The Whenabouts of Burr (12 page)

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The train travelled twenty-four hours a day, pausing only to satisfy the engine's insatiable desire for fuel and water. Even so, the trip took almost a week: six days and most of the seventh. River fording, on great cable-pulled barges, ate up much of the time. Crossing the Mississippi took three trips and nine hours. The fuel was cordwood or soft coal; the only difference to the engine seemed to be in the color and intensity of the smoke it put out. During the stops food and water for the passengers was also hoisted aboard, but it was clear that no waiting would be tolerated for that. The train changed crews every day; one crew being on duty for twenty-four hours before being relieved at the appropriate water stop. Toilet necessities were provided for with the aid of specially designed carriage-pots kept under the seat. The design, Swift found, was poor.

Hamilton spent the time reading, expounding his theories of government, philosophy, religion, ethics, and morality to Swift, and writing in a thick daybook which he kept in his travelling-case. He seemed glad of Swift's company, and willing to answer any questions Swift had about what was happening, to the best of his ability. On the third day out, Swift asked him how he and Burr had gotten involved in the parallel time worlds.

“It was the duel,” Hamilton explained. “You know about the duel?”

“Yes,” Swift said. “On my world you, ah, got killed.”

Hamilton nodded. “That conclusion seems predominant on worlds where the duel happened.”

“It wasn't, ah, universal?”

“In some worlds Burr shot me and I lived; in most I died. In all we both fired, but I missed. At least, all I have any knowledge of. Which is very strange because I had no intention of firing; that is, I was going to discharge my piece into the air. But I aimed and fired. At least—” he shook his head “—I aimed and fired. I can only assume my doppelgangers did the same.

“In some worlds, of course, the duel didn't happen at all: either Burr didn't challenge me, or I contrived an honorable way to apologize for the insults in question. It is true: sometimes I let my mouth—or my pen—run ahead of my brain. I should never have said those things about Burr.”

“What did you say?” Swift asked.

“I gave my opinion of Burr. I said he was a dangerous man and not to be trusted with the reins of government. I said more . . .”

“You didn't mean it?” Swift asked.

“Of
course
I meant it,” Hamilton said, sounding annoyed. “Where I made my mistake was in saying it in public. Public, in this case, was a gentleman named Charles Cooper. Doctor Charles Cooper. He wrote a letter quoting me—half-quoting me, which is worse—which was published in the Albany
Register
. The letter said that I had uttered my ‘despicable opinion' of Burr. You see, sir, in our society words are taken literally. What I had uttered was a
political
opinion of Burr. But despicable means personally vile, not merely politically contemptible.

“This was Cooper's word, not mine; but I was put in the position of having to defend it. If, when Burr called upon me I had retracted, my word would have been valueless, dishonored. And of course he had to call upon me: ‘despicable' was not an epithet that he could, with honor, let pass. So we were forced by the code of our times to fight a duel that I'm sure neither of us really wanted.”

“What happened?” Swift asked. “I mean, to you. Obviously, you weren't killed.”

The train jerked and squealed to a stop; the high-pitched, agonizing sound of softwood brakes pressing against iron wheels. Hamilton and Swift were bounced forward and then back again, as the train came to rest. The sound of yelling carried clearly from the front of the train.

“There seems to be some earnest discussion going on up front,” Hamilton said, opening his travelling bag and removing a pepperbox revolver. “We'd best go see.”

They swung down off the carriage, Hamilton and his pepperbox in the lead, and trotted up toward the disturbance. The countryside was hilly and, except for the corridor cut for the train, heavily wooded. Because of the trees and a slight curve, the front of the train was just out of sight. The discussion seemed to be getting louder and more vigorous. A peculiar sound, half squeal, half bellow, was heard periodically. “Gods are fearless,” Hamilton said, mostly to himself, and rounded the curve.

Hamilton stopped short. Swift caught up with him and also stopped. They stared, silently; there was nothing to say.

A line of camels stood in front of the train. Each camel wore a halter and a pack saddle. A group of gentlemen in long flowing robes and long, straight rifles stood beside the camels. Here in the forests of primordial Ohio, or Pennsylvania, a caravan was in front of their train.

Hamilton stood stock still for a minute, just watching the scene. “What's happening?” Swift demanded. “What are
they
doing there?”

“Only one way to find out,” Hamilton said, and strode forward. “What's going on here?” he bellowed, trying to make himself heard over the Native uproar. “All right, let's have a cessation of yelling. What are you people doing here?”

One of the Arabs, a short, stout fellow, raced over to Hamilton and grabbed his hand. “My dear man,” he said, pumping it up and down, “You speak English. How delightful! Bentham at your service, Jeremy Bentham. Although, actually I'm afraid I'm the one who requires assistance. Would you be good enough to tell me where we are, and where the Great Desert is?”

“Desert?” Hamilton said. “There isn't a desert within two thousand miles of here. There's a nice desert a bit over two thousand miles West. West-south-west, to be more precise.”

Bentham shook his head. ”I've been misinformed. There's such a thing as being overly casual in giving directions. You're
sure
about that, now?”

“Sure,” Hamilton said. He turned to Swift. “Mr. Swift, how say you?”

Swift nodded his head. “No desert around here,” he said.

“Shocking,” Bentham said. “Simply shocking. Never trust a Prime. Never again. What am I to do now?”

“As I see it, sir, you have two choices,” Hamilton said. “Either follow this railroad line West until you cross a great mountain range, then turn left; or follow the line East some two hundred miles until you come to Manhattan, and use the It to return to Prime Time, whence I assume you came. If you are willing to abandon your camels, you can ride along with us and be there in a day. In either case, I must ask you to get your camels off our right-of-way.”

“Of course, dear boy, of course. But what am I to do?” He put his hand under his chin and struck a pose. “I can't just leave the poor beasts… I'll follow behind you, old man. If we don't show up in a couple of days, send the dogs out to look for the camels, ha, ha, ha, ha.” His chuckle had a dry and mechanical sound.

Bentham pulled his camels off the roadway, the Toltecs and their small god re-boarded the train, and the journey resumed.

Hamilton produced a thin bottle and two small silver shot glasses from his baggage. “I think, perhaps, a small libation?” He poured. He extended one of the glasses to Swift. “Rum,” he explained. “I always carry a small personal supply. There are so many places where you can't get it. Here, for example, they don't make it—yet. In many, ah, times, they don't believe in it. There are even times where they don't allow fermented beverages to be made: wine, or small beer, would you believe it?”

“I would,” Swift said, taking the glass. He lifted it: “Your health, sir.”

Hamilton nodded and raised his own shot glass. “And yours, sir; your very good health, indeed. You have proven a fine companion and excellent conversationalist on this long voyage.”

Swift smiled. “You mean I listen well.”

“I do indeed, sir,” Hamilton acknowledged, with a smile of his own. “And a rare thing that is. I own that a great bit of any success I have had in life is due to my ears; I listen well and carefully. Washington valued me for my habit of listening to him. Everyone else either stared at him respectfully, too awed to hear what he was saying, or stared absently past him, too busy framing their rebuttal to care what he had said.
I
listened. I didn't always agree, but I listened.”

“You were telling me about the duel,” Swift reminded him.

“Ah, yes. The duel. It changed my life. Which is, I suppose, all to the good: in other time-lines, it killed me.

“In order to properly understand what happened and why, you must know that Burr and I are a nexus-point in history. By this I mean, if you trace historic lines in adjacent time-tracks to discover where they converge—or diverge, depending on which way you're going—you will find that they come together in bunches, all at the same point, like the straw in a broom. Actually ‘point' is too confining a word: it's more of a, a blob.” Hamilton clenched his left hand into a fist and held it out for examination. “A finite period of time covering one event, or one group of people.

“Well, Burr and I seem to be the foci of one of those times covering a period of about ten years starting in 1802 or so. There are whole sets of time-tracks where Burr was President, where I was, where he was Emperor of Mexico, and where the duel was fought with varying results. The histories of thousands of Americas in thousands of parallel time-worlds are dependent upon what Burr or I did, or didn't do, from 1803 till about 1812.”

“Fascinating,” Swift said, seeing that Hamilton had paused for his reaction. “It must give you a strange sense of power.”

Hamilton stared sadly into his silver glass. “It gives me a strange sense of fate, of destiny,” he said. “I feel like some sort of marionette in a puppet play; and the puppeteer keeps rewriting the ending.”

“How did you get out of this cycle?” Swift asked. Hamilton looked at him strangely for a second, as though he did not understand the question, then he nodded. “The duel!” he said. “That happened about five years ago now, my time, subjective time. Some Prime-Timers came to watch, you see, because it was such a famous, important event. They hid in the trees.”

“So?” Swift asked.

“So, they are very careless, the Primes; thoughtless of what they do.” Hamilton broke off and stared out the window. “This was the segment, you know, where Burr shoots me and I die in agony some days later,” he said finally. “Like your segment, except I live a day or two longer and scream more. Everyplace I go, if it's uptime from my own time, I find out what happened to Alexander Hamilton. It's very sobering.

“Well, in this particular case, in this particular time, one of the Primes took a picture of the duel. A flash picture. It startled Burr so that his shot went wild, hit a stone, and ricocheted into the leg of the photographer. We were startled, he was displeased; it wasn't supposed to work out this way. I was supposed to be shot, and I wasn't. He was supposed to have a picture of me getting shot, and instead he had a ball in the photographer's leg.”

“Don't these Primes have any sense of ethics in dealing with, ah, others?” Swift asked.

“Why should they have any more regard for those on the lower lines—that's what they call them, the lower lines—than we had for the Indians, or the Christians had for the Moslems, or the Catholics had for the Huguenots?”

“What happened?” Swift asked, refusing to get drawn into philosophy when what he wanted was facts.

“To me? I didn't die. To the Prime? We took him to a doctor. There was a surgeon waiting in the barge, but the Prime would have none of our primitive doctoring: he insisted on one of his own. He was perfectly willing to let me spend three days in agony dying, as long as he got his picture; but the thought didn't appeal as much when it was he who was doing the screaming. And at that, it was only a flesh wound. So we took him to one of his doctors—through an It. And our lives have never been the same.”

“The experience of travelling through multiple worlds must be enough to entice anyone,” Swift said.

“That's not it,” Hamilton said, shaking his head. “It's the Primes. Not content with having ruined our duel; not content, I say, with saving life, they had to interfere further. There is some sort of rudimentary law in Prime Time about not interfering with the affairs of the lower lines. Something like your prohibition: the law seems to be there only to encourage the violators. However, in this case, as Burr and I were important to the very fabric of space-time (I quote, I assure you, I quote), they would have to do something about it. The Prime authorities spent large sums of money on my world to convince the citizens that I was dead and Burr was the murderer. As with everything else, they overdid it. I could never go back, as myself, since I was dead. Burr could never go back—they would have lynched him. A consummation most devoutly to be wished, perhaps, but not by Burr. Lynch came from Virginia, you know: Washington, Jefferson and Lynch, three shapers of American destiny, all from Virginia. It giveth one to pause.”

“So what did you do?” Swift asked.

“What you see,” Hamilton said. “I found a world which had a North American Continent inhabited only by uncivilized tribes, and I started my own civilization. With a few dozen picked people from different times as a core, and amenities obtained through the It, we will found here a republic of which Plato would be proud.”

“What about the Indians?” Swift asked.

“What about them?” Hamilton replied, puzzled.

Swift shrugged. “Different points of view, I suppose.”

“More of that democratic idealism of yours?” Hamilton asked. “You worried about the welfare of the Indians? My dear sir, when we came to this continent—to this version of our continent—the Toltec civilization was busily sacrificing people to the gods, in a particularly bloody manner, at the rate of about one a week.”