Not content with those conceptions, Rhoodie had saved the most important for last. “You tell me,” Lee said slowly, “that absent your intervention, the United States would succeed in conquering us.”
“General Lee, I am afraid I do tell you that. Are you so startled to hear it?”
“No,” Lee admitted with a sigh. “Saddened, yes, but not startled. The enemy has always put me in mind of a man with a strong body but a weak head. Our Southern body is weak, but our head, sir, our head is filled with fire. Still, they may find wisdom, while we have ever more difficulty maintaining what strength they have. They force themselves upon us, do they, when all we ever wanted was to leave in peace and live in peace?”
“They do just that,” Rhoodie said grimly. “They force you to free your kaffirs—your niggers, I mean—at the point of a bayonet, then set them over you, with the bayonet still there to make you bow down. The Southern white man is ruined absolutely, and the Southern white woman—no, I won’t go on. That is why we had to steal our time machine, sir; the white man’s cause is so hated in times to come that we could obtain it by no other means.”
There was one question ‘answered before Lee had the chance to ask it. He sadly shook his head. “I had not looked for such, not even from those people. President Lincoln always struck me as true to his principles, however much I may disagree with those.”
“In his second term, he shows what he really is. He does not aim to stand for election after that, so he need not mask himself any longer. And Thaddeus Stevens, who comes after him, is even worse.”
“That I believe.” Lee wondered at Rhoodie’s claims for Lincoln, but Thaddeus Stevens had always been a passionate abolitionist; his mouth was so thin and straight that, but for its bloodlessness, it reminded Lee of a knife gash. Set a Stevens over the prostrate South and any horror was conceivable. Lee went on, “Somewhere, though, in your world of 2013—no, it would be 2014 now—sympathy for our lost cause must remain, or you would not be here.”
“So it does, I’m proud to say,” Rhoodie answered, “even if it is not as much as it should be. Niggers still lord it over white Southern men. Because they have done it for so long, they think it is their right. The bloody kaffirs lord it over South Africa, too, my own homeland—over the white men who built the country up from nothing. There are even blacks in England, millions of them, and blacks in Parliament, if you can believe it.”
“How do I know I can believe any of what you say?” Lee asked. “I have not been to the future to see it for myself; I have only your word that it is as you assert.”
“If you want them, General Lee, I can bring you documents and pictures that make the slave revolt in Santo Domingo look like a Sunday picnic. I will be happy to give you those. But, General, let me ask you this: Why would my friends and I be here if these things were not as I say?”
“There you have me, Mr. Rhoodie,” Lee admitted. Now he finished his glass of wine and poured another. Though it warmed his body, it left his heart cold. “Thaddeus Stevens, president? I had. not thought the northerns hated us so much as that. They might as well have chosen John Brown, were he yet alive.”
“Just so,” Rhoodie said. “You captured John Brown, didn’t you?”
“Yes. I was proud to be an officer of the United States Army then. I wish I had never found the need to leave that service, but I could not lead its soldiers against Virginia.” He studied Rhoodie as if the man were a map to a country he had never seen but where he would soon have to campaign. Fair enough; the future was just such a country. Normally, no man had a map into it; everyone traveled blind. But now—”Mr. Rhoodie, you are saying, are you not, that you know the course this war will take?”
“I know the course the war took, General. We hope to change that course with our AK-47s. We have already changed it in a small way: Kilpatrick’s raid would have penetrated much further into Virginia and caused much more damage and alarm had it not been for us—and for the valor of your troopers.”
“I understand your Konrad de Buys showed uncommon valor of his own,” Lee said.
Rhoodie nodded. “I’ve talked with him. He enjoyed himself. There’s no room for cavalry in our time—too much artillery, too many armored machines.”
“It is well that war is so terrible, or we should get too fond of it,” Lee said. “I am glad to hear the horses, at least, are out of harm’s way in time to come. They cannot choose to go into battle, as men do.”
“True enough,” Rhoodie said.
Lee thought for a while before he spoke again. “You say you think you have as yet affected the course of the war in only a small way.”
“Yes.” Rhoodie’s poker face had disappeared. He was studying Lee as hard as Lee studied him, and not bothering to hide it. Lee felt as if he were back at West Point, not as superintendent, but as student. He had to assume Rhoodie knew everything about him that history recorded, while he knew—could know—only what Rhoodie chose to reveal of himself, his organization, and his purposes.
Picking words with great care, Lee said, “Then you will have knowledge of the opening events of the coming year’s campaign, but your knowledge thereafter will decrease as our victories, should we have such, deflect events away from the path they would have taken without your intervention. Is my understanding accurate?”
“Yes, General Lee. You understand as well as any man could. My friends and I hope and expect that, with the Confederate States a bulwark of freedom and strength, the white man’s cause all through the world will be stronger than in our own sorry history.”
“As may be,” Lee said with a shrug. “Bear with me a moment further, though, if you would. It follows from what you have said that our generals, including myself, will need to be informed as exactly as possible on the situation of the Federals in front of them at the moment the campaigning season resumes, that we may extract the maximum advantage from what you know.”
“I will draft you an appreciation of what the Army of the Potomac plans to do,” Rhoodie said. “One of our people will do the same for General Johnston in regard to the Army of the Tennessee. Other fronts will be less important.”
“Yes, Johnston and I have our country’s two chief field armies. I look forward to receiving your appreciation, Mr. Rhoodie. It may well give me an important edge as the year’s campaign opens. Afterwards, I gather, things will have changed, and we shall have to rely on the valor of the men. The Army of Northern Virginia has never failed me there.”
“You can rely on one other thing now,” Rhoodie said. Lee looked a question at him. He said, “The AK-47.”
“Oh, certainly,” Lee said. “You see how I am already coming to take it for granted. Mr. Rhoodie, now I have answers to some of the matters which have perplexed me for a long while. Thank you for giving them to me.”
“My pleasure, General.” Rhoodie stood to go. Lee also rose. As he did so, the pain that sometimes clogged his chest struck him a stinging blow. He tried to bear up under it, but it must have shown on his face, for Rhoodie took a step toward him and asked, “Are you all right, General?”
“Yes,” Lee said, though he needed an effort to force the word past his teeth. He gathered himself. “Yes, I am all right, Mr. Rhoodie; thank you. I ceased to be a young man some years ago. From time to time, my body insists on reminding me of the fact. I shall last as long as I am required, I assure you.”
Rhoodie, he realized, must know the year—perhaps the day and hour—in which he was to die. That was a question he did not intend to put to the Rivington man; about some things, one was better ignorant. Then it occurred to him that if the course of battles and nations was mutable, so small a thing as a single lifespan must also be. The thought cheered him. He did not care to be only a figure in a dusty text, pinned down as immovably as a butterfly in a naturalist’s collection.