Telling the Map

by Christopher Rowe

  She needn’t have worried. Though she saw nothing of the sprint, she could hear the excited calls of riders telling one another to move up or to move aside. She heard Lydia and David calling encouragement to the sprint train over the radio and, wonder of wonders, she even heard cheers. The people of Cadiz had come out to see the race pass through their little town.

  Maggie barely registered the passage through the village, concentrating on navigating its streets and finding her way back out onto the open road. The sprinters and their lead outs drifted back into the peloton, excitedly chattering about what apparently been a very close sprint.

  Then Michael was right there beside her. “I think I got it!” he said. “I think I pipped that tall woman from California right on the line!”

  Lydia’s voice came, “They’re saying they’re going to a photograph to determine who took it. Camerastats are feeding data to the race director now.”

  Then, a few minutes later, a loud whoop in her ear. “Michael Hammersmith first!” said Lydia.

  All the Americans cheered, and the woman from California rode up beside Michael and gave him a grudging pat on the back. “Hope you saved something for the real finish, rookie,” she said. “I won’t be holding back when we get to the Obelisk.”

  Michael took this in good humor, and told the woman he would be showing her a clean pair of wheels at the line next time, meaning he meant to beat by her a bike length or more. The woman smirked and drifted back over to her own teammates.

  The Obelisk was still hours away. With no more water crossings, the race settled into the pattern it would have shown from the beginning had it been run anywhere besides the Commonwealth. A couple of miles past the intermediate sprint, two riders—one of them the rider from Mexico who had spoken to Maggie, the other a Cuban man with the build of a climber—attacked the front of the peloton to form the day’s escape. No team manager directed a chase, and they were soon lost from view, if temporarily.

  “We can give them a bit of a leash,” said Lydia. “Let them settle in about three minutes ahead. We’ll start the chase at Hopkinsville if nobody else does.”

  But it was the Californians who began ramping up the pace at the army town of Hopkinsville, where the race was saluted in passing by the armored division headquartered there. There was another, far different crowd on the eastern edge of the town. Behind a chain-link fence running along the left side of the road, line upon line of silent onlookers in wheelchairs were parked in the spacious green lawns of an enormous brick hospital.

  “Who are they?” Nicholas asked Maggie.

  “Viewers at Home,” she replied. “Or rather, Viewers at Home who rejected cable but couldn’t come fully back to the world. My father told us that some fairly high percentage of people’s minds are destroyed by the link, but that the federal government and the cable company collude to keep the real number quiet. Is there no cable where you’re from?”

  Nicholas shrugged. “There are no Viewers who reject cable where I’m from. Or anyplace else I’ve visited. These people, they’re like those riders at the river, after they were . . . taken.”

  Maggie glanced over at the patients before they disappeared behind them. There was a similarity. But her father had never made a connection between cable and the Voluntary State. And as he was someone who saw hidden connections behind everything, that seemed to Maggie to mean there couldn’t be one.

  The catch was quick in coming, the peloton reeling in the escapees at the exact moment a gasp went up from the collected riders.

  The Obelisk had come into view on the eastern horizon.

  “Sprint train to the front,” said Lydia, and Michael’s three lead-out riders guided him up the right side of the road. Other teams were massing their sprinters as well, and the speed was going up quickly.

  Not so quickly that the ubiquitous camerastats could not keep up, of course, and now these crowded in more closely than ever. It appeared as though each of the principal sprinters had drawn their own personal camera, and one flew alongside Michael, so close that Maggie imagined that her brother could lash out and hit it with his fist. She wouldn’t have been surprised to see him do just that, in fact.

  But no, Michael was concentrating. He cared little about the thanks the other riders had given him for getting them safely across the Cumberland, but he cared very much indeed about proving himself on the open road. He’d already done that, taking the Cadiz sprint over the more experienced riders, but now he was hungry for something else altogether. Michael wanted his first professional win, and Maggie wanted it for him as well. She wished that she could have been leading him out with the others, but contented herself with slotting in behind him, Nicholas on her wheel.

  So there on the road that was once called the Jefferson Davis Highway, with a crosswind threatening to split the peloton and the noise of the derailleurs and the wheels combining into their high hum, Maggie was placed so that when the camera spoke to her brother, she heard it too.

  “Michael,” it sang.

  Michael cursed. “Hardly the time for an interview!” he shouted, practically spitting the words out.

  The Obelisk loomed, and the first lead outs began drifting back, work done, and the speed went higher.

  At this point, Maggie should have drifted back into the peloton with Nicholas, letting the sprinters have their dangerous sport. But she had recognized the voice of the camera. She had remembered it.

  She had dreamed it. She had heard it say, “Oh my daughter.” It was the voice of a river and of a woman both. It was the voice of what claimed to be their mother, and now it was calling to Michael as they fast approached the finish line of the race.

  “You must listen to me, my son,” said the camera in the lilting sing-song voice from Maggie’s dream. “You and your sister have a great task ahead of you.”

  Michael didn’t answer. He rose out of the saddle and gave a tremendous dig, pulling away from Maggie for all that she rode as hard as she could. She heard Nicholas cry out something from behind. She would be in trouble tonight for leaving him to fend for himself, but that thought vanished as soon as it crossed her mind.

  This was her team, but Michael was her brother.

  The camerastat still flew beside Michael, if anything even closer than it had been before. A rider drifted back, and Maggie saw with a start that it was Samantha, Michael’s final lead out. The sprint had started.

  Why am I up here? Maggie asked herself, and heard her answer from the camera, which said, “Your father is in danger, and he will not listen to me. If—”

  But the camera did not continue speaking, because Michael lashed out. He leaned against it, sitting back in his saddle and punching wildly to the right, even throwing his helmeted head at the flying thing. He clipped it with his right fist, and wobbled wildly, and Maggie, right on his wheel, pulled hard to the left, and then he was down, and then she was flying, as Michael’s violent riding brought down the whole front of the peloton in an enormous crash.

  Chapter Seven

  Maggie had been holding her breath the whole time Tammy stitched up the gash on her elbow. When the soiegneur tied off the thread, she let it out, resisting the urge to punctuate the exhalation with something from Michael’s repertoire of curses.

  Tammy took up a spray can and shook it, and said, “This will feel cold,” before aiming a stream of frigid analgesic over Maggie’s elbow. This time, Maggie did curse.

  “She speaks!” said Tammy, not unfriendly. “I was thinking you’d damaged your voice in that crash in addition to the cut on your elbow. And the gash on your knee. And the sprained wrist.”

  Maggie didn’t need to be reminded of this laundry list of injuries. Her entire body ached, but she wouldn’t complain. There were other riders injured far more badly than she, two of whom had been forced to retire from the race with broken bones. The American team itself was intact, but in addition to she and Michael, Samantha had gone down in the crash, so fully half the squad would be sporting bandages
and splints on the next day’s stage.

  “Okay, now it’s massage time,” said Tammy, rubbing desanitizer into her hands. “Hop up on the table. I’ll work around your wounds, don’t worry.”

  “Michael’s still outside,” said Maggie. “Shouldn’t you see to his cuts first?”

  Michael had landed heavily on one side and had what the cyclists called road rash, deep scrapes, from his ankle to his shoulder. He also had a deep cut over one eyebrow and had been holding a wad of cotton against it for well over an hour, the whole time since the peloton had limped across the finish line.

  Tammy said, “Uh, Lydia wants me to let him stew for a little while. I’m supposed to get everybody seen to before him. And before you, too, for that matter. I’m afraid you guys are a little bit on the outs with our directors at the moment.”

  With their directors and everyone else involved in the race.

  Only a few riders had made it around the crash that Michael had precipitated. Maggie had heard that the stage had been taken by a rider from the Cherokee Nation team, a squad that didn’t even have a pure sprinter but had just happened to be riding on the left side of the road and taken advantage of the carnage.

  The rules stated that in the event of crashes so close to the finish line, that riders involved would be given the same finishing time as the winner, so the overall standings weren’t affected. Practically the entire peloton was tied for first or within a second or two on the general classification. Except for Michael.

  He had been relegated to last place, even though he limped over the line carrying his unridable machine before several others. A penalty of thirty seconds had been assessed against him, so on what was to have been his day of glory, he found himself the lanterne rouge, the rider in dead last.

  As well as being the most despised rider on the race. Other riders, even other team directors, had not been shy in making their feelings known, and Maggie couldn’t exactly blame them. As Tammy began kneading the deep tissues of her legs, Maggie thought of the curses that had been voiced, the angry looks thrown their direction. Even the Mexican woman who had invited Maggie to join their team had given Michael a long, cool look, and this was to say nothing of the members of their own team.

  Samantha in particular, who was badly banged up, had positively seethed at the twins. “What was that? What the hell was that? I know you’re rookies, but I also know you can organize a sprint because we just won one. That camerastat was nowhere near enough you for you to go off your line!” She’d turned on Maggie then. “And you! What the hell were you doing up there anyway? Did you forget about our GC man? Did you know that Nicholas had to jump his bike over two downed riders to avoid crashing himself?”

  She hadn’t waited for answers, but simply stalked off to the team bus for her turn on the massage table. Lydia had been standing nearby, watching silently. Meanwhile, David and the team mechanic could be heard cursing loudly at the work they had to do to repair the racing machines. The race would start the next day at the scheduled time, despite all.

  “That’s it,” Tammy said on finishing. “Um, I’m supposed to tell you to go see Lydia now. And you can send Michael in on your way out.”

  Outside the soigneur’s tent, Michael was sitting on the ground, still in his shredded racing kit, legs splayed out in front of him. He held the bloody wad of cloth over his right eyebrow and when he saw Maggie began the obviously painful process of standing. Maggie held out her hand, but he waved her off.

  “When are we going to talk about it?” she asked him.

  Michael shook his head, if gingerly. “What’s to be said that hasn’t been already? I screwed up. I went off my line and fell and nearly took out every rider in the race.”

  Maggie said, “You know that’s not what I mean. I mean that camera. What it was saying. Who was doing the saying.”

  “I couldn’t hear what it was saying over the noise of the race,” Michael said. “I just thought it was flying too close and let my temper get the better of me.”

  Maggie looked at him for a moment. Then she balled up her fist and hit him solidly above his unwounded eye, and then Michael was sprawled on the ground again.

  Maggie stepped over her brother and put one bare foot on his chest, holding him down.

  “What the hell, Maggie?”

  She looked around and saw that no one was nearby. She had protected Michael as much as she could, but maybe it was time to stop. The voice had been unmistakably the same one from her dream.

  Maggie leaned over, putting more weight onto his chest, and said, “No. Not this time. Something has been trying to contact us, something that’s obviously from Tennessee and something that obviously wants us to think it’s our mother. Now it’s tracked us here and now you’ve jeopardized everything we’ve ever worked for because you’re afraid to find out what it is. Go get sewn up, and then find me at our tent. I have to go make excuses for you to Lydia, but we are going to talk about this.”

  With that, she walked away.

  Lydia was at the table on the team bus, looking at a map of the next day’s stage. She motioned for Maggie to sit down across from her, barely looking up.

  She let Maggie sit in uncomfortable silence for a few long moments, then pulled a sheet of paper out from beneath the map.

  “Injury report from the race director,” she said. “Shall I read it to you?”

  Maggie said nothing.

  Lydia slid the paper across the table. “Why don’t you read it to me?”

  “I already read it,” said Maggie. “They’ve posted it all through the village.”

  Lydia nodded. “Yes, they have. That and the results, which show that I’m directing the rider in last place, which means with today’s times that I’m directing the team in last place. How do you think I should feel about that?”

  Maggie said, “He knows it was his fault.”

  “Oh, does he? You mean he knows what everyone else on the race or watching at home knew from the second he threw a punch at a camerastat? You mean he’s aware that he sent two riders on other teams to the hospital and off the race entirely, and has caused untold difficulty for everybody still here? Every team’s mechanics will be up all night repairing bicycles or building up spares for the bikes they can’t fix, and more than half—more than half—the riders will be trying to sleep with injuries.”

  Maggie looked at her hands. Any other time, she would have been mortified for Michael, trying desperately to argue in his favor, making excuses for him. But all she could think about was the camerastat and its abbreviated message. Your father is in danger and he will not listen to me. If—

  If what? What happened if they wouldn’t listen either and their father really was in danger?

  “You’re not even listening to me,” said Lydia in an exasperated voice. “And I’ve not even gotten to what you did wrong, dragging our GC rider to the front of a sprint, then leaving him to his own devices when you go chasing after your brother. What on earth were you thinking?”

  Maggie thought about the letter Lydia had shown her. She thought about having no friends besides her brother, no allies even, with the possible exception of Japheth Sapp. Should I tell her what really happened?

  “Now,” said Lydia. “Why don’t you tell me what really happened?”

  “What?” said Maggie, startled that her director had echoed her thought so exactly. “What do you mean?”

  “The race director says that the feed from the camerastat Michael went after cut out before he touched it. And though it’s no excuse for what he did, it was flying closer to him than it should have been.”

  She knows so much already, thought Maggie. So she said, “It was talking to him.”

  Lydia narrowed her eyes. “The camera?”

  “Yes. Or something through the camera, anyway.”

  Lydia cursed under her breath. “Was it her?”

  Maggie said, “It claimed to be. And it mentioned our father.”

  “A threat to the race?”
<
br />   “No, no, it said he was in trouble. I think it wants us to help him.”

  “‘It,’” said Lydia. “Not she? Not her?”

  “You saw the riders who were taken at the Tennessee,” said Maggie. “Do you think my mother could have survived the Green River any better?”

  Lydia frowned. “She was an extraordinary woman. Not just as an athlete. But no, I don’t guess so. But the alternative is that that someone, something, is disguising itself as her. Why?”

  Maggie shrugged. “To get us to do its bidding? To recruit us as spies?”

  “Cycling spies?” asked Lydia. “What state secrets do you think we come across in our races? And what kind of sabotage could you get up to? No, the key to this is your father, the preaching man.” Lydia’s eyes widened. “The preaching man who figured out a way to defeat Athena Parthenus’s nanomachines in the river.”

  Maggie said, “You think the Governor of Tennessee knows who my father is? And sees him as a threat?”

  Lydia was thinking fast and got up to pace. “She styles herself—it styles itself, whatever—the ‘Queen of Reason,’ right? And what’s left of the federal government and much of the rest of the world are terrified of what she’s done in Tennessee, so much so that the country went bankrupt building the Girding Wall, fracturing the union in the process.”

  Maggie knew all this. She’d grown up hearing her father lecture about the dangers of the Voluntary State and of the federal government both. The idea that her father, for all that he could manipulate the waters infected by Tennessee, could be perceived as a danger by what he called the “Great Enemy” seemed . . . unlikely. She loved her father, but as she had grown older, and especially in the years since he’d left them, she’d come to think of him as something of a crank. She tried to think of a way to say this that also conveyed the boundless love and respect she had for the man, and realized that she couldn’t fully articulate her complex feelings for him even to herself.