A bootless question.
Rhin turned in her sleep, pressed close to Joao. “Mmmmm,” she murmured.
Our friends will not hold off the attack much longer, Chen-Lhu thought. It’s obvious they’ve just been awaiting the proper time and place. Where will it come—in a rock-filled gorge, at a narrow place? Where?
The thought turned every shadow outside into a source of peril, and Chen-Lhu wondered at himself that he could have allowed his mind to play such a fear-inspiring trick.
Still, he strained his senses against the night.
There was a waiting-silence outside, a feeling of presence in the jungle.
This is nonsense! Chen-Lhu told himself.
He cleared his throat.
Joao turned against the seat, felt Rhin’s head cradled against him. How quietly she breathed.
“Travis,” he whispered.
“Yes?”
“Time’s it?”
“Go back to sleep, Johnny. You’ve a couple more hours.”
Joao closed his eyes, lay back into his seat, but deep sleep evaded him. Something about the cabin… something. There was something here demanding his recognition. His awareness came farther and farther out of sleep.
Mildew.
It was stronger in the cabin than it had been—and there was the acrid tang of rust.
The smells filled Joao with melancholy. He could feel the pod deteriorating around him, and the pod was a symbol of civilization. These imperative odors represented all human decay and mortality.
He stroked Rhin’s hair, thought: Why shouldn’t we grab a little happiness here, now? Tomorrow we could be dead… or worse.
Slowly, he sank back into sleep.
A flock of parakeets announced the dawn. They chattered and gossiped in the jungle beside the river. Smaller birds joined the chorus—flutterings, chirps, twitters.
Joao heard the birds as though from an enormous distance pulling him upward to wakefulness. He awoke, sweating, feeling oddly weak.
Rhin had moved away from him in the night. She slept curled against her side of the cabin.
Joao stared out at blue-white light. Smoky mist hid the river upstream and downstream. There was a feeling of moist, unhealthy warmth in the closed cabin’s air. His mouth tasted dry and bitter.
He sat up straight, leaned forward to look through the overhead curve of windshield. His back ached from sleeping in a cramped position.
“Don’t look up for searchers, Johnny,” Chen-Lhu said.
Joao coughed, said, “I was just looking at the weather. We’re going to get rain soon.”
“Perhaps.”
So gray, that sky, Joao thought. It was an empty slate prepared as a setting for one vulture that sailed into view across the treetops, wings motionless. The vulture tipped majestically, beat its wings once… twice… and flew upstream.
Joao lowered his gaze, noted that the pod had become part of a drifting island of logs and brush during the night. He could see parasite moss on the logs. It was an old island—at least one season old… no, older. The moss was thick.
As he watched, an eddy came between the pod and the logs. They parted company.
“Where are we?” Rhin asked.
Joao turned to see her sitting up, awake. She avoided his eyes.
What the hell? he thought. Is she ashamed?
“We are where we’ve always been, my dear Rhin,” Chen-Lhu said. “We’re on the river. Are you hungry?”
She considered the question, found that she was ravenous.
“Yes, I’m hungry.”
They ate in quick silence with Joao growing more and more convinced that Rhin was avoiding him. She was first out the hatch to the float and stayed a long time. When she returned, she lay back in the seat, pretending sleep.
To hell with her, Joao thought. He went out the hatch, slammed it after him.
Chen-Lhu leaned forward, whispered close to Rhin’s ear, “You were very good last night, my dear.”
She spoke without opening her eyes: “To hell with you.”
“But I don’t believe in hell.”
“And I do?” She opened her eyes, stared at him.
“Of course.”
“Each in his own way,” she said, and she closed her eyes.
For some reason he couldn’t explain, her words and action angered him, and he tried to goad her with what he knew of her beliefs: “You are a terrible aboriginal calamity!”
Again, she spoke without opening her eyes: “That’s Cardinal Newman. Stuff Cardinal Newman.”
“You don’t believe in original sin?” he jeered.
“I only believe in certain kinds of hell,” she said, and again she was looking at him, the green eyes steady.
“To each his own, eh?”
“You said it; I didn’t.”
“But you did say it.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes! You said it!”
“You’re shouting,” she said.
He took a moment to calm himself, then, in a whisper: “And Johnny, was he good?”
“Better than you could ever be.”
Joao opened the hatch and entered the cabin before Chen-Lhu could answer, found Rhin staring up at him.
“Howdy, Jefe,” she said. And she smiled, a warm, intimate, sharing smile.
Joao answered the smile, slipped into his seat. “We’re going to hit rapids today,” he said. “I can feel it. What were you shouting about, Travis?”
“It was nothing,” Chen-Lhu said, but his voice still grated with anger.
“It was an ideological issue,” Rhin said. “Travis remains a militant atheist to the end. Me, I believe in heaven.” She stroked Joao’s cheek.
“Why do you think we are near rapids?” Chen-Lhu asked. And he thought: I must divert this conversation! This is a dangerous game you play with me, Rhin.
“Current’s faster, for one thing,” Joao said. He stared out the front windows. A new, surging character definitely had come over the river. Hills had drawn closer to the channel. More eddies trailed their lines from the shores.
A band of long-tailed monkeys began pacing the pod. They roared and chittered through the trees along the left bank, only to abandon the game at a river bend.
“Every creature I see out there, I have to ask myself: Is that really what it seems?” Rhin said.
“Those are really monkeys,” Joao said. “I think there are some things our friends cannot imitate.”
The river straightened now, and the hills pressed closer. Thick twistings of hardwood trees along both shores gave way to lines of sago palms backed by rising waves of the jungle’s omnipresent greens. Only infrequently was the green broken by smooth red-skinned trunks of guayavilla leaning over the water.
Around another bend, and they surprised a long-legged pink bird feeding in the shallows. It lifted on heavy pinions, flew downstream.
“Fasten your seatbelts,” Joao said.
“Are you that certain?” Chen-Lhu asked.
“Yes.”
Joao heard buckles snapping, fastened his own harness, looked at the dash to review Vierho’s changes in controls. Igniter… firing light… throttle. He moved the wheel; how sluggish it felt. One silent prayer for the patch on the right hand float, and he set himself in readiness.
The sound came as a faint roaring like wind through trees. They felt another quickening of the current that swept the pod around a wide bend, turning in an eddy until it faced directly downstream, and there, no more than a kilometer away, they saw the snarled boiling of white water. Foam and misting spume hurled itself into the air. The sound was a crashing drum roar growing louder by the second.