Retrotopia

by John Michael Greer

  From there it turned into a big party, with plenty of food—somebody spent most of the day roasting a couple of pigs, just for starters—and no shortage of alcohol, either. Pappas and I ended up sipping moonshine around a fire with the guys from the 34th Infantry, who were already talking about what kind of stunt they were going to pull the following year. The ‘shine was pure enough that I’m honestly surprised that the whole lot of us weren’t lifted into the treetops by a sudden explosion, just from the vapors. As it was, I was tipsier than I usually let myself get by the time Pappas and I headed back to the jeep, and he was worse off than I was. Did you know a wheelchair can stagger? Trust me, I’ve seen it.

  The next morning came too early, announced by the same overenthusiastic rooster as before. I got myself washed and dressed, and stumbled downstairs, to find Pappas looking as though he’d slept the clock around and was ready for anything. “I’m going to have to get the early train back,” he told me, “but Melanie says you want to see first tier up close, so she found someone to show you around Hicksville—a city councilwoman, I think.”

  “If she can show me the nearest barber shop first,” I said, “I’d be happy.”

  Pappas pulled out a pocket watch, glanced at it. “There’s one on Main Street,” he told me. “If we go now you’ll have time to take care of that before she shows up.”

  That sounded like a good idea to me, so we said our goodbyes to the New Shakers and piled into the jeep for the ride back into town. This time there weren’t more than three or four wagons on the road that had been so crowded two days back; I gathered that most of the attendees were either sleeping off the consequences of the previous night or enjoying a leisurely morning. Fields and pastures eventually gave way to the outlying houses of the town, and then to the main street, which was paved—I hadn’t expected that—and lined on both sides with the sort of shops and city buildings you’d expected to see in an Old West history vid.

  “City Hall’s there,” Pappas said as the jeep pulled up a few yards from the promised barbershop. He pointed to a three-story building of what looked like local stone half a block up the street. “Right next to the library. Ask for Ruth Mellencamp. All set? Hey, it was a pleasure.” We shook hands, I hauled my suitcase out of the jeep, and away it went.

  The barbershop was a little hole in the wall place toward one end of the block. Just this side of it was another shop, no bigger, with LAKELAND RADIOTELEGRAPH SERVICE in bright yellow paint on the windows and a big antenna rising up above the roof. The sign on the door promised same day message delivery anyplace in the Lakeland Republic. That seemed pretty remarkable for a tier one county, but it suddenly occurred to me that they could do it by having a shop like this in every town of any size. Two customers stood inside, one writing something on a sheet of paper and the other standing at the counter talking with a clerk.

  I shook my head and went into the barbershop, and found a half dozen guys ahead of me in line. I’d expected that; what I didn’t expect is that four of them were singing. They had books open in their laps—copies of the same songbook, I gathered after a fast glance—and were belting out some song I didn’t know, and doing it in pretty fair harmony. I sat down in the nearest available chair, tucked my suitcase back under the seat, and all of a sudden had to fight down an impulse to laugh. You can run into a phrase hundreds of times and never think about what it actually means; I must have read at least that many references to “barbershop quartets” without realizing that that’s what guys did in barbershops while waiting for a shave, back in the days when there weren’t loudspeakers in the ceiling blaring pop music everywhere and veepads sitting in everyone’s lap to make up for any lack of distraction. In the Lakeland Republic, obviously, those days were back.

  I’m pretty sure that if I’d picked up a copy of the songbook from the table in front and joined in, nobody would have blinked, and in fact that’s what happened with two of the next three guys to come into the barber shop. The odd thing was that the songs weren’t the sort of thing I dimly associated with barbershop quartets. I didn’t know most of them, but like most people back home I’ve got pretty specific musical tastes—jazz on the one hand, and opera on the other. Still, they were pretty good. One that stuck in my memory had a rock beat, and something in the chorus about a girl named Lucy who was in the sky with diamonds. I made a note in my notebook to look it up once I got back home and could chase down the lyrics on the metanet.

  It was a half hour or so later when I left the barbershop, feeling a lot less scruffy, and with another song’s chorus, something about turning to face the strange ch-ch-changes, ringing in my head. It wasn’t a bad introduction for the day I was about to have, for that matter.

  I walked up the sidewalk that led to City Hall, went in, and asked for Ruth Mellencamp. She turned out to be short, plump, gray-haired, and businesslike, the kind of woman that looks like somebody’s slightly batty granny until she starts talking and you realize there’s a mind like a steel trap behind the cozy facade. “Pleased to meet you,” she said, shaking my hand. “Yes, Ms. Berger called down from Toledo two days ago. It’s not often we get visitors from outside here in Hicksville, and I admit I’m curious to see what you’ll think of our little town.”

  “So far,” I said, “I know that it has decent train service and you can get an excellent shave at a barbershop here.”

  She chuckled. “Well, that’s certainly a good start! Why don’t you stash your suitcase here and we can have a look at the town.”

  “I was a little surprised to see paved streets and sidewalks here,” I said as we left the building. “I thought you didn’t have those in a first tier county.”

  “They weren’t paid for with tax money,” she said. “About ten years ago, some of the business people in town got together, organized a corporation, got a charter from the legislature for it, and used that to raise money to pave six streets downtown. A lot of people contributed, and not just people who live in town. So the streets got built, a fund was set aside to repair them, and the corporation wound up its affairs and closed down.”

  “I imagine you know,” I said, “just how odd that sounds to someone from outside.”

  “Of course.” She gestured down the street, and we turned. “The thing is, that’s what corporations were originally: schemes for public betterment that were chartered by one of the old state governments for a fixed term, and allowed to raise money by stock sales for that reason alone. It wasn’t until clever lawyers twisted the laws out of shape in the interests of the railroad barons that corporations got turned into imaginary persons with more rights and fewer responsibilities than the rest of us.”

  I remembered what Vinny Patzek told me about corporations at the Toledo stock market. “So you went back to the older way of doing things.”

  “Exactly. We do that a lot here.”

  “I’ve gotten that impression,” I said dryly, and she chuckled again.

  Hicksville was a farm town’s farm town, and you could tell. The biggest store in town was a feed-and-seed with big silos out back, next to a rail siding where freight cars could pull up to take on loads of grain, and the next biggest business was a whiskey distillery—“you won’t find a better bourbon in the Republic,” Mellencamp told me—which also had its own rail siding, and a loading dock stacked with cases of bottles ready to ship. Another large building belonged to an organization called the Freemasons, which confusingly enough didn’t have anything to do with the building trades, and another belonged to something called the Grange, which I gathered was some kind of farmer’s organization. I made notes in my notebook and hoped I’d have time to look things up when I got back to Toledo.

  The thing that struck me hardest, though, was how lively everything was. Thinking about the tier system when I was in Toledo, I’d conjured up a picture of log cabins, dirt roads, and the kind of squalor you get in the poorer rural districts of the Atlantic Republic these days, but that’s not what I saw all around me in Hicksville. What I saw
instead was a bustling, prosperous community that somehow got by without the technologies everyone outside took for granted.

  We’d just passed the Grange building when a policeman came strolling past us and smiled and said hi to us both. That didn’t surprise me, since Ruth Mellencamp was what she was, but he said the same thing to every person he passed, and stopped here and there to talk to people, as though he was everybody’s friend. It was only after he’d passed that it really sank in that he wasn’t wearing a flak jacket or a helmet and he didn’t have an assault rifle in his hands. Like the border guard I’d seen, he was wearing an old-fashioned uniform, this one of blue wool, and the only heat he had on him was a pistol at his hip. I shook my head, wondered how they managed. “I’m curious,” I said to my guide, “about the crime rate here.”

  “In Hicksville, or the Lakeland Republic generally?”

  “Both, actually.”

  “I can get you some hard numbers when we head back to City Hall. The short version is that it’s lower than any other country in North America.”

  “Any idea why?”

  “Sure. On the one hand, anybody who’s willing to work can earn a living wage here, so you don’t have the extreme poverty and joblessness that drives so much crime elsewhere. On the other, we have a lot fewer laws.” I gave her a startled look, and she went on. “I’m not sure how much you know about the laws in the old United States.”

  “Not a lot,” I admitted.

  “Convoluted to the point of insanity,” she said. “You could hardly turn around and draw a deep breath without violating some law or regulation or other. We got rid of most of it; the only things our criminal law covers are significant crimes against persons and property. Then there were the drug laws—I hope those have been scrapped in your country.”

  “No,” I said. “You’ve legalized drugs here?”

  “Prohibition is a recipe for failure,” she replied at once. “It’s never worked anywhere it’s been tried, and it never will. When you come right down to it, the only thing you get from legal prohibition is a system of price supports for organized crime. Treat drug addiction as a medical issue rather than a legal one, the way most European countries do these days, and it’s much more manageable—and you get a lot fewer people in prison.” She shrugged. “Of course some people are going to break the law no matter what, but it’s q uite a bit easier to have a humane prison system when you aren’t throwing millions of people into the prisons for things that don’t actually need to be crimes.”

  I thought about that as we came up to another big building of local stone, with HICKSVILLE SCHOOL carved over the door. “I don’t know whether you’re interested at all in our education system,” Mellencamp said.

  “Actually, I am,” I told her. “Ours has problems; maybe I can pick up some useful ideas.” It was half a joke and half the understatement of the year—the public schools all over the Atlantic Republic are a disaster area, and the private schools charge more and more each year for an education that isn’t all that much better.

  She beamed. “Maybe you can. We’re very proud of our school here.”

  We went inside. I probably shouldn’t have been surprised that there were no armed guards in flak jackets in the halls, but it still rattled me. The place was clean and pleasant, without the medium-security prison look that schools have back home. We went to the office, a cubbyhole in front with a desk for the secretary and a bunch of filing cabinets, and Ellencamp introduced me; the secretary had me sign in, said something pleasant, and away we went.

  “People come here all the time,” Mellencamp explained. “People moving to the area who want to check out our schools, parents and grandparents who have free time and want to volunteer, that sort of thing. It’s very much part of the community.”

  There were eight classrooms, one for each of the eight grades taught there. We slipped into the back of the second grade classroom, nodded a greeting to the teacher, and sat in wooden chairs up against the back wall. The room was about as plain as could be, a simple square space with a blackboard and a teacher’s chair and desk up in front, a round clock over the door, four big windows letting in light on the left, a teacher’s desk and chair up front, and rows of seats for the students, each with its little half-desk curving forward from one arm. Over on the wall opposite the windows, student art projects had been pinned up on a cork board; they looked bright and lively, and a couple showed some real talent.

  The teacher was maybe thirty, brown-skinned, with her hair in a flurry of braids tied back loosely behind her neck. A blonde girl of sixteen or so was standing next to the desk, reading a story aloud, and the students were following along in their textbooks.

  I leaned over to Mellencamp. “Who’s she?” I whispered, meaning the girl who was reading.

  “An apprentice,” she whispered back, and motioned to a boy around the same age, brown-haired and red-cheeked, who was going from student to student, and now and then squatting down and murmuring something or pointing to some bit in the book. “So’s that one.”

  I gave her a startled look, but decided not to risk interrupting.

  The story wound to an end, and then the teacher started asking questions about it to one student after another—not the kind of simple you’d expect to see in a test back home, either. It sank in after a moment that she was actually asking the kids for their thoughts about this or that part of the story. I put my hand on my chin. It struck me as a very odd way to run a lesson—wasn’t the point of schooling to make sure that everyone in the class came up with the right answer when it was called for? Not in the Lakeland Republic, I gathered.

  The reading lesson ended at ten-thirty sharp—it took me a while to remember how to read a clock with hands, but I managed it—and once it was over, the students and both apprentices got up and trooped out the door in a ragged but tolerably well behaved line. Ruth Mellencamp got to her feet once the last of them were gone, gestured for me to follow, and went to the front of the room. “Angie,” she said, “this is Peter Carr, who’s visiting from outside. Mr. Carr, Angela McClintock.”

  We shook hands, said the usual polite things. “How long do you have before the next class?” I asked.

  The teacher gave me a blank look, then smiled the you-don’t-get-it smile I’d seen too often for my liking. “They’ll be back in fifteen minutes, after morning recess.” It was my turn to wear a blank look, and her eyebrows went up. “Good heavens, you can’t expect second graders to sit still for an entire school day. Don’t the early grades have recesses where you’re from?”

  “We probably should,” I allowed.

  “You certainly should. If I kept them in much longer they’d be so restless they wouldn’t absorb a thing I taught them. This way, twenty minutes from now they’ll be ready to sit back down and pay attention to the next set of lessons.”

  I nodded. “I was curious about the two young people who were helping you—apprentices?” She nodded, beaming, and I went on: “They look a little young to have gotten a teaching degree already—will they go to college and get that after their apprenticeship?”

  That got me the blank look again, and this time it wasn’t followed by the too-familiar smile. Ruth Mellencamp came to the rescue. “They used to send teachers to college before the war,” she said. “I gather they still do that outside.”

  “And I gather you don’t do that here,” I said.

  “Good heavens, no,” said the teacher. “Why would we? You don’t need a college degree to teach second graders how to read—just patience and a little bit of practice.”

  “But I’m sure you teach them more than reading,” I objected.

  “Yes, but the same thing’s true of all the three C’s,” she said.

  “That’s what we call the curriculum,” Mellencamp added, seeing the blank look start to appear on my face. “Literacy, numeracy, naturacy—those are the three C’s.”

  I took that in. “So you teach them to read, and then—mathematics?”

>   “Literacy’s more than just reading,” McClintock said. “It’s the whole set of language skills—reading, grammar, spelling, logical reasoning, composition and speaking, so they can learn whatever interests them, think intelligently about it, and share what they find with other people. Numeracy’s the whole set of number skills—mathematics, sure, but also the trick of putting things in numerical terms and using math in the real world, so probability, statistics, everything you need to keep from being fooled or flummoxed by numbers.”

  “Okay,” I said. “And—naturacy? I don’t even know the word.”

  “The same principle,” said the teacher. “The whole set of natural science skills: learning how to observe, how to compare your observations to what’s already known or thought to be known, how to come up with hypotheses and figure out ways to test them—and also natural history, what living things you found here, how they interact with us, with their habitats, with other living things.”

  “I suppose you don’t teach that in the schools back home,” said Mellencamp.

  “There are college classes,” I said.

  “Most of these kids will grow up to be farmers,” McClintock told me. “Most of those that don’t will be dealing with farmers and the farm economy here every day of their lives. How on Earth they’d be able to do that if they don’t understand soil and weather and how plants grow, I’m sure I don’t know.”

  “Back before the war,” Mellencamp reminded her, “the big corporate farms tried to do without that.”

  “Yes, and look what happened.” She shook her head. “I’m not sure we’ve learned everything we should have from the mistakes that were made back then, but that’s one I think we picked up.”

  I thought about that on the train that afternoon all the way back to Toledo.

  SEVEN

  I’d had lunch with Ruth Mellencamp at a pleasant little diner a block from the station before I caught the train, so I had nothing to do until I got to Defiance but watch farmland roll by and think about what I’d seen since I’d crossed the border less than a week before. My reactions were an odd mix of reluctant admiration and unwilling regret. The people of the Lakeland Republic had taken a situation that would have crushed most countries—an international embargo backed up with repeated attempts at regime change—and turned it into their advantage, using isolation from the capital flows and market pressures of the global economy to give them space to return to older ways of doing things that actually produced better results than the modern equivalents.