Eternity Road Read online

  Raney put some water out for Piper. “Let’s go inside,” he said.

  They strolled across the hard ground, not saying anything. It was as if a wall had gone up between them. Raney wasn’t wearing a jacket, so he should have been cold. But he took his time anyhow, walking with his hands pushed into his back pockets. When they got to the house, he filled the teapot with water, hung it on the bar, and swung the bar over the fire. Then he tossed on another log.

  “Dolian is still trying to get his nephew appointed as an auditor,” he said, trying to steer them to a new subject. He talked for a while, and Chaka half listened. The water boiled and he prepared the tea and served it in two large steaming vessels. “Imported from Argon,” he said. He sat down beside her. “I’m glad you came.”

  Chaka decided to let hers cool. “I think Shannon might change his mind,” she said.

  Raney frowned. “Change his mind? About what?”

  “When we’re ready to go, I believe he’ll come with us.”

  She listened to him breathe. “Chaka, if Silas doesn’t think it’s worthwhile, it’s not worthwhile.” He looked casually at her, as if his point were too obvious to dispute.

  “I don’t care what Silas thinks,” she said harshly. “I want to know what happened to my brother.”

  She listened to him sigh. He tasted the tea, and commented that it was pretty good.

  “Raney,” she said, “I’m going to do this.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t.” He spoke softly, in the tone he used when he was trying to be authoritative. His eyes were round and tentative and worried.

  “You haven’t changed your mind about going, have you?”

  “Chaka, I never agreed to go. I said I’d go if it seemed reasonable.”

  She could feel the heat rising into her cheeks. “That’s not what I remember.”

  “Look,” he said, “we can’t just go running into the wilderness. We might not come back.” He shook his head slowly and put one hand on her shoulder. It felt stiff and cold. A stranger’s hand. “We’ve got a good life here.” His voice softened. “Chaka, I’d like you to marry me—” His breathing had become irregular. “We have everything that we need to make us happy.”

  Maddeningly, tears rushed into her eyes. She knew how good life with him would be, building a family, whiling away the years and never again being alone.

  His lips brushed hers and they clung to each other for a long moment. His heart beat against her and his hand caressed her cheek. She responded with a long wet kiss and then abruptly pushed away from him. “You’ll never lose me, Raney, unless you want to. But I am going to do this.”

  He was getting that hurt puppy look. “Chaka, there’s no way I can just pick up and leave for six months.”

  “You didn’t mention that before.”

  “I didn’t think it would come to this. If I leave the shop, they’ll replace me in a minute. I’ve got a good career here. We’ll need it to support us, and if I go on this thing I’d just be throwing everything away. It’s different for you. You can come back and pick up where you left off.”

  She stared at him. “I suppose so,” she said. She got up and pulled on her jacket.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Home. I need to think things out.”

  “Chaka, I don’t want you to be angry about this. But I need you to be reasonable.”

  “I know,” she said. “Tonight, everyone wants me to be reasonable.”

  She was on her feet and out onto the porch, not hearing what else he was saying. She got to Piper, threw the saddle on as Raney came through the barn door, drew the straps tight, pushed him away, and mounted.

  “Chaka—”

  “Later, Raney,” she said. “We can talk about it later.”

  She rode past him, out into the night. The wind pulled at the trees, and there was a hint of rain.

  If you must go, take no strangers. Take nobody you wouldn’t trust with your life.

  7

  If you must go, take no strangers. Take nobody you wouldn’t trust with your life. During the next week, Chaka discovered how few persons fit Shannon’s prescription. Those she had confidence in were all in Raney’s camp: They saw it as their duty to dissuade her from the project. And they would under no circumstances support a second expedition. It’s important, several of them told her, to learn from history. On the other hand, people she did not know arrived at her door and offered to join. Most seemed unstable or unreliable. A few wanted to be paid.

  It’s likely that the second expedition might never have happened had not Quait Esterhok conceived, almost simultaneously, two passions: one for Mark Twain, and the other for Chaka Milana.

  The former led him, perhaps for the first time, to understand the nature of what had been lost with the Roadmaker collapse. Because the League cities had no printing press, they did not possess the novel as an art form. Contemporary writers limited themselves to practical manuals; to philosophical, religious, legal, and ethical tracts; and to histories.

  It was not the literary form, however, which left so strong an impression on Quait. Rather, it was the voice, which seemed so energetic and full of life, so completely at odds with the formalized, stiff writing style of the Illyrians. It was, he told Silas, as if this Mark Twain were sitting right in the room. “What do we know about him?” he asked.

  Silas outlined the limited knowledge they had: that he’d lived in a place called Hartford; that he’d been born in the Roadmaker year 1835 (no one knew when that was); that he was conscious of the delays of government, as shown in “The Facts in the Case of the Great Beef Contract”; and that he’d been a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi, although the precise nature of his riverboat remained a mystery.

  Yet, despite the paucity of facts, Quait felt that he knew Mark Twain almost as well as he knew Silas.

  Quait’s second passion developed out of the first. Stealing time with the book was not easy. Inevitably it was in the hands of the copiers or the scholars, or both. So Quait had got into the habit of coming by and watching the progress of the work, reading over shoulders, and planning where he would get the funds to buy one of the books when it had actually been published. He arrived one afternoon to find another enthusiast also trying to read while a visiting scholar made notes on chapter four. They were in a back room, where the book was kept secure from the general public.

  The enthusiast was a striking young woman whose shoulder-length red hair told him immediately who she was. “I’ve heard a lot about you from Silas,” he said.

  Chaka nodded graciously. “You’re—?”

  “Quait Esterhok.” He drew up another chair and sat down beside her. “Chapter four describes the immoderate language used in and around Camelot.”

  She smiled. “Have you had a chance to read any of it?”

  “In bits and pieces,” Quait said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  She nodded. “Yes. He’s very contemporary. And traveling backward in time. That’s a wild idea.”

  The scholar, who was pinched-looking with strawcolored hair, glanced up with obvious irritation. “Do you mind?” he asked.

  “Sorry,” said Chaka. An hourglass stood on the worktable. Its sands had almost run out. “I’ve got to go anyway,” she said.

  “It’s okay,” said Quait. “I’ll be quiet.”

  “No, I’ve overstayed my time.” She waited a moment to finish what she’d been reading, and then she looked up at him. Her eyes were blue and alive and they took him prisoner on the spot. “Silas says there’ll be copies ready within another week.”

  “Good.” Quait cast about for a way to prolong the interview. But his mind had gone numb.

  “Nice to meet you, Quait.” She rose, smiled, and walked off. He watched her stride to the desk, sign out, and leave the library.

  “You’ve been keeping something from me, Silas.”

  “And what is that?” he asked. They’d met for dinner at the Lost Cause.

  “I
met Chaka Milana today.” Quait rolled his eyes. “She looks pretty good.”

  Silas shook his head. “I don’t think she’s very happy with me right now.”

  “Why’s that?”

  The waiter brought wine and filled their glasses. “I didn’t take her frontier scout very seriously.”

  “Oh.” Quait frowned. “I got the impression the way you described it that you and she had agreed that the evidence was insufficient.”

  Silas looked uncomfortable. “Not quite,” he said. “I guess that was my conclusion. She’s determined to pursue this business. It’s like ten years ago all over again. She’s becoming obsessed. She behaves as if it’s just a matter of going out into the woods for a few days. Anyway, she’s been talking to people at the Imperium, and elsewhere, trying to put together an expedition.”

  “Is she having any luck?”

  “I hope not. Look, Quait, nobody would like to find that place more than I do. Her woodsman found some marks on trees, but they could be anything. What’s going to happen is, she’ll put together a mission, it’ll get a few miles outside the borders, and they’ll run out of signs. Then they’ll come back, and anybody with a professional reputation to lose will very surely lose it. I can’t afford to get mixed up in that.”

  “I didn’t say anything,” said Quait.

  “Well, you were looking at me as if you disapproved. Even what’s-his-name, Shannon, admitted he couldn’t make any guarantees.”

  “Shannon?”

  “The woodsy guy.”

  Quait nodded. “You won’t get a guarantee, Silas, with a thing like this. Not ever. You know that as well as I do.”

  “I know.” A candle burned in a globe on the table. Silas stared at it. “I wasn’t looking for a guarantee, Quait. You know that.”

  Quait tried his wine, licked his lips, put it down. “Silas, may I speak frankly?”

  “Of course.”

  “What is it that frightens you? What is it that keeps you from going after the one thing in this life that has real meaning for you? You backed off nine years ago, and you’re backing off now.”

  “And I was right nine years ago, wasn’t I?”

  “I don’t know. Were you?”

  “Nobody came back. Except Karik.”

  Quait shrugged. “Maybe you would have made the difference.” He leaned forward. “Silas, I know you’d risk your reputation if you went. I know the odds for success aren’t good. But I think basing your decision on what someone else will think doesn’t sound like you.”

  “Sure it does,” said Silas. “I’ve always been concerned about public opinion. I have to be. My livelihood depends on it.”

  “Then maybe you’re right,” he said. “Maybe, if it’s out there, you’re not the right person to find it. But however that may be, I think you’ve been asking the wrong question. I’m more inclined to wonder what might happen if Shannon is right? If the trail is complete. If Haven really is at the end of it.”

  “That’s a lot of if’s.”

  “Yes. Well, I think we’ve already agreed about the odds. But anybody can do stuff when the odds are in their favor. Or when there’s no risk. Right?”

  Silas liked Bernard Shaw. He spent the evening in the Senate library. He was leafing through Mrs. Warren’s Profession, but it was the conversation with Quait that drove his mood. The Illyrians also possessed Man and Superman, Major Barbara, and Too True to Be Good, in addition to a fragment of Saint Joan.

  “I’m going after the prize, Silas,” Karik had said. “It’s all out there. Shakespeare and Dante and the Roadmaker histories. And their mathematics and science. It’s waiting for us. But we need you.”

  Silas had rejected the offer, had turned away. It was nonsense. He’d so thoroughly convinced himself that now he suspected he wanted it to be nonsense. Does a man clasp old beliefs, and old fears, so desperately?

  And it had come again.

  A prize so vast that no risk was too great. But this time, there’d be no Karik Endine to plunge into the wilderness. Only a young woman whose passions were running away with her head, and his infatuated former student.

  Idly, he turned the pages of Mrs. Warren’s Profession, staring at the script, not really reading. But one line jumped out at him. It was Vivie’s comment to Mrs. Warren, near the end of Act IV: If I had been you, mother, I might have done as you did; but I should not have lived one life and believed in another.

  After a while, Silas put the book away.

  He walked slowly home, up the curving road, past candle-lit cottages and the bakeshop and Cape’s Apothecary. Tomorrow he would send a message to Chaka, and then he would ask the Board of Regents to finance the attempt.

  Once it became official that a second expedition would be mounted, Silas became the center of attention at the Imperium. Close friends advised him against the foray; others, not so close, made no real effort to hide their amusement. Nevertheless, all his colleagues, regardless of their views, seemed to feel required to explain publicly why they were unable to join the hunt. After all, the masters were supposed to have invested their lives in the pursuit of wisdom and knowledge. But, as one mathematician pointed out, if his desire for knowledge suggested he should go, wisdom dictated he stay put.

  Silas immediately announced his intention to accompany the mission, and argued that it should leave as soon as possible. The first expedition had been gone more than six months, he said. We know we’ll be heading north, and we want to be back before winter sets in. Silas put himself at Chaka’s disposal, and they set February 16 as the date for departure.

  Silas used his political connections to get Quait assigned as an ad hoc military escort, thereby saving his pay. In addition, he informed Chaka that Quait had been responsible for his change of heart. When she took him aside to thank him, Quait pretended to a degree of humility, but took care not to overdo it.

  It appeared for a time there would be only three of them. Or four, if Chaka was right and Shannon eventually joined. That’s okay, Quait insisted. He argued that a smaller group might have a better chance to succeed. “We’ll be more able to function as a single person, and less likely to run into personality differences. And three people aren’t going to make the Tuks nervous.”

  Chaka spent much of the time leading up to departure reading every scrap of information she could find relating to Haven and Abraham Polk.

  Most of the tales agreed that Polk had been captain of the Quebec, a warship that could sail at high speed against the wind. (Modern authorities thought there might have been a kernel of truth in the legend, that there might have been such a ship, and that it may have been named the Quebec. But no one knew who the name referred to, and of course they dismissed the more fanciful details, e,g., that it had been a submersible.) Polk’s naval efforts, traditionally, had consisted of salvage and rescue.

  The Travels maintained that, after the Plague subsided, the Quebec prowled the seas under Polk’s direction for seventy-seven years (surely a mystic number), gathering survivors and returning them to Haven, which was designed to survive the general collapse. He also collected as much as he could of the art, science, literature, and history of the dead civilization, storing it against the ages. The names of his comrades are almost as famous as his: Casey Winckelhaus, his female second-in-command; Harry Schroeder, a tough, iconoclastic shoemaker’s son who gave his life for his commander off Copenhagen; Jennifer Whitlaw, whose account of the voyages, ironically now lost, gave them the name by which they are best known: the October Patrol.

  Polk himself vanished at sea, called home by the Goddess when his work was done. Haven then shut its doors against the general dissolution and embarked on an effort to preserve what it had saved. Generations of scholars devoted themselves to maintaining and, as the texts yellowed and began to crumble, copying the great works in their care. And they waited for a new civilization to rise. If the legend is correct, they are still waiting.

  Chaka dug out every illustration she could find of the
Quebec and of Haven. The ship was commonly depicted as a schooner without sails, but with its bridge and forecastle enclosed inside a metal shell.

  Haven itself, seen from the outside, revealed an aspect that was not greatly unlike the cliff and sea in the thirteenth sketch. She found more illustrations of the mountain car, which was alleged to have traveled the cliffs between Haven and Polk’s supply base.

  The Quebec operated out of a chamber that had direct access to the sea. It was said the vessel could pass from its nest into the ocean without ever being seen. It was all so imaginative that she could not look at the material without dismissing it out of hand.

  Midway through the final week of preparations, Flojian showed up at the Imperium and took Silas aside. He looked haggard and red-eyed, as if he had not been sleeping well. “I want to go with you,” he said.

  Flojian had never shown any interest in academic pursuits. Moreover, he seemed to be the sort of man whose idea of hardship was having to go outside for fresh water. “Why?” asked Silas. The consensus now was to keep the group small. Furthermore, the regents favored a strategy that would restrain expenses.

  “The stories about my father.”

  Silas squirmed. “Don’t pay any attention to them. People like to talk.” He shook his head.

  Flojian tried to straighten his shoulders. “I have a right to be with you. I can pay my own way. Whether you want me to or not, I’m coming.”

  Silas opposed the proposal. “Plans have already been made,” he explained. “Anyway, it’ll be a difficult trip. This won’t be any pot of tulips.” He winced after that phrase, but he was struggling. Flojian was after all a rather useless individual, whose life had always been circumscribed by money and comfort.

  But he persisted. “You can’t keep me from coming if I want to,” he said. “Please, Silas. I know you don’t think much of me, but you owe it to my father.”

  “I’ll put it to the others,” Silas promised, “and let you know.”