Harry Turtledove: The Guns of the South

The man who returned between the guards was slim and dark and walked with a limp. In plain gray shirt and pants—slave’s clothes, actually; the prison warder saved a dollar where he could—he did not look like one of the fearsome Rivington men. “Good morning, Mr. Lang,” Lee said. He pointed to a chair a few feet in front of the desk. “You may sit if your wound still troubles you.”

“It’s healing well enough,” Benny Lang said. He sat all the same. Lee’s bodyguard, AK-47 ready to fire from the hip, interposed himself between chair and desk. The men from the Libby Prison detachment stood off to one side, their rifles equally ready. As he looked from one of them to another, Lang’s mouth shaped an ironic smile. “I suppose I should be flattered at how dangerous you think I am.”

Lee’s answer was serious: “The Confederacy has learned, to its cost, how dangerous you Rivington men are.” He watched Lang’s smile fade, went on, “I also wish to inform you, so you may pass it on to your fellows upstairs, that the House of Representatives yesterday passed by a vote of fifty-two to forty-one the bill regulating the labor of this nation’s colored individuals. The way in which you sought to turn us from that course succeeded only in putting us more firmly upon it.”

Lang set his jaw. “Get rid of us, then, and have done.” The bodyguard’s back seemed to radiate agreement with the suggestion.

Lee said, “You must understand beyond any possible doubt that the direction in which you intended to go is not the one we have chosen for ourselves. Those of you who grasp that and are able to fully accept it may yet gain the opportunity to redeem your lives despite your treason.”

“How’s that?” the Rivington man asked scornfully. “Say we’re sorry and go scot-free? I’m not a big enough fool to believe it. I wish to heaven I could.”

“You needn’t,” Lee said. Benny Lang gave a mordant chuckle. Ignoring it, Lee went on, “If you were ever to regain your freedom, you would earn it, I assure you.”

Lang studied him. “You’re not a man in the habit of lying,” he said slowly. “Tell me more.”

Lee still wondered if he should. As his bodyguard had said, being certain about anything that had to do with the Rivington men was impossible. Even though they’d been stripped of all their gear from the future, right down to their very clothes, he couldn’t be sure that, knowing something of which 1868 was ignorant, they might not yet find a means to escape and give the Confederacy more grief. He felt, in fact, rather like a fisherman who had rubbed a lamp, seen a genie come forth, and was now wondering how—or if—he could control it.

If he could, though, how much good that would bring his country! And so, cautiously, he said, “You know, Mr. Lang, that in capturing the AWB offices here in Richmond and your headquarters down in Rivington, we have come into possession of a large quantity of volumes from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Our scholars, as you may imagine, have fallen on these with glad cries and will spend years gleaning what they can from them.”

“If you have the bloody books, what do you want with us?” Lang said.

“Primarily, to serve as bridges. A complaint I have heard repeatedly is that your volumes take for granted matters about which we know nothing. I confess that, having seen your works in action, I find this unsurprising: we are speaking, after all, of a gap of a hundred fifty years. You men may well prove of great value by helping us understand—and perhaps helping us use—your, ah, artifacts. Performing that task faithfully and well could, in time, possibly even expiate the crimes of which you are surely guilty.”

“You’d use us, eh?” Lang cocked his head. “From your point of view, I suppose that makes good sense. But how would you know you could trust us?”

“There lies the rub,” Lee admitted. “I am glad you can see it. We would be taking a risk; with your greater knowledge, you might delude the men with whom you work in the same way you sought to delude the entire Confederacy as to the path the future would have taken without your intervention—and as you tried to do with your speaking wireless telegraph.” Learning of that device still irked Lee. He said, “We could have done great things with it in the late war…had you seen fit to reveal its existence.”

Lang said, “We would have, I swear it, if you’d been in trouble. As it was, as we thought, the AKs turned out to be plenty to win your freedom.”

“And so you concealed a potentially vital tool from us, for your own advantage. I promise we shall do our best to prevent any future episodes of that sort. Your Rivington men would be split up, not permitted to know where your fellows are nor, save under most unusual circumstances, to communicate with them. Further, you would be required to explain fully to the scholars or mechanics with whom you will be working every step of every process you demonstrate. Even so, we recognize the risk remains, though we shall do our utmost to minimize it.”

Benny Lang made a sour face. “We’d be just like the poor damned German technicians hauled off to Russia at the end of World War II.” Lee did not understand the reference. Seeing that, Lang went on, “Never mind. Whatever you propose is better than hanging. I think most of us will be willing to go along. I know I will.”

“The reason I chose to put the question to you first, Mr. Lang, is that you are one of the Rivington men likeliest to be chosen to help us comprehend the products of your time. By most accounts, you have comported yourself well here in the Confederate States: you fought bravely on our behalf—and then later, it must be said, against us—and, while living the planter’s life in Rivington, you treated your Negro servants relatively well. This lets me hope, at least, you will be able to accommodate yourself to your changed circumstances.”

“I’ll manage. Given the alternative, you can bet I’ll manage,” Lang said.

“Yes; that would offer considerable incentive—so much so, in fact, that we shall carefully examine every man’s sincerity and credentials before even considering his release. Your sentences may possibly be suspended; they shall not be forgotten.”

“You’d be stupid if you did forget them,” Lang said, nodding. “The other thing that worries me is, not an of us know the kinds of things you will want to learn. Up in our own time, we weren’t professors, you know. A lot of us were soldiers or police. Me, I repaired computers.”

“There. You see what I meant about the gap between your time and mine?” Lee said. “I haven’t the faintest idea what a, ah, computer is, let alone how to repair one.”

“A computer is an electronic machine that calculates and puts information together very quickly,” Benny Lang said.

Lee almost asked him what sort of machine he had said, but decided not to bother, as he doubted the answer would have left him enlightened—the gap again. He chose a simpler question:, ‘What does a computer look like?” When Lang explained, Lee grinned like a small boy—one mystery solved! “So that’s the proper name for the qwerty.”

“For the what?” Lang’s confusion lasted only a couple of seconds. “Oh. You named it for the keyboard, didn’t you? That’s not bad. Give me a steady supply of electricity and I’ll show you things with that machine the likes of which you’ve never imagined.”

Lee believed him. The Rivington men had already shown him—shown all the South—a great many things whose likes had never been imagined. Some of them, he thought, should have remained unimagined. He wondered if the computer would prove to be one such. Time alone would tell. He said, “If the device be as useful as you say, will you teach us to manufacture more like it? We have commenced production of our own AK-47s, you know.”