Conquistador (65 page)

“Great country for hang gliding!” Tully yelled from the rear, and laughed.

“Fasten seat belts, please,” Adrienne replied. “We thank you for the pleasure of your company on Packed in Like Sardines Air, and we will overbook your next flight with no apologies, because you're just so much inanimate cargo to us. Your luggage may be found in Tibet. Hope to see you again! Better still, send money and stay home!”

The seaplane banked sharply, sideslipped and dropped, then came in out of the west. The water was fairly calm, rippling like a mirror of green malachite before them; the note of the engines changed as Adrienne throttled back, and there was a moment when Tom felt a little lighter than he should. The hull touched the surface, a
skip . . . skip . . . skip
sensation, the seat slapping him in the butt, with a thrumming underneath it like a powerboat at speed as the plywood vibrated to the touch of the water. Then they were on the surface, tall rooster tails of spray arching up on either side; he pitched forward against the belts, then back as the amphibian slowed and the nose came up. Seawater ran down the windows, clearing to give them a view of the shore. In the first passenger seats Sandra and Tully leaned in toward the center and forward to get a glimpse.

To the east a small U-shaped cove sheltered between two outthrust ridges that fell steeply to the sea. Along its southern edge a sheer drop of vertical rock ran from pine-forested height to the sand, and a stream had cut a V-shaped notch in it—a plume of water dropped fifty feet, falling on a narrow strip of beach to mingle with the waves rolling at its foot. Between the northern and southern cliffs the beach tapered inland to meet a narrow canyon, leaving a sheltered delta of coarse golden-brown sand edged with rock walls on both sides, lowest at the apex where it rose to the mountain slopes.

Tom rolled down the window; a gust of wind caught the bottom of the threaded waterfall, tossing the droplets out to sea in a broken rainbow and revealing a shallow cave behind. Then it died down, and the water veiled the cleft in the rock again. The seaplane pitched as it came landward, then slowed as it maneuvered around a rock reef in the middle of the cove's entrance, white water creaming off the nearly hidden stone. Adrienne slewed the amphibian back toward the center of the beach and chopped the throttles just before the keel touched bottom. They came to rest with a slow
shhhhusssssh
sound; the plane tilted a little until one of the pontoons touched the surface, and the propellers spun down and stopped.

“Timed it just right,” she said with satisfaction in the sudden blessed silence. “High tide—the plane'll be secure overnight once we've tied off, but easy to float tomorrow.”

By Jesus,
Tom thought as he opened the gull-wing door beside him, the quiet like balm on his abused ears.
Talk about peaceful . . .

Silence flowed in through the opening, and the salt breath of the ocean, the iodine tint of seaweed, and pine from the mountain forest looming above them. It was about as hot as this section of the coast ever got in late summer—in the high seventies—and the wind caressed his face like a damp scented towel.

He shaded his eyes and peered into the inner point of the beach, where sand gave way to upward-sloping rock.

“Ah . . . on second thought, previous occupant still in the room past the checkout time,” he said mildly. “Ah, Adrienne, is that what it looks like?” That part of the sand was shaded by boulders on either side, and an overhanging oak.

“You betcha,” she said softly, popping open her own section of door; that let Tully and Sandra crowd close and look.

There was a partially eaten game carcass lying there, a purebred European boar by its looks; no feral pig had those massive bristly shoulders, black hide, and long upcurving tusks. Crouched above it was . . .

“A gen-u-wine tiger,” Tully said softly; he had the binoculars, and then passed them forward to his partner. “Big 'un.”

“But is it a
Colletta
tiger?” Sandra asked impishly.

The beast crouched above its kill, snarling at the humans a hundred yards away. Tom stood, braced one hand like a clamp on the frame of the
No Biscuit
's hull and leveled the binoculars with the other. That brought the big cat to within touching range, the fanged mouth close enough to draw a startled oath. Its thick, slightly shaggy fur was a pale gold color marked with black stripes, fading to cream on the belly and throat; the paws looked broad as dinner plates as they worked and slid their claws in and out. From its looks, he judged the weight to be about the same as a small horse.

“Siberian,” he said. “Got to be—too big and not brightly colored enough for a Bengal.”

“Near enough,” Adrienne said. “Manchurian; we got a bunch from the Selang-Arsi for release in this area. Tropical tigers find the winters here a trial, although God knows it's warmer than the Amur valley; the Bengal type breed like flies in the southern jungles. . . . We'd better see him off. Hand me that rifle, Sandy, would you?

“Hey!” she shouted, with the weapon in hand. “You there, yes, you—the member of the Future Pelts, Rugs and Trophies of New Virginia—vamoose! Git!”

She slapped a magazine into the rifle, jacked the slide and squeezed off two rounds, a flat
crack-crack!
It came echoing back from the stony walls of the cliff, and a double spurt of sand erupted not far from the big cat. The shells tinkled down the windscreen and off into the sea foam below the amphibian's nose; the tiger snarled, a ripping sound clearly audible over the shushing hiss of the waves falling back down the beach. Then it bent and gripped the boar by the middle of its back. Raising its head to keep the dangling legs free, it turned and leaped up the slope, disappearing into the thick undergrowth.

“Mmm . . . are you
sure
this is a good place to camp?” Tom said.

He'd never seen a tiger except in a zoo; few had, in a time when more than half the tigers on the planet were captive-bred in the United States.
God, that was beautiful,
he thought. And it had been weirdly appropriate for the setting—as much so as the vanished saber-tooths that had perished with the glyptodonts and mastodons not long after the first humans came through this way.

“Oh, they don't bother people, usually,” Adrienne said. “And they avoid the smell of fire—these forests have a natural burn cycle.”

They climbed out of the plane onto the beach, with the
No Biscuit
moving slightly as they leaped down; with the tide still high it was just barely aground, and it was comparatively easy to swing it around with the tail pointing at the beach. He stretched, something popping in his back, and looked around. Beneath his feet was sand with an occasional pebble; some of the stones felt greasy and had a deep green sheen. He commented on it as they paid out two heavy ropes and tied the amphibian down to convenient boulders, making it secure from anything but a severe storm. The rock he and Adrienne made fast to was suspiciously polished too, and it had an even more suspiciously convenient groove about halfway down.

“It's nephrite—jade,” Adrienne said, as they brought the loop of cable around the boulder and secured it. “So's this big hunk of rock here.”

“Yikes,” he said, looking at it.
Nine thousand pounds of jade; call it half a million. Oh, well, a glut of caviar is a glut of caviar.
“You know, I've been to this spot before—looked at it, FirstSide, never got down on the beach, of course—but I don't remember the jade boulder.”

“Mom had it moved here from a little south along the coast,” Adrienne said. “One of her better moves; she loved—loves—this spot too. Hell, you can't quarrel with
everything
your parents like.”

Making camp was a work of moments; they set up two collapsible bell tents with titanium frames at a discreet distance apart, unrolled their sleeping bags, and dug a slit-trench behind a boulder near the inland edge of the beach. A circle of fire-blackened stones showed where others had made a hearth, and there was plenty of driftwood and deadfall; he shaved the kindling they needed, using dry branches, a hatchet, and a fallen log half-buried in sand as a cutting block.

The gear they'd brought included masks, snorkels and flippers—they
were
supposed to be on a vacation, without a care in the world, after all.

And,
he thought, grinning,
why not act like it right now?

Adrienne caught his mood. “Decided to put the Lutheran guilt-and-anxiety thing on hold for a while?”

“It's your corrupting influence,” he said. “Episcopalians don't do guilt, I suppose?”

“Of course not. It's grubby, tacky and thoroughly lower-class,” she said with that irresistible smile. “Let's swim—and get dinner.”

They changed; he noticed with some amusement that the bikinis the women wore were distinctly conservative by FirstSide standards, and that they both undressed in a tent—the body-modesty taboo had stayed stronger here than it had back in the parent society. As for the swimsuits . . .

Tully said it for him: “Hey, it's
Beach Blanket Bingo!
”

“Oh, you liked that one too?” Sandra said artlessly, clapping her hands. The results were spectacular, even with Adrienne standing beside her, long and sleekly curved.

“God, a woman who likes old movies
and
looks like that,” Roy replied, eyes bulging. “I'm lost!”

“Well, the FirstSiders stopped making good movies—the new ones are too likely to be just disgusting, or not make any sense—so the Theatre Guild has to reissue the old ones a lot here,” Sandra said, handing them nets and short, heavy prying irons with sharpened, flattened ends. “Except for the
Mummy
movies, and the
Harry Potter
and the
Rings
series—those were fine, but that was
years
ago now! We should make more of our own.”

“Small population, limited talent pool,” Adrienne said. “We can't do everything. Let's go!”

They ran—as much as you could run with flippers on—and threw themselves into the shallow water, stroking out. He exulted in the sudden cold shock of the water, a good twenty degrees lower than the air, and the pull and surge of the ocean like some great beast tugging at him. It was crystal-clear as they sculled out past the little rock reef in the mouth of the cove; the stone was covered in bright-colored coralline algae and sea anemones, and beyond it the sandy bottom held a thick growth of giant kelp. A couple of five-foot giant sea bass flicked by below him, muscular, scaly brutes, then a school of bright orange garibaldi fish, and the bottom held lingcod and kelp bass and others by the dozens. He flipped upright and trod water; not far away a young sea otter floated on its back, wrapped in a strand of giant kelp by its mother to keep it in place while she foraged, staring at him round-eyed with its small paws raised as if in surrender.

It made a sound at him, something between
meeep!
and
keeeek!

“Sorry, kid, it's not your mother,” he said in reply. “On the other hand, I'm not after your fur, either.”

Just about then its mother did arrive from below, a handsome silvery-brown creature four feet long, with large eyes and a round, blunt-muzzled face framed by long whiskers on either side of a black button nose. She had a foot-long abalone clutched to her chest with one paw, a rock under the other, and looked suspiciously in his direction before she went to check her cub. It greeted her with happy high-pitched squeaks, grunts and coos as it climbed onto her belly and began to nurse, while she juggled rock and shellfish—evidently the problems of working mothers were a transspecies, transdimensional universal.

“Don't worry, lady, the kid's OK,” he said, grinning around the mouthpiece of the snorkel.

There were more of the otters scattered through the kelp forest; he could hear the
whackety-whack-whack!
as one of them held a shellfish between her paws and hammered it against the rock on her chest, going at it like a pneumatic pavement breaker.

“Time to dive,” Sandra said. “This water's
cold.
”

It was, particularly without a wet suit; you were courting hypothermia if you stayed in too long. He took a couple of deep breaths and dove; the bottom was about twenty-five feet down, not very far for an experienced swimmer. The abalone was more abundant than any he'd ever seen, despite all the otters topside—and those critters could gobble down a third of their own considerable weights in seafood every day. Plus you couldn't fault their taste: They'd eat abalone in preference to most other stuff, even sea urchins or crabs. Evidently the absence of millions of humans equally determined to get their hands on the big mollusks was enough to make the difference.

Back FirstSide you had to carry a special measuring stick to make sure none of the ones you took were less than seven inches long, and the meat cost eighty dollars a pound. Here he didn't see many that
weren't
seven inches, and plenty were monsters that would have broken records back FirstSide, a foot long and more.

It wasn't the first time he'd pried abalone off rocks, either—although most of his efforts had gone into stopping poachers from doing it. He thrust the flattened end of the iron under the muscular “foot” of one and levered sharply; it came free after a long moment of effort, and he stuffed the twelve-inch shell into the net at his waist. His lungs were burning by the time he'd gotten three; they all stroked for the shore when he came up, and waded out with their lips blue and teeth on the verge of chattering, or over it in some cases—being big meant you lost heat more slowly. The kindling was ready in the stone circle, neatly piled in a little tepee; Tom blew on his fingers so that he could work the Zippo and get it going. Flames crackled up through the bone-dry shavings, and then through the larger sticks of driftwood as the four of them stood close around it, each couple pressed together for warmth and wrapped in a blanket.