Eternity Road

by Jack McDevitt

  Quait grinned at his captor. “I’m okay,” he called. “But stay where you are. There’s a man here with a gun.”

  “Tell them to come in here where I can see them.”

  “No,” said Quait. “I won’t do that.”

  The man wiped his face with his sleeve. He wore a crumpled gray shirt and baggy black trousers. “You in the hall,” he rumbled. “Come in here now, all of you, guns down, hands up, or I’ll kill this one.”

  That brought a long silence. The bald man backed into a corner of the room so he could cover both Quait and the doorway.

  “Don’t shoot anybody,” said Chaka. She came in, hands raised. Silas followed directly behind.

  “What are you,” sputtered Silas, “a lunatic?”

  “That’s an open question, I suppose.” The bald man glanced into the corridor. “Is there anyone else?”

  “No,” said Quait. “You’ve got everybody.”

  “I hope so. If there are any surprises, I’m going to start shooting. And you three will be first. Now, what are you doing in my house?”

  Quait tried to explain. Silas, true to his nature, had focused on the handful of unbound volumes in the cabinet. Suddenly he sighed. “Ilion Talley,” he said. “Where did you get these?”

  The bald man eyed him suspiciously. “How did you know my name?”

  “You?” said Silas. “I was talking about the author of these books.”

  “I am he.”

  Silas frowned and pursed his lips. “Ilion Talley’s dead.”

  “Oh, not as dead as some would like.”

  “Are you really Talley? Of Masandik?”

  “Of course, you nitwit. Who else would I be?” The rifle wavered and his voice softened. “You know of me, then?”

  “Everyone knows the Mechanic,” said Silas. He was staring hard at the bald man. “I do believe…” he said. “I believe it really is you.” He clapped his hands. “Wonderful. This makes the entire trip worthwhile. Whatever else happens.” He plunged forward, completely forgetful of the weapon.

  Talley hesitated and then, if he’d had a mind to shoot, it was too late. Silas was by him, pumping his hand. “Marvelous,” Silas said. “We met years ago, but I was very young and you’d have no way of remembering. My name’s Silas Glote.”

  Quait knew the Mechanic’s reputation. Ilion Talley had been renowned throughout the five cities as a philosopher, artist, and engineer. He had designed and overseen the construction of Masandik’s superlative water and sewage system, with its state-of-the-art pumps; he had sculpted the magnificent Lyka for her temple at Farroad; he had devised the modern repeating rifle.

  “And you’re not dead,” said Silas.

  “Apparently not.” Talley laid the weapon on a table.

  He’d reportedly died twenty years before, in Masandik. It had been put about that a committee of citizens had charged him and a young woman with impiety, and burned both at the stake.

  Talley waved everyone to sit down, and leaned back against the desktop. “It’s nice to know I haven’t been forgotten. And that there are still people who think well of me.”

  “You were accused of defiling the gods,” said Silas.

  “So they said I was dead, did they?” He chuckled. “A more incompetent pack of fools I’ve never known.”

  “What happened?” asked Quait.

  “Yolanda,” he said.

  “Pardon?”

  “I hired Yolanda to copy manuscripts. She was pretty, so my students were naturally drawn to her. They found excuses to come to my office. They asked questions. And Yolanda forgot that she was not their teacher. She also believed that teachers were bound to the truth.” He fixed Silas with a long gloomy stare. “You look like a teacher.” It was not a question.

  “I am.”

  “Then you understand her naïveté. I tried to explain the political realities to her, the need to avoid offending the community’s sensibilities.” He shrugged. “She wouldn’t listen, and it got around after a while that she did not believe in the gods. That she was a profane influence on young people.”

  Quait frowned. “But the upper classes are mostly skeptics. Were these not their children at the school?”

  “Of course,” said Talley. “But what these people believed, and what they were prepared to admit publicly, were not at all the same thing.”

  “They said you were both killed,” said Silas.

  “We were gone before they arrived. I don’t know who they killed, if anyone, but it most certainly was not me. It was cold, however. Dead of winter. Yolanda died on the road, so I suppose they achieved one of their goals.” His eyes clouded. “I’ve been here since, for the most part. No place else to go. Nobody would have given me sanctuary.”

  “Twenty years is a long time,” said Silas. “Things have changed. You’re a hero now in Masandik. They would welcome you back.”

  “Twenty years. Is it really that long?” He laughed. “Quite a few of the scoundrels must have died.”

  Silas glanced over the volumes, lined up neatly in a cabinet. “May I ask what you’ve been writing about?” Quait would have liked to examine the volumes themselves, but one did not simply take it upon himself to pick up another person’s book.

  “I’ve completed the definitive history of the Baranji Empire,” Talley said. “There are also ruminations on the nature of the Roadmakers’ world.” He came away from the desktop, opened a book, and laid it where they could see its table of contents. “This is a collection of philosophical speculations. The nature of evil. Whether man has a purpose. Whether there is such a thing as absolute morality. And so on.”

  “No wonder they were after you,” laughed Chaka.

  They all joined in, and the doleful mood dissipated. “You must forgive my caution. Visitors here are seldom civil.” Talley returned his attention to his books. “I also have a study of the types of trees, their characteristics, their growing seasons, the best time to plant. And an analysis of the customs and ethical systems of the local Tuks. And a political history of Masandik.” He took down several more for his visitors to look at, and it struck Quait that the man had been writing here alone for years and had probably never before been able to show his work to anyone. Or at least to anyone who gave a damn.

  “I’m forgetting my manners,” said Talley. “Would you like some tea?”

  He set up cups, left the room, and returned moments later with a steaming pot. “It’s just as well things happened the way they did,” he said, pouring. “I’ve spent my time here far more productively than I could have in Masandik. Tell me, does the Legate still rule?”

  “He was overthrown more than a decade ago,” said Silas. “Masandik is a republic. They’re all republics now, all the cities.”

  “Well,” said Talley gloomily, “I’m not sure that’s such good news. Mob rule, it sounds like.”

  Quait had gone over to investigate the lamp, which continued to put out a steady glow. “You have heat without fire,” he said, “and light without a flame.” The light source was inside a glass tube.

  “How does it work?” asked Chaka.

  Talley smiled enigmatically. “Roadmaker technology. I’m not sure myself of the principles behind it. But I’ll learn in time.” He touched a knob and the light died. Touched it again and it came back on.

  “Marvelous,” said Silas.

  The lamp was unpretentious, apparently metal, rounded at its base, lacking the ornate style of the better class of Roadmaker art objects that were popular in League cities. On closer examination, Quait saw that it was not metal at all. It was made of one of the time-defying artificial substances.

  “I had several of them originally, but they’ve been giving out one by one.” He shook his head in silent wonder. “They’re really quite remarkable. They grow dim on occasion, but I have only to connect them to a device in the basement to replenish the light.”

  Quait returned to the source of the room’s warmth, the pipes. There were six of them, in paralle
l loops, protruding from one wall. “And this?” he asked.

  “Ah,” said Talley. “This is my invention.” He waited until everyone had had time to inspect it. “It’s really quite simple,” he said, smiling broadly. “Please follow me.” He swept up the lamp and led the way into the next room.

  It was spacious, with a partially collapsed ceiling supported by a pair of wooden beams and a boarded-up fireplace. A long battered worktable stood in a corner. Pots and ladles hung from hooks, and a heavy, dust-laden purple curtain covered the windows. A stock of firewood had been laid by, and a furnace crouched in the center of the room.

  The furnace was mounted on four bear-claw legs. It was divided into upper and lower compartments. Quait could hear water boiling in the upper. A wide black duct connected the back of the furnace with the ceiling. A gray pipe, much narrower and wrapped with gauze, plunged into the wall. “This one,” the one joined to the ceiling, “carries off the smoke,” he explained. “This carries steam into radiant devices in the office and the far wing.” He smiled broadly, vastly pleased with himself. “The entire suite stays quite comfortable.”

  “Brilliant,” observed Silas. He produced his notebook and began drawing a picture of the apparatus.

  Talley’s shrug said that it was nothing.

  Quait was, of course, familiar with furnaces, which had begun to replace fireplaces in some Illyrian homes. They were a more efficient means of heating a room. But it had never occurred to him that it might be possible to transport excess heat to remote places in a dwelling. Silas was ecstatic. He fired a barrage of questions and wrote down the answers. “If you have no objection,” he said, “we’ll take this idea home with us.”

  “Whatever you wish. It’s really only a minor thing.” He sipped his tea. “And where are you headed? What brings you to the far country?”

  “We’re hoping to find Haven,” said Silas.

  Talley’s expression changed. He had possibly been alone too long to hide his feelings, but it now became apparent that he’d decided he was in the presence of cranks. “I see. Well, I wish you all good fortune.”

  “Actually,” said Silas defensively, “it’s not as farfetched as it sounds.”

  “I’m sure it isn’t.”

  They were moving again, Talley walking them back toward his workroom. “What’s the ridge all about?” Chaka asked.

  Talley looked puzzled.

  “The one that surrounds this place,” she prompted.

  “Oh. The ring. It’s a tunnel. The people who built the facility hoped to use it to learn how the Earth was created.”

  Silas showed no reaction, but Quait felt uneasy.

  “Avila was right,” said Chaka.

  “Avila is one of our friends,” Quait explained. “She said much the same thing.”

  “How did they intend to do that?” asked Silas.

  “Don’t know. I can’t read the results.”

  “You mean they were destroyed?”

  “I mean I can’t read them.”

  Silas looked around, as if he expected to see them lying somewhere on a table. “Maybe we could help?”

  Talley chuckled deep in his throat. “Of course,” he said. “Please come with me.”

  He took them out into the lobby and down two flights of stairs. They turned left into another corridor, lined with doorways. The walls were gray and crumbly.

  “In here.” They passed into another workroom. Rows of dull white metal cases occupied a central table and most of the wall space. Black cables snaked across the floor. The room looked surprisingly clean.

  Another door, made of heavy metal, stood ajar. “This is the entry to the ring,” he said. He pulled it open, hit a wall switch, and interior lights blossomed. They looked into a tunnel. Walls and ceiling were lined with cables and ridges, and a grate had been placed over the concrete floor. The passageway gradually curved away in both directions. “It’s still whole,” said Talley. “All the way around. Seventy miles.”

  “Are you sure?” asked Chaka.

  “I walked it once. It took a week.”

  She glanced at Quait.

  “It’s not as unsettling as it might seem, young lady,” Talley said. “There are hatches every few miles. They didn’t all open, but some of them still work.”

  They went back and looked at the lines of cases. Quait had seen artifacts that resembled this kind of equipment, but never in such good condition, and never so many. He saw his first legible keyboard. He saw dark glass surfaces in pseudo-metal frames. The boxes were of varying sizes and shapes, all linked by a maze of cables.

  “Now,” said Talley. “What is the true nature of the world? The Baranji believed these machines were used to perform experiments, and to store data. If that’s so, it’s reasonable to assume that everything that was learned here was put into them.”

  Quait thought that sounded good, but he didn’t know exactly what it meant.

  Silas was also showing mixed reactions. “Then,” he said, “let’s break them open and take a look.”

  “That seems simple enough,” added Chaka.

  “No. It’s not simple at all. The data are not in written form.”

  Silas’s eyes narrowed. “What other form is there?”

  “I’m not sure how to explain it. I don’t understand it myself. But they may have had a technique for encoding information in invisible fields.”

  “I see,” said Silas, who obviously didn’t.

  “It’s true,” said Talley. “Baranji technicians worked on the problem for almost a century. I have their notes.”

  Silas glanced at Chaka. “Invisible fields,” he said. “It doesn’t sound possible.”

  Talley was unfazed. “You’ve seen the lamp. Don’t underestimate ancient technology.”

  “How,” asked Chaka gently, “do you get the machines to give up their information?”

  “Let me show you.” He led them to the back of the room, where one of the framed glass sheets was connected by cable to a glass globe. A rock was suspended in the center of the globe, and six coils were positioned around it. The globe was connected to a wheel, over which a saddle had been mounted. Talley climbed onto the saddle, inserted his feet into a set of pedals, and began to turn the wheel. As the wheel turned, the coils moved around the rock. “This is a force bottle. The rock’s a lodestone. When the copper coils rotate around the lodestone, they divert a force from it and pass that force through the cable. I don’t quite understand the effect myself, but it works.”

  Talley built up speed and the coils whirled. Suddenly the glass sheet, which had been dark and inert, lit up.

  Silas backed away. He heard Chaka catch her breath.

  “Incredible,” said Silas. “What’s happening?”

  “The generated force makes the machines work. I believe that if I can create enough of it, the machines will talk.”

  Silas touched the globe cautiously as Talley left off pedaling. The light faded. “Talley,” he asked, “How fast can you pedal?”

  Talley laughed. “That task would be beyond any man, Silas. But we’re close to the Wabash. I’m going to build a much larger version of the force bottle, and I plan to let the river god, so to speak, sit in the saddle. When you come back, if you come back, I expect to know whatever the Roadmakers knew about creation.” He took a deep breath. “Stop in and say hello. By then we should have much to talk about.”

  11

  They needed the better part of a day to put the ring-shaped ridge behind them. The woods gave way to an open plain and they were eventually able to look back on perhaps twenty miles of the enigmatic construction. Chaka sat in her saddle and imagined the elderly mystic walking all the way around in the dark. No wonder he was half mad.

  Yet he had produced the light in the glass. They talked of little else for two days, and were so engrossed in speculation that even Jon Shannon was slow to see two Tuks ride out of a wall of forest directly into their path. Both cradled rifles in their arms. They wore stitched an
imal hides and fur-lined boots. The taller of the two, who was almost Shannon’s size, drifted to a stop.

  His companion rode on ahead a few paces, far enough to ensure they couldn’t both be taken down by a single burst of gunfire, and turned to watch. He was also big. An oversized fur hat perched casually on the back of his head.

  “It’s okay,” Shannon said. “They’re friendly.”

  He raised his hand. To Chaka’s considerable relief, the two men raised theirs. Shannon rode forward; words were exchanged, and smiles appeared.

  “Old friends,” commented Flojian.

  “This is Mori,” Shannon said, introducing the taller, “of the Oriki clan.” Mori was in his thirties, blue eyes, thick brown hair, beard, and quite handsome, in a rough-cut sort of way. He had the whitest teeth Chaka had ever seen. He bowed slightly to the women and pronounced everyone welcome.

  “And Valian, his spiritual brother.” Valian removed his hat. His hair was also brown, but cut short. He had dark, intelligent eyes, and was maybe two years younger and twenty pounds leaner than Mori.

  They exchanged greetings.

  “Our home is nearby,” said Mori. “We’d be honored if you would stay with us tonight.”

  Silas looked at Shannon, and Chaka read his expression. Was it safe?

  “Strangers are sacred with the Oriki,” said Mori.

  Shannon nodded.

  An hour later, in deep woodland, they rode into a hamlet. It was so effectively a part of the forest that Chaka did not immediately pick out the log dwellings, which were scattered among trees and shrubbery. There was no clearing of the land, and consequently no obvious external sign betraying the presence of the people of the forest.

  A small group, composed mostly of children, gathered to greet them. Like the Illyrians, the Oriki displayed no distinctive racial type. Some were dark, some pale, but the vast majority favored a middle tone; some had flat noses, others had epicanthic folds. They looked healthy and happy, and they obviously enjoyed visitors.

  Clan members descended on the companions with offers of bread and fruit. Chaka’s red hair provoked laughter. (For no readily apparent reason, red hair was the one physical characteristic that seemed to be missing.) Some wanted to inspect the newcomers’ clothing and weapons. Others wanted only to touch the visitors. “They think we’re strong,” Shannon explained, “because travelers are always protected by spirits. Touching us gives them a share of that strength.”