I laughed again. I couldn’t help myself. I was surprised as hell to discover that I liked this extremely strange woman with her severe Walk-Like-an-Egyptian hairstyle and her buzzy, slightly accented voice. Assuming that she meant to be funny, Galarynd had a sense of humor I could appreciate, wry and self-deprecating. Even better, Clarissa and I had only had to walk about twenty feet from Suprynowicz’s General Store to get here.
Speaking of Clarissa, she had another cup of tea steaming in front of her, this time some rare variety of clover blossom, atop an almost useless table about the size of my hat, covered with an elaborate lace tablecloth. Me, I was abstaining, and thinking about my bladder more than I should.
“I fled the Glorious People’s Republic of California,” Galarynd was serious, now, and apparently unaware that anybody had ever uttered those words as a joke, “when the vitamins, amino acids, and other dietary supplements I’d sold by mail order for ten years were suddenly asserted by the Food and Drug Enforcement Administration to be controlled substances—and unauthorized sale or possession made a ‘L.I.P. Service’ offense.”
“L.I.P. Service?” Clarissa asked. It was interesting to watch my darling learning from somebody besides me just how perversely people with uniforms and funny hats and briefcases could treat one another in places like I’d come from—and what a difference simply arming everybody could make.
Galarynd ground out her cigarette, pulled the butt from the holder, and immediately replaced it with a fresh cigarette, which I lit for her. “Life-Indenture to the People.”
I shuddered. Somehow, it sounded worse than Carneval’s one hundred thousand hours of public service. Clarissa said something about reinstituting slavery.
“Perhaps so, but it was also a L.I.P. Service offense to call it that.” Our hostess observed the shock on Clarissa’s face. “My dear, you think that’s bad? My husband—he’s from a different world than I am altogether; I met him here in the Zone—he was compelled to flee for his very life during his world’s beastly Edward M. Kennedy Administration.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Because?” She flicked an ash into the ashtray. “Because he was a TV standup comedian who created the popular catchphrase—generically describing any lost cause or foregone conclusion—‘Dead before she hit the water.’” I started laughing again, while Clarissa looked at me as if I’d grown an extra nose. Part of it was remembering a wonderful fake Volkswagen ad that National Lampoon had printed in the seventies—and been forced by the car company to withdraw—pointing out that if Teddy Kennedy had been driving a Beetle, which floats, he’d be in the White House today. I excused myself and told Galarynd about the ad. Apparently she thought it was funny, too, which made me think about Jessica Rabbit.
“What does he do?” I asked. “Your husband, I mean. Now.”
She took another long drag on her cigarette. I pulled one out myself and lit it, not knowing how well cigars and tea rooms might go together. “Why, he runs Salmoneus & Quark over on Suter Street.” She pointed a thumb over her shoulder. “‘Acts of Capitalism between Consenting Adults.’”
“I think I’ve heard that slogan somewhere before. You import tea, I assume. What does your husband import?”
She released smoke, uninhaled, from her mouth and breathed it in again through her nose—French inhaling, I think it’s called. “I import much more than tea: teapots, teacups, tea cozies, samovars, espresso machines—”
“And your husband?” I insisted.
“Anything that comes to hand, from microscopic test weights for scientific scales to—well, he imported an entire English Channel hovercraft once.”
“Hardware,” I asserted. “Any movies?”
“Movies? Yes. Would you care for any more tea, Clarissa?”
Clarissa shook her head. “No, thank you. Movies like Gone with the Wind?”
“Yes, that’s a good one!” Galarynd brightened at the memory. “It always makes me cry. Do you suppose that Rhett eventually went back to Scarlett?”
I said, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. Does your husband the comedian ever sell or rent movies like Gone with the Wind to ‘Com channels?”
A puzzled look. “Why, yes, he does. Why? Surely there’s no law against it. I’ll have you know that we both worked in Confederate sweatshops, four hours a day, three days a week, saving copper coins to get where we are, and—”
“Thank you! Thank you!” I wanted to kiss her, or jump up and shout “Shazam!,” but Clarissa was there, nobody seems to remember Captain Marvel anymore, and I certainly didn’t want anybody to think I remembered Gomer Pyle.
When we got back out to Clarissa’s medical van, parked at the curb in front of Suprynowicz’s General Store, there was a note lying on the passenger seat.
TOO DANGEROUS LAST NIGHT
DIDN’T DROP CAR—THEY DID
TONIGHT 10 O’CLOCK
CORNER TRENCHARD & GORDON
Handprinted in the center of the sheet, nice and symmetrical. I don’t know what High Colonic would have done if I hadn’t left the window open a crack. Windshield wiper? Except for certain old-timers like Lucy’s Thornycrofts, which have big round glass centrifugal window disks like an oceangoing ship, the windshield-wiping systems on most hovercraft are electrostatic, with no moving parts you can slip a piece of paper under.
SALMONEUS & QUARK’S on Suter Street turned out to be right around the block behind the Golden Apple. If they’d wanted to, Galarynd and her husband could have stepped out for a smoke together in the alley—although there’s nobody to say you can’t smoke indoors in the Confederacy. By the time we got there and found a parking place, I’d faxed High Colonic’s note to Will—more civilized than phoning him, I thought—and C-mailed Lucy’s’Com account, which she could access wherever she happened to be, from down below the Lubbock caprock to Tombaugh Station on Pluto.
We walked in on an argument.
“And I say you can’t tell the Roosevelt generation anything at all!” somebody shouted. “They lived through every bit of it, the Great Depression, World War Two, Korea, the Cold War, and never understood a single goddamned minute! Back in the 1930s they all got together and decided to carve themselves a great big, thick, quivering, juicy slice of us to feed on in their old age! They sold their liberty—and ours right along with it—at garage-sale prices, for the illusion of security!”
That from the guy standing behind the counter, a slim, wiry, blond-crewcutted individual between forty-five and fifty. He looked familiar, somehow. For a moment he made me think of Crocodile Dundee. The other guy, presumably attempting to be a customer, raised both his hands in self-defense. “Don’t have an epiphany, man! I only said that our parents’ and grandparents’ generations made a lot of sacrifices so that—”
“Yeah,” said the proprietor, “and we’re the sacrifices they made! I say to hell with them! I say let’s repudiate the national debt. And I say let the vicious old bastards freeze in the dark like they deserve!”
So it was Standard Politico-Economic Argument Number 27-A. I’d heard a lot of this kind of stuff down here in the Zone. These guys all reminded me of Civil War buffs—make that War between the States buffs, or even War of Northern Aggression buffs—arguing themselves hoarse over battles that had been finished, and the grass grown back, more than a century before they were born. This particular pair of individuals was safe here in the North American Confederacy now, where none of that stuff mattered anymore. Who gave a rat’s ass about the national debt?
Clarissa looked at me quizzically, probably wondering if this was another thing like the Volkswagen ad. I shrugged and bellied up to the counter.
“You rent movies, here?” I asked.
He looked me over. “I don’t rent ‘em, friend, I sell’em. Eight millimeter celluloid, sixteen millimeter, seventy millimeter, VHS, DVD, Beta, Framnold, Acquiz, High-eight, Mpeg, or Laser-Disc?”
“Framnold?” I shrugged. “Have you got Gone with the Wind?”
“That all depends on
what you want,” the guy said. “You looking for Clark Gable, Errol Flynn, Robert Cummings, Jeremy Hartshorn, or Nigel Wallenburg?”
I laughed. “Nigel Wallenburg? Jeremy Hartshorn? Never heard of either of them. I may take you up on the Errol Flynn version, though, sometime.” I showed him one of my cards. “What I really want to know is where you get these things from. I mean, who drags them through the broach. Nobody’s in any trouble, I just have a couple of clients who want to know.”
He folded his arms. “Well you have got a hell of a nerve, haven’t you? Look at it from my point of view. If I told everybody where I got my stock in trade, then anybody could get them, and then where would I be? Answer me that!”
“Where would you be?” I repeated. “Well, I guess you could be getting your ass sued by people who have an intellectual property right involved.”
“I thought you said,” he leaned forward on the counter, “that nobody’s in any trouble.”
“I lied. Look: I’ll tell you the truth—”
He raised his eyebrows and widened his eyes in mock astonishment. “That would be refreshing.”
“Okay, I deserved that.” I tried reasonable. “The fact is, nobody wants to go to court about this if they don’t have to. The process isn’t any pleasanter here than it is back at home.”
He laughed. “You’re tellin’ me—back home, they stake the loser out over a fire-anthill.”
I frowned. “You made that up.”
“Yeah, I did.” He laughed again. “Now we’re even.”
I’d forgotten that this guy had been a standup comic on TV. I hadn’t mentioned anything that his wife had told me, because I didn’t want a domestic disturbance on my conscience. Now I wished I’d let Clarissa start this one.
Apparently, she’d read my mind. “Excuse me, mister—”
“Yosemite—Sam Yosemite. And don’t say a word, it’s a damned coincidence I didn’t know about until I got here. See, where I come from, all forms of animation are illegal. It’s called the Bambi Law, and from what I’ve heard about other universes since I got here, I almost approve of it.”
He turned a hand over, indicating the man he’d been arguing with, a tall, husky, tanned fellow of about forty, prematurely gray, with about a week’s beard showing. “This is my good friend, Tomas Godinez,” Yosemite told us. I started to offer my hand and my name, but Yosemite pressed on before I could.
“Tom here was a famous personal weapons expert, and the author of many books and hundreds of articles and columns for shooting and hunting magazines. He even had his own reloading show, on satellite TV. But then he went and exiled himself from something called the North American Union, by writing an article for Modern Machineguns calling the statuatory infallibility of the Supreme Court into question.”
Tom lifted his eyebrows and grinned modestly at us. “It’s true, it’s all true. I wanted to call them perverts in black dresses, too, but my editor wouldn’t let me.”
“I suppose my wife’s already told you how I got here,” Sam went on. “Just like Andy to preempt a good story. Now what were you going to say, lady?”
Clarissa sighed and shrugged. “The people we’re working for feel, well, belittled or diminished by some of the movies being shown on the’Com, movies that have otherworld versions of themselves in them, in roles that embarrass them.”
“Or that they didn’t get paid for,” Sam responded. “Tell me about it! I was watching the’Com the other day and saw a version of myself—different name, though, altogether—in a ridiculous thing called Space Precinct. Fake aliens with enormous buggy eyes. The writing was surprisingly not bad, though. I wonder what the guy was getting for—”
I knew I’d seen him—or someone like him—before.
“Excuse me, Mr. Yosemite,” Clarissa cleared her throat. I could tell she was annoyed. She was a big Space Precinct fan. She must have recognized him from the moment we entered the store. “We need to know where these movies come from. Maybe we could work things out so all parties are satisfied.”
“Believe me, lady, all parties are never satisfied,” he told her, writing something on the card I’d handed him. “However, because you’re both gainfully employed elsewhere—I recognize Win Bear when I see him, Lieutenant, and his good-looking wife, Clarissa the Healer—and just possibly to avoid getting my ass sued off, here’s where I get most of my new stuff. Just don’t tell’em I was the one who told you, okay?”
“Mum’s the word,” I said. The address was farther into the Zone than I’d ever been before. I was supposd to talk to someone called Mickey Stonesoup.
“‘Shuddup’ would be a lot more like it, friend,” Yosemite replied amiably.
I grinned, thanked him, and left with Clarissa. There were two messages waiting for us when we got to the car. The first was from Lucy, a C-mail saying that she’d gotten the message I’d sent her, had her hands full where she was, and wouldn’t be home in time for the appointment.
The second message was a video recording of Mary-Beth Sanders, looking tear-stained and uncharacteristically rattled. “Win, Clarissa! I can’t find your personal’Com numbers! I hope this message gets to you right away! Will is … Will’s been shot!” She looked frantically from side to side, then at the camera again. “Please come to the house as soon as you can!”
I glanced at my watch and the timestamp on the screen. She’d called three minutes ago.
“SUPPOSE THE BADGUYS think they’ve killed you?” I asked. I stood on tiptoe, looking past and over Mary-Beth, Fran, and Clarissa, all elbows and decorative backsides, wielding bandages and sponges and surgical instruments and electronic goodies, while Will—fully as conscious as I was, albeit crankier—tried to have a conversation with me.
When Clarissa and I had roared up to the front at 625 Genet Place, across the street from our own home, the pair of big wooden doors at each end of the arched entryway had been shut. Although I’d never truly gotten used to it, LaPorte, the whole Confederacy, in fact, was one of those rare, wonderful places—sort of like Trinidad when my mother was growing up—where you could leave your doors unlocked all day and all night. I’d always hoped to keep it that way here, so this was a dismaying surprise. Two very pregnant young women had greeted us with a four-barrel salute, a pistol of some kind in each hand. Will we’d found upstairs where they’d reluctantly left him, flat on his back in bed, sealed up with emergency plastic sheeting, and complaining to his wives, and anybody else who would listen, that he had work to do and wasn’t hurt that badly.
“She came right to the door,” he explained, as Clarissa, working under a pain-suppression field, extracted the first bullet. It clinked melodically in the enameled pan that Fran was holding. Mary-Beth just stood there looking worried. “Collecting for the Spaceman’s Fund,” Will went on. “When I reached into my pocket, she shot me. Several times, I think—it was a little hard to keep track. A little old lady with—”
“With a hat and a shawl and a basket, tra la,” I finished for him. This was getting to be ridiculous, I thought, imagining how we’d deal with this in the States—a city-wide roundup of little old ladies with big hats and shawls. “I assume she got away while you were busy bleeding on your doorstep. So how come you’re still alive to tell us about it?”
“Kevlar,” he explained. “After last night’s merriment, probably about the same time Clarissa was out shopping for her Marlene Dietrich outfit, I was down in the Zone myself, looking for Kevlar. You know it’s absolutely amazing what some people manage to bring with them through the broach.”
“And even more amazing,” I agreed, “what they think is important.”
I examined the battered vest. It looked like it had been worked over with a small caliber submachinegun—we could always put an APB out on little Mary-Lou, I supposed—or a 12-gauge shotgun spewing #4 buckshot. The damned thing brought back memories I hadn’t realized were horrible until now.
“You know, I hate this piece of crap,” I informed him, meaning the vest. “D
on’t get me wrong, my friend. I’m overjoyed that it worked for you, but this thing wouldn’t have protected you from that plummeting Hupmobile or whatever it was, any more than it will protect you from an electric pistol like Clarissa’s, or a laser. Besides, I’ve always thought that we were a lot nicer—we cops—before we started wearing the stuff.”
Will winced a little as the second bullet came out—Clarissa immediately did something to the pain suppressor—but he managed to snort an old familiar snort. “Was the point to be nice, or to enforce the law?”
“It was to keep the peace, my friend,” I said. “How can you even pretend to protect people once making them afraid of you becomes part of the job?”
Will tried to sit up, but his wives and doctor hollered at him and managed to push him back down again. “But our lives were on the line, Win, and—”
“Oh, please, Will, don’t give me any of that.” I was surprising myself how strongly I felt about this. I hadn’t thought about it for a long time. “We’re both adults, and neither of us would be here if we believed it.”
“And the truth, according to Edward William Bear, is?” he asked sarcastically.
“The truth is that there is no ‘thin blue line.’ There’s only a deep red stream—those who are forced to pay our salaries—a deep red stream that cops and crooks wade through alike, without any thought or care to the lives, liberties, or property they happen to be destroying in the process.”
“Quite a speech.” He sighed. “I’d beg to differ with you, but I’m too tired just now, and I’m unwilling to embarrass myself by telling anyone why I’m compelled to agree with you. Are you planning to make that meeting tonight at Trenchard and Gordon?”