Time as One

by Nathaniel Bates

Thomas Jefferson’s estate was watched over by the entire family.  Edmund Randolph, the crazy conspiracy theorist no one wanted for Thanksgiving dinner, sat next to his entire side of the family.  They always knew Old Tom would come around.  He was a crazy radical in the ‘60s and ‘70s.  His long-hair friend Tom Paine saw to that.  Ben Franklin and his so-called “Enlightenment” philosophers turning on, tuning in and dropping out did not help to settle Jefferson into Southern stability.  While most of America was going conservative in the ‘80s Jefferson still hung around French radicals and revolutionaries.  Something about the “blood of tyrants, the tree of liberty” or some such shrill nonsense did not help.  Jefferson’s cousins knew he needed a dose of reality if he was going to fit into the new America he himself created. 

     What finally got old Tom Jefferson was that he heard the Fire bell in the Night and realized the country needed Law and Order.  This pleased Jefferson’s conservative cousins to no end.  He had finally given up his wayward ways and become a Planter of good name.  “The way most White men went,” Old Isaac said to himself.  They are liberal, even radical when they’re young and it is all about sex, drugs and Beethoven.  But when they suddenly realize that “liberty and equality” might apply to Haitians or Black men also, they balk.  The White Man in America was more trapped than he ever would be under George III because in Liberty he was now trapped in himself.    

Isaac dreamed of freedom for his people.  His biggest fear was not that slavery would last forever.  He knew it would not.  Jefferson himself knew that his people were destined to be free and often said so.  Isaac’s biggest fear was that his people would know freedom as the white man knew freedom, that of being trapped in himself.  Time was the biggest prison of a young man who became old.  The oldest men were those who never thought of others more than themselves.  History marched forward for them but Isaac believed that the Lord knew how to forgive.  He forgave by changing the past, by changing time itself.

     As Isaac prayed the room changed.  The change was imperceptible but it was there.  History itself could change and it would. 

     Harold ripped the page up.  It was the most ridiculous idea for a story he had ever written.  The idea of a time slip in which the politics of the modern era and the politics of the founding era melded into one would never sell.  No one ever read what he wrote anyway.  He would actually have a negative number of viewers at this point.  Jefferson’s slave Isaac as a Black Panther, Tom Paine as the crazy hippie, his granddaughter Evelyn Randolph a feminist University student, and Edmund Randolph as the crazy cousin no one wants to invite to Thanksgiving dinner.  “Fake news!” he would yell.  And no one, I mean no one, wanted to invite his crazy Tory father John from England.

But Harold was going nowhere with the story and he knew it.  He had a class to teach the next day which he also knew. But, where should the time travel come in?  Are the time travelers summoned by Isaac?  Harold hit his bed hard.  The next day would be one in which he would have to introduce the concepts of momentum to High School students.  If his story was going to be saved, it would have to include some kind of physics of time travel that could appeal to a general audience.

That night, he continued to type and then opened his chapter on the French Revolution,

Marat could not see past the fog in his eyes.  The fog in his eyes was all that protected him from the suffering of the poor.  Monarchists and liberals were all the same when it came to the poor.  The Monarchists with their divine right were at least honest.  The liberals and their “constitutions” simply masked oppression behind property.  The fog in his eyes shielded him from Lavoisier, the one who stopped him from joining the Academy of Science.  But what was truly galling was Lavoisier’s investment in the taxation that oppressed so many French subjects.  What France needed was no more subjects.  It needed Citizens in Arms!

     The fog in Marat’s eyes lifted somewhat as Lavoisier left the room.  The event was a meeting of scientists and Marat managed to come in at the invitation of friends.  Marat always had a fog in his eyes at such events that prevented him seeing clearly.  But again that fog seemed to be lifting when Lavoisier left the room.  The theme that day was the propagation of Newtonian philosophy.  But the real reason for the meeting was secret and known only to a few.  The real topic was the creation of a republic that would replace the decadent Monarch.  Marat knew he had to be there.

     A few notables entered a private room and Marat followed them.  There was much discussion of social contracts and Locke.  But Marat preferred Rousseau.  Really, he preferred No Name.  He wanted the People and the People only.  Who were the People?  The People were the ones tired of the hypocrisy and repression around them.  Franklin, Paine, Rousseau and Brutus were fine men.  But the People had only themselves to look to for guidance.  The fog in Marat’s eyes had lifted.

Harold knew the story.  Marat sought and achieved revenge against Lavoisier for his snobbery.  Lavoisier was guillotined.  Marat himself would be assassinated in a chain of violence and revenge.  Lavoisier would be exonerated of all charges after his death when Thermidor wiped away all radicalism and repressed the people once again.  Thermidor repressed the poor more than the radicals.  It is always the working people who suffer repression.  The radicals go back to their garrets and the intellectuals to their privilege.

Harold could not help but to wonder, what if Lavoisier had been guilty?  He never understood how beheading established the end of guilt.  No one who died under the Old Regime came back to life after the beheading.  The guillotine accomplished nothing.  It never does.

It was one thing to serve an angry God.  It was another thing to believe in no afterlife and no God; but to still serve an angry God because of a fog in your eyes.  Anger always leaves a fog in the eyes of the angry even when the cycle of destruction reaches them.  Harold looked at his plaque commemorating the life of the great chemist Anton Lavoisier, 1743-1794. He had this plaque since college.  It was hard, as though engraved in stone.  Marat’s life was a tragedy because the fog in his eyes did more to prevent his full potential than any royal exclusion.

Isaac prayed to his Lord that his own people would not suffer the fate of the White Man.  What was the prison of the White Man?  He was free but not free of himself.  The Black Man’s freedom needed to be more than that.  Already the White Man was moving out west blinded by gold, greed and his need to get away from himself.  Always he was getting away from himself.  Rumors were swirling of uprisings when only Quakers, Frenchmen and friends of liberty would be saved.  But Isaac knew the truth.  If an uprising were to come, all White Men would join in its suppression because the White Man cannot escape himself.  Even old Man Jefferson could not escape himself, no matter where he traveled, no matter how successful his writings, no matter even winning the war against George III.

It was still not going to work.  The idea that Isaac could simply pray and change all of history was not going to sell.  What he needed was a theory from physics that could tie it all together.  “Two timelines, one going to the future and the other going to the past!”  That was it.  The future would actually be able to change the past in a kind of time-loop.  He threw together an amalgamation of half understood theories from Physics, Transactional Analysis, Multiverse and Wormhole Time Loop theories into a kind of half-backed plot that might appeal to some fans.  It was half baked enough.  It would all begin with an exorcism.

The Abbe Sieyes looked at the Dauphin of France frothing at the mouth and chanting nonsense.  He realized that an Exorcism was in order, the Exorcism of Laplace’s Demon.  It was a complicated affair but it was the only way to free the Dauphin to be the constitutional ruler France would need to put an end to social chaos.  The exorcism would get rid of the determinism of historical timelines and the cycle of revenge that would define the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The Dauphin struggled with the Demon and yelled something about heath death, economic alienation, and the N-body problem.  But eventually he gave up the Ghost in the Machine and yelled “free will!” to a jump for joy.  Sometime in the future Charlie Chaplin, Robert Anton Wilson and Niels Bohr breathed sighs of relief.  The time loop that bound the past would be broken and a better future would come. 

Finally, after a long bout of writer’s block, the story was coming to a cranky but somewhat understandable conclusion.  Future interdimensional creatures resembling an octopus that evolved on another timeline redirected the timeline away from the actual history of peace and plenty to one in which wars, revolutions and counter-revolutions would destroy the foundation of that peace and plenty.  Wormholes were accelerated back in time by rotation around black holes and then agents were sent to create a human society under fear and ignorance.

These interdimensional creatures were what the octopus would have been had it evolved intelligence and on land.  It was controlled by a Directorate with a grudge against humans.  Fortunately, some in the octopus society were humanitarian and worked against their extremist brethren.  The rebel group took over and empowered the French Dauphin to free himself of historical determinism, to come to the throne after the death of Louis XVI, and implement reforms to end poverty.  They encouraged Jefferson’s granddaughter to join with his slave Isaac and abolish slavery.  They finally led the Russian Czar to implement a brotherhood of nations, averting the Russian Revolution and the Cold War.  By the twentieth century, space travel would be abundant and the Earth, a paradise planet under proper ecological guidance, became primarily powered by solar energy.

The story would appeal to PKD or Robert Anton Wilson fans, especially if it was free to read.  Those fans tended to love stories that were free to read.

Marat stood up in the Assembly to denounce Lavoisier.  He was labelled a Monarchist, an oppressor, and a conspirator.  The sentence of death was about to be pronounced when Marat had a strange feeling come over him.  Laplace’s demon lost his hold.  Marat began to weep over the poor and oppressed of the Monarchy.  But he realized the revenge would not bring them back. 

The whole idea of timeline edits was ridiculous and would not fly.  He shook his head in despair at a story he could barely piece together, and at writer’s block.  It was time to go to a well-deserved rest, or at least a rest.  Harold saved his work and shot a quick reassuring glance at the plaque.  Antoine Lavoisier, 1743-1724 and went to bed.

Harold’s eyes shot open and he ran out to the plaque.  “Antoine Lavoisier, devoted friend of the Citizen King Dauphin and who together with Jean-Paul Marat ran the People’s Ministry of Science from 1795 to 1810.”  Harold looked out of the window and for the first time ever he knew his place.