Telling the Map

by Christopher Rowe

  “I’m Captain Summers,” she said. “We’ve been ordered to let you all pass, if you still want to. But I’m bound by federal law to give you the standard warning. Crossing waters infested by the machines of the Voluntary State can be deadly. Exposure to this or any other river so infested carries the risk of death, personality obliteration, or possession. If you are so exposed, you will be considered enemies of the United States of America and of the United Nations. No negotiation is possible. No surrender will be recognized. No quarter will be given.”

  With that, the woman walked away, not giving the cyclists a second glance.

  Maggie looked at Nicholas, their leader on the road. “What now?” she asked.

  He looked back at her levelly, eyes invisible behind his sunglasses. “You tell me,” he said.

  Michael kicked off, coasting forward. When no one else moved, Maggie followed, quickly coming up alongside him.

  “This isn’t the Green,” she said nervously. “We don’t know this river. This is the Tennessee River, flowing straight out of the Voluntary State. And the Cumberland comes straight from Nashville, seat of Athena Parthenus.”

  Michael shrugged. “We still know what to do. Everything he taught us should still work. It always has. Look, the waters are calm, anyway.”

  And indeed, the green-brown waters were placid, hardly a ripple evident to show the passing of the current as the river flowed north to its mouth at the Ohio.

  The linked pontoon bridges were actually resting on the ground for much of their length. Like many other rivers in the Commonwealth, like their own Green, the Tennessee had formerly been an impounded lake. But the Kentucky Dam had been blown by the Corps of Engineers decades before as part of some failed effort to tame the river, and so what came to be known as the Land Between the Lakes was once again the Land Between the Rivers.

  Maggie looked out across the water at the federal preserve that extended from the Girding Wall to the south, bound on its other three sides by the Tennessee, the Cumberland, and the Ohio. The road pitched up slightly on the far side.

  “Look,” said Michael. “The one little climb of the day. You’ve got that to look forward to.”

  They reached the bank, visible to either side and even straight down, through the wirework mesh of the bridge surface. The shore was muddy, but lifeless, no plants growing right down to the water. The twins dismounted and leaned their bikes against a stanchion.

  “Everywhere we look there’s water, water . . . ,” Michael sang softly.

  Which he did not, strictly speaking, need to do. The harmonics the twins would send through the water to clear a way through its possession were particular, and the declarative psalm Michael voiced was just a way to reassure her, Maggie knew.

  She breathed deep, then leaned out over the water, examining it. She heard a cry of alarm from somewhere down the road, but she could not tell if it was from one of the cyclists or one of the engineers. The water was cloudy with mud, roiling.

  Yes. Yes, this was organized water.

  Maggie sang a Psalm of David:

  “Thou didst cleave the fountain and the flood:

  Thou driedst up mighty rivers.”

  She held the crystal A note of the last syllable, and Michael joined in two octaves lower with his pure baritone, singing in unison.

  This was the faith of their father, and his great discovery after their mother died. That the impurities in the waterways of the Commonwealth were sensitive to the sound of his voice. But more than that, they could be influenced, manipulated at their unimaginable quantum level of thought and activity—their father believed the rivers thought—to allow safe passage. So long as he—or they, the twins—possessed intent. This intent could be expressed by song, or even, for their father himself, at least, through exhortation. So far as Maggie knew, the Hammersmiths were the sole practitioners for whom this method worked.

  The words of Brother Theodore Hammersmith: “The nanomachines of the Voluntary State are possessed of minds, or of a mind, but not of souls. They make decisions, but have no free will. They are vulnerable to the attitude of us, the singers, and we call this attitude faith.”

  Michael had once asked their father what would happen if they attempted to sing a river down and their faith faltered. Their father told them, “Never falter.”

  Below them, a clarity emerged in the water, spreading out around them, washing up against the shore then lapping back. The muddy bottom of the river became clear, and Michael touched the transmit button at his collarbone. “Bring them up, bring them, you can cross behind us.”

  The other four members of the American team joined them quickly, followed, Maggie was surprised to see, not only by the team car, but by the race director’s car as well. The twins walked across the bridge, pushing their bicycles, singing. In a few moments, they stood in the Land Between the Rivers, looking back at the peloton and the caravan of vehicles that made up the race.

  Rolling down the window of the team car, Lydia beckoned Maggie and Michael over. “This will be necessary at every crossing?”

  Maggie nodded, and Michael said, “Unless you want to sacrifice a rider to the Governor of Tennessee.”

  Lydia ignored that, and said, “Can you teach the others?”

  Maggie looked at Michael, and asked, “Maybe. It’s hard to say . . . Are any of them churched?”

  Lydia gave her a strange look, then said, “Never mind. Let’s see how the other teams fare.”

  Across the river, there was some kind of disagreement going among between the directors, most of whom had gotten out of their cars to watch the first crossing. Whether there were some among them agitating to go second or whether none of them wanted to go was impossible to tell.

  Finally, though, one of the trade teams, dressed in green and yellow kits, glided up the pontoon bridge to the edge of the water, followed closely by their team car. The six riders dismounted, and the mechanics and directors in the car all emerged. The rear hatch of the automobile was opened, and the mechanics began distributing what looked like plastic tarps folded into squares to each rider.

  The six riders arrayed themselves in three rows of two, unfolding the clear plastic sheeting on the bridge, then mounting their bikes and rolling atop the tarp circles they’d just made. A team mechanic moved among them, walking crouched from rider to rider, doing something with a tool at ground level that Maggie couldn’t see.

  Suddenly, the tarps began to inflate. One by one, they were revealed to be large, clear spheres, hardening by some alchemy of material science as they grew up and around each cyclist. Within a few moments, all six of riders were completely enclosed.

  “Clever,” said David. “They will roll across like the little hamsters in their toys.”

  Maggie and Michael exchanged a troubled glance. There was nothing of faith in this. Maggie wondered how she would feel if it didn’t work. She wondered how she would feel if it did.

  “Look,” said Jordan. “They’re putting together a bigger one for the car.” And indeed, the team car was now inside a gigantic sphere that barely fit between the railings of the bridge.

  At some unheard signal, the riders in green began rolling slowly forward. As the front wheels of their machines touched the interior of the spheres, the energy from their drive trains was transferred and the whole, strange, bobbling array of six large bubbles and one huge one moved out over the water.

  “Look at the river,” said Michael.

  The clarity that had spread out beneath their team when they rode across the bridge had disappeared, and the water was once again cloudy and impenetrable. But more than that, the slight rills and ripples that had been visible on the surface before were now more energetic, as if rocks had suddenly thrust up from the riverbed, making this stretch of water into a rapids.

  “It knows they’re there,” said Maggie. “It’s going to do something.”

  What the Tennessee River did was terrifying in its speed and spectacle.

  A tempest exp
loded from the surface of the river, a great crash of water that roared with the tumult of a hundred thunderstorms arcing up and over the crossing riders. The entire length of the bridge disappeared beneath a wave that, impossibly, abruptly ceased all motion for a long and terrible moment. Then it subsided with as much violence as it had appeared, flowing downriver and up against its own current both.

  Leaving behind carnage.

  The bridge had shifted, bowing downstream in a curve that left gaps between its sections, metal twisting and stretching. The team car was on its side, thrown up against the railings on the north side of the bridge, and as everyone watched, paralyzed, it fell back onto its wheels.

  There was no sign of the plastic spheres at all, apparently melted away by the deluge. There were four cyclists spread among a tangle of wrecked bicycle frames just before the car.

  “Where are the other two?” someone whispered, and Maggie didn’t turn from the horrible sight in front of her to see who.

  She heard her brother answer. “Gone. Forever gone.”

  A high-pitched siren began to wail on the other side of the Tennessee, and the Corps of Engineers troops began scrambling into formations. Maggie could see Captain Summers shouting orders, pointing toward the bridge, where three of the remaining riders were stirring, trying to get to their feet. A back door on the green team car opened and a mechanic fell out, feebly waving an arm, as if calling for aid.

  Nicholas stepped forward and Maggie cried, “No!” even as Lydia moved to block him.

  “They’re dying!” Nicholas said, the first time he’d raised his voice in Maggie’s hearing.

  “No,” said Michael, turning his back on the river. “No, the ones who were going to die are dead already. The ones who are left, they’re . . . not who they were.”

  Out on the bridge, the three cyclists had found their feet and kicked the wreckage of their bicycles into the water. Then, raising screams from some of the riders on the far bank, they did the same to their unmoving comrade.

  The director sportif of the drowned team opened the driver’s door of the car and stumbled out. He joined the three riders and the team mechanic and the five of them lined up. The faint sounds of singing rose from the group, and they began to dance.

  “That’s Thierry Dumoulin,” said David. “I’ve known him for over thirty years.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Lydia. “I don’t think that’s Thierry anymore.”

  There was a clank, then a whining noise, and the whole bridge shuddered. The section the lost team stood on began to raise at an angle, spilling them back toward the far bank.

  “It’s the engineers,” said Michael. “They’re forcing them back to shore so they can be taken into custody.”

  “What will happen to them? Can they be cured?” asked Nicholas.

  Maggie shook her head. “Nobody knows what the federals do with Tennessee’s . . . victims.”

  “Our father heard rumors of camps,” added Michael. “But he always cautioned us against rumor.”

  Samantha asked, “The race. Is it over?”

  Michael brightened. “If they can’t cross, they can’t compete. We’ll ride a victory lap across the whole Commonwealth.”

  But Maggie said, “No. No, there will be a race. The other teams will cross.”

  She walked to the edge of the water. She took as her text the first verse of the twenty-second chapter of Revelations, and she sang:

  “And he shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out the throne of God and of the Lamb.”

  “Maggie!” shouted Michael, and there was dissonance and anger in his voice, but it did not stop the waters from clearing again, this time faster, this time farther.

  Maggie listened to the arguments through her earpiece, not contributing anything despite the fact that it had been her actions that precipitated the crisis going on within her team. David and Michael were openly angry with her for clearing the way across the river for all the other teams and escort vehicles, and Maggie suspected that Samantha was as well.

  Nicholas, though, had thanked her, and Jordan had given her a wan smile and a thumbs-up when the caravan started rolling across the bridge, once the engineers had reconstituted it. Lydia was sanguine.

  “Look, it’s happened,” said the director over the radio. “I’ve spoken to the other teams, and we’re going to have the twins get us all across the Cumberland with their holy music or whatever it is as well, then the race will begin in earnest. We have an intermediate sprint coming up at—” There was a sound of ruffling papers, then, “Cadiz. Michael, if you want to stay mad, that’s fine, put it into your racing. Leave your anger on the road.”

  Maggie, tucked onto Michael’s wheel in the peloton as it flew across the Land Between the Rivers, saw her brother throw a glance at her over his shoulder. That’s something Dad told us Mom used to say, she thought. She wondered if he was thinking the same thing.

  This country was different than the flat landscape they’d ridden through before they reached the Tennessee. Trees crowded the road here, and there were no buildings, either maintained or dilapidated, to either side. It was a wilderness, but one heavily patrolled by federal troops from the Girding Wall on the border all the way up to the Ohio River. They saw no sign of the herds of deer, buffalo, and elk that were supposed to roam the area.

  A rider touched her on the shoulder and she turned to see one of the women from the Mexican team looking at her gravely. Maggie smiled and raised an eyebrow.

  “Your mother,” the woman said, “she was my hero all the time I was a child.”

  Maggie looked forward to see if Michael gave any sign of hearing. He was riding head down, lost in the road. She started to thank the woman, but the rider spoke on.

  “Now, you are my hero, too.”

  Maggie blushed and shook her head, unsure of what to say.

  “I do not love this place, though, Margarita Galdeana-Hammersmith. We have talked, and we would extend to you . . . asylum? When this race is done, you should come back to Mexico with us.”

  Maggie was startled. Asylum? Wasn’t that what people fleeing oppression sought? But she decided to chalk the woman’s use of the term up to unfamiliarity with the language, and satisfy her own curiosity about something instead of responding.

  “What’s it like there?” Maggie asked.

  The woman smiled, something flashing in her eyes that indicated to Maggie that she hadn’t misused any words at all. But she answered her. “It is an old place, and getting older all the time.”

  “Isn’t everyplace getting older all the time?”

  “No, I mean . . . I mean old ways keep coming back in Mexico. There is less of Spain and more of the Aztecs in the place, in the people, every year. It is our way of saving ourselves from Athena and things like her.” She looked off to the side then, and Maggie barely heard a call coming over the other woman’s radio. The Mexican rider smiled once again, and said, “I’m moving to the back, perhaps we can talk more later.”

  The woman drifted back into the anonymity of the peloton, and just then Lydia’s voice came over the radio, “Okay, twins, move up, here’s the Cumberland and the race director is waiting at the bridge. He wants to know if it would work best if one of you crosses first and then the other brings up the rear. You’ll be given dispensation to use the convoy vehicles to pace your way back into the peloton on the far side.”

  Michael’s head dipped down as he spoke. “I’ll go first.”

  Which made sense, so that he didn’t waste any energy rejoining the race before the intermediate sprint a few miles up the route, but it still bothered Maggie that he hadn’t consulted her. He really was angry.

  What was I supposed to do, leave them all standing there on the riverbank while those engineers herded the infected team into transports with poles and nets? Maybe that was exactly what he would have preferred.

  The crossing of the Cumberland went smoothly, for all that Michael barely exchanged a wo
rd with her. There were engineers on both sides of the river this time, and they’d clearly been warned that something had happened earlier. They stood in formations on either side of the road, watching silently when the peloton stopped at a pontoon bridge identical to the one over the Tennessee.

  Michael surprised Maggie by whistling out a wordless tune instead of choosing one of their father’s lyrics or something writ. The Cumberland River surprised her by responding just the same.

  At Michael’s nod, the whole of the peloton and all of the support vehicles rolled on, Maggie sitting astride her bike and watching them go. A camerastat hovered right next to her, its unblinking camera eyes shining in the afternoon sun.

  When the last motorcycle had gone, Maggie took a careful look at the river and saw that it was still clear. She rode across, and began the long process of working her way through the support vehicles to rejoin the peloton.

  By the time she passed the race referee’s car at the front of the following train of motorized vehicles, she was encountering stragglers from the peloton. Already, the race was speeding up in preparation for the intermediate sprint, and there were riders who had been doing the bulk of the work for their teams peeling off, exhausted. There were some as well, Maggie suspected, who had done little work at all but who were finding their conditioning was not sufficient for the unexpected rigors of this race. Rigors that weren’t purely physical.

  She rode on, pushing herself so that she could rejoin Nicholas in the peloton and guide him through the upcoming sprint. When she had slowed at the American team car to load up with the bottles Tammy the soigneur handed to her through the window, Lydia had reminded her that the approach to the sprint point was complicated, being in the middle of the town of Cadiz and featuring a ninety-degree turn just three hundred yards before the line. The sprint trains would be well in control of the peloton by that point, flying, and Maggie intended to have Nicholas well back from the front in case there were crashes going into that final bend.