The American Zone

by L. Neil Smith

“Not ours,” Will said. He could be the master of brevity when he wanted. Probably helped a lot, living with two wives.

  “If that’s his philosophy,” Clarissa said, looking away briefly from the road and giving me a cheap adrenaline rush, “why not just emigrate to one of the thousands of—.”

  “’Cause there ain’t no guarantee that he’d be the one in charge, dearie! That’s the trouble with bein’ a radical authoritarian: You’re an authoritarian, but on the other hand, you’re a radical. Most of the regimes he’d theoretically approve of would lock him up first time he opened his mouth. It’s happened t’far better’n him!”

  “I see,” This time Clarissa didn’t look away. “Thank you, Lucy.”

  “You’re welcome, honey.”

  Confederates are neither stupid nor naive. That goes double for my lovely spouse. They’re simply uninfected with the form of mental illness that results in a craving for power. It’s hard, even for a Healer like Clarissa, to identify with those who have the disease. There are always exceptions, of course, like the Franklinites.

  “GREETINGS, MY FRIENDS, salutations!”

  It turned out that to find Bennett Williams, we had to look up his big brother Buckley first. I was surprised to discover that Bennett didn’t reside at the enormous Williams family mansion. Liam Griswold wasn’t the only professional paranoid in LaPorte. Everything Bennett stood for (like starting a government in the Confederacy) was just unpopular and repulsive enough to snap somebody’s ethical strings and get Bennett shot—or at least called out to a duel. Buckley’s politics were just as unpopular and repulsive (they were exactly the same, in fact) but he carried them with better style.

  So here we were, at the extreme north end of the city (at a point where the Cache La Poudre River emerges from a canyon of the same name and eventually runs out onto the prairie) about where historic Ted’s Place used to stand in my world before it burned down. In this world, it was “Buckley’s Place,” a half-mile-tall edifice roughly resembling one of those old-fashioned nonautomated toasters like my mother used to have, with the pair of chrome-plated doors you could swing down about thirty seconds after the bread slices had been reduced to bad-smelling charcoal. At the top of the structure, visible through the glass penthouse ceiling over our heads, was an enormous mast at which Buckley moored his two-hundred-foot, lighter-than-air “yacht,” christened (of course) the Benjamin Franklin.

  “Would anyone care for a drink? How gratifying to see you, Mrs. Kropotkin! Captain Sanders, splendid to renew your acquaintance. Win, why haven’t we gone yachting? And this must be the charming spouse I’ve heard you speak of so often.” He switched what he carried from one hand to the other to take Clarissa’s hand and kiss it. Only in the Confederacy—and maybe the Federated States of Texas—would somebody welcome guests into his office holding a long-barrelled, large-caliber autopistol in his mitt.

  Despite first-class ventilation, the room smelled of nitro powder smoke, and there were empty cartridge cases scattered all over a carpet expensive enough to pay for a dozen little red Neovas. What made it interesting was that they were American cases, .45 ACP—Automatic Colt Pistol—a choice considered just as quaint here as the .41 Magnum I preferred.

  At the far end of the office, which was almost as spacious as my living room, a thick-walled titanium bullet-trap had been bolted to the floor of a stone fireplace big enough to roast rhinocerouses in. It was the life-sized, torso-target hanging in front of the trap that Buckley had been shooting at before our arrival.

  “I beg your pardon,” he told us as we entered, “I’ve made a new acquisition and was giving it a try.” He pressed the release button at the root of the trigger guard, popped the magazine out, shucked the slide back and locked it, then courteously handed the weapon to Lucy.

  Newcomers to the Confederacy are often perplexed by the way that everybody here takes notice of what everybody else carries as a personal sidearm. Of course it never bothers them to see the same thing happening with people’s cars. They’re used to that.

  And just as they believe that a man’s choice of pickup, econovan, SUV, or midlife crisis roadster reveals something of his character and situation in life, so, sometimes, does his choice of weapon. Mine, an American revolver says (I think) that I’m a simple, no-nonsense sort of guy who finds something that works and sticks with it.

  Will’s choice, at least in my world, of a big, silver ten-millimeter autopistol, says he’s interested in keeping up with the times, but not so trendy that he falls for every new toy that comes along. His gun’s about as powerful as mine, but carries twelve rounds in the magazine and one up the pipe.

  Lucy’s choice of the right-hand Gun of Navarone …

  It only took a glance around his office to conclude that Buckley was an antique collector of a new kind, possible only in a culture capable of what’s ofen called “sideways time travel.” His “antiques”—an H&K P9S hanging on the wall behind his chair, a Steyr GB over the fireplace, a Makarov serving as a paperweight on his desk—came from cultures contemporary with his own, but a little behind in their technology (cultures like the one I grew up in) the way an American might collect a Zulu assagai.

  Once the pistol had made the rounds of its presumptive admirers, Buckley declared, “Everybody behind the desk and put your fingers in your ears!” He slammed in a fresh magazine, let the slide down, raised the weapon—but only to belt level—and fired. At his insistence, each of us tried it. Gotta admit, it was effective and fun. His latest acquisition was a good old familiar 1911A1-pattern—the basic .45 auto—that my world could easily have produced, except that it was made entirely of stainless steel and had a barrel—and the extra length of slide to go with it—two inches longer than the standard issue weapon John Moses Browning had invented. The generic term is “longslide.”

  But what made it special from a collector’s point of view (and what fascinated me) was that the right grip panel—black plastic like the left, the same familiar thickness and general profile any .45 afficionado was used to—contained a miniscule laser molded into a slight thickening at the top of the grip, ending in a tiny lens. When I’d left the States there were laser sights for pistols—the size of a shoebox. This one you’d be a long time noticing, even once you picked the gun up and examined it. Along the front edge of the same right grip was a narrow rubber pressure switch. Squeeze the switch, the laser painted a brilliant red dot on the target. Squeeze the trigger and, if everything was properly adjusted, the bullet went to the spot the laser pointed at. My guess was that most of the time you used this thing, you wouldn’t even have to pull the trigger. The other guy would see that bright red spot on his tummy, wet his pants, and just give up. I know I certainly would.

  Finally, it was me who said, “Well, Mr. Williams—Buckley—this has all been a lot of fun, but as Lucy would say, we’re burning daylight, and we need to get down to business.”

  “Of course, Win,” Buckley swiveled in his chair and tapped a stylus against his teeth. “In what way may I assist you?”

  “We need to speak with your brother Bennett, in connection with an investigation we’re conducting. Will here is concerned about the Old Endicott Building and tubeway explosions. I’m only trying to find out something about some recent interworld imports.”

  “Well I’m certain.” Buckley answered, “that my brother knows nothing about the former matters that would interest you. I wouldn’t know about the latter. But it surely couldn’t hurt him to speak to you, now, would it?”

  He used the stylus, wrote the address on a scrap of paper, and we were off, with thanks.

  BENNETT—PROBABLY NOT by accident—lived about as far from Buckley and the rest of the extensive Williams clan as he could and still remain within the city, way down at the southern outskirts of LaPorte, about where Loveland, Colorado ends in my world. Buckley wasn’t the only antique collector in the family. Bennet’s house was at least a hundred years old, three-story, white frame, surrounded by a covered porch and tw
o hundred acres of what once had been an onion farm. It had a modern Impervium roof, I noticed, and I was willing to bet that if anybody batted a baseball through one of its windows on a sunny summer day, the glass would have healed itself by morning.

  I was more surprised to find that there weren’t any servants in evidence. Bennett answered the door himself—we’d called him on the way over—invited us in and offered to take the coats and hats we either weren’t wearing on a July afternoon or didn’t feel like giving up. He didn’t offer us a drink, unusual given Confederate customs, but I wouldn’t have offered us a drink, either, if I was about to be grilled as a suspect.

  As anticipated, he was a big, broad man who’d let his hair go to salt-and-pepper, a choice relatively rare here and now, but favored by those who had nothing else to base their moral authority on. His voice was low, velvety, and reminded me of Orson Wellies. He conducted us into a big living-type-room, sort of New Englandy with a hardwood floor, white walls, and low ceiling, with Early Confederate furniture in which we were invited to sit.

  “Now what,” he inquired, complacent as a Canadian, crossing one leg over the other knee and straightening the crease in his trousers, “can I do for you folks?” Will and I had agreed to keep the physical evidence from the train wreck to ourselves. He didn’t want an unknown opponent to know what we knew. I had a hunch some mysterious ally of ours might be in danger if the real villain got wise. Somebody had noticed Bennett’s thumbprint on that coin and left it as an accusation.

  Will told him, “We’re looking into the two terrorist crimes that were committed this week, the Old Endicott Building disaster, and this morning’s tube-train explosion. We have a long list of all sorts of people we’ve talked to about it or are planning to, and just now, we’ve gotten to you.”

  Bennett leaned back, folded his hands over his middle, and smiled tolerantly. “I’m surprised anyone in this soulless, ungoverned culture is investigating these atrocities. So you’ll want to know where was I at such-and-such a time on such-and-such a date, and so on?”

  “And so on,” Will answered in his soulless, ungoverned way.

  “Regrettably,” Bennett sighed, “I have an … what’s the word? Alibi—like in detective novels. I certainly never expected to use it in any other context. I have an alibi for this morning.”

  Will raised his eyebrows in polite inquiry but said nothing.

  Languidly, Bennett droned on. “I happen to have been attending a political convention. In fact, I was addressing its attendees on the urgency of establishing a real government to prevent such disasters as these in the future. So the tube explosion made my point for me. The blast shook the hotel we occupied, nearly spilling the pitcher of water on the lectern. My address was covered on the Telecom, and there’s a list of one hundred witnesses I can give you to substantiate my claim, if you promise not to use it for commercial purposes.”

  “I promise. How about the night of the Old Endicott explosion?” Will asked.

  “That occurred during the convention’s opening ceremonies. Very disturbing—and about the same number of witnesses.”

  “Excuse me.” I had to butt in; the guy was making me mad. “Just my curiosity mind you; nothing to do with Captain Sanders’s investigation. I’m a blueback, and governments are something I know pretty well. What kind of government could have prevented either of these attacks?”

  Bennett swiveled and looked down his nose at me, reminding me of his brother. Any minute, I expected him to tap his front teeth with a pencil. “One that balances every manifestation of private, personal liberty with an equal and consistent measure of observation and …”

  “‘A microphone in every bedroom’”, I suggested, “the way George Peppard put it in a movie on the subject? These days, he’d have insisted on a camera, too. So, unlike your illustrious older brother, you’re an open advocate of right-wing authoritarian collectivism.”

  Something resembling fury swept over the man’s features, but he regained control in an eyeblink. “My brother has no real political convictions, no ambition. He’s a media personality, pure and simple. As for what I advocate, understand that, although there have been minor variations over six thousand years of history, there are basically only three ways that human beings can organize themselves.”

  “One guy tells ever’body what t’do, that’s one.” Lucy counted on her fingers. “Ever’body tells ever’body else what t’do. Or nobody tells anybody what t’do!”

  Bennett nodded. “The last way is chaos … anarchy …”

  “I believe the word you’re groping for is freedom, Mr. Williams,” Clarissa offered. “It’s how people have chosen to organize themselves in the Confederacy for over two hundred years.”

  “And look at the result!” Bennett protested, speading his hands as if what he had to say was obvious.

  I laughed. “Yeah, look at it: the most progressive, productive, wealthiest civilization in human history!”

  “Two thousand dead,” Bennett argued, “no official way to prevent it, or even find the culprits after the fact and punish them! Try the middle alternative and it leads to hopeless confusion and paralysis—the stupid, useless, dangerous babble of democracy—and eventually evolves into the first alternative. Which would be acceptable, except that we don’t have time for evolution!”

  He was right about one thing. Under democracy, you’re a captive of the fears of the least courageous among you, the integrity of the least honorable, the brains of the least intelligent, and the weakness of the least strong. But finding some clown to order everybody around is a cure worse than the disease.

  “So we all have to start goose-stepping to your drumbeat right away,” I tried not to yell, “before people wake up and start thinking for themselves again.”

  Bennett seemed to be exerting equal effort. “Unlike Ludwig von Mises’s observation—you’re surprised I’ve read von Mises?—about socialists,” he replied evenly, “I don’t insist that the man everybody obeys be myself. I can’t tell you how I long to pledge my personal fealty to someone—anyone—I can regard as worthy.”

  “Of bein’ king,” Lucy finished for him, although he probably thought he’d finished already. “In your heart of hearts, you’re a monarchist. Which means that, for all your criticism of left-wing socialism, you’re a right-wing socialist, yourself.”

  “Call it what you like, Mrs. Kropotkin. I confess I’ve recently—and reluctantly—begun to see merit in Dr. Slaughterbush’s campaign against the private ownership of deadly weapons, if that’s what you’re referring to. They’re an obstacle to accomplishing certain reasonable, commonsense political objectives.”

  Just as Bennett, here, was the closest thing in the Confederacy to a monarchist, Slaughterbush was the closest thing to a communist. Come to think of it, he fit the profile pretty well as a suspect, and there were probably a few others we ought to look up. I made a mental note to mention it to Will.

  “They’re supposed t’be!” This was Lucy’s hot button. “Personal weapons prevent anybody from imposin’ his idea of’reasonable, commonsense objectives’ on anybody else!”

  Bennett snorted delicately. “Then you object to establishing a peaceful, orderly society?”

  She shook her head. “I thought that’s what we have. Unless by ‘orderly,’ you mean regulated t’death.”

  He sighed again. “Madam, I have always favored economic freedom.”

  “Even if you’re a bit weak in areas like unimpeded market entry an’ international trade. An’ don’t call me ‘madam’!”

  “I merely wish to protect my country.”

  “My country, right or wrong, is that it?”

  “If you insist; there are worse philosophies.” Bennett sat up straighter in his chair. It occurred to me that this might have been easier if I’d had a glass of scotch in my hand. “The plain fact,” he lectured Lucy, “is that people are all a little evil and they must be watched. Anything else is mere Utopian foolishness. It overlooks all of mank
ind’s baser qualities. It’s dangerous, Mrs. Kropotkin, to let people labor under the impression that they own their own lives. If they’re to become worthy of their own past glories—”

  “However mythical—or do y’mean the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Thirty Years’ War, the Hundred Years’ War, an’ all those other wonderful things that kings an’ their ilk bestowed on an ungrateful humanity? Y’know, Bennie, lookin’ backward all the time’s a mighty fine way t’trip over your own feet!”

  And she’d be the one to know. I still had trouble, sometimes, dealing with the idea that my little old former next-door neighbor had been born in 1831—1831!—and personally seen exactly two thirds of the history of this great civilization unfold. In Lucy’s century and a half, she’d become a legend. Married more times than she could remember—with children scattered all over the System—she’d pioneered several continents including Antarctica, piloted a dirigible against the Kaiser in 1914, and fought the Czar in 1957. She’d been a miner, farmer, judge, nuclear engineer helping to develop colonies in the Asteroid Belt, adventure novelist, and exotic dancer. No wonder everywhere she goes, she seems to know everybody and everybody knows her. The late husband whose name she bore was a prince who, in many worlds, gave up his title to practice anarchism. In this world, he’d practiced it with Lucy.

  Bennett ignored her. “They must be taught, instead, that their lives belong, not to themselves, but to their own families, to their civilization, to a divinely sanctioned state ultimately presided over by a Supreme Being—”

  “As primitive and vicious as the government He presides over?” She loved this kind of argument and no doubt had missed it on the Great Frontier. “Why do people like you always wind up with a paternalistic, punitive attitude toward other folks, Bennie? With no more evidence to support it than Slaughterbush and his Majoritarians? Whippin’ for the little ones, an’ for the big ones—I don’t expect there’s ever been an execution you didn’t like! I thought we’d given up on mysticism as the governin’ epistemology for civilization.”