The Probability Broach (8 page)

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Authors: L. Neil Smith

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BOOK: The Probability Broach
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“Thomas Jefferson?”
“And in the second place, I didn’t recognize those names you rattled off. Except Jefferson Davis. He was President—no, it would have been the Old United States, back then—in, oh, I just can’t remember! He wasn’t very important.”
“Is there a third place? I can’t stand the suspense.”
“Why, yes. There wasn’t any 1865. The date that
would
have been 1865 was …” She looked up at the ceiling. “89 A.L.”
I wouldn’t give up. “Okay, who was president in 89? Wasn’t it Abraham Lincoln—or maybe Andrew Johnson?”
“No, now you’ve asked an easy one: Lysander Spooner, one of the greatest philosophers who ever lived. I don’t remember the dates, offhand, but he went on to be president for a long time after that. I guess the only president more important was Gallatin.”
“Gallatin!
Albert
Gallatin?”
“Why, yes—second President of the United States, and …” I felt dizzy. What had become of John Adams? Where were Andrew Johnson and the Civil War? What had happened to Lincoln, and who in hell’s name was Lysander Spooner?
“Wait a minute, Clarissa, I didn’t catch that last bit.”
She sighed, giving in to the headshaking impulse again. “I
said
, Albert Gallatin was also the man who killed George Washington.”
 
JEFFERSON, THOMAS, b. 1743 C.E., d.50 A.L., 4th Pres., Old U.S., 44-50 A.L.; auth.,
Decl. of Ind., Rev. Art. of Confed.;
philos., invent., coll. of T. Paine, A. Gallatin; hist. acknowl. respon. for slavery abolition (44 A.L.) which he pursued all his public life; wounded by assassin (35 A.L.) whom he killed, during anti-slavery speech; oppon. of A. Hamilton, Federalist “Constitution”; elected Pres., succ. E. Genêt Notable achiev. during term: Jefferson Doctrine outlining N. Amer. mil. and pol. isolationism while eliminating trade barriers and opposing Eur. imperialism in New World. Died in office, July 2, 50 A.L., succ. by V. Pres. J. Monroe. (SEE: Slavery; Metric System; Coinage; Calendar; Internal Combustion; & Forsyth Pistol.)
—
Encyclopedia of North America
TerraNovaCom Channel 485-A
 
Can time run edgewise? Or can a lifetime of memories turn out to be only a delusion? Those were about the only choices I had. There was a third: that I was hallucinating now. But, delusion though it might be, my life had taught me to trust my own judgment, and each time I questioned it, I’d been disastrously wrong. Every time someone urged me to doubt it for my “own good,” there had been an ulterior motive. I wouldn’t begin doubting myself now.
Which brought me back to the original fork in the road: either my whole life until now had been some kind of dope dream, or somehow history had shifted
sideways.
Correction:
I
had been shifted sideways in time.
Hold on, wasn’t there some book … something about Grant’s horse throwing him and—That’s
right! If the South Had Won the Civil War,
by MacKinlay Kantor. If I’d been dropped into
that
world—two American States, one United and one Confederate; Cuba a southern state and Alaska still Russian—I’d be almost as confused as I was now! And it had all started with Grant getting killed before he’d won the war. Okay, what was the
first
difference between this strangely revised history and the one I learned in school? According to Clarissa, there’d never been a Civil War, so something must have resolved the tariff and slavery issues. Whatever it was, there would be, in turn, some previous cause, and so on, right back to the Declaration of Independence. Could it be that the Fourth of July was on July second? Could two measly little days change the face of everything I knew? It didn’t seem possible, but I was
here!
And where, oh, where, was the world I’d been born into, grown up in, loved and hated? Did it still exist? Had it ever existed?
 
THAT AFTERNOON, ED kept me company while Clarissa was calling on another patient. I caught myself hoping it was some fat old lady. Like every foreign traveler, I was discovering that I could brace myself for big differences like steam-powered hovercraft on grass-covered thoroughfares, but little differences—physicians who make housecalls—seemed almost too much.
Ed stifled a snicker as he came into the room. Everywhere Clarissa thought there was something wrong with me, whether inflicted in the last few hours or not, there were wires, coils, and antennae. She believed firmly I’d had one foot in the grave and the other on a vaudeville cliche for years. Some were connected to oddball hardware she’d left behind, or even to the phone—pardon me,
Telecom.
Some weren’t connected to anything at all—they just sprouted.
The major features of this ridiculous setup were large plastic pillows full of circuitry, placed as close as possible to every broken bone in my body. A miniature pair had even been attached to my big toe, like oversized Chiclets. Clarissa called them Basset coils—something about calcium ions—and claimed I’d be up and around in
days
instead of months.
I must have looked miserable, wired up like the Bride of Frankenstein, but a lot of the machinery was responsible for my dramatic lack of pain:
somasthesia
—some kind of electronic acupuncture.
But something else was on my mind. Once, years ago, I’d started having stomach trouble—heartburn cubed—flares of temper, and depression. Mother had gone that way: cancer. It took a long, long time. Rather than see a doctor and have my final doom pronounced, I put it off and the symptoms got worse and worse. I’d get along perfectly well, five, ten minutes at a time—then suddenly remember the sword hanging over my head. My life would turn to dull, flat pasteboard and I’d brood until something distracted me. Then the process would start all over again.
I finally got an appointment: that must have been one confused sawbones, as I danced him around the office, kissed him on both cheeks, and waltzed out with my brand-new shiny ulcer.
Now I was going through the same thing—suddenly remembering a particularly chilling aspect of the present situation, the world lurching out from under me, that pasteboard feeling again. Only this time I wasn’t worrying about internal medicine but, you might say, metaphysics.
I shared my sideways time-travel notions with Ed, who surprised me by expressing similar conclusions. “I’ll have to admit, if it weren’t for the physical evidence, I’d have written you off as some kind of lunatic.”
“Evidence?” I was half-sitting now, draped in yards of cable, the cast on my arm beginning to be a nuisance.
Ed tipped his chair against a bookcase, serape trailing to the floor, and interlaced his fingers across his stomach—a gesture I recognized eerily as my own. “Well, besides your remarkably good looks, there are your guns. Manufacturing firearms requires heavy capital. It isn’t exactly a cottage industry.”
I smiled, remembering Eibar in Spain, and American cell-block zip guns. “I don’t know. The Cao Dai used to turn out some beauties.”
“I’ll take your word for it—but any industry implies a lot about the culture behind it.” He turned, picking up my guns from the top of the bookcase. “Now I’d never heard of this Smith & Wesson outfit, but I ’commed around and found out they went broke over a hundred years ago trying to sell a pistol called the Volcanic—appropriate, since it tended to blow itself to
Smith
-ereens.”
“Turn up the painkillers!” I groaned. “What about the Browning?”
“Quite a different matter: made in Belgium, it says, for an American company headquartered someplace called Morgan, Utah”—he pronounced it “Ootuh”—“and Montreal … P.Q.?”
“Province of Quebec—used to be part of Canada. Utah—‘You-taw’—is, uh, west of here.” I pointed my good arm at the Rockies on the wall-size TV screen.
Ed raised an eyebrow. “That proves my point. Canada’s been part of our Confederacy since 117 A.L.—”
“Um … 1893? It’s separate from the U.S., all right. ‘People’s Republic.’ Go on about the guns.”
“Well, look at mine. It’s a Browning, too.” He hauled a .45-sized pistol from under his poncho, popped the magazine, and shuffled the chamber round onto the bed. It was beautiful, a soft dull gray with slimmer, cleaner lines than an Army Colt.
J. M. BROWNING’S SONS’, PERSONAL WEAPONS, LTD.
MFG. NAUVOO, N.A.C.
 
“Nauvoo—I’ve heard that somewhere before, but what does it prove?”
“Your
Browning,” Ed said, “is made of steel, smaller, but heavier than mine, which is almost entirely titanium. The last steel firearms were made in this country over sixty years ago—I looked it up. Mine was manufactured by molecular deposition, electron discharge—processes that don’t leave toolmarks. Yours, though they’ve done a first-class job, was obviously cut from a solid slab, another method obsolete for generations. No offense.”
“None taken. You’re way ahead of us technologically, that’s obvious. Anyway, it’s not really my gun. It belonged to one of the people who attacked me.”
Ed nodded. “I see. Well this morning while you were sleeping, I ’commed Browning and took the liberty of showing them this thing. Made by antiquated methods, yet no antique. It caused quite a sensation. I suspect they’d offer you a pretty tenth-piece for it.”
I laughed. “Might need a grubstake at that. I can’t go on being a charity case forever. Kind of tickles me, though. For once in my life, doing business with the government turns out to be profitable!”
He smiled reassuringly. “Don’t worry about charity. Just take it easy so your bones will knit straight.”
“Thanks. Listen, Ed, that ‘Nauvoo’—I remember now: John Moses Browning was brought up Mormon. Had two or three mothers, as I recall—”
“That’s right.” He nodded. “Lots of Mormons practice polygamy, although it’s not too popular anywhere else, especially out west, here.”
“Yeah? Well in
my
history, the Mormons
are
out west! Trekked out here after their settlement was burned—Nauvoo, Illinois. Illinois is a state, like the thirteen colonies—you know, Chicago?”
Ed grinned. “I’ll say I do. It’s the biggest city in the world! Nauvoo, though—let’s take a look.” He removed an object from the bookcase, fourteen inches long, maybe ten wide, half an inch thick. Sort of an overweight clipboard with a screen and keyboard. At the foot of my bed, the mountain glade disappeared, replaced by a map of North America.
“A bit southwest of Chicago,” Ed confirmed. “I guess in my history, they never got—Win?”
“Hunh?” I blinked, a bit preoccupied. All of North America, from the Isthmus to the Arctic, seemed to be one country: the North American Confederacy—no state or provincial boundaries. Chicago was indeed the biggest apple, rivaled closely by Los Angeles and Mexico City. There wasn’t any Washington, D.C., and Manhattan, in tiny, barely visible letters, seemed nothing more than a sleepy Indian village. Laporte was a major urban area half the size of Chicago, and Ed was right—
no Denver
. That sickening chill wrapped itself around my guts again. “—Sorry, Ed. This’ll take some getting used to. Same history up through the Revolution, different afterward … or some strange mixture, anyhow.”
Ed looked at me with concern. “Don’t let a few little differences get to you. It’s still the same old continent.”
“Ed, I never
heard
of half the cities on that map! And in my world, Hollywood’s in
California.
Something big is going on here. If I don’t find out what, I’m gonna go stark raving batty!”
“I see.” He reloaded his pistol and shucked it into his holster. “Win, my friend, something else is driving me … ‘batty’?”
“Yeah.” I returned his gaze. “Us.”
“In a shell case—”
“Make that a nutshell and I’ll second the motion.”
“We look alike, have the same name, pursue much the same vocation. In some sense we might be the same person. Each of us is what the other
might
have been. We’re twin brothers of some kind.”
I looked away, uncomfortably aware of his dark shaggy hair, perfect teeth, unwrinkled face, and slim, youthful bearing. “I’m touched, Ed, but think again—
look
again. How old are you?”
“Forty-eight last May twelfth.”
“Shit.
Remind me to ask who does your hair! Okay, I got another one: I was born right
there.”
I pointed to the Denverless spot on the map. “How could we be twins if my hometown’s nonexistent?”
He looked puzzled briefly. “I was born right about where you’re pointing.” He fiddled with the controls and zoomed in close. Laporte was now at the top, a little south of where Wyoming ought to be, and in the middle, in still-tiny print, the townships of Saint Charles and Auraria, the South Platte River winding between them. A sudden tension swept my body.
“Your parents. What were their names?”
“My parents are both living,” he said firmly. “William and Edna Bear. They moved up to the northwest coast near Tlingit a few years ago, but they’re both from this area originally.”
I forged onward. “And they’re both full-blooded Ute Indians—that’s where the name Utah comes from.”
“I hadn’t made the connection. But you’re right, they’re from Indian stock. Doesn’t mean very much, does it?”
“It never did to me,” I said, “but to some …” I thought about Watts and of the Arab-Vietnamese gang rumbles on my own beat. “Where I come from, people kill each other about it, sometimes.”
“Another difference between our histories?”
“Or between our people. That makes you lucky on two counts, Ed. Dad got his in a B-17—a kind of military bomber—over Germany in 1943. Mom passed away in 1957, the day I graduated from high school. I wish I understood what all this means.”
“So do I. It gives me a very strange, unwholesome feeling. How would you feel about meeting my folks?”
I shuddered and he saw it.
“Just take your time.” He replaced the map with another scenic view, the Royal Gorge this time, then spent a long while looking out into the back garden. “Win, why should we … I mean, why should both our worlds, if they diverged so long ago, have produced—”

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