The large, round, dark object had become even larger. In the starlight it looked like the head of a giant. He estimated that the distance between the tower and the other object was about 100 meters. That meant that the raft which carried them was huge. He had no idea how wide it was, and he hoped he did not find out until after the boat was on the other side of the island.
Just before he turned back to his task, he saw another man appear on the tower. He was waving his hands, and his shrill voice dominated the other man's.
"Here it comes!" Frigate called out.
Burton didn't blame him for sounding panicked. He was in a frenzy himself. All that weight and momentum, hundreds, perhaps thousands of logs, were moving toward the Hadji II.
"Push your guts out!" he yelled. "We'll be crushed if you don't!"
By then the bowsprit, the large spar projecting forward of the ship, had cleared the spire. About ten more pushes should clear the corner, and the Hadji II would be taken by the current past the spire, away from the danger.
The yelling from the raft was loud and close. Burton spared a glance at the tower. It was only a little over 400 feet or 122 meters away. Furthermore, the side of the tower had turned a little. He cursed. That meant that the raft had turned, or been turned, off its course to avoid striking the island in its center part. Unfortunately, it was going to the left instead of to the right.
"Heave!" Burton shouted.
He wondered where the tower was located. Was it on the very prow of the raft or was it set back? If the latter was the situation, then there would be a large part of the raft forward of the tower. That meant that somewhere under the fog the forward part of the raft was very near the boat.
In any case, the raft was not going to miss the island. He did not care about that if it did not strike the boat.
A man on the tower was screaming orders in an unknown language down into the mists.
The prow of the Hadji II was now past the spire. But here the strong current at the corner had pressed the boat against the rocky wall, and their poles were slipping on the rock, which was smoother than that just passed.
"Push, you sons of bitches, push!" Burton thundered.
There was a roar, an abrupt lifting of the deck, a tilting inward toward the rock. Burton was dashed against a bright hardness that made him go soft and black inside. Dimly, he was aware that he had fallen back onto the deck, was lying on his back, was trying to get up in the dark greyness. Screams arose from around him. These and the snapping of smashed timbers and a final explosion, the impact of the forward part of the raft against the rock, were the last things he heard.
Chapter 7
* * *
Fog blinded Jill Gulbirra.
By keeping close to the right bank of The River, she could barely discern the grailstones. They looked ominous, like giant toadstools in a dismal wasteland.
The next one should be the end of her odyssey. She had been counting them as she passed them, counting all night.
Now, a phantom in a ghost canoe, she paddled on. The wind was dead, but she revived it a little, or made it a pseudo-wind, by her own motion, driving against the current. The heavy wet air rubbed against her face like ectoplasmic curtains.
Now she saw a fire by the stone which had to be her destination. It had been a small spark. Now it was bigger, glowing palely, a ghost of a fire. From near it the voices of men. Disembodied voices.
She herself, she thought, must look like the spirit of a nun. White cloths held together by concealed magnetic tabs swathed her body. One cloth formed a hood so that anyone near enough in the fog would see her face as a darker blank in the dark greyness.
Her few belongings crouched on the floor of the canoe. In this wet, dim woolliness, they were two small beasts, white and grey. Near her was a tall grey metal cylinder, her "tucker box.'' Beyond it was a bundle, cloths containing various items. A bamboo flute. A ring of oak set with polished jadeite stone, her lover's gift, a lover departed but dead in only one sense – as far as she knew. A bag of dragonfish leather, crammed with artifacts and memories. Tied to the bundle, but invisible in this darkness, was a leather case holding a yew bow and a quiver of arrows.
Under her seat lay a spear, a bamboo shaft tipped with a hornfish horn. By it lay two heavy oak war-boomerangs and a bag containing two leather slings and forty stones.
As the fire brightened, the voices became louder. Who were they ? Guards? Drunken revelers? Slavers hoping to catch just such as she? Early worms out to catch a bird?
She smiled grimly. If they wanted violence, they would get it.
However, they sounded more like drunks. If what she had been told down-River was true, she was in peaceful territory. Neither Parolando nor its neighboring states practiced grail slavery. She could have sailed the canoe boldly in daylight, according to her information. She would be welcomed and free, free to come or to go. Moreover, it was true that they, Parolandoj, were building a giant airship.
But distrust was her native element, though she could not be blamed for that. Consider her terrible experiences. So, she would scout around in the dark. It would require more work and inconvenience; it would be inefficient. You had to make your choice between survival and efficiency, though in the long run survival was optimum efficiency, no matter how much time and effort it took.
Death was no longer a temporary event in the Rivervalley. Resurrection seemed to have stopped, and with its cessation the ancient terror had returned.
Now the fire was bright enough for her to see the huge toadstool shape. The blaze was just beyond it. Four figure, black outlines, moved by the flames. She could smell the smoke of bamboo and pine, and she thought she whiffed cigars. Why had the disgusting cigars been provided by the Mysterious Donors?
They were talking in somewhat slurred English. Either they had been drinking or English was not their native tongue. No. The voice now booming through the fog belonged to an American.
"No!" the man bellowed. "By the holy flaming rings of buggered Saturn, no! It's not sheer ego, downright stinking hubris! I want to build the biggest ever built, a fabulous ship, a true queen of the skies, a colossus, a leviathan! Bigger than Earth or The Riverworld has ever seen or will ever see again! A ship to make everybody's eyes bug out, make them proud they're human! A beauty! A wondrous behemoth of the air! Unique! Like nothing that ever existed before! What? Don't interrupt, Dave! I'm flying high, and I'm going to keep on flying until we get there! And then some!"
"But, Milt!"
"But me no buts! We need a big one, the biggest, the grandest, for purely logical scientific reasons. My God, man, we have to go higher, further, than any dirigible ever has! We have to range 16,900 kilometers maybe, depending upon where the boat is! And God only knows what winds we'll run into! And it's all one vast one-shot! Do you hear me, Dave, Zeke, Cyrano? A one-shot!"
Her heart would not quit racing. "Dave" had spoken with a German accent. They must be the very men she was looking for. What luck! No, not luck. She had known how many kilometers distant, counted by the grailstones spaced along the bank, her destination was. And she had been told exactly where the headquarters of Milton Firebrass was. And she knew that David Schwartz, the Austrian engineer, was one of Firebrass' lieutenants.
"It'll take too much time, too much material," a man said .loudly. His speech was that of a native of Maine. There was something, or was it just her overactive imagination, of the shriek of the wind in rigging, the creaking of rope and wood in a rolling ship, the thunder of surf, the flapping of sails, in his voice? Imagination, of course.
"Stop that, Jill," she told herself. If Firebrass had not called him Zeke, she would not now be imposing open-sea-sailing-ship images on the voice. He would be Ezekiel Hardy, captain of a New Bedford whaler, killed by a sperm whale off the coast of Japan – 1833? – and he had convinced Firebrass that he would make an excellent helmsman or navigator for the airship. After suitable training, of course. Firebrass must really be hard up for a crew if he signed o
n an early-nineteenth-century whaling ship skipper. The man had probably never even seen a balloon, maybe not even a steam-driven riverboat.
The grapevine had it that Firebrass had had little success so far in finding experienced airshipmen. Men, of course. Always men. So, he had accepted candidates who seemed most likely to benefit from training. Airplane pilots. Balloonists. Sailors. Meanwhile, the word had spread up and down The River for 60,000 kilometers, perhaps 100,000, that Firebrass wanted lighter-than-air men. Always men.
What did Firebrass know about building and flying a gasbag? He may have journeyed to Mars and Ganymede, orbited Jupiter and Saturn, but what did that have to do with dirigibles? David Schwartz, it was true, had designed and built the first truly rigid dirigible. It had also been the first to have a structure and skin made completely from aluminum. This was in 1893, sixty years before she had been born. He'd then started to build a better airship – in Berlin, 1895? – but work had stopped on it when Schwartz had died – January, 1897?
She was not sure now. Thirty-one years on The River had dimmed much of memories on Earth.
She wondered if Schwartz knew what had happened after he had died. Probably not unless he'd met some gasbag freak, a layman Zepfan. Schwartz's widow had carried on his work, and yet no book Jill had read had bothered to note her first name or her maiden name. She was only Frau Schwartz. She had gotten the second ship built, despite being only a woman. And some male jackass had flown the aluminum ship (which looked more like a thermos bottle than anything else), had panicked, and had wrecked it.
All that was left of Schwartz's dream and his wife's devotion to it was a crumpled mass of silvery-looking metal. So much for dreams in a high wind when a big phallus, lilliputian brains, and mouse courage were at the controls. Now, if the jackass had been a woman, her name would have been recorded. See what happens when a woman leaves the kitchen? If God had intended . . .
Jill Gulbirra trembled, a hot ache in her chest. Get hold of yourself, she murmured. Cool does it or you blow it.
She started from her reverie. While she had been dreaming of Frau Schwartz's dream, she had allowed the canoe to be carried down-River. The fire had become smaller, and the voices fainter, and yet she had not noticed. Better bloody watch out, she told herself. She had to be ever alert, or she would never convince the powers-that-be that she was qualified to be one of the airship crew. To be captain?
"There's plenty of time!" Firebrass thundered. "This isn't any government-contract, low-fund, high-pressure project! It'll be thirty-seven years or more before Sam gets to the end of The River. It'll only take two – maybe three – years to complete the beast. Meanwhile, we'll use the blimp for training. And then we're off, heigh ho, for the wild blue yonder, the misty sea of the north pole, where no Santa Claus, but somebody who's given us gifts that make Saint Nick look like the world's worst tightwad, lives! Off to the MistyTower, the Really Big Grail!"
The fourth man spoke up now. He had a pleasant baritone, but it was evident that English was not his natal speech. What was it? It sounded like a French accent in some ways but. . . Yes, of course. That could be Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac, if she could believe what she had heard at about hundredth hand. It just did not seem possible that she would soon be talking to him. Perhaps she wouldn't be, since there were so many phonies on The River.
There was silence for a moment, the silence that only the Rivervalley knew – when people kept their mouths shut. No birds, no animals (especially no barking dogs), no mechanical monsters roaring, bellowing, buzzing, screeching, no tooting horns, no whooping or screaming sirens, no shrieking brakes, no loud radios, no blaring loudspeakers. Only water lapping against shore and then a splash as a fish leaped out and fell back. And the crackle of wood in the fire.
"Ah!" Firebrass said. "Smooth! Better'n anything I ever had on Earth! And free, free! But when, when will the airmen show up? I need more men with experience, real gas-baggers!"
Schwartz made a smacking sound – Jill could see the bottle tilted above his lips now – and he said, "So! You are not so unworried!"
The canoe touched shore, and she got out of it without tipping it. The water was up to her waist, but the magnetically sealed cloths kept the cold liquid out. She waded closer and lifted the long, heavy canoe, moving forward until she was on shore. She let the craft down and dragged it until its entire length was out of the stream. The bank was only about 30 centimeters above the water level. She stood for a moment, planning her entrance, then decided not to go armed.
"Oh, I'll get them eventually," Firebrass was saying.
She stepped closer, sliding her feet over the short grass.
"I'm the one you're looking for," she said loudly.
The four whirled, one almost falling and grabbing another. They stared, their mouths and eyes dark holes in paleness. Like her, they were covered with cloths but theirs were brightly colored. If she had been an enemy, she could have put an arrow into each one before they could grab their weapons – if they had such. Then she saw that they did have guns, placed on the edge of the mushroom top of the grailstone.
Pistols! Made of iron! So, it was true!
Now she suddenly saw a rapier, a long, steel sharp-pointed blade, in the hand of the tallest man there. His other hand brushed his hood back and revealed a long, dark face with a big nose. He had to be the fabled Cyrano de Bergerac.
Cyrano reverted to seventeenth-century French, of which she could understand only a few words.
Firebrass. pushed his hood back, too.
"I almost crapped in my britches! Why didn't you warn us you were coming?"
She lowered her hood.
Firebrass stepped closer and looked keenly at her. "It's a woman!"
"Nevertheless, I'm your man," Jill said.
"What'd you say?"
"Don't you understand English!" she said angrily.
Her displeasure was more at herself. She had been so excited, though pretending to be composed, that she'd reverted to her Toowoomba dialect. She might as well have spoken in Shakespearean English for all they understood. She repeated, in the standard Midwestern American she'd learned so painstakingly, "Nevertheless, I'm your man. My name, by the way, is Jill Gulbirra."
Firebrass introduced himself and the others, then said, "I need another drink.''
"I could use one myself," Jill said. "It's a fallacy that alcohol warms you up, but it does make you think you're warmed up."
Firebrass stopped and picked up a bottle – the first glass Jill had seen for years. He handed it to her and she drank the scotch without wiping the mouth of the bottle. After all, there were no disease germs on The River. And she had no prejudices about drinking from a bottle that had been in the mouth of a half-black. Wasn't her grandmother an aborigine? Of course, abos were not Negroes. They were black-skinned archaic Caucasians.
Why was she thinking such thoughts?
Cyrano, his head stuck forward, his back bent, walked up to her. He looked her over, shook his head, and said, "Mordioux, the hair is shorter than mine! And there is no makeup! Are you sure she is a woman?"
Jill moved the scotch around in her mouth and swallowed it. It was delicious, and it warmed all the way down.
"We shall see," the Frenchman said. He put his hand on her left breast and squeezed gently.
Jill sank a fist into his hard belly. He bent over, and Jill brought her knee up against his chin. He fell heavily.
Firebrass said, "What the hell?" and stared at her.
"How would you react if he felt your crotch to see if you were a man?"
"Simply thrilled, honey," Firebrass said. He whooped with laughter and danced around while the other two men looked at him as if they thought he was crazy.
Cyrano got onto his hands and knees and then onto his feet. His face was red, and he was snarling. Jill wanted to back away, especially after he picked up the rapier. But she did not move, and she said, her voice steady, "Do you always take such familiarities with strange women?"
"No sweat," Jill said. "Just don't let it happen again."
Though she smiled, she was cursing herself for having begun in such a bad way with a man for whom she had a great admiration. It was not her fault, but she could not expect him to forgive her for having felled him so easily before witnesses. No male ego could survive that.
Chapter 8
* * *
The mist thinned. Now they did not need the firelight to see each other's faces. Below their waists the grey-white coils were still dense, however. The sky was brightening, though it would be some hours before the sun cleared the eastern peaks. The great white gas sheets that covered one-sixth of the sky had faded away with the lesser stars. Thousands of the giants still flamed red, green, white, blue, but their intensity, like gas jets slowly being turned off, was diminishing.
Westward, a dozen structures towered up from the mists. Her eyes widened, though she had heard about these through the grapevine and the drum-telegraph. Some were four and five-story high buildings of sheet-iron and aluminum. Factories. But the colossus was an aluminum building, a hangar.
"It's the biggest I ever saw," she murmured.
"You ain't seen nothing yet," Firebrass said. He paused, then said, wonderingly, "So you have come to sign up?"
"I said that once."
He was The Man. He could hire and fire her. But she'd never been able to conceal irritation at stupidity. Repetition was wasteful and hence stupid. Here was a man who had a Ph.D. in astrophysics and a master's in electronic engineering. And the United States had not sent any dummies into space, though they may not have been brilliant. Maybe it was the liquor that made him seem stupid. As it did every man. And every woman, she hastened to remind herself. Be fair.
Riverworld03- The Dark Design (1977) Page 5