Smooth and serene the majestic mud-streaked expanse had seemed as he drifted down obliviously in his skiff. Now the shore was morasses and canebrakes and even whole big plantations, the grand main houses beautiful with their ivory columns. He often gazed up at the world hanging overhead, too, lands of hazy mystery. A ripple passed, flexing the entire tubular esty, and Toby felt suddenly that they all lived in the entrails of a great beast, an unknowable thing that visited the most awful of calamities upon mere humans by merely easing its bowels.
The whorl came upon them without warning. It burst through a channel of bromium, coiling like a blue-green serpent up into the shimmering air. A thunderclap banged into the pilot’s nest and blew in two windows.
Toby saw it from the mid-deck where he was helping Stan and two men with some baling. The glass scroll window shattered but did not catch Mr. Preston in the face, so when Toby raced in the pilot was already bringing the Natchez about, clawing away from the swelling cloud-wrack.
The whorl soared, streamers breaking from it to split the congealing air with yellow forked lightning. Toby saw it hesitate at its high point, as if deciding whether to plunge on across and bury itself in the forest-wall hanging far overhead. Then it shook itself, vigorous with the strength of the newborn, and shot riverward.
The silver river seemed to yearn for this consummation, for it buoyed in up-sucking ardor and kissed the descending column. Instantly a foam of muddy water and a mist of metal soared through the time-whorl, writing a great inverted U that bubbled and frothed and steam-hissed amid more sharp thunder-cracks.
“Damn!” Mr. Preston cried. “That’ll block us for sure.”
Toby held tight to a stanchion. “Can’t we shoot by—”
“It’ll riptide us to pieces, we try that.”
A blistering gale broke over the Natchez. “You figure it’ll last long?”
“This big a one, you bet.”
The Natchez beat steadily away from the whorl, which twisted and shuffled its water-feet around on the skin of the river. Mud and logs sucked up into it tumbled and seemed to break apart and come together again. In the midst of what looked like a water-wave Toby saw a log burst into orange flame. It turned slow-motion, streaming black smoke, and smacked full into the river.
Then he saw the mechs. They had been hiding among some weeping willows. Silvery and quick, they fled as the whorl lashed sidewise.
Suddenly it made sense to him. The whorl was a way into this esty tube and thus a gateway to be policed. It was also the obvious place to wait for anyone, if you knew their ways.
Mechs didn’t know him. But Killeen did.
Toby called, “Wait! Let’s stay a while, see if it—”
“Shut up, boy. We’re running downtime.”
Even the Cap’n could not overrule a pilot reversing course for safety. Toby stood frozen as the mechs lifted off the shoreline. They were angular and reminded him of the Rattler that had nearly killed him long ago. These were more advanced.
They were coming. They would kill his friends.
Tentatively he resurrected his sensorium. Nothing. Then—
A faint echo, a note he had not heard sounded for so long—
Then he did not think anymore but simply ran, down the iron stairs and pine gangway and over—into the water. He flailed about for a desperate moment—he had forgotten his battle gear—then struck for shore.
Stan shouted behind him but he did not look around. He estimated the mechs could see him clearly by now. Good.
But then he heard a whooshing boom, like a giant drawing its breath. The mechs glided beside the funnel mouth of the whorl. A ribbed light pulsed from them. It pushed the whorl . . . slowly . . . faster . . . but not toward Toby. Toward the ship.
The sucking came skating on the choppy silver waters. It swooped with train-wreck malevolence down upon the Natchez and drew it up, elongating the decks like rubber stretched to its limit and then cracking. A deckhand jumped overboard and his body stretched to translucent thinness.
The Natchez squeezed and contorted and obeyed the call of warping forces. It shot up the whorl-mouth. Tide-tides wrenched and wracked it and then it was gone in a brilliant last pearly flash. The glare burned Toby’s face.
Toby had no time to think or mourn. The mouth reeled, crackled and snaked and swept down upon him. He had time to gulp air. Burning orange foam broke over him.
Legs, arms—both stretched involuntarily, as though some God were playing with his strings—yet he was weightless. He knew he must be rising up on the whorl but he felt a sickened, belly-opening vacancy of infinite falling. He struggled not to fill his lungs as the foam thronged at his skin, infested his nose, pried at his eyelids. Don’t breathe! was all he could think as he prepared for the time-crushed impact his instincts told him was coming at the end of such a protracted fall.
He smacked hard. In the river again.
Bobbed to the surface. Paddled, gasping. Ignored the wave-wracked waters. Made the shore and flopped upon it.
THIRTEEN
Pursuit
The mechs were shattered on the shore. Something had blown big chunks of their ivory skins away.
In each hole a midmind lay splintered. Something about the unerring way each shot had found the operating intelligence made him smile without humor.
A sweet dust of time blew high above the river and there was no sign of the whorl. Or of the Natchez.
Toby followed the boot tracks he found over the next rise. The long strides led inland, so there was no time-pressure to fight. He was wet and dazed but he hurried.
Inland the lush forest dribbled away into scrub desert. He realized whoever it was might back around on him so he retraced his steps and erased signs of his passage from the water and onto safe stone. He avoided vegetation where possible and slid through bushes so that stems bent but did not break. This was crucial, for a broken stem cannot be fixed without careful cutting and even so, a sure reader of signs would catch it. He could not let his excitement get him killed here. Leaving stems or branches pointing the way you came was bad, too. They had to be gently urged back to a random pattern. He mussed up a scraped bush and tree so that it looked to be from an animal, from biting or itch-easing. Stealth spelled safety.
His head pounded with a headache that worked its way into his eyes. So much had happened but he put it aside, not thinking about Mr. Preston or Stan, just keeping on. It got dryer and a big-winged thing with teeth flapped overhead, eyeing him for possibilities. He flung a rock at it.
He wished for a blunderbuss tree, recalling the man who had threatened him with one of the awkward weapons. But a big fallen branch served to make a club after he stripped the bark away.
The boot tracks showed heels dug in from haste. He let his senses float out ahead of him. His sensorium was faulty, flickering.
Everything in the land fled from his footsteps. Lizards scattered into the nearest cracked rock. Four-winged quail hovered in shadow, hoping you’d take them for stones, but at the last moment they lost their nerve and burst into frantically flapping birds. Snakes evaporated, doves squeaked skyward, rabbits crazy-legged away in a dead heat. Fox, midget mountain horn, coyote—they melted into legend, leaving only tracks and dung. The heart of the desert was pale sand, a field whose emptiness exposed life here for what it was: conjured out of nothingness and bound for it, too. Desert plants existed as exiles from each other, hoarding their circles of water collection done silently beneath the sand by single-minded roots. Vacancy was life.
