I peered down at the field. “I think you’re right!” The truth is, you can follow the game a lot easier on the’Com, but there’s still nothing quite like being here, where the guy in the seat behind you can drop pickle relish down the back of your neck and the players look like ants.
Tompkins was pitching the first inning for the Patriots. Aurand was the other team’s best batsman—the Patriots were in the third game of a four-game series with the Mexico City Aztecs (they’d won the first and the Aztecs had won the second)—and they’d better not be trying to walk Aurand. Confederate rules penalized an intentional walk by automatically turning it into a run, which is all right by me. I’ve always hated the bad sportsmanship of intentional walks. It was a rule I strongly approved of. I guess it goes without saying that no pitcher in his right mind ever hits a batter on purpose, in a civilization where they fight duels.
Just then Aurand smacked a ground ball into what suddenly seemed like a yawning chasm between shortstop and third. They scrambled wildly for it, but by the time the Patriots in the outfield got their act together, Aurand was standing on second, stripping off his batting gloves and waggling his eyebrows jauntily at the pitcher, who glowered back at him.
“Looks like it’s gonna be one of those days for the home team, Winnie!” Lucy hollered over the general noise. I agreed with her. The Aztecs were tough, but I was pretty sure the rumor about their using obsidian knives to carve out the hearts of teams they’d defeated was exaggeration.
I split open the tail of a crawdad, thumbed out the tender, savory meat, dipped it into a little cup of horseradish and ketchup and devoured it. God, it was delicious! Bear one, crawdads nothing. Licking a little salt off the plastic rim before transferring my attention to the straw, I took a long drink of my margarita. How could it be any better than this?
Confederate baseball—although at first glance it looks exactly like the game I grew up mostly ignoring back in the States—is as different here as anything else is on this side of the brilliant blue circle of the probability broach, and just as similar, too. As Walt Whitman observed in several worlds, it’s our game, and it has a lot to tell about us as a civilization, for those who are willing to pay attention.
What makes the North American pastime different from baseball in the U.S.A.? Well for starters, there’s the happy fact that artificial playing surfaces and the designated hitter are completely unknown. (Attention Kevin Costner, they don’t allow pinch runners, either.) They’ve never heard of metal bats; the big controversy is between those that are turned on a lathe and those that are grown in a field and picked like canteloupe.
But the difference that makes a difference is that everybody does everything. Nobody specializes. It works like this: whoever pitches the first inning, catches in the second inning, plays first base in the third inning, second base in the fourth inning, and third base in the fifth inning. In the sixth inning the same guy plays shortstop—with the rest of the team rotating behind him exactly the way he did—and then proceeds to left field in the seventh inning, center field in the eighth inning, and right field in the ninth inning. If there happen to be extra innings, he pitches again in the tenth, then catches in the eleventh, then plays first base in the twelfth, and so on. Not much of a difference, you think? Well let me tell you it’s a large enough difference to maintain my interest in a way that Major League Baseball never did at home. Instead of a multibillion dollar corporate exercise for a lot of overtrained, overpaid one-noters—including a stable full of infantile, nasty-tempered primadonna pitchers, almost invariably acquired at the expense of a respectable offensive lineup—it’s a glorious romp for generalists where victory goes to the best all-round players. Believe me, there are still plenty of heroic catches and thrilling homers knocked clean out of the park. The double play is every bit as heartbreakingly beautiful here as it is in any universe. Everybody’s strengths and weaknesses are displayed by turn, and there are no full-time catchers to bravely destroy their knees and grow old before their time.
The boys of this world’s summer still wear knickers—and those cylindrical baseball caps with stripes around them. Pitching doesn’t tend to be as high-speed or sleight-of-handy, so the scores would be higher—if they’d ever moved the pitcher’s mound back, from forty-five feet to sixty feet six inches, which they never got around to here. (There’s always talk of moving it to sixty-three feet, seven and two-thirds inches, the exact midpoint between home and second, but all it ever comes to is talk.) I guess you could say truthfully that Confederate baseball is a batter’s game and that’s all right by me, too. The best defense is a good offense, after all.
The second Aztec batter, former San Francisco Vigilante Mark Valverde, struck out ignominiously (three pitches, three swings, three strikes—sometimes you just have days like that; his average was .378) and Aurand had stolen third before I split my second crawdad open, steaming and fragrant in the noonday sun. The crawdad guy—wearing a name tag neatly inscribed E.C. and an impeccably tailored white coat—had promised to come talk with Lucy and me once he’d sold off the rest of what he was carrying. I asked him to save the last one for me.
Now the radio girls (yeah, that’s how they do it here, and always have; you can hear them more clearly and understand them better) were chattering about the third Aztec batter to come to the plate, Mike “Dugout” Dugger. A big, husky, prematurely gray fellow. Dugger swung the heaviest bat on his team—maybe in the league—and on days when Valverde had better luck at the plate, often swatted himself and a couple of other runners home. Personally, I’d always wondered why they didn’t bat Dugger fourth, and get in an occasional grand slam. However, the reasoning processes of baseball managers are something that have never made very much sense to me. Twenty years ago, at a rare Denver Bears game, I told a friend that chimpanzees could probably do it better, but since I arrived in the Confederacy, I’ve discovered that they can’t.
Dugger let the first pitch go by as the ballpark’s invisible lasers scanned it from about fifty-seven different angles, measured its shape and speed and the direction it rotated, and called it a strike. The crowd sort of sighed and grew quieter. The batter settled down a little, hunched over, swung hard at the next one—a slider—and missed again. Strike two.
Lasers? Robo-umpires? Well, like everybody else, I hated the umpire, although I never thought much about it until I got here, where they don’t have umpires anymore. People simply got tired of bad calls until in one game—Mexico versus Boise at Mexico—after six or seven stinkers in a row, the fans started sort of running in place where they sat (I’ve seen the video), making enough noise for an erupting volcano, and setting up vibrations that cracked the foundation of Montezuma Field from the nosebleed seats to the third sub-basement, and cost the owners several million gold ounces to repair. Umpires were replaced by electronics in the very next game.
Dugger suddenly raised a hand, stepped out of the batter’s box, rubbed something on the bat, picked up some dirt and rubbed it on his hands, adjusted his antique cap and the crotch of his pants (baseball players’ union rules require it, I believe), and finally stepped back into the box.
I was glad I wasn’t down on the field. Some purists may not like hearing it, but I’ve never particularly enjoyed being hot, and I’d started going to games at None of the Above Park because—believe it or not—it’s air-conditioned. Sure, it’s wide open to the sky, but cold air tends to pool in any container, open-topped or not. It was replaced constantly in any event by a titanic bank of fusion reactors (Clarissa and I had taken the tour once) beneath the stadium. When the weather got cold—this is a civilization that heats its highways and streets to remove snow and ice—they managed to warm the place up, using radiant projectors, complicated air curtains, and electrically warmed seats, so that we got an extra six weeks in the two hundred-game season.
You can afford two hundred games when you aren’t wearing out pitchers’ arms or catchers’ knees.
Now the crowd settled down even
more. This kind of moment always reminds me of professional billiards or a golf tournament. I’m told it can be very different in other places—San Francisco, Chicago, Mexico City—but what I love most about the game in LaPorte is the quiet—or what the quiet means. It means the spectators are taking in the essence of the game, the awesome skill, the indomitable spirit, the … oh hell, I don’t know. It means that they’re all really paying attention—unlike a herd of brain-dead football fans making enough noise to raise Bob Dole.
Just then, the catcher called time and ran out to the mound to have one of those conversations catchers have with their pitchers. Speaking of pitchers, from the corner of my eye, I saw the margarita guy coming my way. Through my straw I made the traditional slurping sounds in the bottom of my tall plastic glass, then held it up for him to see. He turned out to be a different guy than the one who’d sold me my first margarita, and by happy coincidence, the other guy I wanted to see. As he bent across Lucy to hand me my drink and accept several somewhat fishy-smelling coins, I asked, “Jefferson ‘Motherboard’ Weller?” I suppose it was a stupid question, since his name tag said “M-board.”
Heavily bearded, with longish, curly hair and wire-rimmed glasses, he glanced down at my companion: “Hi there, Lucy.” Then at me: “Who wants to know?”
“Edward William Bear, private detective. I’d give you one of my cards, but …” I held up my collapsing tray of crayfish and gave him an apologetic expression.
“That’s okay,” he told me. His voice was extraordinarily deep. “I know who you are: Lieutenant Edward William “Win” Bear, the first victim through the broach.”
Win Bear, the not very private detective, apparently. I began to tell him that I wanted to have a talk with him when it was more convenient. Suddenly, he stood up to get out of our field of vision. He was just in time. Dugger had belted the horsehide hard and the damned thing was still rocketing upward and outward toward the left field corner. Of course Aurand was already beating feet on his way home, but nobody was watching him do it. The little white sphere that had everybody’s attention rose into the flawlessly blue sky, rose and started to level off—Booong!
It hit the foul pole—which, rumor had it, had been especially constructed and tuned to make that noise. Dugger casually tossed his bat to one side and began jogging around the bases, with a surprising amount of away-game cheering to help him along. Fans in LaPorte are nothing if not generously appreciative of anybody’s sportsmanlike skills, even when they’re exhibited by the opposing team. I was a sucker that way for good defensive plays, and often find myself cheering for the other side—before I slap myself in the forehead and say, “Do’h!”
Three Aztec batters up, one out, and the score was already Mexico City two, LaPorte zip. Ah, well, back to work: I made arrangements with Motherboard to talk to him during the seventh inning, when he had a break. Now if only the Patriots could get one.
“YOU HAVE TO understand,” said Motherboard, “I’m from a different world entirely.”
He was reacting to something the crawdad guy had said. At age forty-six, Weller was an old acquaintance of the Wizard’s. Both were engineers—he was software, Max was hardware—trying valiantly to catch up with the dauntingly advanced Confederacy. When I’d come here, the “science” of detectiving was in its infancy, but I could see how the fact that it was fifty to a hundred years ahead in almost every other endeavor might be discouraging to somebody in a technical field. In the meantime, Motherboard wasn’t too proud to sell margaritas to the crowd at None of the Above Park.
“My wife and I—” he said, “she was an Internet columnist and a self-defense instructor—we left the States more or less in disgust.”
“Disgust?” I raised my eyebrows as I started on my second tray of crawdads.
He nodded. “That’s right. When they rammed a Constitutional amendment through to permit an underage John F. Kennedy, Jr.’s election to the presidency, succeeding his father Jack, his uncle Robert, and his other uncle Edward.”
“Oh, yuck!” both the crawdad guy and I exclaimed at the same time. Lucy looked a question at us.
“I’ll explain later,” I told her.
“I wanna hear that,” the crawdad guy remarked.
We were at the top of the seventh inning, break time for both my subjects, and Derek Lile—a player they’d just brought over from some minor league in Wales, of all places—was pitching. The score was a humiliating five to nothing, Aztecs. I’d have turned my old fedora inside out and worn it on the pointy top of my head if I’d thought it would do any good.
The four of us had adjourned to the most interesting part of None of the Above Park, a big, airy concrete cave under the cheap seats, where folks could drink a beer and watch the game while leaning on a chest-high wall that looked out over the field. Or they could sit at a table, order a three-course meal, and watch the game on one of several’Com screens hanging from the ceiling. Going to the park to watch the game on the’Com: it had taken me a long time to learn that baseball in any world is a social event in which the game itself is the center, but not the whole.
“E. C.” turned out to be Eads Carneval, forty-one, once the well-heeled, well-tailored chairman of something he called the Zeno Foundation, a quasi-freemarket Wall Street style think-tank financed by kelp-oil billionaire, Howard Hughes, Jr. Lucy was helping me interview these guys—in theory—but her attention tended to wander to the wall or the’Com monitors.
“Permit me to be wholly candid with you about my past,” Carneval offered. “I am a criminal. In a culture that executed Michael Millken, I faced life in prison for breaking a statute prohibiting ‘undemocratic and discriminatory selection of personal investments for purposes of profit.’”
Weller’s jaw dropped. The two had swapped their stocks-intrade and were enjoying pond lobster and loony limeade, just like I was. Lucy didn’t seem to have much appetite, for a change, and with the way the Patriots were playing today, who could blame her? “You mean you were supposed to deliberately choose losing securities?” Weller asked incredulously.
“Only a few,” Carneval sneered. “Just to be ‘fair.’ Naturally, no one in or out of the S.E.C. ever defined”a few”—it seemed to change continually, depending on who it was they wanted to get. Given the opportunity offered me by your Investors Liberation Cadre—Millken’s Marauders, they called themselves—I gratefully fled to this world, in preference to ‘getting off lightly’ in mine, with ‘only’ one hundred thousand hours of public service!”
Eleven years—provided he didn’t stop to sleep.
Lucy wiggled my elbow, pointing to the’Com. For the first time in the game, a Patriots pitcher had struck out the side. Zoughi, Chen, and Kearny had fallen to what tomorrow’s sports sites were boringly certain to call “Lile’s Wiles.” Now it was the home team’s turn at bat again, and like everybody here, I wondered—without expecting much—how they’d do.
Telling people how you got to the Confederacy was the small-talk that opened any conversation among immigrants. It reminded me of that song that Debbie Reynolds sang in How the West Was Won, “What Was Your Name in the States?” Of course they both knew my story—E. C. told me he’d heard that they were going to make a miniseries about it on some’Com channel or other. The first thing that went through my mind was that I was damned glad they didn’t have laws to discourage duelling here.
“But what I really wanted to ask both of you,” I told them as soon as my blood pressure had gotten back to normal, “is whether, in the import businesses you run, you’ve ever sold copies of motion pictures like Gone with the Wind, It Happened One Night, Teacher’s Pet, Mogambo—”
“Say, isn’t that the African one with Ava Gardner?” E. C. inquired appreciatively.
“And Grace Kelly, if you like’em freeze-dried.” Weller shook his head. “Personally, gentlemen, I prefer Bettie Page.” That was right. She’d made a movie or two here with the Gable I knew—Hey, I knew Clark Gable! She’d also made movies with Mike M
orrison and Archie Leach.
“Personally,” I told them, “if I had to choose between Ava Gardner and Bettie Page, I’d shoot myself to avoid the stress—and I really prefer blonds.” Bettie Page and Ava Gardner were the exceptions to my preference for blonds—and for that matter, so was Mathilda May, to whom vast armies of men, young and old alike, shall and must be forever grateful.
“I’ll say he does!” Lucy told them. “Say, isn’t that Jorge Aunon comin’ up t’bat, Winnie?” Aunon was Cuban, as were many other baseball players in every version of reality I knew about. Here, Cuba had been a part of the Confederacy for a long time and Fidel Castro had been a major league player, in the mid-170s, instead of a crazy Third World dictator. He was still active, I’d heard, managing a farm team under an all-weather dome in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.
“So how about it?” I insisted. At that precise moment, Aunon “belted one upstairs” as they say, giving him—and the Patriots—a solo homer and spoiling the Aztecs’ chances of a shutout.
“Is that all this is about, Lieutenant?” E. C. asked, completely ignoring the wondrous event that had just transpired and looking disappointed. “Movies? I’d heard that you were investigating the tube-train wreck.”
Weller disagreed, but shared his disappointment. “I’d heard it was the Old Endicott Building explosion.”
“Sorry,” I told them both. “Our very own Greater LaPorte militia is handling both of them. With me, it’s just the movies.”
Suddenly, Lucy’s attention was distracted once again, by something at the end of the concrete cave away from the field. “Lookie there, Winnie! Who does that varmint remind you of?”
I looked at the varmint she was refraining from pointing at. “No ‘remind’ to it—that’s Bennett Williams!” Except that the man’s taste in clothing seemed to have deserted him. He was wearing a loose denim vest over a loose denim jacket, with baggy denim trousers and what can only be described as platform combat boots. He carried a folded denim parasol. Everything, even the boots, was covered with snapped, zippered, or Velcroed pockets. The boots—the most conservative items he had on—were fluorescent lime green.