Conquistador

CHAPTER NINE

Perkins went out on a stretcher; the bodies of the dead were dumped unceremoniously into a big metal crate. Men were scrubbing at red stains on the gallery floor outside, presumably where the departing Vietnamese had departed much more permanently than they anticipated. Industrial-strength cleaning machines foamed and whirred—and their users wore overalls with the name of a well-known janitorial company. Others moved about scanning with eyes and instruments for any sign of the firefight. He saw one group extract a bullet from the plaster of a wall and begin repairs immediately, grouting and plaster and quick-drying paint. The heavy smell of the cleansing chemicals overrode the feces-and-blood stinks of violent death; in half an hour, even a forensics team would have trouble proving anything untoward had happened here.

“That’s the cleanup squad, I presume?” Tully said. “Impressive.”

Adrienne started slightly, brought out of a brown study. “Yes. We’ve managed to keep one of the biggest secrets in human history for sixty-three years now. We didn’t do it by being incompetent.”

“Impressive,” Tully said again, his voice full of enthusiasm. “Say, you don’t really need to keep the cuffs on us—”

Adrienne looked at him, snorted, and walked faster.

Tom whispered to his partner: “Brilliant. Short, but brilliant.”

An ambulance was parked outside, and a Ford Windstar van, as well as a truck with the logo of the cleaning company supposedly at work within—or for all he knew, RM and M actually did own the firm. It would certainly be a good way to hide a cleanup squad. As he watched, two men got into Christiansen’s own vehicle across the street and drove away. The pseudo-paramedics loaded Perkins into the ambulance and did likewise. The big metal box with the bodies came down on a dolly and went up on a hydraulic lift into the truck with the company name.

Bet all the other evidence goes the same way, he thought. Then, with a hint of eeriness: And it’ll all also go where we’re going—somewhere literally out of this world. Maybe it isn’t quite so crazy that they’ve been able to keep the secret. When you can throw evidence away and know it’ll never come back…

Adrienne stopped at the rear of the Windstar. “Are you up to handling them, Botha?” she asked sharply.

“Ja,” he said, and shook himself like a bear. “Yes, miss. It’s… I didn’t think anyone could buy Schalk. He was a good man, not slim, not clever, but a good soldier.”

“I don’t think anyone could buy him either,” Adrienne said, and put a hand on his shoulder in a moment’s odd gentleness. She looked about to make sure that nobody was within earshot. “Not with money. This is political; that’s why you’ve got to keep quiet about how it happened. As far as the official debrief is concerned, he was killed in the firefight. Now let’s get going.”

With their hands cuffed behind their backs, Tom and Tully needed help as they climbed awkwardly into the back of the van; the big Afrikaner’s hand had the impersonal strength of a mechanical grab. Tom evaluated him objectively as they passed close.

I could take him, he decided. He’s about my weight and plenty strong, experienced too, or I miss my guess, but I’m a decade younger at least and I’m not carrying any fat.

Of course, that was in anything like a fair fight. Being woozy from a dose of tear-and-puke gas, and having your hands fastened behind your back, did not count as “fair” under reasonable definition. As it was, Botha could crush his skull with a couple of blows of his massive fist.

The van had seats around the interior, with storage bins beneath them. It also had two wheelchairs fastened to the floor, facing backward and equipped with restraints on the legs and arms, the sort they used for violent patients in mental hospitals. Adrienne stayed on the road between the doors until they were secured, one hand under her suit jacket. Not many people could draw and shoot accurately in conditions like these; he was willing to bet she was one. Botha put Tully in his chair first, then Tom, working from behind the wheelchair, then took up a position behind them as the doors slammed shut and locked.

“There’s redundancy for you,” Tully said, and Tom snorted a bitter chuckle.

Yes; four-point tie-down on these chairs, a human-gorilla hybrid behind with a gun on us, and all of it all inside a locked vehicle.

“Shut up,” Botha said, and prodded him painfully in the back of the head with the muzzle of his pistol.

There was a spell of mixed boredom and rising tension; they couldn’t see much through the small dark-tinted windows in the back of the van. Roads, then alleyways between tall buildings, occasional halts. Then brilliant light. The doors were thrown open and the wheelchairs unfastened and rolled down a ramp by silent armed guards in standard rent-a-cop outfits. They were inside a building’s loading dock; then they were pushed down corridors of blank pastel, lit by overhead fluorescents. The place had the cold, deserted, silent feel of a facility where only the night shift was on duty.

Well, it is three-fifteen in the morning, Tom thought.

They stopped in a set of rooms that had the unmistakable cold, astringent smell of a hospital or clinic. A check-in desk was labeled DECON AND CONTAINMENT.

Tom’s ears perked up when a nurse in a white coat looked up from the desk and spoke; she had the same accent as Bosco and Adrienne. Rather stronger, if anything, as if she wasn’t trying to tone it down. She did not, he was interested to notice, have one of the platinum-and-gold thumb rings on her left hand.

“This clinic is under continual surveillance,” she said, indicating the cameras in the corners. “If you cause any trouble, the guards will be back here in seconds. The exterior doors are locked, and won’t open for anyone without the right retina and palmprint. Are you going to make trouble?”

“Ma’am, we wouldn’t dream of it,” Tom said.

“Good,” she said, getting up and undoing their restraints. “This is FirstSide Decon. You’ll be checked here, and then given sleeping space until the next available transit, which is scheduled for”—she glanced at a computer screen on her desk—“seven tomorrow.”

A shower followed, in hot water that contained some sharp-smelling antiseptic, and a few minutes in a chamber with UV lamps all around. The medical exam was thorough, and used all the latest equipment. They were shown to a small cubicle with a thick locked door, a single toilet and sink, and two bunks; he took the lower and sank into unconsciousness with a swiftness the thin lumpy pallet didn’t deserve.

“Kemosabe.” Tully’s voice brought him awake and sitting upright on the bunk. “Thought you’d want to cut the beauty sleep short.”

Tom shook his head and stretched. They’d lost their watches along with everything else, but his internal clock, not to mention his stomach, said he’d slept at least twelve hours. After the stress of the past twenty-four, that was only to be expected. Possibly shoving them in here buck naked was supposed to keep them subdued, which might have worked with ordinary civilians.

Not that the state of our morale makes much difference in a bare concrete cubicle with a steel door, he thought. And doubtless under constant remote surveillance.

“Anything in the way of food show up?” he said carefully.

“Couple of ration bars, sort of like pressed granola,” Tully said, and threw him one. “Being the sweet guy I am, I didn’t eat both. Also some munificent toiletries and fancy duds via the dumbwaiter there.” He jerked a thumb at the swivel-box arrangement in the plain steel door.

There were plain dark sweat suits, underwear, socks and sneakers, all smelling both new and cheap. Disposable razors, soap, toothpaste and brushes came with them, along with one plastic comb. After he cleaned up as best he could there was nothing to do but sit on the bunks and make desultory conversation, of the type you didn’t mind being overheard. Doubtless the boredom, without even a variation in the light or a distracting sound, was also intended to shake inmates. Neither of them had a problem with it; both police work and military service were good training for waiting. In the long spells of silence, he found his thoughts returning to Adrienne—humiliation at the thought of how he’d been duped, and an obsessive replay of each word and action since the fiasco at the meet.

Could I have played it better? he thought. Dozens of methods occurred to him, each crazier than the last; when he found himself doing the if-only-things-had-been-different daydream game and imagining she’d really been the dewy innocent he’d first assumed, he wrenched his mind away with a concentrated effort of will and did calisthenics instead, mostly isometric types, the sort you could do lying down on a narrow bunk.

When the guards came with the wheelchairs, it was almost a relief. Another stretch of corridor led to an echoing metal-box building with the look of a warehouse—most of the floor was great stacks of boxed goods on pallets, with forklifts whining about and the prickly ozone smell of heavy-duty electric motors. A people mover stood waiting, and Adrienne and Piet Botha stood beside it.

He looked as before, save for a rumpled and red-eyed look that argued sleeplessness. She was wearing a tight black uniform, cloth and gleaming leather, pistol and dagger at belt, and the stylized letters GSF on the shoulder. Despite himself, he looked her up and down and quirked an eyebrow.

“Don’t blame me,” she said with a shrug. “Sturmbanführer Otto von Traupitz had a big hand in designing the uniform—nobody else paid attention until it was too late to change things without offending him, and he had done a lot of the gruntwork setting up Gate Security.”

Then she turned one leg. “You’ll have to admit we have really, really spiffy boots, though.”

Tully chuckled openly. Tom gave a snort and looked away. His stomach was beginning to clench; he knew what was coming, and it was starting to feel real. The people mover slid forward, to where tall metal doors gave on to another warehouselike building. Armed guards waited at the junction; one covered them while another shone a handheld retina scanner into their eyes.

“What have we here?” the guard with the machine carbine said, looking at the men in the restraints.

“Couple of IS,” Adrienne said. “Off to help build our beloved Commonwealth.”

“Haven’t seen any Involuntaries in a while, Miss Rolfe,” the man said.

“Do you have much longer on your tour?” she said.

“A month, miss. I will be so glad to get back to the real world. I understand why furloughs home aren’t practical, but it gets pretty boring never leaving these buildings… pass, then.”

Tom looked up; the metal-stringer ceiling above was frosted with lights, surveillance cameras and an occasional guard platform. Below was an expanse of concrete, bare except for notional roadways outlined in yellow paint; everything converged at the far wall, where a big glass-walled control room hung from the ceiling, and below it a long paved ramp. Trains of flatbed trolleys drawn by electric carts waited or moved to the promptings of the control room, loaded with boxed computers, digitally controlled machine tools, diesel engines, knocked-down cars and trucks, tires, ball bearings, tractors, carboys of industrial chemicals, flats of designer clothing and French perfume, DVDs, MRI scanners….

Everything necessary to keep a civilization going, he thought, fascinated despite himself. Imperious beeps brought trains forward, down the ramp and out of sight—and then others emerged upward, loaded with gleaming stacks of gold and silver ingots, small steel boxes of diamonds or emeralds or tanzanite, rare earths….

“At least we smell better than we did before the shower,” Tully muttered.

It sounded as if the situation was getting to him, at least a little. Tom felt alert enough; very thirsty, and his bladder was painfully full again, but he could take in his surroundings.

“That’s us,” Adrienne said, as a green light flashed and a beep-beep-beep sounded from the dashboard of the electric cart.

He licked dry lips as it whined into motion. It was one thing to read about a gate between worlds, or talk about it, or even reluctantly believe in one. Seeing one was something else. And this…

As they came to the bottom of the ramp it looked like a basement, of all things. There was steel tracking laid down over synthetic sheeting over flagstones, running straight to—

“What’s that?”he burst out involuntarily, at the sight of the rectangle of silvery light.

Adrienne grinned. “That, my friends, is nothing less than the Gate.” Her voice put the italics in the word; she added quotation marks with her fingers. “The Gate to the Commonwealth of New Virginia.” The capitals came across well too.

The big dark Afrikaner gunsel smiled unpleasantly. “Take a good look at the Gate Chamber, jong, because this is the last time you see it.”

He ignored the possible threat and did as he was told; he intended to see it again, in his official capacity, and the information might be valuable in getting that done. The wall opposite the… Gate… was solid and smooth; sandwich armor lifted from a M1 tank, from the look of it. Blisters mounted heavy machine guns and a flamethrower, and compact unmanned armored turrets with video pickups and more machine guns peered in from four spots around the ceiling. A clear plastic enclosure in one corner held a wooden table, with some archaic-looking electronic equipment on it.

Adrienne saw where his eyes fell. “That’s what started it all,” she said. “As of April 17, 1946. It’s just what it looks like; a modified forties shortwave set. How does it do what it does? We have thousands of guesses—some by physicists—and not one goddamned shred of proof. All we know is that if everything connected to the circuit is kept connected and in roughly the same relative and absolute positions, it goes on happening. The Commission bought up the factories that made all the components, just so we could get identical replacement parts. Interrupt the circuit or move things more than a couple of inches, and the Gate closes… and someday I’ll tell you about the panic that’s caused, the times it’s happened. For a week once, after the ’eighty-nine quake. Ah, here we go. Don’t worry—you won’t feel a thing. I’ve done the trip to the Commonwealth and back hundreds of times.”

The people mover jerked forward. Tom’s mind accepted the reassurance, but his gut lurched involuntarily. Passage through the sheet of rippling silver turned out to be exactly as advertised. One instant he was here; the next he was there, wherever the Commonwealth was. The first glimpse turned out to be fairly boring; it was pretty much like the place he’d just come from, although he didn’t think it was underground. A glance upward showed frosted-glass skylights. Another showed that the four corners of the huge room were armor-and-concrete pillboxes mounting General Electric six-barreled Gatling miniguns, and that the overhead gridwork included a complete net of surveillance equipment.

The people mover scooted off to the side, out of the path of the two-way traffic; it stopped before something like an airport security setup crossed with a pillbox—except for the squad in black uniforms that looked as if they covered spider-silk-soft body armor, armed with assault rifles—slab-sided German G36 models, with laser sights plugged into Land Warrior-style helmet computers with VR-display optics over the left eye. You didn’t have to aim with that gear; you just moved the muzzle until the crosshairs in the optic rested on what you wanted to hit.

Somebody’s been selling Uncle Sam’s latest toys, Tom thought.

There were a few more of the black uniforms sitting at desks, and those included two women and a stout man in his forties, with a graying mustache. The troopers were all male, all young, all fit, with an arrogance he recognized from his time in the Rangers, that of men who thought themselves the best.

The sign above their station read:

“Friendly bunch,” he murmured.

“All sarcasm and most bullets just bounce off Gate Security,” Adrienne said cheerfully. She hopped down as the people mover slowed, undid the restraints on the two Americans, then spoke to the man behind the first desk. “Gate Security Agent Adrienne Rolfe. GS Operative Piet Botha. We’ve been cleared through FirstSide decon. Thomas Christiansen and Roy Tully, Invol-fours, and they should be in the databank. You can skip sending them to the familiarization hostel; I’m taking custody.”

Tom, Roy and the silent Afrikaner came down from the little vehicle, and it scooted away. All of them had to pass through the scanner arch, and then put a palm on a plate and look into a fitted eyepiece; it was all familiar enough biometric ID machinery, retina scan, DNA print and fingerprint. It even had the Hitachi logo. The big Afrikaner walked off after exchanging polite good-byes with Adrienne, ignoring the two Americans as if they didn’t exist.

I love you too, Piet, he thought.

He steadied Tully; Roy still looked a little woozy, but he was coming to fast. A machine on a bench whirred and hummed, and extruded ID cards. The technician extended them between finger and thumb. Tom took his; it had his face, name, a number, and coded machine-readable data. At a guess, his data was burned into a file with some sort of read-only central databank; people had talked about that for years during the war, especially after the Charleston disaster, but the ACLU had always killed it. Evidently they thought differently here.

“These are your probationary Settler’s ID cards,” the tech said, in a bored bureaucratic singsong. “It’s your driver’s license, your Social Security card, your debit and credit card, and all your other ID rolled into one. Don’t lose it. There’s a heavy fine for replacement. Carry it on your person at all times. There’s a heavy fine for not producing it when requested by a law-enforcement officer. Don’t try to tamper with it. That never works—the scanners check it against Nostradamus’ central files and your biometric data every time you use it—and it gets you five years at hard labor in the mines. Here is your wallet. It contains one hundred dollars in local currency; remember that prices here are much lower than on FirstSide. Here’s your brochure. Welcome to the Commonwealth of New Virginia, and may you have many productive years as law-abiding citizens.”

“New Virginia?” Tom asked, stuffing the wallet and card into the pocket of his sweatpants.

His voice was calm, but tension sent a slight sour taste into the back of his mouth as they went out into a corridor in institutional beige, with overhead fluorescent lights. Waiting rooms stretched off to either side, very much like an airport, and were full of people in overalls or business suits or family groups—those last looking very much like first-class passengers, and sitting in bubbles of social space. The surveillance cameras were airport-like too, except that no attempt had been made to disguise them.

“Formally, the Commonwealth of New Virginia is what this country—the Pacific coast of North America and inland for a ways, plus Hawaii and a few other bits—is called,” Adrienne said. “Wait a minute and it’ll start to become clear.”

She looked up at the cameras, checked her angles, and then winked at him, holding a finger to her lips in the shhhhh! gesture for a moment.

He grunted and swung his head toward the men’s room sign. She nodded and leaned against the back of a row of chairs to wait, elegantly hipshot in the sleek black uniform.

Tully paused to splash water on his face before joining him at the row of urinals. “So, looks like we’re in the hands of the Bad Guys, who rescued us from the Even Badder Guys?”

“Looks like,” Tom said.

Then he raised his eyes to the ceiling. Tully’s face changed; Tom felt a moment’s warm comfort. At least I have some backup. And Roy doesn’t need me to dot all the I’s; this place is probably sewn up tighter than the Gaza Strip.

Adrienne was similarly quiet when they returned. They swung through a pair of automatic doors, and out into a sidewalk fronting on a road; he was reminded again of a medium-sized airport. It was evening, the sun sinking toward the west; big rectangular sheet-metal buildings painted green stretched off to the right; ahead of them was a parking lot, with many SUVs and four-by-fours; to the left was some rather nice landscaping, flower beds and trees, including a couple of fine valley oaks, a two-lane blacktop road, and then—

He choked, gasping for breath; knowing was one thing, seeing another. Adrienne supported him with a hand under his left arm, guiding him to lean against a six-foot ceramic planter full of impatiens. Tully was staring and whistling. Tom shook his head, conscious that his mouth was hanging open, something that he’d always thought was a figure of speech before, and not caring a damn. Beyond the road and stretching northward and west was classic California lowland savanna, more big oaks and tall grass turning from green to gold, starred with yellow poppies and blue lupine and camas lily. Beyond that…… was San Francisco Bay, with the sun casting a glittering path across the azure surface. Only there was no San Francisco; the day was brilliantly clear, some low whitecaps on water intensely indigo, and he could see the outlines of the peninsula past Alameda—which had a small airport where the Naval Air Station had been once, and was otherwise bare of human works.

Yah. It’s just West Oakland, if you subtract the city, and all the landfill on the shore. Subtract the—

A little farther up the coast long piers had been built out into the bay, with fishing trawlers and a couple of smallish wooden ships tied up next to them; cranes swung cargo nets ashore to a clutch of sheds and warehouses, and trucks carried cargo out onto the highway.

Across the water there were no buildings on the hills where San Francisco should be, only a town along the waterfront. No East Bay bridges either, no Golden Gate, and Alcatraz was white with seabird droppings and swarming with the pelicans that had given it its name. The ships on the water were fewer by an order of magnitude, and small—schooners, a couple of them six-masters, barges and tugs, a clutch of sailboats and some fishing boats under a white-winged storm of gulls. He looked up and saw strings of pelicans and cormorants, golden eagles, and—he counted frantically—half a dozen condors. The sky was alive with wings, and it wasn’t even the season for migratory birds. Out on the bay a whale spouted, then submerged in a smooth black curve. Sea lions hauled themselves out along the shores of Alameda, and he could just make out a sea otter on the nearby shore.

I’m where that video was taken. It’s as if I’m standing in Oakland before Columbus, he thought. But it can’t be. And there are paved roads and Ford SUVs and Hummers and a great big building with a Gate in it, and that little port and—

His vision faded. He felt something pushed between his lips and sucked reflexively; it was brandy, potent and smooth, in a silver flask. That brought on a fit of coughing, blessed pain that called his spirit back into his body. Tully was hovering nearby with a frown of concern on his face; evidently the smaller man was more mentally flexible.

“Takes a lot of FirstSiders hard the first time,” Adrienne said. “And yes, it’s exactly what it looks like, only it’s not the same San Francisco Bay you grew up with. Different… time line. A different history, two different universes existing in the same space and joined only by the Gate. You know the concept?”

“Yeah,” he said hoarsely. “Yeah, you know I read science fiction. You saw my research on you. What the hell… ?”

“Showing is faster than telling, but it’s stressful,” she said. “You feeling better?”

“Yeah. Thanks a lot.”

She chuckled. “Why do I hear a lack of enthusiasm? But come on; I’ll buy you two dinner and fill you in. It’s the least I can do, after getting you into this mess.”

They passed over into the parking lot; it was unbearably prosaic to slide into the front passenger seat of a Hummer and pull out onto the road, heading northward and tending away from the water. His head tried to swivel all possible ways at once; he felt a little undignified, but it was a whole new world—literally.

After a few hundred yards, Adrienne pulled the Humvee over to the graveled side of the road. Tom waited, distantly noting the incredible, intense freshness of the air, even with the mudflat smell that came fairly strong now and then. She took a small black box out of her jacket and went over the vehicle and all three of the humans in it, before shrugging.

“OK, that’s about as secure as I can get, this side of the Sierras. Now we can talk.”

“Someone listening in?” Tully asked. “Mind if I have a swig of whatever it was, by the way?”

Adrienne raised an eyebrow, but handed over her flask. “It’s Seven Oaks brandy—from my own land,” she said. “And as to listening… I think that Nostradamus has been compromised.”

“Nostradamus?” Tom said.

“Formally, the Commonwealth Information and Communications System,” she said. “Nobody calls it anything but Nostradamus except in official documents.”

Tully handed back the silver flask. “Pretty good brandy, by the way. Sort of cognac style, hey? And Nostradamus is your Internet?”

She nodded. “Sort of cognac; Ugni Blanc grapes, at least, and the same style of distilling; this batch was laid down when I was six. Nostradamus is… Imagine…” She paused for thought.

“… imagine that the U.S. government ruled the whole civilized world, that it owned AOL, and AOL was the whole Internet, everywhere. That it owned and operated every ISP, and there was only one type of modem and one set of software for it, and the super-AOL owned all the cables and servers and the whole communications industry and the telephone net and all the TV stations and on-line databanks and the public library as well. It’s an intranet, a closed system. No computer-to-computer contact outside it at all, unless you use floppies, and those can be read anytime you upload to a computer in touch with the system. And you have to use your ID card and get a scan anytime you log on, even from a public terminal.”

Tully snapped his fingers. “Hey! Al Stewart! It’s named after the song, right?” He hummed, and then sang in a half chant:

Mortal man, your time is sand—Your years are leaves upon the sea I am the eyes of Nostradamus—All your ways are known to me!

“Yes, that one was popular about the time the system was first put together,” she said, and nodded with a tinge of surprised respect. “It’s been updated frequently since—all high-broadband fiber now.”

She turned to Tom and looked him in the eye: “All right; Bosco was the man behind that endangered-animal smuggling. He couldn’t have been doing it for the money; that doesn’t really make sense. And somebody got to Schalk—thanks, by the way—and if I wasn’t the nasty suspicious sort who never tells anyone anything until they need to know, he’d have screwed my investigation worse than he undoubtedly did. Schalk was willing to court almost certain death to shut Bosco up when it looked like he’d talk. You were a police officer—”

“Am,” Tom corrected.

She shrugged. “All right, are a police officer. What does that suggest to you?”

“What would Bosco have gotten if he confessed? In the way of punishment.” Because if you burn ’em alive, it would be perfectly natural. And how do I know you don’t burn people alive here? “He put up a lot of resistance, as if the stakes were extremely high.”

“Punishment for smuggling? As long as there wasn’t any question of revealing the Gate secret… ten or fifteen years ‘assisting in the dynamic growth of the mining industry so important to our beloved Commonwealth.’”

“Sent to the mines, hey?” Tom said. “I presume that isn’t a death sentence?”

“Of course not. Gray jumpsuit, monotonous but adequate diet, hard bunk, hard work, unsympathetic guards. Maybe half that time, if the Prime of his Family was willing to pay heavily and twist arms for him. He might get a trusty’s job in a year or two; after all, he was one of the Thirty Families. A pretty poor specimen of the breed, but the principle counts. Do you think he was just unable to bear the thought of a few years turning ore into ingots?”

Tom thought, then shook his head. “Hell no. He was hiding something big, very big. Something that would have gotten him killed if he confessed. Something that did get him killed because it just looked like he might confess.”

Adrienne’s lips skinned back in a notional smile. “Yes. I think he was a small part of a very big conspiracy; a conspiracy against the Gate Control Commission and the Gate secret. One of which Schalk was a tool.”

The big man nodded again. “Now,” he said coldly, crossing his arms, “tell me why we should care.”

For a moment she looked shocked, then shook her head. “All right, it’s natural you should still be thinking like FirstSiders. Reasons? Three reasons you should care.”

She held up three fingers, and turned them down one by one: “First, Bosco was a collateral… sort of a fictive-kinship thing… of the Collettas. If the Colletta Prime, the head of the Family, is involved in this… well, the Collettas have long memories, and they carry grudges. You were partly responsible for their boy’s death. If they were to take over here, your lives wouldn’t be worth squat. Second, even if they were willing to let you live, you’d still have to live here after they took over, and I doubt you’d like it—you’ll know what I mean when you’ve seen more of how things work here.”

“And third?” Tom said, expressionless.

“Third, if the conspiracy takes over, think about who they were operating with back on FirstSide, and how. The Commission—which we Rolfes and our friends run, more or less—believes in leaving a minimal footprint back there and limited expansion here; that’s why our faction is called the Conservatives. The Collettas are more ambitious…. Oh, hell, it’s complicated, sixty years of politics. The Collettas are the head of the Imperialist party here. They want to conquer this world, more or less, and rule all the natives as slaves, more or less. They don’t put it quite that way, and don’t mention that they’d also like to be kings, emperors, themselves. They’re buddy-buddy with the Batyushkovs, who I think still have political ambitions back FirstSide, not just here, ambitions in Russia. Think about the sort of mayhem someone in control of the Gate’s resources and the Commission’s wealth could create here and back FirstSide, if they got their hands on it.”

Tom exchanged a glance with his partner. They both nodded slightly, and he replied, “We don’t have enough information to decide on that… Ms. Rolfe.”

He thought she winced slightly, but she went on coolly enough: “That’s fair. Look, if you want me to do it, I’ll just drop you off in Rolfeston. That hundred dollars you each got will keep you for a month, two if you’re very careful, and there’s plenty of work here for men with your skills. Or, you can let me show you around, and try to convince you that you should help me.”

“Why do you need help, if you’re in the all-powerful Gate Security?” Tom asked.

Adrienne laughed bitterly. “Oh, if only you knew! I can just imagine going over to Colletta Hall”—she pointed in the direction of what should be San Jose—“and waving my little pistol at Giovanni Colletta and telling him he’s under arrest. For that matter, if Bosco had been caught here in the Commonwealth… Let’s say this isn’t the most centralized country in human history. And I’ve got to assume that Gate Security is compromised as well, after what happened with Schalk; there are Collettas and Batyushkovs and their affiliates all through it, of course. I need some help I can trust.”

He looked at her. She flushed, but continued to meet his eyes.

“This is my country, and I’ll do whatever it takes to protect it,” she said. “Including kill, lie and deceive. You never have?”

Tom nodded in grudging acknowledgment. “I’m an American,” he said. “And I’ll do all that for my country. Possibly we can work together.”

“Possibly,” Tully said. “Depends on how much of what you’re telling is the truth, and how we assemble the facts once we know ’em.”

“Fair enough,” she said.

Then she smiled, and despite himself he felt his lips curve up in response. “First, I get to show you my home country.”

Tom straightened up and looked around. Anew, the knowledge that he was really here struck him.

“Dodos?” he murmured. “And tigers and bears, oh my!” Christ, the things we could see here! he thought. Tully gave a sudden strangled whoop; the same thought must have struck him.

“Dodos? Only in the zoo, this side of Mauritius,” she replied, chuckling. “They swarm like vermin there. As for the tigers and bears, the hills here are lousy with ’em.”

“It’s not far to Rolfeston, which is roughly where the People’s Republic of Berkeley is located FirstSide, “ she said. ”hich is a deep irony, once you know Rolfeston a little.”

They stopped for another checkpoint a thousand yards from the Gate complex parking lot; this one had those perforated plates that hid tire-ripping spikes ready to spring up at the push of a button, and two more strongpoints on either side of the road. This time the weapons peering out of the slits included 25mm chain guns, and guided antitank rockets mounted on a rotating cupola on the roof. Another of the black-uniformed soldiers in high-tech gear brought out a mobile reader to scan Adrienne’s fingerprints and retinas, and those of her passengers.

“GSF,” Adrienne said as they accelerated again. “Gate Security Force—reports directly to the Commission. The next layer of security is militia. Right around here is farming country, except for the Gate complex—we keep that closely guarded, as you can imagine. Minefields, dogs, electrified wire, and robot guns included, by the way, so don’t get any funny ideas about sneaking back FirstSide and calling in the marines. This isn’t the United States. Our guard details don’t have lawyers paralyzing their trigger fingers. They spot you off the road within the prohibited area, they kill you dead and investigate later.”

He nodded; there were still more pillboxes at strategic points, sensor towers, a six-wheeled armored car mounting a 40mm automatic cannon in its turret, and more troops—these in gray uniforms, and equipped with what looked like M-14s but weren’t. Occasional aircraft went by overhead, including a big blimp and a tilt-rotor, but one of them was a Black Hawk helicopter with door gunners, flying a patrol pattern.

The vacant countryside around the Gate complex was tawny-green grass and bush studded with enormous live oaks with their characteristic thick, gnarled limbs like the hands of arthritic giants. They passed cars and trucks headed both ways on the north-south bayside road, none very large, but the air held virtually nothing of the hydrocarbon stink you’d get in this area on…

FirstSide, he thought. Get used to the terminology.

Beyond the checkpoints the land was wild, like something out of an old book about the California lowlands, grassland and trees shading into a fringe of bird-swarming salt marsh; he saw a herd of small tule elk trotting off as the Hummer went by. Some of the valley oaks were over a hundred feet high and stretched out to shade circles nearly twice that diameter.

“What, no bears and wolves?” he said feebly.

Adrienne waved a hand toward the blue-and-green line of the Oakland-Berkeley hills that fringed the plain to their right.

“Plenty up there, and mountain lions. We don’t let ’em too close to town, of course.”

He twisted around. Tully had found a pair of binoculars kept cased in a holder attached to the back of the driver’s seat. Tom grabbed them, seeking detail, but the landscape was too alien and too large. He did see the waters of Lake Merritt behind them, and beyond that a glimpse of a house that must be huge to show at this distance. Farming country filled the coastal flats beyond that, a softly colored checkerboard of fields rimmed with the tall shapes of poplars and cypress.

“Why’s all this land here empty?” he asked.

“Partly parks, partly reserve for the expansion of Rolfeston… and we’re here.”

The town had a perfectly ordinary sign: ROLFESTON, POP: 29,855. It started more abruptly than a typical American settlement of its size, though, without the untidy fringe of derelict land awaiting development. There was a modest-sized industrial park of low-slung buildings on both sides of the road. Plantings and trees hid most of the factory-warehouse-whatevers; he could see that many were tile-roofed and stuccoed in various pastel colors, although others had sawtooth skylights and tangles of piping. A line of power cables looped in from the hills to the east on tall wooden poles that looked like whole Douglas fir trunks, before descending to a transformer station; the distribution lines must be underground, and the phone lines if there were any. Trucks pulled in or out, and buses, and lines of workers on foot or on bicycles or Segways: Evidently people were knocking off for the day.

Adrienne swung the Hummer into a parking lot, edged by more green-belt—this laid out as a park separating the workshops from the residential part of the town. It had the flamboyant loveliness you could get in lowland California with plenty of water: rhododendrons, tree-roses, hollyhocks and gardenias and sheets of lavender Chinese ground-lilies in shady spots. Plus copses of trees, pools, fountains surrounded by tiled plazas, streams, a bandstand, benches and brick walks, street lamps on ornate cast-iron stands. A row of bicycles stood at the junction of asphalt and greenery, and Segways—two-wheeled platforms with a vertical handle and crossbar arrangement. A sign over the rack prompted users to remember to plug in the recharger when they dropped one off.

“These’re free?” Tom said.

“Municipal service, like the bikes and the buses,” Adrienne said.

“I remember a couple of places tried that with bicycles,” Tully said. “Seattle, or somewhere else up in the Pacific Northwest. Didn’t work. Somebody always ripped ’em off.”

Adrienne waved around them. “Petty crime isn’t really practical here. For a bunch of reasons, startin’ with the fact that there’s nowhere to run and nowhere to hide, unless you want to go renegade and live up in the hills with the bears.”

Tom shrugged; there must be some way to beat the system here; he could think of several, offhand. It would have to be small-scale, though. Shock was receding, and his mind was starting to function clearly again. The Gate was the key to New Virginia; whoever held it had the place in a vise that needn’t even be very obvious elsewhere.

They stepped onto the little two-wheeled platforms; he hadn’t used one in a while, and that only as a curiosity, but the gyro-sensor computer system made operation instinctive, and you couldn’t fall off. They took off at a little better than a fast walk. There were a fair number of people about, getting out of work or school; his eyes sharpened as he took in the passersby and the scene. It had the same old-fashioned look as the farmland, with an overtone of Leave It to Beaver and the Partridge Family.

Asians were rare enough to be conspicuous; there were no blacks, no obvious Hispanics. There were a fair number of young men and women who looked like Mexican or Guatemalan Indians, unmistakable with their brown skin and Amerindian features, dressed in baggy white pants and shirts, or blouses and skirts, and sandals—and only adults, he realized; no children of that race, or old people; most in their late teens or early twenties, a few as old as Tom himself.

Their body language and gestures were wholly alien, and he overheard snatches of languages that weren’t Spanish, or anything he recognized, full of hissing, guttural sounds—his mind heard them as impossible combinations of letters, tz and zl and rr.

Hmmm. Can’t place them, but otherwise it looks a little like a crowd back in North Dakota, he thought. Then: A crowd in Fargo a long time ago.

He studied the rest of the townspeople. Half the men in the crowd sported hats, and most of the adult women wore skirts, with only a few in slacks or jeans; there wasn’t a single tattoo or body piercing to be seen on the numerous teenagers, many of them in uniforms that looked like they were modeled on a Catholic school’s.

Hell of a lot of teenagers, too… wait a minute…

There were a lot of baby carriages and toddlers and kids running and playing with barking dogs, too, enough to make him look twice and deliberately count.

Adrienne saw the direction of his glance. “The baby boom never stopped, here; it always hits me when I go back FirstSide, how few children there are. Our average family is about four kids—I’ve got four older brothers and a sister myself, and twelve nieces and nephews with more on the way—and the average age of the population is twenty-five years younger than FirstSide America.”

“No kids yourself?” he asked. You said not, but God knows you told me enough howlers… though I remember how odd a family that size seemed….

She laughed and shook her head. “Oh, I’m a freak of nature—ask anyone.”

They wheeled on through a pleasant residential district of winding streets and single-family homes set in modest-sized lawns and very pretty gardens; most of the houses were built in a Mediterranean Revival style that reminded him of Santa Barbara. American elms arched over the streets and brick sidewalks, looking to have been planted about the time he was being born back in 1976; obviously they hadn’t let Dutch elm disease through the Gate. Vehicular traffic was light, mainly small hybrid gas-electric runabouts and a fair smattering of silent fuel-cell buses, but with swarms of bicycles as well, plenty of Segways, and the odd horse-cart. The houses were medium-sized, all single-story; some of the older ones looked like they were made of adobe, many others of plastered brick; there were no frame homes, and all the roofs were tile.

The intersections often had a clutch of shops—none with familiar chain names, none large, but selling ordinary groceries and hardware, computers and personal electronics. There were small parks and churches every now and then—mostly Episcopal, he noted, with a scattering of Baptist and Methodist and Catholic, a Lutheran, a few onion-domed Orthodox and a couple of synagogues; and a fairly big school, two stories, set amid a couple of acres of garden and trees, built in California-Spanish style with its walls overgrown with climbing rose.

“This is the blue-collar section of town, more or less,” Adrienne said. She waved to her right, toward the blue-and-gold patchwork of forest and grassland on the hills. “Then there’s the town hall and the public buildings, and the main business district, and then more expensive housing, well-to-do Settlers, and the town houses of the Families. The steep part’s all Commission reserve, parkland.”

They went past a giant farmer’s market, stalls and stands under a huge truss-timbered roof and enormous redwood pillars stretching upward like the legs of dinosaurs. A cleared laneway wide enough for delivery trucks cut through it lengthwise; she led them into that, slowing down to walking speed perforce among the crush of pedestrians and handcarts.

Well, that’s a switch, Tom thought. A farmer’s market where most of the people selling things look like actual farmers.

Which was a change from FirstSide’s California. That wasn’t the only difference, either; the fruits and vegetables and flowers were in the expected gorgeous Californian abundance, but there were live chickens and other poultry in cages, and rows of butcher’s stalls like a carnivore’s dream, with stout pink-faced men and women in white aprons and square hats beside glass-fronted compartments holding piles of steaks, chops, roasts, garlic-smelling sausages, pâtés and terrines, whole elk and deer and bison carcasses—

“For some reason, most of our butchers are Balts and Germans,” Adrienne said. “We got a bunch of ’em in the forties and the businesses stayed in the same families. Most businesses do, here.”

The fish section opened his eyes and made him lean back unconsciously, bringing the Segway to a slower pace. It was a pungent mass of vats and piles of shaved ice topped with sixty-pound yellowtails and huge albacores, barrels of writhing crabs the size of dinner plates, mounds of three-inch prawns, rock lobsters, abalone by the gross, oysters bigger than his fist, ling and flounder, cauldrons of shrimp…. Knives flashed and paper-wrapped parcels were handed out to shoppers; the prices looked absurdly low.

“Wait a minute,” Tully said shrewdly. “What’s a day’s pay here? Entry-level, grunt work.”

“Two dollars and all found,” she said. “Three-fifty if you’re finding your own eats and bunk. That’s for a day laborer, a deckhand on a fishing boat, that sort of thing. The deckhand might get paid in a share of the profits plus fish.”

Nickel a pound for filet mignon and three cents for shrimp still sounds pretty cheap, Tom thought.

“Where’s the catch?” he said aloud. “Taxes? Housing?”

“You can get a two-bedroom house around here for two thousand,” she replied. “And taxes are low; mostly local school taxes, that sort of thing. No more than a tenth of your income, less for the bottom of the pyramid.”

“Where’s the catch?” he asked again.

She grinned. “Tom, the Families own the Gate. Also the gold mines, the silver mines, the power company, the oil wells down in Long Beach, the refinery, the public utilities, a lot of the factories, and pretty well all the land. Taxes? We don’t need no steeenkin’ taxes!”

Tully snorted. “There’s got to be a catch somewhere.”

“Well, food and housing are cheap,” she said. “So are clothes and shoes—most things made here in the Commonwealth are low-cost—except gas, which is kept expensive deliberately, ten cents a gallon. Stuff from FirstSide can get pricey, especially if it’s big and bulky. Cars are a luxury—ordinary people in Rolfeston usually rent one if they want to get out of town, and use public transport or bicycles inside. The Old Man—ah, my grandfather, John Rolfe the Sixth—doesn’t like sprawl. A town should be a town, and the country should be the countryside, he says.”

“Not an obvious horror show, I’ll admit,” Tom said.

Be honest, he told himself. It actually looks pretty good. But I’m seeing what she wants me to see, so far. Remember what happened to those poor dopes the Russians used to show around, back during the Cold War. A lot of them came back singing hosannas.

“See why we’re not so hot to have everyone and his cousins from FirstSide pouring in?” Adrienne asked sardonically, as they came out onto the street again and leaned forward to pick up speed.

Tom nodded grudgingly. “You’ve got a sweet racket going,” he acknowledged. “The authorities—”

“The U.S. authorities would somehow find it in the interests of the United States and universal truth and justice to confiscate everything we own and ram forty million people through the Gate,” Adrienne said. “Not to mention taking away our national independence and probably throwing half of us in jail.”

“Well, you’ve got a point there….” Tully began, before Tom glared him into silence.

Beyond the open-air market was a commercial section of two-story buildings, shops with apartments for the owners above, and in their windows what he suddenly realized were the first advertisements he’d seen in New Virginia. A few posters at newsstands urged him to vote yes for Bond Issue 34, proclaimed the urgency of electing Michael Taconi to the school board and lauded George McCarthy’s merits for city council.

That makes sense, he thought. Whatever these Thirty Families are, I don’t suppose they want to handle the drudgery of day-to-day administration themselves.

Adrienne pulled up before a high white wall topped with brick and overgrown with climbing roses, splashes of crimson against green leaves and whitewash beneath. It enclosed the end of a U-shaped building, forming the courtyard of a restaurant that proudly announced in tiles set over the arched gateway:

That building was adobe, the genuine article; he recognized the thick-bottomed tapered walls with a slightly melted look; the roof was curved red Roman-style tile. The cooking smells seized him, garlic and fried onions, roasting meat over wood coals, good coffee brewing and the maddeningly delicious scent of baking bread, making him swallow involuntarily as his body remembered that it had been a very long day on one granola bar and that he’d upchucked yesterday’s dinner. They left their Segways at a rack and went through a wrought-iron gate, past a fountain and into a tiled patio shaded by spectacular wisterias growing over trellises, purple and white flowers hanging in clusters like grapes and trunks thicker than peach trees; galleries ran around the court on three sides, supported by wooden pillars made from whole tree trunks. The outdoor patio was scattered with tables that were—

Jesus! Carved out of slabs of redwood six inches thick, he thought.

Some of them were fifteen feet long and six across, too, varnished and polished to show the grain and the deep sienna-red color of the wood. Tile or stone set into the wood showed in the middle of the place settings.

It was busy, with a dozen would-be patrons waiting on padded benches along the inside of the walls, or at a cheerfully noisy bar that could be seen through the open doors of the main building; somewhere a piano was tinkling and an accordion playing. A plump middle-aged woman with black hair and an olive complexion came bustling up and whisked them past the crowd to a table set for four—a waiter scooped up the extra set, and Adrienne ordered for all of them.

In a corner a huge, ancient and somewhat scruffy parrot slumbered on a perch, occasionally waking to cry raucously: “A bas De Gaulle! Salaud, salaud, salaud!”

He eyed her narrowly. “Rank hath its privileges?” he asked.

“I am one of the Thirty Families,” she said. She held up her left hand, showing the braided gold-and-platinum ring on her thumb. “Incidentally, this is something all the members of the Thirty Families wear. We get them at a ceremony in our early teens—sort of a bar mitzvah thing.”

“Mr. Bosco had one of those,” Tom said ironically.

“Well, I’m also a Rolfe, not to mention a granddaughter of the Old Man himself.” Then she grinned. “And you look like a man recovered enough to eat and ask questions.”

A bouillabaisse came, rich with prawns, clams, crab, rock-cod, eel and whiting; with a flourish the waiter mixed in the rouille, a paste of garlic, fish stock, crumbs and red pepper, and laid down a platter of bread fresh enough to steam gently when it was broken, and olive oil for dipping. A carafe of chilled white wine accompanied it. That was followed by grilled potatoes with herbs, green salad, and a beef-and-olive daube, which came with another carafe of red; evidently standard procedure if you didn’t order a specific vintage. Even then, he was hungry enough to do the meal justice between sharp questions and digesting the answers; the cooking was superb even by Californian standards, and the materials better still. Sun faded from the sky; lights came on, candles on the tables and frosted globes in curlicued wrought-iron brackets along the walls. Moths and assorted bugs immolated themselves in both.

Over coffee she concluded: “—near as we can tell, the difference starts in 323 B.C. Alexander the Great didn’t die on schedule. Here he lived another forty years, and he’s still worshiped as a son of Zeus. The Jews got assimilated by the Greeks, so no Christianity; Zoastrianism died out…. The details don’t matter. What’s important is that nobody from the Old World discovered the Americas, here, apart from some Scandinavians on flying visits to Labrador and Maine. But no sustained contact; the European and Asian parts of this world are sort of… oh, equivalent to the Middle Ages, technology-wise. In terms of countries and suchlike…”

She looked around, then pointed for a second. “See those two?”

The two men followed her eyes. Two obvious foreigners were sitting not far away, dressed in long-skirted silk coats lavishly embroidered in writhing animal shapes, baggy pantaloons and curl-toed boots. They were tall, broad-shouldered men with hair worn shoulder-length, youngish but weathered, with a half-Asian look; high cheekbones and slanted eyes contrasted with prominent noses and dense close-cropped beards. One…

“Dude’s a dead ringer for Keanu Reaves,” Tully commented.

The other was similar, save that his hair was a sandy color. Both of them were handling their forks with the slow care of those used to eating with their fingers, and they had sword belts looped over the back of their chairs. The weapons were straight double-edged broadswords with cruciform hilts and dragons curling in gold and crimson along the black leather of the scabbards.

“Those are Selang-Arsi nobles,” Adrienne said. “From kingdoms in Manchuria and Korea and northeast China, in FirstSider terms. The Macedonian Greeks took over Central Asia—the ’Stans, Tom; they call it Bactria here—and stayed strong there. They bounced the north Iranian nomad peoples eastward, the Alans and Saka and Sarmatians and Ye-Tai and whatnot. Back FirstSide, those tribes kept going west and south, as far as India and eastern Europe, with the Asian nomads from east of the Tien Shan, the Huns and their successors, pushing them on and following them. It went the other way here, and the Huns and Turks and Mongols and Manchus disappeared in the ruck.”

“So those guys are basically sort of Persians?” Tully asked, interested.

“No, they’re Tocharians mixed with north Chinese and Tungus peoples; the Tocharians were from Sinkiang and Shansi, originally. Sort of like Celts; they were the easternmost of the Indo-European peoples. In our history the Uighurs, Turks, conquered and absorbed them about seven hundred years after Christ. Here the Iranian-speakers pushed the Tocharians directly east, then went past them south into China in waves, mixing with the locals. The Han only kept their identity in Indo-China…. It’s a long story; two and a half thousand years of different history, all over the world. We trade with the Selang-Arsi a fair bit; they’ve got some gorgeous artwork, and they’ve picked up a lot of simple technology from us. The important point is that nobody here ever developed a real science; our best guess is that the Industrial Revolution needed the equivalent of a toss coming up heads a thousand times in a row.”

“Wait a minute,” Tom said, cudgeling his brain for remnants of high school history. “That means… well, if Europe stayed backward—”

“Did it ever!” Adrienne said. “Outside Spain and Italy, they’re still painting themselves blue and hunting heads.”

“—how did that affect the Indians?” he continued doggedly. “A lot less than the Old World, I’d guess.”

“Hole in one,” Adrienne said. “When the Old Man stumbled through the Gate in 1946, he found things here in the Americas pretty much the way they were when Columbus arrived, barring details.”

“Details?” he asked.

She waved a hand. “You can look ’em up at the library. The Aztecs are gone; it’s a mess of little city-states down Mexico way, and they’ve all learned how to make bronze tools and weapons… that sort of thing. Less obvious differences up here in hunter-gatherer territory. My grandfather thought this was the past, FirstSide’s past, until he was able to check.”

“And the Old Man decided to make a good thing of it,” Tom said.

Adrienne leaned back in her chair; the waiter brought desserts concocted of fruit and cream, and more strong coffee in a silver pot.

“Well, wouldn’t you have?” she said. “Granddad told me he took about five minutes to decide that he’d given Uncle Sam everything he owed on Okinawa—remember, when and where he was a boy some people still stood up for ‘Dixie’ and sat down for ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ Besides, you two, you’re supposed to be environmentalists. What do you think would have happened if the U.S. government had gotten the Gate in 1946? With a whole preindustrial planet to plunder?”

“So he’s still dictator here?” Tom said, deliberately needling. I can get really angry later, he thought to himself. Right now it wouldn’t be tactful… or prudent.

Adrienne shrugged, unaffected.

“He’s certainly still big alpha-male bull gorilla and Chairman-Emeritus of the committee,” she said. “My father’s his number two, and Dad’ll succeed him when Granddad finally decides to go do a hostile takeover on the afterlife. Succeed to his offices, at least. Nobody will ever have quite the Old Man’s position here.”

“Committee?”

“Central Committee of the Gate Control Commission, representing the Thirty Families—Thirty-two, strictly speaking—some of them men who served with him in the Pacific, the rest relatives from back in ol’ Virginny, then a few more with each wave of immigrants. The Rolfes, the Fitzmortons, the O’Briens, the Collettas, the Hugheses, the Ludwins, the Carons, the Pearlmutters, the von Traupitzes, the Chumleys, the Versfelds—well, you’ll pick up the names fast enough.”

She waved a hand around. “To simplify, they’ve been running things ever since, pretty well. This doesn’t look so bad, does it?”

“Not bad, for a pirate kingdom,” Tom said.

Adrienne laughed, the warm chuckle he’d grown to like—and now couldn’t trust.

“What’s that old saying?” she said. “‘The first king was a lucky soldier.’ Or a fortunate pirate. The Old Man’s a rascal and the Thirty are a gang of bandits, but he’s a likable old rascal, and we’re pretty enlightened bandits… most of us, most of the time.”

Tom looked around. “That’s one thing we’ll have to look into. Your Old Man doesn’t seem to have been much of an equal-opportunity employer, for starters,” he said.

She spread her hands. “Ah, you noticed ‘diversity’ wasn’t a priority in recruitment? Yeah, it’s white-boy heaven here.” A wry smile accompanied that. “Emphasis on the boy, by the way… Anyway, Granddad always said he believed in learning from experience, that importing Africans into old Virginia hadn’t turned out all that well for either party, and that if anyone objected to his priorities, they could go find their own alternate universe and run it any way they pleased.”

Tom snorted. “So it’s the WASP promised land?” he said sardonically.

“Not exactly. We’ve got the Blackfeet, the when-wes—”

“Whoa!” Tully held up a hand.

Tom’s head felt heavy, as if the flow of information were clogging the veins there. He went on: “You’re losing me again. Blackfeet? Indians? What’s a when-we?”

“Oh, sorry. Blackfoot is a translation of pied noir. North African French, like the folks who own this restaurant. When-wes are”—she nodded toward another party at a nearby table, three generations in khaki shorts and bush jackets, from a white-haired elder down to a clutch of tow-thatched children—“that comes from ‘when we were in…’ Kenya or Rhodesia, usually, which they’re always going on about. You’ve met some of our Afrikaners, quite a few of those over the last fifteen years, and Russians and some Balkan Slavs—all of ’em with reasons to find a bolthole, the biggest groups of immigrants we’ve had in my lifetime. It was the same back in the forties, granddad got Germans and Balts with, ummmm, a strong incentive to go somewhere they’d never be found; a fair number of Italians; east Europeans running from Stalin; and Brits tired of rationing and things going downhill. Plus we’ve always had a steady trickle of Americans; they’re about half the total, and much the largest single group.”

“Plus people who stumble on the Gate,” Tom said sardonically.

She spread her hands, acknowledging the hit. “There haven’t been more than a few hundred Involuntaries all up, and most of them settle in well enough. Meanwhile, all the original groups have been intermarrying enthusiastically, the melting pot in action. The ones in the first twenty years were the most numerous; by now three-quarters of the Settlers were born here, and nine-tenths of the Thirty. I was, and my father was too, and my nieces and nephews, and some of them have kids already. With our rate of natural increase we double every generation even without immigrants. And of course, nobody leaves.”

“Ah,” Tom nodded. So there is an element here against its will. That has possibilities.

She paused. “I don’t want to tell you any more lies, Tom. You two are Involuntary Settlers. That means you can do anything here… except go near the Gate. That will never be allowed, ever, under any circumstances whatsoever; and trying means dying. It wouldn’t matter if you had the Old Man himself as a hostage; they’d shoot you both down. Ordinary Settlers only get near it if they’re on official business, like Piet. Members of the Thirty Families can visit FirstSide, but they need clearance—and if they endanger the Gate secret, the Commission sends someone like me after them and they never, ever do it again.

“But all that’s rare,” she went on more cheerfully. “Not many stumble on the secret anymore.”

Tully broke in: “OK, if this was a California, an America, that didn’t get discovered by Europeans… what happened to the California Indians? I suppose they were the people we saw on the way, the ones in the Viva Zapata campesino costumes?

Adrienne pursed her lips and examined the play of light on her wineglass as she turned it between long slender fingers.

“No, those are the nahua.”

“Nahua… nahuatl, the Aztec language? Mexicans?” Tom said.

She nodded. “Gastarbeiter. Contract workers, braceros, mostly from Mexico; we call them nahua from the main language down there. About a third of the population, half the labor force.”

“What about them?” Tom asked. “I can’t see your Old Man welcoming them with open arms. Or is this more like the Old South than you were letting on? Contented darkies… brownies… singing in the quarters, stealing chickens and eating watermelon?”

Adrienne grinned. “Now, give credit where it’s due. The Old Man could have done just that, bought slaves to do the dirty work here, you know. The warlords and priest-kings down Mexico way would have sold us any number. They’ll do anything for steel tools and muskets, not to mention brandy and aspirin and plastic beads. They have swarms of slaves of their own, and given the national obsession with chopping out hearts, those are the lucky ones. Lots of wars.”

She frowned, obviously thinking hard. “As I said, the Old Man likes to learn from other people’s mistakes—says it’s less costly than making your own. So we recruit on five-year contracts, and in limited numbers—there are fifteen or twenty applicants for every slot. They don’t settle here—the wages are enormous by their standards, and they go back with nest eggs and a lot of new skills. We’ve had sons of princes volunteer to dig ditches.”

“Oh, sure, and none of them stay on regardless—and what about their kids?”

“Norplant for all the female new arrivals,” Adrienne said. “Or more modern long-term contraceptive implants. And this isn’t FirstSide, Tom. Remember Nostradamus and those ID cards you got issued? It’s impossible to live here without valid ID, not for more than a couple of weeks. Unless you want a long-term career in the borax mines of the Mojave.”

“They’re all happy to go back to Aztec land, when they’ve had five years of flush toilets and modern medicine?” Tom asked skeptically.

“Oh, any who want to stay after their contracts expire can, on certain conditions.”

“Conditions?”

“Well, only one major condition. An injection of P-63.”

Ouch, Tom thought.

That was an immunosterilizant the Chinese had developed back around the turn of the century. It made the body’s immune system sensitive to some of the proteins on the surface of sperm, programming it to treat them as foreign tissue. It was quite popular back on the other side of the Gate because it didn’t have any other symptoms; in fact it mimicked a common natural cause of infertility that had been a complete mystery until the 1990s.

By God, her grandpa certainly does think ahead. I suppose they used tube-tying and vasectomies before that.

Back home, the Germans and French and a lot of other Europeans had found that “guest workers” tended to become very long-term guests, and a lot of them weren’t at all happy with it. Old Man Rolfe seemed to have found a way to have a foreign underclass that was guaranteed not to start families or become a permanent part of the social landscape—without even provoking mass discontent, since they were all volunteers. In fact, the more he thought about it, the more diabolically clever it was.

Because there’s no new generation raised here, none of the nahua will ever really understand how Westerners think, and none of them will ever really learn our way of looking at things—or read Jefferson, or Marx—and they’ll never have the second-generation immigrant’s hopes for full equality, or their frustrations. They’re all perpetually fresh off the boat.

He gave a slight mental wince. The “Old Man” seems a lot more interested in getting the result he wants than in the “how” part, though. Christ, but that man must give new shadings to the word “ruthless.”

He and Tully exchanged a quick glance, and the smaller man nodded. When he spoke, it was to Adrienne: “What happened to the real natives, though? Plenty of them, if I remember the history.”

“Nobody was counting, but the Old Man recorded in his journal that he was surprised at how dense the population was, even though the California natives weren’t farmers. Most estimates of precontact Indian populations back in his day were way too low, of course.”

She sighed and went on after a moment’s pause: “What happened to them? Well, influenza in 1946. That took off about half of them, we think; Uncle Andy—Andy O’Brien, one of the founders—was coming down with it on his first visit and it spread like fire in dry grass; the Ohlone, the local tribe, treated the sick by putting them in the village sweathouse and everyone crowded in with them to keep them company. Then when it got bad, the survivors of each little band ran off to the neighbors, and then they ran to their neighbors, and so on. Like dropping a stone into a pond, with the ripples bouncing back and forth from the Pacific to the Atlantic.”

“Ouch,” Tom said, and added to himself: Again. “Didn’t it occur—”

Adrienne poured herself more coffee. “Why should it have occurred to anyone? The Old Man was a soldier—and in 1946, historical epidemiology was something most historians didn’t know much about. I was a history student, at the University of New Virginia and then at Stanford. The first serious research wasn’t until the sixties, seventies—Plagues and Peoples, Ecological Imperialism, the groundbreakers. Until then most people, most historians, just assumed a pre-Columbian population too small by a factor of ten or fifteen.”

Tully cocked his head. “Bet that flu epidemic wasn’t the last one, either. With the Gate setup, you’d get a unified disease environment on both sides, unless you used air locks and a whole lot of other stuff, including a long quarantine period. That decontamination procedure you put us through wouldn’t catch everything.”

She nodded. “In 1947, some Latvian refugees recruited as Settlers brought over viral hepatitis and typhus both. They got flown in and shoved through the Gate quick to avoid trouble about visas.”

“Ouch.” Tom winced.

“They threw out the clothes of the sick; some of the local Indians picked them up, and there were lice in the seams—amazing how hard it is to kill all the nits—and all of them had lice…. Then measles, mumps, polio, chicken pox from FirstSide; and smallpox from our Selang-Arsi trading partners in the sixties; and influenza every couple of years. Virgin-field epidemics. Plus some of the Asian kingdoms have taken to trading across the Pacific on their own—they’re very quick to imitate things they can understand and apply, like better sailing ships—so smallpox and the other big killers hit again and again.”

“Jesus Christ,” Tom whispered; the meal turned into a rancid lump under his ribs. “At least they’ll be building up immunities.”

“’Fraid not,” Adrienne said. “Or not much. There are a couple of hundred million people in East Asia on this side of the Gate. Some of the Selang-Arsi and Dahaean cities like Changdan or Hagamantash have hundreds of thousands each, enough to keep the big killer plagues going as standard childhood diseases. But even Mexico and Peru don’t have that sort of density here, not anymore they don’t. The plagues burn themselves out and vanish, and a while goes by before another ship happens to have an infectious crewman. The next generation grows up without being exposed, so they’re just as vulnerable as their parents were, and the next plague hits just as hard. When that happens three times with something like hemorrhagic smallpox or pneumonic plague or chicken pox… well, there’s not much left. The few who don’t die of the fever are likely to starve or go mad. Then there are chronics like syphilis and gonorrhea. They spread widely and reduce fertility. We did manage to keep AIDS from getting through the Gate though, thank God.”

“So you don’t have to fight for the territory,” Tully said thoughtfully.

“Not much, usually. We just move into vacant land, or give the survivors some horses and beads and knives, and point them east. Sometimes a little skirmishing.”

Tom made a choked sound. “That’s… pretty ghastly,” he said.

She snorted, but he thought there was a slightly defensive note in her voice as she continued.

“Exactly the same thing happened after Columbus on FirstSide, Tom. Ninety percent die-off within a hundred years. Here, it’s been about the same in sixty-two, because we have much better transport and maps.”

“Moving in on their territory before they could recover, though…” Her shrug was expressive. “Oh, don’t be a hypocrite, Tom. What do you think happened with the Sioux in North Dakota, when your great-grandparents arrived from Norway all eager to sink a plow in the sod? I’ll tell you what didn’t happen.”

She placed her palms together in an attitude of prayer, rolled her eyes skyward and intoned in a voice dripping with mock compassion: “‘Oh, look at these poor Norski immigrants,’ said the noble, selfless Lakota. ‘Let us spontaneously give them the rich prairies swarming with game on which we currently dwell, and then we’ll move west to the dry badlands of our own free will so our descendants can enjoy malnutrition, TB, diabetes, despair and alcoholism on a miserable reservation for the next hundred and fifty years.’”

After a pause: “Not.”

“Well, granted,” Tom said, flushing. “But that was a long time ago—”

“This is 2009. Nineteen forty-six is a long time ago. Why should I get upset over what happened before I was born any more than you do, just because it was three rather than six generations before? Sooner or later someone from Asia or Africa or Europe was going to learn how to sail here, and then it would have happened anyway. For all the breast-beating idiots back FirstSide, I don’t see anyone packing up to leave the continent to the Indians. What nation isn’t built on someone else’s bones? That’s how human beings operate.”

“I suppose it could have been worse,” he said. To himself: That’s even true. Though it’s not saying much.

Adrienne smiled and patted his hand. “I knew you’d be sensible,” she said. “The Old Man’s no ogre, no Pol Pot or Omar. He does have his preferences and crotchets, of course. He likes things clean and tidy and orderly. He likes useful gadgets, but he doesn’t like big cities, or big industries, or agribusiness, or the Internet, or shopping malls or fast food, or modern architecture or freeways, or traffic jams, or… Well, as I said, you can guess the outline. Have either of you heard of the Southern Agrarians?”

“Don’t have that file on my hard drive,” Tom said. “All I know about the South is what I saw in the commercial strips outside places I was stationed.”

“The Agrarians are a big part of the school curriculum here, as far as history and civics go,” Adrienne said. “You should read I’ll Take My Stand. It’ll help you understand the Commonwealth a lot better.”

Tully frowned, evidently searching his memory; he was a Southerner himself, of course. “Yeah, I remember something about them. Big back in the thirties of the last century, weren’t they? Objected to progress and such. Didn’t like ‘damn Yankee’ notions.”

Adrienne chuckled. “The Agrarians thought laissez-faire capitalism was a dastardly subversive plot, and that Adam Smith and Karl Marx were six of one and half a dozen of the other. Things were different back then—real conservatives like the Agrarians worried about pollution and thought factory smoke-stacks were ugly and wanted people to be in touch with the land and nature. Commies and leftists and liberals loved steel mills and coal mines and wrote folk songs about building dams and bridges.”

“That’s a switch,” Tom admitted, a little startled. His brows knitted in thought. “That explains a bit of what I’ve seen here.”

“It does. Just don’t think the Old Man’s a Green. Some of the results are the same, but the attitude’s completely different. Anyway, Granddad was quite taken with the Agrarians back at VMI. Considering that for us Rolfes everything had been going to hell since 1783 or so—we were the ones who wanted to keep the Articles of Confederation and reject that newfangled Constitution—it’s not surprising. Most of the people the Thirty Families brought in here agree with him, roughly. So do most of their children, and the grandchildren, my generation. They came here to get away from modern life, remember, and they raised us here with not much of an outside world to offset their influence. Even the Thirty Families don’t live FirstSide anymore. We visit, we shop, we do business there, but this is our home.”

Tom gave her a considering look. “You didn’t come across as… different,” he said. “I’d think that being raised here would be harder to hide. At first I just thought you were a bit weird because your family was rich.”

“Well, thanks,” she said dryly, and then shrugged. “I visited FirstSide a lot, and spent a couple of years at Stanford. And I had special training in blending in over there; I can understand how modern America operates. The Old Man doesn’t give a damn what FirstSiders think, though, and neither do most people in the Commonwealth. This is another country, and we do things differently here.”

“Not to mention that here, you Rolfes are kings and your word is law.”

“There’s that. This isn’t a dictatorship, but it isn’t a democracy either. Sort of like a reasonably law-abiding and benevolent feudal oligarchy.” Her glance sharpened. “And we—myself included—intend to keep it that way, against all threats.”

Adrienne’s apartment building was off the main square, halfway along the length of Lee Street’s passage at the lower edge of the Berkeley hills, and nestled in the first rolling upswell; it was a two-story block built around a courtyard with a small swimming pool and a fountain, the whole thing rather like the French Quarter in New Orleans. Tom felt himself stumbling with fatigue as they climbed to the bedrooms. It wasn’t even any particular effort to decline an unspoken invitation and fall into one of the beds in the guest room. He woke for a moment then, just on the verge of sleep, to hear Tully say: “You know, Kemosabe, sometimes you’re too stubborn for—”

“Shut the fuck up, Tonto.”