Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

[AUTHOR'S NOTE: What follows is an excerpt from my forthcoming novel Rosalie's World, the fourth volume of my “Ngu Family Saga” that started with Pallas and continues through Ares, and Ceres. (There will eventually be a fifth installment, Beautiful Dreamer, provided I live long enough.) Rosalie's World itself is humanity's first extra-Solar planet, originally discovered by Emerson Ngu. It may only be me, but I like the characters in these stories very much and would rather spend time with them than almost any real people because they have not abjectly surrendered—and never will—to the most stupid, insane, and evil among them. As with anything else I write and publish in this journal, questions and comments from readers are welcomed.]

Chapter 05: TABERNA EST IN OPPIDUM

The American Revolution, Whisky Rebellion, and Stonewall riots all came out of bars.
—Christine Sismondo

Big Jim Willis, was the proud owner and proprietor of what he often thought of as the "Bar With No Name". At this particular moment, the man stood on the wide porch of his establishment, smoking an enormous cigar and enjoying the early summer evening air.

The settlement here on Rosalie’s World being what it was, Big Jim didn’t expect too many customers until after the family dinner hour had passed. Happy music issued from inside. The player piano was regaling a so-far empty bar with Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer”. True to his name, Big Jim was a large man, with huge arms and surprisingly long, delicate fingers, a big belly he claimed to be proud of—“It’s a sign of prosperity!”—and a closely-shaved head that those who knew him accused him of waxing and polishing.

Big Jim carried a heavy Walther infrared burner in a plain, open-topped holster slung low on his right hip.

Big Jim high-fived Dale "Bass" Hill as the man climbed up onto the porch, and entered the establishment through its traditional slatted, swinging saloon doors. Come sundown, folks would start showing up with their spouses and kids to wet their whistles (he made his own whiskey, beer and soft-drinks), smoke tobacco and other things, and enjoy the pair of pool tables and three pinball machines he had mortgaged everything he owned to get here from Earth. Monday was open mike night, Wednesday was trivia, and Tuesday and Thursday, karaoke. Dale, with his _basso-profondo_ voice, was a particular favorite.

The piano stopped and the jukebox started, right on time. Big Jim was well aware of the central importance of his establishment to the pioneer community around it. It was where young people were most likely to meet their future spouses—he’d even held a couple of weddings here—later on, they were happy to bring their babies here to show them off for the first time. Big Jim didn’t make his own baby formula, but he’d thought about it.

He greeted the Ngu family warmly as they arrived. Big Jim understood that Wilson was a space pilot and an intrepid asteroid hunter, originally from Pallas. His wife Jasmeen was originally a Martian, a highly-talented seamstress, and the settlement’s only working accountant. She also taught newbies how to shoot. Their beautiful teenage daughter Tieve had the loveliest singing voice that Big Jim had ever heard in an actual living human being.

Karl and Kyle Armbeiner came in right behind the Ngus: a young gay couple homesteading the wilderness together. Well, Big Jim asked himself, why the hell not? Don’t ask—do tell! They were followed by the growing Trask family, space-pilot Morgan and Llyra, almost the ideal pioneer wife and their four small children, including little Jazzie, a baby in arms.

Back in East America, Big Jim had been a budding academic, for the most part, an historian and sociologist. His doctoral dissertation had concerned itself with the political history of alcohol and the pivotal role played in the previous century by Judge Aloysius Brody’s Curringer bar in the Pallatian struggle for independence, and compared it with famous bars and taverns where the American Revolution and the Pennsylvania Whiskey Rebellion—and later on, the 1960s Stonewall riots—had begun. There had a pub or two under the notorious Newfoundland Dome, as well. Alcohol, he maintained, had gotten humankind through the plague years and now it was helping them to survive the Age of Tyranny.

The far left-leaning Sociology Department at his school hadn’t wanted to award Big Jim the degree that he had earned. Their committee had accused him of being "overly astute", whatever the hell that meant. A thoroughly corrupt university administration had backed the committee’s play, so he had transferred—moved to West America where he quickly became Dr. James B. Willis, Ph.D. An enthusiastic private pilot, he had also joined the West American Space Force Reserve and learned to wrangle a spacegoing hypersonic fighter-interceptor. Good times.

It seemed only a flicker of the mind’s eyelid from a base in Lubbock to a berth aboard the _Fifth Force_ and, a year later, a homestead—strategically set in the center of the settlement’s population—on Rosalie’s World.

People began arriving, now, in fours and fives and sixes. He couldn’t keep track of them all—the little settlement was growing up. It was about time, Big Jim decided, grinding his cigar butt out with a boot heel, to get himself back inside, behind the bar and make sure that everybody had drinks in their hands and hung their weapons on the back wall, as was the custom that he had established, following Judge Aloysius Brody’s wise example.

There was no city hall here (properly speaking, there was no city, although he was resigned to the fact that they were eventually going to name it after those goddamned truffles they were trying to farm just north of here) nor was there any other logical community gathering-place to mention. Nor was a church within most of these people’s experience, so many of them had come from the viciously anti-religious East American portion of the old United States. It was inevitable, he understood, that churches would eventually spring up. But for now, Big Jim’s No-Name bar was the principal social center of the settlement, just as Brody’s Bar on Pallas had once been, so long ago. There were other, competing bars lurking in the future, Big Jim was certain, down around the spaceport, for example, or out by the steel mill, but he was grimly resolved to own and operate the _best_ bar on the planet. For the time being, it was the _only_ bar on the planet, and that suited him.

Before the proprietor could go in, five motley individuals he had heard about pushed him aside rudely and preceded him through the swinging saloon doors. Their apparent leader, one Chellish Lamercreuss, Big Jim knew, was a celebrity lawyer back on Earth, somewhat like Melvin Belli and Jerry Spence and F. Lee Bailey before him. In person, the barkeep thought, the man resembled one of those malicious cartoon crows from the 20th century. Or a giant cockroach, peering comically over his wire-rimmed bifocals.

Behind the famous lawyer was the equally famous former Congressperson Wainsie Axmert, an ancient survivor of and refugee from the California Big One that had killed twenty-five million less lucky individuals. Over the decades, the woman had never introduced a single bill (which was just as well, he thought) and had spent all of her time and effort in office enriching herself, until she became known as "the most corrupt Representative in the United States Congress". She might easily have retired comfortably with her ill-gotten fortune, but she wound up in the new prison on Alcatraz Island. He wondered what the hell she was up to, now.

The two were accompanied by one Cadiff Sham, another refugee from the perpetual political, and economic train-wreck that was California. Big Jim knew the type all too well. They had denied him his Ph.D. From the beginning of the career that Sham had re-established in the East, the man had dedicated himself to the "politics of personal destruction", until he had been personally destroyed, himself. Who the crazy-eyed young woman was that clung to him so tenaciously, nobody appeared to know. She seemed to have a Puerto Rican accent.

Their real leader (Big Jim was not a sociologist for nothing—it had cost him a whole lot of money, he thought—old joke) was Annie Clopsy, an almost terminally nervous elderly woman with a severe stammer. Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Diseases had been cured long ago in West America and elsewhere. In East America, that represented politically-incorrect “life-extensionism”. A veteran of All Worlds Are Earth and the Mass Movement, Clopsy had been defeated by events, again and again until she was a paranoid ruin. Her friends weren’t any better. Big Jim had known a thousand of their kind; they made his trigger-finger itchy.

Once inside, Cadiff Sham didn’t hesitate for an instant. He went behind the bar, where he didn’t belong, rummaged around, unplugged the jukebox, which had been playing Roy Orbison’s "Oobie Doobie", and turned on the amplifier for the microphone on the stage. If Sham had scratched his ancient and valuable 45 RPM recording, Big Jim thought to himself, he was going to kill the man. Chellish Lamercreuss hopped up on the stage, tapped the mike annoyingly and announced, "Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please!"

Three or four individuals booed him. The rest of the room, men, women, and children, turned their backs and unanimously ignored him. Big Jim fiddled with the leather thong that kept his weapon in its holster.

Lamercreuss went on, "Allow me to introduce my esteemed colleague, Annie Clopsy!"

Sham stepped away from the microphone to make way for Clopsy, who had prudently taken the stairs at the back of the stage. She seized the device by its vertical stand as if to hold herself up. "Good p-people of this p-planet!" Leftists generally avoided calling Rosalie’s World by the name that its discoverer, the hated Emerson Ngu, had given it, although his wife Rosalie Frasier Ngu’s only offense lay in helping to discover the ancient, alien race that had built the Portals, two billion years ago. "I represent the C-committee For Responsibility!"

"You represent the Commies of East America!" someone off the stage replied. "Put Orbison back on and go home, ditz!"

Clopsy continued. "The C-committee For R-responsibility has determined that it is very d-dangerous and irresponsible to allow young ch-children in an establishment like this that serves alcohol and allows smoking."

“They hafta bring their own smokes!” somebody hollered, inspiring laughter all around.

Clopsy pointed at the several rows of wooden pegs on the wall at the back of the room, especially the lowest three, laden, as they were, with little gunbelts and pistols. "And even more d-dangerous to allow them to bring d-deadly weapons! Look around you! Everybody has b-brought g-guns!" She shuddered. "It is immoral for adults to p-possess weapons in such an establishment! We, the Committee For R-responsibility d-demand that this vile practice cease immediately!"