by John Brunner
Lord! Lord! He could not see through the telescope, for his vision was preempted by a panorama of faces. How many were aboard the Nonpareil, counting those gamblers and sensation-seekers who had wanted to stick with the boat they had backed until the end? A hundred and twenty—a hundred and fifty?
And as of this moment only Parbury was dead.
The thought of witnessing a calamity that killed them all sickened Joel. He willingly ceded his telescope to Barber, who had now arrived on the platform outside the pilothouse; Cherouen, his chest heaving with effort, was a few steps lower down. As soon as he got his breath, he demanded a share of the telescope, and his tone was greedy, as though he needed the stimulation of seeing the disaster personally to add spice to his existence.
Joel looked at him coldly. It was said this man had been a successful surgeon in the war. Maybe it was war that had corrupted him. Likely enough; it corrupted even the most upright. But it must, in that case, have gone further. It must have brutalized him. For all his machines and electricity, for all his vaunted panaceas, he was a drunkard and a bigot and a swine.
He recalled what Drew had said a few minutes ago, and uttered a private prayer that the surviving Grammont child be too well on their arrival for Cherouen’s services to be invoked.
But there was going to be a greater need for them, and sooner. For the plumes of steam and smoke belching up from the Nonpareil wrote Indian signals of disaster on the sky.
Preoccupied with the shallow narrow channel, Tyburn said, “I guess they got what was coming to us, hm?”
“What?” Drew glanced around, lowering his field glasses.
“Mr. Siskin said—”
“Forget it! She’s afire!” And he gave a captain’s leave to the texas tender, who was still standing by the door, eyes wide in his dark face, licking his lips.
When he opened the door, however, he found his way blocked, and shrank back as if he were somehow to blame for what was happening. Fernand saw and made a resolution: no child of his should cringe so, though it be for a king!
And thought of Dorcas, and wished he might be with her.
Through the open door, Cherouen called, “That seals it, Cap’n!”
And Barber echoed him, beaming.
“What?” Drew growled.
They were taken aback for a moment. Barber recovered first.
“Why, that we can win this race and beat the record!”
“Right!” chimed in Cherouen. “From now on it’s ‘plain sailing’—don’t they say?”
In that instant Fernand realized he loathed this man. He didn’t hate him—hating involved the expenditure of energy, and Cherouen wasn’t worth it. No: he loathed him, like a wet gray slug found under a flagstone, not because of any particular fault he had committed, but because of what he was.
The contrast between this humbug and Dr. Malone…! Could one imagine Cherouen stopping his carriage because he had seen a stranger fall fainting on the sidewalk?
As for Barber, though—
Him he could only detest. And that was different again. He wished Barber no harm, but had no least desire to emulate his way of living. To take money from fools who thought they were going to get more without working for it—that was understandable, yet detestable. It was not cleverness; it was mere cunning, and animals could exhibit that. And withal he was an honorable man.
How was it he had started to think in such terms as Edouard Marocain might have used?
The answer dawned on Fernand the next instant. This was his legacy. This was what Edouard had bequeathed him, infinitely more valuable than gold or property, the thing his own sons would not learn: a power of judgment.
He felt his lips tremble as they had when leaving Edouard’s requiem mass, and knew in his heart for the first time how much he had loved that crotchety uncle. He had been deprived of a part of himself when the old man was laid to rest. But he had been given more. To recognize that he could love—not like, not lust after, not feel proud of owning—another person: was that not a grand bequest?
And he did. He loved Dorcas, and their child, and—and yes, despite her faults, his mother too, and likewise…
Drew?
Yes! Yes, and maybe above all! This man who had stood in a father’s role when teaching him the river: sometimes patient, sometimes snappish, always ready with a borrowed phrase from some favorite poet which could fix a lesson in his pupil’s mind… he was somehow less than likable, but nonetheless transcended that. He was more than honorable.
He was honest.
Within Fernand’s head there were shiftings like a winter revision of the Mississippi’s course, like landslides, like the legendary earthquake that once caused the river to run backward. (Yet it was no myth; he had spoken with people who had spoken with people who had seen it.)
And they were abruptly halted by a sound he recognized, faint though it was, echoing from far below in the engineroom. He came to himself again and realized that Drew, in one decisive step and gesture and in dreadful breach of manners as they held on the river, had reached past Tyburn and rung the bells to stop and back, and laid his hand upon the wheel and said, “I got her!”
Stop and back?
Even those ignoramuses outside, Barber and Cherouen and the reporter, recognized the effect, if not the signal, and came shouting into the pilothouse, trying to issue orders of their own.
“You can’t do that!”—from raging Cherouen. “I have to cure a sick child in St. Louis!”
“You can’t do that!”—from furious Barber. “If we don’t break the record I won’t win half of what I hoped for!”
Looking at him, seeing the naked greed that marred his face, Fernand realized: it was credible in spite of all denials that this man who had finally admitted his African blood—but to a white man!—should have connived at selling freed slaves back to slavery.
It didn’t matter anymore whether he had done so. It was enough to recognize: he could have done.
And with that, Fernand’s attachment to any stranger on the ground of color vanished. That Dorcas matched him was, from now on and forever, his good fortune. That Drew did not, or Cherouen, was indifferent; that Caesar did, and Josephine, the same.
He wanted Drew to stand godfather to his firstborn: not Barber, who had let the room where they conceived it.
All the misery of Drew’s existence came together in the next words he uttered.
He had no business reclaiming the wheel, and knew that Tyburn knew it, hovering ready to take over again. What he had done during the night was as amazing as Parbury’s navigation without eyes; it had called for total control and total insight.
Well, he had managed it. But his achievement had entailed such fatigue as he had never known.
Yet some last resource, like a runner’s second wind, was affording him new energy, and when he spoke he spoke with perfect certainty.
“I won’t!” he exploded, swinging the wheel as he felt the engineers respond to his commands. And in the simple declaration he felt all his remotest ancestors coming to voice their frenzy through his mouth, from that apelike creature whose bones, even, had been dissolved into the mud of time—yet had been the first to deny what the world in its obsessive monotony offered!—clear to that father whom he scarcely thought about these days, who had sincerely mourned the doom of his elder son and was dead before he had a chance to praise the younger.
All those who wanted the world to be otherwise, and better, shared the sound of his shout.
The defiance of his cry created a change in Barber, like the shift from a sand reef to a wind reef. He had loomed in Drew’s mind as though he were somehow larger than life, epitome of all those who had ruined Jacob. Now he was suddenly no more than a bugaboo.
Blustering, he roared, “If you don’t keep right on going you don’t get my half of the boat!”
“Mr. Lamenthe,” Drew said with weariness half real, half affected, “this person has no business in my pilothouse. Expel him.”
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��It will be a perfect pleasure,” Fernand said.
“Jones! Cuffy!” Barber bellowed, retreating nervously toward the door, and there were immediate footsteps on the stairs.
For a second Fernand was irresolute; then he felt a tap on his arm. Tyburn was handing him Drew’s staff, which had stood forgotten in the corner. He took it with a feral grin and, holding it like a bayoneted rifle, made to drive it into Barber’s paunch.
It was almost funny, how smoothly it went: as though it had been rehearsed for the theater.
Behind Barber the door was ajar; a chance motion of the boat was swinging it wide open. Through it his fear of Fernand’s onslaught drove him into the arms of his bodyguards, who lost their footing, so the three of them fell shouting and scrabbling to the foot of the stairs. After them Drew hurled a parting message in a voice like Jove announcing thunderstorms: “One more attempt to usurp my authority aboard this boat, and you and your henchmen will wind up in irons!”
It passed through Fernand’s mind that he had never before heard—only read—that archaic term.
Trust Old Poetical to come up with it when it was needed…
Barber and Jones and Cuffy struggled to their feet, and reached a sensible decision not to return. And that left Cherouen.
Who sniveled, all the bluster leaking out of him: “What about me?”
“Oh, you’re a doctor, ain’t you?” Drew rasped, setting the Atchafalaya into her marks for the southerly course that would shortly bring her back to the stricken Nonpareil.
“God damn you, yes! But—”
“I’m giving you more patients than you’ve ever dreamed of, ain’t I? So what are you worried about—who’ll pay your fee?”
The words hung rankling in the air for a long moment. At last Cherouen turned blindly and stumbled down the stairs in the wake of Barber, who—recovering his dignity—was holding forth to a cluster of crewmen and astonished passengers about the way he had been treated.
“We’re well shut of them,” Drew said with satisfaction. “And we should still make it to the Nonpareil in time. She’s afire, but there should be a chance to ground her before she sinks.”
Joel uttered a strangled exclamation. The others looked at him. He had turned ghost-pale.
He said, “But Whitworth must have had more than one stick of mica powder!”
There was a dead pause. Then Drew said with a shrug, “Yes, it’s a risk. But I’m not turning back because of it. You, Ketch? Fernand, you?”
Together they shook their heads.
“Then it’s decided,” Drew said calmly, and tugged the rope for full ahead.
Loosed from the confines of the furnaces, the fire lay a little while in the belly of the Nonpareil, like a menagerie tiger that had found its cage door open, uncertain what to do next.
Above, the engineers and firemen—some so badly scalded, they were afraid to strip off boots and socks in case the skin came with them—had triggered panic. Passengers and crew rushed to the landward rail. The vessel listed dangerously. There was no one left to trim her with the chain wagon.
Gallantly the officers strove to keep order, but they were a handful among a hundred, and Woodley himself was in no state to inspire confidence. His voice cracked when he tried to utter an order; his face was paper-white; his whole body trembled with terror.
Nor was Gordon any better. Matthew’s charge had struck home past the shield of his excuses, and he was dashing back and forth muttering oaths, thrusting aside anybody who got in his way. There was no sign of Matthew himself.
Now down the stairs from the pilothouse came the pilots, all bar one: Trumbull had accepted to remain at the wheel. Hogan told whoever would listen that he would have done so, but he was shaking as badly as Woodley—not from fright, but mere fatigue—and Barfoot confirmed that he, Smith and Tacy had tossed for the privilege, and Trumbull won.
Yet the task of running the Nonpareil aground, the only sane course of action, was not simple. Here in the upper reaches of the river the current was far more rapid than it had been south of Cairo; the channel was narrower and more beset with every kind of obstacle from snags through sawyers to actual rocks. Moreover there were sunken hulls, relics of war and accident. The river was a cold-hearted god.
The fire below was opposite. The engineroom had been abandoned, so the pilot had no means to control the wheels; as the pressure dropped, so they turned more and more sluggishly and, instead of driving the boat, began to drag her. There remained the rudder… but how long until flames ate through the cables?
Using every ounce of strength, Trumbull hauled the wheel about, broadsiding the boat, forcing her toward the eastern shallows where there would be a chance for people to scramble ashore.
As he struggled, he spared time for a glance upriver and was amazed, delighted, and more than a little awed by what he saw.
No doubt of it! The Atchafalaya was rounding to and coming back.
“Hallelujah!” he exploded, and drove the wheel around an extra inch, and saw his effort was to be rewarded. At this angle the hull would act like the sail of a yacht; the slant of the current would generate a pull that dragged her sideways, nose toward the sanctuary of the towhead where Caesar hid. After that he had no time for thinking. He did not even manage to curse Gordon.
With the eruption of the scalded men, the band had almost scattered like everybody else. But Manuel had summed up the situation in a flash. Not for nothing had he spent his youth in a poor fishing village, where now and then a boat failed to return even on a calm night because someone had spilled the oil that fueled the lamps they hung over the bows to attract their catch, and it had caught on fire. He looked at the breadth of the water, and the way the wheels were churning randomly, and realized that jumping overside was not yet safe. In a little it would be the only recourse. But not yet!
Therefore he drove his musicians back to their station and ordered them to strike up the liveliest tune he could think of on the spur of the moment. To him it meant nothing else; he did not understand why the blackest of the players lowered their instruments and scowled at him, so he had to take half a threatening pace toward them, whistling the parts they were supposed to play. Someone had once told him how at the end of the war President Lincoln called for it from a band in Washington; if Lincoln asked for it, that was good enough for Manuel Campos.
It was Dixie.
Almost as though it had decided to join in the full-throated roar of the music, the fire began its rampage down below.
Licking across planking, it started to char stanchions; it ate wooden cross members like a kid chewing on a stalk of sugarcane, gnawing here, then there, until the juice turned into energy: whump! Gas boiled out, mingled with air, reached flash point, and the whole midships section of the Nonpareil was one vast blaze.
Patient upon his hasty catafalque, Miles Parbury awaited immolation. The fire spoke through the cabin floor of his impending, honorable, end.
Sight of the men pouring from the boiler room, screaming, desperate, and the gouts of steam and smoke that followed them, transfixed Josephine.
One moment ago this splendid vessel had been careering on against all odds, exceeding her best-ever speed between these high and handsome rocks and banks.
Now the Lord had shown his power beyond a peradventure.
Somewhere, some time, long long ago, she had heard a song about a demon lover, about a woman who had pledged her firstborn to the devil, changed her mind, abandoned husband and baby and set sail across the sea with the one she was sworn to, lured by his lies and bribes. And then, in mid-ocean, he stood up taller than the mainmast and dismissed her and the ship to a watery grave.
To her terrified and poisoned vision, those columns of smoke, looming higher than the chimneys as the fire ran wild, took on the shape of Damballah.
When Auberon tried to calm her, she fled, shrieking mad prayers.
“Auberon!”
Turning with the stink of doom in his nostrils, he found himself confronted
by the last people he would have wished to see: Hugo and Stella Spring—Stella in tears, with grime on her face—and Arthur Gattry.
Presentiments of horror assailed him; yet in the midst of them, like coal dust sodden with water on the floor of the boiler room, too wet to answer the call of the surrounding blaze, came a dull pang of recollection.
This was the man he hated for taking his sister and making her a bride.
Weariness overcame him. He forced a smile and even made to offer his hand.
“Arthur, have you news of Louisette?”
But the three of them stared as though believing him insane: to ask such a question with the boat alight beneath their feet!
“I have a gun!” roared Hugo, and turned back his coat to display it. “We must make them put us in the yawl and row ashore! I’d be there now with Stella, but that Arthur thought of you!”
He had to shout; the racket was tremendous, and in among it somewhere the band was still blasting away.
Auberon reflected for the space of a heartbeat or two, thinking about the putrefaction of his lungs, his disappointment in Cherouen, the weakness that betrayed him more and more often, the woman he had lain with on this voyage, a hundred others previous, mostly in Europe…
And there was so much of this planet still to see!
But it was shut off from him, not in space but time. He drew himself up and looked at Arthur squarely.
“If his solicitude had extended to my sister, I’d have been glad. Now, don’t you think it’s rather late?”
Contempt rang loud in every syllable. Overcome by fury, Arthur snatched the gun from Hugo’s belt and leveled it.
“Come with us, damn you! If I have to go on living with your fucking sister, I daren’t tell her I left you to die!”
Auberon smiled. There was something so elegantly theatrical about this resolution of their quarrel, he was no longer sorry to think it might be a final one.
“Gentlemen don’t ordinarily use such language, Arthur. Perhaps you learned the word from Louisette? I taught it to her, I recall.”