Jack McDevitt - Eternity Road

The Travels maintained that, after the Plague subsided, the Quebec prowled the seas under Polk’s direction for seventy-seven years (surely a mystic number), gathering survivors and returning them to Haven, which was designed to survive the general collapse. He also collected as much as he could of the art, science, literature, and history of the dead civilization, storing it against the ages. The names of his comrades are almost as famous as his: Casey Winckelhaus, his female second-in-command; Harry Schroeder, a tough, iconoclastic shoemaker’s son who gave his life for his commander off Copenhagen; Jennifer Whitlaw, whose account of the voyages, ironically now lost, gave them the name by which they are best known: the October Patrol.

Polk himself vanished at sea, called home by the Goddess when his work was done. Haven then shut its doors against the general dissolution and embarked on an effort to preserve what it had saved. Generations of scholars devoted themselves to maintaining and, as the texts yellowed and began to crumble, copying the great works in their care. And they waited for a new civilization to rise. If the legend is correct, they are still waiting.

Chaka dug out every illustration she could find of the Quebec and of Haven. The ship was commonly depicted as a schooner without sails, but with its bridge and forecastle enclosed inside a metal shell.

Haven itself, seen from the outside, revealed an aspect that was not greatly unlike the cliff and sea in the thirteenth sketch. She found more illustrations of the mountain car, which was alleged to have traveled the cliffs between Haven and Folk’s supply base.

The Quebec operated out of a chamber that had direct access to the sea. It was said the vessel could pass from its nest into the ocean without ever being seen. It was all so imaginative that she could not look at the material without dismissing it out of hand.

Midway through the final week of preparations, Flojian showed up at the Imperium and took Silas aside. He looked haggard and red-eyed, as if he had not been sleeping well. “I want to go with you,” he said.

Flojian had never shown any interest in academic pursuits. Moreover, he seemed to be the sort of man whose idea of hardship was having to go outside for fresh water. “Why?” asked Silas. The consensus now was to keep the group small. Furthermore, the regents favored a strategy that would restrain expenses.

“The stories about my father.”

Silas squirmed. “Don’t pay any attention to them. People like to talk.” He shook his head.

Flojian tried to straighten his shoulders. “I have a right to be with you. I can pay my own way. Whether you want me to or not, I’m coming.”

Silas opposed the proposal. “Plans have already been made,” he explained. “Anyway, it’ll be a difficult trip. This won’t be any pot of tulips.” He winced after that phrase, but he was struggling. Flojian was after all a rather useless individual, whose life had always been circumscribed by money and comfort.

But he persisted. “You can’t keep me from coming if I want to,” he said. “Please, Silas. I know you don’t think much of me, but you owe it to my father.”

“I’ll put it to the others,” Silas promised, “and let you know.”

One of the meetings drew another visitor: Avila Kap, of the Order of Shanta the Healer. It was a clear, warm evening, but she nonetheless wore a nondescript flannel shirt and cotton slacks in place of her usual clerical robes. “I would like to go,” she said.

Silas could see that Chaka and Quait, as startled by her appearance as he, were now equally discomfited by the proposal. Avila was, after all, bound by the rules of her calling, and could not simply wander off on her own into the wilderness. “Mentor,” he said, “we have filled our roster.”

She was a tall woman, almost six feet, and she moved with grace. Her dark eyes caught the light, and there was a glint of desperation in them. “Nevertheless,” she said, “I will go, if you will permit it.” She looked at each of them in turn. “We are required to spend several weeks each year in the wilderness, to maintain communication with the Goddess. I’m adept at survival skills, and I can assure you I will not be a burden.”

“I’m sure you would not.” Silas thought about Flojian, and for that matter about himself. If there was going to be a burden on this trip, he knew it would not be this very competent-looking woman. “Have you permission to travel with us?”

“Surely that is my concern.”

An uncomfortable silence followed. “May I ask why you wish to come?”

She took a long, deep breath. “Because,” she said, “I would like my life to count for something.”

Silas was feted by the Imperium, given a scroll attesting to his efforts to expand the boundaries of human knowledge, and sent off with a blast of horns.

Flojian turned his business over to his executive assistant, who promptly unnerved him by promising to explore new avenues for profit. “Don’t change anything,” said Flojian. “Or I’ll have your elbows removed when I get back.”

On February 16, the twentieth day after they had made their decision, and the eighty-third after Karik’s death, Silas, Chaka, Quait, and Avila rode at sunup to Flojian’s villa, where a dozen packhorses and a barnload of supplies had been gathered. Silas had said good-bye to his friends and relatives, who had, in the tradition of the time, wished him that the wind should block his way, and the rivers afford no crossings. (It was thought this would allay the jealousy of the gods.) He had updated his will, and turned his small house over to a trusted student until his return. “Or until news comes, and my testament takes effect.”

Avila arrived in forest green shirt and leggings, having discarded both her sacred raiment and her sacred orders. Her superiors were somewhat stirred up at the Temple, even though her action could not have come entirely as a surprise. Nevertheless, they were unhappy with her, and her life in Illyria would henceforth be that of an outcast.

Flojian hid an ample supply of gold coins in his saddlebags. He didn’t like the idea of traveling with a lot of money, but he knew that gold opens all kinds of doors, and he suspected they would have use for it before they were done.

Chaka half expected that Raney would come at the last minute. While her companions carried out the final details of

getting organized, loading the packhorses, running down checklists, ensuring they had the means of reshodding the animals, she kept looking around, hoping to see him ride in on his big chestnut stallion.

Several dozen well-wishers arrived and shook their hands. The company mounted their horses, waved, and, in brilliant sunlight, moved out of the villa grounds. They climbed to River Road and turned north. It would have been an exaggeration to say that crowds lined the route. However, there were individuals and small groups gathered along the way, watching, waving as they went by.

But there was no chestnut stallion.

River Road ran along the Mississippi to Argon, the northernmost outpost of the League, about ten days’ travel upriver. The road was all-weather construction: In most areas it had a pebble bed and good drainage. It plunged through thick forests of silver maple, bitternut hickory, pecan, and cypress. It passed farms and ranches, navigated among heaps of broken cement and patches of grassland. Concrete causeways carried it through swamps, and wooden bridges across streams and gullies. It hesitated before sites of historical interest: Pandar’s Glade, where the Illyrian hero had turned the tide of war against the Argonites; a restored Baranji fort from the days when the Mississippi marked the western frontier of empire; a statue of a Roadmaker military figure, right arm broken off, with the inscription: HE STOOD LIKE A STONE WALL.