Conquistador (39 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Details?” he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

Adrienne shrugged, unaffected.

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

“Committee?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Whoa!” Tully held up a hand.

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

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

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

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