The Victorious opposition ae-3

by Harry Turtledove

  At last, Moss asked, "Do you really think it will come to… that?"

  "I don't know," Finley replied. "I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised."

  "Well, well." Moss whistled tunelessly. "Do you want to go out and get drunk?"

  "Too early in the day for me," Finley said with genuine regret. "And, like I said, I have to be able to drive back to London. But don't let me stop you."

  "I've got work to do myself." Jonathan looked for a silver lining: "Maybe we're wrong. Here's hoping we're wrong."

  Major Finley nodded. "Yes. Here's hoping." But he didn't sound as if he believed it.

  Mary Pomeroy cut up pieces of fried pork chop and put them on Alec's plate along with some string beans. Her son ate string beans only under protest. He would eat them, though, and only rarely required threats of imminent bodily harm. Not even threats of imminent bodily harm would make him eat spinach. Bodily harm itself wouldn't; Mary and Mort had both made the experiment, which had left everyone in the family unhappy.

  Mort dug in. "That's good," he said.

  "Thanks," Mary answered. "What's the news at the diner?"

  "Not a whole lot," her husband said. "Two different tables of Yank soldiers talking about whether there'll be a whatchamacallit down south."

  "A plebiscite?" Mary asked.

  Mort nodded. "That's it. I hear it a dozen times a day, and I never remember it."

  "If there is one, the people down there will vote to leave the United States. They'll vote to be Confederates again," Mary said.

  "I suppose so." Mort lit a cigarette. He didn't care one way or the other.

  That he didn't care disappointed Mary. She did her best not to let it infuriate her. "What do you suppose would happen if we had one of those plebiscites here in Canada?" she asked.

  Mort didn't answer right away. He was blowing smoke rings for Alec. He was good at it; he could send them out one after another. His son watched in goggle-eyed fascination. Only when Mort ran out of smoke did he shrug and say, "I don't know."

  "Don't you think we'd vote to be Canadians again, to be free again?" Mary blazed. "Don't you think we'd vote to send the Yanks packing?"

  "I suppose so." But Mort still didn't sound very excited. "But we're not going to get to vote, you know."

  "Why not?" Mary said. "If the people in those states ever get to, we should, too. I don't want to be a Yank any more than somebody in Houston does."

  After another virtuoso set of smoke rings, Mort said, "I'll tell you why not. Because those other places have the Confederate States shouting for 'em all the time. Who's going to shout for us? We can't even shout for ourselves."

  Canadians didn't shout, or not very much. One surefire way to tell Yanks in Canada was by how much noise they made. Mary didn't just want to shout. She wanted to scream. "We ought to be shouting for ourselves. We're just as much a country as the United States are."

  "I suppose we could be, if-" Mort began.

  Alec interrupted: "More smoke rings, Daddy!"

  But Mort stubbed out the cigarette in an ashtray. "Next time I light up, sport," he told the little boy, and turned back to Mary. "I suppose we could be, if they let us," he said, picking up where he'd left off. "But they aren't going to let us, and there's nobody who can make them let us. We're stuck. We might as well get used to it. If we do, maybe they'll ease up on us a little more."

  Mary had never imagined hating her husband. She came unpleasantly close to it now. Mort wasn't a collaborator. Mary never would have had anything to do with him if he were, no matter how he stirred her. But he was- what would you call somebody like him? — an accommodator, that was it. He knew he was a Canadian. He even liked being a Canadian, and was proud of it. He didn't think staying a Canadian was worth a big fight, though. All he wanted to do was get along from one day to the next.

  More and more Canadians seemed to be accommodators these days. That made Mary want to scream, too. Accommodate enough, accommodate long enough, and you weren't a Canadian any more, were you? Not as far as she could see. Didn't you turn into a pale imitation of a Yank instead?

  "You want to go to the cinema Saturday night?" Mort asked. "The new film about Roosevelt's Unauthorized Regiment is supposed to be good. And they say Marion Morrison makes a first-rate TR."

  "I don't think so," Mary said tightly, fighting hard against despair. Mort already sounded like a pale imitation of a Yank. He would have denied it if she'd called him on it. She didn't. She didn't want a fight. Life was too short, wasn't it?

  If you don't fight, aren't you giving up, too? she asked herself. She supposed that was partly true, but only partly. She still cared about the wrongs the Americans had committed in occupying her country. She didn't, she wouldn't, forget.

  "Oh," Mort said. "Almost slipped my mind."

  "What?" Mary asked.

  "You know Freddy Halliday?" Mort said. That was a silly question; Rosenfeld wasn't such a big town that everybody didn't know everybody else. Mary nodded impatiently. Her husband went on, "He says the public library really will open in two weeks. He says, 'Cross my heart and hope to die.' "

  "Do you think it will happen?" Mary asked. Freddy Halliday had been trying to bring a public library to Rosenfeld for years. He hadn't had much luck till lately. Now he actually had a building a few doors down from the general store. He had it because the pharmacist who was supposed to come up from Minneapolis had got cold feet, but he did have it. Whether he had anything besides the building was a subject of much speculation in town.

  "He says he has a permit from the occupying authorities in Winnipeg and a budget and books," Mort answered. "I don't know if he really does. If he doesn't, we ought to ride him out of town on a rail, to teach him not to get our hopes up."

  "My hopes are up," Mary said. "You can have as much fun in a library as you can at the cinema, and it doesn't cost you anything." She turned to Alec. "I wonder if it'll have any children's books for you."

  "Read me a story?" Alec asked, cued by the word books.

  "After supper," Mary said. That made Alec shovel food into his mouth like a stoker fueling a fast freight. Mary hoped most stokers had better aim than her little boy did.

  It began to look as if Freddy Halliday had all the things he claimed he had. A brass plaque that said rosenfeld public library went up above the door to the forsaken pharmacy. A formidably stout maiden lady, a Miss Montague, moved into a ground-floor flat in the Pomeroys' block of flats and began spending all her waking hours in the building. A large truck brought crates of something to the place. If those crates didn't hold books, what was in them?

  The promised opening day came… and went. Everybody in town joked about it-everybody except Freddy Halliday, who remained resolutely upbeat. A week later, the Rosenfeld Public Library did in fact open its doors.

  Mary wasn't there for the opening. Alec came down with a cold, which meant he had to stay home, which meant she had to stay home, too. She didn't get to the library for another week. It was a bright spring day, the sky a deep, almost painful, blue overhead. The few white clouds dappling it only made the glorious color deeper. Out on the farms beyond the edge of town, people would be taking advantage of this glorious weather to plant. Mary could just enjoy it. Walking along with Alec's little hand in hers, she felt guilty about not doing more.

  In the library, Miss Montague sat behind a large wooden desk and under an almost equally large quiet, please! sign. She did smile at Alec, and pointed to, sure enough, the children's section. She didn't even breathe fire when Alec whooped with delight at finding books he hadn't seen before.

  Mary arranged to get a library card for herself and one for Mort. She stole brief glimpses of novels and nonfiction books, encyclopedias and magazines and newspapers. "Look at all the telephone books," she said, trying to keep Alec interested so she could go on looking around. "You can find out the telephone number of anybody in Canada or the United States." She refused even to name the Republic of Quebec, stolen from her country as Kentucky
and Houston had been stolen from the CSA.

  "Why?" Alec asked her.

  "So you can call them if you want to."

  "But we don't got a telephone."

  "Don't have a telephone. But if we did, we could."

  "Why?" Alec asked again.

  That string of questions could go on all day. Knowing as much, Mary said, "And here's a book of maps of the whole world." The big, colorful atlas distracted Alec.

  It also distracted Mary, but only for a little while. If I could call anybody, who would it be? What would I say? The thought was enough to make her dizzy. She'd used a telephone only a handful of times in her life. The diner had one, but the flat didn't, and of course there hadn't been one on the farm. If she had a telephone, and if the farm had one, too, she supposed she would talk to her mother whenever she got the chance. She couldn't think of anyone else except her sister Julia she wanted to call. The people she knew in Rosenfeld she could visit whenever she pleased, while no telephone would ever let her talk with her brother or her father.

  But even if she didn't have a telephone, lots of people in Canada and even more in the USA did. The telephone book for Toronto, for instance, had to be an inch and a half thick. Mary pulled it off the shelf-she didn't care even to open a telephone book from the United States. The first name she looked for was McGregor, the one she'd been born with. She found almost a page of McGregors, each name with not only a telephone number but also an address beside it. That must be handy, she thought, especially in a big city where you don't know where everybody else lives. After the McGregors, she checked the Pomeroys. There weren't so many of them-only a little more than a column's worth. She smiled at the obvious superiority of her own birth name. But then, when she saw the seven pages of Smiths, she decided quantity didn't make quality.

  Alec got impatient watching his mother flip pages back and forth. "Want to go home," he said.

  "Hush," Mary told him. "Don't talk loud in the library."

  "Want to go home." Alec didn't care where he was, and knew where he wanted to be.

  "All right," Mary said. She was ready to go, too. But then, as they were on their way out, she suddenly stopped. Alec tugged at the pleats of her skirt. "Wait a second," she told him, and went over to the librarian's desk. "Excuse me, Miss Montague, but could I borrow a pencil and a little piece of paper?"

  "Why, of course." The librarian gave them to her.

  Alec's face clouded up when she went back. "It'll only be a minute," she said. "I want to see something." He didn't burst into tears on the spot, which was something. If he had, she would have had to take him home-and she would have warmed his fanny, too.

  As things were, she found what she was looking for inside of two minutes. She wrote down what she needed to know, gave the pencil back to Miss Montague with a nod of thanks, and walked out of the library. Alec behaved on the way back. Why not? He was getting what he wanted. As Mary walked past the building that housed the Rosenfeld Register, she gave the newspaper a nod of thanks, too.

  Lucien Galtier started up his motorcar. The Chevrolet roared to life right away. He'd finally had to replace the battery. The new one was much stronger than the old one had been, but he still grumbled at the expense. When he was driving a horse, he hadn't had to buy new pieces for it every so often.

  Once the motor warmed up, he put the auto in gear and drove up toward Riviиre-du-Loup. Today was his sixty-somethingeth birthday (he didn't care to contemplate the exact number), and Nicole and Dr. Leonard O'Doull had invited him to their house for supper to celebrate.

  Part of him wondered why people celebrated getting older. Another part, the part that still ached for Marie, told him the answer: because the alternative was not getting older, and that was dreadfully final.

  It had been a quarter of a century now since war's clawed hand raked across the countryside. Young men said you couldn't see the scars any more. Lucien knew better. Time had softened those wounds, but they were still there if you knew where to look. And shells still lay buried in the ground. Every so often, they worked their way to the surface. Most of the time, dйmineurs took them away and disposed of them. Once in a while, one of them went off when a plowshare struck it or it suffered some other mischance of that sort. The Great War was still killing people, and would go on killing for years to come.

  He drove past the post office. The Republic of Quebec's fleur-de-lys flag fluttered in the breeze in front of it. He was used to that flag now, but it still didn't feel like the flag of his country. He didn't suppose it ever would, not when he'd spent his first forty years in the province of Quebec rather than the Republic. Were things better now? Worse? Or just different? For the life of him, he had trouble saying.

  There was the house where Nicole lived with Leonard O'Doull. He parked in front of the walk that led to the front porch. The grass on the lawn was green again. When he got out of the auto, he took the key with him. On the farm, he left it in the ignition half the time. That probably wouldn't do here in town, where a stranger might hop in and decide to go for a spin.

  The door opened before he could knock. There stood his oldest grandson. By what magic had Lucien O'Doull grown taller than the man for whom he was named? "Happy birthday, mon grandpиre," he said. "Come in." That same magic, whatever it was, had given him a man-deep voice, too.

  "Merci," Lucien Galtier said, and then, after an appreciative sniff, "What smells so good?" An instant later, he held up a hand. "No, don't tell me. I'll find out."

  He followed his grandson down the short entry hall to the living room. As soon as he got there, a flashbulb went off in his face. What sounded like a million people shouted, "Surprise!"

  " 'Osti," Lucien muttered, flinching with what was indeed surprise-shock probably came closer. With a large purplish-green spot swimming in front of his eyes, he needed a moment to see how jammed with people the living room was. He'd expected Nicole and Leonard and little Lucien, and they were there, but so were Denise and Charles and Georges and Susanne and Jeanne and their spouses and their children. And, he realized after another startled heartbeat, so was Йloise Granche.

  "Surprise!" they all shouted again, even louder than before. Nicole wriggled through the crowd and kissed Galtier on the cheek. "Happy birthday, cher papa!" Her husband raised the camera again. Another flashbulb froze the moment.

  Lucien was at least partly braced for the second blast of light. He wagged a finger at his offspring. "You are a pack of devils, every one of you," he said. "You did your best to make this the last surprise I would ever have, this side of the Pearly Gates." He mimed clutching his breast and falling over dead.

  His children and grandchildren laughed and cheered. Йloise Granche said, "If they are a pack of devils, where do you suppose they get it?" That brought more laughter yet. Йloise rose from the sofa and threaded her way past children and out to Lucien. As Nicole had, she said, "Happy birthday," and kissed Galtier. Leonard O'Doull took yet another photograph.

  "Well, well," Lucien said. "I suspect you have all been plotting this for a very long time."

  "Oh, no, Papa." Georges shook his head. "Your American son-in-law drove round to our houses a couple of hours ago, and since we weren't doing anything special tonight…"

  "Nonsense," Galtier said. If there hadn't been so many women and children there, he would have said something more colorful than that. But nonsense would do. His younger son's head had always been full of it. Most of the grownups had glasses close by them, some full, some empty. Plaintively, Galtier asked, "Could it be that I might get something to drink?"

  "Well, seeing that it is your birthday," Leonard O'Doull said with the air of a man granting a great concession. "And it could also be that I should prescribe something for that green-around-the-gills look you have. Would you like whiskey or apple brandy?"

  "Yes," Galtier said: a reply worthy of Georges.

  His son-in-law made a face at him. "Which, you cantankerous creature?"

  "Apple brandy, by choice," Lucien an
swered. He would drink whiskey readily enough, but he wasn't wild about it. He turned to Йloise. "And what are you doing here?"

  "Why, wishing you a happy birthday, of course," she answered demurely. "I hope it is a happy birthday?"

  "It seems to be, so far," he answered; coming right out and admitting he was happy struck him as a show of weakness. He turned to Leonard O'Doull. "You see? You have been listening to gossip again."

  "And what if I have?" O'Doull replied. "Are you complaining?"

  "Me? Not at all. I am glad I am here. I am glad everyone is here," Galtier said. "And I do mean everyone." He smiled at Йloise. He wanted to kiss her again, but he wouldn't do that, not in front of his children and grandchildren. They might-most of the ones old enough to understand surely did-know he and Йloise were more than friends, but there was a difference between knowing and showing. One little kiss had been all right. Two would have been excessive. The difference mattered to him. That it might matter much less to his offspring never once crossed his mind.

  Nicole disappeared into the kitchen. When she came out, it was with some of the most arresting words in any language: "Supper's ready!"

  Fried chicken, lamb fragrant with garlic, rabbits stewed with plums, fresh spinach and peas, stewed turnips, endless snowy mounds of mashed potatoes, plenty of whiskey and applejack and beer to wash them down… Any man who couldn't be happy after a feast like that wasn't trying hard enough. Lucien ate till he wanted to curl up on his chair and go to sleep. Nor was he the only one who went above and beyond the call of duty; Georges could easily have built a whole new chicken from the mound of bones on his plate.

  Everyone groaned with horrified pleasure when Nicole brought out an enormous birthday cake. A single large candle topped it. Leonard O'Doull grinned evilly at Lucien. "We did not want to put a candle for each year," he said, "for fear you would burn the house down when you tried to blow them out."

  "An old man hasn't got enough wind to blow out that many candles anyhow," Georges put in.