"Nobody messes with California. We're strong enough so nobody dares," Beckie said, which was just what Justin was thinking. She went on, "When I came east, I never thought I'd get stuck in the middle of this dumb, pointless war." Justin coughed. Under her California tan, Beckie turned pink. "I didn't mean it like that," she told him.
"Well, I didn't think you did." He had to act like a Virginia patriot in spite of what he thought about racial politics here. He didn't like that—he despised it, in fact—but he didn't see what he could do about it. How many people like Senior Agent Jefferson and Agents Madison and Tyler did Virginia have? Lots of them.
"Can I say something and not have you get mad?" Beckie asked. "I mean, I know I'm a foreigner and everything. Will you remember?"
"I'll try." Justin thought he knew what she'd come out with. He waited to see if he was right.
She took a deep breath and brought it out with a rush: "If you treated your Negroes the same as you treat other people, then other states couldn't use them to give you trouble."
She was right. She couldn't have been righter, as far as Justin was concerned. He wanted to sink into the ground because he couldn't just come out and say so—it would have been too far out of character. He had to sound the way an ordinary Virginian from this alternate would, even if that meant sounding like a jerk.
"I don't know," he said. "How much have they done to show they deserve to be treated like anybody else?"
"How much of a chance have you given them?" Beckie returned.
"Well, if we did give them a chance like that and they didn't take it, we'd be even worse off," Justin said. "We can't ship them anywhere else, after all." The trouble was, every bit of that was true. Not all problems came with neat, tidy solutions all tied up with a pink ribbon and a perky bow. When two groups hated each other and were stuck on the same land ... In the home timeline, Palestine had been a disaster for a century and a half, and showed no signs of getting better.
"We don't have troubles like this in California," Beckie said.
"You don't have very many Negroes, either," Justin reminded her.
"No, but we have lots of people from the Mexican states," she said. "Some of them lived there all along. Others come over the border looking for work, because we pay better. We treat them like people. We aren't like Texas. Anybody who isn't white in Texas is down two goals with five minutes to play."
Somebody from the home timeline would probably have said, Anybody who isn't white in Texas has two strikes against him. Rounders here, which was close enough to baseball for government work, was most popular on the East Coast.
No matter how Beckie put it, she wasn't wrong. Whites did rule the roost in this Texas, which was bigger than the one in the home timeline. In state after state, people who were on top clung to power, and no bigger authority could make them change their ways. People in the home timeline grumbled about the things the U.S. government did, but North America without any kind of federal rule was no paradise, either.
Beckie probably would have agreed with Justin had he said that. After all, she was nostalgic for even the weak United States of the Articles of Confederation. But he changed the subject instead. He didn't want her to start wondering how he knew some of the things he was saying. What he did say was, "I hope Mrs. Snodgrass pulls through. She seems like good people."
"She can be snippy sometimes, but she's a lot nicer than Gran—that's for sure," Beckie said. "I wonder what her chances are."
"Don't know," Justin said. That sounded better than not very good. Mrs. Snodgrass wasn't young, and, if she had the military virus, it was specially designed to kill people. This alternate's bioengineering was thirty or forty years behind what they could do in the home timeline, but the viruses the home timeline was able to cook up thirty or forty years ago were plenty nasty. He went on, "I'm sure they're doing everything they can."
She could have taken that the wrong way—she might have thought he was sneering at this alternate's medicine. But she said, "Yeah, but how much do they know in Parkersburg? She might die there even if she'd get better in Los Angeles."
People from the home timeline often thought of each alternate as a unit. That was only natural. Compared to the people who'd lived in an alternate since birth, Crosstime Traffic workers couldn't help being superficial. But every alternate was as complicated as the home timeline. The locals understood that.
People like Justin had to pick it up as they went along. This California was richer than this Virginia, and likely ahead of it in a lot of ways.
Or is that so? Justin wondered. Beckie thought it was, but she came from California. She wasn't. . . what was the term? An objective witness, that was it. What would Ted Snodgrass say about the quality of medicine in Parkersburg? Would he know better than she did? He wasn't objective, either.
The more you looked at things, the more complicated they got. That was one of the first really adult thoughts Justin had ever had, but he didn't even know it.
He said, "They could probably do better in Charleston or Richmond than in Parkersburg, too." Chances were that was true. Charleston was a real city, and Richmond was the state capital. Anybody who was anybody went there.
"Sure." Beckie nodded quickly. "I didn't mean to say Virginia was backward or anything, Justin."
"Okay," he said. Chances were she'd meant exactly that. This Virginia was backward in some ways. Only somebody who lived here would say anything different. Since Justin was supposed to live here, he had to act as if he did. He felt like a hypocrite a lot of the time.
But Beckie worried about hurting his feelings. That was worth knowing.
"I hope we don't get it," she said.
"Yeah. Me, too," Justin said. "Every time I sneeze or I itch or I... do anything, I guess, I start to wonder—Is this it? Am I coming down with it?"
"Oh, good!" Beckie said.
"Good?"
"Good," she said firmly, and nodded again. "Because I feel the same way. It's ... a little scary." She paused, then added, "More than a little," and nodded one more time. That took nerve, admitting how scared you really were.
Justin gave her a hug. She hugged him back, but she still looked relieved when he didn't hold on real tight or get too grabby. "It'll be all right," he said as he let her go. Then, since she'd been honest, he felt he had to do the same: "I hope it'll be all right, anyway."
Every time Mr. Snodgrass' phone rang, Beckie jumped, afraid it would be the hospital in Parkersburg with bad news. Mr. Snodgrass flinched, afraid of the same thing. Gran didn't seem to act any different from the way she always had. Maybe that meant she was holding things inside. Maybe it meant she didn't feel anything much. Maybe it just meant she didn't hear the telephone ring. You never could tell with Gran.
So far, the hospital hadn't called with the worst news. Mrs. Snodgrass was still alive. But everybody in Elizabeth seemed to be calling to find out how she was. People from Palestine telephoned, too. Mr. Snodgrass seemed to think that was a wonder. "Most of the time, the folks down in Palestine don't care if we live or die, and we feel the same way about them," he said. "It's only a couple of miles, but it might as well be the other side of the moon."
Beckie thought that was strange. Back in Los Angeles, a lot of her friends lived farther from her than Palestine was from Elizabeth. Nobody there thought anything of it. The city stretched for kilometer after kilometer. Things were on a different scale here. Elizabeth and Palestine were rivals, each wanting to be the boss frog in a tiny pond. Elizabeth was the county seat, but Palestine had more shops.