Without asking, Mr. Preston yanked a chair from another of the raw hardwood tables which packed the bar, and smacked it down at the boys’ table. “I heard you come from uptime—way uptime,” he said to John.
“Uh, Stan told you?” John asked to get some time to think.
“He dropped a word, yes. Was he wrong?” Mr. Preston peered at John intently, his broad mouth tilted at an assessing angle beneath a bristly brown moustache.
“Nossir. Maybe he, uh, exaggerated, though.”
“Said you’d been above Rockport.”
“I caught sight of it in fog. That awful pearly kind that—”
“How far beyond?”
“Not much.”
“Cairo?”
“I … yeah, I gave it wide berth.”
“Describe it.”
“Big place, grander than this town.”
“You see the point? With the sand reef?”
“I didn’t see any reef.”
“Fair enough—there isn’t any reef. What’s the two-horned point like?”
“Foam whipping up in the air.”
“Where’s the foam go?”
“Shoots out of the river and arcs across to the other horn.”
“You go under the arc?”
“Nossir. I stayed in the easy water close on the other shore.”
“Smart. That arc’s been there since I was a boy and nobody’s lived who tried to shoot with the current under it.”
“I heard that too.”
“Who from?”
“Fellow upstream.”
“How far upstream?”
Nobody ever lied to a pilot, but you could shave the truth some. John took a sip of the dark beer that was thick enough to make a second supper—as some in the bar seemed to be doing, loudly—and said with care, “The reach above Cairo. That’s where I started.”
Mr. Preston leaned forward and jutted out his long jaw shrewdly. “There’s a big bar there, got to go by it easy. Sand, isn’t it?”
“Nossir, it’s black iron.”
Mr. Preston sat back and signaled the barkeep—who had been hovering, wringing a dirty rag—for a round. “Right. A plug of it that gushed up from some terrible event in the river bottom. Books say a geyser of molten metal—not the cool ones which flow under the river—that geyser came fuming up through the worldwall itself.”
“How can that be? What’s outside the world?”
“Not for us to know, son.”
“Please don’t call me son, sir.”
Mr. Preston’s bushy eyebrows crowded together, momentarily puzzled at the quick, hard note that had come into John’s voice, but then he waved his hand in an ample gesture and said, “Well, Mr. John, I am prepared to hire your services.”
Stan was looking bug-eyed at this interchange. For two lowly freight musclers to be drinking with a pilot was like a damp river rat going to dinner at the mayor’s. And this latest development—!
“Services?” Stan put in, unable to restrain himself any longer.
“Navigation. There’ve been five big time-squalls between here and Cairo since I was up that way. Now I got a commission to take the Natchez up that far and no sure way of knowing the river that far.”
“I’m not sure I know the river all that well,” John demurred, his mind still aswarm with scattershot thoughts.
“You see any of those storms?”
“Two of them, yessir. From a distance, though.”
“Only way to see one, I’d say,” Stan said with forced jocularity. He was still stunned from the offer.
The pilot grimaced in agreement, an expression that told much of narrow escapes and lost friends. “You kept your skiff well clear?”
“I poled and rowed, both. Prob’ly just lucky with the currents, truth to tell.”
“A time storm attracts ships according to their mass, see? Your rowing was most likely the cause of your salvation,” the pilot said. “An induction ship, despite its power, must be more crafty. Its weight is its doom.”
John sipped his strong beer and said, “I don’t know as I want to go back up there, sir.”
“I’ll make it worth your while.” The pilot squinted at him, as though trying to see something in John’s face that he wasn’t giving away. “I was hoping you might have business back up there.”
Might have business. At once the Zom’s face lurched into John’s mind’s-eye and he felt the barroom close about him, its suffocating air clotted with cigar smoke. The banks of blue fumes swirled amid the seeping yellow glow of filament bulbs which sprouted from the walls, each the size of a man’s head with his hat on. John had kept his mind away from the memory until now but the weight of uncertainty again descended. He could not know if the Zom was his father unless he found it again, questioned it.
“Sir, I’m going to have to give you my reply tomorrow. I have to see to a certain matter right now.”
The surprise in Stan’s and Mr. Preston’s faces was almost amusing. It increased when John stood, bootheels smacking the floorboards loudly from the drink he had put down. He nodded solemnly and without a word plunged into the darkness outside.
Inky shapes still shifted in his mind as he knocked on the door of Mr. Preston’s house. John still felt himself encased in the night.
It was a fitful morning, with grey light piercing a fog and sending traceries across the rooftops along the slumbering river. John could barely see the white picket fence framing Mr. Preston’s yard. The pearly wisps blotted out detail beyond the brick walk which led to the house. This was a grand place, he had to admit, even in such diffuse light. It was porticoed in pale pine, the massive columns topped with flowery capitals. He rapped the iron door knocker again and instantly the brass doorknob turned, as if attached to the knocker. A dwarf answered, a mute servant, and led John along a carpeted hall.
He was unprepared for the grandiosity of a pilot’s lodging, taking in with awe the mahogany furniture, a new electric lamp with yellow-paper shade, and an entire shelf of sound-sculptures. The dwarf retreated, gesturing at a yawning, tongueless mouth and showing the red servant tattoo on his shoulder to explain his silence.
A bounty of travel visions speckled the walls—Above the Falls of Abraham, Volcanic Quest, Heart of Lightness, Struggle Against Destiny—and many of literature, including the fanciful. John yearned to take the sheets and stroke them into luminosity, but as he reached for Time Stream and World-Wrack he heard heavy thumping footsteps and turned to find the pilot in full blue and gold uniform.
“I hope you have settled your other matter,” Mr. Preston said severely.
Only now did John recall clearly his abrupt departure of the night before. The town beyond that raucous room had swallowed memory. He had made his way through narrow streets lined by rude buildings that seemed to lean out over the street, eclipsing the wan sky glow. The moist lanes near the river had been tangled and impossible to navigate without stumbling and stepping on sprawled forms, like bundles of clothing left for trash collection.
The masters of the Zoms left them where they lay, sure that they could not move without further feeding. John took hours to find the slack-jawed face he had seen on the quay, and then another long time before he was sure that the Zom was not merely in its lapsed state of rest. The thing had proved dead, limbs akimbo, stiffening into a hardened parody of a dance.
At morning the burly owner had come by, shrugged at the corpse, and thrown it into his wagon for disposal. John’s questions about the Zom the big man brushed aside—he didn’t know the names, no, nor where they came from, nor from what part of the river they hailed. And the last glimpse John had of that face had unsettled him further, as if in final death the Zom gave its last secret. There was a clear resemblance to his father, though John’s memory from his early boyhood was shrouded by the rage, anguish and poverty of the intervening years.