Rolfe nodded. Chumley had been offered a seat on the Central Committee; it would be the twenty-nine families then; thirty in truth when Auguste Devereaux arrived, if he managed to dodge both de Gaulle’s “bearded ones” and his ex-friends from the OAS. With a committee appointment came a share of the Gate Control Commission’s revenues, and a portion of its political power in the Commonwealth.
The Kenyan went on: “It’ll make me a very wealthy man, and I’ve fallen in love with the climate and the game here; it’s like Kenya in my father’s time, only better. Completely different from FirstSide California, of course: I wouldn’t live there for all the oil in Arabia. Odd, to think that one man living or dying could make so much difference.”
Rolfe nodded. “Although when that one man is Alexander the Great…” He shrugged and smiled.
Here Alexander the Great hadn’t died in Babylon in 323 B.C. Instead he’d lived to a ripe old three score and ten, and handed an undivided inheritance to his son by Roxanne. At its peak a century later, the empire he founded stretched from Spain to Bengal, before sheer size and entropy and Greek fractiousness broke it asunder in civil war and barbarian invasion. From what the Commonwealth’s explorers could tell, most of that area still worshiped Zeus-Alexander, and spoke languages descended from ancient Greek—in much the same way as Italian and Romanian and the other Romance tongues came from the Latin spread by Imperial Rome. There hadn’t been time or resources to do much more exploration yet, but they had found none of the city-states or kingdoms or tribes in the Old World to be much beyond a late medieval level of technology.
“Evidently science and machinery are unlikely accidents,” Rolfe went on. “Fortunately for us!”
“Fortunately indeed!” Chumley said, returning to their business. “Which gives us this wonderful opportunity. But how many of my compatriots I can bring with me, that’s another matter. Living here would be… well, very different. Not many natives, for one thing; not much labor available.”
“That’s true of Western Australia on FirstSide as well,” Rolfe said. “And a number of them are relocating there. The Commonwealth will be a lot better than going back to England and the crowds and the drizzle.”
“But more are heading for Rhodesia and South Africa on, ah, FirstSide,” Chumley said.
Rolfe gave a wry smile. “And in anything from five to forty years, we’ll be recruiting there,” he said. “Hate to say it, but that’s the way I read events; it’s not going to stop at the Zambezi. That’s one reason I’ve restricted the import of native labor here; we could get any number of workers from the kings and warlords down in Mexico, but we’re keeping our bracero program strictly limited. Inconvenient in the short run, I grant you—but I don’t want my grandchildren to be facing a mass of half-assimilated Aztecs who’ve been reading Locke and Tom Paine, not to mention Marx. Even without foreign countries to stick their oars in, it would be too likely to end badly. Unless we went right back to ox-plows and handicrafts, and while I’m full of reverence for the good qualities of the past, that’s more filial piety than I’m willing to invest.”
“A point, old boy, a most cogent point. I will certainly be able to get several hundred new settlers, possibly a thousand. And as you say, Rhodesia may provide more fairly soon, and I have contacts there—relatives and friends. They won’t all be farmers and planters, of course. Small businessmen, skilled workmen, civil servants. A few white hunters, too—they’d kill for a chance to move here.”
“All useful,” Rolfe said. “Good pioneer stock, like my own English ancestors. And—”
A man in the black uniform of Gate Security came up. He held a sealed message, and his face was pale beyond the degree natural to one with his ash-blond Baltic complexion.
“Thank you, Otto,” Rolfe said, and tore it open, his face an unreadable mask as Lieutenant von Traupitz stood at stiff attention.
That changed to a sigh of relief. Conscious of the glances on him—Salvatore Colletta had noticed something, and so had Louisa Rolfe—he spoke loudly enough that those nearby could hear: “The Russians have backed down. They’ve accepted Kennedy’s terms without qualification. It looks as if there won’t be war on FirstSide after all.”
Chumley nodded and ran a hand over his thick white hair as a murmur spread through the crowd, and the laughter of relief from unacknowledged tension.
“That was too close for bloody comfort,” he said. “I’ve been glad the family was here already.”
“Yes,” Rolfe said. “Although who can tell how the next crisis will go? War now would have destroyed Europe and Russia and hurt America badly. Twenty years from now, with more bombs and missiles to carry them, it could end civilization FirstSide. Or even the human race.”
“That’s something that will get you a few more men willing to move,” Chumley said shrewdly. “This is the ultimate in fallout shelters, old chap. Although… how well would we do here if the Gate were lost for good?”
“There are contingency plans,” Rolfe said, carefully noting the “we.” “Once the formalities are done, you’ll have access to the secret files.”
They’d brought over a vast hoard of technical books and drawings and microfilms, for starters; stockpiles of machine tools and gauges and metals, of crucial parts and materials; and it was all constantly updated. The Commonwealth’s own workshops and skilled men could keep civilization going here, after a fashion, at need. Still, a few score thousand people were not enough to keep up the full panoply of twentieth-century industrial technology. They would have to gear down and give up much of the more complex equipment until population built up. Of course, there would be advantages to that, as well. He hadn’t founded this nation to have it follow exactly in FirstSide’s footsteps.
“Still, I’d prefer it came much later, if ever,” he said. “Much, much later.”
CHAPTER FIVE
I feel good, Adrienne thought, as the descent began. Wired, though. It’s been a long time since anyone affected me the way Tom does. God, but he’s cute. Sweet, too.
Her skin tingled, and all her senses seemed preternaturally sharp, so that even the flat neutral oil-ozone-metal odor of the helicopter seemed as deep and subtle as fine wine. She felt nimble and quick and clever, as if she could dance between the whirring blades of a harvester unharmed and handle this damned smuggling case with the flick of a finger.
Be careful, woman. This is exactly the way people feel when they’re about to screw the pooch. You’ve had a good idea about fixing a horrifying oversight. That doesn’t mean you’re omniscient. Besides which, when and if Tom learns the full truth…
The rolling foothills of the Coast Range were behind them, and the southern San Joaquin Valley spread beneath, turning from the thin green of spring to the dun-colored wasteland of summer drought. At two thousand feet she could see southward to where bare brown mountains and the Tehachapi Pass closed the southern end of the great north-south lowland; a little higher, and she could have looked north to see the San Joaquin join the Sacramento and flow into the delta before emptying into San Francisco Bay. A haze of heat lay over the land beneath her, though it was only an hour past dawn, and most of the game that hadn’t moved up into higher country had retreated to the odd stream that drew a line of trees across the plain, or simply lain down to wait for nightfall.