He had not told anyone that, but Mr. Preston gave him sidewise glances now and then. Stan, after the obligatory ragging of Toby for having shied away from the women of easy virtue, kept pestering him about finding hydrogen hats. So Toby spent long hours pretending, watching beady-eyed the dense, uncut forest roll by.
To him the richness here was vaster than downriver, thicker and mysterious beyond ready expression. He had not the wit nor especially the years to savor it fully; taste comes with age and is perhaps its only reward, though he knew some called the same thing wisdom.
He saw the great slow-working chains of cause and effect on the river—forces which, though elusive in the redolent natural wealth, in hard fact underpinned all the sweeping vistas, the realms of aery compass, the infinitesimal machineries of wood and leaf. The young must make their way in a world that is an enormous puzzle, so he watched the shifting hues quick-eyed, a student of the forever fluid, knowing that the silver river might foam suddenly to suck him under or contrariwise spew him aloft in a frothy geyser—all beautiful events, he supposed, but they would leave him no less dead.
Toby kept lively advising Mr. Preston on reefs and bars. He inspected the passing acres of lumber rafts, great pale platforms behind which the launch could conceal itself. Likewise each bulky barge and the trading scows that peddled from farm to farm, the peddler’s family hanging out wash on deck and kids calling hullos. So when Stan shouted up from the passenger deck, “See that! Must be! Must be!” Toby felt a spur of irritation at being distracted from his work.
Stan scampered aft and poled aboard some floating debris, then had the temerity to carry it forward to the pilot’s nest.
Mr. Preston scowled and looked to bite his mustache at the sight of a mere deckhand intruding, but before Toby could shoo Stan out he saw the flowerlike gray thing Stan carried.
“It’s a hat! A positive hat,” Stan burbled. “Pure hydrogen—worth plenty on its own, wager me—and lookee here.”
Stan proudly displayed broaches and pins mounted into the gunmetal-gray thing, which to Toby’s immense surprise surely did resemble a hat. It was nearly weightless yet hard and the jewels gleamed with inner radiance.
“And you led me straight on it, too, Toby, I’ll not forget,” Stan said. “I’ll share out the proceeds, yessir.”
“Uh, sure thing.”
Mr. Preston’s stormy face had turned mild as he studied the hat. “Never seen anything like this. How far upriver you say you come from?” He peered at Toby.
“Good bit further,” was all Toby could say, for indeed that was so, but the shore already looked odd and contorted to him, as though his memory was warping.
That was nothing compared to the consternation he felt but could not give a hint of, for the hat story was total yarning—yet here was an actual, in-fact, bejeweled hydrogen hat, worth many a month’s pay.
His befuddlement got swept away soon enough by the twisty demands of the river. Under Mr. Preston he was coming to see that the face of the wedded water and metal was a wondrous book, one in a dead language to him before but now speaking cherished secrets. Every fresh point they rounded told a new tale. No page was empty. A passenger might be charmed by a churning dimple on its skin, but to a true riverman that was an italicized shout, announcing a wreak or reef of wrenching space-time Vortex about to break through from the undercrust of timestone.
Passengers went oooh and aahhh at the pretty pictures the silver river painted for them without reading a single word of the dark text it truly was. A lone log floating across the prow could be in truth a jack-jawed beast bent on dining upon the tasty wooden hull. A set of boiling, standing rings spoke of a whorl that could eat an entire induction disk.
Mr. Preston would sometimes muse out loud as they rounded a point and beheld a fresh vista, “That slanting brown mark—what you make of that? I’d say a bar of ground-up metal, dissolving now in the bromine current. See that slick place? Shoaling up now, be worse when we head back down. River’s fishing for induction ships right there, you mark.”
Bust mostly Mr. Preston asked Toby the questions, for the river perpetually tore itself down, danced over its own banks, made merry of memory. They saw a farmer had shoved down pilings to hold his ground, even set a crazy-rail fence atop it, only to have the blithe momentum strip and pry and overrun his fetters, break his handcuffs, and laugh as the lawless currents—seemingly enraged by this confinement—stripped his worldly dominion.
In all of it Toby looked for his father. There was precious little sign of anything from outside this enormous long riverland. But he felt himself drawing backward in time as the ship pressed them against the esty grade.
Mr. Preston brought aboard a local “memory man” to help them through a set of neck-twisting oscillations, and the fellow displayed the affliction Toby had heard of but never witnessed. To remember everything meant that all events were of the same size.
The short, swarthy man sat in the pilot’s nest and guided them well enough through the first two swaybacks, with reefs and snags galore, but on the third he began to tell the history of the snaggle-toothed tree that had fallen in at the lee shore and so stopped them from using the close-pass there, and from that tree went on to the famous boiling timestone eruption that had scorched the tree, and from that to a minute rendition of the efforts of Farmer Finn, who had saved his crops by building a sluice-diverter of the river, to Finn’s wife who ran off with a preacher, only people then found out he was no preacher at all but in fact a felon escaped from some jail uptime, which suggested to the memory man the way laws had to be deformed here to accord with the passage back and forth in eras of relatives and wives and husbands, which brought forth the scandal of the lady in a red dress who had taken on all the men at a dance once, hiking her skirts for each in turn plain as day, outside against the wall, and from there was but a step to the intricate discussion of dance steps the memory man had learned (since he learned anything merely by seeing it once), complete with toe-tapping demonstrations on the deck—so that Mr. Preston had to yank the man’s attention back to the veering river before it gutted them on an aluminum reef.
Within minutes, though, the memory man would drift into more tedious jaw about whatever strayed into view of his panoramic mind. Mr. Preston bore this for the swings and sways of those bends, and then put the memory man ashore with full pay. The man didn’t seem to mind, and left still maundering on about great accidents of the past and where their survivors lived now and how they were doing.
Toby silently envied the man, though, for at least he did know exactly that one short portion of the river, whereas Toby’s own memory betrayed him at each new rounding. Islands and bars arose from the water where none had been before, his mind told him. The river ran in new side-channels and had seemingly cut across headlands to forge fresh entries, thrusting aside monumental hillsides and carving away whatever misunderstandings had arisen with the spongy, pliant forest.
“This sure looks to be a horseshoe curve here. Remember it?” Mr. Preston would ask, and Toby would peer through the misty wreaths that often wrapped the river, and shake his head.
On this particular one they hauled ashore, because a passenger thought he lived near here, though could not spot any landmark either, but wanted to try his own luck. Toby went ashore and slogged through brambles and sandy loam across the neck of the horseshoe, arriving well before the Natchez got there, coming hard-chuffing around the curve.
These branches and inlets lay in his past, yet despite their here-and-now solidity they had wriggled into new shapes, oddities of growth, even whole fresh porticoed master-houses. Slowly it dawned on Toby that none of this surprised Mr. Preston.
“Every time we go upriver, things lay different,” Mr. Preston said, twirling a toothpick in his mouth as his only sign of agitation.
“Damnfire,” Toby said, a new curse he had picked up and was proud to sport. “What use is a memory man, then?”
“Better than nothing, is all.”
They were near to drawing all the water there was in the channel, a curious tide having sucked streamers up and into the clouds above. The hull caught and broke free and then snagged again, so Mr. Preston had to order the induction motors up to full, wrenching them off the bed of the river by sheer magnetic ferocity.
“Sure seems that way,” Toby said. “Why’d you hire me as guide, then?”
“Your knowledge is for certain fresher than any I could find. And you’re young enough, you don’t think you know everydamnthing.”
They were going slow, deck humming, riding on magnetic cushions that Toby thought of as bunched steel coils. Mr. Preston said that wasn’t far wrong, only you couldn’t feel or see the wires. They were more like wrestling magnetic ghosts.
“Sometimes a time-tide will come and cut a little gutter across a neck of land,” Mr. Preston went on. “I saw one once while I was shipping downstream, no bigger than a garden path it was. Shimmered and snaked and snapped yellow fire. Now, there were handsome properties along that shore. But inland from there was a worthless old farm. When I came back uptime on the old Reuben, that li’l time-twist had cut a big course through. Diverted the whole damn river, it did. Shooting off crimson sparklers, still. That old farm was now smack on the river, prime land, worth ten times more. The big places that had been on the river stood inland. No ship could reach them.”
“Lucky,” Toby said.
Mr. Preston grinned. “Was it? Lot of people got mad, accused the family that owned the old farm of starting that time-wrinkle.”
“How could they?”
“Who’s to say? Is there a way to figure it? The past is labyrinth, truly. Give time a shove here, a tuck there? Anybody who knows how, sure don’t talk about it.”
TWELVE
Whorl
Toby felt himself lost in a dense, impenetrable maze of riverways. Coming upstream against the time-pressure now refracted the very air.
