The Valley-Westside War Read online

  “Sure must be a bunch of books in that big old library.” Dan stretched before he sat down on a bench in the courtyard.

  “There are,” Liz agreed. She could tell he was sweet on her—she recognized the signs. Maybe, if she didn’t encourage him, he would take a hint and go away. Maybe.

  “Must be books about all kinds of heavy things,” Dan went on.

  “I guess.” Liz wasn’t sure just what he meant by heavy. She wasn’t sure he was sure, either. Important probably came closest, but that wasn’t right, either.

  “All that stuff in there from the Old Time,” Dan said. “I bet you could find out a lot about what they knew back then if you could just figure out where to look.”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to do,” Liz answered, interested in spite of herself. “I want to know what really kicked off the war.”

  “Yeah, that’s what you said.” Dan nodded. “Surprises me, like, that you worry about history and not something you could really use.”

  “Huh?” Liz didn’t get it. And then she did. He thought she was looking for high tech in the University Research Library. That would have been funny if it weren’t so sad. By the home timeline’s standards, the ones she was used to, nothing in the URL was high-tech. Technology from 1967 here was as old-fashioned and out-of-date to her as it would have been there. But people here had been able to do much more in 1967 than they could nowadays.

  Her understanding must have shown on her face. Nodding again, Dan said, “Now you can dig it, right? I mean, who cares about history when you can look up machine guns?”

  “But I don’t care about machine guns,” Liz said—which was nothing but the truth.

  “Sure you don’t,” Dan said—which was anything but agreement. “If you made them, don’t you think you or your father could sell them?”

  He didn’t understand about factories. How could he, in this poor, sorry alternate? “I couldn’t make a machine gun. Neither could Dad,” Liz said.

  “I bet the Westside could, if it found out how in a book.”

  Dan might have been right about that. Liz wasn’t sure one way or the other. “If they were looking in the library for things like that, they wouldn’t send somebody like me to find them,” Liz said. “Use your head, man. They’d send a gunsmith who already knew most of what he needed. He’d be after the last few clues—he wouldn’t be starting from scratch, the way I’d have to.”

  By the look on Dan’s face, he might have taken a big bite out of a lemon. He hadn’t thought of that ahead of time, and it plainly made more sense than he wished it did. “Well, maybe,” he said.

  “Not maybe—for sure,” Liz said. “Because I don’t know diddly squat about machine guns, and I don’t care, either.”

  “You should care,” Dan said seriously. “If the Westside had a couple of machine guns, you wouldn’t have lost the war.”

  “Well, sure.” Liz knew she was supposed to be a Westside patriot. Taking the idea seriously wasn’t easy. Why would anybody want to fight and die for a silly little excuse for a country like this? But the question, once asked, answered itself. People had fought and died for little tiny countries all through history. Athens. Sparta. Venice. Singapore. Lots of others. She went on with the truth: “Like I told you, I still don’t know anything about machine guns.”

  “You’re a trader.” Dan made money-counting motions. “Where’s the profit in finding out about Old Time history?”

  Liz started to answer that, then stopped before she stuck her foot in her mouth. She sent Dan a sharp look. He sat there in the courtyard, soaking up sun like a lizard. He had a patchy, scratchy-looking beard. He didn’t bathe or wash his uniform often enough. (Liz didn’t bathe often enough, either. Nobody in this alternate did. That made it a little easier to take. People said that, where everybody stank, nobody stank. It wasn’t quite true, but it came close enough.) He didn’t have much education—nobody here did. But he wasn’t stupid after all. He might be dangerously smart.

  She hoped her pause wasn’t too obvious. Then she said, “There isn’t much profit in Old Time history, or there hasn’t been yet.”

  “So why do you do it, in that case?” Dan pounced like a cat jumping on a hamster.

  “It’s my hobby, I guess,” Liz answered. “Some people collect teacups or stamps or Old Time baseball cards. Some people have windup trains. Some of them even still work, or I’ve heard they do, anyhow.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard that, too,” Dan said. But he didn’t sound convinced. He looked at her in a way she didn’t like at all. She would rather have had him following her with his eyes because he thought she was pretty. She knew how to deal with that, and also knew it wasn’t dangerous in any serious way. This intent, thoughtful stare, on the other hand … He went on, “I’ll tell you what bothers me about your—hobby, like. It gives you the excuse to go to the library and look for things that could hurt my kingdom. I don’t want anybody to get away with anything like that. Can you blame me?”

  You bet I can, Liz thought. What irked her was, she was telling the truth—mostly, anyhow. She didn’t care about machine guns or hand grenades or tanks. The home timeline had far better weapons than the ones anybody had imagined in 1967. The history of this alternate, finding out exactly where its breakpoint was … that really mattered—to her, anyhow. But she could see she wouldn’t be able to explain why in any way that made sense to Dan.

  So she didn’t try. She just said, “If you’re going to think like that, you’d better put guards around the library and keep everybody from going in and out. It’s not just me, you know. Lots of people use the books there. That’s what they’re for. And you’d better take away all the Old Time encyclopedias you can find. I’m sure they talk about weapons and things, too. Or do you think I’m wrong?”

  He looked too unhappy to think she was wrong. “You’re saying everyone who can read may be a spy,” he said slowly. He also sounded plenty unhappy.

  Liz shook her head. “Most people aren’t spies. I’m not a spy, for heaven’s sake. I’m just saying you’re on my case for no good reason, and I wish you weren’t. It really bugs me, man.” Talking that way really bugged her, too, but she couldn’t let on. To herself, she sounded like somebody from an ancient sitcom.

  “Sorry,” he said, but she knew he wasn’t. He went on, “You got me interested in you, and now I can’t help noticing the things you do.”

  That’s what I was afraid of—one more thing Liz couldn’t say. She did say, “Like, try. Try as hard as you can.”

  He gave her a nasty look. “What would happen if we did search this place as hard as we could?”

  She glared back at him. She couldn’t let him see the threat worried her. “You’d rob us again, same as you did when you came in here the first time. Just ’cause we can’t do anything about it doesn’t mean we have to like it.”

  “That’s what you get for ending up on the losing side of a war,” Dan said.

  He wasn’t even wrong. Five thousand years of history and countless alternates proved he wasn’t. To the victors went the spoils. That was as old as the hills and as new as next week. It could have been worse, too. The Valley soldiers could have decided that Liz and her mother were part of the spoils. Lots of soldiers would have decided exactly that, and then things really would have turned ugly.

  “I’m not a soldier, and I’m not a spy,” Liz said. “I didn’t do anything to you. I didn’t do anything to the Valley or to King Zev, either.”

  “I guess not.” Yes, Dan agreed, but he didn’t seem convinced. “But there’s something funny about you. I don’t know what it is, but it’s there. You can’t tell me it’s not. You’re … more foreign than most Westsiders. How come?”

  “I don’t know,” Liz lied. She knew much too well. No matter how much she’d trained and practiced, she wasn’t a real Westsider, and nothing could make her one. Somebody who really did belong to this alternate was liable to notice if he looked closely enough. Dan had. His reasons for
looking closely weren’t the ones that usually tripped up Crosstime Traffic people—he liked her. But that made him wonder about her in the same way as if he hated her.

  He scratched the side of his jaw. Those wispy whiskers rasped under his fingernails. She thought the noise was gross, but she couldn’t tell him so. “Well, something funny’s going on,” he said. “Something fishy. You know stuff you aren’t telling. You’re just lucky it’s me asking the questions—that’s all I’ve got to say.”

  Liz shook her head. “That’s not true.” He glared at her. For a split second, she saw what he would look like if he did hate her. It wasn’t pretty. But she made herself go on: “If I were lucky, nobody would be asking me questions, because I haven’t done anything to deserve it.” Her voice broke on the last couple of words. She hadn’t planned that, which probably made it even more effective.

  “Don’t cry!” Dan exclaimed, which almost made Liz laugh instead. Yes, he liked her, and yes, her cracking voice had done her some good. He really sounded alarmed. “I have to ask you these questions, you know,” he said. “It’s my Patriotic Duty.” She could hear the capital letters thud into place.

  “I think you’re using your patriotic duty as an excuse to push people around,” Liz said. And how often had men and women done that in all the different histories of the world? Millions of times, more more likely billions. Most of them would have had the purest motives imaginable—in their own minds, anyhow. The people they pushed around might have had a different opinion.

  “I am not,” he said angrily. “You tell me all this weird stuff about the Old Time—it’s not what I learned in school, that’s for sure. And you know too much about the Russians, and everybody knows how bad they are. So what am I supposed to think, anyway?”

  “I know what I know,” Liz said with a shrug. And how I know it is none of your business, pal. “I don’t know what schools are like in the Valley, or what they teach you there. I don’t know what Westside schools are like, either. I’m a traders’ brat. Maybe that’s what makes me seem different to you. We travel around a lot, so if my folks didn’t teach me nobody would. If you want to blame anybody for the way I think, blame them.”

  If Dan did decide to blame them … well, so what? They could disappear back to the home timeline, and so could Liz.

  “Where all do you travel?” Dan asked. “Have your folks ever seen real, live Russians with their own eyes? Have you?” He might have been talking about demons with horns and fangs and tails. By the way he asked the question, he probably thought he was.

  “I’ve never seen any Russians,” Liz said. “How could I? They’re across the ocean.” She gestured toward the west. You could see the Pacific from the tops of tall buildings in Westwood. You could, if you felt like climbing all those flights of stairs to get that high off the ground. You took elevators for granted … till you had to do without them. When you were climbing stairs, who wanted to go more than four or five flights’ worth?

  “What about your folks?” Dan didn’t want to let it alone. Do they worship devils? He didn’t say that, but it was what he meant.

  “I don’t think they ever have. Like I said, how could they?” Liz answered. “But if you really want to know, you’d do better asking them yourself.”

  She wondered if he would. Talking with somebody your own age—even grilling somebody your own age—wasn’t so hard. Taking on somebody as old as your parents had to be a lot tougher. Sure, Dan wore the uniform of a conquering army. But Dad and Mom wore a different kind of uniform: the beginnings of gray hair and wrinkles and the invisible armor of experience.

  She could tell he felt the burden. “Maybe I will,” he said, but not in a way that suggested he was looking forward to it. He got to his feet. “I guess you aren’t trying to hurt the Valley. I guess.” He didn’t sound sure about that, either—nowhere close. “I don’t know just what you are up to, but it’s something funny. History!” He shook his head and walked off toward the door. He didn’t quite slam it behind him, but he also didn’t shut it gently.

  Liz didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. The only thing that interested her about this alternate was its history. Dan wouldn’t believe her if she told him so. And she couldn’t tell him why it interested her, or that she was from the home timeline. She had to go on pretending to be something she wasn’t, even if it got her into trouble. The trouble she’d get into if he ever found out what she really was would be even worse.

  A rock and a hard place. The devil and the deep blue sea. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t. They were all clichés, of course. But now Liz understood how they’d got to be clichés. They put truth into a handful of words.

  She said a handful of words herself. None of them helped much. Saying them made her feel better—for a little while, anyway. Sometimes you took what you could get, even if it wasn’t much.

  Dan stood in line, waiting for a cook to give him bread and fried chicken and sauerkraut. He hated sauerkraut. It was supposed to be good for you, so the cooks dished it out a couple of times a week. Sergeants kept an eye on you to make sure you really ate it, too.

  The stuff even smelled foul. One of the Valley soldiers in front of Dan pointed at the kettle where the sauerkraut bubbled and asked, “Who died?”

  “Oh, you’re funny,” the cook said. “Funny like a broken leg, you are.” He also got his revenge. He gave the mouthy soldier a burnt piece of bread and a chicken back with more bone than meat. And he gave him a big helping of sauerkraut.

  If the other soldier hadn’t, Dan might have joked about the sauerkraut. Sure, he knew annoying the cooks wasn’t the smartest thing you could do. But there was a difference between knowing and knowing. When the other soldier popped off and paid for it, that drove the lesson home. Dan didn’t say anything at all. He just held out his mess kit. He got a plump thigh, some unscorched bread, and … less sauerkraut than the joker had, anyway.

  He sat down on what had been a concrete bus bench. They had those in the Valley, too. The benches survived, while buses were nothing but pictures in Old Time books and magazines and stories that granddads said they’d heard from their granddads once upon a time when they were little kids.

  No, no buses on the streets now. No cars. No trucks. Some rich people’s carriages had wheels and axles taken from motor vehicles. Some—the super-fancy ones, pulled by big teams of horses—were made from car bodies, with the front part, the part that had held the now-useless motor, cut off to save weight. King Zev had a carriage like that. Its windows still went up and down, even. A few Valley nobles were also lucky enough to travel in style. So were some traders.

  Dan hadn’t seen any carriages like that here in Westwood. He was sure there were some. The big shots here were just as rich as the ones in the Valley, probably richer. But most of them didn’t get rich by being dumb. They weren’t showing off what they owned, not when King Zev ruled this place now instead of their pet City Council.

  Sergeant Chuck came up. He had two juicy-looking drumsticks in his mess kit. A sergeant didn’t need to butter up the cooks the way ordinary soldiers did. A cook who got in trouble with a sergeant would pay for it.

  “What’s happening, Dan?” Chuck asked.

  “Not much, Sergeant.” Dan stood up so Chuck could sit down on the bench. The sergeant did. Dan didn’t have to give up his place—nothing in the rules said he did, anyhow. But Chuck would have remembered if he didn’t. Sergeants had long memories, too.

  “How’s that chick at the traders’ house?” Chuck grinned as he asked the question. That meant he knew Dan liked Liz. A sergeant who was worth his pay kept track of what was going on with his men.

  “She’s okay. She’s kind of weird, though,” Dan said.

  “Well, Westside chicks are supposed to be that way,” Chuck said. That was an article of faith among Valley men. The Westsiders thought people from the Valley were a bunch of hicks, but what did they know?

  “Not weird like that. Not weird weird.” Dan wondered if h
e was making any sense at all. Chuck nodded, so maybe he was. He went on, “I mean, she’s into history, if you can dig that.”

  “History?” Chuck gnawed the meat off one of those drumsticks. Then he shook his head. After he swallowed the fried chicken, he said, “Yeah, that’s pretty freaky, all right. How’d you find out?”

  “She was coming back from the UCLA fancy library. I asked her what she was doing, and that’s what she told me,” Dan said.

  Chuck’s eyes narrowed. So did his mouth. “Could be a cover for something else, something nastier.”

  “I thought so, too,” Dan answered. “But she really does know stuff about Russians and things, and she doesn’t know much about guns. If they were trying to get stuff out of the library, wouldn’t they have picked somebody who does?”

  “We would—that’s for sure,” Chuck said. “The Westsiders, though … they’re kinda far-out, so who knows for sure?” He paused. “Russians, eh? How does she know about Russians?”

  “I’m not quite sure,” Dan admitted. “The way she made it sound, traders hear stuff ordinary people don’t. Do you think that’s true?”

  Chuck scratched his head. “Don’t know for sure. I guess it could be. They travel more than most people do, that’s for sure.” He cocked his head to one side, studying Dan. “I bet you’ve been trying like anything to find out what she does know.”

  “Well … yeah.” Dan was embarrassed. He didn’t think he’d done anything wrong, but he didn’t want his private likes and dislikes to get in the way of his duty, either.

  “Don’t sweat it, man,” Chuck said, understanding his tone. “If you want to like her, you can like her. Plenty of our guys have got Westside girlfriends for themselves. Long as you remember you’re a Valley soldier, everything’s cool.”