The Boolean Gate (Dead Romantics)

By Walter Jon Williams

Mark Twain versus the Singularity!

Mark Twain may be the most celebrated man in the world, but his alter ego Sam Clemens is tottering through life, disillusioned by the massacres and madness of the human race and stalked by guilt over the deaths of his children, his brother, and his wife. Sam’s friend, the brilliant scientist Nikola Tesla, creates dazzling new technologies that may transform the world--- but as Sam discovers, Tesla’s inventions may not belong to him, but might instead be the calculating creations of an malevolent intelligence from beyond the Earth.

Mark Twain might be able to save the world, but first Sam Clemens must make up his mind whether the “damned human race” is worth saving.

In “The Boolean Gate,” Walter Jon Williams continues his brilliant series of stories about writers, and brings to life the milieu and the towering personalities of America’s Gilded Age.

“This one is 99% historical fact, although readers unfamiliar with the career of Tesla may think it’s the stuff of science fiction. Tesla was a science fiction writer’s dream made flesh, with also a bit of the mad scientist in the mix . . . but the story really belongs to Sam Clemens, who was in fact Tesla’s friend.”
Lois Tilton, Locus

‘‘Despite the Ragtime-like sense of a slice of Gilded Age life among the historically prominent, this really is SF... Once again, Williams demonstrates the range of his writerly chops.’’
Russell Letson, Locus

• Language: English
• Publisher: Walter Jon Williams
• Release date: May 5, 2017
• ISBN: 9780997090420

Walter Jon Williams

 Walter Jon Williams is a New York Times bestselling author who has been nominated repeatedly for every major sci-fi award, including Hugo and Nebula Awards nominations for his novel City on Fire. He is the author of Hardwired, Aristoi, Implied Spaces, and Quillifer. Williams lives near Albuquerque, New Mexico, with his wife, Kathleen Hedges.

Book preview

PRAISE FOR

WALTER JON WILLIAMS

A first-rate writer.

--Washington Post Book World

One of science fiction’s most celebrated names.

--St. Petersburg Times

A skillfully literate addition to the stylish new generation of science fiction writers.

--Chicago Tribune

DREAD EMPIRE’S FALL

Walter Jon Williams has succeeded in creating the perfect contemporary space opera, revved up and ready to take the SF genre by force with all the artistry and panache one could ask for.

--Enigma

This is a hugely fun ride. It has empires crashing, civil wars, aliens, humans, scheming clans, plucky young heroes and villains fighting battles in huge starships--- what more can you ask for?

--Alien Online

Space opera isn’t dead…Williams weaves the battle scenes, the bureaucratic lunacy, and the emotions of the characters together into a fascinating story.

--Santa Fe New Mexican

A great read.

--Times of London

THE BOOLEAN GATE

WALTER JON WILLIAMS

Table of Contents

PRAISE

TITLE PAGE

OTHER BOOKS BY WALTER JON WILLIAMS

THE BOOLEAN GATE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT

OTHER BOOKS BY WALTER JON WILLIAMS

Novels

Hardwired

Knight Moves

Voice of the Whirlwind

Days of Atonement

Aristoi

Metropolitan

City on Fire

Ambassador of Progress

Angel Station

The Rift

Implied Spaces

Divertimenti

The Crown Jewels

House of Shards

Rock of Ages

Dread Empire’s Fall

The Praxis

The Sundering

Conventions of War

Investments

Impersonations

Dagmar Shaw Thrillers

This Is Not a Game

Deep State

The Fourth Wall

Short Stories

Daddy’s World

Investments (Set in the world of Dread Empire’s Fall)

Prayers on the Wind

Collections

Facets

Frankensteins & Foreign Devils

The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories

THE BOOLEAN GATE

The dining room in Guildford had yellow wallpaper with little figures on it, and a heavy mahogany sideboard, and vases with flowers that Sam, in his carelessness, was allowing to die. The window was open as a relief against the heavy August heat, but the lace curtains barely stirred.

Sam’s gaze turned from the wallpaper to the sideboard to the window to the dying flowers. Each of them struck him as new, as astonishing. It was as if he had never seen any of them before.

Susy was peacefully released to-day.

The telegram was like a white flower in his hand, a flower offered to no one in particular. The paper had just been delivered to his front door, and because he’d left his pocket-knife somewhere, he’d come to the dining room for a knife to slit open the seal.

Sam blinked at the room again. It was brilliant in the summer sun, brilliantly new. A bell trilled outside the window, the telegraph messenger’s jaunty salute as he rode his bicycle away, a brief jingle that announced the birth of a new world.

It was a world without Sam’s daughter in it, a world completely altered from the world that had existed only a moment before. No wonder it seemed brand-new.

The last telegram had promised that Susy’s recovery was certain. It was clear enough that the old world— the one that had just vanished— was built on the uncertain foundation of that lie. The new world, the world without Susy, was a true world; but it was a world of emptiness, of devastation . . .

And then Sam thought, My God, Livy does not know! His wife was in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, having left on the first home-bound steamer at the first news of Susy’s illness. There was no way to contact a steamship at sea . . . each ship was all alone, little isolated islands entirely on their own until they touched land.

Livy still lived in the old world, the world where Susy waited for her. All unknowing, she was steaming home to a parlor with a coffin in it, and pale Susy lying drawn and dead in a dark, suffocating room where the mirrors were covered in black draperies . . .

Liquid pattered on Sam’s hand. He looked down and saw his own tears falling. He opened his hand and let the telegram flutter like a wounded butterfly to the table.

He should have gone with Livy, he thought. But he had convinced himself that the news in the last cable was true, and that his presence would be unnecessary.

Cowardice, he thought. Sheer cowardice. He must have known, somehow, that Susy was dying. He had avoided his duty as a father because he had been afraid of what he would find the end of the return journey, and he had left his wife and his two surviving daughters to face it on their own.

He walked stiff-legged to the table and gazed out at the English street, the cobbles, the solid brick buildings with their chimneys and white window-frames, the two gentlemen in their bowler hats conversing in front of the public house . . .

Sights of the new world that had just come into being, the world without Susy. A world of desolation, of terror, of weakness. A world with the purpose drained clean out of it, a world of automata, of shadows.

A world in which Sam, blind, would have to grope his way.

MARK TWAIN WAS constipated again.

More correctly, it was Sam Clemens who suffered, but it was Mark Twain, the public man of letters, who would be obliged to travel downtown to Houston Street and beg for the remedy.

He disliked the necessity as he disliked himself. He did not seek to be such a banality, the grumpy, constipated old man barking at the world around him.

He was inclined to blame the banquets. In the last week he had spoken at a dinner given by the Players Club, at the annual meeting of the Directors of the YMCA, at a Gridiron Club dinner in Washington, and at a dinner in Princeton honoring the Presbyterian poet Henry Jackson Van Dyke. The quality of the meals had varied, but the outcome had not.

The disorder was not a novelty to Sam. He and constipation had a long and complex history together, and it was one of the few non-comic subjects which had inspired him to verse.

Constipation, O Constipation,

The Joyful sound proclaim

Till man’s remotest entrail

Shall praise its Maker’s name.

He had recited the poem on many public occasions, those at which an all-male audience encouraged him to flirt with subjects in questionable taste. He had not recited the poem before women— and most especially not before his wife, who had never entirely ceased her efforts to turn Sam into an angel. And it had to be said that for the most part Livy had succeeded— at least as long as she was in the room. When she was absent, Sam was inclined to veer from the path of the angels toward one marked more by the scent of brimstone.

But be he angel or devil, he was in distress. This evening he was scheduled to speak before a reunion of the New York Department of the Grand Army of the Republic. He could not do so in his current condition, and so he must find relief where he could.

He must visit Mr. Tesla.

SAM PUT ON his white summer suit and took the elevator to the Astoria’s lobby. Reporters lounged there waiting for him, a posse of men in shabby suits and derby hats who knew that Mark Twain was always good for a quote. He obliged them with a few comments.

I wish to announce that I have patented myself, he said. And because it is necessary to go into business in order to protect a patent, I will be going into the cigar and whisky business. He brandished one of his cigars. Soon you will be able to buy Mark Twain rye and Mark Twain cigars, all made of ingredients so pure that even Upton Sinclair will enjoy a smoke and a tipple.

Those two sentences were a good day’s work. They would get him headlines in most of the newspapers in the country, and a good many papers abroad.

He was the most quoted man in America, if not the entire world. On his white head rested the undisputed Crown of Column-inches. The fact was that there was no one, Emperor or President, who could equal him in the matter of quotability.

Though Lord knew, Mr. Roosevelt tried.

What are you doing today, Mister Twain? asked one reporter. He had a florid face and a jacket stained with chewing tobacco.

I am going to pay a call on Mister Tesla, the wizard, Sam said. I believe he has invented a process to electrify the streets, so that we may all fly along at fifteen miles per hour, without the benefit of streetcars— or perhaps he has established wireless communication with the inhabitants of Jupiter. I believe it is one of the two. I will have to study upon it.

So there were two newspaper stories. The papers would use the first at once, and perhaps save the other for a slow day.

From the Astoria Sam took a cab down Fifth Avenue to Tesla’s workshop on Houston Street. The carriage was open, and as the horse clopped along Sam was forced to endure the stares of the crowd— a daily humiliation to which he had submitted himself, it seemed, for centuries. Men stared, women pointed him out to their children, newsboys waved and shouted and called him by his first name.

The newsboys had every reason to be grateful. He sold a lot of their papers for them.

For money, he martyred himself before audiences— but very well, that was how he earned his living. But to be stared at in the street, as he bounced along on a private errand in a private carriage in his brilliant white suit— this was a fate that did not befit a