Beyond the Veil of Stars

by Robert Reed

  “You can’t take chances,” she agreed.

  “It’s that bad?”

  “It’s falling apart, the whole operation is. Too many recruits too fast. Too long to get here, and people staying past schedule. Good ones lose their judgment, and the iffy ones go mad.”

  “Logan?”

  “He’s a mess,” she snapped, “last I heard.”

  “Does Porsche need help …?”

  “Absolutely. Go,” Susan said. “She’s asking for you, I hope you know.”

  Again he took up his harnesses, hands numbed by the chill rain.

  “But it’s not a jog,” she warned him. “We’ve gotten through the gorge, at last, but this little river … well, you’ll see. Go on. And here, take some of this.”

  Half-dried meat in wet skins. “Thanks.”

  “I’ll try and get my crew working today,” she promised. “But I don’t know.” Hands over eyes, she looked straight overhead. “It’s got everyone spooked, this weather does.”

  Cornell moved into the gorge, four bodies dragging his mind and the other two scouting ahead, slipping around the first bend and seeing an enormous chute with the river white and loud and the sky shrunk to a remote gray band. There was as much river mist as there was rain, clinging and tasting like rock. He was amazed by the ramp—how it fit into the crevices; how people had used tiny ledges and balancing tricks when there were no crevices—and there were long stretches where he felt as if he was walking in air, suspended miles above a straight white thread of river while the ramp tilted forward, Cornell using every body to inch his mind down the steepest, slippery grades.

  Once the chute closed in tight, so close he reached out and touched the opposite wall, ancient stone cool as porcelain and nearly as smooth. Then the world opened up with the next turn, a great gray pool below him, and waterfalls, and something white on the rocky shoreline. A mind, he realized. It had been shattered by the fall, elements and rot having scoured the bones clean.

  He felt the world breathing, winds gusting back and forth, and his bodies would curl their toes around the damp white boards to hold tight. Sometimes Cornell played a game, wondering which of these boards he had made. In the cramped places his claustrophobia would return, the dim light and the patient weight of the stone making it worse. He would forget to breathe. Then he would pause and make himself take in the thick humid air, shaking his limbs to bring back their strength; and sometimes he would shout, strong sharp whistles echoing once, then swallowed by the roaring waters.

  He came upon a person. A woman. Her mind was set on a rock ledge broad enough for several people, just two of her bodies watching him. “How much farther?” he asked.

  She didn’t answer, scarcely moving.

  “Am I almost there?”

  “Almost,” she muttered, then she wouldn’t say another word.

  But later, he found a second stranger, a man; and the man said, “Oh, it’s another day’s travel. Hard travel.” He was camped on a smaller ledge, five waif-like bodies pretending to patch the nearby ramp. “No, no. Stay!”

  “Can’t.”

  “Help me here. Don’t leave!”

  Cornell started past him, and two bodies picked up spears, threatening him. Clumsy, muddled voices said:

  “I order you. Stop now and help.”

  Cornell grabbed one of his unarmed bodies, holding it over the ramp’s edge, saying, “Now step back. Want me to toss him?”

  The man retreated, making a show of dropping the spears.

  “Good.”

  “I’ll be nice,” the captured body said. “Just please don’t leave!”

  He kept moving, around another bend and down, the ramp dropping to the river and Cornell close enough to taste the river water with each breath. The sound of it made his ears hurt, made his muscles sore. It was gnawing at the tough old rock, and he laughed, saying, “Give it up. You can’t carve through this stuff.” Though it had, obviously. “Give it up.” He couldn’t even hear himself anymore. “Quit!” And then he would let a body stop, putting its tongue against the granite, tasting the mountain for a moment. If only he could steal just a fleck of its strength….

  The chute made a sudden right turn. Following an old fault line? A flaw in the world? And the river fell away, milky water diminishing to a thin cold murmur. The ramp danced with the smooth wall. In places, the whole show was held up with nothing. With wedges in tiny cracks, if that. He imagined dozens of tiny bodies clinging to the wall, laboring to drive home struts and set down these boards, lashing them in place and getting how far in a day? Losing how many bodies to accidents? All because of some alien presence, beatific and persuasive and vast; but if that wasn’t a worthwhile goal, what was?

  The chute straightened; the river plunged downwards.

  Then it was gone, ending abruptly, and Cornell found himself peering out into an expanse of roaring air, thinking for an instant that it was the same river, but knowing it was too loud, too much. Winds gusted, fat raindrops soaking his bodies and the mind, splattering on the granite and flowing towards the noise. He could feel the roar as much as he heard it, feeling it cut through the air and even through the stone. Carefully, one motion at a time, he eased his bodies to the edge of the ramp, peering through the endless rain and the weak sunshine. There was a river, an honest full and titanic river, all of the world’s water pouring through a gorge perhaps a full mile across. What he had been following was a trickle, a thin runnel of sweat. And suddenly, without warning, a great flash of light came with thunder, the ramp shaking and Cornell’s bodies leaping backward, clinging to each other and to the inadequate little chunks of soaked-through lumber.

  He made himself move, dropping fast and sometimes finding himself on long rock ledges. It became night, dark as a closet. Lightning gave him snapshots of his surroundings. A great canyon; the fierce rain; the ramp lost against the face of stone. He was drenched, bodies and mind burning fat to warm themselves. Suddenly the rain quit. No, it was just excluded. The next bolt of lightning made a violent orange glow on his left; he saw the long wedge of rock overhead, acting as a roof. Thousands of years ago the river had run here, at his feet, undercutting its bank where the canyon managed a slight turn.

  Cornell rested, ate and breathed in little gasps. The air was thick, almost too rich, his blood unaccustomed to so much oxygen. Then he moved again, feeling tired enough to sleep with his bodies standing—a dangerous fatigue—five bodies towing the mind and the sixth one in the lead, using a spear to feel its way. He was tired and sloppy. The stone spearhead touched wood, touched wood, then touched nothing but air. Yet he stepped again, a careless long step into nothingness; and the body was falling, tumbling out of control, Cornell thinking: This is how it feels, losing one….

  There was lightning, a series of hard blue bolts, and he saw where the ramp ended in front of him. It wasn’t a gap; there was nothing. He screamed out of despair, nobody here to find, Porsche and the others swept away by the floods, and he knew that he hadn’t the strength or the will to turn around and climb all the way back to California.

  His falling body struck water, cushioned by its tiny size and the heavy air. Still conscious, it submerged and swallowed river water and grit, coughed and vomited, then surfaced again. It was being swept downstream. Cornell could feel the distance growing, and he remembered hearing how drowning was a peaceful death. He tried to let the body relax, accepting fate; yet its tiny mind refused, panic making it kick, managing a kind of frantic dogpaddle until it was completely out of his reach—

  —and Cornell tried to weep, bodies curled up on the soaked rampway with the mind. Only he didn’t have the energy or the concentration to cry, or even feel the single hand that began to caress one of his faces, a familiar voice saying:

  “Look at you.”

  Porsche. One of her bodies was kneeling with him, a rope tied around its waist and the next bolt of lightning showing the rope plugged into the canyon wall high above, like an umbilical cord. Which seemed
reasonable. In his fatigue, after everything, an umbilical to the world was no more incredible than anything else.

  “You’re just in time,” she was saying. Shouting. Over the storm sounds, she told him, “We’re just about to pick up and go home.” A flash of blue-green light, and her face was smiling at him.

  He coughed and blurted, “I was looking for you.”

  Then the rain increased, like a wave breaking over them, and she was tying her umbilical to his mind’s harnesses, saying, “Up. We’ve got to get up and in, love. Up and in.”

  2

  The cave was a fortunate bit of geology, cut deep and large enough to keep a dozen people—minds and several dozen bodies—dry and almost comfortable. They used ropes and simple pulleys to bring Cornell up to them. He knew some of them. He saw Logan and a pair of his minions in the back, doing something that looked remarkably like cowering. And sure enough, Logan sounded changed. Transformed. “Novak?” he whispered, faces twisted in despair. “Are you part of this mutiny, Novak?”

  What did he mean?

  “We’ve changed leaders,” said one woman. “Porsche’s in charge.”

  “And we’re leaving,” said someone else. “With first light, we’re starting for home.”

  Porsche nodded, watching Cornell. Then a single body held him close, speaking into an earhole. “How was the ramp? Still in one piece?”

  When he had come down, yes.

  Worry and silence. Then she told him, “Eat and sleep, love. Whatever happens, happens.”

  He wasn’t thinking of the ramp or the storm. Nothing as small as that. He stared at her nearest faces, as if for the first time; and perhaps she sensed his mood, trying to tickle him—to distract him—while saying:

  “I’m glad you made it. I thought you’d died somewhere, or forgotten about me.”

  “Never,” he promised.

  “Rest,” said several bodies. She was speaking to everyone, telling them, “We’ve got a tough day tomorrow, so rest. All you can.”

  Cornell glanced back at Logan again. A muted flash of lightning made the black eyes look red and scared, and he thought of mice huddling in a corner, ineffectual and terrorized.

  Good.

  He slept hard and dreamed constantly, remembering none of the dreams when he woke. Then he ate from the communal stocks, every piece of meat frosted with a colorless sweet fuzz of mold. Porsche and another person had gone upstream at dawn, he learned. Bodies and minds. Logan remained at the back of the cave, and Cornell counted his bodies. Four of them. Eight hands clinging to each other.

  Walking bodies to the cave’s mouth, Cornell peered out into the ceaseless rain, then downward. Sunlight was dissolving into the airborne water, the occasional flash of lightning lending depth and distance. The river looked even larger in daylight, and it wasn’t an illusion. “It’s higher,” one woman warned him. “I’m keeping track. See that cleft down there? It was high and dry at dawn.”

  And now it was nearly submerged, he realized. There was something hypnotic about gazing into that torrent. He blinked and stepped back, asking, “When’s Porsche coming back?”

  “Soon,” people promised.

  He returned to his mind and began grooming it, needing something to do. Combing fingers worked at snarls in the fur. He inspected his harnesses and the rotting sacks, very little in them now; then someone approached, saying, “I know you.”

  Cornell said, “What?”

  “You’re Novak, aren’t you? When did you get here?”

  He stared at Logan, saying nothing.

  “Get help,” Logan whispered. Then he swallowed as if his throats ached, and he promised, “I’ll make you my assistant. Bump up your pay. Anything if you help me with these mutineers.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” said one of his one-time assistants. Alan? “He’s a fucked up loon.”

  Logan might or might not have heard that assessment. But with conviction he said, “I can trust you, son. I know I can.”

  Alan slapped that face with an open hand, with force. The blow made the body reel, eyes blinking and a pained voice coming from the other bodies. “See what I mean? A mutiny!”

  “Son-of-a-bitch,” Alan growled.

  Then someone yelled, “Porsche’s back.”

  Too soon, Cornell learned. He helped haul her parts up into the cave, and her first body looked at everyone with sorrow and a smoldering anger. “The gorge is flooded,” she confessed. “The ramp’s washed away.”

  People cursed. Some turned on Logan and his men, threatening them with spears. Then Porsche was saying, “No more.” She put her body between them, warning her people, “I’m not leading a mob.”

  Silence, and tension.

  Logan gave a sob, then squeaked, “I’m feeling better…”

  Cornell felt pity for the shit, and anger that he couldn’t blame him for everything.

  Alan asked Porsche, “What do we do now? Wait for help?”

  She said, “We aren’t waiting for anything.”

  There was strength in the voice. That single body dominated the others, glaring at them while her mouth sucked at the thick damp air, and she said, “Stay and we starve. Climb, and we’ll have to navigate the gorge. Which I don’t want to try.” A pause, then she said, “We need to find a new way home.”

  “How?” asked Cornell. And others.

  “We keep building the ramp,” she announced. “Starting now.”

  “With what?” people demanded.

  And she told them, “We’ll dismantle what’s above, piecemeal, and keep extending the ramp downstream.” She knelt, one thick finger drawing her scheme in the foot-packed mud. “Eventually we’ll reach a side canyon, then head upstream. We’ll take our road with us.” A pause. “About a thousand canyons have to lead to the desert. We only need one to get home.”

  There wasn’t time to be with Porsche, much less talk to her. But there was a union, a sense of clear concerted purpose that kept Cornell focused and hopeful. He was part of the salvage team, his five bodies traveling with several dozen more, their minds taken only partway and left protected under a crude lean-to. His bodies made it to the narrow gorge, finding an enormous sideways fountain roaring out of it. Mud was in the water, gray desert soils mixed with rain. The high arroyos had to be flooding. Was this a million-year rain? What if New Reno had been drowned? Then he told himself to stop it. Worry took energy, and he didn’t have calories to spare.

  The rain worsened in the afternoon, driven against the canyon wall and flowing over them. They had to untie ropes never meant to be untied, or cut them and save as much as possible. Then the wood and useful ropes had to be carried down, each body bent under its load. There wasn’t time to cut the struts out of the canyon wall. “We’ll build with what we’ve got,” Porsche warned them. “Not to last. Just to get us from A to B.”

  A sketchy, rickety array of struts and crossbeams followed the canyon’s next bend. It was astonishing to see the little bodies climbing in space, holding on to cracks and sand-sized knobs, ignoring the criminal weather while working, almost never falling. Cornell was delivering boards when one body slipped, and he watched it tumbling, a thin rope of hair drawing taut—tunk—and the body dangling for a moment, bruised but breathing, the wet knot slipping, then breaking, and the victim lost against the roaring waters.

  “We need more faster,” Porsche told him. Her faces were focused, two minutes left in the game and her team down by seven. “Set up a chain of bodies, okay? You’re in charge. Someone dismantles, and someone hands the stuff along.”

  He almost told her that he was glad to have her here, but instead he just said, “Okay.”

  “And I’ll send word when you can stop. Everyone gets a few hours of sleep, or we’ll end up like Logan.”

  At least the rain slackened at night, sometimes no worse than a miserable drizzle. Cornell was in the middle of the human chain, bodies carrying boards over the same stretch of ramp. He recognized where he stepped by its feel. And sometimes, i
n the dark, there was nothing but the feel of the place, the clouds locked over the stars and every sound muffled by the river.

  He got to sleep, as promised. Bodies curled around the base of his mind, inside the lean-to, and it took him forever to wake up again. Someone handed him a last share of meat, now moldy to the gristle. His team went to work on the dry stretch of ramp beneath the rock overhang. Two more bodies fell to their deaths. Alan tried to prove his new loyalties, climbing out too far to retrieve a loose strut, grabbing it and giving it a push. The strut took the bodies down with it. It was a stupid, brave act, leaving him with three bodies. But now the salvage team seemed to trust him more, and Alan was pleased with himself.

  By evening, they were out from the overhang, and everyone’s mind was moved lower, onto the new ramp. Cornell let one of his bodies walk ahead, round a long bend, nothing to see but the stone walls and the river and the clouds masking whatever vistas were above him. A sudden despair came over him. He was exhausted, hungry and feeling ill in ways he didn’t know. It was a general ache and troubled breathing, and his thoughts came in graceless bursts between long thoughtless stretches.

  One of Porsche’s bodies climbed up to him. She watched him, touched him. A single black finger started on his forehead and moved down over his nostril slits, his mouth and his chin. Then she was smiling; maybe she had been smiling from the first. The other hand pointed along the steep sketch of the ramp, and she asked, “Do you see it?”

  He did. A single tree and perhaps some low brush were wedged together on a narrow shelf. The shelf was above the river, not very far above, and the ramp’s aim seemed to be that shelf. “We’re going there?”

  “And make a new base camp,” she promised. “Fresh wood, and food. Maybe we can fish from there. We can certainly rest.”

  Rest was an addictive word, deceptively simple, exploding against his sleepless mind and his muscles.

  “Then we’ll zigzag up,” she added. “To the top.”