The Difference Engine by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling Read Free Book Online Page B

savage, a mad-eyed staring creature hung with feathers, cheeks streaked with kino-blocks of warpaint. “Just across the river,” Houston said, “lived the mighty nation of the Cherokee, a simple folk of natural nobility. I found this suited me far better than a life with my American neighbors. Alas, for their souls were pinched by the greed for dollars.”
    Houston shook his head a bit before his British audience, pained at his own allusion to an American national failing. He had their sympathy, Sybil thought. “The Cherokees won my heart,” Houston continued, “and I ran from home to join them, with nothing, ladies and gentlemen, but the buckskin coat on my back, and Homer’s noble tale of the Iliad in my pocket.” The kinotrope shuffled itself bottom-to-top, producing an image from a Grecian urn, a warrior with a crested helmet, his spear upraised. He bore a round shield with the emblem of a raven, wings outspread. There was a light pattering of impressed applause, which Houston accepted, nodding modestly, as if it were meant for him.
    “As a child of the American frontier,” he said, “I can’t claim to have had much fine schooling, although in later life I passed the bar and led a nation. As a youth, however, I sought my education in an ancient school. I committed every line of the blind bard’s book to memory.” He lifted the medal-strewn lapel of his coat, left-handed. “The heart within this scarred breast,” he said, and thumped it, “still stirs to that noblest of stories, with its tales of a valor to challenge the very gods, and of unstained martial honor that endures . . . till death!” He waited for applause. At length it came, though not as warmly as he seemed to expect.
    “I saw no contradiction in the lives of Homer’s heroes and those of my beloved Cherokees,” Houston persisted. Behind him, the Greek’s javelin sprouted the dangling feathers of a hunting-spear, and war-paint daubed his face.
    Houston peered at his notes. “Together we hunted bear and deer and boar, fished the limpid stream and raised the yellow corn. Around the campfire, under open skies, I told my savage brothers of the moral lessons that my youthful heart had gleaned from Homer’s words. Because of this, they gave me the red-man’s name of Raven, after the feathered spirit that they deem the wisest of birds.”
    The Greek dissolved, giving way to a grander raven, its wings spread stiffly across the screen, its chest covered by a striped shield. Sybil recognized it. It was the American eagle, symbol of the sundered Union, but the white-headed Yankee bird had become Houston’s black crow. It was clever, she decided, perhaps more clever than it was worth, for two of the kinotrope bits in the screen’s upper-left-corner had jammed on their spindles, showing dots of left-over blue; a tiny fault but annoying all out of proportion, like a bit of dust in one’s eye. Mick’s fancy clacking was working the Garrick’s kino very hard.
    Distracted, Sybil had lost the thread of Houston’s speech. ” . . . the brazen cry of the battle-trumpet, in the camp of the Tennessee volunteers.” Another kino-portrait appeared: a man who looked rather like Houston, but with a tall shock of hair in front, and hollow cheeks, identified by caption as GEN . ANDREW JACKSON .
    There was a hiss of breath here and there, led by the soldiers perhaps, and the crowd stirred. Some Britons still remembered “Hickory” Jackson, without fondness. To hear Houston tell it, Jackson had also bravely fought against Indians, and even been President of America for a time; but all that meant little here. Houston praised Jackson as his patron and mentor, “an honest soldier of the people, who valued a man’s true inner worth above the tinsel of wealth or show,” but the applause for this sentiment was grudging at best.
    Now another scene appeared, some kind of rude frontier fort. Houston narrated a tale of siege, from his early military career, when