ohn Rolfe comes back from World War II with a mild disability and modest prospects. That all changes, though, when he accidentally creates a gateway into another world, a geographically identical Earth whose entry point is his Oakland, Calif., basement. The California on the other side of the gateway is very different from the world of postwar America, though. It is a wild land, one that was never settled by Europeans.
Working with men from his old platoon—people he trusts absolutely—Rolfe sets about changing all that, mining gold in his secret retreat and selling it in Firstside (Rolfe's name for their birth dimension). It is an easy process—history has already revealed where gold and other resources are located, and American guns and technology are so vastly advanced compared to those of the natives of California that the new arrivals' decimation of those peoples is even swifter and more brutal than on Firstside.
Soon, the so-called Commonwealth of New Virginia has a thriving colony of white settlers, as well as a frightening amount of wealth and political contacts in Firstside. The fortune, and the people they cultivate, help to protect the secret gateway connecting the two Oaklands.
Founded as it was by men with mid-20th-century worldviews, and separated from Firstside and its many cultural shifts, the Commonwealth becomes a paradise of '50s values: an all-white community whose women are for the most part relegated to secondary roles in society. Despite its homogeneity, though, the sheer wealth bred by its industries becomes a destabilizing factor, and Rolfe's granddaughter is the one on the line when hostilities break out, threatening to expose them all.
An all-but-untouched California marred anew
In Conquistador, readers see a different invasion of the New World, one that is very informed by the successes and mistakes of the settlement of Firstside's North America. The result is chilling. Rolfe and his cohorts build a society whose segregation and privilege are designed to last forever. Aztec nannies and menial workers are imported from the South to work for the New Virginians, but they are on strict contracts—sent home after a set period of time, and subjected to forcible birth control in the meanwhile. The result is a lower class with no prospects for collective improvement—the lowest-paid workers of Rolfe's world will always have poor English skills and no chance of bearing children who might, by growing up within the master society, learn to exploit its rules and culture.
The peculiar and artificial nature of the resulting society has intriguing side effects. With a foot in both the Commonwealth and Firstside, for example, Rolfe's granddaughter Adrienne is well aware that her job in Commonwealth Gate Security is rare for a woman—her position is constantly being undermined by male colleagues, and she must fight for every ounce of respect. The men of Firstside are easier to deal with and more open-minded. However, such men don't know her secret, and are thus unlikely candidates for romance.
When a man Adrienne is interested in does learn about the Commonwealth, new problems arise for them both. How is a 21st-century guy to react when he is forcibly introduced to a society—or an attractive woman—that maintains a virtual slave class, actively solicits Firstside war criminals as settlers and is engaged in exterminating the First Peoples of California?
