The American Zone

  By now, Lucy was sitting up cheerfully. “Well, that was certainly refreshin’, boys,” she told us. “How do I look, Doc—never mind, the question was rhetorical. By Albert, I think we’re startin’ t‘have an adventure here, Winnie! It was gettin’ a mite boring, out in the asteroids.”

  Maybe I should explain about the asteroids—and Ed Bear. Not me, the other one. In my world, some joker—I think it was my mother—noticed an accidental resemblance between the name she’d given me, Edward William Bear (for herself, Edna, and my father, Bill) and the formal monicker of a certain character created by A. A. Milne: Edward Bear. From earliest childhood, guess who got called “Winnie.” At that, I suppose it was better than “Pooh.”

  Over here, there never was an A. A. Milne—or he never wrote all those stories about Christopher Robin and the 100 Acre Wood—so the guy with my fingerprints on this side of the broach was allowed his dignity. When he grew up, he became a private investigator, bought a huge, beautiful house at 626 Genet Place in LaPorte, drove a little red Neova Hoversport, and eventually married his 136-year-old neighbor and moved out to the Asteroid Belt.

  “Rhetorical shmetorical.” The Healer shook his head. “How do you look? Like one of the oldest human beings I’ve ever examined, Lucy, and in remarkably good health. How many regenerations have you undergone, if I may ask?”

  “Just the one,” Lucy replied. “I started another a little while back, but got interrupted by those Hamiltonian dungflies, an’ I never finished it.”

  “I see.” He turned to me. “You, Mr. Bear, have a broken arm.”

  “I know, Francis.” With my good hand, I held out my sling where it hung across my body. “I didn’t exactly borrow this from William S. Hart. And it’s ‘Win.’”

  “William S. Hart … William S. Hart … now where have I heard that—” He shook his head as if shooing away a bothersome insect. “You don’t understand, Win. You’ve broken your arm again. I don’t even know how you got out of that car. It must have been something like hysterical strength.”

  Just then my poor little Neova burst into flames.

  “Hysterical … strength …” Suddenly it was taking an awful lot of effort to understand him. “If the pertwonkies simmer the tricycle doors,” I remember telling him—somebody had thought it was important, but I couldn’t remember who, “remermelize’em!”

  It all went black and this time I really passed out.

  “THERE YOU ARE.” My beloved Clarissa frowned down at me, but I could tell she wasn’t serious. I recognized this dream as a rerun from the Old Endicott Building explosion, and intended to enjoy it for as long as it lasted. “Honestly, Edward William Bear, sometimes I don’t know what to do with you!” Watch it when they use all three of your names. She’d just been scrubbing her fingers with a damp-wipe, which she now disposed of. I could smell the alcohol and began to suspect that this wasn’t a dream, after all.

  “Cut my porkchops for me for another few days?” I grinned up at my adorably freckled spouse. I couldn’t do much else; my left arm was now in a double-sized cast and I was lying on the gurney in the back of her van. I could tell, because she had a dozen pictures of our cat up on the ceiling for her younger patients to look at and enjoy. Through the windows and the wide-open back doors, I could see that we hadn’t left the crash site beside Greenway 200 yet. Somewhere, not very far away, I could hear several voices. One of them was Lucy’s, strong and vigorous. I said, “I’m happy to see you, too, honey.”

  Clarissa’s professional facade evaporated. She bent over me, wrapped her arms around me, and laid her smooth, pink cheek next to mine. A tear trickled between our faces; I wasn’t sure whose it was. I wanted to pat her somewhere, but a drippy-tube in my good arm and the brand-new exoskeleton on my left precluded it. Perhaps unromantically, I found myself thinking that this was definitely going to cause some self-defense problems. “I’m just so glad that you’re alive!” she exclaimed. “Will says he thinks they used something on you called a Stinger!”

  The hair on the back of my neck stirred and stood on end. It’s a very peculiar feeling, let me tell you. “Gee, I’m flattered all to hell, baby! The Mujahideen used those things in Afghanistan to shoot down Russian helicopters. I wonder how the Neova survived as well as it did.”

  She shook her head ruefully and said nothing.

  I went on. “But the real question is, ‘they’ who—or more to the point, can I get up now?” Clarissa started blubbering all over my chest, so I guessed the answer was no.

  I TURNED fifty-seven last May 12—happily, in a culture where years imply experience, not necessarily decrepitude. At my age, I have very few illusions remaining about myself. I’m a short, swarthy, slow-moving, heavyset man, clumsier of wit and tongue and trigger than I’d prefer, who stumbled onto the joys and terrors of absolute liberty rather late in life. I’ve long since made my adjustment to it—or at least I think I have—although I can still be surprised occasionally by things the average Confederate takes for granted. Home heating, water-heating, and electricity, for example, come from a little foot-locker sized box in your basement, and the guy with the coveralls and clipboard who comes to service it twice a year pays you, for the deuterium and tritium he takes away.

  I arrived here in LaPorte, in the North American Confederacy, entirely by accident and considerably worse for the wear, because I pushed the wrong button, pulled the wrong lever, or sat on the wrong knob during a brief but endless pistol fight in a physics laboratory at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado. I’d been investigating government involvement in the downtown Denver drive-by machine-gunning of a scientist that the government didn’t particularly want investigated. Shortly after landing here, I somehow won the heart of a brilliant and highly respected physician, Clarissa MacDougall Olson-Bear, who also happens to be a beautiful and voluptuous strawberry blond. To be absolutely truthful, I’ve never figured out exactly what Clarissa sees in me, and I’ve always been afraid to ask.

  On the other hand, I’ve always known why I love Clarissa. She consistently remains the most interesting person I’ve ever known—the face I’m always surprised and delighted to wake up to—and a study in contrasting stereotypes.

  To begin with, she’s gorgeous, five feet six inches tall, maybe 115 or 120 pounds, with a slender waist I can almost get my hands around, and a full complement of all the assets that go with it. If you just think of Mathilda May as she appeared in Lifeforce—no drooling, now—with that turned-up nose and those wonderful—er, cheekbones, only a little taller, with shoulderblade-length reddish blond hair and a scattering of freckles, you’ve got the picture. When I first met her she was thirty-three years old, but Confederate medicine keeps her looking an eternal twenty-five.

  On the other hand, Clarissa owns the equivalent of three or four Ph.D.s in various subjects related to Healing, and is continentally famous in her own profession as an innovative pharmacologist and surgeon. In my world, academic doctors and practicing physicians are separate populations. Here, those who do are regarded as the only ones fit to write and teach. And they also, miracle of miracles, make housecalls.

  At need, Clarissa can be harder-edged and more businesslike than any Las Vegas blackjack dealer, but with me, she’s more tender and sentimental than any female I’ve ever known. I bought her an imported copy of Dirty Dancing a few years ago (in some ways she also reminds me of Cynthia Rhodes), and it always makes her cry. She’s dedicated her life to life, to relieving suffering and fighting off death, but every day she carries a lethal hypersonic electric pistol on her person and knows how to use it.

  It’s an .11 caliber Webley.

  Up yours, Alan Alda.

  Clarissa—

  “Lookie what we found!”

  My romantic reverie was interrupted, not by Lucy, who’d made that noise, but by another noise, the unmistakable velvety roar of the local equivalent of a helicopter. Picture a set of bedsprings, thirty feet long, twenty feet wide, and six feet thick, stripped o
f foam and fabric, and chrome-plated. In the middle, like the egg in a toasted “bird’s nest,” place a Volkswagen Beetle-sized cabin with as much clear plastic underfoot as overhead—and enough cold fusion generator to run a hundred cars the size of my Neova.

  Make that my former Neova. I missed my car already.

  The thing soon touched down on a dozen or so insectile six-foot legs, just a few yards from Clarissa’s hovervan. The original medical squad, Francis and Snodderly, had been dismissed with many thanks and a reasonable gratuity when Lucy had amiably refused their further services and my personal physician had laid claim to me. Now the swirly bright red lights went out, indicating that the bedspring part of the flying machine was no longer charged with the several hundred thousand volts that kept it in the air. The underside canopy popped open, Will Sanders climbed down the folding steps, ducked beneath the structure, and emerged into the harsh prairie sunlight.

  Holding on to her hairdo, Lucy met him halfway. He held his hands out to show her something. That’s when she’d hollered at Clarissa and me. An instant later, I’d sat up and was butt-scooting my way to the end of the gurney, greatly resenting the needle in my arm. Clarissa pursed her lips—not quite making a little growl like Marge Simpson—but she knew me. More important, she knew that I knew her. She was a worse patient than I was, especially when the prospect for some kind of action presented itself. She pulled the tube out and helped me up and out of the van.

  Meanwhile, the swirly red warning lights went on again as the much-helmeted and darkly visored pilot of Will’s aerial taxi—giving Lucy an enthusiastic wave and receiving one in return—applied the megavoltage once again to its complicated-looking wireworks. Air molecules, ionized by contact with the upper elements of the machine’s openwork structure, were drawn at an extremely high velocity to the oppositely charged elements below, bumbling along with them a whole lot of nonionized molecules that acted just like the propwash of a helicopter. The machine rose switly on the column of moving air it had created without any pesky moving parts, started moving forward, as well, and was gone.

  Meanwhile, Will was proudly dangling a plastic baggie in front of my face.

  “Hold it still, goddammit, will you?”

  “Sorry, Win.” I bent and squinted, thankful all over again for the corrective therapies that gave me vision that was as good as it had been in my teenage years, both up close and far away. “It’s money,” I said, and so it was, a silky-looking bill about midway in size between what I used to carry around in the States and the really big money people used in my nineteenth century. It wasn’t just the size that was weird, or the colors—mostly gold and brown—but the engravings:

  This is to certify that, on deposit in the Petroleum Bank of New Orleans, Federated States of Texas, payable to the bearer of this note upon demand, there is one gallon of AAA grade low-sulphur petroleum.

  On the other side, where it says “One Dollar” on the U.S. notes I’m familiar with, it said “One Crockett d’Huile,” instead, and there was a portrait of ol’ Davy himself in the middle, holding on to ol’ Betsy, but looking a whole lot more like ol’ Ross Perot than ol’ Fess Parker. By now Clarissa was behind me, her arms around me, peering over my shoulder.

  “Do you think it might have anything to do with the trainwreck?” she asked.

  “Do Gypsies wear do-rags?” Will asked picaresquely. “One of my people found it anchored down by a fist-sized rock about where we figure they parked their getaway car.”

  “Under a rock?” I shook my head—it was about all I could do. “Then how the hell did you find it?”

  He grinned. “I thought you’d ask that. It was easy—we caught a bright flash of metal from the air. This was sitting on top of the rock, like a beacon.” He held up another plastic baggie. Will and I had introduced a lot of revolutionary concepts to peacekeeping in the Confederacy, among them the idea that no two sets of fingerprints are alike, and that evidence of that nature should be preserved. This baggie contained a big gold coin. It was very slightly larger in diameter than a silver dollar, but a trifle thinner. On one side was a picture of a guy with the name “Houston” underneath, and on the other side, it proclaimed itself to be “One Gold Samoleon.”

  Money with a sense of humor.

  On an unembossed flat space right beside the portrait (I assumed) of Sam Houston, someone had left—apparently on purpose—a big fat, perfect thumbprint.

  10: BEAUTIFUL, BEAUTIFUL TEXAS

  Choose your enemies carefully: you’ll probably be known much better and far longer for who they were, than for anything else you ever managed to accomplish.

  —Memoirs of Lucille G. Kropotkin

  The flat, hot yellow countryside blurred past at more than three hundred miles per hour. Overhead, one of the mile-long dirigibles we’d talked about with Olongo was making the same speed on its way south to Mexico City.

  “The Federated States of Texas,” Lucy mused, examining the two evidence baggies for maybe the fortieth time. “A universe where New Orleans is a part of the Lone Star Republic an’ the banks issue gold coins an’ oil-based paper currency. Shucks, it sounds almost as good as the Confederacy!”

  “With engraved portraits of good ol’ Sam Houston and Davy Crockett themselves on the money, to boot,” I added. “Anybody ever hear of anyplace like that?”

  Nobody said anything. Then, just to be different, everybody said nothing. We all knew about lots of different alternate continua that had been stumbled across in this latterday Age of Discovery. It was the favorite subject of the Confederate media. And to be objective, these were entire universes being discovered, complete with billions of galaxies, trillions of star systems, quadrillions of planets, and zillions of people. The whole deal was a lot more important than anything Christopher Columbus or Neil Armstrong had done. They’d only found a couple of continents by accident, respectively, and set foot on a big, cold, useless ball of rock. But the number of new universes seemed to be rising every day, and nobody could know about all of them. Nevertheless, I thought that this might possibly be something new. Like almost everybody, I’d heard of various independent Texases being discovered here and there—in fact they seemed to be a little more common than Texases annexed by the United States or Mexico—but I’d never heard of a Texas that included the crescent city or issued oil certificates.

  “I hope the cooking is still good there,” I muttered absently. On one of our many second honeymoons, Clarissa and I had eaten red snapper, and flounder stuffed with some kind of crab and shrimp herb thing in Galveston. The memory still made my mouth water.

  And at the same time, Will said, “You know, that’s not a bad idea, is it?”

  “The cooking in Texas?” Lucy asked. “I guarantee you won’t find any better in the solar system!”

  “No, Lucy,” Will told her, “an oil-based currency. Hell, they sometimes call it ‘black gold,’ don’t they?”

  “That they do, Willy,” Lucy replied. “An’ you can purchase oil certificates, or wheat certificates or tuna certificates, or any other kinda certificates y’want, right here—in LaPorte, that is—at any bank, if y’know what to ask for.”

  I saw Will file away the mental note he’d made about that, and made a small bet with myself that one of his wives handled the family accounts. Most likely Mary-Beth. I’d learned about oil certificates my very first week in the Confederacy.

  We were barrelling—no oil-based pun intended—up Greenway 200 again, this time in Clarissa’s medical hovervan, toward LaPorte. I’d been allowed by my physician to sit upright beside her, feeling both ridiculous and helpless with my recast arm. From time to time she patted my knee reassuringly. In the back, along for the ride, were our friends Lucy and Will. He was officially in charge, but I decided where we were headed, simply by blurting it out.

  “Why not give Deejay a jingle?” I asked my lovely bride. “Tell her we’ll be seeing her in a few minutes and that we’ll want to talk to her partner Ooloorie, as well. They’ve don
e a lot of poking around with that invention of theirs. Maybe they know about this Federated States of Texas.”

  I LOOKED AROUND. Somehow, the place felt like home. This was the very room, after all—this very paratronics laboratory—from which first contact with my homeworld had been made, in 1986. It was also the laboratory in which, only two years later, my first private professional case in the Confederacy had resolved itself, and the murderer of Seaton Mott had met his unspeakable fate. There should have been a bronze plaque hanging somewhere.

  “The Federated States of Texas,” Deejay Thorens mused. She peered intently at the plastic baggie she held before her highly decorative face. This was her lab, situated in a sunny, landscaped corner of the main campus of LaPorte University, Ltd., located just across good old Confederation Boulevard from the very first bit of LaPorte I’d ever seen, however blurrily, a mile-long private park I’m not even sure has a name. Deejay had gotten up from her regulation swivel chair when we’d come in, and politely offered it to Lucy who’d shaken her head, trying not to bridle at what she privately considered an insult. So we were all standing around or leaning against various pieces of scientific furniture, me remembering with a little trepidation that that was how I’d ended up in the Confederacy. “Crockett d’Huiles and gold Samoleons—quick, somebody call Roger Rabbit!” She handed both baggies back to Will. “It all sounds very interesting, Win, very intriguing, but I’m sorry. I’ve never heard of the place.”