The American Zone

by L. Neil Smith

  Turning the slide upside-down, I pushed the recoil spring guide and spring forward a little, lifted them up and out of the slide, then tipped the barrel up and took it out of the slide, as well. That, as the manual says, completed the field-strip. I peered into the barrel, but it was spotless. So was the standing breech inside the slide. Will would iron his skivvies, if they weren’t already wash and wear.

  I took a breath and exhaled, groping for words. “It may be a little hard for you native Confederates to take in. Will can back me up. It’s a psychological condition caused by democracy, which you Confederates wisely passed up in favor of actual freedom. Back home—where the Bill of Rights got run over by Alexander Hamilton’s steamroller, we never got a Covenant of Unanimous Consent like you did, and people are accustomed to voting on everything—back home, everything’s always up for grabs.”

  “‘Up for grabs,’” Mary-Beth repeated, genuinely puzzled. “For example?”

  I sighed and shrugged. “For example: although it’s clearly my own goddamned business what I do with my own goddamned lungs, they decided they had a right to vote my cigarettes illegal. So I had to buy them on the sneak from the black market—at twenty bucks a pack! And if I hadn’t been a cop, it would have been just as illegal for me to carry—or even own—a weapon, because they voted on it. Despite the absolutely ironclad guarantees of the absolutely worthless Second Amendment!”

  Mary-Beth gave me another quizzical look. “Who do you mean by ‘they’?”

  “We, the goddamned people.”

  “How long since you came to the Confederacy, Win?” That was Fran, sounding very much like her sister, the counsellor.

  “Nine years,” I told her.

  “But you still say, ‘back home,’” she observed. “And you’re still so angry about what happened there you can hardly stand it. You should start living here, Win, in your heart, I mean. In your mind. Think of the past, in the States, as a nightmare that’s over now. Wake up in the Confederacy and be home.”

  “That’s what I did,” Will said.

  Clarissa shook her head. “That’s what I tell him all the time, myself. It hasn’t done any good so far.”

  She was right. It hadn’t. I felt a lot better when I looked down at Will’s gun again. In this place and time, folks appreciate firearms the way people used to like cars back home—before those more or less got outlawed, too. This one, in addition to its other virtues, was either a bead-blasted stainless steel or had been given a matte coating of chromium or nickel or something. The legend, just visible on the left side of the frame ahead of the slidestop, executed with extremely tasteful restraint, read:

  WITNESS

  EAA—COCOA—FLA

  At the bottom of the comfortable rubber grip was a single word, TANFOGLIO, which meant the pistol had been imported from Italy to be marketed by an outfit in Florida. The trigger, hammer, slidestop, magazine release and and thumb safety were all a nice contrasting black, like the enormous fixed rear sight. All in all, it was a classy piece of work, and I approved of it.

  The caliber, engraved on both the right side of the slide and the barrel-chamber area where it showed through the ejection port, was 10mm auto, one of the better offerings for autopistols in any version of the United States, generating energy in the middle 600 foot-pounds—considerably more efficacious than a .357 Magnum, but not quite into the larger magnum revolver range.

  “I personally corroborate everything my colleague has just told you, no matter how unlikely.” Will grinned at me from the end of the barbecue grill where he was preparing lunch. He’d invited us all back to his establishment for some kind of special barbecue “experiment” he wouldn’t describe further. I’d accepted, partly because I was curious to see how Fran and Mary-Beth were getting along. Like many women—and unlike many others; the whole thing is very mysterious and unpredictable—they were even more beautiful, if that was possible, waddling around with big fat stomachs than they had been without them. Of course it helped that Clarissa was their midwife.

  “Probably worst of all,” Will said, “especially if you’d prefer to think well of your fellow human beings, there were always thousands-or maybe more like millions—of drooling morons eager to rubberstamp whatever new or improved taxes their masters down at City Hall or the county commision or the state capital could think up for them to pay. A nickel here, a dime there—when I finally left the United States, the average slave of democracy was forced to disgorge more than half of his income to one bunch of lying, vicious, larcenous, disgusting, parasitic …”

  “Slugs?” I suggested, Howard Slaughterbush apparently still on my mind.

  “Or another,” he agreed.

  “I suppose I’m just as bad as the drooling morons,” I admitted to our listeners. I was almost finished reassembling Will’s pistol, and was looking forward to a real drink. “I worked for the City and County of Denver—”

  Will pointed his barbecue tongs at himself and silently mouthed the words, “Me, too.”

  I nodded. “I suppose some argument might be made, defense and so on, for national government. Not a very good one; in the twentieth century alone—that’s since 124 A.L. to you—national governments have murdered as many of their own people in this century as have been killed in war. Something on the order of 110 million individuals or more.”

  “War’s a government activity, too, Winnie.”

  “Point taken, Lucy. So the butcher’s bill comes to a quarter of a billion people needlessly, uselessly dead. Proving that government is vastly worse than anything it pretends to protect us from. It’s a disease masquerading as its own cure.”

  “Hear, hear!” Will agreed.

  I said, “But not even the Franklinite Faction claims that there’s any justification for government at the city level. I know, I’ve been there. Everything that cities do falls into two categories: things that can be done better, cheaper, and more safely by individuals; and things that shouldn’t be done at all.”

  Will laughed. “The people who run city governments fall into two categories, too: those who use their political power to accumulate wealth, and those (usually they’re insufferable do-gooders of one stripe or another) who live only to control the lives of others. You always find the two of them locked together, feeding off each other in an eternal sixty-nine position.”

  “And you always find,” I added, “do-gooders on the outside—taxpayer groups, reformers, minilibertarians—who say they want to ‘cut back’ city government, expose ‘waste,’ or reduce the number of city employees. But their kind—people who run city governments—don’t need to be ‘cut back’ or ‘reduced in number,’ they need to be rendered extinct.”

  “So what,” Mary-Beth inquired, “does all that have to do with ‘legislative intent’?”

  “Oh.” I’d forgotten what had started all this. I looked down at Will’s pistol which I’d reassembled more or less unconsciously and reloaded. My big revolver was at the grill “end” of the big round table, within easy reach of my host. It was a pleasant Confederate custom: I’d temporarily deprived him of his weapon—his personal last resort in the face of adversity—by asking to examine it, so I’d provided him with a “loaner.” Nothing had been said about it, it was simply a custom, and had simply been observed.

  Now I handed him his piece, holstered my own, and reached into the table’s built-in cooler for a frosty long-necked bottle of Tres Equis.

  “In a democracy,” I repeated, “everything’s always up for grabs. Without the absolute limits that were supposed to be imposed by the Bill of Rights, nobody knows how far it can be taken. Hell, they could just as well vote to confiscate your firstborn for lab experiments. But you can rest assured that somebody’s always trying to take it further.”

  “Everybody,” Will interjected, “has some kind of freedom he or she can’t tolerate. Everybody has one little thing he or she wants to take your money for.”

  I nodded, “Exactly. So every conversation, no matter how trivi
al it may seem on the surface, becomes a political argument—openly or otherwise, consciously or otherwise—and every sentence ever spoken oozes with legislative intent.”

  “‘And no man’s life, liberty, or property,’” Will quoted, “‘are safe when the legislature’s in session.’”

  Lucy said, “I see!”

  “Maybe you do. You live like that all your life, with everything that you own or love constantly up for grabs, it’s no damn wonder half the population’s alcoholic or on Ritalin or Prozac. People who live in big cities can’t stand the sight of one another—let alone the smell or the touch—because it’s been pounded into them all their lives that they belong to one another, and at some level, they’re all afraid someone’s going to come along and collect!”

  “What is a wonder, though,” Will observed, “is that there aren’t more poor fools up on rooftops with scoped, high-powered rifles, picking off random—”

  “Voters!” Lucy exclaimed.

  I clapped my hands. “You do get it!”

  “Well, it’s an interesting contrast,” Fran observed. She’d been standing beside Will, supervising his culinary efforts. “As long as you don’t have to live it.”

  “You can say that again!” he told her, turning with his hands full to give her a kiss. Frances Melanie Kendall Sanders—the younger half of the almost legendary Kendall sisters, had a voice best described as “silvery.” Small and lithe, she’d had a somewhat boyish figure when I’d first met her (and probably would again), along with dark brown eyes and a freckled, tip-tilted nose. At five-three or four and twenty-five or twenty-six years of age, she had the most beautiful waist-length, buttery-blond hair I think I’ve ever seen, satiny skin, and enough energetic enthusiasm for a whole circus company.

  She was a phenomenal shot with the Lawrence Shiva model plasma pistol that was always at her hip. For some years, she’d taught something called Intuitive Mechanics at LaPorte University, Ltd. Now she addressed me and her husband. “Let me see if I understand something here. If it’s true, as you both assert, that the different political philosophies are really nothing more than competing lists of excuses for stealing from—”

  “Or enslaving,” suggested Will.

  “Thank you, dear. Or enslaving productive individuals, then our view—the Confederate view that no one should be able to tell anyone else what to do—almost amounts to the absence of a political philosophy.”

  Lucy laughed heartily. “You can say that again with French horns! No ‘almost’ to it, dearie!”

  “If you say so, Lucy. I believe I’ll skip the French horns: the Confederate view that no one should be able to tell anyone else what to do amounts to the absence of a political philosophy.”

  “And that’s the way it’s been,” said Lucy, “for a little over two centuries.”

  Mary-Beth held up an index finger. “Let’s review, then, shall we? Confederates tend to be future-oriented, operating from a rational epistemology, rather than from organized religion like the right wing, or supermarket tabloid mysticism, like the left. We generally believe other people are neither inherently stupid nor inherently evil—the most frequently presented excuses for political oppression—and we try to exercise an adult, hands-off attitude toward others, stemming from our own assertion of absolute self-ownership. We endorse both personal liberty of a private nature, and unlimited economic freedom.”

  We all applauded. She put her finger into the nonexistent dimple in her chin and pretended to curtsey where she sat. “I confess I was primed,” she explained. “I’ve been counselling unhappy immigrants in my spare time.”

  “Somethin’ else worth mentionin’,” Lucy added. “We may be the first adult culture in any universe. The official Confederate slogan—if we had official slogans—would be Admiral Heinlein’s observation that, There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” Will and I looked at each other and grinned. In our respective worlds, the Old Man had been our favorite author. In the Confedracy, during the 1957 War against the Czar, he’d been the Hero of the Bering Straits, commanding a small but deadly fleet of hovercraft against the Imperial Russian Navy. In both situations, he’d been famous for that proverb and the acronym that went with it.

  We all raised our glasses at once. “TANSTAAFL!”

  “MASTADON?” I EXCLAIMED with my mouth full.

  “No, mammoth,” Will, Fran, Mary-Beth, and Lucy all corrected me at once. My darling Clarissa just sat there with a mouth of barbecued proto-elephant as full as mine, and a very strange expression on her face. There are a lot of things I love about her, but she is not particularly adventurous, foodwise.

  She swallowed. “At least it doesn’t taste like chicken,” she observed. “I think I like it!”

  I liked it too—I thought—but I’ll eat a steel-belted radial tire if you put enough barbecue sauce on it. In fact, I was going to say that, but I realized it wouldn’t be polite—and they don’t have steel-belted radial tires here.

  “Lucy very kindly brought the meat with her, in stasis, from the asteroids,” Will explained, “and I concocted a special barbecue sauce for it. You know you can’t just use a sauce that’s meant for pork, say, or chicken or beef.”

  Lucy agreed, “An’ you can’t use it on mammoth, either!” Actually, she said “cain’t,” but you get used to Lucy’s accent after a while, and besides, I’ve always suspected that she practices it at home, in front of a mirror.

  “But …” I did like this barbecued mammoth, after all, and reached for the French bread and another several juicy slices to put on it. “Mammoth from Siberia, I understand—although fifty thousand years of freezer-burn sort of puts me off a little. What are mammoths doing out in the asteroids? Were they abducted by aliens or something?”

  Lucy laughed. “They were cloned by scientists—mad scientists, if it makes y’feel any better, Winnie, because they’re not gettin’ near as much per pound for this stuff as they think they oughta—an’ raised in the closed environment of a hollow asteroid I built for ‘em. Makes y’think of Pellucidar! Y’gotta come out an’ see it sometime!”

  “In some other life,” I replied. “I believe in terra firma. The more firma, the less ‘terra’. I’ll come out to the asteroids when they have a luxury hotel that flies there and back.”

  “I think it’s time we got down to business,” Will suggested.

  Lucy agreed. “Yeah, we’re burnin’ daylight!”

  I knew Clarisa disapproved of bringing business to the table—it’s bad for those ulcers she cured me of nine years ago—but it looked like I didn’t have any choice.

  “Okay,” I said. “Look at what we’ve got. One: somebody blew up the Old Endicott Building, killing one thousand, one hundred and ninety-eight people. Two: three days later, somebody sabotaged the tube-train and they still haven’t figured out how many died in that one, but the estimate is eight hundred. Three: meanwhile, somebody tried to blow up the fusion dirigible City of Calgary. Four: somebody—maybe somebody else, maybe not—may have started poisoning stuff in grocery stores. Five: somebody did blow up my poor little Neova HoverSport, the only car I ever loved, with Lucy and me inside. And five and a half: somebody put that funny money out for you guys to find.”

  “That’s a hell of a lot of somebodies,” said Will, shaking his head. Like me, he was suspicious of coincidences. If the Confederacy was suddenly having a crime wave for the first time in two hundred years, we were both pretty certain it was the doing of one person or group.

  I shrugged and said, “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Some of these somebodies have got to overlap. Oh yeah—and six: somebody’s importing movies that Clark Gable and his wife don’t like.”

  “Clark Gable?” Mary-Beth and Fran asked at the same time, their eyes as big as the appropriate cliché—now being scrubbed by an ultrasonic dishwasher in the house. “You’re working for Clark Gable?”

  “And his wife, Carole Lombard,” I told them, trying to make it sound casual. “Think they’d like to try some of
your barbecued mammoth, Will?”

  16: TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALL GAME

  You say you never watch the’Com like it was something to be proud of. Never look down your nose at the popular culture, or self-righteously shun contact with it. How can you hope to change or preserve something you don’t know anything about?

  —Memoirs of Lucille G. Kropotkin

  The robo-umpire yelled, “Play ball!”

  I began my usual mental inventory. All right, I’ve got my official colorfully printed LaPorte Patriots seatpad. (I’ve often wondered how the Patriots’ batting star, Roger “Killer” Culver feels about fifty thousand fans sitting on his face.) I’ve got my paratronic field glasses (they perched on your nose just like regular spectacles). I’ve got the little radio built into my field glasses (which double as shades) so I can follow the play-by-play on any one of a dozen’Com channels, including one based right here in the ballpark. I’ve got my program—can’t tell the players without a program—and I’ve got my tall, ice-cold, margarita. All I was missing was—

  “CrawDADS! Getcha red hot crawDADS!”

  That was it. I nudged Lucy, who was sitting closer to the aisle than I was, to signal the crawdad guy. She nodded back and grinned. No baseball game—no Confederate baseball game, anyway—is complete without a flimsy paper tray of freshly steamed crawdads disintegrating slowly in your lap. “Y’wannem plain (steamed over beer), Louisiana style, or barbecue?”

  “Steamed over beer,” I said. I wanted to talk with the crawdad guy anyway. He was one of the reasons we were here, instead of grubbing around down in the Zone again. Interestingly, two of the people on my computer-generated list worked here at None of the Above Park (don’t ask, it’s a long story) and ran little import businesses in their spare time.

  “Y’know, Winnie,” Lucy jogged my elbow, distracting me. “I think they’re tryin’ t’walk Tommy Aurand!”