Hmmm. Can’t place them, but otherwise it looks a little like a crowd back in North Dakota, he thought. Then: A crowd in Fargo a long time ago.
He studied the rest of the townspeople. Half the men in the crowd sported hats, and most of the adult women wore skirts, with only a few in slacks or jeans; there wasn’t a single tattoo or body piercing to be seen on the numerous teenagers, many of them in uniforms that looked like they were modeled on a Catholic school’s.
Hell of a lot of teenagers, too… wait a minute…
There were a lot of baby carriages and toddlers and kids running and playing with barking dogs, too, enough to make him look twice and deliberately count.
Adrienne saw the direction of his glance. “The baby boom never stopped, here; it always hits me when I go back FirstSide, how few children there are. Our average family is about four kids—I’ve got four older brothers and a sister myself, and twelve nieces and nephews with more on the way—and the average age of the population is twenty-five years younger than FirstSide America.”
“No kids yourself?” he asked. You said not, but God knows you told me enough howlers… though I remember how odd a family that size seemed….
She laughed and shook her head. “Oh, I’m a freak of nature—ask anyone.”
They wheeled on through a pleasant residential district of winding streets and single-family homes set in modest-sized lawns and very pretty gardens; most of the houses were built in a Mediterranean Revival style that reminded him of Santa Barbara. American elms arched over the streets and brick sidewalks, looking to have been planted about the time he was being born back in 1976; obviously they hadn’t let Dutch elm disease through the Gate. Vehicular traffic was light, mainly small hybrid gas-electric runabouts and a fair smattering of silent fuel-cell buses, but with swarms of bicycles as well, plenty of Segways, and the odd horse-cart. The houses were medium-sized, all single-story; some of the older ones looked like they were made of adobe, many others of plastered brick; there were no frame homes, and all the roofs were tile.
The intersections often had a clutch of shops—none with familiar chain names, none large, but selling ordinary groceries and hardware, computers and personal electronics. There were small parks and churches every now and then—mostly Episcopal, he noted, with a scattering of Baptist and Methodist and Catholic, a Lutheran, a few onion-domed Orthodox and a couple of synagogues; and a fairly big school, two stories, set amid a couple of acres of garden and trees, built in California-Spanish style with its walls overgrown with climbing rose.
“This is the blue-collar section of town, more or less,” Adrienne said. She waved to her right, toward the blue-and-gold patchwork of forest and grassland on the hills. “Then there’s the town hall and the public buildings, and the main business district, and then more expensive housing, well-to-do Settlers, and the town houses of the Families. The steep part’s all Commission reserve, parkland.”
They went past a giant farmer’s market, stalls and stands under a huge truss-timbered roof and enormous redwood pillars stretching upward like the legs of dinosaurs. A cleared laneway wide enough for delivery trucks cut through it lengthwise; she led them into that, slowing down to walking speed perforce among the crush of pedestrians and handcarts.
Well, that’s a switch, Tom thought. A farmer’s market where most of the people selling things look like actual farmers.
Which was a change from FirstSide’s California. That wasn’t the only difference, either; the fruits and vegetables and flowers were in the expected gorgeous Californian abundance, but there were live chickens and other poultry in cages, and rows of butcher’s stalls like a carnivore’s dream, with stout pink-faced men and women in white aprons and square hats beside glass-fronted compartments holding piles of steaks, chops, roasts, garlic-smelling sausages, pâtés and terrines, whole elk and deer and bison carcasses—
“For some reason, most of our butchers are Balts and Germans,” Adrienne said. “We got a bunch of ’em in the forties and the businesses stayed in the same families. Most businesses do, here.”
The fish section opened his eyes and made him lean back unconsciously, bringing the Segway to a slower pace. It was a pungent mass of vats and piles of shaved ice topped with sixty-pound yellowtails and huge albacores, barrels of writhing crabs the size of dinner plates, mounds of three-inch prawns, rock lobsters, abalone by the gross, oysters bigger than his fist, ling and flounder, cauldrons of shrimp…. Knives flashed and paper-wrapped parcels were handed out to shoppers; the prices looked absurdly low.
“Wait a minute,” Tully said shrewdly. “What’s a day’s pay here? Entry-level, grunt work.”
“Two dollars and all found,” she said. “Three-fifty if you’re finding your own eats and bunk. That’s for a day laborer, a deckhand on a fishing boat, that sort of thing. The deckhand might get paid in a share of the profits plus fish.”
Nickel a pound for filet mignon and three cents for shrimp still sounds pretty cheap, Tom thought.
“Where’s the catch?” he said aloud. “Taxes? Housing?”
“You can get a two-bedroom house around here for two thousand,” she replied. “And taxes are low; mostly local school taxes, that sort of thing. No more than a tenth of your income, less for the bottom of the pyramid.”
“Where’s the catch?” he asked again.
She grinned. “Tom, the Families own the Gate. Also the gold mines, the silver mines, the power company, the oil wells down in Long Beach, the refinery, the public utilities, a lot of the factories, and pretty well all the land. Taxes? We don’t need no steeenkin’ taxes!”
Tully snorted. “There’s got to be a catch somewhere.”
“Well, food and housing are cheap,” she said. “So are clothes and shoes—most things made here in the Commonwealth are low-cost—except gas, which is kept expensive deliberately, ten cents a gallon. Stuff from FirstSide can get pricey, especially if it’s big and bulky. Cars are a luxury—ordinary people in Rolfeston usually rent one if they want to get out of town, and use public transport or bicycles inside. The Old Man—ah, my grandfather, John Rolfe the Sixth—doesn’t like sprawl. A town should be a town, and the country should be the countryside, he says.”
“Not an obvious horror show, I’ll admit,” Tom said.
Be honest, he told himself. It actually looks pretty good. But I’m seeing what she wants me to see, so far. Remember what happened to those poor dopes the Russians used to show around, back during the Cold War. A lot of them came back singing hosannas.
“See why we’re not so hot to have everyone and his cousins from FirstSide pouring in?” Adrienne asked sardonically, as they came out onto the street again and leaned forward to pick up speed.
Tom nodded grudgingly. “You’ve got a sweet racket going,” he acknowledged. “The authorities—”
“The U.S. authorities would somehow find it in the interests of the United States and universal truth and justice to confiscate everything we own and ram forty million people through the Gate,” Adrienne said. “Not to mention taking away our national independence and probably throwing half of us in jail.”
“Well, you’ve got a point there….” Tully began, before Tom glared him into silence.
Beyond the open-air market was a commercial section of two-story buildings, shops with apartments for the owners above, and in their windows what he suddenly realized were the first advertisements he’d seen in New Virginia. A few posters at newsstands urged him to vote yes for Bond Issue 34, proclaimed the urgency of electing Michael Taconi to the school board and lauded George McCarthy’s merits for city council.