Jack McDevitt - Eternity Road

“I know.”

“What do you think they are?”

She would have shrugged except that they were out in the open again and she didn’t want to perform any unnecessary movements. “Don’t know.” She edged forward, eager to keep moving.

“I wonder if it’s strictly artistic. Or if there is some other kind of significance?”

“I don’t know, Silas.”

“Hey!” called Flojian. “What’s the hold-up?”

“Hold your horses,” shouted Silas. He turned and grinned at Chaka, then opened his journal. The wind riffled the pages. “I’m going to make a sketch,” he told her. And, to Flojian, “It’ll only take a minute.” He was trying to hold the book open and find a pencil when the pieblad yanked him off his feet. He bounced off a strip of mesh, which was all that kept him from going over the side.

“Damn,” squealed Chaka. “Look out.”

He hung on to the journal, which threatened to blow off the walkway, tightened his grip on the horses, and got back up. He looked embarrassed rather than frightened.

“You okay?” asked Chaka.

“I’m fine.” He shook his head at the piebald. “Tonight, I think we should have this one for dinner.” But his attention went right back to the disk. “When we get down there,” he added, “we ought to make a detour and take a closer look at that thing.”

And there it was. Let’s go see the dragon. Maybe if we’re lucky it’ll come back.

“Meantime,” she urged, “let’s keep moving.”

She passed the last of the protective mesh as she approached the south tower. It was polished and gray and soared hundreds of feet over her head. A massive fracture divided it from top to bottom. Directly ahead, Avila moved cautiously along the open walkway. She wore her hood up against the wind. Once, she turned and waved.

Get across this last long stretch, get to the north tower, and the rest looked easy.

Chaka glanced at her horses. They seemed okay. Nervous, but okay.

The wind lifted the walkway.

Now Silas was in the open.

Behind him, Flojian and Shannon prudently waited, deciding that six people and seventeen horses might be too much for this part of the walkway.

Silas drifted back now and then to deal with his animals. One, a chestnut gray, seemed particularly tense. It was second in line behind the piebald. “No problem,” he called forward to Chaka when the commotion caused her to turn and watch. After he got the creature moving again, he spared her an encouraging smile. As if she were one of the horses.

Now, Chaka was experiencing some resistance on the part of one of her own animals. Reluctantly, she went back, squeezing past Piper, to talk to it. If one of them starts any funny business, she warned herself, let it go. Don’t get involved in a pushing match up here.

She spared a word for Piper too, and they were moving again. But almost immediately she heard a shout behind her. She turned in time to see Silas staggering toward the outside edge, his journal clutched in one hand, while the piebald backed and reared off the walkway.

It bellowed and scrambled for purchase. But it was too late, and Silas reflexively made the mistake of trying to hold the reins, so he was dragged off his feet and over the side as she watched in horror. He would have been gone had not the other two animals dug in their heels. The piebald’s reins were ripped out of his hands and the horse began the long fall to the river.

Chaka scrambled back past her horses. Silas was dangling from the walkway, the reins twisted around his wrist. She threw herself face down on the concrete. He looked up at her, his face a while mask. She seized his jacket with both hands. “Hang on.” she cried.

Bul he was too heavy; she could find no purchase, no way to hold him. There were cries and footsteps behind her, but it was all happening too fast. She screamed for help and he was slipping away and she was sliding forward, looking down at Silas and the river.

“The disk!” he cried.

“I’ve got you!” But she didn’t: She was being dragged over the edge and he was sliding out of her grasp. Where were they?

His eyes were very blue and very frightened. He looked at her in those last seconds, as someone finally grabbed her ankle and told her to hang on.

“Damn!” said Silas. And then he was gone.

She screamed. He seemed only to float away from her, and then strong hands pulled her back from the brink. Afterward, she cried for a long time.

“It was something about the disk,” Flojian said. “He got excited about it for some reason and he startled the animals.” But they saw nothing unusual, even when Chaka observed that Silas’s last act had been to call her attention to the structure.

His journal had fallen onto the walkway, and in the end it was all they could find of him. The scope of a determined search for his body would have been so vast, and their resources were so limited, that they saw little chance of success. And so they restricted themselves to a nominal hunt along the northern shoreline.

Avila spoke for everyone when she pointed out that Silas would have wanted them to move on, to establish his memorial at the end of the trek. So they said farewell to his spirit in a late-afternoon ceremony, engraved the Tasselay on his marker, broke out one of the wineskins, and drank to him.

To Silas Glote, last of the Roadmakers.

They climbed a hill to get a better view of the disk to which Silas had drawn their attention. But it was hard to see why he’d got excited. The object seemed quite unremarkable. After a while they gave it up, and turned again to the north, somber, dispirited, and anxious to be away before dark.

“But I don’t think we’re going to get very far,” said Shannon, pointing to a set of cuttings on twin cottonwoods. They designated a left turn along the riverbank. Toward the esplanade. And the disk.

Reluctantly, they moved out across the ridge, through the dwindling green light. Squirrels gamboled through the leafy overhang, and birds sang. Ancient walls rose around them, brick and stone houses lost among the trees, a post light

crowded out by an elm tree and leaning at a forty-five degree angle, a hall-buried hojjy with a gray tassel hanging from a rusted mirror.

The day was unseasonably warm. Some flowering plants had already bloomed. These were unlike anything Chaka had seen before, with big, yellow, bowl-shaped flowers. “They’re fireglobes,” said Avila. “We had some at the sanctuary.”

The disk was mounted on the roof of a three-story brick building overlooking the esplanade. The front door was missing. Interior walls had crumbled. A mummified desk lay on their left, submerged in clay. “Careful,” said Shannon, as Chaka tested the floor.

“Feels okay,” she said.

She crunched through to the back of the building, with Shannon in tow, and found a stairway. Shannon put his weight on it, climbed one floor, and pronounced it safe. Moments later they stepped out onto the roof.

The disk was bowl-shaped, and looked as if it weighed six hundred pounds. It was mounted on a circular platform and held in place by a thick, U-shaped brace. The interior of the bowl was ribbed, and a series of handholds were bolted to the brace. The open portion of the bowl was raised toward the sky, pointing almost directly up.

“Holy One,” breathed Chaka.

Shannon looked at her, startled. “What?”

“I see what Silas meant. It’s moved.”

Shannon rolled his eyes and measured the bowl with a glance. “I don’t think so,” he said. He put his shoulder against the lower rim, and pushed. Nothing happened. “Nobody’s going to move that.”

But the bowl was no longer aimed in the general direction of the bridge.