“They’re sure as shootin’ tryin’ t’set up some kinda government now!” Lucy remarked. “Call it mercantilism, corporate socialism, state capitalism, or Ring Around the Rosie, they don’t give a hoot as long as they get a piece of the action!”
“Ragtime Dance” finished up, and something else began, maybe it was “The Cascades.” I wished Clarissa could be here to share the talk. Simply to learn that Lucy was visiting Earth would delight her. But she was busy this morning with a client. One of the services she offers is “time therapy.” Clarissa didn’t invent it, but she was one of its first practitioners. The course of treatment is often compared to humans first learning to walk erect, or to the discovery of fire, because it deals with such a fundamental problem. What it does, by various means, is alter an individual’s perception of the passage of time, so that it
doesn’t seem to go by more quickly the more fun he’s having or the older he gets (one of the greatest tragedies, otherwise, of living a long time). I never thought anything could actually make sex
better
, but I was wrong.
Lan chuckled softly. “You know, boys and girls, they could get away with it, these Franklinites. Most native-born Confederates have no experience of government whatever. They simply refuse to believe the horror stories we immigrants have to tell them about the brutal and corrupt police states we escaped from, the crazy and stupid regulations we were expected to obey, the life-crippling taxes we were expected to pay. ‘Five times the tribute a medieval serf owed his master? You’ve got to be pulling my leg.’ Try to explain that we were prisoners of the majority, in a system where our votes didn’t count for anything, and they just shake their heads.”
“Or slap their holsters and wink!” her husband added. Back at the bar, somebody started to complain loudly about the lack of service. Lucy and Lan started to get up, but the Wizard held out a hand and shook his head. “You know the drill as well as I do!” he hollered back at his customers over his shoulder. “Punch your orders into the bartop, and I’ll get right to them!” Remaining at the end of the table, he flipped a panel open at its edge, pressed a button, and closed the flap. Instantly, the third of the tabletop closest to him glowed to life, becoming a virtualized replica of the grill he’d just been slaving over. (It could have been anything else he wanted, including chess, checkers, Trivial Pursuit, or this afternoon’s Patriots—Aztecs game.) Touching the image of this or that ingredient, that or this utensil, he began preparing several exotic omelettes at once, an order of emu eggs over easy, bacon, sausage, chorizo, fried tomatoes, and a personal favorite of mine, grilled parsnips.
Maybe, I thought, I should stay for lunch.
I glanced in the direction of the grill, always tickled to see what was happening there in the Wizard’s virtual absence. A pair of mechanical arms—covered with cheerfully red- and white-striped fabric so they could be called “waldos” with double accuracy—were mimicking every move he made here at the table, to the vast amusement of the formerly dissatisfied customers at the bar, who were whistling and cheering them on.
The arms flipped food onto plates, placed them on the counter before the now-mollified patrons, and served them the drinks they wanted. A hundred years behind Confederate technology or not, the Wizard was catching up fast. He’d designed and constructed the system he’d just put to good use. It wouldn’t be long before he’d acquired the polish required to be a fully practicing crosstime engineer.
“I know what you mean,” I told Lan, continuing our conversation. “With no taxes to stand in the way of a newcomer acquiring a home or other property, no government to drain him at the rate of half of everything he earns and half of everything he spends, he doesn’t need to work more than four or five hours a week to maintain the relatively modest standard of living he was already used to, working forty hours a week back home.”
The Wizard nodded, swallowing a bite of spiced apple omelette. “And those willing to work harder usually do better. If they decide to start a business, they just start it—that’s what we did! All they need is an idea and capital, since there are no permits to buy, no phony safety standards to meet, no environmental impact statements to file, no bureaucracies to satisfy, no inspectors to bribe—”
“All such impediments,” his wife finished for him, “having been legislated in our world by corrupt politicians working for those they were supposed to regulate, to prevent fresh market entries and new competition. But it’s the same old story as it was
back home. America was vastly better than anything the world had ever seen before because it was vastly
freer
than anything the world had ever seen before. But Americans forgot that, somehow. In the same way, people born here in the Confederacy may not appreciate it, and they’re all too likely to listen to parasitic creatures like the Franklinites.”
“Public schools, that’s what happened to America, to Americans. They didn’t forget; they were never taught.” I slid out of the booth, stood up, and stretched as much as I could, retrieving my hat and poncho. “Well, as much as I’ve enjoyed our little seminar this morning,” I told Lan, the Wizard, and Lucy, “and as sincerely as I’d like to stay and have another meal or two, I have work to do.”
They all groaned soulfully on my behalf and rhetorically begged me to reconsider such foolishness, but I could see that they had work on their minds, as well. People tend to be that way when they get to keep everything they earn.
With difficulty, I pulled out my increasingly wrinkled sheet of paper again. Now it even had a grease spot on it, from the sausage, I think. “I originally stopped by to show you this list of Zoners connected with interworld importing one way or another, and to ask if you had any idea who’s responsible for bringing in otherworld movie titles like
Gone with the Wind and It Happened One Night.”
“Why not ask the’Com channels that show them?” the Wizard asked.
“Because the Hanging Judge is Alternate World Central—anything going on in the Zone is usually heard about here, first. Besides, I did, first thing this morning, and they told me to fribble off. And anyway, I needed breakfast.” I reached into one of my pants pockets and extracted the proper amount in copper coins to cover the meal and a tip. Neither of them refused my
money. And I wouldn’t have let them. After all, I was a partner in this establishment, and I’d be expecting my cut at the end of the month.
I got a cigar out and lit it—the perfect finish to a perfect meal. The Confederacy had another thing we didn’t have in the States besides cures for cancer, heart disease, and emphysema: adequate ventilation. Come to think of it, I was surprised friend Doug hadn’t complained about cigar and cigarette machines, which were plentiful.
“I would have told you to fribble off, too,” said the Wizard. “Private business is private business. Anything you’re looking for in particular?”
“In addition to these people? Yeah, but I’m not sure how to put it. Tell me: who played Rhett Butler in the version of
Gone with the Wind
that you grew up with?”
“Clark Gable,” he replied. Yolanda nodded agreement. “Who else would it be?”
“Me, too. But somebody’s imported another version, starring Robert Cummings—featuring Bette Davis as Scarlett O’Hara. Of course that might seem perfectly normal to some of these immigrants—although I doubt they’d actually remember any movie that resulted from that particular casting.”
Lan raised her eyebrows. “So what do you want us to do, Win?”
The usual. Talk to people. Listen to them. Tell these folks I’d like to talk with them. Keep your eye out for anything really bizarre like … well, Bob Cummings and Bette Davis. I know, it’s a hard thing to judge. But keep an open mind and let me know.” They were about to tell me they would, when the floor began to tremble under our feet, the way it had the night of the Old Endicott explosion. The Wizard wiped an arm across the table, clearing it of the stovetop images—the Copperodeon halted right
in the middle of “Solace”—bringing up a news service. It was the animated, cheerful, interactive, image of InstaNews’ bottle-nosed dolphin, Lightning, one of the Confederacy’s historic contributions to mass media. Not.
“ … apparently hit a deliberately set obstruction at eighteen thousand miles an hour, vaporizing itself and blasting out a mile-wide crater.” Lightning took an absolutely unnecessary breath. “To repeat, an ultrahighspeed underground train bound from LaPorte to Mexico City has apparently hit a deliberately set obstruction at 18,000 miles an hour, vaporizing itself and blasting out a mile-wide crater. No reliable word yet on casualties, but we’ll let you know as soon as we hear.”
Okay, my fault: I’d just had a great breakfast and felt as contented as a Canadian. I was a perfect mark for the Bear Curse.
Want to understand why politicians do what they do? Simple: when you’re a big, gray, greasy rat, walking around on two hind legs, you have a lot to gain by turning the world into a garbage heap.
—Memoirs of Lucille G. Kropotkin
I don’t think five minutes passed before the Franklinites were on the’Com again, demanding—as they had for more than two centuries—that
something
be done. This time (surprise!), they had something specific in mind.
“What this unspeakable tragedy teaches us, Jerry,” their spokesman intoned hypersincerely, egged on by the sleaziest dirt-grubber in all the Confederate media, “is that we must begin keeping better track of one another. People must be required to carry cards with holographic likenesses and other vital information on them. Fingerprint or retinal pattern records must be established and maintained—or perhaps both fingerprint
and
retinal patterns—and everyone must be fingerprinted and scanned.”
“Frogsnot!” a furious Lucy exclaimed. Bereft of handy sexual or religious epithets, Confederate profanity approaches the Daliesque—although the fine old expression, “Shit!” is well thought of and often used.
“Why, that fatherless villain!” I heard a voice say. I looked up and was rewarded with the vision of a huge heavyset man with long gray hair and a big gray beard looking over my shoulder. He was wearing patched and faded jeans and the first tie-dyed T-shirt I’d seen in almost a decade.
“Hullo, Lucy. The man’s addressing what happened as if it were some sort of natural disaster, ignoring the criminals who did it, and trying to punish the survivors!”
“Hush, Papa!” Lucy responded in a whisper everyone could hear. The tie-dyed fellow looked very familiar somehow, but I couldn’t place him immediately. We were all looking down at that multitalented tabletop in the booth in the Hanging Judge, although by now there were half a hundred other surfaces around the room—most of them vertical—displaying the same disgraceful performance that held our attention captive in the booth. Some things never change from continuum to continuum.
Onscreen we saw the regrettably wealthy and famous Jerry Rivers, a specimen of H.
journalismus
whom the denizens of any number of different universes would have recognized, although not always by the same name, and never with any genuine enthusiasm. Where I came from, he’d dumped the ethnic names that he’d been born with, then taken them back when they became fashionable. He was a Latino, dark and slight of build, with a big mustache of the kind that were once called “soup strainers.” The broad-lapeled, pin-striped, double-breasted suit he was wearing—an American import with a white turtleneck sweater—probably cost more than my first house.
In any world, the man was a professional tearduct and syndicated hairsprayhead even the networks had avoided for twenty years. For him, no act of dishonesty, depravity, or simple bad taste was too low in the pursuit of ratings. Pretending to uphold the downtrodden (a difficult class to find in the Confederacy), his strategy was always to set one group against another, so that he could cash in on whatever conflict that generated. “Y’know, Winnie,” Lucy offered, as if she’d been reading my mind, “That pile of hyena dung—”
“Meaning Rivers?” I asked, discovering an itch inside my cast.
“Meaning Rivers—he once pushed a crackpot theory that cetaceans aren’t actually sapient—their intelligence is faked by humans
as part of some kinda gigantic an’ horrendous plot against the simians: gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, and gibbons!”
The Wizard laughed. “I remember that! He never explained who or what or when or where or why—after all, it was the same humans who ‘elevated’ simians in the first place and offered them full partnership in Confederate society.”
“This lack of sapience sure must have come as a surprise to Ooloorie Eckickeck P’wheet.” I chuckled. She was the porpoise who invented the probability broach that had brought me and thousands of others to the Confederacy.
Now that I’d noticed it, the itch was getting worse. Lucy began writing something in a notepad in her spidery, almost microscopic hand, Lan looking over her shoulder, offering comments. I knew it meant somebody was in for a heap of trouble.
I was surprised not to recognize the guy Rivers was interviewing. It wasn’t Buckley F. Williams, who usually did the talking for this bunch. Words scrolling across the screen bottom labled him Allard Wayne, junior associate director of the Franklinite Faction of the Gallatinist Party. The man was colorless and characterless, as if he’d been put through the washing machine too many times and dried at too high a temperature. If the expression, “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them—I’ll change them!” hadn’t already been tacked onto George Bush’s New England carpetbagger backside, it would have fit this guy perfectly.
Lucy looked up from her notepad. “I wonder where Buckley is about now, and what he’s thinkin’.”
“I usually disagree with him about nearly everything,” Lan said, “but this seems kind of over-the-top even for him. He strikes me as a basically decent guy.”
“Decent if a litle misguided,” I agreed. “He even invited me
for a ride on his “yacht” once, a two hundred-foot dirigible where we could relax and smoke some Sonoran Sillyweed he was bragging about. I declined with regret.”
“And that’s why they call him ‘dope,’” said the Wizard. Meaning me, not Buckley. I meant to ask if he had a pickle fork or something that could get at the itch in my cast, but got distracted by the’Com.
Just now, Jerry was pretending to be “fair” in his own inimitable fashion: “Is it true, Mr. Wayne—may I call you Allard?—that some opponents of these reasonable, commonsense reforms you Franklinites advocate object; that they compare it to being ‘ear-tagged like cattle’? I’ve heard some call it ‘pre-incrimination’ and others point out that it would be unconstitutional even in most versions of the Old United States.”
That’s what they called the pre-Confederate nation that had merged with Mexico and Canada in 120 A.L. Sometimes the name was applied—by morons like Jerry Rivers, ignorant of history—to otherworld counterparts that hadn’t ever merged with their neighbors to the north and south.
“Well, Jerry,” the junior associate director responded to Rivers’s softball question, “the Confederacy’s Founding Fathers, however wise they happened to have been, couldn’t possibly have conceived of something like this overwhelming tidal wave of
aliens
under which our beloved traditional Confederate values are beginning to break down. If for no other reason than for the sake of our children, the naive eighteenth century notions of Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson and Albert Gallatin must be set aside—at least temporarily—in favor of peace, order, and security.”
The stained glass windows of the Hanging Judge rattled with a unanimous “Boooo!” erupting from its several dozen occupants. Lucy pounded on the table with her pistol butt, threatening
to crack its image-generating surface. Always it’s the children who serve as a handy excuse for whatever atrocities those in power want to justify. These people had had a belly full of it already—that’s why they were here—and so had I.
“You know,” said Lucy as she began to calm down, “this character is relatively clever—”
“Or whoever wrote his script for him,” Lan observed.
“And coached him with the big words,” the Wizard added.
“Well he’s clever in at least one respect.” Lucy looked around, daring anyone else to interrupt. “In only two sentences, he’s blamed both of these catastrophes on you immigrants. He’s branded you as Martians or Venusians or something. He’s established the Founding Fathers as a bunch of hopeless nut cases. And he’s asserted that the Franklinite Faction knows better than anybody else what’s good for everybody concerned!”
I, too, looked around, and saw a bunch of grim faces. “All these people,” I told Lucy, “these immigrants to the Confederacy, are all too well accustomed to dog-and-pony shows like this one. Most of them, given the chance, leaped through the probability broach to escape exactly this kind of insanity.”
Lan nodded. “And the ever-increasing restrictions on their lives that result from the fact that established authority never seems quite competent to ferret out the guilty and so instead, invariably punishes the much handier innocent.”
“That seems to me,” Lucy suggested, “like a good reason not to establish any authority at all!”
The Wizard slapped a broad palm down on the tabletop. “I just realized how clever these Franklinites really are. Lan’s right. Native Confederates—with the exception of those like you, Lucy—might not appreciate what they have. They might even be willing to give it up, perhaps a little bit at a time, just to stop all of this carnage and destruction.”
“And?” I asked, just to be helpful. Maybe a teriyaki stick …
“And Wayne and his buddies,” the Wizard replied, “have now singled out the one and only group likeliest to oppose what amounts to their overnight takeover of theConfederacy—recent immigrants fleeing the kind of tyranny they want to impose—and made them the likeliest suspects for a pair of manmade disasters that renders such a takeover ‘necessary.’”
“Shit,” I said, and meant it.
“Shit, indeed. Everybody in this room knows exactly what comes next. Having broken the ice with this ID card scheme of theirs, next they’ll demand that Congress be reconvened ‘for the duration of the emergency.’”
“Meanin’’til the sun burns out!” Lucy offered. She’d finished her own food and was helping the Wizard finish his.
“Until the sun burns out. Before we know it,” the Wizard went on, ignoring the plundering of his plate, “for the first time in over two centuries, careful talk of taxes ‘for increased security’ will begin to be taken seriously by Rivers and his odiferous ilk, along with ‘reasonable, commonsense’ restrictions on immigration, and maybe even on the personal weapons you Confederates carry every waking minute of your lives—”
“Which happens to make the Confederacy the most crime-free society in this or any other world,” I said.
The Wizard answered, “Right you are, Win. But when did a perfectly solved problem ever help a politician? I tell you, if we don’t do something, the Confederacy could easily end up just like the places we all escaped from!”
“Sssssh!” There was a whole chorus of hissing shushes as the interview went on.
“On the other hand, Allard,” Rivers was saying, “there are those who say the reforms you call for don’t go nearly far
enough—among them the political advocates Jerse Fahel and Howard Slaughterbush.”
“Those gabbling too-farists?” Wayne pretended to be amused. “Well, Jerry, that just goes to show why the people of the North American Confederacy desperately need the Franklinite Faction to balance things out. Unlike Fahel and Slaughterbush, we’re a part of the nation’s history, a part of the Gallatinist Party. We’re in favor of as much freedom as is possible and practicable. The purely temporary measures we recommend are minimal, but they’re necessary if we wish to keep any freedom at all.”
I’d only vaguely heard of Slaughterbush before now—some kind of political kook, exactly like Wayne and his masters—but for the first time since I’d gotten here, I began to have that old, helpless, hopeless feeling one experiences standing in the path of an oncoming legislative steamroller. I’d had that feeling all my life as an American. It was a feeling I’d almost forgotten here. I remembered it now. I hated it. But for me, it was time to go to work. I’d suddenly remembered where I’d seen that big tie-dyed guy—or a reference to him, anyway. He was on the list that I’d compiled earlier in the car. Now, telling my friends good-bye for the third or fourth time, my hat, coat, broken arm, and I followed him out the double doors, onto the brightly sunlit multicolored sidewalk of the Zone.
“Hey, Papa!” I hollered after him, remembering that someone had called him that back in the bar. On my list, he had another name altogether. “You got a minute?”
A little old lady—and in this culture that meant
really
old—heavyset and stooped, approached me. She had a big hat with an almost opaque veil, and a small basket full of smaller change. “Contribute to the Spaceman’s Fund?” she asked in a cracked
and ancient-sounding voice. I looked down: she’d tugged at my serape. There’s no government welfare of any kind in the Confederacy, which is why I try, ordinarily, to be as generous as I can. But I was in a big hurry at the moment. “Not now,” I told her, “maybe later,” and rushed past her.
I yelled again, “Hey, Papa!”
The guy slowed and turned. He wore what we once called “granny glasses” and carried a big leather purse on a wide strap over one shoulder. There was a bulge under his shirt over his right hip. He looked at my left arm. “You’re injured. How may I help?”
I grinned at him—an armed hippie. “I’m okay. You can tell me who played Rhett Butler in
Gone with the Wind.
”
Nine out of ten people would have been annoyed or perplexed. Papa simply said, “Now let me guess—the cinema? I’m afraid I’ve never heard of a Rhett Butler, or
Gone with the Wind.
Is it something I should look for on the’Com?”
I introduced myself and explained a bit of what I was up to. We’d reached my car, the little Neova shining candy-apple red in what was rapidly becoming the broiling afternoon sun. There were some places in the Confederacy where local merchants had thrown in together and air-conditioned the whole damned city. I wished Greater LaPorte were one of them. “Let me guess,” I told the guy. “You come from a world where the United States never fought a civil war.”