Tahira Ghani stared down at all that was left of the trespasser, the stunner pointed down at the summer yellow grass. The big California condor she had interrupted spread its huge stretch of wings and gave a reproachful squawk, scattering the smaller turkey vultures. A hot breeze washed their carrion scent over her, but she barely noticed. The pride probably hadn’t left much, and the coy-dogs—well on their way to emulating the Pleistocene wild dogs—had cleaned up whatever the lions hadn’t eaten before the vultures even had a chance. She squatted beside the mess, smelling a trace of blood, spilled guts, lion, and the musky tang of violent death on the hot wind. A torn, bloodstained piece of black fabric fluttered in the breeze, snagged on a hawthorn. Flies swarmed over the few vertebrae and the piece of a rib that remained, the rags of flesh dark red brown now, the color of old blood. A strand of auburn hair caught her eye, tangled among grass stems. Long. A woman? Like the other one. Caucasian this time. She read the diary of last night in the scuffed ground where the lions had killed, the tracks leading to it, faint on the dry grass, human prints overlaid with lion. She squatted, the stunner in one hand, her dun suncloth coverall hot against her thighs. Laid her fingertips lightly on the double imprint; woman, lion. Brought her hand to her mouth and touched her tongue to her fingertips, tasting dust, dead leaves, and lion.
Running. No shoes. Tahira stood, wiped her fingers on her coverall, and circled the dusty patch of ground that gave up this information, shaded her eyes to stare at the single print, the faint ovals of toes, ball of foot. No blood, so she hadn’t been barefoot long. Frowning, she searched the prairie bisected by the willow-clad banks of the river. Maybe the intruder had thought the river could save her. Barefoot? In the distance, beyond the summer yellow grass and white fluff of the seeding thistles, the stark peaks of the Rockies jutted against the cloudless sky. Once they had had snow on them, even in the summer. Not in her lifetime. Her frown deepened as she studied the marks where the lions had lain to eat. Coy-dog tracks pocked the dust and flattened grass, along with the prints of the turkey vultures. The condor had chased them away, and now they circled patiently overhead waiting for her to leave. By tomorrow, you’d find no traces to prove that someone had died and the lions had eaten here.
Tahira’s frown deepened as she used her link to video the site. She dug into her daypack for a plastic bag, waved the blow flies from the vertebrae, and carefully bagged them. Plenty of flesh for a DNA identification. If this trespasser had wanted to be eaten, she could not have done a better job of placing herself in the old lioness’s path.
Just like the other one.
Tahira collected the fabric and hair, added them to the bag, then trudged back to her skimmer, stowed the stunner in the scabbard beneath the saddle, and climbed aboard. The vultures were already descending, dodging the condor’s half-hearted feints, squabbling as they searched for overlooked scraps, their huge black wings raising dust from the scuffed ground. She pulled out her link and texted a report of the intruder’s death to her boss. Then she frowned at the screen and turned it off. He’d scream about the PR aspects. Not now.
The fabric, torn, dirty, and bloody as it was, had had the feel of silk, the sexy kind of shirt you might buy to wear for a lover. Tahira toed the skimmer to life and lifted gently from the riverbank.
Thoughtfully, she pulled her AR goggles on and zoomed in on the ground as she spiraled slowly outward from the site of the killing, reading the night’s traffic in the bent grass stems, the wisp of tan hair snagged on a tangle of riverbank willow.
She knew where this pride would be lying up, didn’t need to search for their chip signatures with the tracking software. Every major mammal in the Pleistocene Preserve was chipped, from coy-dogs to the new pair of giant sloths that had the gene engineers popping champagne corks, but after her years here, she rarely needed to use a chip to find what she was looking for.
Tahira accelerated until the wind pulled her lips back from her teeth. Not one perimeter alarm had gone off last night. Same with the last one.
Tahira spied a patch of tawny hide in the shade beneath a clump of hawthorn a split second before the goggles ringed it with red and flashed an ID number above it. She braked hard, spiraled back and down. That was the small male, the one with the ragged ear, one of the old lioness’s last surviving cubs. He was a classic African type, with a full tawny mane and only a hint of the Pleistocene striping and narrower head. Which meant he was on the cull list. Like the old lioness. The IDs of the rest of the pride flashed into view. Right where she knew they would be. The old lioness was on her feet, looking up at the skimmer, her scarred face and faded, ratty fur a testament to her age. She was smart and she learned quickly. An offering like the girl would have been too good to pass up the first time. This second offering would have been easier to take.
Tahira sighed, and spun the skimmer away, out over the broad plain of yellow summer grass patched with the dusty gray green of hawthorn and the darker junipers. A small herd of antelope raised their heads as she soared over, tails flashing nervously. The big herd would be farther north, she’d check on them as she circled home. A hawk soared at eye level as she rose, turned its attention back to the ground, searching for rodents flushed by the antelope below. Tahira checked on the horse herd, found them southward, watering at the grassy back of the narrow river, whose waters ran clear and dark. Automatically, she noted the dwindling feeder stream that would be down to a trickle in another month. No glaciers to keep rivers running out here, not anymore. Dark tails whisked their dun sides and they stamped dark-striped legs at the biting flies. The gene engineers were winning here, too. They had engineered the original Przewalski’s horse into a chunky look-alike to the horses that had grazed this plain in the Pleistocene. They were working hard on the elephants now. Some of the recent calves were going to be huge and hairy. She did a quick count of the herd using her link software to scan the GPS chips, although she really didn’t need to. She’d have all the numbers available from the daily sat-scan when she got back to Admin. She didn’t have to do the rounds in person at all, but she liked to see for herself.
And the last body hadn’t showed up on the Security report at Admin. She suspected this one wouldn’t either.
The lead mare raised her head as she circled. The lame filly was gone, probably brought down by the same lion pride that had taken the trespasser. They would have gotten the filly long ago except that the old lead mare was her dam and had protected her foal fiercely, with the whole herd to back her up. Luck must have aided the pride. The old lioness was showing her age, and avoided the hard kills now.
So she had taken the meal that had walked up and asked to be eaten.
How in the name of all that was unholy had the trespasser gotten past the Perimeter?
Tahira kicked the skimmer to high speed, circled south to where the bison herd grazed the lowlands, their huge, erect horns another testament to the geneticists’ wizardry. The eastern elephant troop was hanging around there right now, close enough to the monorail to give the tourists a good show. Sure enough, a train had stopped and even at her height and speed she could make out the passengers hanging out the windows, pointing their links. Their tour goggles would pick out the hairy mastodon-type calves for them and explain in a pleasant voice how the engineers were tweaking the genome. The old cow raised her trunk to blow at Tahira as she skimmed by, then went back to scooping dust from the wallow they’d created, tossing it in ochre showers over her back. Tahira didn’t see any of the camels, but they were probably all back in the trees, out of the sun. They, too, were changing. The old lioness was the only remaining lion that carried wholly African genes, had been wild-caught as a cub.
Tahira liked her for that.
With a sigh, Tahira grounded the skimmer to text a quick report on her find to her boss. Then she shut off the link before he could reply and swung the skimmer northward to find the big antelope herd.
The sun was dipping toward the horizon by the time she returned to Admin. Only the solar farm beyond the low, ochre buildings, row upon row of collectors following the sun, spelled “tech.” The earth-brick buildings might have been built by some primitive peoples, blending gently into the summer prairie. Tech was pretty much invisible now—except in the dry lands where the ranked mirrors of the solar farms and the wind towers had supplanted juniper and sage. But nobody went out there. Her village would have suited this landscape, she thought. Huts decaying slowly into the shriveling desert that had once fed lions and antelope and people. Tahira set the skimmer down hard and fast on the small landing pad behind the building. The trickle of water down the central interior water wall washed a breath of moist cool and greenery-scent over her as she entered, tempting her to strip, shower, and sit in the pool. She ached after her full day on the skimmer. Once upon a time, she had not ached. It was time to make another appointment at the geri clinic. Or perhaps not. Every cycle had a natural end. Well, perhaps that was no longer true. Tahira sighed at the angry blink of the red priority icon above the holo deck.
She ignored it and instead seated herself on her working cushion, doing full lotus for concentration. Called up Security. Some eye somewhere must have seen the girl last night. She started a search for predator-prey movement, narrowed the profile to a human’s mass. No point in watching rodents and coy-dogs. That got her lions, antelope, bison calves. A headache blossomed behind her eyes as the images flickered through her field.
Then . . . there she was. Shadowy, slender, her arms, neck, face, legs stark white in the night-eye recording, that black shirt that would be torn and bloodied revealing a deep cleavage and breasts that were small enough to be natural, not sculpted. Tahira’s eyes narrowed. Short shorts, sexy clothes, nothing you’d wear into the thorny scrub of the Preserve. Sandals—so she had lost them, running. No blood on that white skin. She hadn’t waded through the hawthorn then. How old? Sixteen? No, she decided. Less. Maybe fourteen. That was how old her daughter had been, last time she had seen her. Tahira tasted blood, realized she was biting her lip. She watched the girl wince, bend a slender leg to rub at something—thorn or bite. She looked lost. Pissed. Stood up by a date pissed.
Then her expression changed from lost-and-angry to startled. Then frightened. She looked around and for an instant her eyes seemed to meet Tahira’s. Accusingly.
Like an antelope, she turned and bolted, running through the grass and thorns. One of the sandals flew off, a twinkle of motion on the screen.
“Don’t run.” Tahira said it out loud.
In the holo field the girl kept running and in a second vanished from the eye’s sweep.
Tahira found herself standing. Muttered a curse. She skimmed to the next eye, which should have picked up the girl’s panicked flight and probably the kill, since it covered that sector.
It showed her grass, scrub, the scurry of a small rodent, the silent float of an owl. The small dying shriek of the rodent made her flinch, then she skimmed back through that eye’s sequence.
Nothing. She slowed the segment, watched the owl creep across the scene. Frowned. Seed heads bowed the grass. This species had finished seeding weeks ago and the seed heads had shattered, spilling their ripe seeds.
She copied and filed both sequences and had the station AI code them for search identification. Then she set the AI searching the Preserve’s security base for an exact match to the quiet scene recorded by the second eye. Within a minute, a 99 percent match popped up in her holo field. Side by side, two owls floated and twin shrieks split the quiet. She checked the properties. Yep. The scene had been recorded five weeks ago, on a quiet night with . . . she checked . . . no security alerts, not even a native antelope bumping the perimeter fence.
For several moments, she frowned at the now-frozen images, then blanked them. This time, she directed her AI to match the visual image of the girl running, but she directed it to search the web, excluding only the Preserve datafiles.
That search was going to take some time.
With a sigh, she emailed the video of the girl and the twin owl sequences to her boss, then reached into the holo field to touch the angry, blinking priority icon.
It took five full minutes for Carlo to appear. Which meant he was probably in bed. With someone. He had just spent a week at a body-spa and he was probably trying out the upgrades. Tahira braced herself as Carlo’s face and torso appeared in the field, yes, wrapped in a silken robe, his usually perfect hair tousled. “About time.” His eyes narrowed. “Where were you? I called you as soon as I got your report but your link didn’t answer.”
“Checking the range.”
“You have software to do that.”
“The software didn’t find her. I did.”
“Has the media gotten hold of this?” Carlo looked over his shoulder, back to her, lowered his voice. “I assume not, or my interface would have picked it up and alerted me.” His dark eyes snapped. “All right. This time, you need to find out how the trespasser got in. And why Security failed to alert you. Again. Meanwhile, you will euthanize the lions involved. As insurance against media clamor. We will have done all we could do.”
“It’s not the lions’ fault.” Tahira shook her head. “The girl was meant to run into them. She was dropped right in front of them.”
“What do you mean she was dropped?” He ran a hand through his hair. “Make sense, Tahira, will you?”
“She was dropped.” Tahira bit the words off. “By a skimmer, helicopter. Something. She was in sandals. Bedroom type. I just emailed you the Security clip that did pick her up. And the clip that was used to replace most of the visuals.”
He stared at her. “That’s unbelievable.” He chopped her words aside with the flat of his hand. “Do you know how much it would cost to do that kind of hack job? Worry about the Perimeter security. Something is down. The lion euthanasia shows the public that we’re doing a good job of dealing with this. The US media will howl if they get hold of this. You know how they feel about the Preserve.”
Yes, she knew.
“I can sacrifice you or I can sacrifice a lion or two. You decide, Tahira.” Carlo’s eyes narrowed. “And before you say anything, you’re a hell of a lot more valuable to me than the lions, they’re breeding just fine. Besides, as soon as the genetics geeks get their Panthera leo atrox phenotype we won’t use African lions anymore anyway. So let’s just call it moot and drop it.” He glanced over his shoulder again and his mouth tightened briefly. Turned back to Tahira. “I am ordering you to euthanize a lion that killed this person. Make sure you get a DNA match so we can prove it, and I’ll leave it to you to get the right one. I’ll let you claim it was a rogue animal and make it plausible.”
He was giving her a lot. Carlo could have demanded the whole pride—the media would press for it. He could have fired her. “Can we talk about how this girl got in here? She was a girl, Carlo. Dressed for a hot date. Go take a look at that clip I sent you. She did not hike in from the Perimeter. I think that’s a bit more important than pleasing the media.”
“No, it’s not.” Carlo cut her off with another chop of his aristocratic hand. “If we’re lucky, nobody will pick it up. Make sure you secure those video files. The administrative contract for the Preserve comes up for renewal in one month. The US will push hard to take it over, as usual. If you want a job a month from now, you’d better hope the World Council thinks we’re doing a good job here and doesn’t award the contract somewhere else.” The holo field blanked.
Tahira stared into the opalescent shimmer.
He was right. The vast Preserve, the huge central section of the US that had been restored to its Pliestocene ecology, including megafauna and the species that had inhabited this land millions of years ago, was part of a giant experiment in ecological climate control. And genetic engineering. And a huge tourist draw, which the US did like. A lot of countries were uneasy about it, seeing a threat to their own grasslands and dwindling wildlands as the growing Gaiist movement used carbon credit leverage to press for more preservation. Too much media outcry and the US might garner enough support to end the Preserve and take over control of the huge area again, never mind the carbon credits they’d then owe. It was a matter of national pride, she thought sourly. That had always transcended logic.
She made herself a pot of very black tea and began to go through the security records for the past twenty-four hours, searching for human-sized mass or any sign of a small-craft landing. As the sun cleared the horizon, she finally shut down her station and stumbled off to her small room behind the water wall, sprawling sweaty and fully clothed across her bed.
No airspace invasion, no vehicles, nobody on foot. Maybe the girl had teleported in. She laughed sourly. Sure.
Just like the last one.
“Tahira? Hey, Tahira, are you okay?”
Jen’s voice. Tahira blinked crusted eyes, swimming up from a deep pool of sleep and dreams she couldn’t remember but that had stalked her like lions. “Late night.” She realized that she had spoken in Sotho, switched to English. “Sorry. I just need some tea.” She sat up, stiff and sticky in her dirty clothes, rubbed her eyes.
“I already made you some.” Jen stood in the doorway, nervous, a mug in one hand. “When you didn’t hear me come in I figured you really needed tea.”
“Yeah. Thanks.” Tahira got up, glad that she hadn’t stripped last night, and took the mug. “I appreciate it.” She gave him a smile because this too-earnest graduate student had tried to climb into her bed a week ago, never mind the age difference. And her “no thanks” had apparently bruised him. She swallowed a stinging gulp of the strong-enough tea, gave Jen a nod of approval. Usually, he made it too weak.
“You got official mail.” Jen stood just outside the door, as if a strand of Perimeter fencing blocked it, his beaded and braided silver-white hair—stark contrast to his tawny skin and intended to be sexy—swinging forward around his face with his nod. “Security seal. Looks important.”
“Yeah.” Tahira drank more tea. The official execution orders. “We had another trespasser last night.”
“You’re kidding.” Jen’s eyes got round. “No, you’re not. Another . . . another kill? What are we going to do about it?”
She brushed past him, angry because two plus two was a simple equation. But guilt stabbed her. He had brought strong tea. And he didn’t really understand the Preserve politics. She paused, looked back, and shrugged. “I’ll have to kill one of the lions, of course. Even though it wasn’t really their fault.”
The information didn’t move him, but why should it? He was a graduate student, studying the symbiosis of lions and one of the predatory wasp species. Esoteric stuff. A study that provided a comfortable living and yielded information. Lions were just the food providers for his wasps, who laid their eggs in the larvae of a biting fly that pestered the lions. And the wasps were just a day job, a means to an income. He’d study whatever he was paid to study. She sighed. “Come have some breakfast with me, eh? I found a fresh guinea hen nest yesterday.”
She soft-boiled the small, tan eggs and they ate them together as she listened to him prattle on about his wasp collecting, larvae counts, population fluctuations. When he left on his skimmer, with his collecting nets, sample bags, and a stunner, Tahira stripped and scrubbed herself clean of last night’s sweat and the smell of violent death. She stripped the bed, tossed the dirty sheets into the sonic cleaner, and padded barefoot, in a clean shift, to the lab refrigerator where she had stored the trespasser’s bones. The bag containing the black shirt lay on the floor beside the refrigerator. She picked it up, smoothed out the torn and blood-stiffened fabric within its plastic shroud. Why did you come here? She spoke silently to the girl’s spirit. The lioness’s killing was innocent. My killing of the lioness will not be innocent and it will be my burden, not yours. Anger burned through her. “Your death was not innocent,” she said aloud. “You brought it with you and left it like poison on innocent ground.”
But her own words sounded hollow and that image nagged at her . . . the “where’s my date?” body language, that single, decorative sandal tumbling through the air, bright against the stark night-vision landscape. Dropping the shirt, she took out the bag with the vertebrae and hair and got to work.
The first thing she did was file a full report to the local Sheriff’s Department. That meant the media would have the news within the hour. The Sheriff’s security leaked like a sieve. Next, she started the DNA scan. She was only required to run a minimal ID scan, but she did a full analysis. The longer she spent on this easily rationalized task, the longer she could put off the euthanasia. By noon, her back ached from standing and the building’s major-domo announced Deputy Malthers. Shawn. He always handled Preserve issues. She sent the data to her personal workspace and shut down the lab, retreating into the main room and the cool breath of water wall. “Come in.” She admitted him and he sighed in the cool air, removing his hat, half moons of sweat darkening the tan sun-cloth of his uniform.
“Tahira.” He nodded, his weathered face closed and cautious. “You had an intruder, huh?” Another one, his eyes accused. “Supposedly your fence is tight. Do I have to worry about lions in the hotel lobbies?”
“You know you don’t, Shawn.” Tahira studied the tight lines around his eyes. “The perimeter isn’t porous—to animals. Who chewed on you?”
“My boss, the Sheriff. The governor chewed on him.” He sighed and tossed his hat onto the corner of the table. “He’s getting more pressure from the Take Back America people. They got the news even before the media could post it on the net. Can I have a glass of water?” He gave her a plaintive look. “I know you run a tight ship, Tahira, but jeeze, two deaths in two months? This is too good for the media to pass up. You should see the hit rates.”
“Sit down. I’m sorry.” She headed for the kitchen. “I didn’t get much sleep. Did you get the DNA scan I sent your office?” She carried two full glasses and a pitcher of water back, set the tray on the low table near her work field.
“Yeah. No match.” He took a glass, drank half of it in long, gulping swallows. Wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “She’s not a missing person. I sent it to the national DNA database, but you know how long that takes.” He rolled his eyes. “They’ve got a six month backlog and that’s just on violent crime. I still haven’t heard back on our first Jane Doe.”
At least he had said “our,” although technically, the Preserve was administered by the World Council and not under local jurisdiction. Still, the World Council liked to let local law deal with matters if at all possible. Tahira sat down on her cushion. The holo field shimmered to life and she opened the data file, staring thoughtfully as the letters, numbers, and icons winked like emerging stars.
“I know her.” She spoke to the galaxy of numbers and icons—the translation of those rags of flesh and bits of bone. “She grew up in a slum.” The heavy-metal load in her hair could only belong to a child of the uncleansed suburban wasteland. “She was very young, less than sixteen, I am guessing. European, probably Scotch-Irish, no Asian or African genes, minimum melanin.” Her skin would have been very fair and the red in her hair was natural beneath its cheap dye. Poor all her life, considering the uncorrected genetic predisposition to cholesterol and cancer. She would not have had an uncomplicated middle age, if she had lived. She would have died young, relatively speaking. Unless she earned the money for genetic repair. “Look at this.” She called up the security clip, ran it. Listened to Malthers’ soft indrawn breath.
“She didn’t expect lions.” His face was grim. “And she sure didn’t get lost from one of your tours, huh?”
“Nobody gets lost from our tours.” Tahira shook her head. “And no, she did not expect lions.”
“You got any ideas?”
“This cost a lot of money.” She looked at him. “Hacking our security. It would be expensive. We do not use cheap security.”
He was looking at her quizzically, his thick brows drawn down over those so very blue eyes.
“Some things,” she said slowly, remembering, “Don’t change.”
“Like what?”
Her link chimed. “I have a tour scheduled.” She stood, feeling age in her bones, even though they worked perfectly, levering her young-muscled body erect. As if invisible teleomeres were shortening, ticking like a clock. “I have to go. If I find anything out, I will email you.”
He headed for the door, paused to look back. “Stop by the office.” Those so blue eyes fixed on her face. “I’ll buy you a beer.” The door closed behind him, breathing hot dust into the room.
The tour was an expensive one, which was why she had to lead it. It would be a package with a hotel, maybe a body-spa, the Preserve and a tour conducted personally by the Manager. That was her. Her contract specified how many of these she had to do each month. Originally, Carlo had suggested she wear native dress. When she had told him that would be a ragged T-shirt with the name of a football team on it, he had shut up and not mentioned it again. The tourists were waiting beside their air-conditioned tour bus, looking around at the dusty little compound, pointing their links at the buildings, the guinea hens scratching in the shade. The link videoed the image and instantly searched the web for a match, downloading informational links. The life cycle of the guinea hen, the history of the Preserve, the blueprints for the buildings, if you wanted to look at them. Their tour guide spotted her and said something. Instantly they all, nearly in unison, pointed their links at her.
A part of her wanted to duck, as if they were pointing weapons. The gesture was, her hind brain told her, the same. Was it, she wondered briefly, that this pointing of links to acquire information was a hostile act? Or was it that the men who had fired on the refugees when she was a child hadn’t been hostile, had treated the dealing of death as casually as these tourists treated the gathering of information? She didn’t know, hid her flinch, and smiled for them as the guide did the introduction that they weren’t listening to. Their eyes were on their links as she downloaded onto their screens life and death, love and loss, success and failure, rendered in text and images. She climbed onto the bus after them, took the plush seat up front, facing them. The guide sat beside her in the other rear-facing seat. Some of the tourists were from off-planet, perhaps one of the orbital platforms or perhaps even Mars. They had brown skin, lighter than her Lesotho skin, but their bodies seemed frail, out of proportion. They looked at her, eyes bright.
They did not look quite human.
“Go straight out of the compound and take the first right,” she told the driver, who was a regular. “We’ll take the road down along the river.”
“We’re here to see the mastodon calves.” One of the off-planet tourists looked up from her link. “The park map IDs them to the west, over in the hills.”
“The old cow always brings them down to their favorite place on the river at dusk, to drink.” Tahira spoke patiently. “You’ll have time to stretch your legs and have some dinner before they show up.”
“Why don’t we just go where they are?” Someone else spoke up.
“Our rhythms are more flexible than those of the animals.” She kept her voice patient. “They know we will be there at the river, we are usually there, that does not bother them. It is familiar. If we arrive unexpectedly in an unusual place . . . they will be bothered. And that is unhealthy.”
That didn’t satisfy all of them, but she didn’t expect it to.
“Hey.” A woman with a very young face, golden skin, and hair as silvery white as Jen looked up from her screen. “I just got a newsfeed . . . a tourist got killed by a lion! Last night! This is the second lion kill!”
Murmurs swept the bus and all eyes focused on the link screens.
“It wasn’t a tourist.” Her words fell like stones into the murmur and eyes pried themselves from link screens. “A young woman was dropped from a hovercraft for the lions to find.” She spoke into silence now. All eyes were on her and somehow, this felt no different than the pointed links. “She was intended to die. Someone videoed her death. That person will sell the video for a lot of money. Violent death is very valuable. It is an ugly trade.” Only the purr of the bus’s power plant could be heard now. “But it is a very old trade. No matter. I saw the vehicle that brought her, I saw the person who operated it. I observe that lion pride every night and I was there in the darkness. He will be caught.”
“That’s not on the newsfeed.” The accusatory voice came from the rear of the bus. From one of the off-worlders. Tahira shrugged. “I did not tell the media this. But you are safe.” Her smile was genuine this time. “The lion pride does not water where we will be. This is not their territory.”
She wasn’t sure if they were relieved or disappointed. She cut off their questions by launching into her usual lecture, pointing out the changing ecosystem—it had not reached full climax equilibrium yet—directing their links to the coy-dog family holed up in the shade, waiting the cool of evening. The puppies were playing a game of tug with a scrap of dirty hide and links bristled, zooming in to record. The larger animals were all chipped so the links would offer up the ID information for each animal, their stage of development toward the Pleistocene ideal as the engineers evolved them into their own ancestors.
Voyeurs, she thought as they pointed and murmured. An observable reality, but not personal. Not threatening.
She politely refused to say any more about the death, telling them only that the authorities would handle it. The tourists were distracted by the smaller horse herd. One of the young stallions had been challenging the herd sire over the past few weeks and he chose this day to take his challenge to a new level. Dust rose in tan clouds as the two horses circled and feinted, ears flat, striking snake-like for a bite, whirling to kick. This time, the youngster wasn’t backing down and the two stallions rose, chest to chest, teeth bared. “These horses are very much like the Equus verae, the horses that grazed this plain a million years ago. If you’ll put on your glasses, you’ll be able to identify the young male.” She paused while the tourists all fumbled for the glasses they’d been given at the start. They were slaved to hers. She IDed the young male by chip number and a green halo instantly surrounded him. “This young stallion was foaled four years ago in the spring. The engineers believe that he is a good likeness of the original Equus verae. All the stock began with Przewalski’s Horse, the last truly wild horse species.” They were all watching now, as the stallions shouldered and circled, wheeling to kick, or rearing to feint and bite at each other’s faces. Tahira stifled a sigh. “The herd sire is nearly ten years old. That’s a long life for a herd sire.” The young challenger had been born of artificial insemination with the new, improved genes. If the old herd sire didn’t get ousted soon, she’d have to help a new challenger along. “This is not reality,” she murmured. “It is our version of reality.”
“Pardon?” One of the off-worlders had moved to the front of the bus for a better look, was pointing his link at the fight, recording.
“Nothing.” She shook her head. “I was just talking to myself.”
“It’s so . . . uncontrolled.” He had friendly dark eyes and a wide smile that made his too-fragile body seem less different. “Hard to imagine living in a world this . . . chaotic.”
“It’s not chaotic,” she said softly. “Only humans are chaotic.”
The horses saved her from the questions surfacing in his eyes. The young stallion whirled as the herd sire struck and his heels caught the herd sire full in the face. They heard the thud of hoof on bone, even at this distance, and the sire went down in a cloud of dust. He struggled instantly to his feet, but his jaw looked twisted and blood darkened the dun hide. A low murmur of horror washed through the bus.
“What now?” The white-haired woman’s voice rose over the babble. “What will happen now?”
“This was an accident. Fights like this rarely result in serious injury.” Tahira blocked the tourist glasses, but had her own zoom in on the injured stallion. No point in showing them the bloody details up close. The youngster had run him a few meters from the mares and now trotted back and forth, tossing his head, tail erect as the ousted sire stood with head drooping. She winced at the white gleam of either bone or teeth visible in the bloody mess of his face. Violence seemed to be gathering over the Preserve like a dark cloud. “His jaw is broken.” She didn’t need the text diagnosis scrolling across the visual field. “He won’t be able to eat. The lions will probably kill him, or even the wild dogs. This coy-dog is heavier than the old North American coyotes and they hunt in small packs. They occasionally kill large prey species, mostly when the animal is weak or crippled.”
“Why don’t you do something about it?” A woman spoke up, her voice shrill. “You could take him in and heal him, right?”
“And what will the lions eat tonight?” Tahira faced the woman, watched horror and anger ripple across her features. “These are not our rules. They are much older than us,” she said gently. “That is what the Preserve is all about . . . returning to the old rules. Without the horse, a lion cub may die because of insufficient nutrition.” She waited for the horrified comments to ebb. You could hear the excitement beneath the horror. Now they had a prize in the video files they’d just uploaded to their personal space—something to show proudly to friends, so they could commiserate over that raw moment of blood, and pain, and imminent death. The woman who had spoken up wasn’t satisfied. She was talking about cruelty and emails to powerful people.
“Did you make this happen for us?” The off-worlder was looking at her, and his eyes were shocked and cold.
“No.” She met those eyes, saw her own reflection in them, tiny and perfect. “But I knew the old stallion would be forced out sooner or later. The horses decided to make it happen now. The kick was a freak accident. Horses are good at dodging.”
He didn’t believe her. You cannot conceive of no control, she thought. And wondered suddenly if her daughter had gone off-planet. The Council Security Forces were everywhere. She had never thought of that before, and it chilled her, she was not quite sure why. Her daughter would be much older than this man, now.
They moved on and the tour guide, a seasoned professional, texted her a request to show them something to change the now-soured mood. She had anticipated this and had already called up her inventory. “Turn left just past that clump of willow . . . yes, there.”
The bus took the dirt track easily, its off-road suspension barely sloshing the drinks that the attendant was handing out. “The engineers have had excellent success with the long horned bison. They are very like the bison that grazed this plain during the Pleistocene. Three cows have calved this month and the latest was last night.” She scanned for the IDs, found the three cows in close proximity two hundred meters from the road. “They’re out in the grass, so we can watch them without disturbing them. If you’ll look through the left windows and follow the arrow directions on your glasses, they’ll direct you to the calves.” A green arrow winked on her glasses, pointing to the right, and as she turned her head, it was replaced by one pointing straight up. She lifted her head, and there, in the distance, she spied the small black dots that were the grazing bison. The bus had come to a halt. “Have you all found the bison?” She waited while the slow ones fumbled their way to the bison herd. Zoom while they were panning and they’d get sick every time. “Okay, here we go.” The field blurred and suddenly seemed to be rushing toward her. The tiny specks enlarged, became a dozen shaggy brown beasts with their noses in the sun-burned grass, backs dotted with cowbirds. Small white herons stalked among them, snatching up beetles and the occasional rodent stirred up by the bison’s hooves. Their long horns gleamed in the sun as they tossed their heads at flies.
The newborn calf hugged his mother’s flank, his horns mere bumps. He suddenly butted beneath her flank, tail wriggling as he nursed. The collective sigh from the tourists made the guide breathe his own sigh of relief, she noted. Well, upset guests would hardly give him a fat tip. She let them watch the two older calves butt heads and the herd even obliged by grazing closer to the bus. By the time they moved on to the elephant watching spot for cocktails and their gourmet dinner, the mood was festive once more, the injured stallion forgotten.
Tomorrow, she would go check on him. Assure herself that the predators had found him. Injured as he was, the dog pack that patrolled that territory would almost certainly take him, but perhaps not right away. She called up that sector, scanned the predator inventory. To her relief, the lions were headed in that direction. They should get to him quickly.
During dinner they lucked out. A scimitar cat—quite shy and a rare sighting—chose that night to come down to the river to drink. The tourists flocked to the windows, their links pointing as they videoed in night mode. The elephants showed on time and the new mastodon type calf went so far as to walk nearly up to the bus, trunk lifted in curiosity, before his mother shooed him nervously away, and stomped a threat toward them, her ears erect, trunk curled back like a cobra.
The tour guide looked pleased, as if Tahira had orchestrated the whole show. Tahira sat back in her seat as they returned to the compound in the gathering darkness, answering questions, giving small lectures on the history of the Preserve, the geneticists’ work, the effect of the huge preserve areas on climate stability. They asked occasional questions about the injured stallion.
No one brought up the dead girl. Not one.
She climbed down from the bus into the cooling night beneath the white arch of the Milky Way and a sliver of new moon. They would go back to the comfort of the resort to have dessert and drinks and to compare video clips. The tour guide gave her a wide grin and a wave as the door closed, anticipating good tips, obviously.
Jen would have left for the day and she would have the place to herself.
You have a visitor, the door murmured as she reached the verandah. He had an official security pass to enter. His personal ID is blocked. “I know who it is.” She sighed, then straightened her shoulders. “Open.”
“What the hell is going on, Tahira?” Deputy Malthers levered himself up from the sofa in the main room. “Do you know just how much trouble you’re going to cause me when my boss starts getting the feeds?”
“He has his link shut off tonight? I would have thought he’d have the news already.” She headed for the kitchen wall, thirsty. “And if I protest your use of a security pass to override my door lock, I hope you can produce the warrant.” She closed her eyes as he seized her arm. Halted. “Shawn . . . I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?” He spun her around to face him, his face pale. “You withheld information from me? You lied to me about that girl’s death? And then you spill it to a bunch of tourists?” His nostrils were pinched. “You’d damn well better be sorry.”
Some of them had certainly blogged from the bus. She had counted on that. She met his eyes. “I did not lie to you.”
“Then why did you tell them . . .” His eyes narrowed and he let go of her arm. “No way. No way you do that.”
“Do what?” She widened her eyes. “If I tell a story to tourists to enliven their trip and they exaggerate it in their personal blogs, this is not a crime. Your boss can deny whatever he wishes to deny and if the outcry is loud enough, my boss will probably fire me. Would you like some water?”
“What do you think you’re going to do?” His voice was harsh.
“Go to bed.” She filled a glass from the refrigerator tap, filled a second glass.
“I’m going to get a warrant for your arrest.” He ignored the proffered glass.
“On what grounds?” She raised an eyebrow. “I suspect your boss will not agree with you. It will be hard enough to deal with the media when they get hold of the tourists’ mistaken statements. It will be much worse if you have arrested the manager of the Preserve and then have to release her. Your boss is very conscious of his media image.”
“I’m staying here tonight.” He glared at her.
“Be my guest.” She shrugged. “I told you, I’m going to bed.”
“Good.” He stretched out on the sofa, his jaw set.
She turned her back on him and activated her holo-field. Checked the Preserve first. Minor perimeter alerts only—a couple of licensed backcountry backpackers who had retreated when they triggered the broadcast security announcement, a small herd of pronghorn that moved off when the repulsion field activated, broadcasting an unpleasant sonic pulse that discouraged most wild life and the occasional lost livestock. Nothing else. Red icons signaled stationary chips—indicating that a bearer hadn’t moved for twelve hours. That usually represented death or serious injury. She checked the IDs . . . all prey species except for one elephant from the northernmost herd. An old female, but not so old that she should be dying yet. The elephants and the larger predators had been implanted with biometric chips. Tahira checked it, found signs of physical distress, but no clear diagnosis. She transferred the ID to her link. She’d fly over in the morning and check on it, on her rounds to chip new births. See what had happened.
Her AI search of the Security video of the running girl had turned up a match. Eighty-nine percent. Tahira drew a deep breath, touched the green icon. A merchant site. Models? A naked woman lounged suggestively on a grizzly’s hide, caressing the dead, snarling face, tongue-tip peeking pink from lush, crimson lips. The secure interface requested a user ID and password. And a credit card. The entry fee made her purse her lips. She flagged the link, emailed it.
Malthers was peering at his link, his feet propped on the arm of the sofa. He looked up as she shut down her field. “What if the person who dropped her was a woman?” His eyes were hard.
She shrugged. “You are too tall for that sofa. Would you like me to inflate the guest bed?”
“No, thank you.” He went back to his link. “I don’t plan on sleeping.”
“While you are up, then, maybe you can see what’s for sale on the video sex markets. I just sent you a link that you might . . . find interesting. I don’t have the budget to access it.” She turned and went into her room. When she woke briefly in the middle of the night, the light in the main room was still on and he was sitting on the sofa, hunched over his link.
She slept without dreaming, after that, and when she woke, he was gone…
