Conquistador

by S. M. Stirling

  He shaded his eyes and peered into the inner point of the beach, where sand gave way to upward-sloping rock.

  “Ah… on second thought, previous occupant still in the room past the checkout time,” he said mildly. “Ah, Adrienne, is that what it looks like?” That part of the sand was shaded by boulders on either side, and an overhanging oak.

  “You betcha,” she said softly, popping open her own section of door; that let Tully and Sandra crowd close and look.

  There was a partially eaten game carcass lying there, a purebred European boar by its looks; no feral pig had those massive bristly shoulders, black hide, and long upcurving tusks. Crouched above it was…

  “A gen-u-wine tiger,” Tully said softly; he had the binoculars, and then passed them forward to his partner. “Big ’un.”

  “But is it a Colletta tiger?” Sandra asked impishly.

  The beast crouched above its kill, snarling at the humans a hundred yards away. Tom stood, braced one hand like a clamp on the frame of the No Biscuit’s hull and leveled the binoculars with the other. That brought the big cat to within touching range, the fanged mouth close enough to draw a startled oath. Its thick, slightly shaggy fur was a pale gold color marked with black stripes, fading to cream on the belly and throat; the paws looked broad as dinner plates as they worked and slid their claws in and out. From its looks, he judged the weight to be about the same as a small horse.

  “Siberian,” he said. “Got to be—too big and not brightly colored enough for a Bengal.”

  “Near enough,” Adrienne said. “Manchurian; we got a bunch from the Selang-Arsi for release in this area. Tropical tigers find the winters here a trial, although God knows it’s warmer than the Amur valley; the Bengal type breed like flies in the southern jungles…. We’d better see him off. Hand me that rifle, Sandy, would you?

  “Hey!” she shouted, with the weapon in hand. “You there, yes, you—the member of the Future Pelts, Rugs and Trophies of New Virginia—vamoose! Git!”

  She slapped a magazine into the rifle, jacked the slide and squeezed off two rounds, a flat crack-crack! It came echoing back from the stony walls of the cliff, and a double spurt of sand erupted not far from the big cat. The shells tinkled down the windscreen and off into the sea foam below the amphibian’s nose; the tiger snarled, a ripping sound clearly audible over the shushing hiss of the waves falling back down the beach. Then it bent and gripped the boar by the middle of its back. Raising its head to keep the dangling legs free, it turned and leaped up the slope, disappearing into the thick undergrowth.

  “Mmm… are you sure this is a good place to camp?” Tom said.

  He’d never seen a tiger except in a zoo; few had, in a time when more than half the tigers on the planet were captive-bred in the United States. God, that was beautiful, he thought. And it had been weirdly appropriate for the setting—as much so as the vanished saber-tooths that had perished with the glyptodonts and mastodons not long after the first humans came through this way.

  “Oh, they don’t bother people, usually,” Adrienne said. “And they avoid the smell of fire—these forests have a natural burn cycle.”

  They climbed out of the plane onto the beach, with the No Biscuit moving slightly as they leaped down; with the tide still high it was just barely aground, and it was comparatively easy to swing it around with the tail pointing at the beach. He stretched, something popping in his back, and looked around. Beneath his feet was sand with an occasional pebble; some of the stones felt greasy and had a deep green sheen. He commented on it as they paid out two heavy ropes and tied the amphibian down to convenient boulders, making it secure from anything but a severe storm. The rock he and Adrienne made fast to was suspiciously polished too, and it had an even more suspiciously convenient groove about halfway down.

  “It’s nephrite—jade,” Adrienne said, as they brought the loop of cable around the boulder and secured it. “So’s this big hunk of rock here.”

  “Yikes,” he said, looking at it. Nine thousand pounds of jade; call it half a million. Oh, well, a glut of caviar is a glut of caviar. “You know, I’ve been to this spot before—looked at it, FirstSide, never got down on the beach, of course—but I don’t remember the jade boulder.”

  “Mom had it moved here from a little south along the coast,” Adrienne said. “One of her better moves; she loved—loves—this spot too. Hell, you can’t quarrel with everything your parents like.”

  Making camp was a work of moments; they set up two collapsible bell tents with titanium frames at a discreet distance apart, unrolled their sleeping bags, and dug a slit-trench behind a boulder near the inland edge of the beach. A circle of fire-blackened stones showed where others had made a hearth, and there was plenty of driftwood and deadfall; he shaved the kindling they needed, using dry branches, a hatchet, and a fallen log half-buried in sand as a cutting block.

  The gear they’d brought included masks, snorkels and flippers—they were supposed to be on a vacation, without a care in the world, after all.

  And, he thought, grinning, why not act like it right now?

  Adrienne caught his mood. “Decided to put the Lutheran guilt-and-anxiety thing on hold for a while?”

  “It’s your corrupting influence,” he said. “Episcopalians don’t do guilt, I suppose?”

  “Of course not. It’s grubby, tacky and thoroughly lower-class,” she said with that irresistible smile. “Let’s swim—and get dinner.”

  They changed; he noticed with some amusement that the bikinis the women wore were distinctly conservative by FirstSide standards, and that they both undressed in a tent—the body-modesty taboo had stayed stronger here than it had back in the parent society. As for the swimsuits…

  Tully said it for him: “Hey, it’s Beach Blanket Bingo!”

  “Oh, you liked that one too?” Sandra said artlessly, clapping her hands. The results were spectacular, even with Adrienne standing beside her, long and sleekly curved.

  “God, a woman who likes old movies and looks like that,” Roy replied, eyes bulging. “I’m lost!”

  “Well, the FirstSiders stopped making good movies—the new ones are too likely to be just disgusting, or not make any sense—so the Theatre Guild has to reissue the old ones a lot here,” Sandra said, handing them nets and short, heavy prying irons with sharpened, flattened ends. “Except for the Mummy movies, and the Harry Potter and the Rings series—those were fine, but that was years ago now! We should make more of our own.”

  “Small population, limited talent pool,” Adrienne said. “We can’t do everything. Let’s go!”

  They ran—as much as you could run with flippers on—and threw themselves into the shallow water, stroking out. He exulted in the sudden cold shock of the water, a good twenty degrees lower than the air, and the pull and surge of the ocean like some great beast tugging at him. It was crystal-clear as they sculled out past the little rock reef in the mouth of the cove; the stone was covered in bright-colored coralline algae and sea anemones, and beyond it the sandy bottom held a thick growth of giant kelp. A couple of five-foot giant sea bass flicked by below him, muscular, scaly brutes, then a school of bright orange garibaldi fish, and the bottom held lingcod and kelp bass and others by the dozens. He flipped upright and trod water; not far away a young sea otter floated on its back, wrapped in a strand of giant kelp by its mother to keep it in place while she foraged, staring at him round-eyed with its small paws raised as if in surrender.

  It made a sound at him, something between meeep! and keeeek!

  “Sorry, kid, it’s not your mother,” he said in reply. “On the other hand, I’m not after your fur, either.”

  Just about then its mother did arrive from below, a handsome silvery-brown creature four feet long, with large eyes and a round, blunt-muzzled face framed by long whiskers on either side of a black button nose. She had a foot-long abalone clutched to her chest with one paw, a rock under the other, and looked suspiciously in his direction before she went to check her cub. It g
reeted her with happy high-pitched squeaks, grunts and coos as it climbed onto her belly and began to nurse, while she juggled rock and shellfish—evidently the problems of working mothers were a transspecies, transdimensional universal.

  “Don’t worry, lady, the kid’s OK,” he said, grinning around the mouthpiece of the snorkel.

  There were more of the otters scattered through the kelp forest; he could hear the whackety-whack-whack! as one of them held a shellfish between her paws and hammered it against the rock on her chest, going at it like a pneumatic pavement breaker.

  “Time to dive,” Sandra said. “This water’s cold.”

  It was, particularly without a wet suit; you were courting hypothermia if you stayed in too long. He took a couple of deep breaths and dove; the bottom was about twenty-five feet down, not very far for an experienced swimmer. The abalone was more abundant than any he’d ever seen, despite all the otters topside—and those critters could gobble down a third of their own considerable weights in seafood every day. Plus you couldn’t fault their taste: They’d eat abalone in preference to most other stuff, even sea urchins or crabs. Evidently the absence of millions of humans equally determined to get their hands on the big mollusks was enough to make the difference.

  Back FirstSide you had to carry a special measuring stick to make sure none of the ones you took were less than seven inches long, and the meat cost eighty dollars a pound. Here he didn’t see many that weren’t seven inches, and plenty were monsters that would have broken records back FirstSide, a foot long and more.

  It wasn’t the first time he’d pried abalone off rocks, either—although most of his efforts had gone into stopping poachers from doing it. He thrust the flattened end of the iron under the muscular “foot” of one and levered sharply; it came free after a long moment of effort, and he stuffed the twelve-inch shell into the net at his waist. His lungs were burning by the time he’d gotten three; they all stroked for the shore when he came up, and waded out with their lips blue and teeth on the verge of chattering, or over it in some cases—being big meant you lost heat more slowly. The kindling was ready in the stone circle, neatly piled in a little tepee; Tom blew on his fingers so that he could work the Zippo and get it going. Flames crackled up through the bone-dry shavings, and then through the larger sticks of driftwood as the four of them stood close around it, each couple pressed together for warmth and wrapped in a blanket.

  He could feel Adrienne’s chilled flesh gradually thawing against him, and a big blanket could hide a fair degree of movement. Interesting. Definitely interesting, he thought, and she whispered through a shiver, “I seem to affect you more than the Pacific Ocean itself.”

  “I’m not complaining, and neither is he,” he murmured into her ear.

  After a while they were warm enough to go wash the salt off under the fringes of the waterfall—like God’s cold shower, as Roy put it—dry off around the fire some more, and dress. He felt relaxed and supple and strong again after fighting the chilly waters, but it wasn’t something you’d choose to do every day—or every week.

  “Invigorating, though,” he said.

  “I agree,” she said when he voiced the thought, wringing out the thick fall of her hair and running a comb through it with wincing determination before tying it back. “Too bad we’re not really on vacation; the family has a place at La Jolla, just north of San Diego, with a beach that’s nearly as pretty as this—and the water’s a lot warmer.”

  Tom nodded; he liked “the Jewel,” even if he found it expensive and a bit pwecious; it was probably something to see, here. Speaking of which…

  “Anyone up for a walk?”

  They staked out the nets full of abalone in a pool to keep them alive and fresh, along with a couple of bottles of white wine. Tully went up the steep rocky slope at the bottom of the U of the beach with a coil of rope over his shoulder; that was the only spot where it wasn’t nearly vertical. The other three stood with their rifles in the crooks of their arms, keeping a close eye on the climber and his surroundings.

  “Nice technique,” Adrienne said, watching Tully.

  “Oh, yeah,” Sandra said. “Climbs good, too.”

  Tom felt himself blushing a little as they laughed—who’d ever said women were the bashful sex? Roy did know how to go up steep ground, though; Tom fancied he could do it nearly as well, but one-hundred-sixty pounds could go where two-thirty couldn’t. At the crest Tully stopped and rove one end of the rope through a conveniently placed eyebolt sunk into living rock, and let the other end fall down to the sand. All of them could have made it up without, but there was no reason not to take advantage when you could.

  Tom went next, walking up the steep slope and hand-over-handing along the rope. He was breathing deeply when he reached the top, and it felt a little strange to be hiking in coastal California with a rifle slung over his back, but…

  “Lions and tigers and bears, oh, my,” Roy said as his partner’s cropped white-blond thatch came over the edge.

  “Tigers and bears, at least,” Tom replied. “I understand the lions are mostly south and west of here. But plenty of cougars and leopards.”

  They grinned at each other for a moment, and then Adrienne’s bandanna-covered head came over the crestline; Tom extended a hand, closing it around her strong slender wrist, and pulled her up. Sandra followed, puffing slightly.

  “I ought to get out on my own feet more often,” she said after a moment. “It uses different muscles than riding.” Then: “Lord, that’s pretty, isn’t it?”

  They stood in silence, looking out over infinite blue, along the steep green coastline, down at the white curl of foam along the sand and the arch of the waterfall. Seabirds scattered as a peregrine thunderbolted out of the sky above; it missed its strike, fluttered to a halt just above the shore and then coasted south, gaining height. Then they turned and walked up the line of the creek; it fell in pools and miniature torrents over a rocky bed, under tall cypress and tanbark oak, and then among redwoods—ancient ones, towering above and shading the floor of the forest to a carpet of soft needles, moss and ferns. Tully looked up into the cathedral silence of it, where light seemed to fall like slow honey from gaps above. Then he frowned.

  “You know, I’d swear I’d seen exactly the same redwood here on FirstSide—the one with the kink and the big burl.”

  “You may have,” Adrienne said quietly. “The older sequoias up in the mountains, and the bristlecone pines, are the same on both sides of the Gate. They’re older than the divergence between this world and FirstSide, and as far as we can tell everything was exactly the same until that day in 323 B.C.”

  Tom looked at the redwood. It was big, well over two hundred feet tall, but…

  “I wouldn’t think this one was twenty-three hundred years and change old; that’s near the limit for a redwood, and this is the southern margin of their range.”

  “Wouldn’t have to be quite that ancient. It was centuries before the changes in the Old World started affecting things here—quite a few centuries. Eventually it did; butterfly-effect stuff there started making it rain on different days here, and so an elk went left instead of right and ate a seedling that he didn’t FirstSide, things like that.”

  They stared up at the great reddish-brown columns for a while, then turned back toward their campsite. The fire had died down to a bed of coals red-glowing or white-hot; he looked at his watch and found it was well after seven. His stomach told him the same thing, and that it had been a long time since a sandwich lunch.

  Nothing like a hike and a swim in cold water to work up an appetite, either.

  “Just one thing missing for a campsite,” he said as they stacked their rifles.

  He squatted beside a section of driftwood log and lifted it free of the sand with a long pull and grunting exhalation, then plumped it down beside the fire and brought another across the firepit from the first.

  “Well, you pass the brute-strength test, you big, beautiful brute,” Adrienne said,
handing him the net bag of abalone. “Let’s see how you do on manual dexterity.”

  Shelling and trimming the abalone was a familiar chore. He cut the muscle free of the iridescent interior of the shell with a small sharp blade; once the head and viscera were off and thrown to the attentive gulls he wrapped each one in a towel for a moment, set it on a log and gave it a couple of solid whacks with the flat of a heavy knife.

  “Spare the cutting board?” he said.

  She passed it over, and he scored the abalone fillets with a series of cuts about half an inch deep and an inch apart and repeated the process on the other side, running the cuts at right angles to the first set and piling the meat on a plate. Adrienne reclaimed the board and sliced a few cloves of garlic as Sandra and Roy unpacked the picnic basket, opened the coolers that held venison sausage and salad whose greens had been picked fresh at Seven Oaks that morning, cut bread, uncorked the wine….

  The picnic hamper also held an iron ring on three short stubby legs; he dropped that into the coals and set the frying pan on top. Adrienne dropped in a healthy dollop of butter and waited until it sizzled, then added the garlic. Saliva flooded Tom’s mouth—nothing on earth smelled any better than that, unless you threw some onions into the mix.

  “The secret of pan-frying abalone is to do it quick,” he said, and plopped the first into the hot, frothing butter-and-garlic mixture.

  A few seconds on each side and it was ready; he did enough for everyone, then came to sit beside Adrienne; they ate sitting side by side on the log, with their plates on their knees.

  “God, that’s good.” He sighed. “Particularly considering the fact that it’s essentially a giant seagoing snail.”

  “Nothing wrong with snails, done with some garlic and butter,” Adrienne said, mopping her plate with a heel of the crusty bread.

  “Big fella doesn’t like ’em,” Tully said. “Maybe he should get a rubber escargot ; he likes the sauce well enough, but—”