<< - # % * @ - Once there was an age of revolutions, when spheres broke their chains and moved their stations. It was the lever of reason that broke them loose from the stagnant sovereignty of circles. There was a revolution on Earth, followed by one on Mars; but the latter proved retrograde, and the former proved eccentrically flawed. So both worlds are again restless. The Earth's eccentricity grows every day more wobbly. Larger and smaller in orbit it grows as its circular path expands and warps to weird ellipses, seeking two circles but not finding them, unsatisfying northern focus by southern focus, tugging together on the Sphere's vector, making compromises - >>

" - `Scuse me, but I don't get it," complained Sarah with hands on hips. "Can't you put it in terms of Andy Jackson and President Polk?>>

P. P. F. S. clicked his tin lids up and down, tick-ticking as he thought.

<<Can I? - # % * @ - I can. As follows - # % * @ -

<<Lecture 8. Whence Freedom? Tycho Brahe and Andrew Jackson Compared.

<<It is a little known fact that Andrew Jackson had a wooden nose. He lost the original to a tomahawk. The prosthetic proboscis was of good Tennessee hickory wood. Hence the nickname, Old Hickory Nose.

<<Tycho Brahe was the astronomer who first understood our Terrahelioduoepicentric System. He too lost his nose - to a duel. He wore a replacement made of gold.

<<The general was chief of the Hermitage in Tennessee just as the astronomer was tyrant of the Castle Uraniborg of Hveen Isle.

<<With his mercury clocks precise as Tennessee Rifles and his quadrants the size of teepees, Tycho Brahe chained the light of faith - centered in the Sun - to the weight of reason - centered in the Earth. # % * @ - That was the Sun-Earth Two-Centered System.

<<Andrew Jackson circumscribed the wilderness with steam in the name of the Common Man.

<<With 'extreme unction' Tycho Brahe spied flaws in the Church's Ptolemaic heavens - # % * @ - >>

"Flaws? Here, here!" said one of the goldy-locked southerns. "Them Jesuits say 1 + 1 + 1 = 1! Holy Ghost, my eye!"

"Hold your peace or I'll give you the other - We have had quite enough of Protestant slander," said McKnight in a quiet, nervous voice - he was shaking with fury. Some of his Green Phobos friends stood up with mean expressions.

Just then Martha Miles stood up and called out, "Just today I read something by Professor Morse which reminded me that it was only a dozen years ago your Pope took Galileo's calculations off the Devil's List." Some of her friends stood up, too.

"Was it the same year you Protestants burnt our convent in Massachusetts? As for your Professor Morse, he is a Know- Nothing!" replied McKnight.

Then the friends of Martha's friends stood up, and things looked bad for McKnight's Saint Patties. P. P. F. S. stood in the middle.

"No fightin'!" jumped up Sarah, holding her repeater by the barrel, ready to pistol-whip anybody who challenged her order. "Y'all sit down now. Regardnifyin' the past, it's only human to make mistakes," she said with a smile, to mollify the two sides. "Go on, Perfessor."

It got quiet enough so that we could hear the Metal Man hissing and ticking.

<< - # % * @ - With one slipper pressing down on De Revolutionibus Orbius Celestium, the other slipper on The Almagest, Tycho Brahe chained Copernicus' Sun-centered circles with Ptolemy's Earth-centered circles, thus hanging the Newtonian mass of sin from the Creator's neck -

<< - # % * @ - With extraordinary gall and gumption, and one boot on Congress, the other boot on the Supreme Court, Andrew Jackson unleashed the Common Man's mob on the nation, (with popular suffrage) - # % * @ - >>

"Hurray fer the vote, boys!"

"HURRAH!"

<<And lashed that same leash tighter around the neck of Negro Servitude.>>

"Woe, thar, Perfessor. Woe!" called Sarah, looking at him cross.

<<As the Creator asphyxiates on the Newtonian mass of sin, the New World's pagan goddess, Liberty, is thus a gallows birds.>>

The clamor was general and immediate:"BOO! BOO!"

"Hush, boys!" cried Sarah after a moment's hollering. "I don't care fer his ory-tory, but heck, let'm finish - he is our guest!"

<<Would some brave take a tomahawk and hack off Andrew Jackson's old hickory nose, and examine it under a microscope, would he find there a trail of tears, stinking of gin?>>

"BOO!" cried several hundred voices. "To hell with Savages! To hell with you, Perfessor!"

Sarah stuck two fingers in her mouth and whistled piercingly.

<< - # % * @ - Would he peek inside that pumpkin head, and find a little black boy cranking the `gin of his brain?>>

"What?" cried Sam Walker. "This is too much, Sarah!"

"BOO! BOO!"

"Who's a pumpkin head! BOO!"

"Let's tar an' feather'm!" cried Half Lip McCoy.

"You ain't gonna - I mean you shall do nothing of the kind!" said Kelly. "Perfessor, stop stirring up the men!"

But the Metal Man continued with steam-powered determination:<< - # % * @ - Were gravity to pull the gold nose from the face of Tycho Brahe would he then not be so cross-eyed as to see sidereal parallax in the contradictions of his Irrational vision, Newton hung on the cross of vectors?>>

"HUSH, DEVIL!" screamed Martha, getting red-faced. "He slandered the cross!"

"It's fine for a machine to spit on the cross where god sent his only son to die for our sins!" yelled McKnight.

"BOO! BOO!"

<< - # % * @ - How ridiculous, that all the worlds obey the sun, except one, whom it obeys - >>

"YOU'RE RIDICULOUS!"

<< - # % * @ - If Kepler's golden nose fell off, would we see that his head was hollow, and inside, a pendulum measuring the period of his rotation, pulling his strings according to the fixed laws of irrational faith?>>

"BOO!"

"WHAT'S INSIDE YOUR HEAD - MALLARKY?"

<<As Tycho Brahe crowned his student, Kepler, so did Old Hickory crown his disciple, Young Hickory - >>

"Hooray fer Young Hickory!"

"Hooray fer Presy-dent Polk!" yelled Sarah.

<<The original question asked the implications of astronomical changes upon freedom and liberty.>>

The mob hushed somewhat.

<<The answer follows - # % * @ - As the problems of Tycho Brahe's Earth-Sun Two-Centered System resolve with Kepler's prediction of wobbly ellipses, and as Jackson's wars on Indians, banks, and aristocrats resolve into Manifest Destiny - # % * @ - thus the mind - >>

"Mind what you say, boy!"

<< - # % * @ - The mind is the only means by which matter can simultaneously embrace contradictions. The mind is the brain. The brain is made of matter. Thoughts themselves have physical substance and weight. How can the brain's mechanism hold simultaneous contradictory vectors at the same time? How can a priest ride a locomotive? How can a president own a slave? Without madness? Without brain-seizure and death? Why is hypocrisy so natural to human nature?>>

"SPEAK FER YERSELF, PERFESSOR!"

"What do you know about our nature!"

<<For the System to have two centers, not one, Creation must be flawed. For the sun to revolve around the earth, Reason must be flawed.>>

"It's your reason what's flawed, you corn doll!"

"Shut up, bobbin!"

"You cotton-pickin' man-'gin!"

The flutes and pipes of the Prince-President's voice shrilled louder.

<< - # % * @ - That is why the circles are broken. Circles, broken, make springs. Springs bounce. This unwinding is energy. The System is changing -

<<The Brain is changing too.

<<The Brain, like the rest of the human machine, functions on a more complex level but by the same rational principles as any steam engine. And yet, no engine by itself can produce an independent movement. Self-locomotion is not self-will. All engines are subject to their design and principle of the driving agent. The driving agent is a vector or force. All engine movements are chained to design, and predestined by the inventor. Then whence invention?>>

"What fool invented you, I'd like to know - !"

" - PROBABLY A FUREIGNOR!"

<<Whence invention? In other words - >>

" - The invention a'me came from pa's wenchin'!"

<<In other words, whence free will? Whence ego - ?>>

" - I'll tell you whar e' go. `E go straight to the DEVIL, dat's whar `e go!"

<<Ego is Error. Humanum est errare. A broken engine follows no preset path. It seems to break all laws, but its laws continually change according to the limits of its flaw. Until the furnace fire cools and the boiler pressure drops off, the flawed machine is a law unto itself. That is the source of the appearance - a mere illusion - of Freedom.>>

"Madness!"

<<This is not madness. This is still law.>>

Judging by the weak wisps of steam coming out of his nostrils, the metal fellow had just about run down his steam. <<I have answered. Are there any questions?>>

"Madness? Law? I still don't getcha. Can't you jest put it plain in terms of Andy Jackson?" said Sarah with a sigh.

<<Can I? - # % * @ - Yes. As follows - # % * @ -

<<As President Jackson obeyed the Constitution as he understood it, and was therefore free to do much as he pleased, so the ego obeys the brain as it comprehends its laws, leaving it therefore free to assert the friction it must according to the peculiar slavery of the individual's flaws in discord and confusion with the mortal design - >>

Sarah dropped her Colt repeater in her apron. "Boys, I can't do a thing with this metal Yankee. I figure he can take care of himself."

Sam Walker was waiting for this.

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