The Victorious opposition ae-3

by Harry Turtledove

  But he didn't want to listen to her tonight, any more than she'd wanted to listen to George Jr. earlier in the week. "I am fine. Just fine," he said loudly. The way he said it proved he was nothing of the sort, but also proved he would pay no attention if she tried to tell him so.

  If you can't lick 'em, join 'em, she thought, and waved to the waiter for another drink of her own. After another one, and then another one yet, she stopped worrying-at any rate, she stopped curing-about how many Ernie had had, though he kept pouring them down, too. She took him by the arm. "Where shall we go?" she asked, laughing at how bold and brassy she sounded.

  "We will go back to my place," he answered. "And when we get there, we will see what comes up." That made Sylvia laugh, too, though Ernie wasn't joking the way another man might have. In fact, he seemed to be trying to persuade himself something would come up. Under his leer, or perhaps stirred into it, was enough desperation to give Sylvia pause, though she was a long way from sober herself.

  "Maybe we ought to have some coffee or something first," she said.

  Ernie took her arm. "Come on," he said, and effortlessly hauled her up out of the booth. He was very strong, even if he didn't show it all the time. She went along with him, thinking, The walk will sober him up. It may even sober me up, too.

  Her head still buzzed when they got to Ernie's apartment. She didn't want to think about what it would feel like in the morning. But the morning seemed a million miles away. Ernie closed the door behind them, then took her in his arms and kissed her, hard. He tasted of whiskey and pipe tobacco. He picked her up and carried her into the cramped little bedroom and half set, half dropped her on the bed.

  "Come on," he said again, and started taking off his clothes.

  Sylvia did the same, quickly. His strength and the whiskey in her and the taste and smell of him all combined to excite her. If he'd been any other man, he would have thrown himself on her and done what he wanted to do. But he couldn't. He hadn't been able to do anything like that for more than twenty years. If he was going anywhere, she would have to get him there. She sat up and leaned forward and took what there was of him in her mouth as he stood by the side of the bed.

  And nothing happened. He groaned again and again, but always in frustration, not release. Try as she would, it was no use. She did everything she knew how to do. Nothing helped. Sweat ran down his face, down his chest. "Damn you," he muttered, and then, "Damn me."

  She looked up at him. "What do you want?" she asked. "I'll do anything you think will do you good. You know I will."

  She'd turned on the lamp by the bed a little while before. Sometimes watching helped him. Not tonight. He looked at her, looked through her. His eyes might have belonged to a dead man. His voice sounded as if it came from the other side of the grave, too: "It makes no difference, not any more."

  "What do you mean?" she said. "Of course it does. Next time, we'll-" She broke off. "What are you doing?"

  The blued metal of the pistol he took out of the nightstand gleamed dully in the lamplight. "Nothing matters any more," he said, and pointed it at the side of his own head.

  "No!" He'd played such games before. This time, Sylvia didn't think he was playing. She grabbed for the pistol. Ernie cursed and hit her. She tried to knee him in the crotch. He twisted away. They wrestled, both of them shouting, both of them swearing, there on the bedroom floor.

  Loud as the end of the world, the pistol went off. She never knew whether he'd intended to shoot her. It made no difference. It didn't matter. The bullet tore into her chest, and the world was nothing but pain and darkness.

  As if from very far away, Ernie shouted, "Sylvia! Don't die! Damn you, I love you!" She tried to say something, but blood filled her mouth. From even further away, she heard another shot, and the thump of a falling body, and then nothing, nothing at all.

  Jefferson Pinkard was not a happy man. He'd come to Louisiana to help run a camp for political prisoners, and what had they gone and done? They'd taken out most of the politicals and filled the camp full of colored guerrillas. The politicals had been sober, civilized, middle-aged men who did as they were told. The Negroes, on the other hand…

  Though Pinkard didn't want to admit it, even to himself, the captured Negroes scared him to death. They had taken up arms against the Confederate States not in hope of victory-as the colored Reds had a generation earlier- but because they simply couldn't stand the way things were. Now that they'd been taken prisoner, they expected nothing from the men into whose hands they'd fallen. They expected nothing-and they were seldom disappointed.

  Camp Dependable was a rougher place now than it had been when inoffensive politicals filled it. These days, guards always carried submachine guns. They carried the weapons with safeties off, and they always traveled in pairs in areas where prisoners went. So far, the blacks hadn't managed to steal a submachine gun from a guard. Jeff hoped that record would last. He wondered if it could.

  He had other worries, too, though not of the life-and-death sort. Just keeping track of the prisoners was a record-keeper's worst nightmare. They didn't come into the camp with passbooks in the pockets of their dungarees. He assumed most of the names they gave were false. Even had those names been genuine, they wouldn't have helped much. Negroes in the CSA had never been allowed to take surnames, as they were in the USA. With passbooks, the powers that be didn't have too much trouble sorting out who was who. Without them…

  The camp had an underofficer who specialized in taking fingerprints and forwarding them to Baton Rouge and to Richmond for identification. If the people in Baton Rouge and Richmond had cared as much as Pinkard did about matching those fingerprints to the ones in their files, he would have been happier. As things were, he wasn't sure who most of his prisoners were. The only thing he was sure of was that they had good reason for concealing their identity.

  "We've got to be careful, dammit," he would tell the guards every morning. "These nigger bastards don't want to argue with us like the politicals did. They want to kill us. That's why they're here. Thing we can't do is give 'em the chance."

  Work parties that left the barbed-wire perimeter of the camp made him especially nervous. The blacks who went out on road-building details and other hard labor were chained to one another. They wore balls and chains on their left ankles. They couldn't possibly run. So Jeff told himself. He worried even so.

  And it was all his baby. When the politicals had gone off to another camp, the warden at Camp Dependable had gone with them. "You made this place a going concern," he told Pinkard before he went away. "You know it best, and that makes you best suited to keeping these black devils in line here."

  Maybe he'd even been right. Regardless of whether he had, Jeff didn't love him and never would. The then-warden had had a choice between an easy job and a hard one. He'd taken the easy one himself and left the hard one to somebody else. If he'd fought in the war, he would have sent patrols forward while he stayed in a nice, safe dugout in his own trench line. Jeff had known officers like that. He'd despised them, too.

  Higher rank. Fancier emblems on his collar tabs. A bigger paycheck every month. Pinkard approved of all those things. But he didn't approve of the way he'd got them.

  He checked the clock in his office. Half past five. About time for the working party to come back. Pinkard heaved himself out of the swivel chair, which creaked under his weight. He headed for the front gate. He always liked to watch the gangs come in. If he could get a report on the spot, he didn't give the guards a chance to come up with any lies. He knew such things happened. He'd done the like himself, and didn't want it done to him.

  His timing was good. He got to the gate two or three minutes before the work party returned. The Negroes clanked along, slowed by their chains and the weights attached to their ankles-and slowed also by doing work they didn't want to do and coming back to a place where they didn't want to be.

  "How did it go?" Jeff called to the chief guard, a stocky, hard-faced man named Mercer Scott.<
br />
  "Another day," Scott answered with a shrug. He shifted a plug of tobacco and spat a stream of brown juice on the ground. "Three niggers keeled over. Two of 'em croaked, and we flung 'em in the swamp. The other one got back up on his feet when we thumped him a couple times. Lazy bastard just wanted a break. I'll break his black ass, he tries that kind of shit with me." He spat again.

  "Who died?" Pinkard asked. "I've got to try and keep the records straight, you know."

  "Yeah, yeah." Mercer Scott screwed his face into a parody of deep thought. "One was that mincing little faggot named Dionysus. He's been poorly since that big buck beat him up last month. And the other one… Hell, who was the other one?" He turned to another guard. "Who was the other nigger we pitched in the swamp, Bob?"

  "The skinny bastard," Bob answered. "Cicero, that's his name."

  "Oh, yeah. That's right. I couldn't recollect if he was today or yesterday." Scott turned to Jeff. "That's who it was, all right. Dionysus and Cicero. No loss, either one of 'em."

  Pinkard nodded and scribbled a note to himself. The camp held several Ciceros, but only one of them was in this work gang, so he wouldn't have any trouble with that. He said, "Good enough. Make sure the count matches, then bring 'em on inside." A mosquito lit on the back of his wrist. He smashed it Hell might have more mosquitoes than Louisiana, but he wasn't sure anyplace else did.

  One by one, the Negroes counted off. The reek of their unwashed bodies was harsh in Pinkard's nostrils. The guards smelled nearly as ripe. In this heat and humidity, everybody stank.

  One of Pinkard's aides pounded on the door to his quarters at half past twelve that night. He woke up grabbing for his pistol. Nobody would bother him at that time of night for anything but trouble. As far as he was concerned, trouble came in two flavors: escape and uprising. "What the hell?" he demanded, throwing the door open in just his pajamas.

  "Warden, they need you at the front gate right away," the aide said.

  Jeff shoved his feet into slippers and jammed his hat down onto his head so people would have some idea of who he was. "I'm coming," he said. "What am I walking into?"

  "I don't exactly know," the aide answered, and Jeff wanted to clobber him with the pistol. He went on, "There's folks from Richmond there. Reckon they'll tell you what you need to know."

  "From Richmond?" Pinkard's mind raced. Was he in trouble? What kind of trouble could he be in? He couldn't think of anything he'd screwed up. He'd done his job here. He'd done it back in Alabama, too. He'd been a good Freedom Party man since the days just after the war, and he'd stayed in the Party through the hard times after Grady Calkins shot President Hampton. Hell, he'd broken up with his wife because Emily was fooling around on him on nights when he went to meetings. "Get out of my way, goddammit." He pushed past the aide and hustled to the gate.

  None of the guards said a word about what he had on. He could deal with them later, when he was in proper uniform. The men at the gate wore the regalia of Freedom Party guards, high-ranking ones. Their cold, hard faces would have scared the bejesus out of even a thoroughgoing son of a bitch like Mercer Scott. "You are Jefferson Pinkard?" one of them asked. He didn't say anything about how Pinkard was dressed, either.

  "That's right," Jeff answered. "Who the-devil are you?"

  "Chief Assault Band Leader Ben Chapman." The accent wasn't Virginia; it was Alabama, much like Pinkard's own. "I have a prisoner to deliver to this camp. You are to acknowledge receipt."

  "You do? I am?" Pinkard said. The Party officer nodded. "Well, who the hell is he?" Jeff asked testily. "And what are you doing bringing him here in the middle of the goddamn night?"

  "Orders," Chapman said, as if orders were the most important thing in the world. Well, maybe he had a point there. "And the prisoner is"-he lowered his voice so Pinkard could hear but the guards at the front gate couldn't- "a fellow by the name of Willy Knight."

  "Holy Jesus!" Jeff exploded. Having the vice president of the CSA-well, the former vice president, after his resignation and imprisonment (to say nothing of his impeachment and conviction)-in his prison camp was the last thing he wanted. The responsibility if something went wrong… and things were only too likely to go wrong. "Didn't anybody tell you this here camp is full of niggers?"

  Chief Assault Band Leader Chapman shrugged. He had an athlete's grace, and an athlete's watchful eyes, too. "Goddamn spooks deserve whatever happens to 'em," he said. "And the goddamn son of a bitch we brought down here deserves whatever happens to him, too. Nobody will say a word if he comes out of this place feet first."

  That took a load off Pinkard's mind. But, still cautious, he asked, "Will you put that in writing?"

  "Nothing about this business goes down in writing," Chief Assault Band Leader Chapman said scornfully. "Nothing except your name on the form that says we got Knight here in one piece."

  "I might have known," Jeff muttered, and Chapman nodded, as if to say, Yes, you might have. With a sigh, the warden nodded, too. "I'll sign-as soon as I see him, so I can make sure he is in one piece."

  "Right." Ben Chapman turned to his henchmen. "Bring him on up." The door to a motorcar at the edge of Camp Dependable's lights opened and then slammed shut. More Freedom Party guards hustled someone forward. Chapman pointed. "See for yourself," he told Pinkard.

  It was Willy Knight. Jeff had seen him in Birmingham on the campaign trail. He was still tall and blond and still, in a way, handsome. But, where he had been full of piss and vinegar, he was thin to the point of gauntness, and suffering haunted his face-especially the eyes. "Go ahead and laugh," he said to Pinkard. "One of these days, the son of a bitch will turn on you, too."

  "Shut up, you bastard," Chief Assault Band Leader Chapman told him. Chapman thrust a clipboard and a pen at Jeff. "You've seen him. Sign." Jeff did. His men took charge of the fallen Confederate hero and led him into the camp.

  XIII

  Hipolito Rodriguez had never been a rich man. He was reasonably confident he would never be a rich man. But he was and always had been a proud man. The Confederate States were and always had been a proud nation. And Sonora and Chihuahua were and always had been states where pride counted for even more than it did elsewhere in the CSA. A poor man who could hold his head up often gathered more respect than a rich man who could not meet his neighbors' eyes.

  When Rodriguez brought his youngest son into Baroyeca, he strode along with pride unusual even for him. Pedro seemed a good deal more diffident than his father-or maybe his feet hurt. He had on the sturdy shoes he'd got from the Freedom Youth Corps. He hadn't worn them much since getting out of the Corps a few months earlier; sandals were plenty good for farm work. But he didn't want to seem like a peasant when he came into town.

  "They will make a man of you," Rodriguez said as he and Pedro started up the main street toward the alcalde's residence.

  "I thought the Freedom Youth Corps already did that," his son replied. He was taller than Hipolito Rodriguez, and wider through the shoulders, too. Like his brothers, he spoke more English than Spanish these days-except, sometimes, with his mother.

  "I have nothing bad to say about the Freedom Youth Corps," Rodriguez told him. "But it is what its name says it is: it is a thing for youths. The Army of the Confederate States of America is a thing for men."

  He hadn't thought about it that way when he was conscripted. He remembered as much, remembered very clearly. But times had changed. He'd gone into the Confederate Army in the middle of the Great War and been thrown straight into action, first against Red Negroes in Georgia and then against the USA in west Texas. His son would serve in peacetime. With luck, he would get his hitch out of the way and come back to the farm without ever firing a shot in anger. Rodriguez hoped so, anyhow. When you were shooting in anger, the people on the other side had a nasty habit of shooting back. He didn't know how he'd come through the war unwounded. Luck, no doubt, luck and the Virgin watching over him.

  Out of Jaime Diaz's general store came Felipe Rojas. When Pedro saw the Free
dom Youth Corps drillmaster, he automatically stiffened to attention right there in the middle of the street. Rojas' smile showed several gold teeth. "You don't need to do that today, Pedro," he said. "I don't give you orders any more."

  "Just as well that he stay in practice," Hipolito Rodriguez said. "I've brought him into town to report, because he's been conscripted."

  "Has he?" Rojas' eyes widened. "How the years do get on. He would be old enough, of course, but still, it hardly seems possible. Not so long since we had rifles in our own hands, is it?"

  "No, indeed. I was just thinking that," Rodriguez said. Of course, they'd both had Tredegars in their hands a lot more recently than they'd been mustered out of the Army. They'd shown the big landowners who'd run things in Sonora for so long that the Freedom Party was the new power in the land, and that anyone who thought otherwise had better think again.

  "A soldier." Rojas slapped Rodriguez's son on the back with a big, hard hand. "He'll do well. What we showed him in the Youth Corps will help him, and he's a fine young man. Yes, I'm sure he'll do very well indeed."

  "We'd better go on to the alcalde's residence," Rodriguez said. "I wouldn't want him to get in trouble for reporting late."

  "No, that wouldn't be the right way to start," Felipe Rojas agreed. He clapped Pedro on the back again. "Go with God, and God go with you. You'll be fine. I know you will. Show them what we taught you. They'll build on that."

  "Sн, seсor. Gracias, seсor," Pedro said proudly.

  Another youth and his father were also at the alcalde's residence. He and Pedro started chattering. They'd gone to school together and served in the Freedom Youth Corps together, and now they were going into the Army together. Rodriguez shook his head. It hardly seems possible, Rojas had said, and wasn't that the truth? No matter how it seemed, though, it was the truth. The years had a way of piling on whether you looked at them or not.

  His son had to fill out most of the inevitable paperwork, but there was plenty for Hipolito, too, because Pedro was of course under twenty-one. He signed his name a dozen times, mostly without bothering to look at what he was signing. More than half the forms were in English, anyhow, and he read it less well than he spoke it.