The Difference Engine by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling

he’d fought a campaign under Jackson against the Indians called Creek. But he seemed to have lost his natural audience, the soldiers, for the three Crimea veterans in Sybil’s row were still muttering angrily about Hickory Jackson. “The damned war was over before New Orleans . . . ”
    Suddenly the limelight flashed blood-red. Mick was busy beneath the stage: a tinted glass filter, the sudden booming of a kettle-drum, as little kino cannons cracked gunpowder-white around the fort, and single-bit flickers of red cannon-shell arched rapidly across the screen. “Night after night we heard the Creek fanatics howling their eerie death-songs,” Houston shouted, a pillar of glare beneath the screen. “The situation demanded a direct assault, with cold steel! It was said to be certain death to charge that gate . . . But I was not a Tennessee Volunteer for nothing . . . ”
    A tiny figure dashed toward the fort, no more than a few black squares, a wriggling block of bits, and the entire stage went black. There was surprised applause in the sudden darkness. The penny-boys up in the Garrick’s gallery whistled shrilly. Then limelight framed Houston again. He began to boast about his wounds; two bullets in the arm, a knife-stab in the leg, an arrow into his belly — Houston didn’t say the vulgar word, but he did rub that area lingeringly, as if he were dyspeptic. He’d lain all night on the battlefield, he claimed, and then been hauled for days through wilderness, on a supply cart, bleeding, raving, sick with swamp-fever . . .
    The clerky cove next to Sybil took another lemon-drop, and looked at his pocket-watch. Now a five-pointed star appeared slowly amidst the funereal black of the screen, as Houston narrated his lingering escape from the grave. One of the jammed kino-bits had popped loose again, but another had jammed in the meantime, on the lower right. Sybil stifled a yawn.
    The star brightened slowly as Houston spoke about his entry into American politics, presenting as his motive the desire to help his persecuted pet Cherokees. This was exotic enough, Sybil thought, but at its heart lay the same snicky humbugging politicians always talked, and the audience was growing restive. They would have liked more fighting, or perhaps more poetic talk about life with the Cherokees. Instead, Houston had settled into a litany of his election to some rude equivalent of Parliament, various obscure posts in provincial government, and all the while the star grew slowly, its edges branching elaborately, becoming the emblem of the government of Tennessee.
    Sybil’s eyelids grew heavy, fluttered, while the General blustered on.
    Quite suddenly, Houston’s tone changed, becoming lingering, sentimental, a honeyed lilt creeping into his drawl. He was talking about a woman.
    Sybil sat up straighter, listening.
    Houston had been elected Governor, it seemed, and had gotten himself some tin, and been cheery about it. And he’d found himself a sweetheart, some Tennessee gentry-girl, and married her.
    But on the kino’s screen, fingers of darkness crept in snake-like from the edges. They menaced the State Seal.
    Governor and Mrs. Houston had scarcely settled in when wifey kicked over the traces, and fled back to her family. She’d left him a letter, Houston said, a letter that contained an awful secret. A secret he had never revealed, and had sworn to carry to his grave. “A private matter, of which a gentleman of honor cannot and should not speak. Black disaster struck me . . . ” The newspapers — apparently they did have newspapers, in Tennessee — had attacked him. “The tattling mouths of libel poured their venom on me,” Houston lamented, as the Greek shield with the raven appeared, and black kino-blobs — mud, Sybil supposed — began to spatter it.
    Houston’s revelations grew shocking. He’d actually gone through with it, had divorced his wife, of all the unlikely, awful things. Of course he’d lost his position in