Jack McDevitt - Eternity Road (v1) [rtf]

by Emily

  The operations of the Imperium were funded by the Illyrian treasury, and by donations from wealthy parents and, increas­ingly, from those who had attended in their youth, and who came by periodically to join discussions which ranged from the mechanics of astronomy to the reality of the gods to the unwieldy relationship between diameter and circumference. (A school of skeptics were then using the latter fact to argue that the universe was ill conceived and irrational.)

  The nine masters had been selected as much for their ability to inspire as for their knowledge. They were entertainers as well as teachers, and they were the finest entertainers that Illyria could produce. Silas was proud of his work and considered himself, not entirely without justification, one of the city's foremost citizens.

  He was conscious that there were in fact two Silas Glotes: one who was shy and uncertain of himself, who disliked attending social gatherings where he was expected to mix with strangers; and another who could dazzle people he had never

  seen before with wit and insight. In fact, all of the masters seemed to display, to a degree, this tendency toward a dual personality. Bent Capa, for example, mumbled at dinner but rose to eloquence in the courtyards.

  In the seminars, subjects were designated, but once started, a discussion might lead anywhere. There was no formal cur­riculum, and the philosophy of the institution saw more bene­fit in exposure to a wise master than to a formal body of instruction. Given the level of interest among those in atten­dance, the system could hardly fail to work.

  The death of Karik Endine had ignited discussions in many of the seminars, particularly with regard to Haven and the Abraham Polk legend. Librarians reported that both copies of The Travels were in constant use. Polk became the issue of the hour: Was he historical? Or mythical? If he was historical, had he indeed devoted himself to rescuing the knowledge of the Roadmakers?

  Silas was of several minds on the matter. He wanted to believe in the tale of the adventurer who lived on the edge of a dying world, who with a small band of devoted companions carried on a desperate campaign to save the memory of that world against the day when civilization would come again. It was a magnificent story.

  And it was possible. Not all the trappings, of course. There had certainly never been a Quebec, the mystical boat that pos­sessed neither sails nor oars, that was capable of diving into the depths of the sea. Nor the undersea entrance to Haven, accessi­ble, presumably, only to the submersible. Nor could Polk have rescued all the people for whom he was credited.

  Maybe Polk had existed. Maybe someone tried to save some­thing. And the stories got blown out of proportion. In that sense, there might well be a Haven somewhere.

  On the day after his conversation with Quait, a visitor from the Temple, a priest, took her place among the participants in Silas's assigned conference room. There were nine others, all young men. The seminar's announced topic was: "Can Men Know the Divine Will?"

  Although women were not expressly forbidden from attending Imperium seminars, they were not encouraged, on the grounds that space was limited and intellectual develop­ment was essential for the males from whom the League's leaders would eventually be selected. But women did visit from time to time, and they were particularly welcome if they had specialized knowledge to contribute or a professional inter­est in the proceedings.

  Silas took a few minutes to have each of his participants identify himself. Only the priest was an unknown commodity.

  "My name is Avila Kap," she said. "I represent no one, and I'm here solely because the topic is fascinating." She smiled dis-armingly.

  Avila was about thirty. She wore the green robe of her call­ing, hood drawn back, white cord fastened about her waist, white sash over her right shoulder. The colors of the prime sea­sons. Her black hair was cut short. She glanced around the table with dark, intelligent eyes. There was an almost mocking glint in them, as if they were dismissing the Imperium's reputation as a rationalist institution. Silas thought that her good looks were enhanced by the robe.

  He set the parameters for the dialogue: "In order that we avoid spending the afternoon on extraneous issues, we will assume for purposes of this discussion that divine beings do exist, and that they do take an interest in human affairs. The question then becomes, have they attempted to communicate with us? If so, by what characteristics can we know a divine revelation?"

  Kaymon Rezdik, a middle-aged merchant who had been sporadically attending the seminars longer than Silas could remember, raised his hand. "Considering that we have the Chayla," he said, "I'm surprised that we're even having this dis­cussion."

  "Nonsense," said Telchik, an occasional visitor from Argon. Most of the others present nodded approvingly. Telchik was a handsome youth, brown-haired and blue-eyed. "If the Chayla is the work of the gods, they speak with many voices."

  Among the group that day, only Kaymon and one of the younger participants and, of course, the priest, could be described as believers. Most of the others, in the fashion of the educated classes of the time, were skeptics who maintained that either the gods did not exist, or that they took pains to keep well away from the human race. (The view that the gods were survivors from the age of the Roadmakers had been los­ing ground over the past decade, and had no champions in the field that day.)

  "What characteristics," asked Silas smoothly, "would you demand of a communication before you would pronounce it to be of divine origin?"

  Kaymon looked puzzled. "The official sanction of the Temple," he said, glancing hopefully toward Avila.

  "I think," said Avila, "that, in this case, you are the Temple." "Exactly," said Silas. "If a message were laid before you, with supernatural claims, how would you arrive at a judg­ment?"

  Kaymon's gaze swept left and right, seeking help. "There is no way to be sure," said Telchik, "unless you are standing there when it happens. And even then—"

  "Even then," said Orvon, an advocate's son, "we may be seeing only what we wish to see."

  "Then we may safely conclude," said Telchik, "that there is no way to know whether a communication does in fact have divine backing."

  Several of the disputants glanced uncomfortably at Avila, to see how she was taking the general assault on her career. But she watched placidly, with a smile playing at the corners of her mouth.

  "And what have you to say of all this?" Silas asked her. "They may be right," she said matter-of-factly. "Even assuming that Shanta exists, we cannot know for certain that she really cares about us. We may well be living in a world that has come about by accident. In which everything is transient. In which nothing matters." Her eyes were very dark. "I don't say I believe this, but it is a possibility. But that possibility is outside the parameters of the discussion. I would propose to you that the gods may find us a difficult subject for communication."

  "How do you mean?" asked Orvon. She pressed her palms together. "Orvon, may I ask where you live?"

  "Three miles outside the city. On the heights above River Road."

  "Good." She looked pleased. "It's a lovely location. Let us suppose that, this evening, when you are on your way home, the Goddess herself were to walk out from behind some trees to wish you good day. How would you respond?"

  "He would lose his voice," laughed Telchik.

  "I suppose it would be a little unnerving."

  "And if she gave you a message to bring back to us?"

  "I would most certainly do so."

  She nodded and raised her eyes to encompass the others. "And how would we respond to Orvon's claim?"

  "Nobody'd believe it," said Selenico, youngest of the partic­ipants.

  "And what," asked Silas, "if the Goddess had said hello instead to Avila? Would we believe her?"

  "No," said Orvon, "I don't think so."

  "Why not?" asked Avila.

  "Because you are not objective."

  "No," said Silas. "Not because she is not objective, but because she is committed. There is a difference."

  "Indeed," rumbled T
elchik. "I should like to hear what it is. Shanta would do better to give her message to me."

  "Yes," said Avila, brightening, "because if you came with such a story, we still might not believe it, but we would know that something very odd had happened."

  Sigmon, a young man whose primary interest was in the sciences, suggested that a deity who wished to communicate would necessarily want an unbeliever, to allay suspicions. "And furthermore," he said, "he might want to go for drama, rather than a simple statement that we should do thus and so." "How do you mean?" asked Kaymon. Sigmon's brow wrinkled. "Well," he said, "if I were a god, and I wanted to tell the Illyrians that Haven exists—" All faces turned in his direction.

  "—I can think of nothing better than inspiring Karik Endine to produce a copy of the Connecticut Yankee."

  The moon set at about midnight. It was well into the early hours when Chaka got out of the bed in which she had lain sleepless, and dressed. She put on dark blue riding breeches and a black shirt. She had no dark jacket and had to make do with a light brown coat that was more awkward than she would have liked. (The temperature had fallen too far to try to get by without wearing something warm.) She pulled on a pair of moccasins, attached a lamp to her belt, and stopped in her workshop to pick up a couple of thin shaping blades.

  Shortly thereafter she stood in the shadow of Flojian's villa, listening to his horses move uneasily in the barn. A brisk northern wind shook the trees. The night was dark under banks of clouds. The only lights she could see were out on the river, moving slowly downstream.

  The villa was dark. The tree on the northern side was higher than she remembered, its branches flimsier. But she got lucky. Before attempting the climb she circled the house, trying windows and doors. The latch on one of the shutters in the rear had not been properly secured and she was able to worry it loose. She opened the window, pulled the draperies apart, and peered into the darkness beyond.

  Seeing nothing to give her pause, she threw a leg over the sill and climbed into the room. This was the first time in her adult life she had flagrantly violated someone's property, and she was already trying to compose her story in case she got caught. Too much alcohol. I didn 't think this looked like my house. Or, / fell off my horse last night. Hit my head. I don't remember anything since. Where am I?

  She was in the reception room where she had first met Silas. To her left was the inner parlor in which Flojian had told her of her bequest. And to the right was the north wing, Karik Endine's solitary domain. Curtains were drawn across all the windows, and the room was quite dark. She waited for the tables and chairs to appear, and then navigated among them until she found a doorway in the right-hand wall. It opened into more darkness. She went through and closed the door softly behind her.

  It was a passageway. She bumped into a chair, started to feel her way around a server, and knocked over a candlestick holder. It fell with a terrible clatter and she froze.

  But the noise seemed not to attract anyone's attention. She righted the candlestick holder and passed through another door into a large sitting room, illuminated through a bank of windows. This was, she knew, Karik's wing. She looked outside to assure herself no one was about, and used a match to light the candle in her lamp.

  The room was masculine, filled with hand-drawn charts and drinking mugs, and heavy oak furniture of a somber cast. (The charts depicted areas of political influence during various eras in the valley's history.) A chess game, with ornate pieces, was in progress on a tabletop.

  A wide set of carpeted stairs led to the second floor. The lower level consisted of three rooms. She opened cabinets, inspected desk drawers, examined closets. The area had been thoroughly cleaned. Clothes, shoes, toiletries, everything was gone. No empty glass nor scrap of paper remained to show there had been an occupant only a few days ago.

  She was about to start upstairs when she heard a squeal. The hinges on the door from the corridor. She doused her light and ducked behind a curtain just as the door opened and someone thrust a lamp into the room. "Who's here?" Toko's voice.

  Her heart beat so hard she could not believe it wasn't audible. He came into the room a few steps and raised the lamp. She tried not to breathe. The shadows lengthened and shifted as Toko looked first this way and then that.

  Then, apparently satisfied, he withdrew and closed the door. His steps faded, but she waited several minutes. When she was convinced he would not come back, she tiptoed upstairs.

  There were two rooms on the upper level: a bedroom and a work area. The bedroom was made up, and it too retained no sign of its former owner.

  The workroom was long, L-shaped, with wide windows. The- curtains were drawn back, providing a view of the river. Glasses and goblets filled a cabinet. The windows opened onto a wide balcony, where several chairs surrounded a circular table. One might have thought the occupant had been accus­tomed to entertaining.

  There were two padded chairs inside, a long worktable with several drawers, a desk, a pair of matching cabinets, some empty shelves, and a chest.

  The chest was locked.

  The worktable drawers were empty, save for one or two pieces of paper. The desk contained a few pens, some ink, and a blank notebook. She found a sweater in one of the cabinets, somehow missed in the press to collect everything. And a revolver, which she recognized as the work of the same gun­smith who had supplied most of her own family's weapons. Strange, she thought, that we forgot how to print books. But we remember how to make guns.

  She knelt down in front of the chest.

  The lock was designed to keep out curious children, rather than thieves. She produced the narrower of her blades, and inserted it. Minutes later the mechanism gave and she raised the lid.

  She looked down at an oilskin packet. It was roughly six­teen inches wide by a foot. She lifted it out, set it down under the lamp, and released the binding cords.

  It contained a sketch which she recognized immediately as her brother's work. It was dated July 25, making it later than any of the others.

  The drawing depicted a rock wall rising out of a frothy sea. A sliver of moon floated in a sky swept with dark clouds. It was one of his better efforts, but there was nothing extraordinary about the drawing itself.

  Nothing extraordinary, that is, until she saw the title, which appeared in its customary place below his signature.

  Haven.

  4

  In an age that depended on sails and oars for power, the Mississippi was a cranky partner at best. Northbound cargo had to be hauled upriver by a combination of flatboats and draft horses. To complicate matters, the river was prone to change course periodically. It had swallowed but only partially digested many of the concrete and brick cities that had sprouted along its banks in ancient times. These had now become navigational hazards. There were seven major collapsed bridges, three of which, at Argon, at Farroad on the Arkansaw, and at Masandik in the south, effectively blocked any vessel larger than a canoe. This was the factor that made Illyria the crossroads of the League, and its center of power. And which created economic opportunities for Flojian Endine.

  His draft animals were raised on two ranches near Can-tonfile. He'd been planning for some time to expand the number of horses in his stables, and his conversations with business allies in Masandik convinced him that the traffic would support the investment. On his return to Illyria he met with his groom at the pier to devise a strategy. When the morning-long meeting ended, and the groom had left, he sat back with a cup of tea, feeling satisfied with his life. Business was good, his financial health assured, and the future bright. He was living in the morning of a new age, now that his father was gone. The brooding presence was removed from the house at last. Only the shadow of his ruined name remained.

  What had the old man done out there?

  Well, no matter. Maybe the speculations would stop now. It was time for people to let go and bury their dead and be done with it. But that was unlikely. The damned book had appeared, as if Karik had been det
ermined to stir everything up again. When he'd seen what it was, Flojian had been tempted to burn it. But he could not bring himself to violate his father's last wish, even though he'd hated him for it.

  He suddenly realized Chaka Milana was standing in his doorway. Her eyes radiated hostility.

  "Hello, Chaka," he said, carefully inserting concern into his voice. "Is something wrong?"

  She was clutching an oilskin packet. "I owe you an apol­ogy." Her tone was flat.

  "For what?" He got up and came around the desk. "Please come in."

  She held out the packet. He recognized it, and his heart

  sank.

  "I was in your house last night."

  A welter of emotions rolled through him. "So I see. Is your conscience giving you trouble?"

  She glanced at the oilskin. "I'd be grateful if you'd explain

  this to me."

  Flojian made no move to open it.

  "You do know what's in it."

  "Of course I know."

  "Tell me what it means."

  Flojian would have liked to put the same question to his father. "It's a false alarm. What else could it be? They thought they'd found it, but they hadn't. Simple as that."

  "Here's something else that's been kept quiet. Why?"

  "Why did / keep it quiet? What makes you think 7 knew anything about it? My father didn't have a very high regard for me, Chaka. I'm the last one he'd confide in. I didn't even know the sketch existed until we cleaned up the day after the cere­mony. Anyway, I suspect he didn't make it public because it would have led to exactly this kind of reaction."

  Her expression hardened. Flojian hated confrontations. He preferred to be liked, and much of his personal success was predicated on the fact that people willingly threw business his way, and others were anxious to work for him.

  "I think you owed me the truth," said Chaka.

  "What is the truth, Chaka? That he might have found what he was looking for? Or that your brother might have jumped to an unjustified conclusion? You know as well as I do that at least one of the sketches is pure fantasy. Remember The Dragon? Who knows where the truth is?