The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25

by Gardner Dozois

  It was harder this time, or perhaps just different. Perhaps he was different. He had allowed himself to belong to the country on either side of the bridge; to have more was to have more to miss when it was taken away.

  Rasali – what would her life look like?

  Valo danced by, his arm around a woman half again as tall as he – Rica Bridger – and Kit caught his arm. “Where is Rasali?” he shouted, then, knowing he could not be heard over the noise of drums and pipes, mouthed: Rasali. He didn’t hear what Valo said but followed his pointing hand.

  Rasali was alone, flat on her back on the river side of the levee, looking up. There were no moons, so the Sky Mist hung close overhead, a river of stars that poured north to south like the river itself. Kit knelt a few feet away. “Rasali Ferry of Farside?”

  Her teeth flashed in the dark. “Kit Meinem of Atyar.”

  He lay beside her. The grass was like bad straw, coarse against his back and neck. Without looking at him, she passed a jar of something. Its taste was strong as tar, and Kit gasped for a moment at the bite of it.

  “I did not mean—” he started, but trailed off, unsure how to continue.

  “Yes,” she said, and he knew she had heard the words he didn’t say. Her voice contained a shrug. “Many people born into a Ferry family never cross the mist.”

  “But you—” He stopped, felt carefully for his words. “Maybe others don’t, but you do. And I think maybe you must do so.”

  “Just as you must build,” she said softly. “That’s clever of you, to realize that.”

  “And there will be no need after this, will there? Not on boats, anyway. We’ll still need fish-skin, so they’ll still be out, but they—”

  “—stay close to shore,” she said.

  “And you?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, Kit. Days come, days go. I go onto the mist or I don’t. I live or I don’t. There is no certainty, but there never is.”

  “It doesn’t distress you?”

  “Of course it does. I love and I hate this bridge of yours. I will pine for the mist, for the need to cross it. But I do not want to be part of a family that all die young, without even a corpse for the burning. If I have a child, she will not need to make the decision I did: to cross the mist and die, or to stay safe on one side of the world, and never see the other. She will lose something. She will gain something else.”

  “Do you hate me?” he said finally, afraid of the answer, afraid of any answer she might give.

  “No. Oh, no.” She rolled over to him and kissed his mouth, and Kit could not say if the salt he tasted was from her tears or his own.

  The autumn was spent getting the chains across the river. In the days after the crossing, the rope was linked to another, and then pulled back the way it had come, coupled now; and then there were two ropes in parallel courses. It was tricky work, requiring careful communications through the signal towers, but it was completed without event; and Kit could at last get a good night’s sleep. To break the rope would have been to start anew with the long difficult crossing. Over the next days, each rope was replaced with fish-skin cable strong enough to take the weight of the chains until they were secured.

  The cables were hoisted to the tops of the pillars, to prefigure the path one of the eight chains would take: secured with heavy pins set in protected slots in the anchorages and then straight sharp lines to the saddles on the pillars and, two hundred feet above the mist, the long perfect catenary. A catwalk was suspended from the cables. For the first time, people could cross the mist without the boats, though few chose to do so except for the high-workers from the capital and the coast: a hundred men and women so strong and graceful that they seemed another species, and kept mostly to themselves. They were directed by a woman Kit had worked with before, Feinlin; the high-workers took no surnames. Something about Feinlin reminded him of Rasali.

  The weather grew colder and the days shorter, and Kit pushed hard to have the first two chains across before the winter rains began. There would be no heavy work once the ground got too wet to give sturdy purchase to the teams, and calculations to the contrary, Kit could not quite trust that cables, even fish-skin cables, would survive the weight of those immense arcs through an entire winter – or that a Big One would not take one down in the unthinking throes of some winter storm.

  The eyebars that would make up the chain were each ten feet long and required considerable manhandling to be linked with the bolts, each larger than a man’s forearm. The links became a chain, even more cumbersome. Winches pulled the chain’s end up to the saddles, and out onto the catwalk.

  After this, the work became even more difficult and painstaking. Feinlin and her people moved individual eyebars and pins out onto the catwalks and joined them in situ; a backbreaking, dangerous task that had to be exactly synchronized with the work on the other side of the river, so that the cable would not be stressed.

  Most nights Kit worked into the darkness. When the moons were bright enough, he, the high-workers, and the bridgewrights would work in shifts, day and night.

  He crossed the mist six more times that fall. The high-workers disliked having people on the catwalks, but he was the architect, after all, so he crossed once that way, struggling with vertigo. After that, he preferred the ferries. When he crossed once with Valo, they talked exclusively about the bridge – Valo had decided to stay until the bridge was complete and the ferries finished; but his mind was already full of the capital – but the other times, when it was Rasali, they were silent, listening to the hiss of the V-shaped scull moving in the mist. His fear of the mist decreased with each day they came closer to the bridge’s completion, though he couldn’t say why this was.

  When Kit did not work through the night and Rasali was on the same side of the mist, they spent their nights together, sometimes making love, at other times content to share drinks or play ninepins in The Deer’s Heart’s garden, at which Kit’s proficiency surprised everyone, including himself. He and Rasali did not talk again about what she would do when the bridge was complete – or what he would do, for that matter.

  The hard work was worth it. It was still warm enough that the iron didn’t freeze the high-workers’ hands on the day they placed the final bolt. The first chain was complete.

  Though work had slowed through the winter, the second and third chains were in place by spring, and the others were completed by the end of the summer.

  With the heavy work done, some of the workers returned to their homeplaces. More than half had taken the name Bridger or something similar. “We have changed things,” Kit said to Jenner on one of his Nearside visits, just before Jenner left for his new work. “No,” Jenner said: “You have changed things.” Kit did not respond, but held this close, and thought of it sometimes with mingled pride and fear.

  The workers who remained were high-men and -women, people who did not mind crawling about on the suspension chains securing the support ropes. For the last two years, the rope-makers for two hundred miles up-and downstream from the bridge had been twisting, cutting, and looping and reweaving the ends of the fish-skin cables that would support the road deck, each crate marked with the suspender’s position in the bridge. The cartons stood in carefully sorted, labeled towers in the field that had once been full of sheep.

  Kit’s work was now all paperwork, it seemed – so many invoices, so many reports for the capital – but he managed every day to watch the high-workers, their efficient motions. Sometimes he climbed to the tops of the pillars and looked down into the mist, and saw Rasali’s or Valo’s ferry, an elegant narrow shape half-hidden in tendrils of blazing white mist or pale gray fog.

  Kit lost one more worker, Tommer Bullkeeper, who climbed out onto the catwalk for a drunken bet and fell, with a maniacal cry that changed into unbalanced laughter as he vanished into the mist. His wife wept in mixed anger and grief, and the townspeople wore ash-color, and the bridge continued. Rasali held Kit when he cried in his room at The Red Lurcher. “Ne
ver mind,” she said. “Tommer was a good person: a drunk, but good to his sons and his wife, careful with animals. People have always died. The bridge doesn’t change that.”

  The towns changed shape as Kit watched. Commercial envoys from every direction gathered; many stayed in inns and homes, but some built small houses, shops, and warehouses. Many used the ferries, and it became common for these businessmen and -women to tip Rasali or Valo lavishly – “in hopes I never ride with you again,” they would say. Valo laughed and spent this money buying beer for his friends; the letter had come from University that he could begin his studies with the winter term, and he had many farewells to make. Rasali told no one, not even Kit, what she planned to do with hers.

  Beginning in the spring of the project’s fifth year, they attached the road deck. Wood planks wide enough for oxen two abreast were nailed together with iron struts to give stability. The bridge was made of several hundred sections, constructed on the work sites and then hauled out by workers. Each segment had farther to go before being placed and secured. The two towns celebrated all night the first time a Nearsider shouted from her side of the bridge, and was saluted by Farsider cheers. In the lengthening evenings, it became a pastime for people to walk onto the bridge and lie belly-down at its end, watching the mist so far below them. Sometimes dark shapes moved within it, but no one saw anything big enough to be a Big One. A few heedless locals dropped heavy stones from above to watch the mist twist away, opening holes into its depths; but their neighbors stopped them: “It’s not respectful,” one said; and, “Do you want to piss them off?” said another.

  Kit asked her, but Rasali never walked out with him. “I see enough from the river,” she said.

  Kit was Nearside, in his room in The Fish. He had lived in this room for five years, and it looked it: plans and time tables pinned to the walls. The chair by the fire was heaped with clothes, books, a length of red silk he had seen at a fair and could not resist; it had been years since he sat there. The plans in his folio and on the oversized table had been replaced with waybills and receipts for materials, payrolls, copies of correspondence between Kit and his sponsors in the government. The window was open, and Kit sat on the cupboard bed, watching a bee feel its way through the sun-filled air. He’d left half a pear on the table, and he was waiting to see if the bee would find it, and thinking about the little hexagonal cells of a beehive, whether they were stronger than squares were, and how he might test this.

  Feet ran along the corridor. His door flew open. Rasali stood there blinking in the light, which was so golden that Kit didn’t at first notice how pale she was, or the tears on her face. “What—” he said, as he swung off his bed. He came toward her.

  “Valo,” she said. “The Pearlfinder.”

  He held her. The bee left, then the sun, and still he held her as she rocked silently on the bed. Only when the square of sky in the window faded to purple, and the little moon’s crescent eased across it, did she speak. “Ah,” she said, a sigh like a gasp. “I am so tired.” She fell asleep, as quickly as that, with tears still wet on her face. Kit slipped from the room.

  The taproom was crowded, filled with ash-gray clothes, with soft voices and occasional sobs. Kit wondered for a moment if everyone had a set of mourning clothes always at hand, and what this meant about them.

  Brana Keep saw Kit in the doorway, and came from behind the bar to speak with him. “How is she?” she said.

  “Not good. I think she’s asleep right now,” Kit said. “Can you give me some food for her, something to drink?”

  Brana nodded, spoke to her daughter Lixa as she passed into the back, then returned. “How are you doing, Kit? You saw a fair amount of Valo yourself.”

  “Yes,” Kit said. Valo chasing the children through the field of stones, Valo laughing at the top of a tower, Valo serious-eyed, with a handbook of calculus in the shade of a half-built fishing boat. “What happened? She hasn’t said anything yet.”

  Brana gestured. “What can be said? Signal flags said he was going to cross just after midday; but he never came. When we signaled over, they said he had left when they first signaled.”

  “Could he be alive?” Kit asked, remembering the night that he and Rasali had lost the big scull, the extra hours it had taken for the crossing. “He might have broken the scull, landed somewhere downriver.”

  “No,” Brana said. “I know, that’s what we wanted to hope. Maybe we would have believed it for while before. But Asa, one of the strangers, the high-workers; she was working overhead and heard the boat capsize, heard him cry out. She couldn’t see anything, and didn’t know what she had heard until we figured it out.”

  “Three more months,” Kit said, mostly to himself. He saw Brana looking at him, so he clarified: “Three more months. The bridge would have been done. This wouldn’t have happened.”

  “This was today,” Brana said, “not three months from now. People die when they die; we grieve and move on, Kit. You’ve been with us long enough to understand how we see these things. Here’s the tray.”

  When Kit returned with the tray, Rasali was asleep. He watched her in the dark room, unwilling to light more than the single lamp he’d carried up with him. People die when they die. But he could not stop thinking about the bridge, its deck nearly finished. Another three months. Another month.

  When she awakened, there was a moment when she smiled at him, her face weary but calm. Then she remembered and her face tightened and she started crying again. When she was done, Kit got her to eat some bread and fish and cheese, and drink some watered wine. She did so obediently, like a child. When she was finished, she lay back against him, her matted hair pushing up into his mouth.

  “How can he be gone?”

  “I’m so sorry,” Kit said. “The bridge was so close to finished. Three more months, and this wouldn’t have—”

  She pulled away. “What? Wouldn’t have happened? Wouldn’t have had to happen?” She stood and faced him. “His death would have been unnecessary?”

  “I—” Kit began, but she interrupted him, new tears streaking her face.

  “He died, Kit. It wasn’t necessary, it wasn’t irrelevant, it wasn’t anything except the way things are. But he’s gone, and I’m not, and now what do I do, Kit? I lost my father, and my aunt, and my sister and my brother and my brother’s son, and now I lose the mist when the bridge’s done, and then what? What am I then? Who are the Ferry people then?”

  Kit knew the answer: however she changed, she would still be Rasali; her people would still be strong and clever and beautiful; the mist would still be there, and the Big Ones. But she wouldn’t be able to hear these words, not yet, not for months, maybe. So he held her, and let his own tears slip down his face, and tried not to think.

  The fairs to celebrate the opening of the bridge started days before midsummer, the official date. Representatives of Empire from Atyar polished their speeches and waited impatiently in their suite of tents, planted on hurriedly cleaned-up fields near (but not too near) Nearside. The town had bled northward until it surrounded the west pillar of the bridge. The land that had once been sheep-pasture at the foot of the pillar was crowded with fair-tents and temporary booths, cheek by jowl with more permanent shops of wood and stone, selling food and space for sleeping and the sorts of products a traveler might find herself in need of. Kit was proud of the streets; he had organized construction of the crosshatch of sturdy cobblestones, as something to do while he waited through the bridge’s final year. The new wells had been a project of Jenner’s, planned from the very beginning, but Kit had seen them completed. Kit had just received a letter from Jenner, with news of his new bridge up in the Keitche mountains: on schedule; a happy work site.

  Kit walked alone through the fair, which had splashed up the levee and along its ridge. A few people, townspeople and workers, greeted him; but others only pointed him out to their friends (the man who built the bridge; see there, that short dark man); and still others ignored him completely
, just another stranger in a crowd of strangers. When he had first come to build the bridge everyone in Nearside knew everyone else, local or visitor. He felt solitude settling around him again, the loneliness of coming to a strange place and building something and then leaving. The people of Nearside were moving forward into this new world he had built, the world of a bridge across the mist, but he was not going with them.

  He wondered what Rasali was doing, over in Farside, and wished he could see her. They had not spoken since the days after Valo’s death, except once for a few minutes, when he had come upon her at The Bitch. She had been withdrawn though not hostile, and he had felt unbalanced and not sought her out since.

  Now, at the end of his great labor, he longed to see her. When would she cross next? He laughed. He of all people should know better: five minutes’ walk.

  The bridge was not yet open, but Kit was the architect; the guards at the toll booth only nodded when he asked to pass, and lifted the gate for him. A few people noticed and gestured as he climbed. When Uni Mason (hands filled with ribbons) shouted something he could not hear clearly, Kit smiled and waved and walked on.

  He had crossed the bridge before this. The first stage of building the heavy oak frames that underlay the roadbed had been a narrow strip of planking that led from one shore to the other. Nearly every worker had found some excuse for crossing it at least once before Empire had sent people to the tollgates. Swallowing his fear of the height, Kit himself had crossed it nearly every day for the last two months.

  This was different. It was no longer his bridge, but belonged to Empire and to the people of Near-and Farside. He saw it with the eyes of a stranger.

  The stone ramp was a quarter-mile long, inclined gradually for carts. Kit hiked up, and the noises dropped behind and below him. The barriers that would keep animals (and people) from seeing the drop-off to either side were not yet complete: there were always things left unfinished at a bridge’s opening, afterthoughts and additions. Ahead of him, the bridge was a series of perfect dark lines and arcs.