Harry Turtledove - Return engagement

Jake went back to the desk. He spent the next little while flipping through Over Open Sights. The more he read, the better he liked it. Everything-everything!-you wanted to know about what the Freedom Party stood for was all there in one place. Everybody all over the Confederate States, even those damn greasers, would be able to read it and understand.

He expected the telephone to ring and ruin the moment. As far as he could see, that was what the lousy thing was for. But it held off. He had twenty-five minutes to flip through twenty-five years' worth of hard work. Oh, he hadn't fiddled with the book every day through all that time, but it had never escaped his mind. And now the fruits of all that labor were in print. The more he thought about it, the better it felt.

In the end, the telephone didn't interrupt him. Lulu did. "Sir, the Attorney General is here to see you," she said.

"Well, you'd better send him in, then," Jake answered. His secretary nodded and withdrew. Ferdinand Koenig came into the President's office a moment later. Jake beamed and held up his fancy copy of Over Open Sights. "Hello, Ferd, you old son of a bitch! Ain't this something?"

"Not bad," Koenig answered. "Not bad at all, Sarge." He was one of the handful of men left alive who could call Featherston a name like that. A massive man, he'd been in the Freedom Party even longer than Jake. He'd backed the uprising that put Jake at the head of the Party, and he'd backed him ever since. If anybody in this miserable world was reliable, Ferdinand Koenig was the man.

"Sit down," Featherston said. "Make yourself comfortable, by God."

The chair on the other side of the desk creaked as Koenig settled his bulk into it. He reached for the book. "Let me have a look at that, why don't you? You've been talking about it long enough."

"Here you are," Jake said proudly.

Koenig paged through the book, pausing every now and then to take a look at some passage or another. He would smile and nod or raise an eyebrow. At last, he looked up. "You saw a lot of this before the last war even ended, didn't you?"

"Hell, yes. It was there, if you had your eyes open," Jake answered. "Tell me you didn't know we'd never be able to trust our niggers again. Everybody with an eye to see knew that."

"That's what I came over here to talk about, as a matter of fact," Koenig said. "Way things are going, I need to ask you a couple of questions."

"Go right ahead," Featherston said expansively. With Over Open Sights in print and in his hands at last, he felt happier, more mellow, than he had for a hell of a long time. Maybe this was what women felt when they had a baby. He didn't know about that; he'd never been a woman. But this was pretty fine in its own way.

Koenig said, "Well, the way things are, we're doing two different things, seems to me. Some of these niggers are going into camps like the one that Pinkard fellow runs out in Louisiana."

"Sure." Jake nodded. "Bastards are going in, all right, but they're not coming out again. Good riddance."

"That's right," the Attorney General said. "But then we've got all these other niggers we're roping into war production work, and they just live wherever they've been living when they aren't at the plant."

"So?" Featherston said with a shrug. "They'll get theirs sooner or later, too. The more work we can squeeze out of 'em beforehand, the better."

"I agree with you there," Ferdinand Koenig said. Hardly anyone dared disagree with the President of the CSA these days. Koenig went on, "I've been thinking, though-there might be a neater way to do this."

"Tell me what you've got in mind," Jake said. "I'm listening."

"Well, Sarge, the word that really occurs to me is consolidation," Koenig said. "If we can find some kind of way to put the war work and the camps together, the whole operation'll run a lot smoother. And then, when some of these bucks get too run down to be worth anything on the line…" He snapped his fingers.

Featherston stared. Slowly, a grin spread across his face. "I like it. I like it a hell of a lot, matter of fact. Get it set up so it doesn't disrupt everything else going on too much, and we'll do it, by God."

As Saul Goldman had a little while before, Koenig took a notebook from an inside jacket pocket and wrote in it. He said, "I'll have to see exactly what needs doing. Whatever it is, I'll take care of it. It does seem to be a way to kill two birds with one stone."

"You might say that," Jake answered. "Yeah, you just might. But we'll do a hell of a lot more killing than that." He threw back his head and laughed like a loon. He was not a man to whom laughter came often. When it did, the fit hit him hard.

"Damn right we will." Koenig got to his feet. "I won't bother you any more, Sarge. I know you've got the war with the USA to run. But I did want to keep you up to date on what we're doing."

"That's fine." Featherston laughed again. "Oh, hell, yes, Ferd. That's just fine. And the war with the USA and the war against the niggers go together. Don't you ever forget that."

Down in southern Sonora, Hipolito Rodriguez could have thought the new war against the USA nothing but noise in a distant room. No U.S. bombers appeared over the small town of Baroyeca, outside of which he had his farm. No U.S. soldiers were within a couple of hundred miles, and none seemed likely to come any closer. Peace might have continued uninterrupted… except that he had one son in the Army and two more who might be called to the colors at almost any time. For that matter, he was only in his mid-forties himself. He'd fought in the last war. It wasn't unimaginable that they might want to put butternut on his back again.

He didn't want to leave his farm. He even had electricity these days, something he couldn't have imagined when he left Sonora the first time. That went a long way toward making the place a paradise on earth. Electric lights, a refrigerator, even a wireless set… what more could one man need?

One evening when the war was still very new, he kissed his wife and said, "I'm going into town for the Freedom Party meeting."

Magdalena raised an eyebrow. "Do you think I didn't know you were going to?" she asked. "You've been going as many weeks as you can for more than fifteen years now. Why would you change tonight?"

They spoke Spanish between themselves, a Spanish leavened with English words absorbed in the sixty years Sonora and Chihuahua had belonged to the CSA. Their children used more English, an English leavened with many Spanish words from the 350 years Sonora and Chihuahua had belonged first to Spain and then to Mexico. Their grandchildren and great-grandchildren might one day speak an English more like that heard in the rest of the Confederacy. Thinking about that occasionally worried Rodriguez. Most of the time, though, it lay too far beyond the horizon of now to trouble him very much.

Out the door he went. He still hadn't had a letter from Pedro since the shooting started. There was a worry much more immediate than any over language. He also hadn't had a telegram from the War Department in Richmond. That made him think everything was all right, and that his youngest son was just too busy to write. He hoped so, anyway.

Baroyeca lay in a valley between two ridge lines of the Sierra Madre Occidental. The westering sun shone brightly on them, burnishing their peaks and gilding them. From lifelong familiarity, Rodriguez hardly noticed the mountains' stern beauty. The wonders of our own neighborhoods are seldom obvious to us. What he did notice were the men coming out of the reopened silver mine, the railroad that had closed in the business collapse but was running again, and the poles that carried electricity not only to Baroyeca but also to outlying farms like his. Those, to him, were the real marvels.