American Empire : The Center Cannot Hold

by Harry Turtledove

  “That’s a big pickup, no doubt about it.” Horwitz leaned forward to study the numbers. He looked up at Morrell. “I’m awful damn glad I’m a Jew in the USA, and not a shvartzer in the CSA.”

  “A what?” Morrell said, and then he nodded, making the connection from Yiddish to German. “Oh. Yeah. I bet you are.”

  “There’s people here who don’t like Jews—plenty who feel just like that stupid sergeant,” Horwitz said. “But it isn’t all that bad. Hell, even the president’s wife’s Jewish, not that I’ve got any use for her politics or his. If you’re colored in the Confederate States, you’ve got to be shaking in your shoes—if they let you have any shoes.”

  He was right. Morrell hadn’t even wondered what the Negroes in the CSA felt about the election returns he’d been dissecting. He rarely thought about Negroes. What white man in the USA did? Maybe Horwitz, being a Jew, was more likely to look at other people who had a hard time in their homeland.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Morrell said. “Write me an appreciation of the Confederate Negroes’ likely response to this. Do a good job on it and I’ll forward it to Philadelphia, see if I can get you noticed.”

  “Thank you, sir. That’s damn white of you,” his aide-de-camp answered.

  Morrell’s own thoughts were on the more immediate. “Any time the Freedom vote goes up, that’s trouble for us, because those bastards want another shot at the USA. And Featherston’s boys haven’t seen numbers like these since 1921. I hope to heaven the president sits up and takes notice.”

  “What do you think the odds are?” Lieutenant Horwitz asked.

  “Do I look like a Socialist politician to you? I’d better not, that’s all I’ve got to say,” Morrell replied. “They cut off Confederate reparations early, they haven’t been checking about rearmament near as hard as they should have, they’ve cut our budget. . . .” He sighed. “They think everybody should just be friends. I wish that would work, I really do.”

  “People vote for it,” Horwitz said. “Nobody wants to go through another war like the last one.”

  “No, of course not. But both sides have to want peace. You only need one to have a war. And the only thing worse than fighting a war like that is fighting it and losing. Ask the Confederates if you don’t believe me.”

  “I don’t need to ask anybody,” Horwitz said. “I can see that for myself. Anyone with a brain in his head ought to be able to see that for himself. But what are we going to do?”

  “That’s the question, all right.” Morrell drummed his fingers on the desktop. “I don’t know. I just don’t know. Half of those people who voted for Featherston’s gang of goons probably don’t hope for anything but jobs and three square meals a day if he calls the shots. They sure aren’t getting ’em with the folks they’ve got running things now.”

  His aide-de-camp smiled unhappily. “And isn’t that the sad and sorry truth, sir? When I joined the Army, I never thought I’d be glad to be in for the food and for the roof over my head. But that’s how it looks nowadays. If I were a civilian, I’d probably be scuffling like everybody else.”

  “Good point.” Morrell nodded. “We’re insulated from that, anyhow, thank God.”

  “I suppose the Socialists are doing everything they can there,” Ike Horwitz said grudgingly. “Feeding people who are out of work and giving some of ’em makework jobs—it’s not great, God knows, but it’s better than nothing, you know what I mean?”

  “I guess so.” Morrell sighed. “If you give a man something for nothing, though, will he want to stand up on his own two feet again when times get better, or will he keep wanting a handout for the rest of his life?”

  “You ask me, sir, most people want to work if you give ’em the chance,” Horwitz answered. “Other thing is, if they do starve, talking about the rest of their lives starts looking pretty silly, doesn’t it? And if they’re afraid they’re going to starve, then what happens? Then they start voting for somebody like Jake Featherston in the USA, right?”

  “I suppose so,” Morrell said again. Up till now, his politics had always been firmly Democratic; he’d never had to think about it. He still didn’t, not really. But he’d never been a man to worry about subtleties, either, and now he wondered whether he’d made a mistake. “You’re saying the Socialists are giving us a safety valve, aren’t you?”

  “I wouldn’t have put it quite that way, but yes, sir, I guess I am,” Lieutenant Horwitz answered. “If things blow up, what have we got? Trouble, nothing else but.” Like any soldier—and like anyone else with an ounce of sense—he was convinced staying out of trouble was a good idea.

  A couple of days later, Morrell went into the town of Kamloops to do some shopping—Christmas was coming, and he wanted to buy some things for Agnes and Mildred that he couldn’t hope to find at the post exchange. The weather was crisp and chilly, the sun shining bright out of a blue, blue sky but not giving much in the way of warmth even so.

  The reception he got in Kamloops gave little in the way of warmth, either. Here a dozen years after the end of the war, the Canucks cared for the green-gray uniforms their occupiers wore no more than they had after the USA finally battered them into submission. People on the streets turned their backs when Morrell walked by.

  Most of them did, anyhow. He’d got used to that. What he hadn’t got used to were the ragged-looking men who held out their hands and whined, “Spare change, pal?” And he especially hadn’t got used to the respectable-looking men who held out their hands and said the same thing. One of them added, “Been a long time since my twin boys saw any meat on the table.”

  “Why don’t you get a job, then?” Morrell asked.

  “Why?” The man glared at him. “I’ll tell you why, even though you’re a damned fool to need telling. Because there damned well aren’t any jobs to get, that’s why. Lumber companies aren’t hiring—that’s what I got fired from. Farms aren’t taking on hired men, not when they can’t sell half the sheep and cows and wheat they raise. Even here in town, only way you can keep your job is if you’re somebody’s brother—if you’re just a brother-in-law, you’re in trouble. That’s why, you stinking Yank.”

  Well, I asked him, and he went and told me, Morrell thought. He dug in his pocket and gave the Canadian some coins. “Here, buddy. Good luck to you.”

  “I ought to spit in your eye,” the hungry man told him. “Hell of it is, I can’t. I’ve got to tip my hat”—he did—“and say, ‘Thank you, sir,’ on account of I need the money so goddamn bad.”

  Never in all his days had Morrell heard Thank you, sir sound so much like Go to hell, you son of a bitch.

  And he discovered the problem that sprang from giving one beggar some money. As soon as he did, all the others became four times as obnoxious, swarming around him and cursing him as foully as they knew how when he pushed past without doing for them what he’d done for one of their fellows. Maybe they hoped they’d make him feel guilty. All they really did was make him mad.

  He’d just shaken free of the crowd when a woman sidled up to him. Skirts were longer than they had been a couple of years before, and the day wasn’t warm, but what she wore displayed a lot of her. “Want a good time, soldier?” she said. “Three dollars.”

  She was skinny. Like any town with soldiers in it, Kamloops had its share of easy women, but she didn’t look as if she’d been part of their sorry sisterhood for very long. “What did you used to do?” Morrell asked quietly.

  “What difference does it make?” she answered. “Whatever it was, I can’t do it any more. Do you want to go someplace?”

  “No, thanks,” he answered. She cursed him, too, with a sort of dreary hopelessness that hit him harder than the anger the male beggars had shown.

  Even the storekeepers’ attitudes seemed different from the way they had before things went sour. He’d never seen men so glad to take money from him. When he remarked on that, the fellow who’d just sold him a doll for Mildred said, “You bet I’m glad. You’re only the
second customer I’ve had today. Anybody with any money at all looks good to me right now. How am I going to pay my bills if nobody buys anything from me? And if I can’t pay my bills, what happens then? Do I end up out on the street? I sure hope not.”

  Later, another shopkeeper said, “Hate to tell you this, but Kamloops’d wither up and die if it wasn’t for you Yank soldiers. They still pay you regular, so you still have money in your pockets. Damn few folks do, and you’d better believe that.”

  A third man was even blunter: “If things don’t turn around pretty quick, what the hell’s going to happen to us?”

  Morrell had to run the gauntlet of beggars once more on the way back to the U.S. Army base. The men cursed him all over again, this time for spending money on himself and not on them. “How would you like it if you were hungry?” one of them called after him—a parting shot, as it were.

  It was a good question. He had no good answer. Nobody wanted to be hungry. He remembered that skinny woman. Nobody wanted to have to choose between whoring and starving. But nobody seemed to have much of an idea how to make things better, either. Morrell hurried home, a troubled man.

  Jonathan Moss was making a discovery as old as mankind: that not even getting exactly what you thought you’d always wanted guaranteed happiness. When he thought about it—which was as seldom as he could—he suspected Laura Moss, once Laura Secord, was making the same unpleasant discovery.

  “I don’t like the city,” she said one morning over a cup of tea (Jonathan preferred coffee, which he brewed himself).

  “I’m sorry,” he answered, not altogether sincerely. “I don’t know how I could practice law from a farm. . . .” He almost added in the middle of nowhere, but let that go at the last possible instant.

  He might as well have said it. By her sour expression, Laura heard it even if it remained technically unspoken. “But everybody here loves the Yanks and knuckles under to them,” she complained.

  The first part of that wasn’t even close to true, as she had to know. As for the second . . . “Whether you like it or not, dear, the United States won the war,” Moss pointed out.

  Laura’s expression got unhappier yet. Out on her farm, and even in Arthur—which was far enough off the beaten path for the American occupiers to pay little attention to it—she’d had an easier time pretending that blunt truth wasn’t real. Here in Berlin, she couldn’t ignore it. U.S. military courts here tried cases under occupation law. Soldiers in green-gray uniforms were always on the streets. “Even the newspapers!” she burst out. “They spell color c-o-l-o-r and labor l-a-b-o-r, not c-o-l-o-u-r and l-a-b-o-u-r.”

  “That’s how we spell them in the States,” Moss said.

  “But this isn’t the States! It’s the province of Ontario! Can’t you leave even the King’s English alone?”

  He finished his coffee at a gulp. “The King doesn’t run things around these parts any more. The United States do. Sweetheart, I know you don’t like it, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t so.” Carrying his cup over to the sink, he went on, “I’m going to the office. I’ll see you tonight.”

  “All right.” She sounded almost as relieved to have him out of the apartment as he was to go. With a sigh, she added, “I don’t know what I’m going to do around here, though.”

  Back on her farm, finding ways to pass the time had never been a worry. Moss knew just enough of farm life to be sure of that. If you weren’t busy every waking moment on a farm, you had to be neglecting something. It wasn’t like that here in the city. To Moss, that was one of the advantages of getting off the farm. He wasn’t sure Laura saw things the same way.

  Before leaving, he put on his overcoat and a fur hat with ear flaps that tied under his chin. Berlin, Ontario, might be under U.S. occupation, but its winters remained thoroughly Canadian. Moss had grown up in Chicago. He’d thought he knew everything there was to know about nasty winter weather. The war and coming back here afterwards to practice law had taught him otherwise.

  Only after he was out the door and going down the stairs to his elderly Bucephalus did he realize he hadn’t kissed Laura good-bye. He kept going. His sigh was more glum than bemused. For years, he hadn’t been able to get the idea of her out of his mind. Then, when they finally did come together, their lovemaking had been the most spectacular he’d ever known.

  And now they were married—and he forgot to kiss her good-bye. So much for romance, he thought unhappily. He got into the motorcar and turned the key, hoping the battery held enough charge to start the car. Someone down the street was cranking an old Ford. Most of the time, a self-starter was ever so much more convenient. In weather like this, though . . .

  The Bucephalus’ engine sputtered, coughed, and then came to noisy life. Moss let out a sigh of relief. The motorcar would get him to the office, which meant the odds were good it would get him home again, too. And then, once he got home, he would find out what new things Laura had found to complain about.

  He put the Bucephalus in gear and pulled onto the street even though the engine hadn’t had enough time to warm up. Only after the auto had started to roll did he wonder if he was running away from trouble. Well, what if you are? he asked himself. It’s not as if you won’t go back to it tonight.

  Not many motorcars shared the streets with the Bucephalus. Considering the snow and the state of the machine’s brakes, that might have been just as well. Moss saw one traffic accident, with steam pouring from a shattered radiator, and with two men in heavy coats standing there shouting at each other.

  Moss thought fewer automobiles were on the streets than had been the winter before. He knew why, too: fewer people in Berlin had jobs to go to than had been so the winter before. That was true all over Canada, all over North America, all over the world. Everyone hated it, but no one seemed to have the faintest idea what to do about it.

  Two words painted on the side of a building—YANKS OUT! Before long, somebody would come along and paint over them. The Canucks hadn’t given up wanting their own country back. The United States remained determined they wouldn’t get it. Since the USA had the muscle, the Canadians faced an uphill fight.

  As Moss got out of the Bucephalus, a man in a ragged overcoat who needed a shave came up to him with a gloved hand out and said, “Can you give me just a little money, friend? I’ve been hungry a long time now.”

  “Here you are.” Moss handed him a quarter. “Buy yourself something to eat.”

  The man took the coin. He went down the street muttering something about a damned cheapskate Yank. Jonathan Moss sighed. Try as you would, you couldn’t win.

  He had an electric hot plate in his office. As soon as he got in, he started perking more coffee. Not only would it help keep him awake, it would help keep him warm. Even before the coffee was ready, he got to work on the papers waiting for him on his desk.

  He’d won his name among the Canadians of Berlin for keeping the U.S. occupiers off their backs as much as he could. That brought him a fair number of cases to be tried in military courts. It also brought him a lot of much more ordinary legal business. Most of his current case load involved bankruptcies.

  So many of those were on his desk right now, in fact, that he thought of adding a slug of whiskey to the coffee he poured for himself. Maybe that would help him face the ruin of other men’s hopes with something more like equanimity. Or maybe it’ll turn me into a drunk, he thought, and left the whiskey bottle—it was only a pint—in his desk drawer.

  How many of those bankruptcies would have happened if the Russians had managed to pay their loan to that Austro-Hungarian bank? Moss didn’t know, not exactly. The only sure answer that occurred to him was, a lot fewer. Of course, he was lucky he was still in business himself. He’d sold out when the stock market started dropping like a rock, and had escaped before Swan-Dive Wednesday. The longer he’d stayed in, the worse he’d have got hurt.

  By ten o’clock, he was starting to come up for air in his paperwork. That was when the door to his office opened
and his first appointment of the day came in. “Good morning, Mr. Harrison,” Moss said, getting up and leaning forward across the desk to shake hands. “What can I do for you today?”

  “You can call me Edgar, for starters,” Edgar Harrison answered. He was a short, thin, intense-looking man of about Moss’ age. The top half of his left ear was missing: a war wound. Had the bullet that clipped him traveled a couple of inches to the right of its real course, he would have died before he hit the ground. As he sat down in the chair to which Moss waved him, he added, “It’s not like we haven’t worked together before.”

  “No, it’s not,” Moss agreed. Harrison sailed as close to the wind as he could when it came to urging more freedom for the conquered Canadian provinces. He’d spent time in jail not long after the Great War ended. Moss thought he’d been lucky not to get shot, though he’d never said that out loud. “Care for some coffee?” he asked, pointing to the pot on the hot plate.

  Edgar Harrison shook his head. “Nasty stuff. Never could stand it. Don’t know how you Yanks pour it down the way you do.”

  “We manage,” Moss said dryly, and refilled his cup. “You’ve got something on your mind—I can tell by your lean and hungry look.”

  “Such men are dangerous,” Harrison said with a laugh. “How would you like to mount a court challenge to the whole rationale for the U.S. occupation of Canada?”

  “How would I like it?” Moss echoed. “Personally, I’d like it fine. I’ll tell you straight out, though, you’ll lose. Occupation law says the U.S. Army can do whatever it has to in occupied territory, and the Constitution doesn’t apply here.”

  “I know that.” The Canadian’s face clouded. “I don’t see how I could help knowing it. But that’s what I want to challenge: the notion that your fancy, precious Constitution shouldn’t apply in Canada. Don’t we deserve the rule of law, same as you Yanks?”