Read The Probability Broach Online
Authors: L. Neil Smith
Tags: #Science Fiction, #General, #Fiction
The Probability Broach (10 page)
“Okay,” I said, enmeshed again in therapeutic wiring. “Fingerprints are out.” Ed was having coffee and pie. I was sucking vitamin-sludge through a flex-straw, and not liking it. “What about the Frontenac? Anyone in the neighborhood—Lucy maybe—remember the license plates?”
“What’s a license plate?” He finished up his pie as I watched jealously.
“Well, scratch
that
line of investigation. It’s a large metal tag you screw to your bumper—skirt—which the state issues for a sizable fee. Funny thing—if you’re caught without one, you just might end up
manufacturing
them!”
that
line of investigation. It’s a large metal tag you screw to your bumper—skirt—which the state issues for a sizable fee. Funny thing—if you’re caught without one, you just might end up
manufacturing
them!”
“How’s that?” Ed lit up an enormous stogie, leaned back, and inhaled.
“They’re made by convicts on big stamping machines. How about giving a pal one of those hawsers you’re smoking?”
Ed looked puzzled. “Slaves make license plates, and if you don’t … purchase? … one, you become a slave yourself? A convenient circularity for someone.” He looked at his cigar. “And Clarissa said no smoking until your nitriloside reserves are built up.”
I tried to explain how convict employment—along with conscription and jury duty—isn’t considered slavery, but he just snorted. How could I explain that licenses are necessary to public safely, especially when his culture apparently found no use for such a concept? “Look here, Ed, how many people get killed on your roads every year?”
He puffed his cigar again, and I began to look at homicide from an entirely new angle. “No idea at all.” He reached for the Telecom pad. “Last year, around five or six hundred if you discount probable suicides.”
“What?
Out of what population—and how many of them drive?”
Out of what population—and how many of them drive?”
More button-pushing. “Half a billion in North America, and maybe three vehicles for every person on the continent.”
“Shuddup and give me a goddamned cigar!”
“Your funeral, Lieutenant.”
I lit up ecstatically. Needles and dials began doing funny things, but I ignored them. Anyway, the final problem—how to get back to the good old U.S.A. if it still existed—was unresolvable at the moment. Which brought me back to the same old issue: how come history was different? Not an urgent matter, perhaps, but something I could pursue lying in bed, using the same Telecom my host brandished so unfairly.
And perhaps there was a bit of urgency to the matter, at least for the sake of an old policeman’s mental health. Ed hadn’t stopped with the fingerprints on the knife handle, on the alarm defeater, nor with those on the tips of his own fingers. After the security team had arrived, he’d insisted on showing my poor bruised hand to his marvelous machine. After all, we still had four extra prints to account for.
So maybe it was important to figure out where our histories diverged, maybe the most important thing of all.
Ed and I have the same fingerprints.
That enterprise immodestly represented as “history” resolves, upon inspection, into mere catering. Should you aspire to anything greater, discover what is not considered interesting or relevant by historians: root out an obscure philosopher, a not-quite-forgotten idealist, a leader without apparent following; you may encounter a much despised and greatly feared commodity called “truth.”—Henry L. Mencken
Presidential Days
By morning, the bedroom window had healed up nicely. My troubles were a different matter. Who can explain their own times and the past that created them? I don’t remember enough from high school and a junior college curriculum in police science. What little I can parrot is just a hodgepodge of other people’s opinions.
Hell, they revise it every year. I never did figure out what caused World War I, and with each decade World War II seems more FDR’s doing than Japan’s. If I didn’t understand my own world, how could I understand this one?
Ed and Clarissa didn’t have quite the same problem. For them, there’d never been a World War II; no Roosevelt I could discover had ever scored higher than dogcatcher. Not that they were much more help than I might have been. I enjoyed Clarissa’s frequent, only partially professional visits and I don’t know where I’d have been without Ed, but history was less important to them, and viewed from a radically different perspective. To most Americans it’s a succession of battles, wars, presidents, and kings. To Confederates, history’s Thomas Edisons mean a lot more than its Lyndon Johnsons. Inventions, ideas, philosophies are central; invasions and elections are temporary aberrations.
Take the Westward Movement: France at war with England and the world; Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase; Lewis and Clark; the Homestead Act; cattle barons and squatters; gold in California; the U.S. Cavalry, and war with the Indians. But to Ed it meant Sam Colt, whose repeating sidearm allowed
individuals,
rather than mobs, to make a place for themselves, self-sufficient and free. And it meant renting or buying land from Indians cannily eager to take gold, silver, or attractive stock options.
individuals,
rather than mobs, to make a place for themselves, self-sufficient and free. And it meant renting or buying land from Indians cannily eager to take gold, silver, or attractive stock options.
It was more productive to talk to Lucy. She was older, a lot more widely traveled, and tended to view the past as something that had happened to her personally. She had axes of her own to grind, but at least that gave me a context and detail I couldn’t get elsewhere.
“Elsewhere” meant mostly maps, fiction, reference books, the encyclopedia. But I never lifted a volume or turned a page, just pushed buttons. Even before I began tottering around the house in a borrowed bathrobe, I discovered the Telecom—an inseparable part of Confederate living, as integral to a home as heating and wiring, as common as self-repairing windows: television, telephone, secretary, library, newspaper, baby sitter, housekeeper, kitchen maid, bartender, catalog, and, as I had reason to appreciate, nurse.
The cast on my arm was the devil’s own nuisance, although lighter than a plaster one, and ingeniously rigged for washing and
scratching
—in essence, merely a rigid plastic mesh. Clarissa maintained that, along with electronics and vitamins, it was helping me knit a hundred times faster than I had any right to expect. I don’t know all the therapeutic details, but I’m sure the FDA would have outlawed it.
scratching
—in essence, merely a rigid plastic mesh. Clarissa maintained that, along with electronics and vitamins, it was helping me knit a hundred times faster than I had any right to expect. I don’t know all the therapeutic details, but I’m sure the FDA would have outlawed it.
Even one-handed, I soon got the hang of the Telecom’s tubeless picture screen and keyboard. The portable units could be found in
any
room of the house. I enjoyed that, recalling the cat-fit Evelyn had thrown when I’d insisted on a bookshelf in the bathroom. Most rooms offered at least one wall-size screen, usually tuned in on travelog stuff, up to and including views hot off the beam from the Moon or Mars—sunsets and sunrises at interesting hours.
any
room of the house. I enjoyed that, recalling the cat-fit Evelyn had thrown when I’d insisted on a bookshelf in the bathroom. Most rooms offered at least one wall-size screen, usually tuned in on travelog stuff, up to and including views hot off the beam from the Moon or Mars—sunsets and sunrises at interesting hours.
The Telecom helped me stay out of Ed’s way while he worked on some commission he’d turned down the day I spoiled his vacation. I tried to feel guilty but just couldn’t make it: vacations are always a chore for me—I’d find myself hanging around the department long before the second week was over, everybody tripping over me and some stranger using my desk. Lucy came over almost every evening to play cards and straighten out all the “idiotic conclusions” my day’s reading had led me to.
A short security platoon had been stationed around the house since the knife attack and wouldn’t be gone until the Frontenac mystery was resolved one way or another. I looked forward to talking a little shop with them, once I felt more like hiking around.
Mostly I hunched over the Telecom, a stranger in a strange land, trying to figure out how we both got so strange. What real differences were there between the
Encyclopedia of North America
and the smattering of history I could recall? Something vaguely bothered me about that July 2 Independence Day—but from then on, things seemed jake, right up until the Whiskey Rebellion’s surprise ending.
Encyclopedia of North America
and the smattering of history I could recall? Something vaguely bothered me about that July 2 Independence Day—but from then on, things seemed jake, right up until the Whiskey Rebellion’s surprise ending.
What really differed was
interpretations.
interpretations.
In 1789, the unlucky year 13 A.L., the Revolution was betrayed. Since 1776, people had been free of kings, free of governments, free to live their own lives. It sounded like a Propertarian’s paradise. Now things were going to be different again: America was headed back—so Lucy and the encyclopedia said—toward
slavery.
slavery.
The fiend responsible for this counter-revolutionary nastiness was Alexander Hamilton, a name Confederates hold in about the same esteem as the word “spittoon.” He and his Federalists had shoved down the country’s throat their “Constitution,” a charter for a centralist superstate replacing the thirteen minigovernments that had been operating under the inefficient but tolerable Articles of Confederation. Adopted during an illegal and unrepresentative meeting in Philadelphia, originally authorized only to revise the Articles, this new document amounted to a bloodless
coup d’etat.
coup d’etat.
Funny—as near as I remembered, these were the same
events
that had happened in my own world. But in the eyes of my new friends, historic figures like John Jay and James Madison became villainous authoritarians. Of seventy-four delegates chosen to attend the Constitutional Convention, nineteen
declined,
and sixteen of those present refused to sign. Of the thirty-nine remaining, many of whom signed only reluctantly, just six had put their names to the original Declaration of Independence. By contrast, that agreement had been
unanimous,
and most of its fifty-six signers actively opposed the Federalist Constitution.
events
that had happened in my own world. But in the eyes of my new friends, historic figures like John Jay and James Madison became villainous authoritarians. Of seventy-four delegates chosen to attend the Constitutional Convention, nineteen
declined,
and sixteen of those present refused to sign. Of the thirty-nine remaining, many of whom signed only reluctantly, just six had put their names to the original Declaration of Independence. By contrast, that agreement had been
unanimous,
and most of its fifty-six signers actively opposed the Federalist Constitution.
All this seemed vaguely familiar—Patrick Henry smelling a rat at Alexander’s steamroller derby—but how did it square with what I’d always known? Were there really two distinct sets of Founding Fathers, philosophically at war with one another?
Right off the bat, the newly chartered Congress okayed a number of taxes, one of them on whiskey. This upset certain western Pennsylvania farmers who were accustomed to converting their bulky and perishable crop into White Lightning. They began to wonder what the Revolution had been all about. In 1792, they got together in Pittsburgh to bitch about taxes, Hamilton and his crew, and old General Washington, a once popular hero, now Federalist president and chief enforcer of the hated tax. The farmers feared they’d traded one Tyrant George for another.
The next year saw them tarring and feathering tax collectors, a fate formerly reserved for the king’s minions, and seriously considering hanging a few as examples. Lucy thought highly of this practice; I remembered IRS agents I’d had to work with and grinned. The old general issued a warning proclamation, and when that didn’t quiet the whiskey farmers, followed it with fifteen
thousand
troopers under command of “Light-Horse Harry” Lee. He quickly became known as “Dead-Horse Harry” when the crack-shot sodbusters blasted mount after mount from under him—it became the Whiskey Rebellion’s running gag.
thousand
troopers under command of “Light-Horse Harry” Lee. He quickly became known as “Dead-Horse Harry” when the crack-shot sodbusters blasted mount after mount from under him—it became the Whiskey Rebellion’s running gag.
I’d always thought Kentucky rifles had made
the
difference against the British and so on, but rifled weapons were rare during the Revolution and for a long time afterward. Federal troops carried French smoothbores. The “ultramodern”
rifled
guns were the private property of volunteer guerillas despised by Washington, but the only kind of army Thomas Paine approved of. The encyclopedia waxed downright eloquent about civilians being traditionally better-armed than the authorities, a principal element, it claimed, in the preservation and expansion of liberty.
the
difference against the British and so on, but rifled weapons were rare during the Revolution and for a long time afterward. Federal troops carried French smoothbores. The “ultramodern”
rifled
guns were the private property of volunteer guerillas despised by Washington, but the only kind of army Thomas Paine approved of. The encyclopedia waxed downright eloquent about civilians being traditionally better-armed than the authorities, a principal element, it claimed, in the preservation and expansion of liberty.
It made me think about my uniformed years packing a bureaucratically mandated .38 against shotguns, magnums, and autopistols. I’ve sometimes wished the population stripped of weapons, but I never fooled myself that it was right or even possible. Later I simply broke the regulations and carried the biggest cannon I could handle.
In 1794, a Pennsylvania gentleman stepped into the fray. A former Swiss financier, Albert Gallatin disapproved of the way Alexander Hamilton handled the nation’s checkbook. He organized and led the farmers and began convincing federal soldiers they were fighting on the wrong side—a tactic that created important precedents in Confederate warfare. Eventually he even persuaded General Lee, who was tired of having to find new horses, and the punitive expedition disintegrated.
Thus “fortified,” the 80-proof revolution marched on Philadelphia. Washington went to the wall, Hamilton fled to Prussia and was killed in a duel in 1804. Gallatin was proclaimed president. The Federalists evaporated, substantial numbers of them winding up neighbors of the Tories they’d driven into Canada. The Constitution was declared null and void, and with it the tax on whiskey.
Gallatin’s wizardry saved the tiny nation from becoming the world’s first banana republic. Economic problems that had precipitated the Constitution Conspiracy were solved with a new currency, backed by untold acres of land in the undeveloped Northwest Territories. The Articles of Confederation were duly revised, with stringent limits on the powers, not only of the central government but of the states. They could have
nothing
to do with trade—such interference, in Gallatin’s view, had caused all the problems in the first place. Only private individuals could “create” money, backed by any valuable commodity, to be accepted or rejected by the marketplace on its own merit. Gold and silver were soon in competition with wheat, corn, iron, and—yes—even whiskey-based currency.
nothing
to do with trade—such interference, in Gallatin’s view, had caused all the problems in the first place. Only private individuals could “create” money, backed by any valuable commodity, to be accepted or rejected by the marketplace on its own merit. Gold and silver were soon in competition with wheat, corn, iron, and—yes—even whiskey-based currency.
Gallatin’s land certificates were redeemed, the last money ever issued by a United States government. He served five four-year terms in all, and lived long enough to see his own peculiar brand of anarchism begin spreading throughout the world.
I HADN’T FORGOTTEN my conversation (only last week?) with Jon Carpenter and the Propertarians. In my own world, Gallatin had calmed the Whiskey Rebellion down, not stirred it to victory. What had made him change his mind here? Is history simply absurd? Did Gallatin revolt because he had a headache that day or hadn’t been invited to one of Martha Washington’s cocktail parties?
A policeman’s view of life, his relationship with other human beings, is from a pretty seamy perspective. One of the things that keeps me hanging in there, if only by my figurative fingernails sometimes, is a vague sort of confidence in the ultimate rationality of it all: the universe is
lawful,
and, like a Saint Christopher’s medal, works even if you don’t believe in it. So if history proved a meaningless jumble of fever dreams and belly rumbles, I might just contemplate resigning. Human will and reason
have
to count for something.
lawful,
and, like a Saint Christopher’s medal, works even if you don’t believe in it. So if history proved a meaningless jumble of fever dreams and belly rumbles, I might just contemplate resigning. Human will and reason
have
to count for something.
Confederate history after the Rebellion was a mishmash of the familiar and the fantastic. Gallatin adopted a new calendar and a system of weights and measures, both devised by Thomas Jefferson. A metric ounce, I discovered, is the weight of a cubic inch of water—a
metric
inch, that is.
metric
inch, that is.
Jefferson enjoyed an even more illustrious career than back at home.
Fourth
president, after Edmond Genet, he’d almost single-handedly lectured, argued, and shamed the country into giving up slavery, freeing his own slaves in 31 A.L. On the lecture circuits, four years later, an irate reactionary put a nine-inch dagger into his leg, leaving Jefferson with a limp and a cane he carried the rest of his life. They hauled the assassin out with a faceful of pistol lead, as the inventive future president had mounted the rostrum bearing a repeating sidearm of his own design. He finished the speech before he’d see a doctor. Slavery was abolished in 44 A.L., the year Jefferson ascended to the presidency. He never really descended, but died in office during a second term, on July 2, 1826—30 A.L.
Fourth
president, after Edmond Genet, he’d almost single-handedly lectured, argued, and shamed the country into giving up slavery, freeing his own slaves in 31 A.L. On the lecture circuits, four years later, an irate reactionary put a nine-inch dagger into his leg, leaving Jefferson with a limp and a cane he carried the rest of his life. They hauled the assassin out with a faceful of pistol lead, as the inventive future president had mounted the rostrum bearing a repeating sidearm of his own design. He finished the speech before he’d see a doctor. Slavery was abolished in 44 A.L., the year Jefferson ascended to the presidency. He never really descended, but died in office during a second term, on July 2, 1826—30 A.L.
History goes crazy after that. Inventions come sooner and faster. There seems no mention of Indian trouble—a Cherokee is elected president in 1840, that same Sequoya, I think, who taught his people to read and write. The N.A.C. fights a Mexican War, but only for a few days. Mexico and Canada enthusiastically join in the “Union” half a century later. With no slavery and no tariff, there’s no Civil War.
History must have some weird elastic logic, though. Hamilton got eighty-sixed, but his malady lingered on, becoming vogue with dispossessed European nobility. Splinter groups continued to clash for years, often violently, over who was really his “legitimate” intellectual heir. Amusing, when you consider their idol’s bastard origin. In 1865, while Lysander Spooner presided over a rapidly shrinking national government, a politically shady actor, John Wilkes Booth, plodded through a backwoods tour with an English play,
Our North American Cousin,
when out of the audience an obscure Hamiltonian lawyer stood and shot the thespian through the head. Confederate history writes it off as a conflict between rival Federalist factions, but I wonder …
Our North American Cousin,
when out of the audience an obscure Hamiltonian lawyer stood and shot the thespian through the head. Confederate history writes it off as a conflict between rival Federalist factions, but I wonder …
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