The American Zone

by L. Neil Smith

  And, at least until now, it was a hell of a lot better enforced.

  7: LAWYERS, GUNS, AND MONEY

  The fact that nobody asks you to sing is not an indication that you should sing louder. This appears obvious until it’s applied to matters like mass transportation. In the United States there are virtually no private mass transit companies and thousands of public ones. This does not represent the failure of the market to provide a needed service, it represents the failure of an unneeded service to go away!

  —Memoirs of Lucille G. Kropotkin

  North American Confederates are as peculiar about knives as they are about everything else. In the branch of history I grew up in, when Colonel-by-courtesy James Bowie and his smarter brother Rezin were dreaming up the fabled hand-wide, foot-long sharp-edged slab of steel—meteoric nickel-iron in the Hollywood version of the legend—that, in my homeworld, bears their family name, defensive handguns were single-shot contraptions, cumbersome, finicky, loaded with loose powder and lead balls at the muzzle, and often still ignited by a chunk of flint. A couple of generations later, Buffalo Bill Cody, a little behind the times in his choice of social cutlery, is reputed to have dragged around a Bowie knife with a sixteen-inch blade. That’s a scant two inches shorter than a Roman legionnaire’s regulation-issue gladius.

  However in general, as pistols began to mutate into revolvers, increasingly more powerful and reliable, the knives that gentlemen had been carrying around for personal defense started to atrophy, inch by inch, until (except for the occasional street-punk’s switchblade or spouse-perforating kitchen knife), in my time as a cop in the U.S.—the seventies and eighties—they’d vanished altogether.

  In the Confederacy, on the other hand, knives seem to have grown right along with the increasing power of handguns, as if everybody wanted a toadsticker that was somehow worthy of his primary weapon. A belligerent fashion statement, if you see what I mean.

  In Greater LaPorte, you hardly ever see a pistol belt without a dirk or dagger of some kind hanging from the off-side. One of the first individuals I encountered when I arrived, entirely by accident, believe me, was a gray-haired old gent trailing a huge cavalry saber. To make matters even more confusing, he’d been a chimpanzee.

  All this was on my mind as we drove to the place Will had told me about, Daggett’s Wonderful World of Sharp Pointy Things, on North Snowflake, deep in the Zone. It was the only clean place on the block. I don’t know what it is about the Zone that makes it seem … well, grimy. Objectively, the several dozen square blocks where American immigrants have decided to light—entirely on their own; no Confederate has the inclination or power to make them—are every bit as well-repaired and freshly scrubbed as anyplace else in LaPorte. Maybe attitude can permeate a place as much as dirt and grime.

  Or maybe it was just me.

  Lucy and I were actually on our way, at her insistence, to take a look at what was left at the site of that hypersonic train wreck, south of town. I’d already tried telling her, several times, that she couldn’t hire me, as attractive as a little extra cash might be. I had another commission I’d already accepted payment to deal with. But each time I tried to explain myself, she didn’t hear it. The whole thing was all very Lucy. Okay, I figured the trip out to the wreck that she wanted to make anyway might be just the thing to convince her that top men were already hard at work on the case.

  Top. Men.

  I’d also done a little insisting of my own, hence a brief detour to take a gander at some grownup toys. Thomas Daggett (the name seemed familiar, somehow) seemed to be another recent immigrant from some variation of the U.S. But unlike the delegation that had sent itself to the Hanging Judge, protesting the availability of objects and activities they considered naughty, he seemed happy to be here, a sentiment I could well appreciate. Daggett was a short, broad, tough-looking guy, sort of a low wall of muscle with a heavy black beard, a nose like the beak of a raptor, and shrewd, dangerous eyes. His hands reminded me of the Wizard’s, although where Max resembled an oversized hobbit, this worthy looked to me like one of Tolkien’s mining dwarves. Belying his appearance, his voice was a quick and lively tenor. I had a hard time placing his accent, which seemed to have bits of New York and Chicago in it, maybe even Boston. I learned later that he spoke fluent Korean.

  “I was an attorney back in Beaverton, Oregon,” he said. I perused the glass cases and wall displays in his shop (trying to picture him in a suit and tie—Beaverton: I’d often wondered why Hustler hadn’t made its headquarters there). I’d admitted I’d never seen so many cutting tools and edged weapons in one location in my life. Lucy agreed. “Y’know, Tommy-John, from sheer weight of metal, this place must generate a magnetic anomaly identifiable from orbit!”

  Daggett beamed at her words and said nothing. He and Lucy had greeted each other like old friends. That happens all the time with her. I guess in 145 years you get to know a lot of people.

  As we inspected what he had, I’d figured it couldn’t do any harm to ask him about Gone with the Wind—he was from another Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh—type world—and he’d ended up telling me something about himself. “I got sick and tired of trying to defend my clients with both hands tied behind my back. The cops and the prosecution were always wailing about ‘revolving door justice,’ but I wasn’t allowed any of the basic necessities—like appealing to the Bill of Rights.”

  “What?” It was the first time I’d ever seen Lucy shocked.

  Daggett put a solemn hand to his heart and nodded. “Absolutely true, Lucy. The Bill of Rights is only for’higher intelligences’ in the appeals courts to deliberate—well after the defendant’s been properly terrified, exhausted, and financially destroyed. And the result? Well, if you shot somebody legitimately, in defense of your own life, it still cost you everything you had—your life savings, your house, your car, the braces on your children’s teeth—just to get through the legal meatgrinder.”

  I added, “And you’d damned well better not get caught shooting somebody in defense of your property.”

  “Damn straight,” the ex-lawyer declared. Proudhon rules the day in America’s courts, where property—private property—is theft.”

  Here, except for duelling, shootings in defense of property were the commonest kind—and happened maybe twice a decade, because, well, who’d want to risk it? Lucy shook her head and sighed. “I see now, why Lan and the Wizard named their saloon the way they did.”

  I laughed.

  “Hard as it may be to believe,” Daggett wasn’t through, “I wasn’t even allowed to tell the jury of their thousand-year-old right and duty to reject an unjust, unconstitutional, or just plain stupid law. That was grounds for a mistrial—and maybe a little downtime in the pokey for the defense attorney. So if the law itself was illegal, and my client had broken it simply by exercising his rights, what could I do?”

  “Emigrate!” Lucy replied.

  I hadn’t told him that I’d been one of those cops, Stateside. “It always seemed to me,” I remarked, “that ‘revolving door justice’ was reserved for genuine criminal scumbags who knew how to work the wheels and levers, while members of the productive class, accidentally caught up in the gears of the machine—responsible individuals who’d never done anything illegal in their lives—”

  “They were the ones got chewed up and spat out by the system?” Lucy finished. “If I were the religious type—which I’m not, thank God—I’d be feeling mighty grateful I was born here an’ not there!”

  “Well it wasn’t as bad as I make it sound,” Daggett answered. “It was worse. Most of the time the jury had been handpicked by the judge and his minions to favor the prosecution and police, through a process of interrogation called ‘voir dire’—which a newspaper columnist friend of mine says is French for ‘jury tampering.’”

  That was good for a laugh until I realized we could be heading for a system just like that if the Franklinites got their way. I changed the subject. “A friend of mine said you im
port knives made by a guy named Chris Reeve. I’d like to see some, if you don’t mind.”

  “This case here,” Daggett said. “We get them in from half a dozen timelines; there’re a lot of model variations—Bowies, bolos, spearpoints, tantos, even a bat’leth. Anything specific in mind?

  “My friend had something called a Project I.”

  “That’d be Captain Sanders, of what we call the ‘sharpened prybar’ school. The Project I’s a big, heavy, thick knife, all right.”

  “What’s the little one at the back?” I pointed to a smaller knife. I don’t know what it was about it that caught my eye, some combination of line and form and size—and in this case a curved, gleaming edge—not to mention a sexy voice you hear sometimes, whispering seductively, “I belong to you, Win. I’m your knife. Take me home.” That’s more or less how I’d acquired my .41 Magnum.

  “The Chris Reeve Sable IV.” Daggett bent down, reached into the case, and pulled it out, together with a heavy black leather scabbard. “Extra careful, Lieutenant Bear.” He indicated the cast on my left arm. “You look accident-prone to me, and this thing is literally as sharp as a razor. Reeve knives are all that way.”

  I frowned, wondering how he knew my name. “You may not know it, Lieutenant, but you’re famous in the Zone. A legend. The first individual to step through the broach, and the hero who saved the Confederacy from the Hamiltonians. Somehow it always reminds me of that famous painting of Daniel Boone crossing the mountains into Kentucky—or was it Moses into the Promised Land?”

  “It was just some poor schmuck in a pasture,” I lied, “trying not to walk in the cow patties. Anyway, I didn’t step through the broach, Daggett, not intentionally. I was blasted through and fetched up on my head and parts south in that park over by Confederation Boulevard.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “but it sounds better the other way—call it artistic license.” He handed me the knife.

  Papers in the box said, “Chris Reeve Knives, 11624 W. President Drive, #B, Boise, ID 83713, United States of America.” Sure enough, one was a warning about how sharp the five and a half-inch single-edged blade was. It wasn’t kidding. The trademark hollow handle was made from the same billet of steel as the blade, knurled so well you could almost use it for a file, topped with a threaded aluminum cap sealed with an O-ring. The whole length of skillfully worked metal was covered in a dark matte gray finish. I didn’t know what I’d keep in that little compartment, most likely just some extra atmosphere, but it was nifty knowing it was there.

  In shape, it was like a Finnish puukko knife, but what I liked best about the Sable IV was its size. Unlike my Rezin, it was a tool a man could live with every day. If he had to, he could fight with it, sure, but he was more likely to cut up vegetables and stir-fry meat, do camp chores, maybe whittle a toy for a kid. And more likely to need to, as well. That damned thing felt better in my hand than any knife I’d ever owned. And there was that sexy, seductive voice whispering, “I belong to you, Win. I’m your knife, take me home.” Sighing because, even in the Confederacy there are so many toys and so little money, I reached deep into my pocket—no easy matter with my gimpy wing—in search of gold and silver coins.

  “Whatcha got, Lieutenant, moths?” Daggett pointed at my left side.

  “What are you talking ab—oh!” There it was, between my plastic-covered elbow and my left love handle, a small, round hole, about a quarter of an inch in diameter. That didn’t bother me so much, except there was another hole just like it, where the fabric fell in a natural fold. And another in the back of the garment. When I stood up straight the holes all lined up.

  The knife merchant clucked. “Looks like somebody doesn’t like you, Lieutenant.”

  “Yeah,” Lucy agreed, “Somebody who can’t shoot worth sour owlshit.”

  Vaguely, I recalled a recent tugging at my poncho—it would have to have been a small-caliber weapon wearing a noise-suppressor, something almost unheard of in the Confederacy—although it took me a moment to place it. Had I almost been assassinated on the street by a little old lady collecting for the Spaceman’s Fund?

  Suddenly the itching in my cast got a whole lot worse. I’d been shot at before, but it wasn’t something you ever got used to. Or I ever got used to, anyway. I left the cardboard box, plastic peanuts, and paper with Daggett, and fastened my new knife’s scabbard onto my pistol belt.

  “Come on, Lucy, let’s go see a train wreck.”

  “YAAAHOOOO!” THAT WAS Lucy hollering, but she was hollering for both of us. My stomach gave me a sort of swooping sensation as the Neova tilted on its side and screamed its way around one of the few curves between LaPorte and what I thought of as the New Mexico border. We’d just emerged from a short tunnel bored under the Huerfano River, and it felt like being shot from a cannon.

  Good thing I’m a passable one-hand driver.

  Without a doubt, what I love best about the Confederacy, aside from my darling Clarissa and the general atmosphere of untrammeled liberty (about to become trammeled if we didn’t do something to stop it) is the highway speed: as fast as you can go with the pedal mashed all the way to the firewall, roughly 350 miles an hour. There’s a couple of production hovercars that’ll do twice that, just shy of Mach 1, but I wouldn’t trust myself behind the wheel, or you, either, as far as that goes.

  Ironically, Greenway 200, down which we traveled, was a pair of big, wide, grass-covered ditches, the mound between them containing the earth-covered, normally vacuum-filled tube that, farther along down the track, had been sabotaged somehow. I also love the weather in this part of the world—almost no matter what universe you happen to be in. (There are alternative continua where the weather everywhere has been changed permanently, for the worse, usually by governments or terrorists—or government terrorists—altering the course of medium-sized asteroids in order to overstate a political point. That same kind of thinking cracked the Moon in one universe I know of.) Where we were, roaring down the Greenway at a speed that would have made Ralph Nader pee his pants, the sun was shining hot and bright, and the sky overhead was so blue that the sheer pleasure of looking at it hurt your eyes. I wasn’t thinking about almost being killed more than every five minutes or so.

  At the same time, only a few miles east of the Greenway, a huge and angry-looking thunderstorm was building itself up eight or nine miles in the sky. Colors in the clouds ranged from gray to purple to black—lightning flashed occasionally from layer to layer and toward the ground—and a shadow lay across the land beneath it. (Actually, I’m told that lightning travels from the ground into the clouds, but that isn’t what it looks like to me.)

  Before long, we began to see the first of several dirty-looking extrusions thrust down from the clouds overhead. Out on the prairie somewhere, farm wives were gathering up their chickens and shooing their kids into the root cellar. One particular funnel suddenly touched the ground and generated an enormous debris cloud at its base. I’d seen tornadoes closer than this, but not a whole lot closer. Then, without warning, the funnel and the cloud above it were lit from overhead by the most intense red light I’ve ever seen, pulsing about sixty beats a minute. I assumed that it was some kind of warning.

  About then, the red light shut off, and a beam stabbed down from the heavens. I don’t believe there’s a word for the color of that beam. The funnel began to shrivel and sucked itself up into the cloud. The cloud itself began to shrink, spilling itself onto the land it had begun to demolish.

  The storm was over, the eastern sky cleared, and we roared on.

  “Tornado abatement!” Lucy explained at the top of her lungs. When she discovered that it wasn’t necessary to yell, she quieted down. “Done from close Earth orbit, probably paid for by the farmers’ insurance companies.”

  I nodded, but kept my eyes on the road. “I could see that and figure it out. But how the hell is it done, by some kind of laser?” Lucy was an engineer and Knew Things.

  “Nope. Look inside your freezer when you get home.”


  “Oh, yeah.” Confederate refrigeration systems work on a completely different principle than refrigeration does back home. Paratronics is the name they give it, and like the broach, it’s based on subatomic physics of some kind, but it still seems like magic to this savage. It’s sort of the reverse of a microwave oven. Stick your beer in the fridge, and it’s cold in thirty or forty seconds. I’d gotten my big Bowie knife off the body of a burglar who’d tried hiding in a walk-in paratronic freezer for maybe fifteen minutes. His name was Tricky Dick Milhouse, but it should have been Clarence Birdseye.

  With electronic guidance from beneath the road itself, and no more weather control to entertain us, we arrived at the wreckage site, about two-hundred miles south of LaPorte (just the other side of the highway from what would have been Walsenburg in the world I came from), in less than thirty-five minutes. In this world, it was called Gonzales.

  Bumbling up out of Greenway 200 and onto the prairie flat, the Neova settled to a dusty stop just outside a fluorescent orange tape-line that flashed over and over and over:

  DANGER—EMERGENCY WORKERS ONLY

  PLEASE STAY OUTSIDE PERIMETER

  GREATER LAPORTE MILITIA

  As I raised the bright red gullwing door to step out and disobey the warning, every bit of loose paper in the car took wing noisily like a prairie hen and disappeared into the hot desert wind. I was overtaken by the strangest, strongest feeling I’d been here before. It was more than mere déjà vu; I’d been in this place, and more than once. Then I realized what it was. In many ways, this disaster site was like another I knew well, the famous Barringer Crater, roughly twenty miles west of what I grew up calling Winslow, in northern Arizona.