Presently the Brain put aside the subject of the three humans on the river and began to worry about the fate of its simulacra somewhere beyond the barriers.
Human radio carried no reports that the simulacra had been discovered … but this meant nothing really. Such reports might be suppressed. Unless they could be located by their own kind and warned (and that soon), the simulacra would come out. The danger was great and the time short.
The Brain’s agitation brought its attendants to a step they seldom took. Narcotics were brought up and administered. The Brain sank into a lethargic, drowsing half-sleep where its dreams transformed it into a creature like the humans, and it stalked a dream trail with a rifle in its hands.
Even in its dream, the Brain worried lest the game elude it. And here the nurse insects could not reach and minister. The worry continued.
Joao awoke at dawn to find the river cloaked by a restless drapery of fog. He felt stiff and cramped, his thoughts confused by a feverish sensation as fuzzy as the fog on the river. The sky held the color of platinum.
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 snaplock.”
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 t
hrough 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.
But there was no comfort in that. He knew he was at the edge of his energy … and his reason.
A curving ripple of current fanned away from the left shore where the river turned downstream. The water there began to glisten and sparkle. Joao looked up to see cracks of blue striking through the clouds. He took a deep breath, pressed the igniter, counted.
The warning light blinked out.
Joao eased the throttle ahead. The motors banged, then mounted to a steady roar. The pod began to pick up speed, danced through the ripple track. She was right-side heavy and a dull sloshing could be heard from the float there.
It’ll never lift, Joao thought. He felt feverish and only loosely connected to his senses.
The pod made its racketing, sluggish way around the bend … and there it stood, the lava wall, no more than a kilometer downstream. The river ran through the wall in a notch that rose like something split out by a giant axe. Sheer black heights of rock compressed the water at their base into a tumbling agony.
“Jeeeesus,” Joao whispered.
Rhin clutched his arm. “Turn back! You’ve got to turn back.”
“We can’t,” Joao said. “There’s no other way.”
Still, his hand hesitated on the throttle. Press forward on that knob and risk explosion? There was no alternative. He could see waves in the chasm now cresting over unseen rocks, shooting milk-and-amber mist upward.
With a convulsive movement, Joao slammed the throttle ahead. The roar of the rockets drowned out the water’s sound.
Joao prayed to the float: “Hold together … please … hold together.”
Abruptly, the pod lifted onto its steps, began skimming faster and faster. In that instant, Joao saw movement on both shores beside the chasm. Something lifted dripping and snakelike across the entrance to the gorge.
“Another net!” Rhin screamed.
Joao saw the net with a dreamlike detachment, knew he couldn’t avoid it. The pod skidded over a cross-eddy and onto a glossy black pool inhabited by that dripping barrier. He saw the dark pattern of net squares and, through them, water creased into steeper and steeper furrows that flashed outward and down into the chasm.
The pod slammed into the net, pulled it, stretching it, tearing it. Joao was thrown forward against his harness as the pod tipped down by the nose. He felt the back of the seat slam his ribs. There came a thunderous tearing-grinding-bubbling sound and a sudden giving away.
The motors stopped short—flooded out or unable to suck fuel. The roaring of the water filled the cabin.
Joao pulled himself up by the wheel, looked around. The pod floated almost level, turning. But his eyes interpreted the motion as the world turning around him—black wall, green line of jungle, white water.
The pod slid down a sloping current to the right, crunched against the first obsidian buttress above the torrent. A scraping, wrenching of metal competed with the chasm’s roar.
Rhin screamed something that was lost in the avalanche sound of water.
The pod bounced outward from the rock wall, whirled, pounded across two infolding steps of explosive current. Metal creaked and groaned. The spiral cone of a whirlpool sucked at the floats, shot them sideways into a lifting tipping, pounding delirium of motion.
A vast pulsing-rumbling like ocean waves on rocks deafened Joao. He saw a glistening ledge of black rock, its face carved by the current, loom directly ahead. The pod smashed into it, recoiled. And Joao found himself torn from his harness, on the floor, tangled with Rhin. He grabbed the base of the wheel with his right hand.
Above him the canopy buckled. He watched in unbelieving shock as the canopy tipped forward and disappeared. He saw the left wing crumple upward against rock. The pod whipped around to the right, presenting a blurred arc of sky and another black wall.
A crazy rumbling from the shattered wing added to the din.
Joao thought: We aren’t going to make it. Nothing can survive this.
He felt Rhin with both arms around his waist clinging in terror, her voice in his left ear: “Please make it stop; please make it stop.”
Joao saw the pod’s nose lift, slam down, saw white water and spume boil past where the canopy had been. He saw a sprayrifle jerk out that opening into the river, and he wedged himself more tightly between the seats and the dash. His fingers ached where he clutched the wheel. A wrenching motion of the pod turned his head and he saw Chen-Lhu’s arms wrapped around the seat back directly above him.
Chen-Lhu felt the sound like a direct contact on his nerves magnified almost beyond endurance. It grated through him in an unchecked rhythm, dominated his world: a deafening cymbal dissonance gone wild in counterpoint, a rasping, crunching, maelstrom grating. He felt that he had become a seeing-hearing-feeling receptor without any other function.
Rhin pressed her face against Joao. Everything was the hot smell of Joao’s body and insane motion. She felt the pod lift … lift … lift and slam down, twisting, turning. Up. Down. Up. Down. Up. Down. It was like some crazy kind of sex. A staccato punching motion shook her as the pod shot down a washboard of rapids.
Joao felt all his consciousness concentrated into the terrible intensity of sight. He saw directly out an opening in the cabin side where no opening should be—a millrace chute, a black cavity of water, solid spray, damp green shade along a scarred cliff. He looked directly down into a frothed spiral of current as the pod tipped. His hand was numb where he clutched the wheel. His shoulder ached.
A brown turtleback of current rolled over directly in front of the opening. Joao felt the pod slide up onto that smoothness with a deceptively gentle gliding motion, saw the river drop away beyond.
She can’t take any more, he told himself.
The pod nosed down, faster and faster. Joao braced himself against the dash. He saw a green-brown wave curl upward past a shattered wing stump—up … up … up …
The pod smashed through it.
Green darkness and water cascaded into the cabin. There came a screech of metal. Joao felt the tail slam down, lifting him into washed twilight. He clawed his way toward the seat, dragging Rhin with him, saw Chen-Lhu’s arms still wrapped there, water pouring from the torn side of the cabin. He felt the tail section rip across rocks as the pod shot across another boiling mound of water.
Glaring sunlight!
Joao twisted around, half blinded by the brilliance. He stared past a torn hole where the motors had been, looked back up the gorge. The roaring noise of the place blasted at him. He saw the insane waves, the violence, and he thought: Did we really come through that?
He felt water around his ankles, turned, expecting to see another crazy descent of rapids. But there was only a broad pool—dark water all around. It absorbed the turbulence of the gorge and for all that violence showed only glistening bubbles and the swift spreading and converging of current runnels.
The pod lurched under him. Joao staggered in the water, clutched the right lip of the cabin, looked down at the remaining wing which appeared to float just on the surface of the river.
Rhin’s voice broke across the moment with a shocking tone of normality: “Hadn’t we better get out? We’re sinking.”
Joao tried to shake off his feeling of detachment, looked down to see her seated in her seat. He heard Chen-Lhu struggle upright behind her, coughing, saw the man loom there.
There came a metallic gurgling and the right wing dipped beneath the surface.
It occurred to Joao then with a twisted sense of elation that they were still alive … but the pod was dead. Elation drained from him.
“We gave them a good run for their money,” Chen-Lhu said, “but I think this is the end of the line.”
“Is it?” Joao growled. He felt anger boil in him, touched the bulge of Vierho’s big blunderbuss pistol in his pocket. The reflex motion, the foolish emptiness of it, brought a wave of crazy amusement into his mind.
Imagine trying to kill those things with this gun, he thought.
“Joao?” Rhin said.
“Yes.” He nodded to her, turned, climbed out onto the edge of the cabin, straightened, balancing there to study their surroundings. A damp spray mist from the gorge blew across him.
“This thing’s not going to stay afloat much longer,” Chen-Lhu said. He looked back up the chasm, his mind suddenly refusing to accept what had happened to them.
“I could swim to that point down there,” Rhin said. “How about the rest of you?”
Chen-Lhu turned, saw a treeless finger of land jutting into their pool about a hundred meters downstream. It was a fragile tentacle of reeds and dirt poised on the water and backed by a high wall of trees. Long dragging marks slanted along the mud below the reeds into the river.
Alligator sign, Chen-Lhu thought.
“I see ’gator sign,” Joao said. “Best stick with the pod as long as we can.”
Rhin felt terror rise in her throat, whispered, “Will it float much longer?”
“If we hold very still,” Joao said. “We seem to’ve trapped some air under us somewhere—maybe in the wing and that left float.”
“No sign of … them here,” Rhin said.