Conquistador (40 page)

“Ah,” Tom nodded.
So there
is
an element here against its will. That has possibilities.

She paused. “I don't want to tell you any more lies, Tom. You two are Involuntary Settlers. That means you can do anything here . . . except go near the Gate. That will never be allowed, ever, under any circumstances whatsoever; and trying means dying. It wouldn't matter if you had the Old Man himself as a hostage; they'd shoot you both down. Ordinary Settlers only get near it if they're on official business, like Piet. Members of the Thirty Families can visit FirstSide, but they need clearance—and if they endanger the Gate secret, the Commission sends someone like me after them and they never, ever do it again.

“But all that's rare,” she went on more cheerfully. “Not many stumble on the secret anymore.”

Tully broke in: “OK, if this was a California, an America, that didn't get discovered by Europeans . . . what happened to the California Indians? I suppose they were the people we saw on the way, the ones in the
Viva Zapata
campesino costumes?

Adrienne pursed her lips and examined the play of light on her wineglass as she turned it between long slender fingers.

“No, those are the
nahua.
”

“Nahua . . . nahuatl, the Aztec language? Mexicans?” Tom said.

She nodded. “
Gastarbeiter.
Contract workers,
braceros,
mostly from Mexico; we call them
nahua
from the main language down there. About a third of the population, half the labor force.”

“What about them?” Tom asked. “I can't see your Old Man welcoming them with open arms. Or is this more like the Old South than you were letting on? Contented darkies . . . brownies . . . singing in the quarters, stealing chickens and eating watermelon?”

Adrienne grinned. “Now, give credit where it's due. The Old Man
could
have done just that, bought slaves to do the dirty work here, you know. The warlords and priest-kings down Mexico way would have sold us any number. They'll do anything for steel tools and muskets, not to mention brandy and aspirin and plastic beads. They have swarms of slaves of their own, and given the national obsession with chopping out hearts, those are the lucky ones. Lots of wars.”

She frowned, obviously thinking hard. “As I said, the Old Man likes to learn from other people's mistakes—says it's less costly than making your own. So we recruit on five-year contracts, and in limited numbers—there are fifteen or twenty applicants for every slot. They don't settle here—the wages are enormous by their standards, and they go back with nest eggs and a lot of new skills. We've had sons of princes volunteer to dig ditches.”

“Oh, sure, and none of them stay on regardless—and what about their kids?”

“Norplant for all the female new arrivals,” Adrienne said. “Or more modern long-term contraceptive implants. And this isn't FirstSide, Tom. Remember Nostradamus and those ID cards you got issued? It's impossible to live here without valid ID, not for more than a couple of weeks. Unless you want a long-term career in the borax mines of the Mojave.”

“They're all happy to go back to Aztec land, when they've had five years of flush toilets and modern medicine?” Tom asked skeptically.

“Oh, any who want to stay after their contracts expire can, on certain conditions.”

“Conditions?”

“Well, only one major condition. An injection of P-63.”

Ouch,
Tom thought.

That was an immunosterilizant the Chinese had developed back around the turn of the century. It made the body's immune system sensitive to some of the proteins on the surface of sperm, programming it to treat them as foreign tissue. It was quite popular back on the other side of the Gate because it didn't have any other symptoms; in fact it mimicked a common natural cause of infertility that had been a complete mystery until the 1990s.

By God, her grandpa certainly
does
think ahead. I suppose they used tube-tying and vasectomies before that.

Back home, the Germans and French and a lot of other Europeans had found that “guest workers” tended to become very long-term guests, and a lot of them weren't at all happy with it. Old Man Rolfe seemed to have found a way to have a foreign underclass that was guaranteed not to start families or become a permanent part of the social landscape—without even provoking mass discontent, since they were all volunteers. In fact, the more he thought about it, the more diabolically clever it was.

Because there's no new generation raised here, none of the
nahua
will ever really understand how Westerners think, and none of them will ever really learn our way of looking at things—or read Jefferson, or Marx—and they'll never have the second-generation immigrant's hopes for full equality, or their frustrations. They're all perpetually fresh off the boat.

He gave a slight mental wince.
The “Old Man” seems a lot more interested in getting the result he wants than in the “how” part, though. Christ, but that man must give new shadings to the word “ruthless.”

He and Tully exchanged a quick glance, and the smaller man nodded. When he spoke, it was to Adrienne: “What happened to the real natives, though? Plenty of them, if I remember the history.”

“Nobody was counting, but the Old Man recorded in his journal that he was surprised at how dense the population was, even though the California natives weren't farmers. Most estimates of precontact Indian populations back in his day were way too low, of course.”

She sighed and went on after a moment's pause: “What happened to them? Well, influenza in 1946. That took off about half of them, we think; Uncle Andy—Andy O'Brien, one of the founders—was coming down with it on his first visit and it spread like fire in dry grass; the Ohlone, the local tribe, treated the sick by putting them in the village sweathouse and everyone crowded in with them to keep them company. Then when it got bad, the survivors of each little band ran off to the neighbors, and then they ran to
their
neighbors, and so on. Like dropping a stone into a pond, with the ripples bouncing back and forth from the Pacific to the Atlantic.”

“Ouch,” Tom said, and added to himself:
Again.
“Didn't it occur—”

Adrienne poured herself more coffee. “Why should it have occurred to anyone? The Old Man was a soldier—and in 1946, historical epidemiology was something most
historians
didn't know much about. I
was
a history student, at the University of New Virginia and then at Stanford. The first serious research wasn't until the sixties, seventies—
Plagues and Peoples, Ecological Imperialism,
the groundbreakers. Until then most people, most historians, just assumed a pre-Columbian population too small by a factor of ten or fifteen.”

Tully cocked his head. “Bet that flu epidemic wasn't the last one, either. With the Gate setup, you'd get a unified disease environment on both sides, unless you used air locks and a whole lot of other stuff, including a long quarantine period. That decontamination procedure you put us through wouldn't catch everything.”

She nodded. “In 1947, some Latvian refugees recruited as Settlers brought over viral hepatitis and typhus both. They got flown in and shoved through the Gate quick to avoid trouble about visas.”

“Ouch.” Tom winced.

“They threw out the clothes of the sick; some of the local Indians picked them up, and there were lice in the seams—amazing how hard it is to kill all the nits—and all of
them
had lice. . . . Then measles, mumps, polio, chicken pox from FirstSide; and smallpox from our Selang-Arsi trading partners in the sixties; and influenza every couple of years. Virgin-field epidemics. Plus some of the Asian kingdoms have taken to trading across the Pacific on their own—they're very quick to imitate things they can understand and apply, like better sailing ships—so smallpox and the other big killers hit again and again.”

“Jesus Christ,” Tom whispered; the meal turned into a rancid lump under his ribs. “At least they'll be building up immunities.”

“'Fraid not,” Adrienne said. “Or not much. There are a couple of hundred million people in East Asia on this side of the Gate. Some of the Selang-Arsi and Dahaean cities like Changdan or Hagamantash have hundreds of thousands each, enough to keep the big killer plagues going as standard childhood diseases. But even Mexico and Peru don't have that sort of density here, not anymore they don't. The plagues burn themselves out and vanish, and a while goes by before another ship happens to have an infectious crewman. The next generation grows up without being exposed, so they're just as vulnerable as their parents were, and the
next
plague hits just as hard. When that happens three times with something like hemorrhagic smallpox or pneumonic plague or chicken pox . . . well, there's not much left. The few who don't die of the fever are likely to starve or go mad. Then there are chronics like syphilis and gonorrhea. They spread widely and reduce fertility. We
did
manage to keep AIDS from getting through the Gate though, thank God.”

“So you don't have to fight for the territory,” Tully said thoughtfully.

“Not much, usually. We just move into vacant land, or give the survivors some horses and beads and knives, and point them east. Sometimes a little skirmishing.”

Tom made a choked sound. “That's . . . pretty ghastly,” he said.

She snorted, but he thought there was a slightly defensive note in her voice as she continued.

“Exactly the same thing happened after Columbus on FirstSide, Tom. Ninety percent die-off within a hundred years. Here, it's been about the same in sixty-two, because we have much better transport and maps.”

“Moving in on their territory before they could recover, though . . .” Her shrug was expressive. “Oh, don't be a hypocrite, Tom. What do you think happened with the Sioux in North Dakota, when your great-grandparents arrived from Norway all eager to sink a plow in the sod? I'll tell you what
didn't
happen.”

She placed her palms together in an attitude of prayer, rolled her eyes skyward and intoned in a voice dripping with mock compassion: “ ‘Oh, look at these poor Norski immigrants,' said the noble, selfless Lakota. ‘Let us spontaneously give them the rich prairies swarming with game on which we currently dwell, and then we'll move west to the dry badlands of our own free will so our descendants can enjoy malnutrition, TB, diabetes, despair and alcoholism on a miserable reservation for the next hundred and fifty years.' ”

After a pause: “Not.”

“Well, granted,” Tom said, flushing. “But that was a long time ago—”

“This is 2009.
Nineteen forty-six
is a long time ago. Why should I get upset over what happened before I was born any more than you do, just because it was three rather than six generations before? Sooner or later someone from Asia or Africa or Europe was going to learn how to sail here, and then it would have happened anyway. For all the breast-beating idiots back FirstSide, I don't see anyone packing up to leave the continent to the Indians. What nation isn't built on someone else's bones? That's how human beings operate.”

“I suppose it could have been worse,” he said. To himself:
That's even true. Though it's not saying much.

Adrienne smiled and patted his hand. “I knew you'd be sensible,” she said. “The Old Man's no ogre, no Pol Pot or Omar. He does have his preferences and crotchets, of course. He likes things clean and tidy and orderly. He likes useful gadgets, but he doesn't like big cities, or big industries, or agribusiness, or the Internet, or shopping malls or fast food, or modern architecture or freeways, or traffic jams, or . . . Well, as I said, you can guess the outline. Have either of you heard of the Southern Agrarians?”

“Don't have that file on my hard drive,” Tom said. “All I know about the South is what I saw in the commercial strips outside places I was stationed.”

“The Agrarians are a big part of the school curriculum here, as far as history and civics go,” Adrienne said. “You should read
I'll Take My Stand
. It'll help you understand the Commonwealth a lot better.”

Tully frowned, evidently searching his memory; he was a Southerner himself, of course. “Yeah, I remember something about them. Big back in the thirties of the last century, weren't they? Objected to progress and such. Didn't like ‘damn Yankee' notions.”

Adrienne chuckled. “The Agrarians thought laissez-faire capitalism was a dastardly subversive plot, and that Adam Smith and Karl Marx were six of one and half a dozen of the other. Things were different back then—real conservatives like the Agrarians worried about pollution and thought factory smoke-stacks were ugly and wanted people to be in touch with the land and nature. Commies and leftists and liberals loved steel mills and coal mines and wrote folk songs about building dams and bridges.”

“That's a switch,” Tom admitted, a little startled. His brows knitted in thought. “That explains a bit of what I've seen here.”

“It does. Just don't think the Old Man's a Green. Some of the results are the same, but the attitude's completely different. Anyway, Granddad was quite taken with the Agrarians back at VMI. Considering that for us Rolfes everything had been going to hell since 1783 or so—we were the ones who wanted to keep the Articles of Confederation and reject that newfangled Constitution—it's not surprising. Most of the people the Thirty Families brought in here agree with him, roughly. So do most of their children, and the grandchildren, my generation. They came here to get
away
from modern life, remember, and they raised us here with not much of an outside world to offset their influence. Even the Thirty Families don't live FirstSide anymore. We visit, we shop, we do business there, but this is our home.”