Conquistador

INTERLUDE

“Like the country around Stellenbosch, east of Cape Town,” Piet Botha said to the friend beside him.

Winds and shadows fell toward the west, and the mountains stretching toward the Pacific went from purple-green to a dark sawtooth against the northern horizon.

“Like it, but better,” Schalk van der Merwe said grudgingly. “It’s good land; I grant you that.”

The Cape Dutch-style farmhouse behind them was rawly new, a long single-story rectangle with a stoep in front where they sat, two short wings on the back, and a tall gable over the teak doors; it was whitewashed in the traditional style, but the roof was tile rather than black thatch. Ten acres of young orange trees to either side of the house scented the night with their perfume as the western light cast long shadows across the empty vastness to the south. The day had been sunny and mildly warm. That lingered in the stones of the wall behind them, making the veranda pleasant despite a cooling wind from the sea that picked up smells of manzanita and sage.

He’d picked a spot where the land began its climb toward the Santa Monica Mountains, although there was already a request in to the Commission to rename them the Krugerberg. His grant was part of the new home estate of the Commonwealth’s latest addition to the Thirty Families—the Versfelds, who now had their seat at what another world called Santa Monica, and which this one named Hendriksdorp. The location gave Botha’s new home a view across the land that stretched away across the foothills and down to the flat plain of the Los Angeles basin. It was green with the winter rains, flower-starred tall grass with groves of willow and oak, cottonwood and sycamore along the streamsides and about the surprisingly numerous sloughs and swamps. He’d ridden over the countryside enough to get a feel for it: the open land where the soil rose a little higher, and the lower stretches often impassable with clumps of alder, hackberry and shrubs woven together with California rose and wild grapevines, blackberries and brambles.

The big Afrikaner had been surprised at how wet this area seemed, after having seen the same places FirstSide; swamps covered a third of it even in the dry summer, not counting salt marsh along the coastline, and vast fields of wild mustard rose higher than a rider’s head, thick with game. It didn’t rain that much on the low country in either universe, but here all the runoff from the mountains seeped into the great underground reservoirs, and welled to the surface in innumerable springs and damp spots where the lay of the land forced it to the surface. Nobody had pumped the aquifers dry here, or logged off the mountains, or crammed twenty-five million thirsty human beings onto the land.

Piet Botha’s wife came out onto the stoep and set a tray with coffee and koeksisters on the table between the two men. She was a short, slight woman in contrast to her hulking husband, with curling brown hair and blue eyes.

“Dinner will be ready soon,” she said, turning and finishing over her shoulder as she walked back into the house, wiping her hands on her apron, “if I can keep that nahua girl from ruining it—she throws chilies into everything if you don’t watch her like a hawk. Lamb sosaties and rice today.”

Piet smacked his lips; that meant cubes of lamb marinated in wine and vinegar, spiced with coriander, pepper, turmeric and tamarind, strung on skewers with apricots and peppers, and grilled over a clear wood fire—chaparral scrub oak did wonders.

He and his companion sipped their coffee, ate the doughnutlike sweet pastries and watched the Botha children playing in the garden; the plantings were three years old and it was already well along, trees sprouting amid the flowers with Californian speed, some of the blue gum eucalyptus already thirty feet high. A grove of native oaks gave an illusion of age offset by the half-built buildings in a clump to the east; storage sheds, stables, barn, garage, all in a litter of beams and planks and stacks of adobe brick. A pump chugged in the background, pulling water from a reservoir fed by mountain springs for the house and the automated-drip irrigation system.

“Much better,” Botha said, after a spell of companionable silence. “Man, talk about luck! I’m glad I listened to Oom Versfeld, I’ll tell you that! They don’t call him Slim Hendrik, Clever Hendrik, for nothing.”

Schalk van der Merwe scowled. “He should have held out for the real Cape,” he said. “Not just land here. If not for our own land, what were we fighting for?”

“We fought for South Africa,” Botha said, his slow deep voice giving an extra gravity to the guttural sounds of Afrikaans. “We lost. What do Boers do when we lose? We trek, man, we go somewhere else.”

The moaning rhythmic grunt of a lion’s roar sounded in the distance, as the first stars appeared overhead. A loose scattering of house lights stood miles apart along the foot of the mountains, and a few headlights crawled along the north-south road that ended at San Diego.

Botha chuckled. “This is about as else as you can get. Being beaten once was bad enough. I don’t want to start the same fight over again right away.”

“Hell,” Schalk said, waving his doughnut; a little syrup dropped onto his khaki shirt. “The bushmen and the blacks in South Africa—on this side of the Gate—they’re bare-arsed savages. Just like the ones our ancestors beat at Blood River; and we’d have machine guns and armor and aircraft, not ox-wagons and flintlock roers.”

“And just where would we get the armored cars, and the ammunition, and the fuel, if we were on the other side of the world from here?” Botha said.

He pointed southwest, toward Long Beach. “Kerel, eighty kilometers that way is the only oil well in the world. And the only refinery.” He pointed over his shoulder, northward toward Rolfeston and the Gate. “And up there’s the only place with access to modern weapons or anything else. We’d be back to ox-wagons and flintlocks bliddy soon, if we tried leaving for Africa! Even if the Commission would allow it—which they won’t.”

“We could set up our own factories, in time,” Schalk said stubbornly. “We’d have our own country with our own language and customs, where we wouldn’t be scattered among damned foreigners the way we are here. A Boerstaat for ons volk.”

“Oh, all three thousand of us could man the factories, while we were conquering and settling the country?” Botha said. “Or the Commission would allow a mass migration from FirstSide—and explain to the world why all the Boers were leaving, and where they were going?”

He paused, stroked his jaw as if in thought, then spoke: “I have it, man! Even if there are only a few thousand of us, we could use the kaffirs in our factories. Of course, we’d have to teach them to read, wouldn’t we, to make them useful? Hand out Bibles, hey? And we’d give them modern medicine so all their children survived….”

Botha spoke with heavy sarcasm: “Haven’t I seen this film before, someplace, jong? You know, it started well, but I didn’t like the ending!”

Schalk flushed. “It would be different this time. We could keep the kaffirs in order without any outsiders telling us—”

“Ja, it would be different—for a while. Maybe a long while. Maybe not. Schalk, if you really want to do something for the volk, you should find a girl, get married and have a dozen children. That would help.”

The door behind them opened.

“It’s ready; come in to dinner,” Botha’s wife said, and then called to the children. When they had been sent off to wash their hands, she went on: “And stop talking foolishness about going back, on either side of the Gate, Schalk. If I never see one of them again, it’ll be too soon.”