The Probability Broach, chapter 10

When he arrived in this alternate universe, Win Bear was shot and almost died. Lucky for him, the North American Confederacy has super-advanced medical technology. The high-tech cast that’s healing his bullet wounds is supposed to come off tomorrow. He’s giddy at the prospect, feeling like a kid the night before Christmas.

His counterpart, Ed, tells Win he’s going out to check up on a client. Among Win’s belongings, he notices a pen with a “Paratronics” logo, which he recognizes as his and asks to have it back—except Win brought it from his own world. It’s the one he found in the murdered physicist Vaughn Meiss’ office.

That seems like a clue, especially since Paratronics is the corporate client Ed was going to visit. They both vow to investigate it.

That night, Win is drifting off to sleep when he’s suddenly jerked awake by an alarm. A mechanical voice blares: “INTRUDER AT FRONT GATE!”

He grabs his gun, leaps out of bed and runs outside, to find a melee at Ed’s front door:

At the gate a cluster of forms wrestled just inside the entrance… One guard lay on the ground, blood seeping ugly black onto the driveway, someone in charcoal-colored coveralls standing over him. Ed was on his back, arms outstretched and empty. A huge figure, also in gray, was pointing a weapon at his face. I lined up on the stranger’s chest and pulled the trigger, launching a blinding fireball in the semidarkness. The figure leaped and crumpled.

With Win blazing away at them, plus the rest of the private security team converging on the spot, the attackers scatter.

Ed and Captain Forsyth were both sucker-punched. They’re concussed, but alive. The man that Win shot—actually a gorilla, because that’s a thing here—is dead, and another of the attackers, this one a human, was wounded in the leg.

They carry the wounded into the house. Ed’s neighbor Lucy, awakened by the gunshots (“frustrated at missing all the excitement”) shows up in short order, and again calls for Clarissa the healer to treat their injuries.

That left our friend with the hole in his leg parked sullenly in a corner, two angry chimpanzees holding him none too gently and exchanging interesting notions about what to do with him if Forsyth got worse. That gave me an idea, so I went upstairs to put some clothes on. Draped in a bathrobe, I came back with my forty-one… The prisoner stiffened visibly when I caught his eye, kept looking over at Ed, then back at me, with an occasional wild glance at the S & W.

“Okay, asshole,” I said in my best backroom rubber-hose voice, “You gonna come clean, or do I hafta ventilate you some more?”

… “Barbarian!” he spat. “You don’t frighten me!”

“Is that so?” I shifted the muzzle to rest between his eyebrows. “I got two more slugs left. Think the boys here’d mind if I splatter your brains all over their uniforms? I’ll pay for the dry cleaning. Or would you like it somewhere neater, fellas?” I pointed the gun at his crotch.

“Get this savage away!” he screamed. “I stand on my rights!”

Yes, mock executions are a war crime. Win notes that he made sure the gun was unloaded before pulling this stunt, as if that makes it better.

We’ll get into this question more next week, but as an intro, let me point out that the idea of a person—prisoner or otherwise—having “rights” in the North American Confederacy is a contradiction in terms.

A right is a freedom or protection that the government can’t legally deprive you of. But there is no government here. There might be rights in the sense of moral principles that most people voluntarily agree to respect, but that’s not the same thing at all. You can do anything to anyone if you’re powerful enough or clever enough to get away with it. You won’t be breaking any laws, because there are no laws.

For example: L. Neil Smith is clear that in this society, killing someone in self-defense is completely fine. No one will give you any problems for it. What he seems less clear about is the obvious implication: if you kill someone, you just have to say it was self-defense.

It doesn’t matter if it’s true; it shouldn’t even matter if your story is contradicted by the evidence. There are no police who’ll investigate, after all. Your story only has to be plausible enough to pass minimal scrutiny, to convince everyone else to mind their own business.

(Wait, you say—wouldn’t friends or relatives of the deceased investigate their death, and come after you if they think you’re lying about what happened? Logically, yes. But the same thing should happen even for a justified killing, and yet Smith is adamant that there are no endless blood feuds here—despite that being a common feature of societies with weak or ineffective governments.)

There’s another unpleasant implication that Smith glides past. All of his protagonists—including Win himself, despite his fake execution ploy—have a rigid code of morality and would never actually harm a prisoner. But we can hardly assume that everyone in this society is so principled.

Basically, if someone tries to commit a crime and you capture them, you can torture them as much as you want, just as long as you kill them afterwards so they can never complain about it.

As we’ll see, Win’s friends are upset with him for threatening a captive, but really, he’s the one acting logically. That should be the way to handle this problem: break out the thumbscrews and the hot irons, make the hitman spill his guts about who sent him, then shoot him and bury his body in the wilderness.

In an anarcho-capitalist society where you’re solely responsible for protecting your own life, that’s the proper way to handle this problem. Why respect these imaginary, unenforced “rights” and let him go, when that just gives him a chance to try again?

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Other posts in this series:

• The Probability Broach