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

  “Nope—hmmm...” I raised the cover on a steaming plate of green chili. Cubes of overcooked pork swam in spicy gravy. Breakfast didn’t seem to have changed much in forty-four years. “What kind of oxcart was he?” In my racket, a memory for names and faces is the most important capital asset. If I didn’t recall this guy of Ooloorie’s—and I didn’t—he’d never been consequential, to me or any of my clients.

  “Ochskahrt.” She spelled it. “An assistant of ours ... better than a century ago. Little wonder you do not remember him, he was a rather odd, anonymous wight, bald, thick exterior spectacles—”

  I grinned. “And a head shaped like a light bulb?” I’d only met the subject on the ’Com, but hairlessness and eyeglasses were hens’ teeth in the Confederacy. Rarer, when the advent of gene-tailoring made hens’ teeth a salable novelty. Balditude was usually the result of some intractable psychological malady. So you could still blame it on your mother. “The singular affair of the disappearing flying saucer, wasn’t it?” I referred to a case in the 1990s in which Ooloorie had proved helpful.

  “That is the one. I had not heard from Himschlag von Ochskahrt for decades. He was...well, a little clumsy, a bad thing in an experimental laboratory. I was just as pleased when he resigned to go into business for himself.”

  “Doing what? There isn’t much demand for a professional klutz.” I opened the end of a baggie of orange juice, squeezed out a sip.

  She shook her head. “As a custom inventor, operating out of Laporte. That is what he was doing when he was commissioned to invent a time-machine.”

  I’d heard the words already. I refrained from dropping the baggie, concentrated instead on forking a breakfast steak, three eggs, and six waffles out of the serving pieces and underneath the retaining cover of my own plate. Lucy started similar loading operations.

  Ooloorie continued: “A female human, unidentifiable from his rather vague description, asked him to do it. Something about her aroused his suspicions, even before what happened later. The possibility for time-travel has always been inherent in the physics of the Broach, of course. We learned a great deal more about it during your flying-saucer case. I have even... But there is no point going into that. In any case, Hirnsch-lag von Ochskahrt was a little desperate for clients, so he ignored his second thoughts until afterward.” “Afterward?” I echoed around a mouthful of hash-browns and sausage.

  “When she left him manacled to a bench with twenty-three metric pounds of plastique on time-delay, ticking away next to his invention. By then he understood what she was and what she planned to do. If it had not been for a beaker of acid he had carelessly spilled on the bench that morning—I told you he was clumsy—‘ he would never have gotten loose. His machine was destroyed. Almost paralyzed with panic, he contacted me, and—”

  “You were out in San Francisco at the time?”

  “Beta Centauri IV, actually, attending a colloquium of ”

  “Good heavens! How recently did this—”

  “Eight days ago.”

  I looked at Lucy. “There have been improvements in transportation!” She nodded, went on stuffing pancakes and red peppers into her face with an absorption that didn’t altogether explain her uncharacteristic silence. I let it ride. “And what,” I said, “do you want me to do about it?”

  Instead of an answer, Ooloorie extended a mechanical arm from her silvery framework. Clutched in its three-fingered manipulator was a large coinlike object, bronze, from the shabby look of it, unusual in a culture that used platinum, gold, silver, and copper for money. She laid it with a dull clank beside my plate.

  I stopped eating, started choking.

  Forty-four years without a meal or not, this morning’s appetite was gone. Lucy had to slap me on the back several times, getting makeup all over me in the process. It’s one thing to hear the word “Hamiltonian.” It’s another to be handed their calling card with breakfast. I knew its type too well. “Lucy, they are Hamiltonians!”

  “Toldya so, Winnie. You hadda see for yourself." She turned to Ooloorie. “You want some of this chow, honey, ’fore it disappears?” Ooloorie rolled forward, found a plate of kippers, and began making up for my abrupt lack of interest in food.

  Like the legendary planet Basketball, the Confederacy’s a peaceful place. I’d been hired more often to find lost pets than to tackle something involving foul play. Yet here it was: foul play made manifest. The coin was blank on one side, excepting the Christian Era date Confederate history associates with the “Constitution Conspiracy” that triggered the Whiskey Rebellion, Hamilton and Washington’s parchment coup d’etat in 1789. The “heads” side was embossed with the ominous Eye-In-The Pyramid any U.S. citizen would recognize from a dollar bill, thirteen steps, just like a gallows. More skullduggery had been accomplished in both universes under that logo than the Cosa Nostra ever dreamed of.

  Pretending a casualness I didn’t feel, I flipped the villainous token in the air, caught it in the same hand, gave my fist a shake, and squeezed the coin, hard. Maybe I was hoping it would disappear the way breakfast was doing. Despite the room temperature, Ooloorie shivered again as she rolled back from the table, a pistol whining on its servos in a scabbard on the side of her contraption.

  Thanks to the thoughtfulness of Gary’s Bait & Trust, my own piece was where it had always been, tucked away beneath my left armpit. I levered it out of the spring-holster. I’d used other weapons from time to time, but we’d been through a lot together, this battered old Smith & Wesson .4I and me. The Model 58 Military and Police, its makers had called it a century and a half ago. No fancy rib or adjustable sights or any other nonsense.

  We’d both changed over the centuries. Its barrel was cut back from the standard four inches to a hip-pocket three, with slots either side of the front sight to direct recoil-forces. No small consideration in the gravity-poor Belt. The hammer-spur was bobbed to avoid entangling alliances, and I’d had a broad, smooth trigger installed for double-action work. The grip was rounded to K-frame size, more comfortable in my stubby hands. The entire weapon, blue-black to begin with, patina-gray in later years, had been plated to resemble stainless steel. I hoped I wouldn’t need it. That was a bad sign. Most of the hair-raising adventures in my life had begun with hoping I wouldn’t need the Model 58.

  “She left it with Hirnschlag von Ochskahrt.” Ool-oorie referred to the medallion, explaining with her blowhole while her mouth was busy with my breakfast. “And from what she told him, it appears she’s planning to—”

  “Assassinate Albert Gallatin?” I asked, holstering the magnum.

  “You told him,” Ooloorie said to Lucy.

  The old lady folded skinny arms around her frail chest. “An’ you accused me of never explainin’ nothin’. Whatcha wanna do, save it as a Christmas surprise?” To me: “Winnie, if Gallatin gets knocked off ’fore he leads the Whiskey Boys to victory, ain’t gonna be nothin’ recognizable left. You wanna be here when

  Clarissa wakes up. Okay, we been through a lot together, I’ll give it to you straight: this is gonna be a dangerous stunt. Wouldya rather gamble not bein’ here, in an attempt at savin’ Albert Gallatin’s imported hide—an’ mebbe the whole Confederacy with it?”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but didn’t get the chance.

  “Or go back t’bed an’ wake up a hundred years from now, non-existent?”

  5

  Backing Lookward

  LATER THAT SAME DAY...

  For the first time in forty-four years, I got to my feet.

  “Win,” Ooloorie said, finishing off the final bit of herring—it was the first I could remember her using my first name. “There is something else you ought to know...”

  Gary’s Bait & Trust had done a good job. Not a stiff joint anywhere. I walked around, bounced on my arches. My feet still hurt. For an excop, that was normal. I turned to face the dolphin. “What’s that?”

  Her emptied plate had followed Lucy’s and mine through a slot in the table. Now she hesit
ated. People seemed to be doing a lot of that. Lucy watched her, something in the old lady’s eyes I didn’t like the look of.

  “Venusian orbit,” observed the physicist, “is a hostile environment. Without adequate technology, we

  would expire in seconds. The trust company, like everyone else out here, maintains air pressure, humidity, a tolerable light-level, and—”

  “And the proper magnetic ambience,” I finished the litany for her.

  “So your bones won’t creep away,” Lucy added, “a molecule at a time.” Rummaging in her d6colletage, she produced another pair of cigars, handed one to me.

  “Go on,” I said, lighting up, “I know all that. You forgot the temperature—”

  Lucy snorted, giving the ’Com wall a dirty look. “I reckon it wasn’t Ooloorie who forgot!”

  “Yes, the temperature. And they also—the trust company, I mean—maintain the ... the milieu of contemporaneity.” She stopped there, expecting me to say something.

  “The who of whatT'

  She assumed an exasperated tone. “There is an anachronicity limit, landling, on each chamber in this establishment, set for the individual client when he awakens. In your case, nothing is obtrusive that wasn’t invented before 299 a.l., when you went into stasis. It is one of the services they are supposed to provide. Look at your contract. Outside, change has accumulated geometrically. They are trying to protect you from the—”

  I tried to speak.

  Lucy held up a hand: “If Winnie survived bein’ the first person squoze through a Broach, he can take a little progress. We ain’t got time t’tickle him into the fourth century easy-like. Won’t matter, once we’re back in 1794. Shucks, now’s m’chance t’scrag AI Hamilton himself, ten years aheada schedule.”

  “Lucy!” Ooloorie was shocked, and not by the future. “You cannot do that, any more than we can permit Albert Gallatin—”

  “Yeah, I know.” She sighed. “But I can dream, can’t I?”

  I shouldn’t have been surprised. Hamilton’s no name to conjure with in the Confederacy. You can get Eggs Benedict anywhere this side of reality, but nobody ever heard of a Brandy Alexander. The late founder of the Federalist Party and the National Debt just had sour luck where booze was concerned. Losing the Whiskey Rebellion, he refugeed out to Prussia, only to get shot by an obscure Polish nobleman named Coveleskie. After whom they named a fine Confederate liqueur. But his unsavory shade (Hamilton’s, not Coveleskie’s) marches on. Where I come from, Europeans call any powerful hunting rifle a “Vinchester.” Here, anyone who thinks he knows better how to run your life than you do—Fascist, Communist, Republican—is considered a generic Hamiltonian, whatever the specific brand name of his justification.

  I didn’t know about these clients of Ochskahrt’s, but I was better acquainted with the breed than I wanted to be. John Jay Madison, for instance, and his henchman, Hermann Kleingunther. Or Ab Cromney, the particularly evil Edna Janof, and her paramour, Norrit Gregamer. Voltaire Malaise, self-styled Voice of the Stars. Only a hasty selection of the miscreants I’d dealt with over the years, each one worse than the other, each one dead or MIA—a fair percentage by my own hand—excepting good old Freeman K. Bertram, who’d swapped sides just in time to save my favorite skin. The North American Confederacy, a society without war or crime, was also unusual in teaching its children to appreciate those virtues. Nonetheless, in every generation, even in this liberty-loving land, a small minority of defectives managed to crawl out from under their rocks and do their best, for a while, to make life difficult for the rest of us.

  Until we were forced to make it impossible for them.

  Afterward, we'd pass the box of Band-Aids, heave a big, ragged sigh of relief, and tell ourselves that, at long last, the Hamiltonian Society—or its current imitators—wouldn’t trouble us anymore.

  Ha.

  I’d awakened wearing the rubbery silver all-purpose “smartsuit” of the third-century Confederacy, intended for the airless depths of space. It had proved itself in every other possible environment, and in time had become standard civilized apparel—like the gray flannel suit of 1950s America. Also standard was the lightweight cloak I wore, and the shoulder-holster underneath—though my ancient space-conditioned Smith & Wesson had received its share of peculiar stares from the first day I’d packed it in this universe of laser-pistols, miniature mass-accelerators, and plasma-squirting elephant-demolishers.

  Now, Lucy sported her Happy Hooker outfit, Ool-oorie her bicycle and a big grin—I wondered how she kept her skin damp, a vital necessity for her kind. The smartsuit, unlike the convention of personal arma-meet, seemed to have fallen out of style in the shiny new fourth-century Confederacy. If we were headed for the eighteenth century, something would have to be done about appropriate costumes. In theory, Ed was off somewhere making arrangements. None of us took time to change now.

  “I suppose—” The physicist nodded toward the door, “—we might as well get started.” At least I think it was a door. Without further instruction, it redilated to the cluttered laboratory scene, and, with even less fuss, we stepped Earthside, making the twenty-five million miles from Venus-orbit to Terra Firma, in an infinitesimal fraction of a second. When I’d laid me down to sleep, it had been a ten-day excursion, even at fusion-powered constant boost. But you get used to miracles: I recognized this gimmick as an extension of the Broach-technology that had blasted me from the U.S.A. to the—

  “Watch it, Winnie! It’s a big first step!” I staggered, walking into twenty times the gravity I’d awakened under. Lucy grabbed my arm at the elbow, Ooloorie’s extensors matching her action on my other side.

  “You’re telling me! You can let go now, ladies. I’ll try walking on my own.” I felt like an idiot. Thanks to my Earth-tailored genes, plus a little help from the “proper magnetic ambience,” I soon regained my balance, but it had been a long time.

  Ooloorie must have been away a while, herself: the lab we’d materialized into was disheveled, everything coated with dust—the parts that weren’t covered with soot and itsy-bitsy pieces of paratronic components. Past grimy benches and dented equipment lockers, I could see we weren’t in San Francisco—Laporte’s smack in the middle of the continent, and the Rockies looked the same as ever.

  During the century and a quarter Fd lived in the Belt, the city itself had metamorphosed into unrecog-nizability. We stood, sabotaged paraphernalia and all, in what appeared to be a forest clearing, not a building in sight, not even wrapped around the “room” we occupied. “Outside,” beyond what would have been the boundaries of the physical plant, pedestrians were visible between trees: humans, gorillas, chimps, orangs, porpoises, and killer whales in wheeled frames. Strange beings who resembled ten-foot bundles of asparagus— not to mention the giant hairy crabs—were a bit unsettling. One of the latter waved at Lucy. She waved back. In the background, the mournful, mellow sound of a cello wafted in and out of the conversation.

  Ooloorie watched my puzzled expression as I stared out over the wreckage. “Yes, they come from other planets we have discovered. The tall ones are called Gunjj, the arthropoids are lamviin. There are also three Belts in the System now, the Natural Asteroids, your Venus Belt, and now Neptune. Four, if you count the Cometary Halo. Over a hundred million ‘planets,’ ranging in size from a few hundred yards to—”

  I listened to the invisible, unaccompanied cello a moment. Unbidden, words began forming themselves in my head, not by any miracle of technology: “There are places I’ll remember, all my life, though some have changed...” Lennon and McCartney. Kind of appropriate. Muzak had improved. “What, no ring around Uranus?”

  “Excuse me?" It was the dolphin’s turn to wrinkle her features in confusion. Mine were permanently creased that way.

  “Just paraphrasing an old commercial. Weird how the pronunciation changed when it started getting mentioned on TV.” I waved a hand toward the jungle where a city used to be. “You were explaining...”

  “It is sti
ll here, landling, underground, out of sight. If we had time, I could find your old house on Genet Place. There are still roads for people who like to drive, paths for people who prefer walking, but the Broach—”

  “Does the real work of every former mode of transportation?”

  Pride was in her voice. “Nine-tenths of the sapient population live someplace other than Earth. By earlier standards, every city on the planet is a ghost town.”

  Lucy snorted. “Gravity sucks! Nobody puts up with it if they—”

  “Then what are we doing down here in Deejay’s old workshop, when we could be up—”

  The physicist interrupted. “But landling, this is not—” She indicated the corner of the area worst-destroyed. Nothing remained of the original time-machine. In its place—I’d never been able to communicate precautions about physical evidence to these people—a gleaming structure rose out of the ashes, reminding me of the early Broach devices, only about four times as complicated. Ooloorie had spent a busy week.

  The cello-playing stopped. Across the blast-damaged clearing, the heat-scorched side of one of the larger trees swung open. “I trust I’m not too late,” a high-pitched male voice sobbed. “Has anyone given a thought to tea?”

  A bald figure with thick-lensed glasses, bow and cello clasped to his bosom, stepped into the clearing, tears streaming down his pudgy cheeks. He wiped his eyes, swallowed, inclined his head. “Please to be welcome in my home.” He lifted the cello, nodded toward the blackened tree. “I, er... zis unheimlich looks, I realize. You zee, my mutter... zat is, I—” He stammered to a blushing halt.

  “His parents wanted him to be a physicist,” Ool-oorie explained. “He had to practice the cello on the sly, hiding in a bedroom closet. Now I am afraid that’s the only place he can play.” She nodded in my direction. “Hirnschiag von Ochskahrt, this is Edward William Bear, the famous detective I told you about.”