"Gardner Dozois - Counterfactual" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

in the darkness, as if they depended on him for light and warmth as much as or more than the
low-burning bivouac fire: ragged, worn-out men in tattered uniforms, sprawled on blankets spread on the
grass or sitting on saddles thrown over tree-stumps, without even chairs or camp-stools anymore. Lee
could see their eyes, gleaming wetly in the firelight, as well as feel them. Every eye was on him still.

The barking of rifles had started up again from General Gordon's rear-guard on the road behind them
when the courier arrived. He was thin as a skeleton, like Death himself come to call. He saluted and
handed Lee a sealed communiqu. "Sir, from General Grant."

Lee held the note warily, as if it was a snake. He knew what it was: another message from General
Grant, politely suggesting that he surrender his army.

The question was, what was he going to say in return?
****
The car jolted, shuddered, and jerked again while momentum equalized itself along the length of the train,
and Cliff lifted his pen from the paper, waiting for the ride to steady again. What was he going to say in
return? That was the problem.

He had an arresting central image, one that had come to him whole: Robert E. Lee surrendering the Army
of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant, the soldiers lined up somberly along a country road,
heads down, some of the Confederates openly in tears, Lee handing his sword to Grant while a light rain
fell, both men looking solemn and grim.... How to justify it, though? Counterfactuals had become
increasingly popular in recent years--perhaps because the public had been denied the opportunity to play
soldier during the Great War--until they were now almost respectable as pulp stories went, and you
could make decent money selling them. But in writing Counterfactuals, you had to provide some kind of
tipping-point, some event that would have changed everything that came after--and it had to be at least
superficially plausible, or the fans, armchair historians all, would tear you to pieces. Having the
Confederates win the War was a common enough trope in the genre, and a number of stories had been
written about how Lee had won at Gettysburg or had pushed on out of Virginia to attack and burn
Washington when he had the chance, forcing capitulation on a terrified Union, but Cliff was after
something more subtle--a tale in which the Confederates still lost the War, but lost it in a different way,
with different consequences as a result. It was hard to see what would have motivated Lee to surrender,
though. True, he was nearly at the end of his rope, his men exhausted and starving, being closely harried
by Union forces--but in the real world, none of that had brought him to the point of seriously
contemplating surrender. In fact, it was at that very point when he'd said that he was determined "to fight
to the last," and told his officers and men that "We must all determine to die at our posts." Didn't sound
much like somebody who was ready to throw in the towel.

Then, just when things looked blackest, he had narrowly avoided a closing Union trap by breaking past
Phil Sheridan at Appomattox Court House, and kept on going until he reached the Blue Ridge
Mountains, there to break his army up into smaller units that melted into the wilderness, setting the stage
for decades of bitterly fought guerilla war, a war of terror and ambush that was still smoldering to this
day. It was hard to see what would have made Lee surrender, when he didn't contemplate it even in the
hour of his most extreme need. Especially as he knew that he could expect few compromises in the
matter of surrender and little or no mercy from the implacable President Johnson....

He was spinning his wheels. Time for a drink.

Outside, the sun had finally disappeared below the horizon, leaving behind only a spreading red bruise.
The darkening sky was slate-gray now, and hard little flakes of snow were squeezing themselves out of it,