“You know that in my world,” he was telling her, “Bettie Page
never got to be a movie star at all. She was a devoutly religious person who refused to sleep her way onto the bottom rung of the ladder, let alone to the top.”
Clarissa answered, reminding me of conversations we’d had, “Yes, I know. Win says that her place—if we all have a place in the world—was taken by inferior talent blown way out of proportion by studio publicity departments. Just think, a world without comedy-mysteries like
The Striped Silk Chair, Daddy’s Yacht,
or
The Two Leopards
. How very sad.”
I put the small round tray of drinks on the table. Clarissa likes plain old Lipton’s. Harkin had asked for Scheiner Bock, not quite a microbrew, but a pretty tolerable regional beer from Texas. I’d been surprised that Suprynowicz stocked it. “But she’s a big star here,” Harkin observed. “This version of her, anyway. I think my favorite movie is The Blue
Peekaboo.
” A peekaboo is a tiny sliver of a two-piece swimsuit. They don’t call them bikinis here, because there was never any thermonuclear explosion in the Pacific.
At that point the little bell over the door jangled again, and, leaning heavily on his cane, in clumped Ludfried von Haybard, Nobel Laureate and economist of the Austrian School. “Samuel, my boy!” The professor waved his cane dangerously and loudly addressed Harkin in what sounded to me like a stage-German accent. I learned later that all Austrians sound like Donald Duck’s other uncle, Ludwig von Drake. “How pleasant to see you! Suprynowicz, still practicing practical economics, I see! And this must be the famous shamus Win Bear—somewhat worse for the wear, I see, like any good hardboiled detective—and his lovely companion to whom I have most rudely not been introduced!”
Harkin grinned. “I’ll be glad to introduce you rudely, if that’s what you really want, Doc. Don’t be surprised if the detective
shoots me for it, though. This is another kind of doc, Healer Clarissa MacDougall Olson-Bear.”
Shifting his cane to the other hand, he took Clarissa’s, bowed low over it, and kissed it. People in other parts of the store cheered, whistled, and applauded. They were all pretty easily entertained, I thought. I found him a chair. “I am delighted, my dear, to make your acquaintance. You know that at the age of seventy-two, I think of myself as political
zweiback,
the twice-baked bread of the wonderful world of refugees.”
“More likely,” Harkin muttered, “refried beans.” I’d been thinking half-baked bread, myself.
“My boy, we’ll settle this later, with wet noodles at fifty paces.” Back to Clarissa: “You see (he actually said,”you zee”), I was originally a refugee
to
the United States—
a
United States—which, in my version of reality, reached a diplomatic understanding with a Japan unaligned with Germany, and never entered World War Two. I tell you, I was astounded—and deeply saddened—to hear the way the whole thing went in so many other worlds: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Beaverton.”
“Beaverton?” Harkin and I both said at once.
But Von Haybard had the eyes and ears of what he had every reason to believe—and so do I—was a lovely young girl, and went on without us. “I had fled Austria to avoid the Nazis. I wasn’t Jewish, there was no point in going to New Israel in Tasmania, so I chose the United States. Now I found that I was exiled permanently from my homeland, from all of Europe for that matter, with the passing of a prematurely aged Adolf Hitler—from Parkinson’s Disease, and it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy—and the establishment of the Anglo-German Eurofascist Commonwealth.”
“No, kidding!” I said. How many different versions of World War Two were there, anyway?
“What a mouthful, not?” he laughed. “And they always accuse us German-speakers of liking compound words.”
“And now you’re here,” Clarissa coached him.
“And now I’m here. And now I find myself a refugee once again, owing to a book I wrote, unwisely criticizing America’s ruling ‘One Nation Under God Party.’”
Clarissa said, “I’d like to see that, sometime.”
The old man laughed with delight. “I laboriously carried a single precious copy with me through the broach, my dear. It’s available on the’Com now, but I’d be happy to let you see the original.”
Come up and look at my etchings, little girl
. I barely resisted inspecting his cane for notches.
It was time to take this investigation back in hand—although my lovely Clarissa had certainly softened them up nicely and gotten a lot of background.
I charged in: “What we called you here for, Clarissa and I, was to ask you if you know anything about imported copies of movies like
Gone with the Wind or It Happened One Night
from the States.”
“Gone with the Wind,”
mused the professor (he actually said, “Gone vit’ ze Vint”),
“Gone with the Wind
. An exceedingly long film from the 1930s about the Second American Revolution, was it not, with Robert Cummings and Betty Davis? And a real stinker!”
Actually, he’d said “Und a rrreal schtinker,” but I was suddenly too excited to give a damn. I leaned toward him, almost into his face. “So who’s importing it, Doctor Von Haybard? You got any idea?”
He shook his head sadly. “I haven’t any idea at all. My wife—my dear, departed Hilda—loved movies like that, and she made me go to them with her. I haven’t seen it, probably since 1939. Samuel, how many A.L.s is that, anyway?”
Harkin said, “A hundred and sixty-three.”
“How time flies,” Von Haybard remarked, leaning on the cane between his knees. “Mr. Bear, we will both ask around for you and your lovely Clarissa, after this
Gone with the Wind
movie, if you will do a small thing for us.”
I squinted at him suspiciously. “And that would be?”
He glanced around from side to side, as if worried about being overheard. “First, you must promise to tell no one of this. It could be worth millions of … of …”
“Gold ounces,” Harkin supplied.
“Yes, gold ounces. You see, my friend Samuel here and I have had an idea, and we are looking for financial backers.”
Clarissa asked, “Financial backers for what?”
Von Haybard leaned toward us and whispered, “Governmentland!”
Harkin chuckled with moronic glee.
“What?” I said.
“Governmentland—what we shall call an
abusement
park! It is a brilliant idea, even if I say so myself, and certain to make everybody associated with it wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice!”
“How do you figure that?”
“You have probably noticed, as we have, how Confederate natives never believe it when you tell them how it was. They will want to come and see what living under a government is like, especially with the Franklinite Faction demanding that one be established here. We’ll divide it into sections! Sun Temple Slaveland, Inquisitionland, Robespierreland, Stalinland, Great Leap Forward Land, Third Reichland, and New World Orderland!”
What it sounded like to me was a typical Old Freedom Movement idea, like the Minerva Atoll Landfill Project or any number of other harebrained schemes that had never come to anything
back in the States. Von Haybard appeared obsessed with it in a way I recognized, and he didn’t seem to notice what a terrible idea everybody else thought it was. I looked around: Governmentland was no secret here. People in the store seemed to be cringing with embarrassment as they heard him going on about it, probably for the millionth time. By contrast, when the Indiana Jones movies finally made their way to the Confederacy, some clever entrepreneur put together a
Raiders of the Lost Ark
brace of handguns, consisting of a P35 Browning High Power autopistol like mine and a large-caliber 4” N-frame revolver—followed as soon as possible by a commemorative Webley Mark VI. Now there was a commercial promotion to make the chicken-livered, lace-pantied, hypocritical Californians who produced those pictures swoon with the vapors. “Why not Plagueland, then?” I asked, “or Inflamed Appendixland?
Those who sell their liberty for security are understandable, if pitiable, creatures. Those who sell the liberty of
others
for wealth, power, or even a moment’s respite, deserve only the end of a rope.
—
Memoirs of Lucille G. Kropotkin
“What was my name in the States?” The woman looked at me down her long, straight nose. She had enough eye makeup on for a whole herd of 1960s go-go ponies.
I laughed. I’d just been thinking about that song the other day, and told her so.
“So that’s what you’re asking me?” the woman replied, utterly without visible emotion or even much facial expression. Keely Smith, that’s who she reminded me of, deadpanned band singer and main squeeze to Louis Prima.
“I guess it is,” said Clarissa. “Isn’t it, Win?”
“I guess it is,” I answered.
More Jack Webb. The woman reached a long, pale arm and what seemed like an even longer cigarette holder toward an ashtray. “Well, it was the same there and then as it is here and now. You see before you Andrea Galarynd, age thirty-five or thereabout, proprietor of the Golden Apple Tea Room.”
I started to speak again, but she beat me to it. She’d started taciturn, but one of us, Clarissa or me, had finally pushed a button, although I didn’t know who or how. Whatever it was, it had taken us half an hour.
She said, “I was a best-selling Gothic romance novelist where I came from, Lieutenant Bear. Unfortunately, that sort of thing doesn’t seem to sell very well here. They like
westerns
, of all
things!” she complained.
“Old westerns
, written by people like Louis L’Amour or Ted van Roosevelt!”
I shrugged, but didn’t say anything.
“I was also a popular philosopher of some note—some would say ‘self-styled’—and a health-food activist.” She delivered it all in monotone, with a stone face. “They called me a ‘cultist’ at my trial. It’s true that I’m a natural nonconformist, I suppose. If I hadn’t become a radical individualist, I might have become a nudist, instead.”
I laughed again. I couldn’t help myself. I was surprised as hell to discover that I liked this extremely strange woman with her severe Walk-Like-an-Egyptian hairstyle and her buzzy, slightly accented voice. Assuming that she meant to be funny, Galarynd had a sense of humor I could appreciate, wry and self-deprecating. Even better, Clarissa and I had only had to walk about twenty feet from Suprynowicz’s General Store to get here.
Speaking of Clarissa, she had another cup of tea steaming in front of her, this time some rare variety of clover blossom, atop an almost useless table about the size of my hat, covered with an elaborate lace tablecloth. Me, I was abstaining, and thinking about my bladder more than I should.
“I fled the Glorious People’s Republic of California,” Galarynd was serious, now, and apparently unaware that anybody had ever uttered those words as a joke, “when the vitamins, amino acids, and other dietary supplements I’d sold by mail order for ten years were suddenly asserted by the Food and Drug Enforcement Administration to be controlled substances—and unauthorized sale or possession made a ‘L.I.P. Service’ offense.”
“L.I.P. Service?” Clarissa asked. It was interesting to watch my darling learning from somebody besides me just how perversely people with uniforms and funny hats and briefcases could
treat one another in places like I’d come from—and what a difference simply arming everybody could make.
Galarynd ground out her cigarette, pulled the butt from the holder, and immediately replaced it with a fresh cigarette, which I lit for her. “Life-Indenture to the People.”
I shuddered. Somehow, it sounded worse than Carneval’s one hundred thousand hours of public service. Clarissa said something about reinstituting slavery.
“Perhaps so, but it was also a L.I.P. Service offense to call it that.” Our hostess observed the shock on Clarissa’s face. “My dear, you think that’s bad? My husband—he’s from a different world than I am altogether; I met him here in the Zone—he was compelled to flee for his very life during his world’s beastly Edward M. Kennedy Administration.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Because?” She flicked an ash into the ashtray. “Because he was a TV standup comedian who created the popular catchphrase—generically describing any lost cause or foregone conclusion—‘Dead before she hit the water.’” I started laughing again, while Clarissa looked at me as if I’d grown an extra nose. Part of it was remembering a wonderful fake Volkswagen ad that
National Lampoon
had printed in the seventies—and been forced by the car company to withdraw—pointing out that if Teddy Kennedy had been driving a Beetle, which floats, he’d be in the White House today. I excused myself and told Galarynd about the ad. Apparently she thought it was funny, too, which made me think about Jessica Rabbit.
“What does he do?” I asked. “Your husband, I mean. Now.”
She took another long drag on her cigarette. I pulled one out myself and lit it, not knowing how well cigars and tea rooms might go together. “Why, he runs Salmoneus & Quark over on Suter Street.” She pointed a thumb over her shoulder. “‘Acts of Capitalism between Consenting Adults.’”
“I think I’ve heard that slogan somewhere before. You import tea, I assume. What does your husband import?”
She released smoke, uninhaled, from her mouth and breathed it in again through her nose—French inhaling, I think it’s called. “I import much more than tea: teapots, teacups, tea cozies, samovars, espresso machines—”
“And your husband?” I insisted.
“Anything that comes to hand, from microscopic test weights for scientific scales to—well, he imported an entire English Channel hovercraft once.”
“Hardware,” I asserted. “Any movies?”
“Movies? Yes. Would you care for any more tea, Clarissa?”
Clarissa shook her head. “No, thank you. Movies like
Gone with the Wind?”
“Yes, that’s a good one!” Galarynd brightened at the memory. “It always makes me cry. Do you suppose that Rhett eventually went back to Scarlett?”
I said, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. Does your husband the comedian ever sell or rent movies like
Gone with the Wind
to ‘Com channels?”
A puzzled look. “Why, yes, he does. Why? Surely there’s no law against it. I’ll have you know that we both worked in Confederate sweatshops, four hours a day, three days a week, saving copper coins to get where we are, and—”
“Thank you! Thank you!” I wanted to kiss her, or jump up and shout “Shazam!,” but Clarissa was there, nobody seems to remember Captain Marvel anymore, and I certainly didn’t want anybody to think I remembered Gomer Pyle.
When we got back out to Clarissa’s medical van, parked at the curb in front of Suprynowicz’s General Store, there was a note lying on the passenger seat.
TOO DANGEROUS LAST NIGHT
DIDN’T DROP CAR—THEY DID
TONIGHT 10 O’CLOCK
CORNER TRENCHARD & GORDON
Handprinted in the center of the sheet, nice and symmetrical. I don’t know what High Colonic would have done if I hadn’t left the window open a crack. Windshield wiper? Except for certain old-timers like Lucy’s Thornycrofts, which have big round glass centrifugal window disks like an oceangoing ship, the windshield-wiping systems on most hovercraft are electrostatic, with no moving parts you can slip a piece of paper under.
SALMONEUS & QUARK’S on Suter Street turned out to be right around the block behind the Golden Apple. If they’d wanted to, Galarynd and her husband could have stepped out for a smoke together in the alley—although there’s nobody to say you can’t smoke indoors in the Confederacy. By the time we got there and found a parking place, I’d faxed High Colonic’s note to Will—more civilized than phoning him, I thought—and C-mailed Lucy’s’Com account, which she could access wherever she happened to be, from down below the Lubbock caprock to Tombaugh Station on Pluto.
We walked in on an argument.
“And I say you can’t tell the Roosevelt generation anything at all!” somebody shouted. “They lived through every bit of it, the Great Depression, World War Two, Korea, the Cold War, and never understood a single goddamned minute! Back in the 1930s they all got together and decided to carve themselves a great big, thick, quivering, juicy slice of
us
to feed on in their old age! They sold their liberty—and ours right along with it—at garage-sale prices, for the illusion of security!”
That from the guy standing behind the counter, a slim, wiry, blond-crewcutted individual between forty-five and fifty. He looked familiar, somehow. For a moment he made me think of Crocodile Dundee. The other guy, presumably attempting to be a customer, raised both his hands in self-defense. “Don’t have an epiphany, man! I only said that our parents’ and grandparents’ generations made a lot of sacrifices so that—”
“Yeah,” said the proprietor, “and
we’re
the sacrifices they made! I say to hell with them! I say let’s repudiate the national debt. And I say let the vicious old bastards freeze in the dark like they deserve!”
So it was Standard Politico-Economic Argument Number 27-A. I’d heard a lot of this kind of stuff down here in the Zone. These guys all reminded me of Civil War buffs—make that War between the States buffs, or even War of Northern Aggression buffs—arguing themselves hoarse over battles that had been finished, and the grass grown back, more than a century before they were born. This particular pair of individuals was safe here in the North American Confederacy now, where none of that stuff mattered anymore. Who gave a rat’s ass about the national debt?
Clarissa looked at me quizzically, probably wondering if this was another thing like the Volkswagen ad. I shrugged and bellied up to the counter.
“You rent movies, here?” I asked.
He looked me over. “I don’t rent ‘em, friend, I sell’em. Eight millimeter celluloid, sixteen millimeter, seventy millimeter, VHS, DVD, Beta, Framnold, Acquiz, High-eight, Mpeg, or Laser-Disc?”
“Framnold?” I shrugged. “Have you got
Gone with the Wind?
”
“That all depends on what you want,” the guy said. “You
looking for Clark Gable, Errol Flynn, Robert Cummings, Jeremy Hartshorn, or Nigel Wallenburg?”
I laughed. “Nigel Wallenburg? Jeremy Hartshorn? Never heard of either of them. I may take you up on the Errol Flynn version, though, sometime.” I showed him one of my cards. “What I really want to know is where you get these things from. I mean, who drags them through the broach. Nobody’s in any trouble, I just have a couple of clients who want to know.”
He folded his arms. “Well you have got a hell of a nerve, haven’t you? Look at it from my point of view. If I told everybody where I got my stock in trade, then anybody could get them, and then where would I be? Answer me that!”
“Where would you be?” I repeated. “Well, I guess you could be getting your ass sued by people who have an intellectual property right involved.”
“I thought you said,” he leaned forward on the counter, “that nobody’s in any trouble.”
“I lied. Look: I’ll tell you the truth—”
He raised his eyebrows and widened his eyes in mock astonishment. “That would be refreshing.”
“Okay, I deserved that.” I tried reasonable. “The fact is, nobody wants to go to court about this if they don’t have to. The process isn’t any pleasanter here than it is back at home.”
He laughed. “You’re tellin’ me—back home, they stake the loser out over a fire-anthill.”
I frowned. “You made that up.”
“Yeah, I did.” He laughed again. “Now we’re even.”
I’d forgotten that this guy had been a standup comic on TV. I hadn’t mentioned anything that his wife had told me, because I didn’t want a domestic disturbance on my conscience. Now I wished I’d let Clarissa start this one.
Apparently, she’d read my mind. “Excuse me, mister—”
“Yosemite—Sam Yosemite. And don’t say a word, it’s a damned coincidence I didn’t know about until I got here. See, where I come from, all forms of animation are illegal. It’s called the Bambi Law, and from what I’ve heard about other universes since I got here, I almost approve of it.”
He turned a hand over, indicating the man he’d been arguing with, a tall, husky, tanned fellow of about forty, prematurely gray, with about a week’s beard showing. “This is my good friend, Tomas Godinez,” Yosemite told us. I started to offer my hand and my name, but Yosemite pressed on before I could.
“Tom here was a famous personal weapons expert, and the author of many books and hundreds of articles and columns for shooting and hunting magazines. He even had his own reloading show, on satellite TV. But then he went and exiled himself from something called the North American Union, by writing an article for
Modern Machineguns
calling the statuatory infallibility of the Supreme Court into question.”
Tom lifted his eyebrows and grinned modestly at us. “It’s true, it’s all true. I wanted to call them perverts in black dresses, too, but my editor wouldn’t let me.”
“I suppose my wife’s already told you how I got here,” Sam went on. “Just like Andy to preempt a good story. Now what were you going to say, lady?”