This explanation, if true, seemed to imply a simple technology that could have been vastly improved using rotating magnetic fields. Tesla was also interested in the motorized wheelchair, but the street person found these questions indelicate and drove off noisily.
Nikola Tesla watched the television for several days after that and found its messages extraordinarily trivial, but addictive. He was most fascinated by commercials and by how quickly they told huge stories that in his day would have taken whole epic novels. He had difficulty at first following the quick changes of scene, but as the technique became obvious, he was delighted. He had been thinking in precisely this way at peak mental pitch and few people had understood him. Now, it seemed, the world had no difficulty moving among landscapes, relationships, machines, ideas, and words all within thirty seconds. At the same time, he was astonished by the use to which this technique of quick jump cuts was put. It was as if people were using laser weapons to slice bread.
Tesla couldn’t stop watching. He didn’t even mind it when customers changed a program to another; it was all stimulating to some part of himself that bypassed critical thinking and lodged itself directly into his solar plexus, at the seat of emotions. The addictive nature of the medium led him to consider other forms of addiction.
He had to make a conscious effort to avoid the Laundromat. He had seen commercials for the Internet on television and decided to investigate cyberspace. He was already somewhat familiar with cyberspace from the other side. He had occasionally participated in a party game that was quite the rage in the spirit world. The players entered cyberspace and represented themselves as human beings to people on-line. They entered chat rooms and multiple-user dungeons (MUDs) and MOOs (MUD object oriented), where they interacted with the humans who believed that they were communicating with their own kind. His former archenemy but now friend, Thomas Edison, had revealed himself in full, but his confession was taken to be just another identity assumption in the fluid world of cyberspace, where people switched genders, used pseudonyms, and generally misrepresented themselves in every way conceivable. After Edison’s prank, many spirits went on-line with their real names and were greeted as naturally as if they lived around the corner of some street in some earthly city. Tesla himself had tired of the game, but now, on the other side of it, he was quite interested in what motivated the embodied to explore cyberspace.
Tesla used a computer at the New Orleans Public Library and quickly got a headache surfing the Internet. People’s capacity for producing trivia was inexhaustible. In addition to the rivers of information sludge, there was so much chat it filled his entire capacity for absorption. He likened the din of the never-ending conversation to a huge public festivity where strangers forced themselves to speak in banalities until all vestige of thought was banished. The airwaves were filled with introductory remarks like “Hi,” “Hello,” and “Where are you from?” leaving absolutely no space for genuine dialogue. It had surely been more fun from the other side. It occurred to him that people involved in such activities as cyberspace and television were probably void of memory. He was certain that the world was in the grip of a terrible amnesia. In considering the nature of the attraction, Tesla concluded, once more, that it was addiction.
When he left the public library, bleary eyed and slightly nauseated by his own capacity for addiction, he was appalled at the filth in the air. The great Mississippi River was a brownish yellow color and full of deadly chemicals. Mark Twain would not have been surprised, given the fact that he had once called the great river a cloaca maxima, a great sewer, but even Twain would have been appalled by the depth of the degradation. This too, Tesla concluded, was the result of addiction to products that satisfied a short-term craving while obliterating everything around. Overall, the ethical will of humanity lagged far behind its technology. In some respects, things had reverted to a state he had already thought obsolete in his own time.
As he wandered through the streets of New Orleans, he saw addiction in even cruder forms. Barrooms were crowded with gamblers playing electronic money machines. Casinos stayed open day and night, fleecing suckers who returned as soon as they were able. Of course, this particular human folly was no mystery to him. In fact, he had amused himself in his youth by figuring out probabilities in games of chance, and he was certain that he could do it again. For the first time since landing in this decayed reality, Tesla smiled. When the time came to use money, he could doubtless get it from gambling, and there would be a certain justice to it. Already his mind was working toward possible solutions to some of the more obvious messes.
New Orleans was green, wet, incessantly flowering. Tesla spent an hour with a sweet-olive tree, whose scent of overripe peach stimulated and intrigued him. The tiny cream-colored clusters looked like an unlikely source for such overpowering scent. The tree, at the back of Saint Louis Cathedral, spread its branches over the fence, now and then dropping its tiny blossoms on his hair. He watched a vine clinging to the wrought-iron fence—it put out a tendril that gripped the iron tightly. Tesla pushed his cart up Royal Street, noting green fingers pushing through the cracked sidewalk. He stopped to study a Japanese magnolia—the lavender blooms had opened overnight and were covered by a fine mist. The air was warm, rich, liquid—Tesla drew a breath and sensed the expectant tree waiting for him to exhale. When he did, the tree inhaled the iron-enriched air that had gone through his lungs. They breathed together—man breath out, tree breath in, tree breath out, man breath in—and everything became still except for this symbiotic respiration. Tesla rubbed the top of his head and the sweet-olive seeped into his hand and scalp. The magnolia flowers glowed to reveal their delicate geometry, and Tesla smacked his forehead. Yes. He remembered his idea for chlorophyll propulsion, left behind in one of the notebooks. He’d been unable to experiment in Colorado because it was too dry. But here in New Orleans, at the wettest place in the continental United States, it was possible. Tesla next communed with the intense green leaves of a banana peeking over the wall of a courtyard on Chartres. His breath quickened as it always did at the onset of an inspired project. He sat on a bench and began sketching.
While the bountiful generative world of vegetation claimed most of his attention that week, Tesla did not abandon his observation of humanity. He was astonished to discover that slavery persisted. He observed the existence of flourishing slave markets, connected with the crack cocaine business. Many drug dealers were also slave traders. One of the markets operated quite openly on Fridays right in Jackson Square, in front of Saint Louis Cathedral. Tesla watched a skinny man with a heavy silver buckle and alligator-skin boots, followed at a short distance by a quiescent boy who looked no older than twelve. A buyer appeared shortly, a burly man in a suit with a pencil-thin mustache. Money exchanged hands quickly, and the boy followed the buyer out of the square, toward Royal Street.
The street people were very concerned. Many young drifters, kids who hadn’t been on the street long, were vanishing. Only the old alcoholics and, so far, the Shades had been left alone, possibly because they were not interested in drugs. The slave trade celebrated its might quite brazenly. Bars with slave-and-master motifs stayed open all night, filled with drunk and stoned sadists. Slaves were tortured and killed in back rooms of bars and in luxury apartments. The disposal of young bodies was a growth industry. In his youth, Tesla had been an abolitionist. The new forms of slavery through addiction were alarming.
During one of his rounds, Tesla became intrigued by a shuttered building on Bourbon Street that was the recipient of many young women who never returned from within. A street acquaintance told him that the building was the headquarters of something called SMD, the School for Messiah Development. His informant whispered darkly that the Antichrist was being nurtured there and that the day was not far off when the gates of this house would burst open and he would appear in a globe of fire. This explanation irritated Tesla.
“He? There are only women in there. Is this Antichrist a woman?”
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br /> His informant allowed that the Antichrist might be female. “It might even be my ex-wife.” He grinned toothlessly, offering the anchorite a swig of his peach brandy, which Tesla refused.
Chapter Twenty-two
Wherein Tesla rescues Felicity from her involuntary happiness
Tesla put the SMD quarters on his watch. He was there the day Felicity was brought in. She walked supported by two men, stepping lightly as if she weren’t sure the ground was there. Something about the girl touched him. A small sound, like a distant flute, reached his inner ear. He had no idea what the sound was. It could have been the jingling of her bracelets or something that came from his own mind. Tesla had always thought himself far removed from the vulgar emotions that agitated most people. At one time, he had sought to relieve humanity of its sexual burden entirely. Still, Felicity emanated a fresh, lovely light that Tesla, who had read William James, identified with the first female principle, the mother he had never known, the lover he had never considered. He watched her disappear within and almost immediately conceived the idea of helping this girl escape. Tesla did not undertake this mission solely for the girl’s sake: he needed her in order to construct the chlorophyll-propulsion machine he had already begun assembling at the warehouse beside the river.
The house itself presented few difficulties. The next day, Tesla took his usual position on the stoop next door to SMD. A mule-drawn carriage filled with tourists passed, and the carriage driver pointed out the anchorite to his charges.
“He there a urban anchor that be there every day like clockworks and about him be said that he old as Methuselah, rich as Croesus, smart as Einstein, and some say he Jeezus. I say he be the reincarnate Napoleon,” he explained in rapid patter.
Tesla was by now so ubiquitous many people no longer noticed him and his shopping cart. He was like the Confederate submarine at the Cabildo: it was so odd the locals pretended not to see it. He planned to unlock the iron gate set in a ten-foot brick wall topped by broken glass, with the aid of a small sonic device fashioned from a broken radio. The device had the advantage of being a weapon as well, emitting a high-pitched sound that could burst eardrums.
Tesla was mentally rehearsing his plan when a policeman approached him. Now, of all times!
Joe sat down next to him and showed him a photograph. “Have you seen this girl?”
It was Felicity. Was this a kind of psychic cop or something? In the photo, Felicity’s mouth was slightly open. Her green eyes were looking far away.
“If you’ll excuse me, I’m in a race against time,” Tesla said politely.
“Right. And you race just sitting here?”
“There are grave problems in this city, Constable. In the world. Are you aware that slavery has returned? Human beings are being sold as we speak.”
“And why do you think that is?” Joe asked. He did not want to engage the anchorite but felt obscurely that the madman was somehow valuable.
“Because you can only have as much freedom as you’re willing to take. If you don’t assume your portion, they’ll take it from you. The slavers prey on the weak. The issue did seem to be solved well before the turn of the century. It’s astonishing. My discoveries are everywhere, but they haven’t helped people become any better.” Tesla stopped, afraid that he’d said too much.
Tesla could have told the policeman that the girl he was looking for was right across the street, and then, doubtless, the slave ring would be broken and the girl set free. But he had no faith in guardians of the law, whether in the Old or New World, past or present. He remembered Austrian border guards in Croatia, Turkish soldiers in Serbia, Immigration officers at Ellis Island, cops in New York. He had been detained, questioned, and beaten so many times by lawmen, it was a wonder he had survived to become the renowned Nikola Tesla. And there was something else. This policeman was young and handsome, while he, Nikola Tesla, inventor and neo-anchorite, showed the wear and tear of the street. His broken, yellowed teeth could barely stand comparison to the cop’s gleaming mouth. Simply put, Tesla, though he barely dared to admit it, was jealous. He wanted Felicity for himself.
Joe was disappointed. He sensed that the anchorite knew something. Perhaps he was afraid to talk because he was dealing drugs out of his shopping cart, but the thought of having to wade through masses of junk to find out was not appealing.
“You see any shit I should know about, you call the precinct on Royal and ask for Joe,” he said threateningly.
After the suspicious policeman vanished from sight, Tesla realized that he’d have to act quickly. His experiment lacked only two essential pieces. One of these pieces was vegetal, but the other was human. Felicity was the human component.
To his astonishment, the forbidding gate wasn’t locked. He found himself in the well-kept courtyard of a three-story house with galleries running around both upper floors. Young women in simple white dresses and Chinese slippers stood in small groups, singing hymns. They didn’t take any notice of him.
Tesla climbed the staircase and opened the first door he came to. A Hindu man with a turban on his head was pointing to a lithograph of a long-haired, blond Jesus Christ. Several female students sat on the floor at his feet, listening raptly. Felicity was not among them.
“Excuse me,” said Tesla, but no one seemed to hear him. He shut the door softly.
The next door he tried presented an even more astonishing spectacle. A dozen young women dressed like all the others were sitting before computer consoles, working intently with rows of numbers. This scene interested Tesla—he had not expected the enterprise to be aided by computers. He decided to take a closer look.
No one stopped him. Color charts and rows of numbers alternated on the screens. Tesla knew immediately what the charts displayed—they were integrated circuits. He had worked on similar designs. What was being designed here? And why wasn’t there any security? The thought crossed his mind that he was under surveillance and the reason for the apparent lack of security was that he would never leave here.
He felt a hand on his shoulder. When he turned around, an arm covered with crooked crosses rested there. The man rasped in his ear: “The Bamajan will see you now.”
Tesla was in danger. He resorted to a technique he had developed when he’d been detained and interrogated by men in the employ of J. Pierpont Morgan. He allowed himself to go slack within, and then he raised an impenetrable inner shield. Through the shield he could hear everything, he could even respond, but he remained impervious to psychological or physical assault.
They entered a bare room with a blank screen on the wall. Leaning back on a chair before a kidney-shaped desk was a short smiling Hindu man with a shaved head. Tesla’s escort crossed his spidery arms.
“Welcome to the School for Messiah Development, anchorite. We have been watching your activities, and we have concluded that you can be useful to us,” the bald Bamajan said.
These words were nearly identical to the ones spoken by one of Morgan’s enforcers when Tesla refused to surrender the patent to his worldwide broadcasting invention.
Then the bald man rose from his chair and did something so unexpected that Tesla nearly lost his shield. He threw himself at Tesla’s feet and kissed his dirty bare toes.
“I don’t know what you mean,” mumbled the inventor.
“This is how we welcome new Bamajans. Welcome, Bamajan, welcome!” he exclaimed, rising from the floor. He sat back down behind the desk.
“Don’t you want to know why I’m here?”
“We know. You came to teach us.”
“Teach what? What do you people do?”
“We know that you are a Great Mind. We do not know precisely who you are, but we welcome you. Our psychics have been telling us for some time that the arrival of the Great Minds was imminent, but you are the first that we have had the great honor of encountering.”
Tesla, though surprised by this turn of events, could not help but remark, “Someone must have an extraordinary sense of humo
r to place the welcoming committee for Great Minds among the strip joints, T-shirt shops, fried alligator stands, and drunkards of Bourbon Street.”
Bamajan smiled. “The surface deceives. The Spanish style of this neighborhood is such that great courtyards with pools of deep quiet lie behind the gaudy facades. Are you interested in architecture?”
“Very much,” said Nikola Tesla. “I have studied the construction of the heavens and have a fair idea of the complex layout of hell.”
“Oh, my God! You are Dante Alighieri!” The Bamajan slapped the pate of his bald head. “I have studied your verses in school. It’s a great honor indeed!”
“So how can my poor verses aid your enterprise?” asked Tesla, playing along.
“All skills are welcome and needed. Our leader has ordered the rapid collection of all the Great Minds in order to staff the coming messianic embassy.”
“Your Messiah has arrived, then?”
“We cannot say with any certainty. The modest mission of our school is to welcome the Redeemer. Our seers tell us that he is among us now.”
“I see.” Tesla grinned and bent his head to gather his shimmering psychic shield tightly about him.
The Bamajan came out from behind his desk again and stood behind the inventor. He took Tesla’s head between his hands and squeezed with searing strength. The force was such that all of Tesla’s thoughts and memories rushed forward and would have been sucked out of him if his shield hadn’t been in place. But the shield held and Tesla remained himself.
Bamajan then embraced him and said: “Welcome again! Welcome to the cause of our Redeemer!”
Tesla wondered how many Great Minds had already been captured by the cult. He did not believe the Bamajan’s assertion that he was the first one. He wasn’t sure what the cult’s real purpose was, but they were clearly bent on capturing the Great Minds and coercing them to their cause.
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