The Disunited States Read online

  Later, he wondered how Crosstime Traffic would know whether he used that soap and shampoo. Did transmitters in the packaging record that it was opened? Had he washed away a microchip on the surface of the soap that reacted when it got wet? Or did a camera in the shower stall send his image back to the main station in this alternate, wherever that was?

  He didn't like the idea, not one bit. Probably no humans were involved—only a computer program that wouldn't squeal to a real, live person unless it caught him breaking the rules. He didn't like it anyway.

  Mom squawked when he mentioned it at dinner that night. Mr. Brooks only shrugged. "With all the computer technology we've got these days, something or somebody is watching you all the time anyway. Either you get used to it or you go nuts."

  "That's how it works, all right," Lonnie agreed. "I know they monitor transposition chambers." He shrugged. "What can you do?"

  "There's a difference between monitoring a chamber and a shower." Justin's mother sounded like a cat with its dignity ruffled.

  "To you, maybe. Not to Crosstime Traffic, especially not in a quarantine station," Lonnie said. "If you kick up a fuss, they'd say they had an interest in making sure you followed instructions. How would you convince a court they were wrong?"

  What Mom said then didn't have much to do with convincing a court. It came from the heart, though. Mr. Brooks laughed. "That's telling 'em," he said.

  He'd been through the army. You didn't have much privacy there. Sometimes you didn't have any. Justin had found that out himself, the hard way, when he put on Adrian's uniform. His mother had never had to do anything like that. She didn't know how lucky she was, which might be literally true.

  The mattress on the bed was softer than Justin liked. That kept him awake . . . oh, an extra fifteen seconds or so. He was still catching up on sleep from his hectic couple of days of carrying a gun. He didn't have any nightmares about shooting the African-American kid. That was progress, too.

  Sunshine sliding between slats of the Venetian blinds poked him in the eye and woke him up the next morning. He heated up some waffles and slathered them with syrup.

  Mr. Brooks came into the kitchen as Justin was fixing himself seconds. The older man made a beeline for the espresso machine. He waited impatiently while it made rude noises. "Couldn't get a decent cup of coffee in that alternate, either," he grumbled, and then, "Waffles, eh? That doesn't look too bad."

  "They're okay." Justin wouldn't give them any more than that.

  Mr. Brooks laughed. "You can't expect Trump City food and service here." Justin nodded. The original Trump was many years dead, but his name remained a byword for extravagant luxury. Justin had seen pictures of him on the Net. He wore stiff, old-fashioned, uncomfortable-looking clothes, but he always had one very pretty girl or another on his arm. The girls probably didn't think the clothes were funny.

  Justin—and Lonnie—spotted Carolina parakeets the next day. They heard them before they saw them. To Justin's ear, the squawks and chirps belonged to a tropical jungle, not these ordinary Eastern woods. But there they were: green birds with yellow heads and, some of them, reddish faces.

  Lonnie was in seventh heaven. "They've been extinct in the home timeline about as long as passenger pigeons have," he said. "They never were as common, though. Of course, nothing was as common as passenger pigeons before the white man came. But Audubon, back in the first part of the nineteenth century, talks about Carolina parakeets all the way out past the Mississippi. We don't know what we're missing."

  "We've got starlings instead," Justin said.

  He wanted to hit a nerve with that, and he got what he wanted. Lonnie said some things about starlings that would have shocked the Audubon Society and the SPCA. Then he said something even less polite. Justin laughed, but he knew Lonnie was kidding on the square. Starlings were nothing but pests.

  Lonnie went into the woods looking for ivory-bill woodpeckers. As far as Justin was concerned, the chamber operator was welcome to that kind of exploring. No cell-phone net here, wild animals that had never learned to fear people ... He shook his head. If an ivory-bill happened to show up where he could see it, that would be great. And if not, he wouldn't lose any sleep over it.

  But when Lonnie came back that night, he was even happier than he had been when he set out. He waved his video camera. "I've got 'em!" he said, as if he'd gone hunting with a shotgun instead of a lens and a flash drive.

  "Way to go," Mr. Brooks said. "But now that you've seen the birds you wanted to see most, what will you do for the rest of the time you're here?"

  The question didn't faze Lonnie. "Keep on watching them," he answered. "When will I have another chance?"

  "Well, you've got me there," Mr. Brooks admitted.

  They stayed in quarantine for three weeks. Once a week, a computerized lab system drew blood from their fingers and analyzed it for any trace of genetic material from the plague virus. The system did the same for breath they exhaled into plastic bags. After three negative readings in a row, the powers that be were . . . almost satisfied. More bars of the disinfectant soap and tubes of the disinfectant shampoo appeared, with instructions to use them as on the first day in quarantine.

  As Justin washed, he wondered again if he was under surveillance. He went on washing. What else could he do? Maybe, when he got back to the home timeline, he would ask some questions. Or maybe he wouldn't. Maybe those weren't smart questions to ask.

  The transposition chamber appeared in the hole in the ground the next morning. Justin and his mother and Mr. Brooks and Lonnie hurried down to it. Lonnie had color prints of some of the birds he'd seen. Birders in the home timeline would turn green when they saw them.

  Going back to the home timeline seemed to take about as long as traveling from the alternate to the quarantine station had. But when the chamber's door slid open, it was still the same time as it had been when the machine set out. It was as if what happened inside the chamber while it was traveling between alternates didn't count.

  When the doors opened, there was the room from which Justin and his mother had left the home timeline, bound for Mr. Brooks' coin and stamp shop in the alternate where the Constitution never became the law of the land.

  "Welcome back," said a woman who had to be a Crosstime Traffic honcho. "You had quite a time, didn't you?"

  Justin wondered if she was wearing nose filters to block any viruses quarantine didn't catch. Then he wondered how paranoid he was getting. Of course, you probably weren't fit to live in the home timeline if you weren't a little bit paranoid.

  "I had quite a time." Lonnie gestured with his camera. "Pigeons and parakeets and woodpeckers and—"

  "That's not what I meant." The way the woman cut him off said she was a wheel, all right.

  "Just before we came back, I saw that Virginia and Ohio finally called a truce," Justin said.

  She nodded briskly. "That's right. And maybe it will give us a chance to help Virginia change a little bit. A few people there are smart enough to see that mistreating their African-American minority only puts a KICK ME! sign on their own backs."

  "Not many. Not nearly enough," Randolph Brooks said. Justin and his mother both nodded. The only person Justin had seen who was really appalled by the way Virginia treated African Americans was Beckie, and she was from California.

  "No, not enough, not yet," the woman executive agreed. "But some. And an election to the House of Burgesses is coming up soon. We'll put money into the moderates' campaigns. Even if they win—and not all of them will—this isn't something we can change overnight. It'll be a start, though. We'll keep working on it, there and in some other states."

  "Are you working in Mississippi in that alternate?" Justin asked.

  The executive gave him a sharp look. "Not as hard as we are some other places," she admitted. "There's a feeling that the white minority there is getting what's coming to it."

  "Why?" he said. "The revolt there happened more than a hundred years ago. There aren't an
y whites in Mississippi old enough to have oppressed African Americans. And they get it just as bad as blacks do other places in the South in that alternate. Fair's fair."

  "Logically, I suppose you're right," she said. "Logic doesn't always have anything to do with feelings, though, and feelings are important, too. We've only got limited resources in any one alternate. We have to decide where the best place to use them is."

  "Feelings are a funny thing to base policy on," Mr. Brooks remarked.

  "Not necessarily," the executive said. "We back groups that think and feel closer to the way we do. We want to see them succeed. If we were still racists ourselves, we'd back the hardliners in Virginia, not the moderates. And we'd feel we were right to do it, because they'd be like us. We do a lot of the things we do just because we do them, not because they're logical. One thing the alternates have taught us is that there are lots and lots and lots of different ways to do things, and most of them work all right in their own context."

  "Mm, you've got something there, but only something," Mr. Brooks said. "Virginia wouldn't be in such a mess if blacks there didn't want equality."

  "And we think they ought to have it," the executive said. "A racist would say they ought to be educated so they don't even want it. That's logical, too—it just starts from a different premise. It could work. There are alternates where that kind of thing does work."

  She seemed to think she had all the answers. Justin doubted that. People who were always sure often outsmarted themselves. But she did find interesting questions. He found an interesting question of his own: "Can we go now?"

  "Yes," the executive said. "If you're not healthy, we need to do a lot more work with our quarantine alternate." Maybe she wasn't wearing nose filters, then. She went on, "It was an interesting discussion, I thought. But remember, freedom of speech is just a custom, too. It's a good one, but it's not a law of nature." Right then, Justin wasn't thinking about laws of nature. After three weeks of bland quarantine rations, he was thinking about the biggest double burger in the world, with French fries—no, onion rings—on the side, and a chocolate shake to wash everything down. He headed for the stairs. Somewhere within a block or two, he'd be able to find just what he wanted.

  Home. Beckie had started to wonder if she would ever see it again. She and Gran went through quarantine in Virginia. Then they went through quarantine in Ohio. And then they went through quarantine in California. It would have been bad enough if she were cooped up all by herself. Going through quarantine with her grandmother really made her want to stay away from Gran for the rest of her life.

  But she didn't quite go looking for blunt instruments. It was over now. She had her own room, and she didn't feel like a guinea pig going in and out of it.

  No plagues. No guns going off. No bodies stinking in the streets. No humidity. Back with her family and friends. It all seemed like heaven.

  And everybody made a fuss over her, too. "We're so glad to have you back," her mother said over and over again. "We were so worried about you, and we couldn't find any way to get through. E-mail didn't work, phones didn't work, even letters came back. UNDELIVERABLE—WAR ZONE, they said."

  Gran sniffed. "I don't suppose anybody worried about me."

  "Of course we did," Beckie's father said loyally. Beckie didn't know how he put up with Mom's mother so well. Mom described it as the patience of Job. Beckie didn't know exactly what that meant till she found it in the Bible one day. When she was in a good mood, she thought her mother was exaggerating. When she was in a bad mood, she didn't. After going through quarantine with Gran, she was convinced Job didn't have it so bad.

  "Well, you could have called and said so, then," Gran said.

  "I just explained why we couldn't. The phones weren't working." Mom had been putting up with Gran much longer than Dad and Beckie had. If that wasn't heroism above and beyond the call of duty, Beckie didn't know what would be. And Mom, growing up with Gran for a mother, turned out nice, probably in reaction. If it wasn't in reaction, what was it? A miracle? Knowing Gran wouldn't pay attention, Mom just kept repeating herself till something eventually sank in.

  "What was being in a war like?" Dad asked.

  "Scary like you wouldn't believe," Beckie answered. "You didn't have any control over where the shells came down. If they hit you, even if you were in a trench, that was it. Just luck. Same with bullets." She shivered, remembering some of the things she'd heard and seen and smelled.

  Gran went off to call some of her friends. Beckie's mother said, "It must have been awful, stuck with your grandmother and stuck in that little town with nothing to do. Virginia!" She rolled her eyes. "I shouldn't have let you go."

  "It. . . could have been better." Beckie let it go there. Some of the things that had happened to her, she wondered if she would ever tell anybody. She doubted it.

  "Did you make any friends at all while you were there?" her mother asked.

  "There was a guy named Justin. He was up there from Charleston. He was nice," Beckie said. "He was . . . interesting, too. He could get things. When we went down to Charleston, he got Gran the medicine for when she came down sick. I swear that was before the Virginia hospitals had it."

  "I wonder how," Mom said.

  "So do—" Beckie stopped. She snapped her fingers. Then she ran for her bedroom.

  "What's going on?" her mother called after her.

  She didn't answer. "I almost forgot!" she said when she picked up her purse, but she'd closed the door by then. Her family—except Gran some of the time—respected that as a privacy signal. She'd kept her promise to Justin: kept it so well, she nearly forgot about it. But she was home at last. She could finally find out what he'd given her.

  She had to rummage to find the folded-up envelope. When she opened it, a brass-yellow coin fell into her hand. There were lots of different coins in North America, but she knew she'd never seen one like this before. Benjamin Franklin looked up at her—she recognized him right away. LIBERTY was written above his head. On one side of his bust were the words IN GOD WE TRUST, on the other the date 2091 and a small capital P.

  Marveling, she flipped the coin over. The design on the reverse was an eagle with thirteen arrows in one claw and a branch—an olive branch?—with thirteen leaves in the other. Ice walked up her back when she read the words above it: UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. Below that, in smaller letters, were the words E PLURIBUS UNUM, which didn't mean anything to her right away. Under the eagle, the coin said, ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS.

  "United States of America," she whispered, and turned the coin back to Franklin's portrait. Yes, it still said 2091 there. It was real. It felt real, not like some fake Justin had had made up. Why would he do that, anyway, and how could he? She'd asked him to explain, and he did. And if she spent the rest of her life wondering about the explanation . . . Well, wasn't that better than going through life never wondering about anything at all?