Harry Turtledove - The Valley-Westside War

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As Dan neared the top of the Sepulveda Pass, he saw the barricade the Westside had built across the 405. His deerskin boots scuffed on the old, cracked, sun-faded asphalt. Weeds, even bushes, sprouted from the cracks, but the freeway was still the best route south from the Valley. Or it had been, till the Westsiders blocked it.

They saw the Valley war party coming. Horns blared an alert. Men ran back and forth behind the barrier. Some of them would have crossbows or longbows. At seventeen, Dan himself was only an archer. Others would carry modern smoothbore muskets. And a few would use Old Time rifles. Those were far better than anything people could make nowadays, 130 years after the Fire came down. But the ammunition was two lifetimes old, too. Sometimes it worked the way it was supposed to. Sometimes it didn't do anything. And sometimes it blew up. You needed to be several different kinds of brave to carry an Old Time gun.

Captain Kevin raised the truce flag. He hadn't brought along enough men to rush the barricade. He couldn't have come without a good escort, though, not unless he wanted to lose face. The game had rules.

Big Louie strode out in front of the flag. He had an even bigger voice. “Parley!” he bellowed. “We want to talk!” He stepped back, looking proud of himself.

A Westside herald shouted back: “Come ahead, with no more than ten!” His voice sounded thin after Big Louie's. The Valley man looked prouder than ever.

Captain Kevin chose two riflemen, four musketeers, and four archers. you had to have some of each. That was what democracy was all about. He pointed to Dan as the last archer. Having a youngster among the veterans helped show he wasn't scared.

The barricade looked stronger than first reports suggested. The Westsiders must have worked hard to make it taller and thicker. Dust kicked up from Dan 's boots. It was summer, and hot and dry. Sweat ran down under his broad-brimmed hat. Turkey vultures circled overhead.

Once upon a time, men had flown, too. They could still get gliders into the air, but it wasn't the same. They'd really flown in the Old Time-flown at peace, flown to war. The songs and the old books all said so. And everybody knew the Fire came down from the sky.

“Close enough!” a Westside officer yelled.

“That you, Morris?” Captain Kevin called.

“ Colonel Morris, if you please!” Like most of his kind, the Westsider sounded snooty. Dan thought of things that way, anyhow. Westsiders said Valley people were a bunch of hicks. To Dan, that only proved how dumb Westsiders were.

“Well, Colonel Morris, your Wonderfulness, you can tear down this wall,” Captain Kevin said. “ King Zev and the Council say that's how it's got to be. We have a treaty to keep the pass open, and you people are breaking it. We won't put up with that. We know our rights, we do.”

Better believe it, Dan thought. The barricade would cut the Valley off from trade, and from scrounging farther south. If you didn't scrounge, how were you supposed to keep going? So much the Old Time made was better than its modern equivalents: everything from coins to mirrors to guns. People had scrounged a Jot and time had ruined a lot, but not everything. There weren't that many people any more, and there'd been even fewer right after the Fire came down.

“Times, they are a-changing,” Colonel Morris said. “We've got some things of our own going on. If you want to come south, you'll have to pay to pass.”

“That's simple. We won't do it. And if you think you're coming north, you're crazy,” Captain Kevin declared.

“Who wants to come north?” the Westsider said scornfully.

“Good luck with your oranges. Good luck with your greens. Good luck with your grain,” Captain Kevin told him.

“You need us worse than we need you,” Colonel Morris replied. Westsiders always said that. Maybe it was even true back before the Fire fell. Not many Valley people thought it was any more. The way things were going, it looked as if both sides would find out what was really what before too long. They'd find out the hard way, too.

Captain Kevin scowled. “You won't get away with this. I can tell you that right now. We know what our rights are. If we have to, we'll go to war to make sure the pass stays open. And if we go to war, we'll win it.”

“That's telling him,” Dan muttered. The musketeer next to him nodded.

“You can try.” Colonel Morris didn't sound worried. Did that mean he really wasn't, or did it just mean he was a good liar? Most Westsiders were-Valley people thought so, anyhow.

“That's your last word?” Captain Kevin, by contrast, sounded sad and mad at the same time.

“That's my first, last, and only word,” the Westside commander said.

“Well, I'm sorry for you, but you'll be sorrier.” Captain Kevin nodded to his soldiers. “Come on, boys. If they're going to be dumb, we'll teach 'em a lesson.” The soldiers turned around and marched back toward the rest of the Valley company. Behind them, the Westsiders jeered and swore. Dan got an itchy spot right in the middle of his back. If they started shooting, his leather jerkin wouldn't keep out an arrow, much less a bullet.

But they didn't. He breathed a sigh of relief when he got out of arrow and musket range. Oh, a rifleman could still hit him, but riflemen would go after important targets first. A kid with a bow was no big deal.

“What's the word, sir?” a waiting Valley sergeant asked.

“War!” Captain Kevin answered.

Liz Mendoza hated this Los Angeles. Being here, working here, was like being best friends with one identical twin and then suddenly having to visit the other one in the intensive-care unit. In the home timeline, where she lived, Los Angeles was one of the great cities of the world. Even a hundred years ago, back in the twentieth century, people said the future happened here first. And they were right.

This Los Angeles had been much like that one up till 1967. Then, in this alternate, somebody got stupid. People in what was left of the USA said the Russians fired the first missile. People in what was left of the USSR said the Americans started the war. It hardly mattered any more. Both sides had fired way too many.

Quite a few alternates went through nuclear wars in the second half of the twentieth century or the first half of the twenty-first. Crosstime Traffic stayed away from most of them. The company that controlled trade between the home timeline and the worlds that happened when history changed didn't see much profit in dealing with them. Why would you want to do business with somebody who'd set his own house and car on fire and then jumped into the flames?

Here, though, UCLA was paying the freight. Indirectly, the government was. The university had got a grant to try to find out just what went wrong in this alternate. Liz 's father was one of the historians who'd come here to do research. Her mother was a doctor who specialized in genetic diseases and the effects of radiation. And Liz was…

Protective coloration, she thought. Her parents seemed more normal if they had a kid along. And so here she was. She had studied a lot more about the 1960s than she would have otherwise. It was, in the ancient slang of the day, a mind-blowing experience. Except that slang wasn't ancient here. People still used it. They used whatever they could from the days before the war, because they mostly couldn't match that stuff, whether material goods or language, any more. Sad, but that was how things were in this alternate.

She'd start UCLA herself a year later than she would have otherwise. But she'd start with a year of crosstime experience under her belt. That was good. Or it would have been good if she'd gone to an alternate more different than this one was.