Difference between revisions of "Talk:VII: The Looking Glass"

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VII: The Looking Glass

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—”

“A pair of identical gumshoes? I’ve been thinking about that. Maybe because we’re both Indians.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Well, I never set much store in being ‘Native American’—neolithically ignorant while the rest of the world was out inventing the wheel, gunpowder, carbon steel. Hell, if our esteemed ancestors had been able to get along with one another thirty days running, they could have thrown Pizarro and Cortez out on their hairy asses and developed a real civilization.”

“So what’s your point?”

“I don’t know exactly where our histories diverged. I’d sleep better tonight if I did. But those histories are mostly white people’s histories, right? I mean, George Washington got killed in the Whiskey Rebellion, that’s what Clarissa tells me.”

“And she’s correct. Right between the eyes, like he deserved!”

“Splendid. Well in my history, old George—whom we think pretty highly of—died in bed from a bad case of the quacks. He had a head cold and they bled him to death for it.”

“Seems only just; he was bleeding everybody else with Hamilton’s taxes.”

“All right, funny man, suppose he’d had a child after the Rebellion.”

“In your history? But he was an old man.”

“Never stopped Ben Franklin, did it?”

“Franklin? Oh, yes, the turncoat Federalist.”

“Okay, okay. Now George couldn’t have had another kid in your history, because he was dead, see? But my hypothetical kid—an extra one, from your vantage point—would have had kids of its own, right? And they’d have had kids. Pretty soon the whole population would be substantially different.”

Ed saw some light. “By now there’d hardly be anyone like us, with close counterparts in each world. But that just makes it harder to explain our—”

“Not at all! Look—whatever the White-Eyes were up to back East, that wouldn’t affect what our ancestors were doing!”

He nodded. “Not until much later, and by that time—”

“By that time our heredity—in each world—would be pretty much unaltered!” I was proud of that theory. For the first time I began to feel on top of things. The feeling was good, while it lasted.

Ed tipped the chair back again and relaxed. “That still leaves a number of things to figure out, though. For example, how you got here in the first place, and—”

“And who’s trying to fill me full of bullet holes while I’m here. I thought I’d left the bad guys behind. You got any enemies?”

He shrugged. “You thinking that the Frontenac people mistook you for me? Anything is possible, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. But couldn’t your bad guys have arrived the same way you did?”

“That’s a cheerful thought. Got any more?”

“Now that you mention it: I still don’t understand one thing … I gather that, in your capacity as an investigator, you work for the government. Why that should be so, I—”

“That’s right, the city government of Denver. What of it?”

“Cities with their own governments? Well, let it pass. Now the pistol you took in the laboratory is marked ‘government property,’ yet you find it perfectly reasonable to assume it was in the hands of its rightful owner, correct?”

“Sure, the United States Government—not the same thing at all. Look, I know it sounds strange—hell, it sounds pretty strange to me—but sometimes the interests of various governments—local, state, national—conflict. That’s—”

“A good indication,” he said with a sour look, “that you have too many governments!”

“Let’s skip politics. All I seem to run into lately is anarchists—and garage doors.”

Ed got up and looked at my Browning again. “I wonder about your theory, Win. About us both being Indians. You figure we’re here because changes in history reached our ancestors too late to prevent us being born?”

“That’s right—setting aside the question of whose history is changed.”

“Very well, but can you account for us both being detectives—or even for us having the same name? And something else: these firearms—the Utah and the Nauvoo Brownings—both invented, presumably, by John Moses Browning?”

“Yeah, what of it?”

“John Moses Browning wasn’t an Indian.”

“Damn you, Ed! Just when I’m getting things figured out, you have to confuse me with logic!”

“Not logic,” he laughed, “just the Bear facts!”

“Ugh. Well, where does that put us now?”

He thought a moment. “If we knew how your bad guys got here—assuming they’re not just local talent—that might tell us how to get you back to your own world.”

There it was again, that stomach-wrenching thought. “Wrong,” I said, unable to hold back my fears any longer. “Look, something caused this divergence, some event between the Revolution and the Whiskey Rebellion that wound up with Washington getting prematurely dead, I—”

“What are you driving at? I thought all of this was—”

“Critical! Suppose time travel is possible, Ed, not sideways time travel, but the good old-fashioned linear, back-and-forth kind. Suppose somebody went back—maybe Vaughn Meiss, maybe the government—and killed the wrong dinosaur or his own grandfather! Suppose history has been fouled up for good!”

“What do you mean?”

“All along, I’ve been assuming that I traveled to get here. Suppose Meiss’s machine just sort of held me in place while my own world was ripped out from under me and yours slipped in to take its place! Ed, I’m really scared! How do I know that whatever change in history created your world didn’t destroy mine?”