The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 17

by Gardner Dozois

  This worried Horovitz: Tesla had won that battle, or at least his patron Mr. Westinghouse had, and he wondered what new tricks Mr. Tesla might have in store. Tesla was just exactly what Horovitz feared: an upstart immigrant, and one who indubitably held the views of anarchists and Fabians. Horovitz kept his own origins quiet, most particularly his arrival in America in the arms of immigrant parents and the fact that he had never spoken a word of English until he was nearly six. He was an American, damn them, fully an equal of Pierpont Morgan and Andrew Carnegie; he had nothing in common with the dirty, starving immigrants in their consumption-riddled tenements.

  But Edison didn’t seem to be worried about Tesla. Horovitz relaxed slightly and turned his mind to the question of how he would run Edison. The man was a bull moose quite as headstrong as Roosevelt had been, and it would take some connivance to get him into line.

  Fifty miles away, Samuel Clemens and Sarah Bernhardt were also discussing Tesla.

  Sam had had no luck getting in to see Mr. Edison. When he had come for an interview, a man named Horovitz had quizzed him for nearly half an hour, asking him detailed questions about the Philippines and the Standard Oil Trust. These were issues about which he had quite definite opinions, and he’d given the man quite an earful, he had, quite pleased to show off his detailed command of current events – but after all his talking, rather than showing him to Edison, the man had taken him to see a receptionist, who told him that Mr. Edison was busy and could receive no visitors this month, or next, or, for that matter, the following year.

  But it was a rip-snorting campaign, no denying that, and Sam was enjoying it hugely. On Sunday, Bryan’s campaign had projected an enormous optical show to the curious viewers in Madison Garden, powered by calcium lights. In the middle of the city, a three-story-high projection of Bryan had towered over the bustling city, the projector operator deftly switching the glass slides to make the candidate wave to the crowd. It was, perhaps, not enough to beat Edison’s continuous showing of kinetoscopic images in hired dance halls, showing off the inventor along with fanciful images of the wonders of electricity as a taste of what was to come, but it demonstrated that Bryan wasn’t out of the great game yet.

  When the newspapers had announced Tesla’s joining up with Bryan, Clemens had brightened up. When he had been in New York, young Tesla had been quite a friend of his, and it would be a gay thing now to go meet the mad Serb and see what his views were on the election.

  Sarah Bernhardt, the celebrated French actress, also knew Tesla. Sam had met with her on the train up from New York City, and as she was also heading for Tesla’s Long Island laboratory, when she hired an electric brougham for the ride from the station, she invited him to share the ride. They spent the short trip discussing their acquaintance Nikola Tesla and the political campaign. Now they were in the vestibule of Tesla’s laboratory building. A dozen pigeons scattered from the stoop and fluttered around their heads as they entered the vestibule.

  “Mad as a hatter, n’est pas?” Samuel Clemens said, nodding toward the door, a completely unprepossessing wooden door with a simple brass plate reading NIKOLA TESLA, ELECTRICAL LABORATORY. “But for all that, a most entertaining fellow. Wonder how in the world he gets along with that prig Bryan?”

  “He’s not really mad,” Sarah Bernhardt said, in her elegant French accent. “Eccentric, of course, but not mad. It’s just that his enthusiasms are more intense than other people’s. He gets an idea, and he just can’t get it out of his head; he has to go to his lab and do it. He told me that often while he’s working on one idea, he has another idea, and another and another, and they come so fast and thick, in swarms like mosquitoes, that he cannot work on them fast enough.”

  But then Sarah Bernhardt herself was somebody who was at the edge of madness, Sam thought. Her eccentricity was more than just the whimsy of a diva. She always insisted on her own private railway car, and one reason for this was so that she could take with her the coffin that she would sleep in when she had her headaches. Some people said that she took her paramours in the coffin as well, but perhaps that was only a scurrilous rumor about the flamboyant diva. And as for her relationship with Tesla – “We are friends, nothing more,” she haughtily said when the representatives of the Hearst papers pressed her for more details. “He amuses me.”

  Sam, who had always wondered a bit over Tesla’s views on women, expected that this was exactly it, that regardless of what Bernhardt might have wanted from him, their relationship was likely to be no more than just words. Sam had touched his arm once, and Tesla had jerked away in horror. Tesla had a fear of being touched.

  Sam Clemens wasn’t at all sure of Tesla’s sanity himself. He had seen Tesla in his laboratory once charge himself up to ten million volts of electrical pressure, shooting lightning bolts out of his fingers to burn holes through sheets of plywood. It had looked like great fun to Sam, and he had begged Tesla to let him try it, but Tesla had solemnly demurred, telling him it was too dangerous for a man untrained in electricity.

  “Is he as eccentric as he used to be, or has he calmed down a bit, I wonder?” Sam asked, and rang the bell.

  Mr. Czito, Nikola Tesla’s assistant, opened the door, and after greeting them, ushered them into the laboratory. It was a cavernous, dimly-lit space, a building hollowed out to be just a shell, with bare girders and a ceiling a hundred feet overhead, filled with dynamos and transformers and switching gear and elaborately wound copper coils.

  Nikola Tesla turned to meet them. He was thinner than Sam Clemens had remembered him. He’d always been slender, but now he was almost frighteningly gaunt. “Living on bread and water, but without the bread,” as they’d have put it in the mining camps. “Straight up and down like six o’clock.” He’s still handsome enough to set a few pulses to fluttering, though, Sam thought, and snuck a glance over at Sarah Bernhardt.

  “Ah, Mr. Twain,” Tesla said, and smiled. “So glad you could come.”

  “Sam, please,” Clemens responded.

  “And the divine Mademoiselle Bernhardt.” Tesla bowed deeply and said a few words of welcome to her in a cascading waterfall of French too fluent for Sam to follow. Turning to them both, he said, “A pleasure; indeed, a pleasure and an honor both for me to be visited by luminaries of the page and the stage. I must tell you that my laboratory is off limits to journalists, but for you, Mr. Twain, I make an exception.”

  “Good to see you too, Nick,” Sam said. It was his ritual; if Tesla would insist on calling him Mr. Twain, by damn he would call him Nick. “I’m just my lovable own self today. I’m not in the reporting racket any more these days; no money in it.”

  “And Miss Bernhardt?”

  “Why, I am here to see you, Mr. Tesla, and enjoy the exquisite pleasure of your company and conversation.” She smiled at him. She wore only the simplest of her costumes today, with a plain silver necklace and no earrings; clearly dressing to please Tesla, who detested earrings and elaborate women’s dress.

  Tesla seemed for a moment to be taken aback, but then he bowed again and said, “Enchanted, as always.”

  “So, Nick, what do you think of Mr. Bryan?” Sam asked as they walked into the laboratory. “A real firecracker, would you say?”

  “I would say,” Tesla said, stopping for a moment to consider his words, “he has a poetic soul.”

  “A poet?” Sam laughed. “Now, I expect you’re spinning me a bit of a stretcher there.”

  “A man of peace.” Then Tesla shook his head. “But no science.” He looked across at Clemens.

  “And you? What do you think of Mr. Bryan?”

  “Well,” said Sam, “you may know, I don’t have much regard for politicians. The Almighty made tadpoles, and he made politicians, and as they’re both slimy and pretty-near brainless, you can’t much tell the one from the other. ’Cept that one day a tadpole might grow into a noble frog, and a politician don’t grow into nothing.” He paused and pretended to ponder for a moment. “Still, Mr. Bryan hasn’t lied to me
yet, and it does ’pear that he supports the little man against the robbers, thieves, and bandits running the country right at this moment, so I guess I like him as much as I like any of the bunch. Which is not to say I’d stop watching my wallet if I knew he was in the room.”

  “Still the cynic, Mr. Twain.”

  Sam nodded. “I’d hate to disappoint my audience.”

  “Would you like to see the lab?”

  “I’m here, ain’t I?” Sam said.

  “Oh, please,” Miss Bernhardt said. “I would be delighted.”

  Tesla smiled. “One moment.” He reached into the darkness and pulled three switches in quick succession. With a barely perceptible hum, a glow arose, emanating from long tubes of glass all about the laboratory. Some glowed pale white, others purple, or pink. A few were twisted into fanciful spirals and curlicues. Tesla picked one up from a benchtop and held it in the air. As he raised it, the pink light inside brightened and flowed around the place where his hand gripped it.

  Tesla was showing off, Sam knew. Unlike Edison’s lamps, Tesla’s needed no wires. Sam had seen Tesla’s rarefied gas lamps before, but he enjoyed watching Miss Bernhardt’s expression of delight. The Tesla luminescent lamps really were quite something, he thought, with gay colors far more congenial than the harsh yellow light of Edison bulbs. He wondered if you could twist the tube into any shape you desired. Could a glassblower make one that would spell out words? That would really be some feat; you could make a sign in luminous color, bright red or glowing purple: “Eat at Joe’s” or “Vote for Bryan.”

  And that was the hitch, Clemens thought. That would be just exactly the thing that they would do. It would spoil the magic. Better not bring the idea up.

  Tesla handed him a tiny lamp, barely larger than a match head. Clemens turned it over in his hand. “Cunningly enough made,” he said, “but what’s it for?”

  Tesla smiled. “Isn’t it enough just to be what it is? But watch.”

  On a sheet of pine, a hundred and twenty of the tiny lamps had been mounted in a rectangular grid. Tesla turned a transformer dial, and every other one of the tiny bulbs glowed to life, a deep blood red. “Observe,” Tesla commanded. He turned the bulbs down, then rotated another rheostat, and the other half of the bulbs glowed to light in emerald green.

  “Very pretty,” Sam commented.

  “Wait.” Tesla turned both rheostats together, and now the sheet glowed, not a greenish-red, nor some reddish-green, but instead a lemony yellow.

  “Huh.” Sam Clemens moved forward to examine it. Seen from close up, the individual lights were clearly still red and green, but moving back away from them, the light seemed to blur into yellow. “Now, doesn’t that just beat all,” he said.

  “Keep watching.” Tesla moved to a bank of sliding switches and played his slender fingers over them like an organ. The colored lights danced, and shapes of red and yellow appeared, curves and then an expanding square, and then dancing diagonal stripes. The red faded and green took its place. The effect was strangely hypnotic. A point of light expanded into a diamond shape, with another in the center, and another, each one growing to the edge of the rectangle and fading away.

  “Ah,” Sarah said. “You have made a symphony, a symphony made of light.”

  In answer, Tesla’s fingers danced even more swiftly, and the lights responded to his touch with a paroxysm of color, pulsating shapes changing color in almost sensuous waves. At last he turned to them and bowed. “Do you like it?”

  “Ah, it is magnificent,” Sarah gushed. “Truly, the work of an artist, an outpouring from the soul of a poet of the electrical force.”

  Sam said, “Are you done? Can I try it now?”

  With quite a bit of experimenting, Sam discovered, he could write letters in colored light. With great effort, he slowly spelled out S-A-M, Tesla and Sarah Bernhardt shouting out each letter as he formed it on the grid.

  “I don’t think that the typesetting boys have much to worry about yet,” he said with a smile. “But it’s a gimcrack toy. Reckon you could sell it? I bet Wall Street could use it to flash out stock prices.”

  “Where the man of electricity sees electrical light, the man of letters finds letters,” observed Tesla.

  “And Mademoiselle, voulez vous? What will the woman of the stage see?”

  With a little coaxing, Sarah Bernhardt was persuaded to try it, and she came up with a stick figure of a man. With great concentration, she made one hand wave up and down, as Tesla and Clemens laughed in glee, and then, to everybody’s amazement, even her own, she made it totter off the side of the rectangle.

  “I think that the lady has you beat, Mr. Twain,” Tesla announced. “For a picture, you know, beats a thousand words.”

  “I don’t think it has the jump on Edison’s kinetoscope for entertainment,” Clemens said, “but it’s a crackerjack diversion.” He realized the moment he said it that he shouldn’t have brought up Edison.

  But Tesla waved off the reference to his rival. “Edison won’t be inventing much any more, I don’t think.”

  “Oh? Why?”

  “Why, he’ll be too busy being president to invent!” At Clemens’ shocked look, Tesla continued, “Ah, Mr. Twain, I spend perhaps too much time in the laboratory, but I don’t entirely miss what it is the newspapers say. Within a week, Mr. Edison’s kinetoscopes will be in every dance hall and Sunday school in America, and Mr. Edison will address each voter in person. Without a miracle, Mr. Bryan is unlikely to win.”

  “And what exactly kind of miracle does Mr. Bryan need, then?” Sam asked. He was playing with Tesla’s device, concentrating on making a picture to beat Miss Bernhardt’s.

  “Something to upstage Mr. Edison’s kinetoscope.”

  Sam Clemens had the knack of it now. On the screen of lights, he had drawn a cartoon of a face. The eyes grew from dots to little squares, and then they grew eyebrows, and the mouth opened in an “O.” “You should do something with this, Nick,” Sam said, amusing himself by making the mouth of the little face open and shut in time with his words. “Play around a bit, I bet you could make something of it.”

  The campaign stop was a real jamboree. There was a mounted parade of Civil War veterans in full uniform on horseback, and at least five brass bands, followed by fifteen carriages – mayors and minor politicians, Sam Clemens guessed, people who hoped something of the pomp of the occasion might rub off on them. Several hundred people in full top hats and brass-buttoned jackets marched on foot, each waving (somewhat incongruously) a palm-frond fan. These were followed by a choir of women standing on a flatbed truck decorated with red, white, and blue silk and drawn by four sweating plow horses in flower-bedecked harness. Bryan pumped every outstretched hand thrust at him, what seemed like unending millions of them, trying to conserve his voice, which was on the verge of breaking.

  “There is no greater entertainment in the world than a political campaign,” Sam remarked to Miss Bernhardt, who was in his company again that day. Nikola Tesla had promised them something special, and he wondered what it would be. Drums rang out and trombones blared in five different tunes, with horses snorting and whinnying with no regard to the rhythm or tune. He couldn’t even hear the women singers – the Morristown Presbyterian Choir, according to the sign – except for a stray note on occasions when the trombones paused.

  They stood on the reviewing stand along with a half-dozen other notables. Miss Bernhardt was basking in her element, wearing an outrageous purple dress and an elaborate hat with at least three feet of magenta ostrich plume on it, waving to the crowd and smiling. Sam enjoyed the attention as well, in an absent fashion, but would have rathered that they got on with the show, whatever it was. He was in his trademark white linen suit, with a white panama hat and a diamond-studded bolo-tie, a gift from an admirer in Nevada.

  Nikola Tesla had escorted them to the stand. He had stood with them for a moment to survey the crowd dispassionately, surrounded by pigeons, but then vanished along with Mr. Czito, prom
ising only that they should have a surprise if they stayed to sunset.

  It was nearly sunset now, as best Sam could tell, the day being rather overcast, and Mr. Bryan was still shaking hands, working his way slowly toward them. At last he reached the platform and climbed the wooden steps to the podium, shaking hands on the way with each of the dignitaries on the platform. “Mr. Mark Twain,” he said. “A pleasure. I’m a great admirer of your work, a great admirer. I’m glad to see you joining us doing the great work of God.”

  “I’d be pleased for you to call me Samuel, Mr. Bryan,” Sam said. “By God, it’s an honor to meet a politician who isn’t a skunk and a goddamned liar. Give ’em hell.”

  Bryan’s brow furrowed a moment as if he’d been gravely insulted, and he seemed about to say something, but then he reconsidered, replying only, “I see you live up to your reputation.” He turned to kiss Miss Bernhardt’s hand. “A pleasure to meet you, Madam. Enchanté.”

  Behind them, something odd was going on. A wooden scaffolding was being erected with cranes and pulleys, and strings of Tesla lamps were being stretched along the beams, a thousand of them or more. As the crowd began to notice something was going on, a murmur went through them. Sam could hear a steam engine chuff to life somewhere in the distance. The pulleys had now raised an entire curtain of Tesla lamps, filling out a rectangle fifty feet high.

  In front of William Jennings Bryan, Mr. Czito had set up some sort of contraption of lenses and a spinning disk. An Edison kinetoscopic camera? No, the device had no reels of kinetoscopic film, but instead a spaghetti tangle of electrical wiring snaked away toward the electrical screen that rose behind the candidate. This was something stranger.

  The crowd was chanting now, “Bryan! Bryan! Bryan!” The candidate raised his hand, and the chant intensified.