FirstSide, he thought. Get used to the terminology.
Beyond the checkpoints the land was wild, like something out of an old book about the California lowlands, grassland and trees shading into a fringe of bird-swarming salt marsh; he saw a herd of small tule elk trotting off as the Hummer went by. Some of the valley oaks were over a hundred feet high and stretched out to shade circles nearly twice that diameter.
“What, no bears and wolves?” he said feebly.
Adrienne waved a hand toward the blue-and-green line of the Oakland-Berkeley hills that fringed the plain to their right.
“Plenty up there, and mountain lions. We don’t let ’em too close to town, of course.”
He twisted around. Tully had found a pair of binoculars kept cased in a holder attached to the back of the driver’s seat. Tom grabbed them, seeking detail, but the landscape was too alien and too large. He did see the waters of Lake Merritt behind them, and beyond that a glimpse of a house that must be huge to show at this distance. Farming country filled the coastal flats beyond that, a softly colored checkerboard of fields rimmed with the tall shapes of poplars and cypress.
“Why’s all this land here empty?” he asked.
“Partly parks, partly reserve for the expansion of Rolfeston… and we’re here.”
The town had a perfectly ordinary sign: ROLFESTON, POP: 29,855. It started more abruptly than a typical American settlement of its size, though, without the untidy fringe of derelict land awaiting development. There was a modest-sized industrial park of low-slung buildings on both sides of the road. Plantings and trees hid most of the factory-warehouse-whatevers; he could see that many were tile-roofed and stuccoed in various pastel colors, although others had sawtooth skylights and tangles of piping. A line of power cables looped in from the hills to the east on tall wooden poles that looked like whole Douglas fir trunks, before descending to a transformer station; the distribution lines must be underground, and the phone lines if there were any. Trucks pulled in or out, and buses, and lines of workers on foot or on bicycles or Segways: Evidently people were knocking off for the day.
Adrienne swung the Hummer into a parking lot, edged by more green-belt—this laid out as a park separating the workshops from the residential part of the town. It had the flamboyant loveliness you could get in lowland California with plenty of water: rhododendrons, tree-roses, hollyhocks and gardenias and sheets of lavender Chinese ground-lilies in shady spots. Plus copses of trees, pools, fountains surrounded by tiled plazas, streams, a bandstand, benches and brick walks, street lamps on ornate cast-iron stands. A row of bicycles stood at the junction of asphalt and greenery, and Segways—two-wheeled platforms with a vertical handle and crossbar arrangement. A sign over the rack prompted users to remember to plug in the recharger when they dropped one off.
“These’re free?” Tom said.
“Municipal service, like the bikes and the buses,” Adrienne said.
“I remember a couple of places tried that with bicycles,” Tully said. “Seattle, or somewhere else up in the Pacific Northwest. Didn’t work. Somebody always ripped ’em off.”
Adrienne waved around them. “Petty crime isn’t really practical here. For a bunch of reasons, startin’ with the fact that there’s nowhere to run and nowhere to hide, unless you want to go renegade and live up in the hills with the bears.”
Tom shrugged; there must be some way to beat the system here; he could think of several, offhand. It would have to be small-scale, though. Shock was receding, and his mind was starting to function clearly again. The Gate was the key to New Virginia; whoever held it had the place in a vise that needn’t even be very obvious elsewhere.
They stepped onto the little two-wheeled platforms; he hadn’t used one in a while, and that only as a curiosity, but the gyro-sensor computer system made operation instinctive, and you couldn’t fall off. They took off at a little better than a fast walk. There were a fair number of people about, getting out of work or school; his eyes sharpened as he took in the passersby and the scene. It had the same old-fashioned look as the farmland, with an overtone of Leave It to Beaver and the Partridge Family.
Asians were rare enough to be conspicuous; there were no blacks, no obvious Hispanics. There were a fair number of young men and women who looked like Mexican or Guatemalan Indians, unmistakable with their brown skin and Amerindian features, dressed in baggy white pants and shirts, or blouses and skirts, and sandals—and only adults, he realized; no children of that race, or old people; most in their late teens or early twenties, a few as old as Tom himself.
Their body language and gestures were wholly alien, and he overheard snatches of languages that weren’t Spanish, or anything he recognized, full of hissing, guttural sounds—his mind heard them as impossible combinations of letters, tz and zl and rr.
Hmmm. Can’t place them, but otherwise it looks a little like a crowd back in North Dakota, he thought. Then: A crowd in Fargo a long time ago.
He studied the rest of the townspeople. Half the men in the crowd sported hats, and most of the adult women wore skirts, with only a few in slacks or jeans; there wasn’t a single tattoo or body piercing to be seen on the numerous teenagers, many of them in uniforms that looked like they were modeled on a Catholic school’s.
Hell of a lot of teenagers, too… wait a minute…
There were a lot of baby carriages and toddlers and kids running and playing with barking dogs, too, enough to make him look twice and deliberately count.
Adrienne saw the direction of his glance. “The baby boom never stopped, here; it always hits me when I go back FirstSide, how few children there are. Our average family is about four kids—I’ve got four older brothers and a sister myself, and twelve nieces and nephews with more on the way—and the average age of the population is twenty-five years younger than FirstSide America.”
“No kids yourself?” he asked. You said not, but God knows you told me enough howlers… though I remember how odd a family that size seemed….
She laughed and shook her head. “Oh, I’m a freak of nature—ask anyone.”
They wheeled on through a pleasant residential district of winding streets and single-family homes set in modest-sized lawns and very pretty gardens; most of the houses were built in a Mediterranean Revival style that reminded him of Santa Barbara. American elms arched over the streets and brick sidewalks, looking to have been planted about the time he was being born back in 1976; obviously they hadn’t let Dutch elm disease through the Gate. Vehicular traffic was light, mainly small hybrid gas-electric runabouts and a fair smattering of silent fuel-cell buses, but with swarms of bicycles as well, plenty of Segways, and the odd horse-cart. The houses were medium-sized, all single-story; some of the older ones looked like they were made of adobe, many others of plastered brick; there were no frame homes, and all the roofs were tile.
The intersections often had a clutch of shops—none with familiar chain names, none large, but selling ordinary groceries and hardware, computers and personal electronics. There were small parks and churches every now and then—mostly Episcopal, he noted, with a scattering of Baptist and Methodist and Catholic, a Lutheran, a few onion-domed Orthodox and a couple of synagogues; and a fairly big school, two stories, set amid a couple of acres of garden and trees, built in California-Spanish style with its walls overgrown with climbing rose.
“This is the blue-collar section of town, more or less,” Adrienne said. She waved to her right, toward the blue-and-gold patchwork of forest and grassland on the hills. “Then there’s the town hall and the public buildings, and the main business district, and then more expensive housing, well-to-do Settlers, and the town houses of the Families. The steep part’s all Commission reserve, parkland.”
They went past a giant farmer’s market, stalls and stands under a huge truss-timbered roof and enormous redwood pillars stretching upward like the legs of dinosaurs. A cleared laneway wide enough for delivery trucks cut through it lengthwise; she led them into that, slowin
g down to walking speed perforce among the crush of pedestrians and handcarts.
Well, that’s a switch, Tom thought. A farmer’s market where most of the people selling things look like actual farmers.
Which was a change from FirstSide’s California. That wasn’t the only difference, either; the fruits and vegetables and flowers were in the expected gorgeous Californian abundance, but there were live chickens and other poultry in cages, and rows of butcher’s stalls like a carnivore’s dream, with stout pink-faced men and women in white aprons and square hats beside glass-fronted compartments holding piles of steaks, chops, roasts, garlic-smelling sausages, pâtés and terrines, whole elk and deer and bison carcasses—
“For some reason, most of our butchers are Balts and Germans,” Adrienne said. “We got a bunch of ’em in the forties and the businesses stayed in the same families. Most businesses do, here.”
The fish section opened his eyes and made him lean back unconsciously, bringing the Segway to a slower pace. It was a pungent mass of vats and piles of shaved ice topped with sixty-pound yellowtails and huge albacores, barrels of writhing crabs the size of dinner plates, mounds of three-inch prawns, rock lobsters, abalone by the gross, oysters bigger than his fist, ling and flounder, cauldrons of shrimp…. Knives flashed and paper-wrapped parcels were handed out to shoppers; the prices looked absurdly low.
“Wait a minute,” Tully said shrewdly. “What’s a day’s pay here? Entry-level, grunt work.”
“Two dollars and all found,” she said. “Three-fifty if you’re finding your own eats and bunk. That’s for a day laborer, a deckhand on a fishing boat, that sort of thing. The deckhand might get paid in a share of the profits plus fish.”
Nickel a pound for filet mignon and three cents for shrimp still sounds pretty cheap, Tom thought.
“Where’s the catch?” he said aloud. “Taxes? Housing?”
“You can get a two-bedroom house around here for two thousand,” she replied. “And taxes are low; mostly local school taxes, that sort of thing. No more than a tenth of your income, less for the bottom of the pyramid.”
“Where’s the catch?” he asked again.
She grinned. “Tom, the Families own the Gate. Also the gold mines, the silver mines, the power company, the oil wells down in Long Beach, the refinery, the public utilities, a lot of the factories, and pretty well all the land. Taxes? We don’t need no steeenkin’ taxes!”
Tully snorted. “There’s got to be a catch somewhere.”
“Well, food and housing are cheap,” she said. “So are clothes and shoes—most things made here in the Commonwealth are low-cost—except gas, which is kept expensive deliberately, ten cents a gallon. Stuff from FirstSide can get pricey, especially if it’s big and bulky. Cars are a luxury—ordinary people in Rolfeston usually rent one if they want to get out of town, and use public transport or bicycles inside. The Old Man—ah, my grandfather, John Rolfe the Sixth—doesn’t like sprawl. A town should be a town, and the country should be the countryside, he says.”
“Not an obvious horror show, I’ll admit,” Tom said.
Be honest, he told himself. It actually looks pretty good. But I’m seeing what she wants me to see, so far. Remember what happened to those poor dopes the Russians used to show around, back during the Cold War. A lot of them came back singing hosannas.
“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:
CHANTAL’S.
FINE PROVENCAL AND FRENCH CUISINE SINCE 1961.
SE SIAN PAS ME—SIEGUEN PAS MEN
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.”
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