We the People vol 2: Liberty or Death

Thane followed Franklin down the rickety stairs into the root cellar below the printing press. Musty smells mingled with run off from the press, creating an unusual aroma. Above them, the floorboards creaked as her companions worked on preparing supper. Only Chui had joined them, at Thane’s insistence.

She wanted a chaperone with the lecherous Franklin at all times.

“It truly is serendipitous that you came calling on me here. I actually have an Armonica lying about in this mess...” Franklin said as he moved through the cellar. He picked up a filthy wool cap and blew the dust off of it.

“Mr. Franklin, what does the Armonica even do?” Thane asked. “According to history, it’s a musical instrument of some sort.”

“Please, Thane, call me Ben. I insist!” He arched his gray brows and leered at her. Thane rolled her eyes. “As to the Armonica’s function, I haven’t the vaguest idea.”

“What?” Thane said, “but you invented the damn thing!”

“That’s what I, and my fellows, want people to believe,” Franklin said cryptically. Thane bit back a strangled curse as the old man puttered around in piles of musty artifacts. “So far, all I’ve figured out about it is you can use it to play music, but I believe that function is unintentional by the designers.”

“Well, why don’t we find the designers and ask them?” Chui said.

“That might be difficult, son. You see, the ancient Zimmyr people crafted it, and there aren’t any of them around to explain how it works.”

“The who?” Chui blinked rapidly. “Never heard of them, but that sounds like a name I’ve read somewhere...”

“I have some kind of idea what it does,” Thane said. Her nose wrinkled as she took in the bedlam before her. “Are you sure you have it in this mess?”

“My dear,” Franklin said, narrowing his eyes and seeming a bit miffed “I know my body is falling apart on me like a bad chimney, but my mind remains smart as paint! The Armonica is here...somewhere.”

Thane and Chui pitched in. At once point Chui almost broke his neck, scrambling up the stairs away from a Black Widow. Creepy shooed the lethal creature away, and the search resumed. Finally, while Thane was lifting a thick, heavy beam said to be the mainmast of a ship named Argo, Franklin gave a shout and scurried under the creaking timber.

“Hold it steady, now!” he said.

“You okay, Thane?” Chui looked concerned, as Thane was hard pressed to keep the mast aloft. “It’s not too heavy, is it?”

“Oh, yeah Chui!” snarled Thane through gritted teeth. “It’s the BEST!”

“Maybe I should help him look...”

“Ya think?”

“Behold!” Franklin wheeled out a heavy seeming cart, with their quarry sitting in a receptacle on top. It was in much better condition than the one she’d seen, which had been yellow with age. “I told people that I came upon the idea for this invention seeing a glass harp in Italy.”

“But your ‘friends’ know the truth,” Chui said. “You know, the Freemasons?”

“And what do you know of Freemasonry, boy?” Franklin’s wizened eyes were narrow, and a vein throbbed near his temple.

“In our time, most of the Freemason’s secrets are public knowledge,” Thane said slyly, offering a furtive wink to Chui. .

“Oh, do you now?” Franklin seemed canny. “Well, I’ll just let you tell me which secrets are common knowledge, and I’ll verify.”

Chui’s mouth flew open, but Thane held up a hand.

“Later, Chui. Right now we’re talking about this...whatever it is. You said it was invented by the ancient...Zimmyr? I don’t suppose they included an instruction manual?”

“There were stone tablets found with it, yes, and I have the rubbings in my study,” Franklin said. “I’m afraid they’ll do you no good, however. No one alive reads ancient Zimmyr. It was a dead language long before Atlantis sank beneath the waves.”

“Au contrare,” Chui said.

“What is your boy going on about?” Franklin asked Thane.

“He’s not my ’boy,’” she said in a growl. “He’s my friend, so treat him the same way you’d treat me—that is, treat him with respect.”

“As you wish, my dear,” Franklin said, smiling once more.

While Franklin puttered about his study looking for the rice paper etchings, Thane and Chui pitched in on supper. There were four freshly killed wild turkeys laying on the back stoop.

“Good job, James,” Thane said, patting him on the shoulder.

“Huh? Oh.” His gaze darkened. “Just because I’m Indian, I MUST have done the hunting, right?”

“Oh, can it, Jimmy,” she said with a sigh. “Then who?”

“Rashemi did it,” Faraday said.

“Rashemi?”

Creepy grinned. Thane quickly guessed what had become of the black widow cleared from the cellar. She hoped that the spider venom would thoroughly cook out. Montel used his ability to summon a folksy cookbook for guidance. It was decided that boiling the turkey in oil would be the best bet. Unfortunately, none of them had ever prepared wild fowl for food, and it took nearly two hours to fully pluck and gut the turkeys.

By the time the food was finally nearing completion, Franklin found his etchings and Chui was poring over them. He declined an offer to join them at table, fiercely forging on in his translation.

“In his own way, he’s tough as nails,” whispered James to Montel. “Don’t tell him I said that!”

“My lips are sealed,” Montel said.

Faraday abruptly stood up, and without explanation gathered up a plate of food. She brought it in to Chui, who didn’t even look up from his work.

“Thanks, Thane,” he said.

“No!” Faraday snapped. Chui yelped as the twin candles flanking either side of the table flared to brighter life. “I brought you the food. Me!”

“Uh....thanks, Hannah. It looks great.” He quickly spooned up a bite of jellied yams and shoved them in his mouth. “Mmmm!”

That seemed to satisfy Faraday. She came back to the table and plopped down in her chair. Thane chuckled, sharing smirks with James and Montel.

“What’s funny?” Faraday looked behind herself, but saw only a pair of antlers on the wall.

“For someone who doesn’t like Chui, you sure are making sure he’s taken care of,” Thane said.

Faraday snorted, nostrils flaring, and then she attacked her plate. Bits of turkey flesh stuck to her face, and at one point she noisily spat out a lock of hair which had found its way into her mouth.

“Well, her social skills are getting better,” Montel said “she’s learning how to ignore people who piss her off.”

“Benjamin, what the hell are you doing?” Thane asked, aghast.

Franklin looked up from his plate, where he was cutting up a piece of liver.

“Don’t you have table manners in the future? I’m obviously cutting my meat into smaller bits.”

“I know that,” Thane said, slapping a palm over her face “no, what I mean is, why are you eating liver?”

“Because it’s delicious?” Franklin popped a morsel in his mouth.

“Liver makes the gout flare up. Any organ meat does,” Thane said.

“Are you certain?” Franklin dabbed at his mouth. “I had heard the theory postulated that ill humors build up in one’s liver, and that causes gout. It’s just the stress of the war, and having strange future folk about, that’s all.”

“Being fat causes gout,” James said. Everyone gave him a withering glare and his shoulders slumped. “Well, it does...”

“You’re so sweet to be concerned for my safety,” Franklin said, patting Thane on the knee. His hand lingered, and then started to slide inward.

“That’s it!” Thane’s chair slammed to the floor behind her as she stood bolt upright. “I’m sick of this perv feeling me up!”

“It’s the horny goat weed, I swear!” Franklin held his hands up in protest.

“Stop!” James and Montel both grabbed one of her arms. She dragged them a few steps as Franklin hobbled out of reach. “You can’t kill him! It’ll change history!”

“I don’t give a damn if there’s Nazis riding on dinosaurs when we get back to the future!” Thane bellowed.

“What’s a Nazi?” Franklin asked. His cherubic cheeks were red and he seemed to be having a grand time.

“Damn it, Thane, at least wait to kill him until after he’s helped us!” Montel implored.

Thane forced herself to calm down at Montel’s words. Slowly, cautiously, they released her and backed away.

“I’m out of here,” she said “don’t need to eat, anyway.”

She exited the house and stepped into the evening gloom. Even with gaslights on every street corner, it was still a stark contrast to the brightly lit cities of her own time. Windsor was supposed to be a major settlement, but it seemed small and insignificant, as if it were only a matter of time until the woods swallowed it up whole.

Her belly gnawed, which added to her misery.

She wondered how Bast was doing. He was probably worried sick, but not showing any sign on the surface. The Major would most likely cordon off the mill and conduct a full investigation. He wouldn’t stop until he’d exhausted every means of finding Thane and her team. Bast wouldn’t let her down.

She hoped.

Thane walked slowly down the dirt road. Near the center of what she would call the business district of Windsor the streets were paved with cobblestones, but most of the outlying area was just mud and horse manure. She stepped around a particularly fragrant pile and headed toward a less traveled street. The gas lights dying behind her made the magnificent tapestry of the night sky shine all the brighter.

At one time, looking up just filled her with wonder. Now, she had to ‘wonder’ how many of those cheery, twinkling lights contained a threat as bad or worse than ESX. Finding no solace in the stars, she turned her gaze back to Earth.

A raised voice drew her attention. She walked away from Franklin’s street, coming to a lonely two story house with a nice hedgerow acting as a privacy fence. The interior was brightly lit, and at first she thought there were two people wrestling by the window. Then she realized that one of them was a woman, her face tear streaked, who was being supported by a much younger man. Thane’s eyes followed the boy’s, and she saw a wan figure lying quite still, his chest covered in bloody bandages.

“Oh, great,” Thane said as she got a good look at the figure lurking outside the window. There was a white-haired man who looked a great deal like the corpse lying in bed. His chest wasn’t bloody, but his eyes were hollow and haunted as he stared at his own body.

“Hey,” she said, which seemed to surprise him. He turned and blinked at her, as if trying to wake up from a vivid dream.

“Who...are you?” His voice was oddly hollow and tinny, the way that most dead people sounded when they spoke to her.

“I’m kind of the bouncer,” Thane said.

“Bouncer?”

“Sorry...I help people get where they’re supposed to be, I guess.”

“My wife...” the man looked back through the window. “I’m dead, aren’t I?”

“Yeah. Sorry, honey.” Thane patted him on the shoulder, and his face grew more peaceful.

“It’s all right,” he said “I can feel...I can feel my mother all around me. She’s calling me home...”

As if on cue—and for all Thane knew it was—a shaft of brilliant golden sunlight enveloped them both. Invisible to all but the two of them, it was nevertheless a splendid spectacle.

“It’s beautiful,” said the man, tears running from his eyes. “Can you tell my wife and son that I’ll be waiting for them?”

Thane blanched. Never had one of the spirits made a request of her like that.

“I...I don’t know,” she said. The man’s face looked crestfallen. “But I can try.”

“That’s all I ask,” he said, sighing. Thane watched as the man drifted up to his final destination. She couldn’t see anything but blinding light, but the man’s face split in a wide smile, his arms outstretched for an embrace.

After he was gone, the light faded and Thane pulled her coat around her more tightly—even though it was summer and she wasn’t supposed to get the shivers in the first place.

“Where are you, Thane?”

She looked around the dark street, wondering who was speaking to her. Then with a start she remembered her radio, the ones powered by Faraday. Quickly she depressed the talk button.

“I just went for a walk. Is something wrong?”

“Something’s very wrong,” Hannah said in her clipped tone.

“Damn!” Thane started running. “Try and hang on! Get Franklin to safety!”

“No, it’s not an emergency,” Faraday said. Thane stopped running.

“It’s not?”

“No, but something’s wrong. Hurry!”

“Rain Man was more lovable,” she griped, running once again. Her heavy footfalls echoed loudly off the simple structures as she hoofed it back to Franklin’s property. From the outside it seemed peaceful enough. Still, Thane leaned over and blasted the door open with her shoulder.

“Whoa!” Montel looked up from a satin divan. “Take it easy on our host’s house!”

“Yes, just because you’re angry with me is no reason to vent your frustrations on my property,” Franklin said.

“Faraday said there was something wrong,” Thane said sheepishly.

“Yeah, but I said it wasn’t an emergency,” Faraday said, staring at the ceiling.

Thane closed the door—carefully—and sat down in a wooden chair near Chui. The swarthy young man was poring over his findings, scribbled onto a beeswax tablet.

“What’s the word, Chui?” Thane was curious, of course, but she also wanted to move past the faux pas.

“I’m not entirely sure,” he said “but it scares the hell out of me.”

“I thought you could read any language,” Thane said.

“I can. It’s just...this stuff is out there! It’s written like a history text, with dates and names and figures, but the subject matter is....it has to be some kind of mythology.”

Franklin’s eyes glowed as he fired up his corncob pipe.

“Does it?” His words lingered in the air as long as his fetid smoke. Chui swallowed hard and went on.

“Well, according to this, the Zimmyr weren’t just as advanced as us—they were MORE advanced! There’s references to ships that fly, and visitors from other stars.”

“So?” James grabbed his hair and pulled it up into a wild tangle above his head. “It was ALIENS, man!”

“Yeah, okay,” Chui said quickly “sure the Hindi tomes are full of references like that, but did they talk about a petrol-based economy? Machines that can look inside a person and tell if they’re sick? I don’t know, something about the mind-numbing minutiae of the records...they just smack of reality.”

“Okay, so let’s assume that Chui’s right for a second,” Thane said “how does that help us? Or does it at all?”

“It does lend creed to the idea that the Armonica is stranger than it seems,” Franklin said.

“There’s more,” Chui said. “This is the scary part. Using the Armonica, or the Dimensional Displacement device, which is what their name for it translates as, they learned they could move not just through space but time as well.”

“That’s great!” Thane leaned forward eagerly. They could go home! She could see Bast again after all.

“I don’t know about that,” Chui said, taking a long drink of dandelion wine.

“Careful, dude!” James shook his head. “You can’t even handle wine coolers back home!”

“Shut up, Jimmy,” Thane said with a glare. “Go on, Chui.”

“Okay,” he said, seeming to steel himself. “Here it goes; The Zimmyr could travel through time, but it cost them everything. There’s some sections missing-”

“The tablet was ravaged by immense time,” Franklin said.

“-but the gist seems to be this; By traveling back in time and changing the past, they doomed the future. There’s a sort of balance to the cosmos, they say, and when they muddled with the continuum it tipped.”

“What are you saying, Chui?” Montel asked in a strained voice.

Thane didn’t like the note of panic in Montel’s tone. If he was worried, so was Thane.

“I’m saying...look, you know how we were talking about the Time Traveler’s Paradox?”

“Yeah,” Thane said “like if you go back and kill Hitler before he came to power, then there would be no reason to go back in time in the first place, right?”

“Exactly. The thing is, nature takes care of itself. If the planet’s too hot, there’s an ice age. If one predator kills off too all its prey, it itself goes extinct, and so on. The etchings mention something called the Harbingers, beings of immense power whose task it is to annihilate the divergent timelines. Cleaning up the cosmos, as it were.”

Thane swallowed hard.

“Annihilate?”

“The Zimmyr theorized there was only so much room in all of creation, and therefore alternate realities have to be kept to a minimum.” Chui mopped his sweaty brow with a silk handkerchief he’d borrowed from Franklin. “The Harbingers were a force of nature, a way of restoring balance.”

“Oh, man,” Thane said, hissing. “Do you think ESX has any idea about this?”

She looked from blank stare to blank stare and sighed.

“That’s what I thought. It doesn’t know that by messing with the past it’s killing itself too. Just great!”

“Perhaps your celestial foe knows full well that his victory will be fleeting,” Franklin intoned solemnly “and has grown too desperate to care.”

“Well, we have half of our objective, at least,” Montel said. “We have the Armonica, or Dimensional Doohickey or whatever.”

“Dimensional Displacement Device,” Chui said.

“Yeah, I’m just gonna call it the Doohickey.”

“Montel’s right,” Thane said “let’s focus on our other goal; We need to track down and capture or kill ESX.”

“How are we gonna do that?” Everyone turned to stare at Faraday.

“We look for the host, Hannah,” Thane said. “We find Kass, we find ESX.”

“She’s at a big disadvantage,” James said “during this time period, I mean. Black AND a woman? She probably doesn’t have any rights at all!”

Franklin seemed uncharacteristically quiet. He just propped up his sore foot and puffed on his pipe, regarding all of them with half-lidded eyes. Thane could feel his gaze linger on her, and almost became angry again, but he didn’t seem to be lascivious. Instead he seemed legitimately curious.

“I hate to bring this up,” Montel said “but while we were marching into this pissant little burg I heard the town crier, and well...he was telling people that if they had an escaped slave, they should come by the general store tomorrow and claim them. For a small recovery fee, of course. There’s also going to be an auction-”

“I’ve heard about this bull,” James said darkly “most of the ‘escaped’ slaves are innocent free people! We can’t take part in that!”

“I’m not saying we should,” Montel said, holding up one hand “I’m just saying that Kass might be there.”

“Do you think ESX would let itself be captured?” Thane said.

“If it thought it might be good cover, then yes,” Montel said “I think it would.”

Thane sighed.

“Well, it’s not much of a plan but it’s a plan. Everyone get some sleep. We’ll get up at dawn and see this...ugh, I can’t believe I’m going to say this...slave auction.”

Franklin had a spare bedroom, where Creepy and Faraday wound up sharing a bed. Chui was given a warm blanket and a daybed, Montel his favored divan, while James stretched out on a bearskin rug in front of the crackling fire.

Thane ended up in Franklin’s study, sharing a kettle of tea with the founding father. They kept their voices low, both out of consideration and because of the heady events of the day.

“I have a wonder, Miss Thane,” Franklin said, setting down his steaming cup.

“Franklin,” she hissed “if this is about my bra size-”

Franklin chuckled, holding up his pudgy but long-fingered hands.

“I suppose I deserve a bit of that. No, what I was wondering is...do you still have the institution of slavery in your own time?”

“No,” Thane said, unable to keep the venom out of her tone. “No, we got rid of that a long time ago, thank you very much.”

“I see,” Franklin said. He sipped his tea and regarded her.

“I mean, no disrespect to one of the founding fathers, but...” Thane took a deep breath. Was she really about to say this? “Come on! You spelled out that all men were created equal, but you left out the asterisk!”

“Asterisk?”

“The part that said ’except for Indians and blacks and women,’” Thane’s words hung in the air, heavy and harsh.

“You must think us backward, barbaric...” Franklin pulled out his silver tobacco case and packed up his pipe with fragrant dried leaves. “Truth to tell, my friend Thomas Jefferson believes much as you do. He even wanted us to end slavery as part of our Declaration.”

Thane nodded, though it was news to her.

“I myself am somewhat...revolted...at the institution. The longer I live, the more I doubt the veracity of white superiority. Are most Negros course and unmannered? Yes, but they never had even the most basic education. Even those blacks who are born free are being set up to enter the bottom rung of society.”

“If you think this way, why do you put up with it?” Thane’s hands clenched into fists so tightly she drew a bit of blood with her nails. She unfolded her hands and breathed out slowly through her nose. “You know what? Forget it. I’m not supposed to change the past...”

“Surely, one man’s heart won’t make much of a difference, in the grand scheme of things,” Franklin said with some mirth.

“Yeah, well...” Thane said “maybe if it’s the right man’s heart...”

It was a moment of camaraderie, of bonding. So of course Benjamin Franklin, founding father of the United States of America, had to ruin it by leaning in with his lips pursed for a kiss.

His glasses spun off his face and skittered across the floor when she slapped him, but luckily they didn’t break.