Conquistador

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“I always find a map helps me think,” Tom said, looking up at the one he had pinned to the corkboard, as the people summoned to the meeting trickled casually in.

At least I’m not too tired to think, he mused. After four days of the harvest his body was adjusting nicely; he had plenty of energy for the after-dinner planning session. I think I’m even losing a little weight—and I didn’t think I had any surplus.

“Feeling better?” Adrienne asked, bending to thump the ribs of one of the big dogs that hung around her. The white-bibbed cat looked down disapprovingly from the top of a big globe mounted in a wheeled frame of oak and polished brass.

“Somewhat,” Tom replied.

In fact he was feeling excellent, better than he’d felt since his last long hiking trip, up in Glacier National Park. The aches had gone; he was in fundamentally good condition, after all. He also felt loose-limbed and strong and quick, as if a spring in muscle and bone that had been fading for the last few years without his being quite conscious of it had come back sometime in the past week.

“I always get the sensation my body’s flushing out poisons after a spell FirstSide,” Adrienne went on. “Whether or not it’s true.”

“Ah…” Tom said. “That’s interesting.”

Because I feel just like that now, and don’t want to admit it, he thought, and then shrugged hopelessly as he saw her sly grin and knew she’d followed the thought. Let’s face it, for someone of my tastes, this place has a lot of the features I’d pick for Wish Fulfillment Land. Of course, in other ways…

The map room at Seven Oaks was an annex off the library; there were big tables and slanted desks, atlases, rack-boxes to hold maps and graphics, and a smell of paper and book dust and leather, mixed with greenery from the open windows giving on a courtyard garden. There was also a big thin-film screen for calling up data, and a printer that could handle large maps at need.

There were seven people in the room: Tom and Adrienne, Tully, Piet Botha and Sandra Margolin, plus a brown-haired young man named Jim Simmons, and a silent Indian called Kolo in a breechclout who crouched in a corner, his black eyes intent. They were Frontier Scouts, evidently something like his job with Fish and Game mixed with the sort of thing he’d done in the army Rangers.

The stock of paper maps included an excellent series for the western part of North America; they were marked in the lower left-hand corner with the words Commission Cartographic Authority. He supposed that the basic geography would be the same as FirstSide, minus the draining and damming and clearing of the past three hundred years—there might be differences in the details, the course of rivers and so forth. Evidently the Commission had spent a good deal of effort over the past sixty years to keep theirs current.

The land was familiar, but man’s borders were utterly strange. The map showed the outlines of the domains: a thick clump around the Bay Area, an outlier around Puget Sound, and another series down the coast of Southern California culminating in a big blotch in the lowlands between Santa Monica and San Diego. A trail of dots ran from Sacramento to the Mother Lode mines, then up through the Lake Tahoe area and from there into Nevada; they faded off to a last tiny outpost on the site of Denver.

“All right,” he said, moving his hand from Oregon to Baja. “It’s unlikely in the extreme that the enemy would be trying to train their clandestine force anywhere close to the coast. Too many people, too many aircraft.”

Though that’s an irony, he thought as the others nodded. Two hundred thousand all the way from Portland to San Diego! And a couple of hundred planes all up, including little puddle-jumpers.

“At the same time, they have to be close enough to Rolfeston to strike at the Gate. Unfortunately, with a C-130, that means anywhere within two thousand miles—two thousand with a full load, more if you trade off cargo for fuel.”

“Good plane, the Herky Bird,” Tully added. “I spent a lot of time aboard them myself—and they’re still making them, which is not bad considering the design was finalized in 1951.”

“We’ve been using them since 1958,” Adrienne said. “They’re our standard heavy transport and passenger aircraft…”

“And Colletta Air owns dozens,” Piet Botha said. “Sorry, has owned dozens—every once in a while one is lost or wears out. Or so the reports they file on Nostradamus say.”

“Or they could just divert some at the last moment,” Adrienne said. “Most of the pilots would do whatever Giovanni Colletta tells them unless they had very good reasons not to; they’re part of his affiliation, after all. Telling them to go to point X would be simple enough, and once the troops were on board they’d be committed.”

The Indian said nothing. But I suspect he’s following the conversation much better than he lets on, Tom thought. There was a disturbing, feral quality to the man’s gaze, and the way he squatted and held himself was subtly different from anything he’d seen before. Of course, I’ve never seen an Indian whose people haven’t been in contact with us for a century at least.

“Ten Hercules would be enough to carry a thousand infantry and their equipment, which is more than they’d need,” Tom pointed out. “Cruising at just under four hundred miles an hour. At full range, that means anywhere within this radius.”

He picked up a compass, set it to the right distance, and scribed a three-quarter circle with the center on the Gate. “Everything within this line. That’s half the continent. Let’s start eliminating what we can.”

“They wouldn’t want to be farther away than they must,” Simmons said. “To hit fast when they go for it, and to cut down on the number of trips they’d have to make to bring in supplies while they’re getting ready.”

“Yeah, the usual logistics problems,” Tully said. “Five hundred men minimum, plus some support personnel… who also eat their heads off and need bunks… say seven hundred to twelve hundred all up, even with a real high teeth-to-tail ratio, and more if they’ve got more than five hundred troops. That’s a couple of tons of food a day, plus water, housing, uniforms, stores, spare parts, medical supplies, barracks or tents, fuel….”

“Cover,” Adrienne said thoughtfully; she was sitting with a pad of paper in front of her, tapping her chin with a pen. “It would be somewhere remote, but with something going on to cover a lot of transport. And somewhere they could produce some of the supplies themselves, to keep the transport needs to a minimum.”

Tom looked at the map again. All the mountainous parts of California and the Pacific Northwest, not to mention the deserts, were marked in green as Permanent Commission Reserve. That meant they were national parks, near enough; shades of the color indicated whether they were slated for sustained-yield timbering, hunting preserve attached to one of the Families, or absolute wilderness. The coastal valleys like the Napa or the Salinas or the Santa Ynez were settled, or parts of them were. Sections of the southern basins around the site of LA and San Diego were too; the rest, and the Central Valley, were part reserve, part unallocated land waiting to be handed out as the population grew.

“I don’t think there’s much doubt as to the where, when you take all that into account,” Adrienne said.

She pulled a thick reference work down from a shelf and began to thumb through it: Territorial Domains and Possessions of the Thirty Families, 2007 Edition.

“‘Chapter Seven: The Colletta Family. Primary domain… estates in Hawaii…’ Aha!” she said, and Tom felt a hunter’s grin appear on his face. She went on: “‘Owens Valley: Colletta outlying possession, granted in 1962…’ right, the Old Man told me about that once—something to do with keeping old Salvo Colletta sweet after taking Hawaii away from him. Hunting lodge and small airstrip until 2005; then the Collettas petitioned the committee and were granted permission to open the Cerro Gordo silver mines; construction work began the following spring. Hmmm. Quote: ‘Doubts were expressed as to the profitability of the venture,’ end quote.”

Tom ran one thick finger down the Sierra Nevada until he came to its southeastern edge. It ended in some of highest peaks in the continental United States; Mount Whitney was over fourteen thousand feet. The less lofty Inyo Range paralleled that north-south scarp to the east; between them was a long, flat trough, with a river running down it to a sizable lake—the Owens Valley, and Owens Lake. On FirstSide the river was the source of a lot of LA’s water, brought down from the snowmelt of the Sierras’ peaks and glaciers and then over the deserts and mountains via aqueduct and siphon and canal. The valley floor was high semidesert; right across the Inyos was Death Valley, much lower and hotter—a desert, plain and simple, with no “semi” about it.

Southward was the Mohave; not as bad as Death Valley, but pretty damned bleak, as he knew by experience.

“Bingo,” he said softly. “Just far enough away to be remote—”

“There isn’t anywhere within the zone we control that’s more remote,” Simmons said. “No overland traffic at all—everything goes in and out by air. It might as well be an island.”

“Yes!” Adrienne said, hissing the word. “The Collettas operate the mines there under license from the Commission—nobody would ask any questions, as long as the silver output was consistent with the ore body and the labor they were putting into it.”

Tom peered more closely at the map, then got out a smaller-scale one that covered the southern Sierras. “I’ve been through there FirstSide,” he said. “The old Cerro Gordo mines are up this side canyon, just east of Owens Lake, or what used to be Owens Lake.”

“This isn’t FirstSide, thank God,” Simmons said, leaning forward and then wincing slightly. “Owens Lake is very much there, a hundred and twenty square miles of it. It’s officially called Lake Salvatore, of course.”

Tom frowned. “But if the Collettas are supposed to be operating a silver mine here and they aren’t really pulling out silver…”

“…then they could slip the silver in from their share of other mines,” Adrienne said. “The committee checks pretty carefully to see that none of the Families running the smaller mines shorts the Commission. They aren’t going to look further if the amount is right—it’s the same trick we use FirstSide, with the mining properties we own there. If the Collettas want to waste money on a marginal operation, who cares? Most of the production comes from the big digs that the Commission runs directly, anyway.”

He whistled. “Perfect, then. Hmmm… an aerial recon run? Visit by an inspector?”

He looked around; Adrienne, Simmons and Botha were all shaking their heads.

The woman explained: “First, there probably wouldn’t be much to see from the air; not if they’ve kept it quiet this long. Second, that would let them know what we know, or expect—which might trigger off the coup we’re trying to prevent. And yes, they’d know the minute the plane lifted off. There aren’t enough airports in the Commonwealth to keep that secret, and you’d have to use military aircraft, either the committee’s or requisitioned from one of the Families. Not to mention that if I were running this, I’d have radar surveillance running from Mount Whitney, and maybe some light ground-to-air missiles, if I could manage to smuggle ’em in from FirstSide.”

“Hercs would be perfect for this,” Tully said. “They’re made to lift from grass and dirt strips. Anything hard and level would do.”

“And the Owens would be a good place to grow supplies, too,” Tom added. “Plenty of water, this side of the Gate. That means we can’t judge their maximum numbers by the amount of supplies they ship in.”

They sat and looked at each other, thinking. Sandra went out and came back with a tray of sandwiches and soda; Tom munched at his—excellent thin-cut roast beef with horseradish—and went right on thinking. The soda was a copy of Dr Pepper, the old-fashioned kind.

“The only way I can see to settle this is to go in on the ground,” he said at last. “A small party, overland, could get definite well-documented proof and then get it out again. I take it your grandfather could move once he got that?”

Adrienne nodded. “Not a problem. The committee would suspend the Collettas and the Batyushkovs and any other Family involved—raising private forces beyond their quotas, a no-no, arming natives with modern weapons, a really serious no-no, and attempted overthrow of the state, pretty well the ultimate no-no. They’d be far too outnumbered, without surprise, and with all the other Families prepared and united against them.”

“Well, let’s get in on the ground, then,” Tom said.

Again, he was conscious of the way the others looked at him—the ones who’d spent a long time here in the Commonwealth, or who’d been born here.

“Easier said than done,” Adrienne said. She stood and traced her own lines on the map. “You could try to get a small party in through the San Joaquin, south to Lake Tulare and then over the Sierras. Trouble is, you’d be like a bug on a plate coming in that way, not to mention everyone seeing you as you went through the Carquinez.”

“Well, you could come straight up from LA and through the eastern Mohave,” Tom said, drawing the pathway. “It’s only a couple of hundred… ah.”

Botha and Simmons nodded, and began to speak at the same time. They exchanged glances, and the big Afrikaner spoke: “Man, there aren’t any roads across the desert, except for the one to the borax mines—I live just south of there, on the sea side of the mountains. You might get a caravan of good four-wheel-drive bakkies through, but then again you might not. You’d have to take all your fuel… and you’d be bliddy conspicuous dragging a plume of dust, eh?”

Simmons nodded. “The only way to do it without hanging up a HURRAH, WE’RE HERE! sign would be to go on horseback. Over the Krugersberg—the Santa Monicas—through the San Fernando Valley, over the San Gabriels, then north to the Tehachapi and up the eastern front of the Sierras—”

“Nie, nie,” Botha said. “Too bliddy obvious, kerel. That’s the easiest way across the Mohave. We must swing further east, through the springs at Atolia.”

Simmons winced slightly. “Love punishment, do you, Piet? You’d have to travel mostly by night… but you’d do that anyway, in the Mohave.”

Unexpectedly, the Indian spoke, mixing weirdly accented English with his native tongue. Simmons looked at him and replied in the same, then addressed the rest.

“Then there’s the Mohave nomads, the”—he spoke something unpronounceable.

The Indian spoke up again: “Kinun’ya’tuk. Means ‘mixed-up,’ or ‘many tongues.’ People from all peoples.”

“They’re hostile?” Tom said.

“Very, some of them.” Adrienne sighed. “When we cleared out coastal southern California a couple of generations ago, we gave the surviving natives some presents and horses and pointed them east. Some of them kept going—some of them crossed the Mississippi! But a lot didn’t; they joined up with the tribes who were already in the Mohave. A fair number of white renegades ended up there, too—deserters, criminals, escaped convicts. A mixed bunch, very tough, and more of them than you might think. There’s enough continuous contact across the mountains with the New Virginian settlements that they don’t get hit by once-in-a-generation plagues. Plus there are a couple of missionary groups there who do vaccination programs against smallpox and measles and so forth for children brought into their stations.”

Tom rubbed at his chin. “Can’t see the Mohave desert supporting many people, though.”

“Some of them farm part-time along the Mohave valley and the middle Colorado,” Simmons put in. “The acclimatization program really changed the ecology in that region, too. Lot of introduced plants—spinifex, saltbush, smooth-skin cactus—and animals. Camels, and things like oryx that metabolize their own water from their feed and don’t need to drink. Plus they learned a lot of tricks from us, well-drilling, herding and suchlike.”

Botha nodded. “They’ve been more active the last few years. The occasional hunter or trader in the desert gets chopped, even a few raids over the mountains to steal livestock—”

Tom held up a hand. “How extremely convenient for the Collettas,” he said dryly. “If they’re trying to hide something on the other side of the Mohave Desert.”

There were a few heartfelt curses at that; evidently paying Indians to attack your fellow New Virginians was something that made the general treason more emotionally immediate and intolerable.

“A small party will be easier to hide,” Adrienne said. “But not too small, or we’d have real problems getting across the desert and past the tribesmen. Everybody here’s in, I presume?”

Nods, and a grunt from Botha. “That makes seven,” Adrienne said. Botha and Simmons both turned to look at Sandra, who glared back.

“She’s good with horses, she can shoot, and I can trust her not to talk. We need a couple more. Who can we trust, who’s got the experience we need?”

Botha rumbled, “My eldest boy, Jan. He’s twenty—lived on my plaas there more than half his life, and he’s been over the mountains before, chasing stock thieves and hunting. Guided Oom Versfeld’s son on a trip last year; wants to be a white hunter. No nonsense in the boy; I’ll vouch for him.”

Adrienne nodded, her eyes lost in thought. “That gives us eight guns. I’d be easier with a dozen, but… wait. Ralph’s too old and he was never a boots-and-saddles type, but Henry Villers would probably be up for it. And I know I can trust him.”

“Wait a bliddy minute, miss, not a kaffir—”

Adrienne’s finger stabbed out at him. “Botha, don’t be more of an idiot than God compels you to be. And don’t try any of those boys’-school pissing-match tricks with me, either. I don’t have time for them and I’m not equipped to enjoy them.”

They locked eyes for a moment, and then he nodded. “You’re in charge, miss.”

“I am. While we’re getting things settled, let’s clarify things. I’m in overall command. Tom here is number two. Sandra will be horse wrangler; Jim will be trail boss. Everyone else is a ‘cork.’ Jim, what’ll we need?”

“Two horses each,” the man with the sunstreaked brown hair said. “Three would be better except for the lousy grazing… and six mules. Taking it slow and holing up most of the day—which we’d have to do anyway in high summer—two hundred and fifty miles as the crow flies, call it three-fifty our way, and allowing for accidents and a fair share of bad luck… we’re talking a month to get to Lake Salvatore. Ten, fifteen miles a day at most, and we’ll have to stop and rest the beasts when we hit water. Have to carry some barley for them; the grazing will be sparse.”

“Make it ten,” she said. “I want to talk to Tom about some special gear that might be useful. He was a Ranger, after all. Do up a list of equipment, and we’ll see about getting it together without leaving traces on Nostradamus.”

She smiled at them, or at least showed her teeth. Quite the human whirlwind, you betcha, he thought, amused and bemused at the same time.

“That leaves the question of when,” Simmons said. “I’m not fit for action right now; a week, maybe two, the quacks say.”

She sighed with exasperation. “I begrudge every minute… but we can’t charge right in, not just after an interview with the Old Man. I’ve got to make it look as if I really think we wound everything up FirstSide. So do the rest of you… I’ve applied for long leave from the GSF; I’m overdue on it, anyway. Once the harvest’s in, it’ll be natural for me to go on holiday. And it’ll be natural for you all to stay on until the harvest supper’s over, at least—Jim, you and your tracker can use the rest, too. We can finish our planning, do some quiet training, get the gear together, then split up and make our separate ways to a rendezvous point.”

Botha shook his head. “High summer in the Mohave! God be with us.”

“I hope He is,” Adrienne said soberly. “I surely do.”

The harvest ended on Friday, with the last sheaves twisted into a rough human form and everyone following the flatbed into the long strip behind the barns where the wheat ricks were—like thatched huts for giants, each formed around a long pole set in the earth. The local Episcopalian priest blessed the sheaf, and then everyone went off to shower and sleep.

Saturday was a holiday for everyone except the cooks to rest up for the evening’s banquet and dance; the smell of baking bread and cooking came in a faint mouthwatering waft from the kitchen wing, along with the woodsmoke smell of oak-fired ovens.

They stood in the gardens behind the manor house. A stone reservoir stood at the hillside end, and from twenty feet up its vine-covered side water poured from the mouth of a cast-bronze lion’s head to fall in a shallow pool and then flow into the main basin. The young harvest hands Adrienne had hired were playing around it now, pushing each other under the flow of water and tobogganing down into the swimming pool; it was one of the perks the youngsters had signed up for.

“Up for a ride?” she said, nodding toward the mountains. “Things are going to get serious soon enough.”

“Why not?” he said.

“Good thing you were raised in the country,” Adrienne said as they walked through the lawns and groves toward the hedge that marked off the service sector of the house grounds. “It’s a little rough up there for someone who’s never ridden before.”

Tom grinned, and felt himself relaxing completely into the smile for the first time since the Gate.

“Hell,” he said, “I didn’t learn to ride back in North Dakota. Nobody kept horses around our neck of the woods; that would have been a luxury. We used pickups. I learned to ride in Central Asia. Lot of rough unroaded country there, and sometimes we had to move over it in small teams.”

They walked through the hedges, down a dirt lane lined with pepper trees, fantastically gnarled light brown trunks and spreading branches that met thirty feet overhead in a tangle of light-flecked green, full of pendulous six-inch clusters of yellow-white flowers. The two dogs who’d followed them were tearing back and forth along the lane, wagging frantically and jumping, with a general air of Going for a ride, great idea!

Board fences surrounded grassy paddocks; the stables themselves were a series of low buildings along brick-paved walkways, with adobe to five feet and wood-framed wire grates above. There was an air of neatness, in a stable-esque sort of way; wheelbarrows leaned against buildings, tools racked inside doorways.

The old Indian woman he’d seen on the first day here was sitting in a patch of sun with her back against a stable wall and her feet outstretched, crooning to herself as she wove a basket of willow shoots, sedge, and fern roots; feathers and pieces of abalone shell added to the strange beauty of the pattern. The senile haze cleared for an instant as she saw the two of them walking by and she grinned, exposing a few brown snaggles of tooth and calling out in her own language. Adrienne tossed a reply in the same tongue over her shoulder and the crone cackled louder.

“What was that in aid of?” he asked.

“A speculation about your, ah, height,” Adrienne said, glancing at him out of the corners of her eyes. “The Ohlone weren’t shy, let’s say.”

“What did you tell her?”

“Do you really want to know? It had to do with comparing the dimensions of a baby’s head and those of—”

“No, not really,” Tom said hastily.

Am I blushing? he thought. Well, let’s be honest. I am horny. Very. It was hard not to be, next to a woman this good-looking, and one you’d made love with, one you liked as well as resented. Some of his mind was still angry; other parts of him had different imperatives.

“Need a horse, Adri?” Sandra Margolin said, setting aside a shovel. “Need an ox, Tom?” she went on with a good-natured smile, as she looked Tom over from head to toe.

“I’ll have Ahmed, Sandy. Tom’ll take… oh, Gustav, I think.”

“Oh, you do want an ox for him,” the part-Indian woman replied, then went on more seriously, “Good idea. We’ve been skipping things for the harvest, and they could both use some exercise.”

She leaned the shovel against a wall and whistled sharply for her assistants, then relayed the order. They led two horses up. He could guess which one was Gustav without much trouble; it was a gelding and stood a bit over seventeen hands, black and glossy and muscular.

He ran a hand down its neck and over the legs. “Sturdy,” he said. “I don’t recognize the breed.” Not that I’m an expert on horses. “Reminds me a little of some I saw in the ’Stans. A lot bigger, though.”

“Gustav’s a crossbreed,” Adrienne said. “Hanoverian warmblood on a Kabardin mare—you know, those north Caucasus mountain horses. Gustav here’s certainly plenty agile for his size, and he has extremely tough feet.”

Her mount was more lightly built, an Irish hunter, dapple-coated and two inches over fifteen hands. Sandra Margolin and a nahua stable hand came out with the blankets and saddles; they were a modified Western type, with several rings in the frame for ropes or gear, and machetes strapped to the left side beneath a coiled lariat; the horses champed a little with eagerness to get going. The young woman came back with the rifles, and they slid them into the molded-leather scabbards that rested at each rider’s right knee.

The lane ran through the stables, then out into a big grass paddock right at the foot of the hills, and then through a gate in a deer-high fence and into rougher country, grassland scattered with blue oak. Beyond, it turned into a track up alongside a rivulet that was probably small in spring and had shrunk back to about half that size now. The tinkling of the water over rock made a pleasant counterpoint to the clop of hooves, the occasional jingle of harness and creak of leather, the happy panting of the dogs as they cast back and forth and charged up the steep slopes to either hand, covering four or five times the ground the mounted humans did.

The track showed more deer and elk sign than horse hooves; the north-facing side of the V-shaped notch they were riding in was covered in big timber. Sparse-needled digger pine on the higher rocky slopes gave way to good-sized madrone and blue oak, goldcup oak, with Douglas fir and the odd redwood near the trickle of water—none of the king trees was a real giant like the ones up on the north coast, but they still towered over everything else, rising from forest shadow into the sunlight like great straight-shafted spears. The wildflowers were dying down as June wore on, but there were still clumps of ocean spray with drooping sprays of tiny creamy-white flowers, thickets of bitter cherry with silvery-bronze bark and sweet-smelling snowy clusters of blossom, thimbleberry and trailing blackberry beside the creek, blue chicory beside the trail. Silver-blue and long-tailed coppery butterflies started up from the horses’ hooves, though fortunately there weren’t many mosquitoes.

The air grew cooler as they angled up the ravine. After an hour or so he noticed something odd—a silence. The dogs stopped running through the underbrush and came back to stand by the horses; the mounts themselves tossed their heads a moment later. They both reined in and scanned the trees as their horses stamped and tossed and shifted their weight from foot to foot as a way of indicating they thought it was a bad idea to stop just then. One of the dogs gave a low growl and pointed, its nose locked on a big canyon oak about a hundred yards away. Tom peered closely, pushing back the brim of his hat with one big hand; dapples of sun and shade moved on the scaly gray bark of the trunk and thick limbs, but he thought that about thirty feet up…

“There,” Adrienne said, leaning close. He was pleasantly conscious of her breath on his ear and the contact of their knees. “That branch…”

“… there,” he said. “That isn’t a cougar, is it?”

“No,” she said softly. “Chui,” At his incomprehension, she went on: “We got that word from our when-wes. Leopard. A male, very large.”

There was something else jammed into the crutch of a branch higher on the tree: a mule-deer carcass, he thought. And the branch the big cat was lying on looked to be just perfect for dropping on anything that came by on the game trail beneath. He didn’t feel particularly alarmed; even big predators avoided people unless you cornered them or did something dumb like running away. Still, he didn’t intend to ride under that limb, either.

“Shall we turn back?” he said.

“Not unless you want to,” she replied. “There’s a very pretty little spot a bit farther on I was planning on showing you. Le Chui there’s probably been shot at before—they love the taste of dog, not to mention sheep. Pull your rifle out and see what he does.”

The cat’s head came around sharply as he slowly drew the weapon from the scabbard. It came to its feet as soon as he had the muzzle clear, and growled—a sound with more than a little of a rasping scream in it; then it whirled and went down the trunk of the oak like flowing water, disappearing into the bush so smoothly that scarcely a shrub quivered to the passage of three hundred pounds of carnivore.

“Well, he knows what a rifle looks like and what it’s for,” Tom said. “Doesn’t particularly like it, either.”

“Neither would I, if I could only bite back,” Adrienne said, clicking her white teeth together and laughing. “That was lucky. They tend to be scarce near settled country.”

The dogs relaxed, and the horses went forward without objections; he judged that meant the leopard had either gotten downwind or far away, or both. After a half hour of companionable silence they reached the spot she’d spoken of; it bore the first signs of humankind he’d seen amid the mountains.

“Here it is. Quite famous.”

“Well, you could call it pretty, I suppose,” Tom said.

They’d come out of pine-smelling forest onto a jutting triangle that emerged from the canyonside to make a flattish area about a quarter-acre broad, with pockets of growth amid the rocks. A spring bubbled up from the base of the overhanging sheer mountainside to the rear; it had been ringed with stones to collect the flow in a shallow gravel-floored pool, surrounded with a lush growth of star jasmine. That climbed the cliff higher than his head, grew thick around the water, and trailed along the sides of the trickling stream as it wound over the ledge and plunged off the rim. The water disappeared as mist among the trees below, turning to a constant drift of rain. The clustered white blossoms were thick among the vines, and the heady scent mixed with the forest smell and the chill dampness of the springwater. The ledge didn’t feel exposed, though; it was as if he’d walked into magic and become part of it, connected with everything he saw yet separate from it, safe and walled away.

Yet it was the view that caught at the throat. They were deep enough into the Mayacamas highlands that the ledge of rock seemed to float disembodied above the steep depths beneath and amid the lower rolling peaks about, gashed with occasional cliffs north to the barely glimpsed cone of Mount Saint Helena. The trees and brush about them merged into a deep green velour in the middle distance, fading to indigo that deepened as the sun declined toward the western crest.

They watered the horses, unsaddled them and tethered them to iron rings set in the living rock where the trail emerged from the mountainside; then they walked forward to the tip of the triangle, where a single small oak cast a patch of grassy shade amid poppies and wild hyacinth; the earth fell away beneath their feet. They could see Seven Oaks below them, toy-tiny yet absurdly close after their hours in the saddle, and the soft-colored palette of the valley beyond: the white steeple of a church in a crossroads village to the north, yellow stubble in blocks amid the green of leys, the tree-studded pasture, the occasional geometrical regularity of a vineyard or olive grove or orchard, and long shadows falling toward the riverbank forest from the lines of Italian cypresses. Light glinted on water, on the windows of the scattered farmsteads, and touched the tops of trees with a moving shimmer as people and animals moved antlike below.

It changed as they watched, tingeing the whole with a yellow haze, turning to burnished gold on the bare tops of the Vacas across the valley floor.

“But it’s not pretty,” he said. His arm went around her waist, and she leaned into his shoulder, a motion that seemed very natural. “Its beautiful… like something in a dream, or an old book about stepping through a mirror.”

“It’s the Land of Lost Content,” Adrienne said softly.

The words matched what he saw, but they also had the feel of being part of a larger whole. Adrienne must have felt the question through his arm, for she went on in the same half-dreaming tone:

“But Granddad found it for us again, just for us, against all hope,” she continued, and shivered slightly. “That’s what scares me about going through the Gate, Tom, scares me bad every time I leave. What if I can’t get back?”

She turned in to his embrace and they kissed. Suddenly their hands were eager on each other, scrambling with belts and fasteners; they rolled on the long silky grass….

Some time later Tom Christiansen laid himself back, sweaty and exhausted—and glad they’d paused for a moment to get a blanket to lie on. Jesus, he thought blissfully, staring up at the deepening blue of the sky. I feel like a teenager again—or did for a couple of hours. They said a man’s stamina peaked at sixteen, and it was all downhill from there. But maybe not.

Adrienne propped herself up on an elbow and kissed him. Then she started working her way down his throat; her long, bronze-colored hair tickled, then mingled with the sparse pale blond thatch on his massive chest.

“Adri,” he said, “I’m flattered. But I’m also thirty-two, not sixteen—I was just thinking about—Jesus!”

He was lost for long moments. When his eyes cleared she was swinging astride him.

“You underestimate yourself, darling,” she said, and sank back with a shivering moan. “Turnabout’s fair play….”

The smell of star jasmine mingled with sweat and musk; his hands clenched on her hips. Her face was remote, eyes closed behind a mist of swaying hair, until she stiffened and froze, crying out—quivering motionless except for the strong internal clenching. He shouted and heaved convulsively, and heard the sound die in echoes against the rock as she collapsed forward on his chest; his hand slid up the slick skin along her spine to the back of her neck.

“Oh, my.” She sighed; he could feel the coolness as her breath met his damp skin, although her face was hidden. “Oh, my.” After a moment she went on, obscurely, “Now, that was certainly no chocolate éclair.”

He lay and enjoyed the sensation of her pressed along him—it was a lot easier for him to bear her weight than the reverse, of course; he had a gentleman’s chafe marks on his elbows. That went on for a long lazy time, until the sun struck his eyes and he noticed the time.

“I hate to say it, but oughtn’t we be going? People might suspect….” Adrienne chuckled lazily. “Suspect? They’ll do more than suspect, honeypie. Seein’ as I brought you up alone to Lover’s Leap.”

“So that’s what it’s called?” he said, and tweaked her.

She yelped and rolled off him, glaring in an anger only half-assumed; the tweak had been delivered in a highly sensitive spot, and one she couldn’t have politely rubbed in public. She could here, and did: even in his exhausted state the sight did remarkable things.

“What was that for?”

“For taking me up unto a high place and showing me all the kingdoms of the Earth,” he said, wagging a finger at her—and then grabbing her wrist when she tried to retaliate with a tweak of her own. They both laughed.

She went on, “Well, it worked, didn’t it? Unless you were planning on resisting temptation?”

“I may have Christ in my surname, but the first one isn’t Jesus,” Tom said.

A swing band was tuning up as Tom and Adrienne dismounted at the stables; sunset was about over, leaving only a red glow behind the Mayacamas. He grinned at the sound of the music; he’d been a teenager when the swing-dancing revival was at its height, and the thought of tossing Adrienne around to a brassy big-band sound held no terrors. That and square dancing were the most popular forms here, from what he’d heard.

Then a thought hit him with a sudden chill: It probably wasn’t a swing revival . For all he knew, it had never gone out of fashion, in this enclave of the dimensionally displaced. The population was too small to generate many fashions of their own, and if they were cut off from the living currents of society on FirstSide by choice or circumstance… He remembered his father remarking once that an uncle had gone on a trip to the old country in the 1950s. Modern Norwegians had barely been able to understand the archaic peasant dialect the uncle had picked up from the grandparents who’d made the original westward migration.

Tom and Adrienne helped the stablehands unsaddle their mounts, then walked hand in hand back to the manor. They parted with a kiss at the door to his room on the second floor; he took the time for a quick shower—rubbing down with handfuls of cold springwater wasn’t enough, considering the amount of exertion of various sorts he’d gone through today. The Commonwealth equivalent of party clothes for this sort of affair made him feel a little self-conscious at first—there was a definite zoot-suit influence—but they fit well; for a semiformal occasion like this they included a jacket with broad lapels, an open-necked shirt and loose-cut slacks, with two-tone leather shoes. He gave a thumbs-up sign to the mirror and went out to meet Adrienne. She wore a cream silk dress with a pleated skirt, and low-heeled shoes with diamond-studded buckles.

Whoa, he thought, taking her in.

It must have shown, or maybe he simply couldn’t contain an inarticulate cave-man grunt of admiration, for she curtsied; he offered an arm and she tucked hers through it as they walked down the curving staircase and out the tall doors to the gardens.

“And the same to you, sir,” she said. “Ready to eat? And dance?”

“Eating sounds good,” he replied. “Dancing sounds great in the conditional future tense.”

The rear of the great house was bright, the windows a blaze of lights and Chinese lanterns hanging high in the limbs of the trees, stretching away into dimmer reaches to the west. A set of trestle tables had been set on the velvety lawn, surrounding a white fountain of tapering stone basins; the band was setting up farther away, on a low stone platform nearer the paved area around the pool. A crowd of people awaited them, bowing or curtsying as Tom and Adrienne came out the main doors onto the patio that spanned the rear of the building beyond the enclosed courts. Tom felt hideously self-conscious at that; Adrienne waved with every appearance of calm, and the people went back to milling around and chattering, obviously excited and happy at the special occasion.

They were all in their best, and of all ages from just past toddlerhood to the elderly. The children were surprisingly well behaved….

Or maybe not so surprisingly, he thought.

One started to kick up a ruckus; the five-year-old’s mother grabbed him by an ear and administered half a dozen solid whacks to his behind with the other hand, reducing the noise to a teary pout that soon vanished in the general excitement and high spirits.

Guess a swift smack to the fundament hasn’t been redefined as assault here, he thought, amused.

Tully stood under a string of Chinese lanterns, talking to Sandra Margolin; she was giggling, and then burst out into wholehearted laughter, which with her figure was enough to make you blink; she was wearing a low-cut blouse and peasant-style skirt.

“Not wasting any time, either,” Adrienne said, amusement in her tone.

“He usually doesn’t,” Tom said—he’d always been a bit baffled by Tully’s success with the opposite sex. “He never has any problem finding company. Keeping the woman interested is another matter,” Tom said. Then: “Hi, Roy. Where in hell did you get that oufit?”

Tully’s jacket was acid green, his shirt purple, trousers fawn, belt-buckle silver and turquoise, and his shoes brown, white and black; the cut of the clothes also had a much bigger hint of the zoot suit than Tom’s.

“Picked it up in Rolfeston. I was assured that it’s the height of local fashion,” the smaller man replied loftily. “Hello to you too, Kemosabe.”

“It’s not that people in men’s-wear stores keep lying to you, Roy,” Tom said. “It’s the way that you keep believing them that gets me.”

“I think he looks fine,” Sandra Margolin said, and Tom threw up his hands.

Besides, I’m feeling at one with the world, and everyone’s friend, he thought, grinning.

A bell began to ring, summoning them to the harvest supper; people streamed off toward the tables set up on the lawn. Those were in the shape of a large T with a double stem and a small crossbar. From what Adrienne had said, Tom gathered that this was a twice-yearly occasion, after the wheat harvest and then in the fall after the grapes were brought in; the manor’s cook—a middle-aged woman of Franco-American-Italian descent and formidable heft—her staff, the housewives of the rest of the estate’s households, and the odd man who fancied his hand on a grill had all been working overtime, and with a certain ferocious competitiveness. The food reflected the mix of people who’d gone into founding this strange country: the Southern take on traditional Anglo-Saxon cooking, but with a heavy Latin influence via Italy and southern France, and a dash of German and East European.

He suspected that the mix of plebian and haute cuisine dishes was unique to occasions like this, though. Corn on the cob for starters, with an alternate choice of ranch-cured duck prosciutto and pears, or spicy tuna tartare, tomato fondant and chilled coriander broth… No, there was a twenty-first-century Californian influence there, too.

The crowd took their places, waiting expectantly. Adrienne had seated Tom at her right, with Tully and his new friend beyond that; the rest of the top table held the mayordomo and his family, and the other senior staff and theirs; Simmons’s tracker and the nahua sat at a separate section at the base. There was also a large ceremonial salt shaker, evidently a social marker separating the upper table from the hoi polloi even on a community occasion like this.

Adrienne rose, and took her glass of white wine in hand. Silence fell, after a few shouts of “Speech! Speech!” and “Go for it, Miz Rolfe!”

“Friends,” she said, “this is the twelfth harvest supper I’ve hosted as landholder of Seven Oaks. I’d like to thank everyone for the hard work—”

The speech was mercifully brief, and good-humored. The reactions on all the faces he could see were too. He ate—the corn first; he didn’t really like raw fish of any sort—and helped himself to Lucillian salads with scallops and lobster tails, and greens he’d seen being picked that morning, a steak of Angus beef lightly brushed with garlic-steeped olive oil from the grove to the north of the house and grilled over oak coals, cauliflower with mustard and fennel seed, beaten biscuits….

Tully made a production of drinking a glass of wine—an open bottle stood between each two diners, with a simple label reading Seven Oaks, which included a silhouetted oak tree beneath. Tom drank some of his and decided it was extremely good. When it came to wine he just knew what he liked without pretending to know anything about it. Roy went in for the full wine-country vocabulary.

“Black cherry fruit… soft tannins… just a bit of vanilla from the oak… very nice,” he said to Adrienne, after swirling and tilting a glass, looking through the edge at a candle flame, sniffing and sipping. “Basically a cabernet sauvignon, right? But blended. Is it yours?”

“Well, I’m scarcely going to serve someone else’s wine at my estate’s harvest supper, Roy,” Adrienne said, leaning forward to speak to him across Tom. “Yes, it’s a blend, eighty-twenty cabernet and merlot; the ’ninety-two vintage. That was a wonderful year at Seven Oaks, and it just keeps getting better in the bottle.”

“But there’s something… I can’t quite place it. Not bad, just a little different.”

“Probably the fermenting vats,” she said. “We’ve got temperature control, but we use open-topped redwood tanks, not the closed stainless-steel ones they have FirstSide.” A quick urchin grin. “Our motto—‘Malolactic fermentation is for sissies!’”

Tully nodded. “I noticed driving up that you don’t have the piped water system in the vineyards that they use in the Napa on FirstSide either. What do you do when you get a late frost after budbreak?”

“Ahhh… hope next year is better?” she said, blinking at him, and then they both laughed.

Tom suppressed a slightly miffed feeling and waited until Adrienne was talking to someone who’d come up to the head table; she stood and walked aside with the questioner for a moment. Things weren’t crowded, and he could be quasi-private when he leaned close to Tully and asked, “Look, do you think we’re doing the right thing?”

“Well, it ain’t the U.S. of A., Kemosabe, and I’m not real comfortable with this patron-client setup they’ve got either. But on the whole, it’s not too bad—Uncle Sugar had us defending Allah allies who were a hell of a lot more skanky. The anti-Rolfe league definitely looks a hell of a lot worse.”

“I could have told you all that, Roy,” Sandra said, refilling her own wineglass. “How anyone can live FirstSide, from what the video shows, is beyond me.”

Tom looked at her. “What if you didn’t want to work the horses here at Seven Oaks?”

“Why shouldn’t I?” she said, obviously puzzled. “I love horses, and this is my home—I was born here and so was my father.”

“But if you didn’t?”

“If I didn’t like it here, I’d go somewhere else and get a job. We aren’t slaves, and I’m good at what I do. A dozen places would be glad to take me on; and I’ve had more than one guy offer me a ring, you know—men with their own farms, or horse trainers.”

“I don’t suppose you get invited up here for dinner all that often,” Tom said. “When it isn’t harvest supper, that is.”

“Once upon a time—you might be surprised,” she said, with a twinkle in her dark eyes. “But anyway, yeah, that’s true for most people, but how often did you have dinner with… oh…” She stopped, obviously searching for a FirstSide equivalent to Adrienne or her grandfather.

“The governor? Bill Gates?” Tully said, grinning. “All the time, girl. Why, just the other day I dropped in on Bill at home and went into the kitchen and popped myself a brewski. Then I slapped my ass down on the sofa beside Billy-boy and his old lady and I said, ‘Bill, how’re they hanging? And dude, you gotta do something about the bugs in the new—”

Tom waved him quiet. “OK, OK, Tonto, I get the idea. Nice not to have to feel too guilty about my own take on things, you betcha.”

Sandra went on, “And can you call up the governor or this Gates guy and get help or backup if you need it?” she said. “Doesn’t sound like it; from what I’ve heard it’s sink or swim over there. I can go to Adrienne or her dad if I have to—I’m a Rolfe affiliate and so was my dad. We back them up—they back us up.”

Tom nodded; it wasn’t what he’d been brought up to think of as the ideal system, but as Tully had said, it didn’t seem impossibly bad; he’d been in places—Turkmenistan, for instance—where people literally physically broke out into a cold sweat of fear when someone mentioned the Maximum Leader’s name without implying he walked on air, or publicly doubted that he’d earned every one of the votes he needed to come out at ninety-nine percent plus every single election.

Adrienne had turned back and caught the last of that. Her leaf-green eyes were full of an ironic amusement… and real fondness. “Satisfied?”

“No,” he said. “But I’m not completely repulsed, either.” He smiled back at her. “In a manner of speaking…”

“Glad to know I’m not completely repulsive,” she said.

“Roy and I will help you with this… political problem you’ve got,” he went on, and felt an absurd lurch at the brilliance of her smile. “Once the”—carefully unnamed conspiracy, in this rather public venue—“problem is solved, all bets are off, of course.”

“Of course,” Adrienne said gravely. “And now… we can dance.”

The band pealed out a high sustained brass note, then swung into action. Tom led Adrienne out; Tully was already cutting a jitterbug rug on the way over, with Sandra clapping her hands as she followed. A pair of heels and long slender bare legs suddenly appeared over the head of the crowd, as one girl did a daring handstand on her partner’s palms. Tom met Adrienne’s eyes, nodded, gripped her hands and swung her over one hip, over the other, down between his legs, up in an overhead twirl….