The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century (22 page)

He took me to a bookseller’s and stationery store on Astor Place with a printshop in the basement and the man to whom he introduced me was the owner, Roger Tyss. I spent almost six years there, and when I left neither the store nor its contents nor Tyss himself seemed to have changed or aged. I know books were sold and others bought to take their places on the shelves or be piled towerwise on the floor; I helped cart in many rolls of sulphide paper and bottles of printers’ ink, and delivered many bundles of damp pamphlets, broadsides, letterheads and envelopes. Inked ribbons for typewriting machines, penpoints, ledgers and daybooks; rulers, paperclips, legal forms and cubes of indiarubber came and went. Yet the identical disorder, the same dogeared volumes, the indistinguishable stock, the unaltered cases of type remained fixed for six years, all covered by the same film of dust which responded to vigorous sweeping only by rising into the air, filling it with the sneezes of the sweeper or any customers happening to be present and immediately settling back on the precise spots.

Roger Tyss grew six years older and I can only charge it to the heedless eye of youth that I discerned no signs of that aging or that I was never able to guess his years to my satisfaction. Like Pondible and—as I learned—so many members of the Grand Army, he wore a beard. His was closely trimmed, wiry and grizzled. Above the beard and across his forehead were many fine lines which always held some of the grime of the store or printing press. One did not dwell long on either beard or wrinkles, however; what held you were his eyes: large, dark, fierce and compassionate. Anyone might have dismissed him at first glance as simply an undersized, stoopshouldered, slovenly printer had one not been fixed by those compelling eyes.

For six years that store was home and school, and Roger Tyss was employer, teacher and father to me. I was not indentured to him, nor did he pay me any wages. Our agreement—if so simple and unilateral a statement can be called an agreement—was made ten minutes after he met me for the first time.

“Hodgins,” he said, staring piercingly up at me (he never then nor later condescended to the familiar “Hodge” nor did I ever address or even think of him but as Mr. Tyss), “I’ll feed you and lodge you, teach you to set type and give you the run of the books. I’ll pay you no money; you can steal from me if you have the conscience. You can learn as much here in four months as in a college in four years—or you can learn nothing. I’ll expect you to do the work I think needs doing; any time you don’t like it you’re free to go.”

He was my father and teacher, but he was never my friend. Rather he was my adversary. I respected him and the longer I knew him the deeper became my respect, but it was an ambivalent feeling and attached only to his zealotry. I detested his ideas, his philosophy and some of his actions; and this detestation grew until I was no longer able to live near him. But I am getting ahead of my story.

Tyss knew books, not only as a bookman knows them—binding, size, edition, value—but as a scholar. He seemed to have read enormously and on every conceivable subject, many of them quite useless in practical application. As a printer he followed the same pattern; he was not concerned solely with setting up a neat page; he wrote much on his own account: poetry, essays, manifestoes, composing directly from the font, running off a proof which he read and immediately destroyed before pieing the type.

I slept on a mattress kept under one of the counters during the day; Tyss had a couch, hardly more luxurious, downstairs by the flatbed press. Each morning before it was time to open, Tyss sent me across town on the horse-cars to the Washington Market to buy six pounds of beef—twelve on Saturdays, for the market, unlike the bookstore, was closed Sundays. It was always the same cut, heart of ox or cow, dressed by the butcher in thin strips. Several times, after I had been with him long enough to tire of the fare, but not long enough to realize the obstinacy of his nature, I begged him to let me substitute pork or mutton, or at least some other part of the beef, like brains or tripe which were even cheaper. But he always answered, “The heart, Hodgins; purchase the heart. It is the vital food.”

While I was on my errand he would buy three loaves of yesterday’s bread, still tolerably fresh; when I returned he took a long two-pronged fork, our only utensil, for the establishment was innocent of other cutlery or dishes, and spearing a strip of heart held it over the gas flame until it was sooted and toasted rather than broiled. We tore the loaves with our fingers and with a hunk of bread in one hand and a piece of meat in the other we each ate a pound of beef and half a loaf of bread for breakfast, dinner, and supper.

Tyss expected me to work but he was not a hard nor inconsiderate master. In 1938–44, when the country was being ground deeper into colonialism by the Confederate States and the German Union, there were few employers so lenient. I read much, practically when I pleased, and he encouraged me; even going to the length, when a particular book was not to be found in his considerable stock, of letting me get it from one of his competitors, to be written up against his account.

Nor was he too scrupulous about the time I took on his errands; if I spent some of it with a girl—and there were many girls in New York who didn’t look too unkindly on a tall youth even though he still carried some of the rustic air of Wappinger Falls—he never mentioned that a walk of half a mile had taken me a couple of hours.

It was true he kept rigidly to his original promise never to pay me wages but he often handed me coins for pocket money—evidently satisfied I wasn’t stealing—and he replaced my makeshift wardrobe with worn but decent clothing.

He hadn’t exaggerated the possibilities of the books which now surrounded me. His brief warning, “—or you can learn nothing,” was lost on me. I suppose someone of different temperament might have been surfeited with paper and print; I can only say I wasn’t. I nibbled, tasted, gobbled books. After the store was shut I hooked a student lamp to the nearest gas jet by means of a long tube, and lying on my pallet, with a dozen volumes handy, I read till I was no longer able to keep my eyes open or understand the words. Often I woke in the morning to find the light still burning and my fingers holding the pages open.

It seemed to me Tyss must have read everything, mastered every subject, acquired all languages; even now I believe his knowledge to have been incredibly wide. When he came upon me with an open book he would glance at the running title over my shoulder and begin talking, either of the particular work or its topic. What he had to say often gave me an insight I would otherwise have missed, and turned me to other writers, other aspects. He respected no authority simply because it was acclaimed or established; he prodded me to examine every statement, every hypothesis no matter how commonly accepted.

Early in my employment I was attracted to a large framed parchment he kept hanging over his typecase. It was simply but beautifully printed; I knew without being told that he had set it himself:

THE BODY OF

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

PRINTER

LIKE THE COVER OF AN OLD BOOK

STRIPPED OF ITS LETTERING AND GILDING

LIES HERE FOOD FOR WORMS.

BUT THE WORK SHALL NOT BE LOST

FOR IT WILL, AS HE BELIEVED,

COME FORTH AGAIN.

IN A NEW AND BETTER EDITION

REVISED & CORRRECTED

BY THE AUTHOR.

When he caught me admiring it Tyss laughed. “Elegant, isn’t it, Hodgins? But a lie, a perverse and probably hypocritical lie. There is no Author; the book of life is simply a mess of pied type—a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. There is no plan, no synopsis to be filled in with pious hopes or hypocritical actions. There is nothing but a vast emptiness in the universe.”

I had been reading an obscure Irish theologian—a Protestant curate of some forsaken parish, so ill-esteemed that he had been forced to publish his sermons himself—named George B. Shaw, and I had been impressed by his forceful style if not his philosophy. I quoted him to Tyss, perhaps as much to show erudition as to counter his argument.

“Nonsense,” said my employer, “I’ve seen the good parson’s book, and it’s a waste of good ink and paper. Man does not think; he only thinks he thinks. An automaton, he responds to external stimuli; he cannot order his thought.”

“You mean then that there is no free will—not even a marginal minimum of choice?”

“Exactly. The whole thing is an illusion. We do what we do because someone else has done what he did; he did it because still another someone did what he did. Every action is the rigid result of another action.”

“But there must have been a beginning,” I objected. “And if there was a beginning, choice existed if only for that split second. And if choice exists once it can exist again.”

“You have the makings of a metaphysician, Hodgins,” he said contemptuously, for metaphysics was one of the most despised words in his vocabulary. “The objection is childish. Answering you and the Reverend Shaw on your own level, I could say that time is an illusion and that all events occur simultaneously. Or if I grant its existence I can ask, What makes you think time is a simple straight line running flatly through eternity? Why do you assume that time isn’t curved? Can you conceive of its end? Can you really assume its beginning? Of course not—then why aren’t both the same? The serpent with its tail in its mouth?”

“You mean we not only play a prepared script but repeat the identical lines over and over and over for infinity? There’s no heaven in your cosmos, only an unimaginable, never ending hell.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “That you should spout emotional theology at me is part of what you call the script, Hodgins. You didn’t select the words nor speak them voluntarily. They were called into existence by what I said, which in turn was mere response to what went before.”

Weakly I was forced back to a more elementary attack. “You don’t act in accordance with your own conviction.”

He snorted.

“A thoughtless remark, excusable only because automatic. How could I act differently? Like you, I am a prisoner of stimuli.”

“How pointless to risk ruin and imprisonment as a member of the Grand Army when you can’t change what’s predestined.”

“I can no more help engaging myself in the underground than I can help breathing, or my heart beating, or dying when the time comes. Nothing, they say, is certain but death and taxes; actually everything is certain. Everything....”

Tyss never tried to conceal the extent of his activity in the Grand Army any more than he attempted to indoctrinate me with its principles. One illegal paper, the
True American
, came from his press and I often saw crumpled proofs of large-type warnings to “Get Out of Town you Conf. TRAITOR or the GA will HANG YOU!”

I knew that Pondible and the others who bore an indefinable resemblance whether bearded or not came to the store on Grand Army business, and I knew that many of the errands I was sent on advanced, or were supposed to advance, the Grand Army’s cause. Unwilling to face the moral issue of being, no matter how remotely, accessory to mayhem, kidnaping and murder, or the connected economic one of being unemployed, I simply refused to acknowledge I was aiding the underground organization, but looked upon my duties solely as concerned with the bookstore.

My distaste for the Grand Army bred in me no sympathy for the Whigs or for those who were generally considered to be their masters, the Confederates. My reading taught me conclusively that, contrary to the accepted view in the United States, the victors in the War of Southron Independence had been men of the highest probity, and the noblest among them was their second president. But I also knew that immediately after the Peace of Richmond, less dedicated individuals became increasingly powerful in the new nation. As Sir John Dahlberg remarked, “Power tends to corrupt.”

From his first election in 1865 until his death ten years later, President Lee had been the prisoner of an increasingly headstrong and imperialistic congress. He had opposed the invasion and conquest of Mexico by the Confederacy which had been undertaken on the pretext of restoring order during the conflict between the emperor and the republicans. However, he had too profound a respect for the constitutional processes to continue this opposition in the face of joint resolutions by the Confederate Congress.

Lee remained a symbol, but as the generation which had fought for independence died, the ideals he symbolized faded. Negro emancipation, enacted largely because of the pressure of men like Lee, soon revealed itself as a device for obtaining the benefits of slavery without its obligations. The freedmen on both sides of the new border were without franchise, and indeed for all practical purpose, without civil rights. Yet while the old Union first restricted and then abolished immigration, the Confederacy encouraged it, making the immigrants subjects, like the Latin-Americans who made up so much of the Southron population after the Confederacy expanded southward, limiting full citizenship to posterity of residents in the Confederate States on July Fourth 1864.

My reading of history—and by this time I had found there was no other study holding the same steady attraction for me—together with my strong revulsion to Tyss’s philosophy convinced me there had been a radical alteration in the direction of the world’s progress during the past century. It seemed to me humanity had been heading for longer and longer stretches of peace, greater intelligence in dealing with its problems, more of the necessities and luxuries of life more evenly distributed. But with the War of Southron Independence the trend changed, not into immediate and obvious retrogression perhaps, but certainly away from the bright future which had seemed so assured in 1850.

Take the pervasive fear of imminent war which hung over the world, a fear which was interrupted only by the outbreak of the conflicts themselves—which ranged from skirmishes between civilized powers equipped with modern weapons of extermination and barbarians with nothing more lethal than a bow or a blowgun, to global belligerency. This fear hung, ever more lowering and insistent as it became increasingly predictable that the antagonists in the great clash would be the Confederacy and the German Union.

Both could date their impetus from 1864 when the North German Confederation beat the Danes. From then on the expansion of the two countries was parallel; while the Confederacy worked its way methodically toward Cape Horn and westward through the Pacific, the German Union absorbed the Balkans and made a close alliance with the suddenly rejuvenated Spanish Empire. In the Emperors’ War of 1914–16 the Confederacy had the opportunity of stepping in and giving its rival a mortal blow, and the action would have been popular, for the majority of Southrons, like the inhabitants of the United States, were sympathetic to the cause of England, France and Russia. But for a variety of reasons the Confederacy stayed neutral, allowing the German Union to absorb Ukrainia, Poland and the Baltic States, northern Italy, western France and the Low Countries. The Confederacy took the reward of this course by annexing Alaska from Russia and attaching the crippled British Empire to its orbit in close alliance, so that the two great powers were fairly balanced. The attraction of even so minor a country as the United States not only meant much to either side, but almost surely meant the war itself would be fought on the territory of this new satellite.

Because of all this I realized the Grand Army was in a position to play a much more important part than any similar illegal organization in another country.

Just how it was using its opportunity was something of which I became only gradually aware.