Wilbur knew then what Jackson had planned. It had happened to steamboats often enough in the past, most famously the Sultana, but there were dozens of others: the Lucy Walker, the Pennsylvania, the Eclipse, the Dubuque.…
Every steam line, every boiler, every surface in the room was shaking from holding the increasing pressure, the banging and clanging deafening. Wilbur realized it was impossible to shut down the system now or contain it: Cottle, or whoever had struck him, had tampered with the pressure-relief valves, which by now should have kicked in. He could hear the steel shells of the boiler creaking as they expanded, the explosion imminent.
Three of the crew came rushing into the boiler room and stopped, their faces reflecting terror at the scene in front of them. Wilbur shouted at them, “Get out! Run! Tell the captain to ground the boat and get everyone off! Move!”
They stared at him, an apparition of steam, then the boilers creaked and groaned and a rivet went flying through Wilbur and past the others, pinging loudly against the wall. The stasis broke and the crewmembers fled.
Wilbur knew what he must do, the only thing he could do to avert this disaster. He stepped fully into the inferno of the boilers, letting the steam fill him, letting it fill and expand his own body. He was the steam now, rising and expanding. He felt one of the boilers shatter and explode within him with the sensation of a hundred knives tearing into his guts, yet he contained and held that power as well, rising taller and wider in a tower of white steam, passing through the boat and the decks until his head loomed above the hurricane deck, rising above the boat itself, and he looked down at the scene as if he were a cloudy giant. The second boiler also burst, and now his body was stretched and thin, like a balloon with far too much air in it. The steam hammered at him; the explosions he contained threatening to rip him apart as a shower of condensing hot rain fell from his body.
They were passing under the Suspension Bridge, and Wilbur could see that Jeremiah had abandoned the race, nosing the boat toward the Kentucky shore at the Public Landing of the city of Covington, across from Cincinnati. None of the lifeboats had yet been deployed; the passengers still crowded the boat, staring upward at the roiling white specter of Wilbur rising, rising over the Natchez and above the river. He stared back at them; he took a portion of the steam within him and shaped it. “You must leave the boat!” he shouted in a god’s stentorian, steam-whistle voice. “Get away! I can’t hold this!”
He heard them shouting back at him, but he could no longer think, no longer hear. There was only the steam and the pressure. Memories and thoughts and fears hammered at him. “We make whatever sacrifices are necessary,” Eleanor said to him. Her face floated in front of him, smiling. “This boat holds all of your dreams, and because of that, it’s my dream as well.”
“I don’t deserve you,” he told her, and she laughed.
“Then you’d better get working to make sure you do,” she told him.
“But I don’t know how. I can’t hold this. I can’t.”
Eleanor didn’t answer. Still smiling, she vanished.
He heard another voice, and Nurassyl was shaking his head in front of him. “Not sorry,” the joker said. “Now—you go.”
“I can’t go. You know that.”
“You go.” Nurassyl lifted blistered tentacles toward Wilbur. “You go,” he repeated.
They weren’t going to reach the landing in time. Wilbur looked down at the panic below him, at the crew desperately trying to launch the lifeboats and hand out life jackets, as Captain Montaigne shouted unheard orders, as panicked passengers streamed down to the main deck like a mass of writhing ants, as JoHanna and Jack herded the Kazakhs from the cabin toward the stairs.
He couldn’t hold the pressure, but if he released it here, now, most of those below would die as a result.
You go …
“I can’t. Eleanor…”
The steam giant roared her name as if it were a prayer, but he could not vent the pressure that way. He was as full as possible. The agony of holding in the steam and the explosion pulsed inside Wilbur, throbbing like Brobdingnagian fists hammering at him. Wilbur could see flashing lights wheeling onto the landing and hear the whoop-whoop of a Coast Guard fireboat. He looked over his boat and the river one last time, at the glittering of city lights on the rippling water of the Ohio.
Desperately, he took a step away from the Natchez. River water boiled around his foot, and he screamed with the pain of it. He took another step. Another. And yet another, and he was away from the boat. Impossibly outside his prison. He kept moving, deeper into the river and away. Steam bubbled and frothed around him. Wilbur turned, still a massive, gigantic form: a Colossus of Rhodes made of cloud and steam and attired in his captain’s uniform and hat, standing knee-deep in the middle of the Ohio. He looked at the Natchez one last time: he saw Jeremiah in his wheelhouse, saw Captain Montaigne at the rail of the hurricane deck, saw the Dead Report trio filming him and jabbering at one another.
Closing his eyes, Wilbur finally permitted the forces he held inside to release. It was as if he’d set off a bomb: fire, steam, and river water erupted from his body, all of it showering outward but falling short of the Natchez. The furious, Wilbur-shaped cloud rose even higher above the river and the bridges, the wind shredding it as it blossomed until it was no longer recognizable as a human shape at all. The thunder of the explosion shattered the sky and rebounded from the tall buildings on either side of the riverbank, the reverberations slowly dying away.
A warm, quiet rain began to fall.
In the Shadow of Tall Stacks
Part 8
HE WOULD ONLY FIND out later just how events afterward had played out.…
Once he’d released the boiler explosion, Wilbur had found himself in the river, his largely steamless and invisible body floating unseen. As he watched, exhausted, the Natchez grounded itself on the Kentucky shore, the gangways were lowered quickly, and people scurried madly away from the boat toward the police cruisers and emergency units already on the Public Landing.
The plan had been that the Kazakhs would leave the boat following the race, cloaked by Wild Fox so that neither Lewis nor Evangelique Jones would notice them. Jack would then be the one to drive them on to Charlotte and Theodorus (and, most likely, stay there with Timur). That plan still remained in place even though they landed on the “wrong” side of the river. When the boat landed suddenly on the Kentucky side and everyone poured off, Agent Jones was reduced to frantically trying to get from Cincinnati to Covington over the packed and gridlocked bridges and calling Paul Lewis on his cell, telling him to make sure the Kazakhs stayed in their cabin. But thanks to Wilbur’s warning, Nurassyl and the others had already left the cabin before Lewis reached it (and found it locked); Wild Fox had disguised the Kazakhs as nat passengers while Jack escorted them from the boat, rented a van, and drove them off to Charlotte, where they were able to successfully rendezvous with Theodorus.
Agent Jones and her ICE companions stormed aboard the Natchez during the waning confusion; by then, the Kazakhs were already in the van and on their way. Captain Montaigne shook her head (according to JoHanna, who was also there) at Agent Jones’s insistence that the door to stateroom 3 be opened or she’d have it forced. Lewis was still standing guard outside the room. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” the captain said (according to JoHanna). “What Kazakhs? What jokers? I don’t know this Mr. Lewis or what tale he’s been telling you. Yes, we took some refugees aboard before we knew ICE was looking for them, but they were gone before your first visit.” She slid the key into the lock, opened the stateroom door, and stepped aside as Agent Jones pushed through. The room beyond was empty.
As for Kirby Jackson and the Natchez Consortium, Travis Cottle, despite Wilbur’s fears, hadn’t been killed. When the engineer regained consciousness, he was more than happy to point to Jackson as the man who had wanted him to sabotage the boilers—which in the end Cottle had refused to do—and who struck Cottle over t
he head with a wrench so he could blow up the boilers himself. The local police, the FBI, and eventually the federal prosecutor were delighted with the circumstantial evidence that Leo and Wanda provided them regarding Jackson’s insurance scams. The minority shareholders of the consortium couldn’t plead their ignorance and disavowal of Jackson’s plans fast enough—and were just as quick to accept Captain Montaigne and JoHanna’s renewed offer to buy out Jackson.
The Dead Report trio, with their stunning video of Steam Wilbur saving the Natchez, had been able to parlay that into a new and lucrative contract with the Syfy channel. The Dead Report with Ryan Forge was now an hour-long show in prime time on cable—at least for the current season.
And Wilbur … he finally managed to flail his way ashore a few miles downstream from the Natchez. It took him several hours to return to the boat, and—temporarily steamless and thus invisible and powerless—he could only watch things unfold around him, and rejoice silently when he heard Captain Montaigne declare that the Natchez would be repaired and put back on the river.
It was three months before new boilers were installed and repairs were completed to the Natchez, but she finally steamed back downriver away from Cincinnati, toward the Mississippi and home with—after all the publicity—a full load of passengers once again being entertained by the Jokertown Boys as well as Wild Fox and Sylvia. They were close now to their final destination. Wilbur was in the pilot house with Jeremiah, watching as Jeremiah maneuvered the Natchez around the last bend before they reached their landing in the French Quarter.
Faster. Go faster. I want to be there. I need to be there.…
At the wheel, Jeremiah stirred, as if he had heard Wilbur’s thoughts. “Mr. Cottle,” Jeremiah said into the speaking tube for the boiler room, “how about a little more steam? I believe our Mr. Leathers is impatient to be home.”
Cottle’s voice emerged thin and tinny from the tube. “My pleasure, Mr. Smalls,” he answered. Jeremiah pushed the engine lever forward a notch. The Natchez’s paddles tore at the Mississippi, leaving behind a shimmering white trail in the brown water. Wilbur stared ahead, watching as the lights of New Orleans moved slowly around them. I’m coming back to you, Eleanor. I’m coming back to you at last.
It seemed forever before the Natchez, with Gimcrack playing the calliope, was able to nose up alongside its familiar wharf, as the deckhands tossed out lines to be snugged around the dock cleats, before the gangway was swung over to the shore and secured. “Keep the steam up, Mr. Cottle,” Jeremiah called into the speaking tube. “Mr. Leathers will be needing it.”
“Yessir, Mr. Smalls,” came the reply. “Understood.”
From the rail of the hurricane deck, Wilbur watched the passengers disembarking and flowing outward into the early-evening lights and music of the Quarter. Captain Montaigne and JoHanna stood on either side of the gangway, saying good-bye to the passengers as they left. But Wilbur’s gaze lingered on a van parked to one side of the parking area off Toulouse Street. As most of the crowd cleared from the gangway, the driver—a middle-aged or perhaps slightly older man with balding gray hair—left the van and went to the rear hatch, pulling out a wheelchair. Wilbur stared at the driver, trying to see his features and wondering as the man opened the collapsed chair and wheeled it to the passenger door and opened it, extending a hand to the person inside.
Wilbur left the rail before he saw the person in the passenger seat. He hurried down to the boiler deck, going into a small private dining room just off the main dining area. He took in steam from the pipes he passed, letting it fill him so that his form was easily visible in the dimness of the room. He could see himself in the mirror on one wall: an apparition of cloud in the shape of a man, bled of any color but dressed recognizably in his old captain’s uniform and hat. It would have to do. He waited, anxiously, for several minutes before someone knocked on the door, and it opened, and Captain Montaigne entered, followed by the middle-aged man pushing the wheelchair. Captain Montaigne nodded to Wilbur and stepped back into the main room, shutting the door behind her.
And in the chair …
Wilbur inhaled, his breath quavering in a half sob. Even with the wrinkled, liver-spotted face, the sunken eyes, the sparse white hair, the withered arms, he knew her. He saw her hands tightening on the wheelchair’s arms, her clouded blue eyes staring at him. Her tongue licked dry, cracked lips. “Wilbur?” she said. “Wilbur, is that truly you? The captain told me, but I didn’t know if I could believe her.…” Her voice was Eleanor’s but not Eleanor’s, ravaged by time and only a husky shadow of its former self. “I must look a fright,” Eleanor said, lifting her hands to her face. “I’m so old…”
“And I’m just steam and don’t dare even touch you,” Wilbur told her. “To me, you look lovely.”
Twin tears tracked their way down her cheeks, and Wilbur wanted to rush forward to wipe them away, wanted to kiss her, to fold her into his arms. But he couldn’t. He could only glide closer to her, sinking to cloudy knees before the wheelchair, marveling. She reached toward him, but he slid back so she wouldn’t be scalded by the touch. “It’s me, my dear,” he said in his voice of hissing steam. “My God, I missed you so much.… Eleanor, I never once stopped loving you. Never. You don’t know … All the time together that we lost…” His voice failed him. He was weeping, water falling from his face to the carpet. “I would have left this boat a thousand times to go and find you, but it wouldn’t let me.”
“And I wanted to come here a thousand times to see the Natchez once more,” she answered. “But the memories were so painful…” She stopped.
Wilbur could only stare at her, seeing the young Eleanor through the mask of time. “So many years gone,” he whispered. “So much for us both to tell each other. I don’t even know where to start.”
The man behind the wheelchair put his hand on Eleanor’s shoulder as she sniffed back her own tears. Wilbur glanced again at the man, wanting to ask the question in his mind but afraid that the answer wouldn’t be what he hoped. “I never stopped loving you either,” Eleanor told Wilbur, patting the man’s hand as Wilbur remembered her doing to him so many times in their too-brief time together. “After I lost you … Well, that’s a long tale, and I’m not sure I remember it all now. But I know where to start. Wilbur, my dear Wilbur, this is Thomas.”
Thomas looked at Wilbur, taking a long breath. “Hello, Dad,” he said. “It’s good to finally meet you.”
The Wild Cards Universe
The Original Triad
Wild Cards
Aces High
Jokers Wild
The Puppetman Quartet
Aces Abroad
Down and Dirty
Ace in the Hole
Dead Man’s Hand
The Rox Triad
One-Eyed Jacks
Jokertown Shuffle
Dealer’s Choice
The Novels
Double Solitaire
Turn of the Cards
The Card Sharks Triad
Card Sharks
Marked Cards
Black Trump
Stand-Alones
Deuces Down
Death Draws Five
The Committee Triad
Inside Straight
Busted Flush
Suicide Kings
The Fort Freak Triad
Fort Freak
Lowball
High Stakes
Mississippi Roll
About the Author
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN is the author of the international bestselling series A Song of Ice and Fire, which is the basis for the award-winning HBO series Game of Thrones. Martin has won the Hugo, Nebula, Bram Stoker, and World Fantasy Awards for his numerous novels and short stories.
Visit him online at georgerrmartin.com, or sign up for email updates here.
Twitter: @GRRMspeaking
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Mississippi Roll Rules
In the Shadow of Tall Stacks, Part 1
In the Shadow of Tall Stacks, Part 2
Wingless Angel
In the Shadow of Tall Stacks, Part 3
A Big Break in the Small Time
In the Shadow of Tall Stacks, Part 4
Death on the Water
In the Shadow of Tall Stacks, Part 5
Find the Lady
In the Shadow of Tall Stacks, Part 6
Under the Arch
In the Shadow of Tall Stacks, Part 7
In the Shadow of Tall Stacks, Part 8
The Wild Cards Universe
About the Author
Copyright Acknowledgments
Copyright
Copyright Acknowledgments
“In the Shadow of Tall Stacks” copyright © 2017 by Stephen Leigh.
“Wingless Angel” copyright © 2017 by John Jos. Miller.
“A Big Break in the Small Time” copyright © 2017 by Carrie Vaughn.
“Death on the Water” copyright © 2017 by Cherie Priest.
“Find the Lady” copyright © 2017 by Kevin Andrew Murphy.
“Under the Arch” copyright © 2017 by David D. Levine.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in these stories are either products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously.
MISSISSIPPI ROLL
Copyright © 2017 by George R. R. Martin and the Wild Cards Trust