The Probability Broach (28 page)

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Authors: L. Neil Smith

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BOOK: The Probability Broach
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A rear section of the intruder gaped open—the turbulence inside must have been unbearable—the ugly nozzle of a weapon pointed at us. Ed slammed on the brakes, fishtailed wildly, while the barrel ahead spouted flames. Our windshield starred; a deafening whistle shrieked through the car. “Any way we can shoot back?” I yelled.
Ed jerked the wheel through evasive maneuvers, skidding up the right bank, then slowly back to the center. “No! If he keeps slowing, we won’t have enough momentum to climb the bank. He’ll have us trapped!” He charged up the left bank this time; we didn’t get as far, and came down sooner, describing a diminishing sine-wave on the road. When the curves finally, fatally flattened out …
I sat there, chewing the inside of my mouth. “See if you can pass. Will your rear hatch open so I can get off a couple of shots?”
“I’ll try. Get in back!”
I swiveled, squashing Deejay aside amid a tangle of equipment. She pushed into the front seat. I fumbled with the canopy toggle. Bullet holes screaming in the windshield were drowned suddenly in a roar. I was nearly sucked out the back with the ashtray contents.
“You okay, Win? Hold on!” We swerved to the right, gaining speed, and had pulled almost even with the enemy when he veered, forcing Ed to drop back. He tried again, on the right. Suddenly the car snapped back to center.
“Sorry—junction back there! We’d have smashed into a tunnel mouth!” He played the wheel side to side, avoiding shots from ahead. “We’ll try something else. Hold on tight! Really tight!”
Engines bellowed above the hurricane inside the car. We surged forward,
upward,
yanking my ears down to my bellybutton, and left the ground with a lurch. The other car passed
beneath
us, then we were down with a bump, the Neova groaning in protest. I climbed off the floor and rested my gun on the seat back, sighting as the hatch flopped wildly in the wind.
BLAM! BLAM! Their front window whitened in the center. Aiming more to the right, I smashed the windshield there with two more quick shots. Their car skidded up the center, slid down crabwise, and straightened—someone at the spare wheel now. Two more shots, badly placed. I didn’t relish trying to reload in this confusion.
“Try mine!” Ed passed his 375 back. I thumbed the cocking lever, peered along the top, and took up the trigger-slack. To my surprise, a brilliant spot of light appeared on the car behind as the laser sight caught it. They took evasive action, just as we had, swinging from bank to bank.
“No good!” I shouted. “Get back even with them!”
“I can try!” He nosed us up the left bank, almost flipping her with the brakes. The others rode beside us as we whipped past a sign: SAINT CHARLES TOWN 5. I laid the glowing dot on a shadowy figure at the controls, pumping the trigger as fast as I could.
Slapslapslap!
My own side window disintegrated, glass and chrome spouted from the other car, smoke began to pour out. They slowed, spilling dense black clouds, swerving desperately for an off-ramp.
They didn’t make it. The car glanced off a concrete pillar and came apart, smearing itself down the right embankment. Burning shards and a wall of smoke dashed across the road.
Ed twitched the wheel, dodging bigger chunks that bounced ahead, tearing ugly swaths in the grass. Then we were through. I watched nervously for Clarissa’s car. The road behind us was a sheet of flame.
A mile. Two miles. Smoke billowed a thousand feet or more. Then, through the flames, her little red machine emerged unscathed. I turned and sat back in the seat, one leg up on a carton, breathing easier, and lowered the .375’s hammer as gently as I could. Buildings began flashing by. Ed slowed the Neova, turned adroitly into a curving tunnel and out into the streets of Saint Charles Town.
 
WE LEFT SAINT Charles as quickly as we’d entered it, at Deejay’s direction crossing a ford, gliding through Auraria to a sliding stop beside the local outlet for Paratronics, Ltd. We hustled Deejay’s cargo into the office. On my second trip to the car, Clarissa’s little red machine skated up gracefully beside ours. This close, its plastic skirt looked scorched, the canopy cracked in several places. Clarissa was fine, though, Lucy energetic and noisy.
“C’mon, c’mon—plenty of time for kissy-face later, you two! Let’s get this crap inside!” She shifted one shoulder-slung holster around and grabbed the largest box in the car. I let Clarissa go and followed suit.
Deejay was inside, doing ghastly things to the innards of the office Telecom. “After I pick up their field, we’ll do a little microBroach reconnaissance.” Flipped from her iron, a surplus drop of solder sizzled its way into the carpet. “We’ll hook an optical fiber system into the ’com, here, and see what’s what!” She buried herself in the circuitry, groping along the counter for scattered tools without looking up.
Ed rooted around in the office, found coffee and a bulb of Coke for me. I tried handing tools to Deejay for a while, but couldn’t seem to give her what she wanted. I finally turned the job over to Lucy. All we could do was wait.
It was dark by the time Deejay sat back, turning knobs and watching the Telecom. Abruptly, the screen blossomed into an intricate moire pattern. She began making frantic adjustments. “I think I’ve got something here! Wait—yes, here it is! He’s just warming up again! Okay, I’ve got him. Hand me that meter, Lucy … we’ll know more in a few minutes.” She fiddled with the equipment, unable to resist lecturing. “You may notice that the heart of this rig is that little classroom demonstrator I showed you.”
“I remember too well. Pop!”
She grinned, nodding. “Well, now I can steer the field locus anywhere I want—up to a couple of miles, anyway.” She inserted a slender filament into the guts of the machine, plugged the other end into the Telecom, pushing buttons. I jumped three feet as the screen bulged with the proximity-distorted image of John Jay Madison.
“Whoops!” Lucy cried. “Another inch, and we’d be staring right up his nostrils!”
“Shh!” I whispered, a beat behind Clarissa.
“No need for that,” Deejay explained. The only thing coming across that interface is light, and that, only one way.”
I nodded, relieved. “What’s it look like from the other side?”
“Like a dust mote. We’re magnifiying what the fiber picks up at the interface. Want a look around?” The picture backed off and swooped around the room in Saint Charles, panning 360 degrees to catch Madison’s associates: Skinner, others I recognized from the Continental Congress, finally resting on Bealls himself, up to his armpits in haywired paratronics. An animated conversation was in progress, but we couldn’t hear a word.
“That was our friend Mikva!” Ed exclaimed. Clarissa clutched my hand.
“So what happens now?” Lucy asked.
Deejay started turning knobs again, the viewpoint whirled dizzily. “Forward a bit,” she muttered. “A little more … there! Now I’ll punch up a short program, and—Good! Bealls is still calibrating. When he goes on full power, we’ll match him, foul up his field symmetry, maybe give him some feedback to play with. The best part is, he’ll never figure out what’s going on. He doesn’t know enough field theory yet.”
Clarissa crossed over to the ’com, dragging me along. We watched Bealls’s distorted, sweaty face as he concentrated. “One thing I don’t understand, Deejay,” she said. “Do we have to watch him every minute, from now on, just to prevent him communicating with the other side?”
“That’s the cockroach in the hollandaise, all right!” Lucy muttered grimly. “Say, y’don’t suppose we could put a couple dozen slugs through this contraption of yours and …”
“Perhaps he’ll just get discouraged after a while,” Deejay offered, “and give up.”
Clarissa looked closely at her. “Would
you?”
She frowned a little and then grinned. “No.”
“Deejay,” Ed asked, “I’ve been thinking. Remember what you said about the two fields becoming concentric? Well, what would happen if we did it deliberately? Bealls passes his first message over and we just grab it from him!”
“Better yet,” I suggested, “we can pretend we’re SecPol and string the bastard along for weeks!”
“Sorry, boys. It’s a great idea, but we simply don’t have the power. On regular wall current, this Broach is good for about three-tenths-of-an-inch diameter. I can louse up Beall’s operations, but that’ll have to satisfy us until we think of something else.”
“Nuts!” Lucy complained. “Can’t get a fifty-caliber bullet through a thirty-caliber hole!”
I scowled at the Telecom. Looking pleased with himself, Bealls backed out of the field of view.
“Here it comes!” Deejay warned. “I’ve got to be careful now. It tends to drift. Don’t jog my elbow!” She sat tensed at the controls, making minute adjustments. The screen blurred, then sprang into a mind-twisting kaleidoscopic display. “
Shit!
” Deejay startled all of us, ripping the fiber-optic tube out of the interface. “It’s gone concentric!”
A tiny silvery button popped out of the Broach and sprouted toward us on a slender supporting rod. When the second joint passed the interface, I recognized it. “Not a manuscript!” I whispered hoarsely. “Not even a note! That’s an antenna, an ordinary walkie-talkie antenna!” On impulse I snatched a pair of vise-grips from the bench and clamped them onto the chrome-plated shaft. “Let the son of a bitch figure
that
one out!”
The antenna stopped sliding into the room, backed up suddenly until the pliers banged against the Broach chassis, lurched forward, and retreated again, trapped. “Reminds me of that old vice detail joke,” I laughed. “You know, the one about the public restroom where—”
“Out!” Deejay screamed in horror, pointing at her instruments. “Get out of here before he shuts the field down!” She scrambled for the exit, dragging Lucy by the gunbelt. I shoved Clarissa through the door behind Ed, just making it to the sidewalk outside, when—
The world erupted in fire and thunder.
Windows bulged and splashed, twin balls of fire either side of the door. We tobogganed along the walkway, fetching up beside the little Sunrider. I shoved Clarissa’s face against my shoulder for fear of raining glass. My hair and eyebrows crisped and singed. The world was hell, a raging, incoherent furious roar.
Yet, even above the explosion we’d escaped, I could hear a distant rumble, see the smoke and flame of a vastly greater cataclysm, a mile across the river in Saint Charles.
 
Few things are more laughably pitiable than authority once it has been successfully defied.
 
—Ringer J. Roberts
Looking Out for Intimidation
 
 
The Saint Charles Town explosion left a crater a hundred yards across. Of Madison and his people, we never found so much as a shirt button. Their hideout was an isolated building in the middle of an abandoned buffalo feedlot. I was grateful for that, although neighbors who had to shovel themselves out from under several kilotons of bison flops weren’t quite so happy.
It could have been worse. The coextant point in Denver is a densely populated area, the four-hundred block of East Eighth Avenue. Thousands might have died, even some who didn’t deserve to.
The explosion in Auraria was a mild summer breeze compared to what had happened across the river. Clarissa and I were last out of the building, and escaped with mostly minor scrapes and flash burns. She lost the back half of her coveralls, and, sadly, a lot of her beautiful hair. Protecting her eyes, I got a little careless about my own, so I am now sporting a rakish eyepatch until they clone me a transplant.
At least Lucy says it’s rakish.
Freeman K. Bertram won’t be up and around quite as soon. He’s regenerating a whole new set of internal organs. They’ve got him wedged into a complicated machine that reaches from his throat to his knees, like an iron lung he’s somehow outgrown. He offered to show me—the upper section hinges off, and you can see all the clockworks and half-formed organs whirling around under glass. I politely turned him down.
Naturally, he’s sorry as hell about his part in the Hamiltonian conspiracy. I don’t know whether his stockholders and other outraged Confederates are going to accept that, but I can’t hold much of a grudge while he lies there with the laser burn intended for me. Like lots of people in politics, he’d thought it was all a game, and found out too late that Madison was playing dirty and for keeps.
But the really important development concerns what happened at the Seventh Continental Congress after Lucy and I blasted out of there via underground cannonball.
I don’t know why I expected that stubborn congregation to sit on their hands with the world collapsing around their ears. Too used to the U.S. Congress, I guess. Jenny, Olongo, and Captain Couper conducted a rump session that was still hotly arguing pragmatics while I was being wheeled into intensive care. The explosions in Saint Charles and Auraria didn’t really change anything—maybe relaxed the timetable a little—because the Confederacy has decided to strike back. Not against the Hamiltonians, who were never regarded as a significant threat, but against SecPol and the culture that allows such an abomination to exist. And not with Confederate A-bombs or troops, but in the same way that Sequoyah won the Mexican War: with ideas.
There’s a lot of fundraising and enlistment going on in the Confederacy now. We’re preparing to change a world, an entire universe, and drag the United States of America, kicking and screaming, through two centuries of peace and freedom it managed to miss by letting Alexander Hamilton screw things up back in 1789.
You can’t draft anybody or raise war taxes here, but you can ask folks to chip in, and try to explain why it’s important. And you can try to explain to the Propertarian Party why the first copy of this manuscript and an initial seventy-five pounds of 999 fine have suddenly materialized in the middle of their conference table. I hope it makes up in some small way for Vaughn Meiss’s death. This is what he was trying to accomplish: contact with a free, clean, new world.
And it’s only the beginning.
Propertarians won’t be the only ones to get help, simply the first to know why and where it’s coming from. Denmark’s Progress Party, the oddly named Workers’ Party of Australia, lots of poets, painters, and scientists behind the Bamboo Curtain, are slated for mysterious shipments, too.
The simians are preparing a small army of volunteers to travel across the Broach. They have a tough job ahead of them, taking their borrowed culture to relatives who have, as yet, no culture at all. I’d love to see the first CIA reports of well-dressed, heavily armed “infrahumans” roaming the African countryside.
Ooloorie haughtily assures me that her own people will have no such difficulties. Cetacean civilization, she claims, was already ancient when
H. sapiens
was discovering the useful properties of obsidian. I’ve spent a lot of Telecom time with her while I’m recovering, listening to fascinating stories: how porpoises first discovered the forgotten world above the sea; how they decided to observe and protect man until he was fit company for civilized beings; how the finny folk met in a roving, decades-long convention, deciding at last to let the Confederacy join
them.
So watch out, tuna fishermen! As I’ve had reason to learn, lasers are
nasty
weapons.
While Congress lays plans for the long run, always the first priority in this back-assward place, they’re trusting Deejay Thorens to guard the short run, which, by itself, may help Freeman K. Bertram keep his job and reputation. Paratronics, Ltd.’s Broach detector is being miniaturized, mass-produced, and marketed all over the System, because we still don’t know for sure how much SecPol knows. Should they or anyone else try poking their interfaces into this world uninvited, an interfering field will make their Broaches impassable.
I suppose Jenny has the toughest job of all. The second shipment to Denver won’t be manuscripts or gold, but the President of the North American Confederacy. Naturally, the first person she’ll see there will be Jenny—of the “Party of Principle.” I had some advance warning and a nice cushion of delirium the first time I met Ed Bear. I hope it’s not too harrowing for them. They’ve got a lot of planning to do!
As for me, politics and world-mending were never my forte. I stumbled into this mess, and just sort of dithered my way out of it. Clarissa and I will have a nice long vacation, as soon as her flash burns have healed. Ed’s reservations, a pretty thoughtful “wedding” gift, are still good up on the Leadville slopes. I may try some one-eyed skiing. Then it’s back to doctoring for her and detecting for me. By the time we get back from the mountains, they’ll have finished restoring her house, which, I am happy to say, we’ll be sharing for the next couple of centuries.
It’ll be nice working for live people for a change. My only regret is that I won’t be working with Ed.
It’s strange. When you first move to a new place, you unconsciously assume that everyone you meet has always been exactly as you first found them. I don’t know why I didn’t notice that Lucy was the only gray-haired little old lady in Laporte. Busy at the time, I guess, and after all, she’s 136 years old, isn’t she?
The better part of the last thirty, she’s spent on Mars and in the asteroids as an engineer, jockeying rocks like Ceres and the Martian moons into locations and shapes that people prefer. Being Her Honor, it seems, was just a hobby.
Until 205 A.L., that is. In that year, Lucy had an accident, picking up enough radiation to fry a dozen ordinary people her size. If it hadn’t been for paratronic stasis, a fast spaceship, and the skills of Confederate medicine, this universe would have been deprived of one of its most interesting—and irritating—inhabitants.
Lucy recovered just fine, except that she had to sit out her fourth—or was it fifth?—regeneration. Almost alone in this country, Lucy had been growing old. It took several years for her cellular metabolism to settle down before she could have her youth reinstalled. During that time, she retired, moving back to Laporte. She met Ed, got to know him. He got to know her.
I might have realized she’d be a cradle robber, too.
Once Lucy’s a pretty young thing again, she and my erstwhile partner will be heading back into space, toward a million ice-cold rocks just waiting to be turned into gold mines by aggressive pioneers like Lucille Gallegos Kropotkin and Edward William Bear.
I hope they remember to write. I’ll miss Ed; I never had a brother before. And I’ll miss Lucy, for all her ridiculous advice and uncalled-for opinions. Just this afternoon, she was at it again.
“But Lucy,” I said, exasperated as usual, “you can’t call Americans warlike, exactly. We went to all kinds of trouble to avoid war. More, sometimes, than we should have.”
“And still managed ten or eleven real good ones!” she snorted. “That, plus all your rules and regulations, put you a hundred years behind us and at about three percent of our standard of living.” She rolled a cigar in her fingers, listening to the tobacco. “Anyway, I never said your
people
are warlike, Winnie. People don’t cause wars, governments do. Eliminate governments—hell, just eliminate conscription and taxation—and you eliminate war. Simple as that!”
“Bullshit!” She had a disconcerting habit, pacing toward my blind side, and I was tired of craning my neck. “You anarchists managed plenty of wars on your own. Look at the War in Europe, or the one with the Czar.”
“Whoa there, boy! The last war we fought
as a nation
was in Mexico, and we were still the old United States, then. The Confederacy ain’t a nation, and it doesn’t fight wars.”
“Oh? Well, who does, then?”
“
Governments,
son, like I said. ‘Twas a Prussian government decided to gobble up Europe. Same with the Czar in Antarctica. Every fight we’ve stumbled into has been that way, from the Revolution to this silly thing with the Hamiltonians: individuals tryin’ to stop what some damn fool government started. Look at the Whiskey Rebellion. But all that’s done, now. We’re never likely to see a war again. Every time some overorganized gang of highway robbers decided to push people around, us raggedly and disorganized anarchists smashed ’em good and proper!”
“Lucy, you’ve got an answer handy for everything. I can’t argue with you.”
“Sure y’can, Winnie, it’s a free world, ain’t it?”
 
Lucy still thinks we’ve seen the last of the Hamiltonians, although there’s no guarantee that we killed them all in that explosion.
But even if Madison had gotten everything he wanted from SecPol, I now think he would have lost anyway. Most Confederates would have taken to the hills, fought for centuries if necessary, rather than surrender to tyranny. And nobody in this crazy quilt of a country has the authority to surrender. Nobody. Eventually that would have driven Madison or his successors nuts. As it is, the few hypothetical surviving Federalists have other problems: their leaders are dead. People like Federalists
need
leaders. Confederates don’t. That’s why they’ll always win.
Lucy says it’s the next evolutionary step. We carried government with us from the trees, and later we hunted in packs, like dogs. We don’t require that kind of social organization any more. True, without any official sanction, we fumbled Madison to a standstill. But does natural selection favor anarchy? Go ask Lucy. She’s got plenty of opinions.
I’m satisfied: I finally found out where the two worlds split; though, damn it, I’m no closer to understanding
why.
Clarissa and I were recuperating at ten thousand feet, but hadn’t done much skiing. It’s difficult with one eye—you wind up intimately acquainted with a lot of trees. Going over the Telecom’s version of history and Deejay’s almanac had cleared up one mystery, though: July second is the correct date,
in both worlds!
—Confederate historians are just a little more accurate. That’s when independence was really declared, at the instigation of Richard Henry Lee and John Adams. The document
explaining
what they’d done was adopted on the fourth.
“Win? … Honey? Look here. I wonder if this means anything.”
“Zzzzz!—What? What’s that?” I rubbed my good eye and sat up beside her. It’s nice having a lady who reads in bed till 4 A.M., too.
“This almanac and the Telecom don’t agree.”
“Neither do we, sometimes, but there are compensations.” I leaned over and bit her on the ear. “Anything to eat around here—besides each other?”
“I’m serious, you one-track, single-minded …”
“Flatfoot?”
“Thank heavens it’s only your feet, darling. Now where was I? Oh, yes: ‘Drafting the Declaration was assigned to Thomas Jefferson … Congress suggested a number of changes, which Jefferson called deplorable … eighty-six changes, eliminating 480 words, and leaving 1,337.”’
“Yeah, I remember that. Nitpickers bitching that there’s no such word as ‘unalienable.’”
“Yes, but look at the Telecom. I’ve retrieved a similar entry, essentially the same information, except for the
numbers.
”
“How’s that?” I fished my cloak off the end of the bed, looking for a cigar.
“Well, they both agree that Congress eliminated 480 words, but the ’com says that left 1,338. There’s an extra word somewhere in our Declaration—one that’s not in yours.”
“Or someone miscounted. Lemme see that thing. How the hell do you get it to—goddamned buttons!”
“
Those
are my pajama buttons, lecher!” She giggled and took the pad, made a few adjustments, and there it was.
“Swell. How do we find a surplus ‘and’ or ‘etc.’ in all that mess?”
“
Et cetera
is
two
words, illiterate one. But no need to hunt—” She passed the scanner over the almanac, punched out COMPARE /SEARCH on the keyboard. The screen dimmed and the word OPERATING appeared. I took this opportunity for some
applied
lechery, marveling all over again at the miracle that had brought Clarissa into my life. Ooloorie talks blithely about going off to fight, but as for me …
The screen split, showing nearly identical documents side by side, the handwriting far too small to read, one tiny, illegible word blinking on and off. Clarissa punched ZOOM. The vital paragraphs leaped into visibility, the U.S.A.’s on the right, the Confederacy’s on the left:
… Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the …
 
“There it is!” I paused. “But what the hell does it mean? Is this what I’ve been searching for, what made all the difference?”
She shrugged. “Well, the sentences do have rather different implications, don’t they?”
I thought about that. Yes, if each were followed to the letter. I read “my” version aloud: “ … deriving their just powers from the—”
“—unanimous!—”
Clarissa supplied from hers.
“—consent of the governed,” I finished. “‘The
unanimous
consent of the governed.’ Back home, consent usually means the result of an election. One side wins, the other loses.”
“And a lot of other sides,” Clarissa added, “don’t get any hearing at all. Of the minority eligible, only a few actually vote, especially the way they would if they had a completely free choice of candidates or issues—things that never get on the ballot, somehow. And of those few, only slightly over half will win. The
real
majority always loses. Consent of the governed? Confederate delegates represent themselves and only those others who publicly and explicitly give them permission to do so.”
“The unanimous consent of the governed,” I repeated.
“Win, why do you suppose Jefferson added that one extra word?”
“I don’t know. It would explain Gallatin’s supporting the Whiskey Rebellion. Unanimous consent? Ask those Pennsylvania farmers! Try getting
any
bunch of people,” I paraphrased Lucy, “to agree unanimously on anything! No wonder your government is so harmless and impotent!”
“Unlike somebody
I
know. But they all agreed on the Declaration, didn’t they?”
“That’s what it says at the top, anyway: ‘A Unanimous Declaration.’ But
why?
Why that one word?”
Philosophers have debated the causes of human behavior: heredity or environment? Are heroes and villains made or born? Confederate school children know that nature and nurture are only part of the answer, two-thirds, to be exact. The remaining third, taken as axiomatic here, is
individual free will.
They don’t dismiss it as an illusion, or a whimsical choice between trivial alternatives.
Between chocolate and vanilla.
There’s only one act of free will, they say here, a decision which determines everything else:
to think or not to think.
Precisely, to engage in the formulation and manipulation of concepts: abstractions, generalizations. Mentation. Cognition. Remember how you had to force yourself to do that algebra homework? It was an effort of
will.
You can feel it operating if you give yourself half a chance.
To think or not to think: if you decide upon the latter, then it’s back to good old heredity and environment again, by default. They’ll call the tune if you don’t call it for yourself. Everybody is motivated by some constantly shifting mixture of the three, different for each of us, at each minute in our lives. In human terms, this is the basis for all causation, for all reality—the one I’m living in now, or the one I was born into.
History isn’t determined by some mysterious impersonal machinery, but by people
deciding
whether to use their minds or slough it off. In this world, Jefferson
decided
to insert that one little word. Win Bear and Ed Bear don’t exist in twinned reality because they’re both Indians, but because they—their ancestors—
decided
they would, history be damned. That’s why there are two Jennies, two Marion Morrisons, two Mark Twains. A Smith & Wesson beats four aces; human will beats random chance. The mystical forces of history are so much buffalo dung, a fact both encouraging and a little scary. The old alibis won’t wash any more: we’re responsible, and nothing’s ever written indelibly on that wall.
Death and taxes? Forget it. Gallatin took care of taxes, and Clarissa and her colleagues are taking care of death. Average life span in this crazy place is up around three hundred, but no one’s taking any bets, because by the time you’ve made three hundred, what will they have invented to see you through a thousand, or ten thousand?
What’ll they think of next?
I’m growing a new eyeball, but it’s even more exciting to look at the mirror each morning and see the wrinkles and the bald spot fading. And Clarissa tells me the ulcer’s gone.
Having choices makes a difference. People with options fare better than people with “discipline.” That’s why I add the following, at the specific, and unanimous, request of the Seventh Continental Congress:
You Propertarians have a choice. You can stand and fight, and we’ll help you. But if you’re like me, and you’d rather go fish, Deejay’s Broach is a two-way proposition. The Confederacy lacks a lot of American “necessities”: border guards, customs inspectors, naturalization.
Strangers are welcome here.
We’ll see you around—unless Clarissa and I
decide
to follow our friends out to the stars. We’ve got
centuries
to make up our minds.
And so do you. Maybe more.
What’ll they think of next? In a society where no one is afraid to try
thinking
for a change, you never can tell.
But there’s plenty of time to wait and see for yourself.

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