Jack McDevitt - Eternity Road

They arrived on the north end of the island, where Roadmaker dwellings were numerous, as were ruins from a less remote period. Quait thought they were Baranji, the barbarian empire whose western expansion had reached the Mississippi four centuries earlier. Flojian was doubtful. Baranji architecture tended to be blockish, heavy, utilitarian. Designed for the ages, as if the imperials had been impressed by the permanence of Roadmaker building and had striven to go them one better. These structures were not quite so solid as one would expect from the Baranji, but if the density was missing, the gloom and lack of imagination were there. Quait wondered whether this had not been an imperial outpost either at the beginning or at the end of their great days.

Shortly after their arrival, they encountered a mystery that turned their thoughts from Baranji architecture. A Roadmaker bridge crossed from the eastern shore of the Nyagra. It was down, and its span lay in the water, half submerged. But this piece of wreckage was different from most of what they’d seen.

The rubble was charred, and large holes had been blown in the concrete. “This was deliberate,” said Quait, examining a melted piece of metal. “Somebody blew it up.”

“Why would anyone do that?” asked Chaka.

They were standing on the beach, close to the ancient highway that had once crossed the Nyagra and which now simply gaped into a void. “Possibly to prepare for a replacement bridge,” said Flojian, “that they never got around to making.”

“I don’t think so,” said Quait. “I don’t see any sign of construction. Would you take down the old bridge before you built the new one?” He squinted into the sun. “I wonder whether it wasn’t a military operation? To stop an attacking force.”

Chaka looked out across the river. The current was fast here, and the wreckage created a series of wakes. “The Baranji?” she asked.

“Maybe. The Roadmakers don’t seem to have had any enemies. I mean, there’s never any evidence of deliberate destruction. Right? At least, not on a large scale.”

“What about Memphis?” asked Flojian. “And the city in the swamp? Some of their places burned.”

“Fires can happen in other ways,” said Chaka. “And in any case were probably set to burn out the plague. But you never see a Roadmaker city that looks as if explosives were used on it. They seem to have had a peaceful society. I think Quait’s right: Whoever did this was at war. And it was probably the Baranji on one side or the other. If anybody cares.”

The road crossed the island to the southeast, where it had once leaped back across the river. But here again the bridge had been destroyed. The highway simply came to an end, having not quite cleared the shoreline.

“Maybe,” said Flojian softly, “they were trying to keep the Plague off the island.”

There was another plank bridge upstream. They followed it across the eastern channel, took the horses down onto a boulder-strewn beach, and spotted a path that led into the forest. The beach was narrow and ran up against heavy rock in both

directions, so that the path was the only way forward. They were headed toward it when they saw guns.

A tall, thin man leveled a rifle in their direction and came out of the bushes. “Just stop right there,” he said. He was bearded, elderly, with gray scraggly hair, greasy clothes, and an enormous pair of suspenders.

They stopped.

Two more showed themselves. One was a woman. “Hands up, folks,” she said.

The wedge felt very far away. Chaka raised her hands. “We’re just passing through,” she said. “Don’t mean any harm.”

“Good,” said the second man. He was younger than the first, but gray, with a torn flannel shirt and a red neckerchief. There was a strong family resemblance.

“Don’t mean to be unfriendly,” said the man with the suspenders, “but you just can’t be too careful these days.”

“That’s right,” said Quait behind her. “And I’d like to wish you folks a good day.”

“Who are you people?” asked Flojian.

The man with the suspenders advanced a few paces. “I’m the toll collector,” he said. “My name’s Jeryk.”

“I’m Chaka Milana. These are Quait and Flojian.”

The wind blew the old man’s hair in his eyes. “Where you folks bound?”

“We’re traders,” she said. “Looking for markets.”

“Don’t look like traders.” He squinted at Flojian, “Well, maybe that one does.”

“What’s the toll?” asked Quait.

The younger man grinned. “What have you got?”

Chaka looked at Jeryk. “Can we put our hands down?”

They ended by trading a generous supply of food and trinkets for two filled wineskins.

It never became clear how Jeryk happened to come by his trade, or how long he had been at the bridge. He explained that he and his family were bridge tenders, and that they kept both island bridges in repair. It was a claim that seemed imaginative. Quait responded by suggesting that the western bridge needed some new piles.

“We know about that,” Jeryk said. “We’re going to take care of it this summer.”

“How many people come through here?” asked Flojian.

“Oh, we don’t see many travelers nowadays,” he said. “In my father’s time, this was a busy place. But the traffic’s fallen off.”

“What changed?”

“More robbers on the roads now.” Jeryk frowned with indignation. “People aren’t safe anymore. So they travel in large groups.”

Chaka didn’t miss the obvious: A large group would pass without seeing the toll collector.

They received an invitation to stay to dinner. “Always like to have company,” the woman said. But it seemed safer to move on, and so Chaka explained they were on a tight schedule. Flojian almost fell off his horse trying not to laugh.

As they rode away, Jeryk warned them once more to be on the lookout for brigands. “Can’t be too careful these days,” he said.

The countryside broke up into granite ridges. They passed a pair of structures, hundreds of feet high, that resembled tapered urns, narrow in the center and wide at top and bottom. There were no windows and no indication what their function had been. Quait commented that the Roadmakers had left behind a lot of geometry and a lot of stone, but very little else. “It’d be a pity,” he said, “if whoever comes after us doesn’t know anything about us except the shape of our buildings. And that we made roads. Even good, all-weather ones.”

Their spirits flagged as they continued east on a trail that seemed endless. Another canal appeared, on their north, running parallel. This one was of much more modest dimensions than the great ditch, but it contained water. It went on, day after day, while Flojian visualized legions of men wielding spades. “Our assumption has always been that they had a representative government of some sort. But I can’t see how these engineering feats could have been accomplished without slaves.”

“You really think that’s true?” asked Quait. The Baranjis had owned slaves, but the little that survived of Roadmaker literature suggested a race of free people.

“How else could they have done these things? It’s not so obvious on the highways, where you just think of a lot of people pouring concrete. But this canal, and the other one—?”

They were riding now, moving at a steady pace. They passed a downed bridge that blocked the canal. The day was bright and sunny, flowers were blooming, and the air was clean and ceol. Chaka glanced at a turtle sunning itself on the wreckage.

At the end of their fourth day on the canal, it intersected with a wide, quiet river. There was a blackened city on the north. They forded the river and camped.