The American Zone

by L. Neil Smith

  The rest, to coin a phrase, is alternative history. Shown a suitable backstop, President George was duly ventilated for his counter-Revolutionary transgressions, while Secretary Al bolted for Europe, where he met a fate surprisingly similar to that which befell him in my world, although at the hands of a Polish count named Coveleskie, rather than those of Aaron Burr. The Constitution—the vile document that had emboldened them—was replaced with the Revised Articles of confederation it was supposed to have been all along, fitted with a “Covenant of Unanimous Consent” rather than the weaker “Bill of Rights.”

  Government—at least that of the United States—forever deprived of its looting privileges, grew smaller and less significant in the lives of Americans every day thereafter, guaranteeing the survival of individual liberty, and giving rise to unprecedented peace, prosperity, and progress.

  Albert Gallatin became the second President (at his insistence they went on counting George) of what would someday become known as the North American Confederacy.

  THE REMAINDER OF the next three days is pretty blurry. I lost track of both Gables right away, although I spent a long while working shoulder to shoulder with Will Sanders. The lighting and noise were still like something straight out of Classical Hell, victims screaming and moaning, rescuers shouting at one another, heavy machinery rasping and whining as it tried to pull half a building off of bodies, living and dead. I’m a former homicide detective, and I can’t even begin to describe the smells.

  Will had a big black heavy blade he’d brought from his car and was using it as shovel and crowbar as much as a knife. I’ve a vague memory of the man hacking away, trying desperately to cut through a titanium concrete reinforcement rod with it, to rescue a terrified and injured little girl, cursing blue blazes with every stroke. In the end, we covered the little girl with our coats and shirts and fragments of plywood. Then Will pulled out a great big pistol and shot the rebar right out of the concrete it was set in. Two minutes later, we had the little girl out and in the arms of her mother. Will and I laughed and wept and danced around each other, both of us covered from head to toe with concrete dust and looking like a negative of an old-time minstrel show.

  I didn’t catch up with my darling Clarissa for hours after that, not until the very end of the nightmare, when I suddenly became aware that I was lying on my back, peering up through a shock-induced haze. She was standing over me like some kind of angel, strapping Bassett coils on me in an emergency tent.

  “We gotta stop meeting like this,” I remember telling her. She smiled wearily, crinkling around the eyes in that way I’ve always felt was so sexy. The first time I’d seen her lovely face, nine years ago, she’d been patching up a whole bunch of bullet holes that the badguys had blasted through my carcass—I’d felt like Fearless Fosdick. While she was doing that, she’d incidentally cured me of what would eventually have been cancer.

  This time, I’d “merely” broken my left forearm, radius and ulna both, compound fracture. Lemme tell you, there’s nothing quite like seeing the ends of shattered bones poking out through your own skin. I’d been helping forty other sentimental idiots lift a room-sized slab of reinforced concrete and more of that titanium rebar in order to rescue an orange tiger-stripe and her litter of four kittens. I guess my fingers—or somebody’s—had slipped.

  At that point, there hadn’t been many left to save. Happily, the Old Endicott Building (I’ve always wondered who Old Endicott was) turned out to have been partially empty after all: renovation underway on several dozen floors. Partially empty or not, it was still the size of a small city. The death toll was 1,198, by a horrid coincidence only I was in a position to notice (’cause it hadn’t happened here), the same number of people who had died aboard the Lusitania. Clarissa and I showered together, not from any romantic urge in the beginning, but simply to hold each other up. She hadn’t broken anything, but she was nearly as beat-up as I was. She’d left her well-equipped medical van downtown to be used by the colleagues who’d relieved her. To this day I can’t remember how we got home.

  Eventually, however, that old black magic had us in its spell. I have a serious sexual problem where my lithe and lively Clarissa is concerned. I just can’t seem to get it … down. She noticed.

  “Well,” she observed, as hot, soapy water sluiced over both of us and steam rose to fill what little space was between us, “I know that isn’t a pistol in your pocket, because you’re not wearing any pants.”

  She confirmed her diagnosis by Braille. I put my hands on her. “Doctor, I seem to have this terrible swelling. Can you do something?”

  “Why yes, Mr. Bear,” she grinned, “I believe I can.”

  “Nnnngh! I believe you just made it worse.”

  “Well, then,” she asked, “how about this?” The distance between us disappeared. I lifted her up a little, felt her smooth, wet flesh against mine, wrapped my arms around her slender waist, let her down again and held her tight. Sometimes it’s good, her being a little taller than me.

  “Perfect,” I replied. “But I warn you, in my condition, I’m likely to fall asleep on the forty-ninth stroke.”

  “Fine. That’ll be forty-nine more than I’ve had the last three days.”

  “Okay, if we can just avoid slipping on the tile and killing each other …” The shower heads hissed on for a few moments.

  “Oh! My! Goodness!” Clarissa exclaimed, breathing hard. “Aaaah … it wouldn’t be a bad way to die, at that, would it!”

  I didn’t answer her, I was busy—and too dignified to scream, “Oh! My! Goodness!”

  The last thing I remember, between the time we let the bathroom dry us and my right ear hit the pillow with Clarissa curled up behind me and Silvertip sleeping between my feet, was hearing my old friend Buckley F. Williams of the Franklinite Faction on the’Com, screaming for martial law.

  4: TABERNA EST IN OPPIDUM

  The function of government is to provide us with service; the function of the media is to supply the Vaseline.

  —Memoirs of Lucille G. Kropotkin

  Early morning—well, midmorning, anyway—found me headed the opposite way the Gables and I had taken three nights ago, northeast, driving the shiny red turbocharged Neova HoverSport I’d “inherited” with the house from the guy who took my name, face, fingerprints, and next-door neighbor with him to the asteroids. Already the traffic had begun to slow from its usual ninety miles an hour to a sluggish, confused crawl that betrayed the drivers in the area as new to the Confederate rules of the road and scared half to death.

  I know a conservative radio talk show host back home who avoids thinking about real freedom with a sort of mantra. “You’re the people who don’t want there to be any traffic signs,” he always prattles at libertarians as if it meant something. I’ve tried to tell him that libertarians just want the traffic signs to be private property, but he never listens. Maybe somebody else will get through to him.

  As I drove the’Com blatted, something about immigrants, as usual. Interworld travel, mostly the one-way kind being done by hundreds of thousands of political and economic refugees these days, was the hot topic with Confederate natives and immigrants alike. Weird alternate histories had seized everyone’s imaginations just as unlikely stories in the National Inquirer or People magazine do elsewhere. The folks in this uniquely wonderful world were discovering that they loved to shudder deliciously over versions of America that had taken a wildly different (and almost invariably worse) turn than their own.

  A typical headline might read, COMES FROM WORLD WHERE AMERICA STAYED BRITISH! Lost in thought, I found I’d passed the corner of Farah and Bock where the Zone unofficially begins and, to a dismaying degree, the Confederacy, for all practical purposes, ends. My onboard computer was talking to our machinery at home and the’Com system in general (Confederates have had what we call the Internet for seventy-five years, they just named it something else), compiling a list of folks it might be useful for me to talk to. With my attention divided—an
d trying to avoid the embarrassment of a slow-motion collision—I didn’t actually hear the phone until the answering machine kicked in. “This is Win Bear. I’m not in my car right now, so if you’ll leave a mess—” Swerving to avoid a genuine four-wheeled Toyota Land Cruiser, that big, gray, friendly elephant of a car (and how the hell had they gotten that through the broach?) I jabbed a button on the dashboard. “Sorry about that—hello?”

  “Hello, yourself!” A rugged and familiar face appeared on the screen. “I expected to see you languishing on a bed of pain, not racketing about town in your little red hovercraft like a teenager! How y’doing?”

  It was my neighbor-across-the street, Captain Will Sanders of the Greater LaPorte Militia. Since the horror of July second, he’d obviously showered, shaved, and put on clean, undamaged clothes. About ten years my junior, Will had curly dishwater-blond hair, a recently acquired handlebar mustache, a pair of drop-dead-gorgeous wives (both of them more than a little pregnant at the moment), and the sleepy eyes of a natural-born killer. He was a good man to have at your back in a fight, as I’d discovered several times. “Almost perfectly well, my dear Sanders …” I arranged my features into an expression of high dudgeon (whatever that means—I’ve always meant to look it up). “No thanks to you—I didn’t mention it the other night, but I’m thinking seriously of putting up barrage balloons around the property!”

  That sonofabitch actually laughed heartily, and grinned that I’m-Errol-Flynn-Forgive-Me-Anything grin of his. “The bottle tipped over as the rocket went off—next year we’ll make it RPGs! I was referring to your arm—you were pretty damned lucky not to have sheared it off!” I could still hear the sound that giant concrete slab had made when the whole thing fell through two floors, taking a mortgage company with it, and two marijuana brokers. A short section of rebar had casually slapped me on the arm as it went by.

  Just now I had to steer around some kids—humans and chimps—playing in the street with a ball and bat. It was unusual to see simians at all in the Zone and a good sign as far as I was concerned. It reminded me: the LaPorte Patriots were playing the Mexico City Aztecs this afternoon. I split the screen (Will could share) and sent the system channel-hopping, looking for the game. I also switched to a heads-up display I’d had installed, so I could see traffic while I talked on the’Com.

  Three days after, the so-called news media were still wallowing in the Old Endicott Building disaster, “dancing in the blood” as my darling Clarissa had put it, every second, every minute, every hour, shoving mikes and cameras in people’s faces, asking everybody and his aardvark how they felt (never what they thought, mind you) about what had happened. There had even been talk, for no reason that made any sense, of postponing the ballgame. I switched off their half of the’Com and ignored them.

  “There’s nothing wrong with me that enough time than the elecromagnetic Force won’t cure. I thought you’d be back at Old Endicott still digging for bodies.” I would have been, too, in spite of the damned media, except that I had a job.

  Will grimaced. “No bodies left to dig for, according to the dogs and our instruments. The toll officially stands at 1198, and there were more injuries among the rescue gang than the few survivors we found in the collapsed parts of the building.”

  A surprising number of people had lived—several thousand—proving that tort law does a hell of lot more for the advance of architectural science than building codes do.

  I interrupted him. “Tell me about that hunk of iron you were using that night. I’ve got a working knife, but it’s too big and heavy and I don’t carry it.” Will was familiar with the toadsticker I’d taken off Tricky Dick Milhouse, during my first days here in LaPorte.

  “An import,” he explained, “from one of our native worlds, yours and mine. It’s a Chris Reeve Project I, made by a guy from Montana—by way of South Africa—not the guy who played Superman. I got mine at Daggett’s Wonderful World of Sharp Pointy Things, on North Snowflake.”

  Here in the Zone. I refrained from telling him that in my world, most recently (I have an unfortunate habit of keeping track of such things), Superman had been played by Keanu Reeves. I was about to inquire after Fran and Mary-Beth, Will’s pretty young wives, when he interrupted himself. “What’s that you’re carrying? You look naked and it isn’t a pretty sight!” A burglary dick for another City and County of Denver than mine, Will had worked as a gunsmith when he arrived here the year after I did.

  My arm was in a sling, bone-healing Bassett coils wired to power cells that not only made it awkward to drive, but impractical to wear a shoulder holster. Lacking a hip holster for my .41, I’d settled on a Browning “High-Power” pistol that I’d field-confiscated amidst all the ruckus associated with my having moved here, from a federal agent of the type—known better now than then—who delights in burning children to death or shooting mommies in the head while they hold their babies in their arms.

  “My old P-35,” I replied, referring to the Browning by another of its many names, “with the new barrel.” Will shared my interest in exotic cartridges. I’d equipped the pistol with a brand-new tube, custom-made for a cartridge I’d invented myself one evening, after perusing Cartridges of the World, my all-time favorite bathroom reading material. I’d christened it “.375X19 Win-Bear,” enjoying the combination of English and so-called “metric” designations. It had started as an obscure Japanese military item, 8mm Nambu, “blown out,” as they say, and shortened a trifle. Its rim had been turned—“rebated” is the technical term—to match that of the 9mm cartridge the gun had originally been made for. With a 145-grain ” bullet traveling 1180 feet a second, it was no magnum, but better than the European popgun fodder I’d been feeding it for years.

  Will shook his head. For him (as for the overwhelming majority of Confederate gun-toters), decent-sized guns begin at .40. But instead of giving me a hard time about it as he usually did, he asked what I was up to today.

  “Acting on behalf of some new clients.” I suppose, to any outside observer, after what had happened three nights ago, the Gables’ case may have seemed trivial. But I was pretty sure it didn’t seem that way to them. In any event, moping around, pretending to mourn twelve hundred strangers the way everybody had been forced to do when Kennedy got shot—which Kennedy, of course, depending on what world you’re from—sure wouldn’t do the victims any good, and it was just plain crazy (or counterfeit as a zinc penny) to believe or act otherwise. The point was, I’d taken the Gables’ money, and, as they probably observed themselves from time to time, “The show must go on.”

  I said as much to Will, not mentioning my clients’ names. He was from a line of alternate probability similar—but not identical—to mine and probably wouldn’t have believed me, anyway. Clark Gable. Carole Lombard. Right. By now my house and car computers had assembled a list of a dozen individuals in this part of the city who were generally associated with crossworld imports. I thought I knew already where at least half of them would be hanging out.

  “My system says you’re in the Zone,” Will told me. As usual, I’d forgotten to block the locator. “I’m organizing an investigation of the Old Endicott Building blast, and some fingers seem to point in that direction. So don’t be surprised if you bump into me over there, okay?”

  I answered him: “I’m glad that somebody’s looking into it. I don’t know anything about explosions, but it didn’t smell, taste, or feel like any accident to me.” Will gave me a neutral grunt that told me he agreed but was too professional to say so. We exchanged good-byes and hung up.

  THE HANGING JUDGE, at the corner of Mason and Rodney, did not refer to Roy Bean (a Supreme Court justice in this particular branch of surreality) or to those like Roy with an inclination to judicial severity. No, the sign outside, over the entryway, consisted of a white-wigged dummy in long black robes swinging from a gibbet by a length of looped hemp with the thirteen traditional coils above the knot. At the bottom was a legend: “Sic semper tyrannis!”

&nbs
p; Aside from that, the double doors and bay windows with stained glass were pretty much like those of any “brass and fern” tavern you might happen across. A card suction-cupped on the left half of the door proclaimed, SORRY, WE’RE OPEN. I swung the doors aside and strode into the dark interior as if I owned it—which I did, along with my not-so-silent partners, Yolanda and Maximillian (a.k.a. “the Wizard”) Parker-Frost.

  In the benign absence of any law prohibiting it, the Hanging Judge opened up in the morning so that Yolanda (if you see her, better call her “Lan”) and her husband, who fancied themselves gourmet chefs (and more often than not demonstrated it with aplomb) could serve a late breakfast. At the moment the place was empty but it wouldn’t stay that way. The bar itself was at one side, to the left, tables and chairs at the other. The proprietors stood behind the bar, backs to the doors, Lan’s arm draped over the Wizard’s shoulders. discussing whatever they were cooking on the grill. It smelled wonderful. I recognized it as an apple-cinnamon-vanilla omelette, a recipe they’d gotten from my very own Clarissa, who makes breakfast almost as nicely as she showers.

  On the wall facing them, where you’d expect to see a business permit or a license from the Board of Health (just not happening in the Confederacy) was an animated sign:

  2230 DAYS WITHOUT POISONING A CUSTOMER

  I happened to know it was the number of days, exactly, since they’d opened the place. There was another joint down the block with a similar sign except the number was only two—in their case a selling point. They sold those little Japanese puffer-fish that make eating sushi such an adventure.