Year’s Best SF 15 by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer Page B

Douglas to call us away with concessions and compromises and his disgusting deference to the Slave Aristocracy. In my dream, the war took place. And it was an awful war, Mr. Camber. It seemed to flow before my eyes in a series of bloody tableaux. A half a million dead. Battlefields too awful to contemplate, North and South. Industries crippled, both the print and the cotton pressessilenced, thriving cities reduced to smoldering ruins—all this I saw, or knew, as one sees or knows in dreams.
    But that was not the unbearable part of it.
    Let me say that I have known death altogether too intimately. I have suffered the loss of children. I love peace just as fervently as I despise injustice. I would not wish grief or heartbreak on any mother of any section of this country, or any other country. And yet—!
    And yet, in light of what I have inferred from recent numbers of your newspaper, and from the letters you have written me, and from what old friends and acquaintances have said or written about the camps, the deportations, the Lodges, etc.,—because of all that, a part of me wishes that that war had indeed been fought if only because it might have ended slavery. Ended it cleanly, I mean, with a sane and straightforward liberation, or even a liberation partial and incomplete—a declaration, at least, of the immorality and unacceptability of human bondage—anything but this sickening decline by extinction, this surreptitious (as you so bitterly describe it) “cleansing.”
    I suppose this makes me sound like a monster, a sort of female John Brown, confusing righteousness with violence and murder with redemption.
    I am not such a monster. I confess a certain admiration for those who, like President Douglas, worked so very hard to prevent the apocalypse of which I dreamed last night, even if I distrust their motives and condemn their means. The instinct for peace is the most honorable of all Christian impulses. My conscience rebels at a single death, much less one million.
    But if a War could have ended Slavery…would I have wished it? Welcomed it?
    What is unbearable, Mr. Camber, is that I don’t know that I can answer my own horrifying question either honestly or decently. And so I have to ask: Can you?
    I puzzled it out. Then I gave Percy a blank stare. “Why are you showing me this?”
    â€œWe’re alike in many ways, as you say, Tom. But not all ways. Not all ways. Mrs. Stowe asks an interesting question.Answering it isn’t easy. I don’t know your mind, but fundamentally, Tom, despite all the sympathies between us, the fact is, I suspect that in the end you might give the wrong answer to that question—and I expect you think the same of me.”
    Â 
    There was another difference, which I did not mention to Percy, and that was that every time I remarked on our similarities, I could hear my wife’s scornful voice saying (as she had said when I first shared the idea of this project with her), “Oh, Tom, don’t be ridiculous. You’re nothing like that Percy Camber. That’s your mother talking—all that abolitionist guilt she burdened you with. As if you need to prove you haven’t betrayed the cause , whatever the cause is, exactly.”
    Maggie failed to change my mind, though what she said was true.
    Â 
    â€œFrom about eight feet down,” Ephraim said cryptically, lifting the lantern.
    Eight feet is as high an average man can reach without standing on something. Between eight feet and the floor is the span of a man’s reach.
    â€œYou see, sir,” Ephraim said, “my son and I were held in separate barracks. The idea behind that was that a man might be less eager to escape if it meant leaving behind a son or father or uncle. The overseers said, if you run, your people will suffer for it. But when my chance come I took it. I don’t know if that’s a sin. I think about it often.” He walked toward the nearest