The American Zone

by L. Neil Smith

  Lucy had a funny, sick expression on her face and I knew exactly how that expression felt from the inside. Was the golden dream we all shared, of peace, freedom, and prosperity, coming to an end? What Olongo was saying certainly didn’t sound like the North American Confederacy any of us knew. But I didn’t say anything. What the hell was there to say?

  “Naturally, those immigrants who are aware of the situation are growing increasingly angry and perturbed,” Olongo continued. “But there is good news … of a sort. I believe I have found at least a stop-gap solution.”

  “Well, that’s … that’s something, anyway,” Lucy muttered, more to herself than to any of us. I hated this. This woman, my second closest friend, had fought for freedom and the Confederacy in more than one war. She’d been a pilot in the famous Thousand Airship Flight against the Kaiser. She’d stood against the Czar in Antarctica. Now she was beginning to look her age—a century and a half—and it wasn’t a pretty sight.

  The president replied, “Indeed. Before things get any worse, I have endeavored to persuade a few of the more financially successful among their number to seek an expatriate like them, a former police officer from one of the United Stateses, to get to the bottom of this mess if he can.”

  I threw my hands up. “Olongo, I’m flattered as hell, believe me I am. But damnit, I already have a case! That’s what I’ve been trying to tell—!”

  “My sincerest apologies, old bean,” said Olongo. So he’d been paying attention, after all. “I was referring to Captain Sanders, here. I understand that his public safety experience in his native continuum parallels yours remarkably. His militia credentials and contacts should make the job a trifle easier for him than it might have been for you—and, as you say, you already have a case. Please give my warmest regards to Clark and Carole, will you?”

  Will, that sonofabitch, superciliated at me, gazed complacently at his fingernails, and buffed them on his shirt.

  Meanwhile, I felt myself blush, hot and deep. “Well, pardon me all to hell while I go find a hole to fall into. There oughta be a prairie dog burrow around here somewhere—or how about that big crater over there?”

  LUCY AND I had a long talk on the ride back to LaPorte. Mostly, I talked, about what I’d found for myself, here in the Confederacy, and what I felt I stood to lose. “It’s kind of funny,” I observed to my oldest Confederate friend (in a couple of meanings of the phrase). “It hasn’t been a free ride, by any means. There are plenty of hazards associated with untrammeled individual liberty. For example, those who won’t work are perfectly welcome to starve.”

  Out of the corner of one eye, I could see Lucy nodding, so I went on. “But I’ve noticed that, despite a complete lack of any kind of government welfare system, starving is a pretty difficult thing to do here. This society is just too wealthy and casually generous. Look at the way that you and Ed took care of me when I first arrived.”

  “An’ Clarissa,” she insisted.

  “How could I ever forget? Be that as it may, the fundamental human right to fail is as scrupulously defended in the North American Confederacy as any other right.”

  “Make that a basic sapient right,” Lucy corrected me again. She did a lot of that. “Gorillas an’ chimpanzees an’ dolphins an’ Orcas gotta right to fail, too, same as you and me.”

  It was interesting to me the way that recent American immigrants who’d thought themselves bias-free regarding human beings of other nations, religions, or races, were now struggling with prejudices they hadn’t known they harbored, against creatures they’d perceived all their lives as inferior animals. It seemed that scientific doodling with intelligence and communication—a century earlier here than another place I knew of—had resulted in the education (with a little help from genetics and electronics) of certain simians and cetaceans: chimps, gorillas, gibbons, orangutans, several kinds of dolphins, and killer whales, who were now respected members of society taking full part in its everyday life. As I’d told the Wizard, the paratronic machinery that brought him and me and so many others here in the first place was invented by a physicist, Ooloorie Eckickeck P’wheet, a genuine Tursiops truncatus, or bottle-nosed dolphin. A lot of newcomers—especially, it seemed to me, the most fervent former advocates of “animal rights”—aren’t up to seeing all these furry and finny folk as people. But I didn’t want to change the subject. We’d been discussing the responsibilities that come with full ownership of your life.

  “Meanwhile,” I continued, “any unemployment, or health, or—I don’t know—liability insurance people want, they have to decide on and purchase for themselves. No Social Security or Medicare. Without a legislature to protect them from their own stupidity or negligence, they’re fully liable for any harm they may bring to anybody else’s life, liberty, or property. And you know the thing that surprised me most? It’s that payment may be demanded in gold—or on the field of honor.”

  Lucy chuckled. “Well there certainly aren’t any anti-duellin’ laws t’prohibit it.”

  “Tell me about it.” I’d fought a duel myself, in my first weeks in the Confederacy. To this day, I had mixed feelings about the practice. But in this culture, the only right that nonparticipants have in such affairs is … well, not to participate. You aren’t permitted to make laws about something that other people do among themselves. Sensible. If you don’t play the game, you don’t make the rules.

  “No need to,” Lucy observed. “You know from your own experience that the North American Confederacy is the first culture in history—and the only one in any universe that we know of—run of the adults, by the adults, and for the adults.”

  “That we know of, Mr. Lincoln. And some people might give you an argument about duelling being an adult occupation.”

  She snorted. “The same ones that’d have you believe that ‘honor’ is only a word—an outdated one, at that. Winnie, there’s always a gap between what justice demands and what the law or custom provides. Speakin’ statistically, duelling fills exactly fifty percent of that gap (though I could make an argument that the person in the right is likelier to be a better shot). Anyway, that’s more’n you can claim for any other system.”

  Damn it, there I’d gone and changed the subject! Having fought a duel, I could attest to what she said. It sure hadn’t been much fun at the time, but duelling did seem to make for a better, cleaner world in the long run.

  And that’s a good thing, because the North American Confederacy is not a culture inhabited exclusively by saints, believe me. There’s no lobby here at all for anything resembling patriotism, altruism, or civic virtue. What most former United Statesians fail to comprehend when they’re first informed of it, is that what makes the place tick isn’t the kindliness, decency, or rationality Olongo had referred to (although I like to think he’s right about all of that), or even the love of liberty for its own sake—leave that to us huddled masses—but pure, unvarnished greed.

  Every Confederate child is taught at his mother’s knee to avoid being taken advantage of, just as he’s taught to check the chamber of his pistol or count his change or (sometimes the hard and final way, at the hands of his intended victim) that crime can be as dangerous to any would-be practitioner as juggling bottles of warm nitroglycerin. The time-honored expression, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch,” is more than just a slogan here, it’s a statement of natural law, and a courteous warning.

  Immigrants from a hundred thousand Americas, brought up foolishly dependent on the false comfort of a government’s “protection,” must learn all these lessons and more, rather late in life. Some of them accomplish it more readily than others. Without zoning laws, building codes, trade commissions, or professional licensure, some fall victim to loan sharks, snake-oil salesmen, and crooks of every sort except the political variety—most of whom are bluebacks like themselves, preying on their own kind. Many newcomers suffered from the same disorienting experiences often reported in the late-twentieth century of my world by Communist refugees
to the relatively better-off United States. Unequipped to bear the noise, the color, and the velocity of Confederate life anymore—or simply exhausted by its limitless array of personal choices and opportunities—they finally decided they wanted to go home. Failing that, they tended to pile up like dirty snowdrifts in places like the American Zone and whimper for somebody to pass laws that would turn the Confederacy into the same kind of stagnant cesspool they escaped from.

  “Always it’s the kids,” I rattled on at Lucy, who was bearing it with commendable stoicism, “who serve as an excuse to demand special rules—drug laws, tobacco and alcohol prohibition, censorship, gun control—(so far, thank Gallatin, without success) which would restrict the individual pursuit of happiness and destroy everything that made the Confederacy the haven of liberty they escaped to so gratefully, once upon a time.

  Lucy nodded. “On the other hand, their kids tend t‘learn pretty quick that Confederate children have a customary right to divorce their parents, and that opens up a whole’nother can of worms!”

  We laughed together—Bamm!—until a tremendous blast right behind us lifted the rear of my little red Neova, flipping it end over end over end until it crashed upside-down on the sloped embankment of the Greenway, leaving Lucy and me to hang in our four-points, the smell of smoke filling the tiny passenger compartment. Strangely enough, the last thing I thought of before I lost consciousness was that I’d forgotten to tell Will and Olongo about the hole in my cloak.

  9: CUTS LIKE A KNIFE

  Choose your allies carefully: it’s highly unlikely that you’ll ever be held morally, legally, or historically accountable for the actions of your enemies.

  —Memoirs of Lucille G. Kropotkin

  There’s a problem with gullwing doors that I’d never thought about before: It’s kind of hard to get them open when the car’s lying on them, upside-down.

  Maybe I never fully lost consciousness. I remembered counting at least four times that the little Neova had flipped ass over teakettle before it finally shuddered to a stop, but I’d missed something else, because we were now facing backward, the way we’d come. Whoever did the lawnwork on Greenway 200 was gonna be really annoyed with us. We’d bounced eight times, gouging out huge, ugly divots, then slid a long way, maybe a hundred yards, digging a long, curved furrow upward, exposing the underlying steel and concrete at the bottom of the ditch, onto the east-side berm.

  I shouted, “Lucy!”

  She hung next to me in her seat belt, unconscious beyond any doubt, a little blood trickling from her open mouth. It could have been from a serious internal injury, a split lip, or a broken tooth. For that matter, she might have bitten her tongue. The smoke inside was getting thicker by the second. Briefly, I wondered where it could be coming from. My little supercharged Neova ran on some of the less volatile petroleum fractions—what would probably be sold as jet fuel back in the States. At least we weren’t going to wind up getting fricasseed in gasoline. Carefully, I braced myself against the ceiling with my good arm—the other was still useless in its sling, of course—punched the seat belt release at the center of my chest, and managed a controlled fall onto my head. The passenger compartment seemed even tinier than usual. Once I’d managed to right myself awkwardly, I found that I was sitting in extreme discomfort on a collection of knobs and buttons sticking out of what had been the overhead console. Next time, I thought, a sunroof.

  Momentarily, I considered unlimbering the Browning and shooting a hole through the transparent door, just to get an escape route started. But then I thought better of it. For all I knew, the tough high-tech plastic would bounce my puny little .375 slug all over inside the cab, and Lucy and I would both end up looking like Swiss cheese smothered in raspberry jam. But there wasn’t much time left to think. I was beginning to cough from all the smoke in the cabin, and so was Lucy.

  “Win?” she managed to croak between bouts of coughing.

  “Right here, Lucy,” I told her, “and just about to get us out—I hope.”

  She replied, “Be sure an’ simmer the tricycle doors.”

  “Right, Lucy,” I replied. Now she was delirious. What else was I going to say?

  With a surprising amount of difficulty, I reached around my ample rotundity and retrieved my Chris Reeve Sable IV from its heavy leather scabbard. It was one of those deep, molded, Scandinavian deals that cover half the handle and don’t require a strap. Without realizing it, somewhere in the middle of the process, I worked my left arm out of its sling. It didn’t seem to hurt. If I was injuring it further, I couldn’t feel it, and it was nothing compared to the two of us dying of smoke inhalation.

  The floor of the Neova was some sort of composite, a bit like fiberglass bonded to a sheet of stabilized magnesium-titanium—an alloy that could only be manufactured in the weightlessness of space, that made the lighter of the two metals stronger and less prone to going up like a box of kitchen matches at the slightest provocation. I reached up and pulled two levers that released my seat. Before it fell, I pushed it backward, into the comic-relief rear passenger compartment, pulled the mat away, and pushed the point of the knife into the floor.

  Or tried to, anyway. The knife was sharp and strong, and it penetrated maybe a full thirty-second of an inch. This was going to take a long, long time. Then I got a fairly bright idea.

  “Lucy!”

  “If the pertwonkies call,” she advised, “remermelize’em!”

  “Lucy,” I insisted, “let me have your gun!”

  “Over my dead—oh … okay, Winnie.” She was coughing very badly now. So was I. But the demand to surrender her beloved elephant pistol was like smelling salts, and her mind seemed to be working once again. I still wondered what was burning. “Whatcha gonna do with it, put us outa our misery?”

  It was an idea. “No, I’m gonna get us out of this fucking car! I took the mighty Gabbet-Fairfax in both hands, pointed it upward at the floor, said good-bye to my hearing and wrist tendons, shut my eyes as tightly as I could, and hauled back on the trigger.

  BRRRRAAAMMM!

  “Clonk!” went the empty case against the windshield. We could have cleaned the damned thing out and used it as a shotglass. The noise of the weapon’s discharge had been several times worse than the explosion that had wrecked the car. It not only hurt my ears, it hurt my eyes, my teeth, my testicles, the top of my head, and every axon and dendrite in my nervous system. Lucy stirred and groaned, regaining even more of her consciousness. Oddly, her .50 caliber hip-cannon hadn’t hurt my hands.

  The big fat slug had expanded even farther on impact, opening a three-quarter-inch hole in the belly of the Neova, exactly as I’d hoped it would. I imagined there was smoke billowing out of that hole, and I hoped that somebody would notice it. Greenway 200, for all that it looks like nothing more than a couple of big ditches, is actually a highly sophisticated transport system. Its powerful electronic brain should have noticed by now that something formerly zooming down the line at 350 miles an hour was suddenly doing zero. In fact it should be warning all the drivers as far south as Raton that there was an obstruction on the right side of the northbound lane.

  Us. Dead us, if I didn’t do something about it, soon.

  For all of its strength, the floor was less than an eighth of an inch thick. As I’d planned, I pushed the Chris Reeve knife into the bullet hole until it stopped, and began to rock it, back and forth. Now the hole was an inch wide, from one side of the circle to the end of the slit I’d cut. Now it was two inches wide, now three, now four, and I was beginning to lose leverage. Still, the blade was hard and remained sharp, despite the nasty stuff it was cutting through. Hell on the finish, though. Every now and again I shoved it in to the hilt (to avoid breaking it off) and rocked the knife from side to side to widen the cut as well as lengthen it. The big knurled handle helped a lot (most knives don’t have handles nearly big enough, in my experience) as did the little friction serrations at the rear of the blade where my thumb was pushing.

  Pretty
soon I was using one of Lucy’s shoes—the first thing that came to hand—as a combination hammer and fulcrum to drive the Sable IV farther along the line of the cut. This was mistreatment many another knife might not have survived. Smoke was billowing out of the elongated bullet hole for sure now, and the air inside the car was getting a little clearer. Even better, fresh air was coming in and I began to feel healthier. When I was about eighteen inches along, I fired another shot, made a right-angle turn, and cut a foot and a half in another direction, completing two sides of a square I hoped would be big enough to escape through.

  By the time I started the third side, Lucy was wide enough awake to start offering “helpful” suggestions about what I was trying to do. Fortunately, completely deafened by the roar of her gigantic and powerful pistol—three shots in a closed space the size of your average closet, I couldn’t hear her. At least that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

  I didn’t bother cutting the fourth side, but lay on my back and kicked at the trapdoor I’d made until it bent outward. Then Lucy hit her belt release, I gave her back her gun and put my knife away, and we rearranged ourselves awkwardly inside the tiny cabin.

  I was handing her out through the makeshift hatch I’d whittled, onto the underside of the Neova, when the ambulance arrived. Poor little upside-down Neova, cares and woes you’ve got’em, I misquoted sadly to myself, because, little upside-down Neova, your top is on your bottom. I’d never peeked under the skirt of a hovercraft before—this one was a modern, ducted-fan model, rather than the older kind with propellors that Lucy drove—and under other circumstances it might have been interesting. The EMTs lifted Lucy clear of the wreckage and CAT-scanned her on the spot in the back of their van. Naturally, they both knew her from way back. Everybody does. I thought I recognized Francis, the chimpanzee Healer, from a weekend medical convention (and second honeymoon) I’d attended some time ago with Clarissa. His paramedic aide was a tough-looking, grizzled gorilla named Snodderly who had somehow managed to grow himself a ponytail (better living through recombinant genetics?). He was a stranger to me, but a welcome one.