The Disunited States of America

by Harry Turtledove

  “Well, you’re right,” she said, and he didn’t expect that, either. “I wish you weren’t, but you are.” She sounded like someone who knew what she was talking about.

  “How come you’re so sure?” he asked. Maybe they’d had a TV show that convinced her, or something.

  Instead of answering, she turned even greener. He hadn’t thought she could. She gulped a couple of times, and he wondered if she was going to be sick all over her shoes. “I don’t want to talk about that,” she said in a muffled voice. “I’m sorry, but I really don’t.”

  “Okay. Whatever.” Justin didn’t know what kind of nerve he’d poked, but it was a sensitive one. He could see that.

  He was trying to figure out what to say next when Ted Snodgrass stepped out onto the back porch and said, “I reckon you kids better come inside a minute.”

  Justin looked at Beckie. She was looking at Mr. Snodgrass, and seemed just as surprised and confused as Justin felt. He didn’t know whether that was good or bad. He could try to find out—and he did, asking, “What’s up?”

  “Well, I turned on the noon news for a minute, and there’s something you need to see,” Mr. Snodgrass said.

  In one way, Justin was glad to hear that. It meant Mr. Snodgrass and Mr. Brooks weren’t quarreling. In another way … He hurried inside, Beckie right behind him.

  In the home timeline, the newscaster’s tie would have been too short and too wide and too loud. His jacket, with its little lapels and broad pinstripes, would have been almost too fashionable to stand in 1891. But his handsome, sober face and deep, smooth voice would have marked him as a TV performer anywhere.

  “To repeat,” he said, “outbreaks of this illness have been reported here at Richmond, at Newport News, and at Roanoke in the south-central part of the state. Doctors have declared that it is a genetically engineered disease. It seems to be highly contagious. Because of this, Consul Pendleton has ordered all unnecessary travel suspended until further notice. He has vowed that shipments of food and fuel will go through. Stay tuned for further bulletins.”

  The TV cut to a commercial. Justin stared at Mr. Brooks. Beckie was staring at Mr. Snodgrass. They both said the same thing at the same time: “Oh, my God! Does that mean we’re stuck here?”

  Sheriff Chester Cochrane was one of the biggest men Beckie had ever seen. He was several centimeters—no, they said two or three inches here—taller than Justin Monroe. He was wide-shouldered and narrow-waisted, and had a long, sad face that showed very little of what he thought. “Is this about where they were at?” he asked as he and Beckie paused near the top of Jephany Knob.

  She looked down toward the road by the river. “I think so,” she said. “Somewhere close, anyway.” She pointed that way. “I was right about there when the shots went off.”

  “Okay.” The sheriff had a metal detector. He swung it this way and that. After a moment, he grunted and swung it in a narrower arc. Then he walked over and bent down near a tree trunk. He reached out. When he straightened, he held a couple of cartridge cases. “These are new brass, Miss Royer, sure enough.”

  “I wasn’t making it up,” she said.

  “Well, I didn’t really reckon you were, but you never can tell.” His voice was like a rumble from the bottom of a cave. “Even so, this doesn’t prove anything. Folks could have been up here hunting or just to get some plinking in.”

  “I told you, I can’t prove they were shooting at me—at me as a person, I mean,” Beckie said, and Sheriff Cochrane nodded. She went on, “That’s why I didn’t come to you right away. But I think they were, so I figured I’d better tell somebody.”

  “Not the best marksmen in the world if they missed you at this range,” Cochrane remarked. That wasn’t what Beckie wanted to hear. She wanted sympathy, not scorn for the fools who couldn’t shoot straight.

  One look at Chester Cochrane told her he didn’t care what she wanted. He was doing his job—that was all. She wondered how big a job he had to do most of the time. “Why would they shoot at me at all?” she asked.

  “Don’t rightly know,” he answered. “Maybe they didn’t get a good look at you. Maybe they reckoned you were a deer.” He eyed her, then muttered to himself. “You’re not built like any deer I ever saw. Still and all, you’d be amazed at the dumb things people can do.”

  A sheriff probably saw more of those dumb things than ten ordinary people put together. “I guess so,” Beckie said.

  “Let me ask you one other thing,” Cochrane said. “These people who took those shots at you—were they white?”

  Even hearing the question made Beckie want to go down to the Kanawha and wash herself off. She understood why Sheriff Cochrane asked it. She knew there was a lot of nasty history between whites and blacks in Virginia. She knew blacks had caused some of the nastiness, too, even if, in her judgment, they were provoked.

  “I’m not sure,” she answered, which was the truth. “It was a long way to tell something like that, and I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention.”

  “You what? How could you not be?” Chester Cochrane stopped. Then he gave her a long, measuring look, nothing like the one he’d used when he said she wasn’t built like a deer. There wasn’t even a hint of a twinkle in his eye as he went on, “That’s right, you’re from California. Furriners have some funny notions, don’t they?”

  Beckie wasn’t about to let him get away with that. “I think some of the notions you’ve got here are the funny ones.”

  “Oh, you do, do you?” he growled. “We’ve been doing things our way here in Virginia for almost five hundred years. We aren’t a bunch of johnny-come-latelies like some folks.”

  “Would you rather do things your way or the right way?” Beckie asked.

  Try as she would, she couldn’t faze Sheriff Cochrane. “We don’t reckon there’s any difference,” he said—actually, it sounded more like ary difference. They headed back to town together. After a while, the sheriff went on, “You want to be careful what you say and do around these parts. Some folks don’t cotton to furrin ways.”

  “Well, I didn’t exactly like almost getting my head blown off, either,” Beckie said.

  “I believe that,” Cochrane said. “For now, I’m going to hope it was just an accident—some fool of a hunter getting careless.”

  “What if it wasn’t?” Beckie asked.

  “If it wasn’t …” Chester Cochrane’s long face got even longer. “If it wasn’t, then it seems to me the war’s come to Elizabeth, and that’s not so good.” He paused. “You know those strangers who came to visit Ted Snodgrass?”

  “Sure. What about them?” Beckie said. Randolph Brooks and Justin Monroe were staying in Elizabeth’s one and only motel. It wasn’t called the Dismal Swamp, but from the look of the place it should have been. Justin had some interesting things to say about the food at the diner across the street. Beckie had eaten there a couple of times. If anything, she thought Justin was too nice.

  “Do you suppose they were the people you saw up on Jephany Knob, the people who took a shot at you?” the sheriff asked.

  “They didn’t get here till the day after that happened, so I don’t see how they could be,” Beckie said, wondering if he’d gone nuts.

  He sighed. “No, I don’t reckon so,” he admitted. “But we don’t get a whole lot of strangers around here. Now we’ve got two lots in town. I just kind of wondered if there was any connection.”

  “I don’t think so.” Beckie did think he wanted the people with a gun handed to him on a silver platter. If he could do things the easy way, he wouldn’t have to try to figure out what really happened. Beats working, she thought. Beats trying to discover who did shoot at me, too.

  Sheriff Cochrane sighed again as they tramped up State Highway 14 into Elizabeth. They could walk on the asphalt—you’d hear a car coming in plenty of time to move out of the way. “Sooner or later, I’ll get to the bottom of it,” the sheriff said. “Somebody who knows something’ll blab where he shouldn’t, an
d word’ll get back to me. People can’t keep their fool mouths shut a lot of the time, even when they ought to.”

  “I guess so,” Beckie said. They walked past Clay Street, and up to Prunty. “Can I ask you something?”

  His big head went up and down. “Sure. What is it?”

  “What’s it like trying to be a sheriff when you already know all the people you’re trying to ride herd on?”

  “Well, it’s interesting sometimes.” Even the sheriff’s smile looked mournful. Maybe he had some bloodhound on his mother’s side. “Sometimes you have to do your job in spite of knowing people. If somebody punches somebody else in the nose, it doesn’t matter if you went fishing with him day before yesterday. You’ve got to see that it doesn’t happen again. I’ve lost friends on account of that, I’m afraid.”

  “I bet you have,” Beckie said. She liked Cochrane better, or at least respected him more, for knowing he would come down on his friends if he had to. She turned onto Prunty to go back to the Snodgrasses’ house. Would the sheriff follow her?

  He didn’t. He just tipped his broad-brimmed hat and ambled up 14 toward the county courthouse. When he got there, he’d probably fill out a form. Chances were it would stay buried on his computer’s hard drive till the end of time. Or would he have to put it down on paper instead? He might have a couple of hundred years’ worth of arrest reports in one file drawer. How much ever happened in Elizabeth? How much ever happened in this whole county?

  When Beckie got back to the Snodgrasses’ house, she wasn’t surprised to find Mr. Brooks and his nephew there. Mr. Snodgrass was the only person in town Mr. Brooks knew. As long as the coin and stamp dealer was here, he could do some more business—and he could pass the time with someone who was interested in the same things he was. It beat the stuffing out of sitting in that grim-looking motel staring at the TV—or at the wall.

  As for Justin … Beckie smiled to herself. Plainly, he knew a good bit about coins and stamps. But she didn’t think that was the only reason he’d come over. She didn’t mind. He was interesting to talk to—more interesting, and more complicated, than she’d expected someone from Virginia to be. And they both had to know nothing that happened here was likely to matter much. When they could, they’d go back to where they lived and get on with their real lives.

  Gran was there, too. She was talking with her cousin—and shooting suspicious glances at Justin. Disapproval stuck out all over her, like quills on a porcupine. Beckie couldn’t see why. Justin wasn’t doing anything rude. He was just listening to his uncle and Mr. Snodgrass talk about coins, and putting in something himself every once in a while.

  He did brighten up when Beckie came through the door. “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi, Justin,” Beckie said. Gran’s quills got longer and pointier. But then, Gran disapproved of everybody and everything. Beckie went on, “Want to grab a fizz and go out back and talk?”

  “Sure,” Justin said, and then, politely, “If that’s okay, Mr. Snodgrass?”

  “Don’t see why not.” Mr. Snodgrass chuckled. “When I was your age, I was more interested in pretty girls than in nineteenth-century silver, too.”

  Mrs. Snodgrass clucked. “Watch yourself, Ted. You’ll embarrass him.”

  “I think it’s terrible that—” Gran started.

  Beckie didn’t wait to find out what Gran thought was terrible this time. What Gran didn’t think was terrible made a much shorter list. Beckie grabbed a couple of fizzes from the refrigerator. Justin followed her outside. Once he’d closed the door behind him, he said, “I’m afraid your grandmother doesn’t like me much.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Beckie told him. “You don’t have to be special or anything for Gran not to like you.”

  “She seems nice,” Justin said, which proved how polite he was.

  “That only shows you don’t know her very well,” Beckie said cheerfully. “Have you heard any news lately? Do they know when they’re going to lift this stupid quarantine? People must be going crazy.”

  “I bet they are,” Justin said. “I talked to my mom down in Charleston. She says it hasn’t got there yet.”

  “That’s good, anyhow.” Beckie made a face that reminded her more of Gran’s usual expression than she wished it did. “You know what a mess this is when the best news you have is that a stupid disease hasn’t got somewhere.”

  “Have they figured out what it is yet?” Justin asked.

  “Modified measles—that was on the news last night,” Beckie answered. “No word when they’ll have a vaccine, though.”

  “Measles.” Justin sounded worried. “That’s not so good.”

  “I know. The regular kind will kill you if you get it and you don’t have a lot of immunity.” Beckie thought about American Indians and Pacific Islanders, then wished she hadn’t.

  Maybe Justin was thinking along with her, because he said, “Nobody’s likely to have a lot of immunity to this strain.” Beckie nodded. He added, “What a great thing to talk about on a nice summer afternoon.” She nodded again, even more unhappily.

  Four

  Justin was as thrilled about going back to the motel as he would have been about getting his wisdom teeth yanked. At least dentists knocked you out when you lost your wisdom teeth, and they gave you pain pills afterwards. Bioengineers said they were only a few years away from taking wisdom teeth out of the gene pool so no one had to worry about them any more. They’d been saying that for as long as he could remember, though, so maybe they weren’t so close as they thought.

  As for the motel … It was clean, anyhow. Why not? Justin thought. They would have had plenty of time to wash things since the last time anybody stayed here. Clean or not, there’d been a lot of dust on top of the TV set.

  “How do you suppose they stay in business?” he asked Mr. Brooks.

  “Beats me,” the older man answered. “They must live in one of the units themselves—”

  “Poor devils,” Justin said. People talked about fates worse than death. If spending all your time in a place like this wasn’t one of them … “Do you have any idea when we’ll be able to get out of here?”

  “Sure don’t,” Mr. Brooks said. “A mutated measles virus would be bad news in the home timeline—they used one of those against Crosstime Traffic in Romania a couple of years ago. Do you remember?”

  “I didn’t, not till you reminded me,” Justin said. “They aren’t as good at fighting them here as we are, either.”

  “They also aren’t as good at making them,” Mr. Brooks said. “I can hope our immunity shots will hold up.”

  That made Justin feel better, but only for a little while. There were no guarantees, and he knew it too well. Making viruses was easier than fighting them. Making them just took selective breeding, picking the strongest strains from each generation. People had been using selective breeding ever since they first tamed dogs. Controlling viruses once they got loose, though—that was another story.

  Mr. Brooks’ eyes sparked. “You’re probably happy as a clam here,” he said. How happy were clams? Some of the slang this alternate used was downright weird. The coin and stamp dealer went on, “You’ve met a pretty girl—and I think she’s a nice girl, too. Don’t get me wrong. But anyway, you may not care whether you get back to Charleston or not.”

  “Yes, I do. Beckie is nice, but I’m even more foreign here than she is,” Justin said. “I showed it the day I met her, too.” He told Mr. Brooks how he hadn’t acted like a proper Virginian when it came to the way whites and blacks dealt with each other. “I know I should have sounded like everybody else, but I couldn’t stand it.”

  “Well, I ought to get mad at you, because you did goof,” Mr. Brooks told him. “And in a way I am mad at you. But I know how you feel. Everybody who comes here from the home timeline feels that way. Well, maybe not everybody, but the people who don’t at least know they’d better act like they do when they’re back home.”

  Justin nodded. Racism wasn’t dead in the h
ome timeline. Neither was sexism. Neither was homophobia. He wondered if they ever would be. But, even if they weren’t dead, they were rude. You couldn’t make people love all their neighbors all the time—that wasn’t in the cards. But if you made them lose points for showing they didn’t, that worked almost as well.

  “I told her not to tell anybody what I said,” Justin said. “Here, a white person’s rude if he shows he doesn’t think African Americans are inferior.”

  “All the states with lots of blacks in them are independent,” Mr. Brooks said with a sigh. “Nobody can tell the people in them what to do. That’s almost everybody’s motto in this North America. ‘Nobody can tell me what to do,’ people say. And they’re right. If they want to act like a bunch of idiots, no one can stop them.”

  “I don’t mind that so much,” Justin said. “But now I have to act like an idiot, too, because I’m supposed to come from a state where people do. That, I don’t like.”

  Mr. Brooks sighed again. “Sometimes you’re stuck with it, that’s all. It’s protective coloration. If you were in an alternate where the Roman Empire didn’t fall, you’d have to make offerings to the Emperor’s spirit.”

  “That wouldn’t be as bad as this,” Justin said. “That’s just strange—and people always say, ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans.’” Mr. Brooks winced. Justin grinned, but the smile slipped as he went on, “Making like a Virginian just hurts, because it feels like everything I grew up with is all twisted here. They say they believe in freedom, but they only mean it for people who look like them. Anybody else better watch himself.”

  “We try to reform them, but we can only do so much. We’re mostly here to do business with them and keep an eye on them,” Mr. Brooks said. “And we’re here to try to stop them if they look like they’re working on crosstime travel.”

  “I know,” Justin said. “But there are states in this North America where Negroes have the same rights as anybody else. California’s one of them. That’s what made me slip up with Beckie.”