Coyote Horizon (28 page)

I returned my plate to the counter, then went topside, wine stem in hand. The night was warm, but the humidity was kept down by a soft, steady breeze that wafted along the river. Off to the port side, a few miles away, were the lights of Carlos’s Pizza, the beam of its lighthouse whisking by every couple of minutes. I carried my drink over to the starboard side and leaned against the bulwark rail near one of the tenders. Bear had fully risen by then, its ring plane completely in view; the giant planet cast a bright blue luminescence across the still waters, giving the river the appearance of a tarnished platter upon which the ship rested. I sipped my drink and watched Coyote’s closest neighbor, Eagle, as it slowly moved into sight, a tiny reddish brown orb against the vast superjovian.

The creak of footsteps on the deck behind me. Thinking that Lynn had come up to join me, I didn’t look around. “Romantic, isn’t it?” I murmured, half-hoping that one thing would lead to another.

A low chuckle, then the soft sound of a match being struck. “If you say so, Mr. Lee. My wife often says the same thing, but then she usually has something on her mind.”

Startled, I turned my head to see, in the glow of match light against his face, Carlos Montero lighting a cigar. I nearly dropped my glass. “Uhp . . . um, sorry, Mr. President,” I stammered. “Thought you were someone else.”

“I should hope so.” He shook out the match and puffed at his cigar, coaxing it to burn a little higher. “Would that be Ms. Hu, your dinner companion?”

I had to give it to the old man: he didn’t miss very much. I was still trying to decide whether I should stay or go when he stepped to the railing to stand beside me. “Do you mind?” he asked, holding up his cigar. I shook my head. “Thanks. Habit I’ve picked up lately, courtesy of a mutual acquaintance.”

“Mr. Goldstein?”

“Uh-huh. Has them shipped to him from Earth. Every now and then he gives me a box.” He blew smoke at Bear, briefly framing its rings with one of his own. “My daughter disapproves, and I suppose she’s right. I’m only able to indulge myself when she’s not around.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. Indeed, I was still getting over the fact that I was sharing a private moment with a former president of the colonies, and a legendary one at that. But he spared me the effort of trying to muster a response. “I just wanted to thank you for sharing quarters with my grandson. I would’ve done so myself, but I’m bunking with Barry in the wheelhouse cabin. We’re old friends, and since he’s recently lost his partner . . . well, I think he needs company at this time in his life.”

“Not at all, Mr. President . . . I mean, only too happy to do so.” I hesitated. “He’s a nice kid. A little shy, but . . .”

“Please . . . knock off the ‘Mr. President’ bit, will you? Call me Carlos.” A pensive frown. “Yeah, Jorge is a good boy, but . . . well, a bit sheltered, I’m afraid. Susan protects him far too much for his own good. She would’ve left him with my sister if she’d had her way.”

“Why didn’t she?”

“Jon wanted him to see the world, and so did I.” He glanced over his shoulder to make sure that we weren’t being overheard, then went on. “Also, I’d rather he didn’t spend the summer with his aunt. Marie is a good woman, but her parenting skills . . . um, shall we say, leave something to be desired? Her son, Hawk . . .” He stopped himself, perhaps realizing that he was confiding too much in a stranger. “Anyway, I appreciate your looking after him. Perhaps it’s good for him to spend time with someone who doesn’t belong to his own family. If he gives you any trouble . . .”

“I’m sure he won’t, Mr. . . . Carlos, I mean.” My throat was dry, and I took a sip of wine. “We’re getting along just fine.”

“Good. Glad to hear it.” Leaning against the railing, Carlos tapped an ash over the side. “Since we’re alone, let me ask you about something else. When Morgan told me that he’d wanted to have you join the expedition, he said that he’d hired you before . . . just last year, in fact . . . to take him north to Medsylvania. Is that correct?”

“Yes, sir,” I replied, and he gave me a sidelong look, as if to remind me not to address him with unwanted formality. That would be a difficult habit to break. “He was looking for an old friend of his . . .”

“Joe Cassidy . . . Walking Star.” He nodded. “I know him, though not as well as Morgan. Go on. Did you find him?”

My turn to become reticent. I’d kept my experiences in Medsylvania to myself, not telling anyone about what Morgan and I had discovered up there. The last thing I wanted anyone else to know was that Cassidy and his followers had learned how to read minds; I had little doubt that Walking Star could find ways of making my life miserable if I disclosed that little secret. “He’s up there, yeah. With a few friends. Sort of a . . . a spiritual retreat, I guess you could call it.”

“I see.” Carlos was quiet for a moment. “And have you been back there since? Or heard anything from Walking Star?”

I shook my head. “No. Not a word. I have the impression that he . . . um, would rather be left alone.”

“Hmm.” Carlos gazed out at the river, puffing at his cigar. “Too bad. I’d rather hoped you’d found reason to visit him again. See what he’s up to.”

“I thought you said you didn’t know him well. Why are you . . . ?”

“Hawk, my nephew, he’s . . .” Another pause. “It’s a long story, but he’s been in a lot of trouble in the past, and last year he went missing altogether. I put out feelers, trying to find out where he went, but I didn’t hear anything until just a couple of days ago when I received word that someone who looked a lot like him had been seen in Walking Star’s camp. It was a while back . . . over a year, in fact . . . but apparently he’d managed to get a job as a carpenter on some sort of construction project up there . . . a monastery of some sort . . . only to walk away from it to join Cassidy’s group. My source suspected that the building project was bankrolled by Morgan, but when I asked Morgan himself about it, he denied all knowledge.”

Carlos paused, looked at me again. “You wouldn’t know anything about this, would you?”

I felt a chill. “I . . . No, I don’t. No idea.”

Carlos quietly regarded me for a second or two. He knew I was lying, and for an instant I was afraid that he’d say so. But instead he slowly nodded, as if disappointed by my untruthfulness. “Of course,” he said, standing erect and pushing himself away from the railing. “Just thought I’d ask.”

One last drag from his cigar, then he flung it out into the water. “Well, then . . . perhaps I should go below. See if Jorge would like Grandpa to tell him a bedtime story.” He patted me on the shoulder, then turned to walk away. “Good to meet you, Mr. Lee . . . Sawyer, I mean.”

“Good to meet you, too.” I was still unable to call him by his first name.

I waited until he vanished from sight, his footsteps taking him down the aft ladder, before I let out my breath. There was only a sip of wine left in my glass. Too bad; just then, I could have used a stiff drink.

 

 

 

In the autumn of c.y. 16, while plans were still being made for the Exploratory Expedition, a blue-ribbon commission comprised of representatives of the Colonial Council, various governmental ministries, and the Colonial University faculty convened on the university campus to discuss an unresolved issue: the map of Coyote.

One of the peculiarities of history was that, for the first sixteen years of human presence on the new world, most of Coyote had not only gone unexplored but unnamed as well. The reason for the first was easily explained; the Union occupation had stalled exploration of much of the planet, and even after the Revolution had succeeded in expelling the Union Guard, the ongoing struggle for survival had prevented any effort to find out what lay west of Great Dakota or east of the Meridian Archipelago. As a result, nearly three-quarters of Coyote remained unsurveyed except from orbit.

The reason for the second, though, was largely due to tradition. Since the time of the original
Alabama
colonists, it had been a long-standing practice not to name a place until someone actually set foot there. There were exceptions, of course: the subcontinents of Great Dakota, Medsylvania, Hammerhead, Highland, and Vulcan were christened before anyone visited them, but that was because of their proximity to New Florida and Midland. Likewise, the four major volcanoes—Mt. Bonestell, Mt. Pesek, Mt. Hardy, and Mt. Eggleton—had been named after astronomical artists of the twentieth century, although it had been forgotten who had done this. For the most part, though, the rest of Coyote was a blank slate in terms of nomenclature; the only means of identifying most of the world’s surface features was a system of alphanumeric codes based on their map location. SW2, for example, designated a landmass somewhere southwest of the meridian.

Now that preparations were being made for the first circumnavigation of the Great Equatorial River, though, it was decided that the global map needed to be updated, with the remaining territories finally given proper names. One proposal was to continue the practice of honoring the original colonists or their benefactors by naming places after them. That was immediately rejected by the commission; while no one argued that people like Robert Lee or Tom Shapiro shouldn’t have been memorialized, how many more places should be christened after Coyote’s first human inhabitants before it became absurd? By much the same token, nor did the commission wish to allow expedition members the opportunity to bestow their own names upon newly discovered subcontinents or islands; as a compromise, they’d be given the right to name rivers or channels, so long as it wasn’t after themselves. Likewise—although it went unsaid except in private meetings—no one wanted to give the ExEx’s major benefactor the privilege of having Morganland or Janus Island added to the map; Morgan Goldstein might be underwriting the expedition, but his ego didn’t need to be assuaged in such a crass way.

After considerable debate, the group eventually decided that the most appropriate course of action would be to follow the pattern established by the original discoverers of the 47 Ursae Majoris system, way back in the twenty-first century, and use names derived from Native American culture. Just as Uma’s planets and satellites had been given the names of Southwest Indian deities, the remaining major continents and subcontinents of Coyote would be christened after tribes and nations of both North and South America, with individual islands and major channels given the names of prominent historical figures.

And so, on Gabriel 1, c.y. 17, a revised map of Coyote was unveiled. East of Vulcan lay major landmasses with names like Cherokee, Pequot, Mohawk, and Huron, along with smaller islands such as Massasoit, Pocahontas, and Squanto, while to the west of Great Dakota were places such as Navajo, Apache, Sioux, and Comanche, with islands bearing names like Narabo, Geronimo, and Sacagawea. In the northernmost regions were lands like Aleut, Inuit, and Snohomish; south of the equator lay places such as Aztec, Maya, and Pueblo, with the south polar cap located on the massive continent of Inca. There were a few objections, of course—many European immigrants argued that English, French, and Spanish explorers of the Americas should have been honored as well—but most of Coyote’s inhabitants accepted the new map without complaint.

This is a roundabout way of explaining why, as the
LeMare
sailed eastward along the Great Equatorial River, many of us aboard became fond of saying that we were heading into Indian country. For the first week of the journey, we saw only the southern coast of Midland and, just past the Midland Channel, Barren Isle. Both places had already been explored, though, so few specimens were collected; we went ashore only to replenish our freshwater supplies from streams and rivers. Yet as we entered the Meridian Sea, we came to realize that we were getting close to the real beginning of our expedition; once past the Archipelago, the
LeMare
would be entering uncharted waters.

The Meridian Sea is the broadest part of the Great Equatorial River, so wide that its nearest southern shore, on Iroquois, is over a hundred miles from Barren Isle. As we approached the archipelago, we saw catwhales breaching the surface, mammoth creatures that could have rammed and even capsized the
LeMare
if they’d had a mind to do so. Yet they kept their distance, and everyone breathed a little easier when we couldn’t see them any longer.

The
LeMare
anchored off the southeast coast of Barren Isle as, over the course of the next two days, Carlos led a couple of zoologists to the archipelago, where they studied the migrational nesting grounds of sea-swoops. I joined them on the first of the sorties as a boat pilot; from the back of the tender, I carefully steered between the enormous, pillar-like massifs that make up the string of islets, ready to pick up the rifle resting between my knees to ward off the birds in case they decided to defend their nests. But Carlos had been there before, many years ago when he was a young man, and he knew better than to get too close to any of the massifs. He asked me to throttle down the engine and told everyone to keep their voices low. Thus we remained unmolested as we observed great flocks of broad-winged birds pinwheeling around the massifs in endless gyrations, their ragged cries echoing among the stone columns.

On the second day in the Meridian Sea, a bird of a different feather came to visit us: a gyro from Ft. Lopez, carrying in last-minute supplies. The Colonial Militia base on Hammerhead, just northeast of Barren Isle, was the Federation’s most remote outpost. Established on the site of a Union Guard fortress that had been destroyed during the Revolution, it served the settlements along the northern coast of Midland.

The gyro touched down on Barren Isle, careful to land on the beach, where it wouldn’t disturb the
chirreep
colonies farther inland. Once it landed, we lowered a tender and sent it over to collect the crates of food that had been sent earlier from New Boston. It was only a brief rendezvous, but everyone was all too aware that it would be our last contact with civilization for some time to come. Still, if the ExEx ran into any serious trouble, it was comforting to know that Ft. Lopez would be able to dispatch a rescue mission . . . or at least until we reached Pocahontas, at which point we would be beyond range of their aircraft.