L. Neil Smith - North American Confederacy 02

by Nagasaki Vector

  Tool kits an’ medicine bags were folded up. “Well, I’ll ender my bill inna network. Winnie,” the orang Healer said. “I oughda pay you—imagine me, Chiang Mung Schwar-llosz, practicin’ in Clarissa MacDougall Olson’s house! Dey’ll never believe me back—”

  “Fine,” Win said. “Come see us socially when she’s out of electrosleep, will you, Chiang? We’ve got a bad—” Suddenly, the detective sank to his knees, collapsing on his face at the paramedic’s feet. He rolled onto his back without a sound, revealing a spreading bloodstain underneath his cloak from neckline to navel.

  The Healer knelt beside his friend—my friend—every body’s friend, stethoscope on the investigator’s crimson soaked chest. He looked up at us.

  “He’s dead!”

  16 A Stool-Pigeon in a Chair Tree

  “HE WAS A DECENT SORT, ALL THINGS CONSIDered.” I set m’glass on the coffee table, scratchin’ th Band-Aid on m’ear. Fran looked up from the rummy game she was losin’ to the Freenies on the floor over near the big Com screen.

  She sighed, shakin’ her head reflectively. “And damned good at what he did.”

  “Well, I sure won’t miss him!” Sanders sat by the front window, made t’pass me a reefer he was sharin’ with Mary-Beth. “It gave me a headache, just listening—”

  “He always affected me the same way!” Win Bear turned over where he lay on the other couch, propped himself on an elbow, an’ laughed, wincing at the pain in his chest. “He’s a damned good Healer, our Chiang Mung Schwarz-losz, but he should have his adenoids looked at. Say, don’t bogart that joint, Bernie.”

  Sanders watched Win grab a toke an’ chuckled. “I’ll bet you used to arrest people for that.”

  The detective exhaled violently. “I beg your pardon, I was a homicide dick! The narc squad’s for those who can’t make the grade as real policemen!” He took another drag, held it out for Howell. The coyote’s yellow eyes went big, a ripple of relaxation spread through his fur.

  “Now that's real coffee!” said Nahuatl.

  “Back where I come from,” I observed, “I’d guess it was growin’ up in the Bronx made Chiang talk like that. Only I checked it out on the ’com, an’—there ain’t no Bronx in the Confederacy! Whaddya thinka that?”

  Bear grinned, cannabis smoke slowly seepin’ between his teeth, visibly restrainin’ himself from a potentially painful chuckle.

  Finally, he exhaled. “There isn’t any New York City— to this country’s everlasting credit—probably because there isn’t any Chase Manhattan—!”

  He started coughin’, tears of agony wellin’ in his eyes. He reached to the table beside him, got himself a cigar, an’ lit up. The attack subsided.

  “That’s better. Got a little too much THC in my nicotine system—hard to teach old lungs new tricks. Now what were we talking about?”

  “Geography,” I answered, stokin’ up a stogie of my own. “Way I heard it, AI Hamilton got into the bankin’ racket well before the Whiskey Rebellion—with Aaron Burr, of all people.”

  “True,” Sanders offered, “but Hamilton wasn’t shot by Burr here in the Confederacy. It was some anonymous Polish nobleman he’d offended. Some people are bom to be hanged—Hamilton’s karma slated him for an extra belly-button, no matter what else happened.”

  “And Chase Manhattan,” added Mary-Beth, “along with most of the other crooked financial interests feeding the worms in your ‘Big Apple'—did you know that Hamilton actually bankrolled the country with a bad check; he invented the National Debt and profited off it for years afterward—• they didn’t survive here into what you call the twentieth century.”

  “Couldn’t stand the pressure of real laissez-faire,” her husband agreed. “No government to eliminate the competition for them. Anyway, Philadelphia remained the biggest city on the continent for a long while, then Boston. Now it’s a dead heat between Chicago and L.A., with Mexico City coming up fast on the outside—unless you want to count Ceres Central.”

  “But not adenoids,” Mary-Beth said incongruously. Sanders stared at his wife, then at the Pocatello Puce smoldering in his hand. "What?”

  “Chiang uses a wrist-talker, like any other simian. That accent of his is either latent in his wrist-movements or programed into the machine. I’m not certain whether orangutans even have adenoids.”

  “Sure they do,” Fran interjected. “Every chance they get. Breaded and deep-fried—delicious!”

  That did it. Even Win broke out with the marijuana giggles, grimacing every time he drew a ragged breath. Though he did seem in a little less pain every time I looked at him. Confederate medicine is somethin’ special.

  He’d taken a flechette, just like Will an’ me, slowed down by the front door, an’ in his case, by a Telecom pad, now deceased. Sanders an’ yours truly’d gotten off easy: the steel splinter with Win’s name on it’d clipped a mediumsized artery. He hadn’t realized quite how bad it was, an’, kinda stupidly, he’d been unwiilin’ t’postpone gettin’ after the baddies.

  Fella wasn’t born—the stoic brought him.

  Accordin’ly, he hadn’t mentioned bein’ nicked, an’ pret’near bled t’death under his cape before he—or anybody else—had noticed.

  However, between a vitaminized, catalyzed, an’ sanforized artificial transfusion fluid Chiang'd whipped up on the spot t’match the detective’s tissues an’ standard Confederate treatment for shock, Win was all right now, an’ gettin’ all righter by the minute. A dabba Eastman 910 in the proper place, an’ his heart’d started bearin’ again when we’d plugged him into the wall.

  He’d be up an’ around, his normal flatfooted old self, before his shirt was clean. An’ it was in the washin’. That’s about all we were waitin’ for now.

  Chiang Mung Schwarzlosz, H.D., hadn’t been the only visitor 626 Genet Place’d had that afternoon. While Officer Bear’d been gettin’ repaired, somethin’ called the Personal Rights Protection Group’d put in an appearance, at the summons of Ms. Wizard an’ her trained sardine—both physicists were gleefully monopolizing Georgie’s attention for the nonce, never havin’ invented a sapient bein’ before.

  PRPG, in the Confederate absence of any real authorities, took care of situations like this one’d turned into before they reached the adjudicative stage. They collected physical evidence, recorded affidavits, protected victims, witnesses, an’ the accused alike.

  Sort of an ACLU with guns.

  They, an’ a handful of similar competin’ institutions, some out for profit, some fulla socially-conscious would-be pillars of the community, comprised the civilian counterpart to Will Sanders’ militia organization. Fact, he’d argued for callin’ the Greater Laporte Civil Liberties Association, while Howell’d voted for somethin’ callin' itself the Legion of Discordian Deliberation. But votin’ don’t seem t’count for much in the Confederacy, an’ Deejay’d already placed her own call.

  PRPG got the franchise.

  Thus, under semiofficial supervision, the questionin’ continued. Howell’s chimpanzee prisoner wasn’t terribly informative. He an’ his two permanently horizontal com-padres in the front hall were part-time shooters for a “Bon-zo’s Security Patrol” of Rawlins (a town so small that, even back in the States, it’s only there on Wednesdays), a company ordinarily dedicated to protectin’ farm buildings an’ fence-lines. How they’d got t’thinkin’ we were the malefactors, we an’ the PRPG endeavored t’find out as Denny Kent continued his saucer-saga.

  In our last thrillin’ episode, before the untimely but temporary demise of Edward William Bear, boy detective, Cromney an’ his crew landed smack in the middle of a high-plains furniture farm, reducin’ nearly half an acre of cultured hardwood rockin’ chairs t’cultured hardwood toothpicks.

  I never had much stomach for the overrated sanctity of American family agriculture. Seemed t’me they always wanted it both ways: free enterprise, but with the gravy guaranteed by Uncle Sam. The Confederacy was a different proposition. In a civilization where nobody fig
ured he had a deity-delivered right to a profit—just a right t’try an’ make one unmolested—an’ there wasn’t any Big Brother t’snivel to, but where genetic editin’d been an accomplished fact for generations, why not pluck your livin’-room suites directly off the vine, eliminatin’ middle-men like carpenters, sawmills, lumberjacks, an’ trees?

  A close encounter of the third kind hadn’t impressed the folks at the furniture coop one little bit. They were pretty sore with the Professors who’d swiped my time-buggy until Cromney’d shown them the mutilated remains in the passenger lounge, generously assignin’ the credit t’me an’ Wynken, Blynken, an’ Nod.

  By now, Rand Heplar knew even less about where an’ when Georgie’d landed than he had up in the mountains; the chrono still insisted it was 1993, an’ the consensus of various stunned an’ unreliable navigation instruments was that they were somewhere in southern Wyoming.

  That, or in the middle of the IndianOcean. Depended how y’read the dials.

  But, like all really good con-men, Cromney intended t’let the marks tell him what was really goin’ on.

  “Cross-time!” exclaimed Birdflower, the gigantic gorilloid supervisor of the agricultural cooperative. “I saw it on the Telecom! You people are from another probability continuum, aren’t you?”

  “Why, you’re quite correct,” slithered Cromney, not havin’ the faintest idea what Birdflower was talkin’ about. “We were being pursued—escaping from—”

  "Hamiltonians!" the supervisor supplied, namin’ the worst villians he could think of. “The ’com said there are whole universes controlled by those dirty—of course here they’re only a tiny harmless minority, thank Albert!” Birdflower an’ his wife, Tree, had been the first from the farm admitted into the saucer. Shown what was left of Mssrs. Merwin an’ Hulbert, the anthropoid had gulped audibly an’ rolled his eyes, barely stayin’ vertical. They’d had t’take Tree back to the farmhouse t’lie down.

  Hamiltonians, Birdflower explained to the hijackers, were terrible persons who actually believed there were circumstances under which some individuals had the right to tell other individuals what to do. Only a few years ago, scientists had discovered the Probability Broach, an’ through it, another Earth where such perverted ideas held sway. Some of these creatures had attempted to invade the Confederacy, aided by the few native Hamiltonians who’d survived two centuries of North American anarchism.

  Eventually, of course, all that’d been taken care of, an’ the scientists were presumably a little more careful about who they let into the Confederacy.

  But still there were a few—a very few in every generation—who continued to preach authoritarianism. It’s a Free System, Birdflower observed with a sigh, an’ there wasn’t any moral, ethical, or legal way to stop them. But it did seem a shame.

  An’ kinda crazy, too.

  Cromney’s ears perked up at the mention of potential local allies in what was beginning to appear t’be a sea of licentiousness. He’d have to learn more, a great deal more, before he made his move, but move he would, an’ especially if he were stuck here, this civilization would feel the full weight of his mighty thumb.

  “Tell me more, my dear Birdflower. I must confess, the notion of alternate history is new to me. Our vessel here is merely an ordinary interstellar spaceship, drastically blown off course during the struggle to escape the ghastly tyranny you speak of so eloquently.”

  “Well, I’m no expert on physics or history,” Birdflower said modestly. “I’m a farmer and geneticist. But—here, I have to go back to the house to see how Tree’s coming along. Why don’t you consult the ’com? I’m sure you can find out what you need to know that way.”

  Leaving Rand an’ Edna in charge of the ship—Denny was still unconscious owing to his newly-earned broken nose—Cromney followed the gorilloid through the fields of rocking chairs, end-tables, bookcases, an’ bar-stools— a different variety than the kind Dan’l Boone stepped in— to a streamlined modernistic buildin’ servin’ as headquarters for the coop.

  “Here’s a ’com pad, Mr. Cromney. I’ll punch in a display of instructions—gosh, that brings back memories; I haven’t seen that graphic since I was a little kid—and the machine itself will tell you how to use it. Now I have to go look after my wife.”

  Cromney settled into a comfortable chair in the pecu-liarly-decorated farmhouse living-room. It wasn’t so much the technology of the Telecom which startled him as the cultural implications: this device, apparently, was a household fixture everywhere, just like plumbin’ an’ electricity, an’ taken as casually for granted in the same way.

  This was a fabulously wealthy civilization—an’ scandalously loose, politically. Cromney licked his lips in greedy anticipation an’ plunged onward.

  General information sources on the list included the Encyclopedia of North America, which occupied an entire channel, TerraNovaCom’s 485-A. Very well, he employed the appropriate buttons t’summon it. Scannin’ a brief article on travel between worlds of alternate probability, he found the concept’d been in circulation here for decades before its reality’d been proven accidentally.

  Odd, why hadn’t his own culture thought of such a thing? Or an information system like the Telecom, for that matter? Perhaps the Academy exercised a sterner authority than even he had realized. He found himself approving, grudgin’ly.

  Cross-time entries led him naturally t’history, where he discovered the critical importance of the Whiskey Rebellion in the Confederacy’s past. He shuddered at the idea of a government so thoroughly chastised it was afraid t’collect taxes, of a State growin’ progressively smaller over a couple centuries until recently it’d dwindled an’ vanished like an icecube meltin’ in a drink. Congress had met only twice in fifty years, an’ there were observers who opined as how it might not ever feel the need t’meet again.

  Hideous!

  In an astoundin’ display of scholarly dispassion, the Encyclopedia’s entry on Hamiltonianism’d been commissioned from one Norrit Gregamer, accordin’ to an editor’s footnote, the professor of Alternative Moral Philosophy at the University of Chicago, Ltd., extension in Cheyenne. Cromney took this chance proximity as a sort of omen an’ made a note t’contact Gregamer as he chased down the Encyclopedia’s cross-references refutin’ the Hamiltonian professor’s arguments.

  In the meantime, as his understandin’ of this culture filled out in his mind, he firmed up the story he intended tellin’ Birdflower an’ anybody else he hadda get things from. He must regain that infernal piece of equipment Gruenblum’d stolen, an’ he had little faith that Heplar’s attempts f reproduce it would bear any kinda fruit.

  “You see,” he explained charmin’ly to the farmer, who’d returned after seein’ to his wife, “I believe that the best defense is a good offense. Gruenblum may be stranded here as we are, but his fanatical devotion to the Overlords of our homeworld will move him to pursue us, if for nothing other than revenge. He and those demonic alien monsters of his. He is a violently and dangerously unpredictable man.” Birdflower cluck-clucked sympathetically. Refugees were tricklin’ into the Confederacy at an increasin’ rate these days, exactly as they’d done a century ago before most of the nations of this world’d accepted Gallatinist viewpoints an’ become pleasanter places t’live.

  “Well, you were surely lucky, Mr. Cromney, to get rid of him before he murdered all of you. Those poor.. .but now you want to find him again?”

  “Certainly!" Cromney replied. The livin’-room they occupied was decorated in a curious mixture of Victorian Gothic an’ vintage Haight-Ashbury. Incense an’ bead-cur-tains an’ psychedelic-colored paintin’ competed with old-fashioned oriental carpets, gargoyly overstuffed furniture, an’ hand-stitched samplers bearin’ enigmatic homilies: “A Thief Is Shot In The Night—Whose Hand Is On The Bow?” Cromney shook his head in weary perplexity. “Is that a Zen paradox you’ve got up there over the mantlepiece?” Birdflower blinked. “Why no, it’s an old Shoshone saying. But why look for this Gruenblu
m? Surely his manners will get him into trouble wherever he goes, and that"— he patted the sizable autopistol he wore in a shoulder holster attached to his bib overalls—“will be the end of him.” He glanced significantly at the cross-stitched maxim Cromney’d asked about.

  The professor snorted in annoyance. “What do you mean? Whose hand is on the bow? Presumably, that of the householder—the victim of the thief in the night.”

  It was Birdflower’s turn t’look puzzled. “Not in anything but a purely physical sense, and we’re talking about moral concepts here. The answer, which any school-kid could tell you, is ‘The Thief’s—those who practice aggression as a way of life have merely chosen for themselves a compli-catedly indirect method of committing suicide. Which is why you’ve no need to bother with this Gruenblum nake— er, pardon me, I mean person.” Under the dark pigment of his unfurred face, Birdflower appeared to blush.

  Cromney gulped, more at an intuition of his own than anything Birdflower had told him. He realized that, so far, he hadn’t seen a single unarmed Confederate. Even gentle Tree’d carried some kinda pistol at her waist. He’d unconsciously assumed it had somethin’ t’do with the rustic farm-life they were practicin’ out here. Now. he wasn’t so sure.

  “Nevertheless,” he said, recovering his aplomb for Birdflower’s benefit, “I feel responsible for unleashing this villainous scoundrel upon your fair Confederacy, and I intend to do something about it. To begin with, if you’ll assist me, I have a list of parts my associates require to repair our ship. And there’s a long-distance call I’d like to place to the University of Chicago in Cheyenne.”

  The gorilloid nodded good-naturedly an’ took up the Com pad.

  The rest’d been pretty straightforward. Cromney’d sent Denny down t’Griswold’s as soon as the poor schmuck could totter around. The St. Charles-Auraria security outfit’d tracked me down right smartly, but they never woulda let even Cromney know where I was without a final payment. That’d been the business of the newsies—once my name an’ location’d been plastered all over six thousand channels, Cromney’d made his move.