Catherine Asaro - Nebula Awards Showcase 2013

“Tell me it wasn’t worse!” Tears glittered in her eyes. Her voice was dulled by the drumming in his ears. “They will come, I know it.”

He reached a hand out to her. “It’s a tall levee, Rasali. Even if they do, they’re not going to come over that.” His heart in his chest thrummed. His head was hurting. It was so hard to hear her.

“No one knows what they’ll do! They used to destroy whole towns, drifting inland on foggy nights. Why do you think they built the levees a thousand years ago? The Big Ones—”

She stopped shouting, listening. She mouthed something but Kit could not hear her over the beating in his ears, his heart, his head. He realized suddenly that these were not the after-effects of the explosion; the air itself was beating. He was aware at the edges of his vision of the other workers, every face turned toward the mist. There was nothing to see but the overcast sky. No one moved.

But the sky was moving.

Behind the levee the river mist was rising, a great boiling upheaval of dirty gray-gold against the steel-gray of the clouds, at least a hundred feet high, to be seen over the levee. The mist was seething, breaking open in great swirls and rifts, everything moving, changing. Kit had seen a great fire once when a warehouse of linen had burned in Atyar, where the smoke had poured upward and looked a little like this before bring torn apart by the wind.

Gaps opened in the mountain of mist and closed, and others opened, darker the deeper they were. And through those gaps, in the brown-black shadows at the heart of the mist, was movement.

The gaps closed. After an eternity the mist slowly smoothed and then settled back behind the levee and could no longer be seen. He wasn’t really sure when the thrumming of the air blended back into the ringing of his ears.

“Gone,” Rasali said with a sound like a sob.

A worker made one of the vivid jokes that come after fear; the others laughed, too loud. A woman ran up the levee and shouted down, “Farside levees are fine; ours are fine.” More laughter: people jogged off to Nearside to check on their families.

The back of Kit’s hand was burning. A flake of foam had settled and left an irregular mark. “I only saw mist,” Kit said. “Was there a Big One?”

Rasali shook herself, stern now but no longer angry or afraid. Kit had learned this about the Ferrys, that their emotions coursed through them and then dissolved. “It was in there. I’ve seen the mist boil like that before but never so big. Nothing else could heave it up like that.”

“On purpose?”

“Oh, who knows? They’re a mystery, the Big Ones.” She met his eyes. “I hope your bridge is very high, Kit Meinem of Atyar.”

Kit looked to where the mist had been, but there was only sky. “The deck will be two hundred feet above the mist. High enough. I hope.”

Liu Breaker walked up to them, rubbing her hands on her leather leggings. “So, that’s not something that happens at Hoic. Very exciting. What do you call that? How do we prevent it next time?”

Rasali looked at the smaller woman for a moment. “I don’t think you can. Big Ones come when they come.”

Liu said, “They do not always come?”

Rasali shook her head.

“Well, cold comfort is better than no comfort, as my Da says.”

Kit rubbed his temples. The headache remained. “We’ll continue.”

“Then you’ll have to be careful,” Rasali said, “or you will kill us all.”

“The bridge will save many lives,” Kit said. Yours, eventually.

Rasali turned on her heel.

Kit did not follow her, not that day. Whether it was because subsequent explosions were smaller (“As small as they can be and earn my fees,” Liu Breaker said) or because they were doing other things, the Big Ones did not return, though fish were plentiful for the three months it took to plan and plant the charges, and break the bedrock.

There was also a Meinem tradition of metal working, and Meinem reeves, and many Meinems went into fields altogether different, but Kit had known from nearly the beginning that he would be one of the building Meinems. He loved the invisible architecture of construction, looking for a compromise between the vision in his head and the sites, the materials, and the people that would make them real. The challenge was to compromise as little as possible.

Architecture was studied at University. His tutor was a materials specialist, a woman who had directed construction on an incredible twenty-three bridges. Skossa Timt was so old that her skin and hair had faded together to the white of Gani marble, and she walked with a cane she had designed herself for efficiency. She taught him much. Materials had rules, patterns of behavior: they bent or crumbled or cracked or broke under quantifiable stresses. They augmented or destroyed one another. Even the best materials in the most stable combinations did not last forever—she tapped her own forehead with one gnarled finger and laughed—but if he did his work right, they could last a thousand years or more. “But not forever,” Skossa said. “Do your best but don’t forget this.”

The anchorages and pillars grew. Workers came from towns up and down each bank, and locals were hired on the spot. The new people were generally welcome. They paid for rooms and food and goods of all sorts. The taverns settled into making double and then triple batches of everything, threw out new wings and stables. Nearside accepted the new people easily, the only fights late at night when people had been drinking and flirting more than they should. Farside had fist fights more frequently, though they decreased steadily as skeptics gave in to the money that flowed into Farside, or to the bridge itself, its pillars too solid to be denied.

Farmers and husbanders sold their fields and new buildings sprawled out from the towns’ hearts. Some were made of wattle and daub, slapped together over stamped-earth floors that still smelled of sheep dung. Others, small but permanent, went up more slowly, as the bridge builders laid fieldstones and timber in their evenings and on rest days.

The new people and locals mixed together until it was hard to tell the one from the other, though the older townfolk kept scrupulous track of who truly belonged. For those who sought lovers and friends, the new people were an opportunity to meet someone other than the men and women they had known since childhood. Many took casual lovers, and several term-partnered with new people. There was even a Nearside wedding, between Kes Tiler and a black-eyed builder from far to the south called Jolite Deveren, whatever that meant.

Kit did not have lovers. Working every night until he fell asleep over his paperwork, he didn’t miss it much, except late on certain nights when thunderstorms left him restless and unnaturally alert, as though lightning ran under his skin. Some nights he thought of Rasali, wondered whether she was sleeping with someone that night or alone, and wondered if the storm had awakened her, left her restless as well.

Kit saw a fair amount of Rasali when they were both on the same side of the mist. She was clever and calm and the only person who did not want to talk about the bridge all the time.

He did not forget what Rasali said about Valo. Kit had been a young man himself not so many years before, and he remembered the hunger that young men and women felt to prove themselves against the world. Kit didn’t need Valo to accept the bridge—he was scarcely into adulthood and his only influence over the townspeople was based on his work—but Kit liked the youth, who had Rasali’s eyes and her effortless way of moving.

Valo started asking questions, first of the other workers and then of Kit. His boat-building experience meant the questions were good ones. Kit passed on the first things he had learned as a child on his father’s sites and showed him the manipulation of the immense blocks and the tricky balance of material and plan, the strength of will that allows a man to direct a thousand people toward a single vision. Valo was too honest not to recognize Kit’s mastery and too competitive not to try and meet Kit on his own ground. He came more often to visit the construction sites.