Conquistador

by S. M. Stirling

  “Nineteen-thirties WPA style,” he said, attracting an odd look from a woman passing by. “New Deal Socialist Realism.”

  He whistled cheerfully and cracked his knuckles. There was more of the same inside the big building at the rear—evidently known as Commission House—murals in paint and mosaic; the public areas were open, though nearly deserted. There were also a couple of exhibitions set up in the big lobby, with pictures and artifacts, evidently for visiting school classes and Scout troops and suchlike.

  Hmmm, he thought, scanning one such, “The Heroes Who Built Our Country.” Must be interesting, the records of a country founded after people had cameras and the habit of recording everything possible. The faces glared out at him, grim, stiffly self-conscious, with an archaic toughness.

  Apparently Mr. John Rolfe had brought a camera with him starting with his second trip, and plenty of others had followed suit. Besides the group photos, there were shots of Indian rancherías, dome-shaped reed huts, and of dancers in costume. More of boats and horses and construction machinery; pictures of gold operations in the Mother Lode country, starting with washing pans and working up through diesel-powered rockers and dredgers to hard-rock mining.

  One wing of the government building was a library-cum-archive, all pale wood and flooded with light from tall windows; there was an excellent digital filing system as well as a librarian, and he collected a round dozen introductory texts—mostly those aimed at the junior-high level in history and civics; the science was imported from FirstSide. He read partly for the information, and partly for information on how information was presented to kids; that would be a pretty good way to find the official line. He somehow doubted that an academic Mafia would be able to take over the textbook market here and cock its snoot at the powers that were.

  OK, the Founders were heroic adventurers, he thought, leafing through A History of New Virginia. Don’t make much of a muchness about taking this place over. “Freebooter” and “buccaneer” are complimentary terms, here.

  That was no surprise: He didn’t think conquering pirates would have a self-esteem problem. The book made a lot of comparisons to the founding of the original thirteen colonies, to early Texas and to the Bear Flag Revolt in California. The tone was completely different from recent history books back FirstSide: self-confident arrogant swagger versus agonized sensitivity. Tully grinned, imagining the authors of this one meeting the people who’d written the books he’d studied in high school, back in the late eighties. Cries of “wimp” and “wussy-boy” would meet anguished howls of “Chauvinist! Imperialist!” with a good deal of truth on both sides.

  Then he dove back into the narrative. The Indians got a few cursory paragraphs; they were backward and unprogressive, at best picturesque though doomed, and they all died when the newcomers sneezed on them. It wasn’t actually stated, but the implication was strong that this was just what they deserved, mainly for being no-account losers who couldn’t even develop basics of civilization like farming or a working machine gun. Those who resisted the New Virginians’ turfing the few plague survivors out of their homes were wretched, treacherous, vicious savages.

  Yup, I guessed right, he thought. Injuns still the Bad Guys here.

  That was no surprise either. Usually you didn’t start beating your breast and feeling guilty about overrunning someone and taking their stuff until they’d been reduced from “threat” to “pathetic remnant,” the way Australian aborigines had FirstSide. His collection of old movies had let him see the process in American popular culture, with Indians going from a faceless mob of scalping, raping, torturing two-legged wolves in Drums along the Mohawk to noble natural-ecologist victims of the Bad White Man in Dances with German Shepherds.

  For that matter, the same thing had happened to public perception of wolves, and for about the same reasons—it was a lot easier to love thoroughly disarmed Indians who didn’t have anything left worth stealing except casino receipts, and a lot easier to coo about wolves when you weren’t trying to raise sheep next to them.

  Speaking of Bad Guys, let’s see what the party line is on us FirstSiders….

  FirstSide was evidently a sink of degeneracy and crime, where all the “wrong people” had taken over; plenty of pictures of slums, riots, shots of LA freeways at rush hour, New York and Tokyo subways, terrorist attacks during the war, eroded hillsides, industrial wastelands, mosh pits, homeless addicts slumped against Dumpsters, AIDS victims in Africa, RuPaul, Marilyn Manson wanna-bes and chemical waste dumps. A hell on Earth, from which the heroic Founding Families had led the chosen seed into the wilderness to build a New Jerusalem, and incidentally get rich and make themselves overlords.

  From this, you’d think FirstSide was All Blade Runner, All the Time, he thought, with an amused chuckle. Of course, to someone raised here, it might really look that way.

  “And let’s check on that, shall we?” he said, stacking the books and dropping them in the return carousel. “Now I’ve seen things from the top down, let’s go look at things from the bottom up and see what the sweaty masses think.”

  Whistling, he strolled out past the impressive rotunda, down the marble steps, and across the square.

  He walked past the churches, where the morning service was over and people were milling around, strolling, chewing the fat and dishing the dirt and admiring one another’s infants, and vendors were selling ice cream from little push-pedal carts.

  “Pistachio and cherry, two scoops in a bowl,” he said—he’d always hated the way cones dripped on your hand.

  Then he paid, raising his brows and thinking, My, my, a place where pennies are actually some use.

  It was a nice day for strolling, and the ice cream was good; the last of the fog was gone save for some wisps over where San Francisco wasn’t; it was sunny and bright and the temperature was up to the mid-seventies, about as high as the East Bay got unless there was a heat wave. The long street that stretched down to the water was named Longstreet; evidently John Rolfe had a sense of humor, as well as a Civil War fixation. It was mostly commercial two-story buildings of whitewash and tile, mostly open-plan, varied with an occasional small park. He walked along under the shade trees, and conscientiously dropped his empty cardboard ice-cream dish into a trash container, along with the little wooden spoon. That was a datum too.

  “No plastics,” he muttered. “Not where anything else will do.”

  He kept going until he was west of the big produce market they’d come through on Friday, then turned south. That was the area closest to the docks and the factories, and as he’d expected, it didn’t have quite the burnished look the rest of the town did; not a slum by any means, or even really rundown, but the houses were smaller and older and all made of adobe, looking much alike. He estimated they’d be about fifteen hundred square feet each, with a small open front yard and fences out back, set on a plain gridiron of streets; the arch of tall shade trees over the pavement was still agreeable, though. Men in undershirts and women in print dresses sat on their verandas, drinking lemonade or beer or sodas and smoking; children and dogs ran around playing; music blared now and then from open windows, or the sound of TVs. He dodged a young man on a bicycle, wobbling along with a girl sitting on the handlebars; others were shooting hoops, mostly fastened to roadside trees. Now and then he smelled a barbecue grill in operation.

  Hmmm. Biggest difference is there aren’t any garages, he thought. There were some cars, but they were parked by the side of the road, and there weren’t very many of them. And no mobile homes, of course.

  He paused to talk with a few of the children. Nobody snatched the kids away from conversation with a stranger, and he discovered another difference from the lands he knew: He hadn’t heard so many “sirs” since he’d mustered out of the Tenth Mountain after Iraq. What he sought stood within smelling distance of the mudflats, and a stone’s throw from the first factories of the industrial district.

  The neighborhood watering hole was called Bobcat Bites; he looked
at it for a minute before he realized what the main structure must be. Then he laughed out loud; somebody had taken a medium-sized Quonset hut and stuccoed the outside and whitewashed it—probably, given the degree of uniformity elsewhere, to coincide with the letter if not the spirit of some town-wide building code. Crossing that like the bar of a T was a two-story boxy adobe structure with racks for bicycles and Segways outside, a parking lot to the side with a scattering of cars and pickups, and a sign that gave the tavern’s name and encouraged all passersby to sample the free lunch until two-thirty, three P.M. on weekends.

  Tully looked at his watch: Twelve P.M. Why not? he thought.

  There was a long bar on either side of the entrance to the Quonset, complete with mirror, brass footrail and polished bar. “What’s the deal on the free lunch?” he asked the woman behind it.

  The woman paused in her slow shoving of a rag over the oak. Now there,Tully thought, is someone even Warden Christiansen would admit is a “broad.” She was around forty, with yellow hair that had rather obviously come out of a bottle. A few years older than him, and she looked it, but in a nice way, wearing a long apron over a red dress, and smoking a cigarette. Christ, it’s going to be hard to keep on the wagon here. The secondary smoke stokes the old craving something fierce.

  She looked him up and down; he could tell she was amused, in a friendly sort of way. And Christ, it’s a good thing women don’t go as much by looks as we uncouth males do, or after a few generations everyone would look like Tom. Turn on the charm, Roy.

  “It means what it says, stranger,” she said. “You buy a drink or a beer, you get all you can eat—ain’t that the way it usually is?” Then a pause, and: “Say, aren’t you the guy in the paper this morning? From FirstSide?”

  “Yeah, the famous Roy Tully,” he said, smiling back at her with his best leering-imp impersonation and sliding a New Virginian dime across the counter. “Make it a beer. Whatever you’ve got on tap.”

  “Bayside Steam,” she said, getting out a frosted glass mug and drawing it full, with the foam edging slightly down the sides. “Enjoy.”

  He snagged it, then went down to the spread. There were deviled hard-boiled eggs, half a dozen varieties of bread, sliced meats, soups over heating elements, butter and cheese and olive oil, oysters, smoked salmon, shrimp salad, potato salad, raw vegetables and guacamole, and most of the rest of the makings of a good smorgasbord, plus cakes and muffins under glass.

  He loaded a plate, snickering slightly when he thought about the look of resentment he’d get from Tom if he were here. The big guy wasn’t exactly a chow-hound, but he liked his food and hated the fact that he had to work hard to burn it off. Tully liked to eat too, but knew from family example and his own experience that he’d be able to stuff himself his life long and stay slim… or scrawny, as some unkind souls had called it… without bothering to work out unless he wanted to. His father had never lifted anything heavier than a briefcase full of legal papers, and still had the same belt measurement he’d graduated from high school with.

  “So, what’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” he asked, sitting on a stool, taking a drink of the beer—quite good—and a bite of pumpernickel loaded with shrimp—excellent.

  “The name’s Maud, I’m not a girl, and I own the place, mister,” she replied. “Have since that worthless bastard I married drowned hisself.”

  “He probably deserved it,” Tully said.

  “He certainly did, not knowing better than taking a boat out while he was drunk,” she replied equably. “Second beer’s a nickel.”

  Tully sat, ate, and talked with Maud when she wasn’t busy with other customers. That was less often as the lunch crowd thickened, and then the families started coming in for a Sunday-afternoon outing. He’d judged right about the location; it was all working stiffs, a cut below the lower-middle-class and skilled-labor area nearer the farmer’s market.

  They were ready enough to talk to a newcomer, as well: small-town friendly, but with little of the underlying standoffishness you often found in little out-of-the-way places.

  Probably because it’s new and growing, instead of a place where you’re born and people are more likely to move out than in, he thought.

  Gentle prodding was more than enough to set people talking about themselves. Most of the women were housewives; the rest were in the service trades, or were things like elementary school teachers, with a few nurses. The men worked in the factories—consumer goods, boatbuilding, an electric-arc foundry owned by the O’Briens, small machine shops that made a surprisingly broad range of spare parts—or in construction, or drove forklifts at the Gate complex, or crewed fishing boats and coastal ships, or did things like sewer maintenance. A large majority had been born in the Commonwealth, and many were second or third generation; a majority of their grandparents had come from America, with a bias toward the upper South, and the rest had ancestors who were German, French, and Italian, with a scattering from all over Eastern Europe. The immigrant minority included Russians, Afrikaners, and a few Croats and Serbs.

  The talk wasn’t all that different from a bar-cum-restaurant in a small deep-rural Arkansas town somewhere in the Ozarks: sports, weather, gossip, fishing and hunting, how the farmers were doing that year—the main difference was the absence of national media and their stories. He heard a fair amount of grousing about the Thirty, mostly straightforward envy, and a fair amount of gossip about them as well, mostly of the sort you heard about the upper crust back home, but with more personal knowledge, and a bit less lurid. The main buzz was an elopement between the children of two Family heads, Primes.

  People he spoke to often congratulated him on getting out of FirstSide; they generally thought it was pretty bad, even if they also discounted some of the Commission’s propaganda.

  A little later he overheard a political conversation.

  “…doesn’t sound too bad to me,” one man said. “Couple of nahua girls to peel grapes and drop ’em in my mouth while their brothers do all the work and I kick their asses now and then.”

  The other man snorted; his English had a thick South African accent, clipped and guttural, like the late, unlamented Schalk van der Merwe. “Man, where exactly are they going to work for you? On the big farm you don’t have? The factory you don’t own? Down the mine you’ll never get?”

  The Afrikaner held up his hands. “All you’ve got is your house and these, just like me, you bliddy fool. If we get a lot more nahua in here working for fifty cents a day, and staying around long enough to learn skilled trades, what’s to stop your boss paying you fifty cents, and telling you he’ll put one of them in your place if you complain, and then you can live on nothing? Bliddy poor whites, that’s what we’d be.”

  “Ah, hell, Rhodevik, it ain’t gonna happen anyway.” The other man shrugged. “So who do you like—San Diego or Rolfeston?”

  “None of you soutpens can play rugby anyway,” the immigrant said with a friendly sneer. “Now…”

  And on that note, Roy thought, rising and dropping a nickel tip. Tomorrow I’ll take a look across the bay.

  INTERLUDE

  August 21, 2007

  Zaachila, southern Mexico

  Commonwealth of New Virginia time line

  Lord Seven Flower held the meeting in the ruins of Zaachila, for the sacredness that dwelt in the stones of the lost city. No living men had made their homes here for a long time; what the plagues that swept through in his grandfather’s day had begun, the wars and chaos that followed in their wake had finished. He kept his own seat of power in the great city of Tututepec, much closer to the coast and the foreign trade that had helped make him overlord of half the Zapotec peoples. Yet once this had been the place of the Vuijato, the Great Seer, the Speaker to the Gods—he whose hand conferred sovereignty on kings.

  That would help to overawe turbulent nobles, and even his closest advisers could turn back into such, if his grip wavered. The setting was the more numinous because it was nig
ht, and because of the day—Eight Deer—in the holy calendar. The trees had gone far in their reconquest of the sacred city and loomed about like living green walls, but he had had this courtyard kept clear of the encroaching bush and vines. Except where staircases ascended at the four corners, the great courtyard was flanked by walls higher than a man, carved in bass-relief from hard limestone and still vividly colored despite years of weathering. They showed the story of the first Eight Deer, the great leader who seized power in the War of Heaven—showed it in long pictures, and word-glyphs. The rise of the rival cities of Tilantongo and Red-White Bundle, the feuds and marriages of their lords, the suicide of one such forced by the machinations of Lady Six Monkey, the blood sacrifice of the defeated king of Red-White Bundle by the victorious warlord whose naming day this was…

  Eight Deer had no royal ancestors, Lord Seven Flower thought. Like me, he was the son of a priest, and a great warrior. Like me, he seized power in a time of chaos. Like his, my name will live forever, and my dynasty rule for a thousand years!

  Torches burned at the staircases, torches of aromatic wood that added a heavy, spicy scent to the odors of damp and growth and ancient stone, heavier than the mouthwatering scents of roasting dog and brewing cacao from the cooking-fires nearby. Around the courtyard shone the kerosene lanterns he gained in trade, brighter than any torch. The guards at the staircases bore bronze-headed spears and wooden swords set with bronze shark-tooth edges on both sides, the weapons of his grandfather’s day, before the Deathwalkers came from the northern sea.