Coyote Rising (20 page)

Once I was well, I agreed to meet with the Defiance Town Council. I recognized their leader as soon as I walked into the room: Robert E. Lee, former captain of the URSS
Alabama
, the man who’d stolen Earth’s first starship and brought a group of political dissidents to the new world. His beard had gone white, lending him a strong resemblance to his famous ancestor, but he was clearly the same man whose face I’d seen in history texts when I was growing up. Lee was almost as surprised to see me as I was to meet him, as were the other members of the Council. Although I wasn’t the first Shuttlefield refugee who’d managed to find their way to Defiance, I was the only man who’d ever crossed Mt. Shaw during winter. Not only that, but apparently I’d done it on my own, with only the clothes on my back.

I had a little trouble telling them my story; the form of English they spoke was over two hundred years old, and only recently had they learned Anglo. Once we were past the language barrier, I informed them
that they were only half-right; I hadn’t been alone, but so far as I knew there were no other survivors. Lee and the others listened to my story, and when I was done they excused me in order to hold an executive session. It didn’t last long; when I was brought back into the meeting room, Lee told me that the Council had voted unanimously to accept me as a new member of their town. I accepted the invitation, of course.

A month later, I was able to walk on my own. By then it was early spring; the snow had melted, and it was possible to climb Mt. Shaw safely once more. I took a few days off from my new job as goatherd to escort a small group of men up the western slope. It was a slow ascent—I had to stop often to rest my left foot, and also try to remember the way I’d come—but after a couple of days of searching we managed to find the place just below the tree line where I’d last seen the members of the Church of Universal Transformation.

Two lean-to shelters, already on the verge of collapse, lay near a ring of stones where a fire had been built. Within them, we discovered rotting sleeping bags and backpacks, tattered robes and dead lanterns, a couple of Bibles whose brown pages fluttered in the cool wind. Charred and broken bones lay in and around the fire pit; not far away, we found a pile of mutilated skeletons, some missing their arms and legs, others with skulls fractured as if struck from behind by one of the staffs that lay here and there.

There was no way to identify anyone. Weather, animals, and insects had done their work on the bodies, and I couldn’t look for myself. After a few minutes, I knelt on the ground and wept until one of my companions picked me up and led me away.

I’m sure none of them survived. There’s no way anyone else could have made it off the mountain. Not even Greer. Even today, her fate is something I can’t bear to contemplate.

And yet . . .

Before my partners buried them, they carefully counted the corpses. They came up with twenty-seven bodies. Not counting Clarice, whose body was left on the other side of Mt. Shaw, or me, that was two short of the thirty-one Universalists who left Shuttlefield, including Zoltan Shirow. We never found anything that looked like a wing, or a skull with
fangs among its teeth, or a hand whose fingers had been reshaped as talons.

To this day, though, people who’ve ventured into the Gillis Range have come back with stories of shadowy forms half-seen through the trees. Sometimes they’ve caught a glimpse of a figure with batlike wings, and sometimes they’ve spotted what appears to be a young woman. These could only be stories; the mountains are haunted, and lonely as only the wilderness can be.

I don’t know the answer. But every night, before I go to bed, I pray to God that I never will.

Part 3
THE GARCIA NARROWS BRIDGE

The day is Anael, Adnachiel 66,
C
.
Y
. 05: a perfect morning in early
autumn. The place is the Eastern Divide, the great row of limestone bluffs running along the eastern coast of New Florida, separating its flat marshlands from the East Channel. On the other side of the channel is Midland, the equatorial continent that straddles the northern half of Coyote’s meridian; like most of the planet, it’s largely unexplored, but this is about to change. For where there was once only an expanse of water, there’s now an alien object, something never before seen on this world.

A bridge.

Almost two miles long, with a midlength clearance of 110 feet, the bridge is built almost entirely of native wood and stone; indeed, the only metal used in its construction are the thick steel bolts that hold together the post-and-beam structure of the six blackwood arches holding up the concrete roadway. The arches and the towers that support them rest upon massive limestone piers, and suspended between each arch is a hinged span that seems to float in midair above the channel. The bridge appears fragile, but appearances are deceiving: designed to withstand the harshest winter storm or the highest spring flood, it can hold the weight of pedestrians, carts, rovers . . . even an army, if need be.

At the moment, though, the bridge is vacant. For the first time since last Machidiel, when construction began, no one stands upon it. The scaffolds have been dismantled, along with the temporary caissons that once surrounded the piers at the base of the towers; the bamboo basket that transported workmen along a long cable strung between the towers is still in place, but soon it’ll be taken down. The bridge is finished. The only thing left to be done is the dedication ceremony.

Almost eight hundred people have gathered beneath the river bluffs. During the course of the last year, a small town has grown up within the shadows of the Eastern Divide: dormitories, commissaries, warehouses, and sheds, sprawling across acres of savanna near the limestone quarries where workers chipped out the blocks used to build the towers. Today, though, Bridgeton is empty; everyone has hiked up the new road blasted through the Divide, where they now gaze across the Narrows at a slightly smaller group standing atop the Midland Rise: Forest Camp, whose workmen chopped down the blackwoods and milled them for the massive beams used for the arches and support towers.

More than fourteen hundred men and women have labored long and hard for nearly seven months, almost two years by Gregorian reckoning. They paid for the bridge not only with sweat and muscle, but also blood: seven people perished in construction accidents ranging from falling from the towers to drowning in the channel. But this day is not for mourning, but for celebration. Red and blue pennants dangle from the trusses, and garlands of wildflowers are woven around the handrails. In the Bridgeton mess hall, the long tables have been laid out, and dozens of chickens and pigs have been butchered, in preparation for a midday fiesta, while casks of sourgrass ale carted in from Shuttlefield wait to be tapped. Outside the hall, a small stage has been set up—the Coyote Wood Ensemble will perform a symphony written especially for this occasion by Allegra DiSilvio—and a nearby field has been cleared for a softball game. The crowd shuffles restlessly, impatient to get through the dedication ceremonies so they can begin the long-awaited party.

Standing at the bridge entrance is a small group of dignitaries. The colonial governor, the Matriarch Luisa Hernandez, a stocky woman in a purple brocade cape, her hood pulled back. The lieutenant governor, the Savant Manuel Castro, his black robe concealing his skull-like face and metallic form. Chris Levin, the Chief Proctor, one of the original colonists from the URSS
Alabama
, the first starship to reach the 47 Ursae Majoris system; his eyes constantly shift back and forth, as if searching for trouble. Leaders of the various guilds whose members were recruited for the construction effort; many of them are mildly inebriated, having already sampled the ale before coming up to the bridge.

And in their midst, a quiet figure, slight of build and stooped at the shoulders, his thin face framed by a beard peppered with grey. He wears a threadbare frock coat despite the warmth of the day, and his soft brown eyes peer owlishly from behind wire-rim glasses.

James Alonzo Garcia, architect and chief engineer of the Garcia Narrows Bridge. Not the sort of person one would expect to lead such a monumental task. Indeed, he sees himself not so much as an engineer but rather as a poet. Instead of words, though, physics is his form, mathematics his meter; for him, the bridge that bears his name is a poem of gravity and resistance, tension and compression, an elegant sonnet whose couplets are expressed in equations. Others may see the bridge as an edifice, yet for him it is a song that only he can hear.

It is his masterpiece. And he hates it.

A red ribbon has been stretched across the entrance, tied together in a thick bow. James Garcia—formerly known, a lifetime ago back on Earth, as “Crazy Jimmy”—looks down, gently squeezes his left thumb. Digits appear on the fingernail: 1329:47:03. Almost noon. He’s supposed to deliver a speech at this time; a few public words, expressing his thoughts upon the grand occasion. This sort of thing isn’t in his character—he’s shy, reticent when it comes to things like this—yet a mike dangles from his left ear, wired to a sound system set up so that what he says can be heard by all. Everyone is waiting for him, but he holds off, delaying the ceremony.

Across the channel, just for a moment, he catches a flash of light. Once, twice, three times, from a rocky outcrop on the Midland Rise just below the east side of the bridge. As if to shade his eyes from the sun, Garcia briefly raises a hand. The light winks twice more, then is no longer seen.

He turns to the woman standing next to him, nods briefly. The Matriarch smiles, then turns to Savant Castro. Ruby-colored eyes stare into his own, then a metallic claw comes from beneath the cloak, offering a pair of shears painted gold to resemble ceremonial scissors.

Garcia accepts the shears, steps forward to the ribbon. Seeing this, a cheer rises from the nearby onlookers, reciprocated a few moments later by those on the other side of the channel. Garcia lets the applause wash over him. For better or worse, this is his moment; none of it would have been possible were it not for him.

He raises the shears, his hands trembling as he opens the blades. So tempting just to cut the ribbon, get it over and done. But, no, there are things that must be said; this is an historic event, after all, and history must be served.

And so he speaks . . .

In order to properly understand what James Alonzo Garcia said
that day, and why he did what he did, one must go back. Not to the beginnings of the colonization of Coyote—that story has already been told elsewhere—but to the events after the disappearance of the original settlers and the arrival of the next wave of colonists from Earth. It explains why a bridge was constructed across the Eastern Channel, and why Crazy Jimmy was the man who built it.

When the
Alabama
party abandoned their original settlement and fled New Florida, following the unexpected arrival of the WHSS
Glorious Destiny,
they did so in longboats, kayaks, and sea canoes they had fashioned from native materials. Using a route discovered by the Montero Expedition of
C
.
Y
. 02, they traveled down Sand Creek until they reached the Shapiro Pass, which allowed them access through the Eastern Divide to the East Channel. By the time a squad of Union Guard soldiers led by Luisa Hernandez set foot in Liberty, the settlers had already crossed the channel and vanished into the wilds of Midland, never to be seen again.