Catherine Asaro - Nebula Awards Showcase 2013

He examined the mist more closely, as well, by lifting a piece from the river’s surface on the end of an oar. The mist was stiffer than it looked, and in bright light he thought he could see tiny shapes, perhaps creatures or plants or something altogether different. There were microscopes in Atyar, and people who studied these things; but he had never bothered to learn more, interested only in the structure that would bridge it. In any case, living things interested him less than structures.

Nights, Kit worked on the table in his room. Teniant’s plans had to be revised. He opened the folios and cases she had left behind and read everything he found there. He wrote letters, wrote lists, wrote schedules, wrote duplicates of everything, sent to the capital for someone to do all the subsequent copying. His new plans for the bridge began to take shape. He started to glimpse the invisible architecture that was the management of the vast project.

He did not see Rasali Ferry except to ask each morning whether they might travel that day. The answer was always no.

One afternoon, when the clouds were heaping into anvils filled with rain, he walked up to the building site half a mile north of Nearside. For two years, off and on, carts had tracked south on the Hoic Mine road and the West River Road, leaving limestone blocks and iron bars here in untidy heaps. Huge dismantled shear-legs lay beside a caretaker’s wattle-and-daub hut. There were thousands of large rectangular blocks.

Kit examined some of the blocks. Limestone was often too chossy for large-scale construction but this rock was sound, with no apparent flaws or fractures. There were not enough, of course, but undoubtedly more had been quarried. He had written to order resumption of deliveries and they would start arriving soon.

Delivered years too early, the iron trusses that would eventually support the roadbed were stacked neatly, painted black to protect them from moisture, covered in oiled tarps, and raised from the ground on planks. Sheep grazed the knee-high grass that grew everywhere. When one eyed him incuriously, Kit found himself bowing. “Forgive the intrusion,” he said and laughed: too old to be talking to sheep.

The test pit was still open, with a ladder on the ground nearby. Weeds clung when he moved the ladder as though reluctant to release it. He descended.

The pasture had not been noisy but he was startled when he dropped below ground level and the insects and whispering grasses were suddenly silenced. The soil around him was striated shades of dun and dull yellow. Halfway down, he sliced a wedge free with his knife: lots of clay, good foundation soil as he had been informed. Some twenty feet down, the pit’s bottom looked like the walls, but when he crouched to dig at the dirt between his feet with his knife, he hit rock almost immediately. It seemed to be shale. He wondered how far down the water table was. Did the Nearsiders find it difficult to dig wells? Did the mist ever backwash into one? There were people at University in Atyar who were trying to understand mist, but there was still so much that could not be examined or quantified.

He collected a rock to examine in better light and climbed from the pit in time to see a teamster approaching, leading four mules, her wagon groaning under the weight of the first new blocks. A handful of Nearsider men and women followed, rolling their shoulders and popping their joints. They called out greetings and he walked across to them.

When he got back to The Fish hours later, exhausted from helping unload the cart and soaked from the storm that had started while he did so, there was a message from Rasali. Dusk was all it said.

Kit was stiff and irritable when he left for The Tranquil Crossing . He had hired a carrier from The Fish to haul one of his trunks down to the dock but the others remained in his room, which he would probably keep until the bridge was done. He carried his folio of plans and paperwork himself. He was leaving duplicates of everything on Nearside, but after so much work it was hard to trust any of it to the hands of others.

The storm was over and the clouds were moving past, leaving the sky every shade between lavender and a rich purple-blue. The largest moon was a crescent in the west, the smaller a half circle immediately overhead. In the fading light, the mist was a dark, smoky streak. The air smelled fresh. Kit’s mood lightened and he half-trotted down the final slope.

His fellow passengers were there before him: a prosperous-looking man with a litter of piglets in a woven wicker cage (Tengon whites, the man confided, the best bloodline in all Empire); a woman in the dark clothes fashionable in the capital, with brass-bound document cases and a folio very like Kit’s; two traders with many cartons of powdered pigment; a mail courier with locked leather satchels and two guards. Nervous about their first crossing, Uni and Tom Mason greeted Kit when he arrived.

In the gathering darkness the mist formed tight-folded hills and coulees. Swifts darted just above the surface, using the wind flowing up the valley, searching for insects, he supposed. Once a sudden black shape, too quick to see clearly, appeared from below. Then it, and one of the birds, was gone.

The voices of the fishers at their dock carried to him. They launched their boats and he watched one and then another and then a gaggle of the little coracles push themselves up a slope of the mist. There were no lamps.

“Ready, everyone?” Kit had not heard Rasali approach. She swung down into the ferry. “Hand me your gear.”

Stowing and embarkation were quick, though the piglets complained. Kit strained his eyes but the coracles could no longer be seen. When he noticed Rasali waiting for him, he apologized. “I guess the fish are biting.”

Rasali glanced at the river as she stowed his trunk. “Small ones. A couple of feet long only. The fishers like them bigger, five or six feet, though they don’t want them too big, either. But they’re not fish, not what you think fish are. Hand me that.”

He hesitated a moment, then gave her the folio before stepping into the ferry. The Tranquil Crossing sidled at his weight but sluggishly: a carthorse instead of a riding mare. His stomach lurched. “Oh!” he said.

“What?” one of the traders asked nervously. Rasali untied the rope holding them, pulled it into the boat.

Kit swallowed. “I had forgotten. The motion of the boat. It’s not like water at all.”

He did not mention his fear but there was no need. The others murmured assent. The courier, her dark face sharp-edged as a hawk, growled, “Every time I do this, it surprises me. I dislike it.”

Rasali unshipped a scull and slid the great triangular blade into the mist, which parted reluctantly. “I’ve been on mist more than water but I remember the way water felt. Quick and jittery. This is better.”

“Only to you, Rasali Ferry,” Uni Mason said.

“Water’s safer, anyway,” the man with the piglets said.

Rasali leaned into the oar and the boat slid away from the dock. “Anything is safe until it kills you.”

The mist absorbed the quiet sounds of shore almost immediately. One of Kit’s first projects had been a stone single-arch bridge over water, far to the north in Eskje province. He had visited before construction started, and he was there for five days more than he had expected, caught by a snowstorm that left nearly two feet on the ground. This reminded him of those snowy moonless nights, the air as thick and silencing as a pillow on the ears.

Rasali did not scull so much as steer. It was hard to see far in any direction except up, but perhaps it was true that the mist spoke to her for she seemed to know where best to position the boat for the mist to carry it forward. She followed a small valley until it started to flatten and then mound up. The Crossing tipped slightly as it slid a few feet to port. The mail carrier made a noise and immediately stifled it.