“Nineteen-thirties WPA style,” he said, attracting an odd look from a woman passing by. “New Deal Socialist Realism.”
He whistled cheerfully and cracked his knuckles. There was more of the same inside the big building at the rear—evidently known as Commission House—murals in paint and mosaic; the public areas were open, though nearly deserted. There were also a couple of exhibitions set up in the big lobby, with pictures and artifacts, evidently for visiting school classes and Scout troops and suchlike.
Hmmm, he thought, scanning one such, “The Heroes Who Built Our Country.” Must be interesting, the records of a country founded after people had cameras and the habit of recording everything possible. The faces glared out at him, grim, stiffly self-conscious, with an archaic toughness.
Apparently Mr. John Rolfe had brought a camera with him starting with his second trip, and plenty of others had followed suit. Besides the group photos, there were shots of Indian rancherías, dome-shaped reed huts, and of dancers in costume. More of boats and horses and construction machinery; pictures of gold operations in the Mother Lode country, starting with washing pans and working up through diesel-powered rockers and dredgers to hard-rock mining.
One wing of the government building was a library-cum-archive, all pale wood and flooded with light from tall windows; there was an excellent digital filing system as well as a librarian, and he collected a round dozen introductory texts—mostly those aimed at the junior-high level in history and civics; the science was imported from FirstSide. He read partly for the information, and partly for information on how information was presented to kids; that would be a pretty good way to find the official line. He somehow doubted that an academic Mafia would be able to take over the textbook market here and cock its snoot at the powers that were.
OK, the Founders were heroic adventurers, he thought, leafing through A History of New Virginia. Don’t make much of a muchness about taking this place over. “Freebooter” and “buccaneer” are complimentary terms, here.
That was no surprise: He didn’t think conquering pirates would have a self-esteem problem. The book made a lot of comparisons to the founding of the original thirteen colonies, to early Texas and to the Bear Flag Revolt in California. The tone was completely different from recent history books back FirstSide: self-confident arrogant swagger versus agonized sensitivity. Tully grinned, imagining the authors of this one meeting the people who’d written the books he’d studied in high school, back in the late eighties. Cries of “wimp” and “wussy-boy” would meet anguished howls of “Chauvinist! Imperialist!” with a good deal of truth on both sides.
Then he dove back into the narrative. The Indians got a few cursory paragraphs; they were backward and unprogressive, at best picturesque though doomed, and they all died when the newcomers sneezed on them. It wasn’t actually stated, but the implication was strong that this was just what they deserved, mainly for being no-account losers who couldn’t even develop basics of civilization like farming or a working machine gun. Those who resisted the New Virginians’ turfing the few plague survivors out of their homes were wretched, treacherous, vicious savages.
Yup, I guessed right, he thought. Injuns still the Bad Guys here.
That was no surprise either. Usually you didn’t start beating your breast and feeling guilty about overrunning someone and taking their stuff until they’d been reduced from “threat” to “pathetic remnant,” the way Australian aborigines had FirstSide. His collection of old movies had let him see the process in American popular culture, with Indians going from a faceless mob of scalping, raping, torturing two-legged wolves in Drums along the Mohawk to noble natural-ecologist victims of the Bad White Man in Dances with German Shepherds.
For that matter, the same thing had happened to public perception of wolves, and for about the same reasons—it was a lot easier to love thoroughly disarmed Indians who didn’t have anything left worth stealing except casino receipts, and a lot easier to coo about wolves when you weren’t trying to raise sheep next to them.
Speaking of Bad Guys, let’s see what the party line is on us FirstSiders….
FirstSide was evidently a sink of degeneracy and crime, where all the “wrong people” had taken over; plenty of pictures of slums, riots, shots of LA freeways at rush hour, New York and Tokyo subways, terrorist attacks during the war, eroded hillsides, industrial wastelands, mosh pits, homeless addicts slumped against Dumpsters, AIDS victims in Africa, RuPaul, Marilyn Manson wanna-bes and chemical waste dumps. A hell on Earth, from which the heroic Founding Families had led the chosen seed into the wilderness to build a New Jerusalem, and incidentally get rich and make themselves overlords.
From this, you’d think FirstSide was All Blade Runner, All the Time, he thought, with an amused chuckle. Of course, to someone raised here, it might really look that way.
“And let’s check on that, shall we?” he said, stacking the books and dropping them in the return carousel. “Now I’ve seen things from the top down, let’s go look at things from the bottom up and see what the sweaty masses think.”
Whistling, he strolled out past the impressive rotunda, down the marble steps, and across the square.
He walked past the churches, where the morning service was over and people were milling around, strolling, chewing the fat and dishing the dirt and admiring one another’s infants, and vendors were selling ice cream from little push-pedal carts.
“Pistachio and cherry, two scoops in a bowl,” he said—he’d always hated the way cones dripped on your hand.
Then he paid, raising his brows and thinking, My, my, a place where pennies are actually some use.
It was a nice day for strolling, and the ice cream was good; the last of the fog was gone save for some wisps over where San Francisco wasn’t; it was sunny and bright and the temperature was up to the mid-seventies, about as high as the East Bay got unless there was a heat wave. The long street that stretched down to the water was named Longstreet; evidently John Rolfe had a sense of humor, as well as a Civil War fixation. It was mostly commercial two-story buildings of whitewash and tile, mostly open-plan, varied with an occasional small park. He walked along under the shade trees, and conscientiously dropped his empty cardboard ice-cream dish into a trash container, along with the little wooden spoon. That was a datum too.
“No plastics,” he muttered. “Not where anything else will do.”
He kept going until he was west of the big produce market they’d come through on Friday, then turned south. That was the area closest to the docks and the factories, and as he’d expected, it didn’t have quite the burnished look the rest of the town did; not a slum by any means, or even really run-down, but the houses were smaller and older and all made of adobe, looking much alike. He estimated they’d be about fifteen hundred square feet each, with a small open front yard and fences out back, set on a plain gridiron of streets; the arch of tall shade trees over the pavement was still agreeable, though. Men in undershirts and women in print dresses sat on their verandas, drinking lemonade or beer or sodas and smoking; children and dogs ran around playing; music blared now and then from open windows, or the sound of TVs. He dodged a young man on a bicycle, wobbling along with a girl sitting on the handlebars; others were shooting hoops, mostly fastened to roadside trees. Now and then he smelled a barbecue grill in operation.