The American Zone

by L. Neil Smith

  “Besides, Mac, you don’t gotta spend every wakin’ minute defendin’ yer life an’ property. That’s just the usual anti-freedom, anti-independence bullshit from the Old Country.” He tapped the side of his nose knowingly. “You only gotta defend yourself when somebody tries t’take’em!”

  “MR. FITZDAVID?” His colleague had gone back to work, raking in all those nasty old thick, heavy, inflation-proof coins. I moved to the back of the store, and the counter. I’d never given the meaning of the word any thought before; it’s where all those nasty old coins get counted. Even after all these years, my reflexes still wanted me to reach into my jacket pocket and pull out my badge flipper. I still had my detective’s shield; I kept it in the gun case at home. Instead, I showed the storekeeper one of my cards.

  “Lieutenant Win Bear!” Oh, great. I was famous. “I t’ought dat was youse I saw up front, an’ I wunnert what you was up to. Are you investigatin’ somet’in’? Am I a suspect?” He looked like it would make his day.

  “I guess you could be, if you wanted to,” I told him amiably. “I just wanted to ask you some questions about the movies you import from the States.”

  He nodded enthusiastically. “Which movies? Which States?”

  “We’ll get to that, I hope. According to my notes, you’re David Fitzdavid, age thirty-four, an immigrant, owner and proprietor of ‘News From Home’, is that right?”

  “Sure, as far as it goes. I was a salesman for a pharmaceutical company back home, an’ a damned good one—my territory was da whole Caribbean basin. Hell, I still got an inclination to assume suit an’ tie (or whatever its local equivalent may be) and go out amongst da natives oinin’ a livin’ just like they do. I miss da road, but I gotta support my family, an’ this storefrint is woikin’ for me fine just now.”

  “I see.” For some reason, changing professions had never occurred to me when I arrived. Now I’d met two guys, Daggett and Fitzdavid, who’d managed the transition without blinking. I probably would have ended up as a cesspool cleaner. “Mind if I ask you what brought you to the Confederacy?”

  “Well,” he squinted at me, “I could say it was my convictions dat ended me up here. I was a card-carryin’ member of da Liberty Party, made my donations an’ licked envelopes. But I only became a refugee when da house I owned in da State of Cuba was invaded by militant homeless activists, and da aut’orities wanted t’prosecute me for harrassin’ a protected class when I kicked deir worthless, smelly keisters outa my home!”

  I laughed. “So how come you’re here in LaPorte, instead of in jail Stateside?”

  “Or executed,” he replied. “Dat’s da penalty, officially. I got dis postcard, see? Tellin’ me t’bring da wife and kids—one suitcase apiece—t’such an’ such a place at such an’ such a time. Bay of Pigs. It was from somet’in’ called da Erisian Rescue Brigade. We drove all night, an’ for all I know, our poor little’91 Bolivar is rustin’ on da beach today.”

  “Good story,” I told him. “Who played Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind?”

  He blinked, then recovered. “Never hoid of it—oh, wait. A movie about da War of Secession from woilds where da South lost, right? Dey never filmed it where I’m from, see? British gunboats shelled New York an’ Boston in supporta southern belligerency, Lee took Washington, an’ da war was over in six months.”

  Another new one on me. There are a million naked cities in this story, I thought. “So you’ve never sold copies of that movie. How about It Happened One Night?”

  “I’ll hafta look dat one up. Who’s in it?”

  “It all depends,” I said, “doesn’t it?”

  ACCORDING TO WHAT few records most people will tolerate here and now, Dr. Howard Slaughterbush (Lucy said that if she had a name like that, she’d trade it for an armadillo and shoot the armadillo) was a bona fide native Confederate. His doctoral degree was in “comparative political economies.”

  Despite his being a native, and accustomed to the highest living standard anybody anywhere knows about, Slaughterbush’s offices were in the shabbiest district of the American Zone I’d seen so far, on the walk-up second floor of a creaky office building older than Bennett Williams’s farmhouse, several increasingly grimy blocks from the Wizard and Yolanda’s wonderful bar. There was nothing wonderful about this place, however. It smelled like several generations of monks had taken a vow of incontinence on the stairs and in the hallway. I hadn’t even known that there were places like this in the North American Confederacy.

  “I bet it’s all a fake!” Will whispered to me as we ascended the stairway to somewhere other than heaven. “Conspicuous poverty, mostly for immigrant consumption, I’d guess. Given Confederate technology—cleaning machinery and chemicals, dirt-resistant surfacing materials—you have to work to keep a place this … this …”

  “Film noir?” I suggested, pulling my felt hat level with my eyes and shrugging my jacket shoulders up around my neck. I thumbed the corners of my mouth like Bogey.

  “Yeah, that says it pretty well.”

  “Ugh!” Clarissa exclaimed in horror as she accidentally ran a hand along the bannister and examined the resulting crud on her fingers. In her way, she’s the cleanest human being I’ve ever known.

  “That says it pretty well, too!” declared Lucy.

  Will was right. It was studied shabbiness, strictly artificial, but just like a trip back to my homeworld. The letters in peeling paint on the pebbled glass of the office door said:

  MAJORITARIAN SOCIETY OF GREATER LAPORTE

  HOWARD M. SLAUGHTERBUSH, PH.D.

  ENTER

  Obeying the last line of the sign, Will turned the tarnished brass doorknob and the three of us filed in behind him. The joint didn’t smell quite as bad as the hall outside. It was a good deal cleaner and brighter, with two big eastern windows admitting summer morning light, a well-swept hardwood floor, and the noiseless air-conditioning of the Confederacy (fans here work like the militia’s electric flying machine) keeping it from heating up the room too much.

  Nobody seemed to be in at the moment, although we’d called ahead. This place reminded me strongly of someplace else I couldn’t quite recall. Bennett’s right-wing collectivist philosophy had boiled down, in the end, to monarchism—one guy telling everybody what to do. Now, around the three unwindowed walls (except for the door we’d come through and another), bookshelves and literature racks were filled with badly printed tracts extolling the virtues of a system in which everybody tells everybody else what to do. I took a mental inventory. There were imported works by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Lennon, Mao Tse Tung, Fidel Castro, Saul Alinski, Pol Pot, Oprah Winfrey, Rosie O’Donnell, and assorted other left-wing locksteppers—even the widely despised Ted Turner Diaries—most of whom had been discredited long ago in their own worlds.

  Then I remembered where I’d seen this kind of cheery political hopelessness before: the Colorado Propertarian Party had run an office very much like this one, back in Denver, when I’d begun the homicide investigation that had ended with my being blasted from Fort Collins into the middle of Greater LaPorte. In that sorry time and place, the idea of individual freedom that more or less governs the Confederacy didn’t stand a chance. Not one person in a hundred would even stand still long enough to listen to and disagree with it, let alone nurture and fund it.

  There, the urine in the stairwell had been perfectly genuine.

  Here, socialism got the same short shrift—more deservedly so, I think, considering its dismal and bloody failures back home and the success of freedom here—and stood the same chance of attracting flies, let alone the enthusiastic support of enough people to keep this office building clean.

  Suddenly, a man came through the door with a gun in his hand. “Four intruders?” Howard Slaughterbush exclaimed delightedly. “Where do you want your bodies sent?”

  14: THREE DOLLAR BILL

  Want a clear indication of what the welfare state is really all about? Note that the barest necessities of life—food, clo
thing, shelter, and transportation—are all taxed.

  —Memoirs of Lucille G. Kropotkin

  “Relax, relax!”

  The man with the gun in his hand slowly lowered the muzzle of his unfamiliar weapon until it pointed at the threadbare carpet. The’Com had told me he was an attorney—native born and bred—the second one I’d met in the Confederacy in nine years. He looked about seventy, cleanshaven, and had longish, white hair, combed back and plastered down. He wore a surprisingly American-looking gray suit with a sporty, diagonally striped necktie and yellow- and gray-striped sweater-vest.

  “I’m afraid I can’t resist doing that to all of my guests,” he chuckled condescendingly.

  I realized I’d been expecting him to say, “Away put your weapons, I mean you no harm.” I never liked Yoda.

  “It’s simply my way,” he continued amiably, “of demonstrating the utter insanity of every Tom, Dick, and Harriet carrying deadly engines of destruction about on their persons all the time. It’s dangerous and archaic. What kind of evil, mean-spirited, reactionary hate-monger insists upon such a crazy ‘right’?”

  He finished his rhetorical question with four fingers in the air to simulate quotation marks, a gesture that had snaked in with recent immigrants and apparently settled down to stay.

  I answered his question with a question I’d always wanted to ask one of his type. “What kind of moral cripple would rather see a woman raped in an alley and strangled with her own panty-hose, than see her with a gun in her hand?”

  He protested, “But can’t you see, if I’d suddenly lost control of myself, I could have killed you all!”

  “Unlikely.” I saw his chuckle and raised him a mild snort. Of course the instant I’d seen his gun, I’d pivoted clockwise on the ball of my left foot, taking hold of the rounded rubber grip of my revolver where it lay nestled in the sling. Now I let the .41 Magnum’s big, hungry muzzle peek out the back of the sling at Slaughterbush. “Most of your ‘guests’ here must be pretty fresh meat, right? Bluebacks? Immigrants?”

  He gulped hard, nodding absently. Apparently a lot of the same thing had happened at once. Clarissa had cleared her newly extended Webley and centered it on our host’s torso, its coaxial laser making a tiny red dot on his solar plexus (brother Buckley, with his latest acquisition would have approved). Will had his big, dull silver autopistol out (I’d meant for days to ask him what it was). Lucy was pointing her gigantic Gabbett-Fairfax and her brand-new shiny Borchert & Graham plasma doohickey at the man’s knitted yellow belly. I hadn’t realized she was carrying both weapons.

  Good for Lucy. If Slaughterbush kept the same kind of company he was, there was probably more lethal hardware in this room at the moment than our host had ever seen in one place before. The man stood there, frozen, like a deer in the headlights.

  “Also, Dr. Slaughterbush,” Clarissa offered, sliding her elongated piece back where it came from, “real people don’t just ‘suddenly lose control’ of themselves. Unless that’s what they want to do. Of course if you live by whim instead of purpose, steer your life by your emotions rather than your thoughts, you never really know what you’ll do next, do you? Holly Golightly or Jeffrey Daumer. That’s your problem, not ours; we’re not about to give our rights up over it.” Clarissa doesn’t usually sound like an Ayn Rand character, but she has her moments. I could tell from the way she’d pronounced “doctor” how much she hated sharing a title she’d earned, with a specimen like this one whose academic credentials, given the respect his ideology indicated for two centuries of Confederate law and custom, might as well have been in sociology or underwater basket-weaving.

  On the wall behind him, a little placard read, PROPERTY IS THEFT—PROUDHON. “I believe she’s sayin’ don’t judge others by your own weakness,” Lucy added, putting her guns away. I still haven’t figured out where she was carrying that Borchert & Graham. “You’re worried about what y’might do with dynamite, then don’t have dynamite. Simple as that. You’re worried about what y’might do with an autopistol, then don’t have an autopistol—although I gotta admit that sounds a mite obscene—an’ leave everybody else t’worry about themselves!”

  Will laughed. “I’m a lot more worried about what you might do with a law degree!”

  I wasn’t sure whether he was talking to Lucy or our host. Both were lawyers. And—typical of many of the leftists from my world—according to several infosites on the’Com, Slaughterbush was also one of the wealthiest slobs in the Confederacy. Poor people generally don’t have much use for socialism; they just want to get rich.

  Gradually stirring to life, Slaughterbush stared down at his own weapon and muttered, almost to himself, “Oh, well, then, I guess I won’t be using this thing anymore.” Slowly, very deliberately, the man curled his wrist, bent his elbow, brought the gun up, put the muzzle in his mouth—

  —and bit the end off the gun! He’d been faking being frightened, trusting us not to splatter the woodwork with his insides!

  “Licorice!” I exclaimed before I could stop myself, remembering an almost identical moment from Hepburn and Tracy’s Adam’s Rib. “If it’s one thing he’s a sucker for, it’s licorice!”

  He shook his head, speaking with his mouth full. “Chocolate. Very dark chocolate. And you’re right, madam, I don’t have a weapon of my own, precisely because I don’t know what I’d do with it. And neither do you, no matter what you claim. Now please remind me what it was you wanted to talk about.”

  I could see her scowl. Lucy hates being called “madam.”

  LEAFING ABSENTLY THROUGH an imported copy of Thomas Merton’s No Man Is an Island, Will said, “So what you’re telling us, Doctor, is that democracy is valid because two people are smarter than one person. I always thought the measure of the intelligence in a room was that of the most intelligent individual in the room.”

  In a minute, Slaughterbush had rounded up a mismatched and worn collection of creaky folding chairs, but that didn’t help me relax. Sure, I’d agreed to help Will, but this investigation-by-committee business was beginning to get on my nerves. Private dicks are supposed to be lone wolves—or old married guys like William Powell who take their bright, pretty wives along with them. Of course I’d have to be a thinner man, wouldn’t I?

  A poster thumbtacked to a wall and bled to the margin with pretty pastel posies, butterflies, and Bambi-imposters, carried a typical majoritarian slogan (maybe even the title of Slaughterbush’s favorite song) on a ribbony band of music notation, “To dream the Impossible Dream.”

  I didn’t want to sit down, or stay in this crummy place any longer than I had to. Bad enough it smelled of urine out in the hall. In here it reeked of the hypocrisy and cynical lies I’d come to associate with the left. Why do socialists pretend to be so damned impoverished, when—in the worlds I’m familiar with, anyway—they’re always the ones with the well-endowed institutions and wealthy benefactors? Next question: where else but in America can you amass a fortune writing and performing songs that denounce money?

  Slaughterbush responded, “No, I’m not saying that at all, Captain Sanders. That’s strictly your interpretation. Although in the long run, the greatest wisdom is always to be found in numbers …”

  Will winced. “Isn’t that what I just—”

  “Didn’t you just get done tellin’ us,” Lucy demanded, “that, unlike right-wingers who believe that other people are all a little evil and gotta be watched, you believe that other people are all a little stupid and gotta be ‘helped’—whether they wanna be or not?”

  The man spread his hands and calmly replied, “As I told Captain Sanders, Mrs. Kropotkin, that’s strictly your interpretation. I never actually said those words you’re putting in my mouth.”

  “Yet,” offered Clarissa, “you adopt a maternalistic, suffocating, overly protective attitude toward others, based on an unspoken and unproven assertion that the individual is the property of his fellow beings (meaning you), or the State (meaning you, you wish), or both.”
>
  “Yeah,” Will put in, “if you never actually said those words—or never actually meant them—doesn’t that lack a bit of consistency?”

  “Consistency?” Slaughterbush looked at both of them unbelievingly. “What’s consistency?”

  “A little tweeting bird?” I suggested. “A wreath of pretty flowers that smell bad?”

  “That’s logic,” Will corrected me.

  Slaughterbush chose to ignore the witty reparté. “I’ll tell you what it is. Emerson was right: consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. It’s no more than a sick, stupid, middle-class obsession that always gets in the way of moral progress. It means nothing. I’ve never been able to see why other people make such a fuss about it.”

  I think it was Lucy who told me once that this type—socialists who call themselves liberals—are all a little blind to consistency, logic, or plain old consequences, because they’re psychologically one-dimensional. They’re unable to “bind time” the way other humans do. That’s because they’re present-oriented, as opposed to being past-oriented like the right-wing Williamses, or future-oriented like most Confederates. She also said they tend to operate from whatever irrational epistemology happens to be trendy at the moment, astrology, numerology, OuijaTM boards, the Tarot, or the I Ching. Epistemology? That’s how you know what you know.

  Our host sure hadn’t convinced me otherwise. He excused himself and went into the back where he’d come from. Maybe he had to go to the little socialist’s room. Maybe he was snorting up a line. If it was for another one of those chocolate roscoes, I hoped he’d be a good little socialist and share. It was getting to be lunchtime.