Typecasting

by Harry Turtledove

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  Governor Bill Williamson of the state of Jefferson sat on the bed, waiting. He was ready to go. He had his shorts on, his wallet in one pocket, his keys in the other. That was as dressed-up, and as dressed, as he ever got. Several clean pairs of shorts sat in a small suitcase by the bed. Being a sasquatch made dressing and packing easier, one of the few advantages it had in a world dominated by little people.

  Or he thought it made dressing up easier, anyhow. He looked at the bathroom door, which remained resolutely closed. He looked at the clock on the nightstand. What he saw made him mutter to himself. He looked at the bathroom door again. Still closed.

  His patience slipped, which was dangerous for a politician and even more so for a husband. “Come on, Louise!” he called—bellowed, if you want to get right down to it. “We need to hit the road.”

  “I’ll be out in a minute,” she said.

  It was one of the longer minutes Bill had ever known. Impatient or not, he’d been married too long to say so. What he did say, when she came out in shorts much like his but a brighter blue and a matching top that covered and supported her breasts, was, “Whatever you did, it worked.” They’d had their silver anniversary the summer before. As husband and as politician, he knew how to keep people sweet.

  Or he did most of the time, anyhow. All Louise said was, “Hrmp.” She didn’t like being noodged—a useful word Bill had picked up from Hyman Apfelbaum, Jefferson’s attorney general.

  Getting up from the bed, he went over and hugged his wife. At nine feet two, he was almost two feet taller than she was; sasquatch genders differed in size more than little people did. “You’ll knock ’em dead in Ashland, kiddo,” he said.

  “Save the soft soap for the head of the Appropriations Committee, okay?” she said tartly. But she couldn’t help smiling, and after a moment she relaxed in his arms and squeezed him back.

  “Mike and I lie to each other all the time. It’s part of the game. I don’t play those games with you,” Bill said, which was largely true. Politics and marriage had different rules. Anyone who thought otherwise wouldn’t stay married, or in politics, long.

  Louise picked up her own suitcase. It was bigger than Bill’s, but not a lot. “I’m ready. Let’s go,” she said. “It’ll be great to see Nicole.”

  “It sure will,” Bill agreed. Their older daughter was a senior drama major at Jefferson State Ashland. Bill had no idea what kind of job she thought she’d get after she graduated, but he didn’t need to worry about that for another few months, anyhow.

  Out the bedroom door he and Louise went. The doorways in the governor’s mansion were ten feet high; rooms had thirteen-foot ceilings. When Jefferson split off from Oregon and California right after the end of World War I, the first governor lived in a rented house. The new state’s treasury flush with Coolidge-era prosperity, the second governor built the mansion and the state Capitol. Charlie “Bigfoot” Lewis was a sasquatch himself, and had his architect run them up on a scale that suited him. His working assumption was that little people could deal with too big more easily than sasquatches could with too small. Bill blessed him every time he didn’t have to duck or bang his head.

  The chief steward waited for them at the front door. Opening it, he said, “Enjoy your vacation, Governor, Mrs. Williamson. Give your daughter my best. She’ll be in … The Tempest, isn’t that right?”

  “That is right, Ray,” Bill said, pleased the man had remembered. “I’ll tell her hello for you.”

  Old Glory and Jefferson’s state flag flew on a tall pole in front of the mansion. Jefferson’s banner was pine green, with the state’s seal centered on the field: a gold pan marked with two X’s. They stood for the double crosses Jefferson had endured from Salem and Sacramento till its people finally got a bellyful and formed their own state.

  After the War to End War, self-determination was all the rage in Europe. People in what had been southern Oregon and northern California grabbed it, too, grabbed it and ran with it. That neither Salem nor Sacramento was exactly broken-hearted to see them go didn’t hurt, either.

  Bill’s car waited in the driveway by the flagpole. He fondly called the bronze 1974 Cadillac the Mighty Mo. It wasn’t quite the size of a battleship, but it came close. That was the last model year when Detroit could build for size without worrying about mileage. Then the first oil embargo hit, gas prices zoomed like a moon rocket, and cars got small faster than unpreshrunk jeans in a hot dryer.

  The Mighty Mo was six years old now. It was getting elderly—cars aged faster than dogs. Bill aimed to keep it running as long as he could. He didn’t know of anything newer that could replace it. It guzzled gas the way a wino gulped muscatel, but what could you do? Economy and sasquatch size didn’t go together.

  Bill dug out his keys and opened the trunk. It was big enough to hold a squad of little-people Marines. His suitcase and Louise’s vanished into its depths as if they had never been. The cavernous trunk seemed to say Is that all? Since that was all, Bill slammed the lid.

  Then he opened the right front door and slid the right front seat as far forward as it would go. The Mighty Mo’s right front seat moved on a special track that let it slide forward a long, long way. Bill slammed the right front door and opened the right rear door. He waved Louise into the car. With the seat all the way forward, she didn’t fit badly. He closed the door. She locked it.

  He walked around to the left rear door and got in himself. There was no left front seat. The Mighty Mo had an extra-long steering column so he or someone else his size could drive it. He stuck the key in the ignition and turned it. The enormous engine under that prairie of a hood rumbled to life.

  “Ready to go?” he asked.

  “Would I be sitting here next to you if I wasn’t?” Louise answered reasonably.

  “Okay.” Bill put the Eldorado in gear, swung his size-32 right foot from the brake to the accelerator, and headed for the northbound onramp to the I-5.

  Yreka had been the state capital for longer than he’d been alive, but it still wasn’t what anyone would call a big city. The governor’s mansion lay only a few blocks from the interstate. The Mighty Mo rolled past the Capitol and the state government office building next door to it.

  The Capitol was splendidly neoclassical, with colonnades and a gilded dome. The office building was a Depression-era WPA special, square and ugly and functional. The wonder was that it had gone up at all. Gilbert Gable, who was governor then, did all he could for his home town of Port Orford and as little as he could get away with for Yreka.

  Bill waited in the left-turn lane till he got a green arrow. Then his foot mashed the gas pedal again. The Cadillac zoomed forward. It was twice as heavy
as a nice, economical compact car, but it had twice the motor, too. At least twice.

  More and more of the cars that share the interstate with it were compacts, Datsuns and Toyotas and Hondas and Pintos and Vegas and Gremlins. They were a lot cheaper to run than the dinosaur-burning monster he piloted. He wouldn’t have minded having one himself, if only he could have driven it from anywhere forward of the trunk.

  Hardly anyone on I-5 took the Federally mandated speed limit of fifty-five seriously. Bill sure didn’t. The Mighty Mo’s mileage was atrocious even at the double nickel. If it got a little worse at seventy or seventy-five, so what? He got where he was going sooner.

  Signs on roadside fence posts and barns shouted for Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. The Jefferson primary was coming in a couple of weeks. Reagan already had the GOP nomination pretty much in his back pocket. Bill figured the ex-governor from one state south would have breezed here any which way. Jefferson’s Republicans averaged just to the right of Attila the Hun. Its Democrats, by contrast, were tree-huggers and left-over hippies. That made Kennedy the odds-on favorite.

  From Yreka to Ashland was a little less than forty miles. The Mighty Mo had just passed from Siskiyou County to Jackson County—from what had been California to what used to be Oregon—when Louise said, “I don’t think Nicole’s happy about her part.”

  “No?” Bill said. “She ought to be. She ought to be happy she’s got a part at all. The Ashland Shakespeare Festival gets to be a bigger deal every year. It draws more and more out-of-state tourists. It makes Ashland money. It makes Jefferson money. Sitting where I do, I can’t help liking that.”

  His wife sighed. “I know, I know. She’s not happy anyhow.”

  “She ought to be,” Bill repeated. “The festival gets more professional every year, too. They don’t usually let the Drama Department at Jefferson State put on a show any more. It’s not like it was in 1935—not even close.”

  Jefferson State Ashland had started life as the Southern Oregon Normal School. It became the Ashland Normal School when Ashland and Oregon parted company, and went right on training teachers. One day in the mid-1930s, an instructor there named Angus Bowmer noticed that the roofless old building which had once housed Chautauqua lectures would do very nicely as an Elizabethan-style stage. Bowmer had always wanted to perform and to teach drama; he was training teachers because it was the Depression and you grabbed any job you could find and clung to it like a limpet.

  The first few festivals were sort of like Ren Faires with plays. They included things like archery contests, bowling greens, and dances. Some of the actors were locals, others outsiders who odd-jobbed it while they performed. Nobody got paid, not at first.

  It wasn’t like that any more. The festival had grown and grown. It went on without its founder, who’d retired in 1970 and died a year ago. It had its own campus now, not far from the state university, with three theaters, and ran from spring to fall. Jefferson State drama students still pitched in, but more often behind the scenes now than on stage.

  Louise Williamson clucked, as if disappointed in Bill. “I understand all that,” she said—yes, she was unhappy with him. “It’s more complicated than you’re making it out to be, though.”

  Or else Nicole’s taken arms against a sea of troubles that aren’t there, Bill thought, remembering Hamlet from his own high school and college English classes. Twenty-one-year-olds were good at that. They saw how many things were wrong with the world, and saw them very clearly. They didn’t see that fixing all those many things was usually harder than it looked. Bill hadn’t at twenty-one, either.

  * * *

  Ashland was a town of about 15,000: a college town and, this past generation, a Shakespeare town, too. Hotels and restaurants and shops catered to the outsiders who came to watch the plays. The locals who didn’t cater to tourists raised pears and apples and grain on the fertile soil of the Rogue River Valley.

  They had reservations at the Columbia Hotel on Main Street, just a couple of blocks from the Festival campus. The Columbia was right next to the Varsity Theater, but that ran movies, not live drama. At the moment, the marquee plugged Mad Max and Gilda Live, which struck Bill as one of the odder pairings he’d run across lately.

  One of the entrances into the hotel was tall enough for him to use without ducking very much, either. He didn’t have to walk through the lobby all hunched over, either. He’d been in the Jefferson State Senate when the Equal Accommodations Act finally passed in the early 1970s. If you ran a business in Jefferson, you had to do so in a way that let sasquatches—or yetis, or other oversized visitors—have access to it without turning into quasi-Quasimodos. Not all of it had to fit their needs, but some did.

  Businessmen had fought the law all the way to the Jefferson Supreme Court. They’d lost. They’d lost in Federal district court, too, and at the Federal appeals level. If they took it to the U.S. Supreme Court, Bill expected them to lose there, too. Size was a civil-rights issue, dammit, just as much as race or gender.

  The little man behind the registration desk smiled up at him and Louise. “Hello, Governor. Hello, Mrs. Williamson. “Welcome to the Columbia,” he said.

  “Thanks.” Bill wondered whether ordinary sasquatches got the same kind of treatment he did. Remembering the days when he’d been on the road all the time selling real estate, he had his doubts. But he had the trappings and recognizability of rank now. He would till he lost an election. People would go on recognizing him even then. He wasn’t exactly inconspicuous.

  He and Louise went through the rituals of checking in. He presented his American Express card. This trip was on his nickel, not Jefferson’s. “You’ll be in the Governor’s Suite—that’s room 111,” the desk clerk said. “Would you like me to ring for someone to take your bags?”

  “No, that’s okay. Don’t bother.” Bill always declined such “favors.” He was so much bigger and stronger than anyone the desk clerk would call, having a flunky carry luggage for him seemed more an embarrassment than a service.

  “Here you go, then.” The clerk handed him two keys. He gave Louise one. The clerk pointed. “It’s down that hallway and to your left.” “Thanks.” Bill already knew that; he’d stayed at the Columbia on the campaign trail. But he appreciated the way the clerk worked to treat him like anyone else. Everybody got along in Jefferson, or at least tried. No one here gaped at him like a movie special effect, the way little men and women back East did when he traveled for a governors’ conference. (Some of the people who gaped most were other governors.)

  The year before, the Yeti Lama, exiled since Mao’s soldiers overran Tibet and the Himalayas in 1959, had visited Jefferson. He wanted to see for himself how people of many races and sizes could lived together without murdering one another over differences in religion and politics and hairiness.

  People here didn’t murder one another over such differences … these days. Bill hadn’t gone into detail about his state’s unfortunate past for the holy traveler. Well, damn few places didn’t have unfortunate pasts. Too many places, the Yeti Lama’s homeland among them, had unfortunate presents.

  The door to Bill’s room suited a person of his size. The Columbia dated back to 1910; this was the Governor’s Suite because Bigfoot Lewis had stayed here back in the day. They didn’t need the Equal Accommodations Act to get with the program. Bill hardly minded bending a little to put the key in the lock. Sasquatches weren’t the only people who used the suite. You had to give to get.

  Louise set down her bag and sat on the bed. She pulled a piece of paper from her purse. “Nicole’s number at the dorm,” she said. “I’m going to call her, let her know we’re here.”

  “She’ll be glad to find out,” Bill said. “Mom and Dad are in town! No more dorm food for a while!”

  “It’s not too awful, from what she says. And the meal plan … could be worse, anyhow,” his wife replied. Naturally, sasquatches ate more than little people. Just as naturally, university dorms expected them t
o pay more, too. Louise dialed the room phone. Actually, it was a modern one with buttons, and easier for her to use. She wasn’t that much bigger than little people; in a pinch, she could manage with a real dial. Bill had always needed a pen or pencil to deal with one of those. From force of habit, he still used one most of the time even on the push-button models.

  This one was quite loud. From halfway across the room, he heard two rings and then a “Hello?” he thought was his daughter’s.

  Sure enough, Louise said, “Hello, dear. We’re in Ashland, at the Columbia. Can you meet us at Gepetto’s at noon for lunch? You know—the place on Main, a couple of blocks down from the hotel.” She paused, listening. This time, Bill couldn’t make out what Nicole said. But Louise nodded. “See you then. ’Bye.” She hung up.

  “Noon, huh?” Bill said. “Well, fine. And then I’ll hear the grand and gruesome story of why she isn’t happy with her part?”

  His wife nodded again. “That’s right.”

  “Oh, boy. I can hardly wait,” Bill said. Louise rolled her eyes. I know I can fib better than that, he thought. If I couldn’t, they never would have elected me to the State Senate, let alone governor.

  * * *

  He and Louise got to Gepetto’s ten minutes early. For Bill, that counted as right on time. He had a working politician’s horror of being late. It was as pleasant a morning here as it had been down in Yreka. They waited outside for their daughter to walk over from campus.

  Standing there soaking up the springtime sun, Bill people-watched. In a college town, he remembered John Donne. No man is an island, entire of itself, Donne wrote. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.

  Bill wanted to believe that, just as the old-time Englishman had. A pol who’d once sold houses and lots was, and needed to be, a gregarious soul. But Bill felt isolated in ways John Donne never could have imagined. Even in Jefferson, sasquatches were a tiny minority. Most people didn’t see them every day. Yes, staring was rude, but the sidelong glances he got instead might have been worse.