“He helped break my toy,” Rolfe pointed out reasonably. “It’s only just that if he is to live where others died, he make some recompense. And I do wish a Christmas present for my grandchildren and prospective great-grandchildren. The Commonwealth can survive without the Gate, but regaining it would be a major boon.”
Sergei prayed to a God in whom he’d never believed, and touched the screen.
CRACK!
He winced, then looked up and let himself slump forward in relief, his palms resting on the console and breath shuddering in and out in great gasps. Rolfe might have killed him without rancor, as the price of a sporting wager…
But if I died, it would be in earnest, he thought, and waved the probe forward.
A long boom swung through the gate, with sensors on its end. And a television pickup; it was keyed to a large flatscreen placed where they could all look at it.
The screen flickered, then settled to a clear image. It was raining there, too; as well it might, in midwinter along the Californian coast.
“But where is the Gate complex on FirstSide?” he asked himself; all he could see was long grass….
Rolfe began to laugh; coughed, recovered, laughed again.
Because in the grass was a dead animal, huge and shaggy, almost certainly a giant sloth. Paws braced on it, the saber-tooth bared its foot-long fangs and screamed, flattening its ears and bristling its orange-and-black-striped fur.
APPENDIX ONE
The Thirty Families
Rolfe
Domain: Napa, Lake County
Motto: “Carpe Diem et Omnia Mundi.”
Sigiclass="underline" Red lion rampant on black background
Fitzmorton (twice)
Alan Fitzmorton—Domain: south Oakland to San Leandro
Rob Fitzmorton—Domain: Sonoma Valley
O’Brien
Domain: Marin County
Motto: “O’Brien Go Braugh!”
Sigiclass="underline" winged harp
Colletta
Domain: Santa Clara Valley
Motto: “Silence.”
Sigiclass="underline" Winged Thompson gun
Hughes
Domain: Healdsburg area
Pearlmutter
Domain: San Francisco peninsula to Palo Alto—“New Brooklyn”
Motto: “The Best You Can.”
Throckham
Domain: Petaluma
Filmer
Domain: Concord, Contra Costa
Tuke
Domain: Livermore-Amador, Contra Costa
Cooke
Domain: Orange County
Peyton
Domain: lower Santa Ynez valley
Hammon
Domain: Pleasanton, Contra Costa
Hottywood
Domain: southern Santa Clara valley
Ludwins
Domain: western Santa Maria valley
Carons
Domain: Central Santa Clara (between Collettas, Rob Fitzmortons)
Von Traupitz
Domain: Suisun Valley
Chumley
Domain: western Yolo county
Motto: “Who dares, wins!”
Versfeld
Domain: Santa Monica, east along Santa Monica foothills
Motto: “Look before you trek!”
Bauer
Domain: Carmel, Carmel Valley
Motto: “Death Holds No Repose.”
Stanislaus
Domain: southern Oxnard valley
Motto: “We Fight for Our Friends.”
Morrison
Domain: Lower Salinas
Motto: “Down Styphon!”
Sanders
Domain: Upper Salinas
Sulgrave
Domain: Russian River valley
Motto: “Fortune Is Bald Behind.”
Ball
Domain: Orange County
Motto: “Pick Your Man and Aim Low.”
Fairfield
Domain: San Leandro (south of Alan Fitzmortons)
Motto: “By This Right.”
Fest
Domain: Ventura; northern Oxnard
Motto: “Winter Isn’t Coming.”
Barklay
Domain: inland Santa Ynez valley, around Solvang
Motto: “How Shall One Fight a Hundred?”
Wyans
Domain: inland Santa Maria valley, around Sisquoc
Motto: “Westward the Course of Empire.”
Devereaux
Domain: Paso Robles area
Motto: “Pour Dieu et la Patrie.”
Batyushkov
Domain: Santa Cruz, Pajaro Valley
Motto: “Za Nas!”
Some Collaterals:
Di Montevarichi—collaterals of the Rob Fitzmorton line; relatives of his wife.
Tuscan nobility.
APPENDIX TWO
Pocahontas and the Rolfes of Virginia
In our history, John Rolfe (1585-1622) married the woman nicknamed Pocahontas, whose real name was Matoaka. She was the daughter of the Powhatan chieftain Wahunsonacock, and married Rolfe on April 5, 1614, ensuring peace between the powerful Powhatan confederacy and the struggling English colony at Jamestown for eight more years.
That probably ensured the survival of the first English foothold on North American soil—without that breathing space, it might well have suffered the fate of the earlier “lost colony” at Roanoke, with unguessable consequences for the history of the Americas. Rolfe was also responsible for introducing the already-popular West Indian variety of tobacco to Virginia, sparking the colony’s first boom and putting it, for the first time, on a sound economic footing.
Matoaka, christened as Lady Rebecca at her baptism, gave birth to one son, Thomas, in 1615. In 1616 the colony sponsored a voyage to England for the Rolfes, where Lady Rebecca was given a wildly enthusiastic reception, and Virginia gained invaluable publicity. It was badly needed, for while Virginia was beginning to acquire a reputation as a place where an ambitious man could get rich, for most of the newcomers it was a charnel house. In these decades the average life expectancy of an English settler in Virginia was less than two years; tens of thousands died in the Chesapeake swamps—of malaria, dysentery, Indian arrows, hunger, scurvy, overwork and sheer heartbreak. Not until around 1700 would births outnumber deaths among the English settlers in Virginia, nearly three generations after the foundation of Jamestown.
Lady Rebecca died on her way back to Virginia in the year 1617; like so many of her compatriots, she contracted some European disease, probably smallpox—one of the many maladies to which the long-isolated Amerindians were fatally vulnerable. John Rolfe went on to become a member of the Governor’s Council and a successful tobacco planter, before being killed at Berkeley Hundred in the surprise Indian attack which began the Powhatan-English war of 1622. His son Thomas inherited his lands and prospered, but the Rolfe name became extinct in the next generation. Through his daughter, however, Thomas—and the Powhatan chieftains—became ancestors of virtually all the First Families of Virginia; Robert E. Lee, for example, was among their descendants; so was Thomas Jefferson’s wife.