L. Neil Smith - North American Confederacy 02 (14 page)

“The
what?"

“You know, back in the 80s, when the Russians decided to ‘teach the Chinese a lesson
’—oh no! 'George Herbert
’— for Wells, the novelist? Your time machine’s christened for H. G. Wells?”

“Whoo! When you change the subject, Sherlock, you don’t mess around. An’ it’s
G. H.
Wells, not—holy steaming batshit!”

He looked at me grimly. “We thought we had it all figured out, didn’t we?”

I looked right back. “We did at that, but we were wrong, weren’t we?”

“There
isn’t,"
he said carefully between gritted teeth, “a crack in the moon where you come from, is there? And Wells’ first name was—”

“I’d
hate
referrin’ t’my best girlfriend as
‘Herbie’

“How do you feel, Bernie? Any dizziness? Nausea?” “No. You plannin’ t’sprout flowers from your ears or anything?”

“What?”

I looked up toward Heaven. “Where the fuck
am
1, anyway?”

Heaven remained noncommittal.

11 Stone Walls Do Not

“Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe,
John Quincy
Adams,
Andrew
Jackson, Van Buren,
William Henry
Harrison, and Tyler.” Win Bear ticked ’em off until he ran outa fingers.

So it was my turn: “Polk, Taylor, good ol’ Millard Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan, Lincoln,
Andy
Johnson, Grant, an’ Hayes, an’ Garfield.”

Win continued. “Arthur, Cleveland,
Benjamin
Harrison, Cleveland again, McKinley,
Teddy
Roosevelt, Taft, Wilson, Harding, and Coolidge.”

“Hoover,” I shot back. “Roosevelt II, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy—”

“Kennedy?’’
The detective blinked with surprise. “You don’t mean—”

“John Fitzgerald Kennedy,” I answered, cuein’ data in place inside m’skull, “1960 through ’63, when he got himself ventilated—”

“Whatever happened”—Bear took a stiff drink of his neighbor’s whiskey—“to Richard Milhous Nixon?” “Nixon? Nothin’ more’n he deserved—but we ain’t got t’ that yet.”

“Sure you have—in 1960. Two terms. Followed in ’68 by Henry Cabot Lodge. Then Hubert Humphrey, Jerry Brown, and finally Henry Jackson, who was President in ’87, when I came to the Confederacy.”

“Whew!
We
are
from different time-lines! Way I heard it, it was Eisenhower in ’52, Kennedy,
Lyndon
Johnson—
then
Nixon—followed by Ford, Carter, Reagan, an'—” “Hold on there!” Captain Will Sanders looked up from the gun-parts scattered on the table-cloth, a big guy, broad-shouldered with curly blondish hair of a highly unmilitary cut, heavily-muscled forearms, an’ a surgeon’s hands. There was a mildly Slavic look to the set of his eyes; he was cleanshaven, wore cowboy boots, jeans, a short-sleeved bush-jacket. “Much as it pains me to admit it, I’m confused!” He wiped his oily hands on a rag and extracted a gnarled, full-bent briar from a jacket pocket. “Win, I’d always assumed we were from the same history-line: the bad-guys won the Whiskey Rebellion; Scoop Jackson wound up President. I bugged out in ’88—that’s 212 A.L., locally, Bemie.
‘Anno Liberatis,'
dating from the Revolution, in case nobody’s thought to tel! you. But
your
list of recent American Presidents is closer to mine than Win’s is: Kennedy assassinated in ’63; Johnson abdicating over Viet Nam; Nixon over Watergate...”

He looked t’me for confirmation, then continued: “In my history, Nixon was succeeded by Nelson Rockefeller, who died in office—‘in the saddle,’ you might say, and quite a coverup
that
was! Then Gerald Ford, then Henry Jackson. Hell,
none
of us are from the same place at all!”

Win’d gotten his free dinner twenty-four hours earlier than expected. Apparently, when Sanders’d returned that evenin’ from his meetin’ of the Greater Laporte Volunteer Militia an’ Mountain Rescue, he’d insisted we come over for barbecue—an’ overhauled firin’ pin. The idea of a nonfunctionin’ weapon plain drove him nuts.

“He’s an odd character, all right,” Win’d told me earlier as he set his answerin’ machine, turned on the burglar-rejectors, an’ switched the lights out—all from his lap with a Telecom pad, that fancy electronic clipboard thingie he’d used t’make his phone calls. “You recognize the alias, of course: ‘Sanders,’ as in iiving-under-the-name-of—’ Same goddamn A. A. Milne that got me stuck with ‘Win.’ Also, I think, ‘T. W.,’ presumably for ‘Trespassers W—’ Consequently, everybody calls him ‘Will.’”

“On th’ lam, hunh?” I folded up my nonfunctioning .45 in its tackle, made sure the .375 in my pocket wasn’t pointin’ at anything I wasn’t willin’ t’lose, an’ ushered .the Freenies out the front door, Win lockin’ up behind us.

“I’m not sure,” he said. “I get the feeling somehow that he might have been in politics, except that he feels like an excop, and I should recognize the symptoms. Something really horrible seems to have happened to him back in the States, and he won’t talk much about his past. Mysterious.”

I snorted. “After
this,
I ain’t gonna talk about
my
past anymore. Nobody back home’d believe it—say, where we goin’?”

We’d walked along the springy-surfaced driveway to the street. I was about t’step down onto its golf-green paving when Win did an abrupt left-face, grabbin’ me by the sleeve, tnakin’ me stumble over the Freenies.

“You
don’t
want to go out there,” said the detective.

I pointed helplessly toward the
hacienda
directly across from us. “Why in Ochskahrt’s name not?”

MM MM Mmmmmm!

Somethin’ vaguely mechanical blurred past at about two hundred klicks an hour, another cornin’ along the other way the very next instant.

I
think
they were hovercraft.

“I get th’ point!” I told him, tryin’ t’stop shakin’ as I followed along the rubber sidewalk toward the comer.

“Nobody
quite
believes Will Sanders, either.” Win continued our previous conversation. “He stayed with Clarissa and me the first couple weeks he was here, and one night, in his cups—he was in pretty rough condition at the time— he claimed to be the only person ever to make it to the Confederacy without benefit of the Probability Broach.”

“Besides me.”

“Besides
nobody
—this ‘spatiotemporal displacement,’ you say it’s accompanied by a bluish flash?” I nodded, following him into what looked for all the world like a roadside bus-stop. We rode an escalator down. “Obviously, a variation on the P’wheet-Thorens Broach. But Will’s story is that he became so miserable Stateside, he began daydreaming, visualizing a society personally ideal to him until it became more real, in every detail, than the world he lived in
—and he was here!"
The investigator shook his close-cropped head. “For all he knows, his body’s still over there, curled up in the corner of a padded cell, sucking its thumb.”

The stairs carried us into a brightly-lit arcade lined with shops an’ stands, past yet another flight leadin’ further downward. There was scaffoldin’ an’ big sheetsa hangin’ polyethylene. “They buildin’ a subway down there or somethin’?”

We both looked over a little kiosk in the middle of the mall—roach-clips, hash-pipes, cokespoons, cigarette lighters, an’ snuff-boxes. “Or
something
—they’re digging below the subway for the new Interworld Terminal. Somebody there’ll be regular commercial traffic between here and the States.”

Glancin’ at the display, I said, “Gonna be a helluva surprise t’Phyliis Schlafley an’ the DEA!” I could see it now: some kinda floodlighted archway with the iegend
"Abandon Sanity, All Ye Who Enter."

Win bought a bottle from a vending machine. The Freenies an’ I rode with him across the underground shoppin’ center an’ up to the other side of the street. I’d been thinkin’: “Naturally,” I said t’Win’s broad back as we exited at ground level, “Sanders’ pipe-dreams included a paira beautiful chicks t’make life interestin’.”

He turned. “Those women
are
his life, Bemie. Like Bronco Billy of yore, he’s who he wants to be, and whatever that is, he’s certainly paid the price.”

A brief hike found us at a twelve-foot hole in an adobe fortress with enormous oaken doors. 623 Genet Place. The passageway opened on a jungled courtyard. Mary-Elizabeth Sanders met us by the pool.

“Win!” She grabbed the gumshoe by his prominent ears an’ kissed him on the nose. Easy t’do, since she was a couple inches taller’n he was.

He reddened. “Awww...”

Mary-Beth was
somethin’.
Smoooooth, about thirty, shoulder-length curly hair that mighta been describable as “mousey-brown” on anybody else. She was slender, long-legged, with slim, capable hands an’ sea-green eyes. She wore a clingy, coppery little somethin’ that went down to her ankles an’ seemed t’evaporate here an’ there just for effect—that, an’ a perpetual kinda secret smile.

I shook her hand, blood suddenly poundin’ in m’veins, watched her get acquainted with Larry, Moe, an’ Curly, then straighten back t’five-foot-nine an’ park us at the table, askin’ about drinks.

Win remembered.the wine. “August,” he offered, “a very good month.”

She crinkled prettily around the eyes an’ went for a corkscrew. Win peeled back the foil an’ started on the wirin’. “Shit!” He shook his hand.

“Trouble?” The Freenies trundled up concernedly.

“I’ve got this little mole here”—he pointed between his left ring-finger and pinky—“that gets in the way a lot. Been meaning to get Clarissa to take it off. She’s a doctor— Healer, they say here—did I mention that?”

“I got the impression. Want me t’do that?”

“Thanks, Bernie. I’ll go dig up Will. Should be in his shop.”

I fumbled with the Burgundy, wishing the past few days’d scoured less hide offa
my
hands. Suddenly, Color whipped the bottle outa my fingers impatiently an’ wormed a little green tentacle neatly into the cork. There was a
squeak,
a
pop!,
an’ a
hissss
as th’ sparklin’ wine began t’exhale. “’Least I know
somethin'
you little clowns’re good for.” “Wow! I couldn’t have done
that
better myself!”

I started at the silvery voice behind me an’ turned— jumpin’ up in abrupt politeness. A small lithe figure was cornin’ across the patio-tile, her dark brown eyes an’ tip-tilted nose just visible in the lowerin’ dusk.

“I’m Fran—you're Bernie. Introduce me to your colorful associates.” She was maybe four or five years younger’n her sister, five or six inches shorter, with waist-length bu-tery-blond hair. Where Mary-Beth ran t’sinusoidals, Frances Melanie (nee Kendall) Sanders was almost boyish—in a manner stimulatin’ nothin' but pruriently heterosexual thoughts. Careful, Bernard, ’least till y’findouthow straight this Sanders fella can shoot!

I bowed theatrically t’cover nervousness an’ a multitude of other sins. “These here are Color, Charm, an’ Spin ... they’re aliens,” i finished, realizin’ as I did it how stupid that sounded. “What d’you do?”

“I teach Intuitive Mechanics at Laporte University, Limited.”

“Gotcha—what’s ‘Intuitive Mechanics’?” I started peelin’ a cigar, almost offered her one, but caught m’self just in time.

“That’s a discipline sort of overlapping psychology, philosophy, and mechanical engineering,” she explained. “During the War Against the Czar, somebody in Alaska noticed that the Eskimos seem inherently inclined toward engine-repair and so on, without any cultural background to account for it easily.”

“Kenyans an’ bush-flyin’.” I nodded, tryin’ t’redeem m’reputation for intelligent communication. If all Confederate women were like this, I was gonna be in a messa trouble with m’best gal
Georgie.

“Exactly. Well, they found the explanation in the Eskimo attitude toward sculpture...”

“Right! There’s an animal locked up inside that rock somewhere—just cut off everything that don’t look like a walrus!”

She laughed. “Now we’ve got it down to a science, sort of—at least to a constellation of aesthetic values we can teach to almost anyone who wants to learn.”

“Bravo!” I lit my cigar. “And what do y’do in your
spare
time?”

“Design, build, and race sport-hovercraft with my sister and husband. Mary-Beth’s the hot pilot in the family, although she isn’t a Kenyan. We won the Greenland Invitational last year. What do you do, Bernie?”

I felt around for signs of dizziness, then said, “I’m a time-traveler.”

“Isn’t everybody, these days?”

My aplomb got salvaged by three figures emergin’ through tropical foliage at the rear of the patio. Win, Mary-Beth, an’ a sizable stocky fella in epauletted khaki, exclaiming, “It’s darker than a tax-collector’s soul out here! How about some photons?”

Everybody chuckled, as if at a family joke.

Fran responded suddenly by whipping a pistol-shape from the holster on the left thigh of her maroon velvet coveralls. Goddamn gun, I thought fleetingly, was almost as big as she—

Ssssspakkk!

Whirlin’ on her toes, hair flyin’, she’d aimed at a corner of the courtyard. A pinpoint of hell-fire leapt across to a Hawaiian torch planted between a pair of mimosas. The wick caught.

Ssspakk! Sspak!

On an’ on she fired, pirouetting gracefully till a good half-dozen decorative flames softly illuminated the night. I looked up from where I was cowerin’—in spirit if not in th’ flesh—under the table with the Freenies. No one else’d flinched, not even when a white-hot bolt’d crisped its way between Win an’ our host.

“Plasma gun,” the dangerous little southpaw chimed, slapping it back in its scabbard. “Lawrence
Shiva,
the first off the line. Pretty neat, hunh?”

“Ummh—what woulda happened if you’d missed?”

“At this setting?” She grinned. “Probably have burned right through the house. But I
never
miss.”

“I believe it! I believe it!”