In At the Death sa-4

by Harry Turtledove

  After the speech ended, Dewey turned to the crowd. People came up to congratulate him. He and Truman shook hands and smiled while photographers flashed away. Cassius went down with the rest of the people in his special grandstand.

  "Good luck, suh," he said when he worked his way up to Dewey.

  "Thank you." The new President gave his hand a quick, professional pump. "Thank you for everything. You've made my job much easier."

  "I was mighty glad to do it, suh," Cassius replied. No, nobody would ever think of him without thinking of his one moment. He didn't mind that very much, either. It was one moment more than most of his luckless people ever got.

  Atlanta again. Irving Morrell would rather have stayed home with his family, but even leave was welcome. The Atlantic Military District hadn't come to pieces while he went back to the USA. (Well, he supposed that, technically, Atlanta was part of the USA again, too. The locals didn't believe it for a minute. Morrell had trouble believing it himself.)

  Things could have been worse. None of the morale officers-there were such things-in his command had had the brilliant idea of a soldiers-against-locals football game, the way that maniac in Alabama had. Why not issue any Confederates with a grudge an engraved invitation? Plenty of damnyankees to shoot at right here! The only lucky thing was that the mortar crew hurt their own people worse than the U.S. soldiers they were aiming at.

  Morrell didn't know what the CO of the Gulf Coast Military District had done with his intrepid football-planning officer. He knew what he would have done himself. If it were up to him, that major or whatever he was would be running the coast defenses of Colorado right now.

  He had his own problems. Railroad sabotage just wouldn't stop. There were too many miles of track, and not enough soldiers to keep an eye on all of them. The War Department didn't think that kind of offense justified executing hostages, which was the only thing that might have ended it. Morrell supposed the military bureaucrats in Philadelphia had a point. If the U.S. Army murdered Confederates for any little thing, how did it differ from Jake Featherston's regime except in choice of victims?

  But not killing Confederates for any little thing sure made Morrell's life harder.

  Then there were the two dozen command cars in and around Rocky Mount, North Carolina, that somehow got sugar in their gas tanks: as good a way of wrecking an engine as any ever found. The local CO had dealt with that one on his own and sent Atlanta a report later. Morrell approved of officers with initiative. This one had commandeered motorcars from the locals to make up the lack and fined the whole town.

  Even fines got tricky, though. Confederate silver and gold were still legal tender; weight for weight, those coins matched their U.S. counterparts. Confederate paper wasn't, not for dealings with the occupying authorities. Brown banknotes stayed in circulation among the locals; there weren't enough green bills to go around yet.

  Pretty soon, all Confederate paper would be illegal. Then squeezing the occupied states would get easier, anyhow. Right now, the situation with money was the same as it was most ways. Wherever the U.S. authorities reached, they ruled. Where they didn't, or where they turned their backs even for a moment, the old ways went on.

  "Here's an ugly one, sir." A light colonel from the judge-advocate's office set a manila folder on Morrell's desk. "From Greenville, South Carolina. They strung up a Negro for coughing at a white woman."

  "Coughing?" Morrell said.

  "That's what they do a lot of the time down here instead of whistling like we would," the younger officer explained.

  "Do we know who did it?" Morrell asked. "Sounds like those people need stringing up themselves."

  "Yes, sir." But the lieutenant colonel sounded unhappy.

  "Want to tell me more, or do I need to go through all this stuff?" Morrell set a hand on the folder.

  "Well, I can give you the short version," the military attorney said.

  "Good!" Morrell was drowning in paperwork. "Do that, then."

  "Right. For one thing, we know who did it, but we can't prove anything. Everybody denies it. Everybody who was there swears he wasn't and nobody else was, either. As far as they're concerned, that colored guy hanged himself."

  "No U.S. witnesses?"

  "No, sir."

  "All right. You said, 'For one thing.' That means there's something else, doesn't it?"

  "Yes, sir. That town will go off like a bomb if we arrest these people. Greenville does not want to put up with the idea that a Negro can get fresh with a white woman, no matter what. I don't know if the dead guy really did or he didn't. But the whites may have surrendered to us. They sure haven't given up on the way things were before they did."

  "No, huh?" Morrell had heard that song too many times before. It made up his mind for him. "Send orders to the officer in charge there. Tell him to get his heavy weapons ready and make sure he has air support ready to fly. Then tell him to arrest those people and get them out of there. If Greenville rises, we'll level the place."

  "Are you sure, sir?" the lieutenant colonel asked.

  "If I had a superbomb handy, I'd drop it on those bastards. That's how sure I am. Now let's get cooking."

  "Uh, yes, sir." The military attorney saluted and left his office in a hurry.

  U.S. soldiers arrested seventeen men and two women in Greenville. The town didn't rise. Morrell hadn't thought it would. Diehards here bushwhacked and raided and made godawful nuisances of themselves. They showed no signs of being ready or able to fight pitched battles against U.S. troops.

  He called in a couple of writers from Stars and Stripes, the Army newspaper. "I want you to draft a pamphlet for me," he told them. "Aim it at whites in the former CSA. We can call it Equality. Tell these bastards they don't have to like Negroes, but they can't go pissing on them the way they did before the war."

  "Yes, sir," the men chorused. One of them added, "When do you want it, sir?"

  "Say, a week," Morrell answered. "Then I'll get War Department approval for it, and then I'll issue it. I'll issue it by the millions, by God. From now on, nobody's going to be able to say, 'Well, I didn't know what the rules were.' We'll tell 'em just what the rules are. If they break 'em after that, it's their own damn fault."

  He got the first draft six days later. He didn't think it was strong enough, and suggested changes. When it came back, he sent the text to Philadelphia. He wondered how long things would take there. With the new administration coming in, the bureaucracy was even bumpier than usual.

  But he not only got approval four days later, he also got a message saying that the powers that be had sent his text to the U.S. commandants in the Gulf Coast Military District, the Mid-South Military District, and the Republic of Texas. They had orders to print and distribute Equality, too. What the written word could do, it would.

  As soon as the pamphlet hit the streets, complaints hit his desk. He might have known they would. Hell, he had known they would. The former mayor of Atlanta was in prison for aiding and abetting the removal of Negroes from the town. The new town commissioner was a fortyish lawyer named Clark Butler. He would have been handsome if his ears hadn't stuck out.

  He'd always cooperated with U.S. authorities before. He was hopping mad now. "You mean we have to put up with it if a, uh, colored fellow"-he'd learned it wasn't a good idea to say nigger around Morrell-"makes advances to a white woman?"

  "As long as he's peaceable about it, yes," Morrell asked. "Do you mean to tell me white men never make advances to colored women?"

  Butler turned red. "That's different."

  "How?"

  "It just is."

  Morrell shook his head. "Sorry, no. I'm not going to budge on this one. Maybe it was different before the war, or you thought it was because you were on top and the Negroes were on the bottom. Things aren't like that any more."

  Butler scratched the edge of his thin mustache. "Some of the states in the USA have miscegenation laws. Why are you tougher on us than you would be on them?"

 
"Because you abused things worse," Morrell answered bluntly. "And I don't think they'll keep those laws much longer. You gave them such a horrible example, they'll be too embarrassed to leave 'em on the books."

  "You're going to cause a lot of trouble," Butler predicted in doleful tones.

  "I'll take the chance." Morrell, by contrast, sounded cheerful. "If people here start trouble, I promise we'll finish it."

  "It's not fair," Butler said. "We're only doing what we always did."

  "Yes, and look where that got you," Morrell retorted. "Let's take you in particular, for instance. I know you didn't have anything to do with shipping Negroes to camps-we've checked. You wouldn't be sitting there if you did. You'd be in jail with the old mayor. But you knew they were disappearing, didn't you?"

  "Well…" Butler looked as if he wished he could disappear. "Yes."

  "Good! Well done!" Morrell made clapping motions that were only slightly sardonic. "See? You can own up to things if you try. I would've thrown you out of my office if you said anything different."

  "But treating…colored folks like white people? Equality?" The city commissioner pronounced the name of the pamphlet with great distaste. "People-white people-won't like that, not even a little bit."

  "Frankly, Butler, I don't give a damn." Morrell was getting sick of the whole sorry business. "Those are the rules you've got now. You're going to play by them, and that's flat. If you try to make some poor Negro sorry, we will make you sorrier. If you don't think we can do it-or if you don't think we will do it-go ahead and find out. You won't like what happens next. I promise you that. Wake the town and tell the people. We mean it."

  "Colored folks in the same church? Colored kids in the same school?" Plainly, Butler was picking the most hideous examples he could think of.

  And Morrell nodded as if his head were on springs. "That's right. Negroes working the same jobs as white people, too, and getting the same pay. Oh, I don't expect colored lawyers right away-you didn't let them get the education for that. But they'll get it from here on out."

  "I don't reckon we'll put up with it," Butler said. "I truly don't. Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever!"

  "Are you saying that in your official capacity, Mr. Butler?" Morrell asked. "If you are, you just resigned."

  Clark Butler reconsidered. He had a well-paying, responsible job at a time and in a place where jobs of any kind were hard to come by. "Well, no. I wasn't speaking officially," he said after a brief pause. "I was just expressing the feelings of a lot of people in this part of the continent-and you know that's so, General."

  Morrell knew, all right, much too well. After a pause of his own, he replied, "I don't care what people feel. I can't do anything about that. But I damn well can do something about how people behave. If you want to hate Negroes in your heart, go ahead. While you're hating them, though, I will make you sorry if you treat them any different from whites. Have you got that?"

  "Equality enforced at the point of a bayonet?" Butler jeered.

  "Sounds pretty silly, doesn't it?" Morrell said with a smile. The city commissioner nodded. But Morrell wasn't finished: "Still, when you get right down to it, it beats the hell out of camps and ovens and mass graves."

  "I wasn't involved with that," Butler said quickly.

  "You wouldn't be talking with me now if you were," Morrell replied. "But you think you're serious about what you're going to do? So are we. You can find out the easy way or the hard way. Up to you."

  Butler left in a hurry after that. Morrell wasn't sorry to see him go, and resolved to keep a closer watch on him from here on out. He wondered whether the United States could enforce anything like equality on the old CSA. He still wasn't sure-but he aimed to try.

  T he only way Clarence Potter could have avoided seeing the pamphlet called Equality was to stay in his apartment and never come out. The Yankees plastered the damn thing all over Richmond. During the war, that common a propaganda leaflet would have meant the Quartermaster Corps didn't need to issue toilet paper for a while.

  When he first read the pamphlet, he thought it was an A-number-one asswipe, nothing else but. After he looked at it again, he still thought it was an asswipe. But it was a clever asswipe, and a determined one. The damnyankees weren't out to change hearts or minds in the dead CSA. They were out to change behavior. If they rammed different behavior down people's throats from Richmond to Guaymas, they figured hearts and minds would eventually follow.

  What worried Potter most was, they had a fighting chance of being right.

  He'd watched the same thing happen when the Freedom Party took over the CSA. Even people who didn't like Jake Featherston and the Party started greeting one another with "Freedom!" It was safer. You couldn't get into trouble if you did it. And, after a while, you didn't even feel self-conscious about it. You took it for granted. Pretty soon, you took the truth of everything the Party said for granted. And you, and the Confederate States of America with you, followed Jake Featherston into the abyss.

  Now the Yankees wanted to push what was left of the Confederacy into…Equality. They didn't ask whites to love Negroes. They just said, Treat them the way you'd treat yourselves, or we'll make you regret it.

  Was there ever a more perverted application of the Golden Rule?

  Potter was sure lots of people hated the idea of Negro equality even more than he did. He'd spent sixty-odd years in the CSA; he knew what was what here. But he also knew he was being watched. The damnyankees didn't waste subtlety showing him that-which didn't mean there weren't also subtle spies, ones he didn't notice right away. He assumed his telephone was tapped and his mail read.

  And so he sat tight and worked on his memoirs. A generation earlier, he'd done what he could to free the CSA from the onerous terms of the armistice after the Great War. But the Confederacy wasn't crushed then. It wasn't occupied, either. The USA had learned a bar fighter's lesson since: once you knocked a guy down, you needed to kick him in the head so he couldn't jump up and come after you with a broken bottle.

  One day in early March, when spring was just starting to be in the air, he went over to Capitol Square to look around. Woodrow Wilson had declared war on the USA there in 1914. Potter himself and Nathan Bedford Forrest III had halfheartedly plotted against Jake Featherston there, too.

  Forrest was dead now, because you needed to be a better plotter than he ever was to go up against the wily President of the CSA. Featherston never found out Potter was involved in that scheme. If he had, Potter knew he would have died himself.

  Capitol Square had been battered when the two generals sat on a park bench and talked about where the Confederacy was going. Down the drain, though neither of them knew it at the time.

  The square looked even worse now than it had then, which wasn't easy. The grass was still mangy and leprous from winter's freezes. No one had mowed it for a long time. It softened the outlines of bomb and shell craters without hiding them. Signs with big red letters shouted blunt warnings: WATCH WHERE YOU STEP! and MINES amp; LIVE AMMO!

  Thus cautioned, Potter didn't walk across the square to the remains of the Capitol. A neoclassical building, it had been bombed into looking like an ancient ruin. From the pictures he'd seen, the Colosseum and the Parthenon were both in a hell of a lot better shape than this place.

  Workmen were hauling away the wreckage of Albert Sidney Johnston's heroic statue. Like the Confederacy, it was good for nothing but scrap metal these days. George Washington's statue, now out from under its protective pyramid of sandbags, had come through better. Even the Yankees still respected Washington…some, anyhow.

  Two blue jays screeched in a tree. A robin hopped on the ground, eye cocked for bugs. A skinny red tabby eyed the robin from behind a low mound of earth. "Go get it," Potter murmured. The cat had to eat, too. But the robin flew off. The cat eyed Potter as if it were his fault. It was a cat-it wouldn't blame itself. Potter sketched a salute. "You're a loser, too," he said fondly. The cat yawned, showing
off needle teeth. It ambled away.

  He'd been looking for the bench where Forrest first broached getting rid of Featherston and getting out of the war. Once he sold his memoirs, that bench would become a historical monument of sorts. Or rather, it would have, because he saw no sign of it. One more casualty of war.

  He found another bench, deeper into Capitol Square. Despite the signs, he didn't blow up getting to it. He sat down. Getting out of the apartment felt good. So did the sun on his face, though he'd grown used to being pasty during the war. A man in a filthy Confederate uniform was sleeping or passed out drunk in the tall grass not far away. Some newspapers did duty for a blanket.

  Potter didn't think the derelict was watching him, though you never could tell. Somebody was, somewhere. He was sure of that. He looked around to see if he could spot the spy. Not this time. That proved exactly nothing, of course.

  After the end of the last war, Jake Featherston had spent some time in Capitol Square as a drifter, one more piece of flotsam washed up by the armistice. Then he ran into the Freedom Party-and it ran into him. Before he joined, it was a tiny, hopeless outfit that could keep its membership rolls and accounts in a cigar box. Afterwards…

  Now it was more than twenty-five years afterwards. Potter could see that everybody would have ended up better off if Jake Featherston went down some other street and never met the hopeless chucklehead who founded the Freedom Party. Once upon a time, he'd known that chucklehead's name. He couldn't remember it now to save his life. Well, it sure didn't matter any more.

  He closed his eyes. He wished he could close his nose. The stench of death still lingered in Richmond. It would only get worse as the weather warmed up, too. How many years would it need to go away for good?

  "Hey, friend, you got any change you can spare?"

  Clarence Potter opened his eyes. The sleeping soldier-he still had a sergeant's chevrons on his sleeve-had come to life. He was filthy, and badly needed a shave. God only knew when he'd bathed last. But Potter didn't smell whiskey along with the-what did that Yankee soap ad call it?-B.O.