S. M. Stirling - Conquistador by S. M. Stirling

Author:S. M. Stirling
Language: eng
Format: epub

CHAPTER TWELVE

"Africa"/Rolfe Domain

June 2009

Commonwealth of New Virginia

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

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