Talk:XXIV: The Second of July

XXIV: The Second of July

Few things are more laughably pitiable than authority once it has been successfully defied.

—Ringer J. Roberts

Looking Out for Intimidation

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 211 A.L.

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?”

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 7, 211 A.L.

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.