“Appears so. Though why she’s so small, I cannot say.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“Far downstream.”
“I never saw such.”
“Nor I. Indeed, I suspect, from the quality of the workmanship, that the girl is real.”
“Real? But she’s no bigger than my thumbnail.”
“Some trick of the light makes her seem so to us, I reckon.”
“And these bugs—”
“They’re nearly her size, true. Maybe they’re enlarged, the opposite of the trick with the girl.”
“And if they aren’t?”
“Then when they reach the girl they will have a merry time.” The pilot grinned. “A week’s pay packet, I just handed it over flat, to purchase this. That li’l golden trinket, it’s revolving, too—see?”
She spun farther and he saw that it was Besen. His Besen.
Somewhere she had been trapped. Copied? Or could this somehow be the true Besen?
He tapped on the side but she showed no reaction.
He remembered once aboard Argo when they had cleaned out a filthy shower together, doing ship’s maintenance. Besen had unscrewed the drain and pulled out a hair ball the size of a well-fed rat. It was lustrous and gummy and so amazing when she held it up, a hairy moon beside her beaming, incredulous planet of a face, that he had laughed.
He felt a fresh wave of bitterly cold air waft from the cube of silent, slow time. “Somethin’ wrong, boy?”
He had an urge to smash the blue-white wedge of molasses-slow tempo, to release its wrenched epochs and imprisoning, collapsed perspectives. But this was the pilot’s object, and such men understood the twists of time better than anyone. Perhaps it was right that these things belonged to them.
Best to put it aside. He would not know what to do with the trapped Besen if he did get it. Still, he felt relief when he escaped from the dining room and emerged into the cloaking fog outdoors.
SIX
Going Upback
They were to boom out of the dock that very day. Toby had never known such awe as that instilled by his first moment, when he marched up the gangplank and set foot upon the already thrumming deck.
Never before had he done more than gaze in reverence and abject self-abasement at one of the induction ships as it parted the river with its razor-sharp prow. Now Mr. Preston greeted him with a curt nod, quite circumspect compared to the sprawl of the man’s conversation at breakfast. With minor ceremony he received his employment papers. Other crew shook Toby’s hand with something better than the cool indifference he knew they gave any and all passengers. The customers who paid the costs were of course held in the lowest regard of all those aboard, including the wipe-boys below. Toby could tell from the somewhat distant, glassy gazes of the men and women of the crew that he was at least considered in the human family, pending.
“You been by that li’l flurry up ahead?” Mr. Preston asked him as they made their way up the three flights of external stairs to the pilot’s nest.
“Nossir. I came ashore, stowed my skiff, and walked round it.”
“Ummm. Too bad. Think I’ll nudge out across stream, keep some distance on it.”
“Yessir.”
To Toby this exotic Lane was a continual wonder. He began to see how people could want it this way, a pocket set aside from the mechs and all that weight of history. That they were re-creating some ancient manner long past did not matter; here, now, it was real.
The loading was finishing up, the ship’s barely restrained thirst for the river sending a strong strumming into the air. Freight spun off the wagons and flew aboard at the hands of jostling work gangs, mostly Zoms. Late passengers came dodging and scampering among the boxes and hogsheads awaiting loading. Wives carrying hat boxes and grocery knapsacks urged on sweaty husbands, who lugged carpet bags and yowling babies. Drays and baggage three-wheelers clattered over cobblestones and intersected each others’ trajectories more often than seemed possible from the supposed laws of probability, sending cases and jars smashing. Profanity blued the air. Windlasses snapped into hatches, fore and aft.
Toby loved the turmoil and racket, the whiz and whir of earnest purpose. The bursar called, “All not goin’, please to get themselfs ashore!” and last bells rang, and the thronged decks of the Natchez gushed their yammering burden onto the gangplanks—a running tide that a few last, late passengers fought. The stage-plank slid in and a tall man came running and tried to jump the distance. He got a purchase on the gunmetal side and a crewwoman hauled him up, but his back pocket opened and his wallet thunked into the river. The crowd ashore laughed and a woman had to stop the man from jumping in after it.
All this Toby watched from the elevated sanctity of the pilot’s nest. It was an elegant place, glass in so many directions he had to count to be sure there were only four of the transparent walls. The Cap’n stood beside the pilot, both arrayed in their dark blue-gold uniforms, and an eerie whistle sounded. The orange flag ran up the jack staff and the ship ceased its drift. Momentum surged through the deck and oily smoke belched from the three tall chimneys at the ship’s midships.
The crowd along the quay called last-minute messages and cheered and the ship shot away from them, seeming to accelerate as it caught with induction fields the deep surge of metal beneath the waters. The town dwindled with bewildering speed, people on the quay turning into animated dolls that turned pinkish and mottled as Toby watched.
“The time flux,” Mr. Preston answered Toby’s frown. “I locked us on to her right off. We’re seeing their images squeezed and warped.”
Already the shore was dappled with reds and blues as time shifted and streamed about the ship, the slap and heave of currents resounding in deep bass notes that Toby felt through his big-heeled boots.
To fly across duration itself, to wrench away from the certainty of patient, single-minded time—Toby felt sour nausea grip his throat. Confusion swamped him, gut-deep accelerations—a quickening not in mere velocity but in the quantity that he knew governed the esty but which no man could sense, the force of tangled space and time together. The firm deck went snake-slithery, thick air hummed, sparks forked about him. His body fought for long, aching moments the urgent tows and tugs, his chest tight, bowels watery, knees feather-light—and then somehow his sinews found their equilibrium, without his conscious effort. He gulped in air and found it moist and savory.
“Steady.” Mr. Preston had been eyeing him, he now saw. “I reckoned you’d come through, but can’t be sure till it’s done.”
“What if I hadn’t?”
The pilot shrugged. “Put you ashore next stop, nothing else for it.”
“What about passengers?”
“It’s easier down below. Up here, the tides are worse.”
“Tides?” He studied the river’s table-flat expanse.
