The Probability Broach by L. Neil Smith
In 1794, a Pennsylvania gentleman stepped into the fray. A former Swiss financier, Albert Gallatin disapproved of the way Alexander Hamilton handled the nation’s checkbook. He organized and led the farmers and began convincing federal soldiers they were fighting on the wrong side—a tactic that created important precedents in Confederate warfare. Eventually he even persuaded General Lee, who was tired of having to find new horses, and the punitive expedition disintegrated.
Thus “fortified,” the 80-proof revolution marched on Philadelphia. Washington went to the wall, Hamilton fled to Prussia and was killed in a duel in 1804. Gallatin was proclaimed president. The Federalists evaporated, substantial numbers of them winding up neighbors of the Tories they’d driven into Canada. The Constitution was declared null and void, and with it the tax on whiskey.
Gallatin’s wizardry saved the tiny nation from becoming the world’s first banana republic. Economic problems that had precipitated the Constitution Conspiracy were solved with a new currency, backed by untold acres of land in the undeveloped Northwest Territories. The Articles of Confederation were duly revised, with stringent limits on the powers, not only of the central government but of the states. They could have nothing to do with trade—such interference, in Gallatin’s view, had caused all the problems in the first place. Only private individuals could “create” money, backed by any valuable commodity, to be accepted or rejected by the marketplace on its own merit. Gold and silver were soon in competition with wheat, corn, iron, and—yes—even whiskey-based currency.
Gallatin’s land certificates were redeemed, the last money ever issued by a United States government. He served five four-year terms in all, and lived long enough to see his own peculiar brand of anarchism begin spreading throughout the world.
I HADN’T FORGOTTEN my conversation (only last week?) with Jon Carpenter and the Propertarians. In my own world, Gallatin had calmed the Whiskey Rebellion down, not stirred it to victory. What had made him change his mind here? Is history simply absurd? Did Gallatin revolt because he had a headache that day or hadn’t been invited to one of Martha Washington’s cocktail parties?
A policeman’s view of life, his relationship with other human beings, is from a pretty seamy perspective. One of the things that keeps me hanging in there, if only by my figurative fingernails sometimes, is a vague sort of confidence in the ultimate rationality of it all: the universe is lawful, and, like a Saint Christopher’s medal, works even if you don’t believe in it. So if history proved a meaningless jumble of fever dreams and belly rumbles, I might just contemplate resigning. Human will and reason have to count for something.
Confederate history after the Rebellion was a mishmash of the familiar and the fantastic. Gallatin adopted a new calendar and a system of weights and measures, both devised by Thomas Jefferson. A metric ounce, I discovered, is the weight of a cubic inch of water—a metric inch, that is.
Jefferson enjoyed an even more illustrious career than back at home. Fourth president, after Edmond Genet, he’d almost single-handedly lectured, argued, and shamed the country into giving up slavery, freeing his own slaves in 31 A.L. On the lecture circuits, four years later, an irate reactionary put a nine-inch dagger into his leg, leaving Jefferson with a limp and a cane he carried the rest of his life. They hauled the assassin out with a faceful of pistol lead, as the inventive future president had mounted the rostrum bearing a repeating sidearm of his own design. He finished the speech before he’d see a doctor. Slavery was abolished in 44 A.L., the year Jefferson ascended to the presidency. He never really descended, but died in office during a second term, on July 2, 1826—30 A.L.
History goes crazy after that. Inventions come sooner and faster. There seems no mention of Indian trouble—a Cherokee is elected president in 1840, that same Sequoya, I think, who taught his people to read and write. The N.A.C. fights a Mexican War, but only for a few days. Mexico and Canada enthusiastically join in the “Union” half a century later. With no slavery and no tariff, there’s no Civil War.
History must have some weird elastic logic, though. Hamilton got eighty-sixed, but his malady lingered on, becoming vogue with dispossessed European nobility. Splinter groups continued to clash for years, often violently, over who was really his “legitimate” intellectual heir. Amusing, when you consider their idol’s bastard origin. In 1865, while Lysander Spooner presided over a rapidly shrinking national government, a politically shady actor, John Wilkes Booth, plodded through a backwoods tour with an English play, Our North American Cousin, when out of the audience an obscure Hamiltonian lawyer stood and shot the thespian through the head. Confederate history writes it off as a conflict between rival Federalist factions, but I wonder …
The list of Confederate presidents is short, many serving five or six terms without upsetting anybody. Year after year, their steadily diminishing power was less an object of envy or violent ambition. Nearly everybody got a chance to play King Log: there was another Indian president, Osceola; Harriet Beecher was her own First Lady; in 1880, a French-Canadian of Chinese extraction was elected—so much for the Yellow Peril, mes enfants!
Here and there odd familiarities pop up: the Chicago fire and San Francisco earthquake; Jeff Davis and James Monroe; the Nicaragua canal; the first atomic reactor in Chicago, but in 1922! Color TV appeared in 1947, and dirigibles remained important. There’s something resembling World War I, but no trace of the Spanish-American War, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, or New Guinea. And nothing about Karl Marx, Socialism, or Communism; European revolts in the 1840s are called “Gallatinite.” Men first walked on the Moon—with women right beside them—in 173 A.L.—1949! And North America fought a bitter war with Russia in 1957. The Czar was finally overthrown.
The Czar?
TUESDAY, JULY 14, 1987
“Well,” I said, over my CALIFORNIA TEN-HIGH—100 PROOF, “that’s certainly not the way I heard it in school!” We were sitting on the side terrace, my first excursion outdoors. The afternoon sun was beaming cheerfully, and I’d just had my first gawk at an airship, a mile-long apparition of titanium and ectoplasmic Mylar, on her way over the Rockies at three hundred miles an hour. Life seemed pretty good, and so did the company. The Telecom was filling Ed’s garden with beautiful music.
Captain Forsyth, head of the security contingent, was an old friend of Ed’s, a grizzled, wiry customer in a gray herringbone lava-lava and long black cutaway coat—right in style for Confederate rent-a-cops, and not the least bit funny once you took in the wide leather gunbelt and heavy automatic strapped around his waist.
Not that he was without his little peculiarities. He’s a nineteen-year veteran of Professional Protectives’ on-the-spot guard service, combat pistol champion of Greater Laporte, and “saw the elephant” during the Antarctican War. A pair of warm and twinkling brown eyes made up for the angry scar running along his left cheek. He plays gin for blood, but only off duty.
Oh yes. He’s also a chimpanzee.
My first day here, I’d noticed what I took fuzzily for an unusual number of dwarfs—mutants. Now I knew better. Half of Forsyth’s squad were chimps (and don’t say “monkeys,” for the same reason you don’t say “spics” or “slopes”), complete with guns, nightsticks, and corn pads.
I remembered the discovery in my own world that simians can’t talk only because their vocal apparatus isn’t up to it. We’d only just begun teaching them sign language. It had started here a hundred years earlier, maybe because Darwin’s opinions were more graciously received, or maybe because Confederates view innovation as a blessing instead of a threat. Or maybe because they haven’t wasted so much time and effort, so many useful lives, on war and economic disaster. Anyway, science and philosophy have never been separate departments here. Any critter who can handle more than a few hundred words is human. Killing it becomes murder.
As soon as they understood the setup, chimps, gorillas, a couple of other species waded right in and began exercising their rights. That didn’t arouse hostility t
Lacking vocal speech, simians wear a device which translates tiny muscular movements—subliminal sign-talk—into sound. As with individual handwriting and telegraphy, each “voice” has its own personality: natural variations in bone-structure, muscular development, perhaps even character. Really accomplished Telecom entertainers employ a speech device on each wrist—a whole new wrinkle in ventriloquism.
Gallatin and Spooner believed it: any creature who can think is, Q.E.D., “people.” It’s calmly anticipated here that someday there’ll be computers with rights—and they’ll be welcome too.
“Then how did it go in your world, Win?” Clarissa asked, “I’ve heard bits and pieces, but Captain Forsyth hasn’t heard any of it yet.” She wore a long, simple, celery-colored empire gown she thought of as casual, with a white cross in a circle on her left shoulder, the symbol of her profession.
I shrugged. “I can’t say exactly. Everything seems more or less normal, right up through the Whiskey Rebellion. But in my history, George Washington went right on drawing expenses.”
“So what happened to old Albert?” Lucy had a tumbler in her hand twice the size of mine, but wasn’t showing a sign of it. Her monster Gabbet Fairfax hung from an ornate shoulder strap like a bandito’s cartridge belt. “How come he chickened out?”
“I wish I knew. Gallatin’s hardly remembered at all in my world. Only reason I ever heard of him was …” I showed them the coin I’d taken off Meiss.
Forsyth put down my forty-one—he was fascinated—revolvers had gone out here ninety years ago—and examined the golden disk. “Nothing but an ordinary gold ounce. What’s so unusual—besides the fact I never see enough of them?” He scratched idly and reached for the salted nuts.
Ed smiled wryly. “It showed up on the other side. Win’s world. People there aren’t allowed to own gold. They use paper for money!”
I grimaced. “I still don’t understand you people. You’re all a bunch of crackpots—like the Propertarians. Only in this society, it’s the anarchocapitalists who run things!”
“‘Don’t understand’ is an understatement, Winnie my boy,” Lucy said. “Nobody ‘runs things’ here—’cept their own business! And folks with other cravings …” She patted the holster on her hip.
Forsyth wrinkled his upper lip and screeched with laughter. Ed grinned ruefully. “Lucy’s the last of the vanishing breed—a revolutionary with nothing left to revolt against. Blew up half the Winter Palace getting at the Czar, to hear her tell it—but tends to embroider her adventures a little, as you’ve probably—”
“Embroider?” Lucy lowered her eyebrows and hunched forward. “Eddypoo, you’ll be hearing from my seconds. And speaking of seconds, my glass is empty!”
X: Shots in the Dark
North Americans adore any contraption that moves under its own impetus; they’ve harnessed every conceivable form of energy (and not a few inconceivable ones) to propel that most fantastic of their inventions, the private ground-effect machine. Steam and internal combustion compete with electricity and flywheels; there are fables of “hoverbuggies” run by enormous rubber bands, caged animals, charges of dynamite; and now, nuclear fusion. Secretly playing Prussian Ace in a cloud of turbodust or reading quietly while computers guide them along the Greenway at 300 miles per hour, they don’t care much about the power source. Within the portable privacy of their road machines, they have tapped a greater source of energy, the inner contemplation of a powerfully creative people, which is the source of all their lesser miracles.
—Alistair Brooke
Telly from America
When I was a little kid, I could never get to sleep the night before Christmas. With Dad gone, Mom tried hard to make that day special for me, but she left me with a curse: I’ve never faced a crucial day in my life with a full night’s sleep.
Tonight was going to be like that. Our cocktail party had turned into dinner, then into a few more drinks. Eventually the ladies had gone home, Captain Forsyth, outside to supervise the evening shift. Before taking off, Clarissa had given me the happy news: the cast was coming off tomorrow, and I’d get my first excursion around the city of Laporte.
To me that sounded like a visit from Saint Nick—and I was back in the detective business: Ed came in just as I was getting ready for bed, sorting my pocket contents on the dresser top. Even wearing a bathrobe, I’m a traveling junk collection.
“You’re on your own tonight. I have to go check security for a client.” He watched me disgorge my pockets with the fascination of a small boy watching seventy-three clowns get out of a Volkswagen.
“I guess I can take care of myself—with the help of Forsyth’s finest occupying every foot of the property line.” I pulled out Toward a New Liberty, dog-eared half a dozen places where I’d given up in disbelief, and tossed it on the bed. At least Mary Ross-Byrd was easier to understand than three-quarters of what was on the Telecom, and she never failed to put me to sleep.
Ed shook his head. “Don’t let your guard down. They’re good men, but load that blunderbuss of yours anyway, and tuck it under your pillow—or would you prefer a real gun?” He indicated his autopistol.
I reached for the Smith & Wesson lying amid the ruins of my once functional shoulder holster. “This’ll do fine—it and its little brother. Wish I had some ammunition for the Browning, too.”
“What for?” he asked with a fairly straight face, “—shooting mice?”
“Meiss was shot with a .380, wise guy, I was thinking more of cockroaches, the two-legged kind, and I’ll have you know this fine specimen of Belgian gunsmithing develops over three hundred foot-pounds of—”
“And this”—Ed swept back his cape to uncover the .375—“develops nearly four thousand! Look, Win, we can find somebody to make you ammunition for these toys, but you owe it to yourself—”
“Hell—with any luck, I won’t be needing more ammunition, anyway.”
“We could use some luck like that.” He stood, idly poking through my personal debris: badge carrier, pocket change, empty cartridge cases. I might have objected, but these artifacts must have been as curious to him as the Gallatin coin had been to me. He straightened, took a deep breath. “Well, can’t stand here all night.” He glanced at the bureau again and felt around in his tunic. “So that’s where it got to! Mind if I confiscate my pen?” He held out the one I’d found in Meiss’s desk drawer.
“Welcome to it, brother, but that one I brought with me from the other side. It belonged to my defunct physicist.”
“What? Impossible! I—wait a second.” He slammed out of the room, was gone a few minutes, came back holding his hands like a freshly scrubbed surgeon, in each fist a felt-tip pen. “Found it. Look at this!” They were cheap advertising giveaways, identical right down to the commercial inscription: PARATRONICS, LTD., LAPORTE, N.A.C., TELECOM GRAY 4-3122.
Here, obviously, was a clew (as they spell it here) I shouldn’t have overlooked. I’d carried this damned pen every day without so much as twitching a gray cell. Clarissa could take the cast off my arm and reapply it to my head.
But the upshot was that I’d be employing my newfound mobility tomorrow following a sure-enough lead—asking the Paratronics folks how come their property was winding up in the Twilight Zone. It was more important than it might seem: it was Paratronics, Ltd. that Ed was working for that night, investigating losses somewhat more significant than felt-tip advertising pens. The coincidence bore examination.
I had a big day ahead of me—which, of course, was the problem. I squirmed restlessly under the blankets, resigned to being something of a zombie the next day, finally drifting into that miserable state where you can’t quite tell if you’re asleep, staying there about a ce
“YAWWP!” went the Telecom. I jerked awake—both feet on the floor, gun in hand—stuck a speed-loader between my teeth, wishing for my other arm, and dashed into the hall. “INTRUDER AT FRONT GATE! INTRUDER AT FRONT GATE!” I fumbled with the door, found myself on the sidewalk, then the driveway. At the gate a cluster of forms wrestled just inside the entrance. Forsyth’s men, human and otherwise, were rushing in from other posts. I hoped this wasn’t a feint.
One guard lay on the ground, blood seeping ugly black onto the driveway, someone in charcoal-colored coveralls standing over him. Ed was on his back, arms outstretched and empty. A huge figure, also in gray, was pointing a weapon at his face. I lined up on the stranger’s chest and pulled the trigger, launching a blinding fireball in the semidarkness. The figure leaped and crumpled. The first gray-clad tough lifted a gun toward me, did a double take, and lowered his hands for a moment. It cost him his life. I put two ragged holes through him; he was dead before he hit the ground.
The intruders started to scatter. I snapped a shot at one, but misjudged the distance. He stumbled but kept on, hopping on one leg, until the guards piled on top of him. The rest of the bad guys, four, maybe five, were gone.
Ed sat up on the dewy rubber paving, dabbing one side of his face with the hem of his cloak. He winced a little. “Win. How nice to see you—or anything at all, for that matter. Is that a Denver police uniform you’re wearing?”
I looked down and was suddenly chilly, attired in the gun in my hand and the cast on my arm. I took the speed-loader from between my teeth. “Didn’t know this was a black-tie gunfight. That’s a nasty bruise!”