The American Zone

by L. Neil Smith

  The wind was roaring across the flat just like it does in that part of Arizona, splashing down into the gigantic bowl. (Barringer’s an airplane trap—they fly in but they don’t fly out—you can see pieces of wreckage if you know what you’re looking for.) The only thing missing was the scary observation platform hanging out over the hole. I’d been to Barringer many times. It was sort of a shrine to me, the destination of half a dozen boyhood vacations with my mom, and later on, my friends, a place where a part of the sky had touched the Earth—and scared the living crap out of a million jackrabbits and the local paleo-Folsom-types.

  Now here I was again, give or take a few hundred miles and fifty thousand years, but where the Arizona crater was weathered and rounded, this one was still steaming in the afternoon sunlight and sharp around the edges. There would be technical differences, of course, between a crater made by a Volkswagen-sized meteorite and one made when a big thing going eighteen thousand miles an hour met a smaller thing—it could have been a pea or a marble—that was, for all intents and purposes, motionless, immovable. I didn’t know enough to see any difference.

  Whatever the deadly instrument was, it could have been as small as a BB, introduced somehow into the vacuum-filled, mirror-polished tube that stretches from somewhere around Baffin Island, via LaPorte, through Mexico City, and goes on from there, practically to the South Pole. It would have made an entry hole the size of a BB, and an exit hole … well, we were looking at it, a mile in diameter and three or four hundred feet deep. The Confederate equivalent of Winslow—Haggard, I believe the town is called here, maybe after an English adventure novelist who was popular at the time the town was settled (I hadn’t read him until I was grown, somehow having gotten the notion, as a kid, that his most famous work was called King Solomon’s Mimes) and these days the site of a neat little spaceport—would have to look to its laurels now. This act of sabotage had killed at least one thousand people, or so the’Com had told us, horrible to contemplate the day afterward, but morbidly interesting given the perspective of distance or history—which was the only way you could look at it and stay sane. First, we had to climb a hundred-foot ridge that the explosion had thrown up all around ground zero. Fortunately, the militia had erected temporary scaffolding, flimsy-looking but indestructable, that took us and the Neova halfway around the site to the top of the crater. The first faces Lucy and I saw within the tapeline were the grime-covered, sweat-streaked features of my across-the-street neighbor Will Sanders, who would be supervising the investigation here, and Olongo Featherstone-Haugh (say “Fanshaw”), President of the North American Confederacy and an eight hundred-pound lowland gorilla. He and Will sat side by side in the bucket of a fusion-powered front-end loader, having some lunch out of brown plastic bags and thermos bottles.

  “Yo, Will!” I shouted cheerfully as we approached the pair. I thought Olongo looked particularly jaunty in his great ape-sized yellow hardhat. Like everybody else in the known galaxy, he greeted Lucy warmly. “What’s that you’re eating?” My mind seemed to be on food today. I wondered why.

  “Peanut butter and chutney sandwich.” Will replied. He held it up. “Hiya, Lucy! Either of you want a bite?”

  “Geez.” My stomach gave a lurch, not at all like the one I’d felt making that three-hundred-mile-per-hour turn. It could have been a reaction to being shot at setting in, but it was probably the chutney. “No, thanks. What ever gave you the idea for a sandwich like that, anyway?”

  “The girls got me started,” he grinned, taking a gulp from his vacuum bottle. I didn’t even want to ask about that. “Fran and Mary-Beth. About the only craving they’ve experienced—that and hot-and-sour soup by the gallon. Not such a bad idea, really. After all, what is Major Gray’s but mango preserves with raisins and stuff? Like I said, they thought it up, I tried it, and the rest, as they say—”

  “Is nausea.” I shook my head and waved the thought away. “Okay, y‘wanna tell us what happened here? Lucy’s trying to talk me into investigating this and whatever happened at the Old Endicott Building, of which she’s a partial owner.”

  “Was,” the president corrected. Like everybody else here, I was accustomed to having conversations with furry individuals. In fact, Olongo’s English was better than mine. He didn’t talk in the normal sense. The first apes to communicate, a century ago, had used manual sign language. Later, somebody figured out how to detect microscopic wrist and forearm movements that accompany signing, and translate them electronically into synthesized speech—without actually making the signs themselves. “The insurance companies wrote it off this afternoon as a total loss; I saw the news on the way out here. Presumably, my dear Mrs. Kropotkin, your check is in the mail.”

  His voice didn’t seem to come from his wrist. He was wearing a synthesizer on each arm—I’d seen others do that so they could carry on two different conversations—creating the illusion that his voice was coming from somewhere between them. His lips didn’t move, so, being a politician, he may have been telling the truth.

  Lucy snorted. “That’s a comfort. I’d as lief have the building, given a choice.” She turned to me. “I’m partial owner of this mess, too, Winnie. About point two-five percent, as I recall. Boys, what’re we gonna do? Somebody’s tryin’ hard to put me outa business!”

  8: ALONG GAME THE F.F.V

  Ever notice how the folks who claim to believe in animal rights generally don’t believe in human rights?

  —Memoirs of Lucille G. Kropotkin

  I tried to take a moment and look over the crime-scene as I had so many others during my career as a homicide detective in the States. Apparently Lucy was looking me over at the same time.

  “What’s the matter, Winnie?” she asked. “You’re appearin’ a mite green an’ peaked.”

  It wasn’t an easy thing to confess, even to her. “I gotta face it, Lucy, I’m a city boy.”

  “Denver born and bred,” she nodded, understanding intellectually if not at the emotional level. There isn’t any Denver in the North American Confederacy, just two little towns on the South Platte called St. Charles and Auraria.

  It’s a fairly common thing, but people don’t talk about it often. Some little something deep down inside me felt dangerously exposed and was suffering the yammering jim-jams. Blame the wide open spaces all around me. As it is in my world, this stretch of high plains is about as empty and deserted as anyplace could be this side of Outer Mongolia or the Moon, roofed over with a merciless, blue, blindingly cloudless sky (Mongolians fear the open sky and worship it), carpeted from horizon to horizon with dry yellow grasses, sagebrush, and a few gnarled scrub oaks or pines. Aside from the occasional twister, nobody even made a stab at weather control down here. I think that was okay with me, actually. It’s nice to think that there’s something left in the world that’s wild and out of control, even by default. But between the 110-degree heat and the forty-mile-per-hour wind, I realized it was a whole lot like standing in a convection oven. A broad pair of subtly curved wings, so high overhead they could hardly be seen—some kind of big predatory bird—screeched and circled, no doubt on the lookout for a rabbit or a prairie dog that was about to die of sunstroke or heat exhaustion. Far below the crater lip where we stood, on the breast of the dry golden sea, I heard the shockingly beautiful warble of a meadowlark.

  Down inside the crater and up onto the rim opposite where we were perched, a hundred individuals of assorted sizes, ages, sexes, and species poked around, examining the freshly ravaged ground with all kinds of instruments I wouldn’t have recognized close-up, let alone at this kind of distance. I’ve always been a hands-on kind of homicide detective; I try to leave the scientific stuff to the scientists.

  I turned to Will and asked, “So where’s the wreckage?”

  “An’ all the dead bodies?” Lucy echoed, although I believe she realized the answer at the moment she spoke, about half a heartbeat before I did.

  Will’s eyebrows went up, followed by his shoulders. He wore a LaPorte
Patriots baseball cap, a tan epauletted workshirt with faded denims, a big, unfamiliar-looking, silver-colored autopistol in a custom high-ride on his right hip, and what I guessed were Tony Lama boots. Python, I think. There didn’t seem to be anything like a Greater LaPorte Militia uniform, not so much as an armband, lapel pin, or secret decoder ring. They all just knew each other pretty well, and that he was the boss. All in all, it’s probably the best way to run an outfit like that. Very hard to infiltrate, anyway.

  “There isn’t any wreckage, Win, nor any bodies, Lucy. The best my people down there can figure, someone set a big explosive charge about where the center of this hole is—they probably tamped it by leaving a car parked on top if it—and left it to be set off, most likely by a seismic sensor of some kind. Mind you, that’s just our best guess. It’s how I’d do it if I had to. There isn’t any evidence, either, to speak of.”

  “Or to put it another way,” Olongo offered, having observed the unsatisfied expressions on our faces, “what evidence there may be—whatever wreckage—is all around us, in the form of microscopic particles in the soil, of shocked quartz and tiny beads of vaporized and recondensed titanium, steel, and plastic—”

  “Not t’mention the vaporized and recondensed remains of more’n a thousand souls,” Lucy finished for the president, “who probably never even knew what hit’em.” Her thumbs were thrust in her gunbelt, and she was looking more pissed off than I’d ever seen her. This was proving to be an educational experience. “Or what they hit.”

  Will nodded grimly. “So far, we haven’t found so much as an intact strand of DNA. The best we can hope for is to identify the explosive—if my forensic team is right and there was one—and compare it to what we know about the Old Endicott Building explosion.” He looked toward the president. “As I told Olongo, just as you were arriving, I mistrust coincidences in general, professionally speaking. Frankly, after more than two centuries of nothing like this ever happening in the North American Confederacy, I don’t believe that the two events can be unrelated.”

  Something whirred and chittered out on the prairie, some kind of grasshopper or locust, I supposed. Once it got dark, we’d be hearing coyotes. I’d been told that there were rattlesnakes out here, and big wooly wolf spiders the size of your hand. I agree with Eva Gabor: give me the city, with its rats, pigeons, and cockroaches, any time.

  “They’re very clearly related in at least one sense,” said Olongo after what seemed like a long while. I had to scramble, mentally, to remember what we’d been talking about. “For the first time in decades, something resembling a political party—”

  “The Franklinite Faction,” Lucy and I both spoke at once.

  “That never-to-be-sufficiently cursed Franklinite Faction.” the president corrected us. “Those vile bounders have redoubled their demands that ‘somebody do something’ about these terrible occurrences. Something … well, frankly, governmental.” He spat the word out as if he were disgusted by the taste it left in his mouth. Funny attitude for one of the Confederacy’s few working politicians.

  “Giving the Franklinites a chance to make that ‘something’ permanent,” I offered.

  “Precisely,” Olongo nodded. “Believe me, my friends, I’m as aware as you are that, in the words of the revered sage (whoever he was), ‘No man’s life, liberty, or property are safe when the legislature’s in session.’”

  “You can say that, again!” Lucy agreed. Pointedly, she drew her outsized pistol, pulled the bolt back a quarter of an inch, and inspected the thumb-sized cartridge in the chamber. Mention of certain words like “government” or “taxes” seemed to trigger that reflex in her, and in a great many other Confederates of my acquaintance, as well.

  “Dear me,” Olongo sighed. It was a strange thing to hear, coming from a giant, hideously fanged lowland gorilla, especially one wearing a yellow plastic hard hat and nothing else but a broad leather pistol belt—this morning he favored a Hunter & Jordan .500—over a red and purple kilt. “As president, I continue to resist such demands, of course. But I’m afraid that I can hold out only so long. I came out today, officially, to inspect the damage here, but the sad truth is, I needed very badly to get away from my office. Somewhere that Buckley F. Williams and his little brother can’t find me.”

  “His little brother?” Will asked. “That’s a new one on me.”

  “Bennett Williams,” I supplied, recalling my earlier conversation with Lan and the Wizard. “He runs the Franklinite Faction’s online ragazine, The Postman. Big guy, pleasant enough looking, and he’s got a really wonderful voice—until you make the mistake of paying attention to what he’s saying.”

  “Right as usual, Win. I believe they’re taking turns calling me,” Olongo complained. “They’re also sending me dozens of C-mails a day, and that creature of theirs, that Allard Wayne, has virtually set up camp in my outer office!”

  “Then throw the slimy little flatworm out, Olongo!” advised Lucy, holstering her mighty weapon with a snap of the wrist. “I’ll be glad to help you!”

  The president gave her an appreciative grin—one of the most frightening sights I’ve ever witnessed. “I would enjoy that very much, my dear Lucille, and I thank you for the thought. But they’d simply send somebody else. Besides, I deeply fear that the situation is more complicated than that.”

  I shook my head and rolled my eyes. “Great.”

  “What in Tom Paine’s name’re you talkin’ about, old friend?” Lucy asked, a suspicious look gradually beginning to appear on her face. I could tell that she was frustrated because she’d already checked her pistol chamber.

  “Two things, really,” Olongo answered after a moment’s thought. “In the vulgar parlance, would you prefer to hear the bad news or the worse news first?”

  “Oh, by all means,” I answered sarcastically, “the bad news, if we have a choice, old bean.”

  “Very well, Win.” For the first time since I’d met the gentle giant, I’d failed to get a rise out of him when I made fun of his Oxford accent; the poor guy’s sense of humor was gone completely. “The first—and I must ask you all to keep this to yourselves for the time being—”

  “Oops, here we go down the slippery slope,” Will interrupted the president, “inventing exactly what the North American Confederacy doesn’t need most—government secrecy!”

  Olongo looked severely pained but ignored him. “The first is that, apparently, this is only the start of a series of horrible acts that somebody intends to commit simply to terrify our once-crimeless civilization.”

  “Like … ?” I asked, already having a general idea what he would say.

  “Like a bomb,” Olongo replied, “set to explode at noon, day after tomorrow, that was discovered this morning aboard the fusion dirigible City of Calgary. As you know, she’s just one of dozens of vessels carrying hundreds of thousands of passengers continually from the North Pole to the South Pole and to points between. Had it gone off over the center of a city, many times that number would probably have died.”

  I knew that kind of airship well, having taken a short ride on the huge and elegant San Francisco Palace the first few weeks I’d been in the Confederacy. I’d come to love traveling by fusion dirigible—especially compared to the Bulgarian dungeon tour that air travel in my native country had become—and I wanted to get my hands on the asshole (figuratively speaking) who was trying to make the former just as unpleasant as the latter.

  But the president was going on. “There are also rumors, unconfirmed as yet, of products in stores being randomly poisoned. The worst part is that no demands of any kind are being made, monetary, political, or otherwise, so we must assume that these acts are being carried out for their own sake.”

  “And that’s only the bad news?” Lucy asked Olongo with a highly uncharacteristic gulp. It was admittedly an extremely odd moment.

  I generally tend to think of Confederates as tougher than the people I grew up among. But they’re completely unaccustomed to witnessing vio
lent crime on this or practically any other scale. I suddenly realized that they needed Americans to deal with this mess for them. They were too busy, figuratively or literally, throwing up to deal with it themselves. Lucy and Olongo were in a funk over the sheer callous brutality of it all. Will and I, on the other hand, who’d both been born into cultures jaded by such acts of barbaric criminality—usually carried out by governments—were more or less untouched by it. I wondered which reaction was healthier.

  “I’m afraid so, my dear,” Olongo told her. “The worse news is that I’m beginning to get other calls and C-mails, as well. Hundreds and thousands of them. It would appear that, despite their basically kindly nature, and a long history of judging other individuals strictly on an individual basis, many of our own folk—ordinarily rational, decent Confederates—are starting to blame all that’s happening on you newcomers.” He looked to Will and me.

  In that moment, an old, familiar knot began to tie itself, all over again, in my stomach. God damn these sons of bitches, whoever they were. I hadn’t had any trouble with my ulcer for nine mostly wonderful years. But now, here it was again, just like some long lost relative you dislike and have so far managed to avoid.

  “After all,” Lucy suggested, “these things never used t‘happen’til there was an American Zone.”

  “Right,” I replied. “I seem to recall there’s a name for that particular logical fallacy.”

  “Yeah,” said Will, “Headus upassus.”

  “Heretofore,” the president went on, “we Confederates have tended to feel nothing but compassion toward the immigrants fleeing societies less free than our own. We have welcomed them in, helped them where we could, and they have made a respectable place for themselves. But under the present stress, I fear, the fine line between compassion and contempt could begin to blur. Certain unfortunate tensions could begin to manifest themselves.”