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Authors: L. Neil Smith

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There are two kinds of people in the world, those who say, “There are two kinds of people in the world,” and those who don’t.
—
Memoirs of Lucille G. Kropotkin
“Well, do you plan to let us in or just go on standing there, dribbling on your shoes?”
The blond rolled her eyes impatiently under the front porch-light I’d turned on, not quite tapping a high-heeled toe on my colorful doorstep. It wouldn’t have done her much good in any case: the surface beneath her feet was rubberized concrete and the whole block echoed with the
ratatatat
of long strings of firecrackers going off. A faint, marvelous aroma of black gunpowder drifted in on the evening breeze.
“Janie!” her husband objected.
“Hush, Pappy, Mama knows best. Can’t you see the poor dope is starstruck?” He peered at me clinically as she went on; I felt like crawling underneath the doormat. “We have to
unstrike
him right away, if we’re going to deal with this mess!”
“I, er … uh,” the poor dope replied after deep reflection. “Please come in, please?” You’d think I’d be used to this kind of stuff by now, wouldn’t you?
Nevertheless I was nothing short of breathtaken to recognize my prospective clients as the otherworld counterparts of famous movie stars, both of whom had been dead for decades in the version of reality I hailed from. The husband had died of a heart attack in 1960 (I looked it up later), the wife a generation earlier in a military air crash during a Second World War that had never happened here. The pair were well-known entertainment personalities in the North American Confederacy, as well, and both
owed plenty to its advanced geriatric and cosmetic technologies, since it was 1996 by the pre-Confederate European calendar, and Gable was ninety-five years old.
Somehow I gathered my wits enough (of course there weren’t that many left to gather) to invite them in. I tried to retrieve my drink discreetly as I hung her wrap up in the hall closet, but she caught me with an understanding
Lost Weekend
kind of wink. Takes one to know one, I guess.
Shrugging, I led them up the half-flight of stairs into the living room, where I offered them a place to sit and a drink. Together, they opted for a sofa only slightly smaller than the U.S.S.
Missouri
. It was one of my favorite places, in any world you care to name, for an afternoon nap. She took a double-dessicated vodka Martini, he a bourbon and bourbon, with a dash of bourbon for flavor. All in all, it was turning out to be a pretty high-octane evening.
“Now where did you come from, sweetie?”
Silvertip was suddenly present in the room. She stropped herself across Lombard’s decorative ankles a couple of times—I’d seen that cat shear around other people’s extremities like a mechanical apple peeler, and with about the same results—then levitated up and into the woman’s lap, landing lightly as a blown kiss.
I started to warn Lombard about Silvertip’s temperamental nature, but gave it up as pointless. The animal was obviously perfectly content in the lap she’d discovered, getting cat hair all over a dress worth more than my car.
Somehow, I felt a little betrayed.
Both Gables lit cigarettes—Silvertip tolerated even that—and I followed suit with a nice Belizian Jolly Roger. Unlike other places, smoking hasn’t fallen out of fashion in a continuum with effective cures for cancer, emphysema, and political correctness,
although one negative aspect to Confederate technology is that it’s impossible—unless you pull the house breakers—to fill a room full of the wonderful aroma of cigar smoke.
Outside, the heavens went on sparkling and coruscating with colorful explosions.
Gable turned out to be a pacer. The minute I started to ask him, “What can I do you for?” the man was up and stomping around in circles like a caged cliché, his Tony Lamas or Dan Posts or whatever they were threatening to wear a rut straight through the living-room carpet into the hardwood and polymer floor underneath it. Then he stopped abruptly, took a long drink and a longer drag on his cigarette, and regarded me with that famous sideways squint of his. I started looking around again for that doormat. “On my own time, Mr. Bear, I’m a man of few words!”
Tweed. That’s what the texture of his voice reminded me of, rough tweed. I don’t know what it was about this guy that made me want him to like me—and took it as a failure of character on my part if he didn’t. Maybe that’s the definition of charisma or something. If it is, you and Judy Garland can have it.
From the bar, where I was pretending to be busy freshening my own glass, I turned and replied, “Let’s make that ‘Win,’ Mr. Gable—‘Mr. Bear’ was my father.” Actually, Sergeant Bear was my father. A waistgunner, he’d died aboard a B-17 in Germany when I was too young to know anything about it.
“Fair enough.” Gable nodded and grimaced in the famous way I’d seen a thousand times on the giant silver screen (as well as the nasty little plastic one that superseded it). “Then I’ll be Clark to you. The point I was going to make is that I flatter myself that you know our work, Janie’s and mine. We do drama—a little Shakespeare, an occasional thriller for the right author or director, even some intelligent comedy.”
I nodded because the customer is always right except sometimes. Pulling around the chair I’d occupied earlier, I sat down, ignoring my drink. The unfortunate truth was, having grown up in an entirely different universe, I’d found this world’s Gable and Lombard a little difficult to fathom. They’d made only one picture together where I’d come from, nothing special, early in their respective careers. It’d been
offscreen
that they’d been a national sensation, or a scandal, depending on who was writing the memoirs. But here in the North American Confederacy, they were a legendary theatrical couple, like Tracy and Hepburn, Rohan and Rohan, or Branagh and Thompson.
Gable shrugged angrily. “Now, suddenly, there’s all of this … this
crap
flooding the Telecom!
It Happened One Night
and, by Gallatin, Janie, what did they call it?”
Sipping delicately at the vodka to which I’d added not more than fourteen molecules of vermouth, Carole Lombard wrinkled up her not-quite-pretty nose.
“Gone with the Wind.”
He shuddered.
“Gone with the Wind,
by Gallatin!”
“By Margaret Mitchell, actually,” I offered unhelpfully. There hadn’t been a War between the States here, either, and the “Gallatin” he’d mentioned—Albert Gallatin, second president of the Confederacy—was foremost among the reasons. So the film I personally regarded as the greatest movie ever made must have seemed to them like bad skiffy, something like the 1950s
War of the Worlds,
maybe
,
or
Creation of the Humanoids.
“Just wait’ll you see
Teacher’s Pet.”
“We have!” they both wailed miserably. Hell, I never liked Doris Day, either.
Eventually they managed to come to what faintly resembled the point of their visit. The Gables wanted me to do something (they weren’t exactly sure what, and neither was I) about certain recordings in various media being imported, apparently, from
some parallel world or worlds unknown, featuring strangers who looked and sounded an awful lot like them, but who
weren’t
them, in some fundamental and disturbing ways.
Miss Lombard seemed most concerned for their careers—not to mention that they weren’t being
paid
whenever these “movies” were offered on the’Com, an all-embracing Confederate improvement on the Internet back home—and maybe the fact that she wasn’t quite as big a star, wherever these entertainments were coming from, as she was accustomed to being here. To be fair, most of her otherworld counterparts hadn’t lived long enough to become big stars. Cosmically speaking, World War Two had been a very popular war.
For her husband, it was more personal: he intensely disliked what he’d seen of these other versions of himself. “He simpers!” Gable complained.
To make things even worse, some versions of the Gable and/or Lombard films that were rapidly becoming classics here didn’t even have Gable and/or Lombard in them! There was a version of
Gone with the Wind,
for godsake, starring Robert Cummings (remember him?) as Rhett Butler and Bette Davis as Scarlett O’Hara.
Well, hesh mah mouth.
Apparently unaware of what universe I came from—the first historically alternative universe to be discovered by Confederate scientists—Gable blamed it all on immigrants to the Confederacy. “If only those blasted bluebacks …”
“Don’t talk dirty, Pappy,” Lombard snapped.
Gable grumbled, “Aw, Janie …”
In the end, I warned them that there probably wasn’t any way to stop the vile traffic they complained of, or even to collect royalties on the performances of individuals who merely looked like them. (I happen to have a lookalike myself here—I’d bought
this house from him and he’d gone out to explore the Asteroid Belt with Lucy Kropotkin—we even have the same fingerprints!) I did agree to try and find out who was marketing these otherworld flicks and see whether some reasonable accommodation could be reached about embarrassing the “real” Gable and Lombard.
At that, my clients seemed relieved, if only to have placed their problem in somebody else’s hands. They finished their drinks and let me show them to the door, having offered me a retainer fully in keeping with their lofty status as stars of stage, screen, and (whether they welcomed it or not) Telecom. One of the things I like best about the North American Confederacy is that said retainer now lay heavy in my pocket, and
jingled.
As we said good-bye, I was mentally composing a smug message for the answering machine in Clarissa’s hovervan—and even planning some interplanetary C-mail to Lucy to thank her for the referral. At least I
think
I meant to thank her. I was feeling happy, and the Bear Curse hadn’t stricken yet.
The Bear Curse? Something I’d never even told Clarissa about. All my life, when things seem to be going best, just when I realize I’m happy, it’s suddenly spoiled by a feeling of certainty that it can’t last, that some unnamed disaster is about to strike, almost as a punishment for the happiness I’m feeling. That dark, horrible cloud had lowered over me as long as I could remember—even as a kid. As an adult, I’d come to understand that it was partly from living in a culture where every popular religion holds that the only reason we’re alive is to suffer, and the purpose of government is to take your happiness away and give it to somebody else. But mostly, I believe, it was from hundreds of thousands of books, movies, and television programs where it’s a standard plot device—and an extremely unfortunate one. Here’s the hero, going along, fat, dumb, and happy, when all of
a sudden the bad guys maim and murder his wife, his children, his dog, his hamster, and the neighbor’s parakeet—and that’s just to get the story started. From sheer repetition, that damned scenario has crept deep into the human soul and soured it, possibly beyond repair. Now I lived in a free country with a beautiful, sexy woman who adored me—and still there was nothing I wanted more than to be able to experience happiness without dread.
Enough of that. I’d taken a few notes and accepted the assignment they’d offered me with a resigned sigh, knowing without a doubt that tomorrow morning I wouldn’t be able to avoid visiting the one section of Greater LaPorte that never fails to depress me: the several impoverished, dirty, crowded square blocks that Confederates have come to call the “American Zone.” That was where new immigrants tended to settle when they first arrived, and it was where the imported movies were most likely coming from.
I watched my brand-new clients walk across the driveway to their waiting hovercraft. I don’t know what I’d expected them to be driving. I guess some ostentatious kind of gold-plated, diamond-encrusted chauffeur-driven limousine, or a tiny but expensive little sport hoverer, maybe. What they climbed into—Gable inserting himself happily behind the controls—was the Confederate equivalent of a United States of American four-wheel-drive “sport utility vehicle.” Except, of course, that wheels were optional on this baby. It
was
big—maybe a Suburban and a half. And it was new, a 220 Taylor Off-Roader, powered by huge turbofans capable of pushing it up a 45-degree incline, and as fully at home hovering over ocean water, swamp-grass, or quicksand, as over
Terra firma.
I’d momentarily forgotten that Clark Gable was an inveterate trout fisherman and hunter. As I watched their taillights whisk
away down the drive, the car suddenly swerved and slid to a shuddering stop. In what seemed like the same instant, a blinding flash filled the evening darkness. I was picked up off of my big flat feet and slammed down hard on my big fat ass, bouncing on the rubberized concrete amidst an all-enveloping, thunderous Kettledrum-Roll-of-the-Gods that became my whole universe for an eternal moment and left my ears ringing afterward for hours. Trees swayed in the blast-shattered air; the ground heaved like an ocean swell. And speaking of heaving and swelling, I knew I’d soon be following its example. The Bear Curse had struck again.
Not many women will admit it, but the only thing wrong with men, from their viewpoint, is that they’re not women. If you try to make them into women, it will only annoy most of them. And the few you succeed with, you won’t like.
—Memoirs of Lucille G. Kropotkin,
I was up on my knees in an instant, the carry-worn muzzle of my big .41 sniffing back and forth for something to bite. My first thought was that the Gables’ Off-Roader had exploded. But there the hovercraft still sat, taillights aglow, one hundred metric yards down my absurdly palatial driveway, amid the trees of my miniature national forest. The driver’s door swung up as my client, gun in hand, climbed out to see what the hell was going on. This was not some movie cream puff who talked big and tough on camera and then let himself get buggered on the street. I remembered a grieving Clark Gable from my world flying bona fide bombing missions, just like my dad, over Germany during World War Two.
So exactly what
had
blown up? Eyes, ears, and nostrils wide open. There wasn’t a trace of smoke or fire in the immediate vicinity. Even the celebratory Second of July pyrotechnics had died off exactly as if somebody had turned a tap. Then, from a long way off, I began hearing sirens wail—a sound surpassingly rare in Greater LaPorte—as multiple volunteer fire companies raced across the city, presumably to the scene of whatever disaster had just occurred. “’Com!” I issued the command into thin air as the Gables came trudging back up the driveway, she levering a shiny silver roscoe back into her tiny purse. His gun was still in his hand. In the same thin air (over a patch of rubberized
concrete almost as smart as it was resilient) a colorful transparent three-dimensionsal image formed of a menu screen, which I promptly ignored.
“Local news—explosion in West Central!” We were rewarded with an aerial view of one of the many sections of Greater LaPorte that pass for “downtown.” There’s never been a real center to the city: as Dorothy Parker once observed of my homeworld’s Los Angeles, “there isn’t any
there
there.”
“Pappy, it’s the Old Endicott Building!” Lombard exclaimed. “Why, I was shopping on the three-hundredth floor there, just this afternoon!” Gable shook his head ruefully, but said nothing. The outlandish shape and scale of North American Confederate cities takes a little getting used to. Half of working LaPorte is actually underground, covered in private residential holdings that run to aromatic forest and restored High Plains. (Good thing Confederate medicine has better allergy remedies than Benadryl or Sudafed.)
Individual lots are huge, eight to ten times the size I’d grown up accustomed to. One of my neighbors maintains a stand of the type of prairie grass that overtopped a mounted man’s head in pioneer days. Back home, the neighborhood Nazis and municipal lawn fascists would have been after him with torches and pitchforks. Here and there, architectural structures that would make Howard Roark whimper jealously arise from the golden breast of the Grand Prairie, clawing their way a mile into the clear, dry semi-Colorado air. My clients and I were looking at one now, hanging holographically before our eyes, cross-lit at the moment by the emergency beams of half a hundred hovering aerocraft—like the one whose viewpoint we happened to be sharing—flown by firefighting companies, various militiae, civilian gawkers, and the ubiquitous and useless media.
The Old Endicott Building was a pretty silly name for something
that had been designed in a popular style known here as “NeoEgyptian.” It was a glassy-sided pyramid, the uppermost half of which had just been raggedly removed and dumped into the streets below or blasted into the flanks of neighboring skyscrapers which, luckily, were more trajectile-resistant and farther off than they would have been in any comparable United Statesian city.
The noise was absolutely unimaginable, straight out of Dante—or John Cage. Even this high above it, vicariously speaking, we could hear the screams of injured or frightened individuals—thousands and thousands of them—the roar of at least a dozen types of aerocraft, the caterwaul of emergency ground vehicles, the earth-shaking rumble and crash as more pieces of the building slid off in huge slabs and plummeted into the helpless crowd half a mile below.
At the smoking apex of the ruin, a secondary explosion suddenly engulfed a little sport dirigible in flames—it had been gallantly trying to rescue survivors—and sent the wreckage hurtling into the street. I realized that this wasn’t the U.S.A. in another sense. There could be no hope of it being after hours, with the building blessedly empty: LaPorte is a twenty-four-hour-a-day kind of town. A lot of people were going to be dead, and a lot more badly hurt. No doubt about it, this was the worst disaster the city had seen, even probably the worst in Confederate history since the Peshtigo-Chicago Meteor Fires.
And all I could think about was—“
Win
?”Clarissa was okay! Her voice cut through the chaos as a “window” opened Microsoftly in a corner of the scene we were viewing. It showed me the face I most like to look at in a million universes, that of a pretty honey blond more natural than my latest client, with merry hazel eyes, and what’s customarily called a “smattering” of freckles across her cheeks and the bridge of her uptilted nose.
She also has long, graceful legs, ample apples, and is half a head taller than I am. She once offered kindly to add six inches to my legs if it bothered me. It doesn’t.
Just presently she sat behind the wheel of her powerful medical van. Judging by the way the scenery was whizzing into the distance behind her, she was doing at least three times the usual city speed. I sure hoped her lights and sirens were going. Her’Com software would be cancelling out the latter, so we could talk.
“Right here, baby!” I replied, trying hard and failing not to let pathetic gratitude show in my voice. Looking down, I realized I still held my revolver in my hand. I wiggled it into the holster under my arm. “What the hell is going on?”
She brushed a strand of hair from her eyes. “I’ve no idea, dear. I was on a housecall—oops!”
Hard to tell, but I thought she’d swerved to avoid some obstacle, most likely vehicular. Ordinary traffic would appear to be standing still to her as she sped by. It gave me the yammering jim-jams to watch my beloved driving like that, several miles a minute on a pillow of compressed air down the middle emergency lane of what I recognized as the city’s busiest thoroughfare, Confederation Boulevard. “I no sooner heard an explosion, than I had C-mail from three fire captains and the city militia commander!” That would be Will Sanders, voted the neighbor most likely to have fired that bottle rocket at me, what now seemed like a year ago.
I nodded. “So you’re going to help. Take your phone with you when you leave the car; I’m coming down, too. I’ll want to find you.” I’d been a cop—Denver City and County Homicide—back in the bad old days before the Confederacy and I had discovered one another. I could probably make myself useful at the disaster scene.
Gable and Lombard looked at each other and then at me.
“Planning to get your own car out,” Clark asked me, putting away his heavy autopistol, a Greener .720, “or just ride with us?”
IN THE END, I opted to go with them, grabbing a few useful items from the house and planning to return with my spouse whenever. It could be hours or days. Confederate emergency services—usually run and funded by insurance companies, augmented by every kind of volunteer association imaginable—were generally excellent. But who in Great Lysander’s name had ever expected them to cope with a calamity like this one? A calamity that already looked suspiciously artificial to me.
The Gables and I didn’t speak much on the way “downtown.” They didn’t speak much to each other, for that matter. The streets were hellish, noisy, full of lights that confused, rather than illuminated—people rushing toward disaster, others running away—and getting there took an incredibly long time. Each of us was wrapped completely in his own thoughts. And by a reflex I’d discovered was peculiar to immigrants like me, my thoughts all seemed to be political.
In the States I came from, politicians view any catastrophe like this as a career opportunity. By now they’d all be trampling over one another looking for TV cameras, demanding that everybody and his kid sister be locked in belly chains and leg irons for the duration of the emergency—for which read “forever.” Nine times out of ten, the public would obligingly let themselves be stampeded by that kind of dumbassedness. There aren’t that many politicians in the Confederacy—the climate isn’t healthy for them—individuals here value their freedom above all things, and there isn’t anything to vote on. So I wondered what the political fallout would be like from this unprecedented mess. Mostly I considered Confederate history—very different from the history I’d been taught in school—a history that allowed more
room than mine did for optimism about America, about Americans, and maybe even about the human race in general …
TENSCORE AND BUT a pair of years earlier—1794, for those with fewer than two-hundred fingers to count on—and with the ink just freshly sanded on the brand-new shiny U.S. Constitution, President George “If I ever tell a lie, may I be bled to death by leeches” Washington, and his Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, decided it was high time they tried out their brand-new shiny powers of taxation. Their first victims were to be western Pennsylvania farmers, long accustomed to converting their corn crops into a less perishable, more profitable high-octane liquid form.
Unfortunately (for George
et
Al), many of these rustics, especially those in the vicinity of the frontier municipality of Pittsburgh, were also accustomed to reading books, speaking in words of more than two syllables, and holding meetings where they formally debated the myriad aspects of living in a limited-government republic. They also placed a somewhat different emphasis (than high school teachers do today, for instance) on Revolutionary slogans regarding taxation without representation. In their view, they’d fought the bloody Brits from’75 to 85 to’abolish taxation altogether, and they weren’t interested now in having representation
or
taxation imposed on them by that gaggle of fops in Philadelphia, at that time, the nation’s capital. This they proceeded to make manifest by tarring and feathering Mr. Hamilton’s tax collectors, burning said officials’ houses to the ground, and filling the stills of anybody who willingly paid the hated tribute with large-caliber muzzle-loading bullet holes.
Feeling their authority challenged, Washington and Hamilton dispatched westward a body of fifteen thousand conscripted troops equal to half the population of America’s largest city (Philadelphia
once again, which would later become famous for dropping high explosives from police helicopters on miscreants charged with disturbing the peace), the equivalent of sending in five million National Guardsmen to quell the Rodney King riots. A mere four hundred Whiskey Rebels, properly impressed by this host of fifteen-thousand, subsided, and the all-too-familiar political miracle by which the private transgression of robbery is somehow transubstantiated into a public virtue was firmly established. Pay or die. The inevitable consequences—poverty and unemployment, endless foreign wars, the Branch Davidian Massacre, and reruns on television—are still with us today.
Meanwhile, in another Pennsylvania far, far away, one Albert Gallatin, recent Swiss immigrant, Harvard professor, and gentleman farmer, decided
not
to talk his whiskey-making friends and neighbors out of an uprising that might get them all killed (as he’d done in my version of history) but to organize and lead them instead, inspired by the ethical and political implications of a single word
(“unanimous
consent of the governed”) that somehow got blue-penciled out of my copy of the Declaration of Independence. An erudite and persuasive fellow (in my world he was among the first to study Indian languages academically, invented the science of ethnology, and became Alexander Hamilton’s counterpart in Thomas Jefferson’s cabinet), Gallatin somehow shamed the fifteen thousand conscripts into reversing themselves and marching with him, against the City of Botherly Love.
The rest, to coin a phrase, is alternative history. Shown a suitable backstop, President George was duly ventilated for his counter-Revolutionary transgressions, while Secretary Al bolted for Europe, where he met a fate surprisingly similar to that which befell him in my world, although at the hands of a Polish count named Coveleskie, rather than those of Aaron Burr. The Constitution—the
vile document that had emboldened them—was replaced with the Revised Articles of confederation it was supposed to have been all along, fitted with a “Covenant of Unanimous Consent” rather than the weaker “Bill of Rights.”
Government—at least that of the United States—forever deprived of its looting privileges, grew smaller and less significant in the lives of Americans every day thereafter, guaranteeing the survival of individual liberty, and giving rise to unprecedented peace, prosperity, and progress.
Albert Gallatin became the second President (at his insistence they went on counting George) of what would someday become known as the North American Confederacy.
THE REMAINDER OF the next three days is pretty blurry. I lost track of both Gables right away, although I spent a long while working shoulder to shoulder with Will Sanders. The lighting and noise were still like something straight out of Classical Hell, victims screaming and moaning, rescuers shouting at one another, heavy machinery rasping and whining as it tried to pull half a building off of bodies, living and dead. I’m a former homicide detective, and I can’t even begin to describe the smells.
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