The American Zone by L. Neil Smith
“This lack of sapience sure must have come as a surprise to Ooloorie Eckickeck P’wheet.” I chuckled. She was the porpoise who invented the probability broach that had brought me and thousands of others to the Confederacy.
Now that I’d noticed it, the itch was getting worse. Lucy began writing something in a notepad in her spidery, almost microscopic hand, Lan looking over her shoulder, offering comments. I knew it meant somebody was in for a heap of trouble.
I was surprised not to recognize the guy Rivers was interviewing. It wasn’t Buckley F. Williams, who usually did the talking for this bunch. Words scrolling across the screen bottom labled him Allard Wayne, junior associate director of the Franklinite Faction of the Gallatinist Party. The man was colorless and characterless, as if he’d been put through the washing machine too many times and dried at too high a temperature. If the expression, “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them—I’ll change them!” hadn’t already been tacked onto George Bush’s New England carpetbagger backside, it would have fit this guy perfectly.
Lucy looked up from her notepad. “I wonder where Buckley is about now, and what he’s thinkin’.”
“I usually disagree with him about nearly everything,” Lan said, “but this seems kind of over-the-top even for him. He strikes me as a basically decent guy.”
“Decent if a litle misguided,” I agreed. “He even invited me for a ride on his “yacht” once, a two hundred-foot dirigible where we could relax and smoke some Sonoran Sillyweed he was bragging about. I declined with regret.”
“And that’s why they call him ‘dope,’” said the Wizard. Meaning me, not Buckley. I meant to ask if he had a pickle fork or something that could get at the itch in my cast, but got distracted by the’Com.
Just now, Jerry was pretending to be “fair” in his own inimitable fashion: “Is it true, Mr. Wayne—may I call you Allard?—that some opponents of these reasonable, commonsense reforms you Franklinites advocate object; that they compare it to being ‘ear-tagged like cattle’? I’ve heard some call it ‘pre-incrimination’ and others point out that it would be unconstitutional even in most versions of the Old United States.”
That’s what they called the pre-Confederate nation that had merged with Mexico and Canada in 120 A.L. Sometimes the name was applied—by morons like Jerry Rivers, ignorant of history—to otherworld counterparts that hadn’t ever merged with their neighbors to the north and south.
“Well, Jerry,” the junior associate director responded to Rivers’s softball question, “the Confederacy’s Founding Fathers, however wise they happened to have been, couldn’t possibly have conceived of something like this overwhelming tidal wave of aliens under which our beloved traditional Confederate values are beginning to break down. If for no other reason than for the sake of our children, the naive eighteenth century notions of Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson and Albert Gallatin must be set aside—at least temporarily—in favor of peace, order, and security.”
The stained glass windows of the Hanging Judge rattled with a unanimous “Boooo!” erupting from its several dozen occupants. Lucy pounded on the table with her pistol butt, threatening to crack its image-generating surface. Always it’s the children who serve as a handy excuse for whatever atrocities those in power want to justify. These people had had a belly full of it already—that’s why they were here—and so had I.
“You know,” said Lucy as she began to calm down, “this character is relatively clever—”
“Or whoever wrote his script for him,” Lan observed.
“And coached him with the big words,” the Wizard added.
“Well he’s clever in at least one respect.” Lucy looked around, daring anyone else to interrupt. “In only two sentences, he’s blamed both of these catastrophes on you immigrants. He’s branded you as Martians or Venusians or something. He’s established the Founding Fathers as a bunch of hopeless nut cases. And he’s asserted that the Franklinite Faction knows better than anybody else what’s good for everybody concerned!”
I, too, looked around, and saw a bunch of grim faces. “All these people,” I told Lucy, “these immigrants to the Confederacy, are all too well accustomed to dog-and-pony shows like this one. Most of them, given the chance, leaped through the probability broach to escape exactly this kind of insanity.”
Lan nodded. “And the ever-increasing restrictions on their lives that result from the fact that established authority never seems quite competent to ferret out the guilty and so instead, invariably punishes the much handier innocent.”
“That seems to me,” Lucy suggested, “like a good reason not to establish any authority at all!”
The Wizard slapped a broad palm down on the tabletop. “I just realized how clever these Franklinites really are. Lan’s right. Native Confederates—with the exception of those like you, Lucy—might not appreciate what they have. They might even be willing to give it up, perhaps a little bit at a time, just to stop all of this carnage and destruction.”
“And?” I asked, just to be helpful. Maybe a teriyaki stick …
“And Wayne and his buddies,” the Wizard replied, “have now singled out the one and only group likeliest to oppose what amounts to their overnight takeover of theConfederacy—recent immigrants fleeing the kind of tyranny they want to impose—and made them the likeliest suspects for a pair of manmade disasters that renders such a takeover ‘necessary.’”
“Shit,” I said, and meant it.
“Shit, indeed. Everybody in this room knows exactly what comes next. Having broken the ice with this ID card scheme of theirs, next they’ll demand that Congress be reconvened ‘for the duration of the emergency.’”
“Meanin’’til the sun burns out!” Lucy offered. She’d finished her own food and was helping the Wizard finish his.
“Until the sun burns out. Before we know it,” the Wizard went on, ignoring the plundering of his plate, “for the first time in over two centuries, careful talk of taxes ‘for increased security’ will begin to be taken seriously by Rivers and his odiferous ilk, along with ‘reasonable, commonsense’ restrictions on immigration, and maybe even on the personal weapons you Confederates carry every waking minute of your lives—”
“Which happens to make the Confederacy the most crime-free society in this or any other world,” I said.
The Wizard answered, “Right you are, Win. But when did a perfectly solved problem ever help a politician? I tell you, if we don’t do something, the Confederacy could easily end up just like the places we all escaped from!”
“Sssssh!” There was a whole chorus of hissing shushes as the interview went on.
“On the other hand, Allard,” Rivers was saying, “there are those who say the reforms you call for don’t go nearly far enough—among them the political advocates Jerse Fahel and Howard Slaughterbush.”
“Those gabbling too-farists?” Wayne pretended to be amused. “Well, Jerry, that just goes to show why the people of the North American Confederacy desperately need the Franklinite Faction to balance things out. Unlike Fahel and Slaughterbush, we’re a part of the nation’s history, a part of the Gallatinist Party. We’re in favor of as much freedom as is possible and practicable. The purely temporary measures we recommend are minimal, but they’re necessary if we wish to keep any freedom at all.”
I’d only vaguely heard of Slaughterbush before now—some kind of political kook, exactly like Wayne and his masters—but for the first time since I’d gotten here, I began to have that old, helpless, hopeless feeling one experiences standing in the path of an oncoming legislative steamroller. I’d had that feeling all my life as an American. It was a feeling I’d almost forgotten here. I remembered it now. I hated it. But for me, it was time to go to work. I’d suddenly remembered where I’d seen that big tie-dyed guy—or a reference to him, anyway. He was on the list that I’d compiled earlier in the car. Now, telling my friends good-bye for the third or fourth time, my hat, coat, broken arm, and I followed him out the
“Hey, Papa!” I hollered after him, remembering that someone had called him that back in the bar. On my list, he had another name altogether. “You got a minute?”
A little old lady—and in this culture that meant really old—heavyset and stooped, approached me. She had a big hat with an almost opaque veil, and a small basket full of smaller change. “Contribute to the Spaceman’s Fund?” she asked in a cracked and ancient-sounding voice. I looked down: she’d tugged at my serape. There’s no government welfare of any kind in the Confederacy, which is why I try, ordinarily, to be as generous as I can. But I was in a big hurry at the moment. “Not now,” I told her, “maybe later,” and rushed past her.
I yelled again, “Hey, Papa!”
The guy slowed and turned. He wore what we once called “granny glasses” and carried a big leather purse on a wide strap over one shoulder. There was a bulge under his shirt over his right hip. He looked at my left arm. “You’re injured. How may I help?”
I grinned at him—an armed hippie. “I’m okay. You can tell me who played Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind.”
Nine out of ten people would have been annoyed or perplexed. Papa simply said, “Now let me guess—the cinema? I’m afraid I’ve never heard of a Rhett Butler, or Gone with the Wind. Is it something I should look for on the’Com?”
I introduced myself and explained a bit of what I was up to. We’d reached my car, the little Neova shining candy-apple red in what was rapidly becoming the broiling afternoon sun. There were some places in the Confederacy where local merchants had thrown in together and air-conditioned the whole damned city. I wished Greater LaPorte were one of them. “Let me guess,” I told the guy. “You come from a world where the United States never fought a civil war.”
“As I understand it, the proper term is ‘War Between the States.’” He grinned. “But I come from a world in which there never was a United States.” He extended a big hand and a kindly smile. “Karl LeMat at your service, late, but not lamentably, of the Dominion of British North America.”
“That’s where I saw you!” I snapped my fingers … er, with him, not at him. This had nothing to do with my list. “You’re the guy that story on the’Com was about.”
The big man sighed. “It’s true enough. I suppose the notoriety has been good for business, though.”
It was all coming back to me now. “Papa” Karl LeMat, age sixty-six, was a gentle, grandfatherly grassroots philosopher of great charisma and somewhat variable philosophical rigor. He was one of those types you like from the moment you see them, and was on my list because he had a small business importing some of the most remarkable coins and currency in the known universe.
“The Dominion of British North America was never witness to any revolution against the Crown, nor to a civil war, nor a war between the states.” Papa told me, once we’d adjourned to my “office,” parked at the curb down the street from the Hanging Judge. Even with two big men, it wasn’t too cramped inside, and the air-conditioning was beginning to feel good.
It turned out that he’d come in for breakfast but never ordered any, so disgusted had he been with what he’d seen happening on the’Com. I offered him coffee and had the Neova make it while we waited, nice and strong with that big dollop of chocolate Confederates are so fond of, and a pinch of cinnamon. Before we knew it, the air inside the car smelled wonderful.
He accepted a steaming cup. “I’ve read your history—at least one very close to it. I suspect that in my world the Crown found some way to bribe your Mr. Washington, as he became Sir George, and later Lord Washington, Governor General of as much of the North American continent as was under British authority at the time.”
We both lit cigars, automatically kicking the car’s ventilators up to Warp 10. I’d been putting it off, but finally I asked the inevitable American Zone question. “So how’d you wind up in the Confederacy?”
He took a long drag on his cigar, exhaled, then took a big drink of his coffee. “I’m afraid we British North Americans were never as sanguine about Manifest Destiny as you independents apparently were. Your America was carved out by ordinary individuals attempting to make something better of themselves. Mine was mostly settled by aristocratic second sons attempting to escape the beastly English climate. It is fair to say, though, that it’s the American dominion that wags the British dog, these days. Even King Stephen spends more time at his residence in Boca Raton than he does in London.”
King Stephen. No abdication in the 1930s, I’d be willing to bet, so this would probably be some royal clown I’d never seen or heard of—maybe even the kid that Wally Simpson was paid never to have. Suited me. “And?”
“And as a result of this history, I suppose, I found myself, somewhat late in life, a resident of the city of Trinidad in what you’d call southern Colorado, just this side of the Franco-Mexican border, and one of the leaders of a national movement to establish free trade with Russian California.” “I see.” If you lived in the Confederacy, especially among its immigrants long enough, matters of geography—or rather of national borders—rapidly began to assume the solidity and importance of warm Jell-O. I’d met a guy once who claimed he was from a place where the United World capital was St. John’s, Newfoundland.
He eyed me. “Perhaps you do, after all. We were beginning to enjoy some success politically. Rather too much, I suspect, as I was forced to escape—that is, to accept the refuge that was so kindly offered me by your Gallatinite Rescue Society—when I was suddenly accused of criminal sexual harrassment, for having winked at a female postal employee over the visiphone.”
The GRS was only one of many groups here in LaPorte and elsewhere throughout the Confederacy that made a practice of snatching freedom-loving people from unfree worlds. I’d worked for some of them, myself, including a really good one that made a happy specialty of exposing the nasty private habits of uptight public do-gooders. I still remember a certain Denver district attorney and his hidden walk-in closet full of rubber suits and whips and chains.
“For my own part, I wasn’t certain what astonished me more,” Papa went on, “that I was being watched by my own government—well, His Majesty’s government, anyway—or by people from an alternate world I never suspected exists.”
“Vast intellects, cool and dispassionate, or whatever it was H. G. Wells said. And now I understand you do a little rescuing yourself, a ha’penny here and a guinea there—”
“Dollars and centavos, actually, and only from government coffers, using a dirigible minibroach. Also, the occasional Mexican franc and Russian nickie. They’re all reasonably popular among your Confederate numismatists—though not much of anyone else, since they’re struck from base metals or aluminum.” He pronounced it, “al-you-MIN-i-um,” with the gratuitous British syllable. The guy looked so much like the late Jerry Garcia it was creepy to begin with, and it was even weirder hearing that plummy accent coming out of his mouth. I knew Trinidad pretty well, my mom had been born there. It was a sleepy little town, about half redbrick, three quarters Hispanic, and seven-eighths on welfare, built on steep hillsides and over coal mines. Windy as hell, too. I wondered what it would be like under British rule. Probably windier, with all those extra syllables.
“Not my numismatists, Papa. I’m just as much of a blueback here as you are, although I was the very first, back in 1987, reeled in by P’wheet and Thorens themselves.”
His brow wrinkled. “‘Blueback’? I don’t believe I’ve ever heard that expression before.”
“You will,” I grinned. “It’s for ‘the searing azure color of the broach-margin.’”
“‘Searing azure … I see—or rather, I didn’t see. I was taken away in a passenger car with its windows painted black—I still don’t know how, as private motor vehicles are forbidden in my native land—and brought over blindfold to preserve the otherside secrets of my rescuers.” He blinked. “You’re rather poetic for a det
“Actually,” I grinned, “it was my lovely and talented mate who first described the broach that way. Go down to the Interworld Terminal sometime and have a look. It’s really spectacular. But you wouldn’t know who’s importing Stateside movies?”
He shook his head regretfully. “Not my bailiwick, I’m sorry to say. Thanks ever so much for the coffee, Win, and good to meet you. I believe I’ll go back in now and have that breakfast of which I deprived myself.”
“Thanks, Papa, have some for me.” We shook hands. He lifted the door and climbed out of the car, thoughtfully taking his empty cup with him. I caught myself thinking that if I’d had a microwave, we could have had hot doughnuts with our coffee. But there I was again, concentrating on my stomach, and zero for zero, informationwise. Oh well, I told myself, that’s how they all start.
I consigned my empty cup to the Neova’s trash disintegrator and leaned down to start the engine, when I heard a rapping coming from outside the big curved window at my left. I looked up to see Lucy demanding my attention. I signaled for her to step out of the way and swung the door up.
“You don’t happen to have a knitting needle inside that steamer trunk you’re carrying?” The hotter it got the worse the itch.
“‘Fraid not, Winnie. I haven’t knitted since the Kaiser War.”
“Then what can I do for you this fine, sunny summer day, my dear Miz Kropotkin?” I was happy to see her again. She’d lost the apron, gained a huge leather purse, put her hair up in a bun—it made her look like Tweety Bird’s granny—and wore her giant Gabbett-Fairfax belted around a jersey dress of green and yellow paisley.
“You can let me hire you, Winnie! If we don’t get to the bottom of these disasters—an’ find out who’s behind’em—we’re gonna lose the Covenant!”
By which she meant the Covenant of Unanimous Consent, the document Gallatin had insisted upon once Washington—general and president, not sir and lord—had been duly ventilated. To Lucy, the Covenant was as sacred and worthy of defense as the American Bill of Rights.