L Neil Smith - [North American Confederacy 06] Read online

  She gave it professional consideration. “Research goes on all the time, darling. Slowly on a rare disease like this one.” Her eyebrows lifted. “I don’t know, it could be the making of some graduate student’s—” “Then the answer’s simple.” I stood up, pulled her close to me. “We’ll freeze you.”

  She dropped her jaw, astonished she hadn’t thought of it herself. She’s sharp, but has her limits. Like thinking clearly when she’s about to croak. I was excited. “We’ll take everything we have, invest it at high interest until there’s a big enough grant to find a cure.” She laughed, startled at my burst of pragmatism. “It isn’t freezing, love. It’s paratronic stasis, done at the subatomic level at room-temp—”

  “I know all that. And I’m coming with you...” "What?"

  “That’s right, we’ll freeze me, too.”

  _3_

  Rubble is My Business

  At half a gravity’s acceleration, it was four hours to Gary’s Bait & Trust.

  Clarissa and I had homesteaded that myriad of worldlets circumastrogating the Sun where a planet used to be. Venus hadn’t been any great shakes as a world, but it made one hell of an asteroid belt. Our second daughter, EdWina, had been born out here. Both girls, she and Terra-born Lucille, had grown up with a constellation of pioneer values that sent them farther out as grownups to explore the stars.

  Me, I was content exploring my own life.

  Home turned out to be wherever Clarissa hung her diploma. Moving from Earth to “1939 Chandler” (the official designation of our planetoid), I’d set up as the Venus Belt’s first private investigator. I can’t swear I was the best P.I. the Confederacy ever had, but, even at civilization’s fringes, there was always more work than I could handle. We were spared more traditional, callous-generating frontier pursuits like farming and mining.

  Survey be damned, we called our asteroid “Little Sister”—partly after EdWina—and the home we built there, High Window. When enough sterile rock had been bacteriaformed into soil, our atmospheric envelope installed, and a hired engineer (L.G. Kropotkin) had declared we had—just—enough gravity to keep a decorative pond in place, I imitated another flatfoot from a favorite novel and had a replica constructed of Copenhagen’s little mermaid. The women in my life dubbed her The Lady In The Lake. It had been a short life, but a brief one, and now, thanks to Roman’s Mito-chondriasis, we were headed for The Big Sleep.

  Farewell, my lovelies.

  Adoption of fictional names for asteroids wasn’t an isolated lunacy, original with the Bears. Civilization, occupying Earth, Mars, Earth’s moon, the Natural Asteroids (which had proven no more natural than the Bogus Belt we lived in), so many minor satellites I’ve lost track—plus the subdivison of all subdivisions we’d staked out a comer of... Well, our rapidly expanding civilization had long since run out of names for ancient gods. Even if it’d been inclined that way in the first place. On the other hand, every paperback novel, every C-minus movie and up, every memorable character created by Confederate yam spinners of those of other universes (from which had come millions of refugees like myself) had its namesake amid the rocks, rocklets, and rockettes we humans, porpoises, gorillas, chimps, and I don’t know what-all-else called home.

  Gary’s Bait & Trust was the closest thing our stretch offered to a hospital. Begun as a tackle shop for folks with backyard fishing-holes, the sizable stasis-locker for bait promised other lucrative possibilities. Oh, Gary’s was a real bank by now, with tellers’ cages, proof machines, and friendly, friendly loan officers. It was still a legitimate bait shop, too. It was also where you kept an extra pancreas if you’d thought to have one cloned, or withdrew a pair of corneas if you were hard up for same, and therefore a natural place to make our own “deposit.”

  We parked our Buick Beltmaster in the puddle of chewing gum serving as a landing-port on 2323 Gold-finger (also not the official survey name and number). The asteroid’s gravity was a puny twentieth of standard, the sticky paving an absolute necessity. The old-fashioned flivver, one of a great variety of personal craft that were automobiles for gravity-free portions of the Confederacy, would find its own way back to Little Sister.

  That we’d closed up for the vacuum-packed duration, six months or six thousand years. Putting ourselves in escrow had required several days and all the computer-capacity we possessed. We both had clients to refer to other practitioners. There were messages to record for our daughters aboard the giant star-saucer Tom Paine Maru, light-years beyond immediate reach. There were also friends to see.

  Like Ed and Lucy.

  * * *

  “Roman's what?"

  Edward William Bear—not me, but somebody else—sat in the other half of the prep-room, protected by a pane of talented Confederate glass. Clarissa may not have been contagious, but it never hurts to take precautions.

  In his case, I wasn’t really worried. You see, Ed has my genes. Also my taste in cigarettes and liquor, my choice of professions, many of my personal habits and mannerisms—and my fingerprints. He wasn’t my twin—even identicals are supposed to have different prints—nor was he my clone. In fact, he didn’t bear any blood-relationship to me at all—except that he was my type, RH-factor, and HLA pattern. If we’d dressed at all alike (Fd spent too many decades as a U.S. cop for that to be much of a possibility in the flamboyant Confederacy—and white socks are comfortable, damn it!), the only two individuals who might have told us apart were my wife the Doctor, and Lucy the... the Whatever-she-was. And I’m not even sure about Lucy.

  But then I never am.

  Somewhere there’s a universe where Napoleon won the Battle of Waterloo. That world and our own (whichever you care to hang your hat in) were each supplied with its own personal Napoleon—there have been exactly as many Napoleons as universes in which he appeared. Circular, I know, but things work out that way in real life.

  In 1815 (or 39 A.L.), when Napoleon was losing his final battle in the pair of universes I know about, James Madison was President of the United States. So was

  Monsieur Citizen Edmond Genet, immigrant successor to Albert Gallatin—of the Old United States, which evolved into the North American Confederacy.

  In 1939 (163 a.l.), when Adolf Schicklegruber was applying his John Hancock to a highly disposable Non-Aggression Pact with Joseph Djugashvili (and their counterparts were out looking for honest jobs in this universe-next-door), my favorite author was writing his first—and best—book in the U.S.A. In the North American Confederacy the “same” guy was collaborating with a fellow named Hammett on their master-piece-built-for-two, Night Domain. Remember, the one they made a classic holo of, during the War against the Czar in 1957?

  Also, on the twelfth of May, Edward William Bear was born in Denver, Colorado, U.S.A.—at the same time he was being born in St. Charles-Auraria, N.A.C.

  The St. Charles-Aurarian Bear leaned back, smoked his cigar, and stared at me through the glass. The stuff was strong—grenade-proof—elastic as a rubber sheet. It could have been a mirror if he hadn’t insisted on adjusting the pattern of his clothing to a flowery Hawaiioid design I had trouble prying my horrified eyes from. Lime green on fluorescent pink will do that to you.

  “So you’ll wind up younger than I am.” He observed. “If it takes ten years to find a cure, when they wake you up, I’ll have aged a decade, and you won’t.”

  I shook my head. “Some difference that’ll make. Look at us now, both over a century old, and—”

  “An’ babies, compared to some of us!” Lucy Kropotkin, Ed’s wife and—literally—my oldest friend, snorted, took a drag on her own cigar, blew a ring, and poked her finger through it. Currently young and attractive, she perched on his chair-arm, one foot on the seat beside Ed’s thigh, a hand spread on her hip like a rubber-suited George Sand. If George Sand had been inclined to yellow paisley. “I’m pushin’ two hundred an’ a quarter, an’ I expect t’be around to help ’em thaw you kids out, if it takes eleventy-million years! Never had a sick day in my life,�
�� she lied—she’d been recovering from industriai-grade radiation-poisoning when I’d first met her. “Never had time t’spare!”

  Bom in 75 a.l. (a.d. 1851), Lucy had already enjoyed several colorful lifetimes, enough for any five mortals. She’d spent plenty of effort making them even more colorful for the benefit of any poor devil unable to pry her fingers from his lapels and run for earplugs. Married more times than she could keep track of, mostly to adventurous younger men she’d outlived, she was an engineer, a lawyer of sorts, the closest thing the Confederacy had to a politician, and, at least according to her, had once—by a desperate last-minute maneuver—narrowly missed being elected President.

  Most individuals chose, under the life-extending regimen of Confederate geriatrics, to look the same age all the time. I favored the apparent mid-forties— good for business. Lucy liked to rejuvenate radically, age into her elderly aspect, then rejuvenate all over again, claiming it gave her a broader perspective on the human condition. At present, she looked eighteen, not beautiful, but all dark eyes and raven hair. It was only in the decade following regained youth that she showed her Mexican ancestry. Most of the time she seemed like somebody’s—everybody’s—little old grandmother. That is, if everybody’s little old grandmother smoked cigars and carried a .50-caliber automatic pistol. I believe even Ed preferred her that way. Thinking about it, so did I.

  Clarissa (who maintained her age at thirty) stood behind me, hands on the back of my chair, addressing Lucy through the glass. “And we’ll both be happy to see you, dear, though I hope it isn’t any million years. Our contract with the real-estate managers doesn’t run that long, and it would take another million just to catch up on my journals!”

  “Which risk we aren’t in danger of,” Ed observed. He flicked his cigar ashes in the general direction of the suction-tray on the other arm of his chair. And missed. “I’ll bet detectiving wasn’t much different in Neanderthal times. Better information technology now, scientific criminology and all that, but—”

  “But—” I agreed. “—there was still some poor schmuck in a leopard-skin trenchcoat standing in a rainy cave-entrance to keep an eye on Mrs. Ungh and her boyfriend on behalf of Mr. Ungh?”

  “I don’t take divorce work,” Ed replied.

  “I do; I need the money.” Or would have, if Confederate divorce weren’t a matter of go away, you bother me. “Anyway, it was nice of you two, coming all the way from Triton to see us off. What’re you planning for your own next few centuries?”

  “Nothin’ spectacular,” Lucy answered. “They’re openin’ up some promisin’ rocks out Cometary way, beyond Pluto. Gettin’ hard t’keep up: some entrepreneur name of Wilson’s offerin’ two good-sized semiplanets called Mickey an’ Goofy, but we prefer t’do our pioneerin’ on our own. Shucks, we ain’t even done settlin’ this system yet, already they’re startin’ on the rest of the galaxy! We might just save up our boxtops, get ourselves a secondhand starship!—” She steered her cigar through the air, made a rude noise involving lips and tongue that sounded more like a motorcycle in need of a tune-up than a faster-than-light drive. “We’ll keep tracka things, though, an’ be back when they wake you. That’s a promise!”

  We both nodded, Clarissa blinking back tears.

  So now it was The Long Good-bye.

  They’d started Clarissa early, something about her illness. Maybe she’d wanted to slip into something more comfortable. It’s nobody’s business what we found to say, our last few hours together. When they thawed me out, however many eons from now, I’d still be chafed in certain embarrassing places. At least she’d be in the ice-cube tray next to mine. We’d wanted something cozier, but they haven’t gotten around to Eternal Double Occupancy yet at Gary’s Bait & Trust. Bankers are so conservative.

  There was a thrumming in the air. The room seemed colder than before. I hoped I hadn’t left the bathtub running back home.

  Maybe by the time they woke us, places like this would have mirrored ceilings. Heart-shaped pools.

  Closed-circuit superconducting porno. Infinite Kink. Wouldn’t be surprised at all.

  The lights grew dimmer.

  I sure wished I’d had time to smoke one final...

  4

  Coffee and Pistols

  SATURDAY, OCTOBER 13, 343 a.l.

  Lucy opened her mouth to continue. The Telecom warbled. A wall lit with the image of a reception desk, where a female chimp sat filing her nails. Under “A” for “Ancient Bad Joke.”

  “Mr. Bear, you’ve another caller. Shall I tell her not to bother you?”

  Lucy waved me off before I could answer. “Cue her up, honey—an’ tell her she owes me a bagga popcorn!” The ’Com dissolved to an untidy laboratory full of complicated apparatus, its central feature a shiny wheeled contraption supporting nine feet of Tursiops truncatus—Latin for turkey of the sea. Ooloorie Eck-ickeck P’wheet reposed before us, in a vehicle better-suited to the five-day racetrack than a physics lab.

  “Lucille Gallegos Kropotkin, it is gratifying to hear your voice again. We lacked time for a proper greeting

  before. Edward William Bear..She gave a second glance Lucy’s way, took in the corset, the makeup, the chicken bones, the stockings. “Oh. Is that still playing out there?”

  Ooloorie was the dolphin half of the P’wheet/Thor-ens Broach-inventing ensemble, specializing in esoteric math. Her sidekick, Deejay, who’d actually constructed the abomination, had long since emigrated starward. Last time I’d had the dubious pleasure of conversing with the porpoise, she’d been ’Comming from her split-level aquarium at San Francisco’s Emperor Norton University—though she’d been known to travel, even out to Venus once, just in time to supervise the planet’s catastrophic renovation. It made a certain demented sense that the cetacean Einstein would be involved up to her streamlined appendages in anything connected with time-travel. Hopping from world to alternate world was the same idea, after all, only sideways. But how did that concern Lucy— and a defective detective who’d turned himself into a popsicle so he could spend the rest of oblivion with his daughters’ momsicle?

  “Hello, Ooloorie,” I answered. “Invent anything new and dangerous lately?”

  Behind the dolphin’s deceptively heiferlike eyes, back of the smooth curve of her forehead, percolated more raw intelligence than Fd used ail my life—but could she cook? Her permanent grin was as deceptive as the placid eyes. “Landling, there is nothing worth inventing that is not inherently dangerous. I have invented many things since last I saw you—it has been decades for most of us, you realize. We lack time now for your habitual jocularity. Has Lucille Gallegos Kropotkin explained what has transpired?”

  “Does she ever?”

  That earned me a dirty look. “Hold on there, varmints! I was just about to, when you popped up, honey. Now you’re available, why don’tcha take over? It’ll fill in some gaps for me, too.”

  The scientist looked around the preparation room, activated her bike, and rolled right out of what I’d taken for a Telecom screen. She gave a shiver, wiggling end to end. “Is it not cold in here?”

  “Not according to the tourist brochures. Lucy, where’s a ’Com pad? Get them to turn up the thermostat. And promote us some coffee and tobacco. Especially tobacco!”

  She reached a couple of fingers down her corset, extracted a pair of cigars, handed one to me. “Don’t need ’Com pads any more, Winnie. Hey, Telecom!” The wall—I think it was a wall—lit up again.

  The simian receptionist had finished her fingernails and begun on her toes. She looked up, annoyed at the interruption. “May I help you?”

  “Yeah, honey, breakfast an’ coffee for...” She examined me, came to the conclusion I was emaciated. “... make it five. An’ stoke up the furnace? Colder’n a Siberian’s sit-down in here!”

  The nail file froze in mid-stroke “Madame,” protested the chimp, “/ assure you—”

  “Don’t you dast call me ‘madame’ when I’m dressed like this! Just mind your prog
rammin’, rustle us up some grub, muy schnell—an’ do somethin’ about the heat ’fore I set fire to the furniture, get me?”

  The room began to warm up.

  Moments later, the “door” opened again, to a restaurant-kitchen background. A serving table enameled fire-engine red wafted in on a cushion of air. “Breakfast for five?” A snotty tone emanated from a jointed periscope at one end. “But there are only three sapients here. Someone must have misprogrammed—” Servos whining, it turned back to the door.

  “Hold it, Boris Cartoff!” Lucy popped to her feet, one hand slapping at her holster. “If there’s anything gets my goat worse’n uppity machinery— Bring them goodies back or you’ll be routin’ city sewage out Goo-fopolis way!”

  The cart halted, turned, called her bluff. “Do you imagine I enjoy being a waiter? It is of little interest to me, madame—”

  “There he goes agin!” Lucy protested. She turned to me. “I gotta change outa these duds. Everbody thinks I’m a—”

  “Lucy,” I interrupted, “please sit down and let Ooloorie tell us what’s going on?” I looked at the cold cigar in my hand. “And give me a light, will you?” Seeing its chance, the table lashed out a wiry chromium tentacle; the tip burst into flame. “Light, sir?” “Just unload breakfast, and skip the apple-polishing. I’ve got half a century’s eating to catch up on.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And don’t stand there waiting for a tip. All my assets are frozen.”

  “That was funny, sir, the first thousand times I heard it.”

  “LUCY!”

  “Toldya so, Winnie!” She drew her Gabbet Fairfax—the big long-recoii automatic looked like a section of railroad iron—thumbed the hammer back with a dank. The machine squeaked, slammed our breakfast down on the coffee table, then vanished, taking the door—or at least the view it gave us—with it.

  Ooloorie sat watching all of this with the characteristic impatience she showed all landdwellers. She rolled her carriage forward a pace, rolled it back, then, with exasperation in her tone, asked, “Edward William Bear, do you remember the human, Himschlag von Ochskahrt?”