by John Brunner
“Aye. I mean yes!” Woodley corrected himself, angry at having unconsciously mimicked the other’s usage; seafaring terms had no place aboard a riverboat. “From now on I reckon I’d be best advised to carry it.”
“Until we can get rid o’ yon chiel.”
“Until…?” Woodley checked in mid-word. Eventually he gave a firm nod.
“If he can vanish, as he said,” Gordon observed, resuming his customary tone, “being without ties of family or profession, we’d do well to make the arrangements.”
“I know someone at St. Louis who…”
“Better that he doesn’t reach St. Louis.”
All through the small hours the boats crept on at the same snail’s pace. By three o’clock the passengers started to rise. When they saw how thick the fog still was, they marveled that any progress at all was being made. Awed, they went about the boat as quietly as though in a cathedral, fixing in their minds the fact—to be retailed on arrival home—that from the bow one could not only not see the stern; one could make out neither the pilothouse nor the wheels. Yet both steamers were still running when visibility was down to less than half their own length.
The sober judgment of those with a claim to know held that there had never been such a race before, and most likely there would never be again.
As for the fact that Parbury was at the helm…!
The very muse of history seemed to be brooding on the river, hatching events to nourish memory, creating out of formless chaos the foundation of a legend.
Joel shivered. It was as though he were reading a masterpiece of literature over its author’s shoulder, watching the words go down inexorably on the page.
So too did Eulalie and Josephine, convinced that their Lord was widening the boundary of his rule.
Barber kept finding he was crossing himself; each time he tried to prevent the reflex, it recurred.
Cherouen grumpily strove to dream of a day when the power of electricity would abolish not only sickness, but fog; his efforts failed as the interminable journey dragged along.
Arthur begged for sympathy from Hugo and Stella and found his whining had worn out their patience.
Gaston was fighting to keep his sore eyes open. In his head he could hear the fully-harmonized version of his funeral music, but it would be useless until noted down.
Manuel snored; there would be no call for his band until the lifting of the fog. To make music for even the best of reasons could distract the pilot.
Auberon tossed feverishly in his bed, haunted by dreams of burial alive: a just compensation for his act with Josephine? Half-waking as the engines’ note changed, he found he was able to think of The Fall of the House of Usher, and his fever chills redoubled.
Matthew, between waking and sleeping, thought with relish of the power he now exerted over Gordon, and reached under his pillow to make sure his book about tartans was still safe.
Dorcas was awake, and had been since Fernand left her, though she was terribly tired. She fancied she had felt her baby kicking; what if what they had done together tonight had harmed the child? Eulalie had introduced her to many superstitions on this trip, including the notion that a baby must be affected by what happened when it was in the womb.
Walt Presslie was delirious; his shoulder was as raw as butcher’s meat, too tender to be touched. Fonck had ordered him to his bunk, where he lay tossing and turning and bemoaning his inability to go on working.
But those most directly involved in the running of the boats—the other engineers, the pilots, the mates, the clerks even, for their livelihood was at stake and they must stand by helplessly and watch—they had no rest. They bore the most tremendous strain any of them could recall, as the steamers fumbled toward shoal water and shied away and were caught by the current and had to fight back and make crossings that by daylight would have been difficult, at night almost impossible, in fog absolutely unthinkable.
Yet it was happening. In low voices they reminded one another of the fact, as though it would be incredible were there not words to dress it in.
And still the Nonpareil retained the lead.
At last, in the fullness of time, the caldron of the heavens ceased to seethe. Its vapors dissipated with the touch of dawn.
Gasping and sweating, aching in every limb, and yet exalted by what he had endured, Caesar emerged from the engineroom and leaned on the guardrail. He had been through an experience he never imagined he would meet, and found himself. Tomorrow—no, today, when he had slept awhile—he was going to tell Mam’zelle Josephine he would never again have need of her magic. He had discovered his own. The world had done its worst by him; it had made him a slave from birth, it had stolen his wife and children, it had crippled his leg and plagued him with the insolence of white folks. To season the mixture, it had rotted his teeth and made them a constant source of agony.
So what?
He had proved himself aboard this boat, and to himself as well as to the others working with him. Running dead slow, the engineers had had the chance to tighten and repack every joint and union that showed signs of strain.
Not, of course, that she could be brought back to her full performance without a full-scale overhaul. Those flimsy pipes, that cut-weight boiler plate, those brick firewalls and furnace-arches constructed to meet the lowest limits the steamboat inspectors would accept—they themselves were a handicap to this sleek vessel. Were she to be fitted with another fifty tons of mass, she would ride smoother in the water, offer her pilot more control, perhaps realize her progenitor’s dream in full.
All this he sensed without being able to express it. But it was secondary. What mattered most…
Back there in the dark and heat and noise, while four engineers were slaving to improve her on the run, three had forgotten that the fourth was black.
Instead of orders he was given signals, and responded. It was the way Sergeant Tennice would have wished his battery to work their guns. That, though, was war—blind, indiscriminate, destructive. This was the coming together of a team, whose mutual trust transcended words.
His shoulders were bruised. How often he had had to haul the reversing bars from cam to cam, he dared not think—but Corkran, Roy and Steeples had done their share, turn and turn about with him. Each who was free had run to respond when trouble loomed; each had relieved another when weariness interfered with their response to the clamorous bells. Each, given the chance, had carried cups of water to the rest; each had snatched moments of repose, like this, to cleanse his lungs of smoke and smuts. Helpers had been recruited from the firemen, and wound up watching, uninvolved, because it would have taken longer to explain what was needful than to do it.
They reminded Caesar of himself, the first time he was turned out for a gun drill.
Now he wanted to shout aloud for joy. He turned his face toward the sky.
And saw a star.
He blinked, but it was no illusion.
There, in a rift of the mist: a jewel on the black. The fog was broken. Not yet along the river, but above, there was clear air.
All the impulses of childhood came to him and filled his heart with happiness and his throat with music. He could do nothing else but sing, and there was only one choice of song.
“Stars a-shinin’ number! number one number two, Good Lord!”
The sleepy deckhands cried out to be let alone, but he went on. And after a little there were shouts from the pilothouse, and someone fired a pistol, and the night was over and the Nonpareil was still leading as, in the wan light before sunrise, the mist cleared and an anthem rose to greet the day.
Mile by mile, yard by yard, the Mississippi had grown more real and vivid in Parbury’s head. In the days when he had been sighted, he had known color; all his life, though speech had never been of prime importance to him, he had judged people’s tone of voice, and sometimes he had enjoyed music; since being blinded, he had learned to use echoes to locate himself, as now with the Nonpareil’s whistle.
N
ever, though, had he known the counterpart of color in the context of movement. It was as though the river had shades of—what to call it? Proportion, direction, bearing?
It didn’t matter. He could feel it in his muscles and his guts. He was identifying with this fabulous watercourse. He was building a rainbow of motion. It was marvelous! He trembled with excitement as, automatically, he found he was cross-referring time elapsed against distance covered and sensing the pattern that resulted, as though he were studying a map in uncountable hues representing the river both above and below the surface: here a point and there a reach, here a shoal and there a reef…
This was the culmination of everything he had sought when, as a boy, he set out to conquer the Mississippi that had robbed him of home and family. For the first and only time he felt he was mastering the river as a fish might do, unaware of any other environment, using it to survive in.
It felt natural. It felt like home.
But there was one dreadful taint that kept assailing him: like a foul smell.
Whenever he let himself be sufficiently distracted from the functioning of the Nonpareil, which by now had become like the beating of his heart and the rhythm of his breathing, there was still the sound of the Atchafalaya. Slow those wheel plashes might be; faint and confused the cries of her polemen… nonetheless, they were there.
A black man had killed the other Nonpareil. He had hated him. Then he had met him and invited him aboard to replace that traitorous sot Eb Williams. Issued an order he was not entitled to. But everyone deferred to it. People yielding as the river was yielding to him now—fawning on him, co-operating in the most amazing way!
What had it been like for Caesar, half trained in the borrowed skills of an alien people?
Who had nonetheless survived…
How had he eluded the fuzz—the men (white, of course) on horseback, whose steeds gave them their nickname, after the slave dealers’ pidgin for a horse which, like okay and yam, had entered English from African dialects? How had he escaped their hounds, who would have bayed on his trail like the Atchafalaya on the Nonpareil’s?
During the hours of fog and darkness this image built in Parbury’s mind, matching and sometimes dominating the image he was constructing of the river, as though some striding giant, tall as a steamer’s chimney tops, were overlooking the whole course he might follow, baffled only by the mist and ready to outstrip him the second it blew away.
It had been too long since he felt a steamboat integrate herself with him…
Herself.
All thought of Adèle, or Dorcas, or any other woman, faded. He and his Nonpareil had become a partnership, a marriage, and if only it had not been sterile—!
Well, that was past help. All that could be delivered from this union was victory.
He recalled he had been allowed access to the helm by fog. He remembered that other pilots were standing by. But he thought most of all about the runaway slave who had eluded pursuers far worse than the Atchafalaya… and heard the latter’s whistle once again.
And then the voice of the former slave himself, lifted in song.
“Stars a-shinin’…!”
For a long moment nobody else reacted. Then it dawned on those about him that overhead was a clear sky; the fog was breaking! A paean erupted from the foredeck.
Parbury’s heart hammered and slammed and he reviewed their location in both space and time.
After this nightlong ordeal at a mile an hour, they had arrived a trifle above Devil’s Island, a thousand and seventy miles from New Orleans, where the channel took a sharp bend to larboard, and from now on a succession of long and straight, though sometimes dangerously shallow, reaches would carry them the remaining hundred and twenty miles to St. Louis. Given that the Nonpareil was objectively the faster boat, that meant the race was as good as won.
“All clear!” went up a yell from the foredeck, and the Nonpareil slipped into the fresh and fog-free morning.
But of a sudden Parbury was giddy. The toll the night had taken from his reserves of energy was more than he could bear. His mental map of the river grew abruptly blurred. He found himself throbbing to the engines’ beat even as he signaled full ahead on both, by reflex rather than by reason.
His grasp on the wheel slackened; he fumbled, finding no purchase, while heavy feet tramped up to the pilothouse and loud excited voices—Woodley’s, Gordon’s, even Whitworth’s—shouted compliments: “We never thought you’d do it, but you did!”
While their arrival distracted Hogan, and Trumbull, and Barfoot, and Smith, and Tacy, the colleagues who had stood this final amazing watch with him and could testify to the miracle he had performed.
But as for himself…
He felt and watched it happen: the slide down into dark. All the resources he had retained from his former sufferings were exhausted. His very brain was worn out after his legendary achievement. He could only stand clutching the wheel until his legs weakened and his arms slumped to his sides and a kind of dazzling blackness overwhelmed what had been the incomparable mind of Miles Parbury.
The others were too busy rejoicing for the following ten seconds to realize how terrible was their mistake.
Standing out from the next point, as usual, was an underwater continuation of it, composed of mud and sand. In bank-full conditions, it was possible to run it with a light boat: in other words, cut across the bend. Maybe that was what they thought he planned to do, forgetting he was blind.
Parbury heard Barfoot say, “Oh my God. No! No!”
And realized how right he was, and had no more time to think of anything as he fell against the wheel and the Nonpareil—whose engines were dutiful and had obeyed his signal—drove at full pressure into the sucking, yielding quagmire of the bar above Devil’s Island and below Hamburg which any cub who had paid attention to his lessons could have avoided after his first trip.
A hundred feet of her colossal length slid fast aground and all the speaking tubes whistled with demands to know what was going on.
As senior surviving pilot Hogan was obliged to relay the news after Woodley had knelt over the still, gaunt form and touched his wrist and shaken his head.
He said gruffly, “Captain Parbury is dead.”
The morning breeze carried off the remaining fog. And out of it, a scant mile behind, here came the Atchafalaya on a full-speed bell.
To Drew it felt as though he had been holding his breath for ten solid minutes. When the fog cleared, the first thing he saw ahead was the fountain of sparks from the Nonpareil’s chimneys, but he paid no attention. He was on the verge of collapse; never in his life had he concentrated so hard on any stretch of the river. All his nerves were raw, to the point where he could almost feel the irregularities in the bed of the channel. But he knew where he was now, and had the confidence to signal full ahead.
Panting, heart pounding, he scarcely dared believe what he had done.
Cheering broke out in the pilothouse. Fernand and Tyburn both clapped him on the shoulder, one each side.
Then the unthinkable happened.
In the midst of showering Drew with compliments, both the other pilots broke off and rushed to the forward window, Fernand remembering to seize the field glasses.
“What the hell are you two doing?” Drew rasped.
“She’s grounded!” Tyburn exploded, and snatched the glasses from Fernand, rapidly adjusting the focus. “Yes!” he insisted after a pause. “She’s fast aground!”
“Now that’s ridiculous—” Drew began, and broke off as the final wisps of mist blew away and he was able to see for himself.
It was too much. A gust of laughter blasted forth, so violent it was painful. Before he had to yield to the second spasm, he was able to beckon someone to relieve him at the helm, and Tyburn was prompt to take over, though he too was chuckling so much that tears threatened to spill down his cheeks, like water overtopping a levee.
Fernand helped the captain to the bench, while from below shouts and chee
rs greeted the appearance of clear air. In the wan light of dawn Barber and Cherouen and many others turned out to witness the introit of the race’s final day.
Amazed, incredulous, they saw the graceful Nonpareil stock-still on the mud. Then echoes of the hilarity from above infected them, and as the Atchafalaya drove by, passengers and crew alike cheered and hollered insults.
To which, from the Nonpareil, shouts were returned. After half a dozen repetitions, at last the message could be made out through the noise of wheels and engines.
“Parbury’s dead!”
By now, because Drew kept on being convulsed with laughter, Fernand had grown concerned enough to take him out in the fresh air. Guiding him down the stairs, he encountered Barber and Cherouen.
Just at that time news of the death arrived. They stood for a moment silent, in a formal group like the arrangement of a commemorative painting. Drew’s cachinnations ceased. He took his staff in both hands and held it before him as though he meant to break it, and sententiously intoned, “The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”
Meantime Tyburn urged the Atchafalaya onward at a pace that, were the Nonpareil to fail to free herself in at most ten minutes, would assure her of victory.
“Should we cancel all bets?” ventured Barber after crossing himself and muttering a brief prayer. All eyes turned on him.
“Out of the question!” Cherouen roared. “I have a duty to my patients! We must arrive as soon as possible!”
That tune had been heard before. Drew silenced the doctor with a scowl, lowering his staff to the deck and leaning on it.
“Langston,” he sighed, “you’re not of our kind, are you? With or without a war, we grow used to death. It’s a presence haunting us by day and night. We don’t accord anybody special obsequies, even our most distinguished captains. Leave such garish nonsense to those who have debased themselves by slaughtering a human enemy. We of the river fight in a nobler cause!”