The Center Cannot Hold ae-2

by Harry Turtledove

  How children were begotten was no mystery to Mary, as it could be no mystery to anyone who'd grown up on a farm. Why anyone would want to have anything to do with the process was a different question. To let a man do that with her, to her… She shook her head. The mere idea was repulsive. But people did it. That was what being married was about. She knew that, too. If people didn't do it, after a while there wouldn't be any more people.

  Sometimes that didn't seem such a bad idea.

  Her mother went on, "A couple of knotholes have popped out of the wood in the barn. I want you to nail wood over them when you get the chance, so the inside will stay warmer in winter. The sooner you do it, the sooner we don't have to worry about it any more."

  "I'll take care of it," Mary promised. "I've noticed 'em, too, especially the one that came out right behind that old wagon wheel."

  "Yes, that's the biggest one," Maude McGregor agreed. "A good patch there will keep a lot of warm air from leaking out when the weather turns cold again-and it will."

  "I know," Mary said. No one who'd lived in Manitoba any time from September to April could help knowing.

  When she went out to the barn the next morning, she took care of the livestock first. That had to be done, and done every day. As soon as she'd finished, she went over to her father's work bench. She cut a square off a flat board, then grabbed the wood, a hammer, and some nails and went to get at the knot that had turned into a knothole.

  It was right behind that wagon wheel. She had to put down the tools and the patch to wrestle the wheel out of the way. "Miserable thing," she muttered, or perhaps something a little stronger than that. Why the devil hadn't her father got rid of it? Come to that, why hadn't she or her mother in the years since her father died? She had no good answer except that there had always been more important things to do.

  Once she'd shifted the wheel, she picked up the square of wood and the hammer and nails and advanced on the knothole. As she took the next to last step, she frowned. It didn't sound right-she'd never known that reverberation anywhere else in the barn. It didn't feel quite right underfoot, either. Ground had no business giving slightly, as it did here. It almost felt as if…

  Mary bent down to look more closely at where she'd been standing. It just looked like dirt, with straw scattered over it. But when she scraped at it with her hand, she didn't have to dig far at all before her fingers found a board-undoubtedly, the board she'd trodden on after moving the broken wagon wheel.

  What's that doing there? she wondered. Almost of their own accord, her fingers kept searching till they found the edge of the board. She pulled up. Dirt slid from the board as she raised it.

  Under it was a sharp-edged hollow dug into the soil. And in that hollow… Mary's eyes got big and round. In that hollow rested sticks of dynamite and blasting caps and lengths of fuse and some highly specialized tools. "At last," she whispered. She'd finally found her father's bomb-making gear.

  The first thing she imagined was going into Rosenfeld, as Arthur McGregor had done at the end of the Great War, and blowing as many Americans as she could sky-high. She didn't worry about getting caught. If it meant more revenge on the USA, she would gladly pay the price. The real problem was, she didn't know enough about explosives to make a bomb that had any real chance of doing what she wanted it to do.

  I can learn, she thought. It can't be too hard. I just have to be careful. I'm sure I can figure it out without killing myself while I'm doing it.

  "Thank you, Pa," Mary said. "I'm sorry you had to stop. I'm even sorrier you didn't get General Custer. But the fight's not done. The fight won't be done till Canada's free again."

  She looked toward that old, broken wagon wheel. Suddenly, a wide smile flashed across her face. Now she understood why her father had never repaired it or got rid of it. It perfectly concealed his tools and explosives. Not one of the Yankee soldiers who'd searched this barn-and there had been a lot of them, for they'd suspected much more than they could ever prove-had thought to move it and see what lay underneath. She wouldn't have thought of it, either, if she hadn't had to shift the wheel for an altogether different reason.

  She wondered if she could find anyone in the sputtering Canadian resistance movement who could teach her about making bombs. Then, almost as soon as the thought occurred to her, she shook her head. Her father had gone his own way in fighting the Americans, which meant no one had betrayed him. No one could betray him if no one knew what he was doing.

  People told a bitter joke: when three people sit down to conspire, one is a fool and the other two American spies. That would have been funnier had it not held so painfully much truth. More than once, the Rosenfeld Register had exulted about plots that failed because one member or another gave them away to the Yankees.

  Mary McGregor nodded to herself. Whatever I do, I'll do it alone. That's how Pa did it. He'd still be blowing them up if he hadn't had bad luck. It's my turn now. I'll be as careful as he was, or even more so. Nobody will give me away, and I won't give myself away, either.

  Some people said even the big Canadian uprising of a few years before had been betrayed to the Americans before it broke out, that they'd been on the alert because of that. Mary had even heard some people with reputations as patriots had turned traitor because they'd fallen in love with invaders from the south.

  She didn't want to believe that. She had trouble imagining any proper Canadian falling in love with a Yankee. The Americans had ravished the country. Wouldn't they be ravishing anyone in it who had anything to do with them? That was how it seemed to Mary. As far as she was concerned, nobody who'd betrayed the uprising deserved to live.

  "Yes, that's what I'll do," she said, as if someone had suggested it to her. Getting rid of traitors was the best way she could think of to remind the whole country that going along with the occupation had a price.

  She wanted to go out and start planting bombs that very morning. She knew some names. She was sure she could learn others without much trouble. But she checked herself. You were going to be careful, remember? After nodding, she patched the knothole that had led to her discovery. Then she carefully concealed the hole in the ground once more, replacing the board, covering it with dirt and straw, and putting the old wagon wheel back where it belonged. When she was done, she looked hard at the ground and did a little more smoothing. Satisfied at last, she nodded and went on to cover up the other knots that had come out of the planking.

  "Took you long enough," her mother said when Mary came into the farmhouse. "I didn't think it was that hard a job."

  "Sorry, Ma." Mary had known from the minute she lifted the edge of the board and saw what lay beneath it that she couldn't tell her mother about it. What would Maude McGregor do? Pitch a fit and tell her to leave the stuff alone. She was as sure of that as she was of her own name. She was also sure she wouldn't leave the stuff alone, no matter what her mother told her to do.

  "Sorry?" Her mother shook her head. "Don't you think you have enough other things to take care of? What were you doing, playing with the chicks? You haven't done that since you were a little girl."

  "I know, but I was looking at them, and they looked so cute-and they turn into stupid, boring old hens so fast. I wanted to have some fun with them while I could. They act so silly." Mary seized on the explanation with both hands. She didn't like to lie to her mother, but preferred that to telling the truth here.

  "Can't afford to get sentimental about 'em," her mother said. "They'll go into the pot when they stop giving enough eggs to be worth their keep. Nothing like a good chicken stew on a cold winter night."

  "I know that, too, Ma." Mary didn't want to say anything to stir her mother up or make her start asking questions. Agreeing with everything Maude McGregor said was also liable to make her mother wonder, but not in any dangerous way.

  Or so Mary thought, till her mother asked, "Are you all right, dear?"

  Mary thought that over. After a couple of seconds, she nodded. "I'm swell, Ma. I'm the best I'
ve been for a long time, matter of fact." Her mother gave her a quizzical look, but not of the sort to make her worry. No, she didn't worry at all. Everything was going to be fine now. She could feel it.

  T he Remembrance sailed west through the Straits of Florida, out of Nassau in the Bahamas-the formerly British Bahamas, surrendered to the USA after the Great War-bound for Puerto Limon on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica. The sun stood tropically high in the sky. The day was hot and bright and perfect… perfect, that is, for almost everybody aboard the aeroplane carrier except Sam Carsten.

  No matter how hot and muggy it got, Sam had to keep his cap on and to jam it down as far down over his eyes as he could. A lot of officers went around in their shirtsleeves. He didn't; he left on his white summer jacket, to protect his arms as well as he could.

  His ears, his nose (especially his nose), and the backs of his hands were snowy white with zinc-oxide ointment. Even so, every square inch of flesh he exposed to the sun was red and peeling or blistered. He hated weather like this, hated it where most men reveled in it.

  Like most men, Commander Martin van der Waal tanned readily. Oh, he'd burn if he did something stupid, but even that would only last till he stayed out enough to get his hide acclimated to the sun. The torpedo-defense specialist looked at Sam with wry sympathy. "You'd sooner be patrolling somewhere between Greenland and Iceland, wouldn't you?" he said.

  "Now that you mention it, sir-yes," Carsten answered.

  "Sorry about that," van der Waal said. "They've got somebody else keeping an eye on the Royal Navy up there. We get to show the flag in what used to be a Confederate lake."

  "Not quite enough little specks of land in the Florida Straits to let the CSA claim this as territorial water and make us go the long way round," Sam said.

  "We would have had to before the war," his superior said. "The Confederates thought they were little tin gods then. Now… Now I don't care if they build themselves a bridge from Key West to Habana. We'll sail right under it, by God, and thumb our noses as we go by."

  "Yeah." Carsten smiled and nodded, liking the picture.

  Down at the Remembrance 's stern, a sailor spun an aeroplane's prop. The engine roared to noisy life. With a push from the steam catapult, the machine taxied along the carrier's flight deck, descended for a split second as it went off the end, and then gained altitude and buzzed away. Another followed, and another, and another.

  Sam said, "Of course it'll be unofficial when they look over what the Confederates are up to in south Florida and Cuba." He winked. "Of course it will."

  Commander van der Waal chuckled. "Yeah, and rain makes applesauce."

  But two could play at that game. Before long, a biplane came down from Florida and began flying lazy circles above the Remembrance. Not caring for the company, the aeroplane carrier's commander ordered a couple of fighting scouts aloft to look over the newcomer and, if need be, to warn him off. Sam happened to be going by the wireless shack when one of the U.S. pilots said, "The Confederate says he's just a civilian. His machine's got Confederate Citrus Company painted on the side. He's out for a stroll, you might say."

  What the officer inside the wireless center said meant, Yeah, and rain makes applesauce, but was a good deal more pungently phrased. The officer went on, "Tell the son of a bitch he can goddamn well go strolling somewhere else, or maybe he'll go swimming instead."

  "Yes, sir," the pilot answered. Carsten lingered in the corridor to hear what happened next. After half a minute or so, the pilot came back on the air: "Sir, he says if we want an international incident from shooting down an unarmed civilian pilot in international waters, we can have one."

  The officer in the wireless center expended more bad language. At last, he said, "I'd better talk to the old man about that one." He might have wanted to order the Confederate aeroplane knocked out of the sky, but he didn't have the nerve to do it without approval from on high. Carsten wouldn't have, either.

  Maybe the skipper of the Remembrance used some blue language of his own. Whether he did or not, that CONFEDERATE CITRUS COMPANY aeroplane flew above the carrier for the next hour and a half. Nobody fired a shot at it. The pilot finally ran low on fuel or got bored or found some other reason to fly back off toward the north.

  In the officers' galley at supper that evening, Sam said, "I bet they're developing that bastard's photographs right now."

  "Probably," a lieutenant, junior grade, agreed. "Fat lot of good they can do with 'em, though. Maybe they've built a few submersibles without our noticing, and maybe than can keep 'em hidden from us, too-"

  "Especially since the Socialists aren't spending the money on inspections that the Democrats did," a lieutenant commander put in.

  "Yes, sir," the j.g. said. "But there's no way in hell they could build themselves an aeroplane carrier on the sly. That's too big a secret to keep. Besides, they haven't got the aeroplanes to put aboard it."

  "We hope they don't," Sam said. "For all we know, they're all labeled Confederate Citrus Company right now."

  That produced a few laughs and a few curses. The lieutenant commander said, "That machine had no guns. The pilots checked, first thing."

  "Yes, sir," Sam said. "But how long would they need to convert the type to something they could use in combat?"

  Nobody had anything resembling an answer for him. The lieutenant commander said, "That's something we ought to find out about. Maybe more of these fruit-company bastards will come look us over before too long. If they do, we'll look them over, too." He sighed. "I don't know how much good that will do us, not the way things are in Philadelphia these days, but we do have to make the effort."

  By the next morning, though, they'd left the Straits and even Cuba behind. No more aeroplanes came out from the CSA to inspect them. Carsten was sure that didn't mean nobody was keeping an eye on them. Lots of little fishing boats, some Confederate, others Mexican, bobbed in the Gulf of Mexico. How many of them had wireless sets? How many of those sets were sending reports to, say, the Confederate Naval Academy at Mobile, or to New Orleans? He didn't know, but he had his suspicions.

  He also had suspicions of another sort. Whenever he came up onto the flight deck, he kept staring out into the blue, blue waters of the Gulf. "What are you doing?" Commander van der Waal asked. "Looking for periscopes?"

  "Yes, sir," Sam answered, altogether seriously.

  Van der Waal stared. "Do you really think the Confederates would try to sink us?"

  "No, sir," Sam said. "I think they'd have to be crazy to try that. But if they've got any submersibles, what better way to train their crews than by stalking a real, live aeroplane carrier?"

  His superior pondered that, then nodded. "Good point, Carsten. Let's see what we can do about it. Maybe we ought to get some training in, too."

  Before long, the Remembrance shut down her engines and drifted to a stop. Sam knew what that meant: she was giving her hydrophone operators the best chance she could to pick up the sounds of submarines moving on their electric engines somewhere under the sea.

  What will we do if we hear one? Carsten wondered. The carrier couldn't start lobbing depth charges into the Gulf of Mexico. That would be an act of war, no less than if one of the hypothetical subs launched a torpedo at her. We could report it to Philadelphia. How much good would that do? Sam didn't know. But the Confederate States couldn't claim they had no submersibles if the Remembrance found one.

  Or could they? Maybe they'd claim the boat belonged to the Empire of Mexico. Sam doubted the Mexicans could build such boats on their own, or man them if they did, but how could you know for sure? You couldn't. Subs under the sea were hard to find and even harder to identify; they didn't come with license plates, the way motorcars did.

  Nobody ever officially said whether the hydrophone operators found anything. Sam did get a letter of commendation in his service jacket for "enhancing the Remembrance 's readiness against surprise attack." He drew his own conclusions from that. He also kept his mouth shut about
them. Sometimes advertising you'd done something smart was a good idea. Sometimes it was anything but.

  When they neared the Central American coast, a tiny gunboat flying the blue-and-white Costa Rican flag came out of Puerto Limon to greet the Remembrance. An officer at the bow hailed her through a megaphone. He looked just the way Sam had thought a Costa Rican would look, and spoke English with a Spanish accent. The gunboat, which might have been a toy alongside the aeroplane carrier, got out of the way in a hurry so the elephantine ship could advance.

  Puerto Limon itself turned out to be very different from what Carsten had expected. He'd come to ports in Latin America before. He'd figured the people here would be like the officer: swarthy, most of them of mixed white and Indian blood, and Spanish-speaking. Instead, most of them turned out to be Negroes, and they used more English than Spanish. In their mouths, the language had a lilt that put him in mind of what he'd heard in the Bahamas.

  A long line of black men carrying huge bunches of bananas came up the pier next to the one where the Remembrance tied up. They vanished into the hold of a freighter flying the Confederate flag, then emerged to go back down the pier lugging crates: whatever that freighter had been carrying here to exchange for the golden fruit (actually, the bananas going aboard were green; Sam supposed they would ripen on the way up to the CSA).

  White sailors aboard the freighter stared over at the aeroplane carrier. To Commander van der Waal, Carsten remarked, "I wonder how many of those bastards were in the C.S. Navy during the war."

  "More than a few, or I miss my guess," the other officer answered. "We've just given them some free intelligence." He shrugged. "That's the way it goes, sometimes."

  The Costa Rican officer from the gunboat came aboard a few minutes later. His white uniform was more festooned with gold braid than that of the Remembrance 's skipper, but he introduced himself as Lieutenant Commander Garcia. That tickled Sam's funny bone. "I wonder what an admiral in the Costa Rican Navy looks like," he remarked.