So with fatigue in his bones but a fresh, iron resolve in his spine John made himself stand erect beside the oak mantelpiece and say to Mr. Preston, “I’ll come, sir.”
“Damn good! Here, you had breakfast?”
Cornmeal flapjacks and fritters, brought by the mistress of the house, quickly dominated John’s attention while the pilot regaled him with lore and stories. John managed to keep the details of his long voyage downriver well-muddied, and was distracted from this task by Mr. Preston’s collection of oddments, arrayed along the walls. There were crystals, odd-colored stones betraying volcanic abuse, a circlet of ancestral hair, five flint arrowheads from the fabled days, and some works of handicraft like dozens John had seen before. Beside these were bronze-framed, stiff images of addled-looking children, aged uncles and the like, all arranged awkwardly and in Sunday-suited best for their bout with immortality.
But these oddments were nothing compared with the large transparent cube that dominated the dining room table. It shed cold air and John took it to be ice, but as he ate he saw that no drops ran off the sleek flat sides. Within its blue-white glow small objects of art were suspended—a golden filigree, a jagged bit of quartz, two large insects with bristly feelers, and a miniature statue of a lovely young girl with red hair and a flowing white robe.
He had nearly finished inhaling the molasses-fattened flapjacks and slurping down a pot of coffee when he chanced to notice that one of the insect wings had lowered. Keeping an attentive ear to the pilot, who had launched into what appeared to be a four-volume oral autobiography in first draft, he watched and saw the girl spinning slowly about her right toe, the robe fetching up against her left leg and then gracefully playing out into a spinning disk of velvety delicacy.
By this time the insects had both flapped their transparent gossamer wings nearly through a quarter-stroke. They were both heading toward the girl. Their multifaceted eyes strobed and fidgeted with what to them must be an excited vigor, and to John was a torpid, ominous arabesque.
“Ah, the hunt,” the pilot interrupted his soliloquy. “Beautiful, eh? I’ve been watching it for long enough to grow three beards.”
“The girl, she’s alive.”
“Appears so. Though why she’s so small, I cannot say.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“Far downstream.”
“I never saw such.”
“Nor I. Indeed, I suspect, from the quality of the workmanship, that the girl is real.”
“Real? But she’s no bigger than my thumbnail.”
“Some trick of the light makes her seem so to us, I reckon.”
“And these bugs—”
“They’re nearly her size, true. Maybe they’re enlarged, the opposite of the trick with the girl.”
“And if they aren’t?”
“Then when they reach the girl they will have a merry time.” The pilot grinned. “A week’s pay packet, I just handed it over flat, to purchase this. That li’l golden trinket, it’s revolving, too—see?”
Aghast, John felt a fresh wave of bitterly cold air waft from the cube of silent, slow time. He had an urge to smash the blue-white wedge of molasses-slow tempo, to release its wrenched epochs and imprisoning, collapsed perspectives. But this was the pilot’s object, and such men understood the twists of time better than anyone. Perhaps it was right that these things belonged to them.
Still, he felt relief when he escaped from the dining room and emerged into the cloaking fog outdoors.
They were to boom out of the dock that very day. John had never known such awe as that instilled by his first moment, when he marched up the gangplank and set foot upon the already thrumming deck.
Never before had he done more than gaze in reverence and abject self-abasement at one of the induction ships as it parted the river with its razor-sharp prow. Now Mr. Preston greeted him with a curt nod, quite circumspect compared to the sprawl of the man’s conversation at breakfast. With minor ceremony he received his employment papers. Other crew shook John’s hand with something better than the cool indifference he knew they gave any and all passengers. The customers who paid the costs were of course held in the lowest regard of all those aboard, including the wipe-boys below. John could tell from the somewhat distant, glassy gazes of the men and women of the crew that he was at least considered in the human family, pending.
“You been by that li’l flurry up ahead?” Mr. Preston asked him as they made their way up the three flights of external stairs to the pilot’s nest.
“Nossir. I came ashore, stowed my skiff and walked round it.”
“Ummm. Too bad. Think I’ll nudge out across stream, keep some distance on it.”
“Yessir.”
The loading was finishing, the ship’s barely restrained thirst for the river sending a strong strumming into the air. Freight spun off the wagons and flew aboard at the hands of jostling work gangs, mostly Zoms. Late passengers came dodging and scampering among the boxes and hogsheads awaiting loading. Wives carrying hat boxes and grocery knapsacks urged on sweaty husbands, who lugged carpetbags and yowling babies. Drays and baggage three-wheelers clattered over cobblestones and intersected each other’s trajectories more often than seemed possible from the supposed laws of probability, sending cases and jars smashing. Profanity blued the air. Windlasses snapped into hatches, fore and aft.
John loved the turmoil and racket, the whiz and whir of earnest purpose. The bursar called, “All not goin’, please to get themselfs ashore!” and last bells rang, and the thronged decks of the Natchez gushed their yammering burden onto the gangplanks—a running tide which a few last, late passengers fought. The stage-plank slid in and a tall man came running and tried to jump the distance. He got a purchase on the gunmetal side and a crewwoman hauled him up, but his back pocket opened and his wallet thunked into the river. The crowd ashore laughed and the woman had to stop the man from jumping in after it.
All this John watched from the elevated sanctity of the pilot’s nest. It was an elegant place, glass in so many directions he had to count to be sure there were only four of the transparent walls. The Cap’n stood beside the pilot, both arrayed in their dark blue-gold uniforms, and an eerie whistle sounded. The orange flag ran up the jack-staff and the ship ceased its drift. Momentum surged through the deck and oily smoke belched from the three tall chimneys at the ship’s midships.
The crowd along the quay called last-minute messages and cheered and the ship shot away from them, seeming to accelerate as it caught with induction fields the deep surge of metal beneath the waters. The town dwindled with bewildering speed, people on the quay turning into animated dolls that turned pinkish and mottled as John watched.
“The time flux,” Mr. Preston answered John’s frown. “I locked us onto her right off. We’re seeing their images squeezed and warped.”
Already the shore was dappled with reds and blues as time shifted and streamed about the ship, the slap and heave of currents resounding in deep bass notes that John felt through his big-heeled boots.
To fly across duration itself, to wrench away from the certainty of patient, single-minded time—John felt sour nausea grip his throat. Confusion swamped him as he felt their gut-deep accelerations—a quickening not in mere velocity but in the quantity which he knew governed the world but which no man could sense, the force of tangled space and time together. The firm deck went snake-slithery, thick air hummed and forked about him, the entire world took on a mottled complexion. His body fought for long, aching moments the urgent tows and tugs, his chest tight, bowels watery, knees feather-light—and then somehow his sinews found their equilibrium, without his conscious effort. He gulped in air and found it moist and savory.