The Victorious opposition ae-3

by Harry Turtledove

  When she woke up a couple of days later with a sore hand, she had trouble even remembering what she'd done to it. Only when she looked down and saw how red and angry the cut looked did she nod to herself and think, Oh, that's right-the chicken. Then she went on about her business, favoring the hand as much as she could.

  Clara noticed when she came home from school. "You ought to take that to a doctor, Ma," she said. "It doesn't look so good."

  "Oh, don't be silly," Nellie said. "It'll get better. Besides, who can afford doctors?"

  But the hand didn't get better, and the next day she started feeling weak and hot and run-down. Real alarm in her voice, Clara said, "I'm going to get the doctor over here right now." Nellie started to tell her not to bother, but then didn't. She didn't feel up to it-and besides, Clara was already out the door.

  The doctor looked Nellie over, listened to her heart, took her pulse, and took her temperature. "What is it?" Nellie asked, though she was too miserable to care much about the answer.

  "It's 104.4, Mrs. Jacobs," he said reluctantly. "You have blood poisoning, I'm afraid. It could be… serious. Do you understand me?"

  When Nellie nodded, the room spun. Even so, she said, "Of course I do." After a moment, she added, "And the coffee, and the raspberries…" Even she had no idea what that meant. She tried to laugh, but didn't seem to have the strength.

  "What do we do?" Clara asked from a million miles away.

  "Keep her comfortable. Aspirin, to fight the fever. Soup, water, juice- whatever she can keep down," the doctor answered, his voice even more distant. "If she beats the infection, she'll be fine." He didn't say what would happen if she didn't. Clara didn't ask. Neither did Nellie. She knew. Her body knew, even if the fever clouded her mind.

  She remembered very little of the next few days-and less and less as the time went on. In that same dim way, that way beneath consciousness, she knew she was fading, but she'd already faded so far that she had trouble caring. Above her, people seemed to appear and disappear as she drifted in and out of the real world: Clara, Edna, Merle, Armstrong. She would blink, and one would turn to another. It might have been magic.

  Once, though, when she saw Edna, she knew there was something she had to say. After a struggle, she found it: "Bill Reach." Forcing out the name took all the strength she had.

  "What is it, Ma?" Tears glinted off Edna's cheeks.

  "Bill Reach," Nellie repeated, and Edna nodded, so she'd understood. Fighting for every word, Nellie went on, "Killed him. Stuck him. Fuck him."

  "What's she saying?" asked someone off to the side: Armstrong.

  "She's delirious," Edna said. "There was this crazy man during the war- he was a spy, or something. Hal would've known for sure. But she thinks she killed him."

  "Did," Nellie said, or tried to say, but no one seemed to pay her any mind. Isn't that the way it goes? she thought as lucidity ebbed for the last time. Isn't that just the way it goes? You tell the truth, and no one believes you.

  She felt burning hot, and then cold as the South Pole, and then… nothing at all.

  "Where do you have to go today?" Laura asked as Jonathan Moss threw on his overcoat and jammed a wool hat down low on his head. As usual, April in Berlin, Ontario, was spring by the calendar but not by what it was doing outside. The sun shone brightly, but it shone on drifted snow from the storm that had just blown through-and another snowstorm or two might yet follow on the heels of this one.

  "London," he answered, gulping the hot tea she'd set in front of him. Whatever warmth he could seize now would be welcome.

  Dorothy's eyes got big and round. "You're driving all the way to England, Daddy?" his daughter asked. She was four, an age that seemed startling but not necessarily impossible.

  Moss laughed. "No, sweetie-just over to London, here in Ontario. If the roads aren't clear, though, it'll seem like it's as far as England." He kissed Dorothy and Laura and headed for the door.

  "London," his wife said behind him. "That's where I used to go when I needed something they didn't have in Arthur."

  To someone who'd grown up in Chicago, the idea of London, Ontario, as the big city was pretty funny. Jonathan Moss didn't say so. He knew the things that were likely to spark quarrels with his wife, and tried to steer clear of them. Too many quarrels started out of a clear blue sky for him to want to look for more. Instead, with a wave, he ducked out the door and was gone.

  Snow plows had gone over the road that ran west from Berlin. Moss didn't care to think about what the rock salt the road crews had put down was doing to his undercarriage and his fenders, and so, resolutely, he didn't. He drove past the military airstrip outside of London and let out a nostalgic sigh. He hadn't flown an aeroplane since coming home from the Great War. Unlike a lot of fliers, he'd never had the urge. Now, though, it tugged at him.

  Tug or no, though, meeting the urge would have to wait. He had a trial scheduled at occupation headquarters in London.

  His client, one Morris Metcalfe, was accused of bribing the occupying authorities to look the other way while he did some black-market liquor dealing. Metcalfe was a cadaverous man with none of the bounce and energy Lou Jamieson displayed. Moss suspected he was guilty, but the military prosecutor didn't have a strong case against him.

  Moss made that plain at every turn. At last, the prosecutor, a captain named Gus Landels, complained to the judge: "How can I show he's guilty if all his lawyer has to do is say he's innocent?"

  "How can I show he's innocent if all you have to do is say he's guilty?" Moss retorted, and thought the shot went home.

  In the middle of the afternoon, the judge, a lieutenant colonel who looked as if he'd seen far too many cases, pronounced Metcalfe not guilty. Captain Landels looked disgusted. The judge pointed a finger at Morris Metcalfe. He said, "My personal opinion is that there's more here than meets the eye. I can't prove that, and you're probably lucky I can't. But I won't be surprised if I see you in this court again, and if you don't get off so easy."

  Metcalfe looked back out of dead-fish eyes. "I resent that, your Honor," he said-he'd spent enough time in U.S. courts to know and use the proper form of address.

  "I won't lose any sleep over it," the judge replied. "Case dismissed-for now."

  After a limp handshake, Metcalfe disappeared with hardly a word of thanks for Moss. Captain Landels, noting that, let out a derisive snort. Moss shrugged. His only worry was extracting the balance of his fee from Metcalfe. But he thought he could do it. Like the judge, he believed the other man would need his services again before too long.

  He went out to reclaim his Ford from the secure lot where he'd parked it-like Berlin, London had one. He was starting back to his home town when a flight of five fighting scouts-just plain fighters, they were calling them nowadays-zoomed down to land at the field outside of London.

  He almost drove off the road. A block later, he did drive off the road- down a side street, toward the airstrip. Those lean, low-winged shapes drew him as a lodestone draws nails. They were as different from the machines he'd flown in the Great War as a thoroughbred was from a donkey. He tried to imagine what one of them would have done to a squadron of his kites. It would have knocked down the whole squadron without getting scratched; he was sure of that.

  The rifle-toting guards at the airstrip weren't inclined to let him enter. His U.S. identification card finally persuaded them, though one rode along to escort him to the commandant's office. He caught a break there. The man in charge of the field, Major Rex Finley, had served in Ontario during the war. "I remember you," Finley said. "I was at the party after you made ace. You'd forgotten it was your fifth kill."

  "That's me," Moss agreed cheerfully. "I'd forget my own head if my wife didn't nail it on me every morning."

  Finley chuckled. "I know the feeling. Well, what can I do for you, Mr. Moss?" He bore down on Moss' civilian title.

  "I saw the new fighters coming in for a landing," Moss said. "They're… quite something."

  "The new
Wright 27s? I should say so." Finley rubbed at his mustache, a thin strip of dark hair clinging tight to his upper lip. "And?"

  "Could I sit in one?" The naked longing in Moss' voice startled even him. He hadn't felt anything like that since he'd fallen for Laura Secord long before she fell for him. "Please?"

  Major Finley frowned. "I shouldn't. It's against about half a pound of regulations, and you know it as well as I do." Moss didn't say anything. He'd done all the pleading he could do if he wanted to keep his self-respect. The field commandant made a fist and smacked it into his other hand. "Come on. Officially, you know, you don't exist. You were never here. Got it?"

  "Who, me?" Moss said. Finley laughed.

  They walked out to the airstrip together. Major Finley said, "I've heard you spend your time getting Canucks off the hook."

  To Moss' relief, he sounded curious, not hostile. "I do try," the lawyer answered. "It needs doing. Even if you lost the war, you need decent representation. Maybe you especially need it if you lost the war."

  Sandbagged machine-gun nests protected the field. The soldiers in them looked very alert. Pointing to one of those nests, Finley said, "I'd be happier about having somebody representing the damn Canucks if all of 'em were convinced they had lost the damn war. But we both know it isn't so. That bomb over in Manitoba, and the big one in your town a couple of years ago…"

  "Oh, yeah," Moss said. "That one almost caught me. Still, don't you think things would be worse if the Canadians decided the whole system was rigged against them?"

  Shrugging, Finley answered, "Damned if I know. But then, they don't pay me to worry about politics-which is all to the good, far as I'm concerned."

  Moss only half heard him. By then, they'd come up to the closest Wright 27. The air above the engine mount still shimmered with released heat. Two machine guns on this side of the mount fired through the prop; Moss assumed there were two more on the far side. He'd never flown an aeroplane that carried more than two machine guns. With four, he would have felt like the Grim Reaper in the sky. And yet he knew the armament was nothing out of the ordinary these days.

  "You never piloted a machine that wasn't canvas and wire, did you?" Rex Finley asked, setting an affectionate hand on the blue-painted aluminum skin of the wing.

  "Nope," Moss answered. "Started out in a Curtiss Super Hudson pusher, ended up in our copy of Kaiser Bill's Albatros. This is all new to me. Looks like a shark with wings. All you'd need to do would be to paint eyes and a mouth full of teeth on the front end."

  "Not a half bad idea," Finley said. "Well, go on up."

  The fighter, Moss discovered, had a mounting stirrup just in front of the left wing. He used the stirrup to climb up onto the wing. The aeroplane rocked under his weight. If he'd climbed onto the wing of one of the aeroplanes he'd flown in the Great War, though, odds were he would have stuck his foot straight through the doped fabric. The Wright 27 had a closed cockpit, for better streamlining and because the wind at the high speeds at which it flew would have played havoc with a pilot's vision, goggles or no. After some fumbling, Moss found the latch and slid back the canopy.

  "Good thing I haven't got fat, or I'd never fit in here," he remarked as he settled himself in the seat.

  Major Finley slammed the canopy shut above him. The cockpit smelled of leather and sweat and oil. Its being closed made it feel even more cramped than it really was. The instrument panel bristled with dials. Along with the altimeter, compass, airspeed indicator, inclinometer, and fuel gauge he was used to, instruments monitored engine performance in a dozen different ways, ammunition supply, propellor pitch, and the electrical system. The machine also boasted a wireless set, which had its own profusion of dials. You'd need to go to college all over again to understand what half this stuff does, Moss thought dizzily.

  But the essentials hadn't changed. There was the stick, and there was the firing button on top of it. His right thumb found that button with unconscious ease. The gunsight in the fighter made what he'd used during the Great War seem a ten-cent toy by comparison.

  He jerked when Finley rapped on the thick-armored? — glass with his knuckles. The base commandant gestured to show he should get out. With an odd reluctance, he nodded. Finley pushed back the canopy. Moss felt like a sardine getting out of its can as he extracted himself.

  "What do you think?" Finley asked.

  "That's… the cat's meow, all right." Moss hesitated, then plunged: "Any chance I could… fly it?"

  "When was the last time you flew?" the officer inquired.

  Moss wished he could lie, but judged that would make things worse, not better. With a sigh, he told the truth: "Not long after the Great War ended."

  Rex Finley nodded. "About what I figured-and I would have kicked you off my field if you'd tried to tell me it was week before last. If you're going to take another stab at it, I want you to put in some time on trainers before you smash up a Wright machine. Even a trainer nowadays is a hotter crate than anything you've ever flown."

  "I'll do that," Moss said at once. "Jesus, you bet I will. I figured you'd say you didn't want anything to do with me."

  "Nope. You were an ace. You knew what you were doing up there," Finley said. "With any luck at all, you can find it again. And you know what? One of these days, we're liable to need more people like you again. Or do you think I'm wrong?" Moss wished he could have said yes, but that too would have been a lie.

  After her time in Paris and Richmond-especially after her time in Paris- Anne Colleton found St. Matthews, South Carolina, much too small and confining. She did what she could to fight the feeling by making forays into Columbia and Charleston, but that helped only so much. She had to come back to the flat where she'd lived since Red Negroes almost killed her on the Marshlands plantation.

  The Confederate government-or maybe it was the Freedom Party-had paid the rent on the flat while she was abroad. She hadn't had to put her worldly goods into storage and then exhume them when she took up her life in St. Matthews again. That was something, anyhow. Something… but not enough.

  In Paris, she'd haggled over alliances and foreign affairs in her fluent French. In St. Matthews, people talked about the weather and crops and what they'd heard on the wireless the night before. But for the talk about the wireless, Anne had grown up on such conversation. It seemed all the more stifling now.

  When her brother came over to visit one warm, muggy afternoon in late May, she burst out, "If I hear one more word about tractors and combines and harvesters, the loudmouth who says that word is going to be awfully sorry."

  Tom Colleton shrugged. "Sorry, Sis," he said. "That stuff is important here. It's important all over the CSA."

  "It's boring," Anne replied with great sincerity. "All the yahoos bragging about the fancy equipment they've got… They don't get that excited about the equipment in their drawers, for Christ's sake."

  Her brother turned red. "You can't talk like that around here," he said, and then, before she could further scandalize him by asking why not, he went on, "Besides, tractors and such-like are important. You notice how many niggers have been coming through town lately?"

  "I should say I have," Anne answered. "One more reason to keep guns where I can get at them in a hurry."

  "Yeah, I know. Theft is up. That's a problem," Tom said. "But those niggers are sharecroppers who don't have work any more because the machinery's doing it instead of them. We don't need nearly so many people tied down to the land as we did when the Great War started."

  Anne started to say, And so? Then she remembered that pushing hard for farm machinery was part of Featherston's program.

  Before she could remark on that, Tom said, "I don't know what the towns'll do if all the niggers from the countryside stream into them at once. Do you know? Does the president?"

  "If he does, he isn't telling me," Anne said.

  "No? Too bad. He'd make a lot of friends if he came out and said what he has in mind. This is liable to hurt him when elections come around
this fall."

  That made Anne smile. She couldn't help herself. "Do you think anything will get in the way of the Freedom Party at election time? Anything at all?"

  Her brother's face was a study in astonishment. "But there've always been elections," he said.

  "The Freedom Party is in." Anne might have been an adult reproving a child's naпvetй. "It's going to stay in till it gets where it's going and the Confederate States get where they're going."

  "Christ!" Tom said. "I don't think I much care for that."

  "Tom…" Now Anne spoke urgently, warning him against disaster. "Do you realize how big a chance you're taking saying that even to me? If you say it to somebody else-and it could be somebody you trust-you're liable to end up in more trouble than you've ever imagined."

  Tom Colleton started to say something else. Very visibly, he changed his mind. But he couldn't let it go. He asked, "And you work with these people? You work for these people?" By the way he looked at her, he might have been seeing her for the first time.

  But Anne didn't hesitate before she nodded. "I sure do," she said. "Because they're going to take the CSA where I want us to go-right back up to the top."

  "I'd sooner-" Her brother caught himself again. His face twisted. "All right, Sis. I'll shut up. If I talk too goddamn much, I'm liable to end up in a camp with a big P stenciled on the back of my shirt. Isn't that right?"

  She winced. "Not if you're talking to me."

  "That isn't what you said a minute ago."

  "I just wanted to remind you that you need to be careful. And you do."

  "Because if I'm not careful, I will end up in a camp." That was statement, not question. Tom paused to light a cigarette. After a couple of long, angry puffs, he added, "If that's where the Freedom Party is taking the country, to hell with me if I want to go along. Am I a nigger? Or am I a white man who can stand up on his hind legs and speak his mind if he wants to?"

  "We've all got to give up something if we're going to get revenge on the USA," Anne said soothingly. "The Yankees put up with keeping quiet and doing what they were told and standing in line for rationed goods for thirty years so they could get even with us."