The American Zone

by L. Neil Smith

  I shrugged. “I don’t know.” I glanced at Clarissa. She gave me a particular look, to say that Will had had enough. “I think we want to talk to Lucy, first.”

  “You do that, partner, and let me know how it turns out. I think I’ll just lie here for a while.”

  Clarissa turned another knob, and he was sound asleep.

  22: ROLL ME OVER IN THE CLOVER

  The late-twentieth century Left fawns obsessively over animals because an animal has no intellect, is therefore incapable of challenging their ridiculous ideas, and can’t say, “Leave me the hell alone and get a life, you geek!”

  —Memoirs of Lucille G. Kropotkin

  “Whoop! Yipee!” I hadn’t known I was capable of making a noise like that. “What a ride!”

  Although she’d departed LaPorte in a conventional way—from an SST pad atop the Spooner Building earlier that morning—Lucy asked us to join her by extremely unconventional means, here at the Armadillo Interworld Terminal. I could see why, now, although it had taken me a minute back in LaPorte to understand exactly what I was expected to do.

  Clarissa and I had stepped into the blindingly blue circle that was the locus of a probability broach, at LaPorte Interworld, then out of a blindingly blue circle exactly like it, into a transparent booth, and out onto the concourse. Waiting, as excited as I’ve ever seen her, was Lucy, who gave Clarissa a big hug and the same to me as if she hadn’t seen us for months. “How’dya like that?” She grinned. “LaPorte t’Lubbock in a fraction of a second!” Glancing back, I could still see LaPorte Interworld, like looking through a window.

  I looked down the long line of transparent booths exactly like the one Clarissa and I had just come from, and a few that were different, probably for freight. It was just the same at home—in Laporte, that was. This would have been a noisy place back in the States, full of hustle, bustle, and victims having their bodily orifices probed by uniformed perverts. I wonder why it never seems to have occurred to anyone that a “cavity search” is rape.

  Competent design and plenty of air curtains kept the noise abated here. We’d merely come from eight hundred miles to the north by northwest. But now, in both directions as far as the eye could see (two miles each way in this titanic underground complex), people were stepping from one world—and in most cases, from one life—into another in which such violations of dignity and personal privacy aren’t allowed to happen.

  Not to people who followed Thomas Jefferson’s advice and carried a weapon everywhere they went.

  Some of the booths did have guards—denied any orificeprobing powers—posted around them as a measure of prudence. In an infinite sheaf of universes where anything possible was probable, it might be badguys coming through the broach, or would-be conquering aliens, or herds of stampeding dinosaurs, or giant mosquitos, instead of refugees. Or it might be precious cargo—diamonds or emeralds or sunstones that needed protecting. Thousands of companies were mining hundreds of versions of Earth that had never developed a sapient population. Since these companies already knew where all the big finds had been made in hundreds of inhabited worlds, they always struck the mother lode in any new place they explored.

  Some booths just had families, waiting to be reunited.

  And there were a few where operatives—I was one of them myself, from time to time—were headed the other way, looking for people to be rescued, or brutalitarian assholes who heeded their whole day ruined or their tickets punched.

  “This is something like what happened to J. J. Madison, isn’t it?” Clarissa asked us both. I realized suddenly that my wife had never been through a broach before. She looked a little frightened by what we’d just done, and she had good reason. Permit the toe of a shoe, or a trailing coattail to intersect the bright blue border of the broach; say good-bye to toe or tail. The end of a stick, cut by that boundary, will have a shiny, polished look. Naturally, any interworld terminal worth the name will design its debarking platforms to prevent that sort of thing.

  But it gets worse. Cut the power and let the broach close down on something solid protruding through it, Kaboom! Or make that, Kaboom squared!, at both ends of the operation. The Hamiltonians who’d gunned me down nine years ago had been finished off when I’d sabotaged an experimental setup sort of ancestral to this one. Clarissa and I had been seriously injured in the resulting explosion. She’d lost a lot of her lovely hair, and I’d lost an eye, but she’d found a new one for me.

  Used to belong to somebody named Abby—Abby Normal.

  “Yep,” Lucy answered proudly. “It’s just exactly what you thought it was, a sure-enough genuine double broach! Beam me up, Winnie! It’s the wave of the future! An’ you two are among the first one hundred customers t’try it out! Instantaneous transportation!”

  I peered at her suspiciously. “Does this thing work the way I think it does?”

  “The first broach, in LaPorte,” she answered, “goes t’someplace secure in another world—an undiscovered Egyptian tomb or a lost city that managed t’stay lost. The second broach, set up facing it a thousandth of an inch from the first, leads here.”

  “Ain’t science wonderful?” my mate said graciously, not entirely believing it, herself. I could see her thinking that she wished she’d brought an overnight case.

  I said, “Well, what’ll they think of next?” a phrase that seems to have vanished from the vocabulary of worlds less blessed by freedom—and the peace, progress, and prosperity it invariably engenders—than the Confederacy.

  I kept looking around until I saw a brightly lit sign that read, ALL EXITS. “Okay,” I asked Lucy, “where do we go from here—and why?”

  “Well,” she said, “after we talked t’Slaughterbush, Williams, an’ Fahel, I got t’thinkin’. I was kinda surprised, given what you boys’ve told me about your homeworlds, that we hadn’t run into any native Confederate greenies.”

  “Greenies?” Clarissa asked. We followed Lucy to the sign I’d seen. People were getting into what looked like an elevator, except that above the door, where there should have been numbers, it read, AVENUE A & 34TH. People got in, the door shut, then reopened again and the car was empty. Lucy got in and punched a panel where you’d expect to see buttons. At the top, the address changed to EAST 50TH.

  “Well, c’mon,” she urged us. “We’re burnin’ daylight!”

  The door closed, the goddamned thing lurched sideways, and we were gone.

  “TREE-HUGGERS!” LUCY TOOK a long pull of her mint julep, a drink built on the same basic principle as a good martini, but with bourbon and various imaginary additives instead of gin or vodka and the same. I was sure that her Texican accent had thickened, now that she was in her native country again.

  “Dirt-worshippers,” she went on. “Animal fanatics. Toad lickers. See, where Winnie comes from, every last form of collectivism’s been thoroughly discredited for a long time. That doesn’t mean they’re on their last legs, though—not as long as they’ve still got all the ‘lawyers, guns, an’ money.’”

  We were relaxing at the lavish lakeside estate of yet another old friend of Lucy’s. When we’d emerged from Armadillo Interworld into the hot, dry air on East 50th, Lucy had a car there—a brand-new purple Lenda J.—and we’d roared off due east along the same street until all of the buildings went away and it became a country road. Six miles east of the city, she’d taken a sharp right and frightened me out of ten years’ growth.

  This part of Texas is so flat that it makes Kansas look like the Himalayas. I’d never seen such a featureless landscape in my life, yellow-gray, bone-dry, and dusty, straight out to the horizon in any direction you couldn’t avoid looking. It was a good land, though, full of friendly, hardworking people. It had taken us fifteen minutes to get from the elevator to the waiting car, one hundred yards away, because the strangers we met on the street all asked us how we-all were, and really wanted to know.

  What had scared me out of ten years’ growth, after passing dozens of what would have been hard-luck f
arms back home—here they were razor-edged islands of pure emerald surrounded by desert—and emu ranches, and forty-foot piles of industrial cottonseed you could see two miles away, was that, having driven south, away from the highway a few hundred yards, the Lenda J. suddenly plunged into a yawning hole I hadn’t noticed, and we disappeared—well, if not from the face of the Earth, then at least from the top of what people around there call the “caprock.”

  A hundred feet below, after seven or eight hairpin turns—far more thrilling in a hovercraft than on wheels—we might as well have been on a different planet. The rocks and soil down here had turned red, the vegetation had gone to palmetto and yucca and prickly pear—a big fat raccoon waddled across the residential street we found ourselves on—and it looked and smelled a whole lot more like New Mexico than Texas. At the bottom of this fabulous Lost World lay a cool, blue, refreshing lake.

  “Welcome t’Ransom Canyon!” Lucy told us. “When I was just a little bitty thing, this here was all dry, an’ the Comancheros useta come down here t’buy back white children from the Comanches who’d stolen’em. I was one of those children, Winnie. Now they got this little dam at the east end, an’ the white folks an’ the Comanches all go water-skiin’ t’gether.”

  The trouble with thinking that Lucy was a liar was that she always turned out to be telling the truth. “Captured by the Indians,” I told my wife, “her suffering was in tents.”

  Lucy gave me an evil glare—and then burst out laughing.

  Five minutes later we’d driven across the little dam, up to an enormous Spanish-style home on South Lakeshore Drive with a huge front yard, walled off by a low brick fence, and full of sagebrush and yucca and other southwesterny vegetables. Huge birds with long, stiff wings circled overhead. As we got out of the car, a fox ran across the driveway.

  A mere ten minutes after that, Clarissa and Lucy were reclining on redwood chaise longues, sipping something therapeutically alcoholic. I didn’t want to ask them what it was. It didn’t quite have a little umbrella sticking out of it.

  For the benefit of our host, my lovely wife was recapitulating our earlier conversation about environmentalists. “So if I understand it correctly, the simpleminded manifesto of Lucy’s ‘dirt-worshippers’ goes, ‘Four legs good, two legs bad. Two wheels good, four wheels bad.’”

  Our host made rueful clucking noises. “If accurately rendered, the self-loathing those prejudices reveal sends the imagination of any sane person reeling in shock, disgust, and pity.”

  Lucy had been struggling to explain the political deathgrip that environmentalists had on the worlds Will and I had come from. “Not to mention the corruption of the round-heeled press,” I added, “who make sure it stays that way.”

  Lucy nodded. “But nobody actually believes any of it anymore, right, left, or center. Marx is dead, Rachel Carson is dead, an’ Paul Ehrlich is feelin’ puny. All any of ‘em has left is brute force an’ lies. That’s why a logical argument never works with their proponents. They don’t care t’hear about the facts, what’s right or wrong, correct or incorrect. They’re after somethin’ entirely different from what they claim they want.”

  “Of course the Slaughterbush types are only getting started here,” I cut in, sipping my rum and Coke and enjoying it thoroughly. For a person who never drank alcohol, our host certainly had a well-stocked bar and a generous … well, flipper. “First they’ll try militant safetyism. That usually works pretty well as a justification for running roughshod over everybody’s rights. Or they may try the ever-popular ‘For the children …’”

  “The only ‘safety’ I’m concerned with,” Lucy remarked, “is the safety of liberty. An’ what I want most ‘for’ the children’ is a free country for’em to grow up in!”

  “Admirably stated,” proclaimed our host, his gray-domed head, long nose, and perpetual grin bobbing atop the edge of a swimming pool constructed so that his head was level with ours, where we sat at a wrought aluminum outdoor table at the side of the high-walled pool. “So why does no one ever say this in the world of your calving, landling?”

  “Because,” I told him, “anybody who did would never be allowed on television—the’Com—and any newspaper stories about him that failed to portray him as a thoroughgoing lunatic would be spiked with extreme prejudice.” I looked into the mild brown eyes of Aalaalaa Ickickloo T’wheel, Lucy’s finny friend and the longtime political editor for the West Texas Whiskey Rebel, the biggest online news publication in what used to be its own country until 1896. Or make that 120 A.L. We were here at Aalaalaa’s Ransom Canyon hacienda because he just happened to be personally acquainted with a rare phenomenon: a genuine Confederate environmentalist.

  “Well, you can tell it to Birdie when she gets here,” Aalaalaa said. “The Great Deep knows I’ve tried to tell her this sort of thing often enough, myself. She always says the salt water in this pool or in my house might seep into the lake and spoil the ecology—meaning it might kill all of the trout our Homeowners’ Association has stocked in our artificial lake.”

  General laughter, from me, Lucy, Clarissa, Aalaalaa, and the two other porpoises in the pool beside him. They’d been introduced to us as Uuruulii Ackorkick S’wheen, and Eereeree Ockockock F’wheem, Aalaalaa’s wives. I’ve never figured cetacean names out, but I knew that Will Sanders and his family would be comfortable here. I made a mental note to call him later on this evening.

  “The fact is,” Aalaalaa said, “no rational individual willingly damages his own property. That—not the bayonet—is the solution to maintaining an acceptable environment. I myself have caused to be constructed a carefully valved tunnel between this pool and the lake so that, like my neighbors, I may go fishing there from time to time. They use hooks and lines, whereas I use more traditional methods. I must also wear a protective suit, as fresh water and fishhooks are rather hard on my skin.”

  I laughed. “Well, keep an eye on this pet environmentalist of yours, Aalaalaa. Handle her right, and maybe we’ll find out what her priorities really are. Safety Nazism and ‘for the children’ work most of the time, but the left will turn to environmentalism whenever it looks like they might be losing control. That’s when you see the watermelons out in force. I sure hope we won’t be picking on a good friend of yours.”

  “Be assured, landling,” Aalaalaa told me, “that she is no true friend, but rather a pest. She borrowed our lawn mower six months ago—with the handy attachment that kills rattlesnakes—and she hasn’t brought it back.”

  “She probably melted it down to make a snake memorial,” Clarissa told him. Pretty cynical. I wasn’t sure I liked what this experience was doing to her.

  “Watermelons?” Uuruulii Ackorkick S’wheen shook her head as if the conversation were making less and less sense to her. On the other hand, I was having a political discussion with a bunch of porpoises, so what the hell.

  “Sure, honey,” Lucy told her. “Watermelons: green on the outside, an’ red on the inside.”

  “Red,” Aalaalaa explained, “is the chosen livery of communism, I believe, the crown jewel in the diadem of collectivism, to switch metaphors in the middle of the thermocline. And collectivism is what these people are all advancing one way or another, whether they admit it or not.”

  “Maybe even whether they know it or not,” I added. “Like Joseph Goebbels or Franklin Roosevelt or somebody said, there are a lot of useful idiots out there.”

  “It was Lenin, Edward William Bear. And I know all about the Reds, friend Lucy,” Uuruulii told her. “Are you saying then that these environmentalists are all communists?”

  “One name for a product sold under lotsa labels,” she replied. “They’re all workin’ for it, one way or another. But there’s more to it than that. There’s that psychopathological component Clarissa mentioned. Y’don’t hafta listen long before y’begin t’hear a ‘subtext’ in the pronouncements of environmentalists, a pathetic wail, straight outa John Milton, of absolute, churnin’, acidic selfloathin’.”
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  “A subtext.” Uuruulii seemed to feel a chill and cuddled closer to her husband at the edge of the pool. I’d never seen a porpoise do that before. Eereeree, too, drifted closer to him.

  “And because they hate themselves so venomously,” said Aalaalaa, looking from one of his females to the other, a gesture I was sure he picked up from humans, “and by extension, every other member of their own species or anything remotely like it—”

  “They hate and fear what’s best for sapients of every kind,” Uuruulii concluded. “It’s a kind of political death wish. The less a given policy is likely to work, the more misery and disaster it’s likely to cause, the more energetically they’ll advocate it.”

  Eereeree’s only comment was, “Sick! How did such sick people end up running so many nation-states?”

  “Democracy!” everybody with two legs said at once.

  Lucy said, “At the same time, they hate what works best: free enterprise an’ individual liberty. They’ll do anythin’—use any excuse—to destroy’em. If it weren’t global warmin’, it’d be global coolin’, and if that weren’t handy, then they’d complain that world temperatures are stayin’ the same all the time.”

  “And blame it on individualistic greed and selfish capitalism,” Clarissa finished for her.

  EITHER THE INTERVIEW was not going very well, or it was going perfectly.

  “But don’t you see, all of you, that we owe a debt of love to our Mother Gaea …” the woman had begun. She’d been going on like this since we’d been introduced.

  I sighed, although I’d tried bravely not to. Clarissa bent her head wearily and covered her eyes for a moment. The eversmiling expressions of our cetacean host and hostesses were as unreadable as that of any porpoise.

  “You tree-huggers all gimme a pain in the patoot!” Lucy barely kept herself from shouting. She was embarrassed, I think, that this woman was a native Confederate and not some kind of immigrant. “Your precious Earth, your warm, nurturin’, lovely Mother Gaea, is nothin’ but a giant ball of rock, thinly smeared with three billion years’ accumulation of wormshit!”