Conquistador

by S. M. Stirling

  Long bronze-colored hair whipped across his face as she turned her head to look. She also hit the gas hard enough to send a spray of gravel shooting rearward. That decided the beast; it put its head down and began churning the tree-trunk pillars of its legs. Gravel spurted from under its feet as it hit the roadway, and Tom thought he could feel the ground shaking under the massive thudding impact of those broad three-toed feet.

  Hummers had excellent acceleration, for a diesel-engined vehicle. Experiment showed that for a while a rhinoceros could do even better. The thick dust spewing out from behind the little truck partially hid the giant beast, but the continuous rain of stones thrown up by the rear wheels enraged it further; he could hear its hoarse squeal and the great bellows panting of its breath. That was the problem with animals too big and tough to have natural enemies—their impulse was to charge anything that annoyed them. Charge it and gore it with that huge horn and stomp it under those pile-driving feet…

  “That’s a white rhino!” Adrienne shouted over the rushing air and the engine’s growl. “I thought all the ones in this reserve had been trapped and relocated!”

  “Looks sort of reddish gray to me!”

  “No, it’s from wit—the Afrikaans word for wide—the square lip. It’s a grazer, not a browser like the black rhino.”

  “Could you just drive, please?” he shouted, and grinned back at her; it was an odd combination of fright and exhilaration, a little like hitting the white water in a canoe.

  “Drive, woman! Right now its wide square upper lip is too close for comfort. There’s a goddamn big horn just above it.”

  For an instant he thought the beast would reach them, to flip over the Hummer and send them flying in bone-breaking arcs to the ground—the wide, squat vehicles didn’t tip easily, but he’d seen what happened when they did. Then it began to drop behind; he glanced over at the speedometer and saw they were doing forty miles an hour, about as much as was safe on this winding dirt road in hilly country, or a bit more. The rhino slowed, lumbered to a stop, turned three-quarters on to the Hummer he hadn’t been able to catch and stood in a slowly dispersing cloud of dust, jerking his horn through short savage arcs to left and right as if to show what he’d planned to do when he caught them.

  “By Jesus, that was a little too close,” he said, as Adrienne slowed down. “Adrienne, please tell me there aren’t any elephants around here.”

  “Not anymore,” she said cheerfully. “There’s a whole swarm of them down in the southern basins, though—the LA area, you’d say. They’ve spread from there into Sonora and west to the upper Rio Grande, too; they can take a frosty winter, but not hard blizzards.”

  “I repeat my remark about your grandfather,” Tom said.

  “Then there’s elephants and tigers we dropped off in the Galveston-to-New Orleans area—”

  “I don’t want to know!” he cried half seriously.

  They drove in silence for a while; the countryside about was too beautiful and too weirdly alien not to keep his eyes busy. Occasionally a car or truck would pass them—the cars usually four-by-fours of one sort or another, the trucks pickups or, fairly often, army-style deuce-and-a-halfs. The dust would have been worse if they were more frequent; it was often enough for Tom to be thankful for a spare bandanna Adrienne lent him.

  “I thought the area north of here was fairly well settled,” he said after a few minutes. “Shouldn’t there be more traffic?”

  “It is well settled, by our standards,” she said. “But we use the rivers and bay for transporting freight.” Pointing from east to west: “There’s the von Traupitz domain, and the Chumleys up around Yolo; they ship their produce out through Suisun Bay; Napa’s the riverport for the R-Fitzmortons in Sonoma, the Hugheses around where Healdsburg is FirstSide, the Throckhams the same around Santa Rosa.”

  Another ditch marked the northern border of “Africa”—this one extending east and west out of sight, steep-sided enough to make a rhino cautious, if not an antelope or lion. Just past it they came across a road gang of men in gray overalls doing repairs on the dirt highway’s surface, filling in potholes and spreading crushed rock, with a mechanical roller to pack it down. Overseeing them was a stringy, lean thirty-something man on a big glossy horse, a classic Southern-sheriff type down to the sunglasses, Smokey the Bear-style hat, cigar clamped between his teeth and the shotgun whose butt rested on his hip.

  Tom thought he would have suspected the workers were convicts, even without the word “Convict” printed on chest and back in large red letters. They weren’t fettered—very little point in that amidst swarming wildlife eager to convert them into either food or irritating leftover bits stuck between the toes—and didn’t look beaten or starved. They did look hangdog, and they worked with steady effort.

  “Can we stop here and ask a few questions?” he asked Adrienne, a note of challenge hovering around the edges of the words.

  “Yah, you betcha,” she said with an impish grin, gently mocking his Red River accent, and pulled the Hummer over to the side of the road. “Hi, there, Deputy Gleason!”

  The man looked and did a double take as the Hummer crunched to a halt on the roadside verge. Then he spat the cigar butt out of his mouth, raising his shotgun in an informal salute. He turned his head toward the crew as they paused to look, and shouted, “You boys keep workin’!” Then, to Adrienne, and with respectful politeness: “Afternoon, Miz Rolfe, an’ you, sir. Any way I can help y’all?”

  He had Adrienne’s accent, but stronger still, pronouncing the words “I can help” as Ah kin hep. It was impossible to see his eyes clearly behind the sunglasses, but Tom felt himself quickly scanned, summed up, and to judge from the instinctive slight shift in the man’s seat in the saddle, found formidable. Tom nodded politely himself.

  “I was wondering if you could tell me a bit about your working party,” Adrienne said. “My friend Mr. Christiansen here would like to know. If it’s not too much trouble, Deputy Gleason.”

  “No trouble t’all, Miz Rolfe, Mr. Christiansen,” he said, smiling. That turned into a bark: “Front and center, y’all! Line up and sound off—name, crime and sentence!”

  The half-dozen convicts downed tools and came at the run, lining up along the verge of the road and bracing to attention with their straw hats held in both hands across their chests and eyes to the front.

  “Montgomery, John, drunk and disorderly, unable to pay fine, six months!”

  The sheriff chuckled. “That ol’ boy, he drove a car into the bar when they wouldn’t sell him no more cheap brandy. Lucky he didn’t hurt nobody.”

  “Leclerc, Martin! Domestic violence, one year!”

  “Slapped his missus, and gave her a black eye. She wouldn’t press charges, or he’d be workin’ in the mines, and for a lot more than a year.”

  The tally continued—minor crimes of violence or semiminor ones against property. Adrienne cocked an ironic eyebrow at him as they drove on northwest.

  “Well, let me guess: The Commonwealth isn’t big into rehabilitation,” he said.

  “Criminals aren’t sick people who need therapy,” she said. “They’re bad people who need a whack upside the head to get their attention. We put them in stir to suffer, not to heal. It seems to work rather better than the I-feel-your-pain approach.”

  Tom chuckled; that was one sentiment he couldn’t really find fault with. Few people who’d spent much time in law enforcement would have, in his experience.

  The town of Napa announced itself with a sign stating that its population was 4,562, and that it was the “Gem of the Valley” and “Gateway to the North”; the Kiwanis, Elks and Masons added their pitches. He had an excellent view as they left the rolling hills and coasted toward the river that gleamed like a twisting silver snake in the afternoon sun, throwing glitters back through the leaves of the trees that fringed it. The eastern shore held little but a golf course, a racetrack with wooden stands, and a fenced-in parklike expanse with a shutdown Ferris wheel and roller
coaster. A sign outside bore the Rolfe lion, red rampant on black, and announced that the domain fair would open on August 15, sponsored by the Family.

  “Domain fair?” he asked.

  “County fair, more or less—livestock shows, bake sales and prizes for flowers and jams, big dance, floats, bit of a carnival. The domains of each Family do pretty well the same things a county does in the U.S. back FirstSide. The fair comes between wheat harvest and the beginning of the crush. There’s a big polo match, too.”

  The bridge over the river was yet another web of huge timbers fastened together with arm-thick steel bolts and set in stone piers; the surface was asphalt, and the road on the other side was paved likewise. Tom looked up and down the Napa River as they crossed, estimating how far back from the water most of the west-bank town stood, and the width of wild dense riparian forest that stretched north like a lumpy green quilt on either side of the stream.

  “Let me guess,” he said. “You don’t have much trouble with flooding.”

  “Yah, you betcha,” she said again. “Because we don’t build on flood plains much. There’s no need to when you’ve got plenty of elbow room.”

  Napa town was at roughly the same spot on the river as the settlement FirstSide, and for the same reason; this was the head of navigation for shallow-draft vessels, particularly in the dry season. Dozens of barges lined the wharves, mainly on the west bank of the river; tugs brought more, or towed them away in strings; both types were smallish by the standards he was used to, and wooden-built. A slipway on the water’s side held several more under construction. There were more cars and trucks on the roads than he’d seen in Rolfeston, although the traffic was still light by any standards he’d known before, including those of the little North Dakota town of Ironwood.

  Back from the docks and warehouses on the southern side of town were workshops and factories; the residential part of town was north of that, a little more spread out than Rolfeston had been, equally hidden in trees—some the tall oaks and sycamores that had once occupied the site, more planted since its founding. Between those houses and the vacant lowland along the river was the business district, small shops and offices along streets with timber-pillared or stone-built arcades, and a broad square with central gardens, benches, brick paths and bandstand.

  The riverside itself north of the wharves was a semiwild park, the bigger trees left standing, undergrowth cleared back and some plantings made. It was full of picnickers, people taking advantage of a big municipal swimming pool, impromptu volleyball and touch football or soccer games, people tossing Frisbees to each other or leaping dogs, and plain strollers; it took him a moment to remember this was Sunday afternoon.

  “My alma mater,” Adrienne said, pointing to a big two-story stone building overgrown with climbing rose and surrounded by playing fields. A baseball game was going on in one, and the people in the bleachers let out a shout as they drove by. He could see flickers of it between the tall Lombardy poplars that fringed the way.

  “You went to the public high school?” Tom asked curiously.

  “Everyone does,” she said, sounding surprised. “Why not? Getting a high school diploma means something here, about equivalent to a FirstSide BA. I did very well, when I wasn’t on suspension or waiting to get paddled by the principal. I grant you that was far too often, and if I hadn’t been a Rolfe, I might have got expelled for good.”

  “How did you produce grades for Stanford?” he said.

  “Oh, we fake ’em,” she said. “Phony private school FirstSide… well, it’s actually a real one, but we slip an extra notional student in now and then for when someone goes to a university there. We endowed it and pick the head-masters, of course. Paying full tuition at the university also helps; they don’t check as hard.”

  “Why did you go to Stanford?” he asked. “Why not, ah, University of New Virginia?”

  “I started there, but UNV’s still small,” she said. “Particularly the humanities departments, and I wanted to study history.” A wry laugh. “Not that that’s the only difference; you’re not going to find many postmodernist professors of postcolonial studies at UNV, thank God.”

  He digested that while they cruised past the town hall. The white walls, square tower and big arched courtyard entrance reminded him strongly of Santa Barbara’s post office; then they turned down a street with palms on both sides and two-story adobe buildings behind a continuous arcade roof supported on columns made from varnished black-walnut trunks. The streetlights were black cast-iron pillars with fanciful detailing, and the sidewalks colored brick in geometric patterns.

  “I’ve got to do some business here,” she said, taking an empty parking place; there were, he noted, no meters. “Care to come along?”

  He nodded. One of the buildings had rounded corners and tall glass windows along both streetside walls, now swung wide under the arcade overhang. A tilework sign over the open doors read FOUQUET’S. Adrienne walked into the entranceway and halted.

  The interior was a single great room, with a roof spanned by exposed wooden beams; one end held a pool table, and there was a flat-film TV screen over the big counter with its top of polished stone and revolving seats on stainless-steel pillars. Elsewhere there were long tables, made of the inevitable giant slabs of redwood, here topped with harder varieties in a sort of parquet arrangement, plus booths along the walls. People bustled about, coming and going; the air was full of the smell of frying food and some sort of plangent country-style music and chattering voices. The waiters behind the counter or circulating with trays were dressed in white, with white fore-and-aft caps and aprons.

  Tom blinked. It’s the half-familiar that gets you, he thought. This is the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a real old-style soda joint, the kind in Roy’s movies. It’s not a revival or deliberately retro, either. It’s just… what it is.

  The crowd within must have numbered a hundred or so, none of them over twenty or younger than early adolescence. Some of the girls were wearing those Catholic-school-uniform arrangements he’d seen in Rolfeston, with white shirts and ties (often loosened), pleated knee-length skirts, and knee socks. Most of the rest were in summery cotton dresses, with a minority in slacks or jeans; none of the girls had short hair, or the boys long, and there were a fair number of pigtails tied with ribbon. The boys were more varied; fewer of them were dressed in their version of the school uniform, which included khaki shorts, and some wore suits. It took him a moment to realize something about the ones in overalls.

  That isn’t a fashion statement, he thought. Those are their clothes.

  A giggling clutch of sixteen-year-old females in a booth near the door were looking at Tom out of the corners of their eyes; in the next a boy and girl were actually sipping from the same malt with two straws, something he’d never seen outside a book of Norman Rockwell prints. A dozen or more of the older boys and a couple of girls were smoking, but casually, not as if it was an act of defiance; another clutch argued amiably around the jukebox—which was the latest digital model with flash memory storage.

  It took him a moment to estimate the ages of individuals accurately, too; after a second look he realized his first estimates for most were at least a year too high.

  Not that they’re baby-faced. In fact, they look pretty fit, he thought. There’s a couple of lard-butts and some pimple-faces, but not many for the size of the group.

  It was something indefinable about the eyes….

  “I thought I’d find a good big crowd,” Adrienne said to him as they stood in the doorway. “When I was a teenager, townie kids always used to hang out here after church in summertime. School year ends on June fifteenth, by the way—the day you got here.”

  Then she put two fingers in her mouth and whistled piercingly, followed by a shout: “Hey, kids!”

  Silence fell raggedly, and someone turned the music down in the ensuing quiet. Then there were exclamations; it reminded Tom a little of the way a rave crowd responded to a popular deejay, but
not quite so open.

  “Hi!” he heard over and over. Variations on “It’s Miss Rolfe—Adrienne!”

  A pair of boys in their late teens with platinum-and-gold thumb rings waved in a more casual manner from a corner where they held court with their girlfriends and a gaggle of hangers-on, and Adrienne nodded back to them.

  “How was the prom?” she said to the room at large.

  More enthusiasm, and she lifted hands for quiet. Into it, she said: “OK, I’m back. Look, I need a dozen or so people for the Seven Oaks harvest. Five days, twenty bucks, and the usual trimmings on Saturday. Who’s interested?”

  The ensuing babble took some time to quiet down. After it had, she went on: “Nobody under fourteen, nobody without the letter from the parents—and it had better be dated, kids; I remember all the tricks—and bring a sleeping bag, swimsuit and enough working clothes. And a good pair of gloves. Don’t waste my time if you don’t qualify, OK? Truck’ll be at the school gate tomorrow morning at six sharp.”

  Eager hands shot up; Adrienne pointed at one after the other, until she reached the number she needed. “Oh, all right—you too, Eddie and Sally. But that’s it. No! It’s a business proposition, not a public holiday—I’m asking for work, not your votes. ’Bye!”

  “That seemed popular,” Tom said as they turned away.

  Adrienne chuckled. “Farm work’s high-status here.”

  “That’s a switch.”

  High-status, instead of being the only occupation in which specialists with degrees and hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment are considered ignorant yokels, he thought. That had been one reason he didn’t envy his elder brother Lars too bitterly. Plus he’d been able to understand what getting caught in a cost-price scissors meant even when he was eighteen.

  She went on: “Also, four dollars a day is top-notch summer job money for kids; wages double in harvesttime—it’ll keep them in sodas and pretzels and beer and movies for quite a while. And I’ve got a reputation as being less of a, ummm, nosy-parker chaperon than most at the party afterward,” she said. “Of course, I’ve got to watch that things don’t go too far, or the parents wouldn’t sign off.”