“Possibly,” Tully said. “Depends on how much of what you’re telling is the truth, and how we assemble the facts once we know ’em.”
“Fair enough,” she said.
Then she smiled, and despite himself he felt his lips curve up in response. “First, I get to show you my home country.”
Tom straightened up and looked around. Anew, the knowledge that he was really here struck him.
“Dodos?” he murmured. “And tigers and bears, oh my!” Christ, the things we could see here! he thought. Tully gave a sudden strangled whoop; the same thought must have struck him.
“Dodos? Only in the zoo, this side of Mauritius,” she replied, chuckling. “They swarm like vermin there. As for the tigers and bears, the hills here are lousy with ’em.”
“It’s not far to Rolfeston, which is roughly where the People’s Republic of Berkeley is located FirstSide, “ she said. ”hich is a deep irony, once you know Rolfeston a little.”
They stopped for another checkpoint a thousand yards from the Gate complex parking lot; this one had those perforated plates that hid tire-ripping spikes ready to spring up at the push of a button, and two more strongpoints on either side of the road. This time the weapons peering out of the slits included 25mm chain guns, and guided antitank rockets mounted on a rotating cupola on the roof. Another of the black-uniformed soldiers in high-tech gear brought out a mobile reader to scan Adrienne’s fingerprints and retinas, and those of her passengers.
“GSF,” Adrienne said as they accelerated again. “Gate Security Force—reports directly to the Commission. The next layer of security is militia. Right around here is farming country, except for the Gate complex—we keep that closely guarded, as you can imagine. Minefields, dogs, electrified wire, and robot guns included, by the way, so don’t get any funny ideas about sneaking back FirstSide and calling in the marines. This isn’t the United States. Our guard details don’t have lawyers paralyzing their trigger fingers. They spot you off the road within the prohibited area, they kill you dead and investigate later.”
He nodded; there were still more pillboxes at strategic points, sensor towers, a six-wheeled armored car mounting a 40mm automatic cannon in its turret, and more troops—these in gray uniforms, and equipped with what looked like M-14s but weren’t. Occasional aircraft went by overhead, including a big blimp and a tilt-rotor, but one of them was a Black Hawk helicopter with door gunners, flying a patrol pattern.
The vacant countryside around the Gate complex was tawny-green grass and bush studded with enormous live oaks with their characteristic thick, gnarled limbs like the hands of arthritic giants. They passed cars and trucks headed both ways on the north-south bayside road, none very large, but the air held virtually nothing of the hydrocarbon stink you’d get in this area on…
FirstSide, he thought. Get used to the terminology.
Beyond the checkpoints the land was wild, like something out of an old book about the California lowlands, grassland and trees shading into a fringe of bird-swarming salt marsh; he saw a herd of small tule elk trotting off as the Hummer went by. Some of the valley oaks were over a hundred feet high and stretched out to shade circles nearly twice that diameter.
“What, no bears and wolves?” he said feebly.
Adrienne waved a hand toward the blue-and-green line of the Oakland-Berkeley hills that fringed the plain to their right.
“Plenty up there, and mountain lions. We don’t let ’em too close to town, of course.”
He twisted around. Tully had found a pair of binoculars kept cased in a holder attached to the back of the driver’s seat. Tom grabbed them, seeking detail, but the landscape was too alien and too large. He did see the waters of Lake Merritt behind them, and beyond that a glimpse of a house that must be huge to show at this distance. Farming country filled the coastal flats beyond that, a softly colored checkerboard of fields rimmed with the tall shapes of poplars and cypress.
“Why’s all this land here empty?” he asked.
“Partly parks, partly reserve for the expansion of Rolfeston… and we’re here.”
The town had a perfectly ordinary sign: ROLFESTON, POP: 29,855. It started more abruptly than a typical American settlement of its size, though, without the untidy fringe of derelict land awaiting development. There was a modest-sized industrial park of low-slung buildings on both sides of the road. Plantings and trees hid most of the factory-warehouse-whatevers; he could see that many were tile-roofed and stuccoed in various pastel colors, although others had sawtooth skylights and tangles of piping. A line of power cables looped in from the hills to the east on tall wooden poles that looked like whole Douglas fir trunks, before descending to a transformer station; the distribution lines must be underground, and the phone lines if there were any. Trucks pulled in or out, and buses, and lines of workers on foot or on bicycles or Segways: Evidently people were knocking off for the day.
Adrienne swung the Hummer into a parking lot, edged by more green-belt—this laid out as a park separating the workshops from the residential part of the town. It had the flamboyant loveliness you could get in lowland California with plenty of water: rhododendrons, tree-roses, hollyhocks and gardenias and sheets of lavender Chinese ground-lilies in shady spots. Plus copses of trees, pools, fountains surrounded by tiled plazas, streams, a bandstand, benches and brick walks, street lamps on ornate cast-iron stands. A row of bicycles stood at the junction of asphalt and greenery, and Segways—two-wheeled platforms with a vertical handle and crossbar arrangement. A sign over the rack prompted users to remember to plug in the recharger when they dropped one off.
“These’re free?” Tom said.
“Municipal service, like the bikes and the buses,” Adrienne said.
“I remember a couple of places tried that with bicycles,” Tully said. “Seattle, or somewhere else up in the Pacific Northwest. Didn’t work. Somebody always ripped ’em off.”
Adrienne waved around them. “Petty crime isn’t really practical here. For a bunch of reasons, startin’ with the fact that there’s nowhere to run and nowhere to hide, unless you want to go renegade and live up in the hills with the bears.”
Tom shrugged; there must be some way to beat the system here; he could think of several, offhand. It would have to be small-scale, though. Shock was receding, and his mind was starting to function clearly again. The Gate was the key to New Virginia; whoever held it had the place in a vise that needn’t even be very obvious elsewhere.
They stepped onto the little two-wheeled platforms; he hadn’t used one in a while, and that only as a curiosity, but the gyro-sensor computer system made operation instinctive, and you couldn’t fall off. They took off at a little better than a fast walk. There were a fair number of people about, getting out of work or school; his eyes sharpened as he took in the passersby and the scene. It had the same old-fashioned look as the farmland, with an overtone of Leave It to Beaver and the Partridge Family.
Asians were rare enough to be conspicuous; there were no blacks, no obvious Hispanics. There were a fair number of young men and women who looked like Mexican or Guatemalan Indians, unmistakable with their brown skin and Amerindian features, dressed in baggy white pants and shirts, or blouses and skirts, and sandals—and only adults, he realized; no children of that race, or old people; most in their late teens or early twenties, a few as old as Tom himself.
Their body language and gestures were wholly alien, and he overheard snatches of languages that weren’t Spanish, or anything he recognized, full of hissing, guttural sounds—his mind heard them as impossible combinations of letters, tz and zl and rr.