The short, swarthy man sat in the pilot’s nest and guided them well enough through the first two swaybacks, with reefs and snags galore, but on the third began to tell the history of the snaggle-toothed tree that had fallen in at the lee shore and so stopped them from using the close-pass there, and from that tree went on to the famous boiling summer which had scorched the tree, and from the summer to a minute rendition of the efforts of Farmer Finn, who had saved his crops by building a sluice-diverter of the river, to Finn’s wife who run off with a preacher, only people then found out he was no preacher at all but in fact a felon escaped from some jail uptime, which suggested to the memory man the way laws had to be deformed here to accord with the passage back and forth in time of relatives and wives and husbands, which brought forth the scandal of the lady in a red dress who had taken on all the men at a dance once, hiking her skirts for each in turn plain as day, outside against the wall, and from there it was but a step to the intricate discussion of dance steps the memory man had learned (since he learned anything merely by seeing it once), complete with demonstrations, so that Mr. Preston had to yank the man’s attention back to the veering river before it gutted them on an aluminum reef.
Within minutes, though, the memory man would drift into more tedious jaw about whatever strayed into view of his panoramic mind. Mr. Preston bore this for the swings and sways of those bends, and then put the memory man ashore with full pay. The man didn’t seem to mind, and left still maundering on about great accidents of the past and where their survivors lived now and how they were doing.
John silently envied the man, though, for at least he did know exactly that one short portion of the river, whereas John’s own memory betrayed him at each new rounding. Islands and bars arose from the water where none had been before, his mind told him. The river ran in new side-channels and had seemingly cut across headlands to forge fresh entries, thrusting aside monumental hillsides and carving away whatever misunderstandings had arisen with the spongy, pliant forest.
“This sure looks to be a horseshoe curve here. Remember it?” Mr. Preston would ask, and John would peer through the misty wreaths which often wrapped the river, and shake his head.
On this particular one they hauled ashore, because a passenger thought he lived near here, though could not spot any landmark either, but wanted to try his own luck. John went ashore and slogged through brambles and sandy loam across the neck of the horseshoe, arriving well before the Natchez got there, coming hard-chuffing around the curve.
These branches and inlets lay in his past, yet despite their here-and-now solidity they had wriggled into new shapes, oddities of growth, even whole fresh porticoed master-houses. Slowly it dawned on John that none of this surprised Mr. Preston.
“Every time we go upriver, things lay different,” Mr. Preston said, twirling a toothpick in his mouth as his only sign of agitation.
“Damnfire,” John said, a new curse he had picked up and was proud to sport. “What use is a memory man, then?”
“Better than nothing, is all.”
They were near to drawing all the water there was in the channel, a curious tide having sucked streamers up and into the clouds above. The hull caught and broke free and then snagged again, so Mr. Preston had to order the induction motors up to full, wrenching them off the worldwall bed of the river by sheer magnetic ferocity.
“Sure seems that way,” John said. “Why’d you hire me as guide, then?”
“Your knowledge is for certain fresher than any I could find. And you’re young enough, you don’t think you know everything.”
They were going slow, deck humming, riding on magnetic cushions that John thought of as bunched steel coils. Mr. Preston said that wasn’t far wrong, only you couldn’t feel or see the wires. They were more like the wrestling ghosts of spirit-world steel, he said.
“Sometimes a time-tide will come and cut a little gutter across a neck of land,” Mr. Preston went on. “I saw one once while I was shipping downstream, no bigger than a garden path it was. Shimmered and snaked and snapped yellow fire. Now, there were handsome properties along that shore. But inland from there was a worthless old farm. When I came back uptime on the old Reuben, that li’l time-twist had cut a big course through. Diverted the whole damn river, it did. Shooting off crimson sparklers, still. That old farm was now smack on the river, prime land, worth ten times more. The big places that had been on the river stood inland. No ship could reach them.”
“Lucky,” John said.
Mr. Preston grinned. “Was it? Lot of people got mad, accused the family that owned the old farm of starting that time-wrinkle.”
“How could they?”
“Who’s to say? Is there a way to figure it? The past is labyrinth, truly. Give time a shove here, a tuck there? Anybody who knows how, sure don’t talk about it.”
But John felt himself lost in a dense, impenetrable maze of riverways. Coming upstream against the time-pressure now refracted the very air.
Smooth and serene the majestic mud-streaked expanse had seemed as he drifted down obliviously in his skiff. Now the shore was morasses and canebrakes and even whole big plantations, the grand main houses beautiful in their ivory columns. He often gazed up at the world hanging overhead, lands of hazy mystery. A ripple passed, flexing the entire worldwall, and John felt suddenly that they all lived in the entrails of a great beast, an unknowable thing that visited the most awful of calamities upon mere humans by merely easing its bowels.
The whorl came upon them without warning. It burst through a channel of bromium, coiling like a blue-green serpent up into the shimmering air. A thunderclap banged into the pilot’s nest and blew in two windows.
John saw it from the middeck where he was helping Stan and two men with some baling. The glass scroll window shattered but did not catch Mr. Preston in the face, so when John raced in the pilot was already bringing the Natchez about, clawing away from the swelling cloud-wrack.
The whorl soared, streamers breaking from it to split the sky with yellow forked lightning. John saw it hesitate at its high point, as if deciding whether to plunge on across the world itself and bury itself in the forest-wall hanging far overhead. Then it shook itself, vigorous with the strength of the newborn, and shot riverward.
The silver river seemed to yearn for this consummation, for it buoyed in up-sucking ardor and kissed the descending column. Instantly a foam of muddy water and a mist of metal soared through the time-whorl, writing a great inverted U that bubbled and frothed and steam-hissed amid more sharp thunder-cracks.
“Damn!” Mr. Preston cried. “That’ll block us for sure.”
John held tight to a stanchion. “Can’t we shoot by—”
“It’ll rip-tide us to pieces, we try that.”
A blistering gale broke over the Natchez. “You figure it’ll last long?”
“This big a one, you bet.”
The Natchez beat steadily away from the whorl, which twisted and shuffled its water-feet around on the skin of the river. Mud and logs sucked up into it tumbled and seemed to break apart and come together again. In the midst of what looked like a water-wave John saw a log burst into orange flame. It turned in slow motion, streaming black smoke, and smacked full into the river.
Then he saw the launch. It had been across the river, probably hiding among some weeping willows. It broke out of there as the whorl lashed sidewise and John saw a dark figure at the helm. “Wait! Let’s stay awhile, see if it—”