The road was damp from a rainfall that the race had managed to miss, so she and Nicholas were careful, feathering their brakes as they let gravity take them down the road cut into the side of the towering palisades that bound this stretch of the Kentucky River. Halfway down, they came upon a pair of Shaker women standing at a wooden gate across the road, but the women had opened the gate as they approached and then wordlessly waved them through.
“It’s like someone told them to expect us,” said Nicholas.
Maggie wondered. The reenactors at the Obelisk and the people with the quilt at South Union had all seemingly had encounters with her father or Japheth Sapp or some of her father’s friends, and recently. But it had been three years since their father had left on his mission trip, and his direction had been opposite that of the race’s start.
The road leveled out onto a long, wide shelf that had clearly been constructed by human hands. Poplars and other water-loving trees crowded the road, and then, after a hard turn right, the road plunged straight into the green waters of the Kentucky River.
They came to a halt. There was nobody in sight, either along the road, in the woodland tangle on the opposite bank two hundred yards away, or, of course, on the river itself. There was no sound other than the lapping water, not even birdsong. The air was still and heavy.
“It just looks like a river,” said Nicholas, so quietly that he was almost whispering.
Maggie thought of what her father had taught her. “The Kentucky was the first of the Commonwealth’s rivers to be invaded. Athena sent two of her Commodores across the border to Beattyville to pour part of her essence into the confluence of streams that mark the source.”
“When?” asked Nicholas. “I thought the Girding Wall kept the Commodores at bay. Though I saw the wreck of one in Oklahoma once, where the Federals left it after a battle.”
Maggie had only seen drawings of the towering Commodores and was glad of that. She answered Nicholas. “A long time ago. I don’t know for sure. Before either of us was born, certainly.”
They clipped out of their pedals, then swung off their machines. Maggie leaned over and undid the fasteners on her shoes then kicked them to one side before peeling off her socks. The grass beside the old pavement of the road had been cut short, and was cool on her tired feet. She took off her helmet.
Nicholas clacked around on the road, still in his hard-soled racing shoes. He looked at everything—the trees and the sky, the opposite bank, the ramp down into the water, the water itself. Especially that. His gaze kept returning to the Kentucky River.
“What do you see?” Maggie asked him.
He shrugged. “Water. Just water.”
Maggie sang, “Everywhere we look there’s water, water.”
The river sang, “Dondequiera que miremos hay agua, agua.”
Nicholas strode closer to the riverside, picking his way carefully down the concrete ramp that led right into the water. Maggie joined him, and when he stepped close enough to actually lean out over the green water, she placed a warning hand on the small of his back.
“We don’t know how powerful the Shaker singing is,” she said. “There could be, I don’t know, scouts in the water. Remnants.”
“I want to see my reflection in it,” he replied.
This struck Maggie as an odd thing to say, but she realized that the oddness was probably a product of the prejudices and fears instilled in her by a lifetime on the Green. And then she realized that she, too, wanted to see her features in the water.
“Well,” she said, stepping in front of Nicholas. “Let me go first, in case I have to sing it down.”
She unconsciously held one hand behind her for balance and was surprised when Nicholas took it in his own. She looked back over her shoulder and he shrugged. “For safety,” he said.
Maggie leaned out and looked down. She saw her features, softer than she imagined since she looked at Michael more often than she looked at mirrors. Her hair was matted and sweat-slicked. She leaned out farther, and a drop of sweat from her forehead fell.
She watched it all the way, accelerating at nine point eight meters per second per second, the salty water of her body falling into the unknowable water of the Kentucky.
“Dondequiera que miremos hay agua, agua.”
The drop that fell into the river consisted mainly of water, but also had detectable mineral content. Sodium, potassium, magnesium, and calcium—along with several exogenous organic compounds encoded with Maggie’s DNA—were present in trace amounts. It would take a sophisticated machine to analyze the drop, and to identify a particular human individual from its makeup.
The Kentucky River was a very sophisticated machine.
“Dondequiera que miremos hay agua, agua.”
“What’s happening?” Nicholas shouted. “What’s that noise?”
Because the river was thrumming. Concentric rings that spread hugely and impossibly out from where her sweat had made contact with the water’s surface sounded deep, ringing notes as they grew into waves washing on both shores. Maggie leaped back, barely keeping clear of the tumultuous river.
“Go!” she yelled. “We’ve got to get away!”
But it was far too late for that.
An arcing column of green water grew up from the center of the river, somehow keeping its cohesion as it reached out and over the pair of them, plunging down onto the road and spreading, spreading, spreading until Maggie and Nicholas stood beneath a dome of sunlit water.
The wall of the dome was full of motion but did not move. Maggie saw that there were currents in the dome, that the water was flowing. Then she saw that features were appearing where she looked, on the dome’s riverward side. Features she recognized.
A woman made all of green river water stepped out of the wall.
She said, “Oh my daughter, oh my beautiful daughter.”
Maggie opened her mouth, but before she could scream, a stream of water flew out from the woman’s palm. It flowed into Maggie’s mouth and nose and ears. Before she could close her eyes, the green water was there, holding her lids open. A globe formed around her head, and Maggie felt herself lifted up until her she was dangling with her toes just above the ground.
Nicholas tackled the river woman, or tried to. When he dived against her, he fell through her, and then bounced hard off the watery dome. Through the water and her own panic, Maggie saw him rolling on his back, scratching at the mask of water that now covered his features.
“Don’t hurt him!” she shouted, but the sound was muted by the water filling her mouth and throat.
Why am I not drowning? she wondered, and an answer came into her mind.
You are not drowning because the water in the sphere holding you up is hyperoxygenated. Your lungs will work a little harder, but you will not asphyxiate. Your body will remember what it is like to be enveloped in water, as you once were inside me.
Maggie was still staring wild-eyed at Nicholas, who now lay still while she struggled yet.
The boy is well. He is simply unconscious.
Maggie tried to speak again, but was frustrated in the attempt. So she thought instead. What are you? Why are you doing this? Why are you pretending to be my mother?
The flowing features of the river woman softened, and water flowed from water then as tears fell from her eyes.
I am not pretending to be your mother, Maggie. I am remembering to be. And it is very hard. The Kentucky is not my river, and Athena will sooner or later discover that I have cut her leash.
Maggie thought, You’re dead. You drowned many years ago.
The river woman who looked so much like her nodded at Maggie. I drowned, yes, but I did not die. Not all who are taken by the Voluntary State’s northern waters are completely destroyed. Some of us are absorbed to greater and lesser degrees. My body is gone, but my consciousness, my mind, were taken by the waters and held apart.
Maggie tried to make sense of that. The rivers are . . . are purgatory? Your soul has been kept from its rewa
rd?
A theological explanation is as good as any, replied the river woman. You are certainly your father’s daughter in that, though he would caution you against particulars and parallels. If he could. If he could.
What does that mean? Where is my father? Have you done something to him?
Wait, said the river woman. Someone comes.
And then Maggie was laying on the ground, coughing up water. The upland side of the dome suddenly exploded inward and the entire structure collapsed, water falling like a torrential rain. The dome was breached, Maggie saw, by a speeding bicycle.
And Michael was there.
Chapter Ten
Lydia had cleared the rest of the team and the staff out of the bus, and now sat silently at the end of the table while Michael railed and cursed.
Maggie and Nicholas, their cycling kits still damp from river water, sat on a narrow couch, watching Michael pace back and forth, the two of them not daring to say anything.
“The rivers have taken six people on this race,” he said, repeating himself for a third or fourth time. “And you would have been the seventh if the Shakers hadn’t told me where you’d gone!” He had yet to mention Nicholas, or even look at him.
“You know better than anyone, you should know, the dangers of the waterways, especially the Kentucky! You were engulfed by the waters! If the race director or any other Owls find out about this they’ll turn you over to the Federals and you’ll never be heard from again!”
Maggie was tired of being shouted at, and thought, Never being heard from again is kind of the family tradition.
Except it wasn’t, of course. Not now. No wonder rivers liked the sound of their voices. Or the part that was their mother did.
“Michael, you’ve made your points,” said Lydia. Seeing Maggie and Nicholas relax somewhat at that, she added sharply, “And they’re good ones. What you two did was reckless and foolish. You endangered yourselves and Michael both, and the risk of being ejected from the race or arrested is far from the worst that could have happened. Now . . .” She looked carefully at Maggie. “Are you going to explain yourselves?”
But it was Nicholas who spoke. “It’s my fault. I wanted to see the river. I thought it was supposed to be safe through here because of the Shaker influence.”
Michael muttered, “Always taste it, always fear.”
“He wouldn’t have gone if I hadn’t agreed to it,” said Maggie, and Lydia gave her a curious look, as if she noticed that Maggie wasn’t exactly apologizing.
Michael finally spoke to Nicholas. “What did you think you were going to see? Athena’s Commodores wading upstream? Rock monkeys on war barges out of Nashville? The dangers of the waters aren’t things you see coming.”
Nicholas glanced over at Maggie, but she said nothing. So he said, “We did see something. So did you, for that matter, you saw that dome, but we saw more than that. We saw your—”
“We saw her,” said Maggie. “We saw Mama.” And it occurred to Maggie that she hadn’t uttered that precise word aloud in at least a decade.
Michael’s fury was back in an instant. He looked from Lydia to Nicholas to Maggie and said, “Still? You still want to talk about this, and now in front of strangers?”
Maggie said, “Sit down. I’m tired of you looming over me. I’m tired of you denying what’s been happening and I am so damned tired of you shouting all the time!”
Lydia stood up and signaled for Nicholas to do the same. “We’ll leave you two,” she said. “You can have the bus for now, but remember, we’re leaving in an hour. And Michael.” She turned to him. “We’re not strangers. We’re your team.” They left.
Michael said, “You told her.”
Maggie pointed to a chair.
Michael hesitated for a moment, but then sat. “Look, I was just . . . terrified,” he said.
She almost went to comfort him, but . . . No, not this time. They were not the only family each other had. They were not.
“It . . . she said she’s escaped Athena Parthenus somehow,” she said.
“If she’s escaped then why is she sending telephones from Tennessee? If it’s really her . . . how can it be her if she’s . . . she’s what I saw down there. All water.”
“I don’t know, Michael. But she’s trying to tell us something so important that she’d risk her freedom and ours in the telling. It has to be about Daddy. I think we should listen to her. And I think I have a plan of how we can, safely.”
Michael looked up at her, fear and curiosity as plain on his face as it was in Maggie’s heart. “How?”
“First,” said Maggie, “I have to ride my bicycle faster than I’ve ever ridden.”
The race caravan crossed High Bridge that evening, Maggie riding with the other Team America cyclists in the team bus. Shakers lined either side of the centuries-old iron span, singing down to the river hundreds of feet below.
And then they were north of the river, and in the rolling, sparsely forested hills of the Bluegrass, country of the horselords. For twenty miles, the caravan travelled along broad, smooth roads toward Lexington, where the start and finish of the next day’s time trial was located, and where they would spend the night in actual beds instead of on cots in tents. The horselords maintained an enormous inn at the center of their capital, built among the towers that housed the city’s relatively few Viewers at Home.
It had turned out that the most difficult thing to convince Michael of wasn’t Maggie potentially placing herself in danger, or even his own relative lack of participation in what she planned for the next day, but instead he bucked at taking Lydia and Nicholas further into their confidence. He wasn’t used to sharing secrets, not even really with Maggie. It had never mattered, because Maggie always knew what he was thinking.
“She already knows most of it,” Maggie had said, and told him about the letter Lydia had showed her. “And Nicholas saw more than you did this afternoon. I really believe we can trust them. All of them.”
Maggie knew that might be considered naïve, but she saw little choice. She needed to speak to her mother again, and for that she needed time alone by the river, time that could only be won by turning in a truly epic performance in the next day’s time trial.
The individual time trial was the only discipline in road cycling where a rider found herself alone on the road for any significant period of time. It was not a race against the other riders, strictly speaking, but a race against the clock. The riders would leave the start house one at time, separated by two or three minutes, and ride over the same course as fast as they possibly could.
“Three minutes isn’t much,” Michael had said.
“It will be more than that,” said Maggie. “It’s a course for climbers. I’ll be pulling away from the rider who starts behind me.”
“What if you catch whoever starts before you before you get to the river?”
“It depends on when and where. If there’s time, and I’m strong, I’ll just leave her behind, too. Otherwise I’ll have to stay just behind her and make sure she’s out of sight up the road when I stop on the bank.”
They told Lydia and Nicholas privately before dinner that night. Crowded into the room the twins had been given at the inn, the two Oklahomans met the plan with skepticism. They had asked about the camerastats, but Maggie was confident that the limited number available would be following the GC riders starting behind her. She was also convinced they wouldn’t be a problem for her, not that day, since her mother had used one to talk to Michael and then there’d been the image of her on the screen.
“At the absolute most you’ll have five and half minutes alone by the river before another cyclist comes by,” said Nicholas. “And that’s if you manage to almost catch your three-minute man on a very challenging course.”
“Three-minute woman,” said Maggie. “I’m immediately behind Mexico’s road captain on the GC.”
The order the riders would depart depended on their overall place in the general classification, w
ith the last-place rider leaving first and the yellow jersey wearer last. Because of his wins, Michael was relatively high up and would start late in the day.
“Whoever it is,” said Lydia, “the timing is exceedingly fine, and you’ll need to ride the time trial of your life. Are you up to it?”
Maggie said, “I believe I am,” at the same time Michael said, “Of course she is.”
Lydia smiled. “If you had your brother’s self-confidence you would be among the finest climbers in the world.”
Maggie thought about that for a moment, about her confidence in herself, and realized that her director’s observation was . . . inexact.
“I don’t need confidence,” she said. “I have faith.”
Michael said, “Our father would remind us of the eldest servant of Abraham right now, of his prayer when Abraham sent him to take a wife to Isaac.”
Lydia and Nicholas glanced at one another, and Lydia said, “I don’t think either of us know that prayer.”
“It’s the one I’ll pray on the start ramp tomorrow,” said Maggie. “O Lord, send me good speed this day.”
The Owl held his hand up in front of Maggie’s face, fingers spread. He spoke in French, the traditional language of competitive road cycling.
“Cinq,” he said, and Maggie made a microscopic adjustment to the position of her hands on the handlebar drops.
“Quatre,” he said, folding his thumb across his palm. Maggie gave a shake to her thighs, nervous energy expressing.
“Trois,” said the Owl, holding up three fingers now, and Maggie looked again at the stage directions taped to the top tube of the twitchy, unfamiliar time-trialing bicycle the team had provided. Out of the start house and turn left, so many hundred yards and turn right, a short hill, another left, and then a lengthy rolling ride out of the city to the steeply pitched roads along the river where most of the time trial would take place.
Telling the Map Page 25