Difference between revisions of "Talk:IX: The Constitution Conspiracy"

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IX: The Constitution Conspiracy

FRIDAY, JULY 10, 1987

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.

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.

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.

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.

What really differed was 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 …

The list of Confederate presidents is short, many serving five or six terms without upsetting anybody. Year after year, their steadily diminishing power was less an object of envy or violent ambition. Nearly everybody got a chance to play King Log: there was another Indian president, Osceola; Harriet Beecher was her own First Lady; in 1880, a French-Canadian of Chinese extraction was elected—so much for the Yellow Peril, mes enfants!

Here and there odd familiarities pop up: the Chicago fire and San Francisco earthquake; Jeff Davis and James Monroe; the Nicaragua canal; the first atomic reactor in Chicago, but in 1922! Color TV appeared in 1947, and dirigibles remained important. There’s something resembling World War I, but no trace of the Spanish-American War, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, or New Guinea. And nothing about Karl Marx, Socialism, or Communism; European revolts in the 1840s are called “Gallatinite.” Men first walked on the Moon—with women right beside them—in 173 A.L.—1949! And North America fought a bitter war with Russia in 1957. The Czar was finally overthrown.

The Czar?

TUESDAY, JULY 14, 1987

“Well,” I said, over my CALIFORNIA TEN-HIGH—100 PROOF, “that’s certainly not the way I heard it in school!” We were sitting on the side terrace, my first excursion outdoors. The afternoon sun was beaming cheerfully, and I’d just had my first gawk at an airship, a mile-long apparition of titanium and ectoplasmic Mylar, on her way over the Rockies at three hundred miles an hour. Life seemed pretty good, and so did the company. The Telecom was filling Ed’s garden with beautiful music.

Captain Forsyth, head of the security contingent, was an old friend of Ed’s, a grizzled, wiry customer in a gray herringbone lava-lava and long black cutaway coat—right in style for Confederate rent-a-cops, and not the least bit funny once you took in the wide leather gunbelt and heavy automatic strapped around his waist.

Not that he was without his little peculiarities. He’s a nineteen-year veteran of Professional Protectives’ on-the-spot guard service, combat pistol champion of Greater Laporte, and “saw the elephant” during the Antarctican War. A pair of warm and twinkling brown eyes made up for the angry scar running along his left cheek. He plays gin for blood, but only off duty.

Oh yes. He’s also a chimpanzee.

My first day here, I’d noticed what I took fuzzily for an unusual number of dwarfs—mutants. Now I knew better. Half of Forsyth’s squad were chimps (and don’t say “monkeys,” for the same reason you don’t say “spics” or “slopes”), complete with guns, nightsticks, and corn pads.

I remembered the discovery in my own world that simians can’t talk only because their vocal apparatus isn’t up to it. We’d only just begun teaching them sign language. It had started here a hundred years earlier, maybe because Darwin’s opinions were more graciously received, or maybe because Confederates view innovation as a blessing instead of a threat. Or maybe because they haven’t wasted so much time and effort, so many useful lives, on war and economic disaster. Anyway, science and philosophy have never been separate departments here. Any critter who can handle more than a few hundred words is human. Killing it becomes murder.

As soon as they understood the setup, chimps, gorillas, a couple of other species waded right in and began exercising their rights. That didn’t arouse hostility the way it might back home: there’s too much work to do, and too few minds and hands to get it all done. Anyone’s welcome who can demand a place and carry his own weight: freedom and independence aren’t synonymous. The first time I mentioned “welfare rights” here, all I got was open-mouthed stares.

Lacking vocal speech, simians wear a device which translates tiny muscular movements—subliminal sign-talk—into sound. As with individual handwriting and telegraphy, each “voice” has its own personality: natural variations in bone-structure, muscular development, perhaps even character. Really accomplished Telecom entertainers employ a speech device on each wrist—a whole new wrinkle in ventriloquism.

Gallatin and Spooner believed it: any creature who can think is, Q.E.D., “people.” It’s calmly anticipated here that someday there’ll be computers with rights—and they’ll be welcome too.

“Then how did it go in your world, Win?” Clarissa asked, “I’ve heard bits and pieces, but Captain Forsyth hasn’t heard any of it yet.” She wore a long, simple, celery-colored empire gown she thought of as casual, with a white cross in a circle on her left shoulder, the symbol of her profession.

I shrugged. “I can’t say exactly. Everything seems more or less normal, right up through the Whiskey Rebellion. But in my history, George Washington went right on drawing expenses.”

“So what happened to old Albert?” Lucy had a tumbler in her hand twice the size of mine, but wasn’t showing a sign of it. Her monster Gabbet Fairfax hung from an ornate shoulder strap like a bandito’s cartridge belt. “How come he chickened out?”

“I wish I knew. Gallatin’s hardly remembered at all in my world. Only reason I ever heard of him was …” I showed them the coin I’d taken off Meiss.

Forsyth put down my forty-one—he was fascinated—revolvers had gone out here ninety years ago—and examined the golden disk. “Nothing but an ordinary gold ounce. What’s so unusual—besides the fact I never see enough of them?” He scratched idly and reached for the salted nuts.

Ed smiled wryly. “It showed up on the other side. Win’s world. People there aren’t allowed to own gold. They use paper for money!”

I grimaced. “I still don’t understand you people. You’re all a bunch of crackpots—like the Propertarians. Only in this society, it’s the anarchocapitalists who run things!”

“‘Don’t understand’ is an understatement, Winnie my boy,” Lucy said. “Nobody ‘runs things’ here—’cept their own business! And folks with other cravings …” She patted the holster on her hip.

Forsyth wrinkled his upper lip and screeched with laughter. Ed grinned ruefully. “Lucy’s the last of the vanishing breed—a revolutionary with nothing left to revolt against. Blew up half the Winter Palace getting at the Czar, to hear her tell it—but tends to embroider her adventures a little, as you’ve probably—”

“Embroider?” Lucy lowered her eyebrows and hunched forward. “Eddypoo, you’ll be hearing from my seconds. And speaking of seconds, my glass is empty!”