The guards who stood about the walls in the courtyard below bore modern steel machetes and flintlock muskets. The lesson was one he wanted driven home frequently and hard.
Lord Seven Flower himself was in the traditional costume: silver armbands and greaves, a loincloth intricately folded so that a long flap of snowy cotton edged with embroidery hung to his knees before and behind, gold chains and a gold pectoral across his chest, and a headdress made in the form of a snarling silver jaguar’s head with golden spots, eyes of turquoise and ivory teeth, sporting a huge torrent of colored plumes from its rear in gaudy crimson and green and mauve.
The face that looked out between the jaguar’s jaws was square and hard, dark brown save where white scars seamed it, his narrow eyes a black so deep the pupil merged with the iris. It was pitted with the marks of the Great Sickness—as were those of most men and women of his generation.
Those who lived, he thought mordantly.
The priests and generals and high nobles who sat on cushions before him numbered twelve, dressed only slightly less gorgeously than himself. They also looked a little surprised that the feast had not begun; in the holy city one ate to bursting, drank to drunkenness, ate of certain mushrooms, and then the idols of the gods would speak—or the mummified bodies of one’s ancestors, in the old days. Like him, few of the men before him came from families of sufficient ancient rank to have their forefathers preserved. The idols were present—great Bezelao with his cup of wisdom, Xochipilli with his crest of macaw feathers, and many more.
Also present were twenty men tied to upright wooden posts: common men, naked, slaves or peasants—men of no account, unlikely to be missed, as he had specified to the officials in charge of such matters.
Lord Seven Flower raised the ceremonial sword he bore in his hand; it was so old and holy that the blades were edged with bits of obsidian instead of bronze, like a priest’s sacrificial knife.
“Stand forth, Five Deer,” he called.
A man stepped forward, plainly dressed in cotton loincloth and sandals, but bearing himself proudly. He carried a weapon. There were gasps as the grandees recognized it; not an ordinary musket, although shaped much like it—this one had a projecting box in front of the trigger guard, and no hammer at all, but a complex of metal shapes in roughly the same position.
“These men offend me. Slay them,” he went on, pointing to the stakes with his stone-edged sword.
The strange musket leaped to Five Deer’s shoulder. Crack!
The sound was not like the boom of a musket: harder, sharper, quicker, the flash a brief jet of hot flame in the darkness. A brass cartridge jumped out of the odd metal shapes, and the leftmost of the captives jerked and then slumped, a red spot appearing on his breast.
Crack!
Again, and again: twenty times, as fast as Five Deer could shift his aim and pull the trigger. Lord Seven Flower’s generals and priests were watching with fullest attention, swearing and pounding their fists on the mats that covered the stone pavement, some giving high yelping cries of excitement. There were screams from some of the captives, too; not every shot killed at once, though some did so dramatically—one took the whole top off a captive’s head, and spattered his brains across a mural of human sacrifice. At Lord Seven Flower’s nod, one of the guards stepped forward and silenced the wounded with a knife across the throat. Thick straw mats kept the blood from flowing too far and inconveniencing the great men.
“A rifle of the Deathwalkers!” a general said. “But Lord Seven Flower, always they have refused to trade such with us. Not for silver, or gold, or turquoise, or cacao or hummingbird feathers will they trade such!”
“A rifle of the Deathwalkers,” Lord Seven Flower agreed. “And for one thing will they trade such—some of them, at least. Fighting men. They too have their factions.”
“Ahhhh!”
All of his chief followers were survivors of the long struggles between the Zapotec cities, and within them. The land had heaved and shifted like bubbling cornmeal in a pot for three generations now, brought to a boil by the plagues and the new weapons and goods. Intrigue and assassination, war and battle and sudden revolt were in their blood. None of them had to be told how useful foreign mercenaries could be in a faction fight. All of them bowed their heads to the ground in a wave of colorful feathers and fur, silver and jade and gold. Several were smiling as they rose to a sitting position again; they also knew how useful foreign mercenaries could make themselves useful in ways not intended by their employers.
The general who’d spoken before added: “How difficult are these weapons to learn to use, o man made in the image of the gods?”
“Easier than a musket,” Lord Seven Deer replied. “As a musket is easier than a bow. In any case, the lords of the Deathwalkers will provide instruction; when the instruction is complete, the men will be used for their purposes, then returned to us for ours. Ammunition and spare parts will also be sold, though not cheaply.” His gaze sharpened on his supporters. “Each of you will find fifty warriors. Tried and tested men, but young. Cunning, but obedient and loyal. And none of such note or name that they will be missed. This must remain a secret of secrets.”
He rose and clapped his hands. The slaves filed in, bearing trays of carved wood heaped high with steaming food; others carried golden vessels of cacao and fermented fruits and northern brandy.
Only the king and the nobles, priests and the most trusted guards would return from this meeting, of course. The others would serve to buy the favor of the gods.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Africa”/Rolfe Domain
June 2009
Commonwealth of New Virginia
The ferry that ran across the Carquinez Strait was a big wooden rectangle with movable ramps at both ends, diesel-powered; when the wind blew back toward them for an instant the smell reminded him suddenly of FirstSide, and the way he’d hated the big-city stink of exhausts. That prompted another train of thought; he looked at the power lines that ran down to the northern edge, borne on wooden tripods and crossbeams made of whole Douglas fir trunks a hundred feet long with their feet braced in cast-concrete drums. The cable looped down to a ground station on the northern bank—there was a small hamlet there, where the city of Benicia stood in his California—and then reappeared on the southern shore, striding down the valleys, and he supposed over the hills to Rolfeston and the other Bay Area settlements.
“Where’s the generating station?” he asked curiously. “What’s the energy source?”
Adrienne looked over at him and winked, laying a finger along her nose. “Geothermal,” she said. “And on Rolfe land. Up north of Calistoga—in the geyser country—the Rolfe domain holds everything from Napa Town up through Clear Lake, and over to the Berryessa Valley. You might say we understand the power of power!”
“Ah.” He nodded. That was the world’s biggest geothermal-power area FirstSide, and the geography was the same here. “That the only power station?”
“The only one between Mendocino and Monterey, apart from some very small-scale hydro, and emergency generators at hospitals an’ suchlike,” she said. “The settlement up in Oregon uses hydropower, and down around San Diego they’ve got a turbine setup running on natural gas.”
Her accent’s gotten a little stronger since we came through the Gate, he noted silently. Not acting as much, I suppose. Aloud, he went on: “I suppose Sierra Consultants did the design work?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact,” she said, looking at him with surprise and respect. “One of their last studies for us, in the late fifties. We’ve got about a hundred and fifty megawatts capacity installed as of now, and since we weren’t dumb enough to neglect pumping the condensed steam back down the holes, the Commission thinks that we can eventually pull out ten times as much or more on a sustained-yield basis. That’ll be enough; we aren’t going to let the population here grow indefinitely.”
There were stairs to a walkway that ran along each side of the ferry. Tom to
ok the ones on the left—port, he thought—and they stood on the gallery there, looking about and at the water that foamed by below. It wasn’t much disturbed; the blunt bow of the ferry threw its wave in a correspondingly wide arc, and only smooth surging ripples ran along the hull amidships. The water was blue but clear, amazingly free of silt despite being downstream of the Central Valley and the marshes; he could look straight down and see a pair of fifteen-foot sturgeon swimming slowly downstream, and then a school of eight-inch threadfin shad so thick that they made the water boil, leaving him staring into an infinite blue-tinted chamber of mirrors full of flickering silver.
There was a thick fringe of marsh along the strait’s northern edge; it suddenly occurred to him that upstream the delta country would be eight million acres of nothing but marsh. He looked around again, eyes on the blue cloud-flecked sky. This was a little past the main spring migration season and a month early for the start of the autumn one, but the flocks made those he remembered from his own Red River country in the fall season seem like a tattered remnant. In one casual glance he saw curlews, pelicans numerous as snowflakes slanting down to the surface of the water, ospreys falling like miniature thunderbolts and thrashing back into the air with silver fish writhing in their claws, redthroated loons diving from the surface, three types of grebe, great blue herons striding along the edge of the water, and on and on.
“This area really swarms with life, doesn’t it?” he said.
Adrienne nodded. “Even more than when Granddad arrived,” she said softly; he turned his head and surprised an expression of soft pleasure on her face as she watched the pageant. “God, I love this.”
That surprised him a little, both the expression and the words.
“More than when your grandfather came?” he said. “I know he’s a conservationist of sorts, but—”
She put a hand on his shoulder for a moment; it felt good. And hell, I’m just being professional.
“It makes sense when you think about it,” she said. “After the Gate opened, three hundred thousand top predators who hunted every day for food got replaced by two hundred thousand—mostly concentrated here around the bay—who hunt occasionally for fun. And the Indians used a lot of the wild plant life, too; acorn mush was their staple, plus they burned off millions of acres every year to keep the countryside open. Ecologically speaking, we New Virginians are grass eaters who get most of our food from restricted areas in a few valleys.”
Tom nodded. “So the Indians were the keystone species here; humans generally are. I imagine you’ve had some pretty wild ecological swings since then.”
Like an engine without a governor, racing and stalling, he thought; and tried not to think of the bands and villages struck down by bacteria and viruses from—literally—beyond their world, most likely the last survivors dying from sheer thirst or hunger as they lay tossing with none but the stinking corpses of the dead for company.
My ancestors may not have cared much, any more than these people do—but I’m not my ancestors.
“Right. I can remember the forest and bush getting thicker and encroaching on open country in my own lifetime—though we’re trying to use controlled burns to slow that down.” She glanced sideways at him as they leaned on the railings. “And speaking of wild ecological swings, we’re nearly in Africa.”
“Africa?” he said.
“Formally it’s the North Bay Permanent Wilderness Reserve and Acclimatization Area, but nobody’s called it anything except Africa since 1950.”
She pointed and moved her arm from west to east against the low hills that rimmed the horizon.
“From Miller Creek to about there, and from tidewater inland through the Carneros hills. The whole north shore of San Pablo and Suisun bays, all the wetlands and a rim of dry country too. Easier to show you why it’s called ‘Africa’ than tell you. It’s the reason Ralph called his place the Mermaid Café, though.”
At his curious glance she went on: “You know, Joni Mitchell? ‘Carey’?” A sigh: “I forgot, you didn’t have Ralph shaping your musical tastes as a teenager.” She began to sing in a husky soprano:
The wind is in from Africa
Last night, I couldn’t sleep
“All right, all right,” he said. “Yeah, I have heard that golden oldie.” He gave a snort of laughter. “I like that man’s sense of humor.”
“Rock music’s still faintly scandalous in the Commonwealth,” she said. “So there! You thought I was a fuddy-duddy for liking the classics.”
There was a rush of feet and blasphemous cursing from the crew as they came into the U-shaped pier on the north bank, thick ropes were made fast, and the ramp at the front of the vessel was let down with a clattering thud.
Their Hummer was first on and first off; several two-and-a-half-ton trucks loaded with boxed cargo followed, and another with a huge coil of cable. Adrienne took the wheel, letting the other vehicles pass her as she drove through a pleasant, sleepy-looking village nestled among trees and then past a formidable turf-covered earthwork and ditch. The road forked there, one branch heading northeast, the other more sharply west of north, where it cut like a winding ribbon through the rolling hills and crossed their creeks on trestle bridges. Those looked odd, until he realized the huge size of the interlocked timbers.
There was no fringe of cultivation beyond the town’s gardens; a mile later she turned off the road, downshifted and splashed through a small stream, and then tackled the side of a thirty-degree hill’s slope. The Hummer took the uneven steepness with ease; he’d always liked the way the power-shifting system to the four wheels made them grip like giant fingers. Coming upslope they startled a flock of ostriches into explosive flight, and halted beneath a single small oak near the crest of a hill.
The cooling engine ticked; the cries of birds and the endless sough of the wind were louder. The smell of hot metal was quickly lost beneath the aromas of laurel, ceanothus and minty yerba santa crushed beneath the wheels. Long champagne-pale grass rippled in the cool wind off the water, thickly sown with late California poppies in drifts of small golden coins; nearer the water’s edge, vast fields of tule rushes tossed like a rolling poplin-green sea. Freshwater marsh lined every stream among the many that meandered southward toward the bay. There were trees on their edges, and clumps elsewhere, but everywhere the land stretched immense to the blue horizon.
She handed him the binoculars, and he silently looked about, restraining an impulse to swear and exclaim alternately. A group of brown-and-cream eland wandered along the edge of a patch of blue oak in a swale between two hills, big antelope the size of an ox but with longer legs, dewlaps and spiral horns. A herd of about two hundred elk were scattered in fawn dots up a farther hill; scattered among them were pronghorns, wildebeest, mule deer, and what he thought might be Thomson’s gazelle. A distant drumming of hooves heralded a group of wild horses, flowing over a rise like a wave and then down into a vale; water and birds splashed up as they breasted the damp ground there and vanished over the next hillcrest. Scattered bison grazed, and a grizzly rested under the shade of a blue oak, while two yearling cubs wrestled and fell around her.
“Is there anything that maniac of a grandfather of yours didn’t turn loose here?” Tom asked.
“Well, chimps didn’t do so well in California; they didn’t like the winters. But see that edge of swamp over there? Those knobs and twitchy things are the nostrils and eyes and ears of a bunch of hippos. They’re finally adjusting well. The chimps and the gorillas are doing fine down in Central America. We didn’t introduce just African animals, of course: tigers from China, snow leopards and the ordinary variety, European wild boar—”
“Arrrgghh!” he said, a cry from the heart. “Feral swine are organic bulldozers! They—”
“Don’t worry; the wild pigs aren’t as much of a pest as they are FirstSide. The cougars and wolves and lions and tigers and leopards keep ’em down. And it turns out golden eagles love raw suckling pig. Tom, there are a lot more predat
ors large enough to tackle a boar here than there are FirstSide. Not to mention we hunt them.”
“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.”
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