Coyote Rising

by Allen Steele

  Crazy Jimmy didn’t earn his nickname by accident. The stereotypical image of the civil engineer is one of a broad-shouldered, barrel-chested man with a blueprint in one hand and a protractor in the other. Garcia didn’t fit the profile: ascetic and thin-faced, he looked more like Robert Browning than Robert Moses. Those who knew him personally—there weren’t many, outside a small circle of associates—often described him in two terms: genius and mad. He graduated from the University of Georgia at age twenty-one with a doctorate in physics, and after that he seldom left home, and only then if he could travel by maglev train. He wore black at all times, and his favorite article of clothing was a frock coat he’d found in his grandfather’s attic. He slept no more than four or five hours a night. He had no apparent interest in women; his only love affair was with a seventeen-year-old second cousin he met at a family reunion when he was twenty-three, and he was shattered when she spurned his marriage proposal. Though he claimed to be an atheist, those closest to him knew that he believed in reincarnation and that in a past life he had once been a dog.

  Nevertheless, no one denied the fact that Garcia was brilliant, albeit otherworldly. He perceived complex engineering problems in poetic terms; for him, an equation was a couplet, an algorithm a rhyme. Aquarius was a homage to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The City Under the Sea” expressed in mathematical terms, the Stanley Bridge a contemplation on the value of pi as a material object. In these things, and others—elaborate homes he designed for friends, skyscrapers that seemed to defy gravity, the occasional public monument as a diversion—he displayed his gifts.

  Although he was a perfectionist by nature, he was far from perfect himself. Garcia had little patience for those who couldn’t keep up with him. He fired assistants for as little reason as showing up for work a couple of minutes late, and once walked off project in which he had been involved for several years only because the client failed to appreciate the awning he’d designed for the front entrance. Many of his colleagues perceived him as arrogant, and few realized that his erratic behavior stemmed from a deep sense of insecurity. For all his talent, James Garcia was a lonely man, unable to communicate with the world in any meaningful way except through the things he built.

  Even today, historians disagree over what compelled James Garcia to migrate to Coyote. Certainly it wasn’t to find adventure; for all intents and purposes, he was a recluse. Some speculate that he was seeking another off-world challenge after the Stanley Bridge. If that was so, then why travel forty-six light-years, leaving behind everything he knew? Jonas NcNair, the architecture critic, believes that he may have lost favor with the Proletariate after he refused to design a new Government Centre for the Western Hemisphere Union in Havana, an allegation supported by Garcia’s well-documented dislike for social collectivism, a system that wouldn’t allow him to earn as much as he did when he worked on projects in Europe and the Pacific Coalition. Or perhaps, as some have theorized, like so many others who went to Coyote before him, Garcia simply reached a point in life when he wanted to make a fresh start.

  The truth is very simple: he had no choice. The Proletariate realized that, sooner or later, Coyote would require the services of a master architect, someone able to tackle the most difficult engineering problems. Only one person fit that description, and so he was drafted. Had he been given advance warning, Garcia might have been able to flee the Union; like so many other rich people in the WHU, he kept his private earnings in Swiss banks, and the Union was willing to look the other way so long as he paid his taxes and didn’t flaunt his wealth in public. One of the tenets of collectivist theory was that individuals should be willing to make sacrifices for the greater good of society, so when the Proletariate decided that Coyote needed the talents of James Alonzo Garcia, he awoke one morning to find all his lines of credit frozen, his travel permits denied, his contacts no longer willing to answer the phone, and a Patriarch and two Proctors waiting in his office with an offer that he could not refuse.

  And so, on Barchiel 6, C.Y. 05, James Alonzo Garcia walked down the ramp of a Union shuttle. Unlike the hundreds of other immigrants who’d spent the last forty-eight years in biostasis aboard the Magnificent Voyage, though, Garcia never had to endure a cold night in Shuttlefield. The moment he set foot on Coyote, proctors ushered him to a waiting maxvee, which spirited him away to Liberty, where he was assigned to a three-room log cabin in the center of town. And that evening, while he was unpacking his bags, Garcia received his first visitors: Luisa Hernandez and Manuel Castro. They personally brought him dinner, and while a Union Guard soldier stood watch outside the three of them had a meeting. It lasted only an hour, and after they left Garcia stood on the front porch of his new home, silently gazing up at Bear as it rose into the night sky.

  Garcia was treated with far more dignity than the average immigrant. Since all the usual weight limits had been waived in his favor, his comps, books, and even his antique drafting board had all been freighted from Earth. When it was apparent that he needed a warmer jacket than his frock coat, he was given a fur-lined parka (which he wore only on the coldest days). He didn’t eat in the community hall, but instead took his meals in the privacy of his home. Whenever he needed anything—pads, fresh sheets and blankets for his bed, a coffeepot, a new pair of boots—it was available simply for the asking. Compared to the thousands living in squalor in Shuttlefield, James Garcia lived like a prince . . . and all he was expected to do in return was to lend his talents to the colony.

  His circumstances weren’t unbearable. He hadn’t left behind anyone he couldn’t live without, and while his quarters were relatively primitive, they weren’t uncomfortable. So he went to work on the first task given to him by the Matriarch, designing a master plan for Shuttlefield that would ease the settlement’s overpopulation problems. It took only six weeks for him to come up with a wheel-shaped layout for streets and neighborhoods, complete with a sewage system, a zoned business district, schools and a public commons, with roads leading to Liberty, the nearby farms, and the landing field. Although it was something a first-year student could have done, when he showed it to the Matriarch she praised him as a genius.

  And that’s when she told him she needed a bridge.

  From the outset, Garcia knew that building a bridge across the East Channel would be more difficult than it might seem. No two bridges are exactly alike, no matter how similar they may appear; each poses its own unique challenges, and while the Stanley Bridge was one of the largest ever built, Garcia quickly realized that this new one would stretch the limits of his ingenuity.

  Midway through Machadiel, the last month of winter, Garcia joined a four-man expedition down Sand Creek to survey the channel and the Eastern Divide. Never much of a traveler, the architect made the trip only with great reluctance; however, he knew that he had to see the channel with his own eyes and not simply rely on reports made by others.

  Another expedition member was Chris Levin, the Chief Proctor. Levin was the natural choice to lead the survey team; not only had he designed and built the single-mast keelboat, the Lady of Huntsville, which the team used for the trip, but he had also been on the ill-fated Montero Expedition that crossed the Eastern Divide three years earlier.

  Sand Creek was still running high, so the boat made it through the Shapiro Pass without any difficulties. Once they reached the East Channel, the expedition turned north, spending the next several days exploring the seventy-mile stretch between the Shapiro Pass and Thompson’s Ferry. It was a slow and arduous voyage; the current was against them, making the ride anything but smooth, and Garcia was frequently seasick, trying the patience of the other men aboard. After the first two days on the channel, Garcia elected not to remain aboard any longer. While Levin and his first mate, Union Guard lieutenant Bon Cortez, went ahead in the keelboat, Garcia and Frederic LaRoux, a geologist, hiked the rocky beach beneath the towering bluffs of the Eastern Divide, catching up with the Lady of Huntsville when it came ashore for the evening.

  This tur
ned out to be a wise decision, for it gave Garcia and LaRoux a chance to inspect the bluffs more closely. As Garcia suspected, much of the Eastern Divide was comprised of porous limestone, unsuitable for supporting a large structure. However, here and there the limestone had been eroded away, exposing impermeable shale beneath it. And midway between the Shapiro Pass and Thompson’s Ferry, fortuitously located at the most narrow point of the Eastern Channel, rested a granite bluff suitable for their needs.

  The Narrows, as Levin labeled the straits on his map, were a little less than two miles across; the Midland Rise could easily be seen from the beach. The expedition made camp on the western side, and spent the next several days surveying the site from both sides of the channel, using deep-core drills to extract rock samples and sonar to gauge the depth of the waters. At midpoint, the Narrows were nearly a hundred feet deep, but at several places the floor rose to within forty feet of the surface. Soundings revealed the existence of solid bedrock several feet beneath the muddy river bottom. Garcia climbed to the top of the Eastern Divide and set up his theodolite, then spent a day examining the eastern side of the channel through its scope, repeating this the following day from the top of the Rise, while Bon Cortez stood two miles away with a meter stick in hand.

  Eight days after it set sail upon the East Channel, the Lady of Huntsville arrived at Thompson’s Ferry, thirty-eight miles upstream from the Narrows. Levin, Cortez, and LaRoux took advantage of Clark Thompson’s hospitality, luxuriating in hot baths and devouring everything Aunt Molly put before them; they spoke enthusiastically about what they’d found, and Thompson listened with interest as they told him about the plans to build a bridge across the Narrows. The loner Garcia shared none of this. Locking himself inside a storeroom of the town lodge, he spread his maps, charts, and notebooks across a table and went straight to work, sleeping on the bare wooden floor and eating only when Molly Thompson insisted that he needed food.

  Two days after the Lady of Huntsville showed up at the ferry, Clark Thompson and his nephew Garth went fishing. Cortez and LaRoux took little note of this, but Levin watched from the deck of the lodge while their kayak made its way toward Midland. It returned many hours later, just before sundown; apparently it had been a bad day for fishing, for neither of the men brought home anything. The Chief Proctor took note of the fact that their bait box apparently remained untouched, but he carefully said nothing.

  The following morning, Garcia emerged from the storeroom, haggard and red-eyed, with several scrolls beneath his arms and a hoarse-throated request to return to Liberty at once. His bridge existed, if only on paper and within his mind’s eye.

  All he needed to do was build it.

  James Garcia was under no delusions. Since there were no iron deposits on New Florida, and the ones on Midland weren’t ready to be mined, the bridge would have to be built almost entirely out of wood and stone. With no iron for cables, he ruled out any sort of suspension bridge. While the channel was relatively shallow, its current was swift; the support towers would therefore have to be erected while the waters were at their lowest mark, during late spring and summer. And because none of the heavy machinery available to him on Earth or Mars—tower cranes, dredges, earthmovers—existed on Coyote, they would have to rely upon hand-built derricks, high explosives, portable generators, and sheer muscle. In short, a two-mile bridge would have to be built within a short period of time, using only native materials, under primitive conditions.

  A Crazy Jimmy project, to be sure. And he couldn’t have been happier; it was the sort of challenge he thrived upon.

  When Garcia showed his plans to Luisa Hernandez, the Matriarch quickly gave her approval to the project. Indeed, he was surprised at her sanguine acceptance of the difficulties; it didn’t seem to matter very much to her that the bridge would tax the colony’s resources in terms of both material and human effort. Whatever you need, she said, you’ll get it.

  Such carte blanche should have been an engineer’s dream, but Garcia would soon learn otherwise. A few days later, the Matriarch held a public meeting in Liberty. The community hall was filled to capacity, with hundreds of colonists standing outside; flanked by her staff, with Chris Levin on one side and Manuel Castro on the other, Hernandez announced plans to build a bridge across the East Channel to Midland, with work beginning immediately. She went on to state that the bridge would be the colony’s first priority for the coming year, and that, in the spirit of social collectivism, she expected every able-bodied person to contribute to the effort.

  It soon became clear what the Matriarch meant; she wasn’t seeking volunteers so much as she was issuing a draft notice. Over the course of the next two weeks, Proctors combed Shuttlefield, locating every man and woman above the age of eighteen and checking their employment status against their records. Everyone who wasn’t already working on the farms or serving some other vital function was conscripted to the construction project. No exceptions, no deferrals. When someone tried to refuse, they were informed that their ration cards would be voided, meaning that they wouldn’t be allowed to eat in the community hall. When the Cutters Guild attempted to go on strike, the Matriarch responded by having their leaders arrested and their camp torn down by the Union Guard, their belongings confiscated and impounded. Upon seeing what happened to the largest and most powerful group in Shuttlefield, the other guilds hastily fell into line.

  Garcia was outraged, yet when he told the Matriarch that he needed skilled workmen, not slave laborers, she replied by saying that wasn’t true; everyone would be paid, in credits good for purchasing goods at shops in Liberty (which, it went without saying, were co-opted by the colonial government, meaning that a large percentage of workers’ payments would go straight back to the Union). She then pointed out that most of Shuttlefield was unemployed, with little to do except sit around and wait for a job to open up. The bridge would shake them out of their indolence, give them a purpose for their lives. This was the genius of collectivist theory: the efforts of individuals applied to the greater good of society as a whole. Why, didn’t he believe in social collectivism?

  Garcia grumbled and returned to his drafting board.

  Since the Narrows lay sixty miles from Liberty, one of the first tasks was the establishment of a road to the Eastern Divide. Thirty men spent two weeks marching through the grasslands, burning all the swampgrass and spider bush in their way and building footbridges across the swamps. There were several stands of blackwood and faux birch along the way, the last few remaining in that part of New Florida. They were cut down, the logs hauled on carts down what came to be known as Swamp Road to the construction site. A new settlement began to take form beneath the Eastern Divide—barracks, latrines, a mess hall, warehouses, craft shops—and it wasn’t long before Shuttlefield began to empty out, as men and women were relocated to the coast. Every day, Bridgeton grew a little more, while Shuttlefield gradually shrank.

  While that was going on, a new ferry was established on the channel. Chris Levin, temporarily released from his duties as Chief Proctor, was put in charge of building a fleet of construction barges. Yet another crew under Bon Cortez was given the task of setting up a logging camp and lumber mill on the other side of Midland Rise, with roads leading to the rain forests a few miles away. Forest Camp was smaller than Bridgeton, but no less active. Only the toughest men and women lived there, the ones who didn’t mind getting splinters in their hands or enduring the long nights spent huddled around smoky fires. Indeed, many preferred the hardship; at least they were away from Shuttlefield, and more or less free so long as they ignored the armed soldiers loitering nearby.

  Garcia remained in Liberty during that period. He worked out of his cabin, revising his blueprints, receiving daily reports via satphone from his foremen. Every few days, he’d warily climb aboard a gyro piloted by a Guardsman and pay a visit to the construction site; he still disliked flying, but it was the only way he was able to get to the Narrows on short notice. Those who saw him then remember a smal
l figure in a frock coat, his hands clasped behind his back, silently walking past stacks of cut timber as he listened to crew chiefs whose names he often forgot, occasionally stopping to jot down notes in his pad.

  He rarely spoke, though, so no one knew what was on his mind.

  Garcia wasn’t the only one quietly observing what was going on. The activity at Forest Camp had drawn the attention of others who had a vested interest in the Narrows.

  When Clark Thompson and his nephew went fishing that day in Machadiel, they weren’t out to hook a few channelmouth. After they rowed across the channel, the elder Thompson left Garth behind with the boat while he hiked up a narrow path leading to top of the Midland Rise. A young man whom he knew only as Rigil Kent was waiting for him, summoned two days earlier by a brief satphone call Clark had made when no one was watching. The two men had a short conversation, then once again Rigil Kent vanished into the woods.

  Rigil Kent was the alias adopted by Carlos Montero, the Alabama colonist who, on and off over the course of the last two years, had waged guerrilla war against the Union. Twice already he’d led small raiding parties across the channel—the first time to steal firearms from Liberty, the second to blow up a shuttle. Although his efforts were still sporadic, Carlos’s objective was to force the Union off New Florida; even if he couldn’t get the newcomers to return to Earth, at least he might be able to make them surrender Liberty, which he and his followers considered to be stolen property.

  After his rendezvous with Clark Thompson, Carlos returned to Defiance, the settlement hidden within a river valley on the other side of Mt. Shaw that the Matriarch had been unable to find. That evening, he made his report to the Town Council. Like everyone else, Robert Lee—once the former commanding officer of the Alabama, by then the elected mayor of Defiance—was disturbed to learn that Luisa Hernandez intended to erect a bridge across the East Channel. Thus far, Lee had supported the resistance efforts only reluctantly; he believed that, if his people lay low on Midland, the Union would leave them alone. Yet it had become clear that the Matriarch wanted Midland as well as New Florida. Once the bridge was built, it would only be a matter of time before Union troops invaded Midland.