Conquistador

CHAPTER TWELVE

The ferry that ran across the Carquinez Strait was a big wooden rectangle with movable ramps at both ends, diesel-powered; when the wind blew back toward them for an instant the smell reminded him suddenly of FirstSide, and the way he’d hated the big-city stink of exhausts. That prompted another train of thought; he looked at the power lines that ran down to the northern edge, borne on wooden tripods and crossbeams made of whole Douglas fir trunks a hundred feet long with their feet braced in cast-concrete drums. The cable looped down to a ground station on the northern bank—there was a small hamlet there, where the city of Benicia stood in his California—and then reappeared on the southern shore, striding down the valleys, and he supposed over the hills to Rolfeston and the other Bay Area settlements.

“Where’s the generating station?” he asked curiously. “What’s the energy source?”

Adrienne looked over at him and winked, laying a finger along her nose. “Geothermal,” she said. “And on Rolfe land. Up north of Calistoga—in the geyser country—the Rolfe domain holds everything from Napa Town up through Clear Lake, and over to the Berryessa Valley. You might say we understand the power of power!”

“Ah.” He nodded. That was the world’s biggest geothermal-power area FirstSide, and the geography was the same here. “That the only power station?”

“The only one between Mendocino and Monterey, apart from some very small-scale hydro, and emergency generators at hospitals an’ suchlike,” she said. “The settlement up in Oregon uses hydropower, and down around San Diego they’ve got a turbine setup running on natural gas.”

Her accent’s gotten a little stronger since we came through the Gate, he noted silently. Not acting as much, I suppose. Aloud, he went on: “I suppose Sierra Consultants did the design work?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact,” she said, looking at him with surprise and respect. “One of their last studies for us, in the late fifties. We’ve got about a hundred and fifty megawatts capacity installed as of now, and since we weren’t dumb enough to neglect pumping the condensed steam back down the holes, the Commission thinks that we can eventually pull out ten times as much or more on a sustained-yield basis. That’ll be enough; we aren’t going to let the population here grow indefinitely.”

There were stairs to a walkway that ran along each side of the ferry. Tom took the ones on the left—port, he thought—and they stood on the gallery there, looking about and at the water that foamed by below. It wasn’t much disturbed; the blunt bow of the ferry threw its wave in a correspondingly wide arc, and only smooth surging ripples ran along the hull amidships. The water was blue but clear, amazingly free of silt despite being downstream of the Central Valley and the marshes; he could look straight down and see a pair of fifteen-foot sturgeon swimming slowly downstream, and then a school of eight-inch threadfin shad so thick that they made the water boil, leaving him staring into an infinite blue-tinted chamber of mirrors full of flickering silver.

There was a thick fringe of marsh along the strait’s northern edge; it suddenly occurred to him that upstream the delta country would be eight million acres of nothing but marsh. He looked around again, eyes on the blue cloud-flecked sky. This was a little past the main spring migration season and a month early for the start of the autumn one, but the flocks made those he remembered from his own Red River country in the fall season seem like a tattered remnant. In one casual glance he saw curlews, pelicans numerous as snowflakes slanting down to the surface of the water, ospreys falling like miniature thunderbolts and thrashing back into the air with silver fish writhing in their claws, redthroated loons diving from the surface, three types of grebe, great blue herons striding along the edge of the water, and on and on.

“This area really swarms with life, doesn’t it?” he said.

Adrienne nodded. “Even more than when Granddad arrived,” she said softly; he turned his head and surprised an expression of soft pleasure on her face as she watched the pageant. “God, I love this.”

That surprised him a little, both the expression and the words.

“More than when your grandfather came?” he said. “I know he’s a conservationist of sorts, but—”

She put a hand on his shoulder for a moment; it felt good. And hell, I’m just being professional.

“It makes sense when you think about it,” she said. “After the Gate opened, three hundred thousand top predators who hunted every day for food got replaced by two hundred thousand—mostly concentrated here around the bay—who hunt occasionally for fun. And the Indians used a lot of the wild plant life, too; acorn mush was their staple, plus they burned off millions of acres every year to keep the countryside open. Ecologically speaking, we New Virginians are grass eaters who get most of our food from restricted areas in a few valleys.”

Tom nodded. “So the Indians were the keystone species here; humans generally are. I imagine you’ve had some pretty wild ecological swings since then.”

Like an engine without a governor, racing and stalling, he thought; and tried not to think of the bands and villages struck down by bacteria and viruses from—literally—beyond their world, most likely the last survivors dying from sheer thirst or hunger as they lay tossing with none but the stinking corpses of the dead for company.

My ancestors may not have cared much, any more than these people do—but I’m not my ancestors.

“Right. I can remember the forest and bush getting thicker and encroaching on open country in my own lifetime—though we’re trying to use controlled burns to slow that down.” She glanced sideways at him as they leaned on the railings. “And speaking of wild ecological swings, we’re nearly in Africa.”

“Africa?” he said.

“Formally it’s the North Bay Permanent Wilderness Reserve and Acclimatization Area, but nobody’s called it anything except Africa since 1950.”

She pointed and moved her arm from west to east against the low hills that rimmed the horizon.

“From Miller Creek to about there, and from tidewater inland through the Carneros hills. The whole north shore of San Pablo and Suisun bays, all the wetlands and a rim of dry country too. Easier to show you why it’s called ‘Africa’ than tell you. It’s the reason Ralph called his place the Mermaid Café, though.”

At his curious glance she went on: “You know, Joni Mitchell? ‘Carey’?” A sigh: “I forgot, you didn’t have Ralph shaping your musical tastes as a teenager.” She began to sing in a husky soprano:

“All right, all right,” he said. “Yeah, I have heard that golden oldie.” He gave a snort of laughter. “I like that man’s sense of humor.”

“Rock music’s still faintly scandalous in the Commonwealth,” she said. “So there! You thought I was a fuddy-duddy for liking the classics.”

There was a rush of feet and blasphemous cursing from the crew as they came into the U-shaped pier on the north bank, thick ropes were made fast, and the ramp at the front of the vessel was let down with a clattering thud.

Their Hummer was first on and first off; several two-and-a-half-ton trucks loaded with boxed cargo followed, and another with a huge coil of cable. Adrienne took the wheel, letting the other vehicles pass her as she drove through a pleasant, sleepy-looking village nestled among trees and then past a formidable turf-covered earthwork and ditch. The road forked there, one branch heading northeast, the other more sharply west of north, where it cut like a winding ribbon through the rolling hills and crossed their creeks on trestle bridges. Those looked odd, until he realized the huge size of the interlocked timbers.

There was no fringe of cultivation beyond the town’s gardens; a mile later she turned off the road, downshifted and splashed through a small stream, and then tackled the side of a thirty-degree hill’s slope. The Hummer took the uneven steepness with ease; he’d always liked the way the power-shifting system to the four wheels made them grip like giant fingers. Coming upslope they startled a flock of ostriches into explosive flight, and halted beneath a single small oak near the crest of a hill.

The cooling engine ticked; the cries of birds and the endless sough of the wind were louder. The smell of hot metal was quickly lost beneath the aromas of laurel, ceanothus and minty yerba santa crushed beneath the wheels. Long champagne-pale grass rippled in the cool wind off the water, thickly sown with late California poppies in drifts of small golden coins; nearer the water’s edge, vast fields of tule rushes tossed like a rolling poplin-green sea. Freshwater marsh lined every stream among the many that meandered southward toward the bay. There were trees on their edges, and clumps elsewhere, but everywhere the land stretched immense to the blue horizon.

She handed him the binoculars, and he silently looked about, restraining an impulse to swear and exclaim alternately. A group of brown-and-cream eland wandered along the edge of a patch of blue oak in a swale between two hills, big antelope the size of an ox but with longer legs, dewlaps and spiral horns. A herd of about two hundred elk were scattered in fawn dots up a farther hill; scattered among them were pronghorns, wildebeest, mule deer, and what he thought might be Thomson’s gazelle. A distant drumming of hooves heralded a group of wild horses, flowing over a rise like a wave and then down into a vale; water and birds splashed up as they breasted the damp ground there and vanished over the next hillcrest. Scattered bison grazed, and a grizzly rested under the shade of a blue oak, while two yearling cubs wrestled and fell around her.

“Is there anything that maniac of a grandfather of yours didn’t turn loose here?” Tom asked.

“Well, chimps didn’t do so well in California; they didn’t like the winters. But see that edge of swamp over there? Those knobs and twitchy things are the nostrils and eyes and ears of a bunch of hippos. They’re finally adjusting well. The chimps and the gorillas are doing fine down in Central America. We didn’t introduce just African animals, of course: tigers from China, snow leopards and the ordinary variety, European wild boar—”

“Arrrgghh!” he said, a cry from the heart. “Feral swine are organic bulldozers! They—”

“Don’t worry; the wild pigs aren’t as much of a pest as they are FirstSide. The cougars and wolves and lions and tigers and leopards keep ’em down. And it turns out golden eagles love raw suckling pig. Tom, there are a lot more predators large enough to tackle a boar here than there are FirstSide. Not to mention we hunt them.”

“I certainly hope so,” he mumbled.

“This acclimatization was a really big thing with the Old Man; he spent a pile of his own money on it, and a fair bit of the Commission’s, as soon as the first mines were going. We used this reserve to establish breeding stock, then spread them around—by riverboat, truck, overland drives, sometimes by air. On the east coast and down in South America by ship too, a little later. You should see what the pampas are getting to be like in Argentina; it makes the Serengeti on FirstSide look like a paved-over parking lot.”

“Arrrghh!” Tom said again. He clutched his head in his hands, and Adrienne laughed in a clear peal of mirth.

“You remember that book, Ecological Imperialism?” Tom nodded. “Well, it looks like Crosby’s thesis about the pre-Columbian Americas having a lot of vacant ecological niches after the Pleistocene extinctions was right. At least, nearly everything we introduced spread like dandelions—including dandelions, by the way. The total biomass is up, and the variety of large mammals is way up. Plus the introduced Old World beasties coevolved with human beings. They aren’t helpless like the ground sloths.”

“That’s the reason your grandfather did this, Crosby’s book?”

“Oh, no, he just thought all the new animals looked cool and improved the hunting,” she said, turning the engine back on. “Read too much Tarzan when he was a kid, I suppose. But he felt very vindicated when I pointed the book out to him!”

On the one hand, releasing exotic species like that is insanely risky, he thought. On the other hand, it does look cool. Hunting here would be a bit too much like shooting a dairy herd, though.

He turned his head to say so, and yelped. A twelve-foot-long, five-ton mass tipped with a massive curved horn on its snout and another, shorter one above that had risen from a muddy wallow. It looked at them with little piggy eyes, twitching its ears in bad temper. Tom’s mind gibbered for a second, but his voice was calm as he said, “Adrienne, I think there’s one enormous rhinoceros looking us over about fifty yards thataway. And your grandfather is fucking insane.”

Long bronze-colored hair whipped across his face as she turned her head to look. She also hit the gas hard enough to send a spray of gravel shooting rearward. That decided the beast; it put its head down and began churning the tree-trunk pillars of its legs. Gravel spurted from under its feet as it hit the roadway, and Tom thought he could feel the ground shaking under the massive thudding impact of those broad three-toed feet.

Hummers had excellent acceleration, for a diesel-engined vehicle. Experiment showed that for a while a rhinoceros could do even better. The thick dust spewing out from behind the little truck partially hid the giant beast, but the continuous rain of stones thrown up by the rear wheels enraged it further; he could hear its hoarse squeal and the great bellows panting of its breath. That was the problem with animals too big and tough to have natural enemies—their impulse was to charge anything that annoyed them. Charge it and gore it with that huge horn and stomp it under those pile-driving feet…

“That’s a white rhino!” Adrienne shouted over the rushing air and the engine’s growl. “I thought all the ones in this reserve had been trapped and relocated!”

“Looks sort of reddish gray to me!”

“No, it’s from wit—the Afrikaans word for wide—the square lip. It’s a grazer, not a browser like the black rhino.”

“Could you just drive, please?” he shouted, and grinned back at her; it was an odd combination of fright and exhilaration, a little like hitting the white water in a canoe.

“Drive, woman! Right now its wide square upper lip is too close for comfort. There’s a goddamn big horn just above it.”

For an instant he thought the beast would reach them, to flip over the Hummer and send them flying in bone-breaking arcs to the ground—the wide, squat vehicles didn’t tip easily, but he’d seen what happened when they did. Then it began to drop behind; he glanced over at the speedometer and saw they were doing forty miles an hour, about as much as was safe on this winding dirt road in hilly country, or a bit more. The rhino slowed, lumbered to a stop, turned three-quarters on to the Hummer he hadn’t been able to catch and stood in a slowly dispersing cloud of dust, jerking his horn through short savage arcs to left and right as if to show what he’d planned to do when he caught them.

“By Jesus, that was a little too close,” he said, as Adrienne slowed down. “Adrienne, please tell me there aren’t any elephants around here.”

“Not anymore,” she said cheerfully. “There’s a whole swarm of them down in the southern basins, though—the LA area, you’d say. They’ve spread from there into Sonora and west to the upper Rio Grande, too; they can take a frosty winter, but not hard blizzards.”

“I repeat my remark about your grandfather,” Tom said.

“Then there’s elephants and tigers we dropped off in the Galveston- to-New Orleans area—”

“I don’t want to know!” he cried half seriously.

They drove in silence for a while; the countryside about was too beautiful and too weirdly alien not to keep his eyes busy. Occasionally a car or truck would pass them—the cars usually four-by-fours of one sort or another, the trucks pickups or, fairly often, army-style deuce-and-a-halfs. The dust would have been worse if they were more frequent; it was often enough for Tom to be thankful for a spare bandanna Adrienne lent him.

“I thought the area north of here was fairly well settled,” he said after a few minutes. “Shouldn’t there be more traffic?”

“It is well settled, by our standards,” she said. “But we use the rivers and bay for transporting freight.” Pointing from east to west: “There’s the von Traupitz domain, and the Chumleys up around Yolo; they ship their produce out through Suisun Bay; Napa’s the riverport for the R-Fitzmortons in Sonoma, the Hugheses around where Healdsburg is FirstSide, the Throckhams the same around Santa Rosa.”

Another ditch marked the northern border of “Africa”—this one extending east and west out of sight, steep-sided enough to make a rhino cautious, if not an antelope or lion. Just past it they came across a road gang of men in gray overalls doing repairs on the dirt highway’s surface, filling in potholes and spreading crushed rock, with a mechanical roller to pack it down. Overseeing them was a stringy, lean thirty-something man on a big glossy horse, a classic Southern-sheriff type down to the sunglasses, Smokey the Bear-style hat, cigar clamped between his teeth and the shotgun whose butt rested on his hip.

Tom thought he would have suspected the workers were convicts, even without the word “Convict” printed on chest and back in large red letters. They weren’t fettered—very little point in that amidst swarming wildlife eager to convert them into either food or irritating leftover bits stuck between the toes—and didn’t look beaten or starved. They did look hangdog, and they worked with steady effort.

“Can we stop here and ask a few questions?” he asked Adrienne, a note of challenge hovering around the edges of the words.

“Yah, you betcha,” she said with an impish grin, gently mocking his Red River accent, and pulled the Hummer over to the side of the road. “Hi, there, Deputy Gleason!”

The man looked and did a double take as the Hummer crunched to a halt on the roadside verge. Then he spat the cigar butt out of his mouth, raising his shotgun in an informal salute. He turned his head toward the crew as they paused to look, and shouted, “You boys keep workin’!” Then, to Adrienne, and with respectful politeness: “Afternoon, Miz Rolfe, an’ you, sir. Any way I can help y’all?”

He had Adrienne’s accent, but stronger still, pronouncing the words “I can help” as Ah kin hep. It was impossible to see his eyes clearly behind the sunglasses, but Tom felt himself quickly scanned, summed up, and to judge from the instinctive slight shift in the man’s seat in the saddle, found formidable. Tom nodded politely himself.

“I was wondering if you could tell me a bit about your working party,” Adrienne said. “My friend Mr. Christiansen here would like to know. If it’s not too much trouble, Deputy Gleason.”

“No trouble t’all, Miz Rolfe, Mr. Christiansen,” he said, smiling. That turned into a bark: “Front and center, y’all! Line up and sound off—name, crime and sentence!”

The half-dozen convicts downed tools and came at the run, lining up along the verge of the road and bracing to attention with their straw hats held in both hands across their chests and eyes to the front.

“Montgomery, John, drunk and disorderly, unable to pay fine, six months!”

The sheriff chuckled. “That ol’ boy, he drove a car into the bar when they wouldn’t sell him no more cheap brandy. Lucky he didn’t hurt nobody.”

“Leclerc, Martin! Domestic violence, one year!”

“Slapped his missus, and gave her a black eye. She wouldn’t press charges, or he’d be workin’ in the mines, and for a lot more than a year.”

The tally continued—minor crimes of violence or semiminor ones against property. Adrienne cocked an ironic eyebrow at him as they drove on northwest.

“Well, let me guess: The Commonwealth isn’t big into rehabilitation,” he said.

“Criminals aren’t sick people who need therapy,” she said. “They’re bad people who need a whack upside the head to get their attention. We put them in stir to suffer, not to heal. It seems to work rather better than the I-feel-your-pain approach.”

Tom chuckled; that was one sentiment he couldn’t really find fault with. Few people who’d spent much time in law enforcement would have, in his experience.

The town of Napa announced itself with a sign stating that its population was 4,562, and that it was the “Gem of the Valley” and “Gateway to the North”; the Kiwanis, Elks and Masons added their pitches. He had an excellent view as they left the rolling hills and coasted toward the river that gleamed like a twisting silver snake in the afternoon sun, throwing glitters back through the leaves of the trees that fringed it. The eastern shore held little but a golf course, a racetrack with wooden stands, and a fenced-in parklike expanse with a shutdown Ferris wheel and roller coaster. A sign outside bore the Rolfe lion, red rampant on black, and announced that the domain fair would open on August 15, sponsored by the Family.

“Domain fair?” he asked.

“County fair, more or less—livestock shows, bake sales and prizes for flowers and jams, big dance, floats, bit of a carnival. The domains of each Family do pretty well the same things a county does in the U.S. back FirstSide. The fair comes between wheat harvest and the beginning of the crush. There’s a big polo match, too.”

The bridge over the river was yet another web of huge timbers fastened together with arm-thick steel bolts and set in stone piers; the surface was asphalt, and the road on the other side was paved likewise. Tom looked up and down the Napa River as they crossed, estimating how far back from the water most of the west-bank town stood, and the width of wild dense riparian forest that stretched north like a lumpy green quilt on either side of the stream.

“Let me guess,” he said. “You don’t have much trouble with flooding.”

“Yah, you betcha,” she said again. “Because we don’t build on flood plains much. There’s no need to when you’ve got plenty of elbow room.”

Napa town was at roughly the same spot on the river as the settlement FirstSide, and for the same reason; this was the head of navigation for shallow-draft vessels, particularly in the dry season. Dozens of barges lined the wharves, mainly on the west bank of the river; tugs brought more, or towed them away in strings; both types were smallish by the standards he was used to, and wooden-built. A slipway on the water’s side held several more under construction. There were more cars and trucks on the roads than he’d seen in Rolfeston, although the traffic was still light by any standards he’d known before, including those of the little North Dakota town of Ironwood.

Back from the docks and warehouses on the southern side of town were workshops and factories; the residential part of town was north of that, a little more spread out than Rolfeston had been, equally hidden in trees—some the tall oaks and sycamores that had once occupied the site, more planted since its founding. Between those houses and the vacant lowland along the river was the business district, small shops and offices along streets with timber-pillared or stone-built arcades, and a broad square with central gardens, benches, brick paths and bandstand.

The riverside itself north of the wharves was a semiwild park, the bigger trees left standing, undergrowth cleared back and some plantings made. It was full of picnickers, people taking advantage of a big municipal swimming pool, impromptu volleyball and touch football or soccer games, people tossing Frisbees to each other or leaping dogs, and plain strollers; it took him a moment to remember this was Sunday afternoon.

“My alma mater,” Adrienne said, pointing to a big two-story stone building overgrown with climbing rose and surrounded by playing fields. A baseball game was going on in one, and the people in the bleachers let out a shout as they drove by. He could see flickers of it between the tall Lombardy poplars that fringed the way.

“You went to the public high school?” Tom asked curiously.

“Everyone does,” she said, sounding surprised. “Why not? Getting a high school diploma means something here, about equivalent to a FirstSide BA. I did very well, when I wasn’t on suspension or waiting to get paddled by the principal. I grant you that was far too often, and if I hadn’t been a Rolfe, I might have got expelled for good.”

“How did you produce grades for Stanford?” he said.

“Oh, we fake ’em,” she said. “Phony private school FirstSide… well, it’s actually a real one, but we slip an extra notional student in now and then for when someone goes to a university there. We endowed it and pick the head-masters, of course. Paying full tuition at the university also helps; they don’t check as hard.”

“Why did you go to Stanford?” he asked. “Why not, ah, University of New Virginia?”

“I started there, but UNV’s still small,” she said. “Particularly the humanities departments, and I wanted to study history.” A wry laugh. “Not that that’s the only difference; you’re not going to find many postmodernist professors of postcolonial studies at UNV, thank God.”

He digested that while they cruised past the town hall. The white walls, square tower and big arched courtyard entrance reminded him strongly of Santa Barbara’s post office; then they turned down a street with palms on both sides and two-story adobe buildings behind a continuous arcade roof supported on columns made from varnished black-walnut trunks. The streetlights were black cast-iron pillars with fanciful detailing, and the sidewalks colored brick in geometric patterns.

“I’ve got to do some business here,” she said, taking an empty parking place; there were, he noted, no meters. “Care to come along?”

He nodded. One of the buildings had rounded corners and tall glass windows along both street-side walls, now swung wide under the arcade overhang. A tilework sign over the open doors read FOUQUET’S. Adrienne walked into the entranceway and halted.

The interior was a single great room, with a roof spanned by exposed wooden beams; one end held a pool table, and there was a flat-film TV screen over the big counter with its top of polished stone and revolving seats on stainless-steel pillars. Elsewhere there were long tables, made of the inevitable giant slabs of redwood, here topped with harder varieties in a sort of parquet arrangement, plus booths along the walls. People bustled about, coming and going; the air was full of the smell of frying food and some sort of plangent country-style music and chattering voices. The waiters behind the counter or circulating with trays were dressed in white, with white fore-and-aft caps and aprons.

Tom blinked. It’s the half-familiar that gets you, he thought. This is the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a real old-style soda joint, the kind in Roy’s movies. It’s not a revival or deliberately retro, either. It’s just… what it is.

The crowd within must have numbered a hundred or so, none of them over twenty or younger than early adolescence. Some of the girls were wearing those Catholic-school-uniform arrangements he’d seen in Rolfeston, with white shirts and ties (often loosened), pleated knee-length skirts, and knee socks. Most of the rest were in summery cotton dresses, with a minority in slacks or jeans; none of the girls had short hair, or the boys long, and there were a fair number of pigtails tied with ribbon. The boys were more varied; fewer of them were dressed in their version of the school uniform, which included khaki shorts, and some wore suits. It took him a moment to realize something about the ones in overalls.

That isn’t a fashion statement, he thought. Those are their clothes.

A giggling clutch of sixteen-year-old females in a booth near the door were looking at Tom out of the corners of their eyes; in the next a boy and girl were actually sipping from the same malt with two straws, something he’d never seen outside a book of Norman Rockwell prints. A dozen or more of the older boys and a couple of girls were smoking, but casually, not as if it was an act of defiance; another clutch argued amiably around the jukebox—which was the latest digital model with flash memory storage.

It took him a moment to estimate the ages of individuals accurately, too; after a second look he realized his first estimates for most were at least a year too high.

Not that they’re baby-faced. In fact, they look pretty fit, he thought. There’s a couple of lard-butts and some pimple-faces, but not many for the size of the group.

It was something indefinable about the eyes….

“I thought I’d find a good big crowd,” Adrienne said to him as they stood in the doorway. “When I was a teenager, townie kids always used to hang out here after church in summertime. School year ends on June fifteenth, by the way—the day you got here.”

Then she put two fingers in her mouth and whistled piercingly, followed by a shout: “Hey, kids!”

Silence fell raggedly, and someone turned the music down in the ensuing quiet. Then there were exclamations; it reminded Tom a little of the way a rave crowd responded to a popular deejay, but not quite so open.

“Hi!” he heard over and over. Variations on “It’s Miss Rolfe—Adrienne!”

A pair of boys in their late teens with platinum-and-gold thumb rings waved in a more casual manner from a corner where they held court with their girlfriends and a gaggle of hangers-on, and Adrienne nodded back to them.

“How was the prom?” she said to the room at large.

More enthusiasm, and she lifted hands for quiet. Into it, she said: “OK, I’m back. Look, I need a dozen or so people for the Seven Oaks harvest. Five days, twenty bucks, and the usual trimmings on Saturday. Who’s interested?”

The ensuing babble took some time to quiet down. After it had, she went on: “Nobody under fourteen, nobody without the letter from the parents—and it had better be dated, kids; I remember all the tricks—and bring a sleeping bag, swimsuit and enough working clothes. And a good pair of gloves. Don’t waste my time if you don’t qualify, OK? Truck’ll be at the school gate tomorrow morning at six sharp.”

Eager hands shot up; Adrienne pointed at one after the other, until she reached the number she needed. “Oh, all right—you too, Eddie and Sally. But that’s it. No! It’s a business proposition, not a public holiday—I’m asking for work, not your votes. ’Bye!”

“That seemed popular,” Tom said as they turned away.

Adrienne chuckled. “Farm work’s high-status here.”

“That’s a switch.”

High-status, instead of being the only occupation in which specialists with degrees and hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment are considered ignorant yokels, he thought. That had been one reason he didn’t envy his elder brother Lars too bitterly. Plus he’d been able to understand what getting caught in a cost-price scissors meant even when he was eighteen.

She went on: “Also, four dollars a day is top-notch summer job money for kids; wages double in harvesttime—it’ll keep them in sodas and pretzels and beer and movies for quite a while. And I’ve got a reputation as being less of a, ummm, nosy-parker chaperon than most at the party afterward,” she said. “Of course, I’ve got to watch that things don’t go too far, or the parents wouldn’t sign off.”

They walked half a block southward in the pleasant shade of the streetside arcade; that covered half the herringbone-brick sidewalk, and the roadside maples and oaks and elms the rest. People drove by, or walked, or rode bicycles and a few Segways; a lot of the latter three types stopped to exchange a word or two.

“Our next stop likes to work Sundays,” Adrienne said. “An anticlerical.”

Then the covered arcade ended, and the shops and eateries; they were into the fringe of the factory area. Gates of some pale-colored varnished wood split a high blank wall, stucco over stone. Sounds of hammering and clattering came from within, and occasionally the whir of a power tool. Adrienne pressed the button. Someone opened a small eye-level slot with a clack before the main doors swung wide.

The man inside was in his early seventies but still tough and lean, only a little stooped; the hand he extended to Adrienne was strong but gnarled, callused and scarred with the marks of a carpenter or metalworker. He had a floppy black beret on his head, bushy white eyebrows over bright blue eyes, a cigarette hanging out of one corner of his mouth, and rough baggy overalls below; the bleu de travail Tom had seen in old movies. Like the overalled boys in the soda parlor, he wore it without self-consciousness.

Of course, Tom thought with a prickle of eeriness. He’s not just capital-F French; he left before looking like this died out. And on this side of the Gate, he’d have no reason to change. Nobody to mock or nag him into it. The trickle of books and movies wouldn’t be enough, particularly if certain people took care to see it wasn’t.

“Ah, Mademoiselle Rolfe,” the Frenchman said. “Bonjour; it is a pleasure to see you safe home once more.”

“Pour moi aussi, Marcelle,” she said in reply. “Ça va?”

The old man waggled a hand. “Comme ci, comme ca,” he said, and went on in accented English: “My liver is not a young man’s, but then what can one do? The rest of me is not a young man’s, either. But come in, come in.”

“Je vous presente mon ami, M Thomas Christiansen,” Adrienne said as they walked into an open concrete-floored courtyard. “Tom, M Marcelle Boissinot; proprietor of the best tonnellerie, cooperage, in the Rolfe Domain. Christiansen is newly arrived in the Commonwealth; perhaps you saw the article in the newspaper this morning?”

Tom could follow basic French, if not speak it beyond things like defilade fire or mines; he’d done a little work with the Legion, but he was glad that the conversation had shifted to his mother tongue. The old man gave him a hard, dry handshake.

“An infinite pleasure, but I had no time for papers,” he said. Then, shrewdly: “Monsieur is a hunter, but once also a hunter of men, n’est pas?”

“U.S. Army Rangers,” he said. Here’s one person at least who didn’t read my biography, by Jesus. “Up until a couple of years ago.”

“Ah!” The pale eyes glittered, and Tom felt a sudden unease. “Then monsieur has also been a slayer of les salarabes. Bon!”

He turned and shouted over his shoulder, speaking rapidly in a quacking guttural-nasal dialect Tom couldn’t begin to identify except that it was French of a sort.

Open-sided workshops and storerooms surrounded the courtyard, with ten or so men working. A couple of them looked like sons and grandsons of Marcelle; the rest could have been anybody, and their chatter was mostly in English, with a word or phrase of French here or there. There was a strong smell of seasoned timber in the air, and of sawdust and fire and hot wood. Long planks of blond oak were stacked crisscross up to the high rafters along the inside walls of the workshops, and a businesslike clutter of barrel staves and blanks, iron hoops and tools stood against walls and on workbenches. Several younger men were assembling chest-high wine barrels on the open courtyard, each splayed cylinder of smooth curve-sided oak boards resting open side down over a low hot fire of scraps. Tom watched with interest as one man bent the heat-softened wood to shape with a rope and winch, while another slipped an iron hoop over the top and drove it down to its place with quick, skilled strokes of mallet and wedge.

“Always a pleasure to watch men work who know what they’re doing,” Tom said sincerely.

As he spoke, a youngster came out with a tray and three glasses of white wine. The old man lifted his. “Death to les salarabes!” he said.

Tom touched his lips to the wine but didn’t drink; the word meant wog filth, roughly, and he’d worked with plenty of good-guy Arabs—and Kurds and Afghans and Kazakhs—during the war, ones who hated the loony killers as much as he did. Or more, having a more immediate grudge.

Marcelle Boissinot’s eyes were fixed on something in the distant past, and he was smiling, a remarkably cruel expression. He took another sip of his wine, and murmured under his breath, “Vive la vin, vive la guerre, vive le sacre legionnaire…”

Then he shook himself slightly, and turned politely to his guest, looking up the tall blond length of him. “Monsieur is perhaps of German extraction? In Algeria, I served with some Germans in the First REP—I enlisted claiming to be a Walloon, of course—and they were formidable fighting men.”

“I’m Norwegian-American,” he said. “But I agree; we operated with some German special-forces units.”

“But this reminds me,” Marcelle said to Adrienne. “Of a certainty, you have heard the scandal?”

“Scandal?” she said, arching her brows.

“On the afternoon news; the elopement.”

“Who?” she asked curiously.

“Siegfried von Traupitz,” he said. “A sudden marriage before a magistrate. In Santa Barbara, most naturally.”

Adrienne whistled. “The von Traupitz heir?”

In an aside to Tom: “Santa Barbara is Commission territory, like Rolfeston—common ground, not part of any domain. The justices of the peace there are elected neutrals who have to take anyone who comes; and it’s a holiday resort, a lot of honeymooners go there.”

To the cooper, she went on: “Who with? Tell me instantly, Marcelle!”

The ex-Frenchman’s grin turned enormous, and the cigarette worked at the corner of his mouth.

“With the child of another Prime,” he said, stretching out the delicious tension as she considered and rejected the limited pool of young women it could be. “With… Rebecca Pearlmutter!”

“With Rebecca?” Adrienne gasped. Then she gave a peal of laughter that set all the men within earshot grinning in sympathy—and stealing glances at her face, which lit with an inner glow. At rest, her face was beautiful; when she laughed, it went several notches up from there. Tom wrenched his attention away from her to her words.

“I don’t believe it.”

“But I assure you.” The old man cackled triumphantly. “What a scandal!”

“Romeo and Juliet,” she said, shaking her head. “I knew they got on fairly well at UNV—they were both in one of the post-Alexandrian history courses I took, and neither of them had much time for the old feuds—but… old Otto will plotz! He’ll have an apoplexy. He’ll melt down into a steaming puddle thinking about Rebecca’s children being his heirs! Abe Pearlmutter won’t exactly be happy, either.”

“And your grandfather will laugh comme un loup until he has an apoplexy,” Boissinot replied happily.

Adrienne shook her head. “Ah, that will be a year’s sensation,” she said. “But unfortunately, time presses, Marcelle, and I must get down to business.”

“Bon,” the old man said briskly. “You wish?”

“I need one hundred and fifty new, standard-size aging barrels this fall before the crush,” she said. “And fifty reconditioned. First quality, Oregon oak, and from north of Puget Sound.”

Tom made a curious noise, and she turned her head. “California oaks don’t make good cooperage. Too porous and splintery. French oak staves are impossible to get here, but Oregon oak—that’s Quercus garryana—is just as good. Particularly if you can get slow-grown wood from northern stands.”

“Oregon oak is nearly as good as French,” Marcelle replied pedantically. “Bien, I can have those for you by September. Twenty-five dollars a barrel for the new, eight for the reconditioned.”

Adrienne threw up her hands. “Twenty-five dollars! Extortionist! Assassin!”

Boissinot’s face was calm as he lit another cigarette and made an expansive gesture with it. “Mademoiselle, as a young man in the OAS I was an assassin, and a very good one, even if we unfortunately didn’t get that overgrown Alsatian pimp. Now I am a old man, head of a family, with expenses and a payroll to meet.”

“Fifteen for the new. Four for the old,” she said.

He made a contemptuous sound deep in his throat. “Fifteen? I am offering finished work, not raw logs off the dock. Is mademoiselle’s name Rolfe, or Pearlmutter?”

“If I were a Pearlmutter, you old fraud, I’d be off to Cressaut in Tara as easy as salmon in spring,” she said. “I wouldn’t let sentiment make me pay a ridiculous price to you just because you’ve been a Rolfe affiliate forever.”

“Mademoiselle is a wealthy aristocrat. She can afford sentiment. I, however, am a man of business; and I need at least nineteen dollars for each new cask. Possibly I might concede six dollars seventy-five apiece for the reconditioned barrels. Transport costs on a special shipment would make up any difference on a quote you could get in Tara, and while Cressaut’s barrels are good enough in their way, mine are better.”

“Nineteen is only slightly less ridiculous than twenty-five,” Adrienne said with passionate sincerity. “And the best is the enemy of good enough. You try this with me every summer, Marcelle, and it never works.”

Tom sipped his wine while the haggle went on; personally he detested bargaining, but he had to admit both parties here were skillful, and thoroughly enjoying themselves. This Marcelle Boissinot seemed like a nice enough old duffer, undoubtedly a fine craftsman, beloved by his grandkids and a pillar of the local church and boule club… except for that one disquieting glimpse of something else.

Sort of like the Commonwealth of New Virginia, he thought.

“Ai!”

Jim Simmons swore quietly under his breath as the doctor probed the healing wound in his back.

“Not bad,” the physician said.

“Not bad for you,” the Frontier Scout replied.

“Healing well, considering it’s been only two weeks since you were hurt,” the doctor said.

“You try lying on your stomach for two weeks,” Simmons said.

There were only two beds in this hospital room: his and Kolomusnim’s. The Yokut looked even more absurd in a patient’s gown than the Frontier Scout, but he lay with an infinite hunter’s patience, eyes fixed on the window and the glimpse of blue sky beyond; both of them were here under the Scout medical insurance program. Kolo’s arm was healing well, but he’d lost more weight than Simmons despite the latter’s more severe injury; probably because he couldn’t adjust to the hospital’s idea of “food” as easily, possibly because the environment was just too weirdly alien for him.

“Well, here’s some reading material, then,” the doctor said.

Simmons brightened; he already had a stack of books on the adjustable bedside table, and a computer with access to Nostradamus, but a fresh one would be welcome. One of the advantages of having lots of relatives was that there were plenty of people who felt obliged to send you stuff. Of course, they also felt obliged to visit, but you couldn’t have everything, could you?

It wasn’t a book, though: It was a letter, a single cream-colored envelope. Without, he saw, a postage stamp.

“I wonder who couldn’t just send an e-mail?” he said to himself, as the doctor finished with his poking and prodding and left the room. “Ah, Adrienne! What a woman!”

He read the letter once, and whistled softly. Then he read it again and again, to make sure the elliptical wording meant what he thought it meant. When he’d finished, he called out to the other man—in his own language.

Simmons wasn’t really fluent in Yokut; no more than a hundred or so souls still spoke it, and more than half of those could get along in pidgin English. Still, he’d learned enough to carry on an elementary conversation; Kolo and he had worked together for years, and Simmons had been raised on the frontier, at Scout outposts and stations. It was an interesting tongue; there were things you could say in it with a word or two that required paragraphs in English, and there were English concepts that you couldn’t put into Yokut at all.

Some things, however, worked quite well in both their mother tongues. Kolomusnim’s face lost its blank look of endurance and came alive as the Scout spoke.

Revenge was a concept that translated quite easily.