[What Might Have Been 02] Alternate Heroes Read online

  He left the car with the contract valet at the hotel and took his time getting to the Atrium. Shelby would be late, of course; the only question for Gene was how late. So he was quite surprised to find her already seated and drinking iced tea.

  “Have you called Daddy lately?” she said as soon as they’d kissed.

  “Is this what passes for ‘hello’ at Bradley these days?” Gene said. Brother and sister were both fair and slight, though Shelby’s Confederate princess camouflage made her dishwater blond hair look positively golden and reddened her lips so that most men (though not Gene) would have described them as luscious. Only when she rolled her eyes, as she did now, did Shelby truly resemble Gene, becoming, if only for a moment, a twelve-year-old—the proper age for a younger sister, in Gene’s opinion. In December she would be twenty-one. “As a matter of fact, I haven’t. Don’t tell me you have.”

  “Gene…” This was an argument that, in one form or another, had been going on since the divorce ten years ago. “He’s our father.”

  “Only chemically,” Gene said. “In every other way he separated himself from our life in 1978. He’s got a new wife who is exactly your age—” He was exaggerating for effect. Their step-mother was closer to twenty-three. “—and the perfect new heir. Dylan James Tyler. Christ, how pretentious can you get? I’m only surprised that he hasn’t filed suit to get me to change my name.” Dad was Gene, Sr. “If he gets disgusted enough, maybe he’ll change his.” Gene smiled.

  Shelby sighed. “Never mind. I was only asking.”

  “Fair enough. You didn’t invite me to the Atrium to ask me about Daddy, though.”

  “No.” Shelby was suddenly distant, in a way that was uniquely hers. Confederate princesses—at least those few whose company Gene had tolerated, however briefly—were trained to pay, in any encounter between the sexes, supreme and total attention to the man.

  The waiter arrived to take up one of the four places at the table. Gene ordered a whiskey, which caused Shelby to frown. “I only did it to get your attention,” he said.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “And how is school?”

  “Boring.”

  “That’s a great thing to say about the finest school for women in eleven states including Cuba.” He was kidding her, but the answer disturbed him. Without parental support—there was some money from Mom, but not enough to cover more than a fraction of the tuition and costs—Shelby had worked hard to earn a scholarship. To Gene’s pleasure and pride, she had chosen to study medicine, one of the few fields in which a woman could find a career these days.

  “Oh, you know what I mean. It’s summer. It’s hot and there’s no one around—”

  “There’s no one around Bradley in the winter, darling.”

  “Then you can imagine what it’s like in summer.” She was playing with her iced tea, drawing figures in the condensation. “Maybe I miss being … young.”

  “Oh, you miss being dragged all over the Confederacy by Daddy so you could wait in a hotel room while he did his ‘bidness’? Or is it the custody battle you’re thinking of? Now that was a lot of fun—”

  “Gene, stop it. You know exactly what I mean.”

  Yes, he did. She was thinking of summers on the lake and in the fields behind the big house in Marietta. Their land bordered a state park dedicated to the battle of Stone Mountain, and so, aside from park rangers and the occasional Northern tourists, they had the run of acres of woodland. And before the divorce Gene, Sr., had kept horses. “Sorry. This time of year gets to me, too.”

  “Why don’t you go someplace? God knows you’ve got vacation coming to you.”

  “Why, sister dear, the project would fall apart without me.” He laid on a thick accent, the kind they’d heard from the contractees at the Marietta house. It never failed to make her laugh. “Differential computation is the best hope of the Confederacy. Taking a vacation would be—unpatriotic.”

  “I thought you were under the lash of some sissy professors at Emory.”

  “Sociology professors at Emory,” he corrected, his eyes narrowing. “I’ll have you know there are no sissies in the Confederacy.”

  Gene knew this was dangerous ground, even between loving brother and sister, but battle was postponed. Shelby was on her feet, a beauty-queen smile on her face, waving. “Over here!”

  Before Gene could turn around, a handsome young man in a gray suit was at the table, kissing Shelby in a manner generally reserved, in public at least, for family members. Then he offered his hand to Gene. “I’m Charlie Holder,” he said.

  “My fiancé,” Shelby said.

  Gene tried hard not to despise Holder on sight, a task made unusually difficult by the speed with which this prospective brother-in-law made himself at home, and by the deference shown him by the waiter. He didn’t even ask for Mr. Holder’s order. In the space of seconds, without any proper signs at all, Gene found himself no longer host, but guest. Holder had even interposed his tanned, well-exercised frame between Gene and Shelby.

  “I perceive that you’ve been here before, Mr. Holder,” Gene said, smiling so pleasantly his lips ached.

  Shelby, who recognized the coming fury, reached out for Gene’s hand. “Charlie works for Sumner and Horn,” she said, naming with what Gene took to be excessive enthusiasm the biggest law firm in the state. “Their offices are right across the street.”

  “I’m just an associate, of course,” Holder said. “On what they pay me I’m lucky if I can eat here twice a month.”

  “Does that mean supporting my dear sister will be especially … challenging?” Gene said this while looking at Shelby, who had given up anger and was now attempting to soothe him by looking hurt. He said, “Now don’t you worry, sister. I’m not seriously questioning Mr. Holder’s abilities—”

  “Please call me Charlie.”

  “Charlie it is.” He made it sound like a disease. “But I am the senior male in the family. I have certain responsibilities regarding my sister’s welfare.” He turned to Shelby. “Charlie understands that.” Holder smiled right back. “Perfectly.”

  “Then,” Shelby said, “dear brother, you’ll be pleased to know that Charlie has been nominated for a partnership. He’ll have it long before the wedding.”

  With those words Shelby let him know that she had gone over to the other side. Gene felt like Longstreet at the Last Redoubt: out of ammunition, Sherman’s blue hordes swarming up the parapet. The war was over; lunch was only beginning.

  Current popular wisdom suggested that a diet of greens was one way to ward off the summer vapors. Like Shelby and Holder, Gene found himself staring at a Cantonese salad for which he now had even less enthusiasm than ever. He signaled the waiter and got a second drink. Shelby was so busy tittering at Holder that she didn’t even notice.

  Exactly on cue, two bites into the salad, Holder looked up. “Shelby tells me you work in differentials. That must be an exciting field.”

  “Well, I’m sure it can’t compare to contract law,” Gene said.

  “Come on.” Holder was determined not to let Gene insult him. “It’s the cutting edge of Confederate technology. Without your—what do they call them?—bugs and counters we’d be nothing but a warmer Canada.” He stabbed at the salad, and dabbed at his mouth. “We handle all D.C.D.’s work, you know.”

  Differential Calculating Devices was the Atlanta conglomerate that dominated the global market. There wasn’t a government that functioned without the machines, not even the government of the United States of America, which would sooner buy from Satan than from the Confederacy. The company had the further bonus of being Gene’s ostensible employer. “If you’re involved in D.C.D., then you know more about our ‘importance’ than I do. I’m just a soldier.”

  “A soldier who’s fighting a particularly interesting war, I hear. Project Deconstruction, isn’t it?”

  Gene’s glance shifted from Holder, who was impassive in his command of the situation, to Shelby, who allowed hersel
f a wiggle of triumph at the obvious perfection of her catch. “That’s not a name I’m used to hearing at city lunches,” Gene said finally, hoping that a bit of dignified reproach might be sufficient to raise him back to equal standing with this person.

  “Certainly not,” Holder said. “It’s privileged. Family stuff. But, then, we’re all family here, aren’t we, Shel?” Not only did Holder suddenly use what had heretofore been Gene’s private name for Shelby, but he caused her to blush, confirming to Gene that she had, indeed, spilled to Holder all of the many “privileged” details she knew about Deconstruction.

  Gene examined the bottom of his drink and wished for a sudden outbreak of war—or death—anything to deliver him from this lunch. But fate declined to oblige.

  Shelby was saying, “You know, I’ve heard bits and pieces of this, but never quite the whole story. I’m dying to know. That is, if it’s all right.”

  “I have no objection … if your brother doesn’t,” Holder said, neatly positioning Gene to label his own sister as untrustworthy.

  “If we can’t take such a fine example of Southern womanhood into our confidence, what kind of men are we?” Gene said, slipping into his little-used country club locutions. “Shelby, darling, Project Deconstruction is a device by which we unravel the past so that we might actually tell the future.”

  “I do know that much.”

  “One of the professors at Emory—a tsarist refugee named Asimoff —theorized some years ago that one could predict future events mathematically. But nobody had any idea how to translate events into symbols, nor the ability to perform calculations involving millions or billions of symbols.

  “Over the years people have made attempts to break down historical events, social movements, people, personality traits, even the weather, into irreducible units which somebody started calling ‘memes.’ They’d wind up with these vast systems and complex formulae that would just go up the chimney the moment you applied them to some known historical situation, like the Secession. The world-model bore no relationship to the real world.” He smiled. “Unfortunately, it’s taken us years to realize this. We keep adjusting the numbers and redoing the formulas, but we still haven’t managed to come up with a system that tells you that if Abraham Lincoln is assassinated on July 4, 1863, by a Copperhead named Nathan Shaw, the Confederacy will be occupied by Federal troops for forty years.” He spread his hands. “At the moment, I guess you could say we’re stuck.”

  Holder, who had, Gene thought, been waiting for an opportunity, chose this moment to say, “Until now.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You’re the first person on Deconstruction who’s had the courage to admit that it’s stuck. I’ve thought so for some time.”

  “Imagine how pleased we’ll all be to know how our attorneys judge our work.”

  “Please don’t be angry,” Charlie said, aflush with enthusiasm. “A lot of valuable data has come out of the project so far. I’m not aware of any unhappiness at the higher levels of the company—”

  “Thank God.” Gene tried not to be sarcastic.

  “But the problem, as you surely know, with companies as large as D.C.D., is the flow of information. Acting, as we do, as counsel to the whole organization, we tend to have a better view of what’s going on than most of the gentlemen on the thirty-fourth floor.” He leaned forward and lowered his voice. Shelby had effectively ceased to exist. “The pharmaceutical division has a project of its own that may provide you with your missing link.”

  “What would drugs have to do with Deconstruction?”

  “I’m not talking about drugs.”

  Ordinarily Gene wouldn’t have deigned to play a guessing game. He was stopped in this case by Shelby’s getting up from her chair. “Excuse me,” she said, “I don’t want to inhibit you two—”

  Holder couldn’t get to his feet fast enough. “I’m sorry, Shel, that was rude of me.” He looked to Gene for help.

  “Charlie,” Gene said, forcing out the words, “why don’t you and I get together some other time? I’d really like to hear about this missing link.”

  “I’ll call tonight at six,” Holder said, extending his hand. To Shelby he said, “I have to get back.”

  Before Shelby could protest, Gene said, “Walk him out, Shel,” giving the name a little spin. He picked up the check. “This is my treat.” Arm in arm, the couple left.

  Shelby’s initial assault had driven Gene back from his lines … but he had not broken. It was time for a counterattack.

  “Are you going to see him?”

  Two hours later, it was Shelby who came to call. Gene was sitting in his office at Emory watching some students playing a half-hearted game of rounders when she knocked. She asked the question before she even sat down.

  “What choice do I have, Shel? I realize he’s your fiancé, but he’s also involved in my work. I’m sort of bound to listen to what he has to say.”

  “I suppose.” There was silence while Shelby fumed. “I’m sorry I even introduced you two.”

  “Sooner or later you’d have had to, honey. Unless you were planning to elope to Havana.” Gene was doing a bit of fuming, too. “Look, there’s no sense in fighting. It never really occurred to me that you were ready for marriage—”

  “Gene, I’m going to be twenty-one!”

  “This is the twentieth century, Shel. You haven’t even finished school. Are you going to just throw it all away?” He hauled out the secret weapon. “I thought you wanted to be better than Mom.”

  “That’s a shitty thing to say.”

  “My, my, we’ve been learning some naughty words at school.”

  Shelby stood up and started to leave. At the door she paused long enough to say, “I can’t vote and I can’t own property and if I’m too old or ugly I’m doomed to be a nurse or a schoolteacher for the rest of my life. And here you are, a man, telling me I’m supposed to be self-reliant and independent, that we’ve got this brave new South here, but even you have to treat me like a little girl.” Then she gently closed the door, a gesture which startled Gene because it was not the slam one expected from a child, or from a Confederate princess.

  He was still wondering what he should do about Shelby when the contract girl out front asked permission to go home for the evening, adding that a Mr. Charleston Holder was here.

  “I feel as though I’m here to sell you something,” Holder said, removing a folder from his briefcase and passing it to Gene. Night had fallen; the quad outside the office window was dark and quiet, as was the rest of the building, save for the lone contract janitor swishing his mop in the hall.

  “Is there a problem with that?”

  Holder shrugged. “I was raised to believe that a gentleman didn’t solicit business. It would come to him in the natural order of things.” He smiled again, all charm. “Yet your father is a salesman, and a very successful one, too, from what Shelby says—”

  “But he’s no gentleman,” Gene said, irritated again at Holder’s immersion—there was no other word—in Tyler family matters. “We shouldn’t pursue that subject or I’ll have to call you out—whether I love my father or not.”

  “I meant no offense. I’m unused to working outside normal channels.” Gene doubted that this was even remotely true, but chose not to argue the point. The best parts of his own life were outside normal channels. “What I’ve given you,” Holder said, getting back to business, “is a report on what is, forgive me, D.C.D.’s most closely held and radical research: the creation of life itself.”

  For a man unused to the crass protocols of business, Holder knew just how obtrusive he could be and still allow Gene to understand what he was reading. The only words he honestly heard were “radical” and “creation.” What he saw before him was a memorandum describing the design and construction of microscopic creatures called, in what must have been some lab technician’s idea of a joke, “federals.” Federals were originally cousins to planaria and other relatively simple organisms wh
ose genetic material had been altered to give them greater “intelligence” and, more interestingly, mobility, thus removing them from the kingdom of the protozoans, making them animals.

  “This sounds like a fascinating discovery. I would have thought it would take millions of federal ‘years’ to accomplish that sort of evolution.”

  “I believe that it did,” Holder said, reaching for the memo and flipping ahead several pages. “A generation of federals is born, grows up, and dies in only a few minutes. And though there’s no indication in this document, the project has been going on since 1939.”

  Fifty years ago the United States had been involved in the disastrous World Wide War against the German States and their allies. Although the Confederacy had maintained a public neutrality, Southern sympathies were clearly with their Northern brothers, and many Confederate companies supplied arms and materials to U.S. armies. Gene knew that D.C.D.’s first differential calculators had been employed to that end. And the McCarran Pharmaceutical Company, later acquired by D.C.D. to become its bio division, was rumored to have been involved in the search for chemical weapons. “These things aren’t dangerous, are they?”

  “Well, they have been kept under wraps for a long time,” Holder said, as if that were sufficient answer.

  “This is fascinating information,” Gene said, “but I’m afraid I don’t know what I can do with it.” He slid the memo back to Holder, who pinned it in place with his hand.

  “Please correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t you say that the problem with the Deconstruction process is that it lacks a means of testing?”