He'd always cooperated with U.S. authorities before. He was hopping mad now. "You mean we have to put up with it if a, uh, colored fellow"-he'd learned it wasn't a good idea to say nigger around Morrell-"makes advances to a white woman?"

"As long as he's peaceable about it, yes," Morrell asked. "Do you mean to tell me white men never make advances to colored women?"

Butler turned red. "That's different."

"How?"

"It just is."

Morrell shook his head. "Sorry, no. I'm not going to budge on this one. Maybe it was different before the war, or you thought it was because you were on top and the Negroes were on the bottom. Things aren't like that any more."

Butler scratched the edge of his thin mustache. "Some of the states in the USA have miscegenation laws. Why are you tougher on us than you would be on them?"

"Because you abused things worse," Morrell answered bluntly. "And I don't think they'll keep those laws much longer. You gave them such a horrible example, they'll be too embarrassed to leave 'em on the books."

"You're going to cause a lot of trouble," Butler predicted in doleful tones.

"I'll take the chance." Morrell, by contrast, sounded cheerful. "If people here start trouble, I promise we'll finish it."

"It's not fair," Butler said. "We're only doing what we always did."

"Yes, and look where that got you," Morrell retorted. "Let's take you in particular, for instance. I know you didn't have anything to do with shipping Negroes to camps-we've checked. You wouldn't be sitting there if you did. You'd be in jail with the old mayor. But you knew they were disappearing, didn't you?"

"Well…" Butler looked as if he wished he could disappear. "Yes."

"Good! Well done!" Morrell made clapping motions that were only slightly sardonic. "See? You can own up to things if you try. I would've thrown you out of my office if you said anything different."

"But treating…colored folks like white people? Equality?" The city commissioner pronounced the name of the pamphlet with great distaste. "People-white people-won't like that, not even a little bit."

"Frankly, Butler, I don't give a damn." Morrell was getting sick of the whole sorry business. "Those are the rules you've got now. You're going to play by them, and that's flat. If you try to make some poor Negro sorry, we will make you sorrier. If you don't think we can do it-or if you don't think we will do it-go ahead and find out. You won't like what happens next. I promise you that. Wake the town and tell the people. We mean it."

"Colored folks in the same church? Colored kids in the same school?" Plainly, Butler was picking the most hideous examples he could think of.

And Morrell nodded as if his head were on springs. "That's right. Negroes working the same jobs as white people, too, and getting the same pay. Oh, I don't expect colored lawyers right away-you didn't let them get the education for that. But they'll get it from here on out."

"I don't reckon we'll put up with it," Butler said. "I truly don't. Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever!"

"Are you saying that in your official capacity, Mr. Butler?" Morrell asked. "If you are, you just resigned."

Clark Butler reconsidered. He had a well-paying, responsible job at a time and in a place where jobs of any kind were hard to come by. "Well, no. I wasn't speaking officially," he said after a brief pause. "I was just expressing the feelings of a lot of people in this part of the continent-and you know that's so, General."

Morrell knew, all right, much too well. After a pause of his own, he replied, "I don't care what people feel. I can't do anything about that. But I damn well can do something about how people behave. If you want to hate Negroes in your heart, go ahead. While you're hating them, though, I will make you sorry if you treat them any different from whites. Have you got that?"

"Equality enforced at the point of a bayonet?" Butler jeered.

"Sounds pretty silly, doesn't it?" Morrell said with a smile. The city commissioner nodded. But Morrell wasn't finished: "Still, when you get right down to it, it beats the hell out of camps and ovens and mass graves."

"I wasn't involved with that," Butler said quickly.

"You wouldn't be talking with me now if you were," Morrell replied. "But you think you're serious about what you're going to do? So are we. You can find out the easy way or the hard way. Up to you."

Butler left in a hurry after that. Morrell wasn't sorry to see him go, and resolved to keep a closer watch on him from here on out. He wondered whether the United States could enforce anything like equality on the old CSA. He still wasn't sure-but he aimed to try.

T he only way Clarence Potter could have avoided seeing the pamphlet called Equality was to stay in his apartment and never come out. The Yankees plastered the damn thing all over Richmond. During the war, that common a propaganda leaflet would have meant the Quartermaster Corps didn't need to issue toilet paper for a while.

When he first read the pamphlet, he thought it was an A-number-one asswipe, nothing else but. After he looked at it again, he still thought it was an asswipe. But it was a clever asswipe, and a determined one. The damnyankees weren't out to change hearts or minds in the dead CSA. They were out to change behavior. If they rammed different behavior down people's throats from Richmond to Guaymas, they figured hearts and minds would eventually follow.

What worried Potter most was, they had a fighting chance of being right.

He'd watched the same thing happen when the Freedom Party took over the CSA. Even people who didn't like Jake Featherston and the Party started greeting one another with "Freedom!" It was safer. You couldn't get into trouble if you did it. And, after a while, you didn't even feel self-conscious about it. You took it for granted. Pretty soon, you took the truth of everything the Party said for granted. And you, and the Confederate States of America with you, followed Jake Featherston into the abyss.

Now the Yankees wanted to push what was left of the Confederacy into…Equality. They didn't ask whites to love Negroes. They just said, Treat them the way you'd treat yourselves, or we'll make you regret it.

Was there ever a more perverted application of the Golden Rule?

Potter was sure lots of people hated the idea of Negro equality even more than he did. He'd spent sixty-odd years in the CSA; he knew what was what here. But he also knew he was being watched. The damnyankees didn't waste subtlety showing him that-which didn't mean there weren't also subtle spies, ones he didn't notice right away. He assumed his telephone was tapped and his mail read.

And so he sat tight and worked on his memoirs. A generation earlier, he'd done what he could to free the CSA from the onerous terms of the armistice after the Great War. But the Confederacy wasn't crushed then. It wasn't occupied, either. The USA had learned a bar fighter's lesson since: once you knocked a guy down, you needed to kick him in the head so he couldn't jump up and come after you with a broken bottle.

One day in early March, when spring was just starting to be in the air, he went over to Capitol Square to look around. Woodrow Wilson had declared war on the USA there in 1914. Potter himself and Nathan Bedford Forrest III had halfheartedly plotted against Jake Featherston there, too.

Forrest was dead now, because you needed to be a better plotter than he ever was to go up against the wily President of the CSA. Featherston never found out Potter was involved in that scheme. If he had, Potter knew he would have died himself.

Capitol Square had been battered when the two generals sat on a park bench and talked about where the Confederacy was going. Down the drain, though neither of them knew it at the time.