Blood and iron ae-1

by Harry Turtledove

"That's about what I thought," Martin said. "You believe the papers, though, a lot of people like what they're saying. Stupid damn Rebs."

  "Stupid damn Rebs," Bauer agreed. "But if we'd lost the war, imagine how fouled up our politics would be. There'd be a bounty on Socialists now. You'd better believe there would- they'd be hunting us in the streets. And they'd go on electing Democrats president for the next fifty years. So maybe we shouldn't blame the Rebs-too much-for being stupid."

  "Hmp," was all Chester Martin said to that. He'd spent three years with the Confederates shooting at him. Hell, they hadn't just shot at him-they'd shot him. He had the Purple Heart to prove it, and the note of sympathy signed by Theodore Roosevelt, too. Even with the war almost three and a half years behind him, he wasn't inclined to feel charitable toward the former enemy.

  Bauer slapped him on the back. "Go on, get out of here. Go home. Go Christmas shopping. Go somewhere. I keep having to tell you that. You've got a case of the mopes, looks like to me. You won't do yourself any good till you get over 'em. You won't do the Party any good, either, so go on. Scram."

  Martin didn't argue with him. He buttoned his overcoat and headed out of the Socialist hall. The trolley stop was a couple of blocks away. His breath smoked around him. The one thing he envied the Confederate States was their mild winter weather. Summer in Virginia, on the other hand, was a pretty fair approximation of hell. Of course, summer in Toledo wasn't all that far removed from hell, either.

  Shops shiny with tinsel and bright with electric lights beckoned to people walking past them on the street, BIG SALE! signs in the window shouted. Some of them might even have meant it. But Martin had gone into more than a few shops, and had yet to see much in the way of price cutting. The signs were just a come-on, like the tinsel and the bright lights.

  He would have to get presents for his father and his mother and his sister. He wanted to get something for Albert Bauer, too, though Bauer was the least sentimental man he'd ever known off the battlefield. Maybe some shaving soap, he thought. That would be thoughtful and useful at the same time.

  "Shaving soap," he said several times. A woman walking past gave him an odd look. He didn't care, or not too much. Saying something out loud helped him remember it.

  Coins jingled in his trouser pocket: only a faint noise through the thick wool of his coat. He wasn't broke, as he had been through the labor strife after the war. With a Socialist administration, maybe there wouldn't be any more labor strife. That had been his hope as he'd made an X in the square beside the names of Upton Sinclair and Hosea Blackford. The capitalists had had everything their way for a long time. Now, he thought, it's labor's turn.

  He unbuttoned his coat long enough to grab a nickel. A bum came up to him while he waited for the trolley. The fellow whined for change. He stank of unwashed hide and stale beer. Martin knew he'd just buy another mug with a nickel, but tossed him the coin anyway. "Merry Christmas, pal." He dug another five cents out of his pocket.

  "God bless you, mister," the bum said. Martin waved impatiently, wanting him to get out of there before he regretted his own generosity. The bum had had practice at what he did. He faded away.

  Up rattled the trolley, almost fifteen minutes late. Martin grumbled as he threw his nickel in the fare box. He grumbled some more when he saw he'd have to stand for a while: the car was full, with a lot of passengers festooned with packages. He did the best he could, positioning himself next to a pretty girl who also had no place to sit. She glanced over toward him once, a look colder than the weather outside. When she left a few blocks later, he was more relieved than anything else.

  He eventually did land a seat for himself; more people got off than on as the trolley rolled up to Ottawa Hills. Not for the first time, he thought about renting a place of his own as he walked to the apartment he shared with his parents and sister. He could afford it-as long as the work stayed steady, he could afford it. But his paycheck helped his folks pay the rent here, and they'd carried him when he was out on strike, carried him even though they'd disagreed with his stand. He didn't have to do anything in a hurry.

  When he walked in the front door, his father was draping the Christmas tree with tinsel. A fresh, piney scent fought the usual odors of tobacco smoke and cooking. "That's a good one, Dad," Martin said. "You haven't found such a nice, round, plump one in a long time."

  "Haven't gone looking for nice, round, plump ones, not since I married your mother," Stephen Douglas Martin answered. Ignoring his son's half-scandalized snort, he went on, "I am pretty happy with it, though. Found it at a little lot round the corner; I jewed "em down to four bits for it."

  "That's a good price," Martin agreed. "You recall where you hid the star and the other ornaments after last Christmas?"

  "I didn't hide them," his father said with dignity. "I put them away safe." About every other year, he had to turn the apartment upside down because he'd put the decorations away so securely, he hadn't the faintest idea where they were.

  This time, though, he came up with them and gave his son a superior look that Chester did his best to ignore. They hung the ornaments together. "Are we going to have candles on the tree this year?" Chester asked.

  "Unless you really want 'em, I'd say no," Stephen Douglas Martin answered. "Every year, you read in the paper about some damn fool"-his eyes went toward the kitchen as he made sure Louisa Martin hadn't heard him swear-"who burns down his house and burns up his family on account of those things. I don't aim to be that kind of fool, thank you very much."

  "All right," Martin said. After bombs and barrels and shell fragments in the trenches, after cops and goons with pistols and clubs, candles struck him as a silly thing to worry about. But his father wasn't wrong; people and houses did go up in flames every Christmas. Martin supposed that, absent big fears, small ones pushed their way to the fore.

  Sue came in while they were still decorating. She scaled her broad-brimmed flowered hat across the room as if it were an aeroplane and said, "I get to put the star on top. After the day I had today, I've earned it."

  "What happened today?" Chester asked.

  "Everyone wanted everything typed at the same time, and it was all stupid," his sister answered. "And everyone yelled at me because I couldn't do sixteen different things at the same time. If half the people in the office would have thought for even a couple of seconds before they started piling stuff onto me, everything would have been fine. But throwing things at me and then yelling their heads off was easier, so they did that instead."

  She took the gilded glass star and impaled it on top of the Christmas tree. Then she glared at her brother and her father, defying them to tell her she had no business getting angry. Chester was not about to take his life in his hands. He said "Why don't you go get a bottle of Schmidt's out of the icebox?"

  Sue didn't usually drink beer. Tonight, she nodded briskly. "I'll do that. Thank you, Chester." Off toward the kitchen she went. Chester Martin grinned at Stephen Douglas Martin. He might have been trained as a soldier, but he'd just served the cause of peace.

  Scipio seldom saw snow. Because he seldom saw it, he enjoyed it when he did. So did everyone else in Augusta. Pickaninnies made snow angels and threw snowballs. So did their parents. So did their grandparents, some of whom had hair as white as that snow.

  Because of the clogged, slippery streets, he got to Erasmus' later than he should have, and with his hat askew on his head. More and more boys played football Yankee-style these days, which meant more of them threw the ball, which meant they had practice they used to good effect with snowballs.

  Erasmus' eyes glinted with amusement, but all he said was, "Mornin5, Xerxes. How you be today?"

  "Cold," Scipio answered. "This here nothin' but damnyankee weather. Far as I is concerned, it kin stay up there wid they."

  "Fish keep longer," Erasmus said. "Don't got to buy so much ice from that thief of an ice man for a couple days. Outside o' dat, I ain't gwine argue with you."

  Scipio had just sta
rted his morning sweeping when the first breakfast customer came in. Erasmus had found he made money serving breakfast, so he'd started. The customer shouted for hot coffee. Scipio didn't blame him. He had to pry himself away from the nice, warm stove to bring the fellow the steaming cup, and then the fried eggs and grits that followed.

  After pouring down several steaming cups and shoveling in his food, the black man got to his feet, stuck a hand in the pocket of his dungarees, and looked a question toward Scipio. Even if it was wordless, Scipio understood it. "A million and a half," he said.

  "Was only a million last week," the customer said with a sigh. He gave Scipio two crisp, new $1,000,000 banknotes, with Robert E. Lee's portrait on one side and a picture of Jefferson Davis taking the oath of office as provisional president in Montgomery on the other. Scipio handed him five $100,000 banknotes (older and more worn, because they'd been in circulation longer) for change. As he'd hoped, the customer left a couple of hundred thousand dollars' tip when he went on his way.

  "When was the last time you seen silver or gold money?" Erasmus asked, his voice wistful. "I ain't even seen no pennies in a hell of a long time."

  "Me neither," Scipio said. "Not since the war jus' over. Somebody put down a dime or a qua'ter, reckon I fall over. Somebody put down a Stonewall, I knows I fall over."

  "How much paper you reckon a Stonewall buy these days?" Erasmus' lips moved silently as he made his own calculation. "Somewheres around twenty, twenty-five million, I reckon. What you think?"

  "Sound about right," Scipio agreed. Erasmus had no formal education, but he was shrewd with figures. Scipio added, "Ain't bad fo'fi'dollars in gold."

  "Sure ain't," Erasmus said, and said no more. Scipio wouldn't have been the least bit surprised to find out his boss had a nice pile of Stonewalls hidden away somewhere. If he needed them, they'd come out. If times ever got better, so that money stopped stretching like India rubber, they'd come out then, too. Scipio wished he had his own pile.

  He wondered how many goldpieces Anne Colleton had these days. He was willing to bet she had a good many. She'd always been one to land on her feet. And, if the papers didn't lie, she'd been pumping money into the Freedom Party. That worried Scipio. His former boss didn't back losers. He'd seen as much, time and again. But if the Freedom Party was a winner, every black man and woman in the CSA lost. What the men in the white shirts and butternut trousers had already done in Augusta made that crystal clear.

  If it hadn't been for Bathsheba, he wouldn't have worried so much. He'd always been able to take care of himself. Even after the Congaree Socialist Republic collapsed in blood and fire, he'd taken care of himself. Taking care of somebody else, though, somebody he loved-that was different. It was harder, too: he didn't dare take risks for Bathsheba that he would have cheerfully taken for himself.

  Another Negro came in, asking for flapjacks and eggs. He wore a ribbon on his jacket. After a moment, Scipio recognized what it was: the ribbon for a Purple Heart. Pointing to it, he asked, "Where you git that?"

  "Up in Virginia," the man answered. "Some damnyankee shot me in the leg. I was damn lucky, let me tell you. All he did was blow off a chunk o' meat. Bullet didn't hit no bone or nothin', or I reckon I'd be walkin' around with a peg leg."

  Listening to somebody talk about how lucky he'd been to get shot struck Scipio as strange, but he'd heard white veterans go on the same way. He said, "So you fit the war and done everything the gummint want?" The customer nodded. Scipio hurried back to get his breakfast and bring it to him, then asked, "And now you is a citizen? Now you kin vote an' do like the buckra all kinds o'ways?"

  "Can't marry no white woman." The veteran shrugged. "Don't want to marry no white woman-like the colored gal I got. But yeah," he went on with quiet pride, "I's a citizen." He reached into his pocket and displayed an elaborately printed form attesting to his service in the war. "I carry this here 'stead of a passbook."

  Scipio hadn't thought about the aspect of citizenship. He was deeply and sincerely jealous of the veteran, who enjoyed a liberty he was unlikely ever to know. "Freedom Party give you trouble?" he inquired. He didn't know why he asked the question: was he trying to ease his own mind about what the Freedom Party could do, or was he hoping to make the veteran feel bad in spite of the privilege he'd earned?

  The man's mouth tightened. His eyes narrowed. A vertical groove appeared between them, and other lines by the edges of his lips. 'Them bastards," he said quietly. "You know any niggers don't get trouble from them?"

  "Sure enough don't," Scipio answered. "I was hopin' you did."

  "Ain't none." The Negro veteran spoke with assurance. "Ain't nothin' we can do about it, neither, nothin' I can see. Yeah, I'm a citizen. I punch one o' them sons o' bitches for callin' me names or givin' me some other kind o' hard time, what happen then? White folks' jury send me to jail for about twenty years. That Freedom Party man kick me in the balls, what happen then? White folks'jury say he didn't do nothin' wrong." He didn't try to hide his bitterness.

  "But you kin vote against they," Scipio said. "Most black folks can't do nothin' a-tall."

  "I can vote." The veteran nodded. "I went an' did it last election, an' I'll do it again come November. But so what? So what, God damn it? Ain't but one o' me, an' all them Freedom Party white folks. Even if all the niggers in the country could vote, wouldn't be enough of us. White folks can do what they want, near enough. Why shouldn't they let me vote? They can afford it."

  He got up, laid two million dollars on the table, and stamped out without waiting for change.

  "Hope you didn't ride Antiochus so hard, he don't come back," Erasmus said. "That ain't good business."

  "Sorry," Scipio answered, which was true in the business sense if in no other. "You hear what he say?" He waited for Erasmus to nod, then went on, "You still reckon we ain't got nothin' to fear from no Freedom Party?"

  Erasmus nodded again. "I keeps tellin' you an' tellin' you, the white man ain't gwine do the work hisself If he ain't gwine do it hisself, he ain't gwine do us no harm-or no worse'n usual, anyways. You show me them Freedom Party fellas out in the cotton fields at pickin' time, then I commence to worry. Till then-" He shook his head.

  Scipio wished he could take matters in stride the way his boss did. Rationally, everything Erasmus said made sense. That should have sufficed for Scipio, himself a man rational by inclination and education both. It should have, but it didn't.

  The past few years had been hard on rationality. If the Negro uprising of 1915 hadn't been an exercise in romanticism, he didn't know what was. The Reds hadn't had a chance, but they'd risen anyhow. He didn't think the Freedom Party had a chance of restoring the status quo ante bellum, either. That didn't stop whites from flocking to its banners. Most whites liked the way things had been before the war just fine.

  And there were, as the Negro veteran had said, a lot of whites. If they got behind the Freedom Party, Jake Featherston and his pals might win. How far could they turn back the clock? Finding out would be as big a romantic folly as the Red uprising. But nothing had stopped Cassius and the other Red leaders, and likely nothing would stop Featherston, either.

  Scipio sighed. "Life ain't easy, and at the end you can't do nothin' but up and die. Don't seem right."

  Erasmus busied himself making a fresh pot of coffee. When he was through, he said, "So tell me then, you gwine kiss your lady friend good-bye? You gwine lay in bed by your lonesome, waitin' for to drop dead?"

  " 'Course not," Scipio said angrily. Then he stopped and stared at Erasmus. The fry cook had pierced his gloomy pretensions as neatly as any white man with a fancy degree in philosophy might have done-and with a tenth, or more likely a hundredth, as many words. Instead of angry, Scipio felt foolish, to say nothing of sheepish. "Got to get on with your reg'lar 'fairs," he mumbled.

  "That there make a deal more sense'n what you was spoutin' a minute ago, don't you reckon?" Erasmus demanded.

  "Yes, suh," Scipio said. So far as he could recall, he'
d never called a black man sir before in his life. Whites got the title because they had the whip hand in the CSA. He gave it to Erasmus because-because he deserves it, was the thought that ran through Scipio's mind.

  Erasmus noticed, too. His head whipped around sharply. Scipio would have bet several million dollars-maybe even a Stonewall- nobody'd ever called him sir before that moment, either. "Just get back to work, will you?" he said, his voice gruff. He didn't know how to respond to being treated with respect.

  Why should he? Scipio thought. It's altogether likely no one has ever shown him any With that, Scipio came closer to understanding why the Reds had rebelled against the Confederate government than he ever had before. Was being treated like a human being worth fighting and dying for? Maybe it was.

  What do I know about being treated like a human being? he thought. / was only a butler He didn't think in the dialect of the Congaree, but in the precise, formal English he'd had drilled into him. Sometimes that helped him: it gave him a wider, more detailed map for his world than he would have had if he'd gone to the cotton fields. Sometimes it left him neither fish nor fowl. And sometimes it made him angry at what the Colletons had done to his mind, to his life. They hadn't done it for his sake, either. They hadn't cared at all about him, except as a thing. They'd done it for their own convenience.

  "Just got to get through the day and not worry about nothin' you can't change anyways," Erasmus said. Scipio nodded. The fry cook was pursuing the thought he'd had a little before. But Scipio's thought had veered in a different direction. How can a black man make life worth living in the Confederate States? he wondered. The question was easy to ask. Finding an answer, though…

  "Here is the latest report, sir." Lieutenant Colonel Abner Dow-ling set the document on General Custer's desk.

  "Well, let's have a look at it." The electric lights in the overhead fixture glittered off Custer's reading glasses as he picked up the report and started to go through it. Abner Dowling waited for the explosion he guessed would not be long in coming. He was right. The commander of U.S. forces in Canada slammed the typewritten sheets on the desk. "Poppycock!" he shouted. "Twaddle! Harebrained idiocy! Who was the idiot who produced this nonsense?"