It visibly infuriated Titus that, lacking an arm, he couldn’t manage a paddle himself. But he insisted on riding at the stern, where a crude rudder had been attached.
Once they were all loaded aboard, their stuff lashed down, Chu shoved them off from the bank with a mighty jab of his paddle against a rock, and they drifted out toward the center of the river. Titus was at the stern with his rudder, Stef at the prow with her back to the river. Of the four rowers, Chu and Clodia sat together to Stef’s right, and Beth and Mardina, mother and daughter, to her left. For the first couple of miles they were all silent, save for Titus’s curt commands: “That’s it, we’ll keep to the center where it’s deepest… Paddle a bit less vigorously, Chu and Clodia—you’re too strong and you’re shoving us to the bank. We’ll balance you up better when we stop… That’s it… If we can let the current take the boat away without us having to do any work at all, I’ll be happy…”
Stef found herself anxiously watching the deck under her feet, looking for leaks. She had crossed interstellar space in kernel-drive starships, and had even walked between realities through a technology that was entirely alien. And yet a ride in this ramshackle craft, with just a few meters of water beneath her, was somehow more terrifying than all of that.
But they hadn’t gone far before she was distracted by the atmosphere in the boat itself. Mardina glared at Chu and Clodia, and Clodia glared back.
“Ouch,” Stef said at length. “I never heard a silence so loud. What the hell’s the matter?” But of course she anticipated the reply.
“Her,” Mardina burst out, pointing a finger at Clodia.
Clodia looked ready to leap across the boat and take her rival on.
“Sit still,” Titus commanded his daughter. “Wield your oar. You too, Mardina. Snarl at each other if you must, but you will not imperil this vessel… What’s this about?”
Clodia glared. “Do you really not understand, Father?”
Titus sighed. “Being not entirely without senses—yes, Mardina, Chu, I’ve seen you two sneaking off in the night.”
Chu hung his head, Stef observed, as if he were still a slave who had been caught doing wrong.
“But,” Titus said heavily, “that doesn’t mean you’re lovers. Just because you sleep together. I mean, I remember once on campaign—”
Clodia growled, “Oh, Father.”
“Well—whether or not, Mardina, I don’t see what your problem is with Clodia.”
Mardina flared. “You see us sleep together but you don’t see what she’s doing? The way she’s sitting beside him now. The way she looks at him. Leans against him. Holds onto his arm when the boat rocks—”
“Don’t be absurd.”
“Actually, Titus,” Beth said with a rueful smile, “I noticed the same thing. I don’t think there’s any malice, though, Mardina. I don’t think she can help it. Look, girls, the problem isn’t with the two of you, or with Chu. It’s just that there’s only the three of you, three youngsters—in this boat, on this whole wretched planet. This problem was always going to come up.”
Mardina glared at her. “Oh, how helpful that is, Mother. So what do you suggest we do? Kill each other over Chu, the way those colonists did on Per Ardua like you’re always telling me?”
“Ideally we will avoid that,” Titus said with a dangerous calm. “But while you three work it out, here are the military rules. We’re on a mission here. And we also face a challenge to survive, as simple as that. You three can bed-hop as much as you like,” and he kept his eyes averted from his daughter as he said it. “But if you come to blows, if I get a hint of a sniff of suspicion that you’re putting us all in danger—why, then, I’ll put a stop to the whole business. I’ll cut your pecker off, slave boy, and skin it and use it as a wind sock. Let’s see these young women fight over you then.”
Chu seemed to think that over. “It would be a big wind sock, sir—”
“Shut up.”
For a time they progressed down the river in silence.
Then, from inside its waterproof wrapping, the ColU spoke up. “Well, this is awkward. Shall we sing a song? There’s one you may remember, Beth, from your childhood, with Yuri Eden and Mardina Jones—not that we had a boat in those days. Row, row, row your boat… Come, please join in…”
As they drifted on down the river its voice echoed from the life-choked water.
64
With time the great waterway broadened and deepened, with many tributaries flowing into it from the surrounding land, just as Titus had predicted.
Then there came a day when “their” river passed through a confluence and became a tributary of a much wider river still. Soon the flow was so wide that it was difficult to make out the far bank. “We lucked out,” Stef said. “We found the local Mississippi.” But of her companions, only the ColU and Beth knew which river she meant, and even Beth, Arduan-born, wasn’t sure.
Titus insisted that they should stay close to the bank, fearing stronger currents in the middle of the channel—and, just possibly, more aggressive life-forms than they’d yet encountered. Even so, they swept on with what felt like ever-increasing speed.
Without the physical effort of the march—the hardest work was the daily labor of hauling the craft up the bank for the night—and with Proxima sinking almost imperceptibly slowly in the sky behind them, the days passed in ever more of a blur to Stef. Even so it was a surprise when the ColU announced that they had already been traveling for sixty days.
The character of the landscape around the riverbanks was changing once more. Much of the vegetation was waist high, and Stef was reminded of the prairies of middle America—or rather, of museum reconstructions she’d seen of such ecologies as they’d been before the climate Jolts. With the air cooler and Proxima lower still, the ground-blanketing “lilies” were no longer so successful, and plants that bore leaves tilted toward the star did better. There were even trees here, or tree-like structures, with big leaves competing for the life-giving light, some stubby and fern-like, some quite tall and rising above the “prairie flowers.” But in this more open country some terrestrial plants fared better too, and the travelers gratefully scooped up handfuls of wild potatoes, yams—even grapes from vines that grew laced over Arduan trees, a cooperation across the two spheres of life that the ColU said it found pleasing.
The ColU never asked for stops. It seemed too aware of the pressure on them all to make good progress, and to push on with the journey. But sometimes, during their “night” stops, it would ask Chu, or perhaps Beth or Stef, to take it to sites of particular interest. Such as exposed rock formations—which were rare; this Arduan continent was worn as flat as the interior of Australia. And the ColU would ask for samples to be taken, for fossils to be sought.
“You’ll remember, Beth Eden Jones, how frustrated I used to get! This planet was once so active, chunks of its surface forever churning up, that any fossils were destroyed, the very layers they had formed in disrupted—the whole fossil record was a mess. Now that the world is so much more quiescent, there’s at least a chance of finding some kind of decent record, at least of comparatively recent life-forms…”
But all it ever found were what looked to Stef like matted banks of reeds, compressed into the sandstone and petrified. If there was no significant change, no extinction or evolution, she supposed, you were going to get a featureless fossil record, no matter how well preserved. Nothing but stems for—how long? Millions of years?