The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25

by Gardner Dozois

Valo’s eyes brightened. “May I? I don’t want to get in the way.”

  “I haven’t been up yet today, and they’ll be finishing up soon. Scaffold or stairwell?”

  Valo looked at the scaffolding against one face of the pillar, the ladders tied into place within it, and shivered. “I can’t believe people go up that. Stairs, I think.”

  Kit followed Valo. The steep internal stair was three feet wide and endlessly turning, five steps up and then a platform; turn to the left, and then five more steps and turn. Eventually, the stairs would need to be lit by lanterns set into alcoves at every third turning, but today Kit and Valo felt their way up, fingers trailing along the cold, damp stone, a small lantern in Valo’s hand.

  The stairwell smelled of water and earth and the thin smell of the burning lamp oil. Some of the workers hated the stairs and preferred the ladders outside, but Kit liked it. For these few moments, he was part of his bridge, a strong bone buried deep in flesh he had created.

  They came out at the top and paused a moment to look around the unfinished courses, and the black silhouette of the winch against the dulling sky. The last few workers were breaking down a shear leg, which had been used to move blocks around the pillar. A lantern hung from a pole jammed into one of the holes the laborers would fill with rods and molten iron, later in construction. Kit nodded to them as Valo went to an edge to look down.

  “It is wonderful,” Valo said, smiling. “Being high like this – you can look right down into people’s kitchen yards. Look, Teli Carpenter has a pig smoking.”

  “You don’t need to see it to know that,” Kit said drily. “I’ve been smelling it for two days.”

  Valo snorted. “Can you see as far as White Peak yet?”

  “On a clear day, yes,” Kit said. “I was up here two—”

  A heavy sliding sound and a scream; Kit whirled to see one of the workers on her back, one of the shear leg’s timbers across her chest. Loreh Tanner, a local. Kit ran the few steps to Loreh and dropped beside her. One man, the man who had been working with her, said, “It slipped – oh Loreh, please hang on,” but Kit knew it was futile. She was pinned to the pillar, chest flattened, one shoulder visibly dislocated, unconscious, her breathing labored. Black foam bloomed from her lips in the lantern’s bad light.

  Kit took her cold hand. “It’s all right, Loreh. It’s all right.” It was a lie and in any case she could not hear him, but the others would. “Get Hall,” one of the workers said, and Kit nodded: Hall was a surgeon. And then, “And get Obal, someone. Where’s her husband?” Footsteps ran down the stairs and were lost into the hiss of rain just beginning and someone’s crying and Loreh’s wet breathing.

  Kit glanced up. His chest heaving, Valo stood staring at the body. Kit said to him, “Help find Hall,” and when the boy did not move, he repeated it, his voice sharper. Valo said nothing, did not stop looking at Loreh until he spun and ran down the stairs. Kit heard shouting, far below, as the first messenger ran toward the town.

  Loreh took a last shuddering breath and died.

  Kit looked at the others around Loreh’s body. The man holding Loreh’s other hand pressed his face against it, crying helplessly. The two other workers left here knelt at her feet, a man and a woman, huddled close though they were not a couple. “Tell me,” he said.

  “I tried to stop it from hitting her,” the woman said. She cradled one arm: obviously broken, though she didn’t seem to have noticed. “But it just kept falling.”

  “She was tired; she must have gotten careless,” the man said, and the broken-armed woman said, “I don’t want to think about that sound.” Words fell from them like blood from a cut.

  Kit listened. This was what they needed right now, to speak and to be heard. So he listened, and when the others came, Loreh’s husband white-lipped and angry-eyed, and the surgeon Obal and six other workers, Kit listened to them as well, and gradually moved them down through the pillar and back toward the warm lights and comfort of Farside.

  Kit had lost people before, and it was always like this. There would be tears tonight, and anger at him and at his bridge, anger at fate for permitting this. There would be sadness, and nightmares. There would be lovemaking, and the holding close of children and friends and dogs – affirmations of life in the cold wet night.

  His tutor at University had said, during one of her frequent digressions from the nature of materials and the principles of architecture, “Things will go wrong.”

  It was winter, but in spite of the falling snow they walked slowly to the coffee house, as Skossa looked for purchase for her cane. She continued, “On long projects, you’ll forget that you’re not one of them. But if there’s an accident? You’re slapped in the face with it. whatever you’re feeling? Doesn’t matter. Guilty, grieving, alone, worried about the schedule. None of it. What matters is their feelings. So listen to them. Respect what they’re going through.”

  She paused then, tapped her cane against the ground thoughtfully. “No, I lie. It does matter, but you will have to find your own strength, your own resources elsewhere.”

  “Friends?” Kit said doubtfully. He knew already that he wanted a career like his father’s. He would not be in the same place for more than a few years at a time.

  “Yes, friends.” Snow collected on Skossa’s hair, but she didn’t seem to notice. “Kit, I worry about you. You’re good with people, I’ve seen it. You like them. But there’s a limit for you.” He opened his mouth to protest, but she held up her hand to silence him. “I know. You do care. But inside the framework of a project. Right now it’s your studies. Later it’ll be roads and bridges. But people around you – their lives go on outside the framework. They’re not just tools to your hand, even likeable tools. Your life should go on, too. You should have more than roads to live for. Because if something does go wrong, you’ll need what you’re feeling to matter, to someone somewhere, anyway.”

  Kit walked through Farside toward The Red Lurcher. Most people were home or at one of the taverns by now, a village turned inward; but he heard footsteps running behind him. He turned quickly – it was not unknown for people reeling from a loss to strike at whatever they blamed, and sometimes that was a person.

  It was Valo. Though his fists were balled, Kit could tell immediately that he was angry but that he was not looking for a fight. For a moment, Kit wished he didn’t need to listen, that he could just go back to his rooms and sleep for a thousand hours; but there was a stricken look in Valo’s eyes: Valo, who looked so much like Rasali. He hoped that Rasali and Loreh hadn’t been close.

  Kit said gently, “Why aren’t you inside? It’s cold.” As he said it, he realized suddenly that it was cold; the rain had settled into a steady cold flow.

  “I will, I was, I mean, but I came out for a second, because I thought maybe I could find you, because—”

  The boy was shivering, too. “Where are your friends? Let’s get you inside. It’ll be better there.”

  “No,” he said. “I have to know first. It’s like this always? If I do this, build things, it’ll happen for me? Someone will die?”

  “It might. It probably will, eventually.”

  Valo said an unexpected thing. “I see. It’s just that she had just gotten married.”

  The blood on Loreh’s lips, the wet sound of her crushed chest as she took her last breaths—“Yes,” Kit said. “She was.”

  “I just . . . I had to know if I need to ready for this.” It seemed callous, but Ferrys were used to dying, to death. “I guess I’ll find out.”

  “I hope you don’t have to.” The rain was getting heavier. “You should be inside, Valo.”

  Valo nodded. “Rasali – I wish she were here. She could help maybe. You should go in, too. You’re shivering.”

  Kit watched him go. Valo had not invited him to accompany him back into the light and the warmth; he knew better than to expect that, but for a moment he had permitted himself to hope otherwise.

  Kit slipped through the stables and
through the back door at The Bitch. Wisdon Innkeep, hands full of mugs for the taproom, saw him and nodded, face unsmiling but not hostile. That was good, Kit thought: as good as it would get, tonight.

  He entered his room and shut the door, leaned his back to it as if holding the world out. Someone had already been in his room: a lamp had been lit against the darkness, a fire laid, and bread and cheese and a tankard of ale set by the window to stay cool.

  He began to cry.

  The news went across the river by signal flags. No one worked on the bridge the next day, or the day after that. Kit did all the right things, letting his grief and guilt overwhelm him only when he was alone, huddled in front of the fire in his room.

  The third day, Rasali arrived from Nearside with a boat filled with crates of northland herbs on their way east. Kit was sitting in The Bitch’s taproom, listening. People were coping, starting to look forward again. They should be able to get back to it soon, the next clear day. He would offer them something that would be an immediate, visible accomplishment, something different, perhaps guidelining the ramp.

  He didn’t see Rasali come into the taproom; only felt her hand on his shoulder and heard her voice in his ear. “Come with me,” she murmured.

  He looked up puzzled, as though she was a stranger. “Rasali Ferry, why are you here?”

  She said only, “Come for a walk, Kit.”

  It was raining, but he accompanied her anyway, pulling a scarf over his head when the first cold drops hit his face.

  She said nothing as they splashed through Farside. She was leading him somewhere, but he didn’t care where, grateful not to have to be the decisive one, the strong one. After a time, she opened a door and led him through it into a small room filled with light and warmth.

  “My house,” she said. “And Valo’s. He’s still at the boatyard. Sit.”

  She pointed and Kit dropped onto the settle beside the fire. Rasali swiveled a pot hanging from a bracket out of the fire and ladled something out. She handed a mug to him and sat. “So. Drink.”

  It was spiced porter, and the warmth eased into the tightness in his chest. “Thank you.”

  “Talk.”

  “This is such a loss for you all, I know,” he said. “Did you know Loreh well?”

  She shook her head. “This is not for me, this is for you. Tell me.”

  “I’m fine,” he said, and when she didn’t say anything, he repeated, with a flicker of anger: “I’m fine, Rasali. I can handle this.”

  “Probably you can,” Rasali said. “But you’re not fine. She died, and it was your bridge she died for. You don’t feel responsible? I don’t believe it.”

  “Of course I feel responsible,” he snapped.

  The fire cast gold light across her broad cheekbones when she turned her face to him, but to his surprise she said nothing, only looked at him and waited.

  “She’s not the first,” Kit said, surprising himself. “The first project I had sole charge of, a tollgate. Such a little project, such a dumb little project to lose someone on. The wood frame for the passageway collapsed before we got the keystone in. The whole arch came down. Someone got killed.” It had been a very young man, slim and tall, with a limp. He was raising his little sister; she hadn’t been more than ten. Running loose in the fields around the site, she had missed the collapse, the boy’s death. Dafuen? Naus? He couldn’t remember his name. And the girl – what had her name been? I should remember. I owe that much to them.

  “Every time I lose someone,” he said at last, “I remember the others. There’ve been twelve, in twenty-three years. Not so many, considering. Building’s dangerous. My record’s better than most.”

  “But it doesn’t matter, does it?” she said. “You still feel you killed each one of them, as surely as if you’d thrown them off a bridge yourself.”

  “It’s my responsibility. The first one, Duar—” That had been his name; there it was. The name loosened something in Kit. His face warmed: tears, hot tears running down his face.

  “It’s all right,” she said. She held him until he stopped crying.

  “How did you know?” he said finally.

  “I am the eldest surviving member of the Ferry family,” she said. “My aunt died seven years ago. And then I watched my brother leave to cross the mist, three years ago now. It was a perfect day, calm and sunny, but he never made it. He went instead of me because on that day the river felt wrong to me. It could have been me. It should have, maybe. So I understand.”

  She stretched a little. “Not that most people don’t. If Petro Housewright sends his daughter to select timber in the mountains, and she doesn’t come back—eaten by wolves, struck by lightning, I don’t know – is Petro to blame? It’s probably the wolves or the lightning. Maybe it’s the daughter, if she did something stupid. And it is Petro, a little; she wouldn’t have been there at all if he hadn’t sent her. And it’s her mother for being fearless and teaching that to her daughter; and Thorn Green for wanting a new room to his house. Everyone, except maybe the wolves, feels at least a little responsible. This path leads nowhere. Loreh would have died sooner or later.” Rasali added softly, “We all do.”

  “Can you accept death so readily?” he asked. “Yours, even?”

  She leaned back, her face suddenly weary. “What else can I do, Kit? Someone must ferry, and I am better suited than most – and by more than my blood. I love the mist, its currents and the smell of it and the power in my body as I push us all through. Petro’s daughter – she did not want to die when the wolves came, I’m sure; but she loved selecting timber.”

  “If it comes for you?” he said softly. “Would you be so sanguine then?”

  She laughed, and the pensiveness was gone. “No, indeed. I will curse the stars and go down fighting. But it will still have been a wonderful thing, to cross the mist.”

  At University, Kit’s relationships had all been casual. There were lectures that everyone attended, and he lived near streets and pubs crowded with students; but the physical students had a tradition of keeping to themselves that was rooted in the personal preferences of their predecessors, and in their own. The only people who worked harder than the engineers were the ale-makers, the University joke went. Kit and the other physical students talked and drank and roomed and slept together.

  In his third year, he met Domhu Canna at the arcade where he bought vellums and paper: a small woman with a heart-shaped face and hair in black clouds she kept somewhat confined by gray ribands. She was a philosophical student from a city two thousand miles to the east, on the coast.

  He was fascinated. Her mind was abrupt and fish-quick and made connections he didn’t understand. To her, everything was a metaphor, a symbol for something else. People, she said, could be better understood by comparing their lives to animals, to the seasons, to the structure of certain lyrical songs, to a gambling game.

  This was another form of pattern-making, he saw. Perhaps people were like teamed oxen to be led, or like metals to be smelted and shaped to one’s purpose; or as the stones for a dry-laid wall, which had to be carefully selected for shape and strength, and sorted, and placed. This last suited him best. What held them together was no external mortar but their own weight, and the planning and patience of the drystone builder. But it was an inadequate metaphor: people were this, but they were all the other things, as well.

  He never understood what Domhu found attractive in him. They never talked about regularizing their relationship. When her studies were done halfway through his final year, she returned to her city to help found a new university, and in any case her people did not enter into term marriages. They separated amicably, and with a sense of loss on his part at least; but it did not occur to him until years later that things might have been different.

  The winter was rainy, but there were days they could work, and they did. By spring, there had been other deaths unrelated to the bridge on both banks: a woman who died in childbirth, a child who had never breathed properl
y in his short life; two fisherfolk lost when they capsized; several who died for the various reasons that old or sick people died.

  Over the spring and summer they finished the anchorages, featureless masses of blocks and mortar anchored to the bedrock. They were buried so that only a few courses of stone showed above the ground. The anchoring bolts were each tall as a man, hidden safely behind the portals through which the chains would pass.

  The Farside pillar was finished by midwinter of the third year, well before the Nearside tower. Jenner and Teniant Planner had perfected a signal system that allowed detailed technical information to pass between the banks, and documents traveled each time a ferry crossed. Rasali made sixty-eight trips back and forth; though he spent much of his time with Kit, Valo made twenty. Kit did not cross the mist at all unless the flags told him he must.

  It was early spring and Kit was in Farside when the signals went up: Message. Imperial seal.

  He went to Rasali at once.

  “I can’t go,” she said. “I just got here yesterday. The Big Ones—”

  “I have to get across, and Valo’s on Nearside. There’s news from the capital.”

  “News has always waited before.”

  “No, it hasn’t. You forced it to, but news waited restlessly, pacing along the levee until we could pick it up.”

  “Use the flags,” she said, a little impatiently.

  “They can’t be broken by anyone but me or Jenner. He’s over here. I’m sorry,” he said, thinking of her brother, dead four years before.

  “If you die no one can read it, either,” she said, but they left just after dusk anyway. “If we must go, better then than earlier or later,” she said.

  He met her at the upper dock at dusk. The sky was streaked with bright bands of green and gold, clouds catching the last of the sun, but they radiated no light, themselves just reflections. The current down the river was steady. And light. The mist between the levees was already in shadow, shaped into smooth dunes twenty feet high.