Well, he thought, they would have checked all the cattle they imported for infection. No need to be as finicky as we are.
His first sip of coffee brought his brows up. “Where do you get this stuff?” he said, despite himself. Rich, nutty, mellow, strong but not a trace of bitterness…
“Hawaii,” Adrienne said. “The Big Island, to be precise—it’s Kona Gold. One of the few forms of farming in the Commonwealth that actually makes money. The sugar comes from the islands as well.”
He nodded noncommittally and tucked into the breakfast.
“Roy was right,” he said after a moment. “You can cook. Let me guess: all organic ingredients?”
The eggs were done with cream and diced scallions and a little tangy paprika, and they had a smooth intensity of flavor that perfectly complemented the smoky richness of Canadian-style bacon smoked with apple wood.
“Not exactly,” she said. “But it all comes fresh from close by Rolfeston. Farming’s an artisan-scale industry here. There’s no point in anything capital-intensive, and we don’t have to squeeze out the last bushel. The Old Man likes it that way; he also likes ‘food that tastes like food,’ as he puts it.”
“Mmmph,” he said, mouth full of the boysenberry pancakes. “I’ll have to find a gym,” he said, when he could. If I’m here any length of time, he did not continue aloud.
The orange juice had tiny bits of pulp floating in it, and a wild, sweet flavor he’d never met before. He suppressed an appreciative noise and went on: “Otherwise your Gate will be absolutely safe—I wouldn’t fit through after a couple of months.”
“Well,” she said, chuckling as she brought her own plate to the table, “Roy and I were talking about something related to that.”
Tom gave his partner a brief glance that he meant to be quelling; apparently he was getting entirely too friendly with her. She was the opposition; at best, an ally against someone worse, and that wasn’t proven yet.
The way Adrienne was sitting and Tully was leaning back from the table, she couldn’t see his face. That let Tully mouth words; long practice made them easily comprehensible: Fuck you, Kemosabe.
“You said you needed to see the Commonwealth,” Adrienne said. “Roy suggested that he take a look around Rolfeston, use the archives and library and meet people. You could come up to Seven Oaks with me, and get a feel for how the countryside functions. Rolfeston’s the only city here; most people live in smaller settlements or on farms or the estates of Family members.”
Roy Tully was nodding his head vigorously behind her back and mouthing: Yes! yes!
Tom rubbed his jaw. “What’s your total population?”
“About two hundred thousand, according to Nostradamus,” she said. “Just over three thousand in the Thirty Families, a hundred and fifty thousand Settlers, and fifty thousand nahua; there may be ten thousand or so wild Indians left in what you’d call California, say thirty or forty thousand between the Rockies and the sea from Baja to Alaska, but we don’t have much contact with them. More than half of us live around the bay; there are pockets of settlement down the coast to San Diego—we get our oil from the Long Beach field—and another outpost up around the site of Portland in Oregon. A few thousand in Hawaii and the Australian colony near Adelaide. And a chain through the Sierras to Nevada, with some small outposts further east; that’s the hardest to keep up, so far from the sea.”
“Then why—” He stopped and thumped himself on the forehead with the palm of his hand. “Oh, right. The Comstock Lode.”
“Not to mention Tonopah and Alder Gulch and Cerro Gordo and other places,” she said.
“Yah,” Tom said, nodding slowly. “That sounds reasonable. Sure, I’ll drive north with you. But… what’s that got to do with a gym?”
She grinned, and despite himself he felt his mouth quirking up in response for an instant before he forced his face back into an expressionless mask.
“Well, the reason I want to get back to Seven Oaks today is that my mayordomo ”—she pronounced it Spanish-fashion—“my manager, that is… says that we have to begin on the wheat tomorrow. And rest assured, that’ll work off a lot more breakfasts than one.”
“You always put your guests to work?” he said. Or just lowly peasants from FirstSide?
“At harvesttime? Damned right I do,” she said. “Since I intend to be out there helping too. You have no idea how hungry a landholder here can get for men when something gets ripe. Ogres ain’t in it by comparison; everyone pitches in. And it’ll give you a chance to see the Commonwealth from the bottom up, as it were.”
She paused for a moment. “Also, I’ve spoken with my grandfather, and he’d like to meet you too. Seven Oaks is close to Rolfe Manor.”
And I’d like to meet him, he thought, a hunter’s eagerness behind the expressionless mask of his face.
“Look, Tom, you’ve got to be professional about this,” Tully said, as Adrienne left to dress.
“I’m trying to be,” Tom said. “You’re the one who’s acting like she’s your long-lost sister.”
“No, you’re not being professional,” Tully said, his face serious. “I am being professional; I’m doing my Roy the Friendly Goblin shtick.”
“You think she’s falling for it?”
“No, but she thinks I’m funny—and knows it’s an exaggeration, not just an act. You are pouting, except when you forget and it slips. You’re letting your resentment at being led around by the dick and made a fool of risk alienating our only source of information here.”
“Not to mention she made everyone back home think we’re dirty,” Tom said grimly.
Tully shrugged. “Hey, Kemosabe, there are two possibilities with that. First, we never get back. In which case, who gives a flying F-word what people on the other side of the Gate think? It just plain doesn’t affect us here. Second, we do get back—and chances are our names are cleared. Hell, we’ll be heroes, famous, and rich after the interviews and quickie book deals!”
“It still grates.”
“Without her, we’ve got zero chance of finding out what’s going on here—not to mention of ever doing anything about it. We’d have to give up and start looking around for jobs, because we’d be citizens of the great and wonderful Commonwealth for the rest of our lives whether we liked it or not. That still may happen, but do you want to make it a sure thing?”
Tom opened his mouth, flushed, and closed it again. After a moment he replied: “OK, Roy, you’ve got me. I am being resentful. But Christ, I’m not an actor or an undercover type. She did lie to me and I do resent it.”
“Yeah, but you don’t have to keep hugging it tight, do you? Flashing between warm and chilly according to whether you’re remembering to be mad that moment? Jesus, Tom, the woman really does like you, you know.”
“And…” Tom hesitated, but if you couldn’t talk to your best friend, you were limited to conversations with your mirror. “And she didn’t just lie about what she did. She lied about what she is. She’s a killer.”
Tully let the chair he was leaning back in fall forward onto all four legs with a thump. He stabbed a finger at his partner.
“Hey, Kemosabe, I’ve got news for you! I don’t see nooobody but killers in this room! I killed a fair number of people ’cause Uncle Sam said they deserved to die, and sometimes I killed people who happened to be standing too close to Those Officially Classified as Evil when I set off the area-effect munitions. So did you, not to trade war stories. You think it’s worse because she’s got different plumbing? And she did what she did in the line of duty; she could have offed Perkins, but she didn’t. Have you never done something that stuck in your craw because it was the only way to get the job done?”
“Not quite on that level, but I see what you’re driving at. OK, OK.”
“She’s got her job to do,” Tully said, driving home the point with his customary subtlety. “We’ve got ours.”
Tom grunted in reply and picked up a newspaper from the table, looking for r
efuge from the embarrassment that made him squirm slightly. Instead he half choked on a sip of coffee as he read the headline: TWO FISH AND GAME WARDENS FROM FIRSTSIDE TO COMMONWEALTH!
His picture was there next to Roy’s; neither of them were looking at their best, and the prints must have come from the ID machine at Gate Security. No matter how high the tech became, official photographs always made you look like a criminal degenerate, a moron, or someone who’d been dead for several days. Often all of those at once. Apparently that was true in all possible universes.
The story below listed their CVs, right down to their military service in the Rangers and Tenth Mountain Division, respectively, and had the chutzpah to wish them well, and recommend applying for jobs with the Frontier Scouts, whatever the hell those were.
“Gate Security don’t miss a trick, do they?” Tully said. “This place is a small town—hell, this whole country’s a small town. Now everyone will know our faces.”
Tom gave the rest of the paper a quick scan. The focus was strictly local, with virtually nothing about events back on the other side of the Gate. The politics made no sense to him except for picayune stuff, school board and road improvements. Foreign affairs were really incomprehensible, stories about events abroad, in the Mexican city-states or East Asia. He simply lacked the background information the writers assumed in their audience; it was like a man from Mars trying to understand why the secessionist movement in Iraqi Kurdistan was important to Turkey. Who, what or where the hell was Changdan? And why was it interesting that someone named Lord Seven Flower in a place called Zaachila was buying more horses via San Diego? The back pages were full of amateur theatricals, sports and reviews. Movies, he noted, were often from FirstSide; books seemed to be largely local, and so did TV shows apart from very old reruns.
There was one domestic item that drew his eye.
“Well, lookie here,” he said. “Ahem. ‘Hostile Indian remnants skulking in the Tulare marshes have been taught a stinging lesson for their unprovoked attack on a party of Frontier Scouts accompanied by the adventurous granddaughter of our Founder. Lieutenant von Traupitz reports that even though Miss Adrienne Rolfe, daughter of Chairman Charles Rolfe and granddaughter of the Founder, was temporarily in some danger, timely intervention by his force of Commission Militia—’”
Adrienne came back wearing laced hiking boots, loose brown cords and a black polo shirt. She looked over his shoulder; he was acutely conscious of the slight warmth, a scent of laundry-fresh clothes mingled with shampoo and her.
“That’s where those extra condors came from,” she said. “And Karl von Traupitz has an inflated sense of his own place in the world. The whole Family is like that. If they decide to build a new bacon-curing plant they boast about it beforehand, they tell you how world-historically important it is while they’re doing it, and then they write a seven-volume epic complete with footnotes about it afterward. Maybe it’s genetic—although you’d think all the intermarriage would have diluted it by now.”
She had a floppy broad-brimmed canvas jungle hat on her head, with the cord under her chin; she also had two holstered pistols in her hands, and a rifle across her back.
“Here,” she said, sliding the pistols across the table.
Tom caught his automatically; it was his Fish and Game-issue 9mm Glock. “Ah… I presume carrying a gun’s legal here?” he said.
“For Settlers, carrying anything short of mortars and heavy machine guns is legal,” Adrienne said cheerfully. “But be cautious. Dueling is legal here too, with single-shot pistols, usually.”
Both men looked at her in disbelief. A little defensively, she went on: “Well, it’s not common. Maybe once a year. But it is legal—and when a man in town carries a gun openly, he’s saying he’s ready to fight. Sort of like the Code of the West. I’d advise concealed carry, which is also legal here. I wouldn’t put it past the Collettas to set someone on to pick a fight with you two, if my dark suspicions are correct. I’d have canned that story in the Commonwealth Courier and Herald if I could. That would have caused a fuss, though, and they’d probably be fully informed anyway.”
“Do you really need the artillery for a trip into the country?” he said, his eyes sharpening on her rifle.
“No, but it’s sort of customary to have a rifle in the rack beyond city limits,” she said. “We’ll be going through a couple of reserves where big predators are common and big, irritable herbivores are very common.”
“That’s not a Garand, is it?” Tully asked curiously, as she laid the weapon and a rucksack down on the table and turned to a wall-mounted screen.
“No,” she said over her shoulder, as she pressed her hand to the plate beside the screen and looked into the scanner. “It’s an O’Brien-Garand; a modification that Uncle Andy—Andy O’Brien, the first O’Brien Prime—made back in 1949. He was the Old Man’s top sergeant in Baker company, in the Pacific, and he thought the Garand was the perfect battle rifle except for two things.”
A slight sadness touched her face. “He taught me rifles; and he used to play grizzly bears with me when he came visiting, back when I was a little girl, and give me sips out of his wineglass.”
Tom examined the rifle; it was the classic WWII semiauto, but with the gas port moved back four inches from the muzzle and a twenty-round detachable box magazine instead of the awkward eight-round integral clip you loaded from the top in the GI version. The Pentagon, in its infinite multilayered bureaucratic wisdom, had taken until 1959 to make similar changes—Tom’s grandfather had soldiered through Korea with the original model. The only other difference he could see was a slotted flash suppressor-cum-grenade launcher attachment on the end of the muzzle.
He removed the magazine and looked at the cartridges; they were the old full-power .30-06, but these were hollow points, like a game-hunting round, designed to mushroom inside a wound. Pulling back the operating rod, he saw that the chamber and barrel were chrome-lined; the construction was excellent but in an old-fashioned way, everything beautifully machined from solid metal forms, rather than assembled from stampings and synthetics and powder forgings. And the stock was some close-grained hardwood, polished silky-smooth save for the checker work on the grip and forestock.
“I notice your Gate Security Force has assault rifles,” Tom said, laying the weapon down again. “G-thirty-sixes, weren’t they? Good gun.”
“Just a second.” The screen had come alive, and was showing a logo with a central CICN. “This is Adrienne Rolfe,” she went on to the machine.
“Confirmed: voice, retina, palm.”
“Ronald Tully and Thomas Christiansen, ident numbers as follows, to have access to these premises. Transfer one thousand dollars to each account.”
“Confirmed.”
“Wait a minute—” Tom began.
“You wanted to investigate this place. Having money of your own will help.”
He couldn’t say anything to that. Because it’s so self-evidently true, idiot, he thought, and went on aloud: “Thanks. That will help.”
“Good, because I don’t think we have all that much time to get started.” She tossed a house key to each of the men. “I like to have old-fashioned backup locks. Try not to run wild in the fleshpots of Rolfeston with the thousand while we’re gone, Roy.”
Roy frowned, and spoke with grim seriousness: “It’ll be a tough battle, but a twelve-step program will see me through the temptation.”
She went on to Tom: “You’re right about the assault rifles, but the Gate Security Force might have to fight FirstSiders. The militia’s probable opposition uses bows and arrows. And it doesn’t hurt to have the GSF stronger than any equivalent number of Family militia.”
Tom pocketed the key. “Isn’t it a danger to your reputation, giving dubious characters like us door keys?”
“Oh, my reputation can’t be damaged; it got wrecked back in my teens,” she said with a chuckle. “Popular perceptions of my standards of taste, now…”
INTERLUDE<
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April 17, 2003
The Commonwealth of New Virginia
“Good day, Dimitri Ivanovich,” the young scientist said.
He looked uncertain, a slight dark fellow who still blinked as if he had thick glasses on his face, despite the expensive corneal surgery Batyushkov had financed.
“Uncle Dimitri, please, Sergei,” the Prime said, and the two Russians smiled at each other. “Sit, sit—refresh yourself.”
The Batyushkov country seat was only recently completed; it was not far from FirstSide’s town of Aptos, with the sea breaking at its feet and the Santa Cruz Mountains to the north, stretching eastward along the valley of the Pajaro River and south nearly to the site of Castroville. He’d been offered a selection of coastal properties, all the way from Oregon to San Diego—he supposed he could have picked something in Australia, for that matter—but this had been his choice. It was close enough to Rolfeston to be convenient, but not close enough that the Commission was looking over his shoulder every moment of the day; and it was even closer to Colletta Hall, over the hills in the lower Santa Clara. He sensed opportunity there; the Prime of the Collettas was a discontented man.
“It reminds me of the Crimea,” the young scientist said. “Mountains, the sea, fertile land between, and the climate of heaven.”
Batyushkov nodded. That was true, and as a bonus the land was spectacularly beautiful. Greener than much of New Virginia, which soothed his Leningrad-born eyes. At this time of year, the young apple and apricot orchards of his Settlers left patches of fragrant pink mist strewn along the valley, and the colts kicked up their heels in the green pastures thick with golden poppies. The mansion’s design was based on that of a nobleman’s manse from the old days before the Revolution; one he’d seen on the shores of the Black Sea, converted to a sanitarium and resort. Waves crashed on the cliffs not far away.
Many of those Settlers were Russian too. Most were not, which Batyushkov grudgingly admitted was a wise precaution from the Commission’s point of view. They would let him flavor this part of the stew, but not make a separate pot of his own.
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