The Disunited States of America ct-4
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"They sure are," Mr. Brooks said grimly. "And Lord only knows what happens next. Both these states have the bomb." Lots of states had the bomb in this alternate. So did lots of countries in Europe and Asia. It didn't get used very often, for the same reason it didn't get used very often in the home timeline. Once you let that genie out of the bottle, how did you put it back?
But what this alternate didn't have were superpowers. Nobody was strong enough to tell anybody else not to do something or else and make the or else stick. Every time a squabble started here, people worried. Caught in the middle of a war, Justin was one of those worried people.
When the bombers flew over Elizabeth, Beckie didn't know what was going on. The Snodgrasses didn't have the TV on. Mr. Snodgrass was looking at some of his coins. Mrs. Snodgrass and Gran were going back and forth about something that had happened when they were both much younger than Beckie was now. They remembered it two different ways.
Beckie didn't think it mattered which of them was right, but they both seemed to. Not even the roar in the sky slowed them down. It made Beckie jam her fingers in her ears. When it was over, she said, "Don't you have laws against low-flying planes here? We sure do back home." She wished she were back home.
Her grandmother and Mrs. Snodgrass went on arguing with each other. They didn't care about jets landing on the roof, let alone flying over it. Mr. Snodgrass looked up from the silver florin he was examining. He spoke in a soft, sad voice: "All the rules go out the window in a war, Rebecca."
"In a—? Oh!" She hadn't even thought of that. California hadn't been in a real war since more than twenty years before she was born. And that one was fought more with software than with germs or bombs. "Do you really think those were . . . warplanes?"
"I don't know what else they could have been," Ted Snodgrass answered.
"And that was when the cat threw up the hairball in his lap," Gran said triumphantly.
"It was no such thing," Ethel Snodgrass said. "How could it be, when he didn't come over till two days later?"
Mr. Snodgrass looked from one of them to the other. "Good thing they don't have bombers, I reckon," he said to Beckie.
That held so much truth, it hurt. Beckie started laughing so she wouldn't start to cry. Gran looked bewildered—she hadn't heard what Mr. Snodgrass said. Her cousin had. Husbands and wives often listened to each other out of the corner of their ear, as it were. "That's not funny, Ted," Ethel Snodgrass said.
"Well, maybe it isn't," he said. He wasn't the kind of man who got in a fight for the sake of getting in a fight. But he wasn't the kind of man who backed away when he thought he was right, either. "Don't you reckon you're being silly, going on and on about how things happened when Hector was a pup? What difference does it make now?"
"It makes a difference, all right," his wife answered, though she didn't say what sort of difference it made.
"It sure does," Gran said. Then she kind of blinked and scratched her head. She wasn't used to agreeing with anybody about anything.
The phone rang. "Saved by the bell," Mr. Snodgrass said, and pulled it out of his pocket. "Hello? .. . Oh, hello, Mr. Brooks. . .. Yes, tomorrow morning would be fine. . . . Ten o'clock? Sure, that'll work. See you then. Will your nephew be along? . . . All right. 'Bye now." He hung up. "That was the coin fella," he announced.
"I never would have guessed." Mrs. Snodgrass could sound a lot like Gran. Anybody would have figured they were related. Mrs. Snodgrass seemed to have a little more style with her sarcasm, though.
"The young man'll be along to pass the time of day," Mr. Snodgrass added to Beckie. His wife might not have spoken, as far as he was concerned. She might not even have been in the same county. He went on, "I expect he's more interesting than old folks going on about what happened a long time ago. I expect he may even be more interesting than these Georgia shillings from the 1920s."
Beckie had no idea how to answer that, so she didn't try. Gran and Ethel Snodgrass went back to arguing about what had happened a long time ago. Mrs. Snodgrass didn't stop arguing even when she served up ham and corn on the cob for supper. The food was terrific. It didn't taste as if it was made in a factory and frozen and came off a supermarket shelf. It tasted as if somebody down the street had raised the hog and smoked the ham and grown the corn. And somebody down the street probably had. Lots of people in Elizabeth had little gardens and kept a few pigs and chickens.
Dessert was a cherry pie that also never saw the inside of a freezer. Beckie was just finishing up when jets flew over again, this time from west to east. "I hope those are our planes coming home again," Mr. Snodgrass said. "If they aren't. . . Well, if they aren't we've got even more trouble than I was afraid we did."
"How will we know if they're not?" Beckie asked.
"If you hear things go boom, that's a pretty good clue," he answered. He got off zingers even more readily than his wife did, but in a nicer tone of voice.
And what he said usually had the ring of truth behind it. For the next half hour, Beckie kept cocking her head to one side and listening for bombs going off. She was relieved when she didn't hear any. Then she wondered if she ought to be relieved. Virginia wasn't a very free place. But Ohio wasn't her state, either. She just wished they would have held off on their stupid war till she got home. No doubt that was a selfish attitude, but it was how she felt.
"Mr. Snodgrass!" she said suddenly.
"What is it?"
"Do you have any coins from the days of the old United States?"
"Yes, I think so. A few. That's a long time ago now—almost three hundred years since things fell apart."
"Could I look at them?" Beckie asked.
"Well, let me see where I've got 'em stashed." Mr. Snodgrass flipped through an album and took a plastic mount off a page. "Here's what they call a quarter dollar from 1801, not long before states started breaking away and going off on their own."
One side of the silver coin showed a woman with flowing hair—Liberty, she was supposed to be. On the other side, an eagle spread its wings. Beckie sighed. "I was just thinking—it might have been neat if the United States stayed united. We wouldn't have all these quarrels and wars in that case."
"We'd probably have something even worse. Things happen for the best—I'm sure of it," Mr. Snodgrass said. "Besides, holding that mess together just wasn't in the cards. The little states wouldn't admit that they weren't as important as places like Virginia and Pennsylvania. Imagine—there was a place called Rhode Island. It's part of Massachusetts now, of course, but in those days you could spit from one side of it to the other, near enough. And it said it had to be as strong in Congress— that's what they called the United States legislature—as anybody else."
"I remember reading about how it got founded—they teach us that even on the West Coast," Beckie said. "And I know it's not a state any more. Was that the Second Northeastern War or the Third?"
"The Second, I think, but don't hold me to it." Ted Snodgrass chuckled. "I haven't studied that stuff in a lot longer than you." He paused. "I haven't studied it in school, I should say, but you learn some history if you collect coins, too." After he got out another album, he showed Beckie a stout silver coin, as big as a five-peso piece back home. "See? It's a commemorative from 1837, and that means it's from after the Second Northeastern War."
She looked at the coin. COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS, it said, and 2 FLORINS. A bald man with sideburns was identified as John Quincy Adams. On the other side, the coin showed a cannon and the words LIBERATION OF PROVIDENCE. "Did the people who lived in Providence think they were liberated?" she asked, handing it back.
"Don't bet on it," Mr. Snodgrass answered. "If I recollect right, somebody from Rhode Island took a shot at old Adams not long after that."
"You're right!" Beckie exclaimed. "They made a movie about it—I've seen it on TV. If the movie has things straight, Adams deserved it."
"How often do movies have things straight?" Mr. Snodgrass asked, which was a good questi
on. The answer was, Not very often. He went on, "If that's so, I'm not surprised we've never seen it here. The courts wouldn't let in a film that showed somebody shooting at a consul or whatever Adams called himself—too likely to give folks nasty ideas, and they get too many already as is."
In some states, you could print anything you wanted or say whatever you pleased in movies or on TV or on the radio or online. In others, the censors would land on you with both feet if you tried. Virginia was one of those. What would happen to somebody here who tried to say on the air that Negroes ought to have equal rights? Nothing good—Beckie was sure of that.
Where you couldn't publish different ideas, almost everybody had the same ones. But Justin didn't. Beckie reminded herself of that. He was nervous about admitting it, but he didn't. He seemed embarrassed to come from this state at all.
Beckie took a last look at the United States quarter dollar. If you had one government stretching from coast to coast, you wouldn't need to be embarrassed about where you came from. Maybe a state like that would have fought wars with Quebec and Ontario and Monterrey, but would it have fought as many wars as the real North America had seen? Beckie didn't think so.
"Not much point in driving," Mr. Brooks said. "It's only a few blocks. Come on—the walk will do you good."
"What if somebody knocks us over the head and steals your coins?" Justin asked.
"I'm a big boy now. I can take care of myself. Besides, even if I can't, everybody here knows everybody else. Everyone would know who did it as soon as it happened."
"But you said before that we're not from here, so would they tell?"
"Well, I hope they're starting to get used to us. I don't intend to get them mad or anything. I'm not going to rip off Ted Snod-grass, and I don't expect you to bang the drum for Negro rights where you'll tick folks here off." Mr. Brooks eyed Justin over his glasses. "What you say to the young lady from California . . . Well, be careful about that, too, okay?"
Justin's ears heated. "Okay. I'll try, anyhow."
"I suppose that'll do." Mr. Brooks grinned, which took a lot of tension out of the air. "Come on. Let's go."
As they walked down to Prunty, they passed three or four people out walking dogs or just walking for exercise. Everyone said hello. Nobody tried to knock the strangers from the big city over the head. Justin felt foolish. He felt even more foolish when one of the dogs licked his hand as he was petting it. "01-lie right likes you," said the woman who had the mutt on the leash.
"Uh, I guess he does," Justin answered. Ollie's frantically wagging tail said it was a good guess. So did the dog spit on Justin's fingers.
Mr. Snodgrass let them in when Mr. Brooks rang the bell.
"Mornin', gents," he said. "I've got the coffee on, and there's fizzes in the icebox if you don't care for that."
"I'll have a fizz, thanks," said Justin, who wasn't much of a coffee drinker.
"I'll get it for you," Ted Snodgrass said. Beckie walked into the front room then. Mr. Snodgrass chuckled. "No, I'll let the spry young legs do the job. Rebecca, seems like Mr. Monroe here is perishin' of thirst. You suppose you might lend him a hand?"
"Well, I know you've got a garden hose . . ." Beckie said. Mr. Snodgrass snorted.
"Helpful," Justin said.
"That's me," Beckie agreed. She went into the kitchen and came back with two fizzes.
"Thanks," Justin said when she handed him one. Mr. Snodgrass poured coffee for Mr. Brooks. They started talking about coins. Beckie raised an eyebrow. Justin nodded. The two of them went out into the back yard. "Where's your grandmother?" Justin asked.
"She and Mrs. Snodgrass went down to Palestine to shop," Beckie answered.
"You didn't want to go along?" he said.
She shook her head. "Nope. All they'll want to look at is clothes for old ladies, and that's so exciting I can't stand it." She yawned. Justin laughed. She went on, "Besides, the less I have to do with Gran, the happier I am, and you can take that to the bank. I've been traveling with her for seventy-four days now, and that's about seventy-five too many."
"Oh," Justin said, which seemed safe enough.
Beckie nodded as if he'd said something more. "Yeah, that's about the size of it," she said. "I don't think I'll ever get along with Gran again. I mean, I can still put up with her and everything, but that's not the same as liking her. She's . . . sour."
Justin didn't say anything this time. People could talk about their own relatives as if they were swindlers and bank robbers and grouches. If anybody else said the smallest bad thing about the same people, though, they'd rise up like tigers in their defense. Even if Justin thought he was right—no, especially if he thought she was right—keeping quiet about it looked like a good idea.
"Ever wonder how things might have been?" Beckie asked out of the blue.
"Huh?" Justin said. Brilliant, he thought. Now she won't think you're an idiot. Now she'll be sure of it.
But she wasn't—or it didn't show if she was, which was good enough. "If things were different," she said again.
"What kind of things?" Justin asked. At least that was a better question.
"All kinds of things," Beckie answered. "Things from way back when. Last night, Mr. Snodgrass showed me a coin from the United States. I asked him to, because I was thinking about that stuff."
"Were you?" Justin said. What he was thinking now was, Uh-oh. It worried him a lot more than Huh? had.
Beckie nodded seriously. "I sure was. I wondered what it would have been like if all of this were one state—one country, I guess I mean—and not a whole bunch of them." She waved her arms to show all of this meant everything from sea to shining sea. Except it didn't mean exactly that here, because nobody ever wrote "America the Beautiful" in this alternate. It came along in 1893, and by then this North America was chopped into more pieces than the chicken in a Chinese chicken salad.
"I don't see how that could have happened," he said—a lie he had to tell. In the home timeline, it had happened. The big states and the little ones compromised, and they all agreed to the Constitution, and it worked. But he couldn't let on that he knew anything about that. He'd already talked too much once.
Beckie didn't point her finger at him and go, Oh, yes, you do! She couldn't know he didn't belong in this alternate. All she knew was that he made kind of a peculiar Virginian. And even Virginians were entitled to be peculiar. It was a free state—as long as you weren't an African American, and as long as you didn't push it too hard.
Instead of pointing a finger, Beckie said, "Mr. Snodgrass told me the same thing. I suppose he's right—I suppose you're right, too. It's interesting to think about, though, isn't it? What might have been, I mean."
"Sure," Justin said. "There isn't any way to tell for sure what would have happened after that, though." He knew how true that was, where Beckie didn't. One alternate where the South won the Civil War had racial problems that made the ones here look like a walk in the park. Another alternate U.S.A. was a nasty tyranny that ran most of its world because it could squash anybody else. Yet another, in a world where the Germans won World War I and all the wars afterwards, remained under occupation by the Kaiser's soldiers even now. Endless possibilities . . .
Beckie, who didn't know about any of those alternates or the home timeline, was thinking along different lines. "Not being able to know makes it more interesting, not less. It isn't like some math problem in school, where there's only one right answer. You can just talk about it and see how it might have gone this way, or that one, or even the other one."
Or it might have gone all those different ways—only you'd need a transposition chamber to see how they worked out. Justin couldn't talk about that, either. He was just glad his face didn't give him away. For all practical purposes, Beckie had figured out the crosstime secret.
He made his thumb and forefinger into a pretend gun and aimed it at her. "If you come up with the one true answer, I'll have to kill you," he said, doing his best to sound like a spy.
"I try," he said modestly.
"Well, good, because it's working," she told him.
There was a low, deep rumble, like thunder far away. That was a pretty good comparison, because this part of the continent got some ferocious thunderstorms. Only one trouble: the sun blazed down out of a bright blue sky. Not a cloud anywhere to be seen. But there was a cloud on Justin's hopes as he said, "What's that?" because he feared he knew the answer. Beckie said the same thing at the same time, and he thought he heard the same fear in her voice.
Then she said, "That was something blowing up, wasn't it?" Sometimes naming your fear could drive it away. Other times, naming it made it worse. This felt like one of those.
Justin breathed in a big lungful of warm, muggy air and then sighed it out. "I don't know of anything else it's likely to be."
Her hands folded into fists, so tight that her knuckles turned pale under her California tan. "These people are crazy. What is there to fight about?"
That was a pretty good question in most wars, and a really good question in this one. Justin had to remind himself that he was supposed to come from Virginia, which meant he was supposed to be a Virginia patriot. "Ohio wants to hurt our coal business," he said, which was true. "Ohio wants to stir up trouble between our whites and Negroes, too, to keep us hopping." That was also true. "We can't just let them get away with it." Was that true? Anybody from Virginia would naturally think so. Someone from Ohio? That was likely to be a different story.
"It's all stupid, if you ask me," Beckie said. "Isn't there enough coal business for Ohio and Virginia to share it?"
"There's Pennsylvania, too, and Boone," Justin said. "They think Virginia and Ohio both have too big a share already." If he were a real Virginian, he would know that. Coming from the other side of the continent, Beckie might not.
She said something rude about Pennsylvania and Boone— and about Ohio and Virginia, too. A Virginia girl wouldn't have said it the same way, but people from California seemed less restrained. Some things didn't change much across timelines. Then she added, "Don't get mad, but it seems to me that your Negroes could use somebody on their side, even if it is somebody foreign."