Blood and iron ae-1

by Harry Turtledove

  The apartment house was in the near northwestern part of town, west of the Des Moines River and north of the Raccoon. It was as close as Des Moines came to having a colored district, although only a little more than a thousand Negroes were hardly enough to constitute a real district in a city of over a hundred thousand. The Drivers shared their floor with two other black families and one white; the proprietor of a Chinese laundry lived upstairs. Nobody was rich, not in that neighborhood. People got by, though. As far as Cincinnatus could tell, they got by rather better than they had in Covington.

  "I want to go to school, Pa," Achilles yelled to Cincinnatus when he came home worn from a day's hauling one evening. "Some of my friends go to school. I want to go to school, too."

  "You'll go to school in the fall," his father told him. "You turn six then. We'll put you in this kindergarten they have here."

  In Covington, white children had kindergartens. Black children hadn't had any formal schooling till the USA took Kentucky away from the CSA. Cincinnatus was unusual in his generation of Negroes in the Confederate States in being able to read and write; he'd always had a restless itch to know. Having that kind of itch was dangerous in a country where, up until not long before he was born, it had been not merely difficult but illegal for blacks to learn their letters.

  "What can I get for you, dear?" Elizabeth asked, coming out of the kitchen. "How did it go today?"

  "Got plenty of hauling business," Cincinnatus answered. "Folks was right-the Des Moines runs high in the springtime, even more so than the Ohio does, and boats get up here that can't any other time of year. Won't have so much to do in the summertime. Last summer, when we got here, I wondered for a while if we was goin' to starve."

  "We made it." Elizabeth's voice was warm with pride.

  "Sure enough did," Cincinnatus agreed. "I want to see if we can get ourselves a little bit ahead of things while the river's high. Always good to have some money socked away you don't have to spend right now."

  "Amen," Elizabeth said, as if he'd been a preacher making a point in the pulpit.

  "Amen," Achilles echoed; he liked going to church of a Sunday morning.

  Cincinnatus smiled at his son. Then he looked back to his wife. "What I'd like me right now is a bottle of beer. I knew Iowa was a dry state, but I didn't reckon folks here'd take it so serious. Down in Kentucky, folks always preached against the demon rum, but that didn't stop 'em from drinkin' whiskey. Didn't even hardly slow 'em down none. People round these parts mean it."

  "Most of 'em do, uh-huh." Elizabeth nodded. Her eyes sparkled-or maybe it was a trick of the sun-bright electric bulb above her head. She turned and went back into the kitchen. Her skirt swirled around her, giving Cincinnatus a glimpse of her trim ankles. Some of the white women in Des Moines were wearing skirts well above the ankle-scandalously short, as far as he was concerned. He would have something to say if Elizabeth ever wanted to try that style.

  She opened the icebox, then came back into the living room. In her hand was a tall glass of golden liquid with a creamy white head, on her face a look of triumph. Cincinnatus stared at the beer. "Where'd you get that?"

  "Chinaman upstairs makes it," Elizabeth answered.

  "I'll be." He shook his head in wonder. "I didn't even know Chinamen drank beer, let alone made it." He took the glass from Elizabeth, raised it to his mouth, and cautiously sipped. He smacked his lips, pondering, then nodded. "It ain't great beer, but it's beer, sure enough."

  "I know." Now Elizabeth's eyes definitely twinkled. "Had me some before I'd pay the Chinaman for it. Don't drink that all up now-why don't you bring it to the table with you? Beef stew's just about ready."

  Spit jumped into Cincinnatus' mouth. "I'll do that." Beef was cheap here, and plentiful, too, compared to what things were like in Kentucky. He ate his fill without worrying about whether he'd go broke on account of such lavish meals. He still ate a lot of pork, but now more because he liked it than because he couldn't afford anything better.

  After supper, while Elizabeth washed dishes, Cincinnatus got out a reader and went to work with Achilles. The boy had known for some time the alphabet and the sounds the letters made; up till just a couple of weeks before, he'd had trouble-trouble often to the point of tears-combining the sounds of the letters into words. Cincinnatus, who had learned to read a good many years later in life, vividly remembered that himself.

  Now, though, Achilles had the key. "Ban," he read. "Can. Dan. Fan. Man. Pan. Ran. Tan. Bat. Cat. Fat. Hat. Mat. Pat. Rat. Sat. Den. Fen… What's a fen, Pa?"

  "Dunno. Let's find out." Cincinnatus had a dictionary. Because of the catch-as-catch-can way he'd become literate, his vocabulary had holes. He used the dictionary to fill them. Riffling through it now, he answered, "A fen is like a swamp. Go on, Achilles. You're doin' swell."

  "Hen. Men. Pen. Ten. Wen." That one made the dictionary open again, as dx?. Achilles beamed. "I can read, Pa!"

  "You're gettin' there," Cincinnatus agreed. "We'll keep at it." He figured Achilles would have to work twice as hard at school to get half the respect he deserved. That was what life handed you along with a black skin. People would call Achilles a damn nigger, sure as the sun would come up tomorrow. But nobody would call Achilles a damn dumb nigger, not if Cincinnatus had anything to do with it.

  "I want to read stories like the ones you read to me," Achilles said.

  "You're gettin' there," Cincinnatus said again. "Now let's work on this a little while longer, and then you'll get to bed." Achilles liked learning to read any time. Faced with the choice between trying to read some more and going to bed, he would have read till four in the morning had his father let him. Cincinnatus didn't let him, because he wanted-and needed-to get some sleep himself. Achilles squawked, but was soon breathing heavily; when he did yield to sleep, he yielded deeply and completely.

  So did Cincinnatus, because he was very tired. He slept through the alarm clock; Elizabeth had to shake him awake. A couple of cups of coffee and some scrambled eggs got him moving. He jammed a cloth cap onto his head kissed Elizabeth, and went downstairs to fire up the Duryea.

  He felt more affection for the truck than he ever had down in Covington. It had run very well since the overhaul he'd given it before moving to Iowa. He wished he'd overhauled it sooner; it would have served him better in Kentucky. He climbed in and drove to the wharves along the Des Moines.

  At the high-water season, steamboats were tied up at almost all the piers. Some of the haulers who took their goods to merchants and warehouses were black like him; most were white. Despite his color, he had no trouble getting work. The sheer volume of unloading had something to do with that. But he'd also established a reputation for dependability. He hoped that would give him a boost when the river went down and jobs grew scarcer.

  After hauling dry goods to several general stores, a cargo of plates and bowls to a china shop, and a truckful of reams of paper to the State Capitol over on the east side of the Des Moines, he came back to the wharves to eat his dinner. A couple of other colored drivers, Joe Sims and Pete Dunnett, pulled their trucks up alongside of his within five minutes of each other. They carried their dinner pails over to the bench where he was eating.

  "Business is bully," said Sims, a stocky, very black man in his mid-forties. "Here's hoping it lasts."

  Dunnett was thinner, young, and paler; he might have had a quarter portion of white blood in his veins. "That's right," he said. He and Sims both spoke with an accent Cincinnatus found peculiar. It had some of the rhythms of the black speech with which he was familiar, but only some. It was also heavily tinted by the sharp, nasal, almost braying speech of white Iowans. Because the Negroes of Des Moines were such a small minority, the white sea around them diluted their dialect.

  Cincinnatus said, "Sure enough would be good if it did. Ain't nothin' wrong with money, nothin' a-tall."

  Dunnett and Joe Sims looked at each other. After a moment, Sims said, "First time we heard you talk, Cincinnatus, we thought you w
ere a dumb nigger, you lay on that ain 't stuff so thick. We know better now, but you still talk the way my great-grandpa did."

  "I talk like I talk. Can't hardly help it," Cincinnatus said with a shrug. In Covington, his accent had passed for a mild one among Negroes.

  Pete Dunnett added, "That fancy handle you've got didn't help, either."

  "What's wrong with my name?" Now Cincinnatus really was peeved. "When I came up here and found out all the U.S. niggers had names like white folks, I reckoned that was like oatmeal without sugar or salt or butter or milk or nothin'."

  TVI rather have me a boring name than sound like I was named after a city," Dunnett retorted.

  "The city's named after me, not the other way round," Cincinnatus said. "I mean, the city and me both got named for the same fellow from back in ancient days."

  "Still sounds funny," Joe Sims said. "And what's your kid's name?"

  "Achilles," Cincinnatus said. "He was a hero." He paused a little while in thought, then went on, "You niggers up here in the USA, they let you-all have last names. They let you have plenty of stuff, too-down in Covington, you-all'd be a couple of really rich niggers. When it was the Confederate States down there, most of us hardly had nothin' but our one name. We had to pack everything we could into it."

  Sims and Dunnett glanced at each other again. "We've had hard times, too," Dunnett said. He sounded a little defensive. Cincinnatus didn't answer. Dunnett had reason to sound defensive. White men had patrolled the Ohio to keep blacks from the Confederate States out of the USA. Nobody had ever needed to patrol the Ohio to keep blacks from the United States out of the CSA. Blacks in the USA knew perfectly well the distance between the frying pan and the fire.

  Sam Carsten would sooner not have had the new stripe on his sleeve that showed he was a petty officer second class. He hadn't lost his ambition-far from it. But he'd earned that stripe by doing a good job as head of his gun crew after Willie Moore got killed. It had blood on it, as far as he was concerned.

  The USS Remembrance steamed west across the Atlantic toward Boston harbor. Sam didn't have to worry about taking shellfire here. He didn't have to worry about renegade Confederate submersibles, either. What he'd learned about the C.S. boat that had sunk the U.S. destroyer after the war was over filled him with rage. Under that rage lay terror. A Rebel boat could have stalked his old battleship, the USS Dakota, just as readily.

  A deck hand jerked the prop on a Wright fighting scout. The two-decker's engine thundered to life. The prop blurred into invisibility. The Remembrancers steam catapult hurled the fighting scout into the sky.

  "Bully," Sam said softly. Launching aeroplanes had fascinated him even aboard the Dakota. The fascination had changed to urgency when land-based aeroplanes bombed his battleship off the Argentine coast. He'd imagined air power on the sea then. He lived it now, and still found it awe-inspiring.

  Behind him, a dry voice spoke: "I wonder how long we'll be able to keep them in the air."

  Sam turned. If Commander Grady had wanted to stick a KICK ME sign on him, he stood close enough to do it. "What do you mean, sir?" Sam asked, thinking he knew and hoping he was wrong.

  "How much longer will we be able to keep them in the air?" the gunnery officer repeated. "You're not stupid, Carsten. You understand what I mean. Will the Socialists put enough money into the Navy to keep this ship operating? Right now, your guess is as good as mine."

  "Yes, sir," Sam said dully. His guess was that the Socialists would shut down as much as they could. Except when the war dragged some into the Navy, Socialists were thinly scattered aboard warships: almost as thinly scattered as colored people in the USA. He didn't know a great deal about what Socialist politicians thought, except that they didn't think much of the Navy or the Army.

  He looked at Commander Grady. Grady had always been as proud of the Remembrance as if he'd designed her himself. Now, looking from the flight deck to the conning tower, his eyes were dull, all but hopeless: the eyes of a man who expected a loved one to die. Sighing, he said, "It was a good idea, anyhow. It still is a good idea."

  "It sure as hell is, sir," Carsten said hotly. "It's a swell idea, and anybody who can't see that is a damn fool."

  "Lot of damn fools running around loose in the world," Grady said. "Some of them wear fancy uniforms. Some of them wear expensive suits and get elected to Congress or elected president. Those fools get to tell the ones in the fancy uniforms what to do."

  "And the ones in the fancy uniforms get to tell us what to do." Sam's laugh was harsh as salt spray. "It's the Navy way." He couldn't think of another officer to whom he would have said such a thing. Grady and he had been through a lot together.

  "Damn it," Grady said in a low, furious voice, "we proved what this ship can do. We proved it, but will we get any credit for it?"

  "No way to tell about that, sir," Carsten answered, "but I wouldn't bet anything I cared to lose on it."

  "Neither would I," Grady said. "But I tell you this: we did show what the Remembrance can do. Congress may not be watching. President Upton goddamn Sinclair may not be watching. You can bet, though, the German High Seas Fleet was watching. The Royal Navy was watching. And if the Japs weren't watching, too, I'd be amazed. Plenty of countries are going to have squadrons of aeroplane carriers ten years from now. I hope to God we're one of them." Before Sam could say anything to that, Grady wheeled and rapidly strode away.

  Carsten tried to figure out where he'd be ten years down the line. Likeliest, he supposed, was chief petty officer in charge of a gun crew. He could easily see himself turning into Hiram Kidde or Willie Moore. He'd just have to follow the path of least resistance.

  If he wanted anything more, he'd have to work harder for it. Mustangs didn't grow on trees. And, if he aimed at becoming an officer, he'd have to get lucky, too. He wondered how much he really wanted that kind of luck. What was good for him might turn out to be anything but good for other people. He thought of Moore again, Moore writhing on the floor with his belly torn open.

  The steam catapult hissed like a million snakes, hurling another fighting scout into the air. The crew of the Remembrance kept honing their skills. They were, at the moment, the best in the world at what they did, whether Congress appreciated it or not. They were also, at the moment, the only ones in the world who did what they did. Sam wondered how long that would last. He remembered the German sailors in Dublin harbor staring and staring at the aeroplane carrier. Kaiser Bill's boys built better aeroplanes than the USA did; the Wright two-deckers were Al-batros copies. Could the Germans build better aeroplane carriers, too?

  One of the Wright machines roared low over the flight deck. Had it shot up the deck, Sam would not have cared to be standing there. On the other hand, the flight deck bristled with machine guns and one-pounders. Had that fighting scout been painted with the Stars and Bars instead of the U.S. eagle in front of crossed swords, it would have got a warm welcome.

  It zoomed above the Remembrance again, this time even lower and upside down. A couple of the sailors on deck saluted the pilot with upraised middle fingers. Sam didn't, but he felt like it. He hadn't had a whole lot to do with the pilots aboard the aeroplane carrier: they were officers, and pretty much kept to themselves. But what he had seen made him wonder if their marbles had spilled out of their ears as they flew, because they didn't seem to give two whoops in hell whether they lived or died.

  Staring after the fighting scout after it finally rolled back to right side up, Sam decided that made a certain amount of sense. The rickety contraptions the pilots flew had a habit of falling out of the sky by themselves. The pilots had to take them into harm's way, and had to land them on the rolling, pitching deck of a warship. You probably needed to be crazy to want to do any of that. And, if you weren't crazy when you started doing it, you'd get that way after a while.

  As if to prove the point, the pilot of the other fighting scout dove out of the sky on the Remembrance like a sparrowhawk swooping on a field mouse. In an impossibly
short time, the aeroplane swelled from buzzing speck to roaring monster. It seemed to be heading straight for Sam. He wanted to dig a hole in the deck, dive in, and then pull the planking and steel over himself: an armored blanket to keep him safe and warm. A couple of sailors started to run. Their comrades screamed curses at them. He understood why, but had to work to hold his own feet still.

  At the last possible instant, the Wright two-decker pulled out of the dive. Sam couldn't help ducking; he thought one wheel of the landing gear would clip him. It wasn't quite so close as that, but he did have to snatch at his cap to keep it from blowing off his head and perhaps into the sea. Had it gone into the drink, the price of a new one would have come out of his pay.

  The two-decker almost went into the drink, too, off to port of the Remembrance. Carsten would have sworn its lowest point was lower than the aeroplane carrier's deck. The landing gear didn't quite touch the wavetops, but a flying fish might have leaped into the cockpit. Then the Wright started to gain altitude again, much more slowly than it had shed it.

  "That bastard's nuts," somebody said, shaken respect in his voice.

  "That bastard's nuts almost got cut off him," somebody else said, which was also true, and made everybody who heard it laugh to boot.

  A fellow with bright-colored semaphore paddles strode out near the edge of the deck to guide the aeroplanes in to the controlled crash that constituted a landing aboard ship. His wigwagged signals urged the pilot of the first fighting scout up a little, to starboard, up a little more… Sam had learned to read the wigwags, just as he'd picked up Morse as a kid.

  Smoke spurted from the solid rubber tires as they slammed against the deck. The hook under the fuselage caught a cable. The aeroplane jerked to a halt. Watching it, Carsten understood why the fighting scouts had needed strengthening before they came aboard the Remembrance.

  As the pilot took off his goggles and climbed out of the aeroplane, his face bore an enormous grin. What was he thinking? Lived through it again, probably. Sailors hauled the two-decker out of the way so the other fighting scout could land.