Daughter of Regals (28 page)

1

I WAS STANDING IN FRONT OF ELIZABETH’S CAGE
WHEN the hum behind my right ear told me Inspector Morganstark wanted to see
me. I was a little surprised, but I didn’t show it. I was trained not to show
it. I tongued one of the small switches set against my back teeth and said, “I
copy. Be there in half an hour.” I had to talk out loud if I wanted the
receivers and tape decks back at the Bureau to hear me. The transceiver
implanted in my mastoid process wasn’t sensitive enough to pick up my voice if
I whispered (or else the monitors would’ve spent a hell of a lot of time just
listening to me breathe and swallow). But I was the only one in the area, so I
didn’t have to worry about being overheard.

After I acknowledged the
Inspector’s call, I stayed in front of Elizabeth’s cage for a few more minutes.
It wasn’t that I had any objection to being called in, even though this was
supposed to be my day off. And it certainly wasn’t that I was having a
particularly good time where I was. I don’t like zoos. Not that this wasn’t a
nice place— for people, anyway. There were clean walks and drinking fountains,
and plenty of signs describing the animals. But for the animals…

Well, take Elizabeth,
for
example. When I brought her in a couple months ago, she was the prettiest
cougar I’d ever seen. She had those intense eyes only real hunters have, a
delicate face, and her whiskers were absolutely magnificent. But now her eyes
were dull, didn’t seem to focus on anything. Her pacing was spongy instead of
tight; sometimes she even scraped her toes because she didn’t lift her feet
high enough. And her whiskers had been trimmed short by the zoo
keepers—probably because some great cats in zoos keep trying to push their
faces between the bars, and some bastards who go to zoos like to pull whiskers,
just to show how brave they are. In that cage. Elizabeth was just another
shabby animal going to waste.

That raises the question
of why I put her there in the first place. Well, what else could I do? Leave
her to starve when she was a cub? Turn her over to the breeders after I found
her, so she could grow up and go through the same thing that killed her mother?
Raise her in my apartment until she got so big and feisty she might tear my
throat out? Let her go somewhere—with her not knowing how to hunt for food, and
the people in the area likely to go after her with demolition grenades?

No. the zoo was the only
choice I had. I didn’t like it much.

Back when I was a kid, I
used to say that someday I was going to be rich enough to build a real zoo. The
kind of zoo they had thirty or forty years ago, where the animals lived in what
they called a “natural habitat.” But by now I know I’m not going to be rich.
And all those good old zoos are gone. They were turned into hunting preserves
when the demand for “sport” got high enough. These days, the only animals that
find their ways into zoos at all are the ones that are too broken to be
hunters—or the ones that are just naturally harmless. With exceptions like Elizabeth
every once in a while.

I suppose the reason I
didn’t leave right away was the same reason I visited Elizabeth in the first
place— and Emily and John, too. I was hoping she’d give some sign that she
recognized me. Fat chance. She was a cougar—she wasn’t sentimental enough to be
grateful. Anyway, zoos aren’t exactly conducive to sentimentality in animals of
prey. Even Emily, the coyote, had finally forgotten me. (And John, the bald
eagle, was too stupid for sentiment. He looked like he’d already forgotten
everything he’d ever known.) No, I was the only sentimental one of the bunch.
It made me late getting to the Bureau.

But I wasn’t thinking
about that when I arrived. I was thinking about my work. A trip to the zoo
always makes me notice certain things about the duty room where all the Special
Agents and Inspectors in our Division have their desks. Here we were in the
year 2011—men had walked on Mars, microwave stations were being built to transmit
solar power, marijuana and car racing were so important they were subsidized by
the government—but the rooms where men and women like me did their paperwork
still looked like the squadrooms I’d seen in old movies when I was a kid.

There were no windows.
The dust and butts in the corners were so old they were starting to fossilize.
The desks (all of them littered with paper that seemed to have fallen from the
ceiling) were so close together we could smell each other working, sweating
because we were tired of doing reports, or because we were sick of the fact
that we never seemed to make a dent in the crime rate, or because we were
afraid. Or because we were different. It was like one big cage. Even the ID
clipped to the lapel of my jacket, identifying me as
Special Agent Sam
Browne,
looked more like a zoo label than anything else.

I hadn’t worked there
long, as years go, but already I was glad every time Inspector Morganstark sent
me out in the field. About the only difference the past forty years had made in
the atmosphere of the Bureau was that everything was grimmer now. Special
Agents didn’t work on trivial crimes like prostitution, gambling, missing
persons, because they were too busy with kidnapping, terrorism, murder, gang
warfare. And they worked alone, because there weren’t enough of us to go
around.

The real changes were hidden.
The room next door was even bigger than this one, and it was full to the
ceiling with computer banks and programmers. And in the room next to that were
the transmitters and tape decks that monitored Agents in the field. Because the
Special Agents had been altered, too.

But philosophy (or
physiology, depending on the point of view) is like sentiment, and I was
already late. Before I had even reached my desk, the Inspector spotted me from
across the room and shouted, “Browne!” He didn’t sound in any mood to be kept
waiting, so I just ignored all the new paper on my desk and went into his
office.

I closed the door and
stood waiting for him to decide whether he wanted to chew me out or not. Not
that I had any particular objection to being chewed out. I liked Inspector
Morganstark, even when he was mad at me. He was a sawed-off man with a receding
hairline, and during his years in the Bureau his eyes had turned bleak and
tired. He always looked harassed—and probably he was. He was the only Inspector
in the Division who was sometimes human enough, or stubborn enough, anyway, to Ignore
the computers. He played his hunches sometimes, and sometimes his hunches got
him in trouble. I liked him for that. It was worth being roasted once in a
while to work for him.

He was sitting with his
elbows on his desk, clutching a file with both hands as if it were trying to
get away from him. It was a pretty thin file, by Bureau standards—it’s hard to
shut computers off once they get started. He didn’t look up at me, which is usually
a bad sign; but his expression wasn’t angry. It was “something-about-this-isn’t-right-and-I-don’t-like-it.”
All of a sudden, I wanted that case. So I took a chance and sat down in front
of his desk. Trying to show off my self-confidence—of which I didn’t have a
hell of a lot. After two years as a Special Agent, I was still the rookie under
Inspector Morganstark. So far he’d never given me anything to do that wasn’t
basically routine.

After a minute, he put
down the file and looked at me. His eyes weren’t angry, either. They were
worried. He clamped his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair.
Then he said, “You were at the zoo?”

That was another reason
I liked him. He took my pets seriously. Made me feel less like a piece of
equipment. “Yes,” I said. For the sake of looking competent, I didn’t smile.

“How many have you got
there now?”

“Three. I took Elizabeth
in a couple months ago.”

“How’s she doing?”

I shrugged. “Fair. It
never takes them very long to lose spirit—once they’re caged up.”

His eyes studied me a
minute longer. Then he said. “That’s why I want you for this assignment. You
know about animals. You know about hunting. You won’t jump to the wrong
conclusions.”

Well, I was no hunter,
but I knew what he meant. I was familiar with hunting preserves. That was where
I got John and Emily and Elizabeth. Sort of a hobby. Whenever I get a chance
(like when I’m on leave), I go to preserves. I pay my way in like anybody
else—take my chances like anybody else. But I don’t have any guns. and I’m not
trying to kill anything. I’m hunting for cubs like Elizabeth—young that are
left to die when their mothers are shot or trapped. When I find them, I
smuggle them out of the preserves, raise them myself as long as I can, and then
give them to the zoo.

Sometimes I don’t find
them in time. And sometimes when I find them they’ve already been crippled by
careless shots or traps. Them I kill. Like I say. I’m sentimental.

But I didn’t know what
the Inspector meant about jumping to the wrong conclusions. I put a question on
my face and waited until he said, “Ever hear of the Sharon’s Point Hunting
Preserve?”

“No. But there are a lot
of preserves. Next to car racing, hunting preserves are the most popular—”

He cut me off. He sat
forward and poked the file accusingly with one finger. “People get killed
there.”

 I didn’t say anything
to that. People get killed at all hunting preserves. That’s what they’re for.
Since crime became the top-priority problem in this country about twenty years
ago, the government has spent a lot of money on it. A lot of money. On “law
enforcement” and prisons, of course. On drugs like marijuana that pacify
people. But also on every conceivable way of giving people some kind of non-criminal
outlet for their hostility.

Racing, for instance’ With
government subsidies, there isn’t a man or woman in the country so poor they
can’t afford to get in a hot car and slam it around a track. The important
thing, according to the social scientists, is to give people a chance to do
something violent at the risk of their lives. Both violence and risk have to be
real for catharsis to take place. With all the population and economic pressure
people are under, they have to have some way to let off stew. Keep them from becoming
criminals out of simple boredom and frustration and perversity.

So we have hunting
preserves. Wilderness areas are sealed off and stocked with all manner of
dangerous beasts, and then hunters are turned loose in them—alone, of course—to
kill everything they can while trying to stay alive. Everyone who has a yen to
see the warm blood run can take a rifle and go pit himself, or at least his
firepower, against various assortments of great cats, wolves, wildebeests,
grizzly bears, whatever.

It’s almost as popular
as racing. People like the illusion of “kill or be killed.” They slaughter
animals as fast as the breeders can supply them. (Some people use poisoned
darts and dumdum bullets. Some people even try to sneak lasers into the
preserves, but that is strictly not allowed. Private citizens are strictly not
allowed to have lasers at all.) It’s all very therapeutic. And it’s all very
messy. Slow deaths and crippling outnumber clean kills twenty to one, and not
enough hunters get killed to suit me. But I suppose it’s better than war. At
least we aren’t trying to do the same thing to the Chinese.

The Inspector said, “You’re
thinking, ‘Hooray for the lions and tigers.”‘

I shrugged again. “Sharon’s
Point must be popular.”

“I wouldn’t know,” he
said acidly. “They don’t get Federal money, so they don’t have to file
preserve-use figures. AU I get is death certificates.” This time, he touched
the file with his fingertips as if it were delicate or dangerous. “Since Sharon’s
Point opened, twenty months ago, forty-five people have been killed.”

Involuntarily, I said, “Sonofabitch!”
Which probably didn’t make me sound a whole lot more competent. But I was
surprised. Forty-five! I knew of preserves that hadn’t lost forty-five people
in five years. Most hunters don’t like to be in all that
much danger.

“It’s getting worse,
too,” Inspector Morganstark went on. “Ten in the first ten months. Fifteen in
the next five. Twenty in the last five.”

“They’re very popular,”
I muttered.

“Which is strange,” he
said, “since they don’t advertise.”

“You mean they rely on
word-of-mouth?” That implied several things, but the first one that occurred to
me was, “What have they got that’s so special?”

“You mean besides
forty-five dead?” the Inspector growled. “They get more complaints than any
other preserve in the country.” That didn’t seem to make sense, but he
explained it. “Complaints from the families. They don’t get the bodies back.”

Well, that was
special—sort of. I’d never heard of a preserve that didn’t send the bodies to
the next of kin. “What happens to them?”