“Hole in one,” Adrienne said. “When the Old Man stumbled through the Gate in 1946, he found things here in the Americas pretty much the way they were when Columbus arrived, barring details.”
“Details?” he asked.
She waved a hand. “You can look ’em up at the library. The Aztecs are gone; it’s a mess of little city-states down Mexico way, and they’ve all learned how to make bronze tools and weapons… that sort of thing. Less obvious differences up here in hunter-gatherer territory. My grandfather thought this was the past, FirstSide’s past, until he was able to check.”
“And the Old Man decided to make a good thing of it,” Tom said.
Adrienne leaned back in her chair; the waiter brought desserts concocted of fruit and cream, and more strong coffee in a silver pot.
“Well, wouldn’t you have?” she said. “Granddad told me he took about five minutes to decide that he’d given Uncle Sam everything he owed on Okinawa—remember, when and where he was a boy some people still stood up for ‘Dixie’ and sat down for ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ Besides, you two, you’re supposed to be environmentalists. What do you think would have happened if the U.S. government had gotten the Gate in 1946? With a whole preindustrial planet to plunder?”
“So he’s still dictator here?” Tom said, deliberately needling. I can get really angry later, he thought to himself. Right now it wouldn’t be tactful… or prudent.
Adrienne shrugged, unaffected.
“He’s certainly still big alpha-male bull gorilla and Chairman-Emeritus of the committee,” she said. “My father’s his number two, and Dad’ll succeed him when Granddad finally decides to go do a hostile takeover on the afterlife. Succeed to his offices, at least. Nobody will ever have quite the Old Man’s position here.”
“Committee?”
“Central Committee of the Gate Control Commission, representing the Thirty Families—Thirty-two, strictly speaking—some of them men who served with him in the Pacific, the rest relatives from back in ol’ Virginny, then a few more with each wave of immigrants. The Rolfes, the Fitzmortons, the O’Briens, the Collettas, the Hugheses, the Ludwins, the Carons, the Pearlmutters, the von Traupitzes, the Chumleys, the Versfelds—well, you’ll pick up the names fast enough.”
She waved a hand around. “To simplify, they’ve been running things ever since, pretty well. This doesn’t look so bad, does it?”
“Not bad, for a pirate kingdom,” Tom said.
Adrienne laughed, the warm chuckle he’d grown to like—and now couldn’t trust.
“What’s that old saying?” she said. “‘The first king was a lucky soldier.’ Or a fortunate pirate. The Old Man’s a rascal and the Thirty are a gang of bandits, but he’s a likable old rascal, and we’re pretty enlightened bandits… most of us, most of the time.”
Tom looked around. “That’s one thing we’ll have to look into. Your Old Man doesn’t seem to have been much of an equal-opportunity employer, for starters,” he said.
She spread her hands. “Ah, you noticed ‘diversity’ wasn’t a priority in recruitment? Yeah, it’s white-boy heaven here.” A wry smile accompanied that. “Emphasis on the boy, by the way… Anyway, Granddad always said he believed in learning from experience, that importing Africans into old Virginia hadn’t turned out all that well for either party, and that if anyone objected to his priorities, they could go find their own alternate universe and run it any way they pleased.”
Tom snorted. “So it’s the WASP promised land?” he said sardonically.
“Not exactly. We’ve got the Blackfeet, the when-wes—”
“Whoa!” Tully held up a hand.
Tom’s head felt heavy, as if the flow of information were clogging the veins there. He went on: “You’re losing me again. Blackfeet? Indians? What’s a when-we?”
“Oh, sorry. Blackfoot is a translation of pied noir. North African French, like the folks who own this restaurant. When-wes are”—she nodded toward another party at a nearby table, three generations in khaki shorts and bush jackets, from a white-haired elder down to a clutch of tow-thatched children—“that comes from ‘when we were in…’ Kenya or Rhodesia, usually, which they’re always going on about. You’ve met some of our Afrikaners, quite a few of those over the last fifteen years, and Russians and some Balkan Slavs—all of ’em with reasons to find a bolthole, the biggest groups of immigrants we’ve had in my lifetime. It was the same back in the forties, granddad got Germans and Balts with, ummmm, a strong incentive to go somewhere they’d never be found; a fair number of Italians; east Europeans running from Stalin; and Brits tired of rationing and things going downhill. Plus we’ve always had a steady trickle of Americans; they’re about half the total, and much the largest single group.”
“Plus people who stumble on the Gate,” Tom said sardonically.
She spread her hands, acknowledging the hit. “There haven’t been more than a few hundred Involuntaries all up, and most of them settle in well enough. Meanwhile, all the original groups have been intermarrying enthusiastically, the melting pot in action. The ones in the first twenty years were the most numerous; by now three-quarters of the Settlers were born here, and nine-tenths of the Thirty. I was, and my father was too, and my nieces and nephews, and some of them have kids already. With our rate of natural increase we double every generation even without immigrants. And of course, nobody leaves.”
“Ah,” Tom nodded. So there is an element here against its will. That has possibilities.
She paused. “I don’t want to tell you any more lies, Tom. You two are Involuntary Settlers. That means you can do anything here… except go near the Gate. That will never be allowed, ever, under any circumstances whatsoever; and trying means dying. It wouldn’t matter if you had the Old Man himself as a hostage; they’d shoot you both down. Ordinary Settlers only get near it if they’re on official business, like Piet. Members of the Thirty Families can visit FirstSide, but they need clearance—and if they endanger the Gate secret, the Commission sends someone like me after them and they never, ever do it again.
“But all that’s rare,” she went on more cheerfully. “Not many stumble on the secret anymore.”
Tully broke in: “OK, if this was a California, an America, that didn’t get discovered by Europeans… what happened to the California Indians? I suppose they were the people we saw on the way, the ones in the Viva Zapata campesino costumes?
Adrienne pursed her lips and examined the play of light on her wineglass as she turned it between long slender fingers.
“No, those are the nahua.”
“Nahua… nahuatl, the Aztec language? Mexicans?” Tom said.
She nodded. “Gastarbeiter. Contract workers, braceros, mostly from Mexico; we call them nahua from the main language down there. About a third of the population, half the labor force.”
“What about them?” Tom asked. “I can’t see your Old Man welcoming them with open arms. Or is this more like the Old South than you were letting on? Contented darkies… brownies… singing in the quarters, stealing chickens and eating watermelon?”
Adrienne grinned. “Now, give credit where it’s due. The Old Man could have done just that, bought slaves to do the dirty work here, you know. The warlords and priest-kings down Mexico way would have sold us any number. They’ll do anything for steel tools and muskets, not to mention brandy and aspirin and plastic beads. They have swarms of slaves of their own, and given the national obsession with chopping out hearts, those are the lucky ones. Lots of wars.”