“Lucy, put that wherever you carry it, and listen! We’ve got to find Ed!” I lapelled an attendant. “We’re Congressional witnesses. One of our people has been kidnapped, and this was another attempt. Can we shake loose of here fast?”
I fidgeted as they blotted up the assassins and wheeled them away. “If the lady,” the girl said, “will leave her name and address. There were witnesses, so we can get depositions.” A few remaining bystanders mumbled assent, one frosty-haired chimp in a leisure suit shook his fist at the departing miscreants.
Lucy got stubborn, so I butted in. “Lucy Kropotkin, 628 Genet Place, Laporte! Sorry, Lucy, no time to stand on your dignity.” To the attendant: “’Com ahead and check with the president if there’s any doubt.”
“The president of what?—oh, yes, the Continental Congress.”
“With any luck,” Lucy added, “there’ll be more violence! Where’s Madison?”
“Suite 1919. If somebody who looks like me shows up, tell him where we went—and send troops!”
“I’ll tell my assistant. I’m coming, too!” She herded us to a metal door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY and opened it with an odd-looking key. “Hold on tight!” she ordered, pushing buttons as the stainless-steel capsule shot down, sideways, down again, and way, way up, coming to a screeching three-G halt. We tumbled out into four inches of carpet, a door across the hallway said 1932. “This way!” she whispered. I unlimbered my Smith & Wesson, wishing for something better than plastic bullets.
1919’s door was shut. I raised my foot level with the lock plate and kicked. And kicked again. While I was rubbing my toes, she opened the door with her passkey. We found the note lying propped on the telecom:
Lieutenant:
We enjoyed more success with Dr. Olson and Mr. Bear. Instead of wasting time—and—possibly lives—attempting to follow, reconsider my offer before Congress convenes.
M.v.R.
At that moment a mechanical maid entered, followed by a senior flight attendant and a pair of obvious newlyweds. “What’s going on here?” I demanded as the same words left the glorified room clerk’s mouth.
“If it’s any business of yours,” he answered both me and himself, “I’m making this suite available to Mr. and Mrs. Snedigar, here. Who are you, if I may—”
The security officer flagged him down. “And the previous occupants?”
“Why, Mr. Richthofen and his party took a groundward shuttle not more than five minutes ago. I arranged it myself.”
XVIII: Congress Shall Make No Law
I am less concerned with good and evil than with freedom and non-freedom. Good and evil may both exist within a free society. But given sufficient time, all that remains under tyranny is evil.
We seek only a consistent application of the principle of liberty, without exception, without excuse, without compromise. We do not promise infallibility, but are determined, against the trend of six thousand years of human history, to make our errors on the side of individual rights.
—Albert Gallatin
Rule of Reason
Gallatinopolis, geographic and political center of North America, is a crusty little patch of buildings surrounded by an entire planet of wheat fields. A lone highway stretches from the south: Greenway 200, an emerald ribbon in a sea of gold departing northward until it’s covered with a springy mutated moss.
Our ship found mooring east of the little part-time capital. I wasn’t in a mood to enjoy the scenery—Clarissa and Ed were gone. Everything else seemed pointless. Visiting the Palace’s dungeon, a hastily padlocked tool crib, had proven useless. One prisoner was dead. The other was beyond saving, and beyond telling us anything. Hadn’t anyone here heard of poison in a hollow tooth? He had several week-old bullet wounds, though. Eleven-caliber Webley. I watched the son of a bitch die.
Now, Lucy chattered as the great ship made fast. “They’ll wheel a derrick in behind us and lower the whole shebang to the ground.”
I tried to help: “Why not just fly off, the same way we got on?”
“We would,” she answered, “but most of these passengers are delegates. Simpler to get rid of us all at the same time, doncha think?”
“Maybe not. If there’s any of Madison’s people still aboard, I’ll kill the bastards with my bare hands!”
“Might be more effective than that little gun of yours. Look, Winnie, prudence don’t suit me, either—Pete was the deliberate one in the family—but we gotta sit tight and see what develops first.”
“You call that a plan?”
“It’s all we got. Maybe if we beat ’em in Congress. They’re only holding Ed and Clarissa to keep us from sayin’ our piece … .”
“You’re kidding one of us, Lucy. Madison’ll waste them just for spite.”
“Hmm. We’ll think of something, son. My old cerebrum’s on autopilot right this second. By the way”—she pointed out the window—“if any of those folks down there look like ants, it’s ’cause they are—we’re down!”
Vast sections of wall swung outward, daylight crashed into the cool Victorian lobby, people began filing out. Minutes later, standing at a luggage carousel lowered from the ship’s belly, I replaced the plastic-tipped cartridges with 240-grainers from Ed’s bags, now piled around my feet with Clarissa’s things. I waited for Lucy to hire a taxi, but with thousands of humans, simians, and cetaceans deblimping all at once …
During the Whiskey Rebellion, it says here, government in the Old United States meant Philadelphia—convenient for rebellious farmers, less so for George Washington—but as the country expanded over the next century, it was subject to increasing pressure to move west. Many cities declined the honor vehemently, and, as suits the national style, nothing official was done. In the freewheeling post-Revision days, the capital tended to be wherever the president lived, wandering to Charlottesville, Albany, Boston, back to Philadelphia again, until it was “dumped” as Lucy is fond of saying, in the Dakota Territories, near Balta.
“Sorry, Winnie!” I jumped. “No cabs. Did manage to snag this wheelie frammis for the luggage.” I loaded the thing while Lucy held it upright.
“This is progressive, modern, space-age Gallatinopolis?” I snorted.
“This is miserable, backward, rustic Gallatinopolis. Ain’t it swell?”
I eventually learned not to look down at my feet: the city is preserved exactly as it was eighty-seven years ago—its chief and only industry the much-to-be-despised operation of occasional government. The place looks like a mining boom town: tarpaper shacks ready to burn given thirty seconds of warm weather and a mild breeze, streets narrow runnels of churned mud—but frozen, under two inches of transparent plastic. Walking on polymerized “air” is downright unnerving. The boardwalks and rough buildings are concrete under carefully maintained exteriors.
“Y’see, Winnie—that’s right, don’t look down—we didn’t locate this place to make it more accessible—Whoops! Almost got me that time!” She laughed, and seemed, despite the circumstances, younger than I’d ever seen her.
“Oh?” I asked. “How come it’s in the precise center of the continent then?”
“To make it just as inconvenient as possible to everyone! If Tucker’d had his way, the poxy thing’d be in Siberia! Government needs to be tiresome. Folks think twice before they agree to come up here. We’ve met only six times since the capital was moved. That’s six times too many, but anarchy takes practice. Now where’s that hotel? These streets were planned by a committee, all right!”
IN 138 A.L., Prussia decided to emulate North America by confederating Europe—even if it didn’t want to be confederated. In brief campaigns, the other German states, France, Benelux, and the Italies were gobbled up. Spain and Portugal fell to fifth channelists, and England, as usual, was in trouble.
An agitated Congress assembled, the first since 1900, a disheartening sight to Europeans who’d come begging for assistance: even the assembly hall was roughed out of pine planks. The Old World was mystified at the vi
tal barbarity of the New, but they had good reason to ask for help: Scandinavia was threatened by a Czar emboldened by the Prussian distraction, the Finns fighting a gallant but futile guerrilla war against the Cossacks; two great barge fleets stood ready to invade England—under Hamiltonian leadership, the Irish were preparing their final revenge.
By a substantial margin, Congress voted strict neutrality. There was ample precedent: this nation had avoided wars in 1812, 1860, 1898, and ended its 1845 engagement with Mexico in four virtually bloodless weeks. Yet it surprised no one—except, again, the Europeans—when a volunteer force gathered to make the fabled Thousand Airship Flight, and many a delegate who’d demanded official neutrality boarded those dirigibles, some never to return.
The war lasted one hundred days. The exhausted Hamiltonians, already being nibbled to death by native Thomas Paine Brigades, couldn’t comprehend the fresh, disorderly, leaderless Americans, unwilling to surrender—unable, even if they’d wanted to. The aerolift volunteers were better clothed, better fed than peasant-conscriptees, who’d only recently traded their pitchforks for clumsy Prussian bolt-actions, and fell before the machine pistols Confederates had lived with all their lives. A German officer complained, in an unfinished letter, that these American devils only shot their enemies between the eyes. He was found shot, perhaps by coincidence, between the eyes.
Wherever they went, Confederates left anarchy behind. Gallatin’s ideas carried them fully as far as the force of their arms; enemy and friendly nationals alike learned quickly. Many a nobleman returned home to find his castle turned into a resort hotel by some local enterpriser. The Germanies and Italies remained fragmented. Spain fractured into a dozen polities. Brittany seceded from France. Armed at Prussian expense, Eire returned to her ancient tribal anarchy. The Balkans sub-subdivided until every village was a nation.
England held on. Scotland, Wales, the Isles of Wight and Man departed. Skye and Mull promptly seceded from Scotland, and Oxford University erected customs barriers. The formerly United Kingdom began to resemble a badly done jigsaw until it established a Gallatinist Parliament, and the perplexed king was persuaded to add “Anarch of the Commonwealth” to his titles. Ireland was gone, but Normandy was petitioning for annexation.
In 1918, amid the aftershocks, a worldwide influenza epidemic struck. Nearly four hundred Confederate airships had somehow survived the war. Stocked, again at private expense, they flew around the globe dispensing a new and powerful medication to the disease-ridden planet.
WE FINALLY FOUND our lodgings, across the street from Liberty Hall, and were graciously ensconced in the third-floor “penthouse.” It was a good thing our accommodations had been reserved. All over the tiny capital lobby floors were being rented by the square foot, and people were sleeping in hovercars. I looked at the large, inviting bed and thought of Clarissa. For a man of my age, I was doing a lot of crying these days.
Gallatinopolis was never intended to be large. Except for the Quadrennial, a sort of political skeleton crew meeting every four years to select a president, the city had remained quiet after the War in Europe, stirring again briefly in 1933 with the ascension of President Chodorov, who filled the vacancy created when President Mencken shot his own vice president in a duel, only to be gunned down by the veep’s irate mother.
Accommodations disposed of, Lucy and I crossed over to the assembly hall, passing through its doors beneath the foot-high letters:
THIS IS LIBERTY HALL
YOU CAN SPIT ON THE MAT AND CALL THE CAT A BASTARD
—Fleet Admiral His Grace A. B. Chandler
We paused at a sign in the rough-paneled hallway promising THE JEFFERSONBURGER—IT’LL SET YOU FREE and, with understandable trepidation, elbowed our way into the crowded snack bar.
“Third time Congress met,” Lucy said around the greasy fringes of her lunch, “I only just made it. Always liked politics. Just perverse, I guess. After the war, Pete and me tried ranching the Matto Grosso, but between Jivaros and the soldier ants … Finally got ourselves a little stretch behind the Admiralty range, settled down carving out uranium. Antarctica’s downright homey, compared to Brazil—no poison darts! Damn sight better off than those first Moonsteaders in seventy-three!”
1949?
“There we were, rich as Croesus, an’ getting richer, when the Czar up and claim-jumped the whole bloody continent! Kinda stupid, seein’ as Russian nationals didn’t amount to a full one percent of the population—refugees, at that. Troops came about three weeks later. Pete got kinda shot up, so I herded our old hoverbuggy clear to Tierra del Fuego—dodgin’ Russky war subs, Pete all feverishlike beside me, and all we had left in the world piled on the back seat.”
Piotr Kropotkin, bloodsoaked bandages and all, addressed the Congress. Antarctica was a bonanza of coal, oil, other minerals. Its colonies were popular. America outfitted another volunteer expedition.
The Czar declared war, attacking Alaska, occupied the Kingdom of Hawaii, and invaded Japan, shattering her centuries-old isolation. The Confederate hoverfleet, a small-but-deadly 250-mile-per-hour navy, won decisively at the Bering Strait. Their imperial dynasty murdered by the Czarists, the Japanese adopted a strange quasi-Gallatinism, with feudal undertones that still confuse political scientists. Another political mystery is the precise nature of Hamiltonian involvement with the Czar—why were they allowed to maintain their regime in Hawaii, finally overthrown when massive numbers of occupying Russian troops were reassigned south?
On the ice, attrition had had its way with the first Siberian waves. Now troops came from the warmer Motherland, lacking the preparation and technology for an environment that made the Steppes seem tropical. North Americans in heated spacesuits simply led them where they could die most efficiently.
By 1958, the real war was being waged by advertising people. Broadcasts into the Russian homeland told serfs that their lives were their own, and disputed the fatherly intentions of a ruler who’d let them perish by the millions. Fusion-powered space-planes rained propaganda into the streets of Saint Petersburg. In the meantime, Lunar colonists constructed Sequoyah I, history’s most powerful wireless transmitter. Fusion-potent, it modulated Russian bedsprings, lightbulb filaments, and tooth fillings, singing the praises of well-ordered anarchy, and hissing the vile Czar from moonrise to moonset.
Angrily brandished agricultural implements and machine tools leavened by aerodropped Confederate weapons overwhelmed the Russian government. Czar Rasputin IV vanished; rumor often places him in Argentina or some other remote corner of the System. Today, the hoe and spanner symbolize the birth of Russian liberty.
The war was over, the last significant nation-state on Earth destroyed.
THE ROUGH-HEWN corridor was filled with milling people. Elaborate wrought-iron sconces illuminated portraits between the gift shops and storefronts.
The first, G. Washington, that hated tyrant, hung in a frame no less distinguished than any other. Beneath it a cuspidor was bolted to the floor. Gallatin, Genêt, Jefferson, Monroe, Calhoun—Sequoyah and Osceola in their turbans. Jeff Davis, Gifford Swansea, Arthur Downing, Harriet Beecher, massive bearded Lysander Spooner. Jean-Baptiste Huang, Frederick Douglass, Benjamin Tucker, his face benign as we passed, Nock, Mencken, Chodorov, Lane, Rand, LeFevre—and suddenly an empty frame with a small brass plate:
NONE OF THE ABOVE IS ACCEPTABLE
A.L. 192–196
“Lucy, what’s this?”
She paused, grinning broadly. “That, my boy, may just represent our finest hour—and the sole legacy of the Fifth Continental Congress. Wouldn’ta missed it for buckets of rubies!” She fondly patted the frame. “Back in ninety-one, it was. The Quadrennial couldn’t stomach any of the candidates, an’ the ballot always carries this other choice, so …”
“That’s what they elected?”
“Well, who’d really die without a president for four years? Been thinkin’ of suggesting it again, sometime.”
None-of-the-Above gave way to someone na
med Hospers, then, appropriately enough, to a portrait of Jenny—twenty-fifth President (if you count old George and None-of-the-Above) —of the North American Confederacy.
We jostled into the delegates’ chamber. I don’t know what I’d been expecting—the U.N. General Assembly or Flash Gordon’s Bathroom—it was a barn: weathered pine, rough beams, dominated by a huge Telecom screen up front. Somewhere a vendor was crying “Peanuts! Pinons! Fried Grasshoppers!” My belly rumbled and I tasted greasy hamburger. Two walls were stepped into tiers of upholstered benches. Thousands of desks cluttered the football field-sized floor. I started toward the spectator seats.
“Hey, watcha doin’, youngster?”
“Sorry, Lucy. Is this reserved or something?”
“Shucks no! Just thought you’d like to see the mayhem up close.”
“From the floor, you mean?”
“Sure, as a delegate’s guest. I got connections. Have a grasshopper?”
“God, no!” We threaded our way along: medium-size consoles for humans and chimps, great big daddy-size ones for gorillas.
Lucy pointed at the untiered wall. “Those cylinders over there are for cetaceans. Mostly don’t give a hoot in hot water, but occasionally they want something done bad enough to take being cooped up. Usually prefer staying in a hotel pool, managing by Telecom.”