And the Cap’n’s bellow rang above it all, giving orders—“Belay that! Lever it out, man, heave on that crowbar! Thomson, run there quick! Smash it, son!”
—and abruptly the howling winds faded, the ice ceased surging.
“Ah,” the Cap’n sighed, “at last the pilot has deigned to direct us properly.”
John took some offense at this, for no pilot ever could read the true vector of the time-current flux. Mr. Preston had brought them out of it, which should be fair enough.
There were awful tales of ships truly mispiloted. Of induction craft hurtling uptime out of control—solid iceberg ships, with deep-frozen crew screaming upstream toward the beginning of time. Of downriver runaways, white-hot streaks that exploded long before they could reach the legendary waterfall at the end of eternity.
But the Cap’n reflected on none of that. John learned then that the high station of a pilot implies harsh criticism at the slightest hint of imperfection.
Casks and barrels and hogsheads blocked the quay but could not conceal from the pilot’s nest the sprawling green beauty of the city.
Even the blocks of commercial warehousing sprouted verdant and spring-fresh from the soil. Cairo had perfected the fast-spreading art of growing itself from its own rich loam. This art was much easier than planting and raising trees, only to chop them down, slice them with band saws, plane them out and fashion them elaborately into planks, beams, joists, braces, girders, struts and dowels, all to make shelter.
Such easeful grace demanded a deep sort of knowing, of course. The folk of Cairo fathomed the double-twisted heart of living things.
The Natchez rang three bells as it docked. Uprivermen often had a woman in every port and the bells announced which Cap’n this was, so that the correct lady could come to welcome him—sometimes for only an hour or two layover, in his cabin, before departure for the next port uptime. The vagaries and moods of the time currents led to many a hasty assignation. But the Cap’n might enjoy another such succulent dalliance quite soon—if he were physically able.
A red-faced lady brushed by John on the gangplank as he went ashore. He gave her no notice as he contemplated the overnight here in the river’s biggest city.
His head was crammed with lore he had learned in the pilot’s nest, knowing that his challenge came next. At once he went to Cairo city hall and consulted the log of citizens. There was no notation concerning his father, but then it had been a forlorn hope anyway. His father was never one to let a piece of paper tag along behind like a dog, only to bite him later. John swallowed the disappointment and let his long-simmering anger supply him with fresh energy.
Stan caught up to him and together they patrolled the streets, Stan doing the talking and John striding with hands in pockets, bewitched by the sights.
The self-grown houses rose seamlessly from fruitful soil. Seed-crafters advertised with gaudy signs, some the new neon-piping sort which spelled out whole words in garish, jumpy brilliance—Skillgrower, Houseraiser, even Custom Homeblossoms.
They wandered through raucous bars, high-arched malls, viny factory-circles, and found them smoothly, effortlessly elegant, their atmospheres moist with fragrances which issued from their satiny woods. Women worked looms which grew directly from the damp earth. Stan asked one of these laboring ladies why they could not simply grow their clothes straight on the bush, and she laughed, replying, “Fashion changes much too quick for that, sir!” and then smothered a giggle at Stan’s misshapen trousers and sagging jacket.
This put Stan of a mind to carouse, and soon John found himself strolling through a dimly lit street which reeked of, as Stan put it, “used beer.”
The women who lounged in the doorways here were slatternly in their scarlet bodices and jet-black, ribbed corsets. John felt his face flush and recalled a time long ago, in the county school he had been forced to attend. They had made fun of him there simply because he was from the orphanage. The boys’ athletic coach had given them all a sheet of special paper and a pen that wrote invisibly, with orders to draw a circle for each time they masturbated—“shaking hands with your best friend,” he called it. The invisibility was to preclude discovery and embarrassment.
At the end of a month they had all brought the sheets in. The coach had hung them up in rows and darkened the classroom, then turned on a special lamp. Its violet glow revealed the circles, ranks upon ranks of them, to the suddenly silent boys. “This,” the coach had said, “is the way God sees you. Your inner life.”
The aim of all this displayed sin was to get the boys to cut down on their frequency, for lonely Onan’s dissipation sapped the intellectual skills—or so the theory went. Instead, it led to endless boasting, after they had returned to daylight and each knew his own circle-count, and yet could claim the highest number present, which was one hundred and seven.
John had attained a mere eighty-six, somewhat cowed by the exercise itself, and felt that had he known the end in mind, could have pushed himself over a hundred, easy.
Now in Cairo, with women available for the first time in his life, he had every confidence in his ability, and only a fidgety tautness, but the women beckoning with lacquered leers and painted fingers and arched blue eyebrows somehow did not appeal. He felt that to do this here, while deeper matters troubled his mind, was not right. Stan made some fun of him for this and John reacted with surly swear-words, most fresh-learned from Mr. Preston.
Anger irked his stomach. He left Stan bargaining with a milk-skinned woman who advertised with red hair and hips that seemed as wide as the river, and made his way at random through the darkling city.
Labyrinths of inky geometry enclosed him. Passing conversations came to him muffled and softly discordant as he worked his way among the large commercial buildings near the docks. Here the jobbing trade waxed strong, together with foundries, machine shops, oil presses, flax mills and towering elevators for diverse crops, all springing from the intricately tailored lifecrafts known best in Cairo.
Not that such arts grew no blemishes. Slick yellow fungus coated the cobbled streets, slippery malignancies that sucked at John’s heels, yearning to digest him. Trough-like gutters were awash in fetid fluids, some stagnant and brown-scummed, others running fast and as high as the thick curbstones.
Each building had a mighty cask, several stories high, grown out from the building itself and shooting stilt-roots down to support the great weight of rainwater it held. Never near the river was there enough topsoil to support wells. The passing veils of rain were all Cairo had, and as if to make this point, droplets began to form in the mist overhead and spatter John as he searched.
He descended into a lowland zone of the city, where the streets lay silent, with an empty Sunday aspect. But the wrought-iron symbology on the ramshackle buildings here told the reason. They made heavy, rugged ciphers and monograms, filled in with delicate cobwebs of baffling, intricate weave. John could make out in the gathering gloom the signs of Zom businesses, bearing the skulls and ribbed ornamentation.
It would be just his bad luck, of course, that the worldwall glow would ebb at just this time. The rain dribbled away, leaving a dank cold. He looked upward and saw that far overhead was a broad island of sandy waste, interrupting the worldwall, and so leaving this part of the city permanently darker. So they had decided to put the Zom industry here, in constant gloom.
He peed against a building, reasoning that it would help it to grow just like any plant, though he did modestly slip down a side alley to do it. So John was off the street when a squad of Zom women came by.