The American Zone

by L. Neil Smith

  While I stared, open-mouthed, at somebody who actually dressed worse than I do, Lucy was punching buttons on her personal’Com. I peered over her shoulder as Carneval and Weller looked on with amused curiosity. Lucy’s call, apparently, was to Williams’s home. I stepped back out of range as the call was answered. “Hello,” said an all-too-familiar voice. “Why, Mrs. Kropotkin, how nice to see you again. Are we going to have another political argument?”

  “Not hardly, not this morning, anyway. I just hit the wrong autodial button an’ I apologize deeply an’ humbly for disturbin’ you.”

  “That’s all right, Mrs. Kropotkin. Thanks for including me on your autodial list. I look forward to hearing from you again soon.”

  They both hung up.

  “Deeply and humbly?” I asked in astonishment.

  “I was right!” Lucy punched me in the shoulder. It hurt. “There’s two of him!”

  I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. There are two of me.

  17: STUCK IN THE MIDDLE WITH YOU

  To be human is to live by means of the artifacts that humans devise. To build a home, and scorn a weapon is hypocrisy. It’s also a good way to lose the home.

  —Memoirs of Lucille G. Kropotkin

  “Who the hell,” I demanded for what felt like the hundredth time, “is Jerse Fahel?”

  Lucy and I were roaring across town to meet Will, after a triply frustrating collection of experiences at None of the Above Park. First, we’d been unable to catch up with the Bennett lookalike in the forty-seven different colors of denim—although we’d found his entire ensemble, apparently discarded in a trash can that had been on its way across the parking lot to empty itself near one of the stadium gates. Damn things always remind me of R2-D2.

  I’d had no choice but to run along beside it—vainly hollering at it to stop—while I pulled out a shoe, a vest, another shoe, the pants, the jacket, and finally, the parasol. Lucy, following at a more sedate pace, picking up each item of the guy’s abandoned clothing where I’d dropped it in an effort to get the next piece, was trying not to fall on her elderly prat, laughing at me.

  Second, the LaPorte Patriots had lost to the Mexico City Aztecs eleven to one, making the series so far two for them and one for us. Third, thanks to Mr. Ugly Denim, we hadn’t been there to see it.

  You could add a fourth frustration: my car having recently been reduced to hazardous materials and air pollution, and Clarissa’s being unavailable because she’d had an appointment with a client, and Will off trying to locate another of his native radical suspects, we were using Lucy’s car. It was one of a matched pair of enormous, antiquated, steam-powered Thornycroft hover machines (a century and a quarter ago, Thornycroft had been the first manufacturer of such devices; I suspected this had been his experimental prototype) that had been custom painted green-and-yellow paisley to match her favorite dresses.

  Come to think of it, she and this extra Bennett would probably enjoy swapping fashion tips.

  “Who is Jerse Fahel?” Lucy shouted my question back at me over the thunderous roar of the enormous, obsolete propellor blades beneath us. “I guess the first thing you gotta understand, Winnie, is that the conventional left-right political spectrum you’re used to—with all the idiots who wanna be mommies (or be mommied) on the left, an’ all the morons who wanna be spanked (or give the spankin’s) on the right—the conventional left-right political spectrum doesn’t work anymore, as a description of all the political territory there is.”

  I leaned over so I could holler in her ear. It wasn’t easy for a man of my substance. The Thornycroft had duplicate controls like an airplane, including a pair of steering wheels, three feet in diameter. I was feeling a bit cramped—and terrified by the way she drove.

  “This,” I inquired, “is responsive to my question?”

  “Trust me, Winnie! The plain truth is, the right-left spectrum never did work. I’ve even heard of political science professors throwin’ out the responses t’their surveys that didn’t fit their preconceived model.”

  So had I, when I was doing nightschool to get my detective’s shield. The main victims had been Randites and Georgists.

  Lucy continued. “The whole thing’s a sham that deliberately makes no provision for individuals who wanna deal with others—an’ be dealt with—as autonomous adults. There’s no real choice at all. F’rinstance, there’s not a single point on the conventional spectrum where you don’t get taxed!”

  “Confederate political science professors?” I asked, not really believing it. As we shot down the street in a wake of angry honking from other drivers, I was trying to examine the clothing we’d recovered, hoping we hadn’t recovered something irrelevant—and really nasty—sticking to it.

  “Professors from worlds like yours,” she answered. “Remember what Franny said, about all political ‘philosophies’ bein’ nothin’ more’n competin’ sets of excuses for stealin’ from productive individuals? Well, that’s where the stealin’ starts, Winnie, with a crooked map that leads nowhere but straight into the Swamp of Kleptocracy.”

  Damn, I knew I’d heard that term somewhere before. “Kleptocracy?”

  She turned to me—I wished she hadn’t. “Government by theft.”

  I gulped. “A redundancy. And this relates to Jerse Fahel how?”

  Mercifully, she put her eyes back on the road. “Well, most folks, tryin’ t’be ‘reasonable’, tend t’put themselves somewhere between the extremes. But far from representin’ compromise or moderation, the middleground between right an’ left’s another ideological morass. A better map’d be a triangle, with majoritarians in the left corner, authoritarians in the right, an’ individualists who want no part of either, in the corner at the top.”

  I visualized it: a big chalk triangle drawn on the ground (make it the outfield of None of the Above Park; the Patriots didn’t seem to have much use for it) with Williams in the right corner, Slaughterbush in the left corner, and—of course!—Lucy herself in the top corner. It made sense, and I told her so.

  “Yep, that’d deal with the concept accurately an’ efficiently—every known variation fits inside that triangle somewhere—if it weren’t for those who try t’compromise between right an’ left, despite the danger an’ stupidity it represents. They crowd themselves into the middle of the bottom line, tryin’ t’select Item A from majoritarians an’ Item B from authoritarians, thinkin’ they can reject whatever they don’t like an’ take the best from both ends.”

  “Eclecticism.” I finally had hold of one of the spectacularly colorful pieces of clothing we’d recovered and was trying to see if there were any labels. I wondered if the guy’d had anything on underneath, or was wandering around now—no laws against it, here—in his unmentionables. Provided that he wore unmentionables.

  “Eclecticism’s best left t’ paintin’ an’ jazz,” Lucy said. “Y’see, there isn’t any ‘best’ at either end of the spectrum, an’ the line connectin’ ‘em won’t bear the weight of the contradiction. It slumps, metaphorically speakin’, formin’ a bottom corner, turnin’ our triangle into a diamond, an’ what you find down there, is fascism.”

  I frowned. “You mean like the Nazis?”

  “Jackboots an’ swastikas were only window dressin’ for one brand of fascism, Winnie. I mean suit-an’-tie fascism, the kind you left your world to avoid. Look: majoritarians tend t’favor personal liberty—who y’go t’bed with an’ what y’do with’em—at the expense of economic freedom: acts of capitalism between consentin’ adults. Authoritarians’re the other way around—buy an’ sell whatever y’like at whatever price y’like, but no unauthorized hanky-panky!”

  “Yeah, I’d noticed that, myself.” I’d also found a clothing label.

  “Those in the bottom corner can’t tolerate personal liberty or economic freedom. They’re compromisers. Their takes on every issue are driven an’ defined, not by themselves, but by somebody else—by advocates at the opposite ends of the bottom line. Left an’ right de
fine the ‘reasonable’ middle. An’ because the compromisers sense, at some level, that they don’t control their own opinions, they’re more belligerent, more aggressive, an’ more militant t’make up for it.”

  “Be ‘reasonable’ with us,” I suggested, “or die. So who,” I persisted, “is Jerse Fa—Aha! Lucy, I’ll swear on a stack of The Seat of All Virtues that I am not surprised to find in the very first garment I grabbed, the following:”

  MAYER CO. CLOTHIERS

  5830 SOUTH SHERWOOD BLVD.

  BATON ROUGE

  FEDERATED STATES OF TEXAS

  “This is fine gentlemen’s fashion in that universe. There are tags like it in every item but the boots—they’re from the Canary Islands—and the parasol, which came from El Paso.”

  “I guess y’found a clue, Winnie!” Actually, they spell it “clew” here. Lucy cornered by jerking her wheel, causing the Thornycroft to pivot on its center disconcertingly before it recovered and roared off in the desired direction. It’s very interesting, anthropologically, to observe that Confederate drivers use the middle finger, too. What did surprise me was to find a little .14 caliber Muhgi, the size of the palm of my hand. It was a common kid’s gun and could be found in any schoolyard or playground—if you asked nicely. The twenty-shot magazine was loaded, but there was no round in the chamber.

  “He’s obviously a blueback,” I informed Lucy. “Somebody who thinks an unloaded piece is safer than a loaded one.” When I’d arrived here, I’d been astonished to discover that unlike the pistols where I came from, the safeties on guns here display a big red dot when they’re engaged, that is, when the weapon can’t be fired. To a Confederate, this conveys, “Warning! This weapon is temporarily useless for self-defense!”

  “And Lucy?” I closed my eyes as she passed the equivalent of a semi tractor-trailer on the right.

  “Yeah?” she said, as if she didn’t realize how many years she’d aged me in five seconds.

  “I think I’ve just figured out who the hell Jerse Fahel is.”

  She grinned. “Oh you have, have you?”

  I opened my eyes again, carefully. “I have—he’s what’s in the bottom corner of the diamond.”

  “THERE HE IS!”In a bizarre feat of accidental coordination we probably couldn’t have duplicated if we’d tried, Lucy and I in her giant, obnoxious, paisley Thornycroft, and Will in his old, battered, copper-colored Rockford, arrived at the subject’s home at precisely the same moment he did.

  Lucy had finished “briefing” me on the way over. According to her, Jerse Fahel was a prolific opinion columnist on the’Com. To her, the writings she’d waded through indicated that he was “a bastard child of compromise,” a centrist-collectivist of a variety often mistakenly labeled “populist.” Striving to occupy the “militant middle” on every issue, he wound up combining the worst features of left and right, majoritarianism and authoritarianism. Under the system that resulted, one man would have the power to tell everybody what to do—but only in the name of everybody else. Lucy guessed Fahel believed that he should be that man.

  He was also a mystic, with a screwball twist more characteristic of the trendy beliefs of majoritarians than the grave pomposities of the authoritarians. (I thought about the stories I’d read of Hitler’s obsession with artifacts and art associated with the Norse gods.) Fahel, like Bennett Williams, was fixated on a mythic past, but so much so that his mental processes would be limited, in Lucy’s opinion, to short-term, range-of-the-moment reactions to improperly anticipated crises. I’d never realized that Lucy was a shrink and I suspected that she hadn’t, either. I supposed we’d find out about her theories in a few minutes.

  I don’t know what I’d expected—Keyser Soze, maybe—but after all of the shuddery whispering about Jerse Fahel, reality was a real letdown. He was a slightly built fellow, graying at the sides with a boyish cowlick in the front, walking briskly along the sidewalk beside his private drive in a plain gray business tunic and trousers. Will had found his personal’Com number (Fahel had been in the middle of a carefully timed exercise walk he took every afternoon) and given us a call once he’d arranged this meeting.

  “Come in, neighbors,” the man invited us in a mild, almost timid voice. It was three steps up from the drive, a stoop with a wrought-iron rail leading to an eight-paned door trimmed in white. The house was red brick with white accents, surprisingly modest for this part of town, although it was surrounded, like most of the homes here were, by several grassy acres; in Fahel’s case, cropped level until you could play pool on it.

  Inside, Fahel went to a closet, took off his street tunic, hanging it up carefully, pulled out a shapeless gray poncho, put it on, then stooped, untied his shoes, took them off, and replaced them with soft, comfortable-looking mocassins.

  “There.” He grinned up at the three of us with satisfaction. “It was a beautiful day for my constitutional, but now it’s time for other things. I’m Jerse Fahel, and I’ll bet you’re Captain Sanders.” He thrust out a hand.

  I shook my head and tilted a thumb toward Will.

  “My mistake.” He took Will’s hand and shook it. Then he turned to Lucy and took her hand, bowing slightly over it to kiss it. “My dear Mrs. Kropotkin. I’m very surprised to see you here, but nevertheless delighted.”

  Will said, “This is my neighbor, Win Bear.”

  He took my hand. I hoped he wouldn’t kiss it. He smelled pretty strongly of mothballs. “The very first person through the broach. I’d like to think of you as my neighbor, too, Win. Wouldn’t you like to be my neighbor?” He looked at all of us together. “Would you all care for some milk and cookies?”

  Unanimously, we said thanks but no thanks.

  “Then I hope you’ll excuse the mess.” Fahel led us from the foyer through a broad arch into a larger, brighter, immaculately clean and tidy room with snow white walls, beautiful, deeply polished hardwood floors, and big bay windows on either side, admitting almost as much light as if we were outdoors. It had been a dining room to begin with. Furniture, mostly white folding chairs with canvas backs and seats, was scattered about. In the center, under a big, domed, vaguely Jeffersonian skylight, was a desk with three’Com pads lying on it and several unfamiliar-looking instruments. In front of it was an enormous drawing board. I got a brief glance not at floorplans, cartoons, or homemade cheesecake, but graphs, pies, and flowcharts. Here I’d been thinking this was the age of computer-aided draftsmanship.

  “The mess?” Will asked, rhetorically. We all accepted his offer of a seat, as he took his place behind his desk.

  “I’m afraid so.” Fahel looked genuinely distressed. “You see, I’ve been displaced from my offices by the Old Endicott Building disaster. I have no prospect of returning, as the building has been written off and will likely be demolished altogether. This is my home, and I’m having difficulty getting my business reorganized here.” A door opened at the back left of the office and eight clean and tidy children, ranging from about eight to about twelve, trooped out in two columns, side by side. They were dressed in nearly identical gray pullovers, gray slacks for the boys, gray skirts for the girls. As the rest kept their eyes straight ahead, the oldest acknowledged Fahel with a respectful nod as they all marched softly through the room to the arch we’d entered and vanished through a door into the foyer.

  “You see what I mean?” Fahel squirmed in his swivel chair. “How can I operate my business with the children rampaging through it all the time like a battalion of wild Hessians?”

  “Your business?” Will sounded just like Jack Webb. He tended to react that way to weirdness.

  Fahel opened his mouth, but just then, from a door at the other side of the office, there emerged a small, thin woman in a gray dress, about the same age as Fahel. She timidly approached and waited for him to notice her. When he did, she whispered something in his ear.

  He rolled his eyes. “Another distaction! Very well, tell him I said yes, but only three thousand terabytes.”

  She
nodded wordlessly and left like a little gray mouse by the way she’d come. “Your wife?” I asked.

  “Please forgive me.” He shook his head and added, “Children!” He sort of shook himself where he sat and went on. “You asked about my business. I’m self-employed as a time-motion analyst, mostly for corporations, although—”

  “An efficiency expert,” I said.

  Fahel blinked. “If you must call it that, sir. My highest ambition is simply to apply what I’ve studied and practiced for more than twenty-five years to society as a whole.”

  “Whether society as a whole is interested in participatin’ or not,” said Lucy. She didn’t make it a question.

  He shrugged. “As you wish, madam. I am a scientist; you cannot offend me when it comes to conclusions I’ve reached by scientific means. In perfect candor, as a time-motion analyst and observer of all human behavior, I’m vehemently opposed to any and all manifestations of the uncontrolled expression of individual liberty or of the unsupervised exercise of economic freedom.”

  Lucy turned and gave me that look that says, “I told you so.” Being the honest type, I signaled back with my eyebrows that indeed, she had told me so.

  Fahel noticed none of this. “But I assure you all that if society were run with proper efficiency, no one would ever notice that they weren’t free. They’d be guided by their leader to do only those things that are best for them, and would therefore make them happiest.”

  “But the trains already run on time.” I couldn’t help myself. I could think of lots of things that made me happy that weren’t good for me at all.

  “Lieutenant Bear, like you, I agree that liberty is precious. And like Lenin, I believe it is so precious that it must be rationed!”