The American Zone (15 page)

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Authors: L. Neil Smith

Tags: #Science Fiction, #Fiction, #Adventure

BOOK: The American Zone
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“Everybody,” Will interjected, “has some kind of freedom he or she can’t tolerate. Everybody has one little thing he or she wants to take your money for.”
I nodded, “Exactly. So every conversation, no matter how trivial it may seem on the surface, becomes a political argument—openly or otherwise, consciously or otherwise—and every sentence ever spoken oozes with legislative intent.”
“‘And no man’s life, liberty, or property,’” Will quoted, “‘are safe when the legislature’s in session.’”
Lucy said, “I see!”
“Maybe you do. You live like that all your life, with everything
that you own or love constantly up for grabs, it’s no damn wonder half the population’s alcoholic or on Ritalin or Prozac. People who live in big cities can’t stand the sight of one another—let alone the smell or the touch—because it’s been pounded into them all their lives that they belong to one another, and at some level, they’re all afraid someone’s going to come along and collect!”
“What
is
a wonder, though,” Will observed, “is that there aren’t more poor fools up on rooftops with scoped, high-powered rifles, picking off random—”
“Voters!” Lucy exclaimed.
I clapped my hands. “You
do
get it!”
“Well, it’s an interesting contrast,” Fran observed. She’d been standing beside Will, supervising his culinary efforts. “As long as you don’t have to live it.”
“You can say that again!” he told her, turning with his hands full to give her a kiss. Frances Melanie Kendall Sanders—the younger half of the almost legendary Kendall sisters, had a voice best described as “silvery.” Small and lithe, she’d had a somewhat boyish figure when I’d first met her (and probably would again), along with dark brown eyes and a freckled, tip-tilted nose. At five-three or four and twenty-five or twenty-six years of age, she had the most beautiful waist-length, buttery-blond hair I think I’ve ever seen, satiny skin, and enough energetic enthusiasm for a whole circus company.
She was a phenomenal shot with the Lawrence Shiva model plasma pistol that was always at her hip. For some years, she’d taught something called Intuitive Mechanics at LaPorte University, Ltd. Now she addressed me and her husband. “Let me see if I understand something here. If it’s true, as you both assert, that the different political philosophies are really nothing more than competing lists of excuses for stealing from—”
“Or enslaving,” suggested Will.
“Thank you, dear. Or enslaving productive individuals, then our view—the Confederate view that no one should be able to tell anyone else what to do—almost amounts to the
absence
of a political philosophy.”
Lucy laughed heartily. “You can say that again with French horns! No ‘almost’ to it, dearie!”
“If you say so, Lucy. I believe I’ll skip the French horns: the Confederate view that no one should be able to tell anyone else what to do amounts to the absence of a political philosophy.”
“And that’s the way it’s been,” said Lucy, “for a little over two centuries.”
Mary-Beth held up an index finger. “Let’s review, then, shall we? Confederates tend to be future-oriented, operating from a rational epistemology, rather than from organized religion like the right wing, or supermarket tabloid mysticism, like the left. We generally believe other people are neither inherently stupid nor inherently evil—the most frequently presented excuses for political oppression—and we try to exercise an adult, hands-off attitude toward others, stemming from our own assertion of absolute self-ownership. We endorse both personal liberty of a private nature, and unlimited economic freedom.”
We all applauded. She put her finger into the nonexistent dimple in her chin and pretended to curtsey where she sat. “I confess I was primed,” she explained. “I’ve been counselling unhappy immigrants in my spare time.”
“Somethin’ else worth mentionin’,” Lucy added. “We may be the first
adult
culture in any universe. The official Confederate slogan—if we had official slogans—would be Admiral Heinlein’s observation that, There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” Will and I looked at each other and grinned. In our respective worlds,
the Old Man had been our favorite author. In the Confedracy, during the 1957 War against the Czar, he’d been the Hero of the Bering Straits, commanding a small but deadly fleet of hovercraft against the Imperial Russian Navy. In both situations, he’d been famous for that proverb and the acronym that went with it.
We all raised our glasses at once. “TANSTAAFL!”
“MASTADON?” I EXCLAIMED with my mouth full.
“No, mammoth,” Will, Fran, Mary-Beth, and Lucy all corrected me at once. My darling Clarissa just sat there with a mouth of barbecued proto-elephant as full as mine, and a very strange expression on her face. There are a lot of things I love about her, but she is not particularly adventurous, foodwise.
She swallowed. “At least it doesn’t taste like chicken,” she observed. “I think I like it!”
I liked it too—I thought—but I’ll eat a steel-belted radial tire if you put enough barbecue sauce on it. In fact, I was going to say that, but I realized it wouldn’t be polite—and they don’t have steel-belted radial tires here.
“Lucy very kindly brought the meat with her, in stasis, from the asteroids,” Will explained, “and I concocted a special barbecue sauce for it. You know you can’t just use a sauce that’s meant for pork, say, or chicken or beef.”
Lucy agreed, “An’ you can’t use it on mammoth, either!” Actually, she said “cain’t,” but you get used to Lucy’s accent after a while, and besides, I’ve always suspected that she practices it at home, in front of a mirror.
“But …” I did like this barbecued mammoth, after all, and reached for the French bread and another several juicy slices to put on it. “Mammoth from Siberia, I understand—although fifty thousand years of freezer-burn sort of puts me off a little. What
are mammoths doing out in the asteroids? Were they abducted by aliens or something?”
Lucy laughed. “They were cloned by scientists—mad scientists, if it makes y’feel any better, Winnie, because they’re not gettin’ near as much per pound for this stuff as they think they oughta—an’ raised in the closed environment of a hollow asteroid I built for ‘em. Makes y’think of Pellucidar! Y’gotta come out an’ see it sometime!”
“In some other life,” I replied. “I believe in
terra firma.
The more
firma,
the less ‘terra’. I’ll come out to the asteroids when they have a luxury hotel that flies there and back.”
“I think it’s time we got down to business,” Will suggested.
Lucy agreed. “Yeah, we’re burnin’ daylight!”
I knew Clarisa disapproved of bringing business to the table—it’s bad for those ulcers she cured me of nine years ago—but it looked like I didn’t have any choice.
“Okay,” I said. “Look at what we’ve got. One: somebody blew up the Old Endicott Building, killing one thousand, one hundred and ninety-eight people. Two: three days later, somebody sabotaged the tube-train and they still haven’t figured out how many died in that one, but the estimate is eight hundred. Three: meanwhile, somebody tried to blow up the fusion dirigible
City of Calgary.
Four: somebody—maybe somebody else, maybe not—may have started poisoning stuff in grocery stores. Five: somebody
did
blow up my poor little Neova HoverSport, the only car I ever loved, with Lucy and me inside. And five and a half: somebody put that funny money out for you guys to find.”
“That’s a hell of a lot of somebodies,” said Will, shaking his head. Like me, he was suspicious of coincidences. If the Confederacy was suddenly having a crime wave for the first time in two hundred years, we were both pretty certain it was the doing of one person or group.
I shrugged and said, “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Some of these somebodies have got to overlap. Oh yeah—and six: somebody’s importing movies that Clark Gable and his wife don’t like.”
“Clark Gable?” Mary-Beth and Fran asked at the same time, their eyes as big as the appropriate cliché—now being scrubbed by an ultrasonic dishwasher in the house. “You’re working for Clark Gable?”
“And his wife, Carole Lombard,” I told them, trying to make it sound casual. “Think they’d like to try some of your barbecued mammoth, Will?”
You say you never watch the’Com like it was something to be proud of. Never look down your nose at the popular culture, or self-righteously shun contact with it. How can you hope to change or preserve something you don’t know anything about?
—
Memoirs of Lucille G. Kropotkin
The robo-umpire yelled, “Play ball!”
I began my usual mental inventory. All right, I’ve got my official colorfully printed LaPorte Patriots seatpad. (I’ve often wondered how the Patriots’ batting star, Roger “Killer” Culver feels about fifty thousand fans sitting on his face.) I’ve got my paratronic field glasses (they perched on your nose just like regular spectacles). I’ve got the little radio built into my field glasses (which double as shades) so I can follow the play-by-play on any one of a dozen’Com channels, including one based right here in the ballpark. I’ve got my program—can’t tell the players without a program—and I’ve got my tall, ice-cold, margarita. All I was missing was—
“Craw
DADS
! Getcha red hot craw
DADS!
”
That was it. I nudged Lucy, who was sitting closer to the aisle than I was, to signal the crawdad guy. She nodded back and grinned. No baseball game—no Confederate baseball game, anyway—is complete without a flimsy paper tray of freshly steamed crawdads disintegrating slowly in your lap. “Y’wannem plain (steamed over beer), Louisiana style, or barbecue?”
“Steamed over beer,” I said. I wanted to talk with the crawdad guy anyway. He was one of the reasons we were here, instead of grubbing around down in the Zone again. Interestingly, two of the people on my computer-generated list worked here at None
of the Above Park (don’t ask, it’s a long story) and ran little import businesses in their spare time.
“Y’know, Winnie,” Lucy jogged my elbow, distracting me. “I think they’re tryin’ t’walk Tommy Aurand!”
I peered down at the field. “I think you’re right!” The truth is, you can follow the game a lot easier on the’Com, but there’s still nothing quite like being here, where the guy in the seat behind you can drop pickle relish down the back of your neck and the players look like ants.
Tompkins was pitching the first inning for the Patriots. Aurand was the other team’s best batsman—the Patriots were in the third game of a four-game series with the Mexico City Aztecs (they’d won the first and the Aztecs had won the second)—and they’d better not be trying to walk Aurand. Confederate rules penalized an intentional walk by automatically turning it into a run, which is all right by me. I’ve always hated the bad sportsmanship of intentional walks. It was a rule I strongly approved of. I guess it goes without saying that no pitcher in his right mind ever hits a batter on purpose, in a civilization where they fight duels.
Just then Aurand smacked a ground ball into what suddenly seemed like a yawning chasm between shortstop and third. They scrambled wildly for it, but by the time the Patriots in the outfield got their act together, Aurand was standing on second, stripping off his batting gloves and waggling his eyebrows jauntily at the pitcher, who glowered back at him.
“Looks like it’s gonna be one of those days for the home team, Winnie!” Lucy hollered over the general noise. I agreed with her. The Aztecs were tough, but I was pretty sure the rumor about their using obsidian knives to carve out the hearts of teams they’d defeated was exaggeration.
I split open the tail of a crawdad, thumbed out the tender,
savory meat, dipped it into a little cup of horseradish and ketchup and devoured it. God, it was delicious! Bear one, crawdads nothing. Licking a little salt off the plastic rim before transferring my attention to the straw, I took a long drink of my margarita. How could it be any better than this?
Confederate baseball—although at first glance it looks exactly like the game I grew up mostly ignoring back in the States—is as different here as anything else is on this side of the brilliant blue circle of the probability broach, and just as similar, too. As Walt Whitman observed in several worlds, it’s
our
game, and it has a lot to tell about us as a civilization, for those who are willing to pay attention.
What makes the North American pastime different from baseball in the U.S.A.? Well for starters, there’s the happy fact that artificial playing surfaces and the designated hitter are completely unknown. (Attention Kevin Costner, they don’t allow pinch runners, either.) They’ve never heard of metal bats; the big controversy is between those that are turned on a lathe and those that are grown in a field and picked like canteloupe.
But the difference that makes a difference is that everybody does everything. Nobody specializes. It works like this: whoever pitches the first inning, catches in the second inning, plays first base in the third inning, second base in the fourth inning, and third base in the fifth inning. In the sixth inning the same guy plays shortstop—with the rest of the team rotating behind him exactly the way he did—and then proceeds to left field in the seventh inning, center field in the eighth inning, and right field in the ninth inning. If there happen to be extra innings, he pitches again in the tenth, then catches in the eleventh, then plays first base in the twelfth, and so on. Not much of a difference, you think? Well let me tell you it’s a large enough difference to maintain my interest in a way that Major League Baseball never
did at home. Instead of a multibillion dollar corporate exercise for a lot of overtrained, overpaid one-noters—including a stable full of infantile, nasty-tempered primadonna pitchers, almost invariably acquired at the expense of a respectable offensive lineup—it’s a glorious romp for generalists where victory goes to the best all-round players. Believe me, there are still plenty of heroic catches and thrilling homers knocked clean out of the park. The double play is every bit as heartbreakingly beautiful here as it is in any universe. Everybody’s strengths and weaknesses are displayed by turn, and there are no full-time catchers to bravely destroy their knees and grow old before their time.
The boys of this world’s summer still wear knickers—and those cylindrical baseball caps with stripes around them. Pitching doesn’t tend to be as high-speed or sleight-of-handy, so the scores would be higher—if they’d ever moved the pitcher’s mound back, from forty-five feet to sixty feet six inches, which they never got around to here. (There’s always talk of moving it to sixty-three feet, seven and two-thirds inches, the exact midpoint between home and second, but all it ever comes to is talk.) I guess you could say truthfully that Confederate baseball is a batter’s game and that’s all right by me, too. The best defense is a good offense, after all.
The second Aztec batter, former San Francisco Vigilante Mark Valverde, struck out ignominiously (three pitches, three swings, three strikes—sometimes you just have days like that; his average was .378) and Aurand had stolen third before I split my second crawdad open, steaming and fragrant in the noonday sun. The crawdad guy—wearing a name tag neatly inscribed E.C. and an impeccably tailored white coat—had promised to come talk with Lucy and me once he’d sold off the rest of what he was carrying. I asked him to save the last one for me.
Now the radio girls (yeah, that’s how they do it here, and
always have; you can hear them more clearly and understand them better) were chattering about the third Aztec batter to come to the plate, Mike “Dugout” Dugger. A big, husky, prematurely gray fellow. Dugger swung the heaviest bat on his team—maybe in the league—and on days when Valverde had better luck at the plate, often swatted himself and a couple of other runners home. Personally, I’d always wondered why they didn’t bat Dugger fourth, and get in an occasional grand slam. However, the reasoning processes of baseball managers are something that have never made very much sense to me. Twenty years ago, at a rare Denver Bears game, I told a friend that chimpanzees could probably do it better, but since I arrived in the Confederacy, I’ve discovered that they can’t.
Dugger let the first pitch go by as the ballpark’s invisible lasers scanned it from about fifty-seven different angles, measured its shape and speed and the direction it rotated, and called it a strike. The crowd sort of sighed and grew quieter. The batter settled down a little, hunched over, swung hard at the next one—a slider—and missed again. Strike two.
Lasers? Robo-umpires? Well, like everybody else, I hated the umpire, although I never thought much about it until I got here, where they don’t have umpires anymore. People simply got tired of bad calls until in one game—Mexico versus Boise at Mexico—after six or seven stinkers in a row, the fans started sort of running in place where they sat (I’ve seen the video), making enough noise for an erupting volcano, and setting up vibrations that cracked the foundation of Montezuma Field from the nosebleed seats to the third sub-basement, and cost the owners several million gold ounces to repair. Umpires were replaced by electronics in the very next game.
Dugger suddenly raised a hand, stepped out of the batter’s box, rubbed something on the bat, picked up some dirt and
rubbed it on his hands, adjusted his antique cap and the crotch of his pants (baseball players’ union rules require it, I believe), and finally stepped back into the box.
I was glad I wasn’t down on the field. Some purists may not like hearing it, but I’ve never particularly enjoyed being hot, and I’d started going to games at None of the Above Park because—believe it or not—it’s air-conditioned. Sure, it’s wide open to the sky, but cold air tends to pool in any container, open-topped or not. It was replaced constantly in any event by a titanic bank of fusion reactors (Clarissa and I had taken the tour once) beneath the stadium. When the weather got cold—this is a civilization that heats its highways and streets to remove snow and ice—they managed to warm the place up, using radiant projectors, complicated air curtains, and electrically warmed seats, so that we got an extra six weeks in the two hundred-game season.
You can afford two hundred games when you aren’t wearing out pitchers’ arms or catchers’ knees.
Now the crowd settled down even more. This kind of moment always reminds me of professional billiards or a golf tournament. I’m told it can be very different in other places—San Francisco, Chicago, Mexico City—but what I love most about the game in LaPorte is the quiet—or what the quiet means. It means the spectators are taking in the essence of the game, the awesome skill, the indomitable spirit, the … oh hell, I don’t know. It means that they’re all really paying attention—unlike a herd of brain-dead football fans making enough noise to raise Bob Dole.
Just then, the catcher called time and ran out to the mound to have one of those conversations catchers have with their pitchers. Speaking of pitchers, from the corner of my eye, I saw the margarita guy coming my way. Through my straw I made the traditional slurping sounds in the bottom of my tall plastic glass, then held it up for him to see. He turned out to be a different
guy than the one who’d sold me my first margarita, and by happy coincidence, the other guy I wanted to see. As he bent across Lucy to hand me my drink and accept several somewhat fishy-smelling coins, I asked, “Jefferson ‘Motherboard’ Weller?” I suppose it was a stupid question, since his name tag said “M-board.”
Heavily bearded, with longish, curly hair and wire-rimmed glasses, he glanced down at my companion: “Hi there, Lucy.” Then at me: “Who wants to know?”
“Edward William Bear, private detective. I’d give you one of my cards, but …” I held up my collapsing tray of crayfish and gave him an apologetic expression.
“That’s okay,” he told me. His voice was extraordinarily deep. “I know who you are: Lieutenant Edward William “Win” Bear, the first victim through the broach.”
Win Bear, the not very private detective, apparently. I began to tell him that I wanted to have a talk with him when it was more convenient. Suddenly, he stood up to get out of our field of vision. He was just in time. Dugger had belted the horsehide hard and the damned thing was still rocketing upward and outward toward the left field corner. Of course Aurand was already beating feet on his way home, but nobody was watching him do it. The little white sphere that had everybody’s attention rose into the flawlessly blue sky, rose and started to level off
—Booong!
It hit the foul pole—which, rumor had it, had been especially constructed and tuned to make that noise. Dugger casually tossed his bat to one side and began jogging around the bases, with a surprising amount of away-game cheering to help him along. Fans in LaPorte are nothing if not generously appreciative of anybody’s sportsmanlike skills, even when they’re exhibited by the opposing team. I was a sucker that way for good defensive plays, and often find myself cheering for the other side—before I slap myself in the forehead and say, “Do’h!”
Three Aztec batters up, one out, and the score was already Mexico City two, LaPorte zip. Ah, well, back to work: I made arrangements with Motherboard to talk to him during the seventh inning, when he had a break. Now if only the Patriots could get one.
“YOU HAVE TO understand,” said Motherboard, “I’m from a different world entirely.”
He was reacting to something the crawdad guy had said. At age forty-six, Weller was an old acquaintance of the Wizard’s. Both were engineers—he was software, Max was hardware—trying valiantly to catch up with the dauntingly advanced Confederacy. When I’d come here, the “science” of detectiving was in its infancy, but I could see how the fact that it was fifty to a hundred years ahead in almost every other endeavor might be discouraging to somebody in a technical field. In the meantime, Motherboard wasn’t too proud to sell margaritas to the crowd at None of the Above Park.

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