Conquistador (46 page)

He left the Segway in its rack; a town of thirty thousand couldn't be too hard to see on foot, and you got a better grip on a place that way. It was a little eerie though, looking out and seeing nothing of the ten-million-strong megalopolis he remembered. He had to keep reminding himself that he was living this, not watching it on a screen.

Adrienne's flat was on a low foothill rise; the ground grew steeper and trackless directly behind it. He turned northward, along a broad avenue that ran along the inner edge of the flatlands. It was about as wide as one of the major arteries in DC and had the same slightly artificial feel; he'd noticed the same thing in St. Petersburg, which he'd visited, and in pictures of Brasilia and Canberra, which he hadn't.

Planned city,
he thought.
Planned from scratch. Pretty, though.

The median strip was also broad, and a mass of flower beds: roses, hollyhocks, rhododendrons, penstemon and more, in patterns of purple, pink, white and yellow and green, with a shade tree every so often and a brick pathway down its center. The sidewalks on either side of the road—it was called Lee Avenue—were wide as well, brick-surfaced, with trees in circles of wrought-iron fence surrounded by stone benches. They were also fairly crowded, mostly with families heading northward on foot, all dressed to the nines and this time all wearing hats, down to the little girls in frilly pink dresses and their resentful brothers in ties.

Oh,
Tully thought.
Right. Sunday morning.
He could hear bells ringing, too.
Everyone heading for church.

The heights to landward were much more densely forested than the Berkeley hills he remembered, green and shaggy and marked by the distinctive spikes of old-growth redwoods in the west-facing canyons. Save for bridle paths, they were also empty of the marks of man. Between there and the roadside were what his map called the Golden Mile, evidently the high-rent district. He couldn't see much of it, because the inner side of the sidewalk was paralleled by high brick walls, usually topped by iron spikes. The gates showed a little more, being mostly wrought-iron openwork themselves: curving driveways, lawns and sprinklers shedding silver mist on them, tall old trees, and half-hidden houses. Those continued the Spanish-revival motif he'd noticed, although many were too hidden by greenery and distance for him to tell for sure.

The other side of the avenue was commercial, two-story buildings enclosing small courtyards surrounded by shops or restaurants; those alternated with theaters, live and movie, nightclubs, and a couple of art galleries. The streets westward of that seemed to be residential, with houses and lots getting smaller as they declined toward the bay. Looking downslope, what you mostly saw was trees, with the red of roofs peeking out from among them.

Feels odd to be in a city with no really tall buildings,
he thought.

This wasn't much of a city, as far as size went; less than half the size of his California's Napa; about the same size as Paso Robles minus suburbs. But there were no skyscrapers at all; not a hint of anything Bahaus, in fact, not even the low-rise version.

That didn't mean there weren't any
big
buildings. Just short of Jackson Square both sides of the street were lined with three- or four-story office blocks, set back behind narrow strips of garden. Small discreet signs labeled them Commission offices charged with various functions—one was Gate Security Force HQ and at least partially open on a Sunday; it had black-uniformed guards standing before the doors.

Jackson Square was a rectangle with its longest axis parallel to Lee Avenue; bigger than its namesake in New Orleans, and named for Stonewall instead of Andy; about the size of the park around the State Capitol building in Sacramento. The perimeter was a broad avenue, of the same sort as Lee; another took off from the middle of the western edge and ran down to the water. The parkland in the center held a tall white stone basin and fountain, throwing its plume high in the air and falling into a large oval reflecting pond marked with water lilies, the big showy flowers dotting the blue surface with blossoms of copper, red, blue, white and purple. A marble-paved circle surrounded it, set with planters full of impatiens and flowering vines and with more stone benches; paths radiated out to each corner, separated by flower beds, trees—mostly wide-spreading native oaks—and greensward.

Public buildings rimmed the square. The westernmost corners each held a big church, one vaguely Italianate in style and the other a spare white-steepled structure—the Roman Catholic and Episcopal, respectively. Most of the crowds were hurrying in their direction. Between them along the western edge were a couple of other churches, somewhat smaller, and with their own crowds. The other buildings were official-looking; this time the architecture was neo-Classical, rather than Santa Barbara's 1920s riff on Spanish Renaissance and Baroque.

He grinned at the big Commission headquarters that stood in the middle of the square's long eastern side, standing and staring at the structures that rose at the top of a long ceremonial marble staircase until he was certain. “That's not just
like
the rotunda of the Palace of Fine Arts building in San Francisco. It
is
the rotunda of the Palace of Fine Arts building.”

That made him laugh out loud.
Built in lath and plaster for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition,
he thought.
Restored in reinforced concrete when that started to wash away. And copied here in the real-McCoy stone!

“Or possibly reinforced concrete with stone cladding,” he added to himself—this was earthquake country, after all.

The great central rotunda was a duplicate as far as dimensions went, an octagon over a hundred and thirty feet across, supported on pillars over a hundred feet high and topped with a low dome—here, though, sheathed in genuine polished gold leaf, not gray concrete, sending out blinding flashes in the bright midmorning sun. Behind that was something different—a long rectangular structure, with arcades and a second-story balcony on either side; it was set into the hillside, which gave it a view out over the dome. He walked closer to the rotunda; the eight panels in low bas-relief around the exterior were different too, allegorical sculpture showing scenes he didn't recognize.

The floor of the rotunda held another piece of marble statuary. First and foremost was John Rolfe, Adrienne's grandfather, dressed in rough hiking clothes with a forties look, a rifle leaning against the rock at his back, and a map in his hands. Others—he presumed they were the Founders of the Thirty Families, or some of them at least—were doing various pioneerish things behind them; mostly involving digging, plowing, pounding on a presumably symbolic anvil, piling up bricks, using surveying instruments or standing and peering at the horizon with weapons ready. The murals around the interior of the dome had the same themes, and a similarity that nagged at him before he identified it.

“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.

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 run-down, 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.