by Dan Simmons
“Where’s the Shrike?” I said.
Aenea stood and walked to the place where the creature had stood a moment before. She passed her hand through the air as if the monster had become invisible.
“Hang on!” I said again. The raft was coming up on a modest set of rapids. I returned to the steering oar and unlashed it while the android and girl took up poles on either side. We bounced, splashed, and tried to turn end to end, but were soon past the white ripples.
“That was fun!” said Aenea. It was the most animated I had heard her in some time.
“Yeah,” I said, “fun. But the raft’s coming apart.” This was a slight exaggeration, but not total hyperbole. The loose logs at the front were coming untethered. Our gear was rattling around loose on the collapsed microtent fabric.
“There is a flat space to put in,” said A. Bettik, pointing to a grassy area along the right riverbank. “The hills look more formidable ahead.”
I pulled the binoculars out and studied those black ridges. “You’re right,” I said. “There may be real rapids ahead, and few places to put in. Let’s tie up loose ends here.”
The girl and android poled us to the right bank. I jumped out and pulled the raft higher onto the muddy shore. Damage was not serious to the front and starboard sides, just loose wraith-hide thongs and a few splintered boards. I glanced upriver. The sun was lower, although it looked as if we had another hour or so of light.
“Do we camp tonight?” I said, thinking that this might be the last good place. “Or keep on moving?”
“Keep moving,” Aenea said adamantly.
I understood the impulse. It was still morning, Qom-Riyadh time. “I don’t want to be caught on white water after dark,” I said.
Aenea squinted at the low sun. “And I don’t want to be sitting here after dark,” she said. “Let’s get as far as we can.” She borrowed the binoculars and studied the black ridges to our right, the dark hills to the left of the river. “They wouldn’t have put the Tethys section on a river with dangerous rapids, would they?”
A. Bettik cleared his throat. “It would be my guess,” he said, “that much of that lava flow was created during the Ouster attack on this world. Very severe rapids may have resulted from the seismic disruption such a lancing would cause.”
“It wasn’t the Ousters,” Aenea said softly.
“What was that, kiddo?”
“It wasn’t the Ousters,” she said more firmly. “It was the TechnoCore that built ships to attack the Web … they were simulating an Ouster invasion.”
“Okay,” I said. I had forgotten that Martin Silenus had said as much toward the end of his Cantos. That part had not made much sense to me when I was learning the poem. It was all irrelevant now. “But the slagged hills are still there, and some nasty white water may be as well. White water or actual waterfalls. It could be that we can’t get the raft through it.”
Aenea nodded and set the binoculars back in my pack. “If we can’t, we can’t. We’ll walk it and swim through the next portal. But let’s fix the raft quickly and get as far as we can. If we see bad rapids, we’ll pole for the closest bank.”
“It may be more cliff than riverbank,” I said. “That lava looks mean.”
Aenea shrugged. “Then we’ll climb and keep hiking.”
I admit that I admired that child that evening. I knew that she was tired, sick, overwhelmed by some emotion I could not understand, and scared half to death. But I had never seen her ready to quit.
“Well,” I said, “at least the Shrike’s gone. That’s a good sign.”
Aenea only looked at me. But she tried to smile.
The repairs took only twenty minutes. We relashed the bindings, shifted some of the center supports to the front, and laid the microtent fabric down as a sort of liner to keep our feet dry.
“If we’re going to travel in the dark,” said Aenea, “we should rig our lantern mast again.”
“Yeah,” I said. I had kept a tall pole free for just that purpose and now set it in its socket and lashed its base in place. I used my knife to cut a niche for the lantern handle. “Shall I light it?” I said.
“Not yet,” said Aenea, glancing at the setting sun behind us.
“Okay,” I said, “if we’re going to be bouncing through any white water, we should keep gear in our packs and load the most important things in the waterproof shoulder bags.” We set to work doing just that. In my shoulder bag I put an extra shirt, an extra coil of rope, the folded plasma rifle, a handlamp, and the flashlight laser. I started to toss the useless comlog into my regular backpack, thought, It’s useless, but it doesn’t weigh much, and clipped it around my wrist instead. We had fully charged the comlog, laser, and handlamp batteries at the Qom-Riyadh clinic.
“All set?” I asked, ready to pole us out into the current again. Our raft looked better with its new floor and mast, packs loaded and tied down for white water, lantern ready to be lit at the bow.
“Ready,” said Aenea.
A. Bettik nodded and leaned on his pole. We moved out onto the river.
The current was fast—at least twenty or twenty-five klicks per hour—and the sun was still above the horizon when we moved into the black lava country. Riverbanks changed to bluffs on either side, and we bounced through a few ripples of white water, coming out high and dry each time, and I began to search the banks for places to set in if we heard the roar of a waterfall or wild rapids ahead. There were places—gullies and flat areas—but the land was visibly rougher ahead. I noticed that there was more growth here in the ravines—ever-blues and stunted redwoods—and the low sun painted the higher branches in rich light. I was beginning to think about getting our lunch … dinner … whatever, out of the packs and fixing something hot when A. Bettik called, “Rapids ahead.”
I leaned on the steering oar and looked. Rocks in the river, white water, some spray. My years as a bargeman on the Kans helped assess this stretch of rapids. “It’ll be all right,” I said. “Keep your legs braced, move a bit toward the center if it gets too wild. Push hard when I say push. The trick will be to keep the front headed where we want it, but we can do it. If you go over, swim for the raft. I’ve got a line ready.” I had one booted foot on the coiled rope.
I did not like the black lava cliffs and boulders on the right side of the river ahead, but the river looked wider and milder beyond this stretch of rough water. If this was all we faced, we could probably continue on into the night, using the lantern and widebeam laser to light our way.
All three of us were concentrating on lining the raft up properly to enter the rapids, trying to miss several boulders rising from the frothing water, when it all began. If it had not been for an eddy there that spun us around twice, it would have been over before I’d known what was happening. As it was, it almost happened that way.
Aenea was shouting in glee. I was grinning. Even A. Bettik had a smile. Mild white water does that, I knew from experience. Class V rapids usually just freeze a rictus of terror on people’s faces, but harmless bumps like this were fun. We shouted directions at one another—Push! Hard right! Avoid that rock!—Aenea was a few steps to my right, A. Bettik a few steps farther to my left, and we had just been grabbed by the swirling eddy downstream from the large rock we had avoided, when I looked up to see the mast at the front and the hanging lantern suddenly sliced into pieces.
“What the hell?” I had time to say, and then the old memories hit, and with them, the reflexes I would have guessed had atrophied years before.
We were spinning to my left. I screamed “Down!” at the top of my lungs, abandoned the steering oar, and tackled Aenea headfirst. Both of us rolled off the raft into white water.
A. Bettik had reacted almost instantly, throwing himself down and toward the stern of the raft, and the monofilaments that had sliced the mast and lantern like soft butter must have missed him by millimeters. I came up out of the water with my boots scraping against rocks and my forearm around Aenea’s chest in time to
see the underwater monofilament slice the raft in two sections, then reslice it as the eddy swirled the logs around. The filaments were invisible, of course, but that kind of cutting power meant only one thing. I had seen this trick used on buddies of mine in the brigade on Ursus; the rebels had strung monofilament across the road, sliced through a bus hauling thirty guys back from the cinema in town, and decapitated all of them.
I tried to shout at A. Bettik, but the water was roaring and it filled my mouth. I grabbed at a boulder, missed it, scrabbled my feet against the bottom, and caught the next rock. My scrotum tightened as I thought of those goddamn wires underwater, in front of my face.…
The android saw the raft being sliced a third time and dived into the shallow water. The current flipped him over, his left arm rising instinctively as his head was forced under. There was a brief mist of blood as the arm was sliced off just below his elbow. His head came above the water, but he did not cry out as he grabbed a sharp rock with his right hand and hung on. His left arm and still-spasming hand were swept out of sight downriver.
“Oh, Jesus!” I yelled. “Damn … damn!”
Aenea pulled her face out of the water and looked at me with wild eyes. But there was no panic there.
“Are you all right?” I shouted over the rapids. A monofilament slices so cleanly that you could be missing a leg and not know it for half a minute.
She nodded.
“Hang on to my neck!” I yelled. I had to get my left arm free. She clung to me, her skin already cold from the freezing water.
“Damn, damn, damn,” I said as a mantra while I fumbled in my shoulder bag with my left hand. My pistol was in its holster, pinned under my right hip against the river bottom. It was shallow here … less than a meter in places … barely enough water to dive for cover when the sniper started shooting. But that was irrelevant—any attempt to dive would sweep us downriver, into the monofilaments.
I could see A. Bettik hanging on for his life eight meters or so downriver. He lifted his left arm from the water. Blood spurted from the stump. I could see him grimace and almost lose his grip on the rock as the pain began to pour through shock. Do androids die like humans? I shook the thought away. His blood was very red.
I scanned the lava flows and boulder fields for a glint of dying sunlight on metal. Next would come the sniper’s bullet or bolt. We would not hear it. It was a beautiful ambush—straight out of the book. And I had literally steered us into it.
I found the flashlight laser in the bag, resealed the bag, and clamped the laser cylinder in my teeth. Fumbling underwater with my left hand, I undid my belt and tugged it out of the water. I nodded wildly for Aenea to grab the pistol with her free hand.
Still clinging to my neck with her left arm, she unsnapped the cover and pulled the pistol out. I knew that she would never use it, but that did not matter right now. I needed the belt. I fumbled, setting the laser under my chin and holding it in place while my left hand straightened the belt.
“Bettik!” I screamed.
The android looked up at us. His eyes held agony. “Catch!” I screamed, pulling my arm back over my head and throwing the leather belt at him. I almost lost the flashlight laser with the maneuver, but grabbed it as it hit the water and gripped it in my left hand.
The android could not release his right hand from the rock. His left hand was gone. But he used the bleeding stump of his arm and his chest to stop the hurtling belt. The throw had been perfect … but, then, I had had only one chance.
“Medkit!” I shouted, leaning my head toward the bag rising and falling next to me. “Tourniquet now!”
I don’t think that he heard me, but he did not have to. Pulling himself up against the rock, trying to lodge himself on the upstream side of it, he pulled the leather belt around his left arm below the elbow and pulled tight on the strap with his teeth. There was no notch that low on the belt, but he pulled it tight with a jerk of his head, wrapped it again, and pulled it tight again.
By this time I had triggered on the flashlight laser, set the beam to widest dispersal, and played it above the river.
The wire was monofilament but not superconducting monofilament. That would not have glowed. This did. There was a web of heated wire, glowing red like crisscrossed laser beams, streaking back and forth above and into the river. A. Bettik had floated down beneath some of the glowing wires. Others disappeared into the water to the left and right of him. The first filaments began about a meter in front of Aenea’s feet.
I moved the widebeam, playing it above us and to our left and right. Nothing glowed there. The wires above A. Bettik glowed for a few seconds as they dissipated heat, and then disappeared as if they had never existed. I fanned the widebeam across them again, bringing them back into existence, then dialed a tighter beam. The filament I had targeted glowed white but did not melt. It wasn’t a superconductor, but it wasn’t going to go away with the low energies I could pour into it with a flashlight laser.
Where is the sniper? Maybe it was just a passive trap. Years old. Nobody waiting in ambush.
I did not believe it for a second. I could see A. Bettik’s grip on the rock slip as the current threatened to pull him under.
“Shit,” I said. Setting the laser into the waistband of my pants, I grabbed Aenea with my left arm. “Hang on.”
With my right arm I pulled myself higher onto the slippery boulder. It was triangular in shape and very slick. Wedging my body on the upstream side, I pulled Aenea there. The current was like someone battering me with body blows. “Can you hold on?” I shouted.
“Yeah!” Her face was white. Her hair was plastered to her skull. I could see scratches on her cheek and temple and a rising bruise near her chin, but no other sign of injury.
I patted her on the shoulder, made sure her arms were secure on the rock, and let go. Downstream, I could see the raft—now sliced into half a dozen segments—tumbling into the curve of white water by the lava cliffs.
Bouncing and scraping along the bottom, trying to stand but being swept and battered by the current, I managed to hit A. Bettik’s small rock without knocking him off or myself out. I grabbed him and hung on, noticing that his shirt had been almost ripped off him by the sharp rocks and current. Blood oozed from a dozen scratches in his blue skin, but it was his left arm I wanted to see. He moaned when I lifted the arm from the water.
The tourniquet was helping to staunch the bleeding, but not enough. Red swirled in the sunlit waters. I thought of the rainbow sharks on Mare Infinitus and shivered.
“Come on,” I said, half lifting him, prying his cold hand from the rock. “We’re leaving.”
The water was only to my waist when I stood, but it had the force of several fire hoses. Somehow, despite shock and serious loss of blood, A. Bettik helped. Our boots scrabbled at the sharp rocks on the river bottom.
Where is the sniper’s bolt? My shoulder blades ached from the tension.
The closest riverbank was to our right—a flat, grassy shelf that was the last easy spot to reach as far as I could see downriver. It was inviting. Far too inviting.
Besides, Aenea was still clinging to the rock eight meters upstream.
With A. Bettik’s good arm over my shoulder, we staggered, lurched, half swam, and half crawled our way upstream, the water battering us and splashing in our faces. I was half-blind by the time we reached Aenea’s rock. Her fingers were white with cold and strain.
“The bank!” she shouted as I helped her to her feet. Our first step took us into a hole, and the current battered against her chest and neck, covering her face with white spray.
I shook my head. “Upriver!” I shouted, and the three of us began leaning into the current, water pounding and spraying to both sides. Only my maniacal strength at that moment kept us upright and moving. Every time the current threatened to throw us down, to pull us under, I imagined myself as solid as the Worldtree that had once stood to the south, roots running deep into the bedrock. I had my eye on a fallen log perhaps
twenty meters up on the right bank. If we could shelter behind that … I knew that I had to get the medkit tourniquet on A. Bettik’s arm within minutes, or he would be dead. If we tried to stop here in the river to do it, the medkit, shoulder bag, and everything else ran the risk of being whirled downriver. But I did not want to lie exposed on that inviting shelf of grassy riverbank.…
Monofilaments. I tugged the flashlight laser from my waistband and played its wideband in the air over the river upstream. No wires. But they could be under the water, waiting to slice us off at the ankles.
Trying to shut down my imagination, I pulled the three of us upstream against the force of the river. The flashlight laser was slippery in my hand. A. Bettik’s grip was growing weaker around my shoulder. Aenea clung to my left arm as if it was her only lifeline. It was her only lifeline.
We had struggled less than ten meters upstream when the water ahead of us exploded. I almost tumbled backward. Aenea’s head went under and I pulled her up, gripping her soaked shirt with frenzied fingers. A. Bettik seemed to slump against me.
The Shrike exploded out of the river directly upstream from us, red eyes blazing, arms lifting.
“Holy shit!” I don’t know which one of us shouted. Perhaps all three.
We turned, all of us looking over our shoulders, as the bladed fingers sliced through the air centimeters behind us.
A. Bettik went down. I grabbed him under the arm and pulled him out. The temptation to surrender to that current and ride it downriver was very powerful. Aenea tripped, pulled herself up, and pointed to the right riverbank. I nodded and we struggled in that direction.
Behind us, the Shrike stood in the middle of the river, each of its metallic arms raised and bobbing like a metal scorpion’s tail. When I looked back again, it was gone.
We each fell half a dozen times before my feet felt mud rather than rocks under foot. I shoved Aenea up on the bank, then turned and rolled A. Bettik onto the grass. The river still roared to my waist. I did not bother crawling out myself, but tossed the shoulderbag onto the grass, away from the water. “Medkit,” I gasped, trying to pull myself out. My arms were almost useless. My lower torso was numb from the freezing water.