Eternity Road

by Jack McDevitt

  She drew his lips down to hers and folded her body into his. “Yes,” she said again.

  Orin Claver was not a believer. Nevertheless, he surprised the Illyrians by showing no reluctance to invoke the Goddess as protector of the hearth.

  “We are met on this hilltop,” he began, in the timeless ritual of the ancient ceremony, “to join this man and this woman.” The fire crackled in the background, and a rising wind moved the trees. As there was no one present to give the bride away, Flojian agreed to substitute for the requisite family member.

  Claver’s white scarf served as Chaka’s veil. She was otherwise in buckskin. Quait found a neckerchief to add a touch of formality to his own attire.

  Illyrian weddings required two witnesses, one each from the earthly and from the divine order. Flojian consequently was drawn to double duty, and stood with the invisible Shanta while his two friends pledged love, mutual faith, and fortune. When they’d finished, they exchanged rings which she had woven from vines and set with stones. Claver challenged any who had reason to object to come forward, “or forever remain silent.”

  They glanced around at the dark woods, and Chaka’s eyes shone. “No objection having been raised,” said Claver, “I hereby exercise the authority held by captains from time immemorial and declare you husband and wife. Quait, you may kiss the bride.”

  Flojian, sensing that the Goddess was preparing to depart, took advantage of her proximity to ask her to remember her servant Avila.

  …A sheer wall rising about two hundred feet out of the water. We could see thick woods at the top…. There was a river on the north side of the bluff, and a pebbled beach….

  They looked at their map some more, took bearings on the turn in the channel and the saddle-shaped formation that Knobby had described.

  “I’d say that’s it,” said Claver.

  They compared it with Arin’s sketch. “He would have been back that way,” suggested Chaka. A quarter-mile or so down the beach.

  They stood on wet sand off to one side of the formation. “There’s the discolored rock,” Quait said, drawing a horizontal line in the air with his index finger. “The door.”

  They all saw it. Flojian noted the position of a notched boulder on the summit. Chaka produced Silas’s journal and made the appropriate notation: SUSPECTED ENTRANCE FOUND. She dated and initialed it. When she’d finished, they hiked around behind the bluff and started upslope.

  By early afternoon they’d arrived at the top. They laid out their gear under a spruce tree and peered over the edge. It was a long way down. The cliff face looked gray and hard and very smooth, save for occasional shrubs. Far below, whitecaps washed over rocks. Flojian looked for his notched boulder, walked a few paces along the summit, and stopped. “Right about here,” he said.

  Gulls fluttered on air currents and skimmed the outgoing tide.

  Quait nodded. “I’ll go down.” He was already reaching for a line.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Claver.

  “Why not?”

  He glanced at his own eighty-seven-year-old body, at the diminutive Flojian, at Chaka. “I know I’m in good shape for my age,” he said, “but I’m still not sure the three of us could haul you back up here if you got in trouble. Seems to me as if the muscle in this operation should be on top and not on bottom.”

  There was no arguing the logic. “Who then?”

  “Me,” said Chaka.

  “No,” said Quait.

  Claver nodded. “It makes sense. She’s forty pounds lighter than anybody else.”

  Chaka looped a rope around her shoulders. “It’s not a problem,” she said.

  “Absolutely not,” said Quait.

  But Chaka never paused. “I’m a full member of this mission,” she said. “I’ve taken my chances along with everybody else.”

  “I know that.”

  “Good.” She tightened the rope and stretched her shoulders.

  “Have you ever done anything like this before?” Quait asked.

  “Tree house.” And, when his expression did not lighten, “I’ll be fine, Quait.”

  “We should have thought to bring a harness,” said Claver.

  They secured the rope ladder to a cottonwood and dropped it over the side. Then they looped Chaka’s safety line around the same tree, left sixty feet of slack, and anchored it to an elm. “Be careful,” said Quait. “If you need more line, pull once. You want to get hauled out of there, pull twice.”

  “Okay, lover,” she said. “I got it. And I’m ready.”

  “If the place is really here,” said Flojian, “I can’t believe there’s not another entrance.”

  Claver shook his head. “There’d be a lot of ground to search. Let’s use the way we know. Once inside, we can see what else is available.”

  Chaka put on a pair of gloves, stuffed a bar into her belt, and walked to the edge.

  “Luck,” said Flojian.

  She flashed a smile, straddled the ladder, and began to back down over the cliff edge. Quait paid out the safety line.

  The ladder’s rungs were wooden. But it was hard to get her feet onto them until the rock wall curved away somewhat. She kept her eyes on Quait as long as she could. She did not look down, but she felt the presence of the void. There seemed to be a damned lot of business with heights on this trip.

  But it was surprisingly easy going once she got below the summit.

  “Are you okay?” Flojian’s voice drifted down.

  She assured him she was and continued the descent. Every few steps they’d ask again and as she got farther away it became more distracting until finally she called up that she’d yell if she needed anything and please otherwise keep quiet.

  Once she ran out of slack and had to signal. The rock was rougher than it had looked from above. Vegetation was sharp and prickly. At one point it snagged the ladder and she had to hang by one hand while she worked it free.

  Streams of pebbles dribbled past. Vertical fissures appeared. From a dark hole, a pair of eyes watched her.

  A sudden burst of wind hit her and she swung gently back and forth, clinging to the ladder. Below her, right where it was supposed to be, she saw the discolored rock. It looked exactly like a set of doors. “A little more,” she called up. “I think we’ve got it.”

  There were actually four doors set in the face of the cliff. This was where Showron Voyager’s bullet-shaped vehicle had delivered its passengers. So there had been a terminal here once. Several pieces of iron remained, supports outside, beams inside. And a bench. One of the doors was wedged open. She had some difficulty gaining purchase because the ladder was hanging a couple of feet out, as a result of the overhead bulge. But she swung herself close, grabbed a wiry bush, and tried to get inside.

  The scariest part of the entire operation came when she tried to climb off the ladder and get through the doorway. There wasn’t enough slack and they didn’t seem to understand up there that if they kept the safety line tight she couldn’t move. Moreover, she had to hang on to the bush to keep the ladder close until she was safely through the open door. When it was over she wasted no time releasing the safety line. She congratulated herself and called up that she was okay. The high-roofed corridor Knobby had described lay beyond. But it was too dark to see more than a few yards.

  “Chaka.” Quait’s voice. “We need to tie the ladder down.”

  “Right.” The ladder was about three feet out. Just beyond easy reach.

  She tried for it twice. The second time she lost her balance and almost fell. It was a desperate moment. And it was stupid because they didn’t need to do it this way. “Quait.”

  “Yes. What’s taking so long?”

  “I can’t reach it. I need someone to come down.”

  Flojian came next, with lamps dangling from his belt. When he reached the doorway, she caught his hand and pulled him in. And the ladder along with him. They tied it to a beam and lit the lamps while they waited for Claver.

  Qu
ait was last to descend, having looped his safety line around the tree and dropped it to them so that someone would be holding the other end.

  When he’d joined them, they pushed through into the inner passageway. Beyond, in the gloomy light thrown by the lamps, they saw the stairway and the corridor and the shafts. The shafts were very much like the ones in the towers around Union Station. Chaka looked down into one. “Damp,” she said. She found a couple of pebbles and tossed them in. After a few seconds, they splashed.

  The air was stale away from the door.

  Claver indicated his surprise that the air was breathable at all, until Flojian noted a duct cover in the ceiling. There was a system of vents.

  The stairway was not cut from rock, but rather was an insert, made of Roadmaker metal. The handrail and the stairs were covered with dust.

  They picked up their equipment and started down. Flojian took the lead.

  Chaka had never quite believed the story about the six deaths. When people die in groups, they don’t die without marks. She noticed that Quait kept his hand close to his weapon.

  That Flojian harbored similar feelings was evident. He moved as quietly as he could, spoke in a hushed voice, and everything about his demeanor suggested that he was controlling his own set of devils. That was an unusual attitude for him: He was given to caution, but Chaka rarely saw him frightened. Nevertheless, he stayed in front.

  Even Claver seemed intimidated, and had little to say. He carried a coil of rope and a bar, but he was probably not aware he gripped the bar like a weapon.

  The dark was tangible. It squeezed the light from their lamps. Shadows moved grotesquely around the walls. They could hear the wind, seemingly in the rock. Corridors opened at each level. The shafts were always there, of course, and beyond they saw doorways, sometimes open, sometimes not.

  “The walls are wet,” said Claver. “This isn’t a place I’d use for storage.”

  “It was probably military,” suggested Quait. “Whatever it might have become in later years it was originally a military or naval installation.”

  The stairway wound back and forth, landing by landing, until they concluded they must surely be near the base of the cliff. And then it ended. Broke off.

  “This is probably where they found your father,” Chaka told Flojian.

  Quait stood at the edge of the landing, held his lamp out, and looked down. They could see a floor.

  That’s where they died.

  “No dust here,” said Claver.

  There wasn’t. The landing was clean. So were five or six stairs above the landing. Above that, the dust was thick. Curious.

  The floor was about twenty-five feet down.

  “Maybe,” Claver continued, “they opened a door and released a pocket of gas.”

  That was close to making sense. It was akin to what had happened to Jon Shannon when he opened the wrong door. But there was a missing element. “There was no explosion,” Chaka said.

  “Don’t need one. They start breathing gas, lose consciousness, and they smother.”

  “All six of them?”

  “Well,” Claver admitted, “it does require a stretch.”

  “Anyhow,” said Flojian, “they were found in different places.”

  Claver shook his head. “There’s always a tendency to dramatize when you’re telling a story.”

  “I don’t think Knobby was lying,” said Chaka.

  Flojian tied a line around his lamp and lowered it. The remains of the collapsed staircase lay scattered around the floor below.

  “I wouldn’t suggest he was lying,” said Claver. “But people get confused easily. Especially in a place like this. To be honest with you, if things happened the way Knobby said, I’d be ready to accept the idea that there’s something loose in these tunnels.”

  Quait knew immediately that Claver regretted having said it. But it was out in the open now, no calling it back, and they looked nervously at one another and peered into the area below. They could see the openings to passageways down there. One in each wall. “If it was gas,” he asked, “could the same thing happen to us?”

  “Oh, yes.” Claver shook his head emphatically. “Yes, indeed. I would certainly say so. Just open the wrong door.”

  “How do we protect ourselves?” asked Flojian.

  Chaka made a noise low in her throat. “Stay clear of doors altogether,” she said.

  “That’s right.” Claver folded his arms and assumed the stance of an instructor. “If we open any doors, one person does it, and the rest of us get well back. I’d suggest also no one wander off alone. And be careful with the guns.” He threw a long hard look at Quait. “We’re all a trifle jittery right now.” He stressed the pronoun to suggest that he was really talking about the Illyrians. “We don’t have much light, and we’re likely in more danger from ourselves than from any outside source.”

  “I hope so,” said Quait. He tied a rope to the handrail and pulled it tight. The lower area was dark, cold, dismal. Light reflected off puddles. “It’s not the way I expected Haven to look,” he said. He dropped the other end of the line into the lower chamber, wrapped it around his waist, and stepped off the landing.

  “Careful.” Chaka drew her pistol.

  Quait lowered himself smoothly. He had his own weapon out before he touched ground. The floor was wet. It glittered in the light from the lamps. As soon as he was clear, Chaka started down.

  There was a doorway in each wall.

  The passage with the shafts was behind her. Two adjacent corridors rolled away into the dark. Directly ahead, she was looking at a flat, low tunnel. A massive door lay half wedged in the tunnel entrance.

  Quait was walking around, thrusting his lamp into each passageway in turn. The corridors to left and right revealed several open doors. Chaka took a quick look and saw large rooms with high ceilings and piles of soggy wreckage.

  Flojian gazed at the fallen door, and then walked into the fourth passageway. Chaka followed him. Twenty feet farther on, there was another, apparently identical, door. It too was down. Beyond, they saw black water.

  “The underground lake,” said Flojian.

  “So far,” said Chaka, “Knobby seems to be accurate.”

  The surface of the lake lay several feet below floor level. The lake itself stretched into the dark. Chaka looked up at the ceiling. It was quite smooth and flat, only a few feet above the water. “This is a chamber,” she said, “not a cave.”

  “Look at this.” Flojian directed the beam from his lamp to a stairway. The stairway descended into the water.

  Chaka stared at it a long time. “I don’t think this area’s supposed to be under water,” she said.

  Claver by now had joined them. “The doors are hatches,” he said. “They wanted to seal off the lake.”

  “Why?” asked Flojian.

  “Maybe there’s something that comes out of the water,” suggested Chaka.

  Claver’s brow furrowed. “I just don’t understand what happened here,” he said.

  The tall corridor was lined with open rooms, all resembling the one that Chaka had looked into. They entered the nearest one and played their lantern beams across ancient tables, benches, cabinets. Everything was wet and cold.

  “Must be water in the walls,” said Claver.

  Many of the cabinets were standardized. They were made of Roadmaker materials, neither wood nor metal, and most had four or five drawers of varying thicknesses. Some of the drawers were empty. Most contained a kind of brown sludge.

  Quait knelt beside one and held his lamp close. He dug into the sludge and drew out a piece of shriveled material. Several threads hung from it.

  “Might be a book binding,” said Claver.

  Flojian nodded. “I think that’s right. I think that’s exactly what it is. That’s what they all are. They put the volumes into individual drawers. You wanted to see something, you pulled it out, took it over to one of the tables, read it at your leisure.”

  Chaka sur
veyed the sludge and said nothing.

  Each drawer had been fixed with a metal plate, possibly identifying the book within. But the plates were no longer legible.

  Because of the poor light, they were slow to appreciate the size of the chamber. The ceiling was high, about twenty feet. And the room was quite extensive, probably a hundred feet long and half as wide. It was circled by a gallery, which was connected to the lower level by a staircase at either end. Two hundred cabinets, at a rough guess, were scattered across the floor.

  They walked through the debris with sinking spirits, and climbed to the gallery hoping that, somehow, miraculously, the upper levels might have escaped the general destruction. They had not.

  What had happened? “We know there was stuff here,” said Chaka. “Karik and his people found some books intact. Somewhere.”

  “Let’s see what else there is,” said Quait.

  There were three more such rooms located in that wing. But all were in identical condition. They trooped listlessly through the wreckage, trying to read plates, to find something that had survived.

  The opposite wing, however, gave reason to hope. It too had four storage areas. Three were ruined. But at the end of the corridor, a door was still closed. “Maybe,” said Chaka.

  “These doors look watertight, too,” said Claver.

  The locking mechanism was operated by a ringbolt. Quait lifted it, and the others withdrew to a safe distance, taking the lamps with them.

  But the door would not open. “Give me a bar,” he said.

  They worked almost half an hour, forcing the door away from the jamb. When they were satisfied it was ready, they re assumed their positions, Quait inserted the bar at a strategic point, looked at them hopefully, and pulled.

  The door creaked. He tried again and it came open a few inches. Quait sniffed at the air. “I think it’s okay,” he said.