She had a dreamy quality to her face and voice. She was starting to blur, and I was worried that I might somehow translate into a different world-level as we neared shore.
“My ’usbahnd,” she responded. “Goldier vas hiss name.” She fingered the marriage ring around her neck. “Zo yong, so ’andzum.” She turned her head quickly and looked up at me. “Do yu know vat it iz to be fat and ugly und ’alf bloind and haff ze best uv all men zuddenly pay attenzion to yu, vant to marry yu?”
I admitted I didn’t, but didn’t mention my own experiences.
“What happened? He leave you?” I asked.
There were tears in her eyes. “Ya, in a vay, ya. Goldier he jomped out a tventy-story building, he did. Und itz my own fault, yu know. I shud haff been dere. Or, maybe I didn’t giff him vat he needed. I dunno.”
“Then you of all people know how brutal suicide really is,” I retorted. “Look at what it did to you. You have friends, like your friend here. They care. It will hurt them as your husband’s hurt you. This woman with you—she’ll carry guilt for leaving you alone the whole rest of her life.” She was shaking now, not really from the chill, and I put my arm around her. Where the hell were those marker lights?
“Do you see how cruel it is? What suicide does to others? It leaves a legacy of guilt, much of it false guilt but no less real for that. And you might be needed by somebody else, sometime, to help them. Somebody else might die because you weren’t there.”
She looked up at me, then seemed to dissolve, collapse into a crescendo of tears, and sat down on the deck. I looked up and saw the red and green markers astern, felt the engines slow, felt the Orcas turn.
“Ghetta!” The voice was a piercing scream in the night. I looked around and saw her friend running to us after coming down the stairway. Anxiety and concern were on her stricken face, and there were tears in her eyes. She bent down to the still sobbing girl. “I shuld neffer haff left yu!” she sobbed, and hugged the girl tightly.
I sighed. The Orcas was making its dock approach now, the ringing of bells said that Caldwell had managed to raise the bow without crashing us into the dock.
“My Gott!” the friend swore, then looked up at me. “Yu stopped her? How can I effer?…”
But they both already had that ethereal, unnatural double image about them, both fading into a world different from mine.
“Just remember that there’s a million Ghettas out there,” I told them both softly. “And you can make them or break them.”
I turned and walked away as I heard the satisfying thump and felt the slight jerk of the ferry fitting into the slip. I stopped and glanced back at the stern but I could see no one. Nobody was there.
Who were the ghosts? I mused. Those women, or the crew of the Orcas? How many times did hundreds of people from different worlds coexist on this ship without ever knowing it?
How many times did people in the same world coexist without noticing each other, or caring about each other, for that matter?
“Mr. Dalton!” snapped a voice in my walkie-talkie.
“Sir?” I responded.
“Well?” the Captain asked expectantly.
“No screams this time, Captain,” I told him, satisfaction in my voice. “One young woman will live.”
There was a long pause and, for a moment, I thought he might actually be human. Then he snapped, “There’s eighty-six assorted vehicles still waiting to be off-loaded, and might I remind you we’re short-handed and on a strict schedule?”
I sighed and broke into a trot. Business was business, and I had a whole world to throw out of the car deck so I could run another one in.
BRING THE JUBILEE
Ward Moore
Ward Moore’s “Bring the Jubilee,” a blend of time travel and alternate history in which a Confederate triumph at the Battle of Gettysburg leads to a Southern victory in the American Civil War, is a landmark in alternate-world science fiction. Moore also wrote the satirical Greener Than You Think, a highly regarded ecodisaster novel, and collaborated with Robert Bradford on Caduceus Wild and Avram Davidson on Joyleg. He published nearly two dozen science-fiction short stories between 1946 and his death in 1978 in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Amazing, The Saturday Evening Post, and Galaxy. His oft-reprinted stories “Lot” and “Lot’s Daughter,” collected in 1996, are considered high-water marks of nuclear disaster fiction, and were the uncredited basis for the 1962 film Panic in the Year Zero.
I
ALTHOUGH I AM WRITING this in the year 1877, I was not born until 1921. Neither the dates nor the tenses are error—let me explain:
I was born, as I say, in 1921, but it was not until the early 1930s, when I was about ten, that I began to understand what a peculiarly frustrated and disinherited world was about me. Perhaps my approach to realization was through the crayon portrait of Granpa Hodgins which hung, very solemnly, over the mantel.
Granpa Hodgins, after whom I was named, perhaps a little grandiloquently, Hodgins McCormick Backmaker, had been a veteran of the War of Southron Independence. Like so many young men he had put on a shapeless blue uniform in response to the call of the ill-advised and headstrong—or martyred—Mr. Lincoln. Depending on which of my lives’ viewpoint you take.
Granpa lost an arm on the Great Retreat to Philadelphia after the fall of Washington to General Lee’s victorious Army of Northern Virginia, so his war ended some six months before the capitulation at Reading and the acknowledgement of the independence of the Confederate States on July 4, 1864. One-armed and embittered, Granpa came home to Wappinger Falls and, like his fellow veterans, tried to remake his life in a different and increasingly hopeless world.
On its face the Peace of Richmond was a just and even generous disposition of a defeated foe by the victor. (Both sides—for different reasons—remembered the mutiny of the Unreconstructed Federals of the Armies of the Cumberland and the Tennessee who, despite defeat at Chattanooga, could not forget Vicksburg and Port Hudson and fought bloodily against the order to surrender.) The South could easily have carved the country up to suit its most fiery patriots, even to the point of detaching the West as a satellite protectorate. Instead the chivalrous Southrons contented themselves with drawing the new boundary along more or less traditional lines. The Mason-Dixon gave them Delaware and Maryland, but they generously returned the panhandle of western Virginia jutting above it. Missouri was naturally included in the Confederacy, but of the disputed territory Colorado and Deseret were conceded to the old Union; only Kansas and California as well as—for obvious defensive reasons—Nevada’s tip went to the South.
But the Peace of Richmond had also laid the cost of the war on the beaten North and this was what crippled Granpa Hodgins more than the loss of his arm. The postwar inflation entered the galloping stage during the Vallandigham Administration, became dizzying in the time of President Seymour and precipitated the food riots of 1873 and ’74. It was only after the election of President Butler by the Whigs in 1876 and the reorganization and drastic deflation following that money and property became stable, but by this time all normal values were destroyed. Meanwhile the indemnities had to be paid regularly in gold. Granpa and hundreds of thousands like him just never seemed to get back on their feet.
How well I remember, as a small boy in the 1920s and ’30s, my mother and father talking bitterly of how the War had ruined everything. They were not speaking of the then fairly recent Emperor’s War of 1914–16, but of the War of Southron Independence which still, nearly 70 years later, blighted what was left of the United States. I heard of the strange, bright era when we and our neighbors had owned our own farms outright and had not had to pay rent for them to the banks or half the crop to a landlord. I learned of the bygone time when a man could nearly always get a job for wages which would support himself and a family, before the system of indenture became so common that practically the only alternative to pauperism was to sell oneself to a company. In those days men and women married young and had large families; there might have been five generations between Granpa Hodgins and myself instead of three. And many uncles, aunts, cousins, brothers and sisters. Now late marriages with a single child were the rule.