King Zev wasn't much to look at. Dan had been much younger than he was now when he first realized as much. Zev was short and round, not tall and heroic the way kings in stories usually were. Zev was going bald. His beard was scraggly and streaked with gray. He had a big nose.
But, when he dressed up in an Old Time business suit and necktie, when he put a top hat on his head, he looked dignified even if not quite handsome. And he owned a big, booming voice, the kind of voice a lot of tall, heroic kings would have envied. He hardly needed the gilded Megaphone of State to get what he wanted to say out to the people and the army of the Valley.
Along with the other soldiers who'd gone down to the West-side's barricade across the 405, Dan sat close to the podium from which King Zev spoke. Their tobacco-brown uniforms were a good match for the dirt and the sun-blasted shrubs and bushes all around. Most ordinary people wore homespun, which also went well with the open space. Some richer men, though, had on Old Time shirts of nylon and trousers of polyester. The Old Time fabrics could wear out and fray, but bugs and mildew didn't bother them. And the colors and patterns on some of them drove modern weavers and dyers mad with jealousy.
“The Westside won't get away with it!” King Zev roared through the megaphone. “We won't let the Westside get away with it, will we?”
“No!” Dan yelled, along with the other soldiers. The ordinary citizens shouted, too, but not so loud.
“Down in the Westside, they think they can break treaties whenever they want to,” the king said. “They think they can make us pay for what's always been a freeway. They think we're too spineless to care. Are they right?”
“No!” Dan yelled again, louder than ever.
“I can't hear you!” King Zev cupped a hand behind one ear.
“No!” This time, Dan yelled so loud, it hurt. All around him, other young men in uniform were shouting themselves hoarse, too.
King Zev smiled. “All right. Good,” he said. “Far freaking out. We've told them we won't stand for it, but they don't want to listen. So what are we, like, going to do about it?”
“Fight 'em!” Dan bellowed. The other soldiers were shouting things like “Kill them!” and “Nuke 'em!” and “Smash 'em to bits!”
Zev's smile got wider. “That's just what we'll do. I've given Ambassador Mort his walking papers. He can go down there and tell the Westside City Council our soldiers will take care of their miserable, stupid wall.”
Everybody cheered. No one liked the ambassador much. Even for a Westsider, he was pompous. He seemed to think getting sent to the Valley was a punishment, not a diplomatic appointment. He walked around as if everything up here smelled bad.
“Send him back where he belongs!” Dan yelled. The soldiers sitting near him laughed and clapped.
“I'm going to send him back,” Zev said, picking up on Dan's shout. That made Dan feel pretty special. All the people in the Valley were special, just because they were lucky enough to live here. He'd learned that in school, too. But he felt especially special right now. King Zev went on, “And I'm going to tell him to tell the City Council they can look for our soldiers right behind him!”
“Right on!” Dan thrust his fist in the air in a gesture that came from the Old Time. “Right on, your Majesty!”
“Heavy! That's soooo heavy!” Sergeant Chuck agreed. Soldiers and civilians cheered and pounded on things and made as much noise as they could.
King Zev raised his hands. The hot Valley sun gleamed off the golden megaphone. “I thank you, my people, for rolling with me on this one.” Now he'd said the closing words. It was official. It was democratic. It was war.
Two
What the Westside called a City Council meeting wasn't like the ones in the home timeline. Liz didn't think so. anyway. The Council decided whatever it decided and then told the people what that was. That was what the meeting was about.
When Liz complained to her dad, he smiled a sour smile. “It's not as different as you think, hon,” he said. “They're smoother about hiding what they're really up to in the home timeline-I will say that for them.”
The nine members of the City Council knew what they wanted to get across. What had been the UCLA Sculpture Garden was now the Westside assembly area. Some of the sculptures still stood. Others-mostly the abstract ones-had disappeared, probably melted down for the metal in them.
Ambassador Mort was tall and skinny. He wore a double-breasted Old Time sport jacket over baggy modern pants. “The Valley humiliated me!” he shouted to the people who'd come to the meeting. “Humiliated me, I tell you! They put me on a donkey with my face turned towards its tail and rode me to the border that way. It's a shame and a disgrace, that's what it is!”
It was also the standard way to send an ambassador home when you declared war on his country. Mort didn't say anything about that. How many of the men and women listening to him knew what the custom was? Not many- Liz was sure of that. The Council wanted to get people all worked up, and knew how to get what it wanted.
A big man named Cal was the chairman of the City Council. He wore an Old Time jacket, too-an ugly plaid one. He also wore a big white Stetson for no reason Liz could see. “Are we going to let the Valley get away with treating our ambassador that way?” he shouted, his voice high and quick and glib. Liz wouldn't have wanted to buy a used car from him. “I don't think so!”
“No way! No way! No way!” people chanted. They were a claque, a group set up in advance to make the kind of noise their patrons wanted when their patrons wanted it. They were too loud and too smooth to be anything else. When others joined in the chant, they sounded different-less rehearsed, maybe.
“I'm gonna sic my dog on the Valley!” Cal shouted. That was no idle threat. Cal's dog was famed-and feared-all over the Westside. There weren't nearly so many mutations alter the atomic war as people had feared. But there were some, and that dog was descended from them. It was a German shepherd about three quarters as big as a horse, with teeth a Tyrannosaurus might have envied. It was, mostly, a nice dog. But if it got mad…
“Feed King Zev to it!” yelled somebody from the claque. In a moment, that whole group was shouting the phrase. Again, people who didn't belong joined more slowly. But they did join. The stage managing would have been too open, too blatant, to work in the home timeline- Liz hoped so, anyhow. But it did just fine here.
“So shall we show the Valley that they can't tell us what to do?” Cal asked.
“Yes!” ''That's right!” “Bet your bippy!” people shouted back. Liz didn't know what a bippy was. She wondered if the men who used the word knew what it meant. Back in 1967, it had probably had a meaning. Now it was just a noise here. People said it without thinking about it. There were words like that in the home timeline, too.
“Is it war, then?” Cal wanted to make it official.
“War!” The word came back as a roar. That seemed official enough to Liz.
It seemed official enough to the head of the Westside City Council, too. “Thanks, folks,” he said. “We'll lick 'em. You wait and see. When they got a good look at my dog Pots, they'll be so scared, they'll run away before the fighting really gets going.”
Everybody cheered. As the meeting was breaking up, Liz asked her father, “Why does he call that monster of a dog Pots?”
“Because nobody here seems to remember who the Fenris Wolf was,” Dad said, which both was and wasn't an answer. He added, “Besides, whatever you call a critter like that, the dog is bigger than the name.”
There were old children's books in the home timeline about a dog like that, although he wasn't mean. What was his name? Clarence? That was close, but it wasn't right. “ Clifford!” Liz exclaimed.