The Probability Broach, chapter 10
By threatening a captive prisoner, Win Bear was able to extract two useful pieces of information: one, that someone named “Madison” sent the goon squad after him, and two, that this Madison has or wants to acquire nuclear weapons (“He’ll blast you all to radioactive slag!”).
That second part is more disturbing to Win than to his new friends. Although the North American Confederacy has more advanced technology than the world he came from, Win knows what a nuclear bomb is, while his friends seem unfamiliar with the concept. They give him blank looks when he asks them about it.
But even though it got them the information they wanted, torturing a prisoner is against the rules of this society. Anyone who commits a crime and can’t make restitution is supposed to be ostracized by all, thrown out into the street and left to starve. That’s the way Smith tells us it works here.
However, even though Win flagrantly violated a prisoner’s rights in front of them, his friends never even consider doing that to him. We saw last time that they’re a little angry, but their anger only lasts a few paragraphs and then it’s never brought up again. Despite Smith’s insistence that his anarchy works because everyone follows the unwritten social contract, he unintentionally depicts the more realistic outcome: people overlooking the rules to help out their friends.
That said, when Win asks, “I’ve gone and spoiled it, haven’t I?”, they confirm the prisoner can file a legal case:
“‘Fraid so, buster,” Lucy absently swirled her ice, “He’ll likely sue our pants off and you don’t have that much to spare.”
… “He can’t get blood out of a turnip. Does that mean Devil’s Island?”
“Asteroids. No, Winnie, it just means we can’t sue him: our claims’ll cancel out.”
Once again, no one proposes the obvious solution, which is to kill the prisoner before he can complain to anyone about his treatment. In a world with no laws, where murder is perfectly allowable as long as you say it was self-defense, that’s the rational course of action.
Luckily for Win, this never becomes an issue. When the Civil Liberties Association arrives, the prisoner denies being tortured. No reason for this is given. You’d think the bad guys, who want to subvert this society, would be eager to wield its rules against their enemies. Even if they failed to kill Win, why not try to tie him up in court?
By the time I got to bed, the authorities had carted off the bodies, living and otherwise, along with depositions in living color and stereophonic sound, from every witness and participant—a lengthy process, but not without its rewards.
I wasn’t going to the asteroids, after all. Our damaged guest denied being intimidated—was downright vehement about it. I wasn’t looking any gift horses in the mouth, but everybody else was curious as the CLA shook him down.
“What’s this?” The representative removed a medallion from the prisoner’s neck.
… “Private property!” he snarled. “Give it back!”
The medal is bronze, engraved with “1789” and the “eye-in-the-pyramid” logo—better known as the Eye of Providence—which Win recognizes because it’s on the money where he comes from.
(Evil Overlord tip: Don’t make your henchmen wear identifying regalia when they go out to commit assassinations!)
Lucy, who until this point hasn’t been described as anything other than Ed Bear’s elderly neighbor, declares that she recognizes the symbol:
“I’ve seen this type before”—Lucy chuckled grimly—”back in the War in Europe. Coulda collected a mess of those medals if I’d been the souvenir type.”
Ed looked exasperated. “There you go again, Lucy, that was seventy years ago, and the Confederacy was neutral. The only Americans over there were volunteers in—”
“The Thousand Airship Flight! Bloody Huns shot us to pieces, but I got my passengers down okay, and joined the fighting.”
Lucy explains that they were fighting the Prussians, who had launched an imperial war of conquest against the rest of Europe. It’s this timeline’s version of World War I.
The North American Confederacy, being an anarchy without a standing army, officially stayed neutral. But thousands of its citizens volunteered to go and join the resistance, and Lucy was one of them. (As we’ll see, the NAC has life-extending technology, which is how she’s still alive to recall it seventy years later.)
The symbol dates back to the war, but doesn’t come from the Prussians, she says. Rather, it’s from the conspirators who were giving them their marching orders:
Ed goggled. “You mean it’s really—”
“That’s right, Eddie, it’s them. And Win, I do know what an atom bomb is. I helped move Phobos into synchronous orbit over Coprates.” She jerked an unkind thumb toward the prisoner. “If these crablice’re plannin’ t’use thermonuclear earth-movers as weapons…”
“Who the hell are you talking about?” I demanded. “Who’s them?”
“The Hamiltonians,” Ed answered quietly. “They’re the ones trying to kill you, Win.”
If you hadn’t guessed, the “Hamiltonians” are a secret cabal plotting to impose that ultimate evil: government. Smith chooses this appellation for his villains because he hates Alexander Hamilton the most of all America’s founders.
This is the first indication that that anyone is plotting to overthrow this society. Smith is eager to convince us that his version of anarchism works; that the North American Confederacy is a super-advanced, prosperous, peaceful utopia. But, clearly, it still has people who are so disgruntled that they want to tear it down.
This could be the launching point for an interesting philosophical discussion. If the NAC is as good as its author says it is, what motivates people to be Hamiltonians?
In fact, they’re so attracted to this ideology that they’re willing to kill or die for its sake—as opposed to, say, writing angry letters to the editor. That’s an extreme level of devotion that’s normally only brought out by severe oppression or desperation.
What made them so fanatical? Are these the poor and homeless, people who couldn’t earn enough to survive, and joined a cult because it was better than starving? Did they suffer some appalling injustice at the hands of its for-profit legal system? Are they serfs or indentured servants who escaped brutal treatment by rich owners and want to strike back? Is there a dark underbelly to the NAC that we’re not seeing?
These are the kinds of questions any decent world-builder should ask. Obviously, some societies are better and some are worse, but no arrangement is going to please everyone. The best way to learn about a civilization, real or fictional, is to look into its cracks—to ask who it’s not serving, and why.
Alas, this potentially interesting question goes unanswered in this book. Smith never explains what motivates the Hamiltonians, nor treats them as anything other than anonymous, disposable goons. For plot purposes, there have to be bad guys even in his superior anarcho-capitalist world, but he doesn’t want to delve into their reasoning. Perhaps he felt he couldn’t give them believable motivations without risking his utopia seeming not so utopian.
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I was going to say that not knowing what an atom bomb is would be plausible alt.history. If there’s no rise of anti-semitism post WW-I (see below), then maybe the Jewish physicists don’t move to America and physics takes a different turn. If there’s no WW II, no need for a Manhattan Project so maybe it stays theoretical (while the possibility of atomic fission was clear long before Trinity, there was no certainty it could work or a clear path — Germany’s heavy water experiments were a dead end). But apparently not — do we learn who developed it?
Now, anti-semitism: if the divergence point is the Whisky Rebellion, then presumably religious history proceeded much as it did in our world. Which means anti-Semitism would be a thing, quite possibly even in the enlightened confederacy. Anti-Catholicism too — it was a huge issue in the 19th century (similar to today’s anti-Muslim sentiment about Foreign Unamerican Religion) and the lack of government wouldn’t change that (there were some ugly mob incidents without any government prompting). Does Smith ever get into this side of the Confederacy and how bad is his explanation?
1)If I’m misremembering details of atomic history, sorry. It’s been a while since I read Richard Rhodes “Making of the Atomic Bomb.”
2)Given we already know Harriet Tubman was president, sexism and racism are dead without any real explanation so I imagine religious intolerance is too. Can’t say Smith isn’t consistent!
I checked the appendix where Smith tries to flesh out this alternate history a bit. All it says is that the first nuclear pile was constructed in 1922, in Chicago, and fission and then fusion reactors follow within a few years. There’s no mention of who built any of it.
He does not. As far as I can tell, Smith says nothing about religion. He doesn’t seem to consider it a meaningful influence on human behavior, good or bad.
So…how the AF does ANYONE in this alt-world have a full-on space-colonization program? Even ground-to-orbit rockets aren’t something a plucky entrepreneur can safely build (and test, and modify, and calibrate) in his garage — and that’s only the first and simplest part of a space program. I guess a bunch of big corporations could form an even bigger consortium to do this, but that would start to look an awful lot like…a state!
(Maybe that’s the Hamiltonians’ motive here: they’re trying to create a strong government to uphold the rights, and improve living/working conditions, for whoever chose (why?) to live on Mars or the Asteroids when everything was so hunky-dory on Earth?)
PS: Does anyone explain why anyone needed to move Phobos into a “synchronous orbit” over Coprates? And “I helped move Phobos into synchronous orbit over Coprates” sounds just laughable; sort of like it’s no more of a task than “I helped my brother dig his truck out of the mud after that big rainstorm last week.”
Hey, Superman moved moons around all the time in the Silver Age! Are you seriously suggesting the unfettered genius of anarchist America couldn’t do anything he could do?
I would guess the idea is using Phobos as an orbital base for staging flights to and from Mars, that makes some sense. The bit seems more like something thrown in to justify Lucy knowing about nukes.
It says something about the sensibility of people in this universe that they would use a nuke to move something but find the idea of using a huge bomb as a weapon weird. The author sees conflict as fundamentally being person vs person, not organization vs organization. As a purely personal weapon a nuke is inconvenient but if your goal is to destroy an industrial city it might make sense.
Honestly, the best reason I can think of for moving a small moon like Phobos into a synchronous orbit (I believe technically areosynchronous in this case) would be to use it as a tether for a space elevator. You’d still need to extend the elevator up past the moon to balance things out, but honestly a space elevator would be more feasible to build on Mars than on Earth anyway (lower gravity, less atmosphere and weather to pull on it, not much of a magnetic field to generate currents along the cables), even if it would also be less useful because launching normal rockets from Mars would also be easier for most of the same reasons. It would still at least solve the ‘last mile’ problem of colonization, as it would be much easier to control what gets in and out.
(Of course, it would also grant pretty serious power to whoever ran the elevator. Anything with a chokehold on some aspect of living can become a state if it wants to push the matter. People have been pointing out for decades that any serious space colonization effort will likely require social control we would find oppressive, because unlike colonization on Earth where you can be dropped to a random location and probably survive for at least hours, on a spaceship one person doing something stupid could be dead within seconds and kill everybody else over time. Space is less forgiving than Australian wildlife.)
I have no idea whether or not Smith thought that far ahead, but history in these posts doesn’t seem promising.
Finally, the plot is moving!
Something tells me that these Hamiltonians are just descendants of the royal houses of Europe, seething over their lost privilege. It just seems like the motive Smith would give them. If a European war was in living memory then it’s conceivable that they hold a grudge. For even if Smith himself demonstrates the adage, “for the privileged, equality looks like oppression,” he still might have noticed when his opponents do it without noticing his own hypocrisy.
Now, the Eye of Providence was not originally a Masonic symbol and as such had nothing to do with secret societies, but conspiracy theorists latched onto it anyway. Apparently they did so even in an alternate universe. Sure, in-universe it’s because of their connection to the Founding Fathers, but when has that stopped the far-right from recruiting these people? (It is still kind of weird that Smith wanted to convince Americans of his cause by saying “the Founders were bad, actually,” and then, unlike left-wing critics, provide no evidence to back it up.)
“What’s this?” The representative removed a medallion from the prisoner’s neck.
…“Private property!” he snarled. “Give it back!”
Silly Hamiltonian, the medallion is a personal possession, not private property. A possession is an object you have and can freely use. Property is what allows those with it to exploit those without it. They are not the same. (Basically, if you aren’t a landlord or a company shareholder, you are not a property owner. This is a different definition than most folks are used to. It has nothing to do with the title deed being in your name. Houses are possessions unless they are rented out, and only then become property.) No wonder the Hamiltonian, and his writer Smith, are so confused. They really think “the commies” are coming to take your toothbrush!
That’s a pretty good guess! If you want a small spoiler, one of them turns out to be this universe’s version of Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron.
I find the lack of background for the villains interesting because there is an obvious one that solves most of the issues. Imagine if somebody from the utopia world had created a world gate and introduced themselves to the government of Win’s world. It’s easy to see an evil politician from Win’s world setting up an organization to take over the utopia. It’s an idea that has been done before and gives an easy explanation without having to go into the details. Given the way the story has played out I thought this was highly likely the background. This doesn’t work if it’s tied into some ancient evil organization from the alternative world.
Fritz Leiber’s “Destiny Times Three” is along those lines — there’s a post-nuclear wasteland, a nuclear powered dystopia and a nuclear utopia (not actually nuclear power but that’s clearly the template) and the dystopia wants it all
The 2005 Canadian-South African TV series Charlie Jade had a similar three-world setup: our universe, a pretty explicitly corporatocratic/fascistic universe, and a fairly idyllic ‘in tune with the land’ universe (though a couple of others were added later), and the most dystopian universe wanted resources and dumping grounds from the others, with the other problem that establishing a permanent link would not only despoil the cleanest of the universes, it would essentially create something like a ‘false vacuum decay’ in our universe and completely destroy it.
You’re mostly right. That pretty much is what happened, and the bad guys from Win’s world want to come through the gateway and conquer the NAC. But this universe also has its own homegrown Hamiltonian villains who are in cahoots with them.
*looks it up* Hunh, yeah, the Coprates Quadrangle on Mars does extend up to the Martian equator… even if the actual Coprates Chasma in the middle that it’s named for is about 15 degrees south. So Smith obviously did at least some research on Mars, and a synchronous orbit over the upper edge of that region would be possible.
I’m loving the fact that Ed not only knows all the Founding Fathers, but has one he hates beyond measure.
Does Ed’s world have big statues of Aaron Burr all over the NAC?
There’s a few reasons why the assassin might want to cover up his treatment by Win. First, if he knows an atom bomb is going to go off nearby, he doesn’t want to get involved in a court case that would keep him in the vicinity. Second, if his torture becomes public knowledge, his boss will suspect that he gave up information to Win, Lucy and Ed, and that would be bad – this way he can pretend that he was just caught, but kept his organization’s secrets. But neither of these is particularly convincing.