Conquistador

by S. M. Stirling

  “Which was that RM and M had the Oakland police in their pockets, starting about thirty years ago. If I hadn’t been quick and pig headed, they’d have steered me away from investigating, the way they did with most others who smelled a rat.”

  “Make it forty-odd years,” Adrienne said. “You got caught in 1998, right? According to the GSA records, we’ve had our nominees running the Oakland police department continuously from about 1956. Not that they actually know who they’re working for.”

  “That would take a lot of… Sorry,” Tom said.

  Henry Villers grinned whitely. “Brother, with the sort of money RM and M had to throw around, you could bribe Superman.” He adopted a man-of-steel pose: “‘Ten million dollars,’ the Man says. ‘No, no, I am Superman!’ Then it’s thirty million. ‘No, no, I stand for Truth, Justice and the American Way!’ So then it’s fifty million, and Superman comes back: ‘I’ll kill anyone you want! I’ll fly shit across the border! Up, up and away! Whoooosh!’”

  Villers took a pull at his beer. “Ahhh… So my reports got a lot of attention. Right from the top. Oh, gosh-wow-goody-gumdrops, says I, visions of promotions dancing in my head. Then one night I get called to a private, off-the-reservation meeting with the chief, no less… and wake up here,” Henry finished sourly.

  “Have you had… a rough time here?” Tom asked.

  “What, you mean apart from better than half the people thinking I’m a rape-crazed subhuman just-down-from-the-trees dope fiend nigger barbarian and locking up their daughters and sidling away with their hands on their wallets at the first sight of me?” Henry said with a twisted smile. “Apart from that, not much. It beats getting dropped into the bay in concrete overshoes.”

  He laughed bitterly. “It’s funny, in a way. This place is full of the worst sort of rednecks—”

  “Oh, come now, Henry,” Adrienne said. “Not the very worst sort.”

  “OK, I grant you, your grandpa didn’t like the one-gallus, white-sheet, burning-cross, three-hundred-pounds-and-pimples-and-that’s-just-the-women set,” Henry conceded. “But that was because he despised them for being no’count white trash, not because of they way they felt about black folk. He’s just so fucking genteel about it his ass bleeds, like Robert E. Lee or something. Anyway, the odd thing is that there’s no official discrimination here. Unless you’re a nahua, of course, and most of them aren’t in our beloved Commonwealth long enough to stop being glad they’re not starving or getting their hearts chopped out to juice up Monster of the Week. They don’t have time to realize the way they get fucked over here.”

  Tom thought rapidly. “Ah, there’s no official discrimination because there aren’t enough African-Americans here to count?”

  Henry drank some of his beer and thumped the tankard down, extending a pointing finger at Tom.

  “Give the game warden a chocolate spotted owl!” he said. “I mean, man, all twenty-seven of us—not counting my two kids with Susie, Ralph’s daughter—are not exactly going to start sitting down in many lunch counters. That’s twenty-seven out of a hundred and fifty thousand, with no more coming. None since me, nearly ten years ago, and mostly we live over in New Brooklyn, so people in the other Family domains don’t see much of us.”

  “New Brooklyn?” Tom asked.

  “Uncle Sol—Solomon Pearlmutter—called his domain’s main town that,” Adrienne said. “He wanted to call it the New Lower East Side, but got talked out of it. It’s over where San Francisco got started FirstSide; the Pearlmutter domain runs from the Golden Gate down to a little beyond San Mateo. Everyone thought he was crazy for claiming it, since there’s not much good farmland or timber there.”

  She grinned, and the two men chuckled.

  “After the Old Man, Uncle Sol was the smartest man I ever met,” she said. “And Granddad always said Uncle Sol had more sheer wattage, he was just less practical. When they played chess, it was like mountains colliding. New Brooklyn is the second-largest town in the Commonwealth now, a big seaport and manufacturing center with fifteen thousand people, and it all belongs to the Pearlmutters and their affiliates. They make almost as much off it as they do off their cut from the Gate and the Commission’s properties. Not to mention they donated the land for the University of New Virginia, which is about where Stanford sits FirstSide. Uncle Sol always said knowledge isn’t just power; it’s also wealth.”

  Henry Villers nodded. “No flies on that dude; I met him once just before he died, old but still sharp as a razor. He also said only dumb krauts like the von Traupitzes would think you could get rich here growing wheat. Anyway, nobody’s afraid of us; most people don’t even see any of us more than once a year, which means only a few get upset about us. I think our Supreme Honky is content to let us vanish like a handful of soot in a snowstorm and pat himself on the back about what a goddam humanitarian realist he is. Motherfucker. If there were twenty-seven thousand black folk here, or even twenty-seven hundred, it’d be a different story.”

  You betcha, Tom thought. Point scored. You can’t have much racism when there aren’t any other races to practice it on, so to speak.

  “Adrienne,” Henry went on, “put me in touch with Ralph when I got shanghaied here.” He raised his stein to her. “For which I thank you.”

  “De nada,” she said. “Now, Ralph’s story…”

  The older man told it, then concluded: “So the bastard gave me this land and a loan to get started, yeah. And I love my wife and my kids and grandkids, and I’ve had a pretty good life here. But it ain’t the life I’d have chosen, and if he thinks all this charity-from-on-high makes up for that, he’s got another think coming.”

  Tom finished his hamburger. It had been about as he’d expected: delicious, the meat leanly flavorful but juicy and basted with just a touch of fiery sauce; tangy onions and tomatoes tasting of the earth; homemade garlic mayonnaise; all on a kaiser-style bun warm from the beehive-shaped earth oven on the other side of the patio with bits of caramelized onion in the crust, and a spear of pickle on the side that crunched nicely. Quite possibly the best hamburger he’d ever tasted, even including the ones his own father used to make at Fourth of July barbecues. The fries had been done in olive oil, and they weren’t formed from extruded powdered potato painted with beef fat.

  “OK,” Tom said. “Now”—he looked questioningly at Adrienne, who was wiping her fingers on a checked cloth napkin. She nodded—“if you wouldn’t mind a hypothetical question, would this Commonwealth be better or worse if the Collettas were running it? Instead of the Rolfes and their supporters.”

  Ralph Barnes choked on his last swallow of beer. Henry Villers thumped him on the back, but there was a gray anxiety in the glance he shot Adrienne. She made a soothing gesture.

  “Let’s consider that a hypothetical hypothetical, for now,” she said.

  Ralph nodded vigorously. “Oh, hell, that’s no contest. Yeah, the Old Man’s a throat-cutting pirate,” he said. “And unlike a lotta people here, I don’t use ‘pirate’ as a compliment. Sorry, princess, but I’m not going to start shading it at this late date. Yeah, he’s a nasty piece of work. But he’s smart, and he’s consistent, and he was willing to stop when he got what he wanted. He makes the rules to suit himself, but then he keeps ’em, usually. And you can trust his promises. The Collettas… old man Salvatore had about as much of the milk of human kindness as a lizard does; he and Otto von Traupitz were neck and neck in the Sheer Absolute Fucking Evil sweepstakes, in their different ways. Giovanni tries to live up to the old bastard. Neither of them ever heard of the concept ‘where to stop.’ And they’d change the rules whenever it gave ’em a moment’s advantage. Plus, personally, I’d be a dead man if they took over. I dissed his dad to his face. Giovanni don’t forget.”

  “Ditto, ditto,” Henry said. “Those Collettas would have had me on an auction block. Not that they’re prejudiced. They’d do it to anybody they could. Not to mention their friends the Batyushkovs, who are prejudiced ’gainst us black-asses, as th
ey so charmingly put it, and the von Traupitzes, who’d probably render me down for soap. Me for starters.”

  Barnes frowned and thought for a moment. “Don’t get me wrong, Warden Tom. If there was a chance for a revolution here, I’d be out on the barricades in a minute, and I’d dance around the guillotine when they chopped the heads off the whole rotten gang—present company excepted.”

  “God, that’s big of you, Ralph,” Adrienne said, chuckling.

  Barnes scowled and waved the interjection aside. “There’s a lot here I don’t like. But it could get a hell of a lot worse. And I’ve got my kids and grandkids to think about. They were born here and it’s their home.”

  He looked at Adrienne. “This hypothetical… it ain’t totally hypothetical?” She nodded. “Then anything I can do, princess, you just ask.”

  She put her hand on his and squeezed; he returned the pressure.

  “And say…” He frowned. “One thing. The Collettas’re close with the Batyushkovs these days, right? Well, there’s something I ran across a while ago. You know Sergei Ilyanovich Batyushkov?”

  “The geneticist?” Adrienne asked. “The Batyushkov Prime’s nephew?”

  “Well, for starters, he ain’t a geneticist. He’s a theoretical physicist,” Barnes said. “I read some articles by him a while ago. And yeah, he was called Sergei… but the last name wasn’t Batyushkov. Sergei Lermontov, Ph.D.”

  “I’m definitely going to be less conspicuous without Tom along,” Roy Tully said to himself as he finished washing the breakfast dishes. “I love the big guy like a brother, but…”

  What had Anna Russell said about Siegfried, the hero of the Ring Cycle? He murmured it, trying to match Russell’s upper-class British drawl: “He’s very young, and he’s very tall, and he’s very strong, and he’s very handsome, and he’s very stupid.”

  That was unjust; he knew his partner had plenty upstairs. He was just very…

  Straightforward, that’s it, Tully thought. Straightforward. And he certainly stands out in a crowd.

  Before he left he spent some time with Adrienne’s computer; she had it set up in the living room, which gave him a lovely view of the morning fog and then the town as he sat sipping coffee and tapping his way through some public files, sampling a few chat rooms and getting a feel for how to shift data around. He had to admit Nostradamus was organized with systematic clarity: research, TV, e-mail, auctions, catalog buying, music and everything else in one neat package. It still felt odd, compared to surfing the Net: as if you’d moved from Castle Gormenghast to a utility apartment—no matter how tidy and well laid out it was, you were still going to be disappointed at the lack of crannies and dungeons and attics full of junk and sheer size. After half an hour or so he printed up some maps, stuck them into the pocket of his jeans, fastened the holster of the Glock to the small of his back under a light jacket—it was yellow, with green suede elbow patches; he was very fond of it and glad Adrienne’s cleanup squad had brought it along—then went outside. The East Bay wasn’t as chilly in summertime as San Francisco, but a jacket wouldn’t be completely out of place.

  “Time to soak up some atmosphere,” he said to himself, and patted the gun for reassurance.

  Not that he anticipated any firefights; but the weapon itself was a sign he had the trust of some powerful people here in this miniature pirate kingdom. Everything in miniature except the planet, he thought. Well, that ought to make things easier. There couldn’t be more than a few dozen decision-making individuals involved in whatever machinations were going on. Have to watch my step, though, he reminded himself. Remember that these people aren’t mine, even though they speak the same language and wear the same clothes.

  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.

  Big Tom’s gonna love it. He always did have a major hate-on for modern architecture.

  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 widespreading native oaks—and greensward.

  Publ
ic 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 neoClassical, 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.