Conquistador (67 page)

Adrienne Rolfe smiled to herself as they climbed out of the amphibian and onto the floating dock, blinking lazily in the bright San Diegan sunshine.
I'm feeling disgustingly sleek and satisfied,
she thought, as the crewmen took the ropes.
I like Tom. I like him a
lot.

She grew aware of exactly how sleek and satisfied her smile was, and shrugged ruefully at Tom's expression; Tully's was carefully neutral, but the little man was alarmingly perceptive.

San Diego was the third-largest city in the Commonwealth, nearly twenty thousand people and growing fast. She rather liked it, in small doses—except when the Santa Ana was blowing, of course. The town was a decade younger than the ones around the bay, and it had a tarry practicality, a big-shouldered quality that gave piquancy to the sun-washed, mountain-backed setting. It was also a Commission territory, not dominated by any Family the way Napa or New Brooklyn were. It wasn't centered around the Families collectively either, the way the capital was. Settler merchants and manufacturers set the tone here.

The floatplane docks were near the yacht basin, and just over from the main harbor, all facing south toward Coronado Island and within the sheltering hook of land that cut off the harbor from the Pacific. The land airport was on the shore to the west; a Hercules was coming in as she watched, with the winged Thompson gun of the Collettas on its tailfin; her mouth quirked at the irony.

The main harbor was busy too, amid a white storm of gulls: ten big windjammers , a couple of flat-decked wooden tankers and dozens of smaller craft, from tugs down to fishing craft and rowboats, all moving about the dredged channels to the redwood piers. New
nahua
workers filed over the gangplanks of a three-master up from the southern ports; cranes swung ashore its other cargo: baled raw cotton, rare tropical woods, cacao in the bean, leather, featherwork cloaks, chilies and caged macaws. Another fair-sized sailing ship was being towed in; the absence of a diesel auxiliary and some subtle elements in her lines showed she was foreign—Dahaean out of Hagamantash, probably, from what FirstSiders would call Shanghai—laden with silk and cotton fabrics, tea, pepper and cloves, cinnamon and nutmeg and inlaid furniture, jade statues and thousand-knot rugs. A Tahitian schooner looked more exotic, with its twin prows and flamboyantly colorful tiki-mask figurehead.

Most craft were from the Commonwealth, swapping northern timber and manufactures and FirstSide goods for refined petroleum, chocolate, cement, brick, tile, borax. . . .

And there she is,
Adrienne thought.

A tall young woman with yellow hair came swinging down the docks; she was dressed in a white linen dress with a thin black belt and a wide-brimmed white hat; a little discreet jewelry, and the Families' gold-and-platinum ring on her left thumb. She took off her sunglasses and waved with a bright artificial smile, and walked more quickly.

“Tom Christiansen, my cousin Heather Fitzmorton,” Adrienne said formally.
The bitch,
she did not add aloud, as they exchanged a formal kiss on the cheek.

Heather was Adrienne's age to a year. Her eyes flicked across Tully, lingered on Sandra for an instant, then took Tom in from feet to head.

“Well, Cuz,” she drawled, “I see your taste has improved—and gotten a lot more conventional.”

“Ha,” Adrienne said flatly. “Ha. You always were such a kidder, Cuz.” Heather's handshake was lingering when she took Tom's hand. “And here are the keys. I presume Irene is around?”

“At the town house,” Heather said. “It wouldn't do to have
her
standing next to you where people could see; it might give them ideas.”

“Thanks for helping out.”

“All a
mispocha-mitzvah,
as the saying goes,” Heather said, taking the keys and dropping them into her handbag. “And it's a guilt-free chance to get away from my kids for a while.” She wiggled her fingers at the rest of the party. “Ta,” she finished, and walked away.

Tom blinked. “I got the impression she doesn't like you?” he said, taking in Sandra's black scowl at the retreating back of the woman of the Families.

“I'm not exactly popular, and Heather's a model of respectability,” Adrienne said. “I warned you about that, remember . . . but Heather has a perfectly adequate sense of
responsibility,
fortunately, so I could ask her for a favor.”

“Mmmm . . .
mispocha-mitzvah
. . . something ‘good deeds'?” Tully said. “If that was Yiddish.”

“More or less,” Adrienne said. “ ‘Clan duty' might be closer to the actual colloquial meaning.”

“I didn't think
mispocha
meant family.”

“It doesn't, FirstSide. It sort of came to here; old Sol Pearlmutter used to mutter, ‘What a
mispocha!'
about the Families, so... Heather's my aunt Jennifer's daughter—her father's a Fitzmorton, of course, a collateral, and they have a place just across the Mayacamas in the Fitzmorton domain—Sonoma Valley, you'd say.”

“And Irene?”

“Another cousin; and she looks a
lot
more like me than dear Heather. Blame it on the way the Fitzmortons and Rolfes kept interbreeding back on Firstside. In the meantime, let's get to the hotel.”

The San Diego Arms knew they were coming in, and sent transport—a brand-new European fuel-cell van; it was open in back, and Adrienne enjoyed pointing out the sights as they moved inland, through the bustle of the harbor district and into the town proper: the paved highway and pipeline stretching north toward Long Beach, the new movie theater . . .

“And who the hell are
they?
” Tom blurted, pointing to two men.

“Those?” Adrienne said.
Got to remember what looks weird to a FirstSider,
she chided herself.

Those
were two big brown-skinned men, with middle-aged fat overlying impressive muscles, swirling tattoos over much of their faces and bodies, wearing what looked like crested Grecian helmets made of orange and green feathers, multicolored cloaks and sarongs. They strode along the sidewalk under the pepper trees, occasionally stopping to look in a shop window. Nobody but a few fascinated small boys noticed them.

“Those are Hawaiian
ali'i
—nobles—from Tahiti.”

“Ah . . .” Tully scratched his head. “If they're Hawaiian, how come they're from Tahiti?”

“Long story . . . well, about the time we sent our first ships across the Pacific, the Hawaiian islands got hit with a really bad series of plagues—smallpox from the Selang-Arsi country and chicken pox and measles from who knows where. We bought the islands from the survivors—paid them with vaccination and, umm, a few other things.”

“And they moved to Tahiti?” Tom asked, his fair brows knotted in thought. “Because they're closely related cultures, I suppose?”

“Well, it was more on the order of Tahiti being part of the ‘few other things' we paid them with. Their ancestors had come from there, and they remembered.”

“Wait a minute,” Tom said. “What did the
Tahitians
say to all this?”

“The ‘few other things' also included ships, a couple of thousand trade muskets, some muzzle-loading brass cannon, and a lot of gunpowder.”

“Oh,” he said. “Then they conquered Tahiti?”

Adrienne felt like patting him on the cheek.
Tom's so gentle and sweet!
she thought. Aloud, she went on: “Sort of. Actually, they
ate
a lot of the Tahitians, as I understand it: You could consider it a conquest, or a really big hunt for long pig. And sacrificed a lot of them to Kuka'ilimoku—the war god.”

Tom and his friend winced. Adrienne went on: “Just because someone gets the dirty end of the stick doesn't mean they're very nice,” she pointed out.

Tom would have enjoyed the
Sea-Witch
more if he'd been able to relax, if they were really headed west to the islands for nothing more serious than scuba diving and surfing and climbs among the mountain forests.

As it was . . .
I'm enjoying myself anyway,
he thought.
Just not as much.

He'd done a little boating—canoeing in the North Woods of Minnesota, and a little sailing in California; he'd have done a lot more, but it took money he didn't have.

Right now he was standing at the forepeak, clinging to the foresail shroud where the long bowsprit lanced out from the hull, and looking back at the taut curve of the sails. The two-masted schooner was sailing reach before a following wind, slicing its way northwest and throwing bursts of spray twice the height of his head as it rose to the swells. Land had dropped below the eastern horizon hours ago. The sea was indigo under an azure bowl of sky, cloudless save for a little high haze in the east; the wind was not quite stiff enough to show whitecaps, and the waves were long and smooth. Foam peeled back from the yacht's sharp cutwater, and the bow-wave curled deep along the hull, showing the copper sheathing that protected the wood from teredo-worms. A school of bottlenose dolphins rode the wave, lancing out of the water in smooth curves and spearing back with hardly a splash, dancing with the sea and the ship.

The tune ran through his head as he watched, like a lilt of infinite possibilities beyond the horizon.

Adrienne waved from the rear of the yacht near the wheel and aft of the deckhouse, a hundred and forty feet back. That was only a little more than the height of the mainmast—the foremast was a bit shorter—and she carried ten thousand square feet of canvas in her fore-and-aft sails. That was a number; the dazzling mass piled overhead was reality, like clouds brought to earth and imprisoned in a suave geometry of curves and lines. He levered himself up and walked backward—
sternward,
he reminded himself—along the deck; it was relatively narrow, nowhere more than thirty feet across, and uncluttered save for the low shapes of the geared winches that controlled the sails.

The crew nodded as he passed, not pausing in their work, and Tom returned the gesture. There were twelve men aboard, and three women. Captain McKay was a taciturn man whose hair had been lion-colored before it went mostly badger gray, with blue eyes and a kink in his nose that looked as if it had been put there with something sharp, and scar tissue half an inch thick over his knuckles. His accent was an improbable mixture of Scots and Aussie, when he did speak; his wife was purser-cook, his daughter her assistant, and his son first mate. Evidently McKay had been running the
Sea-Witch
since she was built in the Pearlmutter yards in New Brooklyn thirty-five years before. What he'd done before that, FirstSide, was not mentioned. The rest of the crew were New Virginian-born, except for one Dahaean picked up recently in San Diego, a dark Eurasian-looking man with the front of his scalp shaved and the black hair at the rear worked up into braids and looped over his ears.

Tom nodded to him, too: The man was dressed in a pair of tar-stained breeches that ended at the knee, showing a remarkable assortment of scars on his whipcord-lean torso. God alone knew how he'd ended up here.

Captain MacKay was seated at the table on the fantail, under an awning, along with the rest of their party. A steward was just laying out luncheon: salad, skewers of grilled shrimp the size of Tom's thumb in curry sauce, cold meats, bread, cheese and fruit. The skipper of the
Sea-Witch
had his white peaked cap on the table and was filling a foul old briar pipe; luckily the stiff breeze would snatch away everything but a hint of its reek.