Coyote Rising (23 page)

In the meantime, mill workers at Forest Camp were busy stockpiling wooden beams for the trusses. Care was taken to keep the beams individually cut to precise specifications; once finished, they were covered with canvas tarps to prevent sun and rain from warping them. While that was going on, a demolition crew was using plastic explosives to blast road cuts through the Eastern Divide and the Midland Rise, providing easy access to the Narrows from either side of the channel.

By then, it had become impractical for James Garcia to remain in Liberty. Although he’d found a reliable chief foreman—Klon Newall, a civil engineer who, by coincidence, had overseen construction of the Stanley Bridge before deciding to immigrate to Coyote—there were too many details that he had to look after himself. So once a one-room cabin was built for him in Bridgeton, he packed up his belongings and moved there.

Garcia soon discovered that he no longer had the same degree of solitude he’d enjoyed in Liberty. Since there was no one to bring his meals to him, he had to eat in the mess hall, sitting alongside sweaty, dirt-caked workmen. The air was thick was limestone dust from the quarries, forcing him to put a wet handkerchief against his face whenever he went outside; at night, as he hunched over his drafting board, his thoughts were frequently interrupted by the sounds of men and women carousing in the nearby dormitories. With the exception of Klon, there was no one in Bridgeton with whom he felt comfortable. The workers remained unfriendly toward him, treating him with resentment as if he was the source of their hardships.

And hardships there were aplenty. Because the Matriarch trusted no one working, she posted Union Guard soldiers in Bridgeton and Forest Camp, to prevent anyone from taking off into the wilderness. Naturally
it wasn’t long before some of those soldiers began to assume roles as straw bosses. Workers caught resting at any time other than designated breaks were subject to spending the night in the stockade, deprived of food and water. One evening, in the privacy of Garcia’s cabin, Klon told him that earlier that day he’d found three Guardsmen surrounding a young woman in the mess hall kitchen; only his timely arrival prevented her from being gang-raped. A few days later, a workman on Tower Two fell from the top of the temporary caisson; if someone had dived into the water after him, his life might have been saved, but the Guardsman standing watch on the nearby barge thought that he should swim back by himself and demanded that everyone stay on the job. The current was too swift, and the workman was pulled under; he drowned in the channel. Later, his body washed up several miles downstream.

These incidents, and others like them, began to open Garcia’s eyes. In the past, he’d always been able to maintain a certain distance from his work, his hands remaining clean, his mind focused entirely upon the discrete poetry of physics, the hidden music of mathematics. Yet on Coyote, there was no room for such luxuries; there was only one brutal day after another, of watching men and women being slowly ground down beneath the burden of his dreams. There was beauty in what they were building, yes, but it was tainted with their suffering . . . and with each passing day, James Garcia perceived the monstrosity that his masterpiece was gradually becoming.

Although he protested to Luisa Hernandez that his people were being mistreated, she turned a deaf ear, saying that discipline needed to be maintained if the bridge was to be finished before the winter. He tried to talk to Manuel Castro, but the Savant was detached from all human feeling, and in his glass eyes Garcia saw only a disturbing reflection of himself. Chris Levin was a little more understanding, yet he insisted that there was little he could do; his job was making sure that the barges he built didn’t sink. What it all came down to was the fact that Garcia himself was in charge . . . even though, beyond a certain point, his authority was nonexistent. The Matriarch wanted nothing more from him than what he’d always done before, and yet he’d found that he was no longer able to do even that.

In desperation, Garcia decided to relocate to the other side of the channel. There was no private cabin for him in Forest Camp, but that didn’t matter; he requisitioned a tent and had it erected as far from the mill and the barracks as possible. And so, on Ambriel 91, the last day of the second month of spring, a keelboat transported his drafting board, comp, and books across the East Channel.

Forest Camp offered a little more solitude than Bridgeton. There weren’t as many people over there, consequently there were fewer soldiers, most of whom tended to be less overbearing. With the absence of quarries, the air was cleaner; demolition work on the Rise had already been completed, so there were no more sudden explosions. Garcia came to know a few of the lumberjacks and mill workers, but otherwise he kept to himself. He spent his days making sure that the truss beams had the proper dimensions, and received regular reports from Klon via his comp. When he grew tired of watching tower construction from the Rise, he went off by himself to meditate, taking short hikes along the timber paths that meandered through the nearby rain forest, quickly being reduced to vast acres of stumps.

And then, on the afternoon of Muriel 15, he went for a walk and didn’t return.

When Garcia failed to show up for dinner, several men took
lanterns and went off to look for him. Failing to find him, they alerted Bridgeton; within the hour, gyros were making low-level passes above Midland, their searchlights lancing down into the forest, and by daybreak a squad of soldiers had been ferried across the channel to continue the manhunt. Yet no trace of him was found, nor was there any indication that he’d been attacked by a predator. He had simply vanished.

The search went on for two days, during which soldiers fanned out across a semicircle with a twenty-mile radius inland and to either side of Forest Camp. They even paddled kayaks down the channel, checking the riverbanks just in case he’d fallen off the Midland Rise and drowned. Nothing, not so much as a shred of clothing or a footprint.

By nightfall of the second day, the search parties had returned to
Forest Camp. Proctors were once again questioning those few who had last seen him when someone happened to walk past Garcia’s tent and noticed that the light was on. Looking inside, he was startled to find the architect sitting at his comp, calmly sorting through the reports that had piled up in his absence, as if nothing had happened.

When Luisa Hernandez received word that Garcia had reappeared, she insisted that he be brought to her at once. Garcia had barely finished a late dinner when he was bustled aboard a gyro and flown to Liberty, where Hernandez, Manny Castro, and Chris Levin were waiting for him. With two Guardsmen posted outside her cabin, the Matriarch, the Savant, and the Chief Proctor began interrogating the architect as to where he’d been for the last sixty-two hours.

They were surprised when he informed them that he’d been kidnapped.

He’d been wandering along a timber trail, he said, when three men he’d never seen before emerged from the undergrowth. Before he could resist, they’d pulled his arms behind his back, yanked a bag over his head, and injected him with something that knocked him out. To prove his story, Garcia loosened his shirt collar and showed them a bruise on the right side of his neck where the needle had gone in.

When he woke up many hours later, he found that he was in a deep cave, apparently somewhere in the hills some distance from the East Channel. The cave entrance was covered with a thick blanket, so he had no idea whether it was day or night. There was a fire, with the smoke rising through a chimney vent high above. And he wasn’t alone; the three men who had taken him were there, along with a fourth, a young man who identified himself as Rigil Kent.

Levin wanted to learn more about Rigil Kent, but there was little that Garcia could tell him; all four wore bandannas across the lower parts of their faces and never took off their wide-brimmed hats (although Garcia mentioned that Kent wore an old-style ball cap embroidered with the words
URSS
ALABAMA
). They carried rifles, and it was made clear to him that he wouldn’t leave until they were ready for him to go. Nonetheless he was treated well; he was never roughed up or beaten, and he was given food and water. When he needed to relieve himself, he was led to
the back of the cave, where a chamber pot had been placed. When he got tired they gave him a bedroll and let him stretch out next to the fire. But he was never left unguarded; nor did he ever get a good look at his captors’ faces.

“So why were you there?”
Castro asked, and Garcia shrugged. They only wanted to know the details of the bridge project: how it was going to be built, what form it would take, when he anticipated that it would be finished.
“You didn’t tell them, did you?”
Of course he did . . . why not? It wasn’t as if it was classified information; even the lowliest quarryman knew how the bridge was going to be built. In fact, he was under the impression that they’d been quietly observing the construction effort for quite some time; they’d addressed him by name, and knew that he was the architect and chief engineer. Since there was no point in being stubborn, he told them everything they wished to learn, even tracing sketches in the dirt on the cave floor.
“And what happened then?”
They knocked him out again. When he came to, he found himself back in the same place where he’d been taken. Indeed, the worst part of his ordeal was retracing his steps in the dark; he had gotten lost a couple of times before he managed to find his tent.

Hernandez, Castro, and Levin made him repeat his story again, with Castro asking him to reiterate various parts of it. They were suspicious, of course—how could Garcia have been taken so far, then back again, while search parties were looking for him?

Despite their doubts, there was nothing to disprove his story, and enough physical evidence to support it: his clothes were dirty and rumpled, as if he’d slept in them for a couple of days, and he was obviously exhausted. So they told him that they were glad to have him back, then had a soldier walk him to his cabin.

After that Garcia wasn’t allowed to return to Forest Camp. Luisa Hernandez decided that he needed to be kept on a leash, so he continued to work out of his cabin in Bridgeton. The few times he crossed the channel to Midland, it was with a Proctor constantly at his side.

By then, though, it didn’t matter. A plan had been set in motion.

As spring became summer, the bridge grew a little more with
each passing day. The piers for the eight support towers were completed in the first month of Verchiel, when the last layers of concrete were poured into the caissons, and attention shifted to building the towers themselves. By then, there were almost as many men working on the river at any given time as there were on the shore, with boats moving back and forth across the Narrows, hauling construction material out to the barges anchored next to the piers. It was hard, backbreaking labor for the carpenters on the towers; exhaustion took its toll as accidents began to occur more frequently, causing men to be rushed to the first-aid tent set up on the Midland side.

Every day, James Garcia stood on the Eastern Divide, watching the activity through binoculars as he listened to radio reports from Klon and the other foremen. As the accident rate began to rise, he voiced his concerns to Luisa Hernandez, yet she remained adamant in her refusal to let work stop for even a single hour. The Matriarch was determined to see the bridge finished by autumn and would allow nothing to stand in her way. So Garcia quietly decided to take the matter into his own hands.

He began by instituting a regular schedule of job rotation, reassigning men who’d been on the towers to Bridgeton and Forest Camp, and bringing those who’d been onshore to the river. The changes slowed things a bit, at least at first, while foremen retrained people to handle different jobs; but it also meant that the workmen were given breaks from the repetitive tasks that caused them to become sloppy and careless.

Garcia also had the soldiers removed from the construction site. That took a little more doing, since the Matriarch continued to believe that anyone working on the bridge would try to escape if not watched every moment. The architect persisted, pointing out that it was better for morale if the men were able to work without having guns pointed at their backs. Besides, boids had recently been sighted lurking near Bridgeton and Forest Camp; now that it was the warm season again, the carnivorous avians had returned from the southern regions where they migrated for the winter, so Union Guard were needed to protect the settlements from the man-eaters. Reluctantly, Hernandez agreed, and the soldiers were replaced by Proctors.

Garcia himself started spending more time with the workers. No longer as aloof as he’d once been, he began by going out to the towers, ostensibly to check on their progress but also to see how the guys working on them were doing. He made an effort to memorize their names; very often, at the end of the day, he’d join them for dinner. No longer preferring to sit by himself, he’d carry his plate over from the serving line and take a seat at the long tables between men and women who’d been hauling beams or hammering nails for the last ten hours. They didn’t know what to make of this at first, and many remained hostile or suspicious, but gradually he began to make friends among them. Soon he began to learn who they were, the individual circumstances that led them to come to Coyote.

His attention to the workers was good for morale, too, but that wasn’t the sole reason why Garcia courted them. Through short encounters on the bridge and dinnertime chats, he slowly determined who among them was loyal to the Union and who was not.