“Steady.” Mr. Preston had been eyeing him, he now saw. “I reckoned you’d come through, but can’t be sure till it’s done.”
“What if I hadn’t?”
The pilot shrugged. “Put you ashore next stop, nothing else for it.”
“What about passengers?”
“It’s easier down below. Up here, the tides are worse.”
“Tides?” He studied the river’s expanse, which looked table-flat from here.
“Not river tides—time-tides. Passengers with addled heads and stomachs can just lie down till we reach their getoff point. Most, anyway.”
John had always figured that the job of a pilot was to keep his ship on the river, which was not a considerable feat, since it was so wide. Silently watching Mr. Preston trim and slip among the upwellings of rich brown mud, and then slide with liquid grace along a burnt-golden reef of bromium metal, he saw the dancer’s nimbleness and ease that came from the whirling oak-spoked master wheel, the orchestrated animal mutter of the induction motors, the geometric craft of rudder and prow. To have this elegant gavotte interrupted was not merely an inconvenience, and dangerous, but an aesthetic atrocity.
This John learned when a trading scow came rushing down the washboard-rough main current and into the Natchez’s path. Rather than perturb his elegant course, Mr. Preston ran across the scow’s two aft steering oars. Scarcely had the snapping and crunching ceased than a volley of gnarled profanity wafted up from the clutch of red faces shooting by to starboard. Mr. Preston’s face lit up with a positive joy, for here were fit targets who could, unlike the Natchez’s crew, talk back.
Joy of joys! He snatched open the roller window and stuck his head out and erupted back at the scow. And as the two ships separated and the scowmen’s maledictions grew fainter, Mr. Preston poured on both volume and ferocity, calling upon gods and acts John had never heard of. When Mr. Preston rolled the window shut on its spool the pilot was emptied of malice, all tensions of the departure now well fled.
“My, sir, that was a good one,” a voice said at John’s elbow. It was Stan, beaming with appreciation of the pungent profanity.
Not an opportune appearance. Mr. Preston skewered him with a glare. “Deckhands with opinions? Nose to the planking, you!”
So it was hours before John learned why Stan was on the Natchez at all, for Stan spent his time manicuring the already immaculate-looking pilot’s nest and then the iron stairs and pine gangways nearby. When John found him slurping a steaming cup of blackbean in the rear galley Stan waxed eloquent.
“Treasure, that’s why I signed on. Deckhand pays next to nothin’ and the time-current made me sick a sec or two, but I’m going to stick it out.”
“Uh, treasure?”
“I’m already looking for those hydrogen hats. Nobody never spied any this far downstream, so I figure you overshot, John, coming as far down as us. They got to be above us, for sure.”
John nodded and listened to Stan gush about the star sapphires and fat rubies awaiting them and barely avoided laughing and giving it all away. On the other hand, it had brought him a friend in a place he found daunting.
“Too bad you had to give up your quest, though,” Stan said slyly.
“What?” John was using a bowl of bluebeans to keep his mouth busy and was brought up short by this odd remark.
“You overshot another way. That Zom was who you wanted to find. Only you wanted the man in his first life, and that lies upstream.”
How Stan could swallow whole the hydrogen hat story and yet put together the truth about John’s father from little slivers was a confoundment. John acknowledged this with a grunt and a begrudging nod, but cut off further talk.
He had learned early in his downstreaming not to allow others to indulge in yet another sentimental tale of a poor boy without a mother’s love or a father’s strong arm, heaved all unfriended upon the cold charity of a censorious world. That was not the truth of it and if he did tell them true they drew back in white-eyed horror.
The river’s easy water lay close ashore. There the deep streams of bromium and mercury allowed the induction coils a firm grip, while the water current sped best in midstream. No vaporizing, hull-searing bromium streams broke surface here, so the watch was comparatively at ease.
Mr. Preston explained that the Natchez had to hug the bank, thus separating it from the downstreaming craft that lazed in the middle, harvesting the stiff current. John learned a few of the deft tricks for negotiating the points, bends, bars, islands and reaches which encumbered the route. He resolved early that if he ever became a pilot he would stick to downtiming and leave the uptiming to those dead to caution.
But the time storm afflicted both types of craft.
Murmuring dark fell as they cut across river before the whorl of time that awaited. It rose siphon-like at midriver, whereas reports as recent as yesterday back in town had said it clung to the shore opposite where the Natchez now picked its way.
“Moving quick, it is,” Mr. Preston said sternly at the wheel.
The whirling foam-white column dimpled and reddened the images of forest and plain above it. John stood to the corner of the pilot’s nest and soon exhausted everything he could remember about seeing the storm days before, which proved of no use, for the tempest had grown and shaped itself into a twisted figure-eight knot that spewed black water and grey-metal fountains.
Rain pelted the pilot’s-nest windows. The cyclone air sucked light from around them. Blue-black traceries made a fretwork above. Toward shore John saw the trees dim into spider-web outlines. Winds whipped and blasted at the Natchez, bending trees and turning up the pale underside of their leaves so that waves of color washed over the canopy. Trees tossed their arms as if in panic and with a shriek one of the Natchez’s chimneys wrenched and split and the top half flopped down on the foredeck. Crew ran out to cut it free and toss it overboard. John saw Stan with them, sawing frantically as the wind blasted them nearly off their feet. Peals of profanity blossomed on lips, so close John could read them, but a gust whipped the words away.
This was no ordinary wind. It ripped and cut the air, warping images so that men laboring seemed to go in agonizing slow motion, then frantic speed, all the while stretched and yanked and pounded out of shape by invisible forces.
Then—sssssttt!—a vacuum hiss jerked a brilliant glory-filled radiance into the sky. An ethereal glow flooded the deck. Yet ashore lay in gloom. Treetops plunged and wrestled with imaginary antagonists. At midriver foam spouted.
Another ssssstttt! and a crash and the ship fell a full man’s height, splashing itself into a bath of hot effervescence. In a fragment of a second the air got dark as sin and thunder rumbled across the sky like empty barrels rolling down stone stairs.
And then they were out, the gale was a scenic protuberance on a mild river again, and the pilot said, “Temporal turbulence was mild this go.”