The train slowed to a crawl. The immigrant family across from me had apparently spotted somebody waiting for them on the platform, and were waving at the window. They already had their plastic-bag luggage in hand, and the moment the train stopped they hefted the bags and headed for the exit. I got my suitcase down from the rack; the boy who’d been sitting next to me went back to help his parents with their luggage, and I stepped into the aisle and followed the people in front of me up to the front of the car and out onto the platform.
A brightly painted sign said THIS WAY TO THE STATION. I followed that and the flow of people. Partway along I passed the immigrant family standing there with half a dozen other people in what looked like Victorian clothing out of a history vid—the wife’s family from Ann Arbor, I guessed—all talking a mile a minute. The wife was teary-eyed and beaming, and the two kids looked for the first time since I’d seen them as though they might get around to smiling one of these days. I thought about the conversation I’d had with the husband, wondered if things really were that much better at the bottom end of the income scale here.
I went through a big double door of glass and metal into what had to be the main room of the station, a huge open space under a vaulted ceiling, with benches in long rows on one side, ticket counters on the other, and what looked like half a dozen restaurants and a bar ahead in the middle distance. Okay, I said to myself, here’s where I try to find someone who has a clue about how to locate people and get around in this bizarre country.
I’d almost finished thinking that when a woman and a man in what I’d come to think of as Bogart clothing got up off one of the nearby benches and came over toward me. “Mr. Carr?”
Well, that was easy, I thought, and turned toward them. She was tall for a woman, with red-brown curls spilling out from under a broad-brimmed hat; he was a couple of inches shorter than she was, with the kind of forgettable face you look for when you’re hiring spies or administrative assistants.
“I’m Melanie Berger,” the woman said, shaking my hand, “and this is Fred Vanich.” I shook his hand as well. “I hope your trip this morning wasn’t too disconcerting,” she went on.
That last word was unexpected enough that I laughed. “Not quite,” I said. “Though there were a few surprises.”
“I can imagine. If you’ll come this way?”
“Can I take that for you?” Vanich said, and I handed over my suitcase and followed them.
“I’m afraid we’ve had to do some rescheduling,” Berger said as we headed for the doors. “The President was hoping to meet with you this afternoon, after you have time to get settled in at the hotel, but he’s got a minor crisis on his hands. One of the Restorationist parties is breathing fire and brimstone over a line item in an appropriations bill. It’ll blow over in a day or so, but—well, I’m sure you know how it goes.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Ellen’s been having to deal with squabbles between people in our camp every other day or so since the election.”
“That was quite an upset,” she said.
I nodded. “We were pretty happy with the way it turned out.”
Outside the air was blustery and crisp, with the first taste of approaching winter on it. The trees lining the street still clung to a few brown and crumpled leaves. Just past the trees, where I’d expected to see cabs waiting for passengers in a cloud of exhaust, horses stood placidly in front of brightly colored—buggies? Carriages? Whatever they were called, they looked like boxes with big windows, some with four wheels supporting them and some with two, and a seat up top for the driver.
I blinked, and almost stopped. Berger gave me an amused look. “I know,” she said. “We do a lot of things differently here.”
“I’ve noticed that,” I replied.
She led the way to one of the four-wheeled buggies, or whatever they were. Obviously things had been arranged in advance; she said “Good afternoon, Earl,” to the driver, he said “Good afternoon, ma’am” in response, and without another word being said my suitcase found its way into the trunk in back and the three of us were settling into place in comfortable leather seats inside, Berger and I facing forward and Vanich across from us facing backward.
The buggy swung out into traffic and headed down the street. “Is this standard here?” I asked, indicating the vehicle with a gesture.
“The cab? More or less,” said Berger. “There are a few towns with electric cabs and a fair number with pedal cabs, but you’ll find horse cabs everywhere there’s taxi service at all. The others don’t produce methane feedstock.”
I considered that. “But no gasoline or diesel cabs.”
“Not since Partition, no.”
That made sense to me. “I’m guessing the embargo had a lot to do with that.”
“Well, to some extent. There was smuggling, of course—Chicago being right next to us.”
I snorted. “And Chicago being Chicago.” The Free City of Chicago was the smallest of the independent nations that came out of Partition, and made up for that by being far and away the most gaudily corrupt.
“Well, yes. But there wasn’t that much of a market for petroleum products,” she went on. “There’s the tailpipe tax, of course, and we also lost most of the necessary infrastructure during the war—highways, pipelines, all of it.”
“I’m surprised your government didn’t subsidize rebuilding.”
“We don’t do things that way here,” she said.
I gave her a long startled look. “Obviously I have a lot to learn,” I said finally.
She nodded. “Outsiders generally do.”
I filed away the word outsider for future reference. “One thing I’ve been wondering since I crossed the border,” I said then. “Or rather two. You really don’t have metanet service in the Lakeland Republic?”
“That’s correct,” she replied at once. “We actually have jamming stations to block satellite transmissions, though it’s been fifteen or sixteen years since we last had to use them.”
“Hold it,” I said. “Jamming stations?”
“Mr. Carr,” Berger said, “since Partition we’ve fought off three attempts at regime change and one full-blown military invasion. All the regime change campaigns were one hundred per cent coordinated via the metanet—saturation propaganda via social media, flashmobs, swarming attacks, you know the drill. The third one fizzled because we’d rigged a kill switch in what little metanet infrastructure we still had by then and shut it down, and after that the legislature voted to scrap what was left. Then when Brazil and the Confederacy invaded in ‘49, one reason they pulled back a bloody stump was that military doctrine these days—theirs, yours, everybody else’s—fixates on disrupting network infrastructure and realtime comm-comm, and we don’t have those, so they literally had no clue how to fight us. So, yes, we have jamming stations. If you’d like to visit one I can arrange that.”
I took that in. “That won’t be necessary,” I said then. “Just out of curiosity, do you jam anything else?”
“Not any more. We used to jam radio broadcasts from the Confederacy, but that’s because they jammed ours. We got that settled six years ago.”
“Television?”
“Waste of time. Only about three per cent of the Republic’s within range of a ground station, and the satellite situation—well, I’m sure you know at least as much about that as I do.”
I was by no means sure of that, but let it pass. “Okay, and that leads to my second question. How on earth do you take notes when you don’t have veepads?”
Instead of answering, she directed a rueful look at Vanich, who nodded once, as though my words had settled something.
“I’m guessing,” I said then, “that somebody just won a bet.”
“And it wasn’t me,” Berger said. “There are four questions that outsiders always ask, and there’s always a certain amount of speculation, shall we say, about which one gets asked first.” She held up one finger. “How do you take notes?” A second. “How do you find
out what’s happening in the world?” A third. “What do you do to contact people?” A fourth. “And how do you pay your bar tab?”
I laughed. “I’ve got a fifth,” I said. “How do you look up facts without Metapedia?”
“That’s an uncommon one, Mr. Carr,” Vanich said. His voice was as bland and featureless as his face. If he wasn’t a spy, I decided, the Lakeland Republic was misusing his talents. “I’ve heard it now and then, but it’s uncommon.”
“To answer your question,” Berger said then, “most people use paper notebooks.” She pulled a flat rectangular shape out of her purse, fanned it open to show pages with neat angular handwriting on them, put it away again. “Available at any stationery store, but you won’t have to worry about that. There’s one waiting at your hotel room.”
“Thank you,” I said, trying to wrap my head around writing down notes on sheets of paper. It sounded about as primitive as carving them with a chisel on stone. “Just out of curiosity, what about the others? I was planning on asking those sometime soon.”
“Fair enough,” she said. “You find out what’s happening by reading a newspaper or listening to the radio. You contact people by phone, if you’re in a county with phone service, or by writing a letter or sending a radiotelegram anywhere. You pay your bar tab with cash, and any larger purchases with a check—we’ve got all that set up for you; you’ll just have to visit a bank, and there’s one a block and a half from the hotel. You look up facts in books—your own, if you’ve got them, or a public library’s if you don’t. There’s a branch five blocks from your hotel.”
“Not as convenient as accessing the metanet,” I noted.
“True, but there are more important things than convenience.”
“Like national survival?”
I meant the words as an olive branch, and she took them that way. “Among other things.”
She looked out the window, then, and turned in her seat to face me. “We’re almost to your hotel. I’m going to have to go back to the Capitol right away and see if I can shake some sense into the Restos, and Fred has his own work to get done. One way or another, there’ll be someone to take you around tomorrow. If you like, after you’ve settled in and had some lunch, I can have somebody come out and show you the tourist sights, or whatever else you’d like to see.”
“Thank you,” I said, “but I’d suggest something else. I hear your streets are pretty safe.”
She nodded. “I know the kind of thing you have to deal with in Philadelphia. We don’t have that sort of trouble here.”
“In that case, I’d like to wander around a bit on my own, check out the landscape—maybe visit the public library you mentioned.”
It was a long shot; I figured the Lakeland government would want me under the watchful eye of a handler the whole time I was in the country. To my surprise, she looked relieved. “If that works for you, it works for us,” she said. “I’ll have somebody call you first thing tomorrow—eight o’clock, if that’s not too early.”
“That’ll be fine.”
“With any luck this whole business will have blown over by then and President Meeker can see you right away.”
“Here’s hoping,” I said.
The cab came to a halt. A moment later, the driver opened the door. I shook both their hands, climbed down to the sidewalk and headed through the big double door into the main lobby of the Capitol Hotel.
I’d already guessed that the lobby probably wouldn’t look much like the ones I was used to seeing elsewhere, and so I wasn’t surprised. Instead of the glaring lights, security cameras, angular metal wall art, and automated check-in kiosks I was used to, it was a comfortable space with sofas and chairs around the edges, ornate chandeliers overhead, landscape paintings on the walls, and a couple of desks staffed by actual human beings over to one side. Off to the other side, glass doors framed in wood led into a restaurant. A bellhop—was that the right word?—came trotting over to take my suitcase as soon as I came through the door, said something pleasant, and followed me over to the check-in desk.
“I’ve got a reservation,” I said to the clerk. “The name’s Peter Carr.”
I’d been wondering whether the hotel would turn out to use an old-fashioned computer system with a keyboard and screen, but apparently even that was too high-tech for local standards. Instead, the clerk pulled out a three-ring binder, opened it, and found my reservation in about as much time as it would have taken to input a name on a veepad and wait for a response to come out of the cloud. “Welcome to the Capitol Hotel, Mr. Carr. We have you down for fourteen nights.”
“That’s right.”
“Looks like everything’s paid for in advance. If you’ll sign here.” She handed me a clipboard with a sheet of paper on it and an old-fashioned ballpoint pen. Fortunately I hadn’t quite forgotten how to produce a non-digital signature, and signed at the bottom. “Anything you order in the restaurant here—” She motioned toward the doors on the far side of the room. “—or for room service can be billed to the room account. How many keys will you want?”
“Just one.”
She opened a drawer, pulled out an honest-to-Pete metal key with a ring and a tag with the room number on it. “Here you go. Stairs are right down the hall; if you need the elevator it’s to the left. Is there anything else I can do for you? Enjoy your stay, Mr. Carr.”
I thanked her and headed for the hall with the bellhop in tow. My room was on the third floor and the stairs didn’t look too challenging, so I asked, “Do you mind if we take the stairs?”
“Not a bit,” he said. “Comes with the job.”
We started up the stairs. “Do you get a lot of people here from outside?”
“All the time. Capitol’s just four blocks away, and Embassy Row’s a little further. We had the foreign minister of Québec here just last week.”
“No kidding.” There had been rumors for years that the Québecois started tacitly ignoring the embargo even before Canada broke up. We had decent relations with Québec these days, but that hadn’t always been the case, and so any news about what was going on between Québec and the Lakeland Republic were worth my attention. “Big official visit, or what?”
“Pretty much, yeah,” said the bellhop. “Really nice lady.”
We got to the third floor, left the stair, and went down the hall to my room. “Just leave it inside the door,” I said, meaning the suitcase. “Thanks.”
“Sure thing.”
I didn’t have any Lakeland money to tip him, but guessed the couple of Atlantic bills I had would do. Fortunately I was right; he grinned, thanked me, and headed back toward the stair.
The room was bigger than I’d expected, with a queen-sized bed on one side, a desk and dresser on the other, and a couple of old-fashioned paintings on the walls—you could tell what they were paintings of, they were that outdated—that looked as though someone had actually made them with a brush and paints. I knew there wouldn’t be a veebox, and wondered there might be a screen or even an old-fashioned television in the room, but no dice. The only things even vaguely electronic were a telephone on the desk and a boxy thing on the dresser that had a loudspeaker and some dials on it: a radio, I guessed, and decided to leave turning it on for later. Curtained windows on the far wall let through diffuse light.
I went over and pulled the curtains open, and discovered that the bellhop hadn’t been kidding. There was the Capitol dome, half-complete, rising up above an uneven roofline right in front of me. That would be convenient, I decided, and let the curtains fall again.
I got my things settled and then went to the desk and the big envelope of yellowish paper sitting on top of it. Inside was the notebook Melanie Berger had mentioned, a couple of pens, a packet of papers that had BANK OF TOLEDO printed across the top of each sheet, an identification card with my name and photo on it, a wallet that was pretty clearly meant to hold money and the ID card, and a letter on government stationery welcoming me to Toledo in the usual bland terms,
over President Meeker’s signature. Then there were half a dozen pages of instructions on how to get by in the Lakeland Republic, which covered everything from customary tips (I’d overtipped the bellhop, though not extravagantly) to who to contact in this or that kind of emergency. I nodded; clearly the bellhop hadn’t been exaggerating when he mentioned plenty of foreign guests.
I dropped my veepad in a desk drawer and got the wallet and some of the papers settled into the empty pocket. First things first, I decided: visit the bank and get the money thing sorted out, then get some lunch and do a bit of wandering.
Down in the lobby, the concierge was behind his desk. “Can I help you?”
“Please. I need to know where to find the Bank—” All at once I couldn’t remember the name, and reached for the papers in my pocket.
“Out the door,” said the concierge, “hang a left, go a block and a half straight ahead, and you’ll be standing right in front of it.”
I considered him. “You don’t need to know which bank?”
“There’s only one in town.”
That startled me, though I managed not to show it. “Okay, thanks.”
“Have a great day,” he said.
I headed out the doors, turned left, started along the sidewalk. A cold damp wind was rushing past, pushing shreds of cloud across the sky, and it didn’t take me long to figure out why most of the other people on the sidewalk were wearing hats and long coats; they looked much warmer than I felt. Still, Philadelphia has plenty of cold weather, and I was used to the way the chill came through bioplastic business wear. What annoyed me a little, or more than a little, was the way that my clothing made me stick out like a sore thumb.
In retrospect, it was amusing. Everybody else on the sidewalk looked like extras from half a dozen random history vids, everything from fedoras and trench coats to the kind of thing that was last in style when Toledo was a frontier town, and there I was, the only person in town in modern clothing—and you can guess for yourself who was the conspicuous one. The adults gave me startled looks and then pretended that nothing was up, but the kids stared wide-eyed as though I had two extra heads or something. As I said, it was amusing in retrospect, but at the time it made me acutely uncomfortable, and I was glad to get to the bank.
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