Conquistador

INTERLUDE

“I don’t get it, Sol,” O’Brien said. “You just said that it wouldn’t pay; then you say it will.”

“It wouldn’t pay now,” Solomon Pearlmutter said; he restrained himself visibly from adding, you big dumb mick. “But using the Gate’s going to get more and more expensive every year.”

O’Brien’s thick red brows knitted over blue eyes. “How can it?” he said. “The Gate… all it costs is keeping that radio set of the Old Man’s working. It’s free as air, or nearly.”

“Wait,” John Rolfe said, lifting a hand; Salvo looked about to speak, and that might cause a quarrel. Andy O’Brien had gotten on better with Sol over the years, but worse with Salvo. “You’re thinking about relative volumes, right, Pearlmutter?”

“Yes, sir,” the Jew said, nodding.

Silence fell down the long table; there were a dozen men around it, all of his first partners who could be in Rolfeston today. The big second-story meeting room looked out on an arched colonnade, and that in turn looked over what Rolfe had christened Stonewall Square.

After the general who got my grandfather’s leg shot off, Rolfe thought with a hint of wry self-mockery. While winning a lot of battles and losing the war. But a man’s entitled to his nostalgia, when he’s making dreams real.

Beyond the square was a scatter of dirt streets, trucks bumping along in clouds of dust, houses and buildings of brick and adobe fading off into Quonset huts and tents, swarms of men working at everything from laying sewer pipe to planting roadside trees. Beyond that San Francisco Bay reached, whitecaps across deep-purple waves, lovely under a sky of aching blue thick with wings.

“You explain it, then, Sol,” Rolfe said. “You’ll do it better than I could.”

Sol Pearlmutter grinned at him, and ran a hand over brown hair already going a little thin in front, although he was still only a few years past thirty. He was a thin, sharp-featured, big-nosed man an inch or two below medium height, no longer quite the deadly weasel-quick young soldier he’d been in the Pacific; prosperity and years had put a slight pot on his skinny frame. His hazel-flecked brown eyes were still disconcertingly sharp.

“It’s like this,” he said, holding up his thumb and index finger in a ring and then pushing a pen through it. “And shut up with the laugh, Andy, you dirty-minded gonef. OK. That’s the Gate. It’s only twenty-eight feet, six inches by nine feet, two inches, and it’s never getting any bigger. No matter how well we organize the way we push stuff through, only a certain amount can go through in a day. There are, what… nearly twenty thousand people altogether here in the Commonwealth? It’s not just a combination mining camp and weekend country club anymore; it’s turning into a real… well, a place where people live, kids get born, the whole schmear. Including our kids. Someday not too long from now there’ll be fifty, sixty thousand people here, then more—and every new head means more supplies through the Gate. In the long run, we need to keep the Gate for things we can’t get here; like we’re already growing our food, for example, and cutting our own timber and manufacturing cement. Shipping through bulk commodities is dumb.”

“Yeah, I think I see your point, Solly,” O’Brien said. “If we keep on bringing our fuel through, we’ll need more Gate time every month, until we’ll have no space for anything else.”

“Right,” Pearlmutter said. “And besides—everyone here will still have to buy the oil from our wells and our refinery. Long-term, we’ve got to keep thinking about our economic position here, too. People resent taxes they don’t get anything for. Buying stuff’s different.”

Salvatore Colletta nodded. “When you’ve got control over what people really got to have, you got a little gold mine.” He snickered. “Every bit as good as a real gold mine, eh?”

Pearlmutter sighed. “If only we could get some really first-class physicists… can you imagine what Einstein or Oppenheimer would make of the Gate? And what we could do if we could make more Gates—to FirstSide, or to other, hunh, other New Virginias?”

Rolfe nodded impatiently. “If ifs and buts were candied nuts, the world would be fat,” he said. “I’m keeping an eye open for scientists. The problem is that finding physicists good enough to be worthwhile, inconspicuous enough not to be missed, and willing to work for us—particularly the latter—is…” He shrugged. “But you made a good point there, Sol, about planning for the future. I’ve been thinking about that. Things are sort of… fluid here now. It’s easy to make decisions; but further down the road what we do now will be set in stone. I think we should set up a subcommittee for things like that. First and foremost, we need a legal system; it’s getting just too time-consuming to have everything referred to the committee when some Nazi bashes a good ol’ boy over the head or a Lithuanian knifes a Pole….”

“Over who should own Vilnus, of all things completely meaningless here,” Pearlmutter said; the case had been a ten-days’ wonder in Rolfeston. “With Poland and Lithuania occupied by the Russians, too. Meshuggeneh!”

Rolfe nodded. Shipping people to another dimension didn’t necessarily make them forget the feuds they’d left behind, not at first and sometimes not ever. Hopefully their children would. He went on: “For the legal subcommittee I propose… let’s see. You’ll head it up, Sol; under you, hmmm, Dave Howden, Harry Throckham, and Andy O’Brien.”

“Captain!” the big redhead yelped. “I’m working my ass off getting the machine shop back in shape after the fire! And I’m no shyster, by God.”

Rolfe grinned; Pearlmutter had given a stifled groan of resignation and an appealing glace. He’d figured out what the head of the committee had in mind immediately, and wasn’t looking forward to paring things down enough that O’Brien didn’t object. Andy wasn’t stupid by any means, but he wasn’t an intellectual either.

“That’s the reason, Andy,” he said. “Sol’s smart as a whip, but he does love splitting a split hair until the remnant violates the laws of physics. You don’t have fifteen generations of Talmudic scholars in your blood. I want something straightforward.”

“I make sure what Sol produces is simple enough for a dumb mick to understand, eh, Captain?” O’Brien said, laughing. “Well, when you put it like that…”

“Any objections?” Rolfe said, looking down the table at the twelve men who sat on the Central Committee of the Gate Control Commission. “All right, both measures passed by acclamation. Next item…”

When the meeting broke up, Pearlmutter lingered for a moment. Rolfe gave the window a longing look—he had a sweet little ketch docked, just begging for singlehanding on a day like this—but business was business. A leader’s business was mostly managing his subordinates and knowing how to delegate and how to keep them working together; that was turning out as true here as it had been running Baker company.

“What’s bothering you, Sol?”

“Captain… you mentioned it.” The Jew’s face took on a twist of distaste. “Did you have to recruit those fucking Nazi mamzers? Please, no more of them!”

Rolfe sighed. “Sol, we’ve been over this ground before. We needed skilled labor—and best of all, they really, really wanted, needed, to jump into a hole and pull it in after them. They’re not going to complain about staying in New Virginia, not if they were too hot for Brazil or Paraguay to hold. The supply of Americans who fit the ticket is limited.”

“Yeah, I recognize the logic. I still want to puke every time I see one of those SS fucks. Puke on his dead body after I shove my bayonet into his guts and twist it.”

“Well, look at it this way, Sol. They’re taking orders from you. Can you imagine how happy that makes them?”

That brought a snort of unwilling laughter. “There is that; if they weren’t here, I’d never get to kick a Nazi’s tokhus, would I? Which, I grant you, is some satisfaction; so is the way they have to smile and pretend they like it. A kholereye on them all anyway. But they could be dangerous, Captain. Don’t think they’ve given up dreaming of a little Aryan kingdom all their own.”

Rolfe grinned. “Sol, do you think I’m idiot enough to trust them?”

The smaller man blushed. “Sorry, Captain.”

“Sane, sensible people aren’t likely to be desperate enough to want to come here—not to live, at least. Sane, sensible people stay home in their stalls and chew their cuds; what we get, are going to get, are desperate broken men, mad dreamers, or both. I’m not going to let enough of any one kind in to have any chance of taking over, and I’m not going to let too many of them settle in a group. Spread around, von Traupitz and his cohorts’ll eventually vanish into the New Virginian majority, the good old melting pot. Besides, that well’s about dry. The ones left FirstSide have either found good hiding places or been caught.”

“Where do we go next for manpower?” Pearlmutter said. “Labor’s our big bottleneck, now that we have enough FirstSide mining properties to cover our output. We’re too big to get all our supplies through the Gate, which means as we expand, a higher share of each new input of labor has to go to support functions here, everything from schools to power plants. Now, if you’d let us use hydraulic mining—that’s a labor-saving method.”

“And it chews up the landscape even worse than dredging,” Rolfe said. “What’s that saying you told me? ‘We don’t crap where we eat’? From now on, I’m only going back FirstSide for business and visits to a gallery or two. Let them dine in the latrine.”

“Then we need more workers,” Pearlmutter said.

“I made some contacts in Africa FirstSide last year. They may be very useful; it wasn’t just a safari. That area could be valuable for recruiting settlers as well as covering our gold output.”

Pearlmutter’s eyes went up. “I didn’t think you were that keen on the schwartzers, Captain.”

Rolfe made a dismissive gesture. “I’ve no problems with well-behaved Negroes, in their place; I’ve known plenty who were better citizens than a lot of poor whites—it’s just simpler not to bring them here. I meant colonists of various sorts, like those Dutchmen we got from the East Indies. We’re already getting a few French from North Africa, and that’s going to be a major source. From what I saw and heard and what I’ve read since, the African pot is starting to boil and it’ll get hotter fast. A pity; I enjoyed Kenya, but it’ll give us opportunities. And I think we may be able to get more people more from the U.S. over the next decade; from the South, particularly, for much the same reasons. The war—both the world wars—cracked the foundations of the white man’s empires, and the dust will be a long time settling. ”

Pearlmutter rolled his eyes. “Oh, wonderful. The KKK, yet,” he muttered.

“Not very likely,” Rolfe said, his lip curling in a slight sneer. “The scum who call themselves the KKK in modern times are nothing but dim-witted sadists and white-trash Negro haters, led by confidence men out to make a buck. I wouldn’t hire them to shovel out a stable, not least because they’d be too drunk to do a good job.”

He relaxed. “Sorry. The original Klan after the Civil War was a gentleman’s outfit, Confederate officers fighting against Northern occupation—Forrest himself disbanded it when things got out of hand. What I mean is that there will be a fair number of respectable people unhappy that their right of community self-government’s being trampled, and ready to move.”

“Well, you’d know, Captain. Until I joined the army, I’d never been farther from New York than the Catskills,” Pearlmutter said.

“Rebecca and you on for dinner Sunday? She and Louisa can talk about that Schools Council business afterward, and we can play chess.”

“I don’t know, Captain,” the Jew said mock dubiously. “You’re learning too quickly.”

Rolfe laughed and clapped the other man on the shoulder. He enjoyed Sol’s company, in reasonable doses; he played a wickedly challenging game of chess, and he shared some of the Virginian’s taste in books, and he really knew classical music with a passionate zeal, enough to work hard at getting a chamber group started. Andy was more fun for a drink and a night out on the town, Salvo had taken to yachting with surprising enthusiasm, and his own relatives were the men for a horse-and-hounds meeting or a hunting safari.

All in all, the Commonwealth of New Virginia was shaping up to be a very pleasant place to live, as well as to make money.

I’ve just got to see that it develops in the right way, he thought. Having children changes a man’s perspective; I’ve got my sons’ legacies to think about now.