Conquistador (38 page)

“It's not far to Rolfeston, which is roughly where the People's Republic of Berkeley is located FirstSide, “ she said. ”Which 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 . . .

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.

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, slowing 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.