Eternity Road

by Jack McDevitt

  It was midmorning; they were following Shay’s signs through the forest, and Chaka was thinking how good it would be to quit for the day and soak her feet in the next spring, when she very nearly walked off the edge of an embankment.

  She looked down an angled wall into a steep canyon. The canyon was straight as a rifle barrel and precisely beveled, with concrete walls sloping away at forty-five degrees. The other side was probably four hundred feet away. The bottom appeared to be filled with clay and sparse vegetation.

  “Don’t get too close,” Quait said.

  It was also impassable. “You’re not going to believe this,” she called back to Flojian.

  Flojian surveyed the structure and shook his head. Despite everything he’d seen, his idea of a workforce for a major project still consisted of a hundred people with hand tools. How long would it take to dig something like this? And what was its purpose? It was hard to see because of the shrubbery, and when he leaned out too far to get a better look, he lost his balance and Chaka had to haul him back.

  The trail, stymied by the obstacle, turned north, moving parallel to the ditch. The trees closed in again. The ditch went on and on, and at sunset there was still no end to it. But there was something else: An iron ship of Roadmaker proportions had come to rest against the far wall.

  “That thing is a canal,” said Flojian, staggered. “Or it was.”

  “It’s the sketch,” said Chaka, excited. She pulled out her packet, went through them, and produced the one titled The Ship. “I never thought it was that big,” she said.

  It was an appropriate vessel for so gargantuan an engineering project. It was probably six hundred feet from bow to stern. It had been coming south when it was abandoned, or ran aground, or whatever. The hull was rusted black. Masts and posts and derricks were snapped and broken; they jabbed into the wall and the woods along the rim.

  “How on earth,” asked Chaka, “do you move something like that? I wouldn’t think sails would be adequate. And it doesn’t look as if there’s much provision for sails anyway.”

  Quait shook his head. Banks of oarsmen damned well wouldn’t do the job either. Sometimes he thought the laws of physics didn’t apply to Roadmaker technology.

  “The same way,” said Flojian, “that you lift a maglev, I imagine.”

  It was left to Flojian to point out the bad news: The Ship was dated May 13. The last sketch in the series, Haven, was dated July 25. “When they arrived here,” he said, “they were still ten weeks away.”

  They made camp. That night, despite the fact it was a warm evening, they built the fire a little higher than usual.

  In the morning, they continued north along the rim without seeing any more grounded ships. At midafternoon they topped a rise and came out of the trees. Glades and fields and patches of forest ran down to a placid blue sea. The ditch was blocked off by a wall. Beyond the wall, it divided into twin channels, which descended in a series of steps until they opened into the sea.

  “Incredible,” said Flojian. “They walked the ships down.”

  The wall, on closer inspection, turned out to be a pair of gates, topped by a catwalk. It was a place to cross.

  The river roared past. They gazed at the torrent and, following the faithful Shay, turned upstream.

  The fury of the watercourse filled the afternoon, throwing up a mist that soaked people and animals. It had carved out a gorge and became, as they proceeded south, still more violent. Toward sunset, a remnant of sidewalk appeared along the lip of the gorge and a sound like thunder rolled downriver. The walls of the gorge grew steeper, and the sidewalk skirted its edge for about a mile before taking them past a collection of ruined buildings.

  It also took them to the source of the thunder. A little more than a mile ahead, a great white curtain of mist partially obscured, but could not hide, a waterfall of spectacular dimensions. The river, tens of thousands of tons of it, roared over a V-shaped precipice.

  They knew it at once. The sixth sketch. Nyagra.

  The walkway curved off toward the ruins. They left it, and continued along the edge of the gorge, ascending gradually to the summit of the falls. Spray and mist filled the air, and soon they were drenched. But the majesty of the falling water overwhelmed trivial concerns; here all complaints seemed innocuous, and they looked down from the heights laughing and exhilarated. It was still early afternoon, but they decided they deserved a holiday, and so they took it. They withdrew far enough to find dry shelter while retaining a view of the spectacle, and pitched camp.

  “Incredible,” Quait said. “How would you describe this to people?”

  Flojian nodded. “Carved by the hand of the Goddess. What a beautiful place.” He was looking down toward the distant gorge and the ruined buildings below the falls. “That’s strange,” he said.

  “What is?” asked Chaka.

  “That must have been an observation complex. But why’s it so far away? They could have put it a lot closer, and provided a magnificent view.” Indeed, beyond the point where the ruins lay, only hedge and shrubbery lined the river. There had been more than enough room.

  “Don’t know,” she said.

  Flojian wondered if someone had owned the land and had simply refused permission.

  It occurred to no one that the waterfall was on the move. It was wearing away its rock carapace at about three feet per year, and since the days of the Roadmakers, it had retreated the better part of a mile.

  The falls threw up a lot of mist, and in fact considerably more than it would have when the observation platform was in regular use. The central sections of the horseshoe came under most pressure, and therefore were giving way more quickly than the wings of the cataract, elongating the area in which the falling streams were in violent competition. The absolute clarity of the American falls, and the misty coyness of the Canadian, no longer existed. The spectacle was almost lost in its own shrouds.

  The sky was full of stars that evening, and there was a bright moon. While Flojian slept, Quait and Chaka approached the cataract and looked down into the basin. Mist and moonlight swirled, and Quait had a sense of shifting realities.

  Chaka looked particularly lovely against that silvery backdrop. “If I were going to move into the woods, like Jon,” she said, “I’d want to live here.”

  The mist felt cool on their faces. “It’s the most spectacular place I’ve ever seen,” said Quait. A brisk wind blew downriver. His arm was around her, and she moved closer.

  Chaka was by no means the first woman to stir his emotions profoundly. But there was something about her, and the stars, and the waterfall, that lent a sense of permanence to the embrace. There would never be a time when he would be unable to call up the sound and sights of this night. “It’s a moment we’ll have forever,” he told her.

  Her cheek lay against his, and she was warm and yielding in his arms. “It is very nice here,” she said.

  “It means you’ll never be able to get rid of me. No matter what.”

  She looked at him for a long moment, her eyes dark and unreadable. Then she stood on her toes and brushed her lips against his. It was less a kiss than an invitation.

  She was wearing a woolen shirt under her buckskin jacket. He released the snaps on the jacket, opened it and pulled her close. “I love you, too, Chaka,” he said.

  She murmured something he could not hear and inserted her body against his, fitting part to part. “And I love you, Quait.”

  He was deliciously conscious of her breathing and her lips, her throat and eyes, and the willingness with which she leaned into him. He caressed the nape of her neck.

  She pulled his face close and kissed him very hard. Quait touched her breast and felt the nipple already erect beneath the linen. They stood together for some minutes, enjoying each other. But Quait was careful to go no farther. Although he ached to take her, the penalties for surrendering virtue were high. Not least among them were the consequences of a pregnancy on the trail, far from home.

 
But our night will come.

  23

  South of the falls, the Nyagra divided into two channels, creating an island about five miles long. The companions crossed the western channel on a wobbly plank bridge of uncertain, but relatively recent, origin. Although it was now in a state of general disrepair and could in no way match Roadmaker engineering, the bridge was nevertheless no mean feat of its own, spanning a half-mile of rapids.

  “Sometimes,” Flojian said, “I think we tend to underestimate everyone who followed the Roadmakers. We behave as if nothing substantive happened after they died off.”

  They arrived on the north end of the island, where Roadmaker dwellings were numerous, as were ruins from a less remote period. Quait thought they were Baranji, the barbarian empire whose western expansion had reached the Mississippi four centuries earlier. Flojian was doubtful. Baranji architecture tended to be blockish, heavy, utilitarian. Designed for the ages, as if the imperials had been impressed by the permanence of Roadmaker building and had striven to go them one better. These structures were not quite so solid as one would expect from the Baranji, but if the density was missing, the gloom and lack of imagination were there. Quait wondered whether this had not been an imperial outpost either at the beginning or at the end of their great days.

  Shortly after their arrival, they encountered a mystery that turned their thoughts from Baranji architecture. A Roadmaker bridge crossed from the eastern shore of the Nyagra. It was down, and its span lay in the water, half submerged. But this piece of wreckage was different from most of what they’d seen. The rubble was charred, and large holes had been blown in the concrete. “This was deliberate,” said Quait, examining a melted piece of metal. “Somebody blew it up.”

  “Why would anyone do that?” asked Chaka.

  They were standing on the beach, close to the ancient highway that had once crossed the Nyagra and which now simply gaped into a void. “Possibly to prepare for a replacement bridge,” said Flojian, “that they never got around to making.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Quait. “I don’t see any sign of construction. Would you take down the old bridge before you built the new one?” He squinted into the sun. “I wonder whether it wasn’t a military operation? To stop an attacking force.”

  Chaka looked out across the river. The current was fast here, and the wreckage created a series of wakes. “The Baranji?” she asked.

  “Maybe. The Roadmakers don’t seem to have had any enemies. I mean, there’s never any evidence of deliberate destruction. Right? At least, not on a large scale.”

  “What about Memphis?” asked Flojian. “And the city in the swamp? Some of their places burned.”

  “Fires can happen in other ways,” said Chaka. “And in any case were probably set to burn out the plague. But you never see a Roadmaker city that looks as if explosives were used on it. They seem to have had a peaceful society. I think Quait’s right: Whoever did this was at war. And it was probably the Baranji on one side or the other. If anybody cares.”

  The road crossed the island to the southeast, where it had once leaped back across the river. But here again the bridge had been destroyed. The highway simply came to an end, having not quite cleared the shoreline.

  “Maybe,” said Flojian softly, “they were trying to keep the Plague off the island.”

  There was another plank bridge upstream. They followed it across the eastern channel, took the horses down onto a boulder-strewn beach, and spotted a path that led into the forest. The beach was narrow and ran up against heavy rock in both directions, so that the path was the only way forward. They were headed toward it when they saw guns.

  A tall, thin man leveled a rifle in their direction and came out of the bushes. “Just stop right there,” he said. He was bearded, elderly, with gray scraggly hair, greasy clothes, and an enormous pair of suspenders.

  They stopped.

  Two more showed themselves. One was a woman. “Hands up, folks,” she said.

  The wedge felt very far away. Chaka raised her hands. “We’re just passing through,” she said. “Don’t mean any harm.”

  “Good,” said the second man. He was younger than the first, but gray, with a torn flannel shirt and a red neckerchief. There was a strong family resemblance.

  “Don’t mean to be unfriendly,” said the man with the suspenders, “but you just can’t be too careful these days.”

  “That’s right,” said Quait behind her. “And I’d like to wish you folks a good day.”

  “Who are you people?” asked Flojian.

  The man with the suspenders advanced a few paces. “I’m the toll collector,” he said. “My name’s Jeryk.”

  “I’m Chaka Milana. These are Quait and Flojian.”

  The wind blew the old man’s hair in his eyes. “Where you folks bound?”

  “We’re traders,” she said. “Looking for markets.”

  “Don’t look like traders.” He squinted at Flojian, “Well, maybe that one does.”

  “What’s the toll?” asked Quait.

  The younger man grinned. “What have you got?”

  Chaka looked at Jeryk. “Can we put our hands down?”

  They ended by trading a generous supply of food and trinkets for two filled wineskins.

  It never became clear how Jeryk happened to come by his trade, or how long he had been at the bridge. He explained that he and his family were bridge tenders, and that they kept both island bridges in repair. It was a claim that seemed imaginative. Quait responded by suggesting that the western bridge needed some new piles.

  “We know about that,” Jeryk said. “We’re going to take care of it this summer.”

  “How many people come through here?” asked Flojian.

  “Oh, we don’t see many travelers nowadays,” he said. “In my father’s time, this was a busy place. But the traffic’s fallen off.”

  “What changed?”

  “More robbers on the roads now.” Jeryk frowned with indignation. “People aren’t safe anymore. So they travel in large groups.”

  Chaka didn’t miss the obvious: A large group would pass without seeing the toll collector.

  They received an invitation to stay to dinner. “Always like to have company,” the woman said. But it seemed safer to move on, and so Chaka explained they were on a tight schedule. Flojian almost fell off his horse trying not to laugh.

  As they rode away, Jeryk warned them once more to be on the lookout for brigands. “Can’t be too careful these days,” he said.

  The countryside broke up into granite ridges. They passed a pair of structures, hundreds of feet high, that resembled tapered urns, narrow in the center and wide at top and bottom. There were no windows and no indication what their function had been. Quait commented that the Roadmakers had left behind a lot of geometry and a lot of stone, but very little else. “It’d be a pity,” he said, “if whoever comes after us doesn’t know anything about us except the shape of our buildings. And that we made roads. Even good, all-weather ones.”

  Their spirits flagged as they continued east on a trail that seemed endless. Another canal appeared, on their north, running parallel. This one was of much more modest dimensions than the great ditch, but it contained water. It went on, day after day, while Flojian visualized legions of men wielding spades. “Our assumption has always been that they had a representative government of some sort. But I can’t see how these engineering feats could have been accomplished without slaves.”

  “You really think that’s true?” asked Quait. The Baranjis had owned slaves, but the little that survived of Roadmaker literature suggested a race of free people.

  “How else could they have done these things? It’s not so obvious on the highways, where you just think of a lot of people pouring concrete. But this canal, and the other one—?”

  They were riding now, moving at a steady pace. They passed a downed bridge that blocked the canal. The day was bright and sunny, flowers were blooming, and the air was clean and cool.
Chaka glanced at a turtle sunning itself on the wreckage.

  At the end of their fourth day on the canal, it intersected with a wide, quiet river. There was a blackened city on the north. They forded the river and camped.

  During the night, a band of Tuks, numbering eight or nine, rode confidently in on them, with the clear intention of shooting everyone. Flojian, who’d been on watch, put the would-be raiders to sleep. (One fell into the fire and was badly burned.) But during the momentary confusion Chaka woke up, tried to use her wedge, and afterward insisted that it had had no effect. The lamp, which had once glowed a bright green when she squeezed, now produced a somber red. In the morning, when their prisoners had begun to come around, she tried it again. There was no visible result.

  She armed herself with one of the extra units.

  The man who’d been burned died. They bound the others, appropriated a couple of their horses, and debated taking their rifles. But they were a different caliber from the smaller Illyrian weapons. So ultimately they simply pitched everything into the canal and drove off the spare animals. They followed their custom by leaving a dull knife for the captives.

  Shay’s trail had been running parallel, not only to the canal, but also to a giant double highway. Eventually the two connected, and they climbed onto the road in time to cross another north-south river. They were still headed east. The canal curved north and vanished into the wilderness.

  The great roads were subject to earth movements, flood, severe weather, and the passage of time. Flojian recalled his father’s predictions that they were fast disappearing, sinking into the wilderness, and that eventually they would disappear altogether and become the stuff of legend. When they cannot be seen, Karik had said, who will believe they were ever there?

  The new highway was covered with a thick coat of soil, and in many places it was difficult to distinguish the roadbed from the forest. In others it soared across ravines and lakes, its concrete base gleaming in the sun. In one of these places, it simply went into a long slow descent and plunged directly into a hillside. It did not reappear.