Eternity Road (26 page)

The mist felt cool on their faces. “It’s the most spectacular place I’ve ever seen,” said Quait. A brisk wind blew downriver. His arm was around her, and she moved closer.

Chaka was by no means the first woman to stir his emotions profoundly. But there was something about her, and the stars, and the waterfall, that lent a sense of permanence to the embrace. There would never be a time when he would be unable to call up the sound and sights of this night. “It’s a moment we’ll have forever,” he told her.

Her cheek lay against his, and she was warm and yielding in his arms. “It
is
very nice here,” she said.

“It means you’ll never be able to get rid of me. No matter what.”

She looked at him for a long moment, her eyes dark and unreadable. Then she stood on her toes and brushed her lips against his. It was less a kiss than an invitation.

She was wearing a woolen shirt under her buckskin jacket. He released the snaps on the jacket, opened it and pulled her close. “I love you, too, Chaka,” he said.

She murmured something he could not hear and inserted her body against his, fitting part to part. “And I love you, Quait.”

He was deliciously conscious of her breathing and her lips, her throat and eyes, and the willingness with which she leaned
into
him. He caressed the nape of her neck.

She pulled his face close and kissed him very hard. Quait touched her breast and felt the nipple already erect beneath the linen. They stood together for some minutes, enjoying each other. But Quait was careful to go no farther. Although he ached to take her, the penalties for surrendering virtue were high. Not least among them were the consequences of a pregnancy on the trail, far from home.

But our night will come
.

South of the falls, the Nyagra divided into two channels, cre
ating an island about five miles long. The companions crossed the western channel on a wobbly plank bridge of uncertain, but relatively recent, origin. Although it was now in a state of general disrepair and could in no way match Roadmaker engineering, the bridge was nevertheless no mean feat of its own, spanning a half-mile of rapids.

“Sometimes,” Flojian said, “I think we tend to underestimate everyone who followed the Roadmakers. We behave as if nothing substantive happened after they died off.”

They arrived on the north end of the island, where Roadmaker dwellings were numerous, as were ruins from a less remote period. Quait thought they were Baranji, the barbarian empire whose western expansion had reached the Mississippi four centuries earlier. Flojian was doubtful. Baranji architecture tended to be blockish, heavy, utilitarian. Designed for the ages, as if the imperials had been impressed by the permanence of Roadmaker building and had striven to go them one better. These structures were not quite so solid as one would expect from the Baranji, but if the density was missing, the gloom and lack of imagination were there. Quait wondered whether this had not been an imperial outpost either at the beginning or at the end of their great days.

Shortly after their arrival, they encountered a mystery that turned their thoughts from Baranji architecture. A Roadmaker bridge crossed from the eastern shore of the Nyagra. It was down, and its span lay in the water, half submerged. But this piece of wreckage was different from most of what they’d seen. The rubble was charred, and large holes had been blown in the concrete. “This was deliberate,” said Quait, examining a melted piece of metal. “Somebody blew it up.”

“Why would anyone do that?” asked Chaka.

They were standing on the beach, close to the ancient highway that had once crossed the Nyagra and which now simply gaped into a void. “Possibly to prepare for a replacement bridge,” said Flojian, “that they never got around to making.”

“I don’t think so,” said Quait. “I don’t see any sign of construction. Would you take down the old bridge before you built the new one?” He squinted into the sun. “I wonder whether it wasn’t a military operation? To stop an attacking force.”

Chaka looked out across the river. The current was fast here, and the wreckage created a series of wakes. “The Baranji?” she asked.

“Maybe. The Roadmakers don’t seem to have had any enemies. I mean, there’s never any evidence of deliberate destruction. Right? At least, not on a large scale.”

“What about Memphis?” asked Flojian. “And the city in the swamp? Some of their places burned.”

“Fires can happen in other ways,” said Chaka. “And in any case were probably set to burn out the plague. But you never see a Roadmaker city that looks as if explosives were used on it. They seem to have had a peaceful society. I think Quait’s right: Whoever did this was at war. And it was probably the Baranji on one side or the other. If anybody cares.”

The road crossed the island to the southeast, where it had once leaped back across the river. But here again the bridge had been destroyed. The highway simply came to an end, having not quite cleared the shoreline.

“Maybe,” said Flojian softly, “they were trying to keep the Plague off the island.”

There was another plank bridge upstream. They followed it across the eastern channel, took the horses down onto a boulder-strewn beach, and spotted a path that led into the forest. The beach was narrow and ran up against heavy rock in both directions, so that the path was the only way forward. They were headed toward it when they saw guns.

A tall, thin man leveled a rifle in their direction and came out of the bushes. “Just stop right there,” he said. He was bearded, elderly, with gray scraggly hair, greasy clothes, and an enormous pair of suspenders.

They stopped.

Two more showed themselves. One was a woman. “Hands up, folks,” she said.

The wedge felt very far away. Chaka raised her hands. “We’re just passing through,” she said. “Don’t mean any harm.”

“Good,” said the second man. He was younger than the first, but gray, with a torn flannel shirt and a red neckerchief. There was a strong family resemblance.

“Don’t mean to be unfriendly,” said the man with the suspenders, “but you just can’t be too careful these days.”

“That’s right,” said Quait behind her. “And I’d like to wish you folks a good day.”

“Who are you people?” asked Flojian.

The man with the suspenders advanced a few paces. “I’m the toll collector,” he said. “My name’s Jeryk.”

“I’m Chaka Milana. These are Quait and Flojian.”

The wind blew the old man’s hair in his eyes. “Where you folks bound?”

“We’re traders,” she said. “Looking for markets.”

“Don’t look like traders.” He squinted at Flojian, “Well, maybe that one does.”

“What’s the toll?” asked Quait.

The younger man grinned. “What have you got?”

Chaka looked at Jeryk. “Can we put our hands down?”

They ended by trading a generous supply of food and trinkets for two filled wineskins.

It never became clear how Jeryk happened to come by his trade, or how long he had been at the bridge. He explained that he and his family were bridge tenders, and that they kept both island bridges in repair. It was a claim that seemed imaginative. Quait responded by suggesting that the western bridge needed some new piles.

“We know about that,” Jeryk said. “We’re going to take care of it this summer.”

“How many people come through here?” asked Flojian.

“Oh, we don’t see many travelers nowadays,” he said. “In my father’s time, this was a busy place. But the traffic’s fallen off.”

“What changed?”

“More robbers on the roads now.” Jeryk frowned with indignation. “People aren’t safe anymore. So they travel in large groups.”

Chaka didn’t miss the obvious: A large group would pass without seeing the toll collector.

They received an invitation to stay to dinner. “Always like to have company,” the woman said. But it seemed safer to move on, and so Chaka explained they were on a tight schedule. Flojian almost fell off his horse trying not to laugh.

As they rode away, Jeryk warned them once more to be on the lookout for brigands. “Can’t be too careful these days,” he said.

The countryside broke up into granite ridges. They passed a pair of structures, hundreds of feet high, that resembled tapered urns, narrow in the center and wide at top and bottom. There were no windows and no indication what their function had been. Quait commented that the Roadmakers had left behind a lot of geometry and a lot of stone, but very little else. “It’d be a pity,” he said, “if whoever comes after
us
doesn’t know anything about us except the shape of our buildings. And that we made roads. Even good, all-weather ones.”

Their spirits flagged as they continued east on a trail that seemed endless. Another canal appeared, on their north, running parallel. This one was of much more modest dimensions than the great ditch, but it contained water. It went on, day after day, while Flojian visualized legions of men wielding spades. “Our assumption has always been that they had a representative government of some sort. But I can’t see how these engineering feats could have been accomplished without slaves.”

“You really think that’s true?” asked Quait. The Baranjis had owned slaves, but the little that survived of Roadmaker literature suggested a race of free people.

“How else could they have done these things? It’s not so obvious on the highways, where you just think of a lot of people pouring concrete. But this canal, and the other one—?”

They were riding now, moving at a steady pace. They passed a downed bridge that blocked the canal. The day was bright and sunny, flowers were blooming, and the air was clean and cool. Chaka glanced at a turtle sunning itself on the wreckage.

At the end of their fourth day on the canal, it intersected with a wide, quiet river. There was a blackened city on the north. They forded the river and camped.

During the night, a band of Tuks, numbering eight or nine, rode confidently in on them, with the clear intention of shooting everyone. Flojian, who’d been on watch, put the would-be raiders to sleep. (One fell into the fire and was badly burned.) But during the momentary confusion Chaka woke up, tried to use her wedge, and afterward insisted that it had had no effect. The lamp, which had once glowed a bright green when she squeezed, now produced a somber red. In the morning, when their prisoners had begun to come around, she tried it again. There was no visible result.

She armed herself with one of the extra units.

The man who’d been burned died. They bound the others, appropriated a couple of their horses, and debated taking their rifles. But they were a different caliber from the smaller Illyrian weapons. So ultimately they simply pitched everything into the canal and drove off the spare animals. They followed their custom by leaving a dull knife for the captives.

Shay’s trail had been running parallel, not only to the canal, but also to a giant double highway. Eventually the two connected, and they climbed onto the road in time to cross another north-south river. They were still headed east. The canal curved north and vanished into the wilderness.

The great roads were subject to earth movements, flood, severe weather, and the passage of time. Flojian recalled his father’s predictions that they were fast disappearing, sinking into the wilderness, and that eventually they would disappear altogether and become the stuff of legend.
When they cannot be seen
, Karik had said,
who will believe they were ever there?

The new highway was covered with a thick coat of soil, and in many places it was difficult to distinguish the roadbed from the forest. In others it soared across ravines and lakes, its concrete base gleaming in the sun. In one of these places, it simply went into a long slow descent and plunged directly into a hillside. It did not reappear.

There was a spring nearby, and it seemed a good time to quit for the day. Chaka spotted some quail and went off to hunt down dinner while the others unloaded the horses and made camp.

The forest was a conglomeration of sycamore and birch, pine and maple. Clusters of daffodils and mayflowers had bloomed, and marvelous white-leafed flowers with white and orchid-colored blossoms grew in moist shady soil, usually near trees. She was looking for a good place to set up when she came face to face with a turkey.

The bird squawked and tried to clear out, but Chaka had her rifle at the ready.

As she recovered the animal, a break in the trees revealed a disk, very much like the ones they’d seen at the Devil’s Eye and the maglev station. It was about a half-mile away, and she stood watching it change colors in the setting sun.

They baked bread and added some carrots and berries to the turkey, and washed everything down with Jeryk’s wine. The wine might have been exceptionally good, or it might have been too long since their last round. In any case, they enjoyed dinner thoroughly. After they’d washed up, Quait suggested they take a closer look at the disk. Flojian reluctantly agreed to stay with the horses. “Be careful,” he said. “I don’t want to be left alone out here.”

The sun was down and the forest had grown dark and restless. It smelled of pine and fresh clay and old wood. Occasionally, the gleam of their lamps caught eyes which blinked and were gone. The ground was matted with dead leaves and straw. The wind moved above them, through the night.

It took almost an hour to find it in the dark. When they did, Quait said that it was bigger than the other disks. Certainly the design was different, but it was quite obviously of the same family of objects, although this one was on the ground rather than on a roof. It was seated in a huge metal mount, several times Chaka’s height, and angled toward the sky. The lower sections were encrusted with vines and vegetation. If it had been designed to move, it clearly had not done so for a long time.

They saw another reflection in the treetops directly ahead, which turned out to be a second disk. It was identical to the first, roughly six minutes away. Another lay six minutes beyond that. And a fourth stretched out to the flank. All separated by the same approximate distance.

Chaka and Quait kept close together. Although they believed that they held enlightened views, and would have indignantly rejected any charge they were superstitious, they nevertheless found the combination of dark forest and alien symmetry disquieting. The pattern of the objects, and the fact that they seemed pointed toward the heavens, suggested that the area had been used for religious services.

They were about to concede there was little more they could do in the forest at night when they saw a brick building among the trees. It was a bleak, worn structure, three stories high, ugly, squat, unadorned. Most of the windows were out. A small disk, different in design as well as size from the ones in the woods, was mounted on the roof. It rose just above tree level, and had a clear view of the moon. In front, a fountain had gone to dust.

There was a set of double doors in the rear. Someone had painted
MOLE LOVES TUSHU
across them. The words were faded, and very old.

The doors in front were made of heavy glass set in pseudo-metal frames. One of them was on the ground, the glass still whole.

Inside, a plaque read:

THE PLANETARY SOCIETY
2011

They passed through a set of inner doors. Stairs mounted to the upper floors; a desk was situated on the left; and a long corridor ran to the back of the building. Several rooms opened off the passageway.

They looked into the first. The lamplight fell across several chairs and a desk. Windows were missing. An old carpet had turned to dust. The place smelled of the centuries.

They moved from room to room. Near the far end of the corridor the floor gave way beneath Quait and he bruised a shin. The noise set something outside fluttering.

He rubbed the injury, leaning against a wall. “If there’s a hole,” he said, “I’ll find it.”