by John Brunner
Then there was a disturbance among the bushes, and he heard moans. Reluctantly he roused himself, recognizing what he had often heard during the war. Here was somebody lost and panicking, careless of whether it was friend or enemy who found him.
Limping, he made his way to cross the other’s blundering path, and discovered it was Matthew.
Who, on being checked in his flight, looked up and all of a sudden shifted from shouting to sobbing.
Hysteria. Caesar had been taught to deal with that, and slapped his face on either cheek.
Startled out of his blind terror, Matthew gulped and said inanely, “If he isn’t dead he’s bound to kill me.”
“What? Who?”
“Gordon! Except he isn’t Gordon! Damn it”—this with swelling pride, the pride of a child who has learned an adult term and used it right—“knowing that helped me to save your life, didn’t it?”
Caesar said slowly, “I was kind of thinking of other things at the time. Tell me again.”
“He isn’t Hamish Gordon! He’s a swindler from Scotland called Macrae! He tricked hundreds of people into paying for shares in a forest that didn’t belong to him, including Mr. Moyne, Mr. Auberon’s father! And I wanted him to pay me a thousand dollars to keep my mouth shut, and that was blackmail, and that’s why the boat blew up! It was divine retribution, that’s what it was!”
Black… mail?
Suddenly Caesar was sick of this world, especially its rich inhabitants who could do terrible things without worrying about how they affected the less fortunate. He took Matthew’s arm, discovering as he did so that the boy was hurt; by the way he cringed, he had a broken collarbone.
“This way,” he sighed. “There are enough boats on the river for us to get rescued pretty soon.”
But at the water’s edge there was a new companion for him.
Bobbing gently in the ripples, her stern and handsome features deformed by a violent blow, her short black hair burned off, kept afloat by air trapped in her dress, was the maker of his trickenbag, the devotee of Damballah whom her master had not intervened to save despite her performance of a grand and dreadful ritual in his service. Had her charm still hung around his neck, at that moment Caesar would have cast it in the river, because that was far fitter to be worshiped: the wide, the long, the awesome Mississippi.
To whom even unbelievers must make sacrifice.
He said eventually to Matthew, “Well go find that reporter guy, tell him the whole story about Gordon. Tell about how they skimped on the boilers and the piping for the Nonpareil, how that son of a bitch ordered engineers who should have known better to raise the pressure past what she could stand. We’ll see him put on trial and sent to jail. Now you wait here; I’ll go find somebody to take us off.”
He hobbled into the shallows, doffing his shirt to wave it like a flag. On the way he spurned the body of Josephine Var, and it came loose from the tree root it was snagged on and drifted back toward midstream. Caesar paid it no more mind.
For it had come to him what everybody must rely on. No charms, no trickenbags, no church services or conjuration—nothing but commitment to oneself.
In a little while an old man in a rowboat came to collect them, but by then the Atchafalaya was under way, and it was too late to catch her, or the Lothair.
Never mind.
NO BAD SYMBOL
4TH JULY 1870
“In Evangeline Caroline Norton read the strange-sounding Atchafalaya, the river where the lovers failed in their meeting. She had it cut upon a seal, and later found that the King of the Belgians had been equally impressed by the same word. Neither knew the meaning, but for once the romantic instinct was right; ‘long river’ is no bad symbol for destiny.”
—George R. Stewart,
Names on the Land
This therefore was the manner of the coming of the steamer Atchafalaya to St. Louis half a day past what all expected to be the time of her great triumph: dead bodies on her decks and those who cried for death as merciful release from pain; shaken and shattered victims of disaster, and others who, though far more fortunate, had vowed they would not so tempt fate again; and a scratch band playing elegiac music.
And while they canceled the dinners and receptions and the firework shows, and those who had thought to win huge sums by backing her subsided into petty argument about whether or not their bets must stand, and all the flags in sight were lowered to half-mast…
Drew sobered Denis Cherouen with coffee and sent him and his machines ashore posthaste; the younger Grammont child died shortly after.
Whereat the captain felt profoundly grateful that his dear one had escaped such ministrations.
And also that his protégé Fernand was tough and vital and had proved his fitness with a pretty girl he planned to marry. Such matters smacked of the reality of the river: not barred and circumscribed by human law, but natural. Had he been so free in his mind, then with Susannah…
Too late. All his life he felt he’d been too late. And now most of all. For he would have given anything—the share of his own boat which Barber now so generously conceded him, before an audience of reporters and businessmen, or a limb, or as much of his heart as Susannah had left him—to have made friends with that stern, solitary, and amazing man who had outrun him without eyesight through the fog.
Too late. Too late. Too late…
Wearily, once the casualties had been borne ashore, those who had endured this voyage descended the stage, Fernand with his wife and mother on either arm, the captain last despite the conspicuous impatience of Elphin who waited on the wharf. What need was there for hurry now? Meantime the band repeated the most stirring strain of that music which tomorrow would be heard in the cathedral.
There were not as many steamers at this wharf as last year; half as many as ten years ago. Next year there would be fewer still. Not only this last race, but a whole epoch, was at its close.
Out of sight, save for its plume of smoke and steam, a railroad locomotive uttered the shriek that warned of the departure of a train.
AFTERWORD & ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Strictly, you know, this is not a historical novel. It’s an example of what science fiction people call a retrospective parallel world. There were of course no such steamers as the Atchafalaya and the Nonpareil, any more than there were real captains called Parbury, Drew, and Woodley, or pilots called Tyburn or Lamenthe…
Nor is the river up which my race is run the Mississippi of 1870. It’s rather that of ten years earlier, for no better reason than that in 1861 Schönberg & Company, New York, published a chart of its colossal length “as seen from the hurricane deck,” and I laid hands on a copy of it.
But there was a race, and a memorable one, over just that Independence Day weekend in 1870 which I chose for my book. It was between the Natchez and the Robert E. Lee.
The problem was—to my mind—that that race started over nothing nobler than a quarrel about freight charges; the opposing captains had come to blows in a bar. Worse still, from a dramatic standpoint, the boat that seized the lead on departure held it all the way, and for the last two days the rivals were not even in sight of one another.
Something obviously had to be done about that.
During the five years of my struggle with this project, I received help from too many sources for me to be able to list them all. But I must express my particular gratitude to the staff of The New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street; to Bob Carr of International House, New Orleans, thanks to whose good offices I spent the Bicentennial weekend, 1976, riding the towboat John D. Geary from New Orleans to Memphis, Tennessee; to Captain Loyd Arnold and pilot Bill Lanier and the rest of the Geary’s officers and crew, and to her owners, who granted permission for me to travel on her; to Captain Tate of Memphis, one of the few remaining pilots to hold a paddlewheeler license; to Norbury L. Wayman of St. Louis; and to David Drake, now of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, but formerly of the riverside cities Clinton and Dubu
que, Iowa, whose counsel and assistance proved invaluable.
REFERENCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
Among the publications I drew on most were the following:
Asher and Adams. Pictorial Album of American Industry 1876. New York: Rutledge Books (facsimile reprint), 1976.
My Dr. Cherouen is largely modeled on the Dr. Blood who advertised herein his panacea, oxygenated air.
Barkhau, Roy L. The Great Steamboat Race Between the Natchez and the Rob’t E. Lee. Cincinnati: Steamship Historical Society of America, 1972.
A brief popular account.
Benét, Stephen Vincent. John Brown’s Body. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1928.
Arguably the finest long narrative poem published this century; certainly the best Civil War novel in verse or prose.
Blassingame, John W. Black New Orleans 1860–1880. University of Chicago Press: Phoenix Books, 1976.
Immensely useful, not only for first-hand reactions to the Civil War and the “alternative religion” centering on, for example, Dr. John and Marie Laveau, but in particular for details of black and Creole economic enterprise.
Corps of Engineers, US Army. Flood Control and Navigation Maps of the Mississippi River, Cairo, Illinois, to the Gulf of Mexico. (Forty-third edition, 1975).
Delta Queen Cruise Handbook. New Orleans, 1976.
An exercise book for students aboard “the last packet boat on the western rivers” (Norbury L. Wayman).
Evans, I.O. Flags. London: Hamlyn, 1970.
Gardners Directory for 1863. New Plan of the City and Environs of New Orleans (photographic copy). New Orleans: Louisiana State Museum, 1976.
Harper’s Atlas of American History with Map Studies by Dixon Ryan Fox, Ph.D. New York and London: Harper, 1920.
Harris, Joel Chandler. Uncle Remus or Mr. Fox, Mr. Rabbit and Mr. Terrapin. London: George Routledge, n.d.
This is my childhood copy, which I was given when I was about seven. I have of course made no attempt to imitate the dialects Harris transcribed from firsthand experience; some of the attitudes reflected in his ancillary matter, however, I found especially enlightening.
Hechtlinger, Adelaide. The Great Patent Medicine Era or Without Benefit of Doctor. New York: Galahad Books, by arrangement with Grosset & Dunlap, 1970. A scrapbook that confirmed my impression that, if most of the people I was going to write about were by our standards half-crazy, it was largely owing to the drugs prescribed for them by professional as well as amateur doctors.
Huber, Leonard V. Advertisements of Lower Mississippi River Steamboats 1812–1920. West Barrington, Rhode Island: Steamship Historical Society of America, 1959.
Includes a few contemporary descriptions of steamboats and reports of steamboat disasters.
Hunter, Louis C., with Beatrice Jones Hunter. Steamboats on the Western Rivers, an Economic and Technological History. New York: Octagon Books, 1969.
A monumental academic study of the subject, a basic text for anybody investigating the field.
Jones, Maldwyn A. Destination America. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976. A comprehensive survey of “the immigrant experience.”
Jones, Michael Wynn. The World 100 Years Ago. Book Club Associates, by arrangement with Macmillan London Ltd., 1976.
A useful general work including a picture of Canal Street, New Orleans, in 1870 and many contemporary descriptions of the city.
Levine, Lawrence W. Black Culture and Black Consciousness, Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Especially good on contemporary black attitudes, beliefs and behavior; also useful for folk religion and folk medicine.
Life Nature Library. The Land and Wild Life of North America. Time-Life International (Nederland) NV, 1968.
Details of flora and fauna along the Mississippi.
Life Pictorial Atlas of the World. New York: Time, Inc., 1961.
Lomax, Alan. Mister Jelly Roll. London: Cassell, 1952.
Biography of the jazz pianist after whom I named Fernand Lamenthe, and after whose godmother I named Eulalie; right up to his death in the 1940’s he believed in the power of the alternative religion, as some still do today.
Muir’s Historical Atlas, Ancient, Medieval and Modern. Book Club Associates by arrangement with George Philip & Son Ltd., London, 1973.
New Orleans Magazine. Bicentennial issue, July 1976.
Includes a history of local architecture and some details of paved and unpaved streets around 1870.
Punch, vols. LVI–LIX (1869–70).
Source, inter alia, of the datum that in 1869 fashionable New York ladies were eating arsenic to lighten the complexion… a habit that, incredible though it may seem, was also vouched for in a BBC television play on 3rd July 1980!
Queensbury Group, The. The Book of Key Facts. New York: Ballantine, 1979.
Robert Bain’s The Clans and Tartans of Scotland, Enlarged and Re-edited by Margaret O. MacDougall. London & Glasgow: William Collins, 1964.
Robertson, Patrick. The Shell Book of Firsts. Book Club Associates by arrangement with Ebury Press and Michael Joseph Ltd., 1975.
Saved me, on more than one occasion, from including something that hadn’t been invented yet…
Sabin, Edwin L. Wild Men of the Wild West. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1929.
A somewhat sensational work that nonetheless enabled me to correct a few suspect statements in other books I was referring to.
Sandburg, Carl. The American Songbag. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927. “Stars a-Shining” (By’m By) is in this collection.
Schönberg & Co. The Mississippi (Alton to the Gulf of Mexico) As Seen from the Hurricane Deck. New York, 1861; photostat copy, NY Public Library, 1976. It claims “Constructed from Reliable Sources,” but I found it contradicted by a lot of my other authorities, most notably Mark Twain.
Schroeder Jr., Joseph J., ed. Sears, Roebuck & Co. 1908 Catalogue No. 117, The Great Price Maker. Northfield, Illinois: DBI Books, 1971.
A facsimile selection that gives chapter and verse for the reprehensible trading practices Harry Whitworth imagined he had fallen foul of but intended to emulate—a little out of time, but never mind.
Shenton, James, ed. Free Enterprise Forever! Scientific American in the 19th Century. New York: Images Graphiques, 1977.
Stampp, Kenneth M. The Era of Reconstruction, 1865–1877. New York: Vintage Books, by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, 1965.
A wholesome corrective to the common view of the postbellum period as an epoch of nothing but corruption and carpetbaggers.
Stewart, George R. Names on the Land. New York: Armed Services Edition by arrangement with Random House, 1945.
A history of American place-naming by the author of that greatest of all science fiction novels, Earth Abides.
Times Atlas of World History, The. London: Book Club Associates, by arrangement with Times Books Ltd., 1978.
Twain, Mark (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Life on the Mississippi. New York: Signet, 1961.
The indispensable source for information concerning the training of a Mississippi pilot’s cub, from which I confess I stole by wholesale.
Vries, Leonard de, with Ilonka van Amstel. Victorian Inventions. London: John Murray, 1971.
As corrective on the technical side as Stampp’s on the social and political, though mistitled, since it begins its coverage in 1865, not 1837.
Ward, Ralph T. Steamboats, a History of the Early Adventure. Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973.
Kindly sent to me by my editor at Ballantine Books, Judy-Lynn del Rey.
Wayman, Norbury L. Life on the River, a Pictorial History of the Mississippi, the Missouri, and the Western River System. New York: Bonanza Books, by arrangement with Crown Publishers, 1971.
Uniquely useful for details of boatyards and wharves, although its alleged picture of the pioneering New Orleans of 1812 does lead one to wonder how many more of its 900-odd illustrations may be wrongly captioned.
W
ellman, Manly Wade. Fastest on the River. New York: Holt, 1957.
The definitive account of the race between the Natchez and the Lee, but wrong by two full hours at Baton Rouge.
Wilson, Everett B. Early America at Work, a Pictorial Guide to our Vanishing Occupations. Cranbury, New Jersey: A.S. Barnes, 1963.
A superficial and trivial book whose numerous illustrations somewhat redeem its puerile text.
Wykes, Alan. Gambling. London: Spring Books/Aldus Books, 1964.
Extensive data on the gambling fever that swept the United States after the Civil War.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Brunner was born in England in 1934 and educated at Cheltenham College. He sold his first novel in 1951 and has been publishing sf steadily since then. His books have won him international acclaim from both mainstream and genre audiences. His most famous novel, the classic Stand On Zanzibar, won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1969, the British Science Fiction Award, and the Prix Apollo in France. Mr. Brunner lives in Somerset, England.