Conquistador

by S. M. Stirling

  “Yah, you betcha I will,” Tom said.

  He paused and looked thoughtfully down at his notes. Well, here’s a pretty how-de-doo, he mused. Apparently we not only have poachers who are ruthless enough to trade in a species on the brink of extinction, but smart enough to find members of it where the California DFG and all the biologists in the state can’t.

  “Thanks, and—Wait a minute,” Tom said. He didn’t know precisely why he asked, but extra information never hurt. “To change the subject, do you know anything about the Pacific Open Landscapes League?”

  Manuel was silent for a moment. “That rings a faint bell… could you hold?”

  Tom made affirmative noises, and waited while a faint clicking of keys came over the line.

  God, but computers make it hard to hide anything, he thought. Nothing ever goes away, if you know where to look.

  “I’d heard of them vaguely myself,” Manuel said a moment later, in the peculiar half-strangled tones of a man who is holding a telephone between his jaw and shoulder while working at a computer.

  “Sí, got it. They’re a contributor to the zoo’s fund; an annual hundred and fifty thousand. But they’ve been dealing with us for quite a while—since the late 1940s—only then they had a different name. Let’s see… Zoological Studies and Research. They had an arrangement with us on captured animals—they’d fund the expedition, and we’d split the beasts with them. They wanted the animals for experimentation, I’d guess, from the name. Mostly standard African animals: rhino, giraffe, lions, cheetahs; some Asian varieties as well—tigers, Siberians and Bengals. That sort of thing was more common then; we had exchange operations with zoos and even circuses all over the world—we got our first stock from a circus, you know, back a century ago. The arrangement seems to run for about six years, 1949 to 1955; then they shifted over to a straight donation and doing research through us and people we recommended, a lot of projects on historical ecology—how the early colonization affected California by bringing in new grasses and so forth—and then in 1970 they changed the name. Odd, eh? Why do you ask?”

  “Just a feeling I should,” Tom said, uncertain himself. “Talk to you later.”

  He hung up the phone and stared down at his notes again. They were clearly organized; the only problem was that they were nonsense. His father had once told him that if you couldn’t solve a problem at one end, the trick was to start at the other.

  “All right, let’s move on,” he murmured, and reached for the telephone again; the number he wanted was on the frequently-used list. “One ringie dingie… two ringie dingie… This is Warden Thomas Christiansen from the DFG… that’s the Department of Fish and Game… Special Agent Perkins, please… Hi, Sarah. Any news for me?”

  “Hi, Tom. We have gotten some new leads.” His pen poised again. She went on: “It turns out the buyers for that stuff were… upset… when it all got burned up. They’d already paid for a good bit of it. They think—”

  “They being?”

  “A Vietnamese group, we’re pretty sure. Not as good citizens as most of their community, to put it mildly. They’d have the Asian connections for marketing.”

  Tom nodded, then remembered to produce an audible “uh-huh. Yes, DFG has been having plenty of problems with that. Now that the war’s over and the Asian part of the Pacific Rim is booming harder than ever, the market for animal parts has heated up again. Bear paws, rhino horns, tiger glands, exotic furs, ivory, you name it, and the prices make cocaine look like bottled water.”

  And that would fit in with RM&M’s Pacific Rim operations, if it’s a rogue group within the company the way Adrienne suspects, he added silently to himself, before going on: “Who were the ones selling it in the first place?”

  “A group of Russian ‘entrepreneurs.’ Based out of the Balkans or possibly Turkey, we think; things aren’t quite so wild and hairy in Russia proper these days, not like it was in the nineties, and the ’Stans are getting downright respectable.”

  “Amazing how much respect GPS-guided weapons can instill,” Tom said. “Not to mention the nasty example of what happened to Iraq. How did you find out?”

  “Well, the Vietnamese gentlemen seemed to be under the impression that the Russians were having some sort of internal power struggle, which resulted in their customers getting ripped off. We got an anonymous-concerned-citizen tip by a very excited young man, fingering them. Voice analysis pegged him as born here but brought up in a Vietnamese-speaking household, and we’re working that angle.”

  “Wonderful!” Tom enthused. “And the Russians?”

  “Them we can move on faster; we know where they live. You doing anything later this week? Like to take a trip to beautiful San Francisco?”

  He felt a sudden twinge. Adrienne will probably be leaving town next week. Duty was going to get in the way of his social life again; that had been the proximate cause of his divorce, too.

  “Can do,” he said. “You’ve got my cell-phone number.”

  And as compensation, he might well be on the track of the people responsible for the condor, along with a good deal else.

  And I want to meet them, he thought, as he scooped up the file and set out for his supervisor’s office. I want that very much indeed.

  Colletta Hall

  June 2009

  The Commonwealth of New Virginia

  Giovanni Colletta turned the swivel chair and looked up at his father’s picture, where it hung behind his desk. It showed him in this very chair and room, seated with chin propped on thumb and forefinger.

  The portrait had been painted in late middle age, which was how he himself best remembered Salvatore Colletta: streaks of gray through the sleek, slicked-back raven hair, lines grooved from the hooded eyes to the corners of an unsmiling mouth, the somber elegance of dark suit and cream silk tie, ruby stickpin, discreetly gleaming gold cuff links, snowy linen, on a body that stayed slender and tough into his sixties. Until the cancer racked him to a shadow and he lost his last battle, murmuring a final confession to a priest who turned pasty-pale as he bent his ear to the wrinkled mouth.

  Hard to believe that I’m getting to be that old myself, the Prime of the Collettas—the Colletta—thought. He’d been the third child but the first son, born in the Commonwealth in the 1950s. Minchia! I’m a grandfather and fifty-nine this September.

  The painter had been very good, and fearless. The eyes of Salvatore Colletta reminded his son of Byzantine mosaics he’d seen on trips FirstSide, in the ancient churches of Ravenna—the eyes of the empress Theodora the Great. Dark, fathomless, knowing, somber with unacknowledged sins—although he could hear the wolf-yelp of laughter the first Colletta would have given, and the playful-serious cuff across the side of the head.

  Hey, I got eyes on me like a Greek buttana, eh? Show your father some respect, kid!

  Giovanni’s mouth quirked. Salvatore Colletta had insisted that his son study the arts and graces and learning of a galantuomo, a gentleman, a real civile—despite the fact that he’d been the scion of a long line of laborers and sardine fishermen in a grim little village near Messina, and had himself grown up catch-as-catch-can on the shrill crowded streets of Manhattan’s Little Italy in the twenties and thirties. That education had given Giovanni Colletta a vocabulary and perspective his father could never have imagined, but he’d never been absolutely sure that he’d kept the razor-keen aggression and cold realism that had made the Collettas second only to the Rolfes here in this new land. He could only hope he had, for on that the survival of his blood depended.

  “But I certainly inherited the ambition,” he murmured to the terrible old man whom he’d loved and feared and hated every day of his life, long after he became a man himself. “And everything we do is for the Family, Poppa.”

  As if to underscore the fact, his youngest daughter burst into the office, throwing a laughing word over her shoulder to the friends who giggled and chattered without. His smile grew broader, half from delight at seeing her, free-striding and
tanned and beautiful in her tennis whites, sky-colored eyes sparkling as she twirled her racket, hair the color of dark amber honey held back by a silken headband. The other half was from the amusement….

  Well, Poppa, you wanted me to be a civile, and you wanted a tall, slim, blond wife who was a “real lady.”

  The woman Salvatore Colletta married had been a junker’s daughter from east of the Elbe, whose surviving family had had very good reasons for jumping at a one-way passage through the Gate in 1946—reasons beyond the Russians overrunning their ancestral estates, and having to do with certain political decisions they’d made in the 1930s. The von Traupitz family soon discovered equally good reasons for a matrimonial alliance with one of the founders and overlords of New Virginia.

  Between your social ambitions and your taste in women, Poppa, you certainly made something different out of the legitimate line of the Collettas! Of course, Giovanni had helped the process along. Marianne’s mother had been a yellow-haired daughter of the Fitzmortons.

  “Daddy!” she said, giving him an enthusiastic hug as he came around the broad desk to greet her.

  “Picciridda mia,” he replied fondly.

  “Oh, Daddy, I’m too old to be called ‘little one’ anymore,” she said, holding him at arm’s length, and tactfully not mentioning that she was his height to an inch. “I’m a grown-up young lady now. Which you’d know if you would only get out of this office more, instead of sitting here all the time playing spider-in-the-web. I hardly see you at all, even when I’m at home!”

  “I’d just cast a damper on that great drooling tribe of wellborn young men who follow you around,” he said, smiling at her fondly. “You should pick one to be your prince, little heartbreaker, and give me more grandchildren.”

  “I would, if only I could find one like you, Daddy,” she said, smiling at him.

  His heart melted with love—and not a little with admiration for the skill she used to manipulate him.

  “And what is it you want to wheedle out of your father this time?” he said.

  At nineteen, Marianne Colletta had the family’s diamond-hard concentration on getting what she wanted, but was still working on the subtlety that often went with it, and the knowledge of what she wanted above all. She wrinkled her small straight nose at him.

  “Well, can’t I come to see my own father just for the fun of it? There’s nothing right now… it’s not important, I suppose… but I could use another maid….”

  He sighed and shook a finger. “Young lady, you’ve got a perfectly good maid, what’s her name, Toto, and a secretary, not to mention all the staff running ’round to your whim here, or at the town house when you’re living in Rolfeston—”

  “Well, yes, but it’s a lot of work, and Totochin’s going back to that horrible place with all the X’s in the name when her contract’s up next year, I just couldn’t persuade her to stay. I really need one who can learn enough to be useful before Totochin goes home, and it looks so silly to have only one to run errands and carry things and everything when I’m in town, and a Settler maid is just horribly unfashionable. I’m going to be working at the Gate computer center after the spring semester, too, so I’ll be so busy with that, and then there’s all the parties and—”

  He sighed. More of the damned Rolfes. It was their policies that made it at least a little difficult for him to get a new nahua maid for his favorite daughter—he, Prime of the whole Colletta Family, its collaterals and its affiliation! And it was their law that required every young member of the Thirty Families to contribute time to the Commission’s needs. Although to be fair, he could see a good deal of sense in that.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” he grumbled, and accepted her hug and kiss on the forehead.

  He looked at his watch when she left: eleven-fifteen, which gave him a few minutes before Anthony arrived, and an hour before the business lunch with Dimitri Batyushkov. That was going to be embarrassing. Anthony was at least partly responsible, for all that his claim of bad luck and foul-ups by the FirstSider element had some merit. He’d been in charge. Excuses didn’t matter. Results did.

  He had the report on his desk memorized; he picked it up and threw it in the discreet disposal slot. Equipment hummed, and then there was nothing left but powdered paper with traces of ink, sitting in the hidden waste receptacle and waiting for the cleaning woman to dump into her bin. Giovanni Colletta looked around the big office; it was a square room mostly lined in polished light-gold beewood paneling, and bookcases filled with volumes bound in tooled leather. There was space here and there for a painting or a vase. The porcelain was his own selection, Selang-Arsi ware in subtly mottled eggshell colors, brought from New Virginia’s version of Manchuria. He’d led a trading-and-exploration expedition there, as a young man.

  The paintings were his father’s, some excellent Old Masters, some garish as only a Sicilian peasant’s idea of beauty could be, but both were reminders of the founder—good and bad the old man’s own choices, not bought taste. The floor was marble squares separated by thin strips of lapis, with glowing Eastern rugs beneath the leather-upholstered chairs and settees and tables of rare tropical woods.

  Behind the desk was a solid section of wall bearing Salvatore Colletta’s portrait, flanked on either side by tall glass doors. Outside was a broad terrace, with a balustrade at its outer rim and man-high stone vases spaced along the inner, tumbling sprays of blossom in hot gold and white and purple down their pale sides; hummingbirds like living jewels of malachite and crimson hovered around them in a blur of wings. He went past the sweet-scented glory and leaned his palms against the stone of the balustrade to look northeastward; he often used this sight to hearten himself.

  It was a prideful thing, the view down from where Colletta Hall stood in the first upthrust of the Santa Cruz range’s eastern foothills, over the broad lands that acknowledged him lord.

  “Vallo du Beddu Cuore,” he said softly. It was a fitting name for the Colletta domain. Valley of Heart’s Delight.

  They had called it so on FirstSide, until urban sprawl had eaten the orchards with microchip factories sheathed in black glass and hideously priced little houses, with shopping malls and freeways—he’d seen that on his last trip, and still had nightmares about it.

  Here the lower Santa Clara valley stretched off northeastward to San Francisco Bay; the hall’s gardens with their tall trees and green lawns, pools and fountains and the cool fire of flowers falling from terrace to terrace; the red roofs of the little town that served Colletta Hall below and the farmsteads of the Settler families beyond. Blocks of plum and almond and apricot trees stood green and regular; in springtime they became a riot of pink and white blossoms that scented the air for miles. Vineyards had turned to rows of shaggy green; grain bowed to the breeze in rippling sheets of gold cut by the dark green of trees planted in lines as windbreaks, ready for next week’s harvest; corn stood tall and beginning to tassel; ant-tiny cattle and sheep moved through pastures dotted with widespreading oaks; tractors crawled, leaving swaths of rich dark soil upturned, followed by the wheeling flocks of gulls.

  The distant ticking of their engines, or the occasional car or truck drawing a white plume along a dirt road, were the only mechanical noises that intruded among the slow sough of the warm June wind through tall trees. Other sounds melted into that music: an ax splitting wood, human voices in speech or song, the buzzing whirr of hummingbird wings from flower to flower. Behind him were the steep low mountains, rolling toward the Pacific and turning green with redwood groves.

  “And it’s all part of old John Rolfe’s fantasy of a Virginia that never really was,” he murmured. “A pretty fiction of foxhunting squires and sturdy yeomen. A pleasant dream, and a good place to start. But not to stop.”

  The true power of the Collettas was in their share of the New Virginia gold and silver and mercury mines, the oil wells and factories and power stations, the Settlers who were affiliates of the Colletta family, the weight he and his allies c
ould pull on the Central Committee… and above all, the Colletta share of the Gate revenues and the vast corporate holdings FirstSide. But the Rolfes and their allies dominated the committee and the Commission through it, and imposed a policy of caution that irked him more with every passing year, playing at rustic lordship and keeping the Commonwealth of New Virginia inside its kernel. His hand clenched into a fist on the volcanic stone.

  “We must learn to dream more grandly. There is a world awaiting us—two!”

  A discreet cough brought him round. His personal executive assistant stood there: Angelica McAdams, a plain middle-aged woman of formidable efficiency, whose family had been Colletta affiliates since the 1950s. He was easy enough with her that it didn’t embarrass him to be caught talking to himself—making a political speech to himself, in fact.

  Probably because it’s one I want to make before the committee, but don’t quite dare, he thought as he nodded to her.

  “Mr. Anthony Bosco is here for his appointment, sir.”

  “Thank you, Angelica. Hold any incoming calls.”

  Anthony Bosco was third-generation; the Boscos were members of the Thirty Families but only as collaterals, relatives Salvatore Colletta had brought in a few years after the opening of the Gate; and Anthony’s mother had been of the Filmer Family. He was an unremarkable young man in his late twenties in a neat brown-silk suit, with carefully combed dark-russet hair, a faint trace of acne scars across his cheekbones and currently a hangdog air.

  That broke into a painful smile as he advanced to bow deeply and kiss the Colletta Prime’s hand with a murmur of “Bacciamo le mani”; that was a custom of the Collettas that had spread widely among the Families, like the Rolfes’ riding to hounds or the von Traupitzes’ student saber duels or the Fitzmorton boar hunts with spears.

  “Sir—” he began.