Nothing to be done about him, Tom thought, slightly relieved.
The fallen man was probably a poacher and smuggler—almost certainly was. The warden would still have tried to rescue him if he’d been alive, but he was glad that he wasn’t; the heat was savage even here at the door and getting worse by the second, with a dull pulsing roar that gathered force like the lungs of some huge angry beast. He stooped to make sure, and snatched up a small silvery recording disk lying on the floor that fell under his hand. Then he froze, even as flaming bits and pieces began to fall from the ceiling.
It wasn’t that he didn’t recognize the bird in its cage, thrown into a corner by the blast and very dead, its feathers blackening.
The problem was that he did recognize it.
It was an ugly roly-poly bird, about the size of a large turkey, with a huge, bulbous, hooked orange beak looking like a swollen excrescence on its bare gray head—it had feathers only on the part above and behind the little yellow eyes, rather like a late-period Elvis haircut. The body was gray-brown with hints of gold as well, apart from the thick bright-yellow feet and white plumes at the ends of the absurd stumpy little wings that gave a final dying quiver as he watched.
It was an ugly, cartoonish creature. And very familiar, although he’d never seen one alive. Nobody had, not since a Dutchman chased down and killed the last one around A.D. 1680, on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. There were plenty of artists’ reproductions in books; it was far more famous than many living creatures.
“It’s a goddamned dodo, for Christ’s sake!” he screamed, and lunged toward it, into a wave of heat like a solid wall.
He didn’t hurt much.
That was the first thing he checked on, as the blackness in his head became the blackness behind closed but waking eyes; the first thing, before thinking about where he was. No pain was a good thing; and you usually hurt pretty badly when waking up from a serious concussion. Which he’d done six or seven times in his life, depending on your definition of serious. Not much pain, which meant he could probably count on skipping the blurred vision, nausea, and recurrent headaches that could plague you for months after getting a solid sock to the head that sent your brain surging back and forth like a walnut in a loose shell.
Either he’d slept for a good long while, or he’d gotten off lightly, or both.
The smell told him it was a hospital before he opened his eyes: disinfectant, linoleum, ozone, a faint underlay of something unpleasant, and the odor of utterly inedible food. Memory struggled for a moment, and he thought it was the MASH unit in Tashkent. Then he knew better. That wakening had been far from painless.
His eyes opened. He was in a hospital bed and wearing one of those humiliating gowns that fastened up the back; a privacy screen stood around the enclosure, and there was a scanner hood clipped on the bedstead over his head—the medics had been monitoring his brain activity, then.
Yup, I did get a conk on the head, he thought. They wouldn’t waste one of those on me if I didn’t.
A variant of the same electronic process could produce an artificial analogue of natural sleep to hasten healing these days, and he had a bandage taped over the skin of one elbow, where a drip needle had kept him hydrated and nourished.
An amber light was flashing on the machinery now, so he could expect company. A cautious inventory showed him that there weren’t any casts, splints or broken bones either, and everything moved the way it should. He was a little sore and stiff when he tried to move, but it was all functional.
The nurse’s aide who came at the machine’s call was a heavyset black woman, looking tired with a tiredness that had probably set in for good about fifteen years ago when she turned thirty. She brought him water, which took some of the mummy dust and sourness out of his mouth and throat, and then a doctor—a thin, harried-looking Chinese-American. The name tag on his white coat read Edgar Chen, and he looked as if he’d given up luxuries like sleep. Probably a public hospital, then. San Francisco General, which was on Potrero Avenue near the Mission district.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Christiansen. You’re quite lucky,” he said. “The falling joist wasn’t burning, and your friends got you out quickly. No more than a few scorches and very minor smoke inhalation; you can thank heaven for all that muscle protecting your bones. We kept you under to make sure there was no brain trauma. Breathe deeply, please.”
Tom did, and coughed, as always—there was something about the feel of a stethoscope on the skin of his chest or back that made him cough, had since he was a kid. His lungs did have a faint soreness, the way they felt after a cold or a bout of the flu.
“Excellent. OK, let’s see if the machinery was telling the truth. Look at this light. Then at my finger. Follow the finger….”
The examination was brisk but thorough; he supposed they’d done the EMR and the rest of the sophisticated stuff while he was unconscious.
“Well, you need more rehydration, and there was a mild concussion, but apart from that you’re fine. You can be discharged in a few hours. Take it easy for the next week and drink plenty of water, bouillon or fruit juices. Avoid caffeine or alcohol.”
“Ah… how long was I out, Doctor?”
“It’s shortly after ten A.M., Sunday.”
Whoa! I lost nearly forty-eight hours!
The doctor smiled. “We let you get some rest. Believe me, sleep induction is a wonderful tool. Your friends have been in to see you.”
“Friends?” Tom asked.
“A Mr. Tully, and a young lady—”
“Late twenties, gorgeous?” Tom asked with a grin, and grinned wider at the doctor’s nod. Well, well, he thought. It wasn’t kiss-and-run.
He basked in the glow of that for a second, then let the two help him up and through a small ward—four beds—to a washroom. He felt a little weak, and stiffer than a board, but that faded as he moved. A hot shower made him feel even better, as if the hurt were washing off with the sluicing water and swirling away down the drain in the middle of the little tile floor; he didn’t even much mind the crowded feeling that the hospital shower stall gave him—he was used to that.
Roy Tully showed up first, and laughed outright at Tom’s poorly concealed disappointment. There was a bandage on his right hand, smelling of some sort of burn lotion. Tom made a note of it—as a sort of mental game, he liked to keep track of the people who’d saved his life, and vice versa. This time put Roy up two to one.
“I ran into your Ms. Rolfe in the lobby yesterday,” the little man said. “Oh, sweet Lord Jesus—”
“I can fill in the details,” Tom said dryly, then coughed and took another drink of water. “Nope, nothing serious,” he went on at his partner’s look of concern. “Just need a day or two to get the pipes back in order. What’s up?”
“Wait a second,” Tully said, ducking out of the privacy curtain.
The other beds in this room were vacant at the moment. He dropped a rubber wedge under the door and heeled it home, then brought out his PDA and jacked in a set of display glasses that looked like old-fashioned Ray-Bans. Tom cocked an eyebrow at the precautions but put them on and slid the little mikes on the sides into his ears. The world disappeared; he slitted his eyes against the light that would come when the tiny mirrors and lasers began to shine images onto his retinas.
“This is the disk you had in your hip pocket when we dragged you out. I’ve looked it over, and now you should. It’s… sort of remarkable, Tom. I haven’t let anyone else look at it. Palmed it so Fart, Barf and Itch wouldn’t notice.”
“You haven’t shown it to the boss?” Tom asked, puzzled. Cutting out the competition was fair enough, though he liked Perkins, but the usefulness of data tended to degrade rapidly. “If there’s important information, we should—”
“Shut up and watch.”
The disk was obviously homemade. A professional job would have given a seamless wraparound 3-D effect, with only the fact that you couldn’t alter the viewpoint by turning you
r head to tell it from the real thing. Here he could see the black-line limits of the visual world at the edges of his vision; the first shots were people at a barbecue or outdoor party: well dressed, wealthy, and at a guess somewhere in the northern Bay Area—Adrienne’s stomping grounds, he thought whimsically.
Then he looked again. There were a couple dozen people visible, and all of them were white; that was not something you’d expect in the Bay Area these days. People moved in and out of the view; an unstaged setting was always less orderly than Hollywood. A flash of bright hair brought him bolt upright—it was exactly the shade of Adrienne’s. Then the woman turned around, and the face wasn’t hers; a strong family resemblance, but a good decade older, and not beautiful—merely good-looking in a horsey way that went with the tweeds, riding boots and breeches she was wearing. Children ran by, chased by a nanny who looked Guatemalan or Mayan.
The icon in the lower left-hand corner showed a date: May 17, 2009.
The view panned up past a big Georgian-style country mansion, and then to a mountain behind it. He blinked, racking his memory….
Looks like Mount Saint Helena, north of Callistoga, Tom thought. But it can’t really be.
For one thing, he’d be in Callistoga if it were Mount Saint Helena, and for another this mountain was a lot shaggier, thickly forested with oak and Douglas fir and even redwoods.
The viewpoint changed. The date was the same, but the camera pickup was on an open hillside, looking out over a smallish city or big town on the flats below, and beyond that a huge bay. Something nagged at him as the view swiveled south and then panned slowly north again.
“Holy shit,” he whispered. “That’s the bay—San Francisco Bay, from the hills above Berkeley!”
Only it wasn’t. It had taken him a full minute to recognize it, because so much was different. His San Francisco Bay was half the size of this—the legacy of a century and a half of silting and draining and reclamation. This one was huge, and it still had its broad skirt of marsh and swamp and tidal flat; through the sound pickup he could hear the thunder of millionfold wings arriving and departing across miles, streams of birds rising like skeins of black smoke from reed swamp and cordgrass salt marsh and open water. The land around the bay was mostly open as well, a checkerboard of farmland south where Oakland should be, marsh and slough and oak-studded savanna elsewhere, and directly below him…
“That should be the campus of UC Berkeley,” he whispered.
There was nothing there but forest and flower-studded openings, and then a road and a complex of what looked like neoclassical public buildings where the city proper should start. The town beyond was a small fraction of Berkeley’s size, and its skyline was utterly without steel and glass.
About twenty, thirty thousand people max, he thought. Same as Fargo, North Dakota.
It was mostly low houses, one or two stories with red-tile roofs, and embowered in trees that made it look more like a forest; there was a port toward the southern edge of the built-up area where the marina should be, a modest factory zone, and then a grid of squares, residential alternating with small parks, rather like the older part of Savannah in Georgia. The bayside freeways just weren’t there.
The Golden Gate and Bay bridges weren’t there either, and neither were the container ships and tankers that should have thronged the surface. Instead only a scattering of vessels could be seen on the cobalt-blue water streaked with whitecaps, and none of them were very large. Some were sail-powered, or at least had masts—big schooners and a couple of ship-rigged three-masters. Across the water… the peninsula that should be covered in white tiers by the buildings and towers of San Francisco was mostly sandhills and scrub, with another biggish town along the water’s edge.
Maybe ten thousand or a few more there, Tom’s mind stuttered. Aloud: “Is this some sort of historical reconstruction? It could be… well, maybe CGI of the Gold Rush period.”
“Kemosabe, I don’t think they had quite as much air transport then.”
There was an airport about where Alameda should be, on an island just off the shore. He recognized a pair of C-130 Hercules transports lumbering into the air, and there was a small control tower and a medley of smaller aircraft, including some amphibians. No jets, but a fair assortment of helicopters, Chinooks and Black Hawks and smaller jobs. And there were cars on the roads, and some of the ships and fishing boats out on the water were definitely motor-powered: diesels, from the lack of smoke. The camera swung down to where four saddled horses waited, and a fifth with a gutted mule deer slung over its back. Evidently the camera was a miniaturized cyberstabilized model on a shoulder mount; he could see hands come into the field of view as the bearer put a booted foot into the stirrup and swung into the saddle. The other men in the party—it was all men—were in denim pants and leather jackets, with automatics at their waists and rifles of a model he didn’t recognize in saddle scabbards. The jackets had a blazon on the shoulder, a stylized tommy gun.
Tough-looking bastards, he thought. They rode through a patch of tall grass, high enough to brush the horses’ breasts—
“That’s native bunchgrass,” Tom said softly. “About half of it, anyway. As if it hadn’t been replaced by wild oats and the other intrusive stuff yet, not all of it.”
“Yeah, and that happened… when? The first generation or two after the Spanish arrived in California?” Tully said. “In the bay, that should have been finished by the 1820s or a little after.”
Tom nodded; the native grasses hadn’t been able to compete with the hardy Mediterranean annuals, especially not when cattle and sheep started grazing on them, and the seeds had arrived in hay and bedding when the first European colonists shipped in their foundation stock. In the field he was looking at, that process was still going on.
The horsemen rode down through a forested gully. It was definitely the Berkeley hills—he recognized the lay of the land and the general shape—but more empty of man than Glacier National Park—only the trail, and that might have been made by game. As if to underline that they broke out into another sunlit meadow, starred with orange California poppy, yellow goldfields, purple lupine and dense mats of cream-white yarrow thick among the tall grass. A herd of Roosevelt elk raised their muzzles to watch, then turned and trotted off without overmuch concern; the bull elk’s antlers showed against the morning sun for a moment, broader than Tom could have spanned with both arms. He couldn’t keep track of the smaller game and birds; everything was in bewildering profusion, and once the horses shied at the passage of what had to be a grizzly, although he caught only a fleeting glimpse of silver-tipped brown fur. The trees overhead included huge redwoods, nearly as big as those in Muir Woods; black oak mixed in on the upper slopes, trees giving way to open grassland on the ridges.
All the redwood in the East Bay was logged off in the 1850s, 1860s, he thought. Those trees aren’t second growth, though. That one there must be three hundred feet high! It was growing there when Columbus went looking for Japan and ran the Santa Maria onto Haiti.
The viewpoint changed again, and again Tom had to grope for the location. It went faster this time; he anticipated it, and the camera swung back and forth.
“That’s Mount Diablo over on the right,” he said. “The Carquinez Strait.” That was where the combined waters of the Sacramento and San Joaquin ran out of the delta into San Francisco Bay. Except that the great oil refineries were missing, and the bridge that spanned the strait. Grizzly bears thronged the shore, hundreds of them. They were wading out into the waters, scooping migrating salmon from throngs that whipped the water into froth. Farther out a half dozen big wooden fishing boats were doing the same, swinging in bulging netfulls. Pelicans and cormorants and ospreys stooped and struck, and golden or bald eagles hijacked their catch in a swarm of wings and a chorus of raucous cries. The camera zoomed in, and he could see that many of the salmon were enormous, fifty or sixty pounds each.
Another jump, and this time the landscape wasn’t Californian at a
ll; it looked like somewhere on the High Plains, rising into mountains to the west; the date icon switched to fall. The camera was in an aircraft now, but flying at less than a thousand feet—a small two-engine job, by the shadow. Below stretched a herd of bison moving south, great shaggy brown-black beasts, half-hidden by the cloud of dust they raised from the dry shortgrass prairie. The mass of animals stretched out of sight in both directions, and you could see an awfully long way from eight hundred feet in flat country; not quite a solid carpet, but more buffalo than open space. He’d long ago learned to estimate numbers and distances quickly, skills valuable to a hunter and a soldier both, and essential in wildlife management. Which meant—
“There have to be better than three million buffalo in that one herd!” he blurted.
“Spot on,” Tully said, his voice coming from another world. “I ran a count. That’s north-central Montana, incidentally. At least, the mountains and those buttes over there say it should be, according to the geolocation program.”
Three million buffalo were more than five times the total number in the whole of North America in 2009, and most of those were on ranches, behind barbed wire. These were running free over a plain that showed nothing of modern man—no roads, no fences, no power lines, not so much as a distant ranch house. But the estimates said there had been somewhere between twenty-five and fifty million, back a few centuries ago….
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