Harry Turtledove - Blood and iron

"So you do," his wife replied. "You should remember, though, that declaring a thing does not make it true."

She was laughing at him. He could hear it in her voice. She was also laughing because of him, a very different business. He waggled a forefinger at her. "You are a very troublesome woman." he said severely.

"No doubt you have reason," Marie said. "And no doubt I have my reasons for being troublesome. One of those reasons that comes straight to my mind is that I have a very troublesome husband."

"Me?" Lucien shook his head. "By no means. Not at all." He took another sip of fortified coffee. "How could I possibly be troublesome when I am holding here a cup of the elixir of life?" He put down the elixir of life so he could shrug out of his wool plaid coat. It was not quite warm enough in the bitter cold outside, but much too warm for standing by the stove for very long. As Lucien picked up the coffee cup again, Georges came into the kitchen. Lucien nodded to himself. "If I am troublesome, it could be that I understand why."

"How strange," Marie said. "I just now had this same thought at the same time. Men and women who have been married a long while do this, they say."

"How strange," Georges said, "I just now had the thought that I have been insulted, and for once I do not even know why."

"Never fear, son," Galtier said. "There are always reasons, and they are usually good ones."

"Here, then-I will give you a reason," Georges said. He left the kitchen, and flicked the light switch on the way out. The electric bulb in the lamp hanging from the ceiling went dark, plunging the room into gloom.

"Scamp!" Galtier called after him. Georges laughed-he was being troublesome, all right. Muttering, Galtier went over and turned on the lamp again. The kitchen shone as if he'd brought the sun indoors. "Truly electricity is a great marvel," he said. "I wonder how we ever got along without it."

"I cannot imagine," Marie said. "It makes everything so much easier-and you were clever enough to squeeze it out of the government."

"And the Americans," Galtier said. "You must not forget the Americans"

"I am not likely to forget the Americans." His wife's voice was tart. "Without the Americans, we would not have the son-in-law we now have, nor the grandson, either. Believe me, I remember all this very well."

"Without the Americans, we would not be living in the Republic of Quebec," Galtier said, looking at the large picture as well as the small one. "We would still be paying our taxes to Ottawa and getting nothing for them, instead of paying them to the city of Quebec… and getting nothing for them." Neither independence nor wealth reconciled him to paying taxes. Wealth, indeed, left him even less enthusiastic than he had been before, for it meant he had to pay more than he had when he was not doing so well.

"When the Americans came, we thought it was the end of the world," Marie said.

"And we were right," Lucien answered. "It was the end of the world we had always known. We have changed." From a Quebe-cois farmer, that was blasphemy to rank alongside tabernac and calisse. "We have changed, and we are better for it." From a Que-becois farmer, that was blasphemy viler than any for which the local French dialect had words.

His wife started to contradict him. He could tell by the way she opened her mouth, by the angle at which her head turned, by any number of other small things he could not have named but did see. Before she could speak, he wagged a finger at her-only that and nothing more. She hesitated. At last, she said "Peut-etre-it could be."

That was a greater concession than he'd thought he could get from her. He'd been ready to argue. Instead, all he had to say was, "We are lucky. The whole family is lucky. Things could so easily be worse." He thought again of the farmer out in Manitoba who'd tried to kill General Custer.

"God has been kind to us," Marie said.

"Yes, God has been kind to us," Galtier agreed. "And we have been lucky. And"-he knew just how to forestall an argument, almost as if he'd read a book on the subject-"this is excellent, truly excellent, coffee. Could you fix me another cup, exactly like this one?" His wife turned to take care of it. Galtier smiled behind her back. He'd had good luck and, wherever he could, he'd made good luck. And here he was, in his middle years and happy. He wondered how many of his neighbors could say that. Not many, unless he missed his guess. With an open smile and a word of thanks, he took the cup from Marie.

Jake Featherston tore open the fat package from the William Byrd Press. Dear Mr. Featherston, the letter inside read, Thank you for showing us the manuscript enclosed herewith. We regret that we must doubt its commercial possibilities at the present time, and must therefore regretfully decline to undertake its publication. We hope you will have success in placing it elsewhere.

He cursed. He couldn't place Over Open Sights anywhere, and a lot of the letters he got back from Richmond publishers- and even from one down in Mobile-were a lot less polite than this one. "Nobody wants to hear the truth," he growled.

"Nothing you can do about it now, Jake," Ferdinand Koenig said, slapping him on the back in consolation. "Come on. Let's get out of here "

''Stupid bastards," Featherston snarled. "And they're proud of it, damn them. They want to stay stupid." But he was glad to escape the Freedom Party offices. Even to him, they stank of defeat.

When he went out onto the streets of Richmond, he could have pulled the brim of his hat down low on his forehead or tugged up his collar so it hid part of his face. He could have grown a chin beard or bushy side whiskers to change his looks. He didn't. He hadn't. He wouldn't. As always, he met the world head-on.

The world was less fond of him than it had been before Grady Calkins murdered Wade Hampton V About every other person on the street recognized him, and about every third person who did recognize him showered him with abuse. He gave as good as he got, very often better.

Koenig shook his head while Jake and a passerby exchanged unpleasantries. After the man finally went on his way, Koenig said, "Christ, sometimes I think you look for trouble."

"No such thing." Featherston shook his head. "But I'll be goddamned if I'll run from it, either. After the damnyankee artillery, fools with big mouths aren't enough to put me off my feed."

"I still think you ought to lay low till it gets closer to the next election, let people forget about things," Koenig said.

He was one of the very few people these days who spoke frankly to Jake instead of telling him what they thought he wanted to hear. That made him a valuable man. All the same, Jake shook his head again. "No, dammit. I didn't do anything I'm ashamed of. The Party didn't do anything I'm ashamed of. One crazy man went and fouled things up for us, that's all. People need to forget about Calkins, not about me."

"They didn't forget last November," Koenig pointed out.

"We knew that was going to happen," Featherston said. "All right, it happened. It could have been a lot worse. A lot of people reckoned it would be a lot worse."

"You know what you sound like?" Koenig said. "You sound like the War Department in the last part of 1916, the first part of 1917, when the damnyankees had started hammering us hard. 'We hurt the enemy very badly and contained him more quickly than expected,' they'd say, and all that meant was, we'd lost some more ground."

Featherston grunted. Comparing him to the department he hated hit home. Stubbornly, he said, "The Freedom Party's going to get the ground back, though. The War Department never did figure out how to manage that one."

"If you say so, Sarge," Ferdinand Koenig replied. He didn't sound like a man who believed it. He sounded like a man humoring a rich lunatic-and he made sure Featherston knew he sounded that way.