“Time to soak up some atmosphere,” he said to himself, and patted the gun for reassurance.
Not that he anticipated any firefights; but the weapon itself was a sign he had the trust of some powerful people here in this miniature pirate kingdom. Everything in miniature except the planet, he thought. Well, that ought to make things easier. There couldn’t be more than a few dozen decision-making individuals involved in whatever machinations were going on. Have to watch my step, though, he reminded himself. Remember that these people aren’t mine, even though they speak the same language and wear the same clothes.
He left the Segway in its rack; a town of thirty thousand couldn’t be too hard to see on foot, and you got a better grip on a place that way. It was a little eerie though, looking out and seeing nothing of the ten-million-strong megalopolis he remembered. He had to keep reminding himself that he was living this, not watching it on a screen.
Adrienne’s flat was on a low foothill rise; the ground grew steeper and trackless directly behind it. He turned northward, along a broad avenue that ran along the inner edge of the flatlands. It was about as wide as one of the major arteries in DC and had the same slightly artificial feel; he’d noticed the same thing in St. Petersburg, which he’d visited, and in pictures of Brasilia and Canberra, which he hadn’t.
Planned city, he thought. Planned from scratch. Pretty, though.
The median strip was also broad, and a mass of flower beds: roses, hollyhocks, rhododendrons, penstemon and more, in patterns of purple, pink, white and yellow and green, with a shade tree every so often and a brick pathway down its center. The sidewalks on either side of the road—it was called Lee Avenue—were wide as well, brick-surfaced, with trees in circles of wrought-iron fence surrounded by stone benches. They were also fairly crowded, mostly with families heading northward on foot, all dressed to the nines and this time all wearing hats, down to the little girls in frilly pink dresses and their resentful brothers in ties.
Oh, Tully thought. Right. Sunday morning. He could hear bells ringing, too. Everyone heading for church.
The heights to landward were much more densely forested than the Berkeley hills he remembered, green and shaggy and marked by the distinctive spikes of old-growth redwoods in the west-facing canyons. Save for bridle paths, they were also empty of the marks of man. Between there and the roadside were what his map called the Golden Mile, evidently the high-rent district. He couldn’t see much of it, because the inner side of the sidewalk was paralleled by high brick walls, usually topped by iron spikes. The gates showed a little more, being mostly wrought-iron openwork themselves: curving driveways, lawns and sprinklers shedding silver mist on them, tall old trees, and half-hidden houses. Those continued the Spanish-revival motif he’d noticed, although many were too hidden by greenery and distance for him to tell for sure.
The other side of the avenue was commercial, two-story buildings enclosing small courtyards surrounded by shops or restaurants; those alternated with theaters, live and movie, nightclubs, and a couple of art galleries. The streets westward of that seemed to be residential, with houses and lots getting smaller as they declined toward the bay. Looking downslope, what you mostly saw was trees, with the red of roofs peeking out from among them.
Feels odd to be in a city with no really tall buildings, he thought.
This wasn’t much of a city, as far as size went; less than half the size of his California’s Napa; about the same size as Paso Robles minus suburbs. But there were no skyscrapers at all; not a hint of anything Bahaus, in fact, not even the low-rise version.
Big Tom’s gonna love it. He always did have a major hate-on for modern architecture.
That didn’t mean there weren’t any big buildings. Just short of Jackson Square both sides of the street were lined with three- or four-story office blocks, set back behind narrow strips of garden. Small discreet signs labeled them Commission offices charged with various functions—one was Gate Security Force HQ and at least partially open on a Sunday; it had black-uniformed guards standing before the doors.
Jackson Square was a rectangle with its longest axis parallel to Lee Avenue; bigger than its namesake in New Orleans, and named for Stonewall instead of Andy; about the size of the park around the State Capitol building in Sacramento. The perimeter was a broad avenue, of the same sort as Lee; another took off from the middle of the western edge and ran down to the water. The parkland in the center held a tall white stone basin and fountain, throwing its plume high in the air and falling into a large oval reflecting pond marked with water lilies, the big showy flowers dotting the blue surface with blossoms of copper, red, blue, white and purple. A marble-paved circle surrounded it, set with planters full of impatiens and flowering vines and with more stone benches; paths radiated out to each corner, separated by flower beds, trees—mostly wide-spreading native oaks—and greensward.
Public buildings rimmed the square. The westernmost corners each held a big church, one vaguely Italianate in style and the other a spare white-steepled structure—the Roman Catholic and Episcopal, respectively. Most of the crowds were hurrying in their direction. Between them along the western edge were a couple of other churches, somewhat smaller, and with their own crowds. The other buildings were official-looking; this time the architecture was neo-Classical, rather than Santa Barbara’s 1920s riff on Spanish Renaissance and Baroque.
He grinned at the big Commission headquarters that stood in the middle of the square’s long eastern side, standing and staring at the structures that rose at the top of a long ceremonial marble staircase until he was certain. “That’s not just like the rotunda of the Palace of Fine Arts building in San Francisco. It is the rotunda of the Palace of Fine Arts building.”
That made him laugh out loud. Built in lath and plaster for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition, he thought. Restored in reinforced concrete when that started to wash away. And copied here in the real-McCoy stone!
“Or possibly reinforced concrete with stone cladding,” he added to himself—this was earthquake country, after all.
The great central rotunda was a duplicate as far as dimensions went, an octagon over a hundred and thirty feet across, supported on pillars over a hundred feet high and topped with a low dome—here, though, sheathed in genuine polished gold leaf, not gray concrete, sending out blinding flashes in the bright midmorning sun. Behind that was something different—a long rectangular structure, with arcades and a second-story balcony on either side; it was set into the hillside, which gave it a view out over the dome. He walked closer to the rotunda; the eight panels in low bas-relief around the exterior were different too, allegorical sculpture showing scenes he didn’t recognize.
The floor of the rotunda held another piece of marble statuary. First and foremost was John Rolfe, Adrienne’s grandfather, dressed in rough hiking clothes with a forties look, a rifle leaning against the rock at his back, and a map in his hands. Others—he presumed they were the Founders of the Thirty Families, or some of them at least—were doing various pioneerish things behind them; mostly involving digging, plowing, pounding on a presumably symbolic anvil, piling up bricks, using surveying instruments or standing and peering at the horizon with weapons ready. The murals around the interior of the dome had the same themes, and a similarity that nagged at him before he identified it.