Ganymede (The Clockwork Century 3)

Somers disappeared behind a buttonbush slightly taller than himself. Sounds of rustling, heaving, shoving, scraping, and finally the steady tick-tick noise of a chain cranking clattered out from the spot where he’d vanished. He did not immediately emerge again, but a definite shift occurred—some strange motion that at first made so little sense that Cly and his crew members couldn’t be sure what they were seeing.

But as the seconds clicked by and the chain pattered on, seams appeared in the landscape.

What had seemed at first to be a pair of colossal bald cypress trees were lifted, and as if mounted on a track, they slid to the left, taking a significant chunk of the landscape with them. The buttonbush and two smaller members of the same species went jerkily scooting away as well, and the whole scene slipped as easily and thoroughly as the dropcloth background of a play—revealing a pair of large mirrors that served as the juncture of three unnatural lines. Their angles made the trunks, mosses, twigs, and vines repeat indefinitely, creating the perfect illusion of infinite swamp-space as long as they were touching.

Fang let out a low, impressed whistle.

Houjin’s mouth hung open.

Kirby Troost adjusted his hat and sniffed as if he encountered this kind of thing every day.

Ruthie gave a small, smug smile.

And Captain Cly said, “I’ll be damned. ”

Ruthie asked in French, “You’ve never seen anything like it, have you?”

“Non,” replied Cly. “Jamais. ”

If she was surprised to hear him reply in kind, she did not give him the satisfaction of showing it. Instead she said, in English this time, “Anderson Worth designed it. He grinds glass lenses for spectacles, and he says that mirrors are not so different, the way they change the light—and the things we see. ”

Houjin found his voice and asked, “Where’s Mr. Worth now?” “Is he still here? I’d like to talk to him. I want to know how he made this!”

“You will meet him at the camp. ”

Before any more questions could be generated, Norman emerged from behind a water oak with a mile-wide smile on his face and said, “This is something else, bien sûr?”

“It surely is, Mr. Somers!” Houjin exclaimed. “Can I come down there and look at it?”

“Right now? No, but maybe later if you want, okay? For now, we got to get out of the road and close this gate back up again. ” With that, he climbed back onto the buggy’s driving seat and restarted the engine with a yank of its chain. “We can’t go leaving the way open for anyone to come inside. It keeps out the riffraff, because this is one of only two ways through the swamp to the camp. ”

“What’s the other way?” Cly asked.

Ruthie answered. “You’ll find out later. ”

Norman drove the machine past a certain line, deeper into the swamp than it

felt the wheels could possibly turn, given the terrain … and he dismounted again, landing with a splash in a soupy mess that was not half so deep as it looked. He skipped back to a set of controls, large cranks and a locking lever, and as he moved, he walked on water.

“Another illusion?” Cly asked Ruthie.

She said, “Oui. ”

And when Somers returned, still smiling that toothsome grin, he said, “What we do, you see—is we drop down stones into the bayou, and then we build a road on top of them. ”

“What do you use to make it?” Houjin asked.

“Oak boards, mostly. We paint them black, and just like that—” He snapped his fingers. “—they disappear, and for all anyone can tell, the bayou is as deep as the ocean. ’Cept for the cypress knees. Those don’t lie, but they fib. ”

Another mile through what looked like open swamp—without any roads, without any signs, and without any hint of a path—and the way opened to something like a clearing, though it was not very well cleared.

It might have been better described as a settlement, for such it was, and a well-considered settlement at that.

Tree houses were lifted up above the soft, easily flooding ground. They were mounted six to eight feet up the trunks, and accessible with ladders; they were roofed with native flora and insulated with thick bundles of dried moss, so that when viewed from above, they would not rouse suspicion. Let the dirigibles scope and soar. Nothing at the bayou camp would give any scout a cause for alarm.

Large canopies, woven from palmetto leaves and carefully camouflaged, were strung up on willow poles in order to hide two rolling-crawlers either bought or stolen from the Texians. Another canopy covered boxes of munitions and supplies, which were stashed upon a platform that was raised off the bayou floor much like the houses—and yet a third canopy clearly functioned as a meeting place, and possibly a dining hall.

There beneath the verdant overhangs both natural and man-made, the swamp was a green-black place of beauty and shadow. It was a place of precision and caution, activity and consultation.