The American Zone Read online

  “We have!” they both wailed miserably. Hell, I never liked Doris Day, either.

  Eventually they managed to come to what faintly resembled the point of their visit. The Gables wanted me to do something (they weren’t exactly sure what, and neither was I) about certain recordings in various media being imported, apparently, from some parallel world or worlds unknown, featuring strangers who looked and sounded an awful lot like them, but who weren’t them, in some fundamental and disturbing ways.

  Miss Lombard seemed most concerned for their careers—not to mention that they weren’t being paid whenever these “movies” were offered on the’Com, an all-embracing Confederate improvement on the Internet back home—and maybe the fact that she wasn’t quite as big a star, wherever these entertainments were coming from, as she was accustomed to being here. To be fair, most of her otherworld counterparts hadn’t lived long enough to become big stars. Cosmically speaking, World War Two had been a very popular war.

  For her husband, it was more personal: he intensely disliked what he’d seen of these other versions of himself. “He simpers!” Gable complained.

  To make things even worse, some versions of the Gable and/or Lombard films that were rapidly becoming classics here didn’t even have Gable and/or Lombard in them! There was a version of Gone with the Wind, for godsake, starring Robert Cummings (remember him?) as Rhett Butler and Bette Davis as Scarlett O’Hara.

  Well, hesh mah mouth.

  Apparently unaware of what universe I came from—the first historically alternative universe to be discovered by Confederate scientists—Gable blamed it all on immigrants to the Confederacy. “If only those blasted bluebacks …”

  “Don’t talk dirty, Pappy,” Lombard snapped.

  Gable grumbled, “Aw, Janie …”

  In the end, I warned them that there probably wasn’t any way to stop the vile traffic they complained of, or even to collect royalties on the performances of individuals who merely looked like them. (I happen to have a lookalike myself here—I’d bought this house from him and he’d gone out to explore the Asteroid Belt with Lucy Kropotkin—we even have the same fingerprints!) I did agree to try and find out who was marketing these otherworld flicks and see whether some reasonable accommodation could be reached about embarrassing the “real” Gable and Lombard.

  At that, my clients seemed relieved, if only to have placed their problem in somebody else’s hands. They finished their drinks and let me show them to the door, having offered me a retainer fully in keeping with their lofty status as stars of stage, screen, and (whether they welcomed it or not) Telecom. One of the things I like best about the North American Confederacy is that said retainer now lay heavy in my pocket, and jingled.

  As we said good-bye, I was mentally composing a smug message for the answering machine in Clarissa’s hovervan—and even planning some interplanetary C-mail to Lucy to thank her for the referral. At least I think I meant to thank her. I was feeling happy, and the Bear Curse hadn’t stricken yet.

  The Bear Curse? Something I’d never even told Clarissa about. All my life, when things seem to be going best, just when I realize I’m happy, it’s suddenly spoiled by a feeling of certainty that it can’t last, that some unnamed disaster is about to strike, almost as a punishment for the happiness I’m feeling. That dark, horrible cloud had lowered over me as long as I could remember—even as a kid. As an adult, I’d come to understand that it was partly from living in a culture where every popular religion holds that the only reason we’re alive is to suffer, and the purpose of government is to take your happiness away and give it to somebody else. But mostly, I believe, it was from hundreds of thousands of books, movies, and television programs where it’s a standard plot device—and an extremely unfortunate one. Here’s the hero, going along, fat, dumb, and happy, when all of a sudden the bad guys maim and murder his wife, his children, his dog, his hamster, and the neighbor’s parakeet—and that’s just to get the story started. From sheer repetition, that damned scenario has crept deep into the human soul and soured it, possibly beyond repair. Now I lived in a free country with a beautiful, sexy woman who adored me—and still there was nothing I wanted more than to be able to experience happiness without dread.

  Enough of that. I’d taken a few notes and accepted the assignment they’d offered me with a resigned sigh, knowing without a doubt that tomorrow morning I wouldn’t be able to avoid visiting the one section of Greater LaPorte that never fails to depress me: the several impoverished, dirty, crowded square blocks that Confederates have come to call the “American Zone.” That was where new immigrants tended to settle when they first arrived, and it was where the imported movies were most likely coming from.

  I watched my brand-new clients walk across the driveway to their waiting hovercraft. I don’t know what I’d expected them to be driving. I guess some ostentatious kind of gold-plated, diamond-encrusted chauffeur-driven limousine, or a tiny but expensive little sport hoverer, maybe. What they climbed into—Gable inserting himself happily behind the controls—was the Confederate equivalent of a United States of American four-wheel-drive “sport utility vehicle.” Except, of course, that wheels were optional on this baby. It was big—maybe a Suburban and a half. And it was new, a 220 Taylor Off-Roader, powered by huge turbofans capable of pushing it up a 45-degree incline, and as fully at home hovering over ocean water, swamp-grass, or quicksand, as over Terra firma.

  I’d momentarily forgotten that Clark Gable was an inveterate trout fisherman and hunter. As I watched their taillights whisk away down the drive, the car suddenly swerved and slid to a shuddering stop. In what seemed like the same instant, a blinding flash filled the evening darkness. I was picked up off of my big flat feet and slammed down hard on my big fat ass, bouncing on the rubberized concrete amidst an all-enveloping, thunderous Kettledrum-Roll-of-the-Gods that became my whole universe for an eternal moment and left my ears ringing afterward for hours. Trees swayed in the blast-shattered air; the ground heaved like an ocean swell. And speaking of heaving and swelling, I knew I’d soon be following its example. The Bear Curse had struck again.

  3: JOSHUR FIT DE BATTLE

  Not many women will admit it, but the only thing wrong with men, from their viewpoint, is that they’re not women. If you try to make them into women, it will only annoy most of them. And the few you succeed with, you won’t like.

  —Memoirs of Lucille G. Kropotkin,

  I was up on my knees in an instant, the carry-worn muzzle of my big .41 sniffing back and forth for something to bite. My first thought was that the Gables’ Off-Roader had exploded. But there the hovercraft still sat, taillights aglow, one hundred metric yards down my absurdly palatial driveway, amid the trees of my miniature national forest. The driver’s door swung up as my client, gun in hand, climbed out to see what the hell was going on. This was not some movie cream puff who talked big and tough on camera and then let himself get buggered on the street. I remembered a grieving Clark Gable from my world flying bona fide bombing missions, just like my dad, over Germany during World War Two.

  So exactly what had blown up? Eyes, ears, and nostrils wide open. There wasn’t a trace of smoke or fire in the immediate vicinity. Even the celebratory Second of July pyrotechnics had died off exactly as if somebody had turned a tap. Then, from a long way off, I began hearing sirens wail—a sound surpassingly rare in Greater LaPorte—as multiple volunteer fire companies raced across the city, presumably to the scene of whatever disaster had just occurred. “’Com!” I issued the command into thin air as the Gables came trudging back up the driveway, she levering a shiny silver roscoe back into her tiny purse. His gun was still in his hand. In the same thin air (over a patch of rubberized concrete almost as smart as it was resilient) a colorful transparent three-dimensionsal image formed of a menu screen, which I promptly ignored.

  “Local news—explosion in West Central!” We were rewarded with an aerial view of one of the many sections of Greater LaPorte that pass for “downtown.” T
here’s never been a real center to the city: as Dorothy Parker once observed of my homeworld’s Los Angeles, “there isn’t any there there.”

  “Pappy, it’s the Old Endicott Building!” Lombard exclaimed. “Why, I was shopping on the three-hundredth floor there, just this afternoon!” Gable shook his head ruefully, but said nothing. The outlandish shape and scale of North American Confederate cities takes a little getting used to. Half of working LaPorte is actually underground, covered in private residential holdings that run to aromatic forest and restored High Plains. (Good thing Confederate medicine has better allergy remedies than Benadryl or Sudafed.)

  Individual lots are huge, eight to ten times the size I’d grown up accustomed to. One of my neighbors maintains a stand of the type of prairie grass that overtopped a mounted man’s head in pioneer days. Back home, the neighborhood Nazis and municipal lawn fascists would have been after him with torches and pitchforks. Here and there, architectural structures that would make Howard Roark whimper jealously arise from the golden breast of the Grand Prairie, clawing their way a mile into the clear, dry semi-Colorado air. My clients and I were looking at one now, hanging holographically before our eyes, cross-lit at the moment by the emergency beams of half a hundred hovering aerocraft—like the one whose viewpoint we happened to be sharing—flown by firefighting companies, various militiae, civilian gawkers, and the ubiquitous and useless media.

  The Old Endicott Building was a pretty silly name for something that had been designed in a popular style known here as “NeoEgyptian.” It was a glassy-sided pyramid, the uppermost half of which had just been raggedly removed and dumped into the streets below or blasted into the flanks of neighboring skyscrapers which, luckily, were more trajectile-resistant and farther off than they would have been in any comparable United Statesian city.

  The noise was absolutely unimaginable, straight out of Dante—or John Cage. Even this high above it, vicariously speaking, we could hear the screams of injured or frightened individuals—thousands and thousands of them—the roar of at least a dozen types of aerocraft, the caterwaul of emergency ground vehicles, the earth-shaking rumble and crash as more pieces of the building slid off in huge slabs and plummeted into the helpless crowd half a mile below.

  At the smoking apex of the ruin, a secondary explosion suddenly engulfed a little sport dirigible in flames—it had been gallantly trying to rescue survivors—and sent the wreckage hurtling into the street. I realized that this wasn’t the U.S.A. in another sense. There could be no hope of it being after hours, with the building blessedly empty: LaPorte is a twenty-four-hour-a-day kind of town. A lot of people were going to be dead, and a lot more badly hurt. No doubt about it, this was the worst disaster the city had seen, even probably the worst in Confederate history since the Peshtigo-Chicago Meteor Fires.

  And all I could think about was—“Win?”Clarissa was okay! Her voice cut through the chaos as a “window” opened Microsoftly in a corner of the scene we were viewing. It showed me the face I most like to look at in a million universes, that of a pretty honey blond more natural than my latest client, with merry hazel eyes, and what’s customarily called a “smattering” of freckles across her cheeks and the bridge of her uptilted nose. She also has long, graceful legs, ample apples, and is half a head taller than I am. She once offered kindly to add six inches to my legs if it bothered me. It doesn’t.

  Just presently she sat behind the wheel of her powerful medical van. Judging by the way the scenery was whizzing into the distance behind her, she was doing at least three times the usual city speed. I sure hoped her lights and sirens were going. Her’Com software would be cancelling out the latter, so we could talk.

  “Right here, baby!” I replied, trying hard and failing not to let pathetic gratitude show in my voice. Looking down, I realized I still held my revolver in my hand. I wiggled it into the holster under my arm. “What the hell is going on?”

  She brushed a strand of hair from her eyes. “I’ve no idea, dear. I was on a housecall—oops!”

  Hard to tell, but I thought she’d swerved to avoid some obstacle, most likely vehicular. Ordinary traffic would appear to be standing still to her as she sped by. It gave me the yammering jim-jams to watch my beloved driving like that, several miles a minute on a pillow of compressed air down the middle emergency lane of what I recognized as the city’s busiest thoroughfare, Confederation Boulevard. “I no sooner heard an explosion, than I had C-mail from three fire captains and the city militia commander!” That would be Will Sanders, voted the neighbor most likely to have fired that bottle rocket at me, what now seemed like a year ago.

  I nodded. “So you’re going to help. Take your phone with you when you leave the car; I’m coming down, too. I’ll want to find you.” I’d been a cop—Denver City and County Homicide—back in the bad old days before the Confederacy and I had discovered one another. I could probably make myself useful at the disaster scene.

  Gable and Lombard looked at each other and then at me. “Planning to get your own car out,” Clark asked me, putting away his heavy autopistol, a Greener .720, “or just ride with us?”

  IN THE END, I opted to go with them, grabbing a few useful items from the house and planning to return with my spouse whenever. It could be hours or days. Confederate emergency services—usually run and funded by insurance companies, augmented by every kind of volunteer association imaginable—were generally excellent. But who in Great Lysander’s name had ever expected them to cope with a calamity like this one? A calamity that already looked suspiciously artificial to me.

  The Gables and I didn’t speak much on the way “downtown.” They didn’t speak much to each other, for that matter. The streets were hellish, noisy, full of lights that confused, rather than illuminated—people rushing toward disaster, others running away—and getting there took an incredibly long time. Each of us was wrapped completely in his own thoughts. And by a reflex I’d discovered was peculiar to immigrants like me, my thoughts all seemed to be political.

  In the States I came from, politicians view any catastrophe like this as a career opportunity. By now they’d all be trampling over one another looking for TV cameras, demanding that everybody and his kid sister be locked in belly chains and leg irons for the duration of the emergency—for which read “forever.” Nine times out of ten, the public would obligingly let themselves be stampeded by that kind of dumbassedness. There aren’t that many politicians in the Confederacy—the climate isn’t healthy for them—individuals here value their freedom above all things, and there isn’t anything to vote on. So I wondered what the political fallout would be like from this unprecedented mess. Mostly I considered Confederate history—very different from the history I’d been taught in school—a history that allowed more room than mine did for optimism about America, about Americans, and maybe even about the human race in general …

  TENSCORE AND BUT a pair of years earlier—1794, for those with fewer than two-hundred fingers to count on—and with the ink just freshly sanded on the brand-new shiny U.S. Constitution, President George “If I ever tell a lie, may I be bled to death by leeches” Washington, and his Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, decided it was high time they tried out their brand-new shiny powers of taxation. Their first victims were to be western Pennsylvania farmers, long accustomed to converting their corn crops into a less perishable, more profitable high-octane liquid form.

  Unfortunately (for George et Al), many of these rustics, especially those in the vicinity of the frontier municipality of Pittsburgh, were also accustomed to reading books, speaking in words of more than two syllables, and holding meetings where they formally debated the myriad aspects of living in a limited-government republic. They also placed a somewhat different emphasis (than high school teachers do today, for instance) on Revolutionary slogans regarding taxation without representation. In their view, they’d fought the bloody Brits from’75 to 85 to’abolish taxation altogether, and they weren’t interested now in having represen
tation or taxation imposed on them by that gaggle of fops in Philadelphia, at that time, the nation’s capital. This they proceeded to make manifest by tarring and feathering Mr. Hamilton’s tax collectors, burning said officials’ houses to the ground, and filling the stills of anybody who willingly paid the hated tribute with large-caliber muzzle-loading bullet holes.

  Feeling their authority challenged, Washington and Hamilton dispatched westward a body of fifteen thousand conscripted troops equal to half the population of America’s largest city (Philadelphia once again, which would later become famous for dropping high explosives from police helicopters on miscreants charged with disturbing the peace), the equivalent of sending in five million National Guardsmen to quell the Rodney King riots. A mere four hundred Whiskey Rebels, properly impressed by this host of fifteen-thousand, subsided, and the all-too-familiar political miracle by which the private transgression of robbery is somehow transubstantiated into a public virtue was firmly established. Pay or die. The inevitable consequences—poverty and unemployment, endless foreign wars, the Branch Davidian Massacre, and reruns on television—are still with us today.

  Meanwhile, in another Pennsylvania far, far away, one Albert Gallatin, recent Swiss immigrant, Harvard professor, and gentleman farmer, decided not to talk his whiskey-making friends and neighbors out of an uprising that might get them all killed (as he’d done in my version of history) but to organize and lead them instead, inspired by the ethical and political implications of a single word (“unanimous consent of the governed”) that somehow got blue-penciled out of my copy of the Declaration of Independence. An erudite and persuasive fellow (in my world he was among the first to study Indian languages academically, invented the science of ethnology, and became Alexander Hamilton’s counterpart in Thomas Jefferson’s cabinet), Gallatin somehow shamed the fifteen thousand conscripts into reversing themselves and marching with him, against the City of Botherly Love.