The Victorious opposition ae-3

by Harry Turtledove

  Bathsheba leaned forward and said, "He got nerve."

  "He gots more nerve'n he gots sense," Scipio replied. Even in a place like this-maybe especially in a place like this-informers were bound to be listening. Plenty of Negroes would betray their own people for a little money or simply for the privilege of being left alone by Freedom Party goons. Scipio thought they were fools. Whatever tiny advantages they got wouldn't last long. But a lot of men-and women-couldn't see past the end of their noses.

  "When I heard they was shootin' at the president, I prayed," the comic said. "I tell you, I got down on my knees an' prayed. I prayed, God keep Mistuh Featherston… a long ways away from me."

  More giggles. More gasps, too. Scipio wondered again whether the comic had more nerve than sense. He skated awfully close to the line. In fact, he likely skated right over the line. In how many towns, in how many rooms full of strangers, had he told jokes like that and got away with them?

  Then Scipio had another thought, one that chilled him worse than the December weather outside. Maybe the funny man wasn't worried about informers. Maybe he was an informer himself. Maybe he was trying to smoke out rebellious Negroes in the audience. They would come to him because he said what they were thinking, and then… then they'd be sorry.

  Scipio shivered again. He didn't know that was true. That it could even occur to him was a measure of the time he lived in.

  "Reckon you heard Satchmo and the Rhythm Aces is from New Orleans," the comic went on with a sly leer. "But I reckon you don't know why they is from New Orleans an' not in New Orleans." He paused, setting up his punch line: "The Freedom Party gits in there, they gits outa there."

  It might even have been true. A lot of bands from New Orleans had started touring when Huey Long met an assassin who, unlike those who'd tried for Jake Featherston, had known how to shoot straight. Had Long been easier on Negroes than the Freedom Party? He couldn't have been much tougher. And any which way, a joke about the Party was bound to draw a laugh from this crowd.

  That only made Scipio wonder again whether the funny man was a stalking horse for the people he pretended to mock. No way to know, not for sure, but even the question spoiled his enjoyment of the comic's lines. He ordered another overpriced beer.

  After what seemed a very long time, the comic retreated and Satchmo and the Rhythm Aces came out. The trumpeter who led the band was an engagingly ugly fellow with a froglike bass voice. When he raised the horn to his lips and began to play, Scipio's eyes went wide, not only at the sounds he produced but also at the way his cheeks swelled up. He looked like a frog, too: like a spring peeper calling from a tree.

  But the way he played made Scipio and everybody else forget about the way he looked. In his hands, that trumpet didn't just speak. It laughed and it moaned and it wept. And when it did, everyone who heard it wanted to do the same.

  The Rhythm Aces-fiddler, sax man, bass man, drummer-couldn't have backed him better. And the music that poured from the band sent people hurrying from their seats and onto the dance floor. Now and again, in the Huntsman's Lodge, Scipio had heard rich white men sneering about nigger music. But the wilder, freer rhythms blacks enjoyed had also infected whites' music in the Confederate States. You could hardly find a song or a record on the wireless that didn't sound as if the musicians, no matter how white, had been listening to what came out of New Orleans and Mobile and Atlanta and other towns with a lively colored music scene. Sometimes they didn't seem to know it themselves. But the alert ear could always tell, especially when a song from the USA got played for comparison. Music from north of the border wasn't necessarily bad, but it was different: more staid, less surprising.

  Even in the Confederate States, though, white musicians borrowed only some of the trimmings from what blacks played for themselves and among themselves. Any white band that played like Satchmo and the Rhythm Aces- assuming a white band could do any such thing, which struck Scipio as unlikely-would have been booed off the stage… or, just possibly, idolized.

  Before Scipio could decide which, Bathsheba reached out and tapped him on the arm. "Why you sittin' there?" she demanded. "Let's us dance!"

  "All right. We do dat." He got to his feet. He wasn't the most enthusiastic dancer God ever made, but you didn't come to the Ten of Clubs if you didn't want to get out on the floor.

  He wasn't the most athletic dancer God ever made, either. He never had been; he'd always owned too much of a sense of his own dignity to let loose as fully as a lot of people, and he wasn't so young as he had been, either. He did his best, knowing Bathsheba's was better-and, as he watched some of the youngsters cavort, knowing there were things he hadn't even imagined. Some of the moves they made were as far beyond him as Satchmo's music was beyond a bored Army bugler.

  He shrugged-and found himself trying to do it so it fit the beat. He must have managed; Bathsheba didn't seen too exasperated. All the same, he felt like a sparrow among hummingbirds that could hover and fly backwards and zoom straight up and do a million other things no ordinary bird could ever hope to manage.

  Satchmo seemed ready to play all night. Eyes bugging out of his head, trumpet aimed at the sky as if to let God and the angels hear, he wailed on and on. Scipio wasn't ready to dance all night, though his wife might have been. But when he mimed exhaustion, she went back to the table with him so he could catch his breath. He realized that while out on the floor he hadn't once thought about Jake Featherston or the sorry plight of Negroes in the CSA. The music had driven all his worries clean out of his head. He might almost have been making love. He laughed. Some of the young couples out there might almost have been making love while they danced. For all he knew, maybe some of them had.

  At two in the morning, the manager said, "We gots to close. We git in trouble with the police if we don't. I's right sorry, but I don't want no trouble with the police, not the way things is."

  A few people grumbled, but nobody really raised a fuss. The way things were these days, a black man had to be crazy to court trouble with the police in Augusta or anywhere else. Scipio and Bathsheba got their coats and hats from the girl who'd checked them and walked out into the night.

  The Terry was quiet-almost deserted but for the people leaving the Ten of Clubs. A chilly drizzle had begun to fall. The crowd scattered quickly. The Negro district remained technically under curfew, though the cops hadn't bothered enforcing it lately. Still, nobody wanted to get caught and beaten up or shaken down.

  Bathsheba hoisted an umbrella. Scipio, who didn't have one, pulled his hat low on his forehead and looked down toward the ground to keep the rain out of his eyes. "Lord, I'm so glad tomorrow's Sunday," his wife said.

  He shook his head. "Today Sunday. It be Sunday coupla hours now. Do Jesus, I thanks de Lawd we ain't got to work." Most Sundays, he would have gone to church to thank the Lord. Bathsheba believed, even if he had trouble. This morning, though, it looked as if they would both sleep in, and so would the children.

  He turned a corner, then stopped short. Men were moving up ahead. He couldn't see much-street lights in the Terry hadn't worked for years. But if those weren't rifles being passed back and forth… If they weren't, he'd never seen any. He turned around and, without a word, signed for Bathsheba to back away, raising a finger to his lips to show she needed to be quiet while she did it.

  For a wonder, she didn't argue. For a bigger wonder, none of those men with rifles came after them. Maybe they'd been so intent on their own business, they hadn't noticed the people who'd spotted them. Maybe the drizzle had helped, too.

  Whatever the reason, Scipio knew he was lucky to get away in one piece. He and Bathsheba took a different street home. As they made their escape, a snatch of whistled music pursued them. It wasn't any tune Satchmo and the Rhythm Aces played, but he'd heard it before just the same. It was the "Internationale."

  Reds had come-come back-to the Terry. They'd come back, and they had guns.

  "Holy Jesus!" One of the yeomen in the USS Remembrance's wireless sh
ack yanked off his earphones and stared at his pal. "You hear that, Zach?"

  "Sure as hell did," Zach answered, scribbling furiously on the pad in front of him.

  "What's up?" Sam Carsten asked. As usual when not on duty, he was killing time in the wireless shack. It was warm-the aeroplane carrier cruised between Florida and the U.S.-occupied Bahamas-but at least he was out of the sun. He wished the yeomen weren't wearing earphones. That way, he could have heard whatever it was, too. But they liked to get rid of distractions from the outside world-nosy officers, for instance-when they listened to Morse.

  Zach finished writing, then dropped the pencil. "Signal going out in clear to the Confederate Army and Navy, sir," he answered. "Their vice president- Willy Knight, his name is-has resigned, and he's under arrest."

  "Christ!" Sam said. The other yeoman-his name was Freddy-was on the phone to the bridge with the news. Carsten heard a startled squawk on the other end of the line when it went through. He felt like squawking himself. Instead, he asked, "How come, for the love of Mike?"

  "Story they're giving out is, he was the fellow behind the stalwarts who tried to take out Featherston a couple weeks ago," Zach said.

  "Christ!" Carsten repeated, louder and with more emphasis this time. "That's the kind of crap that happens in Argentina or Nicaragua or one of those places, not up here."

  "Yes, sir." The yeoman nodded. He knew better than to come right out and contradict an officer, no matter how stupid that officer had just been. He got his barb in, all right, but politely: "Except it just did."

  "Well, what do they do now?" Sam asked. "They arrested Knight, you say? They going to give him a blindfold and a cigarette and stand him up against a wall?"

  "No report on that, sir," Zach answered. "Only an alert. He has resigned. He has been arrested. No orders issued in his name are to be obeyed."

  Sam wondered exactly what that meant, too. Had Willy Knight tried to get the Army, or some of it, to move against Jake Featherston? If he had, it didn't sound as if he'd had much luck. Luck or not, though, nobody in either the USA or the CSA had ever tried to play that particular game before.

  "He wanted to put on a Napoleon suit, but it turned out to be three sizes too big," Sam judged. Both yeomen in the wireless shack nodded this time.

  He hung around the wireless shack, hoping for more details, but no more seemed forthcoming. About ten minutes later, the klaxons began to hoot, ordering the crew to general quarters. He thought it was a drill. He hoped it was a drill. He got down to his station in the bowels of the Remembrance in jig time even so.

  "What the hell's going on, sir?" a sailor in the damage-control party asked. "They ain't sprung one of these on us in a while."

  "I'm not sure," said Sam, who had a pretty good idea. "Maybe Lieutenant Commander Pottinger knows more about it than I do."

  But when Pottinger got there half a minute later, he said, "Now what?" in tones mightily aggrieved. He proceeded to explain himself: "I was in the head, God damn it, when the hooters started screeching."

  A couple of sailors smiled. Nobody laughed. That had happened to every man who'd been in the Navy more than a few months. Carsten said, "Well, sir, I don't know for certain, but…" He told what he'd heard about Willy Knight.

  "Shit." Pottinger didn't usually talk that way; maybe his recent misadventure preyed on his mind. He gathered himself and went on, "What the hell are the Confederates going to do now?"

  "Beats me, sir," Sam answered. "But I expect it explains the general-quarters call: they want to make damn sure they don't go and do it to us."

  "Makes sense," Pottinger agreed. He shifted uncomfortably. "If they keep us here too long, though, I'm going to need a honey bucket." Again, nobody laughed. Carsten approved of an officer who wouldn't abandon his post even in the face of what would ordinarily have been an urgent need.

  The all-clear sounded before Lieutenant Commander Pottinger was reduced to such indignities. The officer in charge of the damage-control party left with dignified haste.

  Carsten headed back to the wireless shack. He found the door closed against snoopy interlopers like himself. Somebody on the Remembrance was taking the news out of the CSA very seriously indeed. Sam's suspicions fell on Commander Cressy. Taking things seriously was how the exec earned his pay.

  Balked from getting more news, Sam went out on the flight deck. By the rumors flying among the sailors there, the powers that be had shut the door to the wireless shack too late. Somebody claimed Willy Knight had already been shot. Somebody else said he was still in jail, awaiting trial as a U.S. spy. A grizzled bosun insisted Knight had been trying to flee up into Maryland when he was caught. Other claims seemed to spring from thin air.

  Some of them were probably true. Sam had no idea which, though. He listened to them all, admiring the ones he found most impressive. He might have done the same thing watching girls on a street corner in a liberty port.

  The Remembrance pitched a little as she steamed south, but the sea was a lot calmer here than it would have been in the open waters of the North Atlantic at this time of year. The sun shone down out of a sky mostly blue. In these latitudes, even the winter sun could burn Sam's tender hide. Sea birds scudded along the breeze or dove into the ocean after fish.

  But that buzz Carsten heard didn't come from gulls or petrels. Those were aeroplane motors-and they weren't the motors of the machines aboard the Remembrance. This was a different note. Peering west, Sam saw several brightly painted aeroplanes nearing the carrier. They zoomed past low enough for him to read the words confederate citrus company on their sides.

  A sailor saluted the machines from the CSA with his middle finger. Another man said, "I hear those bastards all have guns in 'em these days."

  Sam had heard the same thing. As with the news about Willy Knight, he didn't know how much to believe, but there was probably a fire somewhere under all that smoke. A petty officer said, "We ought to splash a couple of 'em, fish 'em out of the drink, and damn well see for ourselves."

  That took things right to the edge, because a lot of sailors were nodding. Sam felt he had to draw back a step or two, and he did: "We don't shoot at them unless they shoot first, or unless we get orders from the skipper, which means orders from the Navy Department back in Philadelphia."

  That petty officer muttered something Carsten decided he didn't have to notice in any official way. Just as well, too, for it wasn't a compliment. The fellow knew he was a mustang, and wondered why he took the attitudes of ordinary officers. That was what it amounted to, anyhow; the way the petty officer put it, it would have knocked down one of those confederate citrus company machines without bothering about the carrier's antiaircraft guns.

  Both the flyby and the news out of the CSA got kicked around in the officers' mess that evening. The foulmouthed petty officer might have been surprised, for a lot of the officers he'd sneered at agreed with him. "Those Confederate bastards are just poking at us, seeing how much they can get away with," was a common sentiment. "We ought to break their fingers for 'em, remind 'em who won the last war."

  "Maybe this business with Knight means they'll start fighting among themselves and leave us alone for a while," a lieutenant said.

  "Don't bet on it." Commander Cressy entered the fray with his usual authority. "If they'd got rid of Featherston, then, maybe. The way things are, he just gets the excuse to clamp down harder."

  "Wonder if Knight really was spying for us," a lieutenant commander said.

  In your dreams, Carsten thought. He didn't say that, not to an officer two grades senior to him, but he held the opinion very strongly.

  And he wasn't the only one, for the executive officer snorted and said, "Not likely. He's done us too much harm over the years to make it easy to believe he was on our side all along. But we can deny it till we're blue in the face, and that won't do us any good."

  "Wonder what excuse Knight had for getting rid of him," someone said. "Whatever it was, too bad it didn't work."

 
"Featherston is going to run again, and Knight didn't think he should," Sam said. "Knight figured he was going to get elected this coming November, but their Constitutional amendment screwed his chances."

  "Could be," Commander Cressy said. "Could be, but we don't know for sure. The Confederates are saying Knight was the guy behind those fellows who tried to shoot Featherston, but how do we know that's true? Far as I can see, we don't. Featherston might be using the assassination attempt as an excuse to get rid of Knight, regardless of whether he really had anything to do with it."

  That cynical assessment stopped talk in its tracks. At last, Lieutenant Commander Pottinger whistled in reluctant admiration. "You don't believe in anything, do you, sir?" he said.

  "Not without evidence," Cressy answered at once. "We haven't got any, except for what the Confederate wireless says. And the Confederate wireless lies. It lies like a drunk telling his wife what happened to the grocery money. Are you going to trust it just because it says something you might want to hear?"

  Again, no one spoke for a little while. Sam eyed the exec with real respect. He had believed the wireless reports from the CSA. They were the only news he had, so why not believe them? He hadn't found any reason not to, but Commander Cressy had-and a damn good reason, too.

  "Makes it harder to figure out what the Confederates are up to if we can't believe anything they say," he remarked.

  "That's not our worry," Cressy said. "The way I look at things is, we don't believe any of it till we either have evidence of our own that we should or until our superiors tell us what's true and what isn't. You can bet they've got spies inside the CSA finding out what the straight dope is."