Conquistador

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Tom grinned at the big billboard—it was the first one he’d seen this side of the Gate—and put the binoculars back into the case between the front seats. The wind from the water ahead dried the sweat on his face. For the moment they were stopped at the crest of a low hill, where two live oaks overhung the road in a patch of grateful shade, to enjoy that and the silence. Ahead the land fell away to a flat valley that ran down to the strait.

“No respecter of persons, eh?” he said, before he pressed the starter button. “I like Ralph Barnes already.”

“Ralph’s a law unto himself. He’s not lying about the burgers, either.”

The Mermaid Café was roughly where the downtown section of the city of Martinez would have been, although differences in the details of the shoreline made it hard to be certain. A thousand yards farther north there was a long wooden pier out into the blue water of the Carquinez Strait, with a second cluster of buildings at its base. The road was graveled dirt, as it had been since they left the northern outskirts of Rolfeston, which ended in a Tivoli-style amusement park. After that the bayside road had run through man-empty country nearly to the site of Richmond—the sheer absence of the great oil refineries and chemical plants had left him speechless—and then they’d dog-legged back down the Briones Creek and along Vaca Canyon, much of the trip through hills he remembered as the upscale suburb of Orinda.

Here… the hills dreamed under the early-summer sun, grass turning the color of champagne colored by late wildflowers, oaks and firs green and cool by contrast, and redwoods in the sheltered bay-facing canyons. He’d seen two grizzlies, including one that stood in the road until they were within rock-throwing distance; other game too often to count; and once he’d heard the unmistakable rebel-yell squall of a catamount. They’d stopped often, to ramble or just sit and listen to the wind soughing through the grass. He kept noticing the taste of the air, as well.

Now that they were over the hills another dusty-white road wound southward from here, through farming country in the valley lowlands between the Berkeley hills and the Diablo range—lightly settled, mostly tawny pasture, but with the evidence of man in fields of grain, the regularity of orchards, planted windbreaks around tile-roofed farmsteads. This country was solid suburb on FirstSide, of course, built up in the fifties and sixties of the last century. Here it looked as if the first settlers had moved in about then and not many since.

Right, Tom thought. Let’s not get euphoric; yeah, all that wilderness along the bay looks wonderful, but that’s Mother Nature, not the Thirty Families and their Commission. Let’s get some input on how the people do here. The present population, that is; we already know what happened to the original one.

Tom waved a hand toward the farms. “This belongs to…?”

“The Filmers, from Ralph’s land back a ways; their Prime’s seat is where Concord’s located FirstSide. Then the Tuke and the Hammon domains, down through Amador and Livermore valleys. The uplands on both sides are permanent Commission reserve; so’s Mount Diablo.”

“Yah, but how do the farmers fit in, if your friends and relatives own all the land?”

The houses scattered across the flat-to-rolling valley land were at roughly half-mile intervals, and the fields were modest-sized. It didn’t have the look of ranching country or large landholdings worked as single units. The Christiansen home place in North Dakota was a lot farther from the nearest neighbor.

“The farmers are tenants, allod tenants. The way it usually works is that the head of the Family, the Prime, keeps a seat—a home place—from his domain, and hands out the rest in estates of a few thousand acres to his kids and collaterals—everybody but the Prime and the eldest of the firstborn’s line are collaterals; I am, for example, but my eldest brother and father and grandfather aren’t. I hold Seven Oaks, and I can farm it, hand it down to my children when and if I have any, and sell or will it to another Family member. I’d need the Prime’s approval to sell. I can’t subdivide it or alienate it outside the Family. The landholders rent to farmers on shares; they provide the land and fixed assets, buildings and fences and irrigation and so forth, pay any taxes, and get three-tenths of the crop. The farmer finds the labor and working capital, the machinery and livestock, and keeps the other seventy percent.”

Tom grunted, and thought back to the prices he’d seen in that farmer’s market. “I don’t see how that makes the landlord any money,” he said.

“It’s hobby farming as far as the landholders are concerned, so far,” Adrienne said with a laugh. “Our country estates are how we spend our money, and where most of us live—the money comes out of the Gate and the mines.”

“And what does the ‘allod’ part mean?”

“Allod? It means ‘inalienable’; I think it’s a German word originally. As long as the tenant keeps the land in good heart and pays his share, he can’t be turned out, nor his heirs; the landholder only gets a say and part of the price if the tenant wants to sell it outside the farmer’s bloodline. Not that anyone would lean on his tenants anyway—good ones are too hard to find! Most landholders rent their land except for a home ranch around their country house, but I keep Seven Oaks in hand and work it directly myself, the way Aunt Chloe did. It takes more of my time, but I’ve got a good manager and usually I manage to keep in the black… a little, at least.”

She nodded down into the valley. “Ralph’s a special case. Granddad got him three hundred and sixty acres of Commission land here, rent-free. Long story.”

Tom grunted again, and put the Hummer in gear. The Mermaid Café sprawled parallel to the road but a hundred yards back and to the west of it; beyond was a stretch of lawn, then outbuildings, paddocks and a small reservoir that did double duty as a swimming hole, to judge by the kids swarming around it. One swung out over the water whooping as Tom watched, on a rope suspended from the branch of an overhanging tree, let go, and landed in the middle with a heroic splash.

The inn itself was an I-shape of single-story whitewashed adobe, with the inevitable red-tiled roofs, but the blocks were of slightly different sizes and the alignments were all a bit off—it gave the structure a funky look, something of a relief after the manicured neatness of Rolfeston, and so did the blocks of colorful tilework here and there on the walls. A line of big eucalyptus separated the parking lot from the roadway, their scent familiar and faintly medicinal. The dirt and gravel lot was dotted with the same great valley oaks that surrounded the rest of the inn, each on an island of long tawny grass extending out halfway to the drip line of the branches. There were a dozen cars in the parking lot, and another dozen pickup trucks—working vehicles, to judge from the dust and dings. They swung in and parked, the tires crunching on the crushed rock surface. Adrienne pulled her rifle out of the rack behind the front seat as they stepped down from the Hummer, carrying it casually in the crook of her left arm.

“Doesn’t all this adobe give a lot of trouble?” Tom asked, following her toward the café. “It isn’t southern California, after all.”

“Not with a powdered waterproofing compound in the stucco,” Adrienne said. “With that, as long as you keep the foundation dry and the roof tight it lasts like iron, it’s fireproof, and it’s good insulation. Dirt cheap, too.”

“Ouch,” he said, missing a stride, and found himself grinning for an instant.

More trees and a flower bed separated the cars from the outdoor patio with its picnic-style tables. Off to one side was a row of brick firepits; smoke and an intoxicating smell of grilling meat came from there, and several cooks wielded tongs and spatulas. Others, mostly teenagers, bustled in and out through the doors of a long adobe kitchen. A girl came and took the rifle, unloading it, working the action to make sure there wasn’t a round in the chamber, and then stashing it in another rack by the main doorway with matter-of-fact competence. About half the tables were occupied, mostly with family parties, and there were a few kids running from one to the next; a pleasant burr of conversation and well-wielded cutlery filled the air. An oak cast fifty feet of shade in the center; farther out there were striped umbrellas above the tables; chalk-boards with the menu stood at several places.

A big man came out from the main house as they entered the patio, a little under six feet but bear-wide, the kettle belly straining at his tie-dyed T-shirt simply adding to his impression of burly strength. He had a grizzled brown beard, and his graying shoulder-length hair was held back by a beaded headband; the shoes on his splayed feet were beaded as well, moccasin-style.

Leftover hippie, Tom thought automatically—California was still lousy with them, particularly in the backcountry, and would be until the last of the boomers went to their reward. Then: But a smart one, as he met the small shrewd eyes in the hairy face.

“Ralph Barnes,” Adrienne said in an aside to Tom. Then, louder: “Ralph! How’s my favorite subversive seditionist?”

“Hey, princess!” the thickset man said, in a happy bull bellow. “How’s it hanging in the Gestapo?”

“A continuous merry festival of arbitrary torture and death, Ralph,” she replied, and they exchanged bear hugs.

After a moment she turned. “This is Tom Christiansen—you’ll have seen his picture in the paper this morning. Tom, Ralph Barnes—one of the few people willing to talk to a wastrel like myself, back when I was doing the pimples and rebellion thing. You wondered where I picked up the taste for classic rock and folk songs?”

“Pleased to meet you,” Barnes said, looking him up and down and extending a hand. “Christ, it’s the Swedish Superman. You’re the game warden, right? Don’t let any of the von Traupitzes see you. Those Nazi shits’ll shanghai you off for breeding stock.”

“My family were Norwegian, actually,” Tom said as he took the hand and shook it; it was as strong as he’d expected, and callused with work. “Pleased to meet you,” he went on. “I presume you’re not as hostile to the Thirty Families as your sign suggests?”

“I hate their guts,” Barnes said with a broad white snaggletoothed smile, shepherding them to a vacant table. “I just make a few individual exceptions, like for the princess here. So sue me. I am vast”—he slapped his belly and misquoted—“I contain multitudes.”

“Could you get Henry over here?” Adrienne said. “I think Tom would like to meet him.”

“Aha,” Barnes said. “You want to get the Bitch-and-Moan squad together, hey? Show him the revolutionary element—right on! Sure, we ain’t too busy right now.” He turned and shouted: “Hey, Henry! Over here—two of the usual, and some beer!”

The man who came bearing the tray was younger than the innkeeper; in his late thirties, of medium height, lean and fit. He was also the first black Tom had seen this side of the Gate—light brown in fact, but unmistakably of that mixed breed miscalled African-American, with regular blunt features and inch-long, wiry, tight-kinked hair.

“You the one who bellowed like an ox with a hernia, beloved ol’ massa?” he said, setting the tray down. It held four pint steins of beer, moisture beading on the thick glass, two hamburgers and a basket of chunky-looking French fries.

“Show some respect for your father-in-law and set your worthless cop ass down on the bench,” Ralph replied genially.

Tom coughed and took a drink of his beer; then he stopped and savored it as it deserved while Henry joined the party, sitting beside the older man across from Tom and Adrienne.

“Not bad,” Tom said, putting his mug down. “Well hopped, and a nice sharp taste… some local microbrewery?”

“We brew it ourselves,” Ralph said.

“I brew it ourselves,” Henry said, and offered his hand. “Henry Villers. Ex-Oakland PD. Welcome, fellow Involuntary. I’m the Black Settler of this little transdimensional Rhodesia.” He jerked a thumb at Ralph. “He’s Zorro, but don’t tell anyone; if they found out, they might stop him branding big Z’s on the Thirty’s asses with a red-hot iron.”

“It’s a sword, man—how many times do I have to tell you? Zorro uses a sword.”

“I sell them the hops,” Adrienne cut in. “Also the meat for these hamburgers.”

Tom shook the black man’s hand, smiling. “How’d you end up here?” he said.

The other three burst into laughter, and he looked at them curiously.

“That’s not… usually considered a tactful question here, Tom,” Adrienne said gently. “Commonwealth etiquette. A lot of people are sort of, ah, sensitive about what they or their ancestors did back FirstSide. The way some Aussies don’t like the word ‘convict,’ only it’s a lot fresher here.”

“No problemo,” the black man said. “Me, I got here ’cause I was smart. I cunningly went undercover as an RM and M warehouse employee. In the outer circle, of course, the ones they keep as camouflage. Everyone in Oakland said that RM and M was the greatest thing since grits, but in my prodigious wisdom, I knew they were a bunch of evil honky despots down deep. I could tell from the way the company executives looked at me, on their rare visits—which somehow always included the same secluded set of warehouses in the old section. And wasn’t I right?”

Tom looked at Adrienne. “What happened to your Old Man’s indifference to FirstSider sensibilities?”

She shrugged: “Well, we’d look pretty conspicuous with an all-pink-faces workforce in twenty-first century Oakland, wouldn’t we, Tom? Lawsuits would be the least of it. A lot of genuine traffic goes through that complex—which means we can divert a certain amount without suspicion. We keep shuffling the deck so that nobody notices the kernel at the center of the peanut, to mix a metaphor. That means the outside has to look as genuine as possible.”

Henry Villers nodded vigorously. “RM and M is Oakland’s mostest equal-opportunity false-front scam. So, patiently and slowly I accumulated clues that something funny was going on there. All the while neglecting the really funny thing.”

He paused, and Tom took up the obvious straight line. “Which was?”

“Which was that RM and M had the Oakland police in their pockets, starting about thirty years ago. If I hadn’t been quick and pig headed, they’d have steered me away from investigating, the way they did with most others who smelled a rat.”

“Make it forty-odd years,” Adrienne said. “You got caught in 1998, right? According to the GSA records, we’ve had our nominees running the Oakland police department continuously from about 1956. Not that they actually know who they’re working for.”

“That would take a lot of… Sorry,” Tom said.

Henry Villers grinned whitely. “Brother, with the sort of money RM and M had to throw around, you could bribe Superman.” He adopted a man-of-steel pose: “‘Ten million dollars,’ the Man says. ‘No, no, I am Superman!’ Then it’s thirty million. ‘No, no, I stand for Truth, Justice and the American Way!’ So then it’s fifty million, and Superman comes back: ‘I’ll kill anyone you want! I’ll fly shit across the border! Up, up and away! Whoooosh!’”

Villers took a pull at his beer. “Ahhh… So my reports got a lot of attention. Right from the top. Oh, gosh-wow-goody-gumdrops, says I, visions of promotions dancing in my head. Then one night I get called to a private, off-the-reservation meeting with the chief, no less… and wake up here,” Henry finished sourly.

“Have you had… a rough time here?” Tom asked.

“What, you mean apart from better than half the people thinking I’m a rape-crazed subhuman just-down-from-the-trees dope fiend nigger barbarian and locking up their daughters and sidling away with their hands on their wallets at the first sight of me?” Henry said with a twisted smile. “Apart from that, not much. It beats getting dropped into the bay in concrete overshoes.”

He laughed bitterly. “It’s funny, in a way. This place is full of the worst sort of rednecks—”

“Oh, come now, Henry,” Adrienne said. “Not the very worst sort.”

“OK, I grant you, your grandpa didn’t like the one-gallus, white-sheet, burning-cross, three-hundred-pounds-and-pimples-and-that’s-just-the-women set,” Henry conceded. “But that was because he despised them for being no’count white trash, not because of they way they felt about black folk. He’s just so fucking genteel about it his ass bleeds, like Robert E. Lee or something. Anyway, the odd thing is that there’s no official discrimination here. Unless you’re a nahua, of course, and most of them aren’t in our beloved Commonwealth long enough to stop being glad they’re not starving or getting their hearts chopped out to juice up Monster of the Week. They don’t have time to realize the way they get fucked over here.”

Tom thought rapidly. “Ah, there’s no official discrimination because there aren’t enough African-Americans here to count?”

Henry drank some of his beer and thumped the tankard down, extending a pointing finger at Tom.

“Give the game warden a chocolate spotted owl!” he said. “I mean, man, all twenty-seven of us—not counting my two kids with Susie, Ralph’s daughter—are not exactly going to start sitting down in many lunch counters. That’s twenty-seven out of a hundred and fifty thousand, with no more coming. None since me, nearly ten years ago, and mostly we live over in New Brooklyn, so people in the other Family domains don’t see much of us.”

“New Brooklyn?” Tom asked.

“Uncle Sol—Solomon Pearlmutter—called his domain’s main town that,” Adrienne said. “He wanted to call it the New Lower East Side, but got talked out of it. It’s over where San Francisco got started FirstSide; the Pearlmutter domain runs from the Golden Gate down to a little beyond San Mateo. Everyone thought he was crazy for claiming it, since there’s not much good farmland or timber there.”

She grinned, and the two men chuckled.

“After the Old Man, Uncle Sol was the smartest man I ever met,” she said. “And Granddad always said Uncle Sol had more sheer wattage, he was just less practical. When they played chess, it was like mountains colliding. New Brooklyn is the second-largest town in the Commonwealth now, a big seaport and manufacturing center with fifteen thousand people, and it all belongs to the Pearlmutters and their affiliates. They make almost as much off it as they do off their cut from the Gate and the Commission’s properties. Not to mention they donated the land for the University of New Virginia, which is about where Stanford sits FirstSide. Uncle Sol always said knowledge isn’t just power; it’s also wealth.”

Henry Villers nodded. “No flies on that dude; I met him once just before he died, old but still sharp as a razor. He also said only dumb krauts like the von Traupitzes would think you could get rich here growing wheat. Anyway, nobody’s afraid of us; most people don’t even see any of us more than once a year, which means only a few get upset about us. I think our Supreme Honky is content to let us vanish like a handful of soot in a snowstorm and pat himself on the back about what a goddam humanitarian realist he is. Motherfucker. If there were twenty-seven thousand black folk here, or even twenty-seven hundred, it’d be a different story.”

You betcha, Tom thought. Point scored. You can’t have much racism when there aren’t any other races to practice it on, so to speak.

“Adrienne,” Henry went on, “put me in touch with Ralph when I got shanghaied here.” He raised his stein to her. “For which I thank you.”

“De nada,” she said. “Now, Ralph’s story…”

The older man told it, then concluded: “So the bastard gave me this land and a loan to get started, yeah. And I love my wife and my kids and grandkids, and I’ve had a pretty good life here. But it ain’t the life I’d have chosen, and if he thinks all this charity-from-on-high makes up for that, he’s got another think coming.”

Tom finished his hamburger. It had been about as he’d expected: delicious, the meat leanly flavorful but juicy and basted with just a touch of fiery sauce; tangy onions and tomatoes tasting of the earth; home-made garlic mayonnaise; all on a kaiser-style bun warm from the beehive-shaped earth oven on the other side of the patio with bits of caramelized onion in the crust, and a spear of pickle on the side that crunched nicely. Quite possibly the best hamburger he’d ever tasted, even including the ones his own father used to make at Fourth of July barbecues. The fries had been done in olive oil, and they weren’t formed from extruded powdered potato painted with beef fat.

“OK,” Tom said. “Now”—he looked questioningly at Adrienne, who was wiping her fingers on a checked cloth napkin. She nodded—“if you wouldn’t mind a hypothetical question, would this Commonwealth be better or worse if the Collettas were running it? Instead of the Rolfes and their supporters.”

Ralph Barnes choked on his last swallow of beer. Henry Villers thumped him on the back, but there was a gray anxiety in the glance he shot Adrienne. She made a soothing gesture.

“Let’s consider that a hypothetical hypothetical, for now,” she said.

Ralph nodded vigorously. “Oh, hell, that’s no contest. Yeah, the Old Man’s a throat-cutting pirate,” he said. “And unlike a lotta people here, I don’t use ‘pirate’ as a compliment. Sorry, princess, but I’m not going to start shading it at this late date. Yeah, he’s a nasty piece of work. But he’s smart, and he’s consistent, and he was willing to stop when he got what he wanted. He makes the rules to suit himself, but then he keeps ’em, usually. And you can trust his promises. The Collettas… old man Salvatore had about as much of the milk of human kindness as a lizard does; he and Otto von Traupitz were neck and neck in the Sheer Absolute Fucking Evil sweepstakes, in their different ways. Giovanni tries to live up to the old bastard. Neither of them ever heard of the concept ‘where to stop.’ And they’d change the rules whenever it gave ’em a moment’s advantage. Plus, personally, I’d be a dead man if they took over. I dissed his dad to his face. Giovanni don’t forget.”

“Ditto, ditto,” Henry said. “Those Collettas would have had me on an auction block. Not that they’re prejudiced. They’d do it to anybody they could. Not to mention their friends the Batyushkovs, who are prejudiced ’gainst us black-asses, as they so charmingly put it, and the von Traupitzes, who’d probably render me down for soap. Me for starters.”

Barnes frowned and thought for a moment. “Don’t get me wrong, Warden Tom. If there was a chance for a revolution here, I’d be out on the barricades in a minute, and I’d dance around the guillotine when they chopped the heads off the whole rotten gang—present company excepted.”

“God, that’s big of you, Ralph,” Adrienne said, chuckling.

Barnes scowled and waved the interjection aside. “There’s a lot here I don’t like. But it could get a hell of a lot worse. And I’ve got my kids and grandkids to think about. They were born here and it’s their home.”

He looked at Adrienne. “This hypothetical… it ain’t totally hypothetical?” She nodded. “Then anything I can do, princess, you just ask.”

She put her hand on his and squeezed; he returned the pressure.

“And say…” He frowned. “One thing. The Collettas’re close with the Batyushkovs these days, right? Well, there’s something I ran across a while ago. You know Sergei Ilyanovich Batyushkov?”

“The geneticist?” Adrienne asked. “The Batyushkov Prime’s nephew?”

“Well, for starters, he ain’t a geneticist. He’s a theoretical physicist,” Barnes said. “I read some articles by him a while ago. And yeah, he was called Sergei… but the last name wasn’t Batyushkov. Sergei Lermontov, Ph.D.”

“I’m definitely going to be less conspicuous without Tom along,” Roy Tully said to himself as he finished washing the breakfast dishes. “I love the big guy like a brother, but…”

What had Anna Russell said about Siegfried, the hero of the Ring Cycle? He murmured it, trying to match Russell’s upper-class British drawl: “He’s very young, and he’s very tall, and he’s very strong, and he’s very handsome, and he’s very stupid.”

That was unjust; he knew his partner had plenty upstairs. He was just very…

Straightforward, that’s it, Tully thought. Straightforward. And he certainly stands out in a crowd.

Before he left he spent some time with Adrienne’s computer; she had it set up in the living room, which gave him a lovely view of the morning fog and then the town as he sat sipping coffee and tapping his way through some public files, sampling a few chat rooms and getting a feel for how to shift data around. He had to admit Nostradamus was organized with systematic clarity: research, TV, e-mail, auctions, catalog buying, music and everything else in one neat package. It still felt odd, compared to surfing the Net: as if you’d moved from Castle Gormenghast to a utility apartment—no matter how tidy and well laid out it was, you were still going to be disappointed at the lack of crannies and dungeons and attics full of junk and sheer size. After half an hour or so he printed up some maps, stuck them into the pocket of his jeans, fastened the holster of the Glock to the small of his back under a light jacket—it was yellow, with green suede elbow patches; he was very fond of it and glad Adrienne’s cleanup squad had brought it along—then went outside. The East Bay wasn’t as chilly in summertime as San Francisco, but a jacket wouldn’t be completely out of place.

“Time to soak up some atmosphere,” he said to himself, and patted the gun for reassurance.

Not that he anticipated any firefights; but the weapon itself was a sign he had the trust of some powerful people here in this miniature pirate kingdom. Everything in miniature except the planet, he thought. Well, that ought to make things easier. There couldn’t be more than a few dozen decision-making individuals involved in whatever machinations were going on. Have to watch my step, though, he reminded himself. Remember that these people aren’t mine, even though they speak the same language and wear the same clothes.

He left the Segway in its rack; a town of thirty thousand couldn’t be too hard to see on foot, and you got a better grip on a place that way. It was a little eerie though, looking out and seeing nothing of the ten-million-strong megalopolis he remembered. He had to keep reminding himself that he was living this, not watching it on a screen.

Adrienne’s flat was on a low foothill rise; the ground grew steeper and trackless directly behind it. He turned northward, along a broad avenue that ran along the inner edge of the flatlands. It was about as wide as one of the major arteries in DC and had the same slightly artificial feel; he’d noticed the same thing in St. Petersburg, which he’d visited, and in pictures of Brasilia and Canberra, which he hadn’t.

Planned city, he thought. Planned from scratch. Pretty, though.

The median strip was also broad, and a mass of flower beds: roses, hollyhocks, rhododendrons, penstemon and more, in patterns of purple, pink, white and yellow and green, with a shade tree every so often and a brick pathway down its center. The sidewalks on either side of the road—it was called Lee Avenue—were wide as well, brick-surfaced, with trees in circles of wrought-iron fence surrounded by stone benches. They were also fairly crowded, mostly with families heading northward on foot, all dressed to the nines and this time all wearing hats, down to the little girls in frilly pink dresses and their resentful brothers in ties.

Oh, Tully thought. Right. Sunday morning. He could hear bells ringing, too. Everyone heading for church.

The heights to landward were much more densely forested than the Berkeley hills he remembered, green and shaggy and marked by the distinctive spikes of old-growth redwoods in the west-facing canyons. Save for bridle paths, they were also empty of the marks of man. Between there and the roadside were what his map called the Golden Mile, evidently the high-rent district. He couldn’t see much of it, because the inner side of the sidewalk was paralleled by high brick walls, usually topped by iron spikes. The gates showed a little more, being mostly wrought-iron openwork themselves: curving driveways, lawns and sprinklers shedding silver mist on them, tall old trees, and half-hidden houses. Those continued the Spanish-revival motif he’d noticed, although many were too hidden by greenery and distance for him to tell for sure.

The other side of the avenue was commercial, two-story buildings enclosing small courtyards surrounded by shops or restaurants; those alternated with theaters, live and movie, nightclubs, and a couple of art galleries. The streets westward of that seemed to be residential, with houses and lots getting smaller as they declined toward the bay. Looking downslope, what you mostly saw was trees, with the red of roofs peeking out from among them.

Feels odd to be in a city with no really tall buildings, he thought.

This wasn’t much of a city, as far as size went; less than half the size of his California’s Napa; about the same size as Paso Robles minus suburbs. But there were no skyscrapers at all; not a hint of anything Bahaus, in fact, not even the low-rise version.

Big Tom’s gonna love it. He always did have a major hate-on for modern architecture.

That didn’t mean there weren’t any big buildings. Just short of Jackson Square both sides of the street were lined with three- or four-story office blocks, set back behind narrow strips of garden. Small discreet signs labeled them Commission offices charged with various functions—one was Gate Security Force HQ and at least partially open on a Sunday; it had black-uniformed guards standing before the doors.

Jackson Square was a rectangle with its longest axis parallel to Lee Avenue; bigger than its namesake in New Orleans, and named for Stonewall instead of Andy; about the size of the park around the State Capitol building in Sacramento. The perimeter was a broad avenue, of the same sort as Lee; another took off from the middle of the western edge and ran down to the water. The parkland in the center held a tall white stone basin and fountain, throwing its plume high in the air and falling into a large oval reflecting pond marked with water lilies, the big showy flowers dotting the blue surface with blossoms of copper, red, blue, white and purple. A marble-paved circle surrounded it, set with planters full of impatiens and flowering vines and with more stone benches; paths radiated out to each corner, separated by flower beds, trees—mostly wide-spreading native oaks—and greensward.

Public buildings rimmed the square. The westernmost corners each held a big church, one vaguely Italianate in style and the other a spare white-steepled structure—the Roman Catholic and Episcopal, respectively. Most of the crowds were hurrying in their direction. Between them along the western edge were a couple of other churches, somewhat smaller, and with their own crowds. The other buildings were official-looking; this time the architecture was neo-Classical, rather than Santa Barbara’s 1920s riff on Spanish Renaissance and Baroque.

He grinned at the big Commission headquarters that stood in the middle of the square’s long eastern side, standing and staring at the structures that rose at the top of a long ceremonial marble staircase until he was certain. “That’s not just like the rotunda of the Palace of Fine Arts building in San Francisco. It is the rotunda of the Palace of Fine Arts building.”

That made him laugh out loud. Built in lath and plaster for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition, he thought. Restored in reinforced concrete when that started to wash away. And copied here in the real-McCoy stone!

“Or possibly reinforced concrete with stone cladding,” he added to himself—this was earthquake country, after all.

The great central rotunda was a duplicate as far as dimensions went, an octagon over a hundred and thirty feet across, supported on pillars over a hundred feet high and topped with a low dome—here, though, sheathed in genuine polished gold leaf, not gray concrete, sending out blinding flashes in the bright midmorning sun. Behind that was something different—a long rectangular structure, with arcades and a second-story balcony on either side; it was set into the hillside, which gave it a view out over the dome. He walked closer to the rotunda; the eight panels in low bas-relief around the exterior were different too, allegorical sculpture showing scenes he didn’t recognize.

The floor of the rotunda held another piece of marble statuary. First and foremost was John Rolfe, Adrienne’s grandfather, dressed in rough hiking clothes with a forties look, a rifle leaning against the rock at his back, and a map in his hands. Others—he presumed they were the Founders of the Thirty Families, or some of them at least—were doing various pioneerish things behind them; mostly involving digging, plowing, pounding on a presumably symbolic anvil, piling up bricks, using surveying instruments or standing and peering at the horizon with weapons ready. The murals around the interior of the dome had the same themes, and a similarity that nagged at him before he identified it.

“Nineteen-thirties WPA style,” he said, attracting an odd look from a woman passing by. “New Deal Socialist Realism.”

He whistled cheerfully and cracked his knuckles. There was more of the same inside the big building at the rear—evidently known as Commission House—murals in paint and mosaic; the public areas were open, though nearly deserted. There were also a couple of exhibitions set up in the big lobby, with pictures and artifacts, evidently for visiting school classes and Scout troops and suchlike.

Hmmm, he thought, scanning one such, “The Heroes Who Built Our Country.” Must be interesting, the records of a country founded after people had cameras and the habit of recording everything possible. The faces glared out at him, grim, stiffly self-conscious, with an archaic toughness.

Apparently Mr. John Rolfe had brought a camera with him starting with his second trip, and plenty of others had followed suit. Besides the group photos, there were shots of Indian rancherías, dome-shaped reed huts, and of dancers in costume. More of boats and horses and construction machinery; pictures of gold operations in the Mother Lode country, starting with washing pans and working up through diesel-powered rockers and dredgers to hard-rock mining.

One wing of the government building was a library-cum-archive, all pale wood and flooded with light from tall windows; there was an excellent digital filing system as well as a librarian, and he collected a round dozen introductory texts—mostly those aimed at the junior-high level in history and civics; the science was imported from FirstSide. He read partly for the information, and partly for information on how information was presented to kids; that would be a pretty good way to find the official line. He somehow doubted that an academic Mafia would be able to take over the textbook market here and cock its snoot at the powers that were.

OK, the Founders were heroic adventurers, he thought, leafing through A History of New Virginia. Don’t make much of a muchness about taking this place over. “Freebooter” and “buccaneer” are complimentary terms, here.

That was no surprise: He didn’t think conquering pirates would have a self-esteem problem. The book made a lot of comparisons to the founding of the original thirteen colonies, to early Texas and to the Bear Flag Revolt in California. The tone was completely different from recent history books back FirstSide: self-confident arrogant swagger versus agonized sensitivity. Tully grinned, imagining the authors of this one meeting the people who’d written the books he’d studied in high school, back in the late eighties. Cries of “wimp” and “wussy-boy” would meet anguished howls of “Chauvinist! Imperialist!” with a good deal of truth on both sides.

Then he dove back into the narrative. The Indians got a few cursory paragraphs; they were backward and unprogressive, at best picturesque though doomed, and they all died when the newcomers sneezed on them. It wasn’t actually stated, but the implication was strong that this was just what they deserved, mainly for being no-account losers who couldn’t even develop basics of civilization like farming or a working machine gun. Those who resisted the New Virginians’ turfing the few plague survivors out of their homes were wretched, treacherous, vicious savages.

Yup, I guessed right, he thought. Injuns still the Bad Guys here.

That was no surprise either. Usually you didn’t start beating your breast and feeling guilty about overrunning someone and taking their stuff until they’d been reduced from “threat” to “pathetic remnant,” the way Australian aborigines had FirstSide. His collection of old movies had let him see the process in American popular culture, with Indians going from a faceless mob of scalping, raping, torturing two-legged wolves in Drums along the Mohawk to noble natural-ecologist victims of the Bad White Man in Dances with German Shepherds.

For that matter, the same thing had happened to public perception of wolves, and for about the same reasons—it was a lot easier to love thoroughly disarmed Indians who didn’t have anything left worth stealing except casino receipts, and a lot easier to coo about wolves when you weren’t trying to raise sheep next to them.

Speaking of Bad Guys, let’s see what the party line is on us FirstSiders….

FirstSide was evidently a sink of degeneracy and crime, where all the “wrong people” had taken over; plenty of pictures of slums, riots, shots of LA freeways at rush hour, New York and Tokyo subways, terrorist attacks during the war, eroded hillsides, industrial wastelands, mosh pits, homeless addicts slumped against Dumpsters, AIDS victims in Africa, RuPaul, Marilyn Manson wanna-bes and chemical waste dumps. A hell on Earth, from which the heroic Founding Families had led the chosen seed into the wilderness to build a New Jerusalem, and incidentally get rich and make themselves overlords.

From this, you’d think FirstSide was All Blade Runner, All the Time, he thought, with an amused chuckle. Of course, to someone raised here, it might really look that way.

“And let’s check on that, shall we?” he said, stacking the books and dropping them in the return carousel. “Now I’ve seen things from the top down, let’s go look at things from the bottom up and see what the sweaty masses think.”

Whistling, he strolled out past the impressive rotunda, down the marble steps, and across the square.

He walked past the churches, where the morning service was over and people were milling around, strolling, chewing the fat and dishing the dirt and admiring one another’s infants, and vendors were selling ice cream from little push-pedal carts.

“Pistachio and cherry, two scoops in a bowl,” he said—he’d always hated the way cones dripped on your hand.

Then he paid, raising his brows and thinking, My, my, a place where pennies are actually some use.

It was a nice day for strolling, and the ice cream was good; the last of the fog was gone save for some wisps over where San Francisco wasn’t; it was sunny and bright and the temperature was up to the mid-seventies, about as high as the East Bay got unless there was a heat wave. The long street that stretched down to the water was named Longstreet; evidently John Rolfe had a sense of humor, as well as a Civil War fixation. It was mostly commercial two-story buildings of whitewash and tile, mostly open-plan, varied with an occasional small park. He walked along under the shade trees, and conscientiously dropped his empty cardboard ice-cream dish into a trash container, along with the little wooden spoon. That was a datum too.

“No plastics,” he muttered. “Not where anything else will do.”

He kept going until he was west of the big produce market they’d come through on Friday, then turned south. That was the area closest to the docks and the factories, and as he’d expected, it didn’t have quite the burnished look the rest of the town did; not a slum by any means, or even really run-down, but the houses were smaller and older and all made of adobe, looking much alike. He estimated they’d be about fifteen hundred square feet each, with a small open front yard and fences out back, set on a plain gridiron of streets; the arch of tall shade trees over the pavement was still agreeable, though. Men in undershirts and women in print dresses sat on their verandas, drinking lemonade or beer or sodas and smoking; children and dogs ran around playing; music blared now and then from open windows, or the sound of TVs. He dodged a young man on a bicycle, wobbling along with a girl sitting on the handlebars; others were shooting hoops, mostly fastened to roadside trees. Now and then he smelled a barbecue grill in operation.

Hmmm. Biggest difference is there aren’t any garages, he thought. There were some cars, but they were parked by the side of the road, and there weren’t very many of them. And no mobile homes, of course.

He paused to talk with a few of the children. Nobody snatched the kids away from conversation with a stranger, and he discovered another difference from the lands he knew: He hadn’t heard so many “sirs” since he’d mustered out of the Tenth Mountain after Iraq. What he sought stood within smelling distance of the mudflats, and a stone’s throw from the first factories of the industrial district.

The neighborhood watering hole was called Bobcat Bites; he looked at it for a minute before he realized what the main structure must be. Then he laughed out loud; somebody had taken a medium-sized Quonset hut and stuccoed the outside and whitewashed it—probably, given the degree of uniformity elsewhere, to coincide with the letter if not the spirit of some town-wide building code. Crossing that like the bar of a T was a two-story boxy adobe structure with racks for bicycles and Segways outside, a parking lot to the side with a scattering of cars and pickups, and a sign that gave the tavern’s name and encouraged all passersby to sample the free lunch until two-thirty, three P.M. on weekends.

Tully looked at his watch: Twelve P.M. Why not? he thought.

There was a long bar on either side of the entrance to the Quonset, complete with mirror, brass footrail and polished bar. “What’s the deal on the free lunch?” he asked the woman behind it.

The woman paused in her slow shoving of a rag over the oak. Now there,Tully thought, is someone even Warden Christiansen would admit is a “broad.” She was around forty, with yellow hair that had rather obviously come out of a bottle. A few years older than him, and she looked it, but in a nice way, wearing a long apron over a red dress, and smoking a cigarette. Christ, it’s going to be hard to keep on the wagon here. The secondary smoke stokes the old craving something fierce.

She looked him up and down; he could tell she was amused, in a friendly sort of way. And Christ, it’s a good thing women don’t go as much by looks as we uncouth males do, or after a few generations everyone would look like Tom. Turn on the charm, Roy.

“It means what it says, stranger,” she said. “You buy a drink or a beer, you get all you can eat—ain’t that the way it usually is?” Then a pause, and: “Say, aren’t you the guy in the paper this morning? From FirstSide?”

“Yeah, the famous Roy Tully,” he said, smiling back at her with his best leering-imp impersonation and sliding a New Virginian dime across the counter. “Make it a beer. Whatever you’ve got on tap.”

“Bayside Steam,” she said, getting out a frosted glass mug and drawing it full, with the foam edging slightly down the sides. “Enjoy.”

He snagged it, then went down to the spread. There were deviled hard-boiled eggs, half a dozen varieties of bread, sliced meats, soups over heating elements, butter and cheese and olive oil, oysters, smoked salmon, shrimp salad, potato salad, raw vegetables and guacamole, and most of the rest of the makings of a good smorgasbord, plus cakes and muffins under glass.

He loaded a plate, snickering slightly when he thought about the look of resentment he’d get from Tom if he were here. The big guy wasn’t exactly a chow-hound, but he liked his food and hated the fact that he had to work hard to burn it off. Tully liked to eat too, but knew from family example and his own experience that he’d be able to stuff himself his life long and stay slim… or scrawny, as some unkind souls had called it… without bothering to work out unless he wanted to. His father had never lifted anything heavier than a briefcase full of legal papers, and still had the same belt measurement he’d graduated from high school with.

“So, what’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” he asked, sitting on a stool, taking a drink of the beer—quite good—and a bite of pumpernickel loaded with shrimp—excellent.

“The name’s Maud, I’m not a girl, and I own the place, mister,” she replied. “Have since that worthless bastard I married drowned hisself.”

“He probably deserved it,” Tully said.

“He certainly did, not knowing better than taking a boat out while he was drunk,” she replied equably. “Second beer’s a nickel.”

Tully sat, ate, and talked with Maud when she wasn’t busy with other customers. That was less often as the lunch crowd thickened, and then the families started coming in for a Sunday-afternoon outing. He’d judged right about the location; it was all working stiffs, a cut below the lower-middle-class and skilled-labor area nearer the farmer’s market.

They were ready enough to talk to a newcomer, as well: small-town friendly, but with little of the underlying standoffishness you often found in little out-of-the-way places.

Probably because it’s new and growing, instead of a place where you’re born and people are more likely to move out than in, he thought.

Gentle prodding was more than enough to set people talking about themselves. Most of the women were housewives; the rest were in the service trades, or were things like elementary school teachers, with a few nurses. The men worked in the factories—consumer goods, boatbuilding, an electric-arc foundry owned by the O’Briens, small machine shops that made a surprisingly broad range of spare parts—or in construction, or drove forklifts at the Gate complex, or crewed fishing boats and coastal ships, or did things like sewer maintenance. A large majority had been born in the Commonwealth, and many were second or third generation; a majority of their grandparents had come from America, with a bias toward the upper South, and the rest had ancestors who were German, French, and Italian, with a scattering from all over Eastern Europe. The immigrant minority included Russians, Afrikaners, and a few Croats and Serbs.

The talk wasn’t all that different from a bar-cum-restaurant in a small deep-rural Arkansas town somewhere in the Ozarks: sports, weather, gossip, fishing and hunting, how the farmers were doing that year—the main difference was the absence of national media and their stories. He heard a fair amount of grousing about the Thirty, mostly straightforward envy, and a fair amount of gossip about them as well, mostly of the sort you heard about the upper crust back home, but with more personal knowledge, and a bit less lurid. The main buzz was an elopement between the children of two Family heads, Primes.

People he spoke to often congratulated him on getting out of FirstSide; they generally thought it was pretty bad, even if they also discounted some of the Commission’s propaganda.

A little later he overheard a political conversation.

“…doesn’t sound too bad to me,” one man said. “Couple of nahua girls to peel grapes and drop ’em in my mouth while their brothers do all the work and I kick their asses now and then.”

The other man snorted; his English had a thick South African accent, clipped and guttural, like the late, unlamented Schalk van der Merwe. “Man, where exactly are they going to work for you? On the big farm you don’t have? The factory you don’t own? Down the mine you’ll never get?”

The Afrikaner held up his hands. “All you’ve got is your house and these, just like me, you bliddy fool. If we get a lot more nahua in here working for fifty cents a day, and staying around long enough to learn skilled trades, what’s to stop your boss paying you fifty cents, and telling you he’ll put one of them in your place if you complain, and then you can live on nothing? Bliddy poor whites, that’s what we’d be.”

“Ah, hell, Rhodevik, it ain’t gonna happen anyway.” The other man shrugged. “So who do you like—San Diego or Rolfeston?”

“None of you soutpens can play rugby anyway,” the immigrant said with a friendly sneer. “Now…”

And on that note, Roy thought, rising and dropping a nickel tip. Tomorrow I’ll take a look across the bay.