The American Zone

by L. Neil Smith

How could anybody make a simple, declarative sentence like that so damned sexy? You could practically feel the breeze from her eyelashes. Will and I had decided on the way up here to keep the evidence that had been left for his people out on the prairie a secret—as much as possible, anyway, given the nature of the investigation—and Deejay had agreed. He said, “Know anybody who’s likely to know?”

  She shrugged. As with everything else Deejay did, it was a pretty shrug. I glanced at Clarissa. It’s a good thing my wife isn’t the jealous type. The fact is, if she noticed that I wasn’t admiring a glorious creature like Deejay, she’d feel for my pulse. “While you folks were getting here, I C-mailed LIT and I’m afraid they’ve never heard of this particular time/space/probability continuum, either. The Federated States of Texas. They have no record whatever of anyone entering the Confederacy from it.”

  She was referring to the recently constructed LaPorte InterWorld Terminal, a miles-long underground establishment where thousands upon thousands of immigrants were pouring through every day from worlds of alternity that offered them less personal and economic freedom—and maybe shorter, nastier lives—than this one did. “On the other hand …”

  I always find it difficult describing Deejay to anyone who hasn’t seen her. I just don’t have the vocabulary for it. Hell, she’d make a professional lexicographer drop his jaw, drool on his Florsheims, and mumble “Wannawannawanna.” Anyway, you wouldn’t believe your own eyes, even if you saw her. She’s always reminded me of Loni Anderson in a white labcoat, but others have mentioned Daryl Hannah, Kim Basinger (if you can imagine either of them with any brains), or Natasha Henstridge, in Species. My darling Clarissa once admitted to me—sheepishly—that Deejay is the only female who ever made her feel the least bit tempted to give the girl-on-girl thing a whirl. Fortunate for me, they’re both flaming heterosexuals.

  But Deejay was going on, moving those full, ripe, luscious lips and giving us flashes of her perfect white teeth. “We’re not really explorers, here, you understand.”

  “Whattya mean, honey?” Lucy wanted to know. She liked Deejay, too, and they’d been friends for a long time. Intellectually, at least, I’m pretty sure that Deejay reminded Lucy of herself—about a century and a quarter ago.

  “This is a physics lab, Lucy, a paratronics lab, to be specific. Our discovery of the broach was accidental—we were looking for a star drive, which we still don’t have.”

  “An’ more’s the pity,” Lucy observed.

  Deejay agreed with a nod. “But, after all,” she said, “we were the first to poke our noses into other worlds of probability, and we are making an attempt to keep an orderly record of the more than eleven thousand alternative realities that have been discovered here and by other investigators so far.”

  “Eleven thousand?” I mused, hardly able to believe it, although I’d heard the claim before. It shouldn’t have surprised me. The logic of the alternate probability says the potential number is … well, numberless.

  “And change,” she told me.

  “And … ?” Will, fundamentally a man of action—he thought he was both Starsky and Hutch—was starting to get impatient. I knew the signs well.

  She shrugged again; I tried not to sigh. “And sometimes what we discover out there surprises us. There seem to be interesting patterns or … I don’t know, certain rhythms among the infinite worlds of probability.”

  Lucy raised her eyebrows and asked, “Patterns such as?”

  “Such as …” She laughed, suddenly. “Well, just in the continua most of us would recognize historically, you know about the worlds where, say, Jeffrey Hunter performed in seventy-nine Star Trek episodes as Captain Christopher Pike? Or where Rory Calhoun got the lead in The Wild, Wild West?”

  I knew the programs, all right, from the 1960s, but with different actors. But I nodded along with the others to keep from looking any stupider than I felt.

  “Well recently,” she went on, “we noticed that in those worlds where Robert Conrad played James T. Kirk instead of William Shatner, William Jefferson Blythe Clinton never rose any higher than the attorney-general of Arkansas. And where the circle was complete, where Shatner played James West instead of Conrad, Clinton died in prison, or of AIDS, or both.”

  My wife asked, “And this means something?” I’m pretty sure her question was sincere. There isn’t a molecule of sarcasm in the girl. She has a powerful mind and it wants to know things.

  Deejay blinked. “I don’t know, Clarissa, I don’t know. It hurts my head sometimes. I suppose that it may not mean anything at all—like the coincidence in some worlds between the stock market and women’s hemlines. I do know that we’ve never found a world in which those Puerto Ricans succeeded in assassinating Harry Truman.” Everybody laughed. She pointed to a rotund little redheaded guy I hadn’t noticed before. (It certainly isn’t Deejay’s fault that she tends to monopolize everybody’s retinas.) He was wearing a frayed white labcoat and sitting on a metal stool in the corner of the room, reading the “Classics Illustrated” edition of Story of O. “That’s my assistant, Fred May, over there,” she explained.

  The guy looked up at the mention of his name. He sported a reddish mustache and Victorian sidewhiskers of a similar color. On his head was an odd hat, something like a beret, hunter green, but with a big fluffy black pom-pom on the top.

  “R. Frederick May,” she pronounced, “you know Lucy Kropotkin, of course. These are my old friends detective Win Bear, and Clarissa Olson-Bear. And this is Captain Will Sanders of the Greater LaPorte Militia.” She turned back to me again. “Fred here has just discovered a whole sheaf of worlds where, after losing the Battle of Tours in the eighth century, the forces of Islam hung a left, crossed the English Channel, and conquered the British Isles, producing a very strange history full of Celtic Moslems. In most of those worlds, they even beat the Norman invasion back in the eleventh century.”

  “Erin go bragh, inshallah!” I offered, but there weren’t any takers.

  “Hello, Lucy, how nice to see you again!” Fred put his comic book down—I made a mental note to borrow it from him when he was through with it—doffed his peculiar hat, and opened his mouth to say more, but he was interrupted.

  “My old friends, as well,” insisted an extremely familiar voice as a wall-sized’Com screen lit up at the other side of the room. We were suddenly being given a full-length, life-size view of a porpoise—Tursiops truncatus, the famous “bottlenose dolphin”—who, with a little help from friends with fingers, like Deejay, had invented the probability broach. Ooloorie Eckickeck P’wheet was calling from her own laboratory at the Emperor Joshua Norton University in San Francisco. It was like a scene straight out of Johnny Mnemonic, only her water was a lot cleaner than Jones’s.

  When I first met Ooloorie, she was an obnoxious snob, supercilious (if you can say that about somebody who doesn’t have any eyebrows), and a bit of a racist—or would it be “speciesist”? She was only grudgingly willing to make exceptions—clearly her partner Deejay was one of them—to a general view that primates are inferior organisms whose ridiculous claim to sapience she only acknowledged because she needed the use of their hands.

  Somewhere during the past eight or nine years, Deejay or Lucy or somebody else had somehow begun to straighten her out—I can’t imagine how they’d accomplished it—because she was much easier to get along with these days.

  “Greetings, landlings! I presume to interfere in the sanctity of your private deliberations,” she continued, thrashing around in what must have felt to her like a confined space—sort of a fishy phone booth—“only to remind my associate of the recent isotopic studies we discussed last week.”

  “Highly speculative,” her associate replied cautiously, sounding a bit like the porpoise herself, “and so far entirely uncorroborated.” They would have made a swell vaudeville team—Marlin and Lewis … or Halibut and Costello.

  “That is true, as far as it goes,” Ooloorie acknowleged. “However, we are not attempting
to prove anything scientifically here, Deejay, merely to establish a direction in which our friends might pursue their investigation.”

  “Would you mind telling me what the hell you’re talking about?” Will asked. He’d only beaten me by a fraction of a second. Lucy, on the other hand, looked tolerantly amused. It wasn’t an expression you saw often on her face. She’d been following them perfectly, jane-of-all-trades that she happens to be, and it gave me a distinct pain in the tochis.

  Deejay turned to the frustrated militia captain. “There’s a new theory,” she began, clearly groping around for words that might mean something to a collection of underprivileged non-physicists, “that the distribution of isotopes varies slightly, but measurably—and, we hope, predictably—from continuum to continuum. You do know about isotopes, Captain Sanders?”

  He nodded. “Make that Will. And yes—variations in atomic weight that don’t change what element a given atom basically is. Uranium two hundred and thirty-five and two hundred and thirty-eight, for example.”

  “Carbon twelve and fourteen,” I chimed in, not to be outdone.

  “Very good.” Deejay smiled and would have given us gold stars for our foreheads if she’d had any. “Now the idea is that someday we’ll be able to identify the world of alternative probability that any given artifact comes from by the distribution of isotopes it contains. More U235 than this world maybe, and less C14. The theory is controversial and as yet to be demonstrated to everybody’s satisfaction. But we have acquired the equipment to record and analyze data from these items you found, if you wish.”

  “What will it do to them?” Will wanted to know. I wanted to know, too. It was the only evidence we had.

  “Nothing at all, landling,” Ooloorie assured him. “It’s a simple matter of scanning the items in question under a kind of paratronic microscope, that’s all. And then some computer time will be expended to analyze the data.”

  “So it couldn’t hurt?” he persisted.

  Deejay laughed. “No more than chicken soup.”

  They both laughed. It was a good thing that Will was a happily married man—twice over—or that might have been the beginning of too beautiful a friendship. I wonder if there’s such a word as “trigamy.”

  “THE GREATER LAPORTE Militia doesn’t keep fingerprint records,” Will informed us as we rolled up to our next stop, a low concrete structure with steel doors and angled walls. It only helped a little that the walls were painted a cheerfully clashing plaid, with blues and greens predominating. “In fact, we’re forbidden to do so by our bylaws—it was my predecessor’s last official act.” I found that fairly interesting. Will’s immediate predecessor as Captain-Commander of the GLPM had been one Scipio Africanus Kendall, an imposing figure of a man (although there was a persisent rumor that his wife called him “Skippy”), the father of both of Will’s two wives, Mary-Beth and Fran, now retired to what used to be referred to as a “shooting estate” on the newly terraformed asteroid Pallas.

  The sign outside what amounted to the only bunker in the North American Confederacy said:

  GRISWOLD’S SECURITY

  It should have also said, “Brrrrr.” Inside—once the heavy steel doors had slowly ground open, the portcullis raised, and the tank traps grudgingly retracted—we entered an exercise in paranoia that reminded me of the local IRS office back in Denver. The anteroom was glaringly lit, steel gray, and stark, without furniture or any hint of decoration. By contrast, the receptionist, a young female chimpanzee, wore a hot pink go-go dress, white vinyl boots to go with it, a double shoulder holster rig, and a pair of high-capacity .475 Casasent Magnums. She was separated from us by a floor-to-ceiling transparent barrier at least four inches thick. Greeting Lucy as an old friend—the way everybody seems to—she leaned into an intercom and summoned a tall young human attired in a double pistol belt, military-looking blouse, and a kilt displaying the same color-scheme as outside, the company tartan. His hair was parted in the middle, and he had long mustaches that drooped to below his chin. He came through a door that had been invisible a moment before and met us on our side of the barrier.

  “Why, hello, Lucy! It’s wonderful to see you again! Dad’ll be happy to hear of it, too! I’d heard you were out in the Belt.” He turned to Will, while giving the rest of us the lookover. “Please forgive all of these security formalities; they’re more advertising than anything else, I’m afraid. I’m Liam Griswold IX. What can I do for you, Captain?” Will introduced Clarissa and me and explained about the Greater LaPorte Militia not collecting fingerprint records. What made S. A. Kendall’s decision interesting to me was that, as far as he knew, his son-in-law-to-be was the guy who’d brought the whole idea of fingerprints into this world. Actually, it was me, but I wasn’t particularly proud of it.

  “But I understand that Griswold’s Security does—” he told the proprietor.

  The young man chuckled—nervously, I thought—making the ends of his long mustaches wiggle. “Well, yes, we do—two hundred whole sets, out of the more than two million individuals who live in this city alone. Please understand, Captain, we only take those prints that are offered to us voluntarily. And of course we only retain them on the same basis.”

  “For the time being,” I said, but everyone ignored me except Clarissa, who dug me in the ribs with an elbow. I don’t know what it is about this outfit that inspires such awe. I wasn’t much impressed with Griswold the Ninth, a skinny kid with silly face-fur and a dress, whose guns—they looked like a pair of AutoMags, but probably weren’t—seemed to be wearing him, rather than the other way around.

  Will handed young Griswold a dataplaque, something like a floppy diskette, only a lot smaller. It was a bright, cheery yellow and about an inch on a side, with no moving parts, and contained the results of the paratronic scan Deejay had conducted, including several greatly magnified and enhanced images of the thumbprint. Her own computers, back at LaPorte University, Ltd., were juggling the same information now, trying to find an isotopic match with one of the eleven googleplex worlds, or however many it was, that had recently been discovered.

  Griswold inserted the dataplaque in a slot in the side of a’Com pad he was carrying. Confederates don’t have much use for dataplaques. Even in my own home world, when you transfer information by carrying a floppy from one computer to another, it’s referred to as using the “sneakernet” and sort of sneered at. In this case, we hadn’t wanted to trust these data to that vast equivalent to the Internet we referred to as the Telecom, not really knowing how private it is.

  To everyone’s surprise, Griswold’s results were much quicker in arriving than Deejay’s. “By Gallatin, we do have the thumbprint in question! It was acquired ethically—at the insistence of its owner—during the routine investigation of some minor office pilferage.”

  Will asked, “And it belongs to … ?”

  The young man sniffed behind his mustaches and looked down his long nose at Will. “There is the matter, here, Captain Sanders, of client confidentiality.”

  Will glared up at him. “There is a matter, here, Mr. Griswold, of two thousand extremely violent deaths in the past week and possibly many more to come!

  Griswold sputtered, “But I—”

  “Look at it this way, friend,” Will went on. “Would you rather be sued by a single client whose confidentiality you may have violated, or by the families of thousands whose deaths you could be preventing right now? I’d be happy to arrange for the latter personally!”

  Young Griswold replied without hesitation. “Very well, it belongs to Bennett Williams, the editor of the Franklinite Faction’s online journal The Postman.”

  Will looked satisfied, but I felt the customary privacy and freedom of the Confederacy melting out from under my feet like a well-salted ice floe.

  11: I NEED A HERO

  Hell hath no fury like the well-nursed resentments of a younger sibling.

  —Memoirs of Lucille G. Kropotkin

  “The thumbprint belongs to Benn
ett Williams,” young Griswold had informed us, “editor of the Franklinite Faction’s online journal The Postman.” And that pretty much established where we were headed next. If I’d had two fully operational arms, I might have taken off on my own at this point. I was still working for “Pappy” and “Janie,” and nobody was paying me to look for the Polybomber, or whatever he planned to call himself when he wrote his bestselling autobiography. Okay, so Lucy had offered to pay me. The figure she’d mentioned was significant. It would have replaced my poor little broken car with a spiffy new cold fusion-powered model if the insurance company got sticky about it. But ethics were ethics. Lucy (and my poor little broken car) were just going to have to wait their turn.

  “Hey, Winnie, lookit this!”

  I jumped, startled out of my thoughts. Using the van’s computer, Lucy had logged onto Williams’s comsite to get a feel for the man’s thinking. In her own inimitable manner, she read me the heading that every edition of the Franklinites’ online magazine carried, dating from the day Bennett had taken over and changed the title from the stodgy, if more informative North American Franklinite.

  “‘This publication’s dedicated to all of those, regardless of label or party affiliation, who know that what they want can only be achieved by governin’.’”

  “There’s an open confession for you.” I observed.

  “Or a warning,” Will agreed, “like a rattlesnake rattling.”

  Lucy went on. “‘There are three guidin’ principles: we must create government; we must control it; an’ if we’re not preparin’ t’do these things, we’re waitin’ for someone else t’govern an’ control us.’ Signed, Bennett J. Williams, Editor, The Postman.”

  “I guess it’s clear,” I replied, feeling disgusted—although I shouldn’t have been surprised—“whose side he’s on.”