What Might Have Happened Part 9

"One of the professors at Emory-a tsarist refugee named Asimoff-theorized some years ago that one could predict future events mathematically. But n.o.body 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 a.s.sa.s.sinated 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 G.o.d." 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 a.s.sault 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 fiance, 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 s.h.i.tty 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 pa.s.sing 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 cra.s.s 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 whose 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 doc.u.ment, 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?"

"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 G.o.d."

"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-life-in-a-differential? s.h.i.t 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 a.s.signing 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 naivete, "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 circ.u.mstances, 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. .h.i.t 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 a.s.sa.s.sin was later identified as a Nathan Shaw twenty-eight-year-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 a.s.sa.s.sin 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 hors.e.m.e.n 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 fiance 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 a.s.sumed 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 a.s.sa.s.sination 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 t.i.tle 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 a.s.sertion, 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 fulfil their 'destiny.' Or whatever.

"I mean, in some of our models, poor old Abe Lincoln, who was really nothing more than a victim of circ.u.mstances, 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?"