Poul Anderson - The Year of the Ransom

Still in the saddle, he smiles. Through the blood racketing in my ears, I hear: “Be not afraid, señorita. I beg your pardon for this rough treatment, but saw no other way. Now, alone, we can talk.”

Alone! Look around. We’re close to water, a bay, see those outlines against the sky, got to be Academy Bay near Darwin Station, only what became of the station? Of the road to Puerto Ayora? Matazarno bushes, Palo Santo trees, grass in clumps, cactus between, sparse. Empty, empty. Ashes of a campfire. Jesus Christ! The giant shell, gnawed bones of a tortoise! This man’s killed a Galapagos tortoise!

“Please do not flee,” he says. “I would simply have to overtake you. Believe me, your honor is safe. More safe than it would be anywhere else. For we are quite by ourselves in these islands, like Adam and Eve before the Fall.”

Throat dry, tongue thick, “Who are you? What is this?”

He gets off his machine. Sweeps me a courtly bow. “Don Luis Ildefonso Castelar y Moreno, from Barracota in Castile, lately with the captain Francisco Pizarro in Peru, at your service, my lady.”

He’s crazy, or I am, or the whole world is. Again I wonder if I’m dreaming, hit my head, caught a fever, delirious. Sure doesn’t feel that way. Those are plants I know. They stay put. The sun’s shifted overhead and the air’s less warm, but the smells baked out of the earth, they’re like always. A grasshopper chirrs. A blue heron flaps by. Could this be for real?

“Sit down,” he says. “You are taken aback. Would you like a drink of water?” As if to soothe me: “I fetch it from elsewhere. This is a desolate country. But you are welcome to all you want.”

I nod, do as he suggests. He picks a container off the ground, brings it in reach of me, steps off at once. Not to alarm the little girl. It’s a bucket, pink, cracked at the top, usable but scarcely worth keeping. He must have scrounged it from wherever it got tossed out. Even in those shacky little houses in the village, plastic’s cheap.

Plastic.

Final touch. Practical joke. ’Tain’t funny, God. Got to laugh anyway. Whoop. Howl.

“Be calm, señorita. I tell you, while you behave wisely you have nothing to fear. I will protect you.”

That pig! I’m no ultrafeminist, but when a kidnapper starts patronizing me, too much. The laughter rattles down to silence. Rise. Brace muscles. They shiver a bit.

Somehow, regardless, I am no longer afraid. Coldly furious. At the same time, more aware than ever before. He stands in front of me as sharp as if a lightning flash lit him up. Not a big man; thin; but remember that strength of his. Hispanic features, all right, of the pure European kind, tanned practically black. Not in costume. Those clothes are faded, mended, grubby; vegetable dyes. Unwashed, like himself. Smell powerful but he doesn’t really stink, it’s an outdoor kind of odor. The ridged helmet, sweeping down to guard his neck, and the cuirass are tarnished. I see scratches in the steel. From battle? Sword hung at his left hip. Sheath at the right meant for a knife. It being gone, he must have butchered the tortoise and cut a skewer for roasting it with the sword. Firewood he could break off these parched branches. Yonder, a fire drill he made. Sinew for cord. He’s been here a while.

Whisper “Where is here?”

“Another island of the same archipelago. You know it as Santa Cruz. That is five hundred years hence. Today is one hundred years before the discovery.”

Breathe slow and deep. Heart, take it easy. I’ve read my share of science fiction. Time travel. Only, a Spanish Conquistador!

“When are you from?”

“I told you. About a century in the future. I fared with the brothers Pizarro and we overthrew the pagan king of Peru.”

“No. I shouldn’t understand you.” Wrong, Wanda. I remember. Uncle Steve told me once. If I met a sixteenth-century Englishman, I’d have a devil of a time. Spelling didn’t change (won’t change) too much, but pronunciation did. Spanish is a more stable language.

Uncle Steve!

Cool it. Speak steadily. Can’t quite. Look this man in the eyes, at least. “You mentioned my kinsman just before you . . . laid violent hands on me.”

He sounds exasperated. “I did no more than was necessary. Yes, if you are indeed Wanda Tamberly, I know your father’s brother.” He peers like a cat at a mouse hole. “The name he used among us was Estebán Tanaquil.”

Uncle Steve a time traveler too? I can’t help it, dizziness rushes through me.

I shake myself free of it. Don Luis Et Cetera sees I’m bewildered. Or else he knew I’d be. I think he wants to push things along, keep me off balance. Says, “I warned you he is in danger. That is true. He is my hostage, left in a wilderness where starvation will soon take him off, unless wild beasts do so first. It is for you to earn his ransom.”

Blink. We’re there. Like a blow to the solar plexus. I almost fall off. Grab his waist. Face burrows into roughness of his cloak.

Calm, lassie. He told you to expect this . . . transition. He’s awed. Hasty in the wind, “Ave Maria gratiae plena—” It’s cold up here in heaven. No moon, but stars everywhere. Riding lights of a plane, blink, blink, blink.

The Peninsula tremendous, a sprawled galaxy, half a mile underneath us. White, yellow, red, green, blue, shining blood-flow of cars, from San Jose to San Francisco. Hulks of black to the left where the hills rise. Shimmering darkness to the right, the Bay, fire-streaked by the bridges. Towns glimpsed, clusters of sparks, on the far shore. About ten o’clock of a Friday evening.

How often have I seen this before? From airliners. A space-time bike hanging aloft, me in the buddy seat behind a man born almost five centuries ago, that’s something else.

He masters himself. The sheer lion courage of him—except a lion wouldn’t charge headlong into the unknown, the way those guys did after Columbus showed them half a world to plunder. “Is this the realm of Morgana la Hada?” he breathes.

“No, it’s where I live, those are lamps you see, lamps in the streets and houses and . . . on the wagons. They move by themselves, the wagons, without horses. Yonder goes a flying vessel. But it can’t skip from place to place and year to year like this one.”

A superwoman wouldn’t babble facts. She’d feed him a line, mislead him, use his ignorance to trap him somehow. Yeah, “somehow,” that’s the catch. I’m just me, and he’s a superman, or pretty close to it. Natural selection, back in his day. If you weren’t physically tough, you didn’t live to have kids. And a peasant could be stupid, might even do better if he was, but not a military officer who didn’t have a Pentagon to plan his moves for him. Also, those hours of questioning on Santa Cruz Island (which I, Wanda May Tamberly, am the first woman ever to walk on) have beaten me down. He never laid a hand on me, but he kept at it and kept at it. Eroded the resistance out of me. My main thought right now is that I’d better cooperate. Otherwise he could too easily make some blunder that’d kill us both and leave Uncle Steve stranded.

“I have thought the saints might dwell in such a blaze of glory,” Luis murmurs. The cities he knew went blackout after dark. You needed a lantern to find your way. If it was a fine city, it put stepping stones down the middle of the sidewalkless streets, to keep you above the horse droppings and garbage.

He turns tactical. “Can we descend unseen?”

“If you’re careful. Go slowly as I guide you.” I recognize the Stanford campus, a mostly unlighted patch. Lean forward against him, left hand holding onto the cloak. These are well-designed seats; my knees will keep me in place. That’s a mighty long drop, though. Reach right arm past his side. Point. “Toward there.”