by John Brunner
Abruptly his voice rang out like a steamer’s whistle on a dead still night.
“And we’re too well acquainted with mortality to bow to it!”
“So am I!” Cherouen said bluffly, when he had gathered his wits after that declaration.
None of the others—and by now they included a whole group of the boat’s officers who had been roused on news of the fog’s clearance: Motley and Wills, Diamond and Gross and Vehm, Amboy even, elderly and shambling as he now was, all indeed save the weary mates who were ensuring that the men they had sent out in the yawl were safe aboard again—none paid him the least deference. He tried again.
“I have campaigned for years against the Angel of Death with all the means at my command, and—”
“And how often have you tended Walt Presslie without being dragged to the job? Some suffering is beneath your dignity to notice, ain’t that so?”
It was with pure amazement that Fernand heard those words emerging from his mouth. Once out, however, he found he must continue.
“We’ll finish the run at the best speed we can make—not to suit you, but making it a tribute to someone who was worth ten of you!”
“The Grammont child—”
“He had a child! And so shall I, and why don’t you?” Passion flamed in Fernand’s voice, and his fists folded over as though to strike Cherouen down. He was able to control himself, but his words blasted on like the Atchafalaya entering this clear straight reach.
“There’s life in everything we build: our boats, our roads, our tools to make life easier for all! Which do you care for more—the miserable child who lies abed of fever or the money and prestige you plan to reap?”
Cherouen’s mouth worked, but he could find no answer under the hostile united gaze of all the rest. After a pause, he stormed away.
“Thank you, Fernand,” said Drew almost inaudibly, and was himself again, issuing orders for the better conduct of the boat’s affairs.
“Hey!” shouted Whitworth, struck by inspiration as he caught sight of Caesar. “Want to make ten dollars?”
Caesar brushed him aside; he was on an errand for Corkran.
But Whitworth came after him, almost fawning.
“Twenty, then!” he offered.
And since it was not wholly politic to disregard a white man, even after what he had been through, Caesar checked and looked at him.
“Rout out Mam’zelle Josephine! Ger her to put a curse on the Atchafalaya!”
Which was sliding by in the main channel, her decks alive with mockery.
It was in Whitworth’s mind that if she now blew up, a curse could be attributed as the cause.
But Caesar looked him steadily in the eye and said in the most frigid tone he could command, “I guess, sir, you had best address yourself to Mr. Moyne.”
And went about his business, which had to do with loosing the Nonpareil from her captivity.
Left standing, Whitworth looked at the Atchafalaya and marveled that so many people were still aboard. Somehow in the convoluted confines of his head he had concluded that by now the steamer was an entity of itself, stripped of humans, having shed passengers at sundry points along the way. But seeing that there were still—how many?—at least a hundred souls upon her, qualms of conscience struck him.
How could he have been so stupid as to offer to explode her boilers?
But it was done, and there was no help for it. Perhaps if he appealed to Mam’zelle Josephine direct, and paid her well, suspicion might be distracted from him…
He set out determinedly on such a mission.
But found, when he reached Josephine’s stateroom, no one to answer. For…
A little earlier, coincident upon the grounding, Auberon had woken with a curious sense of purpose. Rising, he had drawn on such clothes as might pass for decent, and made his way through the cabin—empty now, since all attention was fixed on the stranding and attempts to back away.
Given his chance, he headed for Josephine’s door and found it unfastened. Opening and closing it, he discovered her crying, face in a tear-wet pillow. And inquired: “Because of me…?”
She shook her head. He locked the door and lay down beside her, clumsy-handed pushing away the petticoat she wore for lack of night attire.
Yet when she yielded to his importuning, he made no move to take her, but began to talk.
“Oh, my sister, oh, my bride! Why has the world been cruel to us both? Why am I doomed to spew my life away in bloodred gouts, when I’ve seen castles, cities, monuments from a thousand years, two thousand, even older? What cursed you that you have to live a life of lies?”
“I was born of a lie,” she said stonily. “And beyond that, of a crime.”
She could feel the god speaking with her lips, and heard the great echoing of Africa come stress the words.
“I too! I too!” cried Auberon, but whispering. “And my dear Louisette—children of rich and greedy parents who regarded us as little more than slaves, to be married off against another fortune! In that at least I cheated ‘em—I’ll die before they reap the profit of me!”
“And Louisette?” Josephine inquired, wet lips beside his ear. He gave a horizontal shrug, feeling her stiffen him with a caressing hand.
“I had no news of her at Cairo, and that devil Arthur didn’t go ashore… If I’d not been so weak, I’d have called him out by now!”
“You think she should have had another husband,” she suggested.
“Hell, but for what happened to his family, she’d have married Joel!” he exclaimed. “He’s a good friend, and talented. And healthy!”
“And would even that have contented you?” she probed.
“What do you mean?”
“I think you know. That’s why you’re here.” She rose on one elbow, gazing at him though the room was almost lightless.
“You’re here because you wanted Louisette,” she said in the convinced tone of a doctor making a positive diagnosis. “Not me, but her— Oh, don’t run away!” she interrupted herself as he made to get up. “It happened all as was intended. The rite has been consummated.”
“I don’t understand!” Now he sounded frightened.
“You don’t have to. All my life many things have happened to me that I couldn’t understand, and patience has been rewarded, because now I do. The making of a magic child is a long and complex process. Between us it has finally occurred. In it there is enough of the new world, enough of the old—”
Her breath was tracing down his chest, his belly; it suffused him with grateful warmth against the chill of horror that pervaded him when he thought about impending death.
He had to yield; he had no more energy to resist. Cast away upon an ocean of delight, he passively awaited doom.
While she, at intervals, wondered about her rival Eulalie.
Tousle-haired, fresh from bed, her only dress now much crumpled, followed by Dorcas who had at least been able to bring a bagful of clothes with her and looked—albeit sleepy—ravishing, the inheritor of the powers of Athalie Lamenthe frowned at the dawn.
As docile as a well-trained puppy, Dorcas—who had always wanted someone to dominate her and was content when several did, thanks to her upbringing under the rule of multiple aunts—inquired, “Maman, what’s wrong?”
It seemed correct to address her as Fernand did, since she was so soon to be her daughter-in-law.
“Something very terrible,” Eulalie muttered. “I can’t make it out. It’s as though the fog is hanging on inside my head. But something dreadful, anyhow!”
Belatedly awakened, for he had needed sleep, Joel came out of the cabin just in time to catch that last remark. And bethought himself of the way Josephine had predicted danger from a brown stick. Maybe Eulalie also could pierce the future’s veil…
“Madame Lamenthe!” he exclaimed, confronting her. “What do you foresee?” And acknowledged Dorcas with a sketchy bow.
“Death.”
But the steamer was charging ahea
d, and the sun was breaking the horizon, and hordes of children were appearing on the banks to wave and shout, and their joy was infectious, and there was not another vessel to be seen on the whole broad bosom of the Mississippi save the Nonpareil, and she was fast aground.
Moved by a curious pang of sympathy, Joel put his arm around Eulalie’s shoulders.
“You heard the blind captain died aboard the other boat?” he asked. She gave a nod.
“Perhaps that’s what you feel: his loss. He was, they say, a great man, who might have held the horns on every run the length of both the rivers! But there’s no help for that. Now come with me. I’ll get you breakfast; you’ll feel better.”
It’s more than that! Dorcas wanted to say. Or, more exactly: It’s other than that!
But as yet she lacked the skill to put sensations into words. Last night, when Fernand came to her, she had begun to suspect what power she could wield if she were trained. To rule a man who ruled the Mississippi—that was achievement!
Still, it was a great and patient power. Tomorrow would be soon enough.
And when a man was kind to her, or her adoptive kin, especially if the man were white, it behooved her to comply. Such instruction, in Eulalie’s calendar, long preceded subtler methods like trickenbags and dolls and herbal brews.
Nonetheless she was disturbed to note that, confronted by coffee and milk and sugar and beignets in a service of shining silver plate, such as Parbury (had he been sighted, and had he been alive) would have commended his Dorcas for producing, Eulalie still spoke of death and the white reporter paid attention.
The moment the news of Parbury’s death was brought to him, Manuel reacted in the best way he knew how. Smartening himself with a wipe of a wet facecloth and a pass of his comb, he tugged on his dark coat, thrust his feet into his boots, and went shouting for the members of his band.
Five minutes, and he had them mustered on the foredeck. Even as they were tuning up he went from group to group, humming parts for them to play, and when he clapped his hands and stomped out the rhythm, they gave forth a lugubrious hymn beloved at funerals in New Orleans: “Flee as a Bird to the Mountain.”
Hearing it, everybody except those on essential duty stopped. Men awkwardly removed their hats; some, who had seen military service, came to attention.
By chance that was the moment when Woodley and Hogan emerged from the pilothouse, holding between them, in a clumsy parody of a bearer party, the corpse of Miles Parbury on its way to the cabin, where Bates had cleared the common table and had it spread with his finest tablecloths in lieu of a pall.
From the foot of the pilothouse stairs it was easier to be formal. Hiram Burge had ordered his men to bring a spare door, which served well enough for a bier, and from his own quarters had produced something utterly unexpected: in rags and tatters, burnt along one edge, the Confederate battle flag.
With all the fire and fury of his youth, which had made Parbury select him as his engineer, he defied anybody to prevent him spreading the flag across the captain’s body, saying, “That’s what the other Nonpareil was flying when they sank her, and I’ve kept it secret until now!”
“Call him the latest casualty of the war,” said Hogan grayly, and took his place, along with Woodley, Trumbull and McNab—who insisted—at the corners of the door-turned-bier.
Meantime, up in the pilothouse, Barfoot was holding a discussion via speaking tube with Corkran. It could admit of only one conclusion.
Before Parbury’s body had been made decent on the cabin table, the engines were again astir, and the giant wheels had set about their thankless task of dragging the Nonpareil free of the sand reef.
Some spoke of sacrilege or insults to the dead; others, who had known the old man better, chided them.
“We can,” they said, “honor his memory no better way than taking up the work he has abandoned.”
Therefore in minutes, even while the passengers and crew filed past the corpse to pay futile last respects, while McNab intoned quotations from the Psalms, and Auberon and Josephine emerged, shivering, terrified, pretending by mutual agreement that she had once more been tending him in his sickness, so that no one would comment on their having been in the same stateroom (but nobody noticed), and a single thought ran through all their minds: “In the midst of life we are in death!”…
Even as all this happened, to the swelling accompaniment of Manuel’s band, Woodley and Gordon were arguing furiously about the chance of catching up.
“She’s barely ahead of us!” Gordon barked. “It’s not yet full daylight! And if the charts are to be trusted, there’s a plenty of straight reaches from here to St. Louis, where we’ll outstrip her!”
“We have to break free first!” Woodley retorted.
“I’ll settle that!” Gordon rasped, and spun on his heel, making for the engineroom. Matthew, who had turned out as much by reflex as by choice, got in his way and almost earned a cuff about the chin, but fell in behind, as usual.
At which moment Tacy appeared to report what the pilots had decided on as a tribute to Parbury: that they would combine, regardless of salary, to ensure the best time to St. Louis, whether they won or lost. Woodley pumped his hand fervently, meantime wondering what had become of Whitworth (but that was all right: he had resumed his duties and was mustering deckhands to help free the bow from the clinging mud).
More to the point, he also wondered what had become of the explosive.
Red-eyed, foul-tempered, with nothing but a cup of black coffee in his belly by way of breakfast, Gaston cursed and struck a line through the last half-dozen bars he had set out, because they were not the least what he intended.
And blinked, and looked again.
True, he had been deceived into noting down what he could hear, at the edge of perception, from the Nonpareil, whose band was blasting out banalities as usual.
But the tempo was right. And some of those harmonies, though rough, did convey an impression of grief: as though one were to listen to a whole chorus of mourners, each keening in his or her private key.
It was, on reflection, quite effective.
Chewing the end of his pen, he wondered how to take advantage of this happy accident.
“How long tae pull us free o’ yon godfersakit mudpile?”
Gordon barked the question into the dimness of the engineroom, fuller of stench than light because nobody had remembered to raise the canvas awnings used by night to shield stray reflections from the view of the pilot. Matthew stared wildly about him. The tension in the air was so terrific, it minded him to turn and flee. Every time either piston filled and emptied, there was a hiss such as the serpent in the Garden of Eden might have uttered: long, sighing, and seductive.
But under it were the sucking, scraping sounds of the hull fighting loose from the gluey reef.
The four engineers, each turning back from his respective duty—the three whites first, then Caesar—confronted him and let their chief reply.
“About an hour,” Corkran said. “If we don’t get interrupted!”
The gibe was lost on Gordon. He advanced, clenching his fists.
“By then she’ll be miles ahead!”
“I guess she may make ten miles in the next hour, and in the next one twelve.” Corkran delivered the words with resignation.
“But the Nonpareil’s by far the faster boat! We mustnae lose!”
“Objectively,” said Corkran after due deliberation, “I reckon that may be so. But fast aground, no boat is fast in the channel.”
There was a matching grin on all the engineers’ faces: Roy’s, Steeple’s, even Caesar’s, for the latter now felt himself to be a part of this company.
“It willna dae!” hissed Gordon. “Ye’re lily-livered, the lot o’ ye! Hae ye nae thocht on the answer?”
Before any of them had the chance to speak again, he had taken the two strides necessary to bring him within arm’s reach of the device he had insisted on having installed at the time of the Nonpareil’
s maiden voyage: a seven-foot iron rod to move the weight on the safety-valve lever, which the smith had patterned after a logger’s hook, with a wicked curved spike on its end.
“Ye’re a’ cooards!” he hissed. “I proved tae ye, this boat’ll run wi’ twa hunnert tae the inch!”
And twitched the weapon clear of its mount; in his hands, a weapon was what it instantly became. He leveled it like a quarterstaff, defying challenge.
Uncertain, Corkran said, “But the seals—”
“Tae the de’il wi’ yir inspectors!” Gordon roared. “Ask wha payit fer this boat! Ask wha was gleddit in his heirt tae see the streinth o’ her! Did ye nae hear what Parbury wisht o’ his bairn?”
And it was all true. They knew it as well as he did. Steamboat inspectors could be bribed. Her extra power might yet haul the Nonpareil into deep water, and the arguments might happen later, and…
“And wha’ in the de’il’s name are ye aboot?” Gordon cried.
For Caesar had turned away. Over his shoulder he said, “She’s too light. Everything’s too light. She can’t properly stand a hundred sixty without we run from joint to joint until we drop. Two hundred will blow her guts out.”
“Ye daur bespeak me sae?” exploded Gordon, and raised that vicious iron hook as far as the space between decks would allow, aimed for the back of Caesar’s head. “Ye black de’il! Ye son o’ Satan! Ye chiel o’ Ham! Ye curst o’ God!”
Matthew watched all this with a sense of fatality. It did not occur to him that he might alter the course of events until the climactic second when it was plain that Gordon wanted to kill the black engineer.
Who seemed, as far as Matthew could judge, to have more courage and more insight than the others.
And then it struck him how he might intervene.
But at what cost!
Gone, like a blast of spare steam from a riverboat’s whistle, would be all hope of funding his future through the secret knowledge he had acquired. Gone, the money with which he planned to return to his uncle and say—dishonestly—how grateful he was.