Then the river seemed to open itself, revealing first the foaming feet and then the marvelous high swoop of the arcs. Silently they churned at their feet, sending waves to announce their power. Yet as the Natchez came up, holding tight to the opposite shore, the water was glass-smooth, with mercury breaking at midriver and sending spectral flags of glittering mist into an eerily still air.
This tranquility fractured. A wall of thunder shook the glass windows of the pilot’s nest.
“Whoa!” Mr. Preston called and slammed on the power. The induction motors sent a shock through the decking.
“It look the way you seen it last?” Mr. Preston never took his eyes from the arcs, which were shimmering pink and blue now.
“Yessir, only the tall one, it had a bigger foot.”
“You shoot down through here?”
“Nossir, stayed out by that sandbar.”
“Damn right you were, too.”
John had, in the chop and splash of it, been given no choice whatever, but he said nothing, just held on. The deck bucked, popped, complained.
“Eddy running here up the bank to past the point,” Mr. Preston said, betraying some excitement despite himself. “Might get us through without we have to comb our hair afterward.”
They went flying up the shore so close that twigs snapped off on the chimneys. Mist churned the air fever-pink and drumroll bass notes came up through John’s boots. “Hold on for the surge!” Mr. Preston called, as if anyone wasn’t already, and it hit.
The Natchez struck the vortex whorl plunging by near the point. It stretched clear across the river this time, an enormous mouth of mercury and bromium seething brown and silver together in smeared curves. The ship whirled around, John thought as his stomach lurched, like a favorite top his mother had given him, possessing the mysterious ability to stand so long as it spun.
This abstract memory lasted one breath and then water crashed over the pilot’s nest and smashed in the aft window. The ship careened to port. Time-torques whipsawed the groaning timbers. An eddy seized her and crunched one of her chimneys into pathetic torn tin. Concussion clapped both John’s ears and left his head ringing. Lightning-quick flashes of ruby radiance forked from the river and ran caressing over the upper decks. Shouts. Screams.
Athwart the current, then with it, the Natchez shot free of the howling whorl. Within a mere moment they brought up hard in the woods at the next bend. Ordinarily this would have been an embarrassment for a pilot, but as it came from passing uptime against the arcs, it was a deliverance, a penalty, like a stingy tip left after a banquet.
In the lapsed quiet afterward they drummed upstream and John watched the shoreline for signs he remembered, but mostly to find the launch carrying the dark-clothed figure.
He did not tell anyone that, but Mr. Preston gave him sidewise study-filled glances now and then. Stan, after the obligatory ragging of John for having shied away from the women of easy virtue, kept pestering him about finding hydrogen hats. So John spent long hours pretending, watching beady-eyed the dense, uncut forest roll by.
To him the richness here was vaster than downriver, thicker and mysterious beyond ready expression. He had not the wit nor especially the years to savor it fully; taste comes with age and is perhaps its only reward, though some call the same thing wisdom.
He saw the great slow-working chains of cause and effect on the river—forces which, though elusive in the redolent natural wealth, in hard fact underpinned all the sweeping vistas, the realms of aery compass, and infinitesimal machineries of wood and leaf. The young must make their way in a world which is an enormous puzzle, so he watched the shifting hues quick-eyed, a student of the forever fluid, knowing that the silver river might foam suddenly to suck him under or contrariwise spew him aloft in a frothy geyser—all beautiful events, he supposed, but they would leave him no less dead.
John kept lively advising Mr. Preston on reefs and bars. He inspected the passing acres of lumber rafts, great pale platforms behind which the launch could conceal itself. Likewise each bulky barge and the trading scows which peddled from farm to farm, the peddler’s family hanging out washing on deck and kids calling hullos. So when Stan shouted up from the passenger deck, “See that! Must be! Must be!” John felt a spur of irritation at being distracted from his work.
Stan scampered aft and poled aboard some floating debris, then had the temerity to carry it forward to the pilot’s nest.
Mr. Preston scowled and looked to bite his moustache at the sight of a mere deckhand intruding, but before John could shoo Stan out he saw the flower-like grey thing Stan carried.
“It’s a hat! A positive hat,” Stan burbled. “Pure hydrogen—worth plenty on its own, wager me—and lookee here.”
Stan proudly displayed brooches and pins mounted into the gunmetal-grey thing, which to John’s immense surprise surely did resemble a hat. It was nearly weightless yet hard and the jewels gleamed with inner radiance.
“And you led me straight on it, too, John, I’ll not forget,” Stan said. “I’ll share out the proceeds, yessir.”
“Uh, sure thing.”
Mr. Preston’s stormy face had turned mild as he studied the hat. “Never seen anything like this. How far upriver you say you come from?” He peered at John.
“Good bit further,” was all John could say, for indeed that was so, but the shore already looked odd and contorted to him, as though his memory was warping.
That was nothing compared to the consternation he felt but could not give a hint of, for the hat story was total yarning—yet here was an actual, in-fact bejeweled hydrogen hat, worth many a month’s pay.
His befuddlement got swept away soon enough by the twisty demands of the river. Under Mr. Preston he was coming to see that the face of the wedded water and metal was a wondrous book, one in a language dead to him before but now speaking cherished secrets. Every fresh point they rounded told a new tale. No page was empty. A passenger might be charmed by a churning dimple on its skin, but to a true riverman that was an italicized shout, announcing a wreak or reef of wrenching space-time vortex about to break through from the undercrust of worldwall.
Passengers went ooh and aahhh at the pretty pictures the silver river painted for them without reading a single word of the dark text it truly was. A lone log floating across the prow could be in truth a jack-jawed beast bent on dining upon the tasty wooden hull. A set of boiling, standing rings spoke of a whorl which could eat an entire induction disk.
Mr. Preston would sometimes muse out loud as they rounded a point and beheld a fresh vista, “That slanting brown mark—what you make of that? I’d say a bar of ground-up metal, dissolving now in the bromine current. See that slick place? Shoaling up now, be worse when we head back down. River’s fishing for induction ships right there, you mark.”
But mostly Mr. Preston asked John the questions, for the river perpetually tore itself down, danced over its own banks, made merry of memory. They saw a farmer had shoved down pilings to hold his ground, even set a crazy-rail fence atop it, only to have the blithe momentum strip and pry and overrun his fetters, break his handcuffs, and laugh as the lawless currents—seeming enraged by this confinement—stripped his worldly dominion.
Mr. Preston brought aboard a local “memory man” to help them through a set of neck-twisting oscillations, and the fellow displayed the affliction John had heard of but never witnessed. To remember everything meant that all events were of the same size.