He sighed. More of the damned Rolfes. It was their policies that made it at least a little difficult for him to get a new nahua maid for his favorite daughter—he, Prime of the whole Colletta Family, its collaterals and its affiliation! And it was their law that required every young member of the Thirty Families to contribute time to the Commission’s needs. Although to be fair, he could see a good deal of sense in that.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he grumbled, and accepted her hug and kiss on the forehead.
He looked at his watch when she left: eleven-fifteen, which gave him a few minutes before Anthony arrived, and an hour before the business lunch with Dimitri Batyushkov. That was going to be embarrassing. Anthony was at least partly responsible, for all that his claim of bad luck and foul-ups by the FirstSider element had some merit. He’d been in charge. Excuses didn’t matter. Results did.
He had the report on his desk memorized; he picked it up and threw it in the discreet disposal slot. Equipment hummed, and then there was nothing left but powdered paper with traces of ink, sitting in the hidden waste receptacle and waiting for the cleaning woman to dump into her bin. Giovanni Colletta looked around the big office; it was a square room mostly lined in polished light-gold beewood paneling, and bookcases filled with volumes bound in tooled leather. There was space here and there for a painting or a vase. The porcelain was his own selection, Selang-Arsi ware in subtly mottled eggshell colors, brought from New Virginia’s version of Manchuria. He’d led a trading-and-exploration expedition there, as a young man.
The paintings were his father’s, some excellent Old Masters, some garish as only a Sicilian peasant’s idea of beauty could be, but both were reminders of the founder—good and bad the old man’s own choices, not bought taste. The floor was marble squares separated by thin strips of lapis, with glowing Eastern rugs beneath the leather-upholstered chairs and settees and tables of rare tropical woods.
Behind the desk was a solid section of wall bearing Salvatore Colletta’s portrait, flanked on either side by tall glass doors. Outside was a broad terrace, with a balustrade at its outer rim and man-high stone vases spaced along the inner, tumbling sprays of blossom in hot gold and white and purple down their pale sides; hummingbirds like living jewels of malachite and crimson hovered around them in a blur of wings. He went past the sweet-scented glory and leaned his palms against the stone of the balustrade to look northeastward; he often used this sight to hearten himself.
It was a prideful thing, the view down from where Colletta Hall stood in the first upthrust of the Santa Cruz range’s eastern foothills, over the broad lands that acknowledged him lord.
“Vallo du Beddu Cuore,” he said softly. It was a fitting name for the Colletta domain. Valley of Heart’s Delight.
They had called it so on FirstSide, until urban sprawl had eaten the orchards with microchip factories sheathed in black glass and hideously priced little houses, with shopping malls and freeways—he’d seen that on his last trip, and still had nightmares about it.
Here the lower Santa Clara valley stretched off northeastward to San Francisco Bay; the hall’s gardens with their tall trees and green lawns, pools and fountains and the cool fire of flowers falling from terrace to terrace; the red roofs of the little town that served Colletta Hall below and the farmsteads of the Settler families beyond. Blocks of plum and almond and apricot trees stood green and regular; in springtime they became a riot of pink and white blossoms that scented the air for miles. Vineyards had turned to rows of shaggy green; grain bowed to the breeze in rippling sheets of gold cut by the dark green of trees planted in lines as windbreaks, ready for next week’s harvest; corn stood tall and beginning to tassel; ant-tiny cattle and sheep moved through pastures dotted with wide-spreading oaks; tractors crawled, leaving swaths of rich dark soil upturned, followed by the wheeling flocks of gulls.
The distant ticking of their engines, or the occasional car or truck drawing a white plume along a dirt road, were the only mechanical noises that intruded among the slow sough of the warm June wind through tall trees. Other sounds melted into that music: an ax splitting wood, human voices in speech or song, the buzzing whirr of hummingbird wings from flower to flower. Behind him were the steep low mountains, rolling toward the Pacific and turning green with redwood groves.
“And it’s all part of old John Rolfe’s fantasy of a Virginia that never really was,” he murmured. “A pretty fiction of foxhunting squires and sturdy yeomen. A pleasant dream, and a good place to start. But not to stop.”
The true power of the Collettas was in their share of the New Virginia gold and silver and mercury mines, the oil wells and factories and power stations, the Settlers who were affiliates of the Colletta family, the weight he and his allies could pull on the Central Committee… and above all, the Colletta share of the Gate revenues and the vast corporate holdings FirstSide. But the Rolfes and their allies dominated the committee and the Commission through it, and imposed a policy of caution that irked him more with every passing year, playing at rustic lordship and keeping the Commonwealth of New Virginia inside its kernel. His hand clenched into a fist on the volcanic stone.
“We must learn to dream more grandly. There is a world awaiting us—two!”
A discreet cough brought him round. His personal executive assistant stood there: Angelica McAdams, a plain middle-aged woman of formidable efficiency, whose family had been Colletta affiliates since the 1950s. He was easy enough with her that it didn’t embarrass him to be caught talking to himself—making a political speech to himself, in fact.
Probably because it’s one I want to make before the committee, but don’t quite dare, he thought as he nodded to her.
“Mr. Anthony Bosco is here for his appointment, sir.”
“Thank you, Angelica. Hold any incoming calls.”
Anthony Bosco was third-generation; the Boscos were members of the Thirty Families but only as collaterals, relatives Salvatore Colletta had brought in a few years after the opening of the Gate; and Anthony’s mother had been of the Filmer Family. He was an unremarkable young man in his late twenties in a neat brown-silk suit, with carefully combed dark-russet hair, a faint trace of acne scars across his cheekbones and currently a hangdog air.
That broke into a painful smile as he advanced to bow deeply and kiss the Colletta Prime’s hand with a murmur of “Bacciamo le mani”; that was a custom of the Collettas that had spread widely among the Families, like the Rolfes’ riding to hounds or the von Traupitzes’ student saber duels or the Fitzmorton boar hunts with spears.
“Sir—” he began.
Crack.
“Idiota!” Giovanni snapped, as his hand slapped the young man’s face to one side. “Ricchiune scimunito!”
Anthony’s face paled, save where the fingers had left red prints. Normally Giovanni Colletta spoke English, like everyone else except recent immigrants. It was a sign of extreme danger when he started cursing in the Sicilian dialect picked up from his father in infancy. From outside the charmed circle, being a member of the Families looked more important than being one of a collateral line. From the inside, particularly if you were a Colletta collateral, getting the Prime this angry with you could make life intolerable. And when the business you managed for the Prime was a capital crime by Commonwealth law…