The Disunited States of America

by Harry Turtledove

  Lonnie was in seventh heaven. “They’ve been extinct in the home timeline about as long as passenger pigeons have,” he said. “They never were as common, though. Of course, nothing was as common as passenger pigeons before the white man came. But Audubon, back in the first part of the nineteenth century, talks about Carolina parakeets all the way out past the Mississippi. We don’t know what we’re missing.”

  “We’ve got starlings instead,” Justin said.

  He wanted to hit a nerve with that, and he got what he wanted. Lonnie said some things about starlings that would have shocked the Audubon Society and the SPCA. Then he said something even less polite. Justin laughed, but he knew Lonnie was kidding on the square. Starlings were nothing but pests.

  Lonnie went into the woods looking for ivory-bill woodpeckers. As far as Justin was concerned, the chamber operator was welcome to that kind of exploring. No cell-phone net here, wild animals that had never learned to fear people … He shook his head. If an ivory-bill happened to show up where he could see it, that would be great. And if not, he wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.

  But when Lonnie came back that night, he was even happier than he had been when he set out. He waved his video camera. “I’ve got ’em!” he said, as if he’d gone hunting with a shotgun instead of a lens and a flash drive.

  “Way to go,” Mr. Brooks said. “But now that you’ve seen the birds you wanted to see most, what will you do for the rest of the time you’re here?”

  The question didn’t faze Lonnie. “Keep on watching them,” he answered. “When will I have another chance?”

  “Well, you’ve got me there,” Mr. Brooks admitted.

  They stayed in quarantine for three weeks. Once a week, a computerized lab system drew blood from their fingers and analyzed it for any trace of genetic material from the plague virus. The system did the same for breath they exhaled into plastic bags. After three negative readings in a row, the powers that be were … almost satisfied. More bars of the disinfectant soap and tubes of the disinfectant shampoo appeared, with instructions to use them as on the first day in quarantine.

  As Justin washed, he wondered again if he was under surveillance. He went on washing. What else could he do? Maybe, when he got back to the home timeline, he would ask some questions. Or maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe those weren’t smart questions to ask.

  The transposition chamber appeared in the hole in the ground the next morning. Justin and his mother and Mr. Brooks and Lonnie hurried down to it. Lonnie had color prints of some of the birds he’d seen. Birders in the home timeline would turn green when they saw them.

  Going back to the home timeline seemed to take about as long as traveling from the alternate to the quarantine station had. But when the chamber’s door slid open, it was still the same time as it had been when the machine set out. It was as if what happened inside the chamber while it was traveling between alternates didn’t count.

  When the doors opened, there was the room from which Justin and his mother had left the home timeline, bound for Mr. Brooks’ coin and stamp shop in the alternate where the Constitution never became the law of the land.

  “Welcome back,” said a woman who had to be a Crosstime Traffic honcho. “You had quite a time, didn’t you?”

  Justin wondered if she was wearing nose filters to block any viruses quarantine didn’t catch. Then he wondered how paranoid he was getting. Of course, you probably weren’t fit to live in the home timeline if you weren’t a little bit paranoid.

  “I had quite a time.” Lonnie gestured with his camera. “Pigeons and parakeets and woodpeckers and—”

  “That’s not what I meant.” The way the woman cut him off said she was a wheel, all right.

  “Just before we came back, I saw that Virginia and Ohio finally called a truce,” Justin said.

  She nodded briskly. “That’s right. And maybe it will give us a chance to help Virginia change a little bit. A few people there are smart enough to see that mistreating their African-American minority only puts a KICK ME! sign on their own backs.”

  “Not many. Not nearly enough,” Randolph Brooks said. Justin and his mother both nodded. The only person Justin had seen who was really appalled by the way Virginia treated African Americans was Beckie, and she was from California.

  “No, not enough, not yet,” the woman executive agreed. “But some. And an election to the House of Burgesses is coming up soon. We’ll put money into the moderates’ campaigns. Even if they win—and not all of them will—this isn’t something we can change overnight. It’ll be a start, though. We’ll keep working on it, there and in some other states.”

  “Are you working in Mississippi in that alternate?” Justin asked.

  The executive gave him a sharp look. “Not as hard as we are some other places,” she admitted. “There’s a feeling that the white minority there is getting what’s coming to it.”

  “Why?” he said. “The revolt there happened more than a hundred years ago. There aren’t any whites in Mississippi old enough to have oppressed African Americans. And they get it just as bad as blacks do other places in the South in that alternate. Fair’s fair.”

  “Logically, I suppose you’re right,” she said. “Logic doesn’t always have anything to do with feelings, though, and feelings are important, too. We’ve only got limited resources in any one alternate. We have to decide where the best place to use them is.”

  “Feelings are a funny thing to base policy on,” Mr. Brooks remarked.

  “Not necessarily,” the executive said. “We back groups that think and feel closer to the way we do. We want to see them succeed. If we were still racists ourselves, we’d back the hardliners in Virginia, not the moderates. And we’d feel we were right to do it, because they’d be like us. We do a lot of the things we do just because we do them, not because they’re logical. One thing the alternates have taught us is that there are lots and lots and lots of different ways to do things, and most of them work all right in their own context.”

  “Mm, you’ve got something there, but only something,” Mr. Brooks said. “Virginia wouldn’t be in such a mess if blacks there didn’t want equality.”

  “And we think they ought to have it,” the executive said. “A racist would say they ought to be educated so they don’t even want it. That’s logical, too—it just starts from a different premise. It could work. There are alternates where that kind of thing does work.”

  She seemed to think she had all the answers. Justin doubted that. People who were always sure often outsmarted themselves. But she did find interesting questions. He found an interesting question of his own: “Can we go now?”

  “Yes,” the executive said. “If you’re not healthy, we need to do a lot more work with our quarantine alternate.” Maybe she wasn’t wearing nose filters, then. She went on, “It was an interesting discussion, I thought. But remember, freedom of speech is just a custom, too. It’s a good one, but it’s not a law of nature.”

  Right then, Justin wasn’t thinking about laws of nature. After three weeks of bland quarantine rations, he was thinking about the biggest double burger in the world, with French fries—no, onion rings—on the side, and a chocolate shake to wash everything down. He headed for the stairs. Somewhere within a block or two, he’d be able to find just what he wanted.

  Home. Beckie had started to wonder if she would ever see it again. She and Gran went through quarantine in Virginia. Then they went through quarantine in Ohio. And then they went through quarantine in California. It would have been bad enough if she were cooped up all by herself. Going through quarantine with her grandmother really made her want to stay away from Gran for the rest of her life.

  But she didn’t quite go looking for blunt instruments. It was over now. She had her own room, and she didn’t feel like a guinea pig going in and out of it.

  No plagues. No guns going off. No bodies stinking in the streets. No humidity. Back with her family and friends. It all seemed like heaven.

 
; And everybody made a fuss over her, too. “We’re so glad to have you back,” her mother said over and over again. “We were so worried about you, and we couldn’t find any way to get through. E-mail didn’t work, phones didn’t work, even letters came back. UNDELIVERABLE—WAR ZONE, they said.”

  Gran sniffed. “I don’t suppose anybody worried about me.”

  “Of course we did,” Beckie’s father said loyally. Beckie didn’t know how he put up with Mom’s mother so well. Mom described it as the patience of Job. Beckie didn’t know exactly what that meant till she found it in the Bible one day. When she was in a good mood, she thought her mother was exaggerating. When she was in a bad mood, she didn’t. After going through quarantine with Gran, she was convinced Job didn’t have it so bad.

  “Well, you could have called and said so, then,” Gran said.

  “I just explained why we couldn’t. The phones weren’t working.” Mom had been putting up with Gran much longer than Dad and Beckie had. If that wasn’t heroism above and beyond the call of duty, Beckie didn’t know what would be. And Mom, growing up with Gran for a mother, turned out nice, probably in reaction. If it wasn’t in reaction, what was it? A miracle? Knowing Gran wouldn’t pay attention, Mom just kept repeating herself till something eventually sank in.

  “What was being in a war like?” Dad asked.

  “Scary like you wouldn’t believe,” Beckie answered. “You didn’t have any control over where the shells came down. If they hit you, even if you were in a trench, that was it. Just luck. Same with bullets.” She shivered, remembering some of the things she’d heard and seen and smelled.

  Gran went off to call some of her friends. Beckie’s mother said, “It must have been awful, stuck with your grandmother and stuck in that little town with nothing to do. Virginia!” She rolled her eyes. “I shouldn’t have let you go.”

  “It … could have been better.” Beckie let it go there. Some of the things that had happened to her, she wondered if she would ever tell anybody. She doubted it.

  “Did you make any friends at all while you were there?” her mother asked.

  “There was a guy named Justin. He was up there from Charleston. He was nice,” Beckie said. “He was … interesting, too. He could get things. When we went down to Charleston, he got Gran the medicine for when she came down sick. I swear that was before the Virginia hospitals had it.”

  “I wonder how,” Mom said.

  “So do—” Beckie stopped. She snapped her fingers. Then she ran for her bedroom.

  “What’s going on?” her mother called after her.

  She didn’t answer. “I almost forgot!” she said when she picked up her purse, but she’d closed the door by then. Her family—except Gran some of the time—respected that as a privacy signal. She’d kept her promise to Justin: kept it so well, she nearly forgot about it. But she was home at last. She could finally find out what he’d given her.

  She had to rummage to find the folded-up envelope. When she opened it, a brass-yellow coin fell into her hand. There were lots of different coins in North America, but she knew she’d never seen one like this before. Benjamin Franklin looked up at her—she recognized him right away. LIBERTY was written above his head. On one side of his bust were the words IN GOD WE TRUST, on the other the date 2091 and a small capital P.

  Marveling, she flipped the coin over. The design on the reverse was an eagle with thirteen arrows in one claw and a branch—an olive branch?—with thirteen leaves in the other. Ice walked up her back when she read the words above it: UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. Below that, in smaller letters, were the words E PLURIBUS UNUM, which didn’t mean anything to her right away. Under the eagle, the coin said, ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS.

  “United States of America,” she whispered, and turned the coin back to Franklin’s portrait. Yes, it still said 2091 there. It was real. It felt real, not like some fake Justin had had made up. Why would he do that, anyway, and how could he? She’d asked him to explain, and he did. And if she spent the rest of her life wondering about the explanation … Well, wasn’t that better than going through life never wondering about anything at all?

  Tor Books by Harry Turtledove

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  The First Heroes (edited by Harry Turtledove and Noreen Doyle)

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  Out of the Darkness

  Conan of Venarium

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  Curious Notions

  In High Places

  The Disunited States of America

  (writing as H. N. Turteltaub)

  Justinian

  Over the Wine-Dark Sea

  The Gryphon’s Skull

  The Sacred Land

  The Disunited States of America

  by Harry Turtledove

  Reader’s Guide

  About This Guide

  The information, activities, and discussion questions that follow are intended to enhance your reading of The Disunited States of America. Please feel free to adapt these materials to suit your needs and interests.

  Writing and Research Activities

  1. Harry Turtledove starts readers in a moment of intense, dangerous action. With friends or classmates, make a list of novels with action-packed opening paragraphs. If desired, make another list of novels beginning in a slower manner, perhaps with description instead of action. Discuss how these different types of openings affect your reading of a novel.

  2. What would you do if you found yourself riding in a car atop a pile of guns? Write 2–3 paragraphs describing your thoughts and actions. Or write the opening paragraphs of your own story, starting with an action scene.

  3. Imagine you are an executive from Crosstime Traffic. Give a presentation to friends or classmates describing the alternate universes your company has discovered, listing some benefits of crosstime travel, and noting some of the cautions that must be used when visiting alternates. If desired, include graphs or tables, PowerPoint, modified maps, or other visual aids to enhance your presentation.

  4. In the character of Beckie, trapped at the Snodgrass house, or Justin, alone with Mr. Brooks at the motel in Elizabeth, write a journal entry beginning, “If I have to stay here another day …”

  5. Go to the library or online to learn more about biological warfare throughout history. Use your research to create a short report or informational poster to present to friends or classmates.

  6. In the character of Mr. Brooks, write a memo to the Crosstime Traffic corporation describing the war in which you find yourself and asking that Crosstime break its noninterference rules to help. Include a suggestion for the type of help Crosstime should provide and your argument for why this exception should be made.

  7. Go to the library or online to find a definition for the political term “constitution.” Use this information in an introduction to an essay discussing the value of a constitution. Be sure to point to moments in the novel where having a constitution might have meant the difference between war and peace.

  8. In the novel, Harry Turtledove creates a bleak and disturbing world. Make a playlist of songs, a catalogue of artworks, or another creative work which you feel reflects the chaos of Beckie Royer’s America.

  9. In the character of a newspaper reporter from Ohio or Virginia, write an article explaining how the war started and another describing the end of the conflict. If possible have friends or classmates write articles from differing points of view to share with the group.

  10. Has reading this novel impacted your thoughts about racism in America today? Write an essay entitled “Things Crosstime Traffic Can Teach Us About Real-Time Racism.” If desired, clip articles from current newspapers or magazines which deal with issues also explored in the no
vel to share and discuss with friends or classmates, or to consider in your essay.

  11. Imagine you are Justin one year after he has returned from Beckie’s alternate. Write a letter to Beckie explaining why you gave her the coin, what you hope she will do with it, and whether you still believe giving her the coin was the right thing to do. Read your letter aloud to friends or classmates, then debate whether or not you should try to somehow send the letter to Beckie in her world.

  12. Imagine you are Beckie at age twenty-eight, attending your ten-year high school reunion. What is happening in California? Are you there? What is going on in the rest of your “disunited states”? What have you done with the coin Justin gave you? Answer these questions in a presentation to your reunion classmates.

  Questions for Discussion

  1. The novel opens as Beckie Royer finds herself an unwilling accomplice in a gun-running effort. Describe the life Beckie left behind in California. How are Ohio and Virginia different from her home state?

  2. What is Crosstime Traffic? How does it bring Justin and his mother to Beckie’s America? What are the critical differences between Justin’s and Beckie’s timelines?

  3. As they discuss the issues of racial equality and freedom on page 72, Mr. Brooks says to Justin, “You may as well ask why terrorists in the home timeline don’t get it … . They’ve got free countries for examples, too. But they worry more about being on top than being free.” Do you think Mr. Brooks’ thoughts about terrorists could be applied to our own timeline and international political situation? Explain your answer.

  4. Describe the different ways in which Beckie and Justin feel like foreigners in Virginia. How might this feeling of foreignness contribute to their friendship with each other?