The American Zone

by L. Neil Smith

  “I believe that was a pragmasm we were watching just now!” Lucy told us in a stage whisper.

  “A pragmasm?” I mouthed the question silently. I realized that I wanted a cigar, but there were NO SMOKING signs up all over the place—as if a little tobacco smoke could make this dive smell any worse. I’d noticed that, too, about the left. They claim to champion personal liberty—except in unimportant little areas like weapons ownership, drugs, pornography, romance in the workplace, and recently, tobacco.

  “Sure. Any violent, convulsive eruption in which a person’s basic principles are suddenly expelled t’facilitate the pursuit of a goal, usually an unworthy or evil one. That Emerson quote’s a classic, along with ‘That was then, this is now,’ ‘The perfect is the enemy of the good,’ an’ ‘You can’t make an omelette without breakin’ eggs.’”

  “‘For the children.’” Clarissa laughed. Will remained stone-faced. He was taking this a bit more seriously than Lucy and Clarissa were.

  “A pragmasm,” I said. “I’ll have to remember that.”

  “By all means.” Slaughterbush was back. I think he’d been spying on us, to hear what we’d say in his absence. “It will help you put off reasonable, commonsense reforms long overdue in the Confederacy.”

  Will was disgusted. “Doctor, all we really want to know about your politics is, would they allow you to blow up a building full of people or a hypersonic train if you thought it was good for your cause?”

  The man rolled his eyes. “How dare you accuse me of such a thing, when all I want—all I’ve ever wanted—is to protect my fellow beings from one another and their own weak, sick natures!”

  “But don’t let us put words in your mouth.” Will sighed and shook his head. “You know, in the culture I left behind, I was a police officer. That means I set my individual conscience aside for money, to do the bidding of men and women who were less brave, less bright, and less decent than I was—and who for those very reasons had found their place above me in the political hierarchy.”

  “I’m sure this is all very interesting, Mr. Sanders, but—”

  “That’s Captain Sanders,” Will cut him off. “This probably is the first honest job I’ve ever had; I insist on the title that goes with it. Where was I? Oh, yeah: I also set aside my nation’s highest law (which I’d sworn a solemn oath to uphold and defend, and then been informed I was too stupid to understand and interpret) so I could deprive the people I’d promised to watch over, of their rights, their property, and their lives. All for the sake of those who profitted politically and economically by holding my leash. And all of them, Doctor, said exactly what you just said, about protecting their fellow beings.”

  “Yeah,” Lucy agreed, “out of everything they own!”

  Slaughterbush ignored her. “But Captain Sanders, if no one takes command, if no one passes the laws that need passing, if no one enforces them, civilization will be overwhelmed! You can’t trust the people to take the law into their own hands! You can’t even trust them to govern their own lives! Consider drugs alone—”

  “I used to enforce drug laws,” Will told him. “Drug laws amount to nothing more than government price-supports that take a drab, mundane agricultural product worth less than a nickel an ounce, and raise the price to hundreds of dollars.”

  He must have been excited, or he’d have been speaking in terms of Confederate money.

  “And because the drooling idiots who pass and enforce drug laws are products of public education—and therefore abysmally ignorant of elementary economics—every time they hear that the street price of drugs has risen, they stupidly imagine that they’ve won some kind of victory, when what they’ve accomplished is to make drugs even more profitable and attractive to manufacture and distribute than before.”

  Slaughterbush shook his head sadly. “Have you no feeling at all for the suffering millions of innocents who, through no fault of their own, find themselves hopelessly locked into a vile, life-destroying dependency forced on them by profiteers interested only in their money?”

  “Sounds like,” Lucy muttered, “we changed the subject t’welfare.”

  Clarissa leaned forward on her chair. “Dr. Slaughterbush, we live in a country, in a version of reality, where everybody who was likely to destroy himself with drugs already has, removing himself from civilization and his stupidity from the gene-pool. That’s the closest anybody ever gets to a drug-free culture. The sooner other cultures repeal the prohibitions that created the traffic in illicit drugs, the sooner they’ll be where we are.”

  Did I say Ayn Rand? Make it Charlene Darwin.

  “So you just let them die?” Slaughterbush appeared incredulous.

  “You just stand out of the way,” Clarissa answered, “while they willfully, knowingly, deliberately kill themselves. You refrain from distorting and destroying your own culture in a futile attempt to save them from themselves.”

  “Look.” Will wasn’t finished. “Crime was a solved problem where I came from; solved more than a century before I was born. People ‘took the law in their own hands’—along with two pounds of Hartford iron—and crime was a solved problem.” He looked to me for confirmation and I nodded back. “There was so little that even today we remember the names of the last century’s individual criminals.”

  “Sounds kinda like the Confederacy, don’t it?” Lucy asked.

  “But solved problems don’t interest politicians,” Will went on. “There’s no power or profit in solved problems, no opportunity that a politician can take advantage of. Richard Nixon—a U.S. president who had to resign because he was a criminal, himself—admitted it: ‘I’d go further than the Brady Bill,’ he said. ‘Guns are an abomination.’ And he was perfectly right—for any politician who hates solved problems, they are!”

  Slaughterbush caught his breath. “But surely, Captain Sanders, a little reasonable, commonsense gun control—”

  “The accurate term is ‘victim disarmament,’ Dr. Slaughterbush, and I’d appreciate your using it from now on, or shut up. You can’t have a little reasonable, commonsense victim disarmament, any more than you can have a little reasonable, commonsense cancer.”

  I believe the man uttered a genuine, bona fide harumph. “The vast majority of the people will disagree with you, sir, once we’ve had an opportunity to educate them. And we strive every day for a democratic revolution to accomplish exactly that. As I’m sure you and Lieutenant Bear already know, in other worlds, majoritarianism takes many forms, ranging from representative republicanism to communism. Of them all, only pure democracy guarantees the utilitarian objective of the greatest good for the greatest number.”

  “An’ the Purple Shaft for anybody who has anything that everybody wants,” Lucy replied. “I could be wrong. Maybe he’s sayin’ two people are more virtuous than one person, or that they have more rights. Smarter, more virtuous, more rights: those three idiot assumptions are what any form of left-wing collectivism is based on—especially democracy—whether its advocates admit it or not!”

  “The Purple Shaft?” Slaughterbush didn’t quite scratch his head. “But I oppose inequities in the distribution of goods and services. More than anything, I’m an advocate of economic democracy.”

  “Meaning” Will translated, “you’re against any form of economic freedom, whatever. I don’t know how much alternate history you’re aware of, Dr. Slaughterbush, but the best-realized expression of that philosophy—although I’ll bet you’d never acknowledge it, even to yourself—is the China of the Red Guard, who murdered fifty million “landlords,” or Cambodia of the Khmer Rouge, who murdered half their countrymen.”

  So we were having another political argument with an interviewee, instead of asking him proper, detectively questions, and this time, it was Will who’d started it. I glanced at Clarissa. She grinned back, appreciating the joke.

  “In any case,” Will concluded, remembering what Bennett had said, “and at the very least, under the system you propose, everybody winds up
telling everybody else what to do.”

  Slaughterbush assumed the same expression I do when my hemmorhoids are bothering me. He tried to wipe it off and argue back, but he was too slow.

  My spouse said, “The most important assumption of majoritarianism—and one that’s true, but which people like you, Dr. Slaughterbush, always do their best to conceal or euphemize—is that two people are stronger than one, and that the one had damned well better go along with the other two, because there are more of them, and they can beat him up or kill him if he doesn’t. That’s what elections are all about, aren’t they, counting up the sides in advance, in hopes of avoiding a real fight?”

  I believe that was the first time I ever heard my darling Clarissa swear, however mild the “damn.” And every time she said “doctor,” it sounded like she’d discovered a fat, slimy garden slug slithering up her tongue.

  “My dear,” the fat, slimy garden slug waved a deprecating hand toward her, “you misunderstand me. Shall we just agree to disagree, and revel in the free expression of divergent opinions among polite individuals?”

  “This isn’t just a misunderstanding, Dr. Slaughterbush, and our disagreement isn’t just a matter of ‘divergent opinions among polite individuals.’ Your political agenda requires that I get mugged, beaten up, or murdered, simply for exercising my rights. Mine, such as it is, doesn’t make any such requirement of you. So how come I get to be an evil, mean-spirited, reactionary hate-monger all of a sudden? How come I get to be crazy?”

  Slaughterbush started to say something rude, caught himself, and just sat there for a moment, speechless, as if it were the first time his harebrained ideas had ever been challenged. He glanced at a big, pointy quartz crystal in an upright hardwood mounting on his desk, quivering to channel with it, pray to it, or whatever he did with pointy quartz crystals. Maybe he wanted to slam it through Clarissa’s pretty head. Here was another benefactor of humanity who hadn’t even offered us a cup of tea—although I don’t think I’d have accepted any product of the self-conscious proletarianism I saw around me. I was sure, from the sticky feel of the chair seat beneath me, that I was going to have to have my trousers dry-cleaned. I was also sure now that the people he saw were mostly immigrants, homesick and longing for the comfortable confinement of the Nanny State. I remembered hearing about Stalin’s daughter Svetlana having to flee America and go back to Mother Russia because there were too many choices to make at the grocery store and it was driving her crazy.

  “Look, Doc,” I said, “What we would really like to know—and it doesn’t have anything to do with your politics and economics or ours—is whether you’ve heard anything or got any idea who blew up the Old Endicott Building or sabotaged the tube-train yesterday.” (Had it really only been yesterday? I guess Lucy was right, after all, we were having an adventure. I always lose track of time when I’m having an adventure.)

  “Lieutenant Bear, how dare you—”

  “Hey, I’m not accusing you of anything at all, Doc. It’s just that you—I mean, we all—hear a lot about what’s going on under the surface, down here in the Zone. I just thought you might have heard something …”

  A shrewd look slithered across his face, like that garden slug of Clarissa’s. “Well …”

  “Yes?” I said, encouragingly.

  “It’s just the merest of suspicions, mind you. I hate to admit that I agree with the Franklinite Faction about anything, Lieutenant Bear, but they’re absolutely right about the need for establishing a real government here in the North American Confederacy, and I’ve found myself wondering if they aren’t perhaps … well … helping the idea along a little bit.”

  I nodded. “We wondered about that, ourselves. That’s why we talked with Bennett Williams, yesterday. He had just the merest of suspicions about you. Got anybody else in mind?”

  Slaughterbush reddened at the implied accusation. “He—that—well …”

  You just had to love this guy. “Yes?”

  “There’s always Jerse Fahel,” he said finally, folding his arms across his chest.

  Who the hell, I asked myself, not for the first time, is Jerse Fahel?

  15: BACK HOME AGAIN

  Any point of view that fails to assume—and accept enthusiastically—that males and females will inevitably perceive one another as “sex objects” is simply deranged.

  —Memoirs of Lucille G. Kropotkin

  “ … ‘legislative intent,’” I said. “That’s the phrase I was hunting for. If Alexis de Tocqueville didn’t say it, maybe he should have.”

  The home that Will shared with his wives Fran and Mary-Beth—the design was Moroccan Spanish with an off-white stucco finish and a red tile roof—was a lot like Will himself. From the outside, the place was like a little fortress—if you call an eight or nine bedroom hacienda little—with a few narrow windows around the second floor, and a story-and-a-half arched passageway in the front, with big, heavy wooden-beamed doors at either end, wide open most of the time, that led into a large, lush inner courtyard.

  Within the arch, the hardwood-framed glass double doors on the righthand side led into the house. Those on the left opened onto Will’s militia offices. Inside the courtyard, a covered walkway ran around all four sides of the house—offering shade in the summertime and protection from the snow in winter—with a matching covered balcony above. There was even space on the roof to watch a Rocky Mountain sunset or jog around in a big squared circle. It was from here, I suspected, that Will had been launching pop-bottle rockets on the Glorious Second.

  In the middle of the big, impressive garden—Will had palm trees and cacti and mimosas warmed by infrared lamps when the weather was too cool for them—he’d built a fountain in the shape of a mermaid and a decorative pool (full of funny-looking Chinese fish) with his own hands, along with a brick grill big enough to roast an ox, and an oven with a blackened iron door for the veggies to go with it. He’d also built a big round redwood picnic table that would have seated twenty if the need arose.

  A more-than-competent gunsmith, Will was also a carpenter, a mason (no, not that kind, at least as far as I know), an electrician, and a pretty fair country architect. He was a good husband and was gonna make somebody a swell daddy.

  “‘Legislative intent’?” Lucy asked. “What in old Ben Tucker’s name do you mean by that?”

  We’d all agreed, when we got to Will’s place, to leave discussion of our respective investigations until after we’d eaten. Which meant, of course, that we were now skirting the edges of his case by talking politics, instead.

  The barbecue smoke drifting past my nose was beginning to smell wonderful. Lucy was listening to me talk (for a change) as I examined Will’s big silver-colored autopistol. It had turned out to be from the United States, as I’d suspected—a United States—and was, by North American Confederate standards, a trifle puny ballistically. But it was very different and interesting, at least to me.

  “I finally realized that that’s what it is this morning,” I told her, taking a sip of the Coke I was drinking until I finished playing with Will’s gun. Clarissa was sitting beside Lucy on the other side of the gigantic picnic table—way too far away to play footsies with, regrettably—and at her side was Will’s older wife Mary-Beth, who smiled at me encouragingly. More than likely it was a professional reflex. Mary-Elizabeth Kendall Sanders was an elegant five-foot-nine, maybe thirty-two, with lots of shoulder-length curly brown hair. She was slender—“sinusoidal” I’d once heard someone say about her—long-legged, with slim, capable hands, sea-green eyes, and a perpetual secret kind of smile. Even pregnant, she was all well-oiled intelligence and willowy body. A consulting ethicist—somewhere between a judge and a shrink with a little rabbi thrown in—Mary-Beth was shrewd, calm, and deep, with a quick wit and a subtle sense of humor. Until recently, she’d also been the hot pilot in the Sanders family and showed every sign of being so again, once gestation time was over, racing sport hovercraft designed by her sister and handbuilt by both of them
. If you’re like me and tend to judge the character of individuals by their choice of weapons, Mary-Beth carried a plain, non-nonsense .41 Whitney automatic. I’d once seen her hit a rattlesnake in the head with it at seventy-five yards.

  “You finally realized what’s what it is this morning?” Clarissa stopped, mentally reviewed what she’d said, blinked, shook her head, but didn’t try again.

  “Why I hate to go into the Zone,” I answered. “Why I always end up with my ears down between my shoulders like I was expecting something big and heavy to drop on my head if I spend more than half an hour there. And best of all, why I don’t feel that way anywhere else in LaPorte or the Confederacy.”

  I paused to look at the pistol again. To begin with, it was solid, as if it had been milled out of a single block of steel. I was almost surprised—once I pushed the keyhole-shaped button at the root of the trigger guard and let the big, black, heavy magazine slip into my hand—that the slide came back so easily. Until that moment, I think I’d unconsciously seen this piece of machinery more as an item of realistic sculpture than a practical weapon. Glad I hadn’t had to bet my life on that erroneous perception, I let the chamber round pop through the ejection port into the palm of my left hand where it was wrapped around the slide. Then I let the slide down far enough so that two little dimples at the back lined up, pushed on the righthand side of the slidestop, and then pulled it off the frame from the left. The slide then came forward easily off the frame.

  “So tell us, Winnie,” Lucy was watching me field-strip the pistol with patient appreciation. She likes guns for their own sake and knew more about them than any other woman I could recall. “What do the Zoners have that we don’t?”