Cherie Priest: Fiddlehead

As he determinedly, carefully ushered her off the speaker’s stand, she called out over her shoulder, “Men are dying—more men than I ever saved at the Robertson! And if you think”—she tripped over Caperton’s foot, and recovered—“if you think it’ll stop with the soldiers, with the poor men from the Southern fields and the Northern factories, you’re idiots, every last one of you! The problem grows bigger every day.”

“We’re aware of this drug, Captain Sally,” said Wellers Chrisman. “But it’s a Union problem. Who cares if the illiterate Italians blast themselves senseless?”

Frantic now, she grabbed the edge of a table. That bought her another few seconds while her escort tried to figure out how to more forcibly accost a lady without being too ungallant in front of God and everybody.

“Exactly how many Union soldiers do you think I treat at the Robertson, Mr. Chrisman? It’s our boys, too, and we’ve got fewer of them to lose. Take off your blinders and take action while there’s still time. Gentlemen, the world will judge us by the steps we take right now. The whole globe is in danger!”

Her grasp on the table edge failed. She lost a few steps, then caught herself on the door frame. But before Caperton pushed her out with absolute finality, he bowed his head so that his lips came close to her ear, and his breath lightly tousled the stray curl that dangled there. “Captain Sally, you put us in a difficult position.”

She turned her head so fast that it cracked his face. “More difficult than mine?”

He let go of her, then, so he could hold his nose, waiting for it to start bleeding. It didn’t, so he removed his hand. “This isn’t a problem of war. It’s a social issue.”

“It’s a disease!” She tried another angle, pleading now. “A disease spread by soldiers, not so different from cholera or typhoid. That makes it an issue of war, does it not?”

“Not on the word of one nurse.”

“One nurse, fine. What about two? What about a dozen? A thousand? How many nurses will it take, Mr. Caperton?”

“You’re missing the point. Bring me a doctor, and let him testify. In the meantime, the Confederacy thanks you for your service, but you must return to your duties and let the men run the war.”

“Which you’ve done a bang-up job of thus far.”

He didn’t answer. He only shepherded her through the last great door and shut her out of the proceedings with heavy, slow calmness.

He leaned against the door then, holding it shut even though she no longer pushed or knocked. All eyes were on him. He wiped at his nose once more, in case it’d begun to bleed after all. But no. He was not injured, just unsettled. He cleared his throat. “Gentlemen. Now that the matter is resolved, let us return to business.”

The room sighed its relief with a rustle of papers and the creaks of men shifting in their seats, suddenly more at ease. The fifteenth Congress of the Confederacy was in session still, in its enormous hall with gilt ceiling, leaded and colored glass windows, and polished wood trim—all designed to advertise and reassure that Danville was not finished, and certainly not broke.

In the far corner, a young man still in his teens wrote feverishly, recording the minutes in his cleanest Pitman shorthand. He captured every word faithfully, scrawling like a phonography racehorse, noting the last bits of the tense exchange between Captain Sally and Congressman Caperton. He even dutifully included the muttered gripe of Robert Welch, who’d complained, “Shouldn’t have let a woman address the floor in the first place, rank or no rank. Let her take her pride in it, but give her no privileges apart from cashing checks.”

Above and behind the stenographer, on the second-story balcony that ran around the congressional hall, a board creaked under a finely heeled boot, and a spindly white cobweb was swept aside by the long hem of a cotton skirt.

This woman did not approach the floor, but withdrew from it, leaning back among the shadows that had hidden her thus far. She did not want to talk to the men. She’d come to see Captain Sally, though the captain did not know it. Now that the fireworks were finished, this woman took her leave exactly as she’d arrived: in silence and darkness, with a widow’s veil to hide the smile that spread coldly across her face.

But she had not gone unnoticed or unrecognized.

In the back row, seated beside the stenographer, a man collected his belongings, sorting his papers and straightening them before slipping them into a satchel, as if he were any other clerk wrapping up his business.

He was no clerk. Nor was he a congressman, senator, or any other party to the CSA.

As he retreated from the seat he’d borrowed from an absent legislator, he mentally composed the telegram he’d send within the hour.

KATHARINE HAYMES IN DANVILLE STOP PLEASE ADVISE

Gideon Bardsley was working in the basement of the former Jefferson Hospital, which had been converted into the science center that housed his laboratory, when the first window broke. He heard the brittle sound of glass being strategically shattered, but he did not turn off the machine. Instead, he glanced at the dial beside his hand. Its tiny needle leaned hard past the yellow warning threshold, and tapped against the red zone.

A second window broke upstairs.

He rejected the reflex to look up at the basement door. Looking at the basement door would not tell him anything he did not already know—nothing he could not discern from the sounds of motion upstairs. Two intruders, at least. Entering from the western side of the building. Not close yet; not even in the correct wing of the disused hospital space. But coming.

He had time, but not much.

Gideon reached for a large glass knob and turned it carefully, but as quickly as he dared. He checked the dial again. Its needle careened farther to the right, fully in the red, but fairly stable. The lever on the left would activate the printing apparatus upstairs. He pulled it.

He needed an answer, and he needed it now.

The mighty computational engine strained and hummed, its gears and chains struggling against the request. At the rear a fuse fizzled and popped, but did not blow; a circuit objected with a fit of sparks, but held steady; a row of lights flickered, but did not go out.

Now Gideon looked up at the basement door. He stared at it. Hard. And he willed the system to work the way he told it to—please, just this once , if never again.

Three seconds passed. He knew because he counted.

Click.

Whir.

A blue-green glow sparked to life on the machine as a thin line of watery light pooled through the crack where the bottom of the door met the top stair.

“ Yes, ” Gideon breathed, but he did not smile. Turning on the apparatus was not the hard part. It was the first hard part.

The printer was far too large to share the basement with its companion device, which occupied two-thirds of the downstairs floor space. Ordinarily this was a source of great irritation for Gideon, who would’ve been much happier to have everything in one room, or at least on one level, preferably at a quarter of the present size. But just this once, it was a good thing.

So long as everything worked. And sometimes, it didn’t.

The lines, wires, tubes, and lumpily soldered joints that connected the two machines were strung through holes in the ceiling and floor, carrying more information at a greater speed than any such wires were ever expected to bear. They twitched, sparked, and jerked as electricity surged from the master device, depositing Gideon’s answer into the printer’s circuits, where the information sorted and arranged itself.