The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (205 page)

“I was thinking,” A. Bettik said so softly that I could hardly hear him over the noise of the waterfall.

I paused with the ax on my shoulder. The sunlight was very hot, and my shirt was already sticking to me.

“The River Tethys was meant to be a pleasure cruise,” he continued. “I wonder how the pleasure cruisers dealt with that.” He pointed a blue finger at the roaring falls.

“I know,” said Aenea. “I was thinking the same thing. They had levitation barges then, but not everyone going down the Tethys would have been in one. It would have been embarrassing to go for a romantic boat ride and find you and your sweetheart going over those.”

I stood looking at the rainbow-dappled spray of the falls and found myself wondering if I was as intelligent as I often assumed. This had not occurred to me. “The Tethys has been unused for almost three standard centuries,” I said. “Maybe the falls are new.”

“Perhaps,” said A. Bettik, “but I doubt it. These falls appear to have been formed by tectonic shelving that runs for many miles north and south through the jungle—do you see the difference in elevation there? And they have been eroding for a very long time. Note the size of the boulders in the rapids? I would think this has been here for as long as the river has run.”

“And it’s not in your Tethys guidebook?” I said.

“No,” said the android, holding the book out. Aenea took it.

“Maybe we’re not on the Tethys,” I said. Both of the others stared at me. “The ship didn’t get a starsighting,” I went on, “but what if this is some world not on the original Tethys tour?”

Aenea nodded. “I thought of that. The portals are the same as the ones along the remnants of the Tethys today, but who is to say that the TechnoCore did not have other portals … other farcaster-connected rivers?”

I set the head of the ax down and leaned on the shaft. “In which case, we’re in trouble,” I said. “You’ll never find your architect, and we’ll never find our way back to the ship and home.”

Aenea smiled. “It’s too early to worry about that. It
has
been three centuries. Maybe the river here just cut a new channel since the Tethys days. Or maybe there’s a canal and locks we missed because the jungle grew over it. We don’t have to worry about this now. We just have to get downriver to see if there’s another portal.”

I held up one finger. “Another thought,” I said, feeling a bit smarter than I had a moment before. “What if we go to all this trouble of building a raft here and find another waterfall between us and the portal? Or ten more? We didn’t spot the farcaster arch last night, so we don’t know how far it is.”

“I thought of that,” said Aenea.

I tapped my fingers on the ax handle. If that kid said that phrase one more time, I would seriously consider using the implement on her.

“M. Aenea asked me to reconnoiter,” said the android. “I did so during my last shuttle here.”

I was frowning. “Reconnoiter? You didn’t have time to fly that mat a hundred klicks or more downriver.”

“No,” agreed the android, “but I flew the mat very high and used the extra set of binoculars to search our path. The river appears to run straight and true for almost two hundred kilometers. It was difficult, to be sure, but I saw what may be the arch approximately a hundred thirty kilometers downriver. There appeared to be no waterfalls or other major obstacles between us and it.”

My frown must have deepened. “You saw all that?” I said. “How high
were
you?”

“The mat has no altimeter,” said A. Bettik, “but judging
from the visible curvature of the planet and the darkening of the sky, I think I was about one hundred kilometers up.”

“Did you have one of the spacesuits on?” I asked. At that altitude a human being’s blood would boil in his veins and his lungs would burst from explosive decompression. “A respirator?” I looked around, but nothing like that was lying in our modest piles of goods.

“No,” said the android, turning to lift a crate, “I just held my breath.”

Shaking my head, I went off to cut some trees down. I figured that the exercise and solitude would do me good.

It was evening before the raft was finished, and I would have been working all night if A. Bettik had not taken turns with me on the tree cutting. The finished product was not beautiful, but it floated. Our little raft was about six meters long and four wide, with a long steering pole carved into a crude rudder set onto a forked support at the rear, a raised area just in front of the steering pole where Aenea molded the tent into a lean- to with openings front and rear, and crude oar-locks on each side with long oar-poles that would lie along the sides of the ship unless they were needed for rowing in dead water or emergency steering in rapids. I had been worried that the fern trees might soak up too much water and sink too low to be useful as a raft, but with only two layers of them wrapped together into a honeycomb with our climbing rope and bolted in strategic places, the logs rode very nicely and kept the top of the raft about fifteen centimeters above the water.

Aenea had shown a fascination with the microtent, and I had to admit that her sculpting of it was more skillful and efficient than anything I had shaped in all my years of using the things. Our lean-to could be ducked into from the steering position at the rudder, had a nice overhang in front to shield us from sun or rain while keeping the view intact, and had nice vestibules on either side to keep the extra crates of gear dry. She had already spread our foam pads and sleeping bags in various corners of the tent; the high sitting area in the center where we had the best view forward now boasted a meter-wide river stone, which she had set there as a hearth with the mess gear and heating cube on it; one of the handlamps was opened to lantern mode and was
hanging from a centerloop—and, I had to admit, the overall effect was cozy.

The girl did not just spend her afternoon making cozy tents, however. I guess that I had expected her to stand by and watch while the two men sweated through the heavy work—I had stripped to the waist an hour into the heat of the day—but Aenea joined in almost immediately, dragging downed logs to the assembly point, lashing them, driving nails, setting bolts and pivot joints in place, and generally helping in the design. She pointed out why the standard way I’d been taught to jerry-rig a rudder was inefficient, and by moving the base of the support tripod lower and farther apart, I was able to move the long pole easier and to better effect. Twice she showed me different ways to tie the cross supports on the underside of the raft so that they would be tighter and sturdier. When we needed a log shaped, it was Aenea who set to with the machete, and all A. Bettik and I could do was stand back or be hit by flying chips.

Still, even with the three of us working hard, it was almost sundown before the raft was finished and our gear loaded.

“We could camp here tonight, get onto the river early in the morning,” I said. Even as I said it, I knew that I did not want to do that. Neither did the other two. We climbed aboard, and I pushed us away from the shore with the long pole I’d chosen as our main source of locomotion when the current failed. A. Bettik steered, and Aenea stood near the front of the raft, looking for shoals or hidden rocks.

For the first hour or so, the voyage seemed almost magical. After the sultry jungle heat and the tremendous exertion all day, it seemed like paradise to stand on the slowly moving raft, push against the river mud occasionally, and watch the darkening walls of jungle slip past. The sun set almost directly behind us, and for a few minutes the river was as red as molten lava, the undersides of the gymnosperms on either side aflame with reflected light. Then the grayness turned to darkness, and before we caught more than a glimpse of the night sky, the clouds moved in from the east just as they had the previous night.

“I wonder if the ship got a fix,” said Aenea.

“Let’s call and ask,” I said.

The ship had not been able to fix its position. “I was able to ascertain that we are not on Hyperion or Renaissance Vector,” said the small voice from my wrist comlog.

“Well, that’s a relief,” I said. “Any other news?”

“I have moved to the river bottom,” said the ship. “It is quite comfortable, and I am preparing to …”

Suddenly the colored lightning rippled across the northern and western horizons, the wind whipped across the river so strongly that each of us had to rush to keep things from being blown away, the raft began moving toward the south shore with the whitecaps, and the comlog spit static. I thumbed the bracelet off and concentrated on poling while A. Bettik steered again. For several minutes I was afraid that the raft would come apart in the high waves and roaring wind; the bow was chopping, lifting, and dropping, and our only illumination came from the explosions of magenta and crimson lightning. The thunder was audible this night—great, pealing waves of sound, as if someone were rolling giant steel drums down stone stairs at us—and the aurora lightning tore at the sky rather than dancing, as it had the night before. Each of us froze for a second as one of those magenta bolts struck a gymnosperm on the north bank of the river, instantly causing the tree to explode in flame and colored sparks. As an ex-bargeman, I cursed my stupidity for letting us be out here in the middle of such a wide river—the Tethys had opened up to the better part of a klick wide again—without lightning rod or rubber mats. We hunkered down and grimaced when the colored bolts struck either shore or lit the eastern horizon in front of us.

Suddenly it was raining and the worst of the lightning was over. We ran for the tent—Aenea and A. Bettik crouched near the front opening, still hunting for sandbars or floating logs, me standing at the rear where the girl had rigged the tent to provide the person at the rudder shelter even while steering.

It had rained hard and often on the Kans River when I was a bargeman—I remember huddling in the leaky old barge fo’c’sle and wondering if the damned boat was going to go down just because of the weight of the rain on it—but I do not remember any rain like this one.

For a moment I thought that we had come up against another waterfall, a much larger one this time, and had unwittingly poled under the full force of it—but we were still moving downriver, and it was no waterfall descending on us, just the terrible force of the worst rainstorm I had ever experienced.

The wise course would have been to make for the riverbank and hold up until the deluge passed, but we could see nothing except colored lightning exploding behind this vertical wall of
water, and I had no idea how far the banks were, or whether they held any chance of our landing and tying up. So I lashed the rudder in its highest position so that it would do little but keep our stern to the rear, abandoned my post, and huddled with the child and android as the heavens opened and dropped rivers, lakes,
oceans
of water on us.

It says something about the girl’s ability or luck in shaping and securing the tent that not once did it begin to fold or come loose from its cinchings to the raft. I say that I huddled with them, but in truth all three of us were busy holding down crates that had already been lashed in place as that raft pitched, tossed, swung around, and then brought its nose back around yet again. We had no idea which direction we were headed, whether the raft was safe in the middle of the river or was bearing down on boulders in a rapids, or was tearing hell-bent for cliffs as the river turned and we did not. None of us cared at that point: our goal was to keep our gear together, not be washed overboard, and to keep track of the other two as best we could.

At one point—with one arm around our stack of backpacks and my other hand clenched on the girl’s collar as she leaned out to retrieve some cookware headed out of the tent at high speed—I looked out from under our vestibule awning toward the front of the raft and realized that every part of the raft except for our little raised platform where the tent sat was underwater. The wind whipped whitecaps that glowed red or bright yellow depending upon the color of the curtain of the lightning aurora raging at that moment. I remembered something I had forgotten to search for in the ship: life vests—personal flotation devices.

Pulling Aenea back under the flapping cover of the tent, I screamed against the storm, “Can you swim when it’s not zero-g?”

“What?” I could see her lips form the word, but I could not actually hear it.

“Can … you … swim!?”

A. Bettik looked up from his position among the pitching crates. Water blew from his bald head and long nose. His blue eyes looked violet when the aurora crashed.

Aenea shook her head, although I was unsure whether she was answering my question in the negative or signifying she could not hear. I pulled her closer; her many-pocketed vest was soaked through and flapping like a wet sheet in a windstorm.
“CAN … YOU … SWIM??” I was screaming literally at the top of my lungs. The effort took my breath away. I made frenzied swimming motions with both hands cupped in front of me. The raft pitched us apart, then tossed us back into close proximity.

I saw understanding light her dark eyes. The rain or spray whipped from the long strands of her hair. She smiled, the spray making her teeth look wet, and leaned closer to shout back into my ear.

“THANKS! I’D … LIKE TO … TAKE A … SWIM. BUT … MAYBE … LATER.”

We must have hit an eddy then, or perhaps the rising wind just caught the tent and used it as a sail to spin the raft on its axis, but that was when the raft went all the way around, seemed to hesitate, and then continued its spin. The three of us gave up trying to hold on to anything other than our lives and each other and just huddled together in the center of the raft platform. I realized that Aenea was shouting—a sort of happy “Yee-HAW”—and before I could scream at her to shut up, I echoed the cry. It felt good to scream against that spinning and the storm and the deluge, unable to be heard, but feeling your own shouts echoing in your skull and bones even as the thunder rumble echoed there as well. I looked to my right as a crimson bolt illuminated the entire river, saw a boulder sticking up at least five meters above the water and the raft twisting around and past it like a dreidel spinning by a cinder, and was more amazed by the sight of A. Bettik on his knees, his head thrown back, “Yee-HAWing” with us at the top of his android lungs.