Page 102 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

One Born Every Minute

“That is a hair that didn’t need splitting,” expostulated Rutger
Schlager. “Why does this kind of fiction have to be limited to what
is possible, simply because it has one foot in science? The existing
body of alternate histories exists to large extent because their
authors want to make a point about what has happened at crucial
junctures in the past, either to show how things could have turned
out a whole lot better or a whole lot worse. True, that is basically
what we do when we mull over events, looking precisely for those
historical hinges when ‘what-if’ gets overtaken by our emotion into
‘if only’. So this is really fiction as escape, taking advantage of our
natural inclination to conclude, at the gross level of perception to
which we are limited, that things could have easily been different.
As such, it panders to a reader’s base desires for wish fulfilment—
and is therefore a really great ploy! I should try it myself. World
domination has always been short-circuited by some tiny flaw, and
not a tragic one: a technical failure, like the horseshoe nail leaving
Richard III on foot on the battlefield, or a one-in-a-million sniper
shot like the one that killed General Sedgwick at the Battle of
Spotsylvania Courthouse. Those examples are simply to point out
that it is generally the outcomes of great world-changing wars that
pique the interest of people, owing to the obviously far-reaching
consequences of those conflicts. As for putting a showman and
humbugger in the presidency, I cannot begin to conjure up anything
but outrage.”
Felicity Tinderstack begged to differ.
“Oh, no: I think it’s a wonderful proposition: America’s greatest
showman on its biggest stage. As a reformed bigot, he could use his
executive power to help fix what in retrospect has proven to be the
most refractory social problem this country has faced from
inception, racism. Instead of presenting human difference as
something to gawk at and ridicule, he could form several large
national circuses traveling all over the country, showing our
diversity in set pieces to inform and entertain, just as he was doing
in his business. They could go from north to south, east to west on
the new rail lines, helping heal and reunite the country after the
horrors of the Civil War and the botched Reconstruction. Children

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