definition than Tesla’s flickering lamps; anybody who saw the new Edison images would laugh at Tesla’s crude dot pictures.

  He would have the first patents drawn up in a day or so, and then they would be ready. Yes, if Tesla wanted an invention fight, he’d find a fight on his hands, all right.

  “We’re watching your ratings, sir, and it doesn’t look so good.”

  “Ratings, young man?” William Jennings Bryan said to the assistant. “I don’t believe I follow.”

  “How people rate the show.”

  Bryan cocked his head and frowned. “I daresay some people consider politics to be a show, but I assure you, young man, a showman I have never been. If it is a show, then what I show is only the truth.”

  Sunday was his day for relaxing, but although he was nominally resting in his private railroad car, that only meant that the cameras and the press weren’t in with him right at the moment. Bryan knew well enough that, for a serious campaigner, there would be no real relaxing until after November. This young man should have respected his privacy, but the tele-videon crew had been conferring in their equipment room all day, and he had been expecting somebody to barge in sooner or later. He put down his pen and turned the full force of his attention to the young man.

  “That’s the problem in a nutshell, sir,” the young man said. “You’re no showman. We’ve been doing the tele-videon show for a week now . . .” Seeing Bryan’s wince, he paused for a second, but went on: “Sorry, sir, but that’s what the staff call it. A show. We’re watching the ratings. You see, sir, that first time, the novelty of the tele-videon holds them, but when it wears off, your speech . . . Well, it’s not a show, that’s it. It’s – ”

  “Boring,” Bryan said.

  “Well, yes, sir. Boring.”

  “My speeches are too long.”

  The young man was apparently oblivious to the hint of sarcasm in Bryan’s affectless delivery and nodded enthusiastically in agreement. “Gaseous.” He flinched at Bryan’s suddenly darkened expression, but he didn’t back off. “That’s the word we hear. Gaseous.”

  Bryan sighed. “And you want?”

  “Not such a long sermon, sir. Couldn’t you do, maybe, some shorter bits, something that people can bite off more easily?”

  “I will think on it.”

  “Sir, if – ”

  Bryan raised his hand. “Enough. I will think on it, I said, and so I will do. Enough. Leave me.”

  When the young man left, Bryan scowled. So they thought him gaseous, did they? What did they desire, real political reform, or did they want just appearances?

  Ah, that was the question, wasn’t it, what the people wanted. He knew what they needed: reform, breaking the railroad monopolies, a turning away from the poisoning tentacles of imperialism, and a turning toward God. But what they wanted? He had once thought that a leader should shape the wills of the people, but long years in politics made him doubt his own vision.

  But then Reverend Conroy came in, and Bryan stood up and smiled, a genuine smile. “Reverend Conroy, do come in. I am quite pleased to see you.”

  The reverend took off his hat. “Thank you kindly. Your offer was a most kind one, a very generous offering of your time.”

  Bryan laughed. “Why, I should say the same to
you. It’s not so often that a man of the cloth gives up his pulpit, and I am quite cognizant of the honor, I assure you.”

  “I have heard you talk and do believe you to be a man of God.”

  “I do my best, Reverend Conroy.”

  “And that is more than most people, I assure you. My flock will be happy to hear from you, if only as a respite from hearing me drone on. May I ask, have you a title for the sermon you will be giving? No politics in it, I do hope?”

  “Indeed you may ask. I will talk on the subject of the Menace of Evolution.”

  “You’ll be taking on monkey-ism!” Conroy’s face broke out into a huge grin. “Ah, I’ve heard tell that you are a fighter, and I’m pleased as a bear with a watermelon to hear you’ll wrestle them atheists head-on!” He pumped Bryan’s hand. “I’m looking forward to it, I tell you, looking forward to it.”

  “And I as well,” Bryan said. “After a week surrounded by sycophants, office-seekers, and the jackals of the press, it will be a joy to spend a few hours among simple pious Christians, a joy indeed.”

  Bryan’s sermon was a wonderful success. He had kept the audience spellbound, alternately making them angry and then releasing their anger with laughter, for nearly two hours. So the tele-videon crew thought people wanted short sound bites, did they? But these were his people, the simple and believing farmers and workers of America, not the atheists and agnostics who ran politics.

  Afterward, they hadn’t wanted to leave, coming forward in a huge press to shake his hand, tell him how they liked his sermon, even coming to offer money for the campaign against Darwinism, which he diverted to the church offering box. One earnest young man with a waxed handlebar mustache had even wanted to debate him, and he had put that man in his place with half a dozen well-chosen sentences, skewering his poorly thought-out Darwinism and sending up peals of laughter from the crowd. Finally Reverend Conroy had managed to take him away to his private office for a moment of relaxation.

  “That was a fine talking, Mr. Bryan,” the Reverend said. “Indeed, about the finest I’ve ever heard.”

  “Thank you most kindly.”

  “I was wondering . . .” The Reverend hesitated.

  “Please, do speak freely.”

  “Well, it occurs to me that you have used this new tele-videon to bring your political message to the people. Could you not use the same invention to bring the word of God? The people are starving for the Gospel, and I thought . . .”

  Bryan raised his hand. “The tele-videon is a wonderful device, no mistaking, but it is not mine to do with as I wish. Were I to use it on my own behalf, it would be misdirection of campaign money, and dishonesty of any sort, no matter how well intentioned, is something I will have no truck with.”

  “Perhaps . . . we could pay for the use of the equipment? Lease it, as it were?”

  Bryan laughed. “Have you any idea how expensive it is? Why, it would cost over fifty dollars an hour to lease the tele-videon alone – not even counting the money to lease telegraph wires and halls to show the image.”

  “Fifty dollars . . .” Reverend Conroy mused. “Why, that’s not so much. Ten thousand people could watch a sermon. Fifty thousand! If each of ten thousand people were to be asked to contribute but a dime, and if only one in ten did so, why, we would cover our costs and even have money extra.”

  Bryan laughed. “Ah, you are, I think, a plutocrat in disguise! I accept your bargain. If you arrange it, I shall speak, and from the contributions, what is left over after paying the lease we shall split evenly, half for your church and half for my campaign.”

  Reverend Conroy stood up and stretched out his hand. “Sir, it is done.”

  Nikola Tesla introduced Sam Clemens to Bryan’s campaign staff, and particularly to the tele-videon electrical crew. Then he and Mr. Czito headed back to his Long Island laboratory to work on perfecting his atmospheric radiations of electrical tension.

  Miss Bernhardt had gone back with him. Sam was vaguely annoyed by that; since first Clara and then Livy had left him three years ago, he had not realized how much he had missed the comfort of feminine company. And it was not the crude physical pleasures of intimate interplay that he missed, but simply the gentle companionship. He had enjoyed Miss Bernhardt’s company more than he’d thought possible.

  He wondered what Miss Bernhardt got from the companionship of Tesla. Certainly not the human commerce of wit and passion that passed as the ordinary stuff of social intercourse; Tesla was a man of titanic passions, but his passions were of an ethereal nature wholly disconnected from ordinary corporeal lust.

  But meanwhile, Clemens stayed on, interested in seeing the campaign from an insider’s perch. He enjoyed the good fellowship of the tele-videon electrical crew, somewhat less refined company than that of Miss Bernhardt, but in their way enjoyable. The crew were a congenial bunch, most of them awkward boys barely older than puppies, all elbows and thumbs until they had their hands buried inside an electrical dynamo. All of them were fascinated by electricity and mechanisms, and all of them had dreams of riches as inventors and industrialists in the new century. The interior of the tele-videon electrical shack was supposed to be a secret, and definitely off-limits to passersby, but Sam ignored the posted signs and spent half his time in the electrical shack, looking on with curiosity as the boys showed off their expertise with the tele-videon and entertaining them with stories of Tesla. Sam had been a bit of an inventor a few years back, and he told them the story of the typesetting machine, spinning the yarn out and discovering that he could milk it for laughs, although at the time it had meant years of work wasted, ending in frustration and bankruptcy.

  The other half of his time he spent with the campaign’s hangers-on (of which there were many) in his well-practiced role of the celebrated man of letters, accepting with smooth grace offers of an occasional glass of whisky or a good cigar.

  The campaign was settled into the Hotel Gloriana now. The tele-videon shack was set up, along with its steam-powered electrical dynamo, in a vacant lot next door, but right at the moment the electrical boys were taking a break and had gone into town, and so he was sitting in the lobby, a place of antimacassar-clad flowered armchairs and elegant pink decorations that felt like being in a birthday cake.

  He still didn’t know what to make of Bryan. For a week now, the man had given his daily evangelistic speech over the tele-videon, and at the end of it had emphasized how the listeners should give money so that they could continue God’s work.

  God’s work! Sam snorted. This tele-videon evangelism was the greatest flim-flam operation he’d ever seen worked; the people watching were completely mesmerized by the moving lights, and every time Bryan said that they needed to give money, cheques and pledges and ragged silver coins flowed in like a dam had burst. Bryan was no deliberate Chicago con man; he seemed completely sincere. But the daily evangelism was changing him. He was suddenly making far more money from his religious donors than he’d ever made from political donations. His political speeches were now more directly religious in tone, and in the latest one he had actually called for constitutional amendments, one to ban alcohol and another to forbid the teaching of Darwinism.

  And now he was coming over here, drifting though the cloud of sycophants. Sam cut the end off of a cigar to prepare himself for the great man, struck a match and puffed it to life, and put it down.

  “So, Mr. Clemens,” Bryan said. “What do you think of my speech? Any words of wisdom?”

  Sam shook his head. “Mr. Bryan. Quite a show you give, but I must allow as I’m too much of a reprobate to change entirely to your point of view.”

  “Nonsense, Mr. Clemens.”

  “If you ask me . . .”

  “Do speak, Mr. Clemens.”

  “Ask me, I think you should back off a little bit on the constitutional amendment talk.”

  Bryan laughed. “Certainly, with your well-known love of whisky, you would.”

  “Not just that one; I don’t think much of the ame
ndment to ban Darwinism, either.”

  “Atheists should be allowed to teach evolutionism to their heart’s content, Mr. Clemens, but not in publicly funded schools. You are an intelligent man. Surely you are not descended from a monkey?”

  Clemens took a draw from his cigar. “Hear my friends talk, I expect I am. Some people are nearer to monkeys than others, but seems to me, when we talk about being descended from monkeys, it’s the monkeys ought to be offended.”

  “Mr. Clemens, I don’t know whether to be outraged or amused. Are you secretly an atheist? I don’t believe as I’ve heard you speak on your beliefs. What exactly is your stand?”

  Clemens puffed again, to give him a pause before speaking. “Well, you know, Mr. Bryan, in my opinion you have your two kinds of opinions. You have your public opinions, that you talk about in the papers, and then you have your private opinions, that you don’t spread about.”

  “No, Mr. Clemens, I think not. If I believe something, I tell everybody and keep nothing back. You are intimating, I think, that you believe all men to be liars.”

  “Not exactly liars. No sir, I wouldn’t say that. Perhaps a little less private in some of their opinions than others, maybe.”

  “And tell me, then, these private opinions of yours. In the great war between God and Satan, where do you stand?”

  Twain puffed at his cigar and looked at Bryan, in his vested wool suit, with his gold-chained watch, with his round and open face. The man was dressed like a politician, but he was a farmer, you could see that. To hell with it, Sam thought.

  “You ask for truth, Mr. Bryan? I will tell you, then. I believe I just might take my stand with Mr. Satan.”

  “There are some matters too serious for humor, Mr. Clemens, and I believe this is one of them.”

  “Well, Mr. Bryan. Seems to me that religions write their books denouncing Mr. Satan, and say the most injurious things ’bout him, but we never hear his side.”

  “Quite to the contrary, Mr. Clemens. We hear Satan’s voice every day. It is God’s voice that is small, and we must be silent to listen.”