Indians who hunt buffalo on horseback—but know what airplanes are.
Scavengers followed the bison herd, as the plane flew along the broad trampled path of its passage, coyotes and turkey buzzards and condors. Scavengers and predators: grizzly bears, a pack of big pale-coated lobos, the white Plains wolf that had been extinct since the 1920s…
And resting around a partly eaten bison carcass, a pride of lion: half a dozen females, cubs, and a black-maned male who put his paws on it and roared as the aircraft’s shadow swept by.
“Shit!” Tom said, ripped off the viewer goggles. He and Tully stared at each other, and the silence stretched. “Lions? Indians hunting three million buffalo? Lions? How the hell am I going to explain this to Yasujiru?”
“You don’t have to,” Tully said, the usual edge of humor absent from his voice for once. “I tried imagining it myself, and it’s unimaginable. In fact, I’d strongly advise you not to. If you have to show it to him, just hand it over and let him think up an explanation.”
Tom stared at him again. “You’re not serious?” he said.
“I’m dead serious, partner. That thing is seriously weird. Weirdness is contagious, and Yasujiru hates the least little hint of anything that’s outside regular channels. He doesn’t like either of us as it is, despite the fact that we’ve got the best records in Special Operations.”
Tom took a deep breath. “Roy… I haven’t told you why I tried to get into that office you pulled me out of.”
The smaller man’s face cocked to one side. “I guessed there was someone alive in there, and you were trying to get them out. SFPD forensics say there was bone mixed with the ashes, but that’s about all they could tell; it was a pretty damned hot fire. No salvageable DNA.”
“Something was in there.” He paused again. “This is going to sound crazy.”
“So? Isn’t everything in this ratfuck? It started weird in LA and it’s been getting worse.”
“Roy, there was a bird in a cage in that office. Dead, I think, but only just—still twitching. It wasn’t fifteen feet away from my face, and I got a good long look at it.”
“Another condor? Hell, Tom, I know they’re rare, but you’d have been well-done if we hadn’t dragged you out pronto. The stairs collapsed behind us the second we stepped out into the street.”
“Not a condor. A dodo.”
Tully began a laugh, then sobered at the flat seriousness of his partner’s expression. “A dodo?”
“Yeah. Raphus cucullatus. And yeah, I know it’s extinct and has been for centuries. So either I’m lying, or I’m nuts, or there was a fucking dodo in that office. You’re going to have to take your pick, Roy, because I swear I’m not lying and I don’t think I’m crazy.”
Tully’s hands twitched in a way that showed he’d been a two-pack-a-day man until a few years ago. He looked over at the PDA and the viewing goggles, and slowly nodded.
“OK, Kemosabe,” he said. “There’s a third alternative—you could be having a false memory, on account of your head getting whacked and roasted like a chestnut, but I’m not buying that. Losing some recent memory, yup, that happens fairly often with a concussion, but detailed hallucinations? Only on TV.”
Tom exhaled with relief. “I did have nightmares about having to tell Yasujiru this alone,” he said.
“If you tell him, you’ll be completely alone—and I tell you for a third time, don’t do it.”
Tom jerked his head around. “You’re kidding!”
“Nope,” Tully said, shaking his head slowly. “Tom, OK, you saw what you saw. Someone can get dodos. And condors that never met birdshot. And great big loads of sea-otter skins. And yeah, it’s probably from that place on the disk, wherever or whenever or what the fuck it is. But if I didn’t know you pretty damned well, if I hadn’t known you for years, I wouldn’t believe a word of it. I’d say you were subbing for an anal probe from the saucer people. There’s no proof, man. Maybe if you had the dodo in your hands, but you don’t. The disk? CGI can do anything these days; hell, you’ve seen orcs and elves and dragons on screen, haven’t you?”
“What about the condor?” Tom said. “There’s no way to explain that otherwise.”
“Oh?” Tully said. “And yesterday, who was laughing off time travel as an explanation?” He went on gently: “Tom, I may be a hick from Arkansas instead of the big cities of North Dakota, but I know about Occam’s razor. What’s the simplest explanation—that a Fish and Game warden has gone bugfuck, or that there are… hell, aliens, time travelers, whatever, among us?”
“Jesus Christ,” Tom whispered. “But think about it, Roy. We have to get after these people, whoever they are. We have to.”
Roy Tully looked him bleakly in the eye. “And getting fired and possibly sent to the place where the nice man in the white coat has a pill to help you is going to do that exactly how?”
Tom opened his mouth and then closed it. “Roy, think a little more. We have time travelers… dimensional travelers… in touch with…” The words came with difficulty; his mind kept trying to slide away into denial. I saw what I saw, he thought stubbornly.
Tully’s eyes opened a little wider. “In touch with the Russian Mafia,” he went on. “Oh, man, that is not good. It shows distinctly skanky motivation and mucho power. Not a good combination.”
“Doubleplus ungood,” Tom said grimly. “But there’s more to it than that.”
“More to it than them maybe going back in time and rearranging things to suit their preferences?” Tully said; he was pale now, and sweating a little. “More than the Russian Mafia rearranging history?”
“I don’t think we have to worry about that,” Tom said. “Once you accept that the clues are real, they don’t point to, ah, time travel.”
“Why the fuck not?”
“Well”—he pointed to the PDA—“Think about it. That looks like the past, right? Only it isn’t; there’s planes and cars and a couple of small cities… and the lion. There haven’t been lions in North America for, hell, something like twelve thousand years—the big extinctions after the Paleo-Indians arrived. That was before the end of the last Ice Age, and the disk definitely isn’t showing us glacial-era San Francisco Bay: wrong size, wrong vegetation, wrong sea level. It looked like the bay before or right after Europeans arrived. You know the alternate-worlds theory? It was in that comic book you were reading—”
“It was a graphic novel, not a comic book!” Tully said, with a hint of his usual goblin grin. “Yeah, I know the concept. South wins the Civil War, Hitler wins World War Two, that sort of thing. Been some pretty good movies that used it.”
“So that place on the disk, it looks like an alternate history—one where Europeans never got here, ah, there—hell, you know what I mean.”
“Didn’t get there until recently,” Tully corrected.