The general who’d spoken before added: “How difficult are these weapons to learn to use, o man made in the image of the gods?”
“Easier than a musket,” Lord Seven Deer replied. “As a musket is easier than a bow. In any case, the lords of the Deathwalkers will provide instruction; when the instruction is complete, the men will be used for their purposes, then returned to us for ours. Ammunition and spare parts will also be sold, though not cheaply.” His gaze sharpened on his supporters. “Each of you will find fifty warriors. Tried and tested men, but young. Cunning, but obedient and loyal. And none of such note or name that they will be missed. This must remain a secret of secrets.”
He rose and clapped his hands. The slaves filed in, bearing trays of carved wood heaped high with steaming food; others carried golden vessels of cacao and fermented fruits and northern brandy.
Only the king and the nobles, priests and the most trusted guards would return from this meeting, of course. The others would serve to buy the favor of the gods.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The ferry that ran across the Carquinez Strait was a big wooden rectangle with movable ramps at both ends, diesel-powered; when the wind blew back toward them for an instant the smell reminded him suddenly of FirstSide, and the way he’d hated the big-city stink of exhausts. That prompted another train of thought; he looked at the power lines that ran down to the northern edge, borne on wooden tripods and crossbeams made of whole Douglas fir trunks a hundred feet long with their feet braced in cast-concrete drums. The cable looped down to a ground station on the northern bank—there was a small hamlet there, where the city of Benicia stood in his California—and then reappeared on the southern shore, striding down the valleys, and he supposed over the hills to Rolfeston and the other Bay Area settlements.
“Where’s the generating station?” he asked curiously. “What’s the energy source?”
Adrienne looked over at him and winked, laying a finger along her nose. “Geothermal,” she said. “And on Rolfe land. Up north of Calistoga—in the geyser country—the Rolfe domain holds everything from Napa Town up through Clear Lake, and over to the Berryessa Valley. You might say we understand the power of power!”
“Ah.” He nodded. That was the world’s biggest geothermal-power area FirstSide, and the geography was the same here. “That the only power station?”
“The only one between Mendocino and Monterey, apart from some very small-scale hydro, and emergency generators at hospitals an’ suchlike,” she said. “The settlement up in Oregon uses hydropower, and down around San Diego they’ve got a turbine setup running on natural gas.”
Her accent’s gotten a little stronger since we came through the Gate, he noted silently. Not acting as much, I suppose. Aloud, he went on: “I suppose Sierra Consultants did the design work?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact,” she said, looking at him with surprise and respect. “One of their last studies for us, in the late fifties. We’ve got about a hundred and fifty megawatts capacity installed as of now, and since we weren’t dumb enough to neglect pumping the condensed steam back down the holes, the Commission thinks that we can eventually pull out ten times as much or more on a sustained-yield basis. That’ll be enough; we aren’t going to let the population here grow indefinitely.”
There were stairs to a walkway that ran along each side of the ferry. Tom took the ones on the left—port, he thought—and they stood on the gallery there, looking about and at the water that foamed by below. It wasn’t much disturbed; the blunt bow of the ferry threw its wave in a correspondingly wide arc, and only smooth surging ripples ran along the hull amidships. The water was blue but clear, amazingly free of silt despite being downstream of the Central Valley and the marshes; he could look straight down and see a pair of fifteen-foot sturgeon swimming slowly downstream, and then a school of eight-inch threadfin shad so thick that they made the water boil, leaving him staring into an infinite blue-tinted chamber of mirrors full of flickering silver.
There was a thick fringe of marsh along the strait’s northern edge; it suddenly occurred to him that upstream the delta country would be eight million acres of nothing but marsh. He looked around again, eyes on the blue cloud-flecked sky. This was a little past the main spring migration season and a month early for the start of the autumn one, but the flocks made those he remembered from his own Red River country in the fall season seem like a tattered remnant. In one casual glance he saw curlews, pelicans numerous as snowflakes slanting down to the surface of the water, ospreys falling like miniature thunderbolts and thrashing back into the air with silver fish writhing in their claws, redthroated loons diving from the surface, three types of grebe, great blue herons striding along the edge of the water, and on and on.
“This area really swarms with life, doesn’t it?” he said.
Adrienne nodded. “Even more than when Granddad arrived,” she said softly; he turned his head and surprised an expression of soft pleasure on her face as she watched the pageant. “God, I love this.”
That surprised him a little, both the expression and the words.
“More than when your grandfather came?” he said. “I know he’s a conservationist of sorts, but—”
She put a hand on his shoulder for a moment; it felt good. And hell, I’m just being professional.
“It makes sense when you think about it,” she said. “After the Gate opened, three hundred thousand top predators who hunted every day for food got replaced by two hundred thousand—mostly concentrated here around the bay—who hunt occasionally for fun. And the Indians used a lot of the wild plant life, too; acorn mush was their staple, plus they burned off millions of acres every year to keep the countryside open. Ecologically speaking, we New Virginians are grass eaters who get most of our food from restricted areas in a few valleys.”
Tom nodded. “So the Indians were the keystone species here; humans generally are. I imagine you’ve had some pretty wild ecological swings since then.”
Like an engine without a governor, racing and stalling, he thought; and tried not to think of the bands and villages struck down by bacteria and viruses from—literally—beyond their world, most likely the last survivors dying from sheer thirst or hunger as they lay tossing with none but the stinking corpses of the dead for company.
My ancestors may not have cared much, any more than these people do—but I’m not my ancestors.
“Right. I can remember the forest and bush getting thicker and encroaching on open country in my own lifetime—though we’re trying to use controlled burns to slow that down.” She glanced sideways at him as they leaned on the railings. “And speaking of wild ecological swings, we’re nearly in Africa.”
“Africa?” he said.
“Formally it’s the North Bay Permanent Wilderness Reserve and Acclimatization Area, but nobody’s called it anything except Africa since 1950.”
She pointed and moved her arm from west to east against the low hills that rimmed the horizon.
“From Miller Creek to about there, and from tidewater inland through the Carneros hills. The whole north shore of San Pablo and Suisun bays, all the wetlands and a rim of dry country too. Easier to show you why it’s called ‘Africa’ than tell you. It’s the reason Ralph called his place the Mermaid Café, though.”