[What Might Have Been 02] Alternate Heroes Read online

  “Yes.” Gene was vaguely irritated now. For a moment he had been able to think of Holder as just another suit; now he was remembering that he would soon be his brother-in-law. Before the irritation could surface, however, another thought did: the missing link. Means of testing. “Oh,” was all he could say.

  Holder was smiling. “How big is this federal population?” Gene said, reaching for the memo with a bit more vigor.

  “There are several discrete populations,” Holder said, “but I don’t think you’d have any trouble putting together a single group numbering, say, a hundred million individuals.”

  “Which is a number far greater than the population of the United States and Confederacy in 1863 … dear God.”

  “I don’t ordinarily approve of blasphemy,” Holder said, “but in this case, it’s highly appropriate, don’t you agree?”

  To be the Almighty Himself—ruling a microcosmic world! “Don’t say another word.”

  Project Deconstruction was relatively small as D.C.D. enterprises went. At its peak no more than three dozen employees were charged to its budget. With the cutback in funding and other reductions due to staff vacations, there were only about fifteen people who would have the faintest interest in what Gene was doing. And of those fifteen, only three had authority over him.

  Four of those who did not gathered in Gene’s office the next morning as he explained what he wanted them to do. They were all graduate students in differential sciences and largely true to the stereotype: extraordinarily pale, uniformly bespectacled, deliberately ill-fed, and unusually intelligent. The only one who deviated was Stashower, a red-haired farmboy from Nashville whose utter and complete self-absorption was the only thing that kept Gene’s more predatory instincts in check. That and his resolve never to fish off the company pier.

  Stashower was the first to see the possibilities. “Jesus, Gene, we’ve been beating our heads against this how-do-we-simulate-organic-lifein-a-differential? shit for two years! If we can record the growth, death, and migration patterns of a hundred million federals, we’ll increase the memes in our own model by a factor of ten thousand.”

  One of the others, a bearded boy from the red clay country, joined in. He was eager to get to work on the transition models. “We can start out just arbitrarily assigning certain values to federal activities, then keep crunching them over and over again until we match Real Life.”

  They were all out of their chairs now, sketching systems on the board. “Gentlemen, gentlemen!” Gene said. “I hate to interrupt, but permit me a boring management kind of query: When can it be ready and how much will it cost?”

  “Two months,” Stashower said, with his charming Yankee naïveté, “and you’re going to spend twice as much in differential time charges.” Gene nodded, mentally doubling the estimates again. He didn’t need a Deconstruction program to tell him that Stashower tended to underestimate such matters.

  The meeting broke up. Gene was proud of them, but his pride was tempered by annoyance at the speed with which they absorbed the new idea. Their new energy and their prior lack of protest made it clear that at the age of twenty-five he was already too old for creative work.

  II

  On the Fourth of July, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln made a surprise visit to Union veterans at a temporary hospital in Georgetown, near Washington. By all accounts it was an impulsive gesture, a search, perhaps, for distraction. The President was awaiting news of the seige of Vicksburg and, more importantly, of Lee’s advances through nearby Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. But for the circumstances, it would not have been one of Lincoln’s more memorable speeches. He was halfway through it when a man wearing the coat of a hospital orderly stepped out of the crowd and fired a pistol at Lincoln, who was hit twice in the chest.

  In spite of the presence of several doctors, the first to reach him was a Captain Butler, his aide, who heard Lincoln’s last words (“I’m sorry”). The President was carried to a room in the hospital, where he died within hours.

  The assassin was later identified as a Nathan Shaw, twenty-eightyear-old itinerant minister from Baltimore with a history of abolitionist activity and ties to Copperhead democrats unhappy with Lincoln’s prosecution of the war. Shaw claimed that he was angered by Lincoln’s call for a new draft—that it was unfair for a rich man to be able to pay a three-hundred-dollar bounty to avoid serving the Union —but it was later suspected, though never proved, that he had ties to Confederate agents and may, in fact, have been stalking Lincoln since March of 1861. In any case, Shaw went to the gallows in October, unrepentant and silent as to his accomplices.

  Vice-president Hannibal Hamlin of Maine took the oath of office just as the news of the victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg reached the capital. Lincoln’s allies, greater in number after his death than prior to it, and his rivals joined in a call for the utter destruction of the Confederacy. It was hardly necessary. Word of Lincoln’s death at the hands of an assassin had reached Meade’s troops before either army had fully withdrawn from Gettysburg. In a frenzy, Union forces trapped Lee’s battered men on the northern bank of the swollen Potomac near the misnamed Falling Waters, capturing their leader and effectively destroying the Army of Virginia.

  In the west, Generals Grant and Sherman began a total war of attrition, moving through Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia like the horsemen of doom, laying waste to Jackson, Montgomery, Memphis, and Atlanta, then wheeling north. Union forces under Meade met them below burned Richmond, which, like Carthage, had ceased to be a human abode, and pursued Longstreet, catching him at Lynchburg. It was now July 1864. Both political parties sought to name Grant as their candidate, and the Democrats won. Grant turned over leadership of the Union armies, and directorship of the “pacification” of the South, to Sherman, and handily defeated President Hamlin that November.

  August gave way to an unusually warm September, but Gene’s relationship with Shelby remained cool. They were not openly at war: Shelby indicated that she forgave him for “stealing” her fiancé once she learned that, but for the single meeting, Gene and Charlie never saw each other unless she was present. Nevertheless, they ceased to communicate with the old regularity. Gene assumed it was the pressure of her studies in addition to the logistical challenges of a wedding due a Confederate princess. (He kept up with these developments thirdhand, through Shelby’s friends, since Gene, Sr., had elected to bestow his advice upon his only daughter.) But he eventually realized that he himself had drawn back from her.

  Perhaps it was because of the nightmares.

  He had been living with the events of the Lincoln assassination for so long it was no surprise. Every time the boys ran their federal-enhanced program, an event which occurred as many as ten times a day, it started all over again. And that night, as he churned in his bed in his dormitory rooms, Gene would see himself shot … see himself shooting … see the burning fields … find himself yoked, as in the title of the most famous of the postwar novels, like a mule in horse’s harness.

  Sometimes he would simply lie awake briefly, wondering again how his country could have recovered from such devastation to the point where all over the eleven states dark-skinned contract employees, the children of slaves, labored to make the tiny bugs of which differential machines were composed—the machines which no one in the world, not the United States, not the Yellow Empire, not Britain, could match. Comforted by these schoolbook images, he would sleep again.

  Other times he would not. Then, as if testing his resolve to be better than he had been, he would dress and get in the car, driving all the way into the city, to stare at the contract boys under the lamp posts. Occasionally he would stop and meet the eyes of one of them … but the moment a step was made in his direction, he would be off, heart pounding, cursing his own weakness. So he would be “good” again for at least two days. The dreams would be calmer; then it would start again.

  So it went all through August and September and into October, while Stashower and the others
rewrote history, while Gene told the project manager what he needed to know in order to take full credit, until one day late in the month, a week before Redoubt Day, when Shelby came to visit.

  “You’ve been avoiding me,” she said, pouting.

  “Don’t be silly. Maybe I haven’t called, but neither have you.”

  “Nevertheless, because I love you, because of what you mean to me, I’m going to forgive you.”

  Gene almost laughed. He knew that with a woman like Shelby—or more precisely, what Shelby, with repeated exposure to Dad and his new wife, was becoming—he must kill an assertion, not merely wound it.

  “In that case, I apologize. May I plead overwork? The project of a lifetime? And how is school?”

  “I’m dropping out,” she said calmly. “That’s why I came to see you —” She paused, eclipsed by his sudden fury.

  “Are you out of your mind? You worked years to get where you are! You’ve only got two more semesters before you get a certificate!”

  “A certificate I don’t need,” she said, eclipsing him in return.

  “Of course. Charlie will take care of you. I can’t believe this.”

  “Before either of us says more that we will regret, why don’t we talk about the weather. Or your work. How is it going?” Just like that, her tone had changed. They might have been having tea at the Atrium … or lying in the field behind the house in Marietta, looking at the sky. Gene was willing to play along. He wasn’t ready to give up his sister.

  “To tell you the truth, Shel, it’s amazing. Three months ago you’d never have convinced me that it would be possible to create a model—a simulation—of our world so detailed that it accurately ‘predicts’ what the price of wheat was in northeastern Kansas in 1888—”

  “‘Predicts’ what it was?”

  “The language is sadly inadequate to the task, especially when we’re talking about end results as opposed to processes. There were three things we needed to do to make Deconstruction work: We needed to convert human beings and all their traits and activities, from having children to voting for President, into numbers. Then we had to find a way to move those numbers—billions of them, actually —in a way that paralleled the growth or evolution of a society. That’s where Charlie’s federals came in. We’d always thought that the laws that controlled societies were similar to those that controlled biological processes, but we never had any biological process to play with until now.

  “The real challenge, of course, was the interface between the numbers and the federals—the translation, we call it. That’s what we’ve been running over and over again, adjusting, changing and rewriting, for months, until we finally got an overall program—all three elements working together—that allowed us not only to recapitulate American history from 1863 until now, but to learn things we didn’t know ourselves.”

  “The price of wheat in Kansas.” She seemed amused.

  “The length of women’s skirts in 1915. The number of people killed by the Yellow Flu in 1946. It’s like walking into a library of books you’ve never been able to open … until now.”

  “And what good is it?”

  “Well, once you’ve got a working model, you can go back and change certain key events—or change things that happen to certain key people. Ulysses Grant fires his cabinet in 1872 and doesn’t get impeached. Jeremy King is only wounded in 1968, and the contract system is abolished. That sort of thing.”

  “I can’t believe you can find one microscopic Abraham Lincoln.”

  “Oh, you can’t. One lesson we’re learning is that individuals are almost completely irrelevant to history—as individuals. I mean, yes, there are so-called ‘Great Men,’ but they appear in our translation program … not in the biological model. In fact, we’ve worked up a pretty good profile of the Key Individual, the Great Man, and found that at any given time, there are dozens if not hundreds of them around … waiting for the confluence of events that will allow them to fulfill their ‘destiny.’ Or whatever.

  “I mean, in some of our models, poor old Abe Lincoln, who was really nothing more than a victim of circumstances, forced into war because of the Secession and killed just as it appeared he would win, lives long enough to emerge as a Great Man. In that same model, Longstreet serves as a general in a longer, more drawn-out war and never emerges as the President who rebuilt the Confederacy.”

  “Don’t you find this sad?”

  “Why should I?”

  “To know that, at a certain level, nothing you do with your life really matters … that you’re only responding to these biological imperatives. Taking advantage of—what did you call it?—the confluence of events.” She shuddered. “Charlie will hate this.” With some of the tension bled out of their conversation, Shelby apparently felt it was safe to mention Holder.

  “Don’t kid yourself, Shel. Your Charlie will love this. What businessman wouldn’t want to know the future?”

  “You don’t know him at all, Gene. He wants to believe that he can change the future. In many ways, he’s a lot like one of those Great Men. He has ideas, big ideas. He wants the South to be more than it is. He thinks we’ve become rigid and calcified—”

  “He’s right about that. But I never got the idea that he had just the solutions to everyone’s problems. Great.”

  “It’s one of the reasons I love him, Gene.”

  “Do you really? Or do you, dear sister, just love the idea that you’ve done what you were raised to do: caught yourself a great man?”

  “I think I should leave.” She stood up.

  “I’m glad you came. By the way—” She was waiting at the door. There were tears in her eyes, of sadness or defiance he didn’t know. He pulled a small package out of his desk. He’d bought it weeks earlier, not knowing when or if he would have the opportunity to deliver it. “It’s a week late … Happy birthday.”

  Shelby took it, but she did not thank him.

  The federal “world” was located at D.C.D.’s Decatur site in a little-used warehouse off-limits to all but a few personnel—“deep, dark government work” was the rumored reason. It worked so well that Gene grew to wonder just how much deep, dark government work the company had done in the past. Nevertheless, he controlled access … which was why, on his way into the building the next day, he was so surprised to find Holder coming out.

  The man was shameless. He shouldn’t have been within miles of the place, but all he had to say was, “Playing hooky from Emory, I see.”

  “Once a week, whether I need to or not,” Gene said, as furious at himself for showing his anger as he was at Holder. “How the hell did you get in there?”

  Holder smiled. “When I was going to law school I worked here one summer as a security guard. Relax, Gene, as far as anyone at D.C.D. is concerned I’m tied up with a libel action in Pine Mountain. No one is going to kick you out of your sandbox.”

  “Have you seen enough? Or would you like an official tour?” He flashed his badge at the guard, a man Holder’s age whose name Gene didn’t know, who would, if Gene had his way, be working somewhere else at this time tomorrow.

  “Love to.” As they breached the innermost door, Holder said quietly, “Don’t be too hard on old Matthew—” The guard. “—I made it impossible for him to keep me out.” One gentleman to another. Holder had just made it impossible for Gene to punish the guard.

  The federals lived in what always struck Gene as the world’s biggest ant colony—a glass-roofed chamber the size of a rounders court, over which Stashower and his colleagues hovered like angels on high, their cameras and telescopes trained on heaven’s floor. “Incredible,” Holder said. “It’s just incredible.”

  Holder seemed genuinely impressed, which pleased and disgusted Gene. “Well, Charlie, there never would have been a link between Deconstruction and the federals if not for you.”

  To Gene’s greater annoyance, Holder didn’t deny it. “It was pure blind luck. Did I tell you? My first job at the firm was handling insurance f
orms for D.C.D. I amused myself by reading some of the résumés and personnel files. That’s how I learned that you were the key man on Deconstruction.” Oblivious to Gene’s growing outrage, Holder went on to deliver the final blow: “In fact, that’s how I learned that you had a sister at Bradley.”

  By now Gene was so used to creating scenarios that they came to him unbidden. He didn’t like the one being created for him now … this Confederate hustler using his past connections and purloined material to uncover people’s secrets … seeking Gene out in order to make him do his bidding … and worst of all, cultivating his own sister in order to forge a connection between them. What else did Holder know?

  Holder nodded toward Stashower and the others. “Your boys seem to like looking through the scopes.”

  “They’ve convinced themselves the federals have ‘cities’ and ‘fields.’ I think they just enjoy playing microcosmic god.” Gene had looked once and only found the action blurred to incomprehensibility. When he could look at all, that is. In the accelerated life of a federal, one “day” lasted two seconds, and the constant flickering of the “sun” gave Gene a headache. “But, then, they’re not the only ones.”

  Holder laughed out loud. “Come on, Gene. I’m not that manipulative!”

  When Gene offered no comment, Holder lowered his voice and said, “Look, you’re going to come out of this a happy man. When the boys on thirty-four see what you’ve got here, they’ll be on you like a duck on a June bug.”

  “Assuming they don’t already know.”

  “So far I’ve managed to refrain from enlightening them … much as I’d love to. This one belongs to Gene Tyler.”

  “How will I ever thank you?”

  Holder couldn’t miss the sarcasm; he hesitated just long enough to let Gene know he hadn’t. “You’ll find a way.” Then, back in the country-club mode, he slapped Gene on the back. “Got to run.” Over his shoulder, he called, “When am I going to see you at Shel’s?”