And Joe Steele’s running for a third term. And Joe Steele wins, too. Wins even bigger than 1936. What’s a Wendell Willkie? Not enough, that’s for sure. After all the treason trials and such, some folks are surprised. By this time, hardly anybody says so out loud, though. By this time, folks know better.
Joe Steele and J. Edgar, they kind of laugh about it, them and the Hammer. Somebody says Joe Steele quotes Boss Tweed: “As long as I count the votes, what are you going to do about it?” Boss Tweed’s long dead by then. And if anybody else repeats that, he’ll be dead pretty damn quick, too.
When Hitler jumps Trotsky, Joe Steele needs six weeks before he starts shipping guns and trucks to Russia. He hates Trotsky that much. But if the Nazis run things from Brest to Vladivostok, that’s not so good. So he does.
Damn near too late. By December, the Nazis are driving on Moscow. Sinking American ships in the Atlantic, too. And we sink a couple of German subs. Doesn’t make the papers here or in Europe. If you don’t look at it, it’s not a war. Right? Joe Steele and Hitler think so.
And when Joe Steele’s bent over squinting toward Europe, the Japs kick him in the ass. Pearl Harbor blows sky high. Philippines bombed. Invaded. Dutch East Indies invaded. Malaya. We don’t want a war? We’ve got one anyway.
Next morning, Joe Steele comes on the radio. Has to eat his words. Never easy for anybody. Harder if you’ve set yourself up as always right. Joe Steele does it. Just makes like he never said anything different. Not how you remember it? Too bad for you, if you run your mouth.
“A grave danger hangs over our country,” he says. Everybody with a radio listens. “The perfidious military attack on our beloved United States of America, begun on December 7, 1941, continues. There can be no doubt that this short-lived military gain for the Empire of Japan is only an episode. The war with Japan cannot be considered an ordinary war. It is not only a war between two armies and navies, it is also a great war of the entire American people against the Imperial Japanese forces.
“In this war for freedom we shall not be alone. Our forces are numberless. The overweening enemy will soon learn this to his cost. Side by side with the U.S. Army and Navy, thousands of workers, community farmers, and scientists are rising to fight the enemy aggressors. The masses of our people will rise up in their millions.
“To repulse the enemy who treacherously attacked our country, a State Committee for Defense has been formed in whose hands the entire power of the state has been vested. The Committee calls upon all our people to rally around the party of Jefferson and Jackson and Wilson and around the U.S. government so as self-denyingly to support the U.S. Army and Navy, demolish the enemy, and secure victory. Forward!”
Congress declares war on Japan. Hitler declares war on the USA. Joe Steele orders up two new military tribunals. Admiral Kimmel. General Short. In charge of Hawaii. Screwed the pooch in Hawaii. Guilty. Shot Pour encourager les autres.
Philippines fall. MacArthur escapes to Australia. Tribunal. Bombers caught on the ground? Yes. Guilty. Shot. MacArthur likes to see his name in the papers. Can’t have that kind of general. Only one man gets his name in the papers.
Joe Steele.
Joe Steele and George Marshall, now, they do fine. Marshall wants to win. Wants no fanfares. Joe Steele’s kind of man. Same with Nimitz. Same with Eisenhower. Halsey? If Halsey ever loses, he’s a dead man. Knows it. Keeps winning.
We push back the Japs. Afrika Korps runs out of steam in the desert. Germans and Russians fight the biggest goddamn battle in the world at Trotskygrad. Both sides throw men into the meat grinder like it’s going out of style. Turns out the Reds have more men to grind up. Nazis lose a whole army. Russians storm west. For a little while, looks like the whole Eastern Front’s coming unglued. Doesn’t happen. Stinking Nazis are bastards, but they’re pros, if Hitler lets ’em be. Still, you can see they’re on the ropes. It’ll take a while, but it’s when, not if.
Joe Steele and Churchill and Trotsky meet. Start planning what happens next. Trotsky keeps screaming for a real second front. Italy? Screw Italy! Joe Steele . . . smiles. Heaven is every Nazi killing two Reds before he goes down. No more Germans left? No more Russians? Oh, toooo bad.
But it starts looking like there aren’t enough krauts to do the trick. Nobody wants Russia running things from Vladivostok to Brest either. Second front happens. Eisenhower commands. Eisenhower doesn’t hog glory that belongs to Joe Steele. Smart fellow, Eisenhower. Joe Steele wins fourth term. Republicans don’t nominate anybody this time.
Philippines fall. Iwo Jima. Okinawa. Bomb the shit out of the Japs. Get ready to invade.
Germany? American and British hammer. Russian anvil. Smashed between ’em. Smashed flat between ’em. Hitler blows out his brains. Bye, Adolf. Should have done it sooner.
Start shifting men to the Pacific. Operation Downfall. Makes Normandy look like a kiddie game. Japs fight at beaches, everywhere else. Maniacs. Kamikazes. Everything they’ve got. Not enough. We push ’em back. Hell of a price to pay, but we pay it. Trotsky sees we’re winning. Jumps in himself. Takes Hokkaido, north part of Honshu. Rest is ours. Incendiaries roast Hirohito on a train between Tokyo and Kyoto. Sayonara, buddy.
Japan never does surrender. Nobody in charge left to do it. But the Japs finally stop fighting. Nobody left to do that anymore either, not hardly. End of summer, 1946.
Joe Steele. On top of the world.
Turns out the Nazis were working on an atomic bomb. Not too hard. Didn’t really believe in it. Never got it. But working. Joe Steele hits the ceiling in sixteen different places. Maybe eighteen. Calls in Einstein. “Why didn’t you know about this?” he yells.
“We did,” Albert says. “I almost wrote you a letter at the start of the war.”
Joe Steele’s eyelids go down. They come up. Yeah, you can see what’s back there this time. Rage. Raw, red rage. “Why didn’t you?” he asks, all quiet and scary.
“I feared you would use it,” Einstein answers. Half a dozen words. One death warrant.
Einstein? Shot. A Jew.
Szilard? Shot. A Jew.
Fermi? Shot. A dago with a Jew wife.
Von Neumann? Shot. A Jew.
Oppenheimer? Shot. A Jew.
There are more. Lots more. Shot, most of ’em, Jews or not. The rest? To the camps.
“The Professors’ Plot,” the papers call it. All these goddamn eggheads, working to keep the US of A weak. All these goddamn kikes, working to keep the US of A weak. Joe Steele starts muttering maybe Hitler knew what he was doing. Talks to the Hammer. Talks to J. Edgar. The wheels begin to turn.
Then he finds Teller. Teller says, “Turn me loose. I’ll build the son of a bitch in three years, or you can have my head.” Another goddamn Jew. But one who knows which side his bread’s buttered on. Some of the people Teller needs – Feynman, Frisch, Kistiakowsky – he pulls out of camps. There, but not shot yet. Maybe not shot at all, if they come through. First circle of hell, close enough.
Joe Steele tells J. Edgar and the Hammer, “Go slow.” If Teller and the boys come through, maybe some kikes are worth keeping. If not . . . We know who they are. We know where they live. We can always start up again. Oh, hell, yes.
And Trotsky, that stinking Red bastard, he’s working on this shit, too. You bet he is. We caught Nazi high foreheads. And they caught Nazi high foreheads. You think the boys from the master race won’t sing for their supper? Sing for their necks? Ha! Wernher von Braun’d learn Chinese if Chiang caught him. Or Mao.
And Trotsky’s a pain in the ass other ways. World revolution everywhere, he says. 1948. His North Japan invades our South Japan. War of liberation, he says. Red Japs sweeping down toward Tokyo. Screaming “Banzai!” for Trotsky. (Trotsky’s a Jew, too. Makes Joe Steele like ’em even better.)
Hell of a thing – a brand new war, and the old one’s hardly done. Trotsky’s Japs fight like they’re nuts. Our Japs run like they’re nuts. It’s a walkover – till the North Japanese bump up against the U.S. Mari
nes in front of Utsanomiya. If they break through, Tokyo falls. Probably all Honshu with it. But they don’t. Marines hold. Give the Red Japs a bloody nose.
Everybody knows Russians fly the Gurevich-9 jet fighters with the yellow star inside the Rising Sun. Not as good as our F-80s – Me-262s with those starred meatballs, near enough – but fancier than what we thought those SOBs had. Fighting kind of settles down in the mountains. Now they go forward. Now we do. Places like Sukiyaki Valley and Mamasan Ridge? Folks back home don’t know just where they’re at, but a lot of kids get buried there.
Joe Steele wins term number five as easy as number four. Nobody runs against him. There’s a war on.
August 6, 1949. Sapporo. Capital of North Japan. One bomb. No city. Teller lives. Joe Steele tells Trotsky, “Enough is enough.”
August 9, 1949. Nagano. Not the capital of South Japan. Maybe the AA around Tokyo’s too heavy to risk losing the plane. But a hell of a big place. One bomb. No city. Maybe some German egghead lives, too. Trotsky tells Joe Steele, “Yeah, enough is enough.”
Japanese War ends. Status quo ante bellum. Mao runs Chiang off the mainland. More treason trials. Something to keep Joe Steele amused. Getting old. Wins a sixth term almost in his sleep. Dies six weeks after they swear him in again. Natural causes. Who’d dare mess with him?
John Nance Garner, Vice President since 1933. Never says boo all that time. That’s why he’s VP so long. Finally takes over. First thing he does is is order J. Edgar Hoover and the Hammer shot. The Hammer orders him and J. Edgar Hoover shot. J. Edgar orders both the others shot.
J. Edgar lives. J. Edgar takes over. And you thought Joe Steele was trouble?
BIRTH DAYS
Geoff Ryman
You may think that you already live in a world that demands complex choices of you at every turn, but, as the incisive little story that follows demonstrates, in the not-too-distant future, the choices are going to get even more complicated – and the consequences of them more profound.
Born in Canada, Geoff Ryman now lives in England. He made his first sale in 1976, to New Worlds, but it was not until 1984, when he made his first appearance in Interzone – the magazine where almost all of his published short fiction has appeared – with his brilliant novella “The Unconquered Country” that he first attracted any serious attention. “The Unconquered Country”, one of the best novellas of the decade, had a stunning impact on the science fiction scene of the day, and almost overnight established Ryman as one of the most accomplished writers of his generation, winning him both the British Science Fiction Award and the World Fantasy Award; it was later published in a book version, The Unconquered Country: A Life History. His output has been sparse since then, by the high-production standards of the genre, but extremely distinguished, with his novel The Child Garden: A Low Comedy winning both the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. His other novels include The Warrior Who Carried Life, the critically acclaimed mainstream novel Was, and the underground cult classic 253, the “print remix” of an “interactive hypertext novel,” which in its original form ran online on Ryman’s home page of www.ryman.com, and which, in its print form won the Philip K. Dick Award. Four of his novellas have been collected in Unconquered Countries. His most recent books are two new novels, Lust and Air. His stories have appeared in our Twelfth, Thirteenth, Seventeenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth Annual Collections.
TODAY’S MY 16TH BIRTHDAY, so I gave myself a present.
I came out to my Mom.
Sort of. By accident. I left out a mail from Billy, which I could just have left on the machine, but no, I had to go and print it out and leave it on my night table, looking like a huge white flag.
I get up this morning and I kinda half-notice it’s not there. I lump into the kitchen and I can see where it went. The letter is in Mom’s hand and the look on her face tells me, yup, she’s read it. She has these grey lines down either side of her mouth. She holds it up to me, and says, “Can you tell me why you wouldn’t have the courage to tell me this directly?”
And I’m thinking how could I be so dumb? Did I do this to myself deliberately? And I’m also thinking wait a second, where do you get off reading my letters?
So I say to her, “Did you like the part where he says my dick is beautiful?”
She says, “Not much, no.” She’s already looking at me like I’m an alien. And I’m like: Mom, this is what you get for being NeoChristian – your son turns out to be homo. What the Neos call a Darwinian anomaly.
Mom sighs and says, “Well I suppose we’re stuck with it now.”
Yeah Mom, you kinda are. Aren’t you supposed to say something mimsy like, Ron honey you know we still love you? Not my Mom. Oh no. Saying exactly what she thinks is Mom’s way of being real, and her being real is more important to her than anything else. Like what I might be feeling.
So I dig back at her. “That’s a shame, Mom. A few years later and I would have been embryo-screened and you could have just aborted me.”
Mom just sniffs. “That was a cheap shot.”
Yeah, it was. NeoChristians are about the only people who don’t abort homosexual foetuses. Everybody else does. What do they call it? Parental choice.
So Mom looks at me with this real tough face and says, “I hope you think you’ve given yourself a happy birthday.” And that’s all the conversation we have about it.
My little brother is pretending he isn’t there and that he isn’t happy. My little brother is shaped like a pineapple. He’s fat and he has asthma and he’s really good at being sneaky and not playing by the rules. I was always the big brother who tolerated stuff and tried to help Mom along. Her good little boy. Only now I’m samesex. Which to a NeoChristian Mom is like finding out your son likes dressing up as a baby and being jerked off by animals. Sometimes I think Neo is just a way to find new reasons to hate the same old things.
What really dents my paintwork is that Mom is smart: What she likes about Neo is that it’s Darwinian. Last summer she’s reading this article Samesex Gene Planted by Aliens? And she’s rolling her eyes at it. “The least they could do is get the science straight,” she says. “It’s not one gene and it’s not one part of the brain.” But then she said, “But you gotta wonder, why is there a gene like that in the first place?”
My Mom really does think that there’s a chance that homos are an alien plot. Please do not fall over laughing, it hurts too much.
Ever since the Artefacts were found, people have been imagining little green men landing on this beautiful blue planet and just going off again. So people scare themselves wondering if the aliens are about to come back with a nice big army.
Then about five years ago, it turned out that the genes that control sexual orientation have some very unusual sugars, and all of a sudden there’s this conspiracy theory that the aliens created the samesex gene as some kind of weapon. Undermine our reproductive capacity. Even though when they landed we were all triblodites or whatever. Maybe having homos is supposed to soften us up for conquest. Hey, if the aliens invade, I promise, I’ll fight too OK?
On my way to school I ring Billy and tell him, “Mom found out. She read your mail.”
Billy sounds stripped for action, “Did she go crazy?”
“She went laconic. You could just hear her thinking: you gotta own this, Ronald, you did this to yourself, Ronald.”
“It’s better than crying.”
Billy’s in Comportment class. He believes all that shit. To be fair to him, that “you gotta own this” was me digging at some of the stuff he comes out with. That stuff pisses me off. In fact right now, everything pisses me off. Right now, it’s like my guts are twisting and I want to go break something.
Comportment says you’ve got to own the fact people don’t like you, own the fact you got fat hips, own the fact you’re no good in math, own the fact that glacial lakes are collapsing onto Tibetan monasteries. Comportment says hey, you’re complaining about the Chinese treat
ment of Tibet, but what have you personally done about it?
It’s like: we’ll make everybody who has no power feel it’s their fault if stuff goes wrong, so the big people don’t have to do anything about it.
My Mom hates me being a homo. She likes being a big tough lady even more. So, she like, doesn’t get all upset or cry or even say much about it. Being a tough lady is her way of feeling good about her son being an alien plot.
Billy is too focused on being Joe Cool-and-Out to cut me any slack. His stab at being sympathetic is “You should have just told her straight up, like I told you.”
I say back to him in this Minnie-Mouse voice, “I acknowledge that you are absolutely right.” That’s another line he’s used on me.
He’s silent for a sec and then says, “Well, don’t be a bitch with me about it.”
“It’s my authentic response to an emotionally charged situation.” Still sounding like Minnie Mouse.
I’m mad at him. I’m mad at him because he just won’t unbend. Nobody unbends. It’s bad comportment.
Billy comes back at me. “This is just you going back to being a baby. Only you don’t have tantrums, you just whine.”
“Billy. My NeoChristian Mom now knows I’m samesex. Could I have some sympathy?”
“Who’s died, Ron? Anybody dead around here? Did you lose any limbs in the detonation? Or are you just getting all significant on my ass?”
“No. I’m looking for a friend. I’ll try and find one, you know, someone who likes me and not my dick?”
And I hang up.
Like I said, I’m so mad.
I’m mad sitting here right now. I got my stupid kid brother who’s been giggling all day, like it’s such an achievement he likes pussy. I got my Mom doing the household accounts and her shares and her rollovers, and she’s bellowing into the voice recognition and it’s like: look at me having to do all the work around here. I’m realizing that I’ve probably screwed up my relationship with Billy and wondering if I really am the incredible wimp he thinks I am.
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