She looked out at the blue horizon.”Goodbye, Mike,” she said. “Ekra convey you in peace to your eternal home.”
18
The loss of Jon Shannon hit Chaka even harder than Silas’s death had. She had known him when she was a child, and she’d been responsible for bringing him into the effort, but those weren’t the reasons. Rather, there’d been a sense of indestructibility about the man, as if he could not be brought down, as if any enterprise on which he was embarked could not come to a bad end. Now he was gone and his companions were shaken.
Once again, they began to talk about giving it up. But now there were two dead. How did you go back with two dead and explain that you had accomplished nothing?
“That’s true enough,” said Quait. “But we have two women along, and I think our first obligation is to protect them. I vote we turnaround.”
“Forget it,” Chaka said. “If you want to take care of your own hide, say so. But don’t make decisions on my account.”
“Nor mine,” said Avila. She growled her response because she’d been offended, although she too believed that the cost of the mission had now gone too high.
Quait went into a sulk, as if his manhood had been questioned. “Okay,” he said finally. “If you’re willing to go on, then let’s do it. I was only trying to do the right thing.”
And Flojian, who believed he was already fighting a reputation for faintheartedness, took the moral high ground, and insisted that they really had no choice but to go on.
So the decision was made to continue, despite the fact that any one of them, left alone to choose, would have opted to turnback.
By the end of the third day, the towers of the city by the sea were just visible in the light of the setting sun. The companions were moving along the south shore, past heavy dunes. It was country they recognized, country they’d seen from the maglev. Inland, the forest still battled extensive ruins, many of which were charred. Like Memphis. And the city in the swamp. During the final days of the Roadmakers, Alvila suspected, fire had been the last resort against the plague.
Wild dogs began to follow them. When they attacked the horses one evening just after sunset, Avila took advantage of the situation to test one of the wedges.
She’d had to act quickly because Quait and Chaka had shot three of the marauding animals within the first seconds of the attack. This had been enough to send the rest of the pack fleeing, but Avila had aimed a wedge in their general direction and squeezed it. A green lamp had come on and a half-dozen of the creatures had simply collapsed. Afterward, they lay for almost two hours before recovering, one by one, and staggering off into the forest.
“I don’t care,” said Quait. “It’s a pussyfoot weapon. Give me a rifle anytime.”
From that hour forward, Avila was careful to keep one in her pocket at all times.
Flojian was fascinated by the effect, and also curious about the green and red lamps that blinked on during operation. She showed him and Chaka how to use it. “Point this end, and squeeze the shell,” she said.
Chaka tried it that night on a wild turkey. The turkey managed a couple of gobbles before falling over. It was asleep before it hit the ground. They had a good dinner, and the weapon seemed quite effective. But would it work on a man?
Flojian was puzzled, not only by the effect, but by the construction. There didn’t seem to be any way to take the unit apart. “I wonder,” he said, “if we could learn to copy them.”
Flojian had discovered to his pleasure that Avila was a willing listener, and able to talk about more than simply religion. They discussed the weapons at length, and speculated on what sort of force they projected. She listened politely while he outlined various schemes for applying the lessons they were learning. And if she could not entirely conceal her occasional impatience with his pragmatism, she made her arguments seriously and without rancor.
She was a beautiful woman. It was easy to forget that in the dust and grime and forced intimacy of daily travel. Flojian wondered why anyone so lovely would have signed on for the celibate priesthood. The thought made him uncomfortable and he pushed it away.
There had never been a serious passion in Flojian’s life. At least, not for a woman. He’d been married once, but the marriage had been cool and businesslike, a wedding of like-minded individuals. Perhaps she had been too much like Flojian. They’d drifted apart without hard feelings on either side. A civilized marriage and a civilized divorce.
Women were inevitably wanting in one way or another. They had annoying habits, or did not operate on his mental level, or were lacking in social capabilities. He’d long ago recognized that he would not share his life with anyone. His code was very simple: Take care of business, make money, take \our pleasure with those who permit it. And keep a safe distance.
But he could no longer deny that Avila Kap stirred feelings •.hat had lain dormant a long time. Her laughter, her smile, her eyes … It might have been that the two deaths had left him vulnerable to female charms. Or it might have been that it would not have mattered. But he sat deep into the night with her, watching the stars move.
He looked for a sign that she reciprocated his feelings. He suspected that, in her eyes, he was too commercial, too practical, a man with both feet solidly planted. And to make matters literally impossible, she was a half-foot taller than he was. But she was taking him seriously. With this crowd, it was as much as he could reasonably ask.
They were still moving east along the shore when Chaka stopped and pointed out to sea. It was early and the sun had not yet burned off the fog. But they saw something moving through the mist.
Gradually, masts and sails took shape. A schooner, with lanterns strung fore and aft, running parallel to the coast. “And guns,” said Quait. “It’s got guns.”
Voices drifted across the water. And laughter. Then, like a ghost, the vessel slipped away. When the fog lifted, not long after, the horizon was clear.
Shortly before noon they approached a new kind of structure standing alone on an offshore rock. It was unlike anything they’d seen before: a six-sided concrete cylinder several stories high, rising out of the roof of a low building. A few windows looked out of the cylinder. The top was no more than an open frame beneath a metal dome. A deck circled the frame. “I think there must have been glass up there at one time,” said Chaka.
An elevated walkway had once connected it with the shore, but most of the walkway was missing. What remained was a low stone wall, a few broken piles jutting out of rock and sand, and some shorn-off metal. “It looks like something they might have used to signal ships,” said Flojian. “It’s not a bad idea.” Along the Mississippi, they raised and lowered lanterns. He was sufficiently interested that they agreed to climb out across the rocks to inspect the structure.
They got wet but made it safely to the front door. Inside, the floor sagged and the rooms were bare. The moldering furnishings that one usually found in Roadmaker houses were missing. A ladder and a circular stairway rose into the cylinder. The rungs were gone from the ladder, and the stairway was ready to come down. It didn’t matter: There was no pressing reason to go to the top.
They stood for a time on the beach while Chaka sketched the structure into Silas’s journal. There was something peculiarly forlorn about it, cut off and alone, and she tried to capture the effect; but she was not satisfied with the result although everyone else pretended to admire the effort.
The shoreline curved north. A few miles beyond the signal tower, the familiar horizontal stripes began to reappear on trees, directing them up an embankment and onto a road. The road was narrow and overgrown, and almost invisible. Toward the end of the afternoon, it passed over another of the giant highways. Shay’s marks led them down an embankment onto the highway, where they turned northeast.