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Authors: L. Neil Smith

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BOOK: The American Zone
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“As I understand it, the proper term is ‘War Between the States.’” He grinned. “But I come from a world in which there never was a United States.” He extended a big hand and a kindly smile. “Karl LeMat at your service, late, but not lamentably, of the Dominion of British North America.”
“That’s
where I saw you!” I snapped my fingers … er, with
him, not at him. This had nothing to do with my list. “You’re the guy that story on the’Com was about.”
The big man sighed. “It’s true enough. I suppose the notoriety has been good for business, though.”
It was all coming back to me now. “Papa” Karl LeMat, age sixty-six, was a gentle, grandfatherly grassroots philosopher of great charisma and somewhat variable philosophical rigor. He was one of those types you like from the moment you see them, and was on my list because he had a small business importing some of the most remarkable coins and currency in the known universe.
“The Dominion of British North America was never witness to any revolution against the Crown, nor to a civil war, nor a war between the states.” Papa told me, once we’d adjourned to my “office,” parked at the curb down the street from the Hanging Judge. Even with two big men, it wasn’t too cramped inside, and the air-conditioning was beginning to feel good.
It turned out that he’d come in for breakfast but never ordered any, so disgusted had he been with what he’d seen happening on the’Com. I offered him coffee and had the Neova make it while we waited, nice and strong with that big dollop of chocolate Confederates are so fond of, and a pinch of cinnamon. Before we knew it, the air inside the car smelled wonderful.
He accepted a steaming cup. “I’ve read your history—at least one very close to it. I suspect that in my world the Crown found some way to bribe your Mr. Washington, as he became Sir George, and later Lord Washington, Governor General of as much of the North American continent as was under British authority at the time.”
We both lit cigars, automatically kicking the car’s ventilators up to Warp 10. I’d been putting it off, but finally I asked the inevitable American Zone question. “So how’d you wind up in the Confederacy?”
He took a long drag on his cigar, exhaled, then took a big drink of his coffee. “I’m afraid we British North Americans were never as sanguine about Manifest Destiny as you independents apparently were. Your America was carved out by ordinary individuals attempting to make something better of themselves. Mine was mostly settled by aristocratic second sons attempting to escape the beastly English climate. It is fair to say, though, that it’s the American dominion that wags the British dog, these days. Even King Stephen spends more time at his residence in Boca Raton than he does in London.”
King Stephen. No abdication in the 1930s, I’d be willing to bet, so this would probably be some royal clown I’d never seen or heard of—maybe even the kid that Wally Simpson was paid never to have. Suited me. “And?”
“And as a result of this history, I suppose, I found myself, somewhat late in life, a resident of the city of Trinidad in what you’d call southern Colorado, just this side of the Franco-Mexican border, and one of the leaders of a national movement to establish free trade with Russian California.” “I see.” If you lived in the Confederacy, especially among its immigrants long enough, matters of geography—or rather of national borders—rapidly began to assume the solidity and importance of warm Jell-O. I’d met a guy once who claimed he was from a place where the United World capital was St. John’s, Newfoundland.
He eyed me. “Perhaps you do, after all. We were beginning to enjoy some success politically. Rather too much, I suspect, as I was forced to escape—that is, to accept the refuge that was so kindly offered me by your Gallatinite Rescue Society—when I was suddenly accused of criminal sexual harrassment, for having winked at a female postal employee over the visiphone.”
The GRS was only one of many groups here in LaPorte and
elsewhere throughout the Confederacy that made a practice of snatching freedom-loving people from unfree worlds. I’d worked for some of them, myself, including a really good one that made a happy specialty of exposing the nasty private habits of uptight public do-gooders. I still remember a certain Denver district attorney and his hidden walk-in closet full of rubber suits and whips and chains.
“For my own part, I wasn’t certain what astonished me more,” Papa went on, “that I was being watched by my own government—well, His Majesty’s government, anyway—or by people from an alternate world I never suspected exists.”
“Vast intellects, cool and dispassionate, or whatever it was H. G. Wells said. And now I understand you do a little rescuing yourself, a ha’penny here and a guinea there—”
“Dollars and centavos, actually, and only from government coffers, using a dirigible minibroach. Also, the occasional Mexican franc and Russian nickie. They’re all reasonably popular among your Confederate numismatists—though not much of anyone else, since they’re struck from base metals or aluminum.” He pronounced it, “al-you-MIN-i-um,” with the gratuitous British syllable. The guy looked so much like the late Jerry Garcia it was creepy to begin with, and it was even weirder hearing that plummy accent coming out of his mouth. I knew Trinidad pretty well, my mom had been born there. It was a sleepy little town, about half redbrick, three quarters Hispanic, and seven-eighths on welfare, built on steep hillsides and over coal mines. Windy as hell, too. I wondered what it would be like under British rule. Probably windier, with all those extra syllables.
“Not
my
numismatists, Papa. I’m just as much of a blueback here as you are, although I was the very first, back in 1987, reeled in by P’wheet and Thorens themselves.”
His brow wrinkled. “‘Blueback’? I don’t believe I’ve ever heard that expression before.”
“You will,” I grinned. “It’s for ‘the searing azure color of the broach-margin.’”
“‘Searing azure … I see—or rather, I didn’t see. I was taken away in a passenger car with its windows painted black—I still don’t know how, as private motor vehicles are forbidden in my native land—and brought over blindfold to preserve the otherside secrets of my rescuers.” He blinked. “You’re rather poetic for a detective, aren’t you?”
“Actually,” I grinned, “it was my lovely and talented mate who first described the broach that way. Go down to the Interworld Terminal sometime and have a look. It’s really spectacular. But you wouldn’t know who’s importing Stateside movies?”
He shook his head regretfully. “Not my bailiwick, I’m sorry to say. Thanks ever so much for the coffee, Win, and good to meet you. I believe I’ll go back in now and have that breakfast of which I deprived myself.”
“Thanks, Papa, have some for me.” We shook hands. He lifted the door and climbed out of the car, thoughtfully taking his empty cup with him. I caught myself thinking that if I’d had a microwave, we could have had hot doughnuts with our coffee. But there I was again, concentrating on my stomach, and zero for zero, informationwise. Oh well, I told myself, that’s how they all start.
I consigned my empty cup to the Neova’s trash disintegrator and leaned down to start the engine, when I heard a rapping coming from outside the big curved window at my left. I looked up to see Lucy demanding my attention. I signaled for her to step out of the way and swung the door up.
“You don’t happen to have a knitting needle inside that
steamer trunk you’re carrying?” The hotter it got the worse the itch.
“‘Fraid not, Winnie. I haven’t knitted since the Kaiser War.”
“Then what can I do for you this fine, sunny summer day, my dear Miz Kropotkin?” I was happy to see her again. She’d lost the apron, gained a huge leather purse, put her hair up in a bun—it made her look like Tweety Bird’s granny—and wore her giant Gabbett-Fairfax belted around a jersey dress of green and yellow paisley.
“You can let me hire you, Winnie! If we don’t get to the bottom of these disasters—an’ find out who’s behind’em—we’re gonna lose the Covenant!”
By which she meant the Covenant of Unanimous Consent, the document Gallatin had insisted upon once Washington—general and president, not sir and lord—had been duly ventilated. To Lucy, the Covenant was as sacred and worthy of defense as the American Bill of Rights.
And, at least until now, it was a hell of a lot better enforced.
The fact that nobody asks you to sing is
not
an indication that you should sing louder. This appears obvious until it’s applied to matters like mass transportation. In the United States there are virtually
no
private mass transit companies and thousands of public ones. This does not represent the failure of the market to provide a needed service, it represents the failure of an unneeded service to
go away!
—Memoirs of Lucille G
.
Kropotkin
North American Confederates are as peculiar about knives as they are about everything else. In the branch of history I grew up in, when Colonel-by-courtesy James Bowie and his smarter brother Rezin were dreaming up the fabled hand-wide, foot-long sharp-edged slab of steel—meteoric nickel-iron in the Hollywood version of the legend—that, in my homeworld, bears their family name, defensive handguns were single-shot contraptions, cumbersome, finicky, loaded with loose powder and lead balls at the muzzle, and often still ignited by a chunk of flint. A couple of generations later, Buffalo Bill Cody, a little behind the times in his choice of social cutlery, is reputed to have dragged around a Bowie knife with a sixteen-inch blade. That’s a scant two inches shorter than a Roman legionnaire’s regulation-issue
gladius.
However in general, as pistols began to mutate into revolvers, increasingly more powerful and reliable, the knives that gentlemen had been carrying around for personal defense started to atrophy, inch by inch, until (except for the occasional street-punk’s switchblade or spouse-perforating kitchen knife), in my time as a cop in the U.S.—the seventies and eighties—they’d vanished altogether.
In the Confederacy, on the other hand, knives seem to have grown right along with the increasing power of handguns, as if everybody wanted a toadsticker that was somehow
worthy
of his primary weapon. A belligerent fashion statement, if you see what I mean.
In Greater LaPorte, you hardly ever see a pistol belt without a dirk or dagger of some kind hanging from the off-side. One of the first individuals I encountered when I arrived, entirely by accident, believe me, was a gray-haired old gent trailing a huge cavalry saber. To make matters even more confusing, he’d been a chimpanzee.
All this was on my mind as we drove to the place Will had told me about, Daggett’s Wonderful World of Sharp Pointy Things, on North Snowflake, deep in the Zone. It was the only clean place on the block. I don’t know what it is about the Zone that makes it seem … well, grimy. Objectively, the several dozen square blocks where American immigrants have decided to light—entirely on their own; no Confederate has the inclination or power to make them—are every bit as well-repaired and freshly scrubbed as anyplace else in LaPorte. Maybe attitude can permeate a place as much as dirt and grime.
Or maybe it was just me.
Lucy and I were actually on our way, at her insistence, to take a look at what was left at the site of that hypersonic train wreck, south of town. I’d already tried telling her, several times, that she couldn’t hire me, as attractive as a little extra cash might be. I had another commission I’d already accepted payment to deal with. But each time I tried to explain myself, she didn’t hear it. The whole thing was all very Lucy. Okay, I figured the trip out to the wreck that she wanted to make anyway might be just the thing to convince her that top men were already hard at work on the case.
Top. Men.
I’d also done a little insisting of my own, hence a brief detour to take a gander at some grownup toys. Thomas Daggett (the name seemed familiar, somehow) seemed to be another recent immigrant from some variation of the U.S. But unlike the delegation that had sent itself to the Hanging Judge, protesting the availability of objects and activities they considered naughty, he seemed happy to be here, a sentiment I could well appreciate. Daggett was a short, broad, tough-looking guy, sort of a low wall of muscle with a heavy black beard, a nose like the beak of a raptor, and shrewd, dangerous eyes. His hands reminded me of the Wizard’s, although where Max resembled an oversized hobbit, this worthy looked to me like one of Tolkien’s mining dwarves. Belying his appearance, his voice was a quick and lively tenor. I had a hard time placing his accent, which seemed to have bits of New York and Chicago in it, maybe even Boston. I learned later that he spoke fluent Korean.
“I was an attorney back in Beaverton, Oregon,” he said. I perused the glass cases and wall displays in his shop (trying to picture him in a suit and tie—Beaverton: I’d often wondered why
Hustler
hadn’t made its headquarters there). I’d admitted I’d never seen so many cutting tools and edged weapons in one location in my life. Lucy agreed. “Y’know, Tommy-John, from sheer weight of metal, this place must generate a magnetic anomaly identifiable from orbit!”
Daggett beamed at her words and said nothing. He and Lucy had greeted each other like old friends. That happens all the time with her. I guess in 145 years you get to know a lot of people.
As we inspected what he had, I’d figured it couldn’t do any harm to ask him about
Gone with the Wind
—he was from another Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh—type world—and he’d ended up telling me something about himself. “I got sick and
tired of trying to defend my clients with both hands tied behind my back. The cops and the prosecution were always wailing about ‘revolving door justice,’ but I wasn’t allowed any of the basic necessities—like appealing to the Bill of Rights.”
“What?” It was the first time I’d ever seen Lucy shocked.
Daggett put a solemn hand to his heart and nodded. “Absolutely true, Lucy. The Bill of Rights is only for’higher intelligences’ in the appeals courts to deliberate—well after the defendant’s been properly terrified, exhausted, and financially destroyed. And the result? Well, if you shot somebody legitimately, in defense of your own life, it still cost you everything you had—your life savings, your house, your car, the braces on your children’s teeth—just to get through the legal meatgrinder.”
I added, “And you’d damned well better not get caught shooting somebody in defense of your
property.
”
“Damn straight,” the ex-lawyer declared. Proudhon rules the day in America’s courts, where property—private property—is theft.”
Here, except for duelling, shootings in defense of property were the commonest kind—and happened maybe twice a decade, because, well, who’d want to risk it? Lucy shook her head and sighed. “I see now, why Lan and the Wizard named their saloon the way they did.”
I laughed.
“Hard as it may be to believe,” Daggett wasn’t through, “I wasn’t even allowed to tell the jury of their thousand-year-old right and duty to reject an unjust, unconstitutional, or just plain stupid law. That was grounds for a mistrial—and maybe a little downtime in the pokey for the defense attorney. So if the law itself was illegal, and my client had broken it simply by exercising his rights, what could I do?”
“Emigrate!” Lucy replied.
I hadn’t told him that I’d been one of those cops, Stateside. “It always seemed to me,” I remarked, “that ‘revolving door justice’ was reserved for genuine criminal scumbags who knew how to work the wheels and levers, while members of the productive class, accidentally caught up in the gears of the machine—responsible individuals who’d never done anything illegal in their lives—”
“They were the ones got chewed up and spat out by the system?” Lucy finished. “If I were the religious type—which I’m not, thank God—I’d be feeling mighty grateful I was born here an’ not there!”
“Well it wasn’t as bad as I make it sound,” Daggett answered. “It was worse. Most of the time the jury had been handpicked by the judge and his minions to favor the prosecution and police, through a process of interrogation called ‘voir dire’—which a newspaper columnist friend of mine says is French for ‘jury tampering.’”
That was good for a laugh until I realized we could be heading for a system just like that if the Franklinites got their way. I changed the subject. “A friend of mine said you import knives made by a guy named Chris Reeve. I’d like to see some, if you don’t mind.”
“This case here,” Daggett said. “We get them in from half a dozen timelines; there’re a lot of model variations—Bowies, bolos, spearpoints, tantos, even a
bat’leth.
Anything specific in mind?
“My friend had something called a Project I.”
“That’d be Captain Sanders, of what we call the ‘sharpened prybar’ school. The Project I’s a big, heavy, thick knife, all right.”
“What’s the little one at the back?” I pointed to a smaller knife. I don’t know what it was about it that caught my eye, some combination of line and form and size—and in this case a
curved, gleaming edge—not to mention a sexy voice you hear sometimes, whispering seductively, “I belong to you, Win. I’m your knife. Take me home.” That’s more or less how I’d acquired my .41 Magnum.
“The Chris Reeve Sable IV.” Daggett bent down, reached into the case, and pulled it out, together with a heavy black leather scabbard. “Extra careful, Lieutenant Bear.” He indicated the cast on my left arm. “You look accident-prone to me, and this thing is literally as sharp as a razor. Reeve knives are all that way.”
I frowned, wondering how he knew my name. “You may not know it, Lieutenant, but you’re famous in the Zone. A legend. The first individual to step through the broach, and the hero who saved the Confederacy from the Hamiltonians. Somehow it always reminds me of that famous painting of Daniel Boone crossing the mountains into Kentucky—or was it Moses into the Promised Land?”
“It was just some poor schmuck in a pasture,” I lied, “trying not to walk in the cow patties. Anyway, I didn’t step through the broach, Daggett, not intentionally. I was
blasted
through and fetched up on my head and parts south in that park over by Confederation Boulevard.”
“Yeah,” he said, “but it sounds better the other way—call it artistic license.” He handed me the knife.
Papers in the box said, “Chris Reeve Knives, 11624 W. President Drive, #B, Boise, ID 83713, United States of America.” Sure enough, one was a warning about how sharp the five and a half-inch single-edged blade was. It wasn’t kidding. The trademark hollow handle was made from the same billet of steel as the blade, knurled so well you could almost use it for a file, topped with a threaded aluminum cap sealed with an O-ring. The whole length of skillfully worked metal was covered in a dark matte gray finish. I didn’t know what I’d keep in that little
compartment, most likely just some extra atmosphere, but it was nifty knowing it was there.
In shape, it was like a Finnish puukko knife, but what I liked best about the Sable IV was its size. Unlike my Rezin, it was a tool a man could live with every day. If he had to, he could fight with it, sure, but he was more likely to cut up vegetables and stir-fry meat, do camp chores, maybe whittle a toy for a kid. And more likely to need to, as well. That damned thing felt better in my hand than any knife I’d ever owned. And there was that sexy, seductive voice whispering, “I belong to you, Win. I’m your knife, take me home.” Sighing because, even in the Confederacy there are so many toys and so little money, I reached deep into my pocket—no easy matter with my gimpy wing—in search of gold and silver coins.
“Whatcha got, Lieutenant, moths?” Daggett pointed at my left side.
“What are you talking ab—oh!” There it was, between my plastic-covered elbow and my left love handle, a small, round hole, about a quarter of an inch in diameter. That didn’t bother me so much, except there was another hole just like it, where the fabric fell in a natural fold. And another in the back of the garment. When I stood up straight the holes all lined up.
The knife merchant clucked. “Looks like somebody doesn’t like you, Lieutenant.”
“Yeah,” Lucy agreed, “Somebody who can’t shoot worth sour owlshit.”
Vaguely, I recalled a recent tugging at my poncho—it would have to have been a small-caliber weapon wearing a noise-suppressor, something almost unheard of in the Confederacy—although it took me a moment to place it. Had I almost been assassinated on the street by a little old lady collecting for the Spaceman’s Fund?
Suddenly the itching in my cast got a whole lot worse. I’d been shot at before, but it wasn’t something you ever got used to. Or
I
ever got used to, anyway. I left the cardboard box, plastic peanuts, and paper with Daggett, and fastened my new knife’s scabbard onto my pistol belt.
“Come on, Lucy, let’s go see a train wreck.”
“
YAAAHOOOO!”
THAT WAS Lucy hollering, but she was hollering for both of us. My stomach gave me a sort of swooping sensation as the Neova tilted on its side and screamed its way around one of the few curves between LaPorte and what I thought of as the New Mexico border. We’d just emerged from a short tunnel bored under the Huerfano River, and it felt like being shot from a cannon.
Good thing I’m a passable one-hand driver.
Without a doubt, what I love best about the Confederacy, aside from my darling Clarissa and the general atmosphere of untrammeled liberty (about to become trammeled if we didn’t do something to stop it) is the highway speed: as fast as you can go with the pedal mashed all the way to the firewall, roughly 350 miles an hour. There’s a couple of production hovercars that’ll do twice that, just shy of Mach 1, but I wouldn’t trust myself behind the wheel, or you, either, as far as that goes.
BOOK: The American Zone
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