The Disunited States of America Read online

  “What’s your father do?” Daisy Springer asked.

  “He’s a bioengineer,” Beckie said.

  “How about that?” Mrs. Springer said. Beckie wondered if she even knew what a bioengineer did. But she must have, because she went on, “There’s a fish hatchery over by Palestine, a couple of miles south of here.”

  “Is there? That might be interesting.” Beckie had to think how far two miles was—somewhere around three kilometers. California had been metric for more than 150 years. Some states still clung to the old way of measuring, though. North America was almost as much of a crazy quilt as Europe was.

  “Where will y’all be staying?” Mrs. Springer asked Gran. Y’all. They really did talk like that! It wasn’t just a joke on TV and in the movies.

  “With Ted and Ethel Snodgrass,” Gran answered. “Ethel’s my first cousin, you know.”

  “Well, I do now that you remind me, but I plumb forgot,” Daisy Springer said. She hadn’t had to worry about who Gran’s relatives were for longer than Beckie’s mother was alive. “Down on Prunty Street, then.” She didn’t make it a question. She knew where the Snodgrasses—what a name!—lived.

  Gran nodded. “That’s right.”

  “What’s it like in California?” Mrs. Springer sounded wistful. “Is it really as … as nice as all the shows make it out to be?”

  “Not on your life,” Gran said before Beckie could answer. “It’s hot like you wouldn’t believe in the summertime. People are rude. They don’t know their place. You can’t grow apples or pears, on account of you never get a frost. You can’t imagine how terrible the traffic is. My son-in-law pays me no mind, and my daughter’s just about as bad. They—”

  Beckie stopped listening. She’d heard all of this a million times before, even if it was new and fascinating to Mrs. Springer. Would they ever get out of the hot sun and over to the Snodgrasses’ house? Beckie wouldn’t have bet on it. When Gran started grumbling, she could go on for days.

  “Are you ready?” the operator asked as Justin Monroe and his mother got into the transposition chamber.

  “Of course not,” Mom answered. The operator blinked. Then she decided it was a joke and laughed. Justin smiled himself. His mother liked giving dumb questions crazy answers. She looked at the operator and said, “Are you ready?”

  “If I have to be,” the operator said. She didn’t seem to have any imagination to speak of. Justin wasn’t surprised. You didn’t need much in the way of brains to sit in the operator’s chair. Crosstime Traffic paid operators to be glorified spare tires. Computers guided transposition chambers from the home timeline to an alternate, or from one alternate to another. If something went wrong (which hardly ever happened), the operator could take over and bring the chamber home with manual controls (if she or he was very, very lucky).

  Justin sat down and fastened his seat belt. The seats in the chamber were like the ones in airplanes, all the way down to not giving enough legroom. Justin was tall and lanky—just over one meter, ninety centimeters—so he found that especially annoying.

  Six feet three, he reminded himself. I’m six feet three. In the alternate where he and his mother were going, Virginia still used the old-fashioned measurements. He’d learned inches and feet and yards and miles and ounces and pounds and pints and quarts and gallons and bushels and the rest of those foolish values. He’d learned them, and he could use them, but they struck him as an enormous waste of time. Why twelve inches to a foot, or 5,280 feet to a mile? How were you supposed to keep track of stuff like that? Counting by tens was so much easier.

  “Oh, one more thing,” the operator said. “I need your slavery declarations.”

  “Right.” Mom took hers out of her purse and handed it to the woman. Justin had his in a back pocket of his jeans—dungarees, people called them in the alternate where they were headed. The denim was dyed a light brown, not the blue that had been most popular in the home timeline for more than two hundred years.

  “Thank you.” The operator put them in a manila folder. Crosstime Traffic was supposed to get the most it could from the alternates while exploiting the people in them as little as possible. The year before, though, a scandal had rocked the home timeline’s biggest corporation. People, some of them in high places, bought and sold and owned natives of low-tech alternates—not to make money or anything, but just for the thrill of power.

  Government regulations came down in a flood. All over the world, governments had been waiting for an excuse to crack down on Crosstime Traffic. Now they had one. The slavery declarations were part of that. Justin and his mother both pledged not to have anything to do with enslaving anybody. That had always been against the rules, of course, but now they had to sign a paper that said they knew it was against the rules. How much good that signed sheet of paper would do … . Well, some bureaucrat somewhere thought it was a good idea.

  Even though the alternate the Monroes were going to wasn’t low-tech, the slavery declarations did matter there more than they would have in some other alternates. Discrimination survived over much of that changed North America, even if slavery was formally against the law everywhere.

  “Why didn’t they ratify the Constitution in that alternate?” Justin asked.

  “They couldn’t agree on how to set up the legislature,” Mom answered. “The big states wanted it based on population. The little ones wanted each state to have one vote no matter how many people it had. They were too stubborn to split the difference, the way they did here.”

  “That’s right. I remember now. And so they kept the Articles of Confederation instead.” Justin made a face. U.S. history went on and on about all the ways the Articles didn’t work. This alternate was a history text brought to life.

  “They kept them—and then after a while they forgot about them,” Mom said. “They still call countries in North America states, and a lot of them have the same names as states in the United States in the home timeline, but they’re countries, and there’s no United States in that alternate.”

  “Here we go,” the operator said. A few lights glowed and changed color in the instrument panel in front of her. It didn’t feel as if the transposition chamber was going anywhere. In one sense, it wasn’t. It started out in an underground room in Charleston, West Virginia. It would end up in an underground room in Charleston, too.

  But in the alternate where it was going, Charleston was part of Virginia, not of West Virginia. In the home timeline, Virginia seceded from the United States in 1861, as the Civil War was starting. Then West Virginia seceded from Virginia and got admitted to the Union as a separate state. There was no Civil War in that alternate. By the 1860s, the United States had already quietly fallen apart. There were lots of small and medium-sized wars between states, but never one great big one.

  “We’re going to have to be careful here,” Mom warned. “This is a high-tech alternate. Except for traveling crosstime, they know almost as much as we do. We have to make sure we don’t draw the wrong kind of attention to ourselves.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Justin had heard that a million times. “Wouldn’t we be smarter to stay away from alternates like that? If they do catch us, they can really use what they squeeze out of us.”

  “For one thing, we do good business with them,” his mother said. He snorted and rolled his eyes. Crosstime Traffic worshiped the bottom line. He didn’t, or not so much. Mom went on, “Another reason we’re there is to make sure they don’t find the crosstime secret.”

  “What do we do? Screw up their computer data?” Justin asked sarcastically.

  To his surprise, the operator spoke up: “That’s happened in some other alternates. Not in this one, I don’t think.”

  “Oh,” he said, some of the wind gone from his sails.

  “And another reason we’re here is to do what we can to make race relations go better,” Mom said. “Things aren’t perfect in the home timeline even now. You know that as well as I do. They’re a lot better than they used to be, but
they sure aren’t perfect. Even so, they look like heaven compared to Virginia and the other Southern states in that alternate.”

  “The other Southern states except Mississippi,” Justin said.

  Mom shook her head. “No, Mississippi, too. Blacks have no more business lording it over whites than whites do lording it over blacks. Nobody has any business lording it over anybody. It happens, but that doesn’t make it right. Right?”

  “I guess.” Justin hadn’t really worried about it one way or the other. His first thought was that the whites in Mississippi had it coming. But the black revolution there was 120 years old now. None of the whites in the miserable state now had ever persecuted anybody black. Why should they be on the receiving end for something they hadn’t done themselves?

  Before he could find an answer—if there was a good answer to find—the operator said, “We’re there.”

  It felt as if about fifteen minutes had gone by. This alternate’s breakpoint wasn’t very far from the present, so getting there didn’t seem to take very long. But when Justin looked at his watch, it was twenty past four—the same time as it was when he and Mom got into the transposition chamber. He’d seen that before. He still thought it was weird.

  Chronophysicists talked about the difference between time and duration. Without the fancy math to back it up, the talk was just talk. Justin accepted it. He believed it because he saw it worked. But he didn’t pretend to understand it. He wondered if the chronophysicists did, or if they just parroted what the computers told them.

  The door to the transposition chamber slid open. Justin and his mother might not have moved in any physical sense, but they weren’t where they had been, either. This concrete box of an underground room had a few bare bulbs glaring down from the ceiling, and that was it.

  Mom laughed as she looked around. “Be it ever so humble …” she started.

  But this wasn’t home, even if they’d be living here for a while. This was a different and dangerous place. People here didn’t like foreigners, and no one could be more foreign than the Monroes. The locals were racists. They were sexists. And they had a technology not very far behind the home timeline’s. If they ever learned the crosstime secret, they could build transposition chambers. Instead of trading, they could go conquering across the alternates. They could—if people from the home timeline didn’t stop them.

  Even worse, they didn’t have to get the crosstime secret from the home timeline. Even if everybody in Crosstime Traffic did everything right, these people might figure out how to travel between alternates all by themselves. Galbraith and Hester had, back in the home timeline. Otherwise, there would be no crosstime travel … and the home timeline, with too many people and not enough resources, would be in a lot of trouble.

  Justin didn’t want to think about that. Behind him, silently and without any fuss, the transposition chamber disappeared. He followed his mother toward the stairs that led up to the business Crosstime Traffic used for cover here.

  “Mom,” he said, “what do we do if they figure out crosstime travel for themselves?”

  “Well, it hasn’t happened yet,” his mother answered. “Not here, not in any of the other high-tech alternates. We’ve had it for more than fifty years now. Maybe there’s something about the home timelines that the alternates can’t match for a long time, if they ever do.”

  “Like what?” Justin asked.

  “I don’t know.” Mom laughed. “Maybe I’m talking through my hat, too. Maybe they’re working on it right now in a lab in Richmond or New Orleans or Los Angeles or Fremont.” Fremont was an important town here, not far from where Kansas City lay in the home timeline. “Maybe they’ll find it tomorrow, and we’ll all start going nuts.”

  “That would be great, wouldn’t it?” Justin waited for Mom to climb the stairs so he could take them two at a time. Then he swarmed up after her.

  “Hello, hello.” That was Randolph Brooks, who ran the Charleston Coin and Stamp Company. Collecting North American stamps and coins was a lot more complicated here than it was in the home timeline. Every state issued its own. Some states had merged with neighbors over the years—there was only one Carolina these days, for instance. Some had broken apart—thanks to the Florida Intervention, that state was divided into three parts, one of which belonged to Cuba.

  “How are you?” Mom asked. As far as the locals knew, she was Mr. Brooks’ sister, which made Justin his nephew.

  “Never a dull moment.” Mr. Brooks was in his early middle years, plump, balding, with thick glasses that sat too far down on his nose. He looked like a man who bought and sold coins and stamps, in other words. “You wouldn’t believe some of the counterfeits people try to palm off on you.”

  “I don’t think there’s ever been an alternate without thieves,” Mom said.

  “But these are dumb thieves.” Randolph Brooks sounded annoyed at the stupidity of mankind. “They scan something, they print it on an inkjet, and they bring it in and expect me to believe it’s two hundred years old. Ha!”

  “How often do you get fooled?” Justin asked.

  Mr. Brooks started to answer, then stopped. He tried again: “Well, I don’t exactly know. How can I, when getting fooled means I didn’t suspect when I should have?”

  “Well, did you ever sell something to somebody who brought it back and said it was a fake?” Justin asked.

  “No, I never did.” Mr. Brooks looked over toward Justin’s mother. “He likes to get to the bottom of things, doesn’t he?”

  “Oh, you might say so.” Mom’s voice was dry. Justin had an itch to know that he scratched whenever he could.

  Right now, he was looking out the window. The buildings across the street looked like … buildings. They were made of brick, so they looked like old-fashioned buildings, but plenty of brick buildings still went up every year in the home timeline, too. One was a copy shop, one a shoe-repair place, one a donut house—only they always spelled it doughnut in this alternate.

  The cars, though—the cars were something else. Quite a few of them still burned gasoline, which was obsolete in the home timeline. Their lines were strange. They looked faster than cars from the home timeline. They weren’t, but they looked that way. Some of the makes were familiar: Honda, Mercedes, Renault. But Pegasus and Hupmobile and Lancelot and Vance rang no bell for Justin. You saw Vances everywhere. They were the Chevies of this alternate.

  And the people seemed different, too. Hardly anybody here had piercings or tattoos. Women didn’t wear pants. Their dresses looked like explosions in a florist’s shop. Almost all of them were cut below the knee. More men wore suits than in the home timeline, and the four-button jackets with tiny lapels gave them the look of the 1890s. It was only a look, and Justin knew as much. Their technology was a lot closer to the home timeline’s than that. The men who weren’t in suits mostly had on brown jeans like Justin’s.

  An amazing number of people smoked. Men and women puffed on cigarettes, cigars, pipes. “Don’t they know how bad for them that is?” Justin asked.

  “They know. They mostly don’t care,” Mr. Brooks said. “They say they’d rather enjoy life more, even if that means they don’t get quite so much of it.” He shrugged. “Not how I see it, but that’s what they say.”

  An African American walked by. He looked like a janitor. Not many of his race got to be much more than janitors and farm laborers in this Virginia. They weren’t called African Americans here, either. Polite whites called them Negroes. Whites who didn’t bother being polite used a different name, one that sounded something like the nicer label.

  Randolph Brooks saw Justin noticing the black man. “If you aren’t racist here, they’ll think you’re peculiar. Sometimes you have to use those words.”

  “Won’t be easy,” Justin said. In the home timeline, people used what had been obscenities in the twentieth century without even thinking about them. What once was bad language turned normal. But if you used a racist or sexist or homophobic word there, most peo
ple wouldn’t want anything to do with you. It wasn’t exactly illegal, but it was like picking your nose in public or wearing fur.

  A beat-up white Honda pulled into a parking space in front of the donut house. The middle-aged man who got out looked pretty beat-up himself. He had a narrow, suspicious face and about a day’s worth of stubble on his chin. He wore those brown jeans and a T-shirt. Except for the color of his pants, that would have been ordinary enough in the home timeline. Here it said he was a tough guy, or wanted people to think he was.

  Whatever he took out of the space between the front and back seats was wrapped in a blanket. It made a heavy, bulky load. His arm muscles bulged as he lugged it into the donut shop.

  “Wonder what he’s got,” Justin said.

  “About a month’s supply of donut holes,” Mr. Brooks said gravely. Justin started to nod, then sent him a sharp look. More to him than met the eye.

  A few minutes later, the man came out and started back to his car. A pair of policemen in Smokey the Bear hats walked down the street toward him. When he saw them, he almost jumped out of his skin. If Justin were one of those cops, he would have arrested the man in the T-shirt on general principles.

  They could do that here, too, more easily than in the home timeline. Some states in this alternate had bills of rights that limited what their governments could do. Virginia did, but it had lots of exceptions. If the police thought they were putting down a Negro revolt, they could do almost anything they pleased.

  These policemen walked past the man in the T-shirt and jeans. They walked past the donut house. They went on down the street, laughing and talking. The man might have been on a sitcom, he acted so relieved. He jumped into the old Honda and drove away as fast as he could.

  “Wonder what that was all about,” Mom said—she’d noticed, too, then.

  “Nothing to do with us,” Mr. Brooks said. “All we have to do is sit tight, and everything will be fine.” That sounded boring to Justin. He hadn’t yet found out that you didn’t always want excitement in your life. He hadn’t—but he would.