The American Zone

by L. Neil Smith

  Not for the first time this afternoon—nor would it be the last—the woman was shocked. “But how can you … ?”

  Lucy continued, “Earth is a great place to be from, that’s all, a great place to be from!”

  She’d already nearly given Aalaalaa’s neighbor, Birdie, a coronary by quoting Robert Heinlein, more or less: “Well, this planet’s just about used up, it’s time to move on.” I don’t think I’ve ever seen eyes pop out quite that far.

  People dress a lot of different ways in the Confederacy, just like they do practically everywhere in cultures you’d consider modern—except even more so. It’s said that a person covered from head to toe in heavy furs, like an Eskimo, can encounter someone on the streets of Greater LaPorte, someone who’s completely naked, and the first thought of neither will be about clothing.

  This woman, however, was unusual. And not in a nice way. She wore a ratty old sweater over a threadbare jersey dress two sizes too big for her. She wore synthetic stockings of some kind that bagged around her ankles, and old-fashioned black-and-white tennis shoes. Her long, thick auburn hair looked like it hadn’t been washed or combed out for months, probably in a conscientious effort to conserve water. It certainly wasn’t poverty or she wouldn’t have been living down here by the lake. Her neighbors told us she’d inherited about a hundred times her weight in platinum.

  Never leave money to your kids if you can help it. You’re not doing them any favor. I’ve never known a trust baby who wasn’t stupid, evil, or just plain nuts.

  Birdie was one of those people, like Hillary Clinton, who once trembled on the brink. If her face and her body had been driven by anything even remotely resembling a benign spirit, she’d almost have been pretty, say about thirty pounds ago. Instead, you could see that she was motivated by some malignant element in her personality so profound—Aalaalaa had said it was self-hatred—that she had come, in her mere thirty-five years or so of life, to look like whatever she was on the inside.

  Whatever it was, it wasn’t pretty.

  “So what?” Birdie argued. “That doesn’t give humanity—or any other species—the right to pollute our air and water, to ravage and destroy the land!”

  Lucy shook her head. “Whaddya mean, ‘pollute’? Whaddya mean, ‘ravage an’ destroy’? You mean we changed the environment?”

  “Well.” Birdie’s lower lip was starting to tremble and she’d only been talking to Lucy for fifteen minutes. I’d seen others hold out for at least sixteen. Clarissa and I and our finny host and hostesses had pretty much stayed out of it. I still wasn’t entirely certain why Lucy had dragged us down here. “Yes.”

  Lucy was in good form. “You bet your overly cosseted backside we changed it, girlie! The environment out here sucked when we got it! People died of cold an’ starvation in the winter. They died of heat an’ thirst in the summer. They were attacked by bugs an’ snakes an’ they got eaten up by bears an’ wolves.”

  “Just as unnatural intruders should be!” Pretty good, although she said it in a quavery voice.

  Lucy was undaunted. “Anybody that doesn’t change an environment like that, pronto, an’ change it radically, they gotta be … well, they gotta be at least as halfwitted as anybody who’d choose t’be an environmental activist in Lubbock, of all places, where there is no environment t’speak of, at least not above the caprock!”

  “Aalaalaa!” Birdie protested, “are you going to let this woman insult me like this?”

  The porpoise looked her in the eye. “I’d surely hoped that she would, Birdie. Now, are you going to bring my lawn mower back, or shall I sic Lucy on you again?”

  “I can’t,” Birdie sobbed. “I had it melted down to make a snake memorial!”

  23: MONEY FOR NOTHING

  There is some justice in the universe. Simply say, “I’m not a crook,” enough times, and everybody will start believing that’s exactly what you are.

  —Memoirs of Lucille G. Kropotkin

  Back to LaPorte. Clarissa hadn’t worried this time about the dangers of travel by broach, but if we’d been paying customers instead of Friends of Lucy, it would have cost us about the same as a hypersonic suborbital around the world. It would get cheaper. And better. That’s the way a free economy works.

  Our conversation with the only environmental activist in the North American Confederacy (or in northern Texas, anyway) was a success only because it became clear right away that if Birdie had the brains to build the bomb that took down the Old Endicott Building, to sabotage the tube-train, or to drop a car on us from a dirigible, she was the best actress I’d ever seen. I’ve opened cans of sardines that were brighter.

  Birdie had ended up pulling out all the stops—global warming, acid rain, ozone depletion—pseudoscience imported from my world or others like it. Lucy had countered with a low blow: “You got this from government scientists? In worlds where they haven’t even cured cancer or Alzheimer’s?”

  “Well … yes.”

  “How did we cure cancer?” Lucy demanded. “The same way we put people on the Moon a generation before those people did. And left a permanent colony there. We didn’t turn it over to government scientists!” Not the best debating form, I suppose, but it sent Birdie away sobbing. Of course Aalaalaa knew now that he would never get his lawn mower back, which was probably okay. A dolphin needs a lawn mower like a fish needs a bicycle.

  NIGHT IN THE city.

  The American Zone is the only place I know where you can find what the Brits call “bomb sites,” a generic term left over from World War II, meaning any building that’s been reduced to kibbles and bits and left that way.

  At the corner of Trenchard and Gordon, the basic structure still stood—it had been a four-story office complex—but the southwest corner of it, where there had been some kind of store, was nothing but a scoured-out concrete pad with a lone column supporting the rest of the building. Back in the dangerous-looking shadows, lay a little pile of brush and other rubble.

  Not wanting another car dropped on my head, I stood just inside, close to the column, waiting for High Colonic to appear. Will was two city blocks away; I could see him parked in front of the bar, listening to whatever the’Com in my tunic pocket could hear. Suffering mostly from what’s commonly called “blunt trauma” (the bullets hadn’t gone in more than a quarter of an inch, as it turned out, no matter how dramatic they’d sounded, hitting the pan) he’d been given a clean bill of health by Clarissa, almost at the same hour she’d finally cut the plastic off my arm. So we were both “operating within normal parameters.”

  Meanwhile, Clarissa, Fran, and Mary-Beth were parked in her van about the same distance away that Will was, but in the opposite direction, on the crossing street. I didn’t even want to think about the fight the three Sanderses must have had over two pregnant women on a stakeout. It wasn’t quite as cold down here as it had been six floors up at None of the Above Park, but it was dismal, overcast and damp, without a star in the sky. I was suddenly aware how much activity went on, day or night, in the rest of LaPorte. Ten o’clock came and went.

  Eleven o’clock came and went.

  At midnight precisely, Will whisked by. A gun in each hand and my eyes on the sky, I jumped into the Rockford, which was rolling again before I got the door down. I laid the Browning in my lap, wiggled the Model 58 back into its shoulder holster (I’d like to say it was good to be wearing that contrivance again, but I’d be lying), and then shoved the Browning into the holster on my right hip and fastened my seat belt.

  Maybe this was just another trap that didn’t come off this time. Maybe the guy was fearful and that was why he kept putting off meeting with us. Who cared.

  So much for High Colonic. Up his, so to speak.

  The five of us rendezvoused at the 600 block of Genet Place, only because both the Bears and Sanders happened to live there, on opposite sides of the street. Everybody went to bed—or at least Clarissa and I did. We had a long day ahead of us.

  MORNING. I WAS so sick
of the Zone we didn’t even stop for breakfast at the Hanging Judge. Clarissa was off somewhere laboring over a pair of hot tonsils. Lucy was on some errand of her own. The Kendall sisters were busy being pregnant.

  Will glanced at the card in my hand, with Sam Yosemite’s penciled notation, “Baje Wooley—Byzantine Pope—Talk to Mickey Stonesoup.” He’d added a street address and’Com number. We’d discovered now that we’d been directed to the Riverdam Hotel, an ancient moldering pile of plaster with its ratty backside hanging out over the Cache la Poudre River, tucked into the farthest, shabbiest recess of the American Zone. It took us ten minutes to get there. Somehow, the place reminded me of the Hotel California, the one where you can check out any time you want, but you can never leave.

  A hand-lettered cardboard sign taped to the inside of the front door, visible behind a cracked pane of dirty glass said: PRIVATE RESIDENCE. There wasn’t any bell or buzzer. Knocking, we were greeted by a tall, balding, middle-aged man in an American sport coat and slacks. He was wearing glasses, a western bolo tie, and no gun that I could see.

  “What can I do for you gentlemen?” he asked, opening the door about six inches and peering out at us. He blinked as if the outdoor light bothered his eyes. His voice sounded exactly like that of Bullwinkle J. Moose.

  “Win Bear,” I told him, offering a card. “I’m a private detective. In fact, I’m the private detective. This is my associate, Captain Will Sanders of the Greater LaPorte Militia. I called earlier and talked to Mickey Stonesoup.”

  “Nobody ever tells me anything around here.” He shook his head sadly and sighed in his cartoon voice. “Come in, I guess. I’m N. D. Forrest. Everybody calls me Endie.”

  Inside, the place still looked like a hotel lobby. There was even one of those big, round, overstuffed sofas with a conical backrest in the middle, although the maroon velvet it was covered in was more than a little threadbare. The place seemed earthy and damp, like a dungeon, partly because it smelled of mildew and old urinal cakes. Twenty-foot drapes, of the same material as the sofa and other furniture scattered about, had been drawn across the high windows, making it as dim as a dungeon, too.

  Where a bit of light shone between the drapes, the windows were as dirty as the glass in the front doors. Dust motes danced in the feeble rays that made it through. Half the bulbs in the huge chandelier, high above the ancient carpet, had burned out. On the front desk, where guests had once checked in and out, the current residents had put a big Telecom box, an unusual object in the Confederacy, where people usually preferred to use whole walls of their homes for communications and entertainment. This was an old building. The box was presently showing a soap opera with chimpanzees in the starring roles. It was being watched by a dozen or so drab, gray, middle-aged individuals who made me think of ghosts. Some of them were snoring.

  I wouldn’t have been surprised if Forrest had told us, “Walk this way,” like a comical movie butler. Instead, he led Will and me through the dozing residents, across the spooky lobby, past the front desks—a little gray mouse squeaked angrily before scurrying out of our way—and into another big chamber that must have been for dances once, or banquets. Now, for all intents and purposes, it was a throne room.

  It was also a big room, and we walked some more. I thought about my talk with Yosemite, about Mickey Stonesoup. “You remember Paladin?” he’d asked me as he wrote down where he’d gotten Gone with the Wind and the other movies.

  I nodded. “Back in the 1950s. Black and white. Richard Boone. The hired gun with a heart of gold in the old TV show Have Gun Will Travel.”

  “You got it,” Yosemite said. “You remember that Paladin’s calling card had a chess knight on it?”

  The memory took me back a long way. “Sure I do. My mom had some made for me just like them, as a joke, when I graduated from the police academy.”

  “Well this Stonesoup,” Yosemite had declared, “his card should have a rook!”

  At the other end of the vast, dimly lit ballroom—what did these guys have against light, anyway?—stood a six-inch raised platform, originally for a live band, I assumed. Now it had been covered with a fringe-bordered carpet, no doubt snatched from some other room in the hotel. (What would the Bridal Suite be like with naked wooden floors; I wondered.) It was backed up with another carpet just like it, being used as a wall hanging. Apparently the Presidential Suite had been deprived, as well.

  Here and there, sitting around in scattered folding chairs, or standing near the walls, were more gray ghosts just as lively as those in the lobby—maybe fifty or sixty men and women, none of them younger than forty, attired in workclothes, in suits and ties, even in pajamas and nightgowns. They weren’t watching, they were waiting, there with their leader. I wondered if they knew for what.

  Centered at the back of the dais, instead of the big armchair I’d expected, we found a luxurious sofa. Draped along its length was one of the oddest human figures I’d ever seen. This had to be Baje Wooley, known throughout the American Zone as the “Byzantine Pope.” He seemed to me like little more than a living prop. He was waxy-complexioned, grotesquely tall, and inhumanly thin. His body language was like that of an Audio-Animatronics figure at Disneyland.

  The man extended a pale, long-fingered hand at me, palm down, the fingers languidly curved.

  “Kiss the ring! Kiss the ring!” a voice whispered hoarsely behind me. I turned to see a small, urgent, neatly dressed man—blue blazer, brass buttons, gray trousers, red tie, light-blue pin-striped button-down shirt—fidgeting back and forth at my elbow. “Kiss the ring!”

  “Kiss my ass.” I turned to the tall guy. “You Baje Wooley?”

  “Yes,” the man said in a funereal tone, slowly lowering his hand, “I am. And you are?”

  “Win Bear,” the nervous little man on my left said for me. “He’s a detective, Baje.” The word “detective” must have had some special significance for them. “And this is Captain Will Sanders, Commander of the Greater LaPorte Militia.”

  “Greater LaPorte Militia,” Wooley repeated in the same lugubrious manner, but with a slight intonation of distaste, as if he’d just found a dog hair on his tongue.

  “That’s right.” Will turned to the little guy at my elbow who was beginning to make me nervous. “And you would be?”

  “Michael C. Stonesoup.” He took a quick half-step to the left, then another half-step to the right, back to where he’d been. “Special advisor to Mr. Wooley.” I looked around at the semiconscious figures occupying the room. Except for one well-dressed suit standing by a heavily draped window and visibly moving from time to time, they all might as well have been corpses. Forrest had disappeared without a trace, just like a proper servant, which was a little strange, I thought. None of these folks seemed well off enough for a valet. Wooley’s several dozen yards of chalk-striped navy blue suit needed dry cleaning, I noticed, and the tips of Stonesoup’s shirt collar were frayed.

  I was impressed. Poverty like that was a hard thing to accomplish in the Confederacy.

  Stonesoup blinked suddenly and shifted position again, as if he’d been pushed by an invisible hand. “But we’re being ungracious, aren’t we, Baje?”

  “Ungracious,” Wooley repeated mournfully. “We are?”

  “Endie!” Stonesoup shouted abruptly. “Bring chairs right away! Bring—would you gentlemen like something to drink? Of course you would. Coke be all right, or would you—En die! Bring Cokes in here right away!”

  All that spoken at twice the rate of a Top-40 DJ, while he danced around like a bantam-weight boxer, never standing in the same spot or the same position for more than a fraction of a second. It must have been a psychological confession, I thought. Maybe Stonesoup realized, at some level, that a moving target is harder to hit. At the same time that Forrest, huffing and puffing, hurried to do his master’s bidding, Stonesoup demanded, “You’re not armed, are you? Baje won’t have a gun in his house.”

  After talking with Sam Yosemite, Clarissa and I had done a litt
le research of our own, elbow to elbow and shoulder to shoulder. Back in the world he came from, Wooley had been the author of a bestseller—ghostwritten for him over a generation earlier—offering a variety of rationalizations and clever techniques for avoiding inconvenient personal responsibilities. He’d also been the perennial candidate for his country’s National Chief Executive, standing for office on the “Freedom-Loving Party” ticket. Apparently he and his party of freedom-lovers were selective about which freedoms they loved.

  “Of course not,” I lied without a twinge. Maybe it was Wooley’s house, but inside my clothes it was my territory. I knew that Will felt the same way. He didn’t bat an eye. Of course Stonesoup knew we were lying. At least I hoped he did.

  Seated on the rickety, straightbacked chairs we’d been offered—Will’s with one leg casually repaired with a length of wire, mine with a duct-taped seat cushion—we accepted room-temperature Coca-Cola in mismatched teacups from Forrest, mine specially adorned with a long brown crack running from the rim to the bottom. With five dozen eerie figures watching us from the shadows, it was like being on a late-night cable talk show.

  For vampires.

  Will got down to business. “Mr. Wooley, Lieutenant Bear and I are investigating a couple of different matters, possibly related. Both of them are very serious, matters of life and death for thousands of people. We’d both like to ask you a few questions in connection with them, if you don’t mind.”

  Wooley stirred as if from a dream, and blinked. “I don’t mind, do I, Mickey?”

  Hot damn, I thought, a whole sentence! Now we were getting somewhere!