“So,” she said after a few minutes of companionable silence broken only by the plop of a fish in the river and the sound of their feet. “What do you read? I’ll give odds you do.”
“Ah…” He did; the problem was his tastes were a little plebian. “A lot of wildlife and biology… some history now and then… If you mean fiction, mostly SF and mysteries.”
“Me too!” she said. “I was mad for Tolkein as a teenager, of course. Nowadays De Lint, Martin—and Turtledove and Williams, too; it’s not all Big Fat Fantasies.”
“Anderson?” he said, and she nodded. “Bujold? Baxter?”
She countered: “Dick Francis?”
“James Lee Burke?”
“Ford Maddox Roberts?”
“And the classics—Christie…”
They laughed and continued the game—she called it name-dropping in a good cause—until they reached a bridge that spanned the river across a little islet. They stopped there to catch their breath, and to lean on the railing and watch the water flow past, green and cool-looking below. Daddy longlegs skimmed over the surface, and there was the odd predatory glitter of dragonflies.
“Too bad we can’t just dive in,” she said, wiping her face with a wristband.
“Inviting, but I wouldn’t advise it,” he replied, with a wordless gesture eastward.
There was a lot of Central Valley in that direction, and that was the birth-place of industrialized agriculture. God alone knew the full list of things that were sprayed or pumped onto the fields, and then drained into this water; the ones Tom knew about were bad enough. He’d met farmers who kept special gardens for their own use, upwind of the fields where they grew vegetables for sale. Things were better than they had been, and there were more fish below than there would have been in the year of his birth. He still wouldn’t eat anything that came out of this river, though.
She shook her head angrily as they started back. “That’s one thing I hate about this… about the modern world. The feeling that I’m taking in all those chemicals every moment, and there’s nothing I can do about it.” She gave a shudder that seemed only half-assumed.
“Nothing much we can do about it,” he said, a little surprised. Bit vehement, surely? “Although we’re both trying, in our way.”
“Still… have you ever thought what California might be… have been… like? One city, and a few towns, a scattering of farms and ranches in places that don’t need massive engineering to function. All the power from small-scale hydro and geothermal…”
He laughed. “It’s an appealing fantasy, but if I let myself dwell on it, it would drive me completely crazy,” he said. “One of those ‘if I were king’ things.”
She smiled. “We all do our bit, though. I think I’m making progress convincing a couple of key legislators that something has to be done about the illegal animal trade. It’s coming back, and strongly; one of the unfortunate by-products of prosperity.”
“Damned right,” he said. “Any progress on the LA thing from your side?”
“Nothing so far,” she said. “We’re combing through the transit records at our Oakland facility, cargo manifests and so forth, but of course it would have been covered by fake documentation.”
“Bet the publicity doesn’t help,” he said. “There was more coverage of the LA thing than I’d have wanted.”
“Yes, and the TV people did their usual distort-and-get-wrong,” she said. “Bizarre indeed. There was even something about extinct animals! Did you turn up any dinosaurs or saber-tooths?”
“No, just rare ones—and a live California condor, believe it or not.”
“A genuine California condor is impressive enough. Quite a nice bit of knight-errantry, rescuing a Gymnogyps californianus, no less. To hell with beautiful princesses.”
He chuckled; the run was starting to make his lungs burn a bit, but it was a good feeling. He paced the words to the rise and fall of his barrel chest: “Not exactly extinct,” he said. “Not that that was any credit to the poachers; they were trying hard enough.”
She managed to glow at him while running, and he smiled to himself at his instinctive urge to preen. I’m no more immune than the next man to showing off before a pretty girl, he thought, and went on: “Yeah, and a damned strange bird it was; too clean.”
“Clean?” she said, frowning.
“No lead, no pesticides—and strange. The San Diego Zoo people had its DNA tested. It wasn’t related to any of the other condors, which…”
It was a relief to talk to somebody about the aspects that had been teasing at his mind. When he was finished they ran in silence for ten minutes or so; he glanced aside from time to time, watching her frown in concentration.
“I think your friend Martinez’s explanation is the most likely one,” she said after a long moment. “Excluding time travel, that is! But if there is one condor from an unknown breeding population, it’s nearly certain that there are more. And the poachers know where they are, and might well kill some while they’re trying to capture them. They’re not likely to be experts, or very careful.”
Despite the heat of the day and the sweat that was running down his body and plastering the T-shirt to his muscular torso, Tom felt his blood run cold.
“Yeah,” he said. “I was afraid of that.”
“Best bet would be to have people out looking, and beat the poachers to it,” she said thoughtfully. “I can pass the word to HQ and have our contacts in the Sierra Club and some of the birding clubs keep an eye out. If they knew there actually might be unexpected condors, they’d be a lot more likely to find them, right?”
“Good idea!” he enthused. Lord, tell me I haven’t become a complete bureaucrat, and started discounting whatever nonofficials can do. “Hey, we’re back!”
“How time flies when you’re having fun!” Adrienne said. “Just a second—I have to make a phone call.”
Tom walked up and down while he waited, cooling gradually—or cooling as much as you could on a Sacramento afternoon in June; it had the great merit of being better than July or August, but that was about it. He caught a few words of what Adrienne was saying, particularly toward the end of it, when she raised her voice.
“… cuz… condors!… need to know… plenty, and ASAP. Hand-carry… the Old Man… Nostradamus… I said hand-carry and I meant it, Filmer! Just do it!”
Evidently the Pacific Open Landscapes League ran a tight ship; the tone in her voice took him back to his time in the Rangers, especially the last snap. She was scowling slightly as she walked toward him.
“The good thing about a family business is that it’s full of people you’ve known all your life,” she said, a waspish note in her voice. “And the bad thing about a family business is that it’s full of people you’ve known all your life.”
Tom chuckled. I’d find that command voice fairly persuasive even if you were a kid sister, he thought silently. Aloud he went on: “Well, if we’re going to get something to eat, I need to get home and shower first. Otherwise I’m afraid I’d put everyone else off their feed, unless it’s a restaurant for plow-mules.”
“Hmmm,” she said, and came closer, looking up into his face and sliding an arm around his neck. “You wouldn’t happen to have a change in your car, would you?”