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

  “Yes, but this feminine rustic hillbilly person, I do not—” He blinked, then noticed that the end-spike of the instrument was resting on his instep and gave a little yelp. Then he dropped his bow, stooped to pick it up, and whacked his naked scalp on the peg-head of the cello.

  “Hillybilly?” Lucy exclaimed. “Say, buster, don’tcha know a San Antonio Rose when y’see one?”

  Lucy sniffed with disdain at the laboratory beaker Ochskahrt had provided, just as she had glared at the plastic chair she’d been offered, before dusting it off with her ratty feather boa. The professor wasn’t discriminating against San Antonio roses. I had been provided with my own unsanitary tea-receptacle.

  Hirnschlag von Qchskahrt just wasn’t very long on hospitality—or tableware. It was raining in the forest, now, and I had my first real taste of what Ooloorie had warned me about. Water dripped from the surrounding trees, gathered in puddles all around our feet—yet somehow never managed to get anything wet.

  Milieu of contemporaneity, hunh?

  “A voman,” Ochskahrt squeaked, rubbing manacle-scarred wrists. “Much about her, I cannot tell you. Such zings as a rule, I do not notice. She frightened me, but I am afraid everybody does. Und such a great deal of money she offered...”

  I rummaged through the debris for a household ’Com pad, found one in a wastebasket, a scientific Gigacom model, opaque white plastic, the height and width of a clipboard, but three-quarters of an inch thick— decades out of date even before I’d packed it in at Gary’s. You pushed a button on the edge to summon up an onscreen keypad. I had some difficulty getting a file opened, charging it to my long-dormant home account. I began taking notes. “She give you any name?”

  He shook his cantaloupe head, “Money only.”

  “I see. How about an address or ’Com number?” “Tucker Circle, nummer nine und eighty. A big, dark old-fazhioned house mit real walls, glass windows, boarded up—”

  “Hamilton House,” Lucy interrupted in disgust. “That woulda told us, even if we hadn’t had the medallion.”

  She was right. We’d both been there with Ed a couple of times in the old days. Never on a social occasion.

  Suppressing a postmonitory shiver, I keyed the ’Com pad, entered the address, along with a query to the system.

  “Well, I’ll be registered art’ licensed!” said a tiny voice. I looked at the screen in my lap. A cartoon gorilla stared back, blinking. “First time I been up in...” He paused for thought. “... in nine point five times ten to the eighteenth nanoseconds. ’Bout thirty years t’you, nake. Are you really on manual, old timer? Maybe it’s a nostalgia-kick that’ll catch on. Good t’be back in harness."

  Old-timer!

  “Cut the comedy and give me information. What do you mean ‘on manual’?”

  “I mean, venerable friend, that everybody else uses the system more or less the way I do—or did. ” He gave a sigh. “As part of it, using their brain implants. I—’’

  “Implants?” I stopped, looked around at Lucy, Ochskahrt, Ooloorie. I’d wondered how she’d opened that door back in the Belt without— “You mean everybody—” They looked back, trying not to bring up the subject of future-shock for the second time in half an hour. I inhaled and accepted it. Lucy was right: I’m immune.

  “Never mind that,” I interrupted myself. “Tell me who owns the property at 89 Tucker Circle these days.”

  “ You do—if you want it. It’s abandoned property, up for grabs, like half the stuff within ten kilomiles of here. How about it? I can patch in a reputable registration company—”

  I toyed with the idea. It would be kind of ironic if I... “Forget it. Who was the last owner-of-record?” The gorilla blinked again. “That would be ’way back in 219 a.l. The name is 'Greater Laporte Hamiltonian Society (Norrit Gregamer Memorial Chapter)’."

  “But Norrit Gregamer died in 217 a.l.,” I objected. And a good thing, too. He’d crawled out from under that generation’s rock and begun trying to Hamilton-ianize the Confederacy, getting his head blown off as a consequence. Some days, Murphy’s Law or not, everything nice that can happen, does.

  The cartoon ape glared at me. “/ said ‘Memorial,’ didn’t I?"

  “No need to get testy. Maybe it’s silly to ask, where Hamiltonians are concerned, but is there any individual owner connected with—”

  “Sure, old timer—now don’t you get testy, either, you don’t look a day over ninety. The President, Vice President, Secretary, and Treasurer of the G.L.H.S. (N.G.M.C.) is listed as an Edna Janof.”

  “Great,” I said to no one in particular. “She died in 217, as well.” And I ought to know.

  “I killed her myself.”

  6

  The Whiskey Boys

  JULY 16, 1794

  "Ouch! Son-of-a—Hirnschlag, why are you sitting there?”

  Clothed in phony buckskins, Edward William Bear stumbled into the false dawn of an eighteenth-century morning through the azure circle of the Broach, laden with copper-bottomed pots and pans, powder horns, a pair of flintlocks, and more knives than you could shake a stone at. They scattered as he hopped to regain his balance. Behind him, the circle narrowed, shrank, disappeared with a pop!

  Ochskahrt rubbed a bruised spot on his backside, mumbling Teutonic apologies. Having given the terrified nod to fifty-year-old holos of Edna Janof back in the lab, now he was along—against everybody’s better judgment—to identify the culprit in person.

  “Sorry I’m late, folks. Qoloorie tried everything— if she can’t recover those settings, no one can.” Ed recollected his awkward burden, laying it out on the ground beside me. From the casual nod he tossed me, no one would have deduced that we hadn’t seen each other for half a century. “We had a devil of a time with Himschlag’s fabricator—it was programmed to produce nothing but cello strings.”

  Across the clearing, a leather-clad Ochskahrt blushed, as if Ed had told the world of his secret collection of women’s high-heeled footwear. No one had been able to talk him out of bringing the cello. “Please, my apologies to accept,” the physicist said. “Zat my client the dewice vould sabotage, so as ze temporal coordinates to destroy after transposition, I did not anticipate.”

  I said, “It’s okay, Himschlag, nobody could. She covered her tracks, our Edna. Hope we’ve come back in time to get here first.”

  “Me, too, Winnie,” Lucy agreed, Ed nodding along to keep her company.

  Water dripped off leaves overhead, accumulating in my half-tanned leather collar, running down the back of my neck. It felt appropriate. A good man was going to die today—all we were allowed to do was watch— and there wasn’t a bloody thing we could do about it. I took the muzzle-loader my cosmic twin had handed me, a sour expression forming of its own accord across my face. Not wanting to need my Model 58 was one thing. The desire that I’d never have to depend on this chunk of outdated plumbing amounted to a religious experience.

  In this decade of the 1700s, the lower left-hand comer of Pennsylvania—where Pittsburgh boomed, a metropolis of a thousand—was reputed to be one of the most beautiful places in the world. Writers of the day, real estate salesmen I suspect, compared it to the Vale of Cashmere, the Scripture Eden, the Paradise of a hashish-smoker’s dreams. I’d rather have been in Philadelphia. It had been raining here, too. Almost hidden by overhanging trees, a rutted trace wound through the hills. Now and then, it emerged into an open area ringed with blackened stumps or girdled and dying trees—hell, if the alternative’s half a day’s axe-work, why not let the damned things cut themselves down? The resulting rude cabin of unsquared logs constituted the quaint home of the eigh-teenth-century pioneer—accompanied, if said pioneer was well-off, by a quaint little annex out in the back.

  Far below, muddy Chartiers Creek—according to Kropotkin Tours—coiled among guardian hills, clad in a mantle of many-shaded green. If it’d been the Mon-ongahela, a flatboat, with a farm wagon perched on the roof, would have been winding its way downstream to what locals were ca
lling Kaintuck, laden with squalling domestic animals and noisy, tousle-headed children. Or was that noisy tousle-headed domestic animals?

  “Woulda carried other cargo, too,” she told me. “A hundred thousand gallons of firewater’re gonna go gurglin’ down to the Spanish Territories this year, Winnie. Twenty-five percent of the stills in America were—are—in western Pennsylvania, pret’near half that number in Washington County, the very place we’re standin’!”

  Surreality hit me all over again. Even given a U.S. education, which ignores the Whiskey Rebellion, plus the fact I’d been playing with Ooloorie’s universe-hopping toys the better part of a century, it was still scary to be sitting in this drippy woodlot, waiting to meet the John Holeroft.

  Better known as Tom the Tinker.

  Talk about legendary figures: How many movies, TV shows, comic books, and bubble-gum cards had been dedicated in my home-universe to the great-grandaddy of all tax-resistors, Robert Earl of Lockesly, aka Robin Hood? Or Lady Godiva and her chocolates? Throw in Walt Disney’s “Scarecrow” adventures, you’ll have a notion of the timeless popularity of Whiskey Rebel stories on the ’Com. Here I was, in the middle of a goddamned historic picture postcard, waiting for a guy who didn’t even know he was the hero of it yet.

  Also, I was trying—unsuccessfully, so far—to get a linen-patched lead ball started into the unrifled bore of the muzzle-loading pistol Ed had handed me. It was sticking halfway out, like an uncivil tongue. Disgusted, I flopped the semiloaded pistol across one knee. “Forget this time-travel crap,” I muttered, massaging the inside of a thigh where the drizzle-stiffened buckskins Ooloorie had provided were sanding their way through my epidermis. I didn’t seem to fit in either of the centuries I’d visited since waking up. “I’m going back into stasis!”

  “Show him how to adjust his skinsuit, willya, Eddie? Lemme see that blunderbuss!”

  Ed knelt, peeled back the arm of my Davy Crockett outfit, did things to the tiny panel painted on my forearm. The drip-dampness down my back was gone. I began feeling relief where buckskin had been chafing— an end to frontier diaper rash! No buckskins for Miz Lucy. She was charming in her pioneer sunbonnet and a hundred yards of pleated calico. Hems were worn long this century, necklines up around the ears. A stunning pair of Hessian Surplus galoshes completed her ensemble. It beat hell out of the mesh stockings and Merry Widow. Her designs, as well as mine and everybody else’s—including a fringed leather cello-case— were the hasty result of an earlier bout with Ochs-kahrt’s cranky matter fabricator.

  They showed it, too.

  She shoved back a sleeve, seized the pistol, tugged at a corner of the patch until the ball popped out. The charge I’d measured she poured into her hand, flipped hammer back and frizzen forward, dumped the powder on the priming pan. The pistol went off with a nonlethal Whoosh! Recharging the bore, she stretched a new patch across the muzzle, pressed the same slug into its center. With a sharp slap of her palm, the ball went flush, taking most of the patch with it.

  Ed leaned toward her, slid eleven inches of razor-edged steel from the scabbard on his hip. Taking the blade, beveled on one side just for this task, Lucy sawed linen where it stuck out around the projectile. The hardwood ramrod slipped out of its little tunnel underneath the barrel. Lucy ran the ball home, seating it on fresh powder. She dusted the pan, closed the frizzen, lowered the hammer, handed the contraption back to me.

  “There y’go, Winnie. Save that for yourself, case the Indians try t’rape you!”

  “I am an Indian, remember?” It was the truth: Ed and I were full-blooded Utes, but it seldom came up in conversation. I indicated the pistol. “This operation’s pointless anyway. I’m not going to shoot anybody, not at the risk of erasing the future.”

  Ed, still squatting, adjusted what looked like a barrel-wedge on the rifle he carried—I knew damn well he hadn’t yet had time to load it—aiming at a squirrel two yards away, who’d been silly enough to venture out in the rain. He pulled the trigger. Nothing happened—

  —except that the squirrel fell off its limb, onto its back in a pile of leaves. I counted seconds under my breath. After about twenty, the squirrel got up again, shook its head, chittered at us, and scampered back up the tree.

  Ed laughed. “That’s the point, O Chief of the Flat-feet: If we infiltrate the Rebellion, we’ll be expected to help with the fighting. You can’t go making somebody fall down and not have the sound and fury supposed to go with it. That would change the past, too— by our being burned at the stake!”

  “They don’t do that anymore.” I turned to Lucy. “Do they?”

  “A fine old custom, Winnie, still respected in some parts. But this here’s Pennsylvania, not Massachusetts, an’ that lead ball’s designed t’disintegrate right at the muzzle. The Heller Effect’ll be covered by blast an’ smoke.”

  The Heller Effect: another leap that had occurred while I’d been sawing logarithms. The same physics keeping me—and Clarissa’s mitochondriasis—well preserved, were being applied to weapons these days. Admittedly, there wasn’t much demand—being able to recover unscathed without so much as a headache to show for being shot, took a lot of the deterrent-power away from the concept of self-defense. Besides, Confederates believe the Tree of Liberty benefits from a little judicious pruning now and again.

  For that matter, so do I.

  Here and now, however, these phony flintlocks Ed had whipped up were almost as risky as the real thing— in terms of altering history. Talk about a shot heard ’round the world! However, we were up against an unprincipled enemy who wouldn’t be taking precautions. For ail we knew, the Edna Janof would be toting an anachronistic fusion-powered Gatling gun. We had to have something.

  Our “something” wasn’t much. In addition to the pistol, two feet long and about the weight of a twelve-gauge riot pump, we had the .45-caliber vaulting-pole Ed had just tested, of the pattern called Kentucky, but manufactured in Penn’s Woods by old world “Dutch” (for which read “Deutsch”) craftspersons. That was all the firepower we could afford, both in terms of mission-success and to all appearances. A long-barreled Pennsylvania rifle represented about the same investment a family car had in the twentieth century. It made us middle class. Adding the pistol made us weil-to-do. One more article of charcoal-burning hardware would have gotten us into the Social Register.

  Ed would carry the handgun, I the rifle. He was unaccustomed, like most Confederates, to the idea of two-handed weapons, let alone their practical application. Lucy tried to make up for her eighteenth-century feminine gunlessness by smoking a corncob capable of nauseating every mosquito within a mile radius. She had a little silver-handled poignard tucked away, battered and tarnished as though some British officer had misplaced it during the Revolution. A lot of war-surplus was still lying around western Pennsylvania. Ed had followed the same corrosive course with the one-shooter he intended carrying, battlefield pickups being easier to explain than unaccounted-for wealth. Each of us carried a blade, Ed’s, the daggerish “rifleman’s knife” he’d found in the replica catalog used to drive the fabricator.

  The modem Bowie (or “Rezin,” after Jim’s little brother, the inventor) I was most familiar with wouldn’t be developed for another generation. Which is why I kept mine—recovered from Little Sister by my look-alike—out of sight. It would pass inspection in an age of homemade cutlery—until some experimenter noticed you could slice a wagon axle with its stellite blade and still have edge enough to shave by. It was properly balanced, heavy enough for throwing, but I never have seen any sense in tossing the other guy a weapon.

  Himschlag von Ochskahrt carried a hatchet. With a dead-flat cutting edge. We all kept a close watch on the clumsy physicist. In a pinch, the thing would serve as a club. Any camp-chores requiring the real thing could be accomplished with my two-pound Rezin.

  Before leaving, I’d changed into the actual height of Confederate style: thin-film skinsuits. Ooloorie and Lucy had been wearing their own all along, without my n
oticing. Successor to the rubbery smartsuit, frosty on the roll, invisible on the job, they were, among other things, pretty close to bulletproof. I was hoping they were hatchetproof, as well.

  The four of us rested, waiting on the northwestern slope of a half-circle of hills rising half a mile from the lower summit of Bower Hill, residence of John Neville, local chief collector of Alexander Hamilton’s whiskey tax. Neville’s was the “Fourth Survey”: Allegheny, Washington, Fayette, Westmoreland, and Bedford counties. The Chartiers Valley, southwest of Pittsburgh, was where the first shot of genuine Rebellion was about to be fired. We’d made a point of being out of range.

  The rain had let up. I rose, half-leaning behind a small tree, and peered downhill. Neville’s Bower Hill “mansion” was of two-story frame, forty feet by twenty, built on the highest part of the heel of the footprint-shaped hill. The hill itself was a half mile long, its toe pointing northwest to an abrupt end high over Chartiers creek. A ravine each side of the instep ran to a shallow depression behind the heel. From Neville’s veranda, one could obtain a splendid view of the valley three hundred feet below and of the rolling country beyond.

  According to the Encyclopedia of North America, consulted before leaving the twenty-second century, 1790’s census had enumerated eighteen slaves on the estate. Also several white servants. The place was said to be “papered in the best manner, neatly furnished” with carpets, looking-glasses, a Franklin stove, pictures and prints, an eight-day clock, imported china, glass, and silver. There’s no easy way to convey the wealth this represented in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania. Neville was a rich man. Maybe he had three rifles. At four hundred fifty dollars a year (several times the income of a wealthy farmer), tax-collecting was nice work if you could get it—and stomach it afterward.

  At the southwestern verge of the heel, between us and the big house, were the Negro cabins; further up the ravine, Neville’s own distillery, duly and obediently registered. At right angles, the bams and stables helped form a V, protecting the mansion. A road from the east crossed the instep, continuing down the hill to Wood-ville, country home of John’s son Presley—the local militia colonel—visible beyond the creek through a lane cut in the forest. The two households had a system of signals in case of trouble.