Conquistador

by S. M. Stirling

  Tom, Roy and the silent Afrikaner came down from the little vehicle, and it scooted away. All of them had to pass through the scanner arch, and then put a palm on a plate and look into a fitted eyepiece; it was all familiar enough biometric ID machinery, retina scan, DNA print and fingerprint. It even had the Hitachi logo. The big Afrikaner walked off after exchanging polite good-byes with Adrienne, ignoring the two Americans as if they didn’t exist.

  I love you too, Piet, he thought.

  He steadied Tully; Roy still looked a little woozy, but he was coming to fast. A machine on a bench whirred and hummed, and extruded ID cards. The technician extended them between finger and thumb. Tom took his; it had his face, name, a number, and coded machine-readable data. At a guess, his data was burned into a file with some sort of read-only central databank; people had talked about that for years during the war, especially after the Charleston disaster, but the ACLU had always killed it. Evidently they thought differently here.

  “These are your probationary Settler’s ID cards,” the tech said, in a bored bureaucratic singsong. “It’s your driver’s license, your Social Security card, your debit and credit card, and all your other ID rolled into one. Don’t lose it. There’s a heavy fine for replacement. Carry it on your person at all times. There’s a heavy fine for not producing it when requested by a law-enforcement officer. Don’t try to tamper with it. That never works—the scanners check it against Nostradamus’ central files and your biometric data every time you use it—and it gets you five years at hard labor in the mines. Here is your wallet. It contains one hundred dollars in local currency; remember that prices here are much lower than on FirstSide. Here’s your brochure. Welcome to the Commonwealth of New Virginia, and may you have many productive years as law-abiding citizens.”

  “New Virginia?” Tom asked, stuffing the wallet and card into the pocket of his sweatpants.

  His voice was calm, but tension sent a slight sour taste into the back of his mouth as they went out into a corridor in institutional beige, with overhead fluorescent lights. Waiting rooms stretched off to either side, very much like an airport, and were full of people in overalls or business suits or family groups—those last looking very much like first-class passengers, and sitting in bubbles of social space. The surveillance cameras were airport-like too, except that no attempt had been made to disguise them.

  “Formally, the Commonwealth of New Virginia is what this country—the Pacific coast of North America and inland for a ways, plus Hawaii and a few other bits—is called,” Adrienne said. “Wait a minute and it’ll start to become clear.”

  She looked up at the cameras, checked her angles, and then winked at him, holding a finger to her lips in the shhhhh! gesture for a moment.

  He grunted and swung his head toward the men’s room sign. She nodded and leaned against the back of a row of chairs to wait, elegantly hipshot in the sleek black uniform.

  Tully paused to splash water on his face before joining him at the row of urinals. “So, looks like we’re in the hands of the Bad Guys, who rescued us from the Even Badder Guys?”

  “Looks like,” Tom said.

  Then he raised his eyes to the ceiling. Tully’s face changed; Tom felt a moment’s warm comfort. At least I have some backup. And Roy doesn’t need me to dot all the I’s; this place is probably sewn up tighter than the Gaza Strip.

  Adrienne was similarly quiet when they returned. They swung through a pair of automatic doors, and out into a sidewalk fronting on a road; he was reminded again of a medium-sized airport. It was evening, the sun sinking toward the west; big rectangular sheet-metal buildings painted green stretched off to the right; ahead of them was a parking lot, with many SUVs and four-by-fours; to the left was some rather nice landscaping, flower beds and trees, including a couple of fine valley oaks, a two-lane blacktop road, and then—

  He choked, gasping for breath; knowing was one thing, seeing another. Adrienne supported him with a hand under his left arm, guiding him to lean against a six-foot ceramic planter full of impatiens. Tully was staring and whistling. Tom shook his head, conscious that his mouth was hanging open, something that he’d always thought was a figure of speech before, and not caring a damn. Beyond the road and stretching northward and west was classic California lowland savanna, more big oaks and tall grass turning from green to gold, starred with yellow poppies and blue lupine and camas lily. Beyond that…… was San Francisco Bay, with the sun casting a glittering path across the azure surface. Only there was no San Francisco; the day was brilliantly clear, some low whitecaps on water intensely indigo, and he could see the outlines of the peninsula past Alameda—which had a small airport where the Naval Air Station had been once, and was otherwise bare of human works.

  Yah. It’s just West Oakland, if you subtract the city, and all the landfill on the shore. Subtract the—

  A little farther up the coast long piers had been built out into the bay, with fishing trawlers and a couple of smallish wooden ships tied up next to them; cranes swung cargo nets ashore to a clutch of sheds and warehouses, and trucks carried cargo out onto the highway.

  Across the water there were no buildings on the hills where San Francisco should be, only a town along the waterfront. No East Bay bridges either, no Golden Gate, and Alcatraz was white with seabird droppings and swarming with the pelicans that had given it its name. The ships on the water were fewer by an order of magnitude, and small—schooners, a couple of them six-masters, barges and tugs, a clutch of sailboats and some fishing boats under a white-winged storm of gulls. He looked up and saw strings of pelicans and cormorants, golden eagles, and—he counted frantically—half a dozen condors. The sky was alive with wings, and it wasn’t even the season for migratory birds. Out on the bay a whale spouted, then submerged in a smooth black curve. Sea lions hauled themselves out along the shores of Alameda, and he could just make out a sea otter on the nearby shore.

  I’m where that video was taken. It’s as if I’m standing in Oakland before Columbus, he thought. But it can’t be. And there are paved roads and Ford SUVs and Hummers and a great big building with a Gate in it, and that little port and—

  His vision faded. He felt something pushed between his lips and sucked reflexively; it was brandy, potent and smooth, in a silver flask. That brought on a fit of coughing, blessed pain that called his spirit back into his body. Tully was hovering nearby with a frown of concern on his face; evidently the smaller man was more mentally flexible.

  “Takes a lot of FirstSiders hard the first time,” Adrienne said. “And yes, it’s exactly what it looks like, only it’s not the same San Francisco Bay you grew up with. Different… time line. A different history, two different universes existing in the same space and joined only by the Gate. You know the concept?”

  “Yeah,” he said hoarsely. “Yeah, you know I read science fiction. You saw my research on you. What the hell… ?”

  “Showing is faster than telling, but it’s stressful,” she said. “You feeling better?”

  “Yeah. Thanks a lot.”

  She chuckled. “Why do I hear a lack of enthusiasm? But come on; I’ll buy you two dinner and fill you in. It’s the least I can do, after getting you into this mess.”

  They passed over into the parking lot; it was unbearably prosaic to slide into the front passenger seat of a Hummer and pull out onto the road, heading northward and tending away from the water. His head tried to swivel all possible ways at once; he felt a little undignified, but it was a whole new world—literally.

  After a few hundred yards, Adrienne pulled the Humvee over to the graveled side of the road. Tom waited, distantly noting the incredible, intense freshness of the air, even with the mudflat smell that came fairly strong now and then. She took a small black box out of her jacket and went over the vehicle and all three of the humans in it, before shrugging.

  “OK, that’s about as secure as I can get, this side of the Sierras. Now we can talk.”

  “Someone listening in?” Tully asked.
“Mind if I have a swig of whatever it was, by the way?”

  Adrienne raised an eyebrow, but handed over her flask. “It’s Seven Oaks brandy—from my own land,” she said. “And as to listening… I think that Nostradamus has been compromised.”

  “Nostradamus?” Tom said.

  “Formally, the Commonwealth Information and Communications System,” she said. “Nobody calls it anything but Nostradamus except in official documents.”

  Tully handed back the silver flask. “Pretty good brandy, by the way. Sort of cognac style, hey? And Nostradamus is your Internet?”

  She nodded. “Sort of cognac; Ugni Blanc grapes, at least, and the same style of distilling; this batch was laid down when I was six. Nostradamus is… Imagine…” She paused for thought.

  “… imagine that the U.S. government ruled the whole civilized world, that it owned AOL, and AOL was the whole Internet, everywhere. That it owned and operated every ISP, and there was only one type of modem and one set of software for it, and the super-AOL owned all the cables and servers and the whole communications industry and the telephone net and all the TV stations and on-line databanks and the public library as well. It’s an intranet, a closed system. No computer-to-computer contact outside it at all, unless you use floppies, and those can be read anytime you upload to a computer in touch with the system. And you have to use your ID card and get a scan anytime you log on, even from a public terminal.”

  Tully snapped his fingers. “Hey! Al Stewart! It’s named after the song, right?” He hummed, and then sang in a half chant:

  Mortal man, your time is sand—Your years are leaves upon the sea I am the eyes of Nostradamus—All your ways are known to me!

  “Yes, that one was popular about the time the system was first put together,” she said, and nodded with a tinge of surprised respect. “It’s been updated frequently since—all high-broadband fiber now.”

  She turned to Tom and looked him in the eye: “All right; Bosco was the man behind that endangered-animal smuggling. He couldn’t have been doing it for the money; that doesn’t really make sense. And somebody got to Schalk—thanks, by the way—and if I wasn’t the nasty suspicious sort who never tells anyone anything until they need to know, he’d have screwed my investigation worse than he undoubtedly did. Schalk was willing to court almost certain death to shut Bosco up when it looked like he’d talk. You were a police officer—”

  “Am,” Tom corrected.

  She shrugged. “All right, are a police officer. What does that suggest to you?”

  “What would Bosco have gotten if he confessed? In the way of punishment.” Because if you burn ’em alive, it would be perfectly natural. And how do I know you don’t burn people alive here? “He put up a lot of resistance, as if the stakes were extremely high.”

  “Punishment for smuggling? As long as there wasn’t any question of revealing the Gate secret… ten or fifteen years ‘assisting in the dynamic growth of the mining industry so important to our beloved Commonwealth.’”

  “Sent to the mines, hey?” Tom said. “I presume that isn’t a death sentence?”

  “Of course not. Gray jumpsuit, monotonous but adequate diet, hard bunk, hard work, unsympathetic guards. Maybe half that time, if the Prime of his Family was willing to pay heavily and twist arms for him. He might get a trusty’s job in a year or two; after all, he was one of the Thirty Families. A pretty poor specimen of the breed, but the principle counts. Do you think he was just unable to bear the thought of a few years turning ore into ingots?”

  Tom thought, then shook his head. “Hell no. He was hiding something big, very big. Something that would have gotten him killed if he confessed. Something that did get him killed because it just looked like he might confess.”

  Adrienne’s lips skinned back in a notional smile. “Yes. I think he was a small part of a very big conspiracy; a conspiracy against the Gate Control Commission and the Gate secret. One of which Schalk was a tool.”

  The big man nodded again. “Now,” he said coldly, crossing his arms, “tell me why we should care.”

  For a moment she looked shocked, then shook her head. “All right, it’s natural you should still be thinking like FirstSiders. Reasons? Three reasons you should care.”

  She held up three fingers, and turned them down one by one: “First, Bosco was a collateral… sort of a fictive-kinship thing… of the Collettas. If the Colletta Prime, the head of the Family, is involved in this… well, the Collettas have long memories, and they carry grudges. You were partly responsible for their boy’s death. If they were to take over here, your lives wouldn’t be worth squat. Second, even if they were willing to let you live, you’d still have to live here after they took over, and I doubt you’d like it—you’ll know what I mean when you’ve seen more of how things work here.”

  “And third?” Tom said, expressionless.

  “Third, if the conspiracy takes over, think about who they were operating with back on FirstSide, and how. The Commission—which we Rolfes and our friends run, more or less—believes in leaving a minimal footprint back there and limited expansion here; that’s why our faction is called the Conservatives. The Collettas are more ambitious…. Oh, hell, it’s complicated, sixty years of politics. The Collettas are the head of the Imperialist party here. They want to conquer this world, more or less, and rule all the natives as slaves, more or less. They don’t put it quite that way, and don’t mention that they’d also like to be kings, emperors, themselves. They’re buddy-buddy with the Batyushkovs, who I think still have political ambitions back FirstSide, not just here, ambitions in Russia. Think about the sort of mayhem someone in control of the Gate’s resources and the Commission’s wealth could create here and back FirstSide, if they got their hands on it.”

  Tom exchanged a glance with his partner. They both nodded slightly, and he replied, “We don’t have enough information to decide on that… Ms. Rolfe.”

  He thought she winced slightly, but she went on coolly enough: “That’s fair. Look, if you want me to do it, I’ll just drop you off in Rolfeston. That hundred dollars you each got will keep you for a month, two if you’re very careful, and there’s plenty of work here for men with your skills. Or, you can let me show you around, and try to convince you that you should help me.”

  “Why do you need help, if you’re in the all-powerful Gate Security?” Tom asked.

  Adrienne laughed bitterly. “Oh, if only you knew! I can just imagine going over to Colletta Hall”—she pointed in the direction of what should be San Jose—“and waving my little pistol at Giovanni Colletta and telling him he’s under arrest. For that matter, if Bosco had been caught here in the Commonwealth… Let’s say this isn’t the most centralized country in human history. And I’ve got to assume that Gate Security is compromised as well, after what happened with Schalk; there are Collettas and Batyushkovs and their affiliates all through it, of course. I need some help I can trust.”

  He looked at her. She flushed, but continued to meet his eyes.

  “This is my country, and I’ll do whatever it takes to protect it,” she said. “Including kill, lie and deceive. You never have?”

  Tom nodded in grudging acknowledgment. “I’m an American,” he said. “And I’ll do all that for my country. Possibly we can work together.”

  “Possibly,” Tully said. “Depends on how much of what you’re telling is the truth, and how we assemble the facts once we know ’em.”

  “Fair enough,” she said.

  Then she smiled, and despite himself he felt his lips curve up in response. “First, I get to show you my home country.”

  Tom straightened up and looked around. Anew, the knowledge that he was really here struck him.

  “Dodos?” he murmured. “And tigers and bears, oh my!” Christ, the things we could see here! he thought. Tully gave a sudden strangled whoop; the same thought must have struck him.

  “Dodos? Only in the zoo, this side of Mauritius,” she replied, chuckling. “They swarm like ver
min there. As for the tigers and bears, the hills here are lousy with ’em.”

  “It’s not far to Rolfeston, which is roughly where the People’s Republic of Berkeley is located FirstSide, “ she said. ”hich is a deep irony, once you know Rolfeston a little.”

  They stopped for another checkpoint a thousand yards from the Gate complex parking lot; this one had those perforated plates that hid tire-ripping spikes ready to spring up at the push of a button, and two more strongpoints on either side of the road. This time the weapons peering out of the slits included 25mm chain guns, and guided antitank rockets mounted on a rotating cupola on the roof. Another of the black-uniformed soldiers in high-tech gear brought out a mobile reader to scan Adrienne’s fingerprints and retinas, and those of her passengers.

  “GSF,” Adrienne said as they accelerated again. “Gate Security Force—reports directly to the Commission. The next layer of security is militia. Right around here is farming country, except for the Gate complex—we keep that closely guarded, as you can imagine. Minefields, dogs, electrified wire, and robot guns included, by the way, so don’t get any funny ideas about sneaking back FirstSide and calling in the marines. This isn’t the United States. Our guard details don’t have lawyers paralyzing their trigger fingers. They spot you off the road within the prohibited area, they kill you dead and investigate later.”

  He nodded; there were still more pillboxes at strategic points, sensor towers, a six-wheeled armored car mounting a 40mm automatic cannon in its turret, and more troops—these in gray uniforms, and equipped with what looked like M-14s but weren’t. Occasional aircraft went by overhead, including a big blimp and a tilt-rotor, but one of them was a Black Hawk helicopter with door gunners, flying a patrol pattern.

  The vacant countryside around the Gate complex was tawny-green grass and bush studded with enormous live oaks with their characteristic thick, gnarled limbs like the hands of arthritic giants. They passed cars and trucks headed both ways on the north-south bayside road, none very large, but the air held virtually nothing of the hydrocarbon stink you’d get in this area on…