Jack McDevitt - Eternity Road

“Glote wasn’t impressed?”

“You could say that.”

He looked at her. “I’m sorry.”

She shrugged. “Not your fault.” A cold wind was blowing in across the river.

They walked Piper toward the barn.

“What did he say?”

She told him. Raney nodded in the right places, and pulled the saddle off the roan. “To be honest,” he said, “I thought it was a little thin, too.”

It was hard to see his face in the dark. The air smelled of horses and barley and old wood.

“Of course it’s a little thin,” she snapped. “Don’t you think I know that? It’s a thread. But that’s probably all we’ll ever have. And maybe it’s all we’ll need.”

Raney put some water out for Piper. “Let’s go inside,” he said.

They strolled across the hard ground, not saying anything. It was as if a wall had gone up between them. Raney wasn’t wearing a jacket, so he should have been cold. But he took his time anyhow, walking with his hands pushed into his back pockets. When they got to the house, he filled the teapot with water, hung it on the bar, and swung the bar over the fire. Then he tossed on another log.

“Dolian is still trying to get his nephew appointed as an auditor,” he said, trying to steer them to a new subject. He talked for a while, and Chaka half listened. The water boiled and he prepared the tea and served it in two large steaming vessels. “Imported from Argon,” he said. He sat down beside her. “I’m glad you came.”

Chaka decided to let hers cool. “I think Shannon might change his mind,” she said.

Raney frowned. “Change his mind? About what?”

“When we’re ready to go, I believe he’ll come with us.”

She listened to him breathe. “Chaka, if Silas doesn’t think it’s worthwhile, it’s not worthwhile.” He looked casually at her, as if his point were too obvious to dispute.

“I don’t care what Silas thinks,” she said harshly. “I want to know what happened to my brother.”

She listened to him sigh. He tasted the tea, and commented that it was pretty good.

“Raney,” she said, “I’m going to do this.”

“I wish you wouldn’t.” He spoke softly, in the tone he used when he was trying to be authoritative. His eyes were round and tentative and worried.

“You haven’t changed your mind about going, have you?”

“Chaka, I never agreed to go. I said I’d go if it seemed reasonable.”

She could feel the heat rising into her cheeks. “That’s not what I remember.”

“Look,” he said, “we can’t just go running into the wilderness. We might not come back.” He shook his head slowly and put one hand on her shoulder. It felt stiff and cold. A stranger’s hand. “We’ve got a good life here.” His voice softened. “Chaka, I’d like you to marry me—” His breathing had become irregular. “We have everything that we need to make us happy.”

Maddeningly, tears rushed into her eyes. She knew how good life with him would be, building a family, whiling away the years and never again being alone.

His lips brushed hers and they clung to each other for a long moment. His heart beat against her and his hand caressed her cheek. She responded with a long wet kiss and then abruptly pushed away from him. “You’ll never lose me, Raney, unless you want to. But I am going to do this.”

He was getting that hurt puppy look. “Chaka, there’s no way I can just pick up and leave for six months.”

“You didn’t mention that before.”

“I didn’t think it would come to this. If I leave the shop, they’ll replace me in a minute. I’ve got a good career here. We’ll need it to support us, and if I go on this thing I’d just be throwing everything away. It’s different for you. You can come back and pick up where you left off.”

She stared at him. “I suppose so,” she said. She got up and pulled on her jacket.

“Where are you going?”

“Home. I need to think things out.”

“Chaka, I don’t want you to be angry about this. But I need you to be reasonable.”

“I know,” she said. “Tonight, everyone wants me to be reasonable.”

She was on her feet and out onto the porch, not hearing what else he was saying. She got to Piper, threw the saddle on as Raney came through the barn door, drew the straps tight, pushed him away, and mounted.

“Chaka—”

“Later, Raney,” she said. “We can talk about it later.”

She rode past him, out into the night. The wind pulled at the trees, and there was a hint of rain. If you must go, take no strangers. Take nobody you wouldn’t trust with your life.

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.”