Blood and Iron by Harry Turtledove Page A

longer, I will have nothing. I’ve waited too long already. Now, sir: will you do as I instruct you, or would you sooner converse with my attorneys?”
    “I am trying to save you from yourself, Miss Colleton,” Whitson said peevishly.
    “You are my broker, not my pastor,” Anne said. “Answer the question I just gave you, if you would be so kind.”
    Whitson sighed. “Very well. On your head be it.” He hung up.
    So did Anne, angrily. Her brother, Tom, came into the room. “You look happy with the world,” he remarked. His words held less in the way of lighthearted humor and more sardonicism than they would have before the war. He’d gone off, as if to a lark, a captain, and come back a lieutenant-colonel who’d been through all the horrors the Roanoke front had to offer.
    “Delighted,” Anne returned. She was still sorting out what to make of her brother. In a way, she was pleased he didn’t let her do all his thinking for him, as he had before. In another way, that worried her. Having him under her control had been convenient. She went on, “My idiot broker is convinced I’m the maniac. Everything will be rosy day after tomorrow, if you listen to him.”
    “You’re right—he’s an idiot,” Tom agreed. “You know what I paid for a pair of shoes yesterday? Twenty-three dollars—in paper, of course. I keep my gold and silver in my pocket.
I’m
not an idiot.”
    “It will get worse,” Anne said. “If it goes on for another year, people’s life savings won’t be worth anything. That’s when we really have to start worrying.”
    “I’ll say it is.” Her brother nodded. “If the Red niggers had waited to rise up till that happened, half the white folks in the country would have grabbed their squirrel guns and joined in.”
    “If they hadn’t risen up when they did, we might not be in this mess now,” Anne said grimly. “And they did bad enough when they rose.”
    Tom nodded. The Marxist Negroes had killed Jacob, his brother and Anne’s, who was at the Marshlands plantation because Yankee poison gas left him an invalid. They’d burned the mansion, too; only in the past few months had their remnants been cleared from the swamps by the Congaree River.
    “Hmm,” Tom said. “We need an idiot to take Marshlands off our hands for us. Maybe we ought to sell it to your broker.”
    “As a matter of fact, I think we need an imbecile to take Marshlands off our hands,” Anne said. “God only knows when anyone will be able to raise a crop of cotton on that land: one fieldhand in three is liable to be a Red, and how could you tell till too late? And the taxes—I haven’t seen anyone talking about taking the war taxes off the books, have you?”
    “Not likely.” Tom snorted. “Government needs every dime it can squeeze. Only good thing about that is, the government has to take paper. If they don’t take the paper they print, nobody else will, either.”
    “Small favors,” Anne said, and her brother nodded again. She went on, “I’d take just about any kind of offer for Marshlands, and I’d take paper. I’d turn it into gold, but I’d take paper. If that doesn’t prove I’m desperate, I don’t know what would.”
    “A hundred years,” Tom said. “More than a hundred years—gone.” He snapped his fingers. “Like that. Gone.” He snapped them again. “Better than fifty years of good times for the whole country. That’s gone, too.”
    “We have to put the pieces back together,” Anne said. “We have to make the country strong again, or else the damnyankees will run over us again whenever they decide they’re ready. Even if they don’t decide to run over us, they can make us their little brown cousins, the way we’ve done with the Empire of Mexico.”
    “I’m damned if I’ll be anybody’s little brown cousin,” Tom Colleton ground out. He swore with studied deliberation. He’d never cursed in front of her before he went off to the trenches. He still didn’t do it in