The Victorious opposition ae-3

by Harry Turtledove

  The dignitary sitting next to her leaned over and said, "I see why they call you the conscience of the Congress."

  "Thank you," she whispered. Someone, at least, had understood.

  Then he went on, "But really! To get excited about a bunch of niggers? Those black bastards-pardon my French, ma'am-aren't worth it. We'd all be better off if they were back in Africa swinging through the trees."

  He was, she remembered with something approaching horror, a judge. "What do you do if one of them comes into your court?" she asked.

  "Oh, I try to be fair," he answered. "You have to. But they're usually guilty. That's just how things go."

  He didn't see anything wrong with what he said. The only way Flora could have let sense into his head would have been to bash it open with a rock. She knew that. She'd met the type before. If she did it here at a Remembrance Day rally, people would talk. Even telling him off was useless. He'd just get offended. She could talk till Doomsday without persuading him.

  Sitting there quietly felt as much like a compromise with evil to her as letting the Confederates do what they wanted to the Negroes in their country. She made herself remember there were degrees of wickedness, as there were with anything else. If you couldn't tell the difference between one and another, how were you supposed to make choices?

  You couldn't. She knew that, however distasteful she found it. The Confederates were worse than the judge. That still doesn't mean he's good, she thought defiantly. At the microphone, the Democratic Congressman kept on laying into the CSA. The crowd ate up every word.

  When Jake Featherston told the people who protected him that he was going to make a speech in Louisville, they started having conniptions. They screamed about black men with guns. They screamed about white men with guns who didn't want to live in the CSA. They screamed about damnyankees with mortars on the other side of the Ohio River. For the USA to try to bump him off would be an act of war, but it wouldn't be a war he got to run if they went ahead and did it.

  That last comment worried him, because he didn't think anyone else in the Confederacy had the driving will and energy to do what needed doing when the war started. But he stuck out his chin and told the Freedom Party guards, "I'm going, goddammit. You keep the people in Louisville from shooting me. That's your job. I'll worry about the rest. That's mine."

  Even Ferdinand Koenig flabbled about the trip. "You're the one man we can't replace, Jake," he said.

  These days, he was almost the one man who could call Jake by his Christian name. Featherston looked across his desk at the attorney general. "It's worth the risk," he said. "The Party guards'll keep me safe from niggers and nigger-loving bastards who wish they were Yankees. And Al Smith is too nice a fellow to turn his artillery loose while we're at peace."

  Al Smith was a damned fool, as far as Jake was concerned. Had the USA had a dangerous leader-say, another Teddy Roosevelt-Jake would have done everything he could to get rid of the man. People like that were worth an army corps of soldiers, likely more.

  But Ferd Koenig had another worry. Quietly, he asked, "And who's going to keep you safe from the guards?"

  Featherston glared at him. He'd already lived through two assassination tries-three if you counted Clarence Potter, who hadn't come to Richmond to play checkers. The stalwarts who'd backed Willy Knight against him still shook him to the core. But he said, "If I can't trust the Party guards, I can't trust anybody, and I might as well cash in my chips. And if I can't trust them, they can try and do me in right here in Richmond as easy as they can in Louisville."

  By the look on Koenig's heavy-featured, jowly face, he might have just bitten down on a lemon. "You're bound and determined to do this, aren't you?"

  "You bet I am," Jake answered. "You take over a place, you need to let the people there get a look at you." He'd been reading The Prince. He couldn't pronounce Machiavelli's name to save his life, and if he wrote it down he wouldn't have spelled it the same way twice running. All the same, he knew good sense when he ran into it, and that was one hell of a sly dago.

  He went to Louisville. He'd decided he would, and his deciding was what made things so. And when he went, he went in style. He didn't just fly in, make a speech, and fly out again. He took a train up from Nashville, and at every whistle stop all the way north across Kentucky he stood on a platform at the back of his Pullman and made a speech.

  The Pullman had armor plating and bulletproof glass. Nothing short of a direct hit by an artillery shell would make it say uncle. The lectern on the platform was armored, too. But from the chest up and from the sides, he was vulnerable. The Freedom Party guards told him so, over and over. He went right on ignoring them.

  Nobody shot him. Nobody shot at him. People swarmed to the train stations to hear him. They waved Confederate and Freedom Party flags. They shouted, "Freedom!" and, "Featherston!" — sometimes both at once. Women screamed. Men held up little boys so they'd see him and remember for the rest of their lives. The Party had organized some of the crowds, but a lot of the response was genuine and unplanned. That made it all the more gratifying.

  He didn't see any black faces in the crowds. He would have been surprised and alarmed if he had. If he never saw any black faces anywhere in the CSA, that wouldn't have broken his heart.

  "You folks helped us take back what's ours," he told the crowds at the whistle stops. "We got part of the job done, but the damnyankees won't make the rest of it right. They're nothing but a pack of thieves, and how are you supposed to live with a thief next door?"

  People cheered. People howled. People shook their fists toward the north, as if Al Smith could see them. They'd been back in the Confederate States not even a handful of months, but they were ready to fight for them.

  Jake tasted their jubilation. It was different from the cold lust for revenge he felt in the rest of the CSA. People here had spent a generation under Yankee rule. They'd had their men conscripted into the U.S. Army. They knew what they'd abandoned, and they were glad to be back where they belonged.

  Or most of them were: enough to have voted Kentucky back into the CSA, even with Negroes given the franchise to try to queer the deal. But there were white men-white men! — who looked north with longing, not with hate. If they knew what was good for them, they'd be lying low right now. If they didn't know what was good for them, Confederate officials and Party stalwarts would give them lessons on the subject.

  He got into Louisville a little before six in the evening. People waving flags lined the route from the train station to the Galt House, the hotel where he would spend the night. He didn't stop there for long now-just enough time to grab a bite to eat and run a comb through his hair. Then it was on to the Memorial Auditorium a few blocks away for his speech.

  The auditorium was a postwar building, of reinforced concrete that could have gone into a fortress. Most of Louisville was new. The city had been destroyed twice in the past sixty years. The USA had tried to take it in the Second Mexican War-tried and got a bloody nose. In the Great War, General Pershing's Second Army had driven the Confederates out, but not till the defenders, fighting from house to house, made the Yankees wreck the city to be rid of them.

  Before the Second Mexican War, and to a degree after it, Louisville had been an un-Confederate sort of place. Because it did so much business with the United States, it had looked north as well as south. But once it got taken into the USA, it wasn't a booming border town any more. Even before the collapse of 1929, business was slow here. That made people all the more glad to return to the Confederacy.

  A rhythmic cry of, "Featherston! Featherston! Featherston!" greeted Jake as he strode up to the lectern. The bright lights glaring into his face kept him from getting a good look at the blocks of stalwarts who kept the chant strong, but he knew they were there. They weren't the only ones shouting, though- far from it. When he held up his hands for quiet, they fell silent at once. The rest of the crowd, less disciplined, took longer.

  When he had enough quiet to su
it him, he said, "I am Jake Featherston, and I'm here to tell you the truth." That brought him a fresh eruption of cheers. They knew his catch phrase, and had known it for years. Wireless stations from northern Tennessee had beamed his speeches up into Kentucky long before it returned to the Confederate States. He went on, "Here's what the truth is. The truth is, the Yankees don't want peace in North America. Oh, Al Smith says he does, but he's lying through his teeth."

  Boos and hisses rose when he named the president of the United States. One loudmouthed fellow yelled, "We didn't vote for him!" That drew a laugh. Jake scowled. Nobody was supposed to get laughs at his speeches but him.

  He said, "It's been almost twenty-five years since the United States stole our land from us. They coughed up a couple of pieces, and now they think they ought to get a pat on the head and a dish of ice cream on account of it. Well, folks, they're wrong. No two ways about it. They are wrong.

  "And they think that might makes right. They aren't so wrong about that. But they think it gives 'em the right to hold on to things. They may think it does, but I'm here to tell you it isn't so. We've got the right to take back what's ours, and we'll do it if we have to.

  "I want peace. Anybody who's seen a war and wants another one has to have a screw loose somewhere." Jake got a hand when he said that. He'd known he would, which was why he put it in the speech. He didn't believe it, though. He'd never felt more alive than when he was blasting Yankees to hell and gone in the First Richmond Howitzers. By contrast, peacetime was boring. He went on, "But if you back away from a war now, a lot of the time that just means you'll have to fight it later, when it costs you more. If the people in the United States reckon we're afraid to fight, they'd better think twice."

  He got another hand for that, a bigger one. He'd hoped it would. It meant people were ready. They might not be eager, but they were ready. And ready was all that really counted.

  Shaking his fist toward the country across the Ohio, he rolled on: "And if the damnyankees reckon they can get our own niggers to stab us in the back again, they'd better think twice about that, too." A great roar of applause went up then. Louisville had been in U.S. hands when the Negroes in the CSA rebelled in 1915, but the white folks here were just as leery of blacks as if they'd never left the Confederacy. Negroes had never got the right to vote in Kentucky, not till the plebiscite earlier this year. There wouldn't be a next time for them, either. Jake went on, "We've got our niggers under control now, by God. Oh, there's still some trouble from 'em-I won't try to tell you any different-but we're teaching 'em who's boss."

  More thunderous applause. Jake hoped that, if he killed enough rebellious blacks, the rest of them would learn who held the whip hand. As an overseer's son, he took that literally. And if the Negroes didn't care to learn from their lessons… He shrugged. He'd go on teaching. Sooner or later, they would get it.

  He knew damn well the United States were helping blacks resist the Confederate government. His people had already seized more than one arms shipment right here in Kentucky. His mouth opened in a predatory grin. Two could play at that game.

  "Here's the last thing I've got to say to you, folks," he cried. "Kentucky is Confederate again. As God is my witness, Kentucky will always be Confederate from here on out. And I promise you, I won't take off this uniform till we've got everything back that belongs to us. We don't retreat. We go forward!"

  He slammed his fist down on the podium. The Memorial Auditorium went wild. He couldn't make out individual cheers amid the din. He might have been in the middle of artillery barrages louder than this, but he wasn't sure. After a while, it all got to be more than the ears could handle.

  He looked north toward the United States again. He was ready. Were they? He didn't think so. They'd started rearming a lot more slowly than he had. They're soft. They're rotten. They're just waiting for somebody to kick the door in.

  "Featherston! Featherston! Featherston!" Little by little, the chant emerged from chaos. Jake waved to the crowd. The cheers redoubled. The Yanks are waiting for somebody to kick the door in, and I'm the man to do it.

  Anne Colleton muttered a mild obscenity when someone knocked on the door to her St. Matthews apartment. She hadn't been home for long, and she'd head out on the road again soon. She wanted to enjoy what time she had here, and her idea of enjoyment didn't include gabbing with the neighbors.

  She took a pistol to the door, as she usually did when someone unexpected knocked. The Congaree Socialist Republic was dead, but Negro unrest in these parts had never quite subsided. If a black man wanted to try to do her in, she aimed to shoot first.

  But it wasn't a homicidal Red. It was a middle-aged white man in a lieutenant-colonel's uniform, two stars on each collar tab. That was all she saw at first. Then she did a double take. "Tom!" she exclaimed.

  "Hello, Sis," her younger brother said. "I came to say good-bye. I've been called up, and I'm on my way out to report to my unit."

  "My God," Anne said. "But you're married. You've got a family. What will Bertha do with the kids?"

  "The best she can," Tom Colleton answered, which didn't leave much room for argument. "You're right-I didn't have to go. But I couldn't have looked at myself in a mirror if I hadn't. The Yankees have got more men than we do. If we don't use everybody we can get our hands on, we're in a hell of a lot of trouble."

  She knew perfectly well that he was right. The USA had always outweighed the CSA two to one. If the United States could bring their full strength to bear, the Confederate States would face the same squeeze as they had a generation earlier. The USA hadn't managed that in the War of Secession, and had failed spectacularly in the Second Mexican War. In the Great War, they'd succeeded, and they'd won. Keeping them from succeeding again would be essential if the Confederacy was to have a chance.

  All of which passed through Anne's mind in a space of a second and a half and then blew away. "For God's sake come in and have a drink," she said. "You've got time for that, don't you?"

  "The day I don't have time for a drink is the day they bury me," Tom Colleton answered with a trace of the boyish good nature he'd largely submerged over the past few years.

  Anne was all for revenge. She was all for teaching the United States a lesson. When it came to putting her only living brother's life on the line, she was much less enthusiastic. She poured him an enormous whiskey, and one just as potent for herself. "Here's to you," she said. Half of hers sizzled down her throat.

  Tom drank, too. He stared at the glass, or maybe at the butternut cuff of his sleeve. "Christ, I did a lot of drinking in this uniform," he said. He might have been talking about somebody else. In a way, he was. He'd been in his early twenties, not fifty. He'd been sure the bullet that could hurt him hadn't been made. Men were at that age, which went a long way toward making war possible. By the time you reached middle age-if you did-you knew better. Ask not for whom the bell tolls…

  "How's Bertha doing?" Anne asked. She'd always thought her brother had married below his station, but she couldn't deny that he and his wife loved each other.

  He shook his head now. "She's not very happy. I don't reckon I can blame her for that. But I have to go." He finished the whiskey and held out the glass. "Pour me another one. Then I've got to head for the station and catch the northbound train."

  "All right." Anne poured herself another drink, too, even though the first one was already making her head swim. It loosened her tongue, too. Without it, she never would have asked, "What do you think our chances are?"

  Tom only shrugged. "Damned if I can tell you. Last time I went off to war, I was sure we'd lick the Yankees in six weeks and be home in time for the cotton harvest. One whole hell of a lot I knew about that, wasn't it? This time, I've got no idea. We'll find out."

  "Maybe there won't be a war." Anne knew she was trying to talk herself into believing what she suddenly wanted with all her heart to believe, but she went on, "Maybe the damnyankees will back down and give us what we're asking for."

&n
bsp; "Not a chance," Tom said. "I thought they were a pack of cowards last time. I know better now. They're as tough as we are. And even if they did, how much difference would it make?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "You know what I mean. If the damnyankees back down tomorrow, what'll Jake Featherston do the day after? Ask 'em for something else, that's what. And he'll keep right on doing it till they say no and have to fight. Because whether you want a war or I want a war, Featherston damn well does, and he's got the only vote that counts. You going to tell me I'm wrong?"

  Part of Anne-most of Anne-wanted to, but she knew she couldn't. She shook her head. "No, you're not wrong. But the time is ripe, too, and you know it. Things are going to blow up in Europe any day. The old Kaiser can't possibly last much longer, and his son's going to spit in France's eye. What'll happen then?"

  "Boom," Tom said solemnly. "I'm surprised the French have waited as long as they have, but Action Franзaise doesn't seem to have one clear voice at the top, the way the Freedom Party does."

  "No, they don't," Anne agreed. "But if they and the British and the Russians can put Germany in her place and give us even a little help against the USA, we'll do all right. If you don't think so, why are you wearing the uniform again?"

  "It's not for the Freedom Party. You can tell that to Jake Featherston's face next time you see him. I don't care," Tom said. "It's for the country. I'd fight for my country no matter who was in charge."

  Anne had no intention of telling the president any such thing, regardless of what Tom said. It wouldn't do her brother any good, and might do him a lot of harm. Tom didn't seem to understand how thoroughly politics had twined themselves around everything else in the CSA these days. If you said uncomplimentary things about the Freedom Party, you'd probably be thought disloyal to the Confederate States, too.

  Anne wondered if she ought to warn him. The only thing that held her back was the near certainty he wouldn't listen to her. Maybe he'd learn better when he got back on active duty. Or maybe he wouldn't, and he'd run his mouth once too often, and get cashiered and sent home.