Year's Best SF 15 - By David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer Page 0,22

a response to a difficult time. Slavery had died, but the slaves had not. That was the dilemma of the South. Black men without skills, along with their families and countless unaccompanied children, crowded the roads—more of them every day, as “free-labor cotton” became a rallying cry for progressive French and English buyers.

Who were Marcus and Benjamin Pilgassi? Probably nothing more than a pair of Richmond investors jumping on a bandwagon. The Liberty Lodges bore no onus then. The appeal of the business was explicit: Don’t put your slaves on the road and risk prosecution or fines for “abandonment of property.” We will take your aging and unprofitable chattel and house them. The men will be kept separate from the women to prevent any reckless reproduction. They will live out their lives with their basic needs attended to for an annual fee only a fraction of what it would cost to keep them privately.

What the Pilgassi brothers (and businessmen like them) did not say directly—but implied in every line of their advertisements—was that the Liberty Lodge movement aimed to achieve an absolute and irreversible decline in the Negro population in the South.

In time, Percy had told me, the clients of these businesses came to include entire state governments, which had tired of the expense and notoriety incurred by the existence of temporary camps in which tens of thousands of “intramural refugees” could neither be fed economically nor be allowed to starve. It had been less onerous for them to subsidize the Lodges, which tended to be built in isolated places, away from casual observation.

Percy’s grandfather had escaped slavery in the 1830s and settled in Boston, where he picked up enough education to make himself prominent in the Abolition movement. Percy’s father, an ordained minister, had spoken at Lyman Beecher’s famous church, in the days before he founded the journal that became the Tocsin.

Percy had taken up the moral burden of his forebears in a way I had not, but there was still a similarity between us. We were the children of crusaders. We had inherited their disappointments and drunk the lees of their bitterness.

I was not a medical man, but I had witnessed bullet wounds in Cuba. Percy had been shot in the shoulder. He lay on the ground with his eyes open, blinking, his left hand pressed against the wound. I pried his hand away so that I could examine his injury.

The wound was bleeding badly, but the blood did not spurt out, a good sign. I took a handkerchief from my pocket, folded it and pressed it against the hole.

“Am I dying?” Percy asked. “I don’t feel like I’m dying.”

“You’re not all that badly hurt or you wouldn’t be talking. You need attention, though.”

A third shot rang out. I couldn’t tell where the bullet went.

“And we need to get under cover,” I added.

The nearest building was the boarded-up barracks. I told Percy to hold the handkerchief in place. His right arm didn’t seem to work correctly, perhaps because the bullet had damaged some bundle of muscles or nerves. But I got him crouching, and we hurried toward shelter.

We came into the shadow of the building and stumbled to the side of it away from the direction from which the shots had come. Grasshoppers buzzed out of the weeds in fierce brown flurries, some of them lighting on our clothes. There was the sound of dry thunder down the valley. This barracks had a door—a wooden door on a rail, large enough to admit dozens of people at once. But it was closed, and there was a brass latch and a padlock on it.

So we had no real shelter—just some shade and a moment’s peace.

I used the time to put a fresh handkerchief on Percy’s wound and to bind it with a strip of cloth torn from my own shirt.

“Thank you,” Percy said breathlessly.

“Welcome. The problem now is how to get back to the carriage.” We had no weapons, and we could hardly withstand a siege, no matter where we hid. Our only hope was escape, and I could not see any likely way of achieving it.

Then the question became moot, for the man who had tried to kill us came around the corner of the barracks.

“Why do you want to make these pictures?” Elsie asked yet again, from a dim cavern at the back of my mind.

In an adjoining chamber of my skull a different voice reminded me that I wanted a drink, a strong one, immediately.

The ancient