Eternity Road

7

If you must go, take no strangers. Take nobody you wouldn’t trust with your life. During the next week, Chaka discovered how few persons fit Shannon’s prescription. Those she had confidence in were all in Raney’s camp: They saw it as their duty to dissuade her from the project. And they would under no circumstances support a second expedition. It’s important, several of them told her, to learn from history. On the other hand, people she did not know arrived at her door and offered to join. Most seemed unstable or unreliable. A few wanted to be paid.

It’s likely that the second expedition might never have happened had not Quait Esterhok conceived, almost simultaneously, two passions: one for Mark Twain, and the other for Chaka Milana.

The former led him, perhaps for the first time, to understand the nature of what had been lost with the Roadmaker collapse. Because the League cities had no printing press, they did not possess the novel as an art form. Contemporary writers limited themselves to practical manuals; to philosophical, religious, legal, and ethical tracts; and to histories.

It was not the literary form, however, which left so strong an impression on Quait. Rather, it was the voice, which seemed so energetic and full of life, so completely at odds with the formalized, stiff writing style of the Illyrians. It was, he told Silas, as if this Mark Twain were sitting right in the room. “What do we know about him?” he asked.

Silas outlined the limited knowledge they had: that he’d lived in a place called Hartford; that he’d been born in the Roadmaker year 1835 (no one knew when that was); that he was conscious of the delays of government, as shown in “The Facts in the Case of the Great Beef Contract”; and that he’d been a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi, although the precise nature of his riverboat remained a mystery.

Yet, despite the paucity of facts, Quait felt that he knew Mark Twain almost as well as he knew Silas.

Quait’s second passion developed out of the first. Stealing time with the book was not easy. Inevitably it was in the hands of the copiers or the scholars, or both. So Quait had got into the habit of coming by and watching the progress of the work, reading over shoulders, and planning where he would get the funds to buy one of the books when it had actually been published. He arrived one afternoon to find another enthusiast also trying to read while a visiting scholar made notes on chapter four. They were in a back room, where the book was kept secure from the general public.

The enthusiast was a striking young woman whose shoulder-length red hair told him immediately who she was. “I’ve heard a lot about you from Silas,” he said.

Chaka nodded graciously. “You’re—?”

“Quait Esterhok.” He drew up another chair and sat down beside her. “Chapter four describes the immoderate language used in and around Camelot.”

She smiled. “Have you had a chance to read any of it?”

“In bits and pieces,” Quait said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

She nodded. “Yes. He’s very contemporary. And traveling backward in time. That’s a wild idea.”

The scholar, who was pinched-looking with straw-colored hair, glanced up with obvious irritation. “Do you mind?” he asked.

“Sorry,” said Chaka. An hourglass stood on the worktable Its sands had almost run out. “I’ve got to go anyway,” she said.

“It’s okay,” said Quait. “I’ll be quiet.”

“No, I’ve overstayed my time.” She waited a moment to finish what she’d been reading, and then she looked up at him Her eyes were blue and alive and they took him prisoner on the spot. “Silas says there’ll be copies ready within another week.”

“Good.” Quait cast about for a way to prolong the interview. But his mind had gone numb.

“Nice to meet you, Quait.” She rose, smiled, and walked off. He watched her stride to the desk, sign out, and leave the library.

“You’ve been keeping something from me, Silas.”

“And what is that?” he asked. They’d met for dinner at the Lost Cause.

“I met Chaka Milana today.” Quait rolled his eyes. “She looks pretty good.”

Silas shook his head. “I don’t think she’s very happy with me right now.”

“Why’s that?”

The waiter brought wine and filled their glasses. “I didn’t take her frontier scout very seriously.”

“Oh.” Quait frowned. “I got the impression the way you described it that you and she had agreed that the evidence was insufficient.”

Silas looked uncomfortable. “Not quite,” he said. “I guess that was my conclusion. She’s determined to pursue this business. It’s like ten years ago all over again. She’s becoming obsessed. She behaves as if it’s just a matter of going out into the woods for a few days. Anyway, she’s been talking to people at the Imperium, and elsewhere, trying to put together an expedition.”

“Is she having any luck?”

“I hope not. Look, Quait, nobody would like to find that place more than I do. Her woodsman found some marks on trees, but they could be anything. What’s going to happen is, she’ll put together a mission, it’ll get a few miles outside the borders, and they’ll run out of signs. Then they’ll come back, and anybody with a professional reputation to lose will very surely lose it. I can’t afford to get mixed up in that.”

“I didn’t say anything,” said Quait.

“Well, you were looking at me as if you disapproved. Even what’s-his-name. Shannon, admitted he couldn’t make any guarantees.”

“Shannon?”

“The woodsy guy.”

Quait nodded. “You won’t get a guarantee, Silas, with a thing like this. Not ever. You know that as well as I do.”

“I know.” A candle burned in a globe on the table. Silas stared at it. “I wasn’t looking for a guarantee, Quait. You know that.”

Quait tried his wine, licked his lips, put it down. “Silas, may I speak frankly?”

“Of course.”

“What is it that frightens you? What is it that keeps you from going after the one thing in this life that has real meaning for you? You backed off nine years ago, and you’re backing off now.”

“And I was right nine years ago, wasn’t I?”

“I don’t know. Were you?”

“Nobody came back. Except Karik.”

Quait shrugged. “Maybe you would have made the difference.” He leaned forward. “Silas, I know you’d risk your reputation if you went. I know the odds for success aren’t good. But I think basing your decision on what someone else will think doesn’t sound like you.”

“Sure it does,” said Silas. “I’ve always been concerned about public opinion. I have to be. My livelihood depends on it.”

“Then maybe you’re right,’ he said. “Maybe, if it’s out there, you’re not the right person to find it. But however that may be, I think you’ve been asking the wrong question. I’m more inclined to wonder what might happen if Shannon is right? If the trail is complete. If Haven really is at the end of it.”

“That’s a lot of if’s.”

“Yes. Well, I think we’ve already agreed about the odds. But anybody can do stuff when the odds are in their favor. Or when there’s no risk. Right?”

Silas liked Bernard Shaw. He spent the evening in the Senate library. He was leafing through Mrs. Warren’s Profession, but it was the conversation with Quait that drove his mood. The illyrians also possessed Man and Superman, Major Barbara, and Too True to Be Good, in addition to a fragment of Saint Joan.

“I’m going after the prize, Silas,” Karik had said. “It’s all out there. Shakespeare and Dante and the Roadmaker histories. And their mathematics and science. It’s waiting for us. But we need you.”

Silas had rejected the offer, had turned away. It was nonsense. He’d so thoroughly convinced himself that now he suspected he wanted it to be nonsense. Does a man clasp old beliefs, and old fears, so desperately?

And it had come again.

A prize so vast that no risk was too great. But this time, there’d be no Karik Endine to plunge into the wilderness. Only a young woman whose passions were running away with her head, and his infatuated former student.

Idly, he turned the pages of Mrs. Warren’s Profession, staring at the script, not really reading. But one line jumped out at him. It was Vivie’s comment to Mrs. Warren, near the end of Act IV: /// had been you, mother, I might have done as you did; but I should not have lived one life and believed in another.

After a while, Silas put the book away.

He walked slowly home, up the curving road, past candlelit cottages and the bakeshop and Cape’s Apothecary. Tomorrow he would send a message to Chaka, and then he would ask the Board of Regents to finance the attempt.

Once it became official that a second expedition would be mounted, Silas became the center of attention at the Imperium. Close friends advised him against the foray; others, not so close, made no real effort to hide their amusement. Nevertheless, all his colleagues, regardless of their views, seemed to feel required to explain publicly why they were unable to join the hunt. After all, the masters were supposed to have invested their lives in the pursuit of wisdom and knowledge. But, as one mathematician pointed out, if his desire for knowledge suggested he should go, wisdom dictated he stay put.

Silas immediately announced his intention to accompany the mission, and argued that it should leave as soon as possible. The lirsi expedition had been gone more than six months, he-said. We know we’ll be heading north, and we wain to be back before winter sets in. Silas put himself at Chaka’s disposal, and they set February 16 as the date for departure.

Silas used his political connections to get Quait assigned as an ad hoc military escort, thereby saving his pay. In addition, he informed Chaka that Quait had been responsible for his change of heart. When she took him aside to thank him, Quait pretended to a degree of humility, but took care not to overdo it.

It appeared for a time there would be only three of them. Or four, if Chaka was right and Shannon eventually joined. That’s okay, Quait insisted. He argued that a smaller group might have a better chance to succeed. “We’ll be more able to function as a single person, and less likely to run into personality differences. And three people aren’t going to make the Tuks nervous.”

Chaka spent much of the time leading up to departure reading every scrap of information she could find relating to Haven and Abraham Polk.

Most of the tales agreed that Polk had been captain of the Quebec, a warship that could sail at high speed against the wind. (Modern authorities thought there might have been a kernel of truth in the legend, that there might have been such a ship, and that it may have been named the Quebec. But no one knew who the name referred to, and of course they dismissed the more fanciful details, e,g., that it had been a submersible.) Folk’s naval efforts, traditionally, had consisted of salvage and rescue.

The Travels maintained that, after the Plague subsided, the Quebec prowled the seas under Polk’s direction for seventy-seven years (surely a mystic number), gathering survivors and returning them to Haven, which was designed to survive the general collapse. He also collected as much as he could of the art, science, literature, and history of the dead civilization, storing it against the ages. The names of his comrades are almost as famous as his: Casey Winckelhaus, his female second-in-command; Harry Schroeder, a tough, iconoclastic shoemaker’s son who gave his life for his commander off Copenhagen; Jennifer Whitlaw, whose account of the voyages, ironically now lost, gave them the name by which they are best known: the October Patrol.

Polk himself vanished at sea, called home by the Goddess when his work was done. Haven then shut its doors against the general dissolution and embarked on an effort to preserve what it had saved. Generations of scholars devoted themselves to maintaining and, as the texts yellowed and began to crumble, copying the great works in their care. And they waited for a new civilization to rise. If the legend is correct, they are still waiting.

Chaka dug out every illustration she could find of the Quebec and of Haven. The ship was commonly depicted as a schooner without sails, but with its bridge and forecastle enclosed inside a metal shell.

Haven itself, seen from the outside, revealed an aspect that was not greatly unlike the cliff and sea in the thirteenth sketch. She found more illustrations of the mountain car, which was alleged to have traveled the cliffs between Haven and Folk’s supply base.

The Quebec operated out of a chamber that had direct access to the sea. It was said the vessel could pass from its nest into the ocean without ever being seen. It was all so imaginative that she could not look at the material without dismissing it out of hand.

Midway through the final week of preparations, Flojian showed up at the Imperium and took Silas aside. He looked haggard and red-eyed, as if he had not been sleeping well. “I want to go with you,” he said.

Flojian had never shown any interest in academic pursuits. Moreover, he seemed to be the sort of man whose idea of hardship was having to go outside for fresh water. “Why?” asked Silas. The consensus now was to keep the group small. Furthermore, the regents favored a strategy that would restrain expenses.

“The stories about my father.”

Silas squirmed. “Don’t pay any attention to them. People like to talk.” He shook his head.

Flojian tried to straighten his shoulders. “I have a right to be with you. I can pay my own way. Whether you want me to or not, I’m coming.”

Silas opposed the proposal. “Plans have already been made,” he explained. “Anyway, it’ll be a difficult trip. This won’t be any pot of tulips.” He winced after that phrase, but he was struggling. Flojian was after all a rather useless individual, whose life had always been circumscribed by money and comfort.

But he persisted. “You can’t keep me from coming if I want to,” he said. “Please, Silas. I know you don’t think much of me, but you owe it to my father.”

“I’ll put it to the others,” Silas promised, “and let you know.”

One of the meetings drew another visitor: Avila Kap, of the Order of Shanta the Healer. It was a clear, warm evening, but she nonetheless wore a nondescript flannel shirt and cotton slacks in place of her usual clerical robes. “I would like to go,” she said.

Silas could see that Chaka and Quait, as startled by her appearance as he, were now equally discomfited by the proposal. Avila was, after all, bound by the rules of her calling, and could not simply wander off on her own into the wilderness. “Mentor,” he said, “we have filled our roster.”

She was a tall woman, almost six feet, and she moved with grace. Her dark eyes caught the light, and there was a glint of desperation in them. “Nevertheless,” she said, “I will go, if you will permit it.” She looked at each of them in turn. “We are required to spend several weeks each year in the wilderness, to maintain communication with the Goddess. I’m adept at survival skills, and I can assure you I will not be a burden.”

“I’m sure you would not.” Silas thought about Flojian, and for that matter about himself. If there was going to be a burden on this trip, he knew it would not be this very competent-looking woman. “Have you permission to travel with us?”

“Surely that is my concern.”

An uncomfortable silence followed. “May I ask why you wish to come?”

She took a long, deep breath. “Because,” she said, “I would like my life to count for something.”

Silas was feted by the Imperium, given a scroll attesting to his efforts to expand the boundaries of human knowledge, and sent off with a blast of horns.

Flojian turned his business over to his executive assistant, who promptly unnerved him by promising to explore new avenues for profit. “Don’t change anything,” said Flojian. “Or I’ll have your elbows removed when I get back.”

On February 16, the twentieth day after they had made their decision, and the eighty-third after Karik’s death, Silas, Chaka, Quait, and Avila rode at sunup to Flojian’s villa, where a dozen packhorses and a barnload of supplies had been gathered. Silas had said good-bye to his friends and relatives, who had, in the tradition of the time, wished him that the wind should block his way, and the rivers afford no crossings. (It was thought this would allay the jealousy of the gods.) He had updated his will, and turned his small house over to a trusted student until his return. “Or until news comes, and my testament takes effect.”

Avila arrived in forest green shirt and leggings, having discarded both her sacred raiment and her sacred orders. Her superiors were somewhat stirred up at the Temple, even though her action could not have come entirely as a surprise. Nevertheless, they were unhappy with her, and her life in Illyria would henceforth be that of an outcast.

Flojian hid an ample supply of gold coins in his saddlebags. He didn’t like the idea of traveling with a lot of money, but he knew that gold opens all kinds of doors, and he suspected they would have use for it before they were done.

Chaka half expected that Raney would come at the last minute. While her companions carried out the final details of

getting organized, loading the packhorses, running down checklists, ensuring they had the means of reshodding the animals, she kept looking around, hoping to see him ride in on his big chestnut stallion.

Several dozen well-wishers arrived and shook their hands. The company mounted their horses, waved, and, in brilliant sunlight, moved out of the villa grounds. They climbed to River Road and turned north. It would have been an exaggeration to say that crowds lined the route. However, there were individuals and small groups gathered along the way, watching, waving as they went by.

But there was no chestnut stallion.