She frowned, obviously thinking hard. “As I said, the Old Man likes to learn from other people’s mistakes—says it’s less costly than making your own. So we recruit on five-year contracts, and in limited numbers—there are fifteen or twenty applicants for every slot. They don’t settle here—the wages are enormous by their standards, and they go back with nest eggs and a lot of new skills. We’ve had sons of princes volunteer to dig ditches.”
“Oh, sure, and none of them stay on regardless—and what about their kids?”
“Norplant for all the female new arrivals,” Adrienne said. “Or more modern long-term contraceptive implants. And this isn’t FirstSide, Tom. Remember Nostradamus and those ID cards you got issued? It’s impossible to live here without valid ID, not for more than a couple of weeks. Unless you want a long-term career in the borax mines of the Mojave.”
“They’re all happy to go back to Aztec land, when they’ve had five years of flush toilets and modern medicine?” Tom asked skeptically.
“Oh, any who want to stay after their contracts expire can, on certain conditions.”
“Conditions?”
“Well, only one major condition. An injection of P-63.”
Ouch, Tom thought.
That was an immunosterilizant the Chinese had developed back around the turn of the century. It made the body’s immune system sensitive to some of the proteins on the surface of sperm, programming it to treat them as foreign tissue. It was quite popular back on the other side of the Gate because it didn’t have any other symptoms; in fact it mimicked a common natural cause of infertility that had been a complete mystery until the 1990s.
By God, her grandpa certainly does think ahead. I suppose they used tube-tying and vasectomies before that.
Back home, the Germans and French and a lot of other Europeans had found that “guest workers” tended to become very long-term guests, and a lot of them weren’t at all happy with it. Old Man Rolfe seemed to have found a way to have a foreign underclass that was guaranteed not to start families or become a permanent part of the social landscape—without even provoking mass discontent, since they were all volunteers. In fact, the more he thought about it, the more diabolically clever it was.
Because there’s no new generation raised here, none of the nahua will ever really understand how Westerners think, and none of them will ever really learn our way of looking at things—or read Jefferson, or Marx—and they’ll never have the second-generation immigrant’s hopes for full equality, or their frustrations. They’re all perpetually fresh off the boat.
He gave a slight mental wince. The “Old Man” seems a lot more interested in getting the result he wants than in the “how” part, though. Christ, but that man must give new shadings to the word “ruthless.”
He and Tully exchanged a quick glance, and the smaller man nodded. When he spoke, it was to Adrienne: “What happened to the real natives, though? Plenty of them, if I remember the history.”
“Nobody was counting, but the Old Man recorded in his journal that he was surprised at how dense the population was, even though the California natives weren’t farmers. Most estimates of precontact Indian populations back in his day were way too low, of course.”
She sighed and went on after a moment’s pause: “What happened to them? Well, influenza in 1946. That took off about half of them, we think; Uncle Andy—Andy O’Brien, one of the founders—was coming down with it on his first visit and it spread like fire in dry grass; the Ohlone, the local tribe, treated the sick by putting them in the village sweathouse and everyone crowded in with them to keep them company. Then when it got bad, the survivors of each little band ran off to the neighbors, and then they ran to their neighbors, and so on. Like dropping a stone into a pond, with the ripples bouncing back and forth from the Pacific to the Atlantic.”
“Ouch,” Tom said, and added to himself: Again. “Didn’t it occur—”
Adrienne poured herself more coffee. “Why should it have occurred to anyone? The Old Man was a soldier—and in 1946, historical epidemiology was something most historians didn’t know much about. I was a history student, at the University of New Virginia and then at Stanford. The first serious research wasn’t until the sixties, seventies—Plagues and Peoples, Ecological Imperialism, the groundbreakers. Until then most people, most historians, just assumed a pre-Columbian population too small by a factor of ten or fifteen.”
Tully cocked his head. “Bet that flu epidemic wasn’t the last one, either. With the Gate setup, you’d get a unified disease environment on both sides, unless you used air locks and a whole lot of other stuff, including a long quarantine period. That decontamination procedure you put us through wouldn’t catch everything.”
She nodded. “In 1947, some Latvian refugees recruited as Settlers brought over viral hepatitis and typhus both. They got flown in and shoved through the Gate quick to avoid trouble about visas.”
“Ouch.” Tom winced.
“They threw out the clothes of the sick; some of the local Indians picked them up, and there were lice in the seams—amazing how hard it is to kill all the nits—and all of them had lice…. Then measles, mumps, polio, chicken pox from FirstSide; and smallpox from our Selang-Arsi trading partners in the sixties; and influenza every couple of years. Virgin-field epidemics. Plus some of the Asian kingdoms have taken to trading across the Pacific on their own—they’re very quick to imitate things they can understand and apply, like better sailing ships—so smallpox and the other big killers hit again and again.”
“Jesus Christ,” Tom whispered; the meal turned into a rancid lump under his ribs. “At least they’ll be building up immunities.”
“’Fraid not,” Adrienne said. “Or not much. There are a couple of hundred million people in East Asia on this side of the Gate. Some of the Selang-Arsi and Dahaean cities like Changdan or Hagamantash have hundreds of thousands each, enough to keep the big killer plagues going as standard childhood diseases. But even Mexico and Peru don’t have that sort of density here, not anymore they don’t. The plagues burn themselves out and vanish, and a while goes by before another ship happens to have an infectious crewman. The next generation grows up without being exposed, so they’re just as vulnerable as their parents were, and the next plague hits just as hard. When that happens three times with something like hemorrhagic smallpox or pneumonic plague or chicken pox… well, there’s not much left. The few who don’t die of the fever are likely to starve or go mad. Then there are chronics like syphilis and gonorrhea. They spread widely and reduce fertility. We did manage to keep AIDS from getting through the Gate though, thank God.”
“So you don’t have to fight for the territory,” Tully said thoughtfully.
“Not much, usually. We just move into vacant land, or give the survivors some horses and beads and knives, and point them east. Sometimes a little skirmishing.”
Tom made a choked sound. “That’s… pretty ghastly,” he said.
She snorted, but he thought there was a slightly defensive note in her voice as she continued.
“Exactly the same thing happened after Columbus on FirstSide, Tom. Ninety percent die-off within a hundred years. Here, it’s been about the same in sixty-two, because we have much better transport and maps.”
“Moving in on their territory before they could recover, though…” Her shrug was expressive. “Oh, don’t be a hypocrite, Tom. What do you think happened with the Sioux in North Dakota, when your great-grandparents arrived from Norway all eager to sink a plow in the sod? I’ll tell you what didn’t happen.”