The American Zone

by L. Neil Smith

“It’s instructive that he refugeed outa there,” Lucy observed. “Think he failed the I.Q. test?”

  Mary-Beth replied, “It’s far more likely he was fleeing from the consequences of rule by intellectuals—who can screw more things up, far worse, and in less time, than any other category of individuals I know of.”

  “Ouch!” Professor Wilhelmsohn exclaimed, laughing so heartily he nearly dropped a forkful of his pie. “I don’t know about all that, Miz Sanders—and aren’t you some kind of academic, too?—the fellow was talking about his fiancé, whom he planned to bring over as soon as he could. He kept going on and on about her having ‘saved herself’ for after their wedding.”

  That ancient notion was regaining some ground in my homeworld, too. I won’t say it was the reason I left, but it was another swell reason to stay away.

  “I observed—” Wilhelmsohn went on, “quite casually, mind you, not making a point of it—that it had been my observation that girls who don’t believe in premarital sex usually don’t believe in sex after the wedding, either.

  General laughter. This guy had missed his calling. He should have been a standup comedian. I made a mental note to introduce him to Sam Yosemite.

  When the laughter died down, Wilhelmsohn went on, just like a pro. “‘Any act of intercourse,’ the Hegemony fellow waggled his finger at me, ‘outside of wedlock, or that cannot result in the conception of a child, is a Grievous Sin, as well as an Abomination in the Eyes of the Creator.’”

  “Some religious people speak in tongues,” Will observed, “and others in capital letters.”

  “How very right you are, Captain Sanders. ‘That’s interesting,’ I told the fellow. ‘And how do you know that?’

  “Well, he looked at me incredulously, as if I’d asked how he knew the Earth was round—or maybe flat, in his case. ‘Why, my good man, it is the Revealed Word of the Living God!’

  “‘I see,’ I told him. ‘Was it notarized?’”

  By now it was all any of us could do to keep from rolling on the floor, laughing. For my own part, despite the fact that we often disagree on matters like this, I tend to get along pretty well with religious individuals—the armed, self-contained, self-sufficient, home-canning, home-schooling kind, inclined to thump the Constitution as much as the Bible, and whom the government back home regards as a threat—right up to the point when they start telling me how to live my own life.

  “When both of us were teenagers,” Mary-Beth told Wilhelmsohn, “our father used to assign us what he would call ‘mental muscle-building’ exercises. It was always a lot of fun. Frannie and I used to stay up late, sometimes, making up perfectly sound left-wing arguments for gun ownership—”

  “How else are you going to overthrow the government,” her sister Fran interrupted, “or seize the means of production, or massacre the landlords?”

  “—and right-wing arguments in favor of abortion.” Mary-Beth concluded.

  Fran grinned. “Just suppose that gayness could be detected in utero.”

  “I get it,” Wilhelmsohn said, “Just think what a cleaner, better place the world would be today, if only Rose Kennedy had believed in abortion.”

  After the general laughter had died down again, Wilhelmsohn took a deep breath. “I suppose it’s also possible that I couldn’t join the plotters because I was the only one of the ‘Bennetts’ who was dying, slowly—and very painfully if I may be permitted to say so—of cancer.”

  “What?” Clarissa looked up, startled, and I felt a pang, myself. If I hadn’t come to the Confederacy in 1987, and met Clarissa, I’d have been dead by now of cancer, myself. I told him so, squeezing the hand of the woman who’d saved my life on more than one occasion, and from more than one cause. As for her, she was up in an instant with her little black bag open and electronic diagnosing devices running. With every year that passed this business seemed more to me like DeForest Kelly, pointing his empty salt-shakers at actors wearing red shirts.

  Wilhelmsohn, tolerating Clarissa’s ministrations in fair humor, nodded. “It is a strange thing indeed to resign oneself to death. I had by then, I assure you, and had made substantial progress clearing up my meager personal affairs. That’s why I wasn’t answering my C-mail. And then to discover that you’re going to live? Somewhat perversely, you discover that you resent it just a little.”

  I hadn’t known that I had cancer, but I’d been where he’d been. Wilhelmsohn went on. “Well, partly because of that—the simple fact that the Confederacy routinely cures cancer with a handful of pills—I pretended to go along with their vile enterprise. My heart was certainly no longer in my work at Baton Rouge (to the degree that it ever had been), I had nothing and nobody in particular back home, and lots of very nice Confederate folks were going to get hurt if these … gentlemen—my “evil twins” as I’d begun thinking of them—had their way.

  “But maybe I could prevent it, now that I’d arrived. (My financial contribution to their ‘cause’ had been my own precious video recording of Scott Joplin and Richard Wagner’s epic opera, Die Alamo.) But what to do? I couldn’t just call a cop. In the first place, there didn’t appear to be any.”

  “We got reasons for that,” Lucy told him cheerfully.

  27: RATTLESNAKE MOUNTAIN

  Always attack in perpendicular fashion, from an unconventional and unexpected (but relevant) direction. The enemy will be unprepared; you can strike him with your full strength while he finds nothing to attack effectively.

  —Memoirs of Lucille G. Kropotkin

  “I’m not complaining, ma’am. My people don’t have all that much use for policemen, either. But I wasn’t convinced that the various private security agencies I saw advertised on the Telecom would be interested in anything I had to tell them. Please understand, I had to be absolutely sure.”

  “And why was that?” asked Mary-Beth.

  He shook his head. “Because I couldn’t take any risks. You see, at that point, they were all gleefully discussing long range plans even more horrifying than what they’d done to the Old Endicott Building or the tube train.”

  The Commander of the Greater LaPorte Militia sat up straight. “Like what?”

  Wilhelmsohn took a deep breath. “Like arranging for a collision between a pair of spacecraft—passenger vessels, I believe—in order to distract everybody’s attention from the theft of yet a third ship, some heavy-lift utility machine, which they planned to use to divert a small, near-Earth asteroid, dropping it where it would kill millions.”

  Clarissa shook her head in disbelief. The process of dealing with this insanity was very hard on her. “And exactly what was that supposed to accomplish?”

  “At best,” Wilhelmson told her, “it would make the formation of a permanent world government seem absolutely, inarguably imperative.”

  “And at worst?” I don’t think I’ve ever seen her more upset.

  “Why, ma’am, they’d use the threat of dropping a second rock on the planet to impose their values and beliefs on everybody else, in perpetuity.”

  We all sat silently, trying to take the sheer enormity of it in. When Wilhelmsohn spoke again, it was almost like he’d abruptly changed the subject.

  “I was grimly certain that I would only have one chance to try and get some help before my fellow Bennetts discovered my true sentiments and killed me outright.”

  “How soon are they planning to do this?” Will wanted to know.

  Wilhelmsohn shrugged. “Not right away, Captain Sanders. It was just one of the many things they liked to talk about and impress each other with. I mentioned it just now because I wanted you to understand exactly how far they’re willing to go to get their way, and how frightened I was about it.”

  “Well it sure woulda scared me shitless, spitless, and witless.” Lucy grinned at him. “I guess it turned out that y’wanted t’live, after all, didn’t you, Benjie?”

  “I guess so, Miz Kropotkin. Anyway, I didn’t have any idea what I was going to do about it. Then one day, I was work
ing in the back of Bennett’s house—in the editorial office of The Postman—where all of the Bennetts ordinarily kept themselves. When suddenly, I was overhearing the original Bennett Williams being questioned by this hard-eyed pair—” He pointed at me and Will. Will nodded acknowledgement. Recalling Mary-Beth the other day, I put a finger in my nonexistent chin dimple and pretended to curtsey. This time, she laughed out loud.

  “—and a voluble little old lady with an enormous automatic pistol. Everybody carried a sidearm where I come from, too, unless they applied for a license not to. It’s a requirement of citizenship, you see.”

  “And every bit as great an ethical travesty as forbidding weapons,” Mary-Beth insisted.

  “Well, I believe I conceded that the Federated States of Texas are almost as punctilious as the Confederacy,” Wilhelmsohn told her. “That very point is often made in ethics and political science classes where I’m from.”

  “As it should be,” she replied.

  “Be that as it may, I immediately noted their names: Captain Will Sanders of the Greater LaPorte Militia—to me, that sounded like the Texas Rangers I was accustomed to—Win Bear, a tough-looking private detective. And Miz Lucy Kropotkin, a little old lady who looked more dangerous to me than the two men put together.”

  “Why, thank you, Benjie.” Lucy beamed at him. She was forced to call him that, since she was already calling the “original” Williams “Bennie.”

  “Delighted, ma’am. Somehow—as carefully as porcupines making love—I knew I had to let you all know what was going on. I began to look for some way I could send you a message—Good heavens!” He glanced at his wristwatch, stood up, and began putting his dress back on. “I’ve been gone longer than I ever expected, and now they’re going to miss me!”

  I rose and put a hand on his shoulder. “Benjamin, you can’t be seriously thinking of going back—”

  “I have to go back, Win. I mainly wanted to tell you about the dirty work at Pistol Sight Mountain.”

  “What dirty work at Pistol Sight Mountain?” we all asked at once.

  “You mean, after all that, I didn’t tell you? It’s happening at the reservoir, and it’s happening tonight! At midnight exactly! And I have to be there with them to sabotage it, somehow, in case you all don’t make it!”

  Will told him, “Oh, we’ll make it all right. Count on it. Where will you be?”

  “With them,” Wilhelmson said. “The original Bennett and Panghurst and the others, right at the top of the structure, helping them lower a great big explosive charge into the water where it’ll be set off right against the inside of the thing.”

  I said, “Damn.”

  SOMETIMES I FORGET what a swell view LaPorte has to the west. On a clear day, you can see several distinct layers of “purple mountains’ majesty,” going up, one behind the other, like ragged stairsteps to somewhere around fourteen thousand feet. Between them and the city lies a line of “hogbacks,” where the earth was split by emerging mountains, upward and outward, so that their eastern faces stand at forty-five degrees. In almost every version of this geographical region that I’m aware of, where the earth split itself like the edges of a blob of mashed Play-doh, dams have been erected and a large reservoir created to provide water for alternatives to LaPorte ranging in population from twenty-five thousand to twenty-five million. The latter wasn’t a nice place at all—and I’m a city boy at heart.

  We were climbing one of those dams right now, just to the left, or south, of the geological feature known here as Pistol Sight Mountain … more of a rock-crested hill, really. At the moment, if I’d looked over my shoulder, I could have gazed down at the lights of over two million people twinkling in the high summer darkness, their owners blissfully unaware of the five-hundred-foot wave of destruction that was about to sweep away everything and everyone they loved—unless my friends and I could stop it. On the other hand, if I looked over my shoulder now, I’d probably have missed my next step and immediately fallen several hundred diagonal, sharp-edged-boulder-strewn feet to where my darling Clarissa was waiting morbidly in her medical van for that very kind of accident to happen. Already, I had a fine collection of thistles in my palms, despite the thick leather gloves I was wearing. That was nothing compared to the prickly pear. Its spines were in the worst possible place—well, almost the worst possible place—they could be, the back of my heel. Nobody’s ever convinced me that the damned things don’t leap at you if you step close enough.

  As if to make up for that, I could smell sagebrush all around me as I climbed the face of the dam, and the late evening breeze carried the scent of evergreen from across the lake. A dirigible at least a mile long, lit from the inside like a vast moon, passed overhead, the lights of smaller craft flying up to load or unload passengers and freight surrounding her like fireflies. I could just make out the illuminated nameplate on her hull bottom: San Francisco Palace, the first airship I’d ever—Suddenly, a rock slipped under my foot. I began sliding backward. Just as suddenly, a hand grabbed the seat of my pants and stopped my fall. Regaining my footing, and embarrassed to be rescued that way, I turned to Will. “Thanks,” I whispered. “Again, how many troops do you command?”

  I couldn’t see the expression on his face, but I didn’t need to. “Twelve hundred, give or take. About three times that number in reserve. Why?”

  “Close to five thousand heavily armed troopies,” I whispered. “Now tell me again how come they’re not here, climbing this fucking mountain with us in the dark?”

  He chuckled. “Be pretty hard to justify, Win. We’re only up against eight badguys, and you know the old saying, ‘One mob, one militiaman.’”

  I didn’t, but in more than one version of Texas I was acquainted with, I’d heard the expression “One riot, one Ranger,” a sentiment clearly obsolete in an age of cowardly, body-armored, ski-masked, Nazi-helmeted, tank-driving, jackbooted thugs. These days, it was more like, “One wino, six hundred SWAT.”

  In the end, we’d borrowed the CIPE manager’s personal car, so our own wouldn’t be recognized, and dropped Wilhelmsohn off, to save him precious time, out of sight, but within easy walking distance, of the Williams farmhouse. I still had plenty of misgivings about his plan to rejoin the conspirators, but it was his right, and he seemed to know what he was doing. We then waited until about nine o’clock, and now it seemed like we’d been climbing for most of my adult life, since the sun had started down behind the mountains, giving us some shadows to work with. I’d been thinking about that farmhouse of Bennett’s a lot, ever since Wilhelmsohn had outlined the Bennets’ scheme to blow up Pistol Sight Mountain dam and destroy the city with an enormous wave of released water.

  Consulting online topography maps on the computer in the manager’s car, I’d understood immediately. Between the dam and the farmhouse lay half a dozen big irrigating ditches, and a river that people in my world call the Big Thompson. In my world, eleven years before I got blown accidentally into the Confederacy, a sudden summer thunderstorm had parked itself above the Big Thompson canyon for most of one July 31st, ultimately generating a twenty-foot wave that had scoured the canyon out and killed 139 people. The next week, they’d found bodies as far as Greeley, thirty miles to the east.

  Natural phenomena like thunderstorms didn’t vary much from one world of alternate probability to another. The same storm and flood had happened here, but with fewer than a dozen deaths, thanks to some foresight on the part of the river’s owners, and superior technology. Afterward, they’d fixed the river so that nothing like that could ever happen again.

  This was going to be vastly worse, the wave twenty-five times as high and several times wider. It would rush out onto the prairie and wouldn’t stop until it hit the Cache la Poudre River. But the farmhouse stood on a rise, with all those irrigation ditches and the new-and-improved Big Thompson river to protect it. Millions were about to die horribly—with the perpetrators high and dry—unless we could do something to stop it.

  Will was cli
mbing on my right, and Lucy—Lucy!—was climbing on my left. My favorite little old lady wasn’t talking very much, but I found that I was having a surprisingly hard time keeping up with her. I absolutely gotta find out what vitamins Lucy takes. This time, Fran and Mary-Beth had lost the argument about pregnant ladies in combat. Understand that there’s a perfectly good road from the town below to the top of the dam, with about a dozen switchbacks to make up for the lack of climbing power that happens to be a hovercraft’s only limitation, compared to cars with wheels. Me, I’m from Denver, about seventy miles south of this place, and I can’t remember, but I think there are at least twice the number of hairpins in the Confederacy that are in my homeworld, where the town below is Fort Collins, Pop. 100,000, and both the dam and the reservoir, named for the mountain, are called “Horsetooth.” Hell of a stupid name for a mountain that looks so much like something else. What could the Fort Collins city founders have been thinking of? The mountain looks exactly like the sight picture of an 1873 Colt Peacemaker.

  Our tactic was to cut across the road, skipping the switchbacks, and climbing as straight up the face of the earthen dam—covered in rocks, gravel, and high plains vegetation, all of it stickery and hyperallergenic—as we could. Meanwhile, what I was hoping most was not to find one of the diamondback rattlesnakes that this area is infamous for. Abruptly, less than two inches from my clawed left hand—God, how I hate heights—something far worse than any rattlesnake began to happen.

  Knitch! Pwing!

  “Shit!” I whispered hoarsely to my comrades on either side. “Don’t look now, but some asshole’s up there shooting at us with a silenced weapon!”

  “Suppressed,” Will whispered back pedantically. “Not silenced.”

  28: TEN LITTLE INDIANS

  Understand from the minute the fight begins that you’re going to take damage. Accept it. (You’ll always suffer more from the idiots and cowards on your own side than from any enemy.) Keep your overall goal in mind above all. Those who swerve to avoid a few cuts and bruises defeat themselves.