Jack McDevitt - Eternity Road

“What else?” asked Raney, swinging around in his saddle to watch the horsemen ride away.

“I don’t know. I think there’s more to this than Flojian’s telling.”

Raney’s eyes came to rest on her. “I can’t imagine what it could be,” he said patiently.

“Nor can I. But I just don’t understand what happened.”

“Look, the truth is probably very simple. He felt guilty about being the only survivor of the expedition. Anybody would. So he gave you his most valuable possession. It’s an offering, an act of penance. He was trying to soothe his conscience. I don’t think there’s anything very mysterious about it.”

“Why did he wait until he died?”

“What do you mean?”

“If he was trying to soothe his conscience, why didn’t he soothe it while he was alive?”

“That’s easy, Chaka. Because he didn’t want to let go of the book. So you become an heir. That way, he wins all the way around. He can be generous with you, and it doesn’t cost him anything. We know he didn’t like his son, so he makes a statement there too.”

The conversation drifted to other, more mundane, topics. One of the senators had been caught in a tax scandal. Business at Raney’s establishment was picking up. One of Chaka’s friends had begun studying for the priesthood.

“What I can’t understand,” she said, as they rode through Baffle’s Pass, where the trees intertwine and form a green tunnel almost a hundred yards long, “is that Karik didn’t tell anybody about this. Not anybody.”

When he saw it was hopeless to try to save the animal, Ann let it go aid swam for shore. We thought he’d make it, but every time he got close, the current pushed him out again.

She could not get the image clear in her mind: Ann’s clumsy stroke fighting the rushing waters.

Afterward, Chaka was never certain precisely when she made up her mind to break into Flojian’s villa. She went to bed that night with a picture of the north wing in her mind, and her stomach churning. Sleep did not come. She progressed from contemplating the ferry operator’s secret to considering the consequences of getting caught. She thought about spending the rest of her life wondering why Karik Endine had concealed his recovery. The mechanics of actually doing a breakin did not seem daunting. Presumably the doors and windows on the ground floor would be locked. She remembered seeing a tree whose limbs overhung the house on the north. It should be possible to climb the tree and drop down onto the roof. Once that far, she could get in through the courtyard or from one of the balconies. She’d almost brought the subject up with Raney on the ride home, to give him the opportunity to volunteer. But she knew he would not. He would instead try to dissuade her, and would eventually become annoyed if she persisted, and condescending if she didn’t.

Flojian was away. There was only Toko, who would certainly be asleep in the servant’s quarters.

Not really intending to do it, she went over the details in her mind, where she would leave Piper, how to approach the property, what might go wrong, how she would gain entrance, whether there were any dogs about. (She couldn’t remember any.) As she lay safe and warm in the big bed, she realized gradually there was no real obstacle. And she owed it to her brother to proceed.

She considered how easy it would be, and her heart began to beat faster.

When Silas had joked with Chaka about burglarizing Karik’s home, he was, of course, expressing the wish that it would happen but that he wouldn’t have to do it. This is not to imply that Silas was a coward. His shoulder still ached from a bullet taken during service with the militia. He had stayed behind during the six-month plague to help the priests with the victims. And on one particularly memorable occasion, he had used a stick to face down a cougar.

Nor was he above bending a law or two to get his way. As he often reminded his students, laws are not ethics. But the risk entailed in a breakin daunted him. How would it look if an ethics instructor were caught burglarizing the home of a friend?

He was still smiling at the thought when he assumed his place in front of an evening seminar in the Imperium.

The Imperium was not an academic institution in the traditional sense. Its students, privileged and generally talented, might more properly be thought of as participants in an ongoing effort to extend human knowledge. Or to recover it, for it was obvious that much had been lost.

The questions naturally arising from the single unrelenting fact of the ruins dominated Illyrian thought. Who were these people? What systems of law and government sustained them? What purposes had they set out for themselves? What was the extent of the ruins?

The young men came when their own schedules permitted, and they discussed philosophy or geometry with whichever masters happened to be available. They were driven by pride and curiosity, they were highly motivated, and they wanted to understand the Roadmakers. It was an important goal, because something more elemental than mere technology had been lost. The Plague had killed indiscriminately, had carried off whole populations, and with them had gone whatever driving force had produced the great roadways and the structures that touched the clouds. Beyond the walls of the Imperium, the Illyrians had built a society whose sole purpose was to maintain political stability and an economic status quo. There was little discernible drive for progress.

The operations of the Imperium were funded by the Illyrian treasury, and by donations from wealthy parents and, increasingly, from those who had attended in their youth, and who came by periodically to join discussions which ranged from the mechanics of astronomy to the reality of the gods to the unwieldy relationship between diameter and circumference. (A school of skeptics were then using the latter fact to argue that the universe was ill conceived and irrational.)

The nine masters had been selected as much for their ability to inspire as for their knowledge. They were entertainers as well as teachers, and they were the finest entertainers that Illyria could produce. Silas was proud of his work and considered himself, not entirely without justification, one of the city’s foremost citizens.

He was conscious that there were in fact two Silas Glotes: one who was shy and uncertain of himself, who disliked attending social gatherings where he was expected to mix with strangers; and another who could dazzle people he had never seen before with wit and insight. In fact, all of the masters seemed to display, to a degree, this tendency toward a dual personality. Bent Capa, for example, mumbled at dinner but rose to eloquence in the courtyards.

In the seminars, subjects were designated, but once started, a discussion might lead anywhere. There was no formal curriculum, and the philosophy of the institution saw more benefit in exposure to a wise master than to a formal body of instruction. Given the level of interest among those in attendance, the system could hardly fail to work.

The death of Karik Endine had ignited discussions in many of the seminars, particularly with regard to Haven and the Abraham Polk legend. Librarians reported that both copies of The Travels were in constant use. Polk became the issue of the hour: Was he historical? Or mythical? If he was historical, had he indeed devoted himself to rescuing the knowledge of the Roadmakers?

Silas was of several minds on the matter. He wanted to believe in the tale of the adventurer who lived on the edge of a dying world, who with a small band of devoted companions carried on a desperate campaign to save the memory of that world against the day when civilization would come again. It was a magnificent story.