Empire of Unreason (15 page)

But when the threat came, they were Carolinians.

At least Paolo was. But Franklin would bet his life that most others were as well, whether the invader was Catholic, Presbyter, or Baal worshiper.

“Nothing just yet, Mr. Forseti. I’ll be in touch with you, though. Spread the word quietly, if you like, of what you’ve seen here tonight—but only to those you trust. It won’t do for it to get back to King James that I’ve seen this thing.

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Do you understand?”

“Clear as ice,” the fellow said. “And proud I was to have you in my home.”

“Proud I’d be to have you in mine. Come when you will.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Thank you, rather. And now we have to go, I’m afraid.”

“Go with Allah, then.”

Then Franklin did remember where he had seen Paolo, and he remembered something else: all the Italians were not, after all, Catholic—or even Christian.

“Inshallah,” Franklin agreed, repeating the word he had long ago learned from this man’s captain, the head of a detachment of Janissaries.

As they walked barefoot back toward his house, Franklin turned to Robert.

“I’m not happy about this king and his fish ships, Robin. Not one little bit.”

Franklin found Voltaire awake, reading by lanthorn light. The Frenchman’s eyebrows leapt up when he saw Ben.

“Good morning, sir,” he said.

Franklin eased himself down into a chair and nodded.

“Your new king kept you up passing late, I’d say.”

Franklin suppressed a surge of anger at the Frenchman’s smugness and simply nodded wearily.

“And you’ve given him your shoes and the coat off your back. You’ve convinced me, sir, that Englishmen and Colonials truly love liberty.”

Franklin rose and walked over to open a small cabinet. When he turned back to Voltaire, he was holding a
kraftpistole.
The Frenchman first looked amused, EMPIRE OF UNREASON

but as Franklin returned to his chair, keeping the sharp point of the weapon trained on him, his face clouded.

“See here,” Voltaire said, “if you’ve no taste for my wit, simply say so.”

“It’s not your wit, Voltaire, though I’ll admit I’m in no mood to hear it just now. It’s your allegiance I’m worried about. I knew you, long ago, for a brief time. Now I find that I do not trust you.”

“Understandable,” Voltaire replied. “You were always trusting the wrong people. Vasilisa Karevna, for instance—”

“You trusted her, too.”

“Trusted her? No, I merely did us all the disservice of underestimating her.

But, yes, she fooled us both. What became of her, anyway?”

“I don’t know,” Franklin murmured. “You’re the one as has been cultivating Moscovado friends. Perhaps you should tell me.”

Voltaire sighed. “I told you my story. I heard a ship was to cross the Atlantic, and I wanted to come here, where I heard some sanity still existed. I am no servant of your Jacobite king, nor of the Russian tsar. If you cannot trust my word on that, I sincerely do not know what I can say.”

“Tell me you know nothing at all of a Moscovado fleet.”

Voltaire held up his hands. “I told you I heard talk of a fleet, but never saw one. I wondered at first why James risked the ocean in a sailing ship, when his sponsors could readily provide him with an airship, but then I can’t say for certain James really is sponsored by the tsar. Is there a fleet? Have you discovered it?”

Franklin studied Voltaire for another moment or so and lowered the weapon.

“God help you if you are lying to me,” he said. “But let me tell you this, for your own information. The governments of Europe are beasts with heads. Cut off the head and the beast dies. America is not so.”

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“Meaning?”

“Meaning, my old friend, that if you have been sent here to kill me, it will help no cause imaginable. Things will proceed very nicely without me.”

“What things?”

Franklin shook his head. “You will see, directly. I’m going to bed now.”

He paused at the stair, however. “Voltaire, I want to trust you. You have the edge in that. I want it desperately, and the colonies have need of you—of your wit, of your intellect, of the basic decency I believe you own. But I cannot afford to leave you above suspicion. Please understand it, and if I have wronged you, do not hold it against me.”

“What would happen if I chose to leave your house just now?”

“I debated that,” Franklin admitted. “I thought to have you followed if you did, so that you might reveal yourself if you are a spy. I have decided that even that is an unacceptable risk.”

“I cannot come and go?”

“With an escort of my choosing, or with me. This state of affairs will not last long, I promise you, and then you will be at liberty.”

Voltaire regarded him for a long moment and then sighed.

“Liberty and freedom are not one and the same. Which will I have, if I stay at your side?”

“Both—or neither,” Franklin replied, and went up the stairs.

To Ben’s relief, nothing of note happened the next day. He spent his time in his laboratory and in a secret meeting with members of the Junto. They questioned Euler again, but he claimed to know little more about the fleet than Franklin had discovered.

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The next morning he was awakened by a pounding at his door. He rose, gave Lenka a kiss, and put a
kraftpistole
in the inner pocket of his dressing gown.

It was Sterne, in the company of a pair of footmen.

“Oh, dear,” he said, when he saw Ben’s state. “I hoped not to wake you.”

“I was abed rather late,” Franklin said. “All the recent excitement, you know.

Come in, if you wish, and break your fast with us.”

“Thank you, sir, I’ve already eaten. I only came by to collect whether you have formed an opinion yet.”

“As to what?” Franklin asked warily.

“As to whether you are interested in the post of court philosopher.”

Franklin nodded. “I believe that I am,” he said.

Sterne smiled. “The king will be so pleased. Since that is the case, I wonder if I might impose upon you a bit?”

“In what way? I aim to please, of course.”

“In three days’ time, your Assembly will debate the matter of accepting His Majesty as sovereign. Of course, as a member of the Commons, you shall already be present. But I had hoped for something further, for next the vote will be before your Commonwealth Parliament. I hear you have invented an aetherschreiber of a superior sort, which conveys not mere written words but image and voice as well. Is this so?”

“Yes, indeed.”

“How many of these exist?”

“A handful, sir.”

“But could others be instructed so as to build them in the other colonies?”

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“You wish for the other colonies to watch and listen to the proceedings here in Charles Town?”

“Indeed. In that way the debate and consequences will be unmarred by hearsay. They will see it as it happens.”

“A wonderful idea, sir. However, there is one small flaw in the plan. My devices work well enough—but work best outdoors.”

“Oh.”

“The weather should be nice, though. Perhaps the assembly could meet in a pavilion on the half moon behind the old Court of Guard? It would be particularly well, if the sunlight holds. The image can be dark and blurry, even in the best of conditions; and I’m certain you wish the king to appear in his best light, as it were.”

Sterne nodded thoughtfully. “Not a bad idea. That way, the populace here can look on as well, rather than crowding into the statehouse. A capital suggestion, sir.”

“Well, let me get on this then, if we’ve but three days.”

“Thank you most kindly, Mr. Franklin. I think you will find the king’s thanks are worth more than gold.”

“They already are,” Franklin replied.

When Sterne and his men were gone, Franklin turned to find Lenka regarding him with a puzzled expression.

“What was he talking about? Have you invented such a device?”

Franklin smiled. “I had it given out that I have. It got round to Sterne as quickly as I’d hoped.”

“What will you say when you cannot produce your crystal ball?”

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“Oh,” Franklin said, cupping her face in for a kiss, “small worry. I shall have it invented by this afternoon.”

The atmosphere was again carnival three days later, when the Assembly met.

Or, rather, it had remained so. The festival that began when James and his court arrived had never really ceased.

The half moon was part of an old bastion, shaped as it sounded, curving out into the Cooper River. Just now it was shaded almost entirely from the glaring noonday sun by a pavilion as grand as the tent of an Ottoman sultan. It was all roof, though, and no walls, so the spectators who clustered around on the landward side had a good view of what was going on.

Brackish winds from the river and the marshes mingled with the scent of cook fires and sausages, baking bread and pipe smoke. The water below cracked the sunlight and tossed its bits about playfully. Almost everything else was more sluggish—it was so hot the air itself seemed to sweat.

Franklin noticed that the number of the king’s soldiers had increased. He was unsurprised to realize that some of them were native South Carolinians, dressed in clean new uniforms. James and his people had been busy these past few days. At least half the crowd wore his colors.

James himself was seated in an armchair, as if presiding over the meeting. The legislators sat in rows of pews, which had been removed from one of the churches.

He found Sterne examining a wooden cabinet mounted on rollers. It stood waist high, where a pair of truncated cones emerged from a jumble of tubes and wires, rather like backward horns.

“How does it work?” Sterne asked rather excitedly.

“Much like an aetherschreiber,” Franklin replied, tugging at his too-tight steinkirk, already sopping with sweat. “I am calling it an opticon. The brass cone funnels sound into a sheepskin membrane and drum of graphite dust. Its vibrations are translated by a chime into aetheric ones, and in its mates become sound again through the action of a similar membrane. The copper EMPIRE OF UNREASON

cone, you note, has a lens—like a telescope, it concentrates an image to a small point. A substance of my invention translates the impact of lux atoms into aetheric motion as well. These are reproduced, magnified, and projected much as in a
laterna magica.”

“Ingenious.”

“Since it cannot see all at once, my man will stand here and shift the lens from speaker to speaker, as the need arises.” He indicated Robert, who made a little bow.

“And each of the other colonies have a receptive device?”

“If they followed my building instructions, and I do not doubt that. And now, if you please, Mr. Sterne, I should join my colleagues.”

“Yes, of course.”

Franklin took his place and waited for the debate to begin.

It did not take long.

The first to speak was Sir Chapton, speaker for the upper house.

“Friends,” he began, “I cannot adequately explain to you how my heart feels at this moment. I was an orphan, and now I have a father again. I was lost in a trackless wilderness, and now I have, at last, a map and landmarks. Every one of you knows the loss I speak of, shares my pain, my worries, my fear. Each of you knows my present joy. England gave us all birth, if not in this generation, in generations past. It was the desire of our fathers to make the world England, and now, at last, England is here!”

He paused for the inevitable cheers. When they had subsided a bit, he continued. “We have before us a choice, but I say it is no choice. Look what has become of us, these ten years alone. We have drifted, my friends, with no firm rudder. How many of you have watched as your neighbors have donned the manner and even the dress of the Indian? How many Latin ways have come to us with the Venetian silks, from our commerce with the Spaniards in Florida EMPIRE OF UNREASON

and French in Louisiana? In a few generations, all that is England will have left us, and we will have become like the savages who once owned this continent. It is the nature of Englishmen to have a king; the people and the king are inseparable. Without the will of the English people there can be no king, but I say to you without a monarch there can be no people. Each is axis to the other, and one without the other is like half a house.”

That got him more cheers, and he went on mixing metaphors in that vein. The next two speakers were Tory as well, and they said much the same; and to Ben’s eye most of the crowd seemed pleased.

Finally Theophilus Smith arose, a Whig, and cleared his throat. “I agree with much of what has been said here today. I wish, however, to add this. That the guarantee of English law provides not only for a monarch, but for liberty. We look around us and see many kings but little liberty. Is there liberty under the tsar? I hear not. Does Louisiana have just law under her king? No, indeed. And so I say—”

He was interrupted by a chorus of loud booing, both from the legislators and from the crowd. He set his jaw and continued stubbornly. “Hear me out! I do not object to a king. How could I, for I am English. But I would know that I have an English king, and the liberty that comes with such a king. We have heard of Latin ways, but the Stuarts are Catholic, and thus loyal to the pope; and where was James Stuart raised if not in France and Urbino, Italy, amongst Romish cousins?”

More booing followed, as well as some cheers, but all were silenced when James rose from his armchair.

“Dear friends,” he called in a loud, clear voice. “Listen to this man, for he speaks the truth. I see you all do desire a king. This man does, too. His only concern is to know that I will be an English king of an English people, that law and divine right are clasped hand in hand. This is more than reasonable, it is necessary. Do not shout him down for raising the concern which is the duty of you all to consider.”

He bowed slightly to Smith, and sat back down.

The crowd went mad for a space of five minutes. When the cheering died away, EMPIRE OF UNREASON