She placed her palms together in an attitude of prayer, rolled her eyes skyward and intoned in a voice dripping with mock compassion: “‘Oh, look at these poor Norski immigrants,’ said the noble, selfless Lakota. ‘Let us spontaneously give them the rich prairies swarming with game on which we currently dwell, and then we’ll move west to the dry badlands of our own free will so our descendants can enjoy malnutrition, TB, diabetes, despair and alcoholism on a miserable reservation for the next hundred and fifty years.’”
After a pause: “Not.”
“Well, granted,” Tom said, flushing. “But that was a long time ago—”
“This is 2009. Nineteen forty-six is a long time ago. Why should I get upset over what happened before I was born any more than you do, just because it was three rather than six generations before? Sooner or later someone from Asia or Africa or Europe was going to learn how to sail here, and then it would have happened anyway. For all the breast-beating idiots back FirstSide, I don’t see anyone packing up to leave the continent to the Indians. What nation isn’t built on someone else’s bones? That’s how human beings operate.”
“I suppose it could have been worse,” he said. To himself: That’s even true. Though it’s not saying much.
Adrienne smiled and patted his hand. “I knew you’d be sensible,” she said. “The Old Man’s no ogre, no Pol Pot or Omar. He does have his preferences and crotchets, of course. He likes things clean and tidy and orderly. He likes useful gadgets, but he doesn’t like big cities, or big industries, or agribusiness, or the Internet, or shopping malls or fast food, or modern architecture or freeways, or traffic jams, or… Well, as I said, you can guess the outline. Have either of you heard of the Southern Agrarians?”
“Don’t have that file on my hard drive,” Tom said. “All I know about the South is what I saw in the commercial strips outside places I was stationed.”
“The Agrarians are a big part of the school curriculum here, as far as history and civics go,” Adrienne said. “You should read I’ll Take My Stand. It’ll help you understand the Commonwealth a lot better.”
Tully frowned, evidently searching his memory; he was a Southerner himself, of course. “Yeah, I remember something about them. Big back in the thirties of the last century, weren’t they? Objected to progress and such. Didn’t like ‘damn Yankee’ notions.”
Adrienne chuckled. “The Agrarians thought laissez-faire capitalism was a dastardly subversive plot, and that Adam Smith and Karl Marx were six of one and half a dozen of the other. Things were different back then—real conservatives like the Agrarians worried about pollution and thought factory smoke-stacks were ugly and wanted people to be in touch with the land and nature. Commies and leftists and liberals loved steel mills and coal mines and wrote folk songs about building dams and bridges.”
“That’s a switch,” Tom admitted, a little startled. His brows knitted in thought. “That explains a bit of what I’ve seen here.”
“It does. Just don’t think the Old Man’s a Green. Some of the results are the same, but the attitude’s completely different. Anyway, Granddad was quite taken with the Agrarians back at VMI. Considering that for us Rolfes everything had been going to hell since 1783 or so—we were the ones who wanted to keep the Articles of Confederation and reject that newfangled Constitution—it’s not surprising. Most of the people the Thirty Families brought in here agree with him, roughly. So do most of their children, and the grandchildren, my generation. They came here to get away from modern life, remember, and they raised us here with not much of an outside world to offset their influence. Even the Thirty Families don’t live FirstSide anymore. We visit, we shop, we do business there, but this is our home.”
Tom gave her a considering look. “You didn’t come across as… different,” he said. “I’d think that being raised here would be harder to hide. At first I just thought you were a bit weird because your family was rich.”
“Well, thanks,” she said dryly, and then shrugged. “I visited FirstSide a lot, and spent a couple of years at Stanford. And I had special training in blending in over there; I can understand how modern America operates. The Old Man doesn’t give a damn what FirstSiders think, though, and neither do most people in the Commonwealth. This is another country, and we do things differently here.”
“Not to mention that here, you Rolfes are kings and your word is law.”
“There’s that. This isn’t a dictatorship, but it isn’t a democracy either. Sort of like a reasonably law-abiding and benevolent feudal oligarchy.” Her glance sharpened. “And we—myself included—intend to keep it that way, against all threats.”
Adrienne’s apartment building was off the main square, halfway along the length of Lee Street’s passage at the lower edge of the Berkeley hills, and nestled in the first rolling upswell; it was a two-story block built around a courtyard with a small swimming pool and a fountain, the whole thing rather like the French Quarter in New Orleans. Tom felt himself stumbling with fatigue as they climbed to the bedrooms. It wasn’t even any particular effort to decline an unspoken invitation and fall into one of the beds in the guest room. He woke for a moment then, just on the verge of sleep, to hear Tully say: “You know, Kemosabe, sometimes you’re too stubborn for—”
“Shut the fuck up, Tonto.”
INTERLUDE
The Mermaid Café had been busy all day, and Ralph Barnes was mildly contented with the take once he’d added the cash to the amounts paid by direct debit—he’d make payroll and expenses and a bit over, so far this year. He dropped the last of the bundled bills into the strongbox, followed by coins that he poured into the appropriate tray by denomination. A few were gold ten-dollar pieces, about the size of a dime; at this time of year, he got a lot of boat crews from the fishing craft working the salmon run up Carquinez Strait. Twenty hungry men per boat could work up quite a tab, even at the extremely reasonable prices he charged for steaks, chops, lavish salads, first-rate burgers and pretty damned good home-brewed beer.
He flicked a gold coin up toward the ceiling, watched it spin in the lamp-light, and then snatched it out of the air with one thick-fingered, hairy-backed hand. He might be pushing fifty, he might be putting on weight despite the hard work—hell, he thought, looking down at his belly, face it, I’m getting fat—but his reflexes were still pretty good. The coin bore a California condor in flight on one side, with John Rolfe’s straight-nosed profile on the other and the Latin motto he’d given the country he founded: Carpe diem et omnia mundi.
“Seize the day. And everything else you can lay your hands on, you fascist bastard,” he said in a growl. “It’s no wonder you made a giant vulture the national bird. Why not the skull and crossbones for the flag?”
A knock came on the door, followed by: “Hey, Dad?”
He looked up. His eldest son was in his twenties, a close match to his father’s blunt-featured stockiness; the black hair and hazel eyes were his mother’s coloring.
“We’ve got a customer, Dad,” Sam Barnes said nervously.
“So?” Ralph said.