I love you too, Piet, he thought.
He steadied Tully; Roy still looked a little woozy, but he was coming to fast. A machine on a bench whirred and hummed, and extruded ID cards. The technician extended them between finger and thumb. Tom took his; it had his face, name, a number, and coded machine-readable data. At a guess, his data was burned into a file with some sort of read-only central databank; people had talked about that for years during the war, especially after the Charleston disaster, but the ACLU had always killed it. Evidently they thought differently here.
“These are your probationary Settler’s ID cards,” the tech said, in a bored bureaucratic singsong. “It’s your driver’s license, your Social Security card, your debit and credit card, and all your other ID rolled into one. Don’t lose it. There’s a heavy fine for replacement. Carry it on your person at all times. There’s a heavy fine for not producing it when requested by a law-enforcement officer. Don’t try to tamper with it. That never works—the scanners check it against Nostradamus’ central files and your biometric data every time you use it—and it gets you five years at hard labor in the mines. Here is your wallet. It contains one hundred dollars in local currency; remember that prices here are much lower than on FirstSide. Here’s your brochure. Welcome to the Commonwealth of New Virginia, and may you have many productive years as law-abiding citizens.”
“New Virginia?” Tom asked, stuffing the wallet and card into the pocket of his sweatpants.
His voice was calm, but tension sent a slight sour taste into the back of his mouth as they went out into a corridor in institutional beige, with overhead fluorescent lights. Waiting rooms stretched off to either side, very much like an airport, and were full of people in overalls or business suits or family groups—those last looking very much like first-class passengers, and sitting in bubbles of social space. The surveillance cameras were airport-like too, except that no attempt had been made to disguise them.
“Formally, the Commonwealth of New Virginia is what this country—the Pacific coast of North America and inland for a ways, plus Hawaii and a few other bits—is called,” Adrienne said. “Wait a minute and it’ll start to become clear.”
She looked up at the cameras, checked her angles, and then winked at him, holding a finger to her lips in the shhhhh! gesture for a moment.
He grunted and swung his head toward the men’s room sign. She nodded and leaned against the back of a row of chairs to wait, elegantly hipshot in the sleek black uniform.
Tully paused to splash water on his face before joining him at the row of urinals. “So, looks like we’re in the hands of the Bad Guys, who rescued us from the Even Badder Guys?”
“Looks like,” Tom said.
Then he raised his eyes to the ceiling. Tully’s face changed; Tom felt a moment’s warm comfort. At least I have some backup. And Roy doesn’t need me to dot all the I’s; this place is probably sewn up tighter than the Gaza Strip.
Adrienne was similarly quiet when they returned. They swung through a pair of automatic doors, and out into a sidewalk fronting on a road; he was reminded again of a medium-sized airport. It was evening, the sun sinking toward the west; big rectangular sheet-metal buildings painted green stretched off to the right; ahead of them was a parking lot, with many SUVs and four-by-fours; to the left was some rather nice landscaping, flower beds and trees, including a couple of fine valley oaks, a two-lane blacktop road, and then—
He choked, gasping for breath; knowing was one thing, seeing another. Adrienne supported him with a hand under his left arm, guiding him to lean against a six-foot ceramic planter full of impatiens. Tully was staring and whistling. Tom shook his head, conscious that his mouth was hanging open, something that he’d always thought was a figure of speech before, and not caring a damn. Beyond the road and stretching northward and west was classic California lowland savanna, more big oaks and tall grass turning from green to gold, starred with yellow poppies and blue lupine and camas lily. Beyond that…… was San Francisco Bay, with the sun casting a glittering path across the azure surface. Only there was no San Francisco; the day was brilliantly clear, some low whitecaps on water intensely indigo, and he could see the outlines of the peninsula past Alameda—which had a small airport where the Naval Air Station had been once, and was otherwise bare of human works.
Yah. It’s just West Oakland, if you subtract the city, and all the landfill on the shore. Subtract the—
A little farther up the coast long piers had been built out into the bay, with fishing trawlers and a couple of smallish wooden ships tied up next to them; cranes swung cargo nets ashore to a clutch of sheds and warehouses, and trucks carried cargo out onto the highway.
Across the water there were no buildings on the hills where San Francisco should be, only a town along the waterfront. No East Bay bridges either, no Golden Gate, and Alcatraz was white with seabird droppings and swarming with the pelicans that had given it its name. The ships on the water were fewer by an order of magnitude, and small—schooners, a couple of them six-masters, barges and tugs, a clutch of sailboats and some fishing boats under a white-winged storm of gulls. He looked up and saw strings of pelicans and cormorants, golden eagles, and—he counted frantically—half a dozen condors. The sky was alive with wings, and it wasn’t even the season for migratory birds. Out on the bay a whale spouted, then submerged in a smooth black curve. Sea lions hauled themselves out along the shores of Alameda, and he could just make out a sea otter on the nearby shore.
I’m where that video was taken. It’s as if I’m standing in Oakland before Columbus, he thought. But it can’t be. And there are paved roads and Ford SUVs and Hummers and a great big building with a Gate in it, and that little port and—
His vision faded. He felt something pushed between his lips and sucked reflexively; it was brandy, potent and smooth, in a silver flask. That brought on a fit of coughing, blessed pain that called his spirit back into his body. Tully was hovering nearby with a frown of concern on his face; evidently the smaller man was more mentally flexible.
“Takes a lot of FirstSiders hard the first time,” Adrienne said. “And yes, it’s exactly what it looks like, only it’s not the same San Francisco Bay you grew up with. Different… time line. A different history, two different universes existing in the same space and joined only by the Gate. You know the concept?”
“Yeah,” he said hoarsely. “Yeah, you know I read science fiction. You saw my research on you. What the hell… ?”
“Showing is faster than telling, but it’s stressful,” she said. “You feeling better?”
“Yeah. Thanks a lot.”
She chuckled. “Why do I hear a lack of enthusiasm? But come on; I’ll buy you two dinner and fill you in. It’s the least I can do, after getting you into this mess.”
They passed over into the parking lot; it was unbearably prosaic to slide into the front passenger seat of a Hummer and pull out onto the road, heading northward and tending away from the water. His head tried to swivel all possible ways at once; he felt a little undignified, but it was a whole new world—literally.
After a few hundred yards, Adrienne pulled the Humvee over to the graveled side of the road. Tom waited, distantly noting the incredible, intense freshness of the air, even with the mudflat smell that came fairly strong now and then. She took a small black box out of her jacket and went over the vehicle and all three of the humans in it, before shrugging.