He felt that somewhere in his past he had reached a glowing summit devoid of before-and-after complications, a place of no doubts. Action … play … reflex motion—that had been the life. Now, it all lay there, open to introspection, open to study and re-examination.
But he sensed there might be a tip-over point with introspection, that somewhere within him lurked memories which could engulf him.
Rhin rested her head against the back of the seat, looked up at the sky. Someone’ll start looking for us soon, she thought. They must … they must … they must.
Must rhymes with lust, she thought. And she swallowed, wondering where that thought had originated. She forced her attention onto the sky—so blue … blue
… blue: a blank surface upon which anything could be written.
Searchers could come over us at any minute now.
Her gaze wavered, went to the mountains along the western horizon. Mountains grew and diminished there as the river carried her through its blue furrow.
It’s the things we must not think about because they’d overpower us with emotion, she thought. These things are the terrible burden. Her hand crept out, clasped Joao’s. He didn’t look at her, but the pressure of his response was more than a hand enfolding hers.
Chen-Lhu saw the motion and smiled.
Joao stared out at the passing shore. The pod drifted on an enchanted current between drooping curtains of lianas. The current carried them around a bend, exposing the towered brilliance of three Fernan Sanchez trees: imperative red against the green. But Joao’s eye went to the water where the river was at work, slowly undercutting clawed roots in the muddy bank.
Her hand in mine, he thought. Her hand in mine.
Her palm was moist, intimate, possessive.
Rising waves of heat encased the pod in dead air. The sun grew to a throbbing inferno that drifted over them … slowly, slowly settling toward the western peaks.
Hands together … hands together, Joao thought.
He began to pray for the night.
Evening shadows began to quilt the river’s edges. Night swept upward from the trench of slow current toward the blazing peaks.
Chen-Lhu stirred, sat up as the sun dipped behind the mountains. Amethyst vapors from the sunset produced a space of polished ruby water ahead of the pod—like flowing blood. There came a moment at the dark when the river appeared to cease all movement. Then they entered the damply cushioned night.
This is the time of the timid and the terrible, Chen-Lhu thought. The night is my time—and I am not timid.
And he smiled at the way the two shadows in the front seats had become one shadow.
The animal with two backs, he thought. It was such an amusing thought that he put a hand to his mouth to suppress laughter.
Presently, Chen-Lhu spoke: “I will sleep now, Johnny. You take the first watch. Wake me at midnight.”
The small stirring noises from the front of the cabin ceased momentarily, then resumed.
“Right,” Joao said, and his voice was husky.
Ahh, that Rhin, Chen-Lhu thought. Such a good tool even when she does not want to be.
8
The report, although interesting for its variations, added little to the Brain’s general information about humans. They reacted with shock and fear to the display along the river bank. That was to be expected. The Chinese had demonstrated practicality not shared by the other two. This fact, added to the apparent attempts of the Chinese to get the other two to mate—that might be significant. Time would tell.
Meanwhile, the Brain experienced something akin to another human emotion-worry.
The trio in the vehicle were drifting farther and farther away from the chamber above the river chasm. A significant delay factor was entering the system of report-computation-decision-action.
The Brain’s sensors reviewed once more the messenger pattern being repeated on the cavern ceiling.
The vehicle was approaching a series of rapids. Its occupants could be killed there and irrevocably lost. Or they might renew their efforts to fly away in the craft. There lay a worry-element requiring a heavy weighing factor.
The vehicle had flown once.
Computation-decision.
“You report to the action groups,” the Brain commanded. “Tell them to capture the vehicle and occupants before they reach the rapids. Capture the humans alive, if possible. Order of importance if some of them must be sacrificed: first the Chinese is to be taken, then the dormant queen, and finally the other male.”
The insects on the ceiling danced their message pattern and hummed the modulation elements to fix them, then took off into the dawnlight at the cavemouth.
Action.
Chen-Lhu stared downriver across the front seats, watching the moonpath crawl beneath the pod. The path rippled with spider lines in the eddies, flowed like painted silk in the broad reaches.
The breathing sounds of deep, satiated sleep came from the front of the cabin.
Now I probably will not have to kill that fool, Johnny, Chen-Lhu thought.
He looked out the side windows at the moon, low and near to setting. Bronze earthlight filled out the hid-dle circle. Within this darker area there appeared the likeness of a face: Vierho.
He is dead, Johnny’s companion, Chen-Lhu thought. That was a simulacrum we saw beside the river. Nothing could’ve survived that attack on the camp. Our friends out there have copied dear Padre.
Chen-Lhu asked himself then: I wonder how Vierho encountered death—as an illusion or as a cataclysm?
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—nutterings, 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.
Joao weighed the circumstances—high walls of trees on both sides, narrowing channel, high black walls of wet rock on both sides of the rapids. There was only one way to go: through it.
Current and distance required careful judgment: the pod’s floats had to hit the crosscurrent waves above the rapids at just the right moment for those waves to help break the river’s grip on the floats.
This’ll be the place, Chen-Lhu thought. Our friends’ll be here … waiting for us. He gripped a sprayrifle, tried to see both shores at once.
Rhin gripped the sides of her seat, pressed herself backward against the cushions. She felt that they were hurtling without hope toward the maelstrom.
“Something in the trees on our right,” Chen-Lhu said. “Something overhead.”
A shadow darkened the water all around them. Fluttering white shapes began to obscure the view ahead.
Joao punched the igniter, counted—one, two, three. Light off—throttle.
The motors caught with a great banging, spitting roar that drowned the sound of the rapids. The pod surged through the screen of insects, out of the shadow. Joao swerved them to avoid a line of foaming rocks in the upper pool. He nursed the throttle by the feeling of G-pressure against his back.
Don’t blow, baby, he prayed. Don’t blow.
“A net!” Rhin screamed. “They have a net across the river!”
It lifted from the water above the rapids like a dripping snake.
Reflex moved Joao’s hand on the throttle, sent the knob slamming against the dash.
The pod leaped, skimmed across a glossy pool. Slithering current tugged them sideways toward smooth black walls of rock. The net stood out directly ahead when the pod lifted, floats breaking from the water.
Up …up.
Joao could see the river plunge off beyond the net, water leaping in crazy violence there as though trying to escape the glassy black walls of rock.
Something slapped the floats with a screech and sound of tearing. The pod’s nose dipped, bounced up as Joao hauled on the wheel. A staccato rattling shook the craft. Spray filled the air all around.
In one flickering moment, Joao saw motion along the chasm’s rim. A line of boulders thundered down there, fell behind.
Then they were out of it, airborne and climbing-lurching-twisting … but climbing. Joao eased the throttle back.
The pod thundered over a line of trees, back across the river. Another tree-spiked hill shot beneath them. A long straight avenue of water opened out ahead of them like turbulent brown grease.
Joao grew conscious of Rhin’s voice: “Look at us go! Look at us go!
“That was inspired flying,” Chen-Lhu said.
Joao tried to swallow in a dry throat. The controls felt hea
vy under his hands. He saw downstream a great bend in the river, and beyond that a wide island-broken lake of flooded land.
Brown river … flooded land, he thought.
He fishtailed the pod, shot a look back to the west. Brown clouds were piled there, with black beneath them: thunderheads! Rain in the hills behind us, he thought. Flood here. It must’ve happened during the night.
And he cursed himself for not noticing the change in water color earlier.
“What’s wrong, Johnny?” Chen-Lhu asked.
“Nothing we can do anything about.”
Joao eased the throttle back another notch, another. The motors sputtered, died. He shut off all fuel.
Wind whistled around them as Joao eased back on the wheel, trying to gain as much distance as possible. The pod began to stagger at the edge of stalling. He tipped the nose down, still nursing it for distance. But the pod flew like all pods—gliding like a rock.
The wind of their passage was an eerie whistling that filled the cabin.
The river curved off to the left through more drowned land. A thin furrow of turbulent water marked the main channel. Gently, Joao banked the pod, turned to follow that furrow. The water rushed up to meet them. The pod began to yaw and Joao fought the controls.
Floats touched in a splashing, rocking motion with too much drag. An eddy turned the pod. The right wing began to drop—lower, lower.
Joao aimed for a brown sand beach on their left.
“We’re sinking,” Rhin said, and her voice conveyed both surprise and horror in a flat tone of understatement.
“That right float,” Chen-Lhu said. “I felt it hit the net.”
The left float grated on sand, stopped, spun the sinking float in a short arc until it, too, touched. Something gurgled under the water to the right and a burst of bubbles lifted to the surface. Less than six millimeters of air remained between the right wing tip and the water.
Rhin buried her head in her hands and shuddered.
“Now what?” Chen-Lhu asked. And he felt shocked amusement as he heard the dismay in his own voice.
Now it is the end, he thought. Our friends will find us here. It is the end for sure.