The old road is broken only once, where the sea-cliffs suddenly give way to a narrow gash of an inlet, perhaps a kilometer across. To the east the valley extends indefinitely, its path improbably, mechanically straight.
There is nothing like this on my pre-Fever maps. Closer, though, and inland, where the water is shallower, the reason becomes clear. A hump of charcoal-colored material runs straight down the center of the valley, rising from the sand and water like the back of some submerged serpent.
'A ladder to heaven,' Maryam says, looking out into the valley. 'That's what it was, once.' In her voice there is some emotion that I can't identify.
She turns to me, obviously sensing my mystification even through the veil.
'A space elevator,' she says dryly, using the modern, bazaar-Arabic words.
Now I understand. I nod, and look down at the gray ribbon. A piece of skyhook cable, some fragment of the forty thousand kilometers of cable that once connected Hippolyta to the stars-cut when Hippolyta's equatorial ring station was destroyed to enforce the quarantine.
If I am successful here, people will have to come to terms with the painful knowledge that many millions might have been saved-if outside powers like the Consilium and the Erewhon Republic had, instead of that quarantine, devoted themselves to evacuation. But I can't help that.
We have to detour many kilometers inland before the water becomes shallow enough to ford.
The old city of Haiming is a long green island, topped with white and blue, set in the middle of a wide brown river. The Otrera flows north to south for two thousand kilometers, before taking a left turn, just south of here, and emptying itself into Hippolyta's eastern ocean. On the east side of the river, in Tieshan proper, the shore is lined with ironworks and concrete, and the horizon is smudged with smoke.
Here on the west side, the market side, the buildings are low and brown and poor-all of them seemingly either made of clay, and very old, or made of wood, and very flimsy. The effect should be depressing, but the rooftops are lined with flapping colored banners, the air smells of earth and river water and spices, and the streets are filled with people, shouting and laughing and dickering in Ezheler and Arabic and Chinese.
I leave Maryam at the ferry terminal, where the north-bound boats stop before heading upriver.
She lingers on the gangway. 'This is probably my last chance, you know,' she says.
'What do you mean?'
'I'm thirty-six,' she says. 'I don't have any other daughters, or granddaughters. That's why I'm going north.'
Into Erethea. Into the blank space on the map, the center of the causal anomaly. Where my goal has been all along.
I don't know what to say, except:
'I'm sure you'll be successful,' I tell her, 'God willing.'
'God willing,' she echoes.
'Perhaps I'll come north myself, some day soon,' I say.
She laughs, and, unexpectedly, puts her arms around me, pressing her veiled cheek against mine.
'You're too young, little daughter,' she tells me. 'Live for yourself first.'
The boat's whistle blows, and she draws back. She takes a pen and a bit of paper from one of her bags and scribbles a name and an address. She hands it to me, and I read:
Dr. Aysun Orbay, 23 Marpesia 4, Themiscyra.
'My friend,' she says. 'In case you are too foolish to listen to me.'
Then the boat's whistle is blowing again, and she is gone, leading her horse up the gangway.
A Tieshanese mule trader named Zhou Xiling buys my animals at what would be a vicious discount, if I'd ever paid for them. Mules, their hybrid histories stripped from them, breed better on Hippolyta than they do anywhere else, or the Aminas would never have had their two beasts; but in Aella's southern highlands, far from the center of the anomaly, they breed no better than human beings do. In this relationship women like Zhou, who can import stock from farther north, have all the power.
I lift the bales of coca onto my shoulders. I am not tall-Maryam, for instance, was taller than I am-but I am taller than most of the women in East Haiming's streets. As I carry the bales to the coca market, the crowds give me a wide berth.
Mei Yueyin has hardly said twenty words since I identified myself to her in the coca market. She stalks a little ahead of me-walking quickly, as if she would like to leave me behind, or at least make her unwilling association with me less obvious.
It's no use, though; I'm the only Ezheler on the bridge to Haimingdao, and I can't help but draw stares.
The bridge is wide, and lined with ancient gingko trees; the sidewalk under our feet is strewn with their fallen leaves, golden green and soft as flower petals. Eddies from the passing motor traffic stir the humid air, and the swirling of the leaves is like some exotic danse de caractиre.
'What's that?' I ask, pointing ahead to the island, where at the southern end the blue and white of the city gives way to a broad green hill dotted with gray structures. At its crest the low evening sun winks off something gold.
Yueyin glances in the direction I've indicated.
'That's where they buried all the men,' she says.
She doesn't want me here.
I don't know what gave me away. Something about my voice, my walk, something about the shape of my body, even merely hinted at through the folds of the burka. Perhaps nothing more than the fact that of all the women on Hippolyta, Mei Yueyin is the only one to have seen a man with her own eyes.
I stop, suddenly.
Yueyin continues a few steps, then stops and turns.
'Listen,' I say, in Arabic. 'I'm not here to get you in trouble. I'm not here to threaten you. I'm certainly not here to drag you back, if that's what you're worried about. I just want a little information. And if you won't give it to me, I'll do without.'
She gives me a long, level stare. In her face, something softens for a moment-then hardens again.
'You're here to threaten everyone on this world,' she says. 'You do that just by being here.'
Then she turns away, and starts walking again.
After that, I didn't really expect Yueyin to hide my identity from her partner, and sure enough, when we reach her house-an aged but clean two-story block tucked behind a vine-covered wall, in some neighborhood of narrow alleys on Haimingdao's east side-her first words to her partner are:
'Liwen, we have a visitor. He's from Earth.'
She says this in Arabic. The pronouns of spoken Chinese have no gender.
'Yazmina Tanzikbayeva,' I say.
'That's not your real name,' says Yueyin.
'It is now,' I tell her.
Yueyin's partner is tall, probably taller than I am, and thin, with high cheekbones, and braided hair that goes to her waist. There is a little girl in her lap, six or eight years old, who looks shyly up at me-whether Yueyin's or her partner's I can't tell; at this age she is all eyes and elbows and knees. They are playing some game with colored tiles like dominoes.
'Peace be with you,' the woman says. 'Welcome to Hippolyta.' Her Arabic is strongly accented, much more than Yueyin's.
'My partner,' Yueyin says. 'Fu Liwen. She's a rocket engineer for the Tieshanese government.'
A rocket engineer.
I miss the little girl's name, and the rest of the introductions. I give distracted answers while Yueyin mechanically makes tea and Liwen sends the little girl upstairs.
A rocket engineer.
'You know they haven't forgotten you, out there,' I tell Liwen, as Yueyin sits down. 'There's a battleship at L2, waiting to kill any of you who try to leave.' Calling the Tenacious a battleship feels like a lie. But to Liwen's industrial-age rockets, the Republic's little picket, with its quaint collection of lasers and particle beams, is just as deadly as a Consilium stabilizer-swarm.
Liwen shrugs. 'I understand how they feel,' she says. 'If we leave Hippolyta, hundreds of billions might die. If it were the other way around, if we were out there, and the men were trapped down here-we would do the same
