The American Zone
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Will headed toward the medical van, shouting “Clarissa! Clarissa! Come quick!”
30: DIRTY LAUNDRY
No process, event, or situation has ever improved under media scrutiny. The average media personality rises to his level of incompetence simply by getting out of bed in the morning.
—Memoirs of Lucille G. Kropotkin
Unaware of what was happening, Buckley went on, “That’s an original .41 caliber Model 58 Military and Police you’re carrying, isn’t it? And a nine-millimeter Browning P-35 High Power if I’m not entirely mistaken. Would you care to see my Broomhandle Mauser sometime?”
“It’s a .375 wildcat,” I told him. “And I’d love to see your Broomhandle, Buckley, only not just now—there are babies about to be born!”
Clarissa already had her van in gear and reversed it carefully toward the aerocraft—with Lucy shouting directions from the back—where Will’s wives were doing their Lamaze thing, puffing and blowing, while they waited. Buckley helped Will and me lift the girls up into the vehicle.
Over many years of police work, I’d delivered quite a number of babies myself, and I was looking forward to doing it again. But to my astonished disappointment, I got rudely kicked out of the now-crowded van—Will, of course, got to stay—and left to cool my heels with Buckley.
Of course the news-media vultures were all over the place before you could say, “Charles Foster Kane.” Dozens of them had shown up within minutes of the president’s arrival. They were taking long, loving holos of bloodstained crabgrass and the shiny shell casings lying on the road, pointing their lights and shoving their microphones and camera lenses everywhere they didn’t belong and would be most annoying and upsetting to the survivors. It was their job description, after all.
I had an idea where they could shove all that equipment, and I told them, too, but it was Buckley who had the best way of dealing with these vermin. I intend to remember it for future reference and spread it around as much as I can.
“How does it feel,” one obnoxious jerk asked Buckley, breathing garlic halitosis in his face as the hololens closed in for the kill, “to murder your own brother?”
“I believe you’re Arlen Hopkins, aren’t you?” Buckley replied calmly. “The fellow who was sued successfully for a drunken hit-and-run on a helpless baby chimpanzee last month?”
Hopkins cleared his throat, glanced wildly around, saw somebody who looked more interesting to interview on the other side of the dam, grabbed his cameraman—a chimpanzee—by the elbow, and evaporated. I pitied the poor sonofabitch a little—he was going to interview Lucy.
I congratulated Buckley.
“Dirty laundry,” he told me, winking. “That fellow over there is recovering from a gunshot wound; his wife shot him after he tried to beat her up. And that one sends money to arm Howard Slaughterbush’s majoritarian rebels in Patagonia. Win, they all have their own dirty laundry.”
BUCKLEY WAS RIGHT, of course—about life going on, I mean. And it’s true that time heals all wounds—with a little help from one’s friends. Permanently cured of cancer, Benjamin Wilhelmsohn was free to begin enjoying life in the North American Confederacy—although I doubted he’d find anyone willing to pay him to teach sophistry. My guess is that he’d be happy just being a waiter at Mr. Meep’s. The simple truth is that we’d all be—if we could do it in a free country.
Olongo went back contentedly to being caretaker president. I understand that he’s a contender for this year’s Telecom solitaire championship.
Will and I went back to our wives—and he to his babies—and I proceeded to get to know my lovely spouse better, some more. It’s a life-long study. The babies? A fine brace of daughters, normal size and healthy weight. One of them, Mary-Beth’s, I believe, is as bald as an egg, the other, Fran’s, is a flaming redhead like her illustrious grandpa. Fran is calling her little girl Elcie, for her initials, L. C., which stand for Lucille Clarissa. I have a feeling that this was all arranged far in advance. Mary-Beth’s daughter is called Cielle, for C. L., or Clarissa Lucille.
Will is nothing but a big walking grin.
Buckley took control of his own magazine—changing the title back to The North American Franklinite—and wrote a story for the very next issue, explaining what his brother had done, and claiming that the incident just resolved, proved, that the Confederacy needs a government.
Benjamin Wilhelmsohn, who spends a great deal of time “yachting” with his newfound “brother” Buckley (Clarissa and I have accepted an invitation to go with them once or twice), passionately authored the very first letter-to-the-new-editor, arguing that Buckley had it all wrong.
Best of all (at any rate, it felt that way at the time) was what I found in the driveway the morning after the gunfight up on Pistol Sight Mountain: a brand-new, fusion-powered, candy-apple red Neova HoverSport. I had declined Lucy’s offer to pay me, and this was her way of getting even. I was overjoyed—and without the faintest foreboding. I guess somewhere along the way I’d lost the Bear Curse, or it had lost me.
To my utter astonishment—and mortification—Government-land looks like it’s going to be a big hit. It’s a good thing that Clarissa and Lucy quietly bought shares in such a stupid idea. On the other hand, if anything ever came of Deejay Thorens’s isotope theory, I never heard anything about it.
Immigrants continue streaming in through probability broaches everywhere, their numbers about evenly matched by individuals leaving the Earth, headed out to the Asteroid Belt and other places in the Solar System.
I guess what it all proves, if it proves anything at all (and my darling Clarissa insists that it should or, she says, the whole effort was wasted), is that if you want to be free you really only have two choices. The first is to do what I did, which is to escape to the North American Confederacy—if you can find it—and help defend it with us.
The other is to make another Confederacy, where you are.
Of all the animals in creation, only human beings have civilization, because only human beings have buttocks on which they can be beaten to instill it into them.
—Bennett Williams, The Seat of All Virtues
BOOKS BY L. NEIL SMITH
*The Probability Broach
The Venus Belt
Their Majesties’ Bucketeers
The Nagasaki Vector
Tom Paine Maru
The Gallatin Divergence
Lando Calrissian and the Mindharp of Sharu
Lando Calrissian and the Flamewind of Oseon
Lando Calrissian and the Starcave of Thonboka
The Wardove
Contact and Commune
Converse and Conflict
Brightsuit MacBear
Taflak Lysandra
*The Crystal Empire
*Henry Martyn
*Pallas
*Bretta Martyn
Lever Action (essays)
The Mitzvah (with Aaron Zelman)
Forge of the Elders
Hope (with Aaron Zelman)
*The American Zone
*denotes a Tor Book
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
L. NEIL SMITH has won the Prometheus Award for Best Libertarian Fiction three times, for his first novel, The Probability Broach, for Pallas, and for Forge of the Elders. He is the author of two dozen novels, including The Crystal Empire, The Lando Calrissian Adventures, The Wardove, Henry Martyn, and Bretta Martyn. A life member of the National Rifle Association since 1974, founder and national coordinator of the Libertarian Second Amendment Caucus, and publisher of an online magazine, The Libertarian Enterprise, he has been active in the libertarian movement for thirty-nine years and is its most prolific and widely published living writer. He is also an essayist and radio commentator. Smith lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, with his wife, Cathy, and their daughter, Rylla, and can be reached via the “Webley Page” at http://www.webleyweb.com/lneil.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or ar
e used fictitiously.
THE AMERICAN ZONE
Copyright © 2001 by L. Neil Smith
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
Edited by James Frenkel
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
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New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
eISBN 9781429980807
First eBook Edition : February 2011
First Edition: December 2001