“Shut up, boy. We’re running downtime.”
Even the Cap’n could not overrule a pilot reversing course for safety. John stood frozen as the launch cut cross-river. Then he did not think any more but simply ran, down the iron stairs and pine gangway and then was in the water, flailing about him for a desperate moment and then striking for shore. Stan shouted behind him but he did not look around. The shore was pretty close and it lay near where the launch would end up, he estimated. But then he heard a whooshing boom, like a giant drawing its breath, and a funnel mouth of the whorl came skating on the choppy silver waters. It swooped with trainwreck malevolence down upon the Natchez and drew it up, elongating the decks like rubber stretched to its limit and then cracking—fracturing time with a rolling boom. A deckhand jumped overboard and his body stretched to translucent thinness.
The Natchez squeezed and contorted and obeyed the call of warping forces. It shot up the whorl-mouth. Time-tides wrenched and wracked it and then it was gone in a brilliant last pearly flash. The glare burned John’s face.
John had no time to think or mourn. The mouth reeled, crackled and snaked and swept down upon him. He had time to gulp in air. Burning orange foam broke over him. Legs, arms—both stretched involuntarily, as though some God were playing with his strings—yet he was weightless. He knew he must be rising up the whorl but he felt a sickened, belly-opening vacancy of infinite falling. He struggled not to fill his lungs as the foam thronged at his skin, infested his nose, pried at his eyelids. Don’t breathe! was all he could think as he prepared for the time-crushed impact his instincts told him was coming at the end of such a protracted fall.
He smacked hard. Bobbed to the surface. Paddled, gasping. Ignored the wave-wracked waters. Made the shore and flopped upon it.
He found the launch upstream, backed into a copse. It was hidden just the way he had done with his skiff and he smiled without humor.
A sweet dust of time blew high above the river and there was no sign of the whorl. Or of the Natchez.
John followed the boot tracks away from the launch. They led inland, so there was no time pressure to fight. His clothes dried out as he walked beneath a shimmering patch of burnt-gold worldwall that hung tantalizingly behind roiling clouds.
Inland the lush forest dribbled away into scrub desert. He realized his father might back around on him so he retraced his steps and erased signs of his passage from the water and onto safe stone. He avoided vegetation where possible and slid through bushes so that stems bent but did not break. This was crucial, for a broken stem cannot be fixed without careful cutting and even so, a sure reader of signs would catch it. Leaving stems or branches pointing the way you came was bad, too. They had to be gently urged back to a random pattern. He mussed up a scraped bush and tree so that it looked to be from an animal, from biting or itch-easing. Stealth spelled safety.
His head pounded with a mysterious headache that worked its way into his eyes. So much had happened but he put it aside, not thinking about Mr. Preston or Stan, just keeping on. It got dryer and a big-winged thing with teeth flapped overhead, eyeing him for possibilities. He flung a rock at it.
He wished for a blunderbuss tree, recalling the man who had threatened him with one of the awkward weapons. But a big fallen branch served to make a club after he stripped the bark away.
The boot tracks were steady, no heels dug in from haste. He had grown up well above here but knew the manner of empty spaces better than the rich riverland and so let his senses float out ahead of him. Once he reached up and the hand was there, shaking his with calm certainty.
Everything in the land fled from his footsteps. Lizards scattered into the nearest cracked rock. Four-winged quail hovered in shadow, hoping you’d take them for stones, but at the last moment they lost their nerve and burst into frantically flapping birds. Snakes evaporated, doves squeaked skyward, rabbits crazylegged away in a dead heat. Fox, midget mountain horn, coyote—they melted into legend, leaving only tracks and dung. The heart of the desert was pale sand, a field whose emptiness exposed life here for what it was: conjured out of nothingness, bound for it, too. Desert plants existed as exiles from each other, hoarding their circles of water collection done silently beneath the sand by single-minded roots. Vacancy was life. He had learned to think that way since his father left the burning house.
He caught a smell fetid and pestiferous and knew instantly that his father would be drawn to it. An upwelling—he worked his way around it by nose alone. But when he looked down into the bowl-like field he could see only sprawled dead. Cautiously he ventured out. Men in armor lay putrefying, faces puffed and lips bruised. Most were gutted, appearing to give birth to their own entrails.
The time-whorls sometimes did this, disgorging people or matter from times and places no one knew. What the induction ships did by laboring upstream a flick of space-time could accomplish in an instant. Sometimes carrion like this could still be saved for the Zom business.
John turned to merge again with the brush and there he was.
The face—angular, hollow-eyed, a familiar cut to the jawline and the downcurved mouth. John compared it with the last sharp image, the portrait framed in conflagration and carried now for a dozen immemorial years in his mind, taken out and studied every day. Yes. He was sure. The father.
“What do you want?” The voice was low and edged.
“Justice.”
“Who are you?” The eyes showed skittering fear.
“You know me.”
“In these places? Don’t know what I know anymore. Nothing’s regular. You’ve run me far uptime. Blew out the i-boat. Dunno what the hell this place even is. I—”
“You fled the house.”
“What?” The face constricted as though wolfdark memories pressed against it. Then it relaxed. “Damnfire! You’re talking that far back?”
“You know I am. She died in there.”
A long silence. The man studied him as if looking for an edge, some advantage. Or was there some recognition? “Yes. Yes. All past now though. Listen, the family was finished.”
“It will be when this is done.”
The man squinted as clouds above parted and golden glare descended. John sensed his uncertainty and knew this was the moment and stepped forward quickly without thinking any more. He had been thinking over a decade and was tired of that.
The man’s face flickered with sudden recognition and his mouth shaped a cry John was never to hear. He put up an arm and to John’s surprise there was no weapon in it. John hesitated for only an instant. He swung the branch as a club, once, twice, three—and the man’s head split open. Without saying another word.
He sat up from the blur of sleep and sucked in cloying, damp air, the reek of a room permanently perfumed. Utter blackness, which was unusual. For a long moment he could only remember the time-whorl and the Natchez and then the rest of it came back.
It had taken a day’s work to fashion a raft from blown-down trees at the riverside—the legacy of the whorl, he reckoned—and lash it firmly. He had lain on the raft for days with a fatigue he could not explain. He had the man’s clothes in a bundle and used it as a pillow but could not look at them beyond that. Fishing was poor and he was skeleton-thin by the time he saw the arcs above Cairo. He knew enough then to pole ashore, barely making it against the sharp reef-shaped current. Then he spent two days walking downstream, the time-pressure sickening him. He was eating leaves by the time he saw the distant church steeples of Cairo.