Conquistador (49 page)

“I certainly hope so,” he mumbled.

“This acclimatization was a really big thing with the Old Man; he spent a pile of his own money on it, and a fair bit of the Commission's, as soon as the first mines were going. We used this reserve to establish breeding stock, then spread them around—by riverboat, truck, overland drives, sometimes by air. On the east coast and down in South America by ship too, a little later. You should see what the pampas are getting to be like in Argentina; it makes the Serengeti on FirstSide look like a paved-over parking lot.”

“Arrrghh!” Tom said again. He clutched his head in his hands, and Adrienne laughed in a clear peal of mirth.

“You remember that book,
Ecological Imperialism?
” Tom nodded. “Well, it looks like Crosby's thesis about the pre-Columbian Americas having a lot of vacant ecological niches after the Pleistocene extinctions was right. At least, nearly everything we introduced spread like dandelions—including dandelions, by the way. The total biomass is up, and the variety of large mammals is
way
up. Plus the introduced Old World beasties coevolved with human beings. They aren't helpless like the ground sloths.”

“That's the reason your grandfather did this, Crosby's book?”

“Oh, no, he just thought all the new animals looked cool and improved the hunting,” she said, turning the engine back on. “Read too much Tarzan when he was a kid, I suppose. But he felt
very
vindicated when I pointed the book out to him!”

On the one hand, releasing exotic species like that is insanely risky,
he thought.
On the other hand, it
does
look cool. Hunting here would be a bit too much like shooting a dairy herd, though.

He turned his head to say so, and yelped. A twelve-foot-long, five-ton mass tipped with a massive curved horn on its snout and another, shorter one above that had risen from a muddy wallow. It looked at them with little piggy eyes, twitching its ears in bad temper. Tom's mind gibbered for a second, but his voice was calm as he said, “Adrienne, I think there's one enormous rhinoceros looking us over about fifty yards thataway. And your grandfather is fucking
insane
.”

Long bronze-colored hair whipped across his face as she turned her head to look. She also hit the gas hard enough to send a spray of gravel shooting rearward. That decided the beast; it put its head down and began churning the tree-trunk pillars of its legs. Gravel spurted from under
its
feet as it hit the roadway, and Tom thought he could feel the ground shaking under the massive thudding impact of those broad three-toed feet.

Hummers had excellent acceleration, for a diesel-engined vehicle. Experiment showed that for a while a rhinoceros could do even better. The thick dust spewing out from behind the little truck partially hid the giant beast, but the continuous rain of stones thrown up by the rear wheels enraged it further; he could hear its hoarse squeal and the great bellows panting of its breath. That was the problem with animals too big and tough to have natural enemies—their impulse was to charge anything that annoyed them. Charge it and gore it with that huge horn and stomp it under those pile-driving feet . . .

“That's a white rhino!” Adrienne shouted over the rushing air and the engine's growl. “I thought all the ones in this reserve had been trapped and relocated!”

“Looks sort of reddish gray to me!”

“No, it's from
wit
—the Afrikaans word for wide—the square lip. It's a grazer, not a browser like the black rhino.”

“Could you just drive, please?” he shouted, and grinned back at her; it was an odd combination of fright and exhilaration, a little like hitting the white water in a canoe.

“Drive, woman! Right now its wide square upper lip is too close for comfort. There's a goddamn big horn just above it.”

For an instant he thought the beast would reach them, to flip over the Hummer and send them flying in bone-breaking arcs to the ground—the wide, squat vehicles didn't tip easily, but he'd seen what happened when they did. Then it began to drop behind; he glanced over at the speedometer and saw they were doing forty miles an hour, about as much as was safe on this winding dirt road in hilly country, or a bit more. The rhino slowed, lumbered to a stop, turned three-quarters on to the Hummer he hadn't been able to catch and stood in a slowly dispersing cloud of dust, jerking his horn through short savage arcs to left and right as if to show what he'd planned to do when he caught them.

“By Jesus, that was a little too close,” he said, as Adrienne slowed down. “Adrienne, please tell me there aren't any elephants around here.”

“Not anymore,” she said cheerfully. “There's a whole swarm of them down in the southern basins, though—the LA area, you'd say. They've spread from there into Sonora and west to the upper Rio Grande, too; they can take a frosty winter, but not hard blizzards.”

“I repeat my remark about your grandfather,” Tom said.

“Then there's elephants and tigers we dropped off in the Galveston- to-New Orleans area—”

“I don't want to know!” he cried half seriously.

They drove in silence for a while; the countryside about was too beautiful and too weirdly alien not to keep his eyes busy. Occasionally a car or truck would pass them—the cars usually four-by-fours of one sort or another, the trucks pickups or, fairly often, army-style deuce-and-a-halfs. The dust would have been worse if they were more frequent; it was often enough for Tom to be thankful for a spare bandanna Adrienne lent him.

“I thought the area north of here was fairly well settled,” he said after a few minutes. “Shouldn't there be more traffic?”

“It is well settled, by our standards,” she said. “But we use the rivers and bay for transporting freight.” Pointing from east to west: “There's the von Traupitz domain, and the Chumleys up around Yolo; they ship their produce out through Suisun Bay; Napa's the riverport for the R-Fitzmortons in Sonoma, the Hugheses around where Healdsburg is FirstSide, the Throckhams the same around Santa Rosa.”

Another ditch marked the northern border of “Africa”—this one extending east and west out of sight, steep-sided enough to make a rhino cautious, if not an antelope or lion. Just past it they came across a road gang of men in gray overalls doing repairs on the dirt highway's surface, filling in potholes and spreading crushed rock, with a mechanical roller to pack it down. Overseeing them was a stringy, lean thirty-something man on a big glossy horse, a classic Southern-sheriff type down to the sunglasses, Smokey the Bear-style hat, cigar clamped between his teeth and the shotgun whose butt rested on his hip.

Tom thought he would have suspected the workers were convicts, even
without
the word “Convict” printed on chest and back in large red letters. They weren't fettered—very little point in that amidst swarming wildlife eager to convert them into either food or irritating leftover bits stuck between the toes—and didn't look beaten or starved. They did look hangdog, and they worked with steady effort.

“Can we stop here and ask a few questions?” he asked Adrienne, a note of challenge hovering around the edges of the words.

“Yah, you betcha,” she said with an impish grin, gently mocking his Red River accent, and pulled the Hummer over to the side of the road. “Hi, there, Deputy Gleason!”

The man looked and did a double take as the Hummer crunched to a halt on the roadside verge. Then he spat the cigar butt out of his mouth, raising his shotgun in an informal salute. He turned his head toward the crew as they paused to look, and shouted, “You boys keep workin'!” Then, to Adrienne, and with respectful politeness: “Afternoon, Miz Rolfe, an' you, sir. Any way I can help y'all?”

He had Adrienne's accent, but stronger still, pronouncing the words “I can help” as
Ah kin hep.
It was impossible to see his eyes clearly behind the sunglasses, but Tom felt himself quickly scanned, summed up, and to judge from the instinctive slight shift in the man's seat in the saddle, found formidable. Tom nodded politely himself.

“I was wondering if you could tell me a bit about your working party,” Adrienne said. “My friend Mr. Christiansen here would like to know. If it's not too much trouble, Deputy Gleason.”

“No trouble t'all, Miz Rolfe, Mr. Christiansen,” he said, smiling. That turned into a bark: “Front and center, y'all! Line up and sound off—name, crime and sentence!”

The half-dozen convicts downed tools and came at the run, lining up along the verge of the road and bracing to attention with their straw hats held in both hands across their chests and eyes to the front.

“Montgomery, John, drunk and disorderly, unable to pay fine, six months!”

The sheriff chuckled. “That ol' boy, he drove a car into the bar when they wouldn't sell him no more cheap brandy. Lucky he didn't hurt nobody.”

“Leclerc, Martin! Domestic violence, one year!”

“Slapped his missus, and gave her a black eye. She wouldn't press charges, or he'd be workin' in the mines, and for a lot more than a year.”

The tally continued—minor crimes of violence or semiminor ones against property. Adrienne cocked an ironic eyebrow at him as they drove on northwest.

“Well, let me guess: The Commonwealth isn't big into rehabilitation,” he said.

“Criminals aren't sick people who need therapy,” she said. “They're bad people who need a whack upside the head to get their attention. We put them in stir to suffer, not to heal. It seems to work rather better than the I-feel-your-pain approach.”

Tom chuckled; that was one sentiment he couldn't really find fault with. Few people who'd spent much time in law enforcement would have, in his experience.

The town of Napa announced itself with a sign stating that its population was 4,562, and that it was the “Gem of the Valley” and “Gateway to the North”; the Kiwanis, Elks and Masons added their pitches. He had an excellent view as they left the rolling hills and coasted toward the river that gleamed like a twisting silver snake in the afternoon sun, throwing glitters back through the leaves of the trees that fringed it. The eastern shore held little but a golf course, a racetrack with wooden stands, and a fenced-in parklike expanse with a shutdown Ferris wheel and roller coaster. A sign outside bore the Rolfe lion, red rampant on black, and announced that the domain fair would open on August 15, sponsored by the Family.

“Domain fair?” he asked.

“County fair, more or less—livestock shows, bake sales and prizes for flowers and jams, big dance, floats, bit of a carnival. The domains of each Family do pretty well the same things a county does in the U.S. back FirstSide. The fair comes between wheat harvest and the beginning of the crush. There's a big polo match, too.”

The bridge over the river was yet another web of huge timbers fastened together with arm-thick steel bolts and set in stone piers; the surface was asphalt, and the road on the other side was paved likewise. Tom looked up and down the Napa River as they crossed, estimating how far back from the water most of the west-bank town stood, and the width of wild dense riparian forest that stretched north like a lumpy green quilt on either side of the stream.

“Let me guess,” he said. “You don't have much trouble with flooding.”

“Yah, you betcha,” she said again. “Because we don't build on flood plains much. There's no need to when you've got plenty of elbow room.”

Napa town was at roughly the same spot on the river as the settlement FirstSide, and for the same reason; this was the head of navigation for shallow-draft vessels, particularly in the dry season. Dozens of barges lined the wharves, mainly on the west bank of the river; tugs brought more, or towed them away in strings; both types were smallish by the standards he was used to, and wooden-built. A slipway on the water's side held several more under construction. There were more cars and trucks on the roads than he'd seen in Rolfeston, although the traffic was still light by any standards he'd known before, including those of the little North Dakota town of Ironwood.

Back from the docks and warehouses on the southern side of town were workshops and factories; the residential part of town was north of that, a little more spread out than Rolfeston had been, equally hidden in trees—some the tall oaks and sycamores that had once occupied the site, more planted since its founding. Between those houses and the vacant lowland along the river was the business district, small shops and offices along streets with timber-pillared or stone-built arcades, and a broad square with central gardens, benches, brick paths and bandstand.

The riverside itself north of the wharves was a semiwild park, the bigger trees left standing, undergrowth cleared back and some plantings made. It was full of picnickers, people taking advantage of a big municipal swimming pool, impromptu volleyball and touch football or soccer games, people tossing Frisbees to each other or leaping dogs, and plain strollers; it took him a moment to remember this was Sunday afternoon.

“My alma mater,” Adrienne said, pointing to a big two-story stone building overgrown with climbing rose and surrounded by playing fields. A baseball game was going on in one, and the people in the bleachers let out a shout as they drove by. He could see flickers of it between the tall Lombardy poplars that fringed the way.

“You went to the public high school?” Tom asked curiously.

“Everyone does,” she said, sounding surprised. “Why not? Getting a high school diploma
means
something here, about equivalent to a FirstSide BA. I did very well, when I wasn't on suspension or waiting to get paddled by the principal. I grant you that was far too often, and if I hadn't been a Rolfe, I might have got expelled for good.”