Conquistador

by S. M. Stirling

  The first meeting of the Rolfe Hunt every year had become a central part of the Commonwealth’s social calendar, and all its brand-new ruling class attended, unless caught beyond the Gate by press of business. This autumn very few had missed the occasion here, not while the empires back on FirstSide snarled at each other in the Caribbean and the city-smashing weapons waited on a hair trigger.

  At least “The Commonwealth of New Virginia” took, he thought with a wry smile as he took a glass of white wine from a tray and murmured thanks to the girl who carried it. Her father farmed part of this land for the Rolfes, and he made a point of being punctiliously polite to the Settlers affiliated with his family. Apart from being the right thing to do—his father had gotten the importance of manners into him early, with a belt when necessary—in this labor-short economy it was also common sense. Not to mention the political benefits.

  The first foxhunt came in late October, after the majority of the grape harvest was in, but before you got much really chilly-wet weather. Rain wouldn’t stop the hunt later in the year, but better weather made the social aspects easier. The tables had been set out on the lawns of Rolfe Hall, where it stood looking southward down the Napa Valley; the hills showed to either side, and Mount Saint Helena loomed green with oak and Douglas fir and redwood behind the big Georgian manor house. It was just getting on to three o’clock and the sky was blue after yesterday’s rain, with a mild pleasant warmth; the hills to either side were turning green, which was a relief after the brown-gold of the Californian summer. Southward past the edge of the ha-ha—a hidden brick-lined dropoff that served to keep livestock off the lawns without a fence to break the view—the leaves in the vineyards were putting on their autumn clothes in fields edged with Lombardy poplar and Italian cypress.

  They glowed in every color from pale gold to deep wine red, turning the fields to a dimpled Persian carpet. The Eastern and Rocky Mountain maples he’d planted here back in ’47—several years before the house was started—were tall enough now to add to the symphony of color, scarlet and orange and yellow. Beyond that stretched the yellow of harvested grain fields, and pasture studded with great spreading oaks.

  Everyone was here, even ones like Sol Pearlmutter and Andy O’Brien who rode like sacks of potatoes and hated the whole business. The whole pink-coated crowd was circulating as the late posthunt luncheon got under way, socializing and deal making and what Sol called schmoozing; Pearlmutter and his affiliation carefully avoiding von Traupitz and his, and vice versa. Servants were bustling up with trays of appetizers and drinks, and the long table glowed with centerpieces of roses and petunias and rhododendrons. The cheeks of the guests were flushed with country air and exercise, and there was a faint but unmistakable smell of horses among the cut grass and flowers, though all the mounts had been led away to the stables tucked out of sight to the west.

  His eldest son Charles came toward him, leading a certain guest. John Rolfe hid his smile of pride behind a grave nod. The fifteen-year-old was nearly his father’s height, already five-foot-nine. He would be taller when he had his full growth, and a bit broader; his hair was darker, a brown touched with russet, and his eyes hazel. Right now his face was a little stiff with the responsibility—Charles was a good lad, intelligent and hardworking, if anything a little too conscious of his duties as a Rolfe and the eldest son.

  A bit shy, I think, his father thought. And more serious than I was at his age. Less of a wild streak.

  “Thank you for showing Lord Chumley around, Charles,” he said aloud.

  “My pleasure, sir,” Charles said.

  “And now you’re free to seek company younger and prettier,” Rolfe replied with a smile, letting it grow a little at the boy’s blush.

  “My apologies for not showing you around personally,” he said to the older man when young Charles was lost amid the crowd. “The news about the Cuban crisis has been rather disturbing and I’ve been keeping close tabs through our contacts on FirstSide. None of the missiles there could reach California… but there might be a Soviet submarine off the coast. Or even inside the bay.”

  “Too right,” the other man said. “Still, we’re safe enough here.”

  “Yes. But it’s been difficult, keeping our FirstSide operations going while evacuating everyone from the Families here to the Commonwealth. I trust you’ve not been unduly inconvenienced.”

  “It’s been interesting. Damnation, it’s been fascinating, Mr. Rolfe.”

  “John, I think?”

  Lord Chumley was a little shorter and plumper than his host. His hair—and a mustache worn in the bushy style the RAF had favored during the Battle of Britain—had turned white, where gray had only begun to streak the temples of the Virginian. His eyes were blue and very direct, and more intelligent than his bluff manner might suggest; his upper-class British speech had a hint of something harder and more nasal beneath it. By hereditary right he was Baron Chumley, and could claim a seat in the House of Lords, but his father had come to the equatorial uplands west of Mount Kenya in 1905, and he had been born and reared there. He’d also spent much of the 1950s leading a counter-gang against the Mau Mau in the forests of the Aberdares mountains.

  “And Cecil, by all means. But returning to business, John,” Chumley said. “I’m certainly going to accept your offer. My oath, I’d be a bloody fool not to!”

  Rolfe nodded. Chumley had been offered a seat on the Central Committee; it would be the twenty-nine families then; thirty in truth when Auguste Devereaux arrived, if he managed to dodge both de Gaulle’s “bearded ones” and his ex-friends from the OAS. With a committee appointment came a share of the Gate Control Commission’s revenues, and a portion of its political power in the Commonwealth.

  The Kenyan went on: “It’ll make me a very wealthy man, and I’ve fallen in love with the climate and the game here; it’s like Kenya in my father’s time, only better. Completely different from FirstSide California, of course: I wouldn’t live there for all the oil in Arabia. Odd, to think that one man living or dying could make so much difference.”

  Rolfe nodded. “Although when that one man is Alexander the Great…” He shrugged and smiled.

  Here Alexander the Great hadn’t died in Babylon in 323 B.C. Instead he’d lived to a ripe old three score and ten, and handed an undivided inheritance to his son by Roxanne. At its peak a century later, the empire he founded stretched from Spain to Bengal, before sheer size and entropy and Greek fractiousness broke it asunder in civil war and barbarian invasion. From what the Commonwealth’s explorers could tell, most of that area still worshiped Zeus-Alexander, and spoke languages descended from ancient Greek—in much the same way as Italian and Romanian and the other Romance tongues came from the Latin spread by Imperial Rome. There hadn’t been time or resources to do much more exploration yet, but they had found none of the city-states or kingdoms or tribes in the Old World to be much beyond a late medieval level of technology.

  “Evidently science and machinery are unlikely accidents,” Rolfe went on. “Fortunately for us!”

  “Fortunately indeed!” Chumley said, returning to their business. “Which gives us this wonderful opportunity. But how many of my compatriots I can bring with me, that’s another matter. Living here would be… well, very different. Not many natives, for one thing; not much labor available.”

  “That’s true of Western Australia on FirstSide as well,” Rolfe said. “And a number of them are relocating there. The Commonwealth will be a lot better than going back to England and the crowds and the drizzle.”

  “But more are heading for Rhodesia and South Africa on, ah, FirstSide,” Chumley said.

  Rolfe gave a wry smile. “And in anything from five to forty years, we’ll be recruiting there,” he said. “Hate to say it, but that’s the way I read events; it’s not going to stop at the Zambezi. That’s one reason I’ve restricted the import of native labor here; we could get any number of workers from the kings and warlords down in Mexico, but we’re keeping our brace
ro program strictly limited. Inconvenient in the short run, I grant you—but I don’t want my grandchildren to be facing a mass of half-assimilated Aztecs who’ve been reading Locke and Tom Paine, not to mention Marx. Even without foreign countries to stick their oars in, it would be too likely to end badly. Unless we went right back to ox-plows and handicrafts, and while I’m full of reverence for the good qualities of the past, that’s more filial piety than I’m willing to invest.”

  “A point, old boy, a most cogent point. I will certainly be able to get several hundred new settlers, possibly a thousand. And as you say, Rhodesia may provide more fairly soon, and I have contacts there—relatives and friends. They won’t all be farmers and planters, of course. Small businessmen, skilled workmen, civil servants. A few white hunters, too—they’d kill for a chance to move here.”

  “All useful,” Rolfe said. “Good pioneer stock, like my own English ancestors. And—”

  A man in the black uniform of Gate Security came up. He held a sealed message, and his face was pale beyond the degree natural to one with his ash-blond Baltic complexion.

  “Thank you, Otto,” Rolfe said, and tore it open, his face an unreadable mask as Lieutenant von Traupitz stood at stiff attention.

  That changed to a sigh of relief. Conscious of the glances on him—Salvatore Colletta had noticed something, and so had Louisa Rolfe—he spoke loudly enough that those nearby could hear: “The Russians have backed down. They’ve accepted Kennedy’s terms without qualification. It looks as if there won’t be war on FirstSide after all.”

  Chumley nodded and ran a hand over his thick white hair as a murmur spread through the crowd, and the laughter of relief from unacknowledged tension.

  “That was too close for bloody comfort,” he said. “I’ve been glad the family was here already.”

  “Yes,” Rolfe said. “Although who can tell how the next crisis will go? War now would have destroyed Europe and Russia and hurt America badly. Twenty years from now, with more bombs and missiles to carry them, it could end civilization FirstSide. Or even the human race.”

  “That’s something that will get you a few more men willing to move,” Chumley said shrewdly. “This is the ultimate in fallout shelters, old chap. Although… how well would we do here if the Gate were lost for good?”

  “There are contingency plans,” Rolfe said, carefully noting the “we.” “Once the formalities are done, you’ll have access to the secret files.”

  They’d brought over a vast hoard of technical books and drawings and microfilms, for starters; stockpiles of machine tools and gauges and metals, of crucial parts and materials; and it was all constantly updated. The Commonwealth’s own workshops and skilled men could keep civilization going here, after a fashion, at need. Still, a few score thousand people were not enough to keep up the full panoply of twentieth-century industrial technology. They would have to gear down and give up much of the more complex equipment until population built up. Of course, there would be advantages to that, as well. He hadn’t founded this nation to have it follow exactly in FirstSide’s footsteps.

  “Still, I’d prefer it came much later, if ever,” he said. “Much, much later.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  San Joaquin Valley—Lake Tulare

  June 2009

  The Commonwealth of New Virginia

  I feel good, Adrienne thought, as the descent began. Wired, though. It’s been a long time since anyone affected me the way Tom does. God, but he’s cute. Sweet, too.

  Her skin tingled, and all her senses seemed preternaturally sharp, so that even the flat neutral oil-ozone-metal odor of the helicopter seemed as deep and subtle as fine wine. She felt nimble and quick and clever, as if she could dance between the whirring blades of a harvester unharmed and handle this damned smuggling case with the flick of a finger.

  Be careful, woman. This is exactly the way people feel when they’re about to screw the pooch. You’ve had a good idea about fixing a horrifying oversight. That doesn’t mean you’re omniscient. Besides which, when and if Tom learns the full truth…

  The rolling foothills of the Coast Range were behind them, and the southern San Joaquin Valley spread beneath, turning from the thin green of spring to the dun-colored wasteland of summer drought. At two thousand feet she could see southward to where bare brown mountains and the Tehachapi Pass closed the southern end of the great north-south lowland; a little higher, and she could have looked north to see the San Joaquin join the Sacramento and flow into the delta before emptying into San Francisco Bay. A haze of heat lay over the land beneath her, though it was only an hour past dawn, and most of the game that hadn’t moved up into higher country had retreated to the odd stream that drew a line of trees across the plain, or simply lain down to wait for nightfall.

  A herd of mustangs drew a plume of dust across the barren land, spooked by the Black Hawk’s shadow, and pronghorns scattered like drops of mercury on a block of ice. Ahead was a vivid, livid green, where the tule swamps spread around the great shallow lakes that occupied much of this end of the valley even in summer. Looking east she could see the harsh glitter of sunlight on water through the rippling sea of reeds twice the height of a man. Beyond them lay open blue, and beyond that rose the source of the life-giving flow—the snowpeaks of the Sierras. They floated salt white and ethereally lovely in the distance, turned to an eye-hurting brilliance by the morning sun, a wall between her homeland and the deserts and plains of the far interior.

  A smoke flare cast a long streak of orange-red across the yellow-brown steppe not far away from the edge of the marsh. Nearby was the camp she’d come to find, vehicles parked in a square laager, a dozen hobbled horses in a swale that still kept a little green and had a single scraggly valley oak, and a set of tents grouped around campfires. The pilot nodded when she leaned forward into the crew section and pointed, his bulbous helmet and face shield making him insectile as he swung the helicopter sharply in a banking turn and cut toward the flare. It was suitably distant from the tents and the long row of wire cages covered by an awning; it would be just what she needed to send the birds into cataleptic shock. Suddenly the ground was closer; a falling-elevator sensation pressed her into the web seat, and hot dusty air flicked grit into her face as the side doors were opened and swung alongside the fuselage.

  Adrienne hopped down with one hand holding the floppy-brimmed canvas hat on her head against the blast of the helicopter’s slowing rotors; she could feel sweat starting out under the thin, tough cotton fabric of her bush jacket, and dry instantly in the blade-wash as the turbine howl of the engines died.

  Schalk and Piet followed her toward the camp. Closer, she could see eight big Land Rovers, the Aussie SAS six-wheeled model designed FirstSide for long-range desert patrols, plus two Hummers and a Cheetah light armored car with paired machine guns in its little octagonal turret. A heavy-duty field radio sat on a table under a large tent with its sides rolled up; the other tents were rigged as shade-only as well, with bedrolls resting beneath them. Most of the thirty or so men there were in wolf-gray militia uniforms, wearing peaked caps with neck flaps and the von Traupitz double-lightning-bolt-and-eagle Family badge on their shoulders; there were three men in Frontier Scout khaki as well. The Scouts were the Commonwealth’s wilderness and frontier experts. As a sideline, they handled relations with Indian remnants who’d survived the plagues.

  She recognized both the commanders; the militia platoon was led by Heinrich von Traupitz, scion of a younger-son branch of that Family, and the Frontier Scout was a Settler by the name of Jim Simmons. Both were her contemporaries, in their twenties and of the third generation born in the Commonwealth; she’d met Heinrich socially any number of times since her sixth birthday party, and had worked with Simmons before. The troops were all young men doing their national service except for a grizzled sergeant; probably all from farming and ranching households affiliated with the von Traupitzes, too, and experienced hunters. That Family had their main holding southeast of the Rol
fe domain in the Napa watershed, over the Vaca hills and out on the edge of settlement in the Suisun Valley, deeply rural even by her people’s standards; they and their Settlers raised a fifth of New Virginia’s wheat crop.

  “Jim, good to see you,” she said, shaking their hands. “Hi, Heinrich. How’s Caitlin, Cuz?”

  “Last time we talked, she said, ‘I’m feeling well, though enormous.’”

  Members of the Thirty in the same generation usually called each other Cuz—Cousin—but Caitlin was one in the literal sense, daughter of one of Adrienne’s paternal uncles. She’d always been fond of the girl in an elder-sister fashion, and Heinrich was a nice enough sort. For a von Traupitz.

  Unlike the older generation, she thought with slight distaste.

  Their founder had been a colonel—in Das Reich, a Waffen-SS division with an unsavory reputation, if that wasn’t redundant, and a nasty piece of work personally. The third generation were quite human, most of them. Of course, Heinrich’s mother had been an O’Brien.

  Heinrich smiled back; he was a black-haired man with amber-colored eyes and pale skin that glistened with sunblock.

  “I would like to be back for the birth; it’s our first, you know,” he went on. “I suspect my men wouldn’t turn down a cold beer at the Mermaid Café, either.”

  He looked over her shoulder. The Black Hawks were Commission property, usually used as air ambulances to bring in patients from outlying settlements. This one had been fitted out in “militarized” mode, with stub wings bearing a six-barreled Gatling minigun on the left side and rocket pods on the right.

  “Fancy carriage there, Cuz,” he said, raising an eyebrow. “Is there something I should know about, or is this the Old Man’s usual overkill?”

  “The ’copter is staying to take me back once we’ve got the cargo,” she replied, jerking her thumb over her shoulder. “It’s just what was available.”

  The pilot and his assistant were out, doing a maintenance check on the engines and weapons systems, something of which she heartily approved. Her years as a Gate Security agent had taught her that if you didn’t take care of equipment, it wouldn’t take care of you when you needed it. And while you might not need any particular item often, when you did you’d need it very badly.