That makes sense, he thought. Whatever these Thirty Families are, I don’t suppose they want to handle the drudgery of day-to-day administration themselves.
Adrienne pulled up before a high white wall topped with brick and overgrown with climbing roses, splashes of crimson against green leaves and whitewash beneath. It enclosed the end of a U-shaped building, forming the courtyard of a restaurant that proudly announced in tiles set over the arched gateway:
That building was adobe, the genuine article; he recognized the thick-bottomed tapered walls with a slightly melted look; the roof was curved red Roman-style tile. The cooking smells seized him, garlic and fried onions, roasting meat over wood coals, good coffee brewing and the maddeningly delicious scent of baking bread, making him swallow involuntarily as his body remembered that it had been a very long day on one granola bar and that he’d upchucked yesterday’s dinner. They left their Segways at a rack and went through a wrought-iron gate, past a fountain and into a tiled patio shaded by spectacular wisterias growing over trellises, purple and white flowers hanging in clusters like grapes and trunks thicker than peach trees; galleries ran around the court on three sides, supported by wooden pillars made from whole tree trunks. The outdoor patio was scattered with tables that were—
Jesus! Carved out of slabs of redwood six inches thick, he thought.
Some of them were fifteen feet long and six across, too, varnished and polished to show the grain and the deep sienna-red color of the wood. Tile or stone set into the wood showed in the middle of the place settings.
It was busy, with a dozen would-be patrons waiting on padded benches along the inside of the walls, or at a cheerfully noisy bar that could be seen through the open doors of the main building; somewhere a piano was tinkling and an accordion playing. A plump middle-aged woman with black hair and an olive complexion came bustling up and whisked them past the crowd to a table set for four—a waiter scooped up the extra set, and Adrienne ordered for all of them.
In a corner a huge, ancient and somewhat scruffy parrot slumbered on a perch, occasionally waking to cry raucously: “A bas De Gaulle! Salaud, salaud, salaud!”
He eyed her narrowly. “Rank hath its privileges?” he asked.
“I am one of the Thirty Families,” she said. She held up her left hand, showing the braided gold-and-platinum ring on her thumb. “Incidentally, this is something all the members of the Thirty Families wear. We get them at a ceremony in our early teens—sort of a bar mitzvah thing.”
“Mr. Bosco had one of those,” Tom said ironically.
“Well, I’m also a Rolfe, not to mention a granddaughter of the Old Man himself.” Then she grinned. “And you look like a man recovered enough to eat and ask questions.”
A bouillabaisse came, rich with prawns, clams, crab, rock-cod, eel and whiting; with a flourish the waiter mixed in the rouille, a paste of garlic, fish stock, crumbs and red pepper, and laid down a platter of bread fresh enough to steam gently when it was broken, and olive oil for dipping. A carafe of chilled white wine accompanied it. That was followed by grilled potatoes with herbs, green salad, and a beef-and-olive daube, which came with another carafe of red; evidently standard procedure if you didn’t order a specific vintage. Even then, he was hungry enough to do the meal justice between sharp questions and digesting the answers; the cooking was superb even by Californian standards, and the materials better still. Sun faded from the sky; lights came on, candles on the tables and frosted globes in curlicued wrought-iron brackets along the walls. Moths and assorted bugs immolated themselves in both.
Over coffee she concluded: “—near as we can tell, the difference starts in 323 B.C. Alexander the Great didn’t die on schedule. Here he lived another forty years, and he’s still worshiped as a son of Zeus. The Jews got assimilated by the Greeks, so no Christianity; Zoastrianism died out…. The details don’t matter. What’s important is that nobody from the Old World discovered the Americas, here, apart from some Scandinavians on flying visits to Labrador and Maine. But no sustained contact; the European and Asian parts of this world are sort of… oh, equivalent to the Middle Ages, technology-wise. In terms of countries and suchlike…”
She looked around, then pointed for a second. “See those two?”
The two men followed her eyes. Two obvious foreigners were sitting not far away, dressed in long-skirted silk coats lavishly embroidered in writhing animal shapes, baggy pantaloons and curl-toed boots. They were tall, broad-shouldered men with hair worn shoulder-length, youngish but weathered, with a half-Asian look; high cheekbones and slanted eyes contrasted with prominent noses and dense close-cropped beards. One…
“Dude’s a dead ringer for Keanu Reaves,” Tully commented.
The other was similar, save that his hair was a sandy color. Both of them were handling their forks with the slow care of those used to eating with their fingers, and they had sword belts looped over the back of their chairs. The weapons were straight double-edged broadswords with cruciform hilts and dragons curling in gold and crimson along the black leather of the scabbards.
“Those are Selang-Arsi nobles,” Adrienne said. “From kingdoms in Manchuria and Korea and northeast China, in FirstSider terms. The Macedonian Greeks took over Central Asia—the ’Stans, Tom; they call it Bactria here—and stayed strong there. They bounced the north Iranian nomad peoples eastward, the Alans and Saka and Sarmatians and Ye-Tai and whatnot. Back FirstSide, those tribes kept going west and south, as far as India and eastern Europe, with the Asian nomads from east of the Tien Shan, the Huns and their successors, pushing them on and following them. It went the other way here, and the Huns and Turks and Mongols and Manchus disappeared in the ruck.”
“So those guys are basically sort of Persians?” Tully asked, interested.
“No, they’re Tocharians mixed with north Chinese and Tungus peoples; the Tocharians were from Sinkiang and Shansi, originally. Sort of like Celts; they were the easternmost of the Indo-European peoples. In our history the Uighurs, Turks, conquered and absorbed them about seven hundred years after Christ. Here the Iranian-speakers pushed the Tocharians directly east, then went past them south into China in waves, mixing with the locals. The Han only kept their identity in Indo-China…. It’s a long story; two and a half thousand years of different history, all over the world. We trade with the Selang-Arsi a fair bit; they’ve got some gorgeous artwork, and they’ve picked up a lot of simple technology from us. The important point is that nobody here ever developed a real science; our best guess is that the Industrial Revolution needed the equivalent of a toss coming up heads a thousand times in a row.”
“Wait a minute,” Tom said, cudgeling his brain for remnants of high school history. “That means… well, if Europe stayed backward—”
“Did it ever!” Adrienne said. “Outside Spain and Italy, they’re still painting themselves blue and hunting heads.”
“—how did that affect the Indians?” he continued doggedly. “A lot less than the Old World, I’d guess.”