Conquistador

by S. M. Stirling

  The shadow of the aircraft swooped downward, the ground swelling until they were flying nape-of-the-earth, above a section of the herd that had decided to bolt cross-country at a dead run. He could see the reason, a band of men on horseback clinging to the edge of the great mass of buffalo, galloping along beside them. The picture leaped closer as the camera’s operator dialed up his magnification, and the Indians jumped to arm’s length; the picture jiggled a little, as the close-up and the plane’s motion stressed the limits of the camera rig’s stabilizer.

  There were two dozen of the Indians, wild-looking men in breechclouts and leggings with braided hair and bars of paint across their faces and naked chests; here a spray of feathers tucked into the raven hair, there a necklace of wolf teeth. Their mounts were not Indian ponies, though; they were big long-legged horses, and the hunters rode saddles rather than bareback. They were using short thick bows and long lances with steel or obsidian heads, riding in recklessly close to send shafts slamming into the ton-weight bodies, or thrusting the spears behind a shoulder. Maddened dying buffalo ran with blood frothing from their nostrils, and then collapsed in tumbling chaos as others behind with no room to swerve tripped in multibeast pileups.

  The men left off their hunting as the plane approached, shaking their fists or lances at it, or launching futile arrows into the sky. A hand extended into the camera’s view, giving the hunters below the finger, and he heard laughter over the engine roar. Then the aircraft swept on, over another group of Indians; these were families on the march, probably the home base of the hunting party, with more horses and—he blinked—spoke-wheeled carts. Women had stopped in small groups to skin and butcher the slain animals, with children and dogs running around; the adults stood and shaded their eyes as the aircraft circled above. They weren’t as openly hostile as the hunters, but he saw fists raised, and a man in a weirdly complex costume of bison horns and plumes shook a feathered stick at the camera.

  Indians who hunt buffalo on horseback—but know what airplanes are.

  Scavengers followed the bison herd, as the plane flew along the broad trampled path of its passage, coyotes and turkey buzzards and condors. Scavengers and predators: grizzly bears, a pack of big pale-coated lobos, the white Plains wolf that had been extinct since the 1920s…

  And resting around a partly eaten bison carcass, a pride of lion: half a dozen females, cubs, and a black-maned male who put his paws on it and roared as the aircraft’s shadow swept by.

  “Shit!” Tom said, ripped off the viewer goggles. He and Tully stared at each other, and the silence stretched. “Lions? Indians hunting three million buffalo? Lions? How the hell am I going to explain this to Yasujiru?”

  “You don’t have to,” Tully said, the usual edge of humor absent from his voice for once. “I tried imagining it myself, and it’s unimaginable. In fact, I’d strongly advise you not to. If you have to show it to him, just hand it over and let him think up an explanation.”

  Tom stared at him again. “You’re not serious?” he said.

  “I’m dead serious, partner. That thing is seriously weird. Weirdness is contagious, and Yasujiru hates the least little hint of anything that’s outside regular channels. He doesn’t like either of us as it is, despite the fact that we’ve got the best records in Special Operations.”

  Tom took a deep breath. “Roy… I haven’t told you why I tried to get into that office you pulled me out of.”

  The smaller man’s face cocked to one side. “I guessed there was someone alive in there, and you were trying to get them out. SFPD forensics say there was bone mixed with the ashes, but that’s about all they could tell; it was a pretty damned hot fire. No salvageable DNA.”

  “Something was in there.” He paused again. “This is going to sound crazy.”

  “So? Isn’t everything in this ratfuck? It started weird in LA and it’s been getting worse.”

  “Roy, there was a bird in a cage in that office. Dead, I think, but only just—still twitching. It wasn’t fifteen feet away from my face, and I got a good long look at it.”

  “Another condor? Hell, Tom, I know they’re rare, but you’d have been well-done if we hadn’t dragged you out pronto. The stairs collapsed behind us the second we stepped out into the street.”

  “Not a condor. A dodo.”

  Tully began a laugh, then sobered at the flat seriousness of his partner’s expression. “A dodo?”

  “Yeah. Raphus cucullatus. And yeah, I know it’s extinct and has been for centuries. So either I’m lying, or I’m nuts, or there was a fucking dodo in that office. You’re going to have to take your pick, Roy, because I swear I’m not lying and I don’t think I’m crazy.”

  Tully’s hands twitched in a way that showed he’d been a two-pack-a-day man until a few years ago. He looked over at the PDA and the viewing goggles, and slowly nodded.

  “OK, Kemosabe,” he said. “There’s a third alternative—you could be having a false memory, on account of your head getting whacked and roasted like a chestnut, but I’m not buying that. Losing some recent memory, yup, that happens fairly often with a concussion, but detailed hallucinations? Only on TV.”

  Tom exhaled with relief. “I did have nightmares about having to tell Yasujiru this alone,” he said.

  “If you tell him, you’ll be completely alone—and I tell you for a third time, don’t do it.”

  Tom jerked his head around. “You’re kidding!”

  “Nope,” Tully said, shaking his head slowly. “Tom, OK, you saw what you saw. Someone can get dodos. And condors that never met birdshot. And great big loads of sea-otter skins. And yeah, it’s probably from that place on the disk, wherever or whenever or what the fuck it is. But if I didn’t know you pretty damned well, if I hadn’t known you for years, I wouldn’t believe a word of it. I’d say you were subbing for an anal probe from the saucer people. There’s no proof, man. Maybe if you had the dodo in your hands, but you don’t. The disk? CGI can do anything these days; hell, you’ve seen orcs and elves and dragons on screen, haven’t you?”

  “What about the condor?” Tom said. “There’s no way to explain that otherwise.”

  “Oh?” Tully said. “And yesterday, who was laughing off time travel as an explanation?” He went on gently: “Tom, I may be a hick from Arkansas instead of the big cities of North Dakota, but I know about Occam’s razor. What’s the simplest explanation—that a Fish and Game warden has gone bugfuck, or that there are… hell, aliens, time travelers, whatever, among us?”

  “Jesus Christ,” Tom whispered. “But think about it, Roy. We have to get after these people, whoever they are. We have to.”

  Roy Tully looked him bleakly in the eye. “And getting fired and possibly sent to the place where the nice man in the white coat has a pill to help you is going to do that exactly how?”

  Tom opened his mouth and then closed it. “Roy, think a little more. We have time travelers… dimensional travelers… in touch with…” The words came with difficulty; his mind kept trying to slide away into denial. I saw what I saw, he thought stubbornly.

  Tully’s eyes opened a little wider. “In touch with the Russian Mafia,” he went on. “Oh, man, that is not good. It shows distinctly skanky motivation and mucho power. Not a good combination.”

  “Doubleplus ungood,” Tom said grimly. “But there’s more to it than that.”

  “More to it than them maybe going back in time and rearranging things to suit their preferences?” Tully said; he was pale now, and sweating a little. “More than the Russian Mafia rearranging history?”

  “I don’t think we have to worry about that,” Tom said. “Once you accept that the clues are real, they don’t point to, ah, time travel.”

  “Why the fuck not?”

  “Well”—he pointed to the PDA—“Think about it. That looks like the past, right? Only it isn’t; there’s planes and cars and a couple of small cities… and the lion. There haven’t been lions in North America for, hell, something like twelve thousand yea
rs—the big extinctions after the Paleo-Indians arrived. That was before the end of the last Ice Age, and the disk definitely isn’t showing us glacial-era San Francisco Bay: wrong size, wrong vegetation, wrong sea level. It looked like the bay before or right after Europeans arrived. You know the alternate-worlds theory? It was in that comic book you were reading—”

  “It was a graphic novel, not a comic book!” Tully said, with a hint of his usual goblin grin. “Yeah, I know the concept. South wins the Civil War, Hitler wins World War Two, that sort of thing. Been some pretty good movies that used it.”

  “So that place on the disk, it looks like an alternate history—one where Europeans never got here, ah, there—hell, you know what I mean.”

  “Didn’t get there until recently,” Tully corrected.

  He looked calmer, and his eyes shone with a hunter’s instinct. “That town, those guys with the planes and choppers and ships. We’re talking thousands of people. That would take a while, if you were doing it in secret.”

  “Yah, you betcha,” Tom said, feeling his way along the implications of what he’d seen. “And that’s more evidence it’s not time travelers or aliens from another dimension—or even humans from an alternate history themselves.”

  “How so?”

  “They wouldn’t be talking English, or having garden parties, or using Black Hawks or any of that stuff. Well,” he conceded, “they might if they came from a history a lot like ours, branching off fairly recently—but if they have, ah, hell, call it cross-time-line travel, then they should have a technology a lot more advanced than ours, because there’s nothing in our science that more than hints at it. From the evidence, I’d say it’s some bunch of people from here, here and now, who learned how to get over there a while ago. Learned how to do it once, with only one… machine or passageway or whatever.”

  Tully snapped his fingers. “Gold,” he said. Tom looked at him. “Brother, you are a pure-minded soul. What’s the first thing you think of when the words California and history come together?”

  “The Gold Rush, by Jesus,” Tom said. “The days of old, the days of gold, the days of ’forty-nine.”

  Tully nodded, smiling a smug smile; evidently his natural spirits were returning. “Hell, half the towns in the Mother Lode country get more gold out of the rootin’-tootin’ ’forty-niner tourist stuff than they ever got out of the ground,” he said. “So say you’re Mr. X—must have been a long time ago to build up all that stuff we saw on the disk—and you find out, somehow, that you can nip from here over to a California where ‘wealth’ means ‘acorns.’ What do you do? Call in our beloved Feds and have them take it all? You might, because you’re such a goddamned Boy Scout. Hell, I might, after wrestling with my conscience and wiping my sweaty palms. But how many would just get themselves a pan and a pick and a mule and head for the goldfields?”

  Tom nodded, rubbing a big hand over his face. “And you’d want to recruit some help, too—you’d need a base over there, and support, logistics. Christ, though, what a racket, if you could keep it secret!”

  Tully snapped his fingers again. “Two sets of ’em,” he said. “Not one bunch using this other universe, two—one working against the other. That’s why our busts keep getting bombed and the people we want to arrest turn up dead. What would be your priority, if you were Mr. X?”

  “Keeping it secret,” Tom said. “That is, assuming I was the Mr. X sort of perp.”

  “Yeah, but this operation’s big and it’s been going on for a while. At a guess, at least twenty, thirty years, maybe more. By now there’s thousands and thousands involved. From the look of it, there are tens of thousands of people living over there—you could see farming country off to the south of what should be Berkeley, and there were those fishing boats, and a couple of good-sized towns. So what happens when there are thousands involved in something like that?”

  “Someone gets greedy,” Tom whispered. “Someone wants to knock over the apple cart so he can get a bigger share than the big bosses are giving him.”

  “Right, partner. So we’ve got this bunch peddling stuff to the Russians, and we’ve got some sort of cleanup squad going around shooting and burning the evidence and trying to shut the whole thing down before it blows up. I’d guess the ones dealing with the Russians are doing it on the quiet, that they’re smugglers—maybe with a bigger agenda, but not out in the open over there, not now.”

  “Yah,” Tom said slowly, nodding. “But there’s one thing that bothers me. The lion.”

  “There were lions around here once,” Tully said. He had a fair grasp on wildlife biology and ecology, but he wasn’t as well-read in the subject as Christiansen.

  “Right, but it was Felix atrox, the Plains lion—bigger than African lions, nearly as big as a horse. And those were modern bison—they evolved from a much bigger breed after the Indians got here and killed off the megafauna, the giant sloths and antelope and suchlike. And the dire wolves and saber-tooths and lions that ate ’em died off when their prey species went. Back before humans arrived, the Americas were more like Africa: lions, saber-toothed tigers, cheetahs—which is the reason pronghorn antelope are so fast; the slow ones ended up as cheetah food—and there were mammoths and mastodons in place of elephants, dozens of types of big grazing animals, you name it. That’s what condors evolved to scavenge. There was a bit of an overlap between Paleo-Indians and lions and horses, but they weren’t riding the horses or using bows or wheeled carts. They went through two continents with javelins and throwing sticks.”

  Tully looked interested. “Hey, then how come we human types wiped out all that stuff here, and not in Africa?”

  “Because African animals had two million years to learn how to deal with us—the usual evolutionary arms race. Places like the Americas, or Australia, got fully modern humans unleashed on animals with no genetic preparation, and back around the end of the Ice Age the humans were specialist big-game hunters. The big, tasty, easy-to-catch beasts got wiped out in a blitzkrieg of barbecues. Back to the topic, Roy.”

  “OK,” Tully said, shaking his head. “So the, ummm, Mr. X gang, they must have introduced lions.”

  “Probably a lot of other stuff, too, God damn them. They don’t seem to have much compunction about letting exotic species loose.”

  Tully nodded. “OK, and probably they did that from somewhere around here—I mean around their Bay Area. From the look of things, that’s where this Mr. X got started, and where his operation’s still centered.”

  “We can’t be sure of that—let’s not get too in love with our assumptions. But it does look that way—”

  He stopped, appalled, grunting as a sudden pain twisted his gut. Tully reached out, alarmed; Tom ground his right fist into his left hand, the skin around his lips going white with the force of his anger.

  “Jesus Christ, I’ve been played for a sucker. Adrienne.”

  “How do you figure that?” Tully said.

  “The bunch she works for, Pacific Open Landscapes League. Son of a bitch. Back in the fifties—they had a different name then—they had an arrangement for importing animals with the San Diego Zoo. Lions, tigers, elephants, rhinos, the whole menagerie. Why? Who the hell knows? Maybe Mr. X likes big-game hunting. And both those groups were—are—tied really tight with Rolfe Mining and Minerals, run by—guess who?—Adrienne Rolfe’s father and grandfather. A company that got its start in the later forties, developing gold mines in the Far East and the Congo.”

  “Gold mines,” Tully said, shaking his head with the reluctant admiration a policeman develops for a really good scam. “You just mix the gold you’re bringing in from a goddamned alternate world together with what you’re getting out of the real mines here and now, in countries where you can fake invoices easily by greasing a few palms. Who’s going to notice? You’re paying your taxes on the full amount—the only thing our cops and IRS and customs inspectors look for is people reporting less than what they’re actually bringing in.”

  “And wi
th the gold you buy guns and trucks and planes—”

  “And anything else you want,” Tully finished for him. “Dredges. Lions so you can go on safari… hey, that means they probably can’t get around all that much over there, or they’d just go to Africa for their big cats.”

  “And that’s why the sailing ships,” Tom said. Tully looked at him, and Tom continued: “Those were too big for yachts, some of them. They must have fuel sources near the Bay Area, but not some of the places they’re sending ships to.”

  “Slick.” Tully nodded. “San Francisco, you can sail anywhere in the Pacific Basin from there… anywhere in the world, I suppose, eventually.”

  “And Adrienne must be a… hell, maybe they think of it as cops,” Tom said bitterly. “Or spooks. Company security, just like she told me. Trying to plug this leak, this group who’re scamming the bosses… her family. She needed to get information out of me, so they could get to the smugglers before we did. And I fell for it hook, line and sinker!”

  Roy Tully sent him a look of sympathy that stung like acid. “Wait a minute,” he said, pulling a chair close. “Look, could you give me the details? Everything she said and did, and the order she did it in?”

  The big man did, forcing his voice to steadiness; he knew the value of a second viewpoint, one more objective—free of infatuation, or the rage of betrayal. When he was finished Tully was sitting back in his chair, looking up at the ceiling with his hands linked behind his head.

  “Look, Kemosabe, for what it’s worth, I don’t think she was just playing you for a sucker,” he said gently.

  “How do you figure that?” Tom replied roughly.

  “Because she got all the information she needed before you did the wild thing with her. And let’s be honest, Kemosabe: She could have gotten everything she needed to know with a little cock-teasing, right? No need to go all the way.”

  Tom flushed. “Right,” he admitted. “I sang like a canary.”