Conquistador

by S. M. Stirling

  His brows rose. “You liked her, though?”

  “I adored her; she made me feel like a fairy changeling. She told me once that all my brothers and sisters were tainted by bourgeois respectability, but that she saw from an early age that I had inherited something of her soul and could be productively corrupted by spoiling and indulgence. Even when she was old—in my first memories of her she must have been about sixty—she always wore these lovely clothes, appropriate but so chic and soigné, drove Italian sports cars on our dirt roads… I remember her perfume, and those stunning diamonds came out at the slightest excuse. She saw it as her mission to civilize a bunch of Saxon barbarians—meaning the Fitzmortons, her husband’s family, and us Rolfes—who had all sorts of boring virtues like industry and determination but lacked the aristocratic ones like savoir faire, style and ruthless selfishness.”

  “So she accepted you the way you were? That must have been a relief.”

  “Lord, no! But she didn’t disapprove of the same things my parents did. Looking back, a few people did accept me as I was—Ralph, for example….”

  “Ralph?” he asked. A boyfriend? He tried to keep a quick flush of hostile interest out of his voice, and by the slight quirk of one elegant red-blond eyebrow, didn’t quite manage it.

  “Ralph was one of Aunt Chloe’s odd friends; he ran—runs—a burger joint near, ah, near Martinez.” That was a town west of the Delta, on the Carquinez Strait. “Sort of a sixties type, you might say.”

  “I wouldn’t think your grandmother would approve of him, then,” Tom said with a grin.

  “And you’d be soooo right,” Adrienne said. “‘A sweaty, shaggy peasant,’ and I quote.”

  “Your grandmother had a rough edge to her tongue,” Tom observed.

  “More like an edge lined with razors. She told me I had no dress sense and was far too fond of things like riding horses; a little was good for the posture, but too much was rustic, and shooting animals was just too, too boring. But she’d sweep me off when things got too impossible at home, off through… off to San Francisco, which she reluctantly granted was a real city, if provincial compared to Florence.”

  “Took you to the zoo and suchlike?” Tom prompted. She can’t have been all bad, if she took that much trouble for a grandchild.

  “Usually she’d take me to the ballet and the galleries and the best theater and restaurants, and sit up talking with me till all hours while we ate these amazing chocolates, and let me sleep till noon, and then take me to have my hair and nails done. Mind you, I knew from the time I was eight that she’d drop me in an instant if I started being more boring than amusing. She found my mother terminally dull—overshadowed her completely from infancy; it must have been like growing up as a minor moon attendant on a star—and she detested my father as a prig… well, Dad is a prig, I grant, or at least very stuffy.”

  “And your great-aunt Chloe?” Tom said, watching the play of emotion on the sculpted face, trying to imagine her as a sullen rebellious teenager.

  The warm affection that showed when she spoke of her grandmother made her face more human; there was often a slight edge of coldness to her expression, something that you didn’t notice until it melted away. His own grandmother had been as different from this exotic contessa creature as it was possible to imagine, a Norski farm wife as tough as an old root, short-spoken and direct. He could remember her birch syrup, though….

  “Oh, Aunt Chloe was completely different. Everybody loved her, and she took in strays of the oddest sorts. She took me in, and put up with me when I was a perfect little beast. And she was the best listener I ever met—although you’re not bad in that respect yourself, Tom.”

  He blushed. “Well, I try not to do the stereotypical thing; you know, the man who natters on about himself whenever he meets a woman, as if his life was necessarily interesting just because it’s his.”

  “I think yours is interesting,” she said. “Not to mention your work.”

  “Nine-tenths paperwork, I’m afraid,” he said. “Wait a minute—your aunt took you in, you said?”

  “Great-aunt. Took me in informally; I more or less ran away from home for a while. Things got extremely messy. My parents wanted me put in therapy; committed and tranked out, in other words. Chloe wouldn’t hear of it, and the Old Man—her brother, my father’s father—backed her up, and of course what he said went. Looking back on it, I blush with shame at the way I treated her and everyone else at Seven Oaks—that was her place in the country—but I was monstrously preoccupied with my own grievances, real and imagined. At that point my parents pretty well washed their hands of me; the consensus was that I was either a psychopath, a dangerous juvenile delinquent—I got caught smoking weed at a wild party with people making out in the darker corners—or a lesbian degenerate—possibly all three, though not necessarily at the same time. I am crazy, of course, and you can outgrow juvenile delinquency like spots….”

  “Two out of three isn’t bad.” Tom grinned. “Tried to get me worrying there for a moment, didn’t you?”

  Her gaze came back to his, and a mischievous twinkle lit the green eyes. She ate a forkful of the curried lamb, made an appreciative noise, took a sip of her red zinfandel, then chuckled and went on: “And alas, I turned out to be incorrigibly straight. I mean, have you ever tried to have a romantic relationship with a girl?”

  This time his shout of laughter turned heads. He turned it down, and saw that she was chuckling helplessly too; it was a husky, wholehearted sound, with nothing of a giggle in it, and he liked that. His ex-wife had had an unfortunate tendency to giggle, and what could be charming at eighteen turned into a fingernails-on-slate torment later.

  “Well, yah, you betcha, I have tried that, repeatedly,” Tom said. “Not always successfully, but I keep at it. A dirty job that somebody has to do.”

  “Ms. Malaprop strikes again; but seriously, from my viewpoint it was like attempting a nice hot shower in lukewarm chicken soup. While trying to live on nothing but chocolate éclairs. God have mercy.” She sighed. “It would have been so convenient, though. Women don’t always think you’ve invited them to run your life just because you sleep with them.”

  “Neither do all men, not these days,” Tom said, a little defensively. Silently: I guess I don’t know the Bay Area as well as I thought. Sensitive Guys in Touch with Their Feelings Who Understand Her Need for Personal Space are a dime a dozen there, aren’t they? And the family in a tizzy in the nineties because she smoked a joint, or there were kids necking at a party? This whole saga—the big, sprawling, intermarried families and crazy rich grandmothers and country houses with names and fathers obsessed with proper behavior and such… sounds sort of Southern Gothic, or even European, and Old European at that, Faulkner or Chekhov with a few Californian touches. Maybe things get really different up beyond the last thin layers of the middle classes? Because I’d swear she’s telling the truth.

  Perhaps Adrienne saw something in his face. “Let’s say the, ah, families in our crowd were sort of behind the times,” she said. “Still are…”

  This wasn’t a conversation he could imagine having in, say, Ironwood, the small town where his high school had been located; too much Lutheran primness lingered there. Nothing out of the ordinary for California, though, and it was enjoyable to be doing the mutual-exploration thing again. Particularly when you liked the personality revealed, and thought it was true in reverse too.

  “Sorry about you and your parents, though,” he said sincerely. You appreciate having a solid family in childhood more when you get to know people who didn’t.

  “Oh, we get along well enough now. When Aunt Chloe died—”

  “I am sorry,” he said, and meant it. Impulsively, he put his hand on hers.

  She returned the grip for an instant; he felt the touch of her fingers for minutes after their hands parted.

  “—she died, and she left me Seven Oaks, asking me to take care of the estate. That shocked me silly. I’d taken her for gran
ted, and assumed that she’d just go on and on like the mountains and the seasons and the Old Man. You know how it is, the first time you realize death is real, that someone you loved is gone, you’ll never get the chance to say the things you were planning on… and you realize that you’re going to die someday too?”

  “Yes,” he said somberly. “I remember it when my mother died. As if you’re hatching from an egg, and you don’t much like what you’ve found outside.”

  “Exactly. There I was, eighteen—it was nine years ago next May twenty-first—and I suddenly realized that the people I’d spent all my adolescence rebelling against would be gone someday. So I decided to buckle down and make some use of the circumstances I’d been handed.”

  “Like your work with the Pacific Open Landscapes League?” he said.

  She smiled. “Yes, that and other things to do with the family business. Here I had an opportunity not one in a hundred million of the human race had, to do something significant for my family and my… country, my people, and why was I wasting time—time that I suddenly realized I’d never get back? Aunt Chloe thought I was competent to look after her things, and the contessa had told me someone of good blood shouldn’t care what the smelly peasants thought. I decided to go out and do something with the talents and the chances I’d been handed.”

  “Bravo,” Tom said softly.

  “I even manage to get on well with my parents now, except that they keep nagging me to get married and produce grandchildren; at least, Mother does.”

  “Don’t your brothers and sisters have any?”

  “Every one, three or more each,” Adrienne said. “But evidently there’s never enough.”

  Tom shook his head. “My family sounds a lot duller than yours,” he said.

  She cocked her head to one side. “Restful, not dull. Incidentally, fair warning: What I’ve told you is all true, but it’s incomplete. But as we native-born Californios say, enough about me. Let’s talk about you. How do you feel about me?”

  She laughed at his sudden alarm, and went on: “No, really, what I’d like to know is why you went into the Fish and Game Department after you left the army.”

  “Well, I’d gotten to like California while I was stationed here. Yes, it’s been mucked up beyond belief, but even what’s left of it is the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen. So…”

  And the whole rest of the evening we talked about my family and my work, he realized, coming back to himself and the present with a slight wince. She’d been very interested in the details of this bizarre poaching-smuggling case and the disaster in LA; he hadn’t mentioned anything about the SOU’s sources, or the Bureau’s, of course. RM&M wouldn’t need that to do their own internal housekeeping.

  He hoped he hadn’t been the stereotypical male after all.

  Roy was grinning sardonically, and Tom realized that he’d drifted off into a reminiscent daydream for a good minute by the clock.

  “So, you talked family?” Roy asked. “That gave you the dazed look and the sappy grin? Or the sheer careerist joy of finding a good source for this little investigation of ours?”

  Well, the fact that the evening ended with one short kiss, one long passionate kiss, and a murmured “I like you a lot, but we should get to know each other better,” and a date to go running together may have something to do with that.

  “And we talked about things we’ve done or would like to do,” he went on aloud. “She says she makes a good venison ragout—and she actually likes hunting.”

  “Bambi? She shot Bambi?” Roy said. “And ate the poor little fucker?”

  “I didn’t notice you turning down those venison chops last Christmas.”

  “It doesn’t count if it comes in boxes. Everyone born in civilized urban surroundings knows that there are magical warehouses where neatly wrapped steaks and chops and roasts appear, probably through some miracle of super-science. Better watch it; remarriage is the triumph of hope over experience.”

  Tom shrugged. “Maybe I need to work on my divorce technique. I haven’t had as much practice at them as you,” he said, with malice aforethought.

  Roy winced. He was currently in the middle of his very messy second.

  “Anyway, we’re scarcely engaged yet. A date to go running is not part of the wedding ceremony. She’s on the side of the angels. RM and M has put a lot of money into conservation. She’s just a nice, smart”—very rich, very sophisticated, very beautiful—“girl, Roy.”

  Hmmm. Although she seemed entranced with the food at the Maharani’s. I wonder why? If there’s one place in the world you can get good East Indian food, it’s Berkeley—probably better there than in Bombay. Maharani’s is nice, but it isn’t world-class.

  “OK, I’ll leave your love life out of things… for now. Anything on the LA bust from the city cops or Fart, Barf and Itch? I want to hear how the forensics turned out.”

  “I’m expecting something from the San Diego Zoo—”

  The phone rang, and Roy left for his own cubicle with a wave. Whistling quietly under his breath, Tom reached for the telephone.

  “Yes, this is Mr. Christiansen… Hi, Manuel? Anything yet on the bird?”

  There was a long silence, which wasn’t like Manuel Carminez; he loved explaining things about his specialty. With a lurch of fear, Tom went on: “Look, it didn’t die or anything, did it? Not smoke inhalation, or stress shock?”

  “No,” the voice on the other end said; it belonged to a biologist at the San Diego Zoo’s captive-breeding program. “The problem is that bird is too healthy. Among other things.”

  “How so?” Tom said, pulling a pad towards him and poising a pen.

  “To begin with, it isn’t a condor from California.”

  The pen hung fire. “I could have sworn—”

  “Oh, it’s a Gymnogyps californianus, all right—young adult male. The thing is, Tom… you know how you find a California condor in the wild?”

  “I’ll bite.”

  “It’s the bird with the four ornithologists standing around it in a circle. We captured the last wild one for the breeding program back in ’eighty-seven, at which point there were exactly twenty-seven in the entire world. There are barely two hundred twenty total today, with eighty in the wild. Not only is every single one accounted for, but we have tissue samples and DNA of every single one alive and every single one that’s died in the last thirty years.”

  “So how did the poachers get one without the four ornithologists noticing?” Tom asked. “It’s not as if they were ripping off abalone—the seabed is a lot less closely watched.”

  “They didn’t get one of ours. They’re all accounted for—I checked. And that’s where things get really interesting. All the California condors alive today are descended from the same twenty-seven individuals. That makes them all pretty closely related; it’s what we call a ‘near-extinction event’ or a ‘genetic bottleneck’—”

  “Manuel, you do remember who I work for, don’t you?” Tom said gently.

  “Oh, sorry. Anyway, they’re all pretty closely related. We can trace their relationships easily. So we did; took a sample, put it through one of those handy-dandy new gene-fingerprint machines, the one with the nanoscale gold electrodes, to see which pair of wild birds had a chick we somehow didn’t notice.”

  “Wait a minute,” Tom whispered. “You mean it’s not related to the known condors?”

  “Not even remotely. It’s as unrelated to them as it can be and still be a member of the same species. There’s more genetic variation between that bird’s DNA and the others than there is among all the other condors left. Which will make it tremendously useful to the breeding program, amigo. But it still leaves the question of where the son of a whore came from.”

  “You mean it’s as if it came from an entirely different population?”

  “Right in one. And there is one, repeat one, breeding population of Californian condors.”

  Now I wish I’d gotten more samples from that chamber of
horrors at the warehouse, Tom thought. Oh, how I wish I’d gotten more samples!

  “Anything else?”

  “Yes. We also did every other test we could on the damn overgrown vulture. You know the main cause of death for wild condors?”

  “Lead poisoning, from shot.”

  “Right in one again. Hunter shoots something, something runs away and dies, condor eats thing, condor also eats buckshot, and then it’s ‘Go walk with God, condor.’ Well, this condor never met a lead buckshot pellet. There’s no lead in its feathers or tissues at all, much less dangerous amounts. But wait, there’s more. This condor never ingested any pesticides, or herbicides—none, not even trace amounts—or any of a dozen other things that a bird in the modern world eats… por Dios, things that we all breathe every day.”

  Manuel paused. “If you can find out the valley this condor lived in, I would like to move there! Because that place… it is like nowhere on earth for this hundred years and more.”

  “Where could it have come from, then?”

  “Well… possibly… a very isolated group somewhere up in the Sierras? I don’t see how the hell we could have not found them, given their flying range, but it’s the only thing that occurs to me, frankly. And it’s a pretty lame explanation; there aren’t any places in California that pristine, and condors scavenge open lowland areas by choice. It would take a whole series of fantastically unlikely coincidences for the past hundred years. Or some mad scientist has been cloning them, using frozen tissue that’s been around for sixty, seventy years, to get any possibility of an unrelated bird… take your pick.”

  “Thanks, Manuel.”

  “Thank you, amigo. This bird improves our chances of succeeding with this program by more than a bit. I just can’t figure out where in the name of todos santos it comes from. But if you find any more—send them along!”