“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.”
“Ah,” Tom nodded. So there is an element here against its will. That has possibilities.
She paused. “I don’t want to tell you any more lies, Tom. You two are Involuntary Settlers. That means you can do anything here… except go near the Gate. That will never be allowed, ever, under any circumstances whatsoever; and trying means dying. It wouldn’t matter if you had the Old Man himself as a hostage; they’d shoot you both down. Ordinary Settlers only get near it if they’re on official business, like Piet. Members of the Thirty Families can visit FirstSide, but they need clearance—and if they endanger the Gate secret, the Commission sends someone like me after them and they never, ever do it again.
“But all that’s rare,” she went on more cheerfully. “Not many stumble on the secret anymore.”
Tully broke in: “OK, if this was a California, an America, that didn’t get discovered by Europeans… what happened to the California Indians? I suppose they were the people we saw on the way, the ones in the Viva Zapata campesino costumes?
Adrienne pursed her lips and examined the play of light on her wineglass as she turned it between long slender fingers.
“No, those are the nahua.”
“Nahua… nahuatl, the Aztec language? Mexicans?” Tom said.
She nodded. “Gastar
beiter. Contract workers, braceros, mostly from Mexico; we call them nahua from the main language down there. About a third of the population, half the labor force.”
“What about them?” Tom asked. “I can’t see your Old Man welcoming them with open arms. Or is this more like the Old South than you were letting on? Contented darkies… brownies… singing in the quarters, stealing chickens and eating watermelon?”
Adrienne grinned. “Now, give credit where it’s due. The Old Man could have done just that, bought slaves to do the dirty work here, you know. The warlords and priest-kings down Mexico way would have sold us any number. They’ll do anything for steel tools and muskets, not to mention brandy and aspirin and plastic beads. They have swarms of slaves of their own, and given the national obsession with chopping out hearts, those are the lucky ones. Lots of wars.”
She frowned, obviously thinking hard. “As I said, the Old Man likes to learn from other people’s mistakes—says it’s less costly than making your own. So we recruit on five-year contracts, and in limited numbers—there are fifteen or twenty applicants for every slot. They don’t settle here—the wages are enormous by their standards, and they go back with nest eggs and a lot of new skills. We’ve had sons of princes volunteer to dig ditches.”
“Oh, sure, and none of them stay on regardless—and what about their kids?”
“Norplant for all the female new arrivals,” Adrienne said. “Or more modern long-term contraceptive implants. And this isn’t FirstSide, Tom. Remember Nostradamus and those ID cards you got issued? It’s impossible to live here without valid ID, not for more than a couple of weeks. Unless you want a long-term career in the borax mines of the Mojave.”
“They’re all happy to go back to Aztec land, when they’ve had five years of flush toilets and modern medicine?” Tom asked skeptically.
“Oh, any who want to stay after their contracts expire can, on certain conditions.”
“Conditions?”
“Well, only one major condition. An injection of P-63.”
Ouch, Tom thought.
That was an immunosterilizant the Chinese had developed back around the turn of the century. It made the body’s immune system sensitive to some of the proteins on the surface of sperm, programming it to treat them as foreign tissue. It was quite popular back on the other side of the Gate because it didn’t have any other symptoms; in fact it mimicked a common natural cause of infertility that had been a complete mystery until the 1990s.
By God, her grandpa certainly does think ahead. I suppose they used tube-tying and vasectomies before that.
Back home, the Germans and French and a lot of other Europeans had found that “guest workers” tended to become very long-term guests, and a lot of them weren’t at all happy with it. Old Man Rolfe seemed to have found a way to have a foreign underclass that was guaranteed not to start families or become a permanent part of the social landscape—without even provoking mass discontent, since they were all volunteers. In fact, the more he thought about it, the more diabolically clever it was.
Because there’s no new generation raised here, none of the nahua will ever really understand how Westerners think, and none of them will ever really learn our way of looking at things—or read Jefferson, or Marx—and they’ll never have the second-generation immigrant’s hopes for full equality, or their frustrations. They’re all perpetually fresh off the boat.
He gave a slight mental wince. The “Old Man” seems a lot more interested in getting the result he wants than in the “how” part, though. Christ, but that man must give new shadings to the word “ruthless.”
He and Tully exchanged a quick glance, and the smaller man nodded. When he spoke, it was to Adrienne: “What happened to the real natives, though? Plenty of them, if I remember the history.”
“Nobody was counting, but the Old Man recorded in his journal that he was surprised at how dense the population was, even though the California natives weren’t farmers. Most estimates of precontact Indian populations back in his day were way too low, of course.”
She sighed and went on after a moment’s pause: “What happened to them? Well, influenza in 1946. That took off about half of them, we think; Uncle Andy—Andy O’Brien, one of the founders—was coming down with it on his first visit and it spread like fire in dry grass; the Ohlone, the local tribe, treated the sick by putting them in the village sweathouse and everyone crowded in with them to keep them company. Then when it got bad, the survivors of each little band ran off to the neighbors, and then they ran to their neighbors, and so on. Like dropping a stone into a pond, with the ripples bouncing back and forth from the Pacific to the Atlantic.”
“Ouch,” Tom said, and added to himself: Again. “Didn’t it occur—”
Adrienne poured herself more coffee. “Why should it have occurred to anyone? The Old Man was a soldier—and in 1946, historical epidemiology was something most historians didn’t know much about. I was a history student, at the University of New Virginia and then at Stanford. The first serious research wasn’t until the sixties, seventies—Plagues and Peoples, Ecological Imperialism, the groundbreakers. Until then most people, most historians, just assumed a pre-Columbian population too small by a factor of ten or fifteen.”
Tully cocked his head. “Bet that flu epidemic wasn’t the last one, either. With the Gate setup, you’d get a unified disease environment on both sides, unless you used air locks and a whole lot of other stuff, including a long quarantine period. That decontamination procedure you put us through wouldn’t catch everything.”
She nodded. “In 1947, some Latvian refugees recruited as Settlers brought over viral hepatitis and typhus both. They got flown in and shoved through the Gate quick to avoid trouble about visas.”
“Ouch.” Tom winced.
“They threw out the clothes of the sick; some of the local Indians picked them up, and there were lice in the seams—amazing how hard it is to kill all the nits—and all of them had lice…. Then measles, mumps, polio, chicken pox from FirstSide; and smallpox from our Selang-Arsi trading partners in the sixties; and influenza every couple of years. Virgin-field epidemics. Plus some of the Asian kingdoms have taken to trading across the Pacific on their own—they’re very quick to imitate things they can understand and apply, like better sailing ships—so smallpox and the other big killers hit again and again.”
“Jesus Christ,” Tom whispered; the meal turned into a rancid lump under his ribs. “At least they’ll be building up immunities.”
“’Fraid not,” Adrienne said. “Or not much. There are a couple of hundred million people in East Asia on this side of the Gate. Some of the Selang-Arsi and Dahaean cities like Changdan or Hagamantash have hundreds of thousands each, enough to keep the big killer plagues going as standard childhood diseases. But even Mexico and Peru don’t have that sort of density here, not anymore they don’t. The plagues burn themselves out and vanish, and a while goes by before another ship happens to have an infectious crewman. The next generation grows up without being exposed, so they’re just as vulnerable as their parents were, and the next plague hits just as hard. When that happens three times with something like hemorrhagic smallpox or pneumonic plague or chicken pox… well, there’s not much left. The few who don’t die of the fever are likely to starve or go mad. Then there are chronics like syphilis and gonorrhea. They spread widely and reduce fertility. We did manage to keep AIDS from getting through the Gate though, thank God.”
“So you don’t have to fight for the territory,” Tully said thoughtfully.
“Not much, usually. We just move into vacant land, or give the survivors some horses and beads and knives, and point them east. Sometimes a little skirmishing.”
Tom made a choked sound. “That’s… pretty ghastly,” he said.
She snorted, but he thought there was a slightly defensive note in her voice as she continued.
“Exactly the same thing happened after Columbus on FirstSide, Tom. Ninety percent die-off within a hundred years
. Here, it’s been about the same in sixty-two, because we have much better transport and maps.”
“Moving in on their territory before they could recover, though…” Her shrug was expressive. “Oh, don’t be a hypocrite, Tom. What do you think happened with the Sioux in North Dakota, when your great-grandparents arrived from Norway all eager to sink a plow in the sod? I’ll tell you what didn’t happen.”
She placed her palms together in an attitude of prayer, rolled her eyes skyward and intoned in a voice dripping with mock compassion: “‘Oh, look at these poor Norski immigrants,’ said the noble, selfless Lakota. ‘Let us spontaneously give them the rich prairies swarming with game on which we currently dwell, and then we’ll move west to the dry badlands of our own free will so our descendants can enjoy malnutrition, TB, diabetes, despair and alcoholism on a miserable reservation for the next hundred and fifty years.’”
After a pause: “Not.”
“Well, granted,” Tom said, flushing. “But that was a long time ago—”
“This is 2009. Nineteen forty-six is a long time ago. Why should I get upset over what happened before I was born any more than you do, just because it was three rather than six generations before? Sooner or later someone from Asia or Africa or Europe was going to learn how to sail here, and then it would have happened anyway. For all the breast-beating idiots back FirstSide, I don’t see anyone packing up to leave the continent to the Indians. What nation isn’t built on someone else’s bones? That’s how human beings operate.”
“I suppose it could have been worse,” he said. To himself: That’s even true. Though it’s not saying much.
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