"Do you make regular stops on this run?"
"Not this trip. You're my only cargo. But usually, yes. Some regular, some when I'm flagged in. Everywhere a group of farms can give me a dock. If it wasn't for us rivermen, there'd be no Hestia at all. Many's the time I've had to bring Celestine in close to get a family off the porch or had the deck full of sheep and pigs when someone's field's been washed over. We're a stubborn breed, but there's none of us yet learned to breathe water."
Jim brought up tea and sandwiches about noon, into the wheelhouse, the walls of which were cluttered with Merritt's tablets and the corner with a plastic book of charts. Amos slipped a loop on the wheel and kept an eye forward while he ate, pausing to correct course now and again, and now and again to stare at Merrill.
"How old are those?" he asked Merritt finally.
"They're the original survey charts. They're what they gave me to work with."
"You mean the survey a hundred years back?"
"From what you've said and from what I see, I can tell something of the extent of the changes. It's bad. It's a lot worse even than was reported."
Amos washed down a bite of sandwich. "You'll find out more than that. I don't read much: you'll guess that. But I know this valley and this river, and I can show you plenty, how it was and how it is. I can tell you most every sandbar and shift of current from here to Burns' Station."
"And beyond that?"
"No, sir. No one goes up there, and no one will take you there."
"Not for any amount of asking, then?"
"No. No, sir. First of all you'd need to pass white water against the current and there's no boat could do it. And then you're into uncharted river and wild country if you made it. No, I'll do whatever errand-running you want done from the Station to New Hope and points between, but I value my boat and my own neck too much to run beyond the Station. I don't know that I'll convince you of it too early, but there's times you'll be safest just to take advice untried."
"Is the river open year-round between the Station and New Hope?"
"Mostly." Amos waved his cup toward the view. "Shell drop considerable after the fall rains quit. Then there's sandbars where we're riding now high and easy. Come spring when the ice melts in the high country, there'll be pigs swept clear to sea. Then summers, there's seldom any rain and it's sticky hot. The killer floods, those are the ones in spring, the sudden risings. If a man tries to gamble and stay on his land when it's a question of a few feet of crest between him and drowning, well, we lose some few each year that try to outguess the river."
Merritt looked out, braving the wind. The river was very broad at that point, isolating dead trees and small hummocks of earth, fence posts and bits of field, and houses which had ceased to be habitable. Newer homes could be seen occasionally against the backdrop of rougher highlands on either side of the river, fields terraced on the hills. In the north a ragged line of mountains showed as a gray horizon, bristling with trees.
"Is that the Upriver you're so afraid of?" Merritt asked.
"Yonder? Part of it. That's Williams' Heights there, just big forest. Myself, I don't trust any forest, but there's some with the nerve to bed down next to it. Trouble is, it runs on and on forever, right into the Upriver itself, and what lives in the Upriver can live there too, for all you know. I don't like places like that at all; no one does; but there's not so much land left now that folks can be choosy. Some even get brave enough to cut a few trees into the deep forest and clear them new land."
"What's to stop them?"
Amos gave him one of those guarded looks and bit thoughtfully at the sandwich, swallowed again. "Well, Mr. Merritt, it's just well known on Hestia there's things in the forest that don't like axes; and some of them are downright clever about showing it. Little trees nobody misses; but you cut down a big one, now, a really old one, well, your fences could fall down or your livestock could die or your house could catch fire."
"Truth?"
"Truth. And another truth, friend—when you start building your dam up at Burns' Station and backing a lake up into the Upriver, you're going to flush a few things out of there that none of us are going to want for neighbors. But the lake has to be. We'll solve the other problem when it meets us on our own grounds."
"Maybe the dam shouldn't be built there. Maybe it would be better to create several smaller reservoirs up-river."
"Huh. You'll get Hestians into the Upriver when rain falls up."
"Because you're convinced something lives there. But you tell me then, Mr. Selby, how a group of minded beings could have been missed in the first survey and then live next to a human colony for a hundred years without leaving something in the way of tangible evidence they exist."
"We got plenty of evidence. Dead men and livestock."
"Animals could do that. It doesn't take sapients."
"Didn't claim they was human. But clever and mean, yes. Friend, you're in the middle of civilization right now. When you've lived next to an Upriver woods for a month or so, you'll believe in a lot of things." He galvanized himself into sudden action, put down the food and took the wheel, for they were coming into shallow water, little ripples to the starboard side. A house sat on that side, between trees and inlets of floodwater. Heaps of flood-borne brush were banked along the highwater mark, and what land was not flooded was pitted with small lakes permanent enough to grow reeds in profusion.
"See that place?" Amos asked.
"Looks like that farm is lost."
"You set foot out there and you'd go in up to your knees even where it looks solid. Can't work it any more, no way. Only survival crops will grow there now, and that just summertime vegetables. Nothing much. The river used to keep its banks here and this was a beautiful farm. There were levees and a house nearer the river when I was a boy. They lost two children when the first house went. Rebuilt then. The old man lost his wife in the flood this spring. Now he sits in that house with the windows all out and not enough to eat and takes shots at anyone that comes onto his land. He may be dead now. I passed this way by night and didn't see a light. So he's likely gone, or out of lights. Same with this whole forsaken riverside. We know the score, but it's our world, and we'll stay in spite of all them that try to make us go. You want to understand Hestia, friend outsider, well, understand that old man. Understand us that lets him stay. We got no use for Earthmen and Earthmen's attitudes. Mother Earth ain't our mother, and I don't know why you come out here, but I'm sure you've found out by now that we haven't got it. We're a little touchy in temper; a lot shy of outsiders' help. But you help us on our terms: that's help. That's help we can do with. Maybe you got the sense to see that. I hope so."
"If I have to build where you say build, I can't guarantee anything; but if that's the way you want it, that's what you'll get. I'll tell you my opinion on it, but I'll do it if that's my only choice."
"You know, there ain't a man or woman on Hestia that don't know they could pack up and ride the next starship out. But no one's done it, not one. We're stubborn. We stay."
"You think you have the resources to stop the river?"
Amos frowned. "Well, about that, I don't know. I seen the river win every round so far. But we just give a little when it does."
Merrill had expected the boat to tie up at some dock to spend the night: it was a good many days' traveling to Burns' Station. But well after dusk she was still running along at a much reduced speed, with nothing in sight but the distant lonely lights of an occasional house on the southside ridge. The slap and suck of water at the moving hull, the monotonous slow sound of the engine, were all alone in the dark. Celestine held the center of the channel, with one dim lamp burning outside the wheelhouse.