An island shrouded by the fog’s ghost-smoke loomed ahead. The current moved the pod to the right past matchstick piles of logs and flooded remnants of bushes and grass that bent downstream and vibrated with the current.
The pod floated definitely low on the right. Joao knew he should go out and pump the float. He knew he had the energy to do the job, but he couldn’t find energy to set himself into motion.
Rhin’s voice intruded: “When did the rain stop?”
Chen-Lhu answered from the rear, “Just before dawn.” He began to cough, then: “Still no sign of our friends.”
“We’re floating low on the right,” Rhin said.
“I was about to see to that,” Chen-Lhu said. “Johnny, I presume I just put the sprayhead tube into the float and work the toggle?”
Joao swallowed, astonished at how grateful he felt that Chen-Lhu had volunteered for this job.
“Johnny?”
“Yes… that’s all you do,” Joao said. “The inspection hole in the float has a simple snap-lock.”
Joao lay back, closed his eyes. He heard Chen-Lhu go out the hatch.
Rhin looked at Joao, noting how tired he appeared. His closed eyes were death’s-head sockets rimmed with shadow.
My latest lover, she thought. Death.
The thought confused her and she wondered at herself that she could find no warmth of feeling this morning toward the man who had drugged her with passion during the night. A tristia post coitum had seized her, and now Joao seemed merely another mote of awareness that had touched her quite by accident and paused to share a moment of explosive brilliance.
There was no love in that thought.
Nor hate.
Her feelings now were as nearly sexless and clinical as they’d ever been. The coupling in the night had been a mutual experience, but morning had reduced it to something without savor.
She turned away, looked downstream.
The fog mist had thinned. Through it she glimpsed a black face of lava rock perhaps two kilometers distant. It was difficult to judge the distance, but it towered above the jungle like a ghost ship.
She heard air sucking in the pump then and noted how the pod had returned to an almost level position.
Presently, Chen-Lhu returned. He brought a brief air of cold dampness that stopped when he sealed the hatch.
“It’s almost cold out there,” he said. “What’s the altimeter reading, Johnny?”
Joao aroused himself, peered at the dash. “Six hundred and eight meters.”
“How far do you think we’ve come?”
Joao shrugged, remained silent.
“As much as a hundred and fifty kilometers?” Chen-Lhu asked.
Joao looked out at the flooded banks rushing past, at the current sucking gnarled, obscene roots. “Perhaps.”
Perhaps, Chen-Lhu thought. And he wondered why he felt so exhilarated and full of energy. He was actually hungry! He dug for the ration packets, distributed them, then ate in wolfing gulps.
A barrage of rain whipped against the windshield. The pod turned and dipped. Another blast of wind shook them. The pod skittered in it across lines of slapping wavelets. The wind diminished, but the rain continued in sheets that blotted all color from the passing shores. The wind died entirely, but still the rain fell, its drops so thick they appeared to jiggle and dance horizontally.
Joao stared out at a mottled granite shore that passed like a surrealist backdrop. The river appeared at least a kilometer wide here, its dirty brown surface turgid and rolling and spotted by clumps of trees, floating sedge islands, drifting logs.
Abruptly, the pod lurched. Something bumped and scraped beneath the floats. Joao held his breath in fear the patched float would be opened to the torrent.
“Shallows?” Chen-Lhu asked.
A water-logged snag lifted out of the river on their left, rolled and dived like a live thing.
Rhin whispered, “The float…”
“It seems to be holding,” Joao said.
A green beetle darted in over the snag, landed on the windshield, waved its antennae at them and departed.
“Anything that happens to us, they’re interested,” Chen-Lhu said.
Rhin said, “That snag—you don’t think…”
“I’m ready to believe anything,” Chen-Lhu said.
Rhin closed her eyes, muttered, “I hate them! I hate them!”
The rain slackened, fell off to occasional drops that spattered the river or thudded against the canopy. Rhin opened her eyes to see pale avenues of blue opening and closing in the clouds.
“Is it clearing?” she asked.
“What’s the difference?” Chen-Lhu asked.
Joao stared out across the rain-flattened grass of a savannah that appeared on their left. The grass ended at an oily green jungle wall some two hundred meters back.
As he looked, a figure emerged from the jungle and waved and beckoned until they drifted out of sight.
“What was that?” Rhin asked, and there was hysteria in her voice.
The distance was too great for certainty, but the figure had looked to Joao like the Padre.
“Vierho?” he whispered.
“It had his appearance, I thought,” Chen-Lhu said. “You don’t suppose…”
“I suppose nothing!”
Ahh, Chen-Lhu thought. The bandeirante is beginning to break down.
“I hear something,” Rhin said. “It sounds like rapids.”
Joao straightened, listened. A faint roaring came to him. “Probably just wind in the trees,” he said. But even as he spoke he knew it was not the wind.
“It is rapids,” Chen-Lhu said. “See that cliff ahead?”
They stared downstream until gusts of wind pushed a black line up the river toward them and pulled a rain veil over the cliff. The downpour whipped around the pod, thudded onto the canopy. As quickly as it had come, the wind passed, and the current slid them forward through a hiss of rain. Presently even the rain faded, and the river with its slick appearance of secret turbulence stretched out like a tabletop display composed on a mirror.
The pod became for Chen-Lhu a toy miniature shrunken by witchery and lost in an immensity of flood.
Over it all stood the black face of the cliff, growing more and more solid with each second.
Chen-Lhu moved his head slowly from side to side, wondering how he knew what they must face beneath that cliff. He felt that he drifted in a moist pocket of air that drained his life from him. The air carried a smell of physical substance, the dank piling of life and death on the forest floor around the river. Rotting and festering odors came over him. Each carried its message: “They are there ahead… waiting.”
“The pod… it won’t fly now, will it?” Chen-Lhu asked.
“I don’t think I can get that float off the river,” Joao said. He wiped perspiration from his forehead, closed his eyes and experienced the nightmare sensation of dreaming through the entire trip to this point. His eyes snapped open.
Stagnant silence settled over the cabin.
The roar of rapids grew louder, but there was still no view of the white water.
A flock of golden-beaked toucans lifted from a stand of palms at a downstream bend. They climbed in a frenzied cloud, filling the air with their dog-pack yelps. Then they were gone and the sound of the rapids remained. The cliff loomed above the palms just around the bend.
“We have five or six minutes of fuel… maybe,” Joao said. “I think we should go around that bend under power.”
“Agreed,” Chen-Lhu said. He fastened his safety harness.
Rhin heard the sound, buckled her own harness.
Joao found the cold buckles of his harness beside him, snapped them in place as he studied the dash. His hands began to tremble as he thought of the delicacy required in manipulating the throttle. I’ve done it twice, he told himself.