The American Zone (21 page)

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Authors: L. Neil Smith

Tags: #Science Fiction, #Fiction, #Adventure

BOOK: The American Zone
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Clarissa sighed and shrugged. “The people we’re working for feel, well, belittled or diminished by some of the movies being shown on the’Com, movies that have otherworld versions of themselves in them, in roles that embarrass them.”
“Or that they didn’t get paid for,” Sam responded. “Tell me about it! I was watching the’Com the other day and saw a version of myself—different name, though, altogether—in a ridiculous thing called
Space Precinct
. Fake aliens with enormous
buggy eyes. The writing was surprisingly not bad, though. I wonder what the guy was getting for—”
I knew I’d seen him—or someone like him—before.
“Excuse me, Mr. Yosemite,” Clarissa cleared her throat. I could tell she was annoyed. She was a big
Space Precinct
fan. She must have recognized him from the moment we entered the store. “We need to know where these movies come from. Maybe we could work things out so all parties are satisfied.”
“Believe me, lady, all parties are
never
satisfied,” he told her, writing something on the card I’d handed him. “However, because you’re both gainfully employed elsewhere—I recognize Win Bear when I see him, Lieutenant, and his good-looking wife, Clarissa the Healer—and just possibly to avoid getting my ass sued off, here’s where I get most of my new stuff. Just don’t tell’em I was the one who told you, okay?”
“Mum’s the word,” I said. The address was farther into the Zone than I’d ever been before. I was supposd to talk to someone called Mickey Stonesoup.
“‘Shuddup’ would be a lot more like it, friend,” Yosemite replied amiably.
I grinned, thanked him, and left with Clarissa. There were two messages waiting for us when we got to the car. The first was from Lucy, a C-mail saying that she’d gotten the message I’d sent her, had her hands full where she was, and wouldn’t be home in time for the appointment.
The second message was a video recording of Mary-Beth Sanders, looking tear-stained and uncharacteristically rattled. “Win, Clarissa! I can’t find your personal’Com numbers! I hope this message gets to you right away! Will is … Will’s been shot!” She looked frantically from side to side, then at the camera again. “Please come to the house as soon as you can!”
I glanced at my watch and the timestamp on the screen. She’d called three minutes ago.
“SUPPOSE THE BADGUYS think they’ve killed you?” I asked. I stood on tiptoe, looking past and over Mary-Beth, Fran, and Clarissa, all elbows and decorative backsides, wielding bandages and sponges and surgical instruments and electronic goodies, while Will—fully as conscious as I was, albeit crankier—tried to have a conversation with me.
When Clarissa and I had roared up to the front at 625 Genet Place, across the street from our own home, the pair of big wooden doors at each end of the arched entryway had been shut. Although I’d never truly gotten used to it, LaPorte, the whole Confederacy, in fact, was one of those rare, wonderful places—sort of like Trinidad when my mother was growing up—where you could leave your doors unlocked all day and all night. I’d always hoped to keep it that way here, so this was a dismaying surprise. Two very pregnant young women had greeted us with a four-barrel salute, a pistol of some kind in each hand. Will we’d found upstairs where they’d reluctantly left him, flat on his back in bed, sealed up with emergency plastic sheeting, and complaining to his wives, and anybody else who would listen, that he had work to do and wasn’t hurt that badly.
“She came right to the door,” he explained, as Clarissa, working under a pain-suppression field, extracted the first bullet. It clinked melodically in the enameled pan that Fran was holding. Mary-Beth just stood there looking worried. “Collecting for the Spaceman’s Fund,” Will went on. “When I reached into my pocket, she shot me. Several times, I think—it was a little hard to keep track. A little old lady with—”
“With a hat and a shawl and a basket, tra la,” I finished for
him. This was getting to be ridiculous, I thought, imagining how we’d deal with this in the States—a city-wide roundup of little old ladies with big hats and shawls. “I assume she got away while you were busy bleeding on your doorstep. So how come you’re still alive to tell us about it?”
“Kevlar,” he explained. “After last night’s merriment, probably about the same time Clarissa was out shopping for her Marlene Dietrich outfit, I was down in the Zone myself, looking for Kevlar. You know it’s absolutely amazing what some people manage to bring with them through the broach.”
“And even more amazing,” I agreed, “what they think is important.”
I examined the battered vest. It looked like it had been worked over with a small caliber submachinegun—we could always put an APB out on little Mary-Lou, I supposed—or a 12-gauge shotgun spewing #4 buckshot. The damned thing brought back memories I hadn’t realized were horrible until now.
“You know, I hate this piece of crap,” I informed him, meaning the vest. “Don’t get me wrong, my friend. I’m overjoyed that it worked for you, but this thing wouldn’t have protected you from that plummeting Hupmobile or whatever it was, any more than it will protect you from an electric pistol like Clarissa’s, or a laser. Besides, I’ve always thought that we were a lot nicer—we cops—before we started wearing the stuff.”
Will winced a little as the second bullet came out—Clarissa immediately did something to the pain suppressor—but he managed to snort an old familiar snort. “Was the point to be nice, or to enforce the law?”
“It was to keep the peace, my friend,” I said. “How can you even pretend to protect people once making them afraid of you becomes part of the job?”
Will tried to sit up, but his wives and doctor hollered at him and managed to push him back down again. “But our lives were on the line, Win, and—”
“Oh, please, Will, don’t give me any of that.” I was surprising myself how strongly I felt about this. I hadn’t thought about it for a long time. “We’re both adults, and neither of us would be here if we believed it.”
“And the truth, according to Edward William Bear, is?” he asked sarcastically.
“The truth is that there
is
no ‘thin blue line.’ There’s only a deep red stream—those who are forced to pay our salaries—a deep red stream that cops and crooks wade through alike, without any thought or care to the lives, liberties, or property they happen to be destroying in the process.”
“Quite a speech.” He sighed. “I’d beg to differ with you, but I’m too tired just now, and I’m unwilling to embarrass myself by telling anyone why I’m compelled to agree with you. Are you planning to make that meeting tonight at Trenchard and Gordon?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.” I glanced at Clarissa. She gave me a particular look, to say that Will had had enough. “I think we want to talk to Lucy, first.”
“You do that, partner, and let me know how it turns out. I think I’ll just lie here for a while.”
Clarissa turned another knob, and he was sound asleep.
The late-twentieth century Left fawns obsessively over animals because an animal has no intellect, is therefore incapable of challenging their ridiculous ideas, and can’t say, “Leave me the hell alone and get a life, you geek!”
—
Memoirs of Lucille G. Kropotkin
“Whoop! Yipee!” I hadn’t known I was capable of making a noise like that. “What a ride!”
Although she’d departed LaPorte in a conventional way—from an SST pad atop the Spooner Building earlier that morning—Lucy asked us to join her by extremely unconventional means, here at the Armadillo Interworld Terminal. I could see why, now, although it had taken me a minute back in LaPorte to understand exactly what I was expected to do.
Clarissa and I had stepped into the blindingly blue circle that was the locus of a probability broach, at LaPorte Interworld, then out of a blindingly blue circle exactly like it, into a transparent booth, and out onto the concourse. Waiting, as excited as I’ve ever seen her, was Lucy, who gave Clarissa a big hug and the same to me as if she hadn’t seen us for months. “How’dya like that?” She grinned. “LaPorte t’Lubbock in a fraction of a second!” Glancing back, I could still see LaPorte Interworld, like looking through a window.
I looked down the long line of transparent booths exactly like the one Clarissa and I had just come from, and a few that were different, probably for freight. It was just the same at home—in Laporte, that was. This would have been a noisy place back in the States, full of hustle, bustle, and victims having their bodily orifices probed by uniformed perverts. I wonder why it never seems to have occurred to anyone that a “cavity search” is rape.
Competent design and plenty of air curtains kept the noise abated here. We’d merely come from eight hundred miles to the north by northwest. But now, in both directions as far as the eye could see (two miles each way in this titanic underground complex), people were stepping from one world—and in most cases, from one life—into another in which such violations of dignity and personal privacy aren’t allowed to happen.
Not to people who followed Thomas Jefferson’s advice and carried a weapon everywhere they went.
Some of the booths did have guards—denied any orificeprobing powers—posted around them as a measure of prudence. In an infinite sheaf of universes where anything possible was probable, it might be badguys coming through the broach, or would-be conquering aliens, or herds of stampeding dinosaurs, or giant mosquitos, instead of refugees. Or it might be precious cargo—diamonds or emeralds or sunstones that needed protecting. Thousands of companies were mining hundreds of versions of Earth that had never developed a sapient population. Since these companies already knew where all the big finds had been made in hundreds of inhabited worlds, they always struck the mother lode in any new place they explored.
Some booths just had families, waiting to be reunited.
And there were a few where operatives—I was one of them myself, from time to time—were headed the other way, looking for people to be rescued, or brutalitarian assholes who heeded their whole day ruined or their tickets punched.
“This is something like what happened to J. J. Madison, isn’t it?” Clarissa asked us both. I realized suddenly that my wife had never been through a broach before. She looked a little frightened by what we’d just done, and she had good reason. Permit the toe of a shoe, or a trailing coattail to intersect the bright blue
border of the broach; say good-bye to toe or tail. The end of a stick, cut by that boundary, will have a shiny, polished look. Naturally, any interworld terminal worth the name will design its debarking platforms to prevent that sort of thing.
But it gets worse. Cut the power and let the broach close down on something solid protruding through it,
Kaboom!
Or make that,
Kaboom
squared!, at both ends of the operation. The Hamiltonians who’d gunned me down nine years ago had been finished off when I’d sabotaged an experimental setup sort of ancestral to this one. Clarissa and I had been seriously injured in the resulting explosion. She’d lost a lot of her lovely hair, and I’d lost an eye, but she’d found a new one for me.
Used to belong to somebody named Abby—Abby Normal.
“Yep,” Lucy answered proudly. “It’s just exactly what you thought it was, a sure-enough genuine double broach! Beam me up, Winnie! It’s the wave of the future! An’ you two are among the first one hundred customers t’try it out! Instantaneous transportation!”
I peered at her suspiciously. “Does this thing work the way I think it does?”
“The first broach, in LaPorte,” she answered, “goes t’someplace secure in another world—an undiscovered Egyptian tomb or a lost city that managed t’stay lost. The second broach, set up facing it a thousandth of an inch from the first, leads here.”
“Ain’t science wonderful?” my mate said graciously, not entirely believing it, herself. I could see her thinking that she wished she’d brought an overnight case.
I said, “Well, what’ll they think of next?” a phrase that seems to have vanished from the vocabulary of worlds less blessed by freedom—and the peace, progress, and prosperity it invariably engenders—than the Confederacy.
I kept looking around until I saw a brightly lit sign that read, ALL EXITS. “Okay,” I asked Lucy, “where do we go from here—and why?”
“Well,” she said, “after we talked t’Slaughterbush, Williams, an’ Fahel, I got t’thinkin’. I was kinda surprised, given what you boys’ve told me about your homeworlds, that we hadn’t run into any native Confederate greenies.”
“Greenies?” Clarissa asked. We followed Lucy to the sign I’d seen. People were getting into what looked like an elevator, except that above the door, where there should have been numbers, it read, AVENUE A & 34TH. People got in, the door shut, then reopened again and the car was empty. Lucy got in and punched a panel where you’d expect to see buttons. At the top, the address changed to EAST 50TH.
“Well, c’mon,” she urged us. “We’re burnin’ daylight!”
The door closed, the goddamned thing lurched sideways, and we were gone.
“TREE-HUGGERS!” LUCY TOOK a long pull of her mint julep, a drink built on the same basic principle as a good martini, but with bourbon and various imaginary additives instead of gin or vodka and the same. I was sure that her Texican accent had thickened, now that she was in her native country again.
“Dirt-worshippers,” she went on. “Animal fanatics. Toad lickers. See, where Winnie comes from, every last form of collectivism’s been thoroughly discredited for a long time. That doesn’t mean they’re on their last legs, though—not as long as they’ve still got all the ‘lawyers, guns, an’ money.’”
We were relaxing at the lavish lakeside estate of yet another old friend of Lucy’s. When we’d emerged from Armadillo Interworld into the hot, dry air on East 50th, Lucy had a car there—a brand-new purple Lenda J.—and we’d roared off due east along
the same street until all of the buildings went away and it became a country road. Six miles east of the city, she’d taken a sharp right and frightened me out of ten years’ growth.
This part of Texas is so flat that it makes Kansas look like the Himalayas. I’d never seen such a featureless landscape in my life, yellow-gray, bone-dry, and dusty, straight out to the horizon in any direction you couldn’t avoid looking. It was a good land, though, full of friendly, hardworking people. It had taken us fifteen minutes to get from the elevator to the waiting car, one hundred yards away, because the strangers we met on the street all asked us how we-all were, and really wanted to know.
What had scared me out of ten years’ growth, after passing dozens of what would have been hard-luck farms back home—here they were razor-edged islands of pure emerald surrounded by desert—and emu ranches, and forty-foot piles of industrial cottonseed you could see two miles away, was that, having driven south, away from the highway a few hundred yards, the Lenda J. suddenly plunged into a yawning hole I hadn’t noticed, and we disappeared—well, if not from the face of the Earth, then at least from the top of what people around there call the “caprock.”
A hundred feet below, after seven or eight hairpin turns—far more thrilling in a hovercraft than on wheels—we might as well have been on a different planet. The rocks and soil down here had turned red, the vegetation had gone to palmetto and yucca and prickly pear—a big fat raccoon waddled across the residential street we found ourselves on—and it looked and smelled a whole lot more like New Mexico than Texas. At the bottom of this fabulous Lost World lay a cool, blue, refreshing lake.
“Welcome t’Ransom Canyon!” Lucy told us. “When I was just a little bitty thing, this here was all dry, an’ the Comancheros useta come down here t’buy back white children from the Comanches
who’d stolen’em. I was one of those children, Winnie. Now they got this little dam at the east end, an’ the white folks an’ the Comanches all go water-skiin’ t’gether.”
The trouble with thinking that Lucy was a liar was that she always turned out to be telling the truth. “Captured by the Indians,” I told my wife, “her suffering was in tents.”
Lucy gave me an evil glare—and then burst out laughing.
Five minutes later we’d driven across the little dam, up to an enormous Spanish-style home on South Lakeshore Drive with a huge front yard, walled off by a low brick fence, and full of sagebrush and yucca and other southwesterny vegetables. Huge birds with long, stiff wings circled overhead. As we got out of the car, a fox ran across the driveway.
A mere ten minutes after that, Clarissa and Lucy were reclining on redwood chaise longues, sipping something therapeutically alcoholic. I didn’t want to ask them what it was. It didn’t
quite
have a little umbrella sticking out of it.
For the benefit of our host, my lovely wife was recapitulating our earlier conversation about environmentalists. “So if I understand it correctly, the simpleminded manifesto of Lucy’s ‘dirt-worshippers’ goes, ‘Four legs good, two legs bad. Two wheels good, four wheels bad.’”
Our host made rueful clucking noises. “If accurately rendered, the self-loathing those prejudices reveal sends the imagination of any sane person reeling in shock, disgust, and pity.”
Lucy had been struggling to explain the political deathgrip that environmentalists had on the worlds Will and I had come from. “Not to mention the corruption of the round-heeled press,” I added, “who make sure it stays that way.”
Lucy nodded. “But nobody actually
believes
any of it anymore, right, left, or center. Marx is dead, Rachel Carson is dead, an’ Paul Ehrlich is feelin’ puny. All any of ‘em has left is brute force
an’ lies. That’s why a logical argument never works with their proponents. They don’t care t’hear about the facts, what’s right or wrong, correct or incorrect. They’re after somethin’ entirely different from what they claim they want.”
“Of course the Slaughterbush types are only getting started here,” I cut in, sipping my rum and Coke and enjoying it thoroughly. For a person who never drank alcohol, our host certainly had a well-stocked bar and a generous … well, flipper. “First they’ll try militant safetyism. That usually works pretty well as a justification for running roughshod over everybody’s rights. Or they may try the ever-popular ‘For the children …’”
“The only ‘safety’ I’m concerned with,” Lucy remarked, “is the safety of liberty. An’ what I want most ‘for’ the children’ is a free country for’em to grow up in!”
“Admirably stated,” proclaimed our host, his gray-domed head, long nose, and perpetual grin bobbing atop the edge of a swimming pool constructed so that his head was level with ours, where we sat at a wrought aluminum outdoor table at the side of the high-walled pool. “So why does no one ever say this in the world of your calving, landling?”
“Because,” I told him, “anybody who did would never be allowed on television—the’Com—and any newspaper stories about him that failed to portray him as a thoroughgoing lunatic would be spiked with extreme prejudice.” I looked into the mild brown eyes of Aalaalaa Ickickloo T’wheel, Lucy’s finny friend and the longtime political editor for the
West Texas Whiskey Rebel
, the biggest online news publication in what used to be its own country until 1896. Or make that 120 A.L. We were here at Aalaalaa’s Ransom Canyon hacienda because he just happened to be personally acquainted with a rare phenomenon: a genuine Confederate environmentalist.
“Well, you can tell it to Birdie when she gets here,” Aalaalaa
said. “The Great Deep knows I’ve tried to tell her this sort of thing often enough, myself. She always says the salt water in this pool or in my house might seep into the lake and spoil the ecology—meaning it might kill all of the trout our Homeowners’ Association has stocked in our artificial lake.”
General laughter, from me, Lucy, Clarissa, Aalaalaa, and the two other porpoises in the pool beside him. They’d been introduced to us as Uuruulii Ackorkick S’wheen, and Eereeree Ockockock F’wheem, Aalaalaa’s wives. I’ve never figured cetacean names out, but I knew that Will Sanders and his family would be comfortable here. I made a mental note to call him later on this evening.
“The fact is,” Aalaalaa said, “no rational individual willingly damages his own property. That—not the bayonet—is the solution to maintaining an acceptable environment. I myself have caused to be constructed a carefully valved tunnel between this pool and the lake so that, like my neighbors, I may go fishing there from time to time. They use hooks and lines, whereas I use more traditional methods. I must also wear a protective suit, as fresh water and fishhooks are rather hard on my skin.”

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