The American Zone

by L. Neil Smith

  Always, the newcomer was instructed to bring whatever real wealth he could lay his hands on, regardless of the source: gold, silver, platinum, portable antiques, such as watches and miniature paintings—and especially any films, tapes, full-size, compact, or subcompact disks he could beg, borrow, steal, or otherwise acquire that might prove salable in the novelty-hungry North American Confederacy.

  One of the “Bennetts” had come through the broach and immediately collapsed, his luggage and clothing bulging. Nobody at this end cared—there can’t be any smuggling if there aren’t any “customs.” He’d checked out a sizeable fraction of the fiction of several local libraries in his homeworld, and would return—if he was ever that stupid—to a king’s ransom in fines and late fees. Another brave soul had swallowed half his weight in highly polished iridium spheres a centimeter in diameter.

  “YOU KNOW,” MARY-BETH observed shrewdly, “If they’d left it at that, they could have established one of the Confederacy’s great fortunes. Think of it, free choice of an infinty of motion picture masterpieces—yes, and smaller pictures and music—with little or no production costs.”

  “Overlooking the fact that they’re all stolen from somebody else,” her sister said. “Clarissa, would you please pass the chocolate? Anybody want more coffee?”

  They both looked to Will, and it wasn’t about the coffee. He knew that, and shrugged. “Hey, whatever crimes are being committed here—setting aside a couple of thousand cold-blooded murders—they’re all way out of my jurisdiction. Besides, I’ve told you all a hundred times, I’m not a cop!”

  Five voices sang out at once, “Yeah, right!”

  “So now,” Fran told us, “even if we defeat these Bennetts, the North American Confederacy will become a pirate culture, plundering all the other worlds for their art and literature and movies and music. And there’ll be lots of interests here who won’t be limited to an inch. They’ll steal everything out there that isn’t nailed down, and half of what is! God, we’ll be just like the British Empire!”

  She sat down, threw her face into her hands, and actually started crying. I hadn’t seen her so upset since her husband got shot. I glanced at Clarissa, to see if she was worried that Fran was going to start having her baby. Clarissa gave me a shake of her head that said there wasn’t any danger.

  “Tell y’what, honey …” Lucy put a hand on her shoulder. “I’ll promise that I won’t do any interworld plunderin’ if you will. That’s two, an’ we can get more—if we whip the Bennetts.”

  Fran, ordinarily one of the toughest individuals I knew, raised a tearstained face to Lucy and said in an equally tearstained voice, Really?”

  “Really—course I don’t promise not t’offer’em a handful of beads for what they got.”

  Fran laughed, took a tissue from Clarissa, a hug from her husband, and blew her nose. Maybe it wasn’t so bad a thing that my wife had never been pregnant.

  SOON, NO FEWER than eight Bennett Williamses—by various names, from various places—were living and working together in the big old antique farmhouse at the extreme southern edge of Greater LaPorte. They were shooting for an even dozen. They agreed (of course) that they would need all the help they could get, for their overall plan was ambitious and immense.

  The next stage would depend on the unwitting—but 100 percent perfectly predictable—cooperation of the original Bennett’s older brother Buckley, head of the Williams family, and of the Franklinite Faction, which was all that still existed of the historic but outmoded Gallatinist Party. Perhaps Buckley himself had begun to grow a bit soft on excessive freedom over the years. He’d attempted to make friends with that immigrant policeman Bear, for example, after the Hamiltonian incident. But Buckley’s followers, Allard Wayne, for example, could be counted on, Bennett knew, to shriek long and loud for greatly increased political control of the Confederate population—perhaps even for the formation of a permanent government, which was what he and his counterparts really wanted—if a sufficient number of sufficiently horrible crimes were to occur. Especially if they could be made to look sufficiently like crimes committed by the motley immigrant denizens of the drab and grimy American Zone.

  It was therefore up to Bennett Williams—to all of the Bennett Williamses—to carry out these crimes, and this, too, would prove surprisingly easy. Except for the personal weapons everybody carried in the Confederacy, and which rendered them all but invulnerable to common street crimes like mugging or rape or home invasions, the people here were shockingly undefended—physically and mentally—against apparently random acts of cold-blooded mass violence. Such atrocities simply weren’t within their worldview.

  Yet.

  Wilhelmsohn had been astonished and horrified to discover that the eight Bennetts employed a “Wheel of Crime” dartboard to determine the place and type of crime to be committed. Believing they could send a subliminal message to the public, they let the media do their timing for them: whenever the’Com announced that a new record number of refugee immigrants had been admitted through the interworld terminals in LaPorte and other cities of the Confederacy, they struck within the next twenty-four hours. While one Bennett made himself publicly conspicuous to establish an alibi for them all—the original Bennett at that convention, for example—and another Bennett wrote the authoritarian ranting that would be used at press conferences or appear subsequently in the Franklinite online magazine The Postman, the rest of the Bennetts would sabotage a train, blow up a building, or plant a time bomb on the City of Calgary.

  It seemed like child’s play.

  And what would Bennett—all of the Bennetts, of course—stand to gain from all this vile chicanery? More than simply all the wealth and power in the world. That was chump change, perhaps suitable for minor conquerors like Alexander of Macedon, Hannibal Barca, Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler, or Lavrenti Beria. They would have more. They would have all the wealth and power in a whole infinity of worlds!

  If their plan succeeded, with older brother Buckley and his cronies firmly established in power, and younger brother Bennett irrevocably a part of that power establishment, it would be easy to appropriate tax money—Confederate tax money, what a concept! —to look for alternate worlds especially susceptible to conquest. These pushover worlds would be made to look like a threat to the Confederacy and all that it (no longer) stood for. An emergency would be declared. Conscription would be instituted for the first time in Confederate history, and huge armies of invasion raised. Later, forces would be recruited from otherworld subject populations less likely to resist the draft.

  An infinity of worlds.

  Together, the Bennetts shrewdly calculated that their scheme might require as many as ten years to bear fruit worthy of the picking. That was fine with them; they knew they had plenty of time. To the surprise and delight of many in their company (and the incomprehensible horror of others), for practical purposes, advanced Confederate medical technology made them all immortal. Thanks to their import “business,” they were already rich, and rapidly getting richer. In the end, they’d possess a vast interworld empire, boggling every mind and beggaring any previous such accomplishment in human history.

  And what of the hundreds of thousands of Confederate victims of the heinous crimes the Bennetts planned to commit? Or the tens of millions of victims of the interworld rape and pillage they were planning? As one of them joked—Star Trek being a cultural experience shared by many worlds—the only person who could make an omelette without breaking eggs was the transporter chief of the starship Enterprise.

  But what none of the Bennett Williamses had counted on was a traitor in their midst.

  26: STRANGER IN PARADISE

  America’s historic misfortune is that her people have seldom been equal to the ideals upon which their nation was established.

  —Memoirs of Lucille G. Kropotkin

  “I confess, at first, that I was merely curious,” Wilhelmsohn said between bites of the blackbottom pie he’d ordered,
expecting to be disappointed, “when I first was shown the Bennetts’ ad on our university comnet:

  DO YOU KNOW THIS MAN?

  DO YOU HAPPEN TO LOOK LIKE HIM?

  REPLY DIRECT TO THIS ACCOUNT

  UNIMAGINABLE REWARDS!!

  “I knew him all right. I saw him every morning in the bathroom mirror, when I shaved.” Most of our dinner dishes had been cleared away by now, although Lucy’s friend the CIPE restaurant manager obligingly continued to keep us supplied with water and assorted other liquids. Serious goings-on or not, watching Wilhelmsohn, I was considering what I might have for dessert, myself.

  “Well, by the end of the day,” our guest from another Texas went on, “Old T. Walt—he’s the Philosophy of Economics Fellow in the office next door—Murray Suruasolaphecychap in the office on the other side, and no fewer than a dozen of my other colleagues—not to mention about a hundred of my students—had brought that peculiar online ad to my attention.”

  Mary-Beth took a sip of the coffee she wasn’t supposed to be drinking and looked at him curiously. “I take it you don’t normally read your own … what do you call it in the Federated States of Texas, E-mail?”

  “Normally …” Wilhelmsohn smiled a strange, private kind of smile. “No, ma’am, Miz Sanders, I wasn’t looking at it, not at all. I had reasons of my own—and we call it C-mail, just like you folks here do.”

  Mary-Beth nodded, still looking at the man sort of speculatively. I’d noticed that Clarissa was starting to do it, too. I wondered what was up with them, or him, or all of the above. There wasn’t any chance to ask right now.

  “Anyway,” Wilhelmsohn took a breath and shook off whatever was bothering him. “I was a philosophy professor, myself, holder of the George F. Will chair of Sophistry at the Baton Rouge campus of Texas A&M—or did I tell you that?”

  He had, but everybody let it pass.

  “I’d been raised in a world where what we sometimes call the Lone Star Republic had never annexed itself abjectly to the contemptible United States.” (He said, “YEW-natted.”) “And although I was extremely well-educated in the rich-textured and most glorious history of my own beloved country, it had never before occurred to me to imagine a world in which it had.”

  Had what? Oh, yeah: annexed itself abjectly to the contemptible yewnatted. This clown used more adverbs and subordinate clauses than a Civil War documentary festival, although the womenfolk seemed to enjoy listening to him.

  “No kidding?” I asked. “You mean they don’t have any concept like parallel histories or alternative probabilities in the science fiction where you come from? No Jack Williamson, Poul Anderson, or H. Beam Piper?”

  “Harry Turtledove?” Will added, “Brad Linaweaver, S. M. Stirling, Michael Kurland?”

  “Andre Norton?” Clarissa finished the list.

  Wilhelmsohn slowly shook his head. “I’m afraid that I’ve never even heard of any of them, my friends. Mind you, that doesn’t mean that nobody else in my homeworld never has, I just don’t have much of a taste for science fiction, myself. Although now I seem to be living it, don’t I?” He spread both hands out on the table, and paused for a long while, seeming to examine them. “It’s absolutely astonishing, isn’t it?”

  About that time, the waiter came back and I knew what I wanted. I’m not the dessert guy that my manly figure might indicate. I do enjoy Chinese and Mexican food, and it was the latter that had gotten me into the habit of eating flan. If you’re not familiar with the stuff, it’s a Mexican egg custard made with cinnamon instead of nutmeg, drenched with a thin but delicious caramel sauce. If it’s one thing I’m a sucker for, to misquote Spencer Tracy again, it’s flan.

  Ironically the best I ever had was in a Vietnamese restaurant that decided to start making it for some reason (I always meant to ask why, but never got around to it), where the waiters came around and asked if you wanted frawn.

  Frawn it was. I told the waiter, who nodded and vanished.

  Finally, an impatient Fran said, “Please go on with your story, Mr. Wilhelmsohn.”

  The man from Texas A&M looked up into her pretty face and blinked. “That’s Benjamin to you, Miz Sanders, ma‘am, and I do believe that I will.” He inhaled and exhaled. “Almost from the first contact I made with my counterparts in this world, I felt alarmed—and increasingly confused. An opportunity to follow in the illustrious footsteps of Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon … it should have been exhilarating. Why, I kept asking myself over and over, couldn’t I simply throw my lot in with my newfound’brothers’ and cheerfully help them conquer the known universe?”

  Clarissa seemed startled. “You mean you actually considered it?”

  He grinned that self-deprecating grin of his. “Not at all, Miz Bear, not at all. And that was what troubled me, you see? What would it have hurt? Who would it have hurt? From an historical viewpoint alone, this is a very technically advanced and ethically enlightened civilization you have here. Far more so, say, than the Romans or the British. Most of the worlds it came to dominate would probably benefit from it.

  “Meanwhile,” he closed his eyes and imagined it, “I’d be rich.”

  He sat up straight. “I’d be powerful.”

  “He’d get laid,” Will suggested.

  Wilhelmson looked down at his shoes. “I most humbly beg your pardon, ladies!”

  Clarissa suppressed a grin and blushed. It never fails to surprise me she can do that, given her medical education and everything she knows about life, inside and out. So, surprisingly, did Lucy, who’s been married so many times she can’t keep track. Mary-Beth grinned, and Fran laughed out loud.

  “Why couldn’t I simply join my newfound ‘brothers’?” he repeated rhetorically. “My friends, I didn’t know—and the question haunted me. Perhaps it was because, however you may wish to glorify their names—Alexander of Macedon, Hannibal Barca, Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler, Lavrenti Beria—they’re nothing more than a lot of murderous bandits.”

  Nobody gave him any argument about that.

  “Perhaps,” he offered, “on the opposite side of the scale, it had more than a little to do with where I’d been born and grown up, in the Federated States of Texas, which I soon came to understand happened to be the closest political equivalent, so far discovered, to the North American Confederacy.”

  “Sounds pretty much like it,” Will observed. “Tell me, what kind of taxes do you have there?”

  He blinked like many Confederates often do, as if struggling to recall the meaning of that hated word. “Why, no taxes at all, Captain Sanders. Although the practice is alive and well in other countries, the United States, the Republic of California, and French Imperial Mexico. For the last century, our government—what little of it there is—has been given a monopoly on the collection and recycling of garbage.”

  Everybody laughed.

  “But you were speaking,” Mary-Beth said, “of why you couldn’t be a villain.”

  “I suppose I was, at that, Miz Sanders,” Wilhelmsohn replied in his courtly manner. “How downright Shakespearian of me. Well, one thing I discovered, shortly after arriving in the Confederacy, was that I seemed to be the only ‘version of Bennett Williams’ (and how I’d begun to loathe thinking of myself in those terms) who hadn’t attended a Jesuit seminary.”

  Now there was another new one on me. This adventure was certainly turning out to be educational. I hadn’t even known that there were Jesuit seminaries in the Confederacy. There are certainly plenty of religious folks here, but out of fear, I think, of the bitter, bloody conflicts that have plagued other people in other times and places, and to stay focused on the one thing—absolute individual liberty—that makes all other things possible, they tend to keep their religious beliefs and practices pretty much to themselves. I’d never seen a priest of any kind in LaPorte—not the guys who followed Ringo Starr around trying to cut his finger off, nor saffron-robed Buddhists with shaved heads, nor Greek Orthodox, nor even Roman Catholic. I wondered if t
hey carried guns. But Wilhelmsohn was going on. “Perhaps it had something to do with a little couplet that Bennett had framed on the wall of his office, all stitched up with pretty embroidered flowers, like an old-fashioned sampler:

  MEN ARE NOBLER WHEN THEY ARE FREE,

  AND WOMEN, WHEN THEY ARE PROPERTY.

  “Let me tell you, that thing offended me mightily. The fairer sex, you see, at one time constituted the rarest and most valuable presence imaginable, during the founding years of our Lone Star Republic. The respect that they garnered then—we couldn’t have tamed that harsh frontier without them, and there wouldn’t have been much point to it in any case, would there?—had extended itself well into the twentieth century.”

  Of course the women-folk cheered and clapped, even though to them this was only the third century. In my homeworld, something like this sentiment prevailed in Wyoming, which had imagined it was conferring an honor on women by being the first state in the union to give them the vote.

  “I may have tipped my hand just a little,” Wilhelmson told us, “in a conversation I had with one of the Bennetts—not the original, but from something called the Scientific Hegemony of North America, where your vote is weighted according to your Intelligence Quotient.