Authors: L. Neil Smith

Tags: #Science Fiction, #Fiction, #Adventure

The American Zone (10 page)

BOOK: The American Zone

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“Would you mind telling me what the hell you’re talking about?” Will asked. He’d only beaten me by a fraction of a second. Lucy, on the other hand, looked tolerantly amused. It wasn’t an expression you saw often on her face. She’d been following them perfectly, jane-of-all-trades that she happens to be, and it gave me a distinct pain in the
tochis.

Deejay turned to the frustrated militia captain. “There’s a new theory,” she began, clearly groping around for words that might mean something to a collection of underprivileged non-physicists, “that the distribution of isotopes varies slightly, but measurably—and, we hope, predictably—from continuum to continuum. You do know about isotopes, Captain Sanders?”

He nodded. “Make that Will. And yes—variations in atomic weight that don’t change what element a given atom basically is. Uranium two hundred and thirty-five and two hundred and thirty-eight, for example.”

“Carbon twelve and fourteen,” I chimed in, not to be outdone.

“Very good.” Deejay smiled and would have given us gold stars for our foreheads if she’d had any. “Now the idea is that someday we’ll be able to identify the world of alternative probability that any given artifact comes from by the distribution of isotopes it contains. More U235 than this world maybe, and less C14. The theory is controversial and as yet to be demonstrated to everybody’s satisfaction. But we have acquired the equipment to record and analyze data from these items you found, if you wish.”

“What will it do to them?” Will wanted to know. I wanted to know, too. It was the only evidence we had.

“Nothing at all, landling,” Ooloorie assured him. “It’s a simple matter of scanning the items in question under a kind of paratronic microscope, that’s all. And then some computer time will be expended to analyze the data.”

“So it couldn’t hurt?” he persisted.

Deejay laughed. “No more than chicken soup.”

They both laughed. It was a good thing that Will was a happily married man—twice over—or that might have been the beginning of too beautiful a friendship. I wonder if there’s such a word as “trigamy.”

“THE GREATER LAPORTE Militia doesn’t keep fingerprint records,” Will informed us as we rolled up to our next stop, a low concrete structure with steel doors and angled walls. It only helped a little that the walls were painted a cheerfully clashing plaid, with blues and greens predominating. “In fact, we’re forbidden to do so by our bylaws—it was my predecessor’s last official act.” I found that fairly interesting. Will’s immediate predecessor as Captain-Commander of the GLPM had been one Scipio Africanus Kendall, an imposing figure of a man (although
there was a persisent rumor that his wife called him “Skippy”), the father of both of Will’s two wives, Mary-Beth and Fran, now retired to what used to be referred to as a “shooting estate” on the newly terraformed asteroid Pallas.

The sign outside what amounted to the only bunker in the North American Confederacy said:

GRISWOLD’S SECURITY

It should have also said, “Brrrrr.” Inside—once the heavy steel doors had slowly ground open, the portcullis raised, and the tank traps grudgingly retracted—we entered an exercise in paranoia that reminded me of the local IRS office back in Denver. The anteroom was glaringly lit, steel gray, and stark, without furniture or any hint of decoration. By contrast, the receptionist, a young female chimpanzee, wore a hot pink go-go dress, white vinyl boots to go with it, a double shoulder holster rig, and a pair of high-capacity .475 Casasent Magnums. She was separated from us by a floor-to-ceiling transparent barrier at least four inches thick. Greeting Lucy as an old friend—the way everybody seems to—she leaned into an intercom and summoned a tall young human attired in a double pistol belt, military-looking blouse, and a kilt displaying the same color-scheme as outside, the company tartan. His hair was parted in the middle, and he had long mustaches that drooped to below his chin. He came through a door that had been invisible a moment before and met us on our side of the barrier.

“Why, hello, Lucy! It’s wonderful to see you again! Dad’ll be happy to hear of it, too! I’d heard you were out in the Belt.” He turned to Will, while giving the rest of us the lookover. “Please forgive all of these security formalities; they’re more advertising than anything else, I’m afraid. I’m Liam Griswold IX. What can
I do for you, Captain?” Will introduced Clarissa and me and explained about the Greater LaPorte Militia not collecting fingerprint records. What made S. A. Kendall’s decision interesting to me was that, as far as he knew, his son-in-law-to-be was the guy who’d brought the whole idea of fingerprints into this world. Actually, it was me, but I wasn’t particularly proud of it.

“But I understand that Griswold’s Security does—” he told the proprietor.

The young man chuckled—nervously, I thought—making the ends of his long mustaches wiggle. “Well, yes, we do—two hundred whole sets, out of the more than two million individuals who live in this city alone. Please understand, Captain, we only take those prints that are offered to us voluntarily. And of course we only retain them on the same basis.”

“For the time being,” I said, but everyone ignored me except Clarissa, who dug me in the ribs with an elbow. I don’t know what it is about this outfit that inspires such awe. I wasn’t much impressed with Griswold the Ninth, a skinny kid with silly face-fur and a dress, whose guns—they looked like a pair of AutoMags, but probably weren’t—seemed to be wearing him, rather than the other way around.

Will handed young Griswold a dataplaque, something like a floppy diskette, only a lot smaller. It was a bright, cheery yellow and about an inch on a side, with no moving parts, and contained the results of the paratronic scan Deejay had conducted, including several greatly magnified and enhanced images of the thumbprint. Her own computers, back at LaPorte University, Ltd., were juggling the same information now, trying to find an isotopic match with one of the eleven googleplex worlds, or however many it was, that had recently been discovered.

Griswold inserted the dataplaque in a slot in the side of a’Com pad he was carrying. Confederates don’t have much use for dataplaques.
Even in my own home world, when you transfer information by carrying a floppy from one computer to another, it’s referred to as using the “sneakernet” and sort of sneered at. In this case, we hadn’t wanted to trust these data to that vast equivalent to the Internet we referred to as the Telecom, not really knowing how private it is.

To everyone’s surprise, Griswold’s results were much quicker in arriving than Deejay’s. “By Gallatin, we do have the thumbprint in question! It was acquired ethically—at the insistence of its owner—during the routine investigation of some minor office pilferage.”

Will asked, “And it belongs to … ?”

The young man sniffed behind his mustaches and looked down his long nose at Will. “There is the matter, here, Captain Sanders, of client confidentiality.”

Will glared up at him. “There is a matter, here, Mr. Griswold, of two thousand extremely violent deaths in the past week and possibly many more to come!

Griswold sputtered, “But I—”

“Look at it this way, friend,” Will went on. “Would you rather be sued by a single client whose confidentiality you may have violated, or by the families of thousands whose deaths you could be preventing right now? I’d be happy to arrange for the latter personally!”

Young Griswold replied without hesitation. “Very well, it belongs to Bennett Williams, the editor of the Franklinite Faction’s online journal
The Postman.”

Will looked satisfied, but I felt the customary privacy and freedom of the Confederacy melting out from under my feet like a well-salted ice floe.

11: I NEED A HERO

Hell hath no fury like the well-nursed resentments of a younger sibling.

—
Memoirs of Lucille G. Kropotkin

“The thumbprint belongs to Bennett Williams,” young Griswold had informed us, “editor of the Franklinite Faction’s online journal The Postman.” And that pretty much established where we were headed next. If I’d had two fully operational arms, I might have taken off on my own at this point. I was still working for “Pappy” and “Janie,” and nobody was paying me to look for the Polybomber, or whatever he planned to call himself when he wrote his bestselling autobiography. Okay, so Lucy
had
offered to pay me. The figure she’d mentioned was significant. It would have replaced my poor little broken car with a spiffy new cold fusion-powered model if the insurance company got sticky about it. But ethics were ethics. Lucy (and my poor little broken car) were just going to have to wait their turn.

“Hey, Winnie, lookit this!”

I jumped, startled out of my thoughts. Using the van’s computer, Lucy had logged onto Williams’s comsite to get a feel for the man’s thinking. In her own inimitable manner, she read me the heading that every edition of the Franklinites’ online magazine carried, dating from the day Bennett had taken over and changed the title from the stodgy, if more informative
North American Franklinite.

“‘This publication’s dedicated to all of those, regardless of label or party affiliation, who know that what they want can only be achieved by
governin’.’”

“There’s an open confession for you.” I observed.

“Or a warning,” Will agreed, “like a rattlesnake rattling.”

Lucy went on. “‘There are three guidin’ principles: we must
create
government;
we
must control it; an’ if we’re not preparin’ t’do these things, we’re waitin’ for someone else t’govern an’ control
us.’
Signed, Bennett J. Williams, Editor,
The Postman.
”

“I guess it’s clear,” I replied, feeling disgusted—although I shouldn’t have been surprised—“whose side he’s on.”

“Not ours,” Will said. He could be the master of brevity when he wanted. Probably helped a lot, living with two wives.

“If that’s his philosophy,” Clarissa said, looking away briefly from the road and giving me a cheap adrenaline rush, “why not just emigrate to one of the thousands of—.”

“’Cause there ain’t no guarantee that he’d be the one in charge, dearie! That’s the trouble with bein’ a radical authoritarian: You’re an authoritarian, but on the other hand, you’re a radical. Most of the regimes he’d theoretically approve of would lock him up first time he opened his mouth. It’s happened t’far better’n him!”

“I see,” This time Clarissa didn’t look away. “Thank you, Lucy.”

“You’re welcome, honey.”

Confederates are neither stupid nor naive. That goes double for my lovely spouse. They’re simply uninfected with the form of mental illness that results in a craving for power. It’s hard, even for a Healer like Clarissa, to identify with those who have the disease. There are always exceptions, of course, like the Franklinites.

“GREETINGS, MY FRIENDS, salutations!”

It turned out that to find Bennett Williams, we had to look up his big brother Buckley first. I was surprised to discover that Bennett didn’t reside at the enormous Williams family mansion.
Liam Griswold wasn’t the only professional paranoid in LaPorte. Everything Bennett stood for (like starting a government in the Confederacy) was just unpopular and repulsive enough to snap somebody’s ethical strings and get Bennett shot—or at least called out to a duel. Buckley’s politics were just as unpopular and repulsive (they were exactly the same, in fact) but he carried them with better style.

So here we were, at the extreme north end of the city (at a point where the Cache La Poudre River emerges from a canyon of the same name and eventually runs out onto the prairie) about where historic Ted’s Place used to stand in my world before it burned down. In this world, it was “Buckley’s Place,” a half-mile-tall edifice roughly resembling one of those old-fashioned nonautomated toasters like my mother used to have, with the pair of chrome-plated doors you could swing down about thirty seconds after the bread slices had been reduced to bad-smelling charcoal. At the top of the structure, visible through the glass penthouse ceiling over our heads, was an enormous mast at which Buckley moored his two-hundred-foot, lighter-than-air “yacht,” christened (of course) the
Benjamin Franklin.

“Would anyone care for a drink? How gratifying to see you, Mrs. Kropotkin! Captain Sanders, splendid to renew your acquaintance. Win, why haven’t we gone yachting? And this must be the charming spouse I’ve heard you speak of so often.” He switched what he carried from one hand to the other to take Clarissa’s hand and kiss it. Only in the Confederacy—and maybe the Federated States of Texas—would somebody welcome guests into his office holding a long-barrelled, large-caliber autopistol in his mitt.

Despite first-class ventilation, the room smelled of nitro powder smoke, and there were empty cartridge cases scattered all over a carpet expensive enough to pay for a dozen little red
Neovas. What made it interesting was that they were American cases, .45 ACP—Automatic Colt Pistol—a choice considered just as quaint here as the .41 Magnum I preferred.

At the far end of the office, which was almost as spacious as my living room, a thick-walled titanium bullet-trap had been bolted to the floor of a stone fireplace big enough to roast rhinocerouses in. It was the life-sized, torso-target hanging in front of the trap that Buckley had been shooting at before our arrival.

“I beg your pardon,” he told us as we entered, “I’ve made a new acquisition and was giving it a try.” He pressed the release button at the root of the trigger guard, popped the magazine out, shucked the slide back and locked it, then courteously handed the weapon to Lucy.

Newcomers to the Confederacy are often perplexed by the way that everybody here takes notice of what everybody else carries as a personal sidearm. Of course it never bothers them to see the same thing happening with people’s cars. They’re used to that.

And just as they believe that a man’s choice of pickup, econovan, SUV, or midlife crisis roadster reveals something of his character and situation in life, so, sometimes, does his choice of weapon. Mine, an American revolver says (I think) that I’m a simple, no-nonsense sort of guy who finds something that works and sticks with it.

Will’s choice, at least in my world, of a big, silver ten-millimeter autopistol, says he’s interested in keeping up with the times, but not so trendy that he falls for every new toy that comes along. His gun’s about as powerful as mine, but carries twelve rounds in the magazine and one up the pipe.

Lucy’s choice of the right-hand Gun of Navarone …

It only took a glance around his office to conclude that Buckley was an antique collector of a new kind, possible only in a
culture capable of what’s ofen called “sideways time travel.” His “antiques”—an H&K P9S hanging on the wall behind his chair, a Steyr GB over the fireplace, a Makarov serving as a paperweight on his desk—came from cultures contemporary with his own, but a little behind in their technology (cultures like the one I grew up in) the way an American might collect a Zulu assagai.

Once the pistol had made the rounds of its presumptive admirers, Buckley declared, “Everybody behind the desk and put your fingers in your ears!” He slammed in a fresh magazine, let the slide down, raised the weapon—but only to belt level—and fired. At his insistence, each of us tried it. Gotta admit, it was effective and fun. His latest acquisition was a good old familiar 1911A1-pattern—the basic .45 auto—that my world could easily have produced, except that it was made entirely of stainless steel and had a barrel—and the extra length of slide to go with it—two inches longer than the standard issue weapon John Moses Browning had invented. The generic term is “longslide.”

But what made it special from a collector’s point of view (and what fascinated me) was that the right grip panel—black plastic like the left, the same familiar thickness and general profile any .45 afficionado was used to—contained a miniscule laser molded into a slight thickening at the top of the grip, ending in a tiny lens. When I’d left the States there were laser sights for pistols—the size of a shoebox. This one you’d be a long time noticing, even once you picked the gun up and examined it. Along the front edge of the same right grip was a narrow rubber pressure switch. Squeeze the switch, the laser painted a brilliant red dot on the target. Squeeze the trigger and, if everything was properly adjusted, the bullet went to the spot the laser pointed at. My guess was that most of the time you used this thing, you wouldn’t even have to pull the trigger. The other guy would see that bright
red spot on his tummy, wet his pants, and just give up. I know I certainly would.

Finally, it was me who said, “Well, Mr. Williams—Buckley—this has all been a lot of fun, but as Lucy would say, we’re burning daylight, and we need to get down to business.”

“Of course, Win,” Buckley swiveled in his chair and tapped a stylus against his teeth. “In what way may I assist you?”

“We need to speak with your brother Bennett, in connection with an investigation we’re conducting. Will here is concerned about the Old Endicott Building and tubeway explosions. I’m only trying to find out something about some recent interworld imports.”

“Well I’m certain.” Buckley answered, “that my brother knows nothing about the former matters that would interest you. I wouldn’t know about the latter. But it surely couldn’t hurt him to speak to you, now, would it?”

He used the stylus, wrote the address on a scrap of paper, and we were off, with thanks.

BENNETT—PROBABLY NOT by accident—lived about as far from Buckley and the rest of the extensive Williams clan as he could and still remain within the city, way down at the southern outskirts of LaPorte, about where Loveland, Colorado ends in my world. Buckley wasn’t the only antique collector in the family. Bennet’s house was at least a hundred years old, three-story, white frame, surrounded by a covered porch and two hundred acres of what once had been an onion farm. It had a modern Impervium roof, I noticed, and I was willing to bet that if anybody batted a baseball through one of its windows on a sunny summer day, the glass would have healed itself by morning.

I was more surprised to find that there weren’t any servants
in evidence. Bennett answered the door himself—we’d called him on the way over—invited us in and offered to take the coats and hats we either weren’t wearing on a July afternoon or didn’t feel like giving up. He didn’t offer us a drink, unusual given Confederate customs, but I wouldn’t have offered us a drink, either, if I was about to be grilled as a suspect.

As anticipated, he was a big, broad man who’d let his hair go to salt-and-pepper, a choice relatively rare here and now, but favored by those who had nothing else to base their moral authority on. His voice was low, velvety, and reminded me of Orson Wellies. He conducted us into a big living-type-room, sort of New Englandy with a hardwood floor, white walls, and low ceiling, with Early Confederate furniture in which we were invited to sit.

“Now what,” he inquired, complacent as a Canadian, crossing one leg over the other knee and straightening the crease in his trousers, “can I do for you folks?” Will and I had agreed to keep the physical evidence from the train wreck to ourselves. He didn’t want an unknown opponent to know what we knew. I had a hunch some mysterious ally of ours might be in danger if the real villain got wise. Somebody had noticed Bennett’s thumbprint on that coin and left it as an accusation.

Will told him, “We’re looking into the two terrorist crimes that were committed this week, the Old Endicott Building disaster, and this morning’s tube-train explosion. We have a long list of all sorts of people we’ve talked to about it or are planning to, and just now, we’ve gotten to you.”

Bennett leaned back, folded his hands over his middle, and smiled tolerantly. “I’m surprised anyone in this soulless, ungoverned culture is investigating these atrocities. So you’ll want to know where was I at such-and-such a time on such-and-such a date, and so on?”

“And so on,” Will answered in his soulless, ungoverned way.

“Regrettably,” Bennett sighed, “I have an … what’s the word?
Alibi
—like in detective novels. I certainly never expected to use it in any other context. I have an alibi for this morning.”

Will raised his eyebrows in polite inquiry but said nothing.

Languidly, Bennett droned on. “I happen to have been attending a political convention. In fact, I was addressing its attendees on the urgency of establishing a real government to prevent such disasters as these in the future. So the tube explosion made my point for me. The blast shook the hotel we occupied, nearly spilling the pitcher of water on the lectern. My address was covered on the Telecom, and there’s a list of one hundred witnesses I can give you to substantiate my claim, if you promise not to use it for commercial purposes.”

“I promise. How about the night of the Old Endicott explosion?” Will asked.

“That occurred during the convention’s opening ceremonies. Very disturbing—and about the same number of witnesses.”

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