Conquistador (88 page)

Matoaka, christened as Lady Rebecca at her baptism, gave birth to one son, Thomas, in 1615. In 1616 the colony sponsored a voyage to England for the Rolfes, where Lady Rebecca was given a wildly enthusiastic reception, and Virginia gained invaluable publicity. It was badly needed, for while Virginia was beginning to acquire a reputation as a place where an ambitious man could get rich, for most of the newcomers it was a charnel house. In these decades the average life expectancy of an English settler in Virginia was less than two years; tens of thousands died in the Chesapeake swamps—of malaria, dysentery, Indian arrows, hunger, scurvy, overwork and sheer heartbreak. Not until around 1700 would births outnumber deaths among the English settlers in Virginia, nearly three generations after the foundation of Jamestown.

Lady Rebecca died on her way back to Virginia in the year 1617; like so many of her compatriots, she contracted some European disease, probably smallpox—one of the many maladies to which the long-isolated Amerindians were fatally vulnerable. John Rolfe went on to become a member of the Governor's Council and a successful tobacco planter, before being killed at Berkeley Hundred in the surprise Indian attack which began the Powhatan-English war of 1622. His son Thomas inherited his lands and prospered, but the Rolfe name became extinct in the next generation. Through his daughter, however, Thomas—and the Powhatan chieftains—became ancestors of virtually all the First Families of Virginia; Robert E. Lee, for example, was among their descendants; so was Thomas Jefferson's wife.

In the very slightly different history of
Conquistador,
Lady Rebecca did not contract her fatal disease; she lived until 1622, when she shared her husband's fate at the hands of her furious countrymen. She also bore two more sons, John and Samuel—and from them derived the long line of the Rolfes of Virginia. Few made any great mark on history; they were typical of their time and class: horsemen and hunters, owners of plantations and slaves, and growers of tobacco and wheat and corn. Some served on the Governor's Council; others led the colony's militia in time of war. They shared the declining fortunes of the Virginian gentry as the nineteenth century wore on, and lost the last of their wealth in the convulsions of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

None shook the earth . . . until John Rolfe VI, fresh from the Pacific Theatre of World War Two, started fiddling with a shortwave set one April in 1946. . . .

A Brief Overview and Ethnography of the Post-Alexandrian World

 

 

 

When Alexander did not die in 323 B.C.E., the history of the world and its peoples turned down an entirely new track.

After recovering from his illness, Alexander spent several years consolidating his vast conquests, and pressing forward with his policy of Graeco-Iranian synthesis and Greek colonization. In 320 B.C.E., the Greek cities of Sicily and southern Italy, pressed by the Carthaginians and Italics, appealed to Alexander, and a new round of conquests began. . . .

Alexander the Great died in August of 280 B.C.E., in the summer capital of Ecbatanta, in the Zagros mountains. He was succeeded by his son Alexander II (by the Bactrian-Persian princess Roxanne), and his dynasty remained in power for a further century and a half. By that time, the empire ruled from Babylon (renamed, of course, Alexandria) stretched from Iberia to the Ganges delta. After roughly A.D. 0, it began to decline and eventually fissured into a maze of quarrelsome city-states and regional kingdoms; by about A.D. 300 the last pretence of political unity was gone. Its ghost continued to haunt men's minds for many generations, and “Alexandros” became alternate title for Zeus, and the term for “ruler” as well.

Twenty-two hundred years after his death, the heritage of the Conqueror still marked the world. Since the Alexandrian empire had been so much larger than Rome's, its legacy was more widespread; half the 600 million or so human beings on Earth in the early twenty-first century spoke languages derived from Greek, in much the same way as French, Spanish and so forth are derived from Latin. The post-Alexandrian linguistic/cultural zone encompassed the whole Mediterranean basin, the Balkans as far north as the Carpathians, Egypt, Ethiopia, the Near East including Anatolia and the Caucasus, parts of the southern Ukraine, most of the settled part of Central Asia (plus Iran-Afghanistan), and northern India all the way from Pakistan to Bengal.

Technologically, the post-Greek zone was the most advanced part of the world prior to the opening of the Gate in 1946; the level is roughly late-medieval, and has shown little change for many centuries. Paper and printing are known, but gunpowder is not.

 

 

Arabic is limited to the southern coast of Arabia, and to spots along the East African coast. Most of sub-Saharan Africa is much as it was in our timeline in the Renaissance period, with a huge and obvious exception: no Islam or Christianity. Tribal statelets or ancephalous societies cover most of the continent, with some substantial kingdoms in the savannah of West Africa; those have been profoundly influenced by the neo-Greek states of North Africa via the trans-Saharan trade routes. The South Arabian civilizations have been influential down the east coast.

Southern India is inhabited by Dravidian-speaking Hindus who use Sanskrit as a liturgical language, but they have been heavily influenced by Greek culture. Southeast Asia is mostly Hindu but speaks Austronesian-Malaysian languages, except for a Han kingdom in what is northern Vietnam and southeastern China in our timeline.

There are vast differences in Central and East Asia. The Alexandrian empire and its neo-Greek successor states remained strong in Bactria—the settled, agricultural part of southern Central Asia—and assimilated the sedentary Iranian peoples. The north-Iranian nomads, blocked and harassed by the Greeks in Bactria, the southern Ukraine and cis-Caucasia, turn east instead of west—in our history they eventually moved as far as central Europe, pushed and followed by the Turkic, Ugrian (Hungarian) and later Mongol-speaking tribes.

In the Alexandrian timeline the migrations went the other way. The northern Iranian nomads first moved east over the Tien Shan and pushed the Tocharian-speakers of the Tarim Basin
¹
and Shansi directly east, into Manchuria, Korea and northeastern China. Then they followed and bypassed them in waves, taking over outer and inner Mongolia, then invading China proper.

Korea-Manchuria-northeast China is held by a number of Selang-Arsi kingdoms, essentially Tocharian, but with substantial influence from the Chinese substrate. The rest of China as far south as the southern fringes of the Yangtse valley is occupied by mixed peoples speaking Iranian languages. Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, Sinkiang and the steppe zone as far as the Tien Shan are inhabited by North Iranian nomads, and farmers in the oasis zones. The Mongol and Turkic peoples were swallowed up by the Tocharian and Iranian migrations.

Europe was always a backwater to the Alexandrian Empire, although Greece remained culturally important. Italy, southern France (roughly Provence), and Spain are post-Greek—small kingdoms and city-states, civilized in a provincial fashion.

In northern Europe, without the Romans to intervene, the Germanics more or less completely displaced the Celts; the destructive passage of the Cimbri through Gaul around 100 B.C., and their settlement in the Garronne estuary, began the obliteration of the western Celts.

The area from Ireland to the mouth of the Danube is occupied by various Germanic kingdoms and tribes—all barbarians and preliterate save for a narrow fringe along the edge of the post-Alexandrian zone; occasional folk-migrations and conquests along the Mediterranean shore have been of little long-range consequence, since the invaders were invariably absorbed by the higher culture.

In eastern Europe, the Slavs were weakened by their clashes with the Alexandrian Empire and its successors; this largely prevented the Dark Age migrations out of the
urheimat
in southeastern Poland/northwestern Ukraine, which in our history carried the Slavic languages deep into the Balkans and far into Asia. Instead, the Balts supplanted the Slavs in a long series of folk-movements, occupying the zone east of the Germanics and stretching to the upper Volga; however, except for a few of their southernmost kingdoms, they remain even more backward than their western neighbors.

New Guinea and Australia-New Zealand are roughly as in our history—prediscovery—except that the New Virginians have begun making settlements there.

North America was neolithic or hunter-gatherer when the Gate opened in 1946. Some early state-level societies had emerged in the Mississipi-Ohio valley, and the Iroquoian peoples had mostly replaced the others in the northeast and middle Atlantic states. On the Pacific, the Potlatch tribes—the Haida and their relatives—had the most elaborate culture, and had spread further than in our timeline, reaching down the Oregon coast. They had some contact with the Chumash, the most sophisticated of the Californian peoples.

The Aztec and Inca hegemonies had long since fallen apart in 1946, but their areas remained civilized and had advanced into a full Bronze Age, with extensive use of bronze weapons and tools, and both had developed genuine writing systems ultimately derived from the Maya syllabic script. Politically they were chaotic, with many small kingdoms; they remained handicapped by the lack of horses and other draft animals. The Nahuatl and Quechua languages had spread to most of those areas, reducing their linguistic diversity.

All this was thrown into chaos by the epidemics which accompanied the opening of the Gate, and which were renewed and worsened by the beginning of trans-Pacific trade by both the New Virginians and various East Asian peoples in the early 1960s.

By the twenty-first century, the population of the Americas had declined by about 90 percent from its peak in 1946, from around 35 to 45 million to about 3 to 4 million total, with less than half a million in North America above the FirstSide Mexican border. The percentage decline is roughly similar to that which the Americas suffered in the century after Columbus in our history. Losses were worse than that in the areas along the Pacific coast of North America, where the indigenous populations effectively ceased to exist.

There were also ecological upheavals, partly through the inadvertent introduction of new weeds and microorganisms—this begins almost immediately, as the horses brought over for the first expedition to the goldfields scatter grass seeds in their dung. Within a few years, even more radical changes result from John Rolfe's program of deliberately introducing African and Eurasian animals and plants over huge areas. This is comparable to the post-Columbian exchange in our timeline, but faster and larger-scale, since it is conscious rather than inadvertent and the New Virginians have much better transportation technology than Renaissance-era Europeans.

Remnants of the western tribes move east, encouraged by the Commonwealth authorites. With them go horses, and via trade, steel tools and trade firearms (replica flintlocks).

By the twenty-first century, there is a horse-nomad culture on the Great Plains and in the southwestern basin and range area; most of them are hunters, in a rather close analogue of the mounted buffalo hunters of our timeline's Old West, but some have become herders of cattle and sheep as well. Technology transfer is rather swifter; for example, most tribes learn to use wheeled carts and saddles with stirrups almost as soon as they adopt the horse.

The higher neolithic farming societies of the central and eastern parts of the continent collapse back into a simpler village-based culture under the hammer of the plagues, losing most of their complex social hierarchies. As yet they have had little contact with the New Virginians, except in the immediate vicinity of their trading posts and small settlements on the east coast.

By 2009, the New Virginians are dominant all along the Pacific coast from southern Alaska to Baja, and are steadily pushing inland as their numbers increase. They have also colonized Hawaii (the survivors there migrated to Tahiti by agreement) and are making a beginning in Australasia.

There are surviving Mexica-Zapotec-Mayan city states in Mesoamerica, and ditto in Peru, in contact with the New Virginians, trading with them and learning a good deal. The New Virginians have trading posts there, and small colonies on the eastern coasts—at the mouth of the Rio de la Plata, Rio, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic coast of North America.

The Demographics of the Commonwealth of New Virginia

 

 

 

John Rolfe always intended that the new land beyond the Gate should become an autonomous, self-reproducing community, rather than merely a source of wealth. Much of his initial profit, and at his encouragement a good deal of that made by his associates, went into promoting this growth.

The initial immigration got off to a slow start in 1946 (less than 200), but built up rapidly—by 1950, the Settler population was over 15,000. Then immigration remained at an average of around 1,000 to 1,500 a year for the next twenty years or so, but with wide fluctuations: big spikes in the early 1950s, the early 1960s; smaller ones in the early 1980s and the mid-1990s.

The “steady” part of the influx is Americans, usually recruited by chain migration (people sponsoring friends and relatives) or very careful approaches by Commission agents. There were a sprinkling of “involuntaries,” people who stumbled on the Gate secret or looked likely to do so—Gate Security usually abducted them to New Virginia.

Punctuating the steady inflow of Americans are bursts of quasi-refugees: in the 1940s Germans, Italians, Dutch from Indonesia, and Balts; French
colons
from North Africa and British settlers from Kenya in the 1950s and early 1960s; Rhodesians later; and Russians and Afrikaners in the 1990s.