The American Zone

by L. Neil Smith

  Lan was average-sized, I guess, tall compared to her husband, substantial, sort of like Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone. She wore neatly pressed blue denim bib overalls this morning, a dashing red silk blouse puffed at the wrists, dangly earrings, and high heels. Her eyes were made up and she’d chosen extra-long eyelashes. Her straight ash-blond hair fell to her waist. On a narrow belt slanted across her hips, she carried an elegantly designed Whitney autopistol. The Wizard wasn’t more than five-feet-two or-three inches tall. The expanse of his scalp, exposed in front, was shiny pink. His sandy hair at the back and sides was long like Benjamin Franklin’s and caught in a ponytail. He affected a full beard and mustache somewhat redder than his hair and thick glasses medically unnecessary in the Confederacy, which had developed laser eye surgery about the time of our Spanish—American War. My guess was that he was just busy and hadn’t gotten around to getting himself repaired yet.

  They cure baldness here, too.

  The Wizard’s shoulders and arms, broad and powerful like those of a bear, ended in broad hands with stubby, competent fingers. Watching him use them was like watching a Muppet, especially since (like most Muppets) he was left-handed. Barrel-chested, he had a narrow waist. His legs were short and slightly bowed. His feet were small, like those of a child. He wore a white dress shirt, a suit vest (with a calculator sticking out of the pocket), and a pair of bell-bottom jeans. He carried a well-worn Colt Delta Elite 10mm automatic tucked into his waistband. Both guns—hers was a .22, believe it or not—were pure United Statesian items, held by all the locals here to be ridiculously underpowered, although Yolanda and the Wizard both shot competitively and I wouldn’t care to be on the receiving end of anything they fired in my direction.

  “Yo, Wiz!” I announced myself. “Yo, Lan!”

  “Duh,” she finished the pronunciation of her name. “Come to collect your piece of the action, or just slumming?” I liked Lan’s voice when she was being sarcastic. It reminded me of … napalm in the morning.

  I shook my head. “Just information,” I waggled a printout of my list at her, “and some of that omelette!”

  “Fine,” the Wizard replied in a voice textured suitably for telling tales to little children. Naughty children. Tales about cannibals. “You want coffee with that?”

  “The Real Thing,” I replied, congratulating myself for perhaps the millionth time on one of the best R&R—rescue and relocation—jobs I’d ever pulled off for the Confederacy: three Atlanta corporate types from my homeworld who knew the formula for Coca-Cola and had been jailed for refusing to divulge it to a socialist government that had just outlawed trade secrets.

  At one end of the bar, lying open and facedown, was a plastiback copy of The Steamcoach Pillagers by Ted van Roosevelt. It was a particular favorite of mine, as Confederate fiction goes. The Wizard noticed me noticing and winked. “Made a hell of a lot better novelist than he did a president, didn’t he?”

  I nodded. Most people where I come from still don’t realize that socialism in America—started by Abraham Lincoln, who suspended the Constitution (and undid the Revolution) during what he called a civil war—got shoved along a whole lot further by another chief executive who desperately despised the free-market economy that had made his family rich, and stomped and shredded the Constitution himself, if only by pushing the concept of public lands.

  “Just bully,” I replied.

  The Wizard grinned, the corners of his eyes crinkling behind his spectacles in a way that made you think his beard should have been snow-white and smelled faintly of reindeer. He cut the enormous omelette he was working on in half and slapped it on a plate. Adding a couple of outsized country sausage patties, he garnished the whole thing with a sprig of mint and handed it over. The corners of my jaws twinged painfully, like they do sometimes when you’re hungry and about to eat something so delicious it should be outlawed. Lan was apparently going to chitchat with me, where I sat down at the bar, but just then a dozen or so customers came in all at once—the brunch hour was beginning in the Zone—and she and her husband got real busy. So instead of chit-chat, I sat and ate and thought.

  THE MAJOR CONSEQUENCE of the historical events that resulted in the creation of the Confederacy is that the inhabitants of this world—unlike others I might mention—are completely in charge of their own individual destinies. Another was that, without government “help,” science and technology have progressed more rapidly than elsewhere. The nineteenth century west was explored and populated by steam-driven off-road vehicles, rather than by covered wagon, railroad, or stagecoach. People first walked on the Moon—where they’d come to build a permanent settlement—in 1949. And travel between alternate realties, through a “probability broach” invented by a scientific porpoise, became possible in 1987. Or make that 211 Anno Liberatis, since these folks reckon their dates from July 2, 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was really signed. And now, in the Confederacy’s third century, hundreds of thousands of former “United Statesians” like me, fleeing numerous alternative versions of a government becoming more bloated, rapacious, and violent every day, were making a new start alongside refugees from hundreds of similar nations in dozens of similar continua. Newcomers to the Confederacy, a culture that uses private coinages of precious metals, typically arrive with their pockets full of worthless government paper money. With little in the way of resources besides their hands and their minds, they all hope that the “American Zone”—the seedy LaPorte neighborhood they settle in—will turn out to be only a temporary jumping-off place in this land of unimpeded opportunity.

  “YOLANDA PARKER-FROST, something has to be done about this!”

  I glanced up from breakfast as a gaggle of indignant citizen-types heretofore generally unknown in the Confederacy pushed through the door, led by a puffy faced, prematurely middle-aged guy with hair so blond it was white. He was wearing the first necktie I’d seen in five years and held a great big roll of paper aloft like a semaphore flag, swinging it back and forth.

  “Problems with your arm again?” Lan asked. The Wizard grinned to himself and turned over a crepe.

  Above the necktie, which didn’t even redeem itself with an interesting color or pattern, the guy’s face swelled and reddened. A little bald-headed fellow who’d followed him in let a tiny giggle escape, but the blond guy pounded him back into place using only his nearly invisible blond eyebrows. It must be a gift.

  “You know perfectly well what I mean!” He unrolled his paper on the bar three feet from my left elbow. I gave it a casual perusal. “This is a chart of every vending machine within a five-block radius that sells drugs or alcohol or ammunition to anyone who has the money! Even children!”

  “And?” Lan asked blandly.

  “And we’ve formed a committee to have them all removed!”

  “Even children!” an idiot in a brass-buttoned blue blazer echoed, nodding his head and making his preppie bangs bob absurdly. If I were forming a committee, it would be to prevent guys over fifty from getting Moe Howard haircuts. “For pennies!” These chumps were complaining about something I’d always thought was rather charming about the Confederacy. In a free-market system, competition always forces prices down, while driving progress that keeps quality high. The result? A box of pistol ammunition even children can buy for pennies from a vending machine. An armed schoolyard is a polite schoolyard.

  While the Wizard continued apparently ignoring them, Lan shook her head at the blond guy and his companions. There were four of them, the bald guy, the preppie, an extremely tall and skinny guy with bad skin, and somebody in a Spiderman costume. Go figure. “Look, Douglas,” Lan took them all in with a contemptuous glare from beneath her eyelashes. “Most immigrants to the Confederacy considered themselves libertarians—even anarchists—where they came from in the ‘Land of the Fee and the Home of the Slave.’ To them, the Confederacy is their every dream fulfilled. They’re grateful just to be here.” The blond guy started to splutter but Lan cut him off before
it came to anything. “Still, there’s always someone like you, having personal trouble—”

  “The technical term is ‘acculturation,’ my dear,” said the Wizard.

  “—personal trouble adjusting to full ownership of their own lives, along with everything that implies, trouble that they somehow think they have a right to pass along to everybody else! Well you don’t have such a right, Douglas! Nobody ever promised you that being free would be easy!”

  The Wizard added in his best Shel Silverstein voice, “You can’t child-proof the world. If you try, you end up with a mess like we all escaped from.” He lifted his spatula in emphasis. “The best you can do is world-proof your children. That’s hard work, undeniably. But nobody here is going to let you fob it off on someone else.”

  “How dare you—!” Shaking with fury, the blond guy opened his mouth again, but an all-too-familiar voice from a storeroom behind the bar chopped him off in mid-harangue.

  “Blow it out your ass, Dougie! Those vendin’ machines’re private property, standin’ in locations that’re private property, too, most of which’re protected by Griswold’s Security! Now, y’wanna go an’ tangle with them?”

  Everybody in the room shook their heads and said, “Brrrr!” simultaneously, including yours truly. At least these newbies knew about Griswold’s. A huge plastic carton wiggled through the narrow door, held up and propelled by a little old lady. “Lan, where y’want this stuff, honey?”

  “Lucy!” I yelled. The voice alone told me it was Lucille Gallegos Kropotkin, my former neighbor and second favorite Confederate. “I thought you were—”

  “Out Beltside, Winnie? Not on your carbonaceous chondrite! I mean t’find the assholes who knocked down the Old Endicott Building, whoever they are—I was the majority stockholder—or know the reason why!”

  5: EASY WINNERS

  As much as “sunshine soldiers” or “summer patriots,” beware an ally—more common than you know—whose fear of the uncertainties of success moves him to surrender at the very moment of victory.

  —Memoirs of Lucille G. Kropotkin

  “Now if y’don’t want any breakfast or beer,” the little old lady told Douglas and his crew, “you can all get your baldheaded backsides outa here!” I’d have applauded if my arm hadn’t been in a cast. She can be plenty spirited when the situation calls for it, but that was about the strongest language I’d ever heard Lucy use directly on anyone. For just a moment, the guy in the Spiderman outfit thought he was going to talk back. He got out a mere handful of United Statesian cusswords—much nastier than is customary here, something that included “bitch”—before Lucy laid a hand on her pistol grip and he shut off with a sort of gurgle.

  “Your mommy know you talk like that?” she asked with deceptive mildness.

  The Wizard looked up briefly from where he was performing culinary miracles at the sizzling grill. “He didn’t have a mommy, he had a village.”

  Not that Lucy wasn’t sufficiently hot-tempered and salty-tongued in her own way. But Confederate profanity includes neither religious nor sexual references, the former, I guess, because everybody figures that religion is a very personal business and they tend to keep it in their pants. The latter because sex is too nice. It isn’t politically incorrect here and never was. The American epithet “Get fucked!,” for example, is likely to elicit an astonished grin and, “Thanks, friend, I’ll certainly try.” All of Douglas’s delegation seemed well-enough acquainted with Lucy, and obeyed the heavily armed old lady without a moment’s further hesitation. They departed the Hanging Judge, no doubt to hold another committee meeting somewhere. I wondered if they’d ever realize that they were becoming exactly what they’d come here to escape.

  Except for the little bald guy, who unabashedly bellied up to the bar for one of the Wizard’s fabulous apple omelettes. Looking down at my plate, I couldn’t blame him.

  “Hey, Douglas left his chart!” Lucy observed. “Somebody staple it up over there by the door so people’ll know where to find those vending machines!”

  The little bald guy was soon joined by two dozen others drifting in through the double doors, attired in everything from workman’s clothes to the more formal bolero jacket and serape of a Confederate businessman. I was wearing one of the striped and colorful blankets, myself, thankful that local fashion made it easier on somebody with his arm in a tube of rigid plastic. This was a popular spot in the Zone and attracted all kinds of characters from all kinds of worlds. I kept expecting to see a Wookkie or—what were those lizard people called in Babylon 5? Oh yeah, the Narn. And maybe a Klingon or two, as well. They’d like the cooking.

  Way at the back, behind the pool and mah jong tables, somebody put some money in the Copperodeon, and we began to hear music, music, music. It was the only place I knew of in several universes where the jukebox played Scott Joplin.

  Lucy Kropotkin was, let me see, now, 145 years old, born Lucille Conchita Gallegos, “in the shadow of the Alamo,” as she often put it. One of the feistiest, kindliest individuals I’ve ever known. Lucy had once been married to a Russian prince with whom she’d helped colonize Antarctica and fight a war against the Czar in 1957. She didn’t look a day over a hundred. Think of Thelma Ritter (Debbie Reynolds’ traveling companion in How the West Was Won) only wirier and tougher, Mexican instead of Jewish, with a San Antonio accent instead of something strictly from Brooklyn, and an enormous .50 caliber Gabbet-Fairfax “Mars” automatic pistol strapped about her tiny waist.

  Looking back now, I don’t think I’ve ever seen Lucy without that goddamned gun. (I shot it once; it was an experience I’ll never forget—neither will my carpal tunnels—or ever willingly repeat.) The first time I laid eyes on her, she was wearing hair curlers and that pistol belted around a faded chenille bathrobe. No, it was hanging dangerously from one of its pockets. Don’t blame me, I was only just semiconscious at the time, shot to pieces and bleeding profusely on her next-door neighbor’s garage floor. Today Lucy had selected a colorful “broomstick” skirt and one of those white Mexican peasant blouses with a little colored ribbon woven into the lace at the neckline. She may even have been a full five feet tall in those expensive high-heeled Lucchese dung-displacers she had on under the skirt.

  Lucy turned to me, spreading her spindly arms as wide as she could for a hug. “Ain’t you a sight for sore eyes, Edward William Bear Mark Two—but then who wants sore eyes?”

  “I like to think of myself as Edward William Bear Mark One,” I told her. We were joking, of course, about her husband, my counterpart in this continuum.

  “I’m sure you do, Winnie, I’m sure you do.” She looked up at a clock above the bar. “The sun’s down over the yardarm somewhere on the planet—probably Bulgaria about now! Wanna drink?”

  Dangerous, but warranted, given the occasion. I gave her a jaunty, what-the-hell shrug and took the Cuba Libra she offered me, “since you already got started on that brown, bubbly, Atlanta stuff.” Having a rather difficult time with the cast, I managed to pick up my plate with about a quarter of the wonderful omelette left on it and one precious sausage patty—I could have ordered more, but that way, as someone said, lay fatness—and moved with her to a great big, comfortable booth across the room under the wall-sized picture of a naked lady traditional to better saloons everywhere and everywhen. The jukebox in the back finished “The Entertainer” and began my favorite, “Ragtime Dance.”

  Somebody in the big room—the tobacco totalitarians would have gasped in horror back where I came from—had lit up a pipe. Cherry Blend, I think. I could just barely smell it, but the aroma went perfectly with my sausage and omelette.

  “Well, there ain’t nothin’, however attractive,” Lucy observed, nodding toward the bald guy at the bar as she settled in behind her drink—a tequila sunrise almost as big as she was—and a big sopapilla overflowing with green chili and chorizo, “that’s entirely without its blemishes, is there?”

  “I’m extremely sorry you feel that way about me,” I
complained melodramatically around a mouthful of egg and apple. I’ll confess here and now that I deeply envied her the chorizo. Deeply. It’s unspeakably delicious but I’m deathly allergic to the stuff. One bite equals about two days running to the toilet spewing at one end or the other or both. I took a big swig of rum and Coke, instead. “I always liked you well enough, I guess.”

  Waiting for her reaction, I looked up at the naked lady picture, pretending to examine it minutely. It was new to the place, very nice to look at, and about twenty feet long. I suddenly realized that it was Bettie Page. In my world, she was a 1950s pinup model with an enormous cult following, mostly on the Internet, who’d failed to make it in Hollywood because she’d dared to bring her personal morality with her from Tennessee. In this world—where demanding a session on the casting-couch could get a producer’s or director’s cojones shot off for his trouble—she was every bit as big a movie star as Gable or Lombard, and her soft southern accent, like everything else about her, was completely genuine.

  Lucy shook her head and grinned. “You’ll clown at your funeral, Winnie! You know perfectly well I was talkin’ about little Dougie and his friends. If I hadn’t seen too much of’em already this mornin’, I’d ask’em who they thought was gonna enforce that idiot edict of theirs, the governments they jumped headlong through the broach t’get away from?”

  I laughed, but I didn’t mean it cruelly. Well, not very cruelly, anyway. The sad, simple truth was that I’d suffered many of the same cultural shocks, gone through many of the same personal adjustments that these poor saps still had ahead of them. For me at least, it was always the little things that had been the hardest. The window glass that grew back by itself. The number and shape of the holes in the electrical outlets. No driver’s licenses in anybody’s billfolds. No license plates on their cars. No wheels on their cars, either, as far as that goes, but that’s a whole different story. It hadn’t been fun, but it had sure been worth it. I said as much to Lucy.