by Libba Bray
“Yes they are.”
A tiny sigh.
“Then I can’t see. Tash, talk to me.”
“What about?”
“I don’t know. Anything. Everything. Just talk to me. We’re on the line, did you say?”
“We’re on the line. We’re going home.”
“Five hours then. Talk to me.”
So she did. Tash pulled cushions and mats around her into a nest and sat holding her In-Aunt’s head and she talked. She talked about her friends and her in-sisters and her out-sisters and who would go away from West Diggory and who would stay. She talked about boys and how she liked them looking at her but still wanted to be different and special, not to be taken for-granted, funny-Tash, odd-Tash. She talked about whether she would marry, which she didn’t think she would, not as far as she could see, and what she would do then if she didn’t. She talked about the things she loved, like swimming, and cooking vegetables, and drawing and words words words. She talked about how she loved the sound and shape of words, the sound of them as something quite different from what they meant and how you could put them together to say things that could not possibly be, and how the words came to her, like they were blown on the wind, shaped from wind, the wind brought to life. She talked of these in words that weren’t clever or mouth-filling, words said quietly and simply and honestly, saying what she thought and how she felt. Tash saw then a richer lode in words; beyond the beauty of their sounds and shapes and patterns was a deeper beauty of the truth they could shape. They could tell what it was to be Tash Gelem-Opunyo. Words could fly the banners and turn the rotors of a life. Milaba squeezed her hand and pushed her broken lips into a smile, and creased the corner of her white, frost-burned eyes.
The Emergency Channel chimed. Yoyote had her on visual: they were about twenty kilometers down slope from her. They were coming to get her. They would be safe soon. Well done. And there was other news, news that made his voice sound strange to Tash in Diggler Six, like he was dead and walking and talking and about to cry all at the same time. A command had come in from Iridis Excavation Command, from the High Orbital, ultimately all the way from Earth and the Iridis Development Consortium. There had been a political shift. The faction that was up was down and the faction that was down was up. The Big Dig was cancelled.
From here, every way was up. There had been no official announcement from the Council of Diggers for ceremonials or small mournings: in their ones and two, their families and kinship groups and sororities and fraternities the people of West Diggory had decided to share the news that their world was ending, and to see the bottom of it; the base that had been their striving for three generations; the machine head. Dig Zero. Minimum elevation. So they took digglers or rode down the scoopline to the bottom of the Big Dig, and looked around them, and looked around at the digging heads of the scooplines, stilled and frozen for the first time in memory, buckets filled with their last bite of Mars turned to the sky. As they grew accustomed to the sights and wonders of the dig head, for not one in fifty of the Excavating Cities’ populations worked at the minimum elevation, they saw in the distance, between the black scoopline, groups and families and societies from North Cutter and Southdelving and A.R.E.A. They waved to each other, greeting relatives they had not seen in years; the Common Channel was a flock of voices. Tash stood with her Raven Sorority sisters. They positioned themselves around her, even queen-bee Leyta. Tash was a slam and brief heroine—perhaps the last one the Big Dig would ever have. In-Aunt Milaba had been taken to the main medical facility A.R.E.A where they were growing her new irises for her frost-blinded eyes. Her face would be scarred and patched with ugly white but her smile would always be beautiful. So the In-sisters and In-cousins stood around Tash, needing to be down at zero but not knowing why, or what to do now. The boys from the Black Obsidian Fraternity waved over and came across the sand to join the girls. So few of us, really, Tash thought.
“Why?” Out-cousin Sebben asked.
“Environment,’ said Sweto and in the same transmission, Qori said “Cost.”
“Are they going to take us all back to Earth?” Chunye asked.
“No, they’re never going to do that,’ Haramwe said. He walked with a stick, which made him look like an old man but at the same interesting and attractive. “That would cost too much.”
“We couldn’t anyway,’ Sweto said. “The gravity down there would kill us. We can’t live anywhere but here. This is our home.”
“We’re Martians,’ Tash said. Then she put her hands up to her face mask.
“What are you doing?” Chunye, always the nervous In-cousin, cried in alarm.
“I just want to know,’ Tash said. “I just want to feel it, like it should be.” Three taps, and the face plate fell into her waiting hands. The air was cold, shakingly cold, and still too thin to breathe and anyway, to breathe was to die on lungfuls of carbon dioxide but she could feel the wind, the real wind, the true wind in her face. Tash exhaled gently into the atmosphere gathered at the bottom of the Big Dig. The world still sloped gently away from her, all the way up the sky. Tears would freeze in an instant so she kept them to herself. Then Tash clapped the plate back over her face and fastened it to the psuit hood with her clever fingers.
“So, what do we do now?” whiny Chunye asked. Tash knelt. She pushed her fingers into the soft regolith. What else was there? What else had their ever been. A message had come down Mt Incredible, from High Orbital, from a world on the other side of the sky, from people who had never seen this, whose horizons were always curved away from them. Who were they so say? What wind blew their words and made them so strong? Here were people, whole cities, an entire civilization, in a hole. This was Mars.
“We do what we know best,’ Tash said, scooping up pale golden mars in her gloved hand. “We put it all back again.”
The Man Who Bridged
the Mist
Kij Johnson
Kij Johnson is the author of three novels, many short stories, and several essays.. She has won the Theodore A. Sturgeon Memorial Award and the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts’ Crawford Award. Her short story “The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change” was nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Hugo Awards. Her story “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss” was nominated for the Nebula, Sturgeon and Hugo Awards, and won the World Fantasy Award, while short science fiction story “Spar” won the 2009 Nebula Award.
Her novels include World Fantasy Award nominee The Fox Woman and Fudoki. Coming up later this year is a new short story collection, At the Mouth of the River of Bees.
Kit came to Nearside with two trunks and an oiled-cloth folio full of plans for the bridge across the mist. His trunks lay tumbled like stones at his feet, where the mailcoach guard had dropped them. The folio he held close, away from the drying mud of yesterday’s storm.
Nearside was small, especially to a man of the capital where buildings towered seven and eight stories tall, a city so large that even a vigorous walker could not cross in half a day. Here hard-packed dirt roads threaded through irregular spaces scattered with structures and fences. Even the inn was plain, two stories of golden limestone and blue slate tiles, with (he could smell) some sort of animals living behind it. On the sign overhead, a flat, pale blue fish very like a ray curvetted against a black background.
A brightly dressed woman stood by the inn’s door. Her skin and eyes were pale, almost colorless. “Excuse me,” Kit. “Where can I find the ferry to take me across the mist?” He could feel himself being weighed, but amiably: a stranger, small and very dark, in gray—a man from the east.
The woman smiled. “Well, the ferries are both on this side, at the upper dock. But I expect what you really want is someone to oar the ferry, yes? Rasali Ferry came over from Farside last night. She’s the one you’ll want to talk to. She spends a lot of time at The Deer’s Hart. But you wouldn’t like The Hart, sir,” she added. “It’s not nearly as nice as The
Fish here. Are you looking for a room?”
“I’ll be staying in Farside tonight,” Kit said apologetically. He didn’t want to seem arrogant. The invisible web of connections he would need for his work started here, with this first impression, with all the first impressions of the next few days.
“That’s what you think,” the woman said. “I’m guessing it’ll be a day or two or more before Rasali goes back. Valo Ferry might, but he doesn’t cross so often.”
“I could buy out the trip’s fares, if that’s why she’s waiting.”
“It’s not that,” the woman said. “She won’t cross the mist ‘til she’s ready. “’Until she feels it’s right, if you follow me. But you can ask, I suppose.”
Kit didn’t follow, but he nodded anyway. “Where’s The Deer’s Hart?”
She pointed. “Left, then right, then down by the little boat yard.”
“Thank you,” Kit said. “May I leave my trunks here until I work things out with her?”
“We always stow for travelers.” The woman grinned. “And cater to them, too, when they find out there’s no way across the mist today.”
The Deer’s Hart was smaller than The Fish, and livelier. At midday the oak-shaded tables in the beer garden beside the inn were clustered with light-skinned people in brilliant clothes, drinking and tossing comments over the low fence into the boat yard next door, where, half lost in steam, a youth and two women bent planks to form the hull of a small flat-bellied boat. When Kit spoke to a man carrying two mugs of something that looked like mud and smelled of yeast, the man gestured at the yard with his chin. “Ferrys are over there. Rasali’s the one in red,” he said as he walked away.
“The one in red” was tall, her skin as pale as that of the rest of the locals, with a black braid so long that she had looped it around her neck to keep it out of the way. Her shoulders flexed in the sunlight as she and the youth forced a curved plank to take the skeletal hull’s shape. The other woman, slightly shorter, with the ash-blond hair so common here, forced an augur through the plank and into a rib, then hammered a peg into the hole she’d made. After three pegs, the boatwrights straightened. The plank held. Strong, Kit thought; I wonder if I can get them for the bridge?
“Rasali!” a voice bellowed, almost in Kit’s ear. “Man here’s looking for you.” Kit turned in time to see the man with the mugs gesturing, again with his chin. He sighed and walked to the waist-high fence. The boatwrights stopped to drink from blueware bowls before the one in red and the youth came over.
“I’m Rasali Ferry of Farside,” the woman said. Her voice was softer and higher than he had expected of a woman as strong as she, with the fluid vowels of the local accent. She nodded to the boy beside her: “Valo Ferry of Farside, my brother’s eldest.” Valo was more a young man than a boy, lighter-haired than Rasali and slightly taller. They had the same heavy eyebrows and direct amber eyes.
“Kit Meinem of Atyar,” Kit said.
Valo asked, “What sort of name is Meinem? It doesn’t mean anything.”
“In the capital, we take our names differently than you.”
“Oh, like Jenner Ellar.” Valo nodded. “I guessed you were from the capital—your clothes and your skin.”
Rasali said, “What can we do for you, Kit Meinem of Atyar?”
“I need to get to Farside today,” Kit said.
Rasali shook her head. “I can’t take you. I just got here, and it’s too soon. Perhaps Valo?”
The youth tipped his head to one side, his expression suddenly abstract. He shook his head. “No, not today, I don’t think.”
“I can buy out the fares, if that helps. It’s Jenner Ellar I am here to see.”
Valo looked interested but said, “No,” to Rasali, and she added, “What’s so important that it can’t wait a few days?”
Better now than later, Kit thought. “I am replacing Teniant Planner as the lead engineer and architect for construction of the bridge over the mist. We start work again as soon as I’ve reviewed everything. And had a chance to talk to Jenner.” He watched their faces.
Rasali said, “It’s been a year since Teniant died. I was starting to think Empire had forgotten all about us, and your deliveries would be here ‘til the iron rusted away.”
“Jenner Ellar’s not taking over?” Valo asked, frowning.
“The new Department of Roads cartel is in my name,” Kit said. “but I hope Jenner will remain as my second. You can see why I would like to meet him as soon as is possible, of course. He will—”
Valo burst out, “You’re going to take over from Jenner, after he’s worked so hard on this? And what about us? What about our work?” His cheeks were flushed an angry red. How do they conceal anything with skin like that? Kit thought.
“Valo,” Rasali said, a warning tone in her voice. Flushing darker still, the youth turned and strode away. Rasali snorted but said only: “Boys. He likes Jenner, and he has problems with the bridge, anyway.”
That was worth addressing. Later. “So what will it take to get you to carry me across the mist, Rasali Ferry of Farside? The project will pay anything reasonable.”
“I cannot,” she said. “Not today, not tomorrow. You’ll have to wait.”
“Why?” Kit asked: reasonably enough, he thought, but she eyed him for a long moment, as if deciding whether to be annoyed.
“Have you gone across mist before?” she said at last.
“Of course.”
“Not the river,” she said.
“Not the river,” he agreed. “It’s a quarter-mile across here, yes?”
“Oh, yes.” She smiled suddenly: white even teeth and warmth like sunlight in her eyes. “Let’s go down and perhaps I can explain things better there.” She jumped the fence with a single powerful motion, landing beside him to a chorus of cheers and shouts from the inn garden’s patrons. She laughed at them, then gestured to Kit to follow her. She was well-liked, clearly. Her opinion would matter.
The boat yard was heavily shaded by low-hanging oaks and chestnuts, and bounded on the east by an open-walled shelter filled with barrels and stacks of lumber. Rasali waved at the third boat maker, who was still putting her tools away. “Tilisk Boatwright of Nearside. My brother’s wife,” she said to Kit. “She makes skiffs with us but she won’t ferry. She’s not born to it as Valo and I are.”
“Where’s your brother?” Kit asked.
“Dead,” Rasali said, and lengthened her stride.
They walked a few streets over and then climbed a long even ridge perhaps eighty feet high, too regular to be natural. A levee, Kit thought, and distracted himself from the steep path by estimating the volume of earth and the labor that had been required to build it. Decades, perhaps, but how long ago? How long was it? The levee was treeless. The only feature was a slender wood tower hung with flags on the ridge, probably for signaling across the mist to Farside, since it appeared too fragile for anything else. They had storms out here, Kit knew; there’d been one the night before. How often was the tower struck by lightning?
Rasali stopped. “There.”
Kit had been watching his feet. He looked up and nearly cried out as light lanced his suddenly tearing eyes. He fell back a step and shielded his face. What had blinded him was an immense band of mist reflecting the morning sun.
Kit had never seen the mist river itself, though he bridged mist before this, two simple post-and-beam structures over narrow gorges closer to the capital. From his work in Atyar, he knew what was to be known. It was not water, or anything like. It did not flow but formed somehow in the deep gorge of the great riverbed before him. It found its way many hundreds of miles north, upstream through a hundred narrowing mist creeks and streams before failing at last in shreds of drying foam that left bare patches of earth where they collected.
The mist stretched to the south as well, a deepening, thickening band that poured out at last from the river’s mouth two thousand miles south to form the mist ocean, which lay on the face of the salt-water
ocean. Water had to follow the river’s bed to run somewhere beneath or through the mist, but there was no way to prove this.
There was mist nowhere but this river and its streams and sea, but the mist split Empire in half.
After a moment, the pain in Kit’s eyes grew less, and he opened them again. The river was a quarter-mile across where they stood, a great gash of light between the levees. It seemed nearly featureless, blazing under the sun like a river of cream or of bleached silk, but as his eyes accustomed themselves, he saw the surface was not smooth but heaped and hollowed, and that it shifted slowly, almost indiscernibly, as he watched.
Rasali stepped forward, and Kit started. “I’m sorry,” he said with a laugh. “How long have I been staring? It’s just—I had no idea.”
“No one does,” Rasali said. Her eyes when he met them were amused.
The east and west levees were nearly identical, each treeless and scrub-covered, with a signal tower. The levee on their side ran down to a narrow bare bank half a dozen yards wide. There was a wooden dock and a boat ramp, a rough switchback leading down to them. Two large boats had been pulled onto the bank. Another, smaller dock was visible a hundred yards downstream, attended by a clutter of boats, sheds, and indeterminate piles covered in tarps.
“Let’s go down.” Rasali led the way, her words coming back to him over her shoulder. “The little ferry is Valo’s. Pearlfinder. The Tranquil Crossing’s mine.” Her voice warmed when she said the name. “Eighteen feet long, eight wide. Mostly pine, but a purpleheart keel and pearwood headpiece. You can’t see it from here, but the hull’s sheathed in blue-dyed fishskin. I can carry three horses or a ton and a half of cartage or fifteen passengers. Or various combinations. I once carried twenty-four hunting dogs and two handlers. Never again.”
Channeled by the levees, a steady light breeze eased down from the north. The air had a smell, not unpleasant but a little sour, wild. ““How can you manage a boat like this alone? Are you that strong?”