L. Neil Smith - North American Confederacy 02 (13 page)

The Ambassador gave another of his shrugs-by-implication. “It is difficult to say, sir. The phenomenon does not exist among our species. Bernie, would you agree that ...
Bernie!"

“Zzz—unk! Only restin’ my eyes, fellas! I’m, er.. .hypnosis?” Through the haze I began t’see his point. “I don’t seem t’be hittin’ on all sixteen cylinders, lately, an’ that’s the pitiful truth. But what’s it got t’do with time-trav... zzzzz...”

"Bernie!"

“Okay! Okay!” I got up, fightin’ disorientation, stomped m’feet for circulation, an’ started pacin’ back an’ forth m’self, justa stay awake. “Keep talkin’, while I’m still conscious t’hear it!”

“You’ve been conditioned,” Charm continued, “not to speak of t... you-know-what, especially with, as you often put it yourself, ‘the locals’.”

“Yeah? Well, then it ain’t workin’ very good. I’ve blown m’cover t’Koko, her Uncle Olongo, half his roughnecks, an’ now Sherlock here, an’ the worst that’s happened is I tend t’zonk off every now an’ again.”

“Right,” Bear answered sarcastically, “and occasionally set yourself up for suicide. Let me see that pistol of yours a minute.”

With reflexive reluctance, I recovered the Milt Sparks rig from where I’d tossed it on the end of the couch, slid the Gold Cup out of its scabbard, cleared both chamber an’ magazine well, an’ handed it over.

Bear grunted. “First G.I. .45 I’ve handled in half a dozen years.” He jacked the slide. “You make a habit of handing people loaded guns?” He held a big brass cartridge between his thumb an’ index finger.

I plopped onto the couch, shocked to the bone. Of course! I’d emptied the chamber first—the classical dumb boot’s trick—neatly shuffling the first round from the magazine in behind the ejected cartridge!

“All right! I believe everything you’ve said, Charm! I believe it!” I could fee! my ears redden, but Bear, bless him, went on’s if nothin’d happened.

“This is the fancy target model, isn’t it? What’s the trouble with it?”

Overcoming embarrassment, I told him about the firing pin. Hirnschlag von Ochskahrt alone knew what else was amiss, both with the .45 an’ me—an’ I hoped he wouldn’t tell.

“Well, it should be fairly simple, then.” The detective reached for what appeared t’be a thick, white, legal-sized clipboard on the coffee table, its upper half consistin’ of the same translucent pseudoporcelain as the video unit in Olongo’s car. The lower half was keyboard, which he used.

“Will?” A pause, then: “Oh, hello, Mary-Beth. How are you?”

From this angle, all I could make out was a colored image an’ a voice too small t’be overheard.

“No, she’s still electrosleeping, be another week... Why thanks, I
am
pretty tired of punching my own kitchen-buttons. Maybe tomorrow night, if that’s convenient.”

He looked up at me, then to the Freenies.

“I might bring a guest or two along, if that wouldn’t be imposing. Which reminds me why I called. When Will gets back from his militia meeting, tell him I’ve got a job for him, if you would. Fairly urgent—the customer’s carrying ;i borrowed life-preserver.” Another pause. “Okay, fine. Love to Fran. Bye.”

Bear set the educated clipboard down, nodding out the window behind me toward the Alamo replica across the street. “Will Sanders,” he explained, “a good neighbor, the best goddamned gunsmith in Greater Laporte, and also an immigrant American, like you and me. That was one of his wives I was—”

“Mormon?” I thought about the Browning in my coverall pocket.

“No”—the detective grinned—“just greedy.
What?”
The Ambassador was pullin’ at his pants cuff. Glad t’see it happen t’somebody else for once.

“Your pardon, Mr. Bear, but we were discussing the matter of Bernie’s, er, delicate—”

“So we were. I... say, why don’t you guys call me Win?”

“Yeah,” I echoed. “Us gods are all alike. Informal. Listen, fellow sapients, could I get a word in here? I don’t much care t’be talked about in third person!” I stoked up a cigar—another gift from the Galloping Gorilla. “Main thing is—always assumin’ you’re right about this conditioning thing—what’re we gonna
do
about it?”

Charm: “it would appear, Lord, that the condition is relatively specific. For example, you’re permitted to discuss er, you-know-what with individuals of your own calling. It should be greatly inconvenient, otherwise.”

"Permitted?”
I squeaked, almost soundin’ like a Freenie. “Yes, Bernie. I believe a direct breach of the inhibition might render you completely comatose, perhaps even kill you. However, Koko freed you from a portion of the compulsion by telling you that she knew what you are.”

“And yet,” Color offered from the couch, speaking for the first time, “her conception of you-know-what seems sufficiently disparate from yours, Bernie, that the prohibition generates uncontrollable drowsiness and lethal carelessness.”

The former of which ! was beginnin’ t’feel again. I got up t’pace. My legs felt like columns of lead. I sat down in a comfortable chair by the fireplace instead. It all seemed too much trouble t’think about.

Abruptly, Spin’s eyestalk straightened. He skittered closer t’Bear, persuadin’ the detective t’bend down to him. There was a whispered conference.

I yawned.

“That’s it!” Bear exclaimed. “Bemie, look at me closely!”

I tried, but the haze was thickenin’.

“Bemie, I don’t know exactly what Olongo told you about me or if you’ve thought about it much, but—...—

Suddenly, I couldn’t hear him. His mouth kept makin’ words, but it was like tryin’ t’read in a dream. The whole room seemed dark an’ gettin’ darker. By the time he’d risen an’ crossed over t’me, he was a blur in little better focus than his surroundings. I couldn’ta told him from Koko or the Man In The...

“—... —...—” Somethin’ seized me by the shoulders, shook me.    .—...!” Bear’s face swam into momentary sharpness but insisted on turnin’ round an’ round like a slow-motion pinwheel. I tried t’move.

“...—carefully, Bernie! Listen to me! I’m telling you that
I'm a time-traveler myself!’’

I pitched over onto the floor, the pain inside my head like a draft-dodger’s eardrums at the moment of truth. I was conscious of my elbow an’ forehead hittin’ the carpet, of convulsions fit t’break every bone in m’scrawny carcass, then a feelin’ of
release!,
blood gushin’ from my nose.

An’ suddenly it was over with.

My vision cleared. Hearing returned. The haze inside my skull evaporated as if somebody’d jerked a dishrag through one ear an’ out the other. The air seemed fulla oxygen again.

I sat up, sneered contemptuously at the whiskey in Bear’s outthrust hand, an’ dashed it down. Even through the cow-juice, it burned nicely, but that was its only effect. Meanwhile, data seemed t’be failin’ into place in my noggin like punch-cards in a sorter.

“God’s wounds!” I said briskly. “Also gosharootie, holy shit, an’ twenty-three skidoo! But you’re a
sidewise
time-traveler—across alternate universes—
not
lengthwise, like me, right?”

“Right!” shouted Bear an’ Charm an’ Spin’ an’ Color, all at the same time. Sounded like a calliope in rut.

“Right—you came from
a... dimension
separate from the Confederacy, where history turned out different, branched off at some critical choice-point an’ developed independently after that. Prob’ly the Whiskey Rebellion, since Olongo saw fit t’mention it.”

Bear was nodding violently, grinnin’ from ear t’ear. I watched those appendages closely, expectin’ flowers t’start blossomin’ from ’em any moment.

I said, “An’ I’m from the future of
your
universe, not this one!”

There was a huge collective sigh of relief. “Welcome back to reality, Bemie,” Bear said, “whatever
that
is.”
“Why those unexpurgated slime-mold-suckin' sneaky misbegotten sons of
—who’da thought even a bastard like Cromney’d do a thing like this t’me? Musta been when I had the DreamCap on, an’—”

“Oh Lord!” Charm exclaimed, an’ for the first time, I wasn’t sure how he meant it. “You still don’t see it, do you? It was that Academy of yours, not Cromney! Doubtless all the time you were in training as a youth.”

Now he’d said it, it was obvious. An’ entirely consistent. I felt around for incipient signs of drowsiness, but even the nosebleed’d stopped.

I rose. “Awfui sorry ’bout the carpet. Win.”

“It’ll have cleaned itself by morning.” He smiled, giving me a hand. “How do you feel?”

“Aside from innumerable internal injuries—mostly to m’pride—just like somebody’d screwed all my sparkplugs back in place. Thanks. Pylon take those bureaucrats, I’m gonna file complaints in
googolicate
when I get back—’less I
nuke
th’ mother-humpers first!”

I took the fresh drink he offered, retrieved my cigar, an’ noticed that the burned spot on the carpet was already healin’ itself. Back home, a metal mousoid woulda come out an’ pissed on it.

“Okay,” I said to my fellow time-traveler, “you gonna tell me about it?”

He chuckled. “I arrived in the North American Confederacy seven years ago—and about as explosively as you did—while investigating the political murder of a theoretical physicist.”

He’d been a
public
eye in those days. Homicide Lieutenant Edward Bear—“Win” because of A. A. Milne—had run afoul of SecPol, predecessors of the twenty-first century Freedom Police, and very nearly been eighty-sixed himself.

The physicist in question had been contacted by Confederate scientists by means of a “probability broach” whose inventors’d originally been plumbing for a way around the lightspeed barrier.

Shades of Herr Professor von Ochskahrt!

But things’d turned out differently, an’ the U.S. government’s nastiest covert branch took a dim view of unauthorized communications from the Twilight Zone. They’d machine-gunned the uncooperative American scientist an’ chased Win through his experimental hardware, straight into anarchist heaven.

While fendin’ off badguys an’ foilin’ their plot t’import nuclear weapons—considered gauche in the Confederacy, an’ consequently never brought to the full flower of development exhibited elsewhere—Win’d had t’make adjustments to a society without laws, police, armies, any government at all—which nonetheless seemed t’operate just swell, thank you.

Even the trains ran on time.

“It’s the first
adult
society in history, Bernie,” Win finished. “Politically,
legally,
you’re entirely on your own, to operate a business, shove opiates in your arm, break your neck sky-diving, buy or sell sex—or anything else—invent new things or enjoy the oldest ones, like dirty movies and books. It’s up to you to profit from your successes and suffer the full responsibility for your mistakes.”

I laughed. “Y’think humanity’s up to it? Whatcha do here, euthanize th’ crooks an’ dummies?”

“Bernie”—he shook his head—“a culture like this, despite possible appearances,
doesn’t
run on good will
or
rationality. Those are just
results.
It runs on
greed
—self-interest, if you prefer. You know, somebody—-was it Kor-zybski or Donald Duck?—once pointed out how we get stymied by certain words and phrases that cause us to give up on things before we really try.”

“Yeah,” I answered, “like ‘impossible’ or ‘it’ll never fly’ or ‘we’d hafta get a supplemental appropriation’.” I sipped my drink.

Win grinned at me. “That last one never seemed to stop anybody for long. But in this case, the operant verbal roadblock is ‘the perfectabiiity of Man’—or rather the notion, absolutely correct, that such perfection is impossible. It keeps us from inquiring why people have to be perfect in order to be free.”

“Or how come workin’ for the bureaucracy makes you
perfecter
than civilians!”

“Right!” He laughed. “Sure, running your own life can be a little uncomfortable at times, especially for those of us who grew up in a system where success was punished—
fined
—so failure can be rewarded through the welfare system. Hell of it is, I’ve found that by respecting everybody’s sovereignty, you liberate them to cooperate far more cordially than when they’re
forced
to get along. What finally convinced me, about the second year I was here, was a strike: the host-mothers’ unions wanted shorter pregnancies and were picketing their chief customers, the commercial orphanages—baby-brokerages, to you. The orphanages had picket-lines around the union headquarters in retaliation. Secondary boycott, sauce for the goose. And nobody thought a thing about it. People
have
to play fair in the Confederacy; there isn’t any other choice.

“Good god, I’m starting to preach! I need another drink!”

He rose t’accomplish that, while I jingled the coins in m’pocket, considerin’ Confederate kindness an’ generosity. “Mebbe I understand now why Koko insisted on helpin’ me. How old is she, anyway?”

The ice clinked in his scotch an’ milk. “The President’s niece? I seem to recall Olongo mentioning... eleven or twelve, perhaps. I know: you’re thinking about the lethal hardware she probably carries. Everybody does, regardless of age, and
that
took me longer to get used to than anything else. But Confederates believe—and’ll lecture anyone who’ll stand still long enough—that you can’t teach individual responsibility by denying the pupil the chance to practice it. Besides, if you make exceptions where rights are concerned, for anyone or any reason, you’ve established a deadly precedent for doing it eventually to everybody else.”

“An’
that,"
I nodded ruefully, “would likely be an unhealthy exercise t’advocate in these parts. All the same, there are folks as hold that makin’ kids act like grownups is bad for their little psyches. Take the fourteenth century—”

“You
take it. I read
A Distant Mirror,
too, and that’s one place where Tuchman had it wrong. It wasn’t a matter of kids growing up too fast but of adults who never
did
grow up. And it got worse, after that, not better. Look at the Crack in the Moon.”