THE GARCIA NARROWS BRIDGE

The day is Anael, Adnachiel 66, C. Y. 05: a perfect morning in early autumn. The place is the Eastern Divide, the great row of limestone bluffs running along the eastern coast of New Florida, separating its flat marshlands from the East Channel. On the other side of the channel is Midland, the equatorial continent that straddles the northern half of Coyote's meridian; like most of the planet, it's largely unexplored, but this is about to change. For where there was once only an expanse of water, there's now an alien object, something never before seen on this world.

A bridge.

Almost two miles long, with a midlength clearance of 110 feet, the bridge is built almost entirely of native wood and stone; indeed, the only metal used in its construction are the thick steel bolts that hold together the post-and-beam structure of the six blackwood arches holding up the concrete roadway. The arches and the towers that support them rest upon massive limestone piers, and suspended between each arch is a hinged span that seems to float in midair above the channel. The bridge appears fragile, but appearances are deceiving: designed to withstand the harshest winter storm or the highest spring flood, it can hold the weight of pedestrians, carts, rovers . . . even an army, if need be.

At the moment, though, the bridge is vacant. For the first time since last Machidiel, when construction began, no one stands upon it. The scaffolds have been dismantled, along with the temporary caissons that once surrounded the piers at the base of the towers; the bamboo basket that transported workmen along a long cable strung between the towers is still in place, but soon it'll be taken down. The bridge is finished. The only thing left to be done is the dedication ceremony.

Almost eight hundred people have gathered beneath the river bluffs. During the course of the last year, a small town has grown up within the shadows of the Eastern Divide: dormitories, commissaries, warehouses, and sheds, sprawling across acres of savanna near the limestone quarries where workers chipped out the blocks used to build the towers. Today, though, Bridgeton is empty; everyone has hiked up the new road blasted through the Divide, where they now gaze across the Narrows at a slightly smaller group standing atop the Midland Rise: Forest Camp, whose workmen chopped down the blackwoods and milled them for the massive beams used for the arches and support towers.

More than fourteen hundred men and women have labored long and hard for nearly seven months, almost two years by Gregorian reckoning. They paid for the bridge not only with sweat and muscle, but also blood: seven people perished in construction accidents ranging from falling from the towers to drowning in the channel. But this day is not for mourning, but for celebration. Red and blue pennants dangle from the trusses, and garlands of wildflowers are woven around the handrails. In the Bridgeton mess hall, the long tables have been laid out, and dozens of chickens and pigs have been butchered, in preparation for a midday fiesta, while casks of sourgrass ale carted in from Shuttlefield wait to be tapped. Outside the hall, a small stage has been set up-the Coyote Wood Ensemble will perform a symphony written especially for this occasion by Allegra DiSilvio-and a nearby field has been cleared for a softball game. The crowd shuffles restlessly, impatient to get through the dedication ceremonies so they can begin the long-awaited party.

Standing at the bridge entrance is a small group of dignitaries. The colonial governor, the Matriarch Luisa Hernandez, a stocky woman in a purple brocade cape, her hood pulled back. The lieutenant governor, the Savant Manuel Castro, his black robe concealing his skull-like face and metallic form. Chris Levin, the Chief Proctor, one of the original colonists from the URSS Alabama , the first starship to reach the 47 Ursae Majoris system; his eyes constantly shift back and forth, as if searching for trouble. Leaders of the various guilds whose members were recruited for the construction effort; many of them are mildly inebriated, having already sampled the ale before coming up to the bridge.

And in their midst, a quiet figure, slight of build and stooped at the shoulders, his thin face framed by a beard peppered with grey. He wears a threadbare frock coat despite the warmth of the day, and his soft brown eyes peer owlishly from behind wire-rim glasses.

James Alonzo Garcia, architect and chief engineer of the Garcia Narrows Bridge. Not the sort of person one would expect to lead such a monumental task. Indeed, he sees himself not so much as an engineer but rather as a poet. Instead of words, though, physics is his form, mathematics his meter; for him, the bridge that bears his name is a poem of gravity and resistance, tension and compression, an elegant sonnet whose couplets are expressed in equations. Others may see the bridge as an edifice, yet for him it is a song that only he can hear.

It is his masterpiece. And he hates it.

A red ribbon has been stretched across the entrance, tied together in a thick bow. James Garcia-formerly known, a lifetime ago back on Earth, as "Crazy Jimmy"-looks down, gently squeezes his left thumb. Digits appear on the fingernail: 1329:47:03. Almost noon. He's supposed to deliver a speech at this time; a few public words, expressing his thoughts upon the grand occasion. This sort of thing isn't in his character-he's shy, reticent when it comes to things like this-yet a mike dangles from his left ear, wired to a sound system set up so that what he says can be heard by all. Everyone is waiting for him, but he holds off, delaying the ceremony.

Across the channel, just for a moment, he catches a flash of light. Once, twice, three times, from a rocky outcrop on the Midland Rise just below the east side of the bridge. As if to shade his eyes from the sun, Garcia briefly raises a hand. The light winks twice more, then is no longer seen.

He turns to the woman standing next to him, nods briefly. The Matriarch smiles, then turns to Savant Castro. Ruby-colored eyes stare into his own, then a metallic claw comes from beneath the cloak, offering a pair of shears painted gold to resemble ceremonial scissors.

Garcia accepts the shears, steps forward to the ribbon. Seeing this, a cheer rises from the nearby onlookers, reciprocated a few moments later by those on the other side of the channel. Garcia lets the applause wash over him. For better or worse, this is his moment; none of it would have been possible were it not for him.

He raises the shears, his hands trembling as he opens the blades. So tempting just to cut the ribbon, get it over and done. But, no, there are things that must be said; this is an historic event, after all, and history must be served.

And so he speaks . . .

In order to properly understand what James Alonzo Garcia said that day, and why he did what he did, one must go back. Not to the beginnings of the colonization of Coyote-that story has already been told elsewhere-but to the events after the disappearance of the original settlers and the arrival of the next wave of colonists from Earth. It explains why a bridge was constructed across the Eastern Channel, and why Crazy Jimmy was the man who built it.

When the Alabama party abandoned their original settlement and fled New Florida, following the unexpected arrival of the WHSS Glorious Destiny, they did so in longboats, kayaks, and sea canoes they had fashioned from native materials. Using a route discovered by the Montero Expedition ofC .Y. 02, they traveled down Sand Creek until they reached the Shapiro Pass, which allowed them access through the Eastern Divide to the East Channel. By the time a squad of Union Guard soldiers led by Luisa Hernandez set foot in Liberty, the settlers had already crossed the channel and vanished into the wilds of Midland, never to be seen again.

Once the Western Hemisphere Union assumed control of New Florida, the Matriarch turned her attention to tracking down the Alabama party. Despite her efforts, though, their whereabouts remained a mystery; although every square mile of Coyote was surveyed from orbit, no signs of human habitation were found anywhere on the planet. No radio signals were detected by long-range sensors, and low-altitude sorties by shuttles were likewise unsuccessful.

Suspecting that the colonists had established a new settlement somewhere on Midland, Savant Castro proposed sending a military expedition into the adjacent continent. However, the Matriarch declined. Her primary objective had already been fulfilled, so there was no real reason to pursue them. Her major concern now was assuring the survival of the one thousand people aboard the Glorious Destiny ; since Liberty was much too small to house all of them, a second town was established near the landing field. During their first long winter on Coyote, most of the immigrants were forced to live in tents, subsisting on meager rations brought from Earth; morale was low, and only a relative handful of Union Guard soldiers were available to keep them in line. So Hernandez was unwilling to spare any of her troops; the location of the vanished colonists would have to remain a mystery, at least for the time being.

As time went on, though, the Matriarch came to realize that her troubles had only begun. Over the course of the next year and a half, by LeMarean reckoning, three more ships arrived-the New Frontiers , the Long Journey , and the Magnificent Voyage -each depositing a thousand more colonists on New Florida before turning around for the trip back to Earth. The majority were unsuited for frontier life; although most had won their berths through public lotteries, many had bribed their way aboard; nor was it a secret that some were political exiles or furloughed criminals. Shuttlefield swelled in size, soon becoming a shantytown ruled by various guilds, groups, and gangs. The newcomers were put to work on collective farms, yet after a while even the Matriarch was forced to admit-albeit only to Manuel Castro, her closest aide-that social collectivism was inadequate for settling a new world.

Making the situation worse was the fact that New Florida was a savanna, a vast expanse of grasslands and swamp, with few forests to supply wood for building new houses. Within a year, all the nearby stands of blackwood and faux birch had been leveled; although Japanese bamboo had been successfully introduced, it wasn't suitable for dwellings able to withstand Coyote's long winters. Clearly, they had to look elsewhere for native resources.

And so the Matriarch cast her gaze upon Midland. Not only was it closer and more accessible than Great Dakota to the west, but its lowlands were also covered by dense rain forests. Geological surveys along the Gillis Range indicated that the mountains held sizable deposits of iron, titanium, copper, even silver and gold-metals scarce on New Florida. Midland was virgin territory, just waiting to be conquered.

All they needed was a way to get there.

The East Channel was the obstacle. From high orbit, it only looked like a river, until one realized that, at the Montero Delta, where the channel flowed into the Great Equatorial River, it was nearly fifty miles wide. Furthermore, there were only four major passes through the Eastern Divide, none of which was easily navigable except during late winter and early spring, when the streams that had carved them through solid limestone were flooded by melting snow . . . and even then, it was only a one-way trip, because the currents were too swift to make a return crossing.

A group of malcontents, fed up with life in Shuttlefield, had built a tiny settlement near the Monroe Pass, establishing a ferry able to carry people over to Midland, including a religious cult whom the Matriarch was only too glad to let go. However, Thompson's Ferry was inadequate for her purposes; she needed reliable access across the channel, one that was firmly under Union control, so she would be able to send timber and mining crews into Midland and bring back wood and ore. As things stood boats were dependent upon weather and the seasons, aircraft limited by low payloads and inability to land in difficult terrain.

Clearly, she needed a bridge. And that was when she turned to James Alonzo Garcia.

In the year 2246, the sea-mining industry had grown to the extent that OceanSpace LLC determined that it was more cost-efficient to build a permanent colony on the continental shelf off the Atlantic coast of Florida. Until then, the only successful deep-ocean habs had been small installations capable of supporting no more than fifty people at a time; OceanSpace wanted a small city, located more than three hundred feet beneath the surface, able to support more than a thousand people in a shirtsleeve environment. Not only that, but it also would have to sustain a one-atmosphere internal pressure of oxygen-nitrogen instead of oxygen-helium, and be totally self-sufficient. And it had to be comfortable; no bunks or crowded compartments, but rather individual living quarters, spacious pedestrian malls, even holotheaters and miniature golf courses.

Quite a few people thought it was impossible. Many predicted that the colony was a disaster waiting to happen, and they produced graphs, simulations, and pie charts to make the point. Yet six years later, Aquarius opened its airlocks to submersibles bringing aboard its first residents. Despite dire forecasts, the buckydomes never collapsed under pressure, nor did its hydrothermal power systems or open-loop life-support systems ever fail.

The architect responsible for this miracle was James Alonzo Garcia. He was thirty-one years old when Aquarius was finished, yet he never visited his creation; he was prone to seasickness.

In 2253, the Mars colonies needed an efficient means of traversing the Valles Marineris. Until then, the only way to travel from one side of the vast canyon system to the other was by means of airship. Semirigid dirigibles could only carry a handful of people, though, and had limited cargo capacity, and were also vulnerable to Martian weather conditions. A solution had to be found.

On Ares Day, 2258, the Alice B. Stanley Bridge across the Noctis Labyrinthis was officially dedicated. Over ten miles in length, with twin five-hundred-foot towers supporting a stayed-cable roadway above a chasm nearly a mile deep, the bridge was so enormous that it could be seen by the naked eye from low orbit. Again, there were predictions that it would be destroyed by the first major dust storm or marsquake, yet the Stanley Bridge survived everything that nature threw at it.

Its designer, the thirty-nine-year-old engineer James Alonzo Garcia, attended the opening ceremonies via holotransmission from his home in Athens, Georgia. He claimed that the flu prevented him from making the trip to Mars, yet everyone who worked on the project knew that he was mortified by the prospect of setting foot aboard anything that left the ground.

Crazy Jimmy didn't earn his nickname by accident. The stereotypical image of the civil engineer is one of a broad-shouldered, barrel-chested man with a blueprint in one hand and a protractor in the other. Garcia didn't fit the profile: ascetic and thin-faced, he looked more like Robert Browning than Robert Moses. Those who knew him personally-there weren't many, outside a small circle of associates-often described him in two terms: genius and mad. He graduated from the University of Georgia at age twenty-one with a doctorate in physics, and after that he seldom left home, and only then if he could travel by maglev train. He wore black at all times, and his favorite article of clothing was a frock coat he'd found in his grandfather's attic. He slept no more than four or five hours a night. He had no apparent interest in women; his only love affair was with a seventeen-year-old second cousin he met at a family reunion when he was twenty-three, and he was shattered when she spurned his marriage proposal. Though he claimed to be an atheist, those closest to him knew that he believed in reincarnation and that in a past life he had once been a dog.

Nevertheless, no one denied the fact that Garcia was brilliant, albeit otherworldly. He perceived complex engineering problems in poetic terms; for him, an equation was a couplet, an algorithm a rhyme. Aquarius was a homage to Edgar Allan Poe's "The City Under the Sea" expressed in mathematical terms, the Stanley Bridge a contemplation on the value of pi as a material object. In these things, and others-elaborate homes he designed for friends, skyscrapers that seemed to defy gravity, the occasional public monument as a diversion-he displayed his gifts.

Although he was a perfectionist by nature, he was far from perfect himself. Garcia had little patience for those who couldn't keep up with him. He fired assistants for as little reason as showing up for work a couple of minutes late, and once walked off project in which he had been involved for several years only because the client failed to appreciate the awning he'd designed for the front entrance. Many of his colleagues perceived him as arrogant, and few realized that his erratic behavior stemmed from a deep sense of insecurity. For all his talent, James Garcia was a lonely man, unable to communicate with the world in any meaningful way except through the things he built.

Even today, historians disagree over what compelled James Garcia to migrate to Coyote. Certainly it wasn't to find adventure; for all intents and purposes, he was a recluse. Some speculate that he was seeking another off-world challenge after the Stanley Bridge. If that was so, then why travel forty-six light-years, leaving behind everything he knew? Jonas NcNair, the architecture critic, believes that he may have lost favor with the Proletariate after he refused to design a new Government Centre for the Western Hemisphere Union in Havana, an allegation supported by Garcia's well-documented dislike for social collectivism, a system that wouldn't allow him to earn as much as he did when he worked on projects in Europe and the Pacific Coalition. Or perhaps, as some have theorized, like so many others who went to Coyote before him, Garcia simply reached a point in life when he wanted to make a fresh start.

The truth is very simple: he had no choice. The Proletariate realized that, sooner or later, Coyote would require the services of a master architect, someone able to tackle the most difficult engineering problems. Only one person fit that description, and so he was drafted. Had he been given advance warning, Garcia might have been able to flee the Union; like so many other rich people in the WHU, he kept his private earnings in Swiss banks, and the Union was willing to look the other way so long as he paid his taxes and didn't flaunt his wealth in public. One of the tenets of collectivist theory was that individuals should be willing to make sacrifices for the greater good of society, so when the Proletariate decided that Coyote needed the talents of James Alonzo Garcia, he awoke one morning to find all his lines of credit frozen, his travel permits denied, his contacts no longer willing to answer the phone, and a Patriarch and two Proctors waiting in his office with an offer that he could not refuse.

And so, on Barchiel 6,C .Y. 05, James Alonzo Garcia walked down the ramp of a Union shuttle. Unlike the hundreds of other immigrants who'd spent the last forty-eight years in biostasis aboard the Magnificent Voyage , though, Garcia never had to endure a cold night in Shuttlefield. The moment he set foot on Coyote, proctors ushered him to a waiting maxvee, which spirited him away to Liberty, where he was assigned to a three-room log cabin in the center of town. And that evening, while he was unpacking his bags, Garcia received his first visitors: Luisa Hernandez and Manuel Castro. They personally brought him dinner, and while a Union Guard soldier stood watch outside the three of them had a meeting. It lasted only an hour, and after they left Garcia stood on the front porch of his new home, silently gazing up at Bear as it rose into the night sky.

Garcia was treated with far more dignity than the average immigrant. Since all the usual weight limits had been waived in his favor, his comps, books, and even his antique drafting board had all been freighted from Earth. When it was apparent that he needed a warmer jacket than his frock coat, he was given a fur-lined parka (which he wore only on the coldest days). He didn't eat in the community hall, but instead took his meals in the privacy of his home. Whenever he needed anything-pads, fresh sheets and blankets for his bed, a coffeepot, a new pair of boots-it was available simply for the asking. Compared to the thousands living in squalor in Shuttlefield, James Garcia lived like a prince . . . and all he was expected to do in return was to lend his talents to the colony.

His circumstances weren't unbearable. He hadn't left behind anyone he couldn't live without, and while his quarters were relatively primitive, they weren't uncomfortable. So he went to work on the first task given to him by the Matriarch, designing a master plan for Shuttlefield that would ease the settlement's overpopulation problems. It took only six weeks for him to come up with a wheel-shaped layout for streets and neighborhoods, complete with a sewage system, a zoned business district, schools and a public commons, with roads leading to Liberty, the nearby farms, and the landing field. Although it was something a first-year student could have done, when he showed it to the Matriarch she praised him as a genius.

And that's when she told him she needed a bridge.

From the outset, Garcia knew that building a bridge across the East Channel would be more difficult than it might seem. No two bridges are exactly alike, no matter how similar they may appear; each poses its own unique challenges, and while the Stanley Bridge was one of the largest ever built, Garcia quickly realized that this new one would stretch the limits of his ingenuity.

Midway through Machadiel, the last month of winter, Garcia joined a four-man expedition down Sand Creek to survey the channel and the Eastern Divide. Never much of a traveler, the architect made the trip only with great reluctance; however, he knew that he had to see the channel with his own eyes and not simply rely on reports made by others.

Another expedition member was Chris Levin, the Chief Proctor. Levin was the natural choice to lead the survey team; not only had he designed and built the single-mast keelboat, the Lady of Huntsville , which the team used for the trip, but he had also been on the ill-fated Montero Expedition that crossed the Eastern Divide three years earlier.

Sand Creek was still running high, so the boat made it through the Shapiro Pass without any difficulties. Once they reached the East Channel, the expedition turned north, spending the next several days exploring the seventy-mile stretch between the Shapiro Pass and Thompson's Ferry. It was a slow and arduous voyage; the current was against them, making the ride anything but smooth, and Garcia was frequently seasick, trying the patience of the other men aboard. After the first two days on the channel, Garcia elected not to remain aboard any longer. While Levin and his first mate, Union Guard lieutenant Bon Cortez, went ahead in the keelboat, Garcia and Frederic LaRoux, a geologist, hiked the rocky beach beneath the towering bluffs of the Eastern Divide, catching up with the Lady of Huntsville when it came ashore for the evening.

This turned out to be a wise decision, for it gave Garcia and LaRoux a chance to inspect the bluffs more closely. As Garcia suspected, much of the Eastern Divide was comprised of porous limestone, unsuitable for supporting a large structure. However, here and there the limestone had been eroded away, exposing impermeable shale beneath it. And midway between the Shapiro Pass and Thompson's Ferry, fortuitously located at the most narrow point of the Eastern Channel, rested a granite bluff suitable for their needs.

The Narrows, as Levin labeled the straits on his map, were a little less than two miles across; the Midland Rise could easily be seen from the beach. The expedition made camp on the western side, and spent the next several days surveying the site from both sides of the channel, using deep-core drills to extract rock samples and sonar to gauge the depth of the waters. At midpoint, the Narrows were nearly a hundred feet deep, but at several places the floor rose to within forty feet of the surface. Soundings revealed the existence of solid bedrock several feet beneath the muddy river bottom. Garcia climbed to the top of the Eastern Divide and set up his theodolite, then spent a day examining the eastern side of the channel through its scope, repeating this the following day from the top of the Rise, while Bon Cortez stood two miles away with a meter stick in hand.

Eight days after it set sail upon the East Channel, the Lady of Huntsville arrived at Thompson's Ferry, thirty-eight miles upstream from the Narrows. Levin, Cortez, and LaRoux took advantage of Clark Thompson's hospitality, luxuriating in hot baths and devouring everything Aunt Molly put before them; they spoke enthusiastically about what they'd found, and Thompson listened with interest as they told him about the plans to build a bridge across the Narrows. The loner Garcia shared none of this. Locking himself inside a storeroom of the town lodge, he spread his maps, charts, and notebooks across a table and went straight to work, sleeping on the bare wooden floor and eating only when Molly Thompson insisted that he needed food.

Two days after the Lady of Huntsville showed up at the ferry, Clark Thompson and his nephew Garth went fishing. Cortez and LaRoux took little note of this, but Levin watched from the deck of the lodge while their kayak made its way toward Midland. It returned many hours later, just before sundown; apparently it had been a bad day for fishing, for neither of the men brought home anything. The Chief Proctor took note of the fact that their bait box apparently remained untouched, but he carefully said nothing.

The following morning, Garcia emerged from the storeroom, haggard and red-eyed, with several scrolls beneath his arms and a hoarse-throated request to return to Liberty at once. His bridge existed, if only on paper and within his mind's eye.

All he needed to do was build it.

James Garcia was under no delusions. Since there were no iron deposits on New Florida, and the ones on Midland weren't ready to be mined, the bridge would have to be built almost entirely out of wood and stone. With no iron for cables, he ruled out any sort of suspension bridge. While the channel was relatively shallow, its current was swift; the support towers would therefore have to be erected while the waters were at their lowest mark, during late spring and summer. And because none of the heavy machinery available to him on Earth or Mars-tower cranes, dredges, earthmovers-existed on Coyote, they would have to rely upon hand-built derricks, high explosives, portable generators, and sheer muscle. In short, a two-mile bridge would have to be built within a short period of time, using only native materials, under primitive conditions.

A Crazy Jimmy project, to be sure. And he couldn't have been happier; it was the sort of challenge he thrived upon.

When Garcia showed his plans to Luisa Hernandez, the Matriarch quickly gave her approval to the project. Indeed, he was surprised at her sanguine acceptance of the difficulties; it didn't seem to matter very much to her that the bridge would tax the colony's resources in terms of both material and human effort. Whatever you need , she said, you'll get it .

Such carte blanche should have been an engineer's dream, but Garcia would soon learn otherwise. A few days later, the Matriarch held a public meeting in Liberty. The community hall was filled to capacity, with hundreds of colonists standing outside; flanked by her staff, with Chris Levin on one side and Manuel Castro on the other, Hernandez announced plans to build a bridge across the East Channel to Midland, with work beginning immediately. She went on to state that the bridge would be the colony's first priority for the coming year, and that, in the spirit of social collectivism, she expected every able-bodied person to contribute to the effort.

It soon became clear what the Matriarch meant; she wasn't seeking volunteers so much as she was issuing a draft notice. Over the course of the next two weeks, Proctors combed Shuttlefield, locating every man and woman above the age of eighteen and checking their employment status against their records. Everyone who wasn't already working on the farms or serving some other vital function was conscripted to the construction project. No exceptions, no deferrals. When someone tried to refuse, they were informed that their ration cards would be voided, meaning that they wouldn't be allowed to eat in the community hall. When the Cutters Guild attempted to go on strike, the Matriarch responded by having their leaders arrested and their camp torn down by the Union Guard, their belongings confiscated and impounded. Upon seeing what happened to the largest and most powerful group in Shuttlefield, the other guilds hastily fell into line.

Garcia was outraged, yet when he told the Matriarch that he needed skilled workmen, not slave laborers, she replied by saying that wasn't true; everyone would be paid, in credits good for purchasing goods at shops in Liberty (which, it went without saying, were co-opted by the colonial government, meaning that a large percentage of workers' payments would go straight back to the Union). She then pointed out that most of Shuttlefield was unemployed, with little to do except sit around and wait for a job to open up. The bridge would shake them out of their indolence, give them a purpose for their lives. This was the genius of collectivist theory: the efforts of individuals applied to the greater good of society as a whole. Why, didn't he believe in social collectivism?

Garcia grumbled and returned to his drafting board.

Since the Narrows lay sixty miles from Liberty, one of the first tasks was the establishment of a road to the Eastern Divide. Thirty men spent two weeks marching through the grasslands, burning all the swampgrass and spider bush in their way and building footbridges across the swamps. There were several stands of blackwood and faux birch along the way, the last few remaining in that part of New Florida. They were cut down, the logs hauled on carts down what came to be known as Swamp Road to the construction site. A new settlement began to take form beneath the Eastern Divide-barracks, latrines, a mess hall, warehouses, craft shops-and it wasn't long before Shuttlefield began to empty out, as men and women were relocated to the coast. Every day, Bridgeton grew a little more, while Shuttlefield gradually shrank.

While that was going on, a new ferry was established on the channel. Chris Levin, temporarily released from his duties as Chief Proctor, was put in charge of building a fleet of construction barges. Yet another crew under Bon Cortez was given the task of setting up a logging camp and lumber mill on the other side of Midland Rise, with roads leading to the rain forests a few miles away. Forest Camp was smaller than Bridgeton, but no less active. Only the toughest men and women lived there, the ones who didn't mind getting splinters in their hands or enduring the long nights spent huddled around smoky fires. Indeed, many preferred the hardship; at least they were away from Shuttlefield, and more or less free so long as they ignored the armed soldiers loitering nearby.

Garcia remained in Liberty during that period. He worked out of his cabin, revising his blueprints, receiving daily reports via satphone from his foremen. Every few days, he'd warily climb aboard a gyro piloted by a Guardsman and pay a visit to the construction site; he still disliked flying, but it was the only way he was able to get to the Narrows on short notice. Those who saw him then remember a small figure in a frock coat, his hands clasped behind his back, silently walking past stacks of cut timber as he listened to crew chiefs whose names he often forgot, occasionally stopping to jot down notes in his pad.

He rarely spoke, though, so no one knew what was on his mind.

Garcia wasn't the only one quietly observing what was going on. The activity at Forest Camp had drawn the attention of others who had a vested interest in the Narrows.

When Clark Thompson and his nephew went fishing that day in Machadiel, they weren't out to hook a few channelmouth. After they rowed across the channel, the elder Thompson left Garth behind with the boat while he hiked up a narrow path leading to top of the Midland Rise. A young man whom he knew only as Rigil Kent was waiting for him, summoned two days earlier by a brief satphone call Clark had made when no one was watching. The two men had a short conversation, then once again Rigil Kent vanished into the woods.

Rigil Kent was the alias adopted by Carlos Montero, the Alabama colonist who, on and off over the course of the last two years, had waged guerrilla war against the Union. Twice already he'd led small raiding parties across the channel-the first time to steal firearms from Liberty, the second to blow up a shuttle. Although his efforts were still sporadic, Carlos's objective was to force the Union off New Florida; even if he couldn't get the newcomers to return to Earth, at least he might be able to make them surrender Liberty, which he and his followers considered to be stolen property.

After his rendezvous with Clark Thompson, Carlos returned to Defiance, the settlement hidden within a river valley on the other side of Mt. Shaw that the Matriarch had been unable to find. That evening, he made his report to the Town Council. Like everyone else, Robert Lee-once the former commanding officer of the Alabama , by then the elected mayor of Defiance-was disturbed to learn that Luisa Hernandez intended to erect a bridge across the East Channel. Thus far, Lee had supported the resistance efforts only reluctantly; he believed that, if his people lay low on Midland, the Union would leave them alone. Yet it had become clear that the Matriarch wanted Midland as well as New Florida. Once the bridge was built, it would only be a matter of time before Union troops invaded Midland.

Several Council members favored destroying the bridge before it could be completed, yet Lee had no desire to do anything that might kill or injure any civilians working on the project. Several newcomers had already made their way across the Gillis Range to Defiance; from them, he'd learned that the Union had misled immigrants as to how they'd be living on Coyote. If Rigil Kent attacked the bridge, then innocent lives would doubtless be lost, and Lee knew that would only cause colonists who might otherwise be sympathetic to their cause to turn against them. There's a fine line between being a freedom fighter and being a terrorist, and Lee was reluctant to cross it.

However, Carlos had another idea. According to what Clark Thompson had told him, it appeared that the bridge's architect might not be marching in lockstep with the Matriarch. If that was true, then they might be able to reach him somehow, perhaps convince him of the error of his ways. If they could do so, perhaps there might be a way to make the bridge work for them . . .

The Council listened to him, and Lee gave his approval. See if you can contact Garcia, Lee told Carlos. Maybe we can work something out with him.

And that's what Rigil Kent set forth to do.

By the middle of Ambriel, the second month of spring, the first phase was well under way. The spring floods had subsided by then, allowing for the construction of eight watertight caissons, made of thick, rough-barked logs harvested on Midland that had been hauled by barges from Forest Camp into the Narrows, where they were vertically sunk in a straight line across the channel, a quarter mile from one another. Once the water was pumped out, masons descended into the shafts to build permanent caissons for the support towers; from the New Florida side, limestone blocks were excavated from quarries near Bridgeton and transported by barges to the caissons, where they were slowly lowered by hand-cranked derricks into the empty shafts. Once the permanent caissons were finished, they would be filled with concrete brought over from Bridgeton, forming the piers for the support towers.

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 wordsURSS 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.

By midsummer, the bridge was beginning to take form. Upon each tower base, two A-frame structures were built, cross-braced to provide stability. The towers gradually rose in height from both ends of the bridge, with Towers One and Eight eighty feet tall, Towers Two and Seven ninety feet, Towers Three and Six a hundred feet, and Towers Four and Five rising a hundred and ten feet above the Narrows. Once finished, the bridge would be shaped like a longbow, thus allowing for compression at the center span.

The towers were completed on Hamaliel 37, a week ahead of schedule. For the occasion, Luisa Hernandez made a surprise visit. Escorted by a pair of Guardsmen, with Savant Castro walking just a few steps behind her and Garcia, the Matriarch strode up the packed-earth path leading through the road cut recently blasted through the Eastern Divide until she reached the end of the unfinished ramp leading to the bridge, and silently gazed out upon the long row of towers that loomed above the East Channel. Derricks bolted to platforms on top of the towers hauled truss beams up from barges; the humid air was filled with the sound of hammers and saws as carpenters worked on temporary scaffolds suspended from the towers.

The Matriarch silently observed the activity before her, making a face as she batted at the skeeters that tormented her. Garcia tried to explain what was being done, yet it was clear that the details bored her; she only seemed to take interest when she noticed a couple of nearby workmen fastening safety lines around their stomachs and thighs, mountaineering-style.

"Seems like a lot of wasted effort," she said, and Garcia informed her that he had mandated the practice as a safety precaution after a couple of men had fallen to their deaths from the towers. She shrugged as she swatted another skeeter. "Very well. If you think it's important." Then she turned to smile at him. "Have you given any thought as to what we should call this? Whom we should name it after?"

"No, ma'am." Garcia watched the men attaching safety lines to themselves. "I have more important things to think about just now."

She regarded him coldly. "Perhaps you should take this into consideration," she replied, then she turned to march away.

Before work commenced on the arches, Garcia had cable cars installed between the towers. Made of tightly coiled rough-barked vine harvested from the Midland forests and greased with creek cat fat, the cables were stretched from one tower to the next, with sturdy baskets woven from sourgrass hanging from pulleys running along the cables. Although riding the cable was hair-raising, it was the quickest way to transport workers from one end of the bridge to another, and once they got used to racing along a hundred feet above the channel, many said the commute was the best part of the day.

Providing cheap thrills, though, was the farthest thing from Garcia's mind; he also had a quick means of getting people over to Midland. By First Landing Day, Uriel 47, Garcia and Klon had recruited nearly three hundred men and women they knew they could trust; two and three at a time, they were transferred across the channel to Forest Camp, where they switched jobs with people who had been working on the timber crews and at the mill. Since it was all part of the job-rotation system Garcia had set up, the Proctors took little notice; only a few foremen were keeping track of who was where at any one time, and most of them had already been enlisted by Garcia.

The arches weren't long enough to support the roadway by themselves; to make up for the distance, and also to relieve the bridge from stress in the event of high winds, Garcia designed bolt-hinged suspension spans that would be laid between them. The hundred-foot spans-four in all, practically small bridges in themselves-were built as single-piece units on the wharves beneath the Midland Rise; once completed, they would be floated on barges out into the channel, then carefully hoisted into place by the tower derricks.

No one noticed the extra care that was being taken, by mill workers in the Forest Camp, to carve small cavities within the cross braces of the suspension spans. Each cavity was large enough to contain a one-pound plastique charge, and was hidden by a thin panel through which a tiny hole had been drilled.

The suspension spans were raised during mid-Adnachiel, two weeks after the trusswork for the arches was completed. All that was left to be done was the laying of rough-barked planks for the roadway and rigging solar-powered lights on lampposts. For all intents and purposes, the bridge was nearly finished.

Even while preparations were being made for the dedication ceremony, Chris Levin kept a wary eye upon the construction site. Although there had been no further sign of Rigil Kent, the Chief Proctor was unconvinced that his nemesis had lost interest in the bridge. He pulled the guards out of Forest Camp and posted a twenty-seven-hour watch on the bridge itself, with Proctors stationed on the roadway and at the entrances and more patrolling the channel itself. Because they were alert for trouble onshore or on the water, they weren't closely observing the workmen wiring the electrical fixtures, and thus failed to notice where some of the wires were leading.

On the evening of Raphael, Adnachiel 65, in the cool twilight as the sun setting behind the Eastern Divide, James Alonzo Garcia inspected the bridge one last time. Although there were soldiers every few hundred feet, for the first time in months he walked alone. Hands clasped behind his back, wearing the frock coat that had become increasingly frayed and dirty over the past several months, the architect strolled down the entire length of the bridge, taking the moment to admire his work. Of all the things he'd built, this was his greatest achievement. Aquarius might have been more revolutionary in design, the Stanley Bridge taller and more ambitious, yet this edifice-as yet unchristened, or at least nameless until the next day-was the thing of which he was the most proud.

But he heard no poetry in its arches, felt no music in its towers. He had long since stopped thinking in abstract terms; too many lives had been lost, too many injustices had been committed, for him to find any beauty in his accomplishment. The symphony was almost finished; all that remained for him to do was to write the coda.

When he reached the Midland end of the bridge, he found Klon Newall waiting for him. He shook hands with his chief foreman, exchanged a few pleasantries. A meaningful look passed between them, and Klon nodded once. Everything was ready.

Garcia nodded in return. Then he began to walk back toward New Florida, as alone as he ever had been.

So now it's the following morning, and he stands before the red ribbon stretched across the entrance, the gold shears in his hands poised before the bow. On either side of him, there's an expectant silence. The architect hesitates, then he begins to speak:

"This bridge . . ." Garcia coughs, clearing his dry throat. His voice, picked up by the mike under his left ear, is carried to the crowd behind him by the loudspeakers and reverberates ten seconds later off the Midland Rise. "Pardon me . . . this bridge is the result of months of effort by hundreds of men and women. They've suffered long and hard to bring it into existence. Some of them sacrificed their lives. Nothing I can say will ever make up for this. I just . . . I just . . ."

Uncertain of what to say next, he hesitates. From the corner of his eye, he sees Luisa Hernandez staring at him. This isn't what she expected: a few words extolling the virtues of social collectivism, perhaps, or promises of the riches to be found in the mountains of Midland.

"Others would like to claim this bridge for themselves," he continues, steadfastly refusing to meet the Matriarch's angry gaze. "They would claim credit for the work of others, but they must be told that all this wasn't done in their name. We didn't build this for them . . . we built it for ourselves, for our own future." He hesitates. "What we'll call this is not for me to decide, but for you. Let history give it a name. My work is done."

Then he turns to look at the Matriarch. "But this . . . this is for you, ma'am." And then he cuts the ribbon.

A thin wire was concealed within the fabric of the ribbon, which led to a detonator hidden beneath Tower One. When Garcia severed it, he tripped the detonator, which in turn caused an electrical charge to be sent to charges concealed within the crossbeams of the suspension spans. A quick succession of thunderous explosions echoed off the limestone walls of the Eastern Divide and the Midland Rise, and the spans toppled into the channel.

On the New Florida side of the Narrows, there is a collective gasp of horror from the officials standing nearby. On the Midland side, though, a loud cheer rises from the hundreds of people whose freedom Garcia had secretly arranged over the past few months as they watch the spans crash into the channel, leaving behind only a series of towers and arches unconnected to one another. The few Proctors and Union Guard soldiers remaining on the eastern side of the channel are caught unprepared for the mob that descends upon them; a couple of them try to resist, but they are quickly brought down, with the rest forced to flee for boats anchored beneath the bluffs.

The bridge could be repaired, of course . . . but not until the following spring, when it would become possible to replace the suspension spans. The seasonal currents within East Channel would not permit restoration work before next year. New beams would have to be harvested from the few remaining stands of blackwood on the western side of New Florida. By then, the men and women of Forest Camp had escaped into the Midland wilderness, where they were met by Rigil Kent's compatriots, eager to enlist those ready to defy the Western Hemisphere Union.

Garcia was not among them.

To this day, no one knows why he didn't take the chance to escape. The cable car had been left intact for that very purpose; the moment he severed the ribbon, the plan called for him to run over to it, jump aboard, and race across the Narrows, going from tower to tower until he made his way to Midland.

Instead, Garcia kept his back turned toward the bridge even as it was being ruined by his own hand and calmly waited for a couple of soldiers to put him under arrest and take him away. Perhaps he realized that any attempt to escape was futile, that he would have been shot before he made it to the first tower. Or perhaps, as others have speculated, there was only one way this particular poem could end.

Whatever the reason, Garcia spent the next two days in the Liberty stockade, a windowless log cabin built by the original settlers. He was doubtless interrogated, and equally without doubt he told his interrogators everything that he knew, even though there was little useful information that he could have revealed; the bridge was ruined, his accomplices already vanished. Eyewitnesses would later say that the last time he was known to be alive was when the Matriarch and two Union Guards soldiers paid him a visit. A gunshot was heard, and the following morning it was announced that Garcia had hanged himself.

James Alonzo Garcia was buried in the Shuttlefield graveyard, beneath a tombstone that bore only his name. The bridge he built was eventually repaired, but it never bore the name of the Matriarch Luisa Hernandez, as she had intended. The locals know it as the Garcia Narrows Bridge.

They also claim that, in the twilight hours just after the sun goes down behind the Eastern Divide, you can sometimes see him walking across it, as if admiring his creation one more time.