The American Zone, Page 5

  “I never doubted you for a minute, Winnie!” One of the things I liked best about Lucy was that, even at her age, her hair wasn’t blue. This morning it was fiery red. “You were born for this world! These blasted newcomers, though …”

  I laughed out loud. “Next thing you know they’ll be talking about banning tobacco!”

  She peered at me, wondering if I was serious. “There’s more to it than that, even! Thanks to a lifetime spent in one welfare state or another, somewhere at the back of his beady little mind, even the noisiest anarchist among’em expects some official program t‘handle his little dissatisfactions—these morons an’ their vending machine vendetta for instance—or t‘keep his family eatin’ while he looks for work.”

  I felt my eyebrows rise and I was suddenly perfectly serious. “You know, I think you may be onto something, at that.”

  “You bet I am, Winnie. He’s always stunned by the truth—that nobody cares if they don’t like the vendin’ machines. (I’m surprised they didn’t mention the Porn-O-Mats!) That he’s expected t’raise his own kids and leave everybody else’s alone. That we’ve got charities in the Confederacy, but they’re all totally private—an’ reserved exclusively for a miniscule minority legitimately incapable of feedin’ themselves.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “And even worse, there are those who used to be doctors, lawyers, engineers, scientists, or technicians Stateside. They soon discover that they have more than a century of professional catching up to do (or that they aren’t needed at all; hell, it almost happened to me)—and have to start all over again as busboys, janitors, or …”

  “Fry-cooks.” I looked up to see the Wizard standing beside me, wiping his hands on his apron. I shoved over in the booth, but he waved me off and pulled up a chair. Lan squeezed in with Lucy. They’d brought plates with them and drinks of their own. The Wizard was famous for the size and potency of his margaritas, sometimes known around here as “Mexican martinis.” I briefly regretted settling for rum and Coke. “On the other hand,” he went on, taking a swig of his fabled lime and tequila elixir, “they get paid in real money while they’re catching up—copper, nickel, silver, gold, platinum, palladium—not a single grain of which is ever subject to income, sales, excise, or self-employment taxes.”

  “Or ever confiscated,” his wife added, “using the excuse of some worthless government insurance pyramid scheme.” General nodding all around. Given everything that went on within its walls, the Hanging Judge as we knew it wouldn’t have been allowed to exist in any of the regimes we’d variously and severally left behind, and the dozen or so individuals it employed would have been on food stamps. Or in prison.

  “Tell me something,” Lan asked. “We’ve been so busy, Max and I, getting restarted in life, that we haven’t paid much attention to what passes for politics in the Confederacy. Until now, we felt pretty safe doing that, but maybe we were wrong. Who are these Franklinites that seem to be monopolizing the’Com ever since the Old Endicott Building disaster?”

  Lucy grinned. This was her meat. She had degrees, I’d been told, in engineering and the law. She’d even been a judge once upon a time. But this was her thing. Someone had once described her to me as an individual who hated government and loved politics.

  She opened her mouth, but I interrupted her. “They’re a bunch of sore losers, free-market rejects, who want some kind of government—any kind of government—established, not from any high-minded (if wrongheaded) principle, but so it can issue lucrative contracts that they and their cronies can get rich on.”

  I smiled brightly at Lucy.

  She frowned, torn between annoyance and approval. She’d been my mentor on this and many other topics, and it was funny to watch her deciding what attitude to take about being upstaged by her pupil. I hurried on before she could make up her mind. “They’d be plain old Republicans where I come from. Buckley F. Williams ramrods them and, rumor has it, bankrolls them. It’s practically a family business. His little brother, well-known philosopher-thug Bennett Williams, runs their online journal, The Postman.”

  I’d actually met older brother Buckley the first year I’d arrived here in the Confederacy, although not under the most auspicious of circumstances. Very funny kinda guy. Lan wrinkled her forehead at me. “The Postman?”

  “I get it!” her husband answered.

  “I’ll bet you do at that,” I replied. “Good old Benjamin Franklin, author, inventor, the Williams brothers’ hero, and the Franklinites’ namesake. Most people don’t realize he was the father of corporate socialism—or of state capitalism, if there’s a difference—in Revolutionary America. It was his intention that the government would accomplish everything it undertook by granting monopolies to certain ‘deserving’ parties. That’s how, in most worlds, he wound up in charge of the government postal monopoly.”

  “‘Neither rain, nor sleet, nor dark of night,’” Lan misquoted, “‘nor threat of competition will stay these messengers from their appointed rounds.’ I get it now, too: The Postman. And darling, it’s called mercantilism. Corporate socialism and state capitalism hadn’t been invented yet. I wonder if Ben Franklin ever met its nemesis, his contemporary, Adam Smith.”

  “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.

  6: HELL IN A BUCKET

  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.”