The Disunited States of America

by Harry Turtledove

  “Wow,” Justin said. “I didn’t think it would work like that.”

  Beckie hurried into the bathroom. She filled a glass and brought it to her grandmother. “Here you go, Gran,” she said. When she felt the old woman’s forehead, she was amazed all over again. Gran still had a fever, but not the killing kind she’d been fighting a little while before.

  She held out the glass when she’d emptied it. “Fetch me some more, would you? I’m mighty dry inside. And could you call down to room service for some food? Feels like I haven’t eaten anything in ages.” She suddenly noticed Justin was there. “Oh. The boy. Hello.”

  “Hello,” Justin said. “I’m glad you’re feeling better.”

  “Thank you,” Beckie told him in a low voice as she went past him to get Gran another glass of water. He nodded. He really did seem as surprised as she was about how well the medicine was working. She called room service and ordered soft-boiled eggs and toast for Gran. Then she said, “Justin brought you the medicine that helped break your fever.”

  “Went to the drug store for you, did he?” Gran said. “That was nice of him. I’ve been sicker before—you’d better believe I have. Why, I remember a couple of times … .” And she was off. She never got tired of talking about her ailments, and she didn’t realize how sick she’d been here. She was lucky, or it looked that way to Beckie.

  Once Gran got going, you didn’t have to listen to her. She was her own best company. Beckie talked under her drone: “Will you please answer my question? How come you’ve got this medicine before the hospitals do?”

  “It’s a secret,” Justin said unhappily. “You really shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

  Listening to Gran, looking at her, told Beckie he had a point, and a good one. She was reviving right before their eyes. It was amazing to watch. Even so, Beckie said, “I want to know. I won’t blab, honest. You know me pretty well by now. Do I break promises?”

  Somebody knocked on the door. It was room service, with a tray for Gran. When Beckie found she was out of Virginia cash, Justin tipped the black man who brought it. He touched the brim of his cap with a forefinger. “Thank you kindly, suh,” he said, and withdrew.

  Gran started eating soft-boiled eggs as if she thought they’d be outlawed tomorrow. Sadly, Justin said, “I wonder what that waiter was really thinking about us. Nothing good, that’s for sure.”

  Even though Beckie had wondered the same thing, hearing it from a Virginian was strange. She wanted to ask Justin about that, too. One thing at a time, she told herself. “Do I break promises?” she asked again.

  “Nooo,” he admitted, sounding as if he didn’t want to. “Okay, then. Here.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out something—a folded envelope. “Hang on to this. Don’t open it till you get back home to California. Promise?”

  “I promise,” she said, and put it in her purse. “What do I do with it then?”

  “That’s the other half of the promise,” Justin answered. “Look at it. Keep it. But don’t do anything else with it. These are … good-bye promises, I guess you’d say. All right?”

  “All right,” Beckie said firmly. But then, not so firmly, she went on, “Good-bye promises?”

  “Afraid so.” Justin nodded. “Doesn’t look like we’re going to stick around here much longer.”

  “You’re going back to Fredericksburg? You can do that?” Beckie asked.

  “Sure. We’re going back to Fredericksburg.” Justin was lying through his teeth. Beckie knew it. She also knew he wanted her to know it. But before she could ask him any questions, he wagged a finger at her. “Don’t. Don’t even start, okay? This has to do with your promises. I can’t tell you how, but you’ll understand better—a little better, anyway—when you open the envelope.”

  Naturally, that made her want to open it right away. But she was somebody who kept promises, so she nodded and said, “I can hardly wait.”

  He smiled. She got the feeling she’d passed a test. “I’d better go,” he said. “I’m awful glad the medicine worked so well for your grandmother. And …” He smiled a crooked smile and shook his head. “Nah. Even if things were different, I don’t suppose it would have worked out.”

  “Neither do I, not really,” Beckie said. “But even so, since you’re going …” She took a step forward. So did Justin. Afterwards, she never did figure out who kissed whom first. His arms were tight around her, but not too tight. They felt good.

  Behind her, Gran coughed.

  Beckie pulled away just long enough to say, “Oh, hush,” and went back to what she was doing. Finally, it was done. She took a deep breath. Then she asked, “Will I ever see you again?”

  “Maybe. You never know for sure,” Justin said. “But I wouldn’t bet on it.”

  She nodded. “That’s about what I thought. Take care of yourself … in Fredericksburg.”

  Justin’s smile said he noticed the little pause and knew what it meant. “Thanks. You, too, when you get back to L.A. I don’t think the war here will last a whole lot longer. You’ll be able to go through quarantine or whatever and head for home. And now”—he bobbed his head, suddenly and surprisingly shy again—“so long.” Faster than Beckie expected, he opened the door and was gone.

  “So long.” She hoped he heard it before the closing door cut it off. But she was never sure about that afterwards, either.

  “The boy,” Gran said, “he’s a nice enough boy.”

  Beckie sighed. “More than nice enough,” she said.

  Down in the subbasement, Justin and his mother and Mr. Brooks waited for the transposition chamber. “Home!” Mom said. But it wouldn’t be home, not yet. It would be a stretch in the quarantine alternate, while they and the chamber that carried them there got cleaned out. It wouldn’t be much fun, but almost anything was better than staying in battered Charleston.

  Mr. Brooks set a hand on Justin’s shoulder. “Way to go,” he said. “I’m not kidding, not even a little bit. You nudged Crosstime Traffic into doing things it didn’t want to do, and that’s not easy. If you hadn’t, no telling how long we would’ve been stuck here, or whether they ever would have let us get away from this alternate.”

  “I couldn’t get them to bend, that’s for sure,” Justin’s mother said.

  “You didn’t think you’d be able to when you started,” Mr. Brooks told her. “You settled for no. Justin didn’t want to hear it, and he kept after them till he got what he did want. If you aim to get anywhere, that’s what you need to do.”

  “I just want to get back to the home timeline,” Justin said.

  “Well, we’ll only be one stop away,” said Mr. Brooks. “And you won’t have anybody shooting at you while you wait.”

  A few days earlier, it would have been a joke, and a tasteless joke at that. Now Justin understood how wonderful not getting shot at was. Most of the people of Charleston, white and black, probably appreciated it by now.

  Silently and without any fuss, the transposition chamber appeared. The door slid open. Justin and his mother and Mr. Brooks got in. Justin expected the chamber to be on full remote control, the way the one that brought the antiviral for Beckie’s grandmother was. But it had a human operator. Not only that, the man was smiling.

  “Don’t you know you’re going into quarantine?” Justin asked.

  “I know I’m going on vacation,” the operator answered. “I’m a birder, and I’ll be able to see things I never could back home.” On the seat beside him were binoculars, spotting scope, camera, and two books: Field Guide to Birds of Eastern North America and Guide to North American Birds Extinct in the Home Timeline. He was ready for what he’d be doing in the quarantine alternate, all right.

  Mr. Brooks laughed. “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.”

  “No.” The chamber operator shook his head. “Close, but not quite. When you want lemonade, go out and pick lemons. I volunteered for this run.”

  “I bet you didn’t have much competition,” Justin�
��s mother said.

  “Not a whole lot,” the operator agreed. “But when I get back with my photos and the new birds on my life list, plenty of people will be jealous. Unless you’re able to get out to the alternates, you’ll never see these birds. Crosstime Traffic ought to run birding safaris into some of these alternates. Lots of people would pay to go.”

  “Don’t tell us. Tell the company,” Mr. Brooks said as the doors slid shut. “If they take you up on it, you’ll get a suggestion bonus.”

  “Maybe,” the operator said. Some of the lights on the board in front of him went from red to green. “Well, we’re on our way.” He came back to what Mr. Brooks said: “They might try to take the idea and do me out of the bonus. That would help their bottom line. But maybe not. You never can tell.”

  As usual, nothing seemed to happen in the chamber. Justin tried to guess how much subjective time they would need to get where they were going. However long it seemed, the sun wouldn’t have moved in the sky from when they left here to when they got here. Ever since travel between alternates began, chronophysicists had been wrangling about the difference between time and duration. Justin didn’t have the math to follow the argument in detail. One of these days, maybe, he thought.

  This journey felt longer than the one from the home timeline to the alternate where the Constitution never replaced the Articles of Confederation. That meant the quarantine alternate had a much more distant breakpoint … if it meant anything at all. Chronophysicists were still writing papers about that in the learned journals, too.

  Nothing to do but wait. Justin didn’t like it. He wondered if he would go stir-crazy in the quarantine alternate. It wouldn’t be very exciting there. He hoped they’d have game boxes and video players. Or maybe he could go birding with the chamber operator. Normally, he wouldn’t have thought that was interesting. Seeing birds he couldn’t find in the home timeline gave it a special kick, though.

  More lights on the instrument panel went green. “We’re here!” The operator sure sounded excited.

  The doors slid open. “Passengers, please disembark,” said a recorded voice coming out of a ceiling speaker.

  Out Justin went. He expected to smell fresh air—not much pollution here. What he did smell was freshly dug earth. This hole in the ground hadn’t been here very long. A hastily made set of wooden stairs offered a way up out of it.

  Spoil from the digging ruined the look of the meadow by the Kanawha. The slab-sided prefab buildings a few hundred meters away did nothing to improve things. A Red Cross flag floated over them. Maybe that was meant to be reassuring. If it was, it didn’t work, not for Justin. It struck him as wasted effort. People who showed up here would know this was a quarantine station, and the passenger pigeons and whatever else lived here wouldn’t care.

  Something fluttered in a tree a couple of hundred meters away, at the edge of the woods. The chamber operator—his name was Lonnie something—aimed his binoculars at it. “That’s a passenger pigeon, all right!” he said. “There’ll be billions of ’em in this alternate, and you can only seem ’em stuffed in a few museums back home.” He held out the binoculars to Justin. “Want a look?”

  “Okay.” There were passenger pigeons in the alternate Justin had just left, too, but not billions of them. He couldn’t remember seeing any. He pointed the binoculars at the tree. Not one but dozens of birds perched there. They were slimmer than the ordinary pigeons that scrounged for handouts in cities around the world—built more like mourning doves. They had salmon-pink bellies, gray backs, and eyes of a startling red. Justin handed the binoculars back. “Passenger pigeons, all right.”

  A noise came from deeper in the woods—a bear? a fox? a falling branch? Whatever it was, it spooked the birds. They erupted, not just from that oak but from all the oaks and elms and chestnuts and maples and hickories and other trees close by. As the flock zoomed past overhead, it was big enough to darken the sky. How many birds were in it? Not billions, not in this one group, but surely many, many thousands. The din of their wings was like the roar of the surf.

  “Whoa!” Justin said.

  “Whoa is right,” Mr. Brooks said. “I’ve seen starlings in our Midwest and queleas in Africa, but I’ve never seen anything like this.” He sent a wary glance up at the sky, where stragglers still whizzed past. “If you go anywhere around here, you’d better carry an umbrella.”

  “Let’s see what kind of quarters we’ve got,” Mom said.

  They put Justin in mind of the motel room where he’d stayed in Elizabeth. They had all the basic conveniences: bed, sink, shower, soap, shampoo, computer, even a bare-bones fasarta. But they wouldn’t make a home, not in a million years. Everything about them screamed, People pen! Well, he could put up with it till they decided he wouldn’t come down sick and let him go back to the home timeline.

  Food came out of a freezer and went into a microwave. There was also canned fruit, and plenty of soda. “The beer is Bud,” Mr. Brooks said. He and Lonnie exchanged identical sighs. Justin thought any beer tasted nasty, so he wasn’t as sympathetic as he might have been.

  He let the fasarta pamper him for a little while—as much as it could, anyhow. Then he fired up the computer to find out what had gone on in the home timeline while he was stuck in Elizabeth. He hadn’t had much of a chance to do that in Charleston—too many other things going on.

  Getting it all in text, without video or even stills, made him feel he’d fallen back in time instead of going across it. The Russians had turned a tailored virus loose in Chechnya, and hadn’t immunized enough people outside the borders to keep it from spreading. He shook his head, People had been wondering when the Russians would get their act together for hundreds of years. It hadn’t happened yet. It didn’t look as if it would happen any time soon, either. Russia was too big to conquer and too big to ignore, same as always.

  In Iran, the Shah’s secret police were executing ayatollahs again. And a suicide bomber tried to blow up the Shah’s prime minister in revenge. That was also another verse of the same old song. So was the ecoterrorist outfit claiming responsibility for poisoning fifty kilometers of the Amazon to protest logging policies in Brazil. And the Scottish nationalists had blown up another British mail truck. It was as if Justin had never left the home timeline.

  But getting his news like this left him strangely distant from it. He couldn’t see and hear what was happening. All he could do was read about it. He had to make the pictures in his own mind, the way he would if he were reading a history book. He didn’t even have any pictures to help, as he would in a book. He might have fallen back from the end of the twenty-first century to the end of the nineteenth.

  Along with the usual hotel supplies were special soap and shampoo marked PLEASE USE ON YOUR FIRST DAY HERE. When Justin did, he found they smelled strongly medicinal. They probably killed a lot of the germs he’d brought from the alternate where he was staying. The shampoo wasn’t easy on his hair—that was for sure.

  Later, he wondered how Crosstime Traffic would know whether he used that soap and shampoo. Did transmitters in the packaging record that it was opened? Had he washed away a microchip on the surface of the soap that reacted when it got wet? Or did a camera in the shower stall send his image back to the main station in this alternate, wherever that was?

  He didn’t like the idea, not one bit. Probably no humans were involved—only a computer program that wouldn’t squeal to a real, live person unless it caught him breaking the rules. He didn’t like it anyway.

  Mom squawked when he mentioned it at dinner that night. Mr. Brooks only shrugged. “With all the computer technology we’ve got these days, something or somebody is watching you all the time anyway. Either you get used to it or you go nuts.”

  “That’s how it works, all right,” Lonnie agreed. “I know they monitor transposition chambers.” He shrugged. “What can you do?”

  “There’s a difference between monitoring a chamber and a shower.” Justin’s mother sounded like a cat wit
h its dignity ruffled.

  “To you, maybe. Not to Crosstime Traffic, especially not in a quarantine station,” Lonnie said. “If you kick up a fuss, they’d say they had an interest in making sure you followed instructions. How would you convince a court they were wrong?”

  What Mom said then didn’t have much to do with convincing a court. It came from the heart, though. Mr. Brooks laughed. “That’s telling ’em,” he said.

  He’d been through the army. You didn’t have much privacy there. Sometimes you didn’t have any. Justin had found that out himself, the hard way, when he put on Adrian’s uniform. His mother had never had to do anything like that. She didn’t know how lucky she was, which might be literally true.

  The mattress on the bed was softer than Justin liked. That kept him awake … oh, an extra fifteen seconds or so. He was still catching up on sleep from his hectic couple of days of carrying a gun. He didn’t have any nightmares about shooting the African-American kid. That was progress, too.

  Sunshine sliding between slats of the Venetian blinds poked him in the eye and woke him up the next morning. He heated up some waffles and slathered them with syrup.

  Mr. Brooks came into the kitchen as Justin was fixing himself seconds. The older man made a beeline for the espresso machine. He waited impatiently while it made rude noises. “Couldn’t get a decent cup of coffee in that alternate, either,” he grumbled, and then, “Waffles, eh? That doesn’t look too bad.”

  “They’re okay.” Justin wouldn’t give them any more than that.

  Mr. Brooks laughed. “You can’t expect Trump City food and service here.” Justin nodded. The original Trump was many years dead, but his name remained a byword for extravagant luxury. Justin had seen pictures of him on the Net. He wore stiff, old-fashioned, uncomfortable-looking clothes, but he always had one very pretty girl or another on his arm. The girls probably didn’t think the clothes were funny.

  Justin—and Lonnie—spotted Carolina parakeets the next day. They heard them before they saw them. To Justin’s ear, the squawks and chirps belonged to a tropical jungle, not these ordinary Eastern woods. But there they were: green birds with yellow heads and, some of them, reddish faces.