Asimov's SF, October-November 2011

by Dell Magazine Authors

  * * * *

  The quiet pasture was gone. All that remained of the tall grass was struggling tufts and dirty straw. The air smelled of sweat and meat and the bitter scent of hot metal. There were more blocks here now, a lot more. The pits for the anchorage and the pillar were excavated to bedrock, overshadowed by mountains of dirt. One sheep remained, skinned and spitted, and greasy smoke rose as a girl turned it over a fire beside the temporary forge. Kit had considered the pasture a nuisance, but looking at the skewered sheep, he felt a twinge of guilt.

  The rest of the flock had been replaced by sturdy-looking men and women, who were using rollers to shift stones down a dugout ramp into the hole for the anchorage foundation. Dust muted the bright colors of their short kilts and breastbands and dulled their skin, and in spite of the cold, sweat had cleared tracks along their muscles.

  One of the workers waved to Rasali and she waved back. Kit recalled his name: Mik Rounder, very strong but he needed direction. Had they been lovers? Relationships out here were tangled in ways Kit didn't understand; in the capital such things were more formal and often involved contracts.

  Jenner and a small woman knelt, conferring, on the exposed stone floor of the larger pit. When Kit slid down the ladder to join them, the small woman bowed slightly. Her eyes and short hair and skin all seemed to be turning the same iron-gray. “I am Liu Breaker of Hoic. Your specialist.”

  “Kit Meinem of Atyar. How shall we address this?”

  “Your Jenner says you need some of this basalt cleared away, yes?”

  Kit nodded.

  Liu knelt to run her hand along the pit's floor. “See where the color and texture change along this line? Your Jenner was right: this upthrust of basalt is a problem. Here where the shale is, you can carve out most of the foundation the usual way with drills, picks. But the basalt is too hard to drill.” She straightened and brushed dust from her knees. “Have you ever seen explosives used?”

  Kit shook his head. “We haven't needed them for any of my projects. I've never been to the mines, either.”

  “Not much good anywhere else,” Liu said, “but very useful for breaking up large amounts of rock. A lot of the blocks you have here were loosed using explosives.” She grinned. “You'll like the noise.”

  “We can't afford to break the bedrock's structural integrity.”

  “I brought enough powder for a number of small charges. Comparatively small.”

  “How—”

  Liu held up a weathered hand. “I don't need to understand bridges to walk across one. Yes?”

  Kit laughed outright. “Yes.”

  * * * *

  Liu Breaker was right; Kit liked the noise very much. Liu would not allow anyone close to the pit, but even from what she considered a safe distance, behind huge piles of dirt, the explosion was an immense shattering thing, a crack of thunder that shook the earth. There was a second of echoing silence. The workers, after a collective gasp and some scattered screams, cheered and stamped their feet. A small cloud of mingled smoke and rock-dust eased over the pit's edge, sharp with the smell of saltpeter. The birds were not happy; with the explosion, they burst from their trees and wheeled nervously.

  Grinning, Liu climbed from her bunker near the pit, her face dust-caked everywhere but around her eyes, which had been protected by the wooden slit-goggles now hanging around her neck. “So far, so good,” she shouted over the ringing in Kit's ears. Seeing his face, she laughed. “These are nothing—gnat sneezes. You should hear when we quarry granite up at Hoic.”

  Kit was going to speak more with her when he noticed Rasali striding away. He had forgotten she was there; now he followed her, half shouting to hear himself. “Some noise, yes?”

  Rasali whirled. “What are you thinking?” She was shaking and her lips were white. Her voice was very loud.

  Taken aback, Kit answered, “We are blowing the foundations.” Rage? Fear? He wished he could think a little more clearly, but the sound had stunned his wits.

  “And making the earth shake! The Big Ones come to thunder, Kit!”

  “It wasn't thunder,” he said.

  “Tell me it wasn't worse!” Tears glittered in her eyes. Her voice was dulled by the echo in his ears. “They will come, I know it.”

  He reached a hand out to her. “It's a tall levee, Rasali. Even if they do, they're not going to come over that.” His heart in his chest thrummed. His head was hurting. It was so hard to hear her.

  “No one knows what they'll do! They used to destroy whole towns, drifting inland on foggy nights. Why do you think they built the levees, a thousand years ago? The Big Ones—”

  She stopped shouting, listening. She mouthed something, but Kit could not hear her over the beating in his ears, his heart, his head. He realized suddenly that these were not the after-effects of the explosion; the air itself was beating. He was aware at the edges of his vision of the other workers, every face turned toward the mist. There was nothing to see but the overcast sky. No one moved.

  But the sky was moving.

  Behind the levee the river mist was rising, dirty gray-gold against the steel-gray of the clouds in a great boiling upheaval, at least a hundred feet high, to be seen over the levee. The mist was seething, breaking open in great swirls and rifts, and everything moving, changing. Kit had seen a great fire once, when a warehouse of linen had burned, and the smoke had poured upward and looked a little like this before it was torn apart by the wind.

  Gaps opened in the mountain of mist and closed; and others opened, darker the deeper they were. And through those gaps, in the brown-black shadows at the heart of the mist, was movement.

  The gaps closed. After an eternity, the mist slowly smoothed and then settled back, behind the levee, and could no longer be seen. He wasn't really sure when the thrumming of the air blended back into the ringing of his ears.

  “Gone,” Rasali said with a sound like a sob.

  A worker made one of the vivid jokes that come after fear; the others laughed, too loud. A woman ran up the levee and shouted down, “Farside levees are fine; ours are fine.” More laughter: people jogged off to Nearside to check on their families.

  The back of Kit's hand was burning. A flake of foam had settled and left an irregular mark. “I only saw mist,” Kit said. “Was there a Big One?”

  Rasali shook herself, stern now but no longer angry or afraid. Kit had learned this about the Ferrys, that their emotions coursed through them and then dissolved. “It was in there. I've seen the mist boil like that before, but never so big. Nothing else could heave it up like that.”

  “On purpose?”

  “Oh, who knows? They're a mystery, the Big Ones.” She met his eyes. “I hope your bridge is very high, Kit Meinem of Atyar.”

  Kit looked to where the mist had been, but there was only sky. “The deck will be two hundred feet above the mist. High enough. I hope.”

  Liu Breaker walked up to them, rubbing her hands on her leather leggings. “So, that's not something that happens at Hoic. Very exciting. What do you call that? How do we prevent it next time?”

  Rasali looked at the smaller woman for a moment. “I don't think you can. Big Ones come when they come.”

  Liu said, “They do not always come?”

  Rasali shook her head.

  “Well, cold comfort is better than no comfort, as my Da says.”

  Kit rubbed his temples; the headache remained. “We'll continue.”

  “Then you'll have to be careful,” Rasali said. “Or you will kill us all.”

  “The bridge will save many lives,” Kit said. Yours, eventually.

  Rasali turned on her heel.

  Kit did not follow her, not that day. Whether it was because subsequent explosions were smaller ("As small as they can be and still break rock,” Liu said), or because they were doing other things, the Big Ones did not return, though fish were plentiful for the three months it took to plan and plant the charges, and break the bedrock.

  * * * *

&nbs
p; There was also a Meinem tradition of metal-working, and Meinem reeves, and many Meinems went into fields altogether different; but Kit had known from nearly the beginning that he would be one of the building Meinems. He loved the invisible architecture of construction, looking for a compromise between the vision in his head and the sites, the materials, and the people that would make them real. The challenge was to compromise as little as possible.

  Architecture was studied at University. His tutor was a materials specialist, a woman who had directed construction on an incredible twenty-three bridges. Skossa Timt was so old that her skin and hair had faded together to the white of Gani marble, and she walked with a cane she had designed herself, for efficiency. She taught him much. Materials had rules, patterns of behavior: they bent or crumbled or cracked or broke under quantifiable stresses. They strengthened or destroyed one another. Even the best materials in the most efficient combinations did not last forever—she tapped her own forehead with one gnarled finger and laughed—but if he did his work right, they could last a thousand years or more. “But not forever,” Skossa said. “Do your best, but don't forget this.”

  * * * *

  The anchorages and pillars grew. Workers came from towns up and down each bank; and locals, idle or inclined to make money from outside, were hired on the spot. Generally the new people were welcome: they paid for rooms and food and goods of all sorts. The taverns settled in to making double and then triple batches of everything, threw out new wings and stables. Nearside accepted the new people easily, the only fights late at night when people had been drinking and flirting more than they should. Farside had fist fights more frequently, though they decreased steadily as skeptics gave in to the money that flowed into Farside, or to the bridge itself, its pillars too solid to be denied.

  Farmers and husbanders sold their fields, and new buildings sprawled out from the towns’ hearts. Some were made of wattle and daub, slapped together above stamped-earth floors that still smelled of sheep dung; others, small but permanent, went up more slowly, as the bridge builders laid fieldstones and timber in their evenings and on rest days.

  The new people and locals mixed together until it was hard to tell the one from the other, though the older townfolk kept scrupulous track of who truly belonged. For those who sought lovers and friends, the new people were an opportunity to meet someone other than the men and women they had known since childhood. Many met casual lovers, and several term-partnered with new people. There was even a Nearside wedding, between Kes Tiler and a black-eyed builder from far to the south called Jolite Deveren, whatever that meant.

  Kit did not have lovers. Working every night until he fell asleep over his paperwork, he didn't miss it much, except late on certain nights when thunderstorms left him restless and unnaturally alert, as if lightning ran under his skin. Some nights he thought of Rasali, wondered whether she was sleeping with someone that night or alone, and wondered if the storm had awakened her, left her restless as well.

  Kit saw a fair amount of Rasali when they were both on the same side of the mist. She was clever and calm, and the only person who did not want to talk about the bridge all the time.

  Kit did not forget what Rasali said about Valo. Kit had been a young man himself not so many years before, and he remembered what young men and women felt, the hunger to prove themselves against the world. Kit didn't need Valo to accept the bridge—he was scarcely into adulthood and his only influence over the townspeople was based on his work—but Kit liked the youth, who had Rasali's eyes and sometimes her effortless way of moving.

  Valo started asking questions, first of the other workers and then of Kit. His boat-building experience meant the questions were good ones, and he already designed boats. Kit passed on the first things he had learned as a child on his father's sites, and showed him the manipulation of the immense blocks, and the tricky balance of material and plan; the strength of will that allows a man to direct a thousand people toward a single vision. Valo was too honest not to recognize Kit's mastery, and too competitive not to try and meet Kit on his own ground. He came more often to visit the construction sites.

  After a season, Kit took him aside. “You could be a builder, if you wished.”

  Valo flushed. “Build things? You mean, bridges?”

  “Or houses, or granges, or retaining walls. Or bridges. You could make people's lives better.”

  “Change people's lives?” He frowned suddenly. “No.”

  “Our lives change all the time, whether we want them to or not,” Kit said. “Valo Ferry, you are smart. You are good with people. You learn quickly. If you were interested, I could start teaching you myself, or send you to Atyar to study there.”

  “Valo Builder . . . “ he said, trying it out, then: “No.” But after that, whenever he had time free from ferrying or building boats, he was always to be found on the site. Kit knew that the answer would be different the next time he asked. There was for everything a possibility, an invisible pattern that could be made manifest given work and the right materials. Kit wrote to an old friend or two, finding contacts that would help Valo when the time came.

  The pillars and anchorages grew. Winter came, and summer, and a second winter. There were falls, a broken arm, two sets of cracked ribs. Someone on Farside had her toes crushed when one of the stones slipped from its rollers and she lost the foot. The bridge was on schedule, even after the delay caused by the slow rock-breaking. There were no problems with payroll or the Department of Roads or Empire, and only minor, manageable issues with the occasionally disruptive representatives from Triple or the local governors.

  Kit knew he was lucky.

  * * * *

  The first death came during one of Valo's visits.

  It was early in the second winter of the bridge, and Kit had been in Farside for three months. He had learned that winter meant gray skies and rain and sometimes snow. Soon they would have to stop the heavy work for the season. Still, it had been a good day, and the workers had lifted and placed almost a hundred stones.

  Valo had returned after three weeks at Nearside, building a boat for Jenna Blue-fish. Kit found him staring up at the slim tower through a rain so faint it felt like fog. The black opening of the roadway arch looked out of place, halfway up the pillar.

  Valo said, “You're a lot farther along since I was here last. How tall now?”

  Kit got this question a lot. “A hundred and five feet, more or less. A third finished.”

  Valo smiled, shook his head. “Hard to believe it'll stay up.”

  “There's a tower in Atyar, black basalt and iron, five hundred feet. Five times this tall.”

  “It just looks so delicate,” Valo said. “I know what you said, that most of the stress on the pillar is compression, but it still looks as though it'll snap in half.”

  “After a while, you'll have more experience with suspension bridges and it will seem less . . . unsettling. Would you like to see the progress?”

  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 at need 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 l
ook around the unfinished courses, and the black silhouette of the winch against the dulling sky. The last few workers were breaking down the shear-legs, 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 dryly. “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 shearleg'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 could see 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.