Roy Tully was nodding his head vigorously behind her back and mouthing: Yes! yes!
Tom rubbed his jaw. “What’s your total population?”
“About two hundred thousand, according to Nostradamus,” she said. “Just over three thousand in the Thirty Families, a hundred and fifty thousand Settlers, and fifty thousand nahua; there may be ten thousand or so wild Indians left in what you’d call California, say thirty or forty thousand between the Rockies and the sea from Baja to Alaska, but we don’t have much contact with them. More than half of us live around the bay; there are pockets of settlement down the coast to San Diego—we get our oil from the Long Beach field—and another outpost up around the site of Portland in Oregon. A few thousand in Hawaii and the Australian colony near Adelaide. And a chain through the Sierras to Nevada, with some small outposts further east; that’s the hardest to keep up, so far from the sea.”
“Then why—” He stopped and thumped himself on the forehead with the palm of his hand. “Oh, right. The Comstock Lode.”
“Not to mention Tonopah and Alder Gulch and Cerro Gordo and other places,” she said.
“Yah,” Tom said, nodding slowly. “That sounds reasonable. Sure, I’ll drive north with you. But… what’s that got to do with a gym?”
She grinned, and despite himself he felt his mouth quirking up in response for an instant before he forced his face back into an expressionless mask.
“Well, the reason I want to get back to Seven Oaks today is that my mayordomo ”—she pronounced it Spanish-fashion—“my manager, that is… says that we have to begin on the wheat tomorrow. And rest assured, that’ll work off a lot more breakfasts than one.”
“You always put your guests to work?” he said. Or just lowly peasants from FirstSide?
“At harvesttime? Damned right I do,” she said. “Since I intend to be out there helping too. You have no idea how hungry a landholder here can get for men when something gets ripe. Ogres ain’t in it by comparison; everyone pitches in. And it’ll give you a chance to see the Commonwealth from the bottom up, as it were.”
She paused for a moment. “Also, I’ve spoken with my grandfather, and he’d like to meet you too. Seven Oaks is close to Rolfe Manor.”
And I’d like to meet him, he thought, a hunter’s eagerness behind the expressionless mask of his face.
“Look, Tom, you’ve got to be professional about this,” Tully said, as Adrienne left to dress.
“I’m trying to be,” Tom said. “You’re the one who’s acting like she’s your long-lost sister.”
“No, you’re not being professional,” Tully said, his face serious. “I am being professional; I’m doing my Roy the Friendly Goblin shtick.”
“You think she’s falling for it?”
“No, but she thinks I’m funny—and knows it’s an exaggeration, not just an act. You are pouting, except when you forget and it slips. You’re letting your resentment at being led around by the dick and made a fool of risk alienating our only source of information here.”
“Not to mention she made everyone back home think we’re dirty,” Tom said grimly.
Tully shrugged. “Hey, Kemosabe, there are two possibilities with that. First, we never get back. In which case, who gives a flying F-word what people on the other side of the Gate think? It just plain doesn’t affect us here. Second, we do get back—and chances are our names are cleared. Hell, we’ll be heroes, famous, and rich after the interviews and quickie book deals!”
“It still grates.”
“Without her, we’ve got zero chance of finding out what’s going on here—not to mention of ever doing anything about it. We’d have to give up and start looking around for jobs, because we’d be citizens of the great and wonderful Commonwealth for the rest of our lives whether we liked it or not. That still may happen, but do you want to make it a sure thing?”
Tom opened his mouth, flushed, and closed it again. After a moment he replied: “OK, Roy, you’ve got me. I am being resentful. But Christ, I’m not an actor or an undercover type. She did lie to me and I do resent it.”
“Yeah, but you don’t have to keep hugging it tight, do you? Flashing between warm and chilly according to whether you’re remembering to be mad that moment? Jesus, Tom, the woman really does like you, you know.”
“And…” Tom hesitated, but if you couldn’t talk to your best friend, you were limited to conversations with your mirror. “And she didn’t just lie about what she did. She lied about what she is. She’s a killer.”
Tully let the chair he was leaning back in fall forward onto all four legs with a thump. He stabbed a finger at his partner.
“Hey, Kemosabe, I’ve got news for you! I don’t see nooobody but killers in this room! I killed a fair number of people ’cause Uncle Sam said they deserved to die, and sometimes I killed people who happened to be standing too close to Those Officially Classified as Evil when I set off the area-effect munitions. So did you, not to trade war stories. You think it’s worse because she’s got different plumbing? And she did what she did in the line of duty; she could have offed Perkins, but she didn’t. Have you never done something that stuck in your craw because it was the only way to get the job done?”
“Not quite on that level, but I see what you’re driving at. OK, OK.”
“She’s got her job to do,” Tully said, driving home the point with his customary subtlety. “We’ve got ours.”
Tom grunted in reply and picked up a newspaper from the table, looking for refuge from the embarrassment that made him squirm slightly. Instead he half choked on a sip of coffee as he read the headline: TWO FISH AND GAME WARDENS FROM FIRSTSIDE TO COMMONWEALTH!
His picture was there next to Roy’s; neither of them were looking at their best, and the prints must have come from the ID machine at Gate Security. No matter how high the tech became, official photographs always made you look like a criminal degenerate, a moron, or someone who’d been dead for several days. Often all of those at once. Apparently that was true in all possible universes.
The story below listed their CVs, right down to their military service in the Rangers and Tenth Mountain Division, respectively, and had the chutzpah to wish them well, and recommend applying for jobs with the Frontier Scouts, whatever the hell those were.
“Gate Security don’t miss a trick, do they?” Tully said. “This place is a small town—hell, this whole country’s a small town. Now everyone will know our faces.”
Tom gave the rest of the paper a quick scan. The focus was strictly local, with virtually nothing about events back on the other side of the Gate. The politics made no sense to him except for picayune stuff, school board and road improvements. Foreign affairs were really incomprehensible, stories about events abroad, in the Mexican city-states or East Asia. He simply lacked the background information the writers assumed in their audience; it was like a man from Mars trying to understand why the secessionist movement in Iraqi Kurdistan was important to Turkey. Who, what or where the hell was Changdan? And why was it interesting that someone named Lord Seven Flower in a place called Zaachila was buying more horses via San Diego? The back pages were full of amateur theatricals, sports and reviews. Movies, he noted, were often from FirstSide; books seemed to be largely local, and so did TV shows apart from very old reruns.