The Valley-Westside War Read online

  No rain now, not in the summertime. The Valley was full of cisterns to hold the rain that had fallen the winter before. Watermasters doled it out to farms and families. In years with dry winters, everyone worried about whether there’d be enough for crops—and for people.

  Back in the Old Time, irrigation had brought water from hundreds of miles away. Everybody in Los Angeles had had plenty. All the houses and apartments and factories and shops showed as much. There were far more of them than the people who lived here now could ever hope to fill. All over L.A., in all the little countries that had sprung up since the day the Fire fell, scavengers scrounged through the swarms of abandoned buildings for whatever they could find.

  Something occurred to Dan. “Hey, Sergeant!” he said. If Sergeant Chuck didn’t know everything, he didn’t know he didn’t know it.

  “What is it, kid?” The three stripes on his sleeve—genuine Old Time stripes, machine-embroidered—gave him the right to treat everybody below him the way Dan’s father treated him before he got drafted.

  “Is it true what they say about swimming pools?”

  “You mean, did the Old Time people really fill those cement holes in the ground with water and swim in them? They didn’t just use ’em for cisterns or put dirt back in ’em?”

  “Yes, Sergeant. That’s what I mean.” Dan nodded.

  “Oh, it’s true, all right.” Sergeant Chuck nodded, too, solemnly. “I’ve seen pictures in Old Time magazines.”

  That proved it, all right, unless … “Were they for-true magazines?”

  “Well, I sure think so,” the sergeant answered. “They had other things that sure are real—cars and things, you know.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Dan nodded. You couldn’t not know about cars. Their rusting corpses filled the streets. To this day, they were the main source of iron for blacksmiths. Their wheels—with tires of wood, not the rubber that had rotted away—still turned on carts and wagons. Glass from their windows gave homes light to this day. “I wonder how they moved so fast all by themselves, though.”

  “Well, who doesn’t?” Chuck said. “Must’ve been something like a steam engine, I expect.”

  Big, puffing steam engines pumped water. A few of them moved engines along railroads. But so many rail lines were broken, and so many bandits prowled the routes, that railroads often seemed more trouble than they were worth. “How did Old Time people keep railroads from getting raided?” Dan asked.

  “I don’t think they did,” the sergeant told him. “You know the story of Jesse James and Annie Oakley, don’t you?”

  “Little Orphan Annie? I hope I do!” Dan said.

  “Well, they were train robbers, right?”

  “They were,” Dan admitted. “But they got caught and paid the price. Jesse did, anyway. Annie married Judge Warbucks and got off. Too many robbers these days never even get caught.”

  “Too many places for bad guys to slip through the cracks,” Sergeant Chuck said. “What you’ve got to remember is, back in Old Time days this was all one country—the Valley and the Westside and Burbank and Speedro. All the way from Sandago to Frisco. Even Vegas. All one country. Bad guys couldn’t just skip over a border and disappear, like.”

  “Uh-huh.” Dan had learned that in school. And there were big stretches of land now that didn’t belong to anybody—except bandits and brigands, anyhow. “If people other places would just admit Zev was their rightful king …”

  Chuck laughed. “Don’t hold your breath. The Westside wants the City Council to run everything. Burbank’s got a Director and a Producer. All the other countries think they ought to be top dog, too.”

  “But they don’t know what they’re talking about. We’re the only really civilized one.” Dan had learned that in school, too.

  “Well, sure.” Chuck had probably also learned it in school. Most people in the Valley had four years of education. Quite a few had six or even eight. Dan did. He could read and write and add and subtract and even multiply and do long division. Adding and subtracting always came in handy. He didn’t know if he’d ever use the fancier stuff, but he had it if he needed it.

  And reading … Nothing killed time better than reading. Back in the Old Time, they’d had TV and the movies and radio and records to make time go by. A few records still played on wind-up phonographs. The other things weren’t even memories any more, because nobody still alive recalled using them. But old people remembered their grandparents talking about them, and Old Time books and magazines mentioned them all the time. They had to be for-true.

  Sergeant Chuck broke into his thoughts: “If I were you, Dan, I’d start practicing hard. A good archer’s worth about as much as a musketeer.”

  “Do you think there’ll be a war, honest?” Dan asked.

  “Sure do,” the sergeant answered. “King Zev won’t let the Westside close the pass. That’s too big a slap in the face to put up with. If those snooty so-and-so’s get away with it, next thing you know Burbank’ll start pushing us around, too.”

  “It’s a good thing they put these barracks on Victory Boulevard,” Dan said.

  “Yeah, that’s heavy, all right,” Chuck agreed. “Talk about your good omens.”

  “Can’t hardly get a better one,” Dan said. Some Old Time books seemed to laugh at the idea that anyone could foretell the future. But the Bible didn’t. Whether you were Christian or Jewish, you had to believe in prophets. And plenty of decks of tarot cards floated around, some printed before the Fire came down and others, cruder, afterwards. Dan snapped his fingers. “Talking about omens—can I ask you one more thing?”

  “Go ahead.” Sergeant Chuck was in a good mood—maybe he looked forward to a war with the Westside.

  “Does King Zev really have a Magic Eight Ball to help tell him what to do?”

  “He doesn’t have just one—he’s got two,” Chuck declared. “My cousin’s a preacher’s assistant, and he knows stuff like that.”

  “Two? Wow! Oh, wow!” Dan hadn’t dreamt the Valley was so rich.

  “You better believe it,” Chuck said. “And what he does is, he asks both of them the same question and then he sees how each one answers. If that’s not scientific, I don’t know what is.”

  “Scientific.” Dan’s voice went all dreamy—there was a word to conjure with. And plenty of wizards and fortune-tellers did just that. “Well, if we don’t have the vitamins to beat the Westside with two Magic Eight Balls, I don’t know what else we’d need.”

  “Soldiers,” Sergeant Chuck told him. “Whatever else you’ve got, you always need soldiers.”

  Walking up Hilgard to the UCLA campus made Liz want to cry. It was like walking past the skeleton of a good friend. You knew who it was. If you tried, you could picture what the person—or the place—had looked like alive. But all you saw was death.

  The asphalt was so old, it was nearer white than black. Here and there, it had washed out altogether. Cobblestones replaced a few stretches. Others were just dirt. Cracks seamed even intact asphalt, like the wrinkles on a great-grandmother’s face.

  Cracks also marred the concrete of the sidewalk. Back in the home timeline, Liz would have gone past the botanical gardens and some nicely watered lawns across the street. Here, most of the imported plants in the gardens were dead, killed off by L.A.’s summer droughts. No one here had a lawn that was green in the summertime. There was no water to spare for such luxury. From November to March—in a wet year, to May—things were green. Any other time? Brown.

  Sorority houses and rich people’s homes stood across the street from the campus in the home timeline. Some of the buildings still stood here. A couple of the old sororities even had their Greek letters on the front wall. Nobody in this alternate seemed to know what they meant any more.

  They weren’t sorority houses and rich people’s homes any more, not here. Guards stood outside one of them—it was the Westside jail. Smoke poured from another one—it was a smithy and armory, and made a lot of the weapons the local army used. Se
veral homes were armored with iron—some old sheet metal, some taken from dead automobiles. Members of the City Council lived in those. As far as Liz was concerned, they took A man’s home is his castle too far. The rulers of the Westside didn’t seem to take chances about how well loved they were.

  Turning left onto the actual campus was both a relief and a bigger wound. Parts of the north end seemed hauntingly familiar. Everyone in the home timeline called Bunche Hall the Waffle because of the square windows in the south wall that stuck out from the brown stone surface. The building remained intact here, too. Only a few of the windows did, though.

  There was also another difference—a subtler one—between the two versions of the same building. Down at the bottom of Bunche Hall in the home timeline, there was a bust of the diplomat, and his name, and the dates of his birth and death: 1904–1971. Everything here was the same … except the date of Ralph Bunche’s death was missing. He was still alive when the war started, and after that nobody cared. The 1904–that remained seemed asymmetrical. The artisan who put it up had figured it would look fine once Bunche died. In the home timeline, he was right.

  Liz wondered whether Ralph Bunche ever saw the building named for him. If he did, what did he think of the way that nameless artisan had laid things out? Wouldn’t it have seemed as if the man was just waiting for him to keel over? It felt that way to Liz, anyhow.

  Her goal lay beyond Bunche Hall and to the left as she came up from the south. In the home timeline, it was the Young Research Library—the YRL—named after a twentieth-century administrator. Here, it was the University Research Library, or URL. They hadn’t got around to naming it for the otherwise forgotten Young before the missiles started flying.

  Five stories’ worth of books and periodicals … What better place to try to figure out why things went wrong in this alternate? The Westsiders had an almost superstitious respect for what they called Old Time knowledge. They took care of what the URL held as best they could. Most of it was still intact.

  A guard outside the door nodded to Liz—she’d been here before. He had an Old Time .45 on his hip—that was how important the Westsiders thought the URL was. Liz had sometimes wondered if computer URLs got their name from the University Research Library. That turned out not to be true—only an interesting coincidence.

  Once upon a time, the plate-glass door by the guard station had been automatic. No more. No infrared beam to cut. No electricity to power the door even if there were a beam. Nothing but muscle power and fading memories. Liz pulled the door open and went in.

  Her eyes needed a few seconds to get used to the gloom in the foyer. Some of the lamp fixtures in the ceiling still had fluorescent tubes in them. Maybe some of the tubes still worked. But no electricity had flowed through them since the Fire fell. The light inside the entrance hall came from the doorway and from the flickering oil lamps and candles. Soot caked thick on the walls above them said they’d burned there for a long, long time.

  In the home timeline, students—and other people who needed to find things they couldn’t track on the Net—would have bustled through the library and gathered in front of the elevators. Only a couple of people here wandered across the foyer. The elevators, of course, were as dead as the door and the fluorescent tubes.

  If you wanted to go upstairs here, you literally had to go up the stairs. A stair dragon waited at the bottom. He called himself a librarian, but he was really a stair dragon. You had to placate him before you could go up, and he’d search you when you came down again to make sure you weren’t stealing books.

  “Stack pass?” he growled as Liz came up. He breathed smoke, too—he was puffing on a fat cigar. Liz thought he smelled gross. Tobacco was a popular crop and trade good here. And why not? In this alternate, other things were likely to kill you before cancer or heart disease could.

  To make sure he didn’t start breathing fire, Liz showed him the family stack pass. It had cost her father a pretty penny in bribes, but good whiskey and wind-up alarm clocks and other goodies from the home timeline made getting what you wanted here pretty easy.

  “Thank you. Go ahead.” The stair dragon actually smiled. The stink of his smoldering cheroot chased Liz up the stairs. She coughed a couple of times, wishing she needed to go all the way up to the fifth floor so she could escape it. But the magazines she wanted lived on the second floor, and the nasty smell was bound to keep coming up after her.

  Study desks and chairs and tables all stood near the southfacing windows. Sunlight was the best light by which to work here, and the library shut down after dark. The desks and the tables dated back to the Old Time. A few of the chairs—the plastic ones with metal legs—did, too. Most of those had cracked or worn out since, though. That didn’t bother Liz. The wooden ones the Westsiders had made since were more comfortable anyhow.

  When Liz did go back into the stacks, the musty smell of old paper filled her nostrils. It was stronger here than it would have been in the home timeline. No climate control here, so the paper aged faster. A lot of books on the top floor were damaged beyond repair because the roof leaked. Down here, that wasn’t a worry, anyhow.

  She pulled out a bound volume of Newsweek magazines that ran from January to March of 1967. The war had started—and ended—in the summer. Nobody at the URL had bound the issues for April to June. Or, if somebody had, the volume had disappeared before Crosstime Traffic discovered this blighted alternate.

  Liz wanted those, or the equivalent from Time or Life or Look or U.S. News & World Report. She was stuck with what she had, though. She carried the bound volume back to a table. She was the only one there, so she could open the volume—carefully—and start scanning pages with a handheld scanner that sucked up data the way a vacuum cleaner sucked up dust.

  If a local did see her doing that, he wouldn’t understand it. Neither this alternate nor the home timeline had known how to make handheld scanners in 1967. Transistor radios were still pretty new. She saw an ad for one. It was bigger than an iPod, and couldn’t do one percent as much. It didn’t even have an FM band, only AM. And the ad said it was a technological breakthrough! The scary thing was, maybe the ad was right.

  The Vietnam War dominated the news. It would have done the same thing in the home timeline. Liz didn’t know exactly how what had happened here differed from what happened in the home timeline. That was why she was sucking up data. Computers could compare the text here to what the same issues said in the home timeline. Once they figured out how things had changed, they would have a better chance of nailing down where the breakpoint lay.

  In the meantime … In the meantime, Liz was unskilled labor. All she had to do was slide the scanner over one column after another. It did the real work. If she wanted to stare at the strange clothes and hairdos and the funky lines of the cars, she could. If she wanted to pause and read something interesting-looking, she could do that.

  And, as long as the mellow sunshine poured in through the windows, if she wanted to pretend she was at the other UCLA, the right UCLA … well, she could almost do that, too.

  King Zev wasn’t much to look at. Dan had been much younger than he was now when he first realized as much. Zev was short and round, not tall and heroic the way kings in stories usually were. Zev was going bald. His beard was scraggly and streaked with gray. He had a big nose.

  But, when he dressed up in an Old Time business suit and necktie, when he put a top hat on his head, he looked dignified even if not quite handsome. And he owned a big, booming voice, the kind of voice a lot of tall, heroic kings would have envied. He hardly needed the gilded Megaphone of State to get what he wanted to say out to the people and the army of the Valley.

  Along with the other soldiers who’d gone down to the Westside’s barricade across the 405, Dan sat close to the podium from which King Zev spoke. Their tobacco-brown uniforms were a good match for the dirt and the sun-blasted shrubs and bushes all around. Most ordinary people wore homespun, which also went well with the open space. Some rich
er men, though, had on Old Time shirts of nylon and trousers of polyester. The Old Time fabrics could wear out and fray, but bugs and mildew didn’t bother them. And the colors and patterns on some of them drove modern weavers and dyers mad with jealousy.

  “The Westside won’t get away with it!” King Zev roared through the megaphone. “We won’t let the Westside get away with it, will we?”

  “No!” Dan yelled, along with the other soldiers. The ordinary citizens shouted, too, but not so loud.

  “Down in the Westside, they think they can break treaties whenever they want to,” the king said. “They think they can make us pay for what’s always been a freeway. They think we’re too spineless to care. Are they right?”

  “No!” Dan yelled again, louder than ever.

  “I can’t hear you!” King Zev cupped a hand behind one ear.

  “No!” This time, Dan yelled so loud, it hurt. All around him, other young men in uniform were shouting themselves hoarse, too.

  King Zev smiled. “All right. Good,” he said. “Far freaking out. We’ve told them we won’t stand for it, but they don’t want to listen. So what are we, like, going to do about it?”

  “Fight ’em!” Dan bellowed. The other soldiers were shouting things like “Kill them!” and “Nuke ’em!” and “Smash ’em to bits!”

  Zev’s smile got wider. “That’s just what we’ll do. I’ve given Ambassador Mort his walking papers. He can go down there and tell the Westside City Council our soldiers will take care of their miserable, stupid wall.”

  Everybody cheered. No one liked the ambassador much. Even for a Westsider, he was pompous. He seemed to think getting sent to the Valley was a punishment, not a diplomatic appointment. He walked around as if everything up here smelled bad.