Free Pallas by L. Neil Smith

for us on a roll-call vote!”
    So that was it. Another failed attempt, this time in the Senate, to fill the “vacant” Western seats. For more than ten years there had been constant pressure, mostly from his own party, to accomplish that highly necessary task. They even had historical precedent: exactly the same thing had been done to the South during the nineteenth century. It had been the major issue of his career, responsible for vaulting him to prominence—which was why Dodd was calling him about it—but Altman was surprised now at how little he cared. After nine years in exile, it was difficult reme m bering how the “Cold Civil War” had started in the first place.
    Money, he supposed.
    What else would it be?
    The Second Great Depression had been brought about by Third World debts amounting to fourteen figures, the widespread and enthusiastic repudiation of which had devastated the American banking system. Of course the bankers had understood from the beginning that the gaggle of dictatorships and people’s republics they were showering with credit were bad risks. They’d counted on taxpayers to bail them out—with a little coercive assistance from Congress. And why not? Weren’t both parties doing essentially the same thing with their Russian aid program?
    And hadn’t Congress helpfully destroyed the only competition American banks had ever had, the savings and loan institutions, toward the end of the twentieth century?
    Then the economy of California had been destroyed by a long-predicted earthquake which, despite expensive (some said repre s sive) civil defense measures, had killed twenty million in the Greater Los Angeles area alone, inflicting trillions of Old Dollars’ worth of damage. Suddenly the money wasn’t there to bail out the banks, even if a new three-sided Congress—composed of Democratic Unionists, Conserv a tives, and Libertarians rather than Republicans and Democrats—had been willing.
    “Something you won’t hear about at all—from Atlanta or from an y where else, with any luck—is that the goddamned Jackelopes apparently took over another nuclear waste facility and they’ve been mailing that crap, an ounce at a time in foil-lined envelopes, to members of both houses! And still we lost the vote! Sometimes I think I ought to give up politics, Gibbie, and look for honest work like you!”
    Altman gasped. This was more important than a lost vote in the S e nate, and far more dangerous than the ecoterrorism of the last century because it was part of an incredibly popular movement rooted in respect for individual rights and private property. It was the closest thing so far to a provocation that couldn’t be overlooked, and it couldn’t have been accomplished without the cooperation of Western postal officials. However, owing to the Great Depression II and countless other stresses (which, to give Aloysius Brody credit, much like the San Andreas Fault had been long overdue for relief), a dramatic—although not yet officially acknowledged—political, economic, social, and geographic reshuffling had followed in North America without respect to offices and titles.
    Westerners had often complained bitterly of what they felt amounted to colonial treatment by the Northeast, of three-quarters of their land being perpetually tied up for the sake of a future which somehow never arrived, of their involuntary status as the Northeast’s dumping ground, its bottomless food, water, and mineral reserve, its hiding place for the Pentagon’s most dangerous toys.
    Privately, Altman admitted that there was substance to their co m plaints. His own party had always taken pains to assure that the West was represented by transplanted easterners—“carpetbaggers,” some called them—or by westerners with eastern values. The eastern-based media followed the same policy: for sixty years, there hadn’t been a news anchor in Denver, to name one example, who truly spoke for western values, although that