L. Neil Smith - North American Confederacy 06 Read online

  THE GALLATIN DIVERGENCE

  L. NEIL SMITH

  DEL REY

  A Del Rey Book BALLANTINE BOOKS • NEW YORK

  1

  Is It Soup, Yet?

  SOMEWHAT LATER...

  “Lips!"

  I shook my head, trying to focus on the blurry but familiar figure before me.

  It was small, not much over five metric feet, scented with lavender, maybe ninety-five pounds, soaking wet— not counting the .50-caliber pistol certain to be belted around its waist. It had come from San Antonio—born in the shadow of an Alamo where the Texans had beaten Santa Anna—but acquired a certain polish, a certain elan vital in such disparate locales as Kansas, Prussia, Antarctica, and Ceres Central, principal metropolis of the Natural Asteroids.

  And it was thoroughly, gloriously pissed off.

  For me, it was like peering through a steamy win-dowpane. Letting a groan escape, I dragged my legs over the edge of the couch, levered myself upright, planted my dogs on the floor. The ants were having a square dance on the soles of my feet. I gave my scalp a thorough going-over, then fisted my eyelids. Phos-phenes danced in the comers of my field of vision.

  “Run that by me again, Lucy? I’m a little slow, this century.”

  “Lips I said, an’ Lips I meant! Hot patootie, Winnie, we hadn’t even got to the weddin’ scene, when a coupla goons from Griswold’s come an’ hauled me right outa the late night double feature, water pistol, Zwieback, flashlight, bagga rice, an’ all! I thought they was ushers, crackin’ down on contraband, else I woulda plugged ’em right where they was Velcroed to!”

  Griswold’s. The oldest—and toughest—security outfit in the Confederacy. The grim, textured tartan they wore was black on black, and they carried more iron than Lucy did. Their motto wasn’t quite “No Quarter;” it just seemed that way, sometimes.

  Brrr.

  I squeezed my eyelids shut until tears rimmed the lashes, blinked a time or two... and I could see. And I wished I couldn’t.

  Lucille Gallegos Kropotkin stood before me, gray-shot hair combed into a crazy-crinkled Afro, decorated with what looked for all the world like chicken bones. She’d painted circles under her eyes, makeup slashing down to the jawline. Her lips were colored white, her teeth stained red. She wore fishnet stockings, a lacy garter belt, a black Merry Widow accented with tiny scarlet bows that looked downright ridiculous on a little old lady her apparent age. Her spiked heels looked even sillier in our local twentieth of a gravity. A threadbare feather boa was draped around her scrawny shoulders ... and, yes, the heavy Gabbet Fairfax automatic I’d anticipated, knobby, knurled, menacing, hung in a broad plastic gunbelt slanted around her skinny waist.

  Were the tips of my fingers tinged with blue, or was it just imagination?

  “Lucy, whether Clarissa’s cured or not, I’m going back to sleep until women’s styles change again!” Suppressing a yawn, I added, “What the hell year is this, anyway?”

  “343, sleepyhead, Anno Liberatis—A.D. 2119, in case you’re still mother-tongue groggy—Saturday, October thirteenth, an’ later’n y’think, like always.” Under the heavy makeup, her expression changed, from the high dudgeon she’d been enjoying, to a grave aspect I hadn’t seen much over the years—centuries, now—I’d known her.

  “Lucy, what’s the matter? Is it—” A chill swept through me that had nothing to do with the stasis I’d been suspended in for, let’s see... forty-four years. I remembered: there was a small percentage of mortality involved that— “Is it Clarissa?”

  “Naw, she’s fine. Still nappin’, right beside where you been makin’ zees all this time.” She cleared her throat, stood straighter, wrapping an invisible cloak of dignity about herself. “Winnie, I gotta get this part over with now: Clarissa is not cured.”

  Something with big, cold hands wrapped its fingers around my stomach and squeezed. “What? Then why—”

  “On account of I took it on m’self t’authorize wakin’ you. Wouldn’t blame you if you punched me in the nose—or rolled over an’ went back t’sleep.” She inhaled, let it out through her nose, slapped a skinny fist into a palm. “Plain truth is, we’re in a bad place, an’ we needya.”

  “Nice to be indispensable,” I grunted, looking around me. It was the same hospital-style preparation room, all right. Exactly. A big picture window in a stained plastic setting displayed a sunlit meadow back on Earth. Probably a subdivision by now—or a graveyard. The overpiush carpeting still rolled across the floor right up the wall opposite the walk-in fireplace, with its four-foot andirons in the disarmed shape of Venus de Milo. There were deep-cushioned peacock chairs around a table that would have suited Henry VIII—or the Harlem Globetrotters—and a Cleopatrine velvet sofa I was half sitting, half lying on. Like the admiral said to the duchess, anything worth doing is worth overdoing.

  I was dressed, just as I’d been... before. And there was still no cure for Koman’s Mitochondriasis. Four and a half decades gone, with nothing to show for it except Lucy’s graying hair? Fighting the curtain of dread I felt descending, I rubbed a hand across my still numb face. “All right,” I asked. “Who’s 'we’re'?"

  She hitched at her girdle, parked herself on the sofa beside me. “The Confederacy, of course. The Solar System. The Known Galaxy. Everybody, Win, everybody there is. Everybody there was or ever will be. Whatcha want, hero, egg in your beer?”

  “Aha! Win Bear Saves The Universe! It’s a dream, a goddam—” I paused in mid-thought. “Gee, I didn’t know you could dream in stasis.”

  Lucy sighed, reached over, flicked the blue-enameled nail of her right index finger against the end of my nose. It hurt.

  “Your brainpan’s still frozen, Winnie! This ain’t no dream, though I wish t’Lysander it was! Mebbe I oughta wish to Albert Gallatin; it’d be a passle more appropriate!”

  Albert Gallatin had been the founder, in 1794—c.e.— of what was later to become the North American Confederacy. In the portion of reality I’d come from, the United States of America, he’d settled for Secretary of the Treasury in Thomas Jefferson’s cabinet. Historically, it had made all the difference between the two universes. But what did that have to do with anything? For perhaps the hundred -thousandth time since I’d first met her one sunny bullet-pocked afternoon in 1987, I growled, “What the hell are you talking about, Lucy?”

  “Parajective reality, Winnie—or was it metajective reality? They didn’t gimme time to get that part straight.”

  There was a moment of silence. Then she looked up at me. “Ooloorie had me arrested, shoved a quick briefin’ down m’throat while you were thawin’, an’ I hustled out here, prontissimo. Total elapsed time, from Tim Curry to you—an’ no improvement, I hope t’shout—twenty-three minutes flat!”

  “Twenty-three minutes? Lucy, there isn’t another asteroid within two hours of this one.”

  A long moment of silence this time.

  Then I nodded. “Forty-four years. There have been improvements in transportation, haven’t there?” Too bad there hadn’t been in medicine.

  She grinned, warming to a subject dear to whatever she was using for a heart these days, Progress. “You can say that again, with afterburners! Kiddo, it’s gettin’ so a body don’t have any privacy at all! Time for movin’ on...” She braked to an abrupt halt. “Only we got this little problem, first.”

  “Problem?” The woman I loved was dying by inches—make that molecules—and Lucille Gallegos Kropotkin, a little old lady who’d make Pearson and Shaw sorry they’d been right, said she had a problem. “It’s them Hamiltonians, Winnie.”

  “Hamiltonians?”

  Lu
cy’s scowl would have soured nondairy creamer. “Guess I’d better tellya where we stand: there’ve been improvements in all kindsa transporation. Now one of them authoritarian varmints’s traveled back in time— “•—to assassinate Albert Gallatin!”

  2_

  Clarissa Bear, Deceased

  SOMEWHEN EARLIER...

  It was cold.

  They’d promised it wouldn’t be. They’d explained how ambient temperature hadn’t anything to do with it. They’d pointed out the warm browns, oranges, yellows of the decor, the crackling holo of a fireplace, just like we had at home—setting aside those andirons. They’d even mentioned the unmentionable (seeing I was a Healer’s husband), that the process just began here. We were headed for colder storage, wouldn’t be conscious to appreciate what they avoided calling our final resting place.

  But it was cold.

  I stubbed my last cigar out, lay down on a preparation-table disguised as a studio couch, ignoring the indoctrination coming from the Telecom across the room, just as I ignored the phony fireplace, the phony picture window, the shaggy wallpaper. Instead, I focused on Clarissa, the Light of my Life, the Mother of my Children, the Moon of my Desire—the little girl I’d sentenced to a grisly death.

  MONDAY, JUNE 10, 299 A.L.

  “Koman’s viroid,” Clarissa had intoned with unnatural evenness. She called up a display from the neu-trinomicroscope I’d given her last Painemas. I would have guessed viruses are round or cylindrical, simpler than bacteria. This thing looked like a pair of Groucho Marx nose-glasses. Ignominious, being done in by a dimestore novelty.

  “One hundred percent fatal,” she continued, “non-contagious, rare in the Confederacy.” Her chin began quivering as she shifted from detached professional to future statistic.

  “But not rare enough!" I roared. “Damn it, how could this have happened to us?” I guess I’d always thought of her as indestructible. Plenty of bad actors had tried for a piece of both of us—and wound up with bloodied noses. Now, tangling with a micronemesis that made a pinpoint resemble Mount Everest, I was learning differently. I shook the feeling of futility settling over me like a weighted net. Damn, there were things I knew she wanted to do! Now they’d have to be postponed. Forever.

  This much I could help her with: “Arrangements” have to be made in a hurry when a disease even the North American Confederacy can’t cure rips through your body like a prairie fire. Funny how habits of language linger on. They hadn’t called it North American for a long time. It was the Solar Confederacy now, on its way to becoming the Galactic Confederacy. And I hadn’t seen a prairie (let alone that kind of fire) in half a century.

  I shook my head. My mind was wandering, but it was too weak to get very far. Not feeling much of anything, I chucked the ’Com pad we’d been looking at, a hand-held terminal linked to the household retrieval system (including Clarissa’s microscope) onto her desk in the office/surgery we called her Sewing Room, and sat down in the desk chair.

  The place was a sterile, pastel green, lined with racks of instruments and supplies, yet feminine, imprinted with her personality—despite the odor of disinfectant that seems as ritually necessary as incense in a Buddhist temple. “Not ‘how’, sweetheart,” I answered my own rhetorical complaint, “but where? Courtesy of good old Laporte Interworld Terminal.”

  I grunted. The cynics were right, no good deed goes unpunished. This Koman gink had been a Broach-explorer. Some folks were content traveling between known worlds, studying divergent civilizations, smuggling forbidden fruit, fomenting an occasional revolution. This clown had poked around for new realities, cultures contemporary to our own, but with different histories, different triumphs and disasters...

  The P’wheet-Thorens Probability Broach had been discovered (that’s the word: they’d been trying to invent a star-drive) in 194 A.L. Make that A.D. 1970 for people unused to doing their calendric reckoning in terms of the American Revolution. I’d come from such a place, a depression-battered United States of America, but was “collected” by Ooloorie Eckickeck P’wheet, during early live-sample experiments. I’d been a homicide detective for the City and County of Denver.

  My name’s Win Bear.

  1987 had been a bad year for wine and everything else, unemployment and inflation well into double digits and trying for three. It was a toss-up whether we were going to die first from pollution or starvation. Everything was scarce, everything rationed, especially freedom. And make that 211 a.l. , for people and places unused to the assumption that everybody ought to have the same religion. Or any religion at all.

  The Confederacy had been such a place, the result of the Pennsylvania Whiskey Rebellion’s having turned out differently—thanks to Albert Gallatin. Back home, it was the first occasion that the central government (located in Philadelphia at the time) tried collecting taxes, under President George Washington, Treasury-Secretary Alexander Hamilton, and a brand-new Federalist Constitution. The taxees, between sessions with hot tar and feathers reserved for Hamilton’s collectors, had wanted to know why they’d bothered to duke it out with England a generation earlier. There’d almost been a second Revolution.

  Here in the Confederacy, carrying their tar and feathers from Pittsburgh to the City of Brotherly Love, the second-revolutionaries had won. Washington had exhaled the smoke of his final cigarette through a dozen bullet holes. Hamilton had found the slug with his name on it in Prussia—where he’d bugged out to—rather than at the trigger-finger of Aaron Burr.

  Koman’s World (as it came to be called, just before they sealed it off forever) was another alternative—from an available infinity—and not the only one where humankind had finished the job of destroying themselves. There were hundreds of cindered, radioactive Earths, places where the planet was reduced to cosmic gravel, and some where man-made—rather, government-made—diseases had done the dirty work.

  Koman’s World was the worst of a bad lot. The trouble there was that they hadn’t quite finished. Clarissa had responded, with a dozen other Healers, to a call from the original explorers. Naturally, I went along. The call took us to Newfoundland, Belle Isle, about twenty miles from where the city of St. John’s had been, the only place on the planet where something resembling human life remained—a hundred pitiable specimens who might have been native Newfies, descendants of Canadian troops, Americans, even Russians. They wouldn’t talk to us, except to call themselves “The Winners.” Even willing, they weren’t in any shape to tel! us more than that.

  I’d always thought they failed to trust us because we came in spacesuits. And never took them off. One by one “The Winners” succumbed. There wasn’t anything we could do except commit their bodies to the leaden waters of Conception Bay, contemplating what a swell incentive a worldwide antinuclear treaty had provided for the development of biological warfare.

  We burned our spacesuits afterward.

  “I can tell you what it is." She knelt beside the chair, where S focused on the wall across the surgery, ignoring the furniture’s attempt to massage me into feeling better.

  “Yeah?”

  “A simplified virus, hovering at the edge of our best definitions of life—” She used the ’Com pad to call up microphotographs of the viroid “—designed to attack human mitochondria. Elegant engineering, in a horrible way, since mitochondria are foreign to the rest of the cell. There’s some thought they were independent organisms, like chloroplasts in plant cells, even to possessing their own peculiar DNA complement.”

  Haying been a murder cop has advantages. The peculiar DNA complement I call my own echoed her momentary objectivity. “Elegantly devastating, since without mitochondria, the body can’t produce energy.” I paused, gathering courage. “How much time left, honey?”

  She looked away, her face contorted by the anguish we both felt. Big tears rolled down her cheeks, taking their languid time in the almost nonexistent gravity. She started to speak, couldn’t make the words come out. What the hell, I wasn’t in a hurry to hear them.
/>
  I hadn’t expected her to live forever, but I’d grown accustomed to the science of my adopted culture, enough to feel cheated. I’d come here at the age of forty-eight, plagued with everything that implied in the twentieth-century U.S., plus ulcers, baldness, rotten teeth, chronic fatigue, incipient cancer, thrown in as a bonus for a lifetime of police work. Without government to stifle progress—it had never recovered from being forbidden to collect taxes—the Confederacy was way ahead, having found means to reverse the aging process, i’d even gotten back my hair and teeth.

  Clarissa was every bit as beautiful as the day I’d met her, eighty-eight years before. She looked cute in her medical pastels, the ones with the circled white cross on the shoulder. I never thought admiring my wife would make me feel depressed. Thoughts going around inside my head had the acrid odor of cigarette smoke in a bathroom. “Three weeks,” she told me at last, “perhaps a little less. Oh, Win, what are we—” “Three weeks?” I’d known it was bad, but I was still surprised. “Some vims! And you say you’re not contagious?”

  Clarissa blinked. “Win, a thousand other Broach-explorers could have opened Koman’s World in perfect safety. By mischance—fortunate, since the warning saved the lives of others—he had that rare susceptibility that...”

  “That you seem to share.”

  “That I seem to share.” She rose, crossed the room, began rearranging the supply shelves. We didn’t say anything for a long while. I lit a cigar. “Well, at least I won’t die of lung cancer, after you’re gone.” I fingered the big Smith & Wesson under my left armpit. “Will there be much pain?”

  She whirled, scattering teardrops. “Cancer I could cure, blast all the luck! There will be pain... but I can deal with that.” She watched me, aware of the way I was playing with the antique six-gun: “Dear, please don’t do anything... well, permanent. Who knows, science might come up with an answer any—”

  Shock hummed through my body. “Wait a minute, Clarissa, are you telling me that someday, somebody—”

  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.”