American Empire: Blood and Iron - By Harry Turtledove Page 0,13

sixteen to attend school at least six months out of the year. They didn’t intend to miss any chances to tell their stories to people they wanted to grow up to be Americans, not Canadians.

“It’ll be all right, Pa,” Julia said. “I really think it will. You can send Mary and me, and we won’t end up Yanks, truly we won’t.” She looked toward Alexander’s photograph again.

“I know you won’t, chick,” he said. “But I don’t know that Mary would be able to keep from telling the teacher what she really thinks.”

At nine, Mary wore her heart on her sleeve, even more than Alexander had. She also hated Americans with a pure, clear hatred that made even her father’s pale beside it. Letting the Yanks know how she felt struck McGregor as most unwise.

Julia had washed the supper dishes; Mary was drying them. After the last one clattered into the cupboard, she came out to join the rest of the family. She was sprouting up, too, like wheat after planting. She would, McGregor judged, make a tall woman. But she still kept some of the feline grace she’d had since she was very small, and also some of a cat’s self-containment. McGregor hadn’t needed to teach her much about conspiracy. She understood it as if by instinct.

Now he said, “Mary, if you have to, do you suppose you can put up with listening to the Yanks’ lies in school without telling them off?”

“Why would I have to do that, Pa?” she answered. “Maybe they can make me go to school, but—” She caught herself. Her gray eyes, so like those of her father and her dead brother, widened. “Oh. You mean put up with them so I wouldn’t get in trouble—so we wouldn’t get in trouble.”

“That’s right.” Arthur McGregor nodded. No, no one needed to teach Mary about conspiracy.

She thought it over. “If I have to, I suppose I could,” she said at last. “But telling lies is a sin on their heads, isn’t it?”

“So it is.” McGregor smiled to hear that, but not too much: he’d passed his own stern Presbyterian ethic down to the new generation. “The Yanks have so many other sins on the book against them, though, that lying doesn’t look like so much to them.”

“Well, it should,” Mary said. “It should all count against them, every bit of it. And it will. God counts everything.” She spoke with great assurance.

McGregor wished he felt so sure himself. He believed, yes, but he’d lost that simple certainty. If he’d had any left, Alexander’s death would have burned it out of him, leaving ashes behind. He said, “You will go to school, then, and be a good little parrot, so we can show the Americans we’re obeying their law?”

His younger daughter sighed. “If I have to,” she said again.

“Good,” McGregor said. “The more we look like we’re doing what they want us to, the more we can do what we want to when they aren’t looking.”

Julia said, “That’s good, Pa. That’s very good. That’s just what we’ll do.”

“That’s what we’ll have to do,” Maude said. “That’s what everyone will have to do, for however long it takes till we’re free again.”

“Or till we turn into Americans,” Arthur McGregor said bleakly. He held up a work-roughened hand. “No, I don’t mean us. Some of our neighbors will turn into Americans, but not us.”

“Some of our neighbors have already turned into Americans,” Julia said. “They don’t care about what they were, so they don’t care what they are. We know better. We’re Canadians. We’ll always be Canadians. Always.”

McGregor wondered if, with the strongest will in the world, his grandchildren and great-grandchildren would remember they were Canadians. And then, perhaps wondering the same thing, Maude spoke as if to reassure herself: “Germany took Alsace and Lorraine away from France almost fifty years ago, but the people there still remember they’re Frenchmen.”

Canadians had heard a great deal about their ally’s grievances against the Kaiser and his henchmen (till the Americans overran them, after which they’d had to endure lies about Germany’s grievances against France). Now France had more reasons to grieve, for the Germans were biting off more of her land. And McGregor, still in his bleak mood, said, “The Germans settled a lot of their own people in Alsace and Lorraine to help hold them down. If the Americans did that…”

His wife and daughters stared at him in horror. Mary spoke first: “I wouldn’t live next to Americans, Pa! I wouldn’t.