The Best Alternate History Stories Of The Twentieth Century Part 16

I went up to her and stood beside her, looking out at the water.

"Don't do it," I said softly, not looking directly at her. "It's too d.a.m.ned selfish a way to go."

She gave a small gasp and turned to look at me in wonder.

"How-how didt yu-?" she managed.

"I'm an old hand at suicides," I told her, that was no lie. Joanna, then almost me, then this woman seven other times.

"I vouldn't really haff-" she began, but I cut her off.

"Yes, you would. You know it and I know it. The only thing you know and I don't is why."

We were inside s.h.i.+pshead light now. If I could keep her talking just a few more minutes we'd clear the channel markers and slow for the turn and docking. The turn and the slowdown would make it impossible for her to be caught in the propwash, and, I felt, the cycle would be broken, at least for her.

"Vy du yu care?" she asked, turning again to look at the dark sea, only slightly illuminated by the rapidly receding light.

"Well, partly because it's my s.h.i.+p, and I don't like things like that to happen on my s.h.i.+p," I told her. "Partly because I've been there myself, and I know how brutal a suicide is."

She looked at me strangely. "Dat's a fonny t'ing tu zay," she responded. "Jost vun qvick jomp and pszzt ! All ofer."

"You're wrong," I said. "Besides, why would anyone so young want to end it?"

She had a dreamy quality to her face and voice. She was starting to blur, and I was worried that I might somehow translate into a different world-level as we neared sh.o.r.e.

"My 'usbahnd," she responded. "Goldier vas hiss name." She fingered the marriage ring around her neck. "Zo yong, so 'andzum." She turned her head quickly and looked up at me. "Do yu know vat it iz to be fat and ugly und 'alf bloind and haff ze best uv all men zuddenly pay attenzion to yu, vant to marry yu?"

I admitted I didn't, but didn't mention my own experiences.

"What happened? He leave you?" I asked.

There were tears in her eyes. "Ya, in a vay, ya. Goldier he jomped out a tventy-story building, he did. Und itz my own fault, yu know. I shud haff been dere. Or, maybe I didn't giff him vat he needed. I dunno."

"Then you of all people know how brutal suicide really is," I retorted. "Look at what it did to you. You have friends, like your friend here. They care. It will hurt them as your husband's hurt you. This woman with you-she'll carry guilt for leaving you alone the whole rest of her life." She was shaking now, not really from the chill, and I put my arm around her. Where the h.e.l.l were those marker lights?

"Do you see how cruel it is? What suicide does to others? It leaves a legacy of guilt, much of it false guilt but no less real for that. And you might be needed by somebody else, sometime, to help them. Somebody else might die because you weren't there."

She looked up at me, then seemed to dissolve, collapse into a crescendo of tears, and sat down on the deck. I looked up and saw the red and green markers astern, felt the engines slow, felt the Orcas turn.

"Ghetta!" The voice was a piercing scream in the night. I looked around and saw her friend running to us after coming down the stairway. Anxiety and concern were on her stricken face, and there were tears in her eyes. She bent down to the still sobbing girl. "I shuld neffer haff left yu!" she sobbed, and hugged the girl tightly.

I sighed. The Orcas was making its dock approach now, the ringing of bells said that Caldwell had managed to raise the bow without cras.h.i.+ng us into the dock.

"My Gott!" the friend swore, then looked up at me. "Yu stopped her? How can I effer?..."

But they both already had that ethereal, unnatural double image about them, both fading into a world different from mine.

"Just remember that there's a million Ghettas out there," I told them both softly. "And you can make them or break them."

I turned and walked away as I heard the satisfying thump and felt the slight jerk of the ferry fitting into the slip. I stopped and glanced back at the stern but I could see no one. n.o.body was there.

Who were the ghosts? I mused. Those women, or the crew of the Orcas ? How many times did hundreds of people from different worlds coexist on this s.h.i.+p without ever knowing it?

How many times did people in the same world coexist without noticing each other, or caring about each other, for that matter?

"Mr. Dalton!" snapped a voice in my walkie-talkie.

"Sir?" I responded.

"Well?" the Captain asked expectantly.

"No screams this time, Captain," I told him, satisfaction in my voice. "One young woman will live."

There was a long pause and, for a moment, I thought he might actually be human. Then he snapped, "There's eighty-six a.s.sorted vehicles still waiting to be off-loaded, and might I remind you we're short-handed and on a strict schedule?"

I sighed and broke into a trot. Business was business, and I had a whole world to throw out of the car deck so I could run another one in.

WARD MOORE.

Ward Moore's "Bring the Jubilee," a blend of time travel and alternate history in which a Confederate triumph at the Battle of Gettysburg leads to a Southern victory in the American Civil War, is a landmark in alternate-world science fiction. Moore also wrote the satirical Greener Than You Think, a highly regarded ecodisaster novel, and collaborated with Robert Bradford on Caduceus Wild and Avram Davidson on Joyleg. He published nearly two dozen science-fiction short stories between 1946 and his death in 1978 in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Amazing, The Sat.u.r.day Evening Post, and Galaxy. His oft-reprinted stories "Lot" and "Lot's Daughter," collected in 1996, are considered high-water marks of nuclear disaster fiction, and were the uncredited basis for the 1962 film Panic in the Year Zero.

BRING THE JUBILEE.

Ward Moore

I.

Although I am writing this in the year 1877, I was not born until 1921. Neither the dates nor the tenses are error-let me explain: I was born, as I say, in 1921, but it was not until the early 1930s, when I was about ten, that I began to understand what a peculiarly frustrated and disinherited world was about me. Perhaps my approach to realization was through the crayon portrait of Granpa Hodgins which hung, very solemnly, over the mantel.

Granpa Hodgins, after whom I was named, perhaps a little grandiloquently, Hodgins McCormick Backmaker, had been a veteran of the War of Southron Independence. Like so many young men he had put on a shapeless blue uniform in response to the call of the ill-advised and headstrong-or martyred-Mr. Lincoln. Depending on which of my lives' viewpoint you take.

Granpa lost an arm on the Great Retreat to Philadelphia after the fall of Was.h.i.+ngton to General Lee's victorious Army of Northern Virginia, so his war ended some six months before the capitulation at Reading and the acknowledgement of the independence of the Confederate States on July 4, 1864. One-armed and embittered, Granpa came home to Wappinger Falls and, like his fellow veterans, tried to remake his life in a different and increasingly hopeless world.

On its face the Peace of Richmond was a just and even generous disposition of a defeated foe by the victor. (Both sides-for different reasons-remembered the mutiny of the Unreconstructed Federals of the Armies of the c.u.mberland and the Tennessee who, despite defeat at Chattanooga, could not forget Vicksburg and Port Hudson and fought bloodily against the order to surrender.) The South could easily have carved the country up to suit its most fiery patriots, even to the point of detaching the West as a satellite protectorate. Instead the chivalrous Southrons contented themselves with drawing the new boundary along more or less traditional lines. The Mason-Dixon gave them Delaware and Maryland, but they generously returned the panhandle of western Virginia jutting above it. Missouri was naturally included in the Confederacy, but of the disputed territory Colorado and Deseret were conceded to the old Union; only Kansas and California as well as-for obvious defensive reasons-Nevada's tip went to the South.

But the Peace of Richmond had also laid the cost of the war on the beaten North and this was what crippled Granpa Hodgins more than the loss of his arm. The postwar inflation entered the galloping stage during the Vallandigham Administration, became dizzying in the time of President Seymour and precipitated the food riots of 1873 and '74. It was only after the election of President Butler by the Whigs in 1876 and the reorganization and drastic deflation following that money and property became stable, but by this time all normal values were destroyed. Meanwhile the indemnities had to be paid regularly in gold. Granpa and hundreds of thousands like him just never seemed to get back on their feet.

How well I remember, as a small boy in the 1920s and '30s, my mother and father talking bitterly of how the War had ruined everything. They were not speaking of the then fairly recent Emperor's War of 191416, but of the War of Southron Independence which still, nearly 70 years later, blighted what was left of the United States. I heard of the strange, bright era when we and our neighbors had owned our own farms outright and had not had to pay rent for them to the banks or half the crop to a landlord. I learned of the bygone time when a man could nearly always get a job for wages which would support himself and a family, before the system of indenture became so common that practically the only alternative to pauperism was to sell oneself to a company. In those days men and women married young and had large families; there might have been five generations between Granpa Hodgins and myself instead of three. And many uncles, aunts, cousins, brothers and sisters. Now late marriages with a single child were the rule.

If it hadn't been for the War-was the basic theme stated with variations suited to the particular circ.u.mstance. If it hadn't been for the War the most energetic young men and women would not turn to emigration; foreigners would not visit the United States with condescending contempt; the great powers would think twice before sending troops to "restore order" every time one of their citizens was molested and our own inadequate police forces were unable to protect him. If it hadn't been for the War it would be possible to live like a self-respecting human being, to work reasonable hours for wages that would buy decent food and clothing instead of shoddy.

Perhaps because of the ever increasing hostility to immigrants which culminated in the virtual barring of the country to all, little mention was ever made of Grandfather Backmaker. No enlarged crayon portrait of him hung anywhere, much less over the mantel. Somehow I got the impression my father's father had been not only a foreigner by birth, but a shady character in his own right, a man who actually believed in the things for which Granpa Hodgins had fought. I don't know how I learned that Grandfather Backmaker had made speeches advocating equal rights for Negroes or protesting the ma.s.s lynchings so popular in the North, in contrast to the humane treatment accorded these noncitizens in the Confederacy. Nor did I remember how I found out he had been run out of several places before finally settling in Wappinger Falls or that all his life people had muttered darkly at his back, "Dirty Abolitionist!"-a very deep imprecation indeed. I only know that as a consequence of this taint my father, a meek, hardworking, worried little man, was completely dominated by my mother who never let him forget that a Hodgins or a McCormick was worth dozens of Backmakers.

I must have been a great trial to her for I showed no signs of proper Hodgins gumption, such as she had a right to expect in her only child. For one thing I was remarkably unhandy and awkward; of little use in the hundred necessary ch.o.r.es around our dilapidated house. I could not pick up a hammer at her command to do something about fixing the loose weatherboards on the east side without mas.h.i.+ng my thumb or splitting the aged, unpainted wood. I could not hoe the kitchen garden without damaging precious vegetables and leaving weeds intact. I could shovel snow in the winter at a tremendous rate for I was strong and had endurance, but work requiring manual dexterity baffled me. I fumbled in harnessing Bessie, our mare, or hitching her to the cart for my father's trips to Poughkeepsie, and as for helping him on the farm or in his smithy-from which most of our meager cash income came-I'm afraid my efforts drove that mild man nearest to a temper he ever experienced. He would lay the reins on the plowhorse's back or his hammer down on the anvil and say mournfully, "Better see if you can help your mother, Hodge. You're only in my way here."

I remember the time a trackless locomotive-minibiles, they were called-broke down not a quarter of a mile from Father's smithy. This was a golden, unparalleled, unbelievable opportunity. Minibiles, like any other luxury, were rare in the United States though they were common enough in prosperous countries like the German Union or the Confederacy. We had to rely for our transportation on the never-failing horse or on the railroads, wornout and broken down as they were. For decades the great issue in Congress was the never completed Pacific transcontinental line, though Canada had one and the Confederate States seven. (Though sailing balloons were in frequent use they were still looked upon as somehow "impractical.") Only a rare millionaire with the connections in Berlin, Was.h.i.+ngton-Baltimore or Leesburg could afford the indulgence of the costly and complicated minibile which required a trained driver in order to bounce over the rutted and chuckholed roads. Only one of an extraordinarily adventurous spirit would leave the tar-surfaced streets of New York or its sister city of Brooklyn, where the solid rubber tires of the minibiles could at worst find traction on the horse or cable-car rails, for the mora.s.ses or washboard roads which were the only highways north of the Harlem River.

When such a one did it was inevitable that the jolting, jouncing and shaking it received would break or disconnect one of the delicate parts in its complex mechanism. Then the only recourse-apart from telegraphing back to the city if the traveler were fortunate enough to break down near an instrument-was to the closest blacksmith. Smiths rarely knew much of the principles of the minibiles, but with the broken part before them they could fabricate a pa.s.sable duplicate and, unless the machine had suffered serious damage, put it back in place. It was customary for such a craftsman to compensate himself for the time taken away from horseshoeing or spring-fitting (or just absently chewing on an oatstraw) by demanding exorbitant remuneration, amounting to perhaps 25 or 30 cents an hour, thus revenging his rural poverty and self-sufficiency upon the effete wealth and helplessness of the urban excursionist.

Such a golden opportunity befell my father, as I said, during the fall of 1933 when I was twelve years old. The driver had made his way to the smithy, leaving the owner of the minibile marooned and fuming in the enclosed pa.s.senger seat. A hasty visit convinced Father-who could repair a clock or broken rake with equal dexterity-that his only course was to bring the machine to the forge since a part, not easy to disa.s.semble, had been bent and needed heating and straightening. (The driver, the owner, and Father all repeated the name of the part often enough, but so inept have I been with "practical" things all my life that I couldn't recall it ten minutes later, much less after more than 30 years.) "Hodge," he said, "run and get the mare and ride over to Jones's. Don't try to saddle her-go bareback. Ask Mr. Jones to kindly lend me his team."

"I'll give the boy a quarter dollar for himself if he's back with the team within twenty minutes," added the owner of the minibile, sticking his head out of the window.

I won't say I was off like the wind, for my life's work has given me a distaste for exaggeration or hyperbole, but I moved faster than I ever had before. A quarter, a whole s.h.i.+ning silver quarter, a day's full wage for a boy, half the day's pay of a grown man-all for myself, to spend as I wished.

I ran all the way to the barn, led Bessie out by her halter and jumped on her broad back, my enthralling daydream growing and deepening each moment. With my quarter safely got I could perhaps persuade my father to take me along on his next trip to Poughkeepsie; in the shops there I could find some yards of figured cotton for Mother, or a box of cigars to which Father was partial but rarely bought for himself, or an unimagined something for Mary McCutcheon, temporarily the acme of feminine charm to me.

Or I could take the entire quarter into Newman's Book and Stationery Store. Here I could not afford to buy one of the latest English or Confederate books-even the novels I disdained cost 50 cents in their original and 30 in the pirated United States' edition-but what treasures there were in the twelve and a half cent reprints and the dime cla.s.sics!

With Bessie's legs moving steadily beneath me I pored over in my imagination Mr. Newman's entire stock. Now, my quarter would buy two reprints, but I would read them in as many evenings and be no better off than before until their memory faded and I could read them again. Better to invest in paperbacked adventure stories giving sharp, breathless pictures of life in the West or rekindling the glories of the War. True, they were written almost entirely by Confederate authors and I was, thanks perhaps to the portrait of Granpa Hodgins and my mother's hard patriotism, a devout partisan of the lost cause of Sheridan and Sherman and Thomas. But patriotism could not steel me against the excitement of the Confederate paperbacks; literature simply disregarded the boundary stretching to the Pacific.

I had finally determined to invest all my 25 cents, not in five paperbound volumes but in ten of the same in secondhand or shopworn condition, when I suddenly became aware I had been riding Bessie for some considerable time. I looked around, rather dazed by the abrupt translation from the dark and slightly musty interior of Newman's bookstore to the bright countryside, to find with dismay that Bessie hadn't taken me to the Jones farm after all but on some private tour of her own in the opposite direction.

I'm afraid this little anecdote is pointless (it was momentarily pointed enough for me that particular evening, for in addition to the loss of the promised quarter I received a thorough whacking with a willow switch from my mother after my father had, as usual, dolefully refused his parental duty) except that it shows that in pursuing the dream I could lose the reality.

My feeling that books were a part of life, and the most important part, was no pa.s.sing phase. Other boys in their early teens dreamed of going to Dakotah, indenting to a company run by a young and beautiful woman (this was a favorite theme of many of the paperbacks), discovering the loot hidden by a gang, or emigrating to Australia or the South African Republic. Or else they faced the reality of carrying on the family farm, petty trade, or indenture. I only wanted to be allowed to read.

The school at Wappinger Falls taught as little as possible as quickly as possible; parents needed the help of their children to survive or to build up a small reserve in the illusory hope of buying free of their indenture. Both my mother and my teachers looked askance at my desire to persist in my studies past an age when my contemporaries were making themselves economically useful.

Nor-even supposing I had the fees-could the Academy at Poughkeepsie provide me with what I wanted. There was no money for Yale, Harvard, or Columbia, those increasingly decayed and provincialized colleges which contrasted so painfully with the great and flouris.h.i.+ng universities of the Confederacy or Europe. Indeed our financial position was very bad and there was often talk of my father selling the smithy and indenting.

I was of no help; rather I was one who ate three meals a day and occupied a bed. Yet when I spoke of trying to get more learning my mother went into a perfect fury at the very mention of such idleness and self-indulgence. My father merely shrugged resignedly. Only Agnes Jones who had supplanted Mary McCutcheon sympathized and encouraged me. Unhappily, her plans for my future were limited to marrying her and helping her father on his farm, which didn't seem to me any great advance over what I had to look forward to at home.

I was increasingly conscious too of the looks and smiles which followed me. A great lout of seventeen, too lazy to do a stroke of work, always wandering around with his head in the clouds or lying with his nose stuck in a book. Too bad-and the Backmakers such hardworking folks too. Wappinger Falls was intolerable.

A few months before my eighteenth birthday then, I packed my three most cherished books in my good white cotton s.h.i.+rt, and having bade a most romantic goodbye to Agnes (which certainly would have eventuated in the consummation of all her hopes had her father discovered us), I set out on foot for New York.

II.

New York, in 1938, had a population of nearly a million, having grown gradually but steadily since the close of the War of Southron Independence. Together with the half million in the city of Brooklyn this represented by far the greatest concentration of people in the United States, though of course it could not compare with the great Confederate centers of Was.h.i.+ngton (now including Baltimore and Alexandria), St. Louis, or Leesburg (once Mexico City).

The country boy who had never seen anything more metropolitan than Poughkeepsie was tremendously impressed. Cable-cars whizzed northward as far as 59th Street on the west side and all the way to 87th on the east, while horse-cars furnished convenient crosstown transportation with a line every few blocks. Bicycles, rare around Wappinger Falls, were thick as flies, darting ahead and alongside drayhorses pulling wallowing vans, carts and wagons. Prancing trotters drew private carriages, buggies, broughams, victorias, hansoms, dogcarts or sulkies; neither the cyclists, coachmen nor horses seemed overawed or discommoded by occasional minibiles chuffing their way swiftly and implacably over cobblestones or asphalt.

Incredibly intricate traceries of telegraph wires swarmed overhead, crossing and recrossing at all angles, slanting upward into offices and flats or downward into stores, a reminder that no family with pretensions to gentility would be without the clacking instrument in the parlor and every child learned the Morse code before he could read. Thousands of sparrows considered the wires properly their own; they perched and swung, quarrelled and scolded on them, leaving only to satisfy their voracity upon the steaming mounds of horsedung below.

Buildings of eight or ten storeys were common, and there were many of fourteen or fifteen, serviced by pneumatic English lifts, that same marvelous invention which permitted the erection of veritable skysc.r.a.pers in Was.h.i.+ngton and Leesburg. Above them balloons moved gracefully through the air, guided and controlled as skillfully as an old time sailing vessel.

Most exciting of all was simply the number of people who walked, rode, or merely stood around on the streets. It seemed hardly believable that so many humans could crowd themselves so closely. Beggars pleaded, touts wheedled, peddlers hawked, newsboys shouted, bootblacks chanted. Messengers pushed their way, loafers yawned, ladies stared, drunks staggered. For long moments I paused, standing stock still, not thinking of going anywhere, merely watching the spectacle.

I had hardly begun to fondle the sharp edge of wonder when darkness fell and the gas lamps, lit simultaneously by telegraphic sparks, glowed and shone on nearly every corner. Whatever had been drab and dingy in daylight-and even my eyes had not been blind to the signs of dirt and decay-became in an instant magically enchanting, softened and shadowed into mysterious beauty. I breathed the dusty air with a relish I had never felt for that of the country and knew myself for the first time to be spiritually at home.

But spiritual sustenance is not quite enough for an eighteen year old; I began to feel the need for food and rest. The three dollars in my pocket I was resolved to h.o.a.rd, not having any notion how to go about replenis.h.i.+ng it. I could not do without eating, however, so I stopped in at the first gaslit bakery, buying a penny loaf, and walked slowly through the entrancing streets, munching on it.

Now the fronts of the tinugraph lyceums were lit up by porters with long tapers, so that they glowed yellow and inviting, each heralded with a boldly lettered broadside or das.h.i.+ngly drawn cartoon advertising the amus.e.m.e.nt to be found within. I was sorely tempted to see for myself this magical entertainment of pictures taken so close together they gave the illusion of motion, but the lowest price of admission was five cents. Some of the more garish theaters, which specialized in the incredible phonotos-tinugraphs which were ingeniously combined with a sound-producing machine operated by compressed air, so that the pictures seemed not only to move, but to talk-actually charged ten or even fifteen cents for an hour's spectacle.

By now I ached with tiredness; the insignificant bundle of s.h.i.+rt and books had become a burden. I was pressed by the question of where to sleep, but I didn't connect the gla.s.s transparencies behind which gaslight shone through the unpainted letters of BEDS, ROOMS, or HOTEL with my need, for I was looking for the urban version of the inn at Wappinger Falls or the Poughkeepsie Commercial House. I became more and more confused as fatigue blurred impressions of still newer marvels, so that I am not entirely sure whether it was merely one or a succession of enchanting girls who offered delights for a quarter. I know I was solicited by crimps for the Confederate Legion who operated openly in defiance of the laws of the United States and that an incredible number of beggars accosted me.

At last I thought of asking directions from one of the mult.i.tude on the wooden or granite sidewalks. But without realizing it I had wandered from thronged, brightly lit avenues into an unpeopled, darkened area where buildings were low and frowning, where the flicker of a candle or the yellow of a kerosene lamp in windows far apart were unrivalled by any streetlights.

My ears had been deafened all day by the clop of hooves, the rattling of iron tires or the puffing of minibiles; now the empty street seemed unnaturally still. The suddenly looming figure of another walker was the luckiest of chances.

"Excuse me, friend," I said. "Can you tell me where's the nearest inn, or anywhere I can get a bed for the night cheap?"

I felt him peering at me. "Rube, huh? Much money you got?"

"Th-Not very much. That's why I want to find cheap lodging."

"OK, Reuben-come along."

"Oh, don't trouble to show me. Just give me an idea how to get there."

He grunted. "No trouble, Reuben. No trouble at all."

Taking my arm just above the elbow in a firm grip he steered me along. For the first time I began to feel alarm. However, before I could even attempt to shrug free, he had shoved me into the mouth of an alley discernible only because its absolute blackness contrasted with the relative darkness of the street.

"Wait-" I began.

"In here, Reuben. Soundest night's sleep you've had in a long time. And cheap-it's free."

I started to break loose and was surprised to find he no longer held me. Before I could even begin to think, however, a terrific blow fell on the right side of my head and I traded the blackness of the alley for the blackness of insensibility.

I was recalled to consciousness by a smell. More accurately a cacophony of smells. I opened my eyes and shut them against the unbearable pain of light; I groaned at the equally unbearable pain in my skull bones. Feverishly and against my will I tried to identify the walloping odors around me.

The stink of death and rottenness was thick. I knew there was an outhouse-many outhouses-nearby. The ground I lay upon was damp with the water of endless dishwas.h.i.+ngs and launderings. The noisomeness of offal suggested that the garbage of many families had never been buried, but left to rot in the alley or near it. In addition there was the smell of death-not the sweetish effluvium of blood, such as any country boy who has helped butcher a bull-calf or hog knows-but the unmistakable stench of corrupt, maggotty flesh. Besides all this there was the spoor of humanity.

A new discomfort at last forced my eyes open for the second time. A hard surface was pressing painful k.n.o.bs into my exposed skin. I looked and felt around me.

The k.n.o.bs were the cobbles of a fetid alley; not a foot away was the cadaver of a dog, thoroughly putrescent; beyond him a drunk retched and groaned. A trickle of liquid swill wound its way delicately between the stones. My coat, s.h.i.+rt, and shoes were gone; so was the bundle with my books. There was no use searching my pocket for the three dollars-I knew I was lucky the robber left me my pants and my life.