Now is when the witch looks at the younger Nelson for the first time. Right into his eyes and he can’t look away. It’s the body and the face of his mother but with a witch inside it. She smiles and explodes into a swarm of palmetto bugs which sweeps inward through the front door. There is a moment of absolute quiet. Young Nelson realizes he can move again. He struggles to his feet. The buzzing of the palmettos comes swelling, a deep rumble that shakes the earth. The house bursts apart, the swarm exploding out in all directions. And off they go, a huge churning mist that blends the night until they’ve vanished, gone into the lowest dark sliver of the eastern sky.
Benjamin Franklin :: April 17th 1790
Ben Franklin is in the tub again for his gout. “The age of collecting is over,” he says. Above him, his words appear in the air, projected from a smartpad propped up on a side table. A young male page sits in a chair beside the tub, redfanged into the smartpad. The kid takes Franklin’s spoken words and gets them into a text editor he keeps portaled into Newnet. Last Thoughts of Benjamin Franklin. Been at it on and off a couple days, and still no last thoughts. Franklin just hasn’t been able to nail down anything worthy. Each thought he’s thought up he’s had the boy delete a few minutes later, hundreds of sentences buried in a long string of undo. Coughing fits keep him from proper concentration, constant interruptions by lesser thoughts Franklin can’t hold back. Last half hour or so, he’s been alternately thinking and talking about the death of John Penn, a few Signers ago. “I wonder if he’s off in some other universe,” Franklin says, “looking back at us.”
Franklin watches the words appear in the air above the tub.
“Don’t type that.”
“Type?” the kid says. “You should get an eyereader, Dr. F. You’ll never have to type again.” The page points a finger back at his eye. “This one has a camera. Everything I see can be on Newnet as soon as I see it.”
Franklin shakes his head, “Need my pupils to think.” And he seems to, both of them bounding around inside their sockets, like REM sleep with the lids left open. In Franklin’s brain, memories cycle, the video of John Penn vanishing. The last moments were captured by several smartdevices around the hotel foyer. Franklin has examined them each, frame by frame, dozens of times. The clothes, the man, all his bodily possessions, but nothing else in the room affected at all.
It’s a way Franklin would love to go, to go wherever John Penn went, even if just into cold space, one glimpse of some galactic event before you suffocate. Instead, it looks like Ben Franklin is going to cough himself to death. How droll. Right now he can feel a fit building. Then he’s hacking and yet another piece of tissue has been knocked free. Franklin leans over the lip of the tub to spit it into a bucket set there for this purpose. A little pile of meat sits inside, festering.
Throughout the fit, the pageboy keeps chin in hand, watching the window, clearly bored by the death of Benjamin Franklin. Settling now deeper in the tub to better sink his legs, Dr. Franklin returns to his last thoughts, his brain storming for some respectable idea. “Suppose I’ll be separate from this body soon.” Franklin’s lips barely hover the water. “The country is free now. The Death is cured. The bodies all cleaned up like it never happened. Probably spend the next dozen generations reverse engineering Off‐Worlder technologies.” He looks down the end of his nose at his own reflection, what he can see of it so close, with the soap bubbles clouding its edges. “All this stuff we’ve collected. All this potential energy. And I won’t be here for the fun of shaking it all up.”
Franklin has tried, this whole last year, and more fevered this last declining month, to arrange a tour of an Off‐Worlder ship. It’s the last request of America’s great scientist. Even George Washington had put in a good word. But no response ever came. Franklin wonders if they’re sore about the deal he negotiated for the cure. Humans got the cure, cleanup of the bodies and fourteen tons of solid gold bars. All for a little oil, actually all of it, all that filthy sludge gone forever. Maybe I did take them for a ride, Franklin thinks. A little one at least.
“Off‐Worlders,” the page inquires. “Do you think they’re peaceful, Dr. F.?”
“Well, so far, my boy. Cured The Death and removed all the bodies. Took a few bazillion gallons of oil off our hands, too. Doesn’t seem so bad to me.”
The kid scoffs. “But what about the currency? All that gold made gold worthless. Can’t have a nation without a hard, stable currency.”
Franklin smiles. “Where did you read that?”
But the page doesn’t answer. He’s gazing out that window again, considering these visitors to his world.
“Gold,” Franklin shivers despite the warmth of the water. “Glad to be free of such a hordable device.” Now Franklin ponders. He gets the look of Ben Franklin, hit by inspiration. “Type this, my boy: The Death is the end of the age of gathering.” Franklin thinks. “No,” he says. “Delete that.” The water rises and sinks minutely with his breathing. “Type this: The age of gathering is over. Declare in your profile that you are tired of being an organizer, a sorter, a decider of order. Refer to something people will recognize, but change the words so the new point is: No more mindless sorting. No more throwing my generation at sifting through the data of the last.”
The pageboy’s pupils dance behind those invisible films. Rising above the tub, the same words Ben Franklin is saying. Franklin stops to read them over. He coughs something into that bucket, looks at where it splats. “The pail of me,” he says. Franklin works up a few more pieces and hawks them on in.
“You don’t want that, right? That ‘pail of me’ bit? Those noises?”
Franklin looks over the top of his bifocals at the boy. Then back at the words hovering. “Thomas Lynch lost at sea,” he says. “Makes forty Signers left.”
“Signers of what?”
“The Declaration.” Franklin lets it sit. “Constitutions will come and go, you’ll see. We’ll be on the fourth or fifth and the Declaration will still be what it is, a declaration of independence.” Franklin coughs three quick coughs. “When the history of all this is written, will it be about the fledgling birth of a small coastal nation? Or will it be about The Death? Endless European war? Off‐Worlders visiting Earth for the first time?”
“First time we know of,” the boy puts in. “You still don’t want me transcribing this, right?”
“Will all these documents be separate things in some distant, modern brain? The Declaration just one pixel in a much larger image, a collective mural of culture moving forward through time? The Declaration, Constitution, this Bill of Rights when it gets ratified, whatever comes of getting slavery fixed, whatever adjustment comes after that. I suppose if the country’s around long enough, we’ll be able to write our own history. Europe and The Death and the Off‐Worlders can just be the details.”
Franklin looks up, but all that’s above his head is the thought he thought a few thoughts ago. “Erase it,” he says. He reaches for his handkerchief. Like everything he does, be it cross a room or ignite a revolution, it looks like it’s being done in slow motion. Somehow he does manage to get the hanky to his mouth just in time for his most violent coughing yet. Lasts a whole minute while the pageboy glances off, almost dozing.
Then it’s over. Seems like this might be it for Ben Franklin. He’s gone pretty still, does actually look like he’s floated up to the surface of the tub. But when Lieutenant Governor George Ross comes bursting in, old Ben Franklin, not dead yet, raises his head.
Ross is all but shouting, “Dr. Franklin!” With fleeting breath, Ross manages, “The Off‐Worlders! They’re coming!”
Both Franklin in the tub and the pageboy in his seat perk up. “Here?”
“Your request, Dr. Franklin. For a tour of the ship…”
Franklin is smiling now, wipes water downward off his face. It’s at times like this that Ben Franklin reveals his most serene quality, the ability to break off from something of universal importance and slip seamlessly into smal
l talk. “We were talking about the Declaration a moment ago,” he tells the Lieutenant Governor. “The other George Ross.”
“Yes,” George Ross says. “I’m still friends with many of his friends, online anyway. Guess that makes them my friends too.”
But the less‐than‐gracious Franklin resurfaces again in the tub. “My, my,” he says, and he works himself slowly to his feet, totters there as the pageboy goes rushing for a towel. Ben Franklin in all his suds‐dripping nudity.
The Off‐Worlders are waiting in a carriage in front of Ben Franklin’s house when he comes wobbling down the steps, one step at a time. Every smartdevice in town has been dragged out to be the one to get it fastest to Newnet. Franklin looks into the lenses like he’s slipping forward in time, to see the eyes of Americans not yet born. Someday they’ll be watching. This is a moment that will be seen as long as man exists.
Franklin climbs aboard, settles back into the carriage seat. Across are two Off‐Worlders that look human but for red crystal eyes. It’s the first time he’s seen the species up close. The negotiations for the cure were done through remote servers and video links, him and General Lachlan McIntosh in one room and the Off‐Worlders far away in a ship somewhere in the stratosphere. It was all very proper and plastic.
Franklin greets them with his ever‐perfect blend of warmth and protocol. He is to be the first human allowed on an Off‐Worlder ship. He can barely hide his excitement the whole ride to Independence Hall. Down the steps and into the basement, a small sub‐room where a portal to the ship remains frozen, looks like one of the Off‐Worlder photographs of a once‐an‐eon gravity storm twisting together. The leader of the Off‐Worlder delegation speaks a few words of their hard, low grumble, and the frozen portal spins to life. In perfect English now: “You’ll feel nothing, Dr. Franklin.”
“I’m feeling plenty already.” As he totters through the portal, vanishing from the Earth, another cough shakes some larger pieces up into his throat. He takes a deep breath and one lodges. That first little glimpse of the ship is all he gets.
William Hooper :: October 14th 1790
William Hooper says, “Bushed.” He says, “Beat.” He goes to where the morning’s fire has burned out, pokes it to see if some embers are left in there somewhere. “Have to start the damn thing over.”
“Talk to yourself much these days, Hooper?”
Hooper stops, leans the poker against the brick, turns slowly to face the man seated in the big leather chair, buried in the darkest corner of the room. “General Lachlan McIntosh.”
McIntosh finishes loading a pipe. The match fire illuminates his face as he puffs. Embers make edges along the bottom of his smile, devious and withdrawn. He whips the match out and tosses it on the floor. “Bill of Rights,” he says.
Hooper is shaking his head. “When they said we needed a Declaration, I worked. When they said we needed a Constitution, I worked. Now they want a Bill of Rights, too? Well, I gave them my answer already. William Hooper is all worked out.” He picks up that extinguished match and tosses it on the burned‐out fire, leans there on the mantle looking back, kinda like he’s warming himself but all there is is the draft sucking up the chimney. “Bill of Rights,” he says. “Next thing it’s every town has a senator. No taxes ever, no matter what wars the government wins for us.”
McIntosh puffs on that pipe. “Love your sentiment, sir.”
Hooper plops into the big swivel chair behind his desk.
“But frankly,” McIntosh says, “I don’t think we can take that risk.”
“Risk what?”
“You were a Loyalist, were you not?”
Hooper blanches. His brow furrows. “Come on, McIntosh. You’re not calling me on that. Not now.”
McIntosh shrugs. Sings it a little: “You fought against us at Alamance.”
“That was a hell of a long time ago and you know it. And you know there were plenty of others too, plenty who fought against you at Alamance.”
McIntosh shrugs. “You were a Loyalist. I don’t hold it against you because you came around. Saw the right path, or the left one, so to say.” McIntosh lays out a hand. “Your name’s on the Declaration, for God’s sake.”
“And yours, sir, is not.”
McIntosh leans into the light. “No. No, it is not.” He smiles at his fellow American. “You are one of our great patriots. No denying. But then when the Constitution came along, you were against that one, too.”
“Surely you can’t be—”
McIntosh waves a hand. “Relax, Hooper. What I’m saying is you found yourself eventually on the side of the people. And once there you worked damn hard for that thing. Some of us thought it was going to kill you down here, getting the Constitution through.”
“What is the point, General?”
“What happens a few months from now is the point. The cry of the people starts to get to you? You feel it in your belly? Then you’re out there pounding Newnet, getting that old flavor back. Public’s like a drug to you guys. Your face up there again, an arch‐Federalist busting hump for the BofR, give the people the idea that it can’t be all bad. You starting to see what I mean?”
“Not really.”
“Man like you gets behind the Bill of Rights, might not be any stopping it.”
“But I don’t want the Bill of Rights ratified any more than you do.”
“I believe you now. But I don’t believe you two months from now.” McIntosh takes a long puff from his pipe. Keeps that cherry burning, lighting his face as he sinks back. “And the President, he doesn’t believe you either.”
“The President?”
“Hooper, you know anything about Doctor Benjamin Franklin’s Dream America?”
Hooper points at the smartpad on his desk. “Some new‐fangled social networking platform. Still in Beta, I hear. Haven’t used it.”
“Any idea who’s behind the code?”
Hooper shakes his head. “The President sent you here?”
“Now that he is the President, General Washington’s main job is keeping the country together. That’s number one. What happens to the country when we need a new law, when we need troops to defend the shore, and every plebe with a smartphone is in Franklin’s Dream, screaming about how it violates something in the Bill of Rights? We just sit there with our thumb up our ass while the country goes to shit? Who needs a Congress, or a President for that matter, when each citizen can log on and represent himself?”
“Represent himself? It’s just a social networking tool, McIn‐tosh. No one’s talking about connecting it to the government.”
“Not now they’re not. But rights never were connected to the government either. Used to be something we just understood. And now here it is, the Bill of Rights.”
“I’ll ask again, McIntosh. Did. The. President. Send. You. Here?”
McIntosh turns his hand around, as if showing Hooper something from the other side. “The President thinks the Revolution has gone far enough.”
Hooper is right then sliding his finger onto the trigger of a shotgun he keeps nailed to the underside of his desk. “You worried about the country?” he asks. “Or about not being in control of it?” But Hooper blows it. As he goes to pull the trigger, he moves his shoulder the slightest bit and McIntosh sees it. The General is on his feet in a flash, still has a little of that soldier left in him. He sidesteps in time to see his chair split five exact ways, looks like a dance move what he just did. Hooper is yanking on the gun, trying to get it free from the desk, then decides to spin the desk. He gets it turned a degree or two before McIntosh puts a boot to it and everything goes still. The General has out that pearl‐handled dueling pistol of his, same one he used to kill Button Gwinnett. Levels it at William Hooper’s chest and fires.
Hooper slumps back. When he tries to speak, blood comes out instead. A second shot from under the desk, but the pellets vanish harmlessly into the wall. McIntosh takes a few limping steps to stand at Hooper’s side. “That’s the second
Signer taken a shot at me, second one who blew his chance.” He puts the pistol flush against Hooper’s chest, just above his heart. Guy looks pretty well headed toward an old‐fashioned bleed out. McIntosh shrugs, pulls the trigger. “Just in case.”
Lyman Hall :: October 19th 1790
Lyman Hall believes that when the President asks you to do something, you do it. It being especially important when that President is the first President ever. Turn down something like that and you might help set a precedent: chief executive of the country goes on chat and asks a citizen to do something and gets turned down? Pretty soon the President’s going to have to do every little thing by himself. There is, of course, also the fact that the first President of the United States of America is George Washington. Probably wouldn’t be a good idea to turn down a request from the Old Man, whether he’s the President or not. And so when the first President of the United States, George Washington, opens up a chat with Lyman Hall, Lyman is like, whatever you need, boss.
Actually, it’s the Secretary of War, Henry Knox, who opens the chat. But he says the President sent him and that’s pretty much the same, right, as the President asking himself? “Lyman,” the Secretary tells him, “the Indians have resurfaced.”
“Native Americans, you mean?”
“Out from some mountains they were hiding inside of from The Death this whole time. Guess it didn’t help. About the same death rate as the rest of the globe, sounds like from what they’re saying.”
Lyman says, “Wow.” He says into the chat, “What does the President think?”
“The Indians,” the Secretary says. “They’ve got this bug up their ass about some treaty, and apparently after The Death these guys refuse to go on Newnet. We need someone down in Georgia to get out there, see what they’re all hard about.” A pause there in the chat viewer. “And Lyman. There’s one other thing…”
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