by Greg Egan
If the slope shifted its gradient slightly, rising above forty-five degrees, the river would continue ascending for some distance out of sheer momentum. But when it reached its limit and spilled back down the slope, the transition would not be a smooth one. The best they could hope for was another flooded terrace, broad enough, and with water running deep enough, to keep them from smashing into rock.
Seth reached up and gripped the handle on the right side of his compartment, but with his weight bearing down on him he was unable to take hold of the left one as well. He considered the merits of freeing both his hands and letting himself be thrown from the boat. How many more bends in the river did he think they could survive? And even if they ended up on dry land, they’d starve to death long before they found their way back to the basket.
But Theo’s life wasn’t his to take, and the thought of seeking assent for the act was enough to drain it of its allure. If the time came when he could argue in all honesty that no hope remained, he’d make his case, but not before.
The hiss was drowning out every other sound now. When Seth tried to picture the source of the noise, the image that sprang into his mind was not water slamming into water, or rock, but water scattering into the air. «Should I climb up onto the top of the boat and see if you can ping anything to the south?» he asked Theo.
«If I could, is there anything we’d do differently?»
«Not that I can think of.»
«Then it’s not worth the risk.»
The hiss grew deafening, then painful. Seth’s muscles were rigid, bracing his body against the hull. Any thought of surrendering to death was gone, but the prospect of meeting the same fate unwillingly had never felt more likely.
Something started drumming on the top of the boat; Seth felt the hull’s vibrations before the impacts grew loud enough to hear. He poked a hand out to the north, and felt large, cold droplets pelting his skin: some portion of the river’s flow was raining back down, in the aftermath of whatever lay ahead.
«Not long now,» Theo said calmly. Seth recalled his last, breathless immersion, and began consciously inhaling and exhaling, forcing himself to concentrate on the rhythm in the hope that he wouldn’t break it, no matter what the shock. He pictured Andrei and Nicholas, and Ada with her silent passenger, all huddled in their own dark compartments—then he pictured Sarah and Judith, Raina and Amina hiking back up the slope toward the waiting basket. If he had to die, this was how he wanted to go: believing in his friends’ survival, embracing their shared history.
«Remember when we were in awe of Raina and Amina, just for traveling to the steamlands?»
«Yes.» But Theo wouldn’t countenance distractions. «Be ready,» he said sternly.
«For what?»
«For anything.»
The hull groaned, then something tore and something shattered. Seth’s weight vanished; he cried out unwillingly, gasping and bellowing—but the fall went on for so long that he had time to recover and take control of his breathing, and even time to become aware of his grip on the handle and make it more secure.
Then the north wall of the compartment slammed against his side, and he was deep in the cold water. His right shoulder burned with pain as the hull jerked fitfully, belching out its last trapped air, but he clung on to the handle, less through any conscious act of will than an instinctive refusal to be prized out of his shelter.
In the calm that followed, he waited for the boat to break the surface, anxious and impatient but, with a lungful of air, infinitely better prepared for the ordeal than before. The shock of sledding off the top of the river lingered, but the pounding in his blood and the tingling of his skin began to feel as much a thrill of triumph as of fear. They had not struck rocks, and his own injuries seemed mild compared to the worst he might have suffered.
His lungs began to ache. It was not the blind panic he’d felt before, but an insistent nagging.
«Are we rising or sinking?» he asked Theo. However fast the boat had struck the water, it should have been ascending by now. «I can’t tell.»
«I can’t either. Take off your pack.»
Seth unbuckled the straps and let his pack fall away. A second later, he struck the top of the boat: unburdened, he was more buoyant than it was. The hull must have been breached, the air-filled walls ruptured.
His only choice was to leave the boat. The strange southwards gravity wouldn’t let him swim upward, but he should still float up.
He groped around and found the edge of the hull. His intention had been to try to bring the others with him, if they hadn’t already departed—but when he maneuvered himself into the place where Andrei and Nicholas should have been, there was nothing but open water. He forced himself down along the edge of the hull, hand over hand, then reached out for Ada’s compartment, but that was gone too. He let go of the broken, sinking box of sodden tent fabric and willed his body to ascend.
In the blackness, he had no sense of motion. He stretched his right arm away from his body and tried cupping the water and driving it down, but his palm felt no resistance, however he angled it. He wanted to exhale some of the stale air from his lungs, but he was afraid it might be the only thing that made him lighter than the water around him; a careless stream of bubbles escaping from his lips could send him back down to join the wreck of the boat.
The blackness brightened to a strange bluish gray. Seth took the hallucination as a sign of imminent suffocation, but whatever instinct made him squeeze his eyes shut rewarded him with the knowledge that the impossible light was real enough to be extinguished and regained with a blink.
He reached up with his right arm, and felt cool air on the back of his hand. Jubilant, he clawed at the water, trying to raise his head, but it remained stubbornly immersed.
Seth forced himself to be still, and pictured himself floating just below the water. He swung his left leg slowly away from his body, while using his arms to maintain his balance and keep himself from tipping over the wrong way.
Air touched his cheek. He managed to turn his head far enough to catch a breath. For a time he was perfectly motionless except for the expansion and contraction of his lungs, but the whole configuration was precarious; the smallest disturbance in the water, the tiniest shift in his limbs, sent him back down and he had to start again.
«What now?» he asked Theo.
«We hope that one of the other modules is intact. Give me time to dry out a bit more, and I’ll start yelling for help.»
«All right.» Seth didn’t know how long he could keep up his balancing act, but they had no other choice.
With his head so low and his movements constrained, he couldn’t see far across the shimmering water, but whatever lit it appeared to be both less diffuse than the twilight he’d grown used to on the slope, and much weaker than full sunlight. But then, neither had any right to manifest themselves in the middle of the night. The water around him felt impossibly placid; Seth searched for a landmark to give him some cue as to its speed, but it was hard to discern anything in the distance.
The current was turning his body slowly around a vertical axis—his own left-right axis—taking him through a leisurely backflip entirely unconstrained by gravity. East, west, and the old up and down were indistinguishable now, leaving him with no real sense of where he was facing. As he struggled to keep his head from submerging again, a string of blue-tinged lights came into view somewhere beyond the water, stretching into the distance and rising up as far as he could see. He counted a dozen individual points before they became too close to separate; they all seemed to lie more or less on a smooth, almost flat curve, and though they didn’t conform to it perfectly, the curve made its presence clear nonetheless, with the lights that departed from it dimmer than those that hewed closer, as if they gained all their strength from proximity to this otherwise abstract and invisible form.
Theo said, «I can hear a Sider.»
«You mean Nicholas?»
«I hope not.»
«Why
?» Seth was confused.
«This Sider’s screaming like an infant. If it’s Nicholas, he must have suffered something worse than a painful injury; only brain damage would make an adult emit sounds like that.»
«You think it’s Ada’s?» Seth had stopped wondering exactly where Ada kept her supply of the drug, but she’d confessed to losing her barometer, so it was entirely possible that her puffballs had been swept away in the river too.
«It must be.»
Notwithstanding the grotesque timing of the awakening, this bawling woman-child meant that one, and probably both, of the pair were alive. «Can you tell how water-logged this Sider is?»
«Less than me. I’d say she’s clear of the water on both sides.»
So their module was still afloat. «We have to get Ada’s attention—and hope she’s got something to use as a runner.»
«Be my guest,» Theo replied. «I’m still drenched, and you can speak in her range as well as I can.»
Seth bellowed her name across the water, trying not to let the movement ruin his balance. His voice sounded feeble, but for all he knew she might be just a few dozen paces away behind him, waiting to be revealed in the current’s slow panorama.
Theo said, «Something’s coming through the water. Moving fast, almost straight toward us.»
«Ada’s boat?»
Theo hesitated. «I don’t think so. The Sider’s not getting any closer.»
“Andrei!” Seth yelled, afraid that he might be all but invisible, a bobbing head barely breaking the surface.
Theo said, «If it’s them, Nicholas isn’t replying.»
Seth could wait until they were all together in one boat before he started fretting over Nicholas’s silence. “Andrei!” he called again. His real worry was being missed entirely as Nicholas directed Andrei straight toward Ada’s screaming Sider.
Theo said, «They’re here.» Seth felt some kind of wake wash over him; he spluttered and went under.
Someone reached down and grabbed his shoulder and right arm. Two hands, three hands, four. They lifted him out of the water, and up across a short solid topside that did not feel anything like the tent-fabric hull of the expedition’s boat. He was lowered onto the deck of the vessel, dripping, facing away from his rescuers.
“Who are you?” he pleaded. An excited chatter broke out behind him, in no language he’d heard before.
PART FIVE
14
Seth tipped his head back. A dozen orange-furred limbs were stretched out across the deck toward him, below three pairs of eyes in three not-quite-faces.
«Are you seeing this?» he asked Theo.
«I’m only seeing what you’re showing me, so it’s your eyes I’ll have to trust. There’s nothing for me to ping but the deck and the sky.»
«We’ve reached the southern hyperboloid,» Seth realized. This wasn’t one more flooded terrace; they’d left the slope behind.
«I’d say so.»
«Which is peopled by scampers in boats?»
«I don’t think they look much like scampers.»
«They look even less like Walkers.»
Theo said, «They might struggle to walk in Baharabad, but here they seem entirely ambulatory.»
Seth struggled to get past his astonishment. Whatever he called them, these people had saved his life, but Ada and her Sider were still out on the water somewhere—and with luck, Andrei and Nicholas too.
He said, «Yell at them in your own language and see if they respond.»
Theo didn’t ask why, and Seth didn’t need to be told when he’d done it: the Southites began shrieking and hooting, turning their faces to each other and then staring at Seth with a renewed intensity. If they could hear Theo, there was a good chance that they could also hear the newly wakened Sider, and they might well have been drawn to this part of the water by her bawling. Seth was immensely grateful that their eyes were as sharp as their hearing, but there was no reason for the novelty he presented to distract them from continuing their search for the source of the sound. Granted, if he looked half as bizarre to them as they did to him he had to expect a certain amount of attention, but he hoped that he’d only piqued their curiosity, not sated it.
«We need to let them know that they should keep looking,» he told Theo.
«How?»
Seth thought for a while. «Which direction is the Sider?»
«It’s hard to tell,» Theo grumbled. «I’m still wet, we’ve been moving around in the water, and I’m not used to . . . any of this.»
Seth gazed at the three Southites, who gazed back, showing no sign of losing interest in their exotic catch and getting on with other tasks. «Roughly,» he pleaded.
«Speaking body-wise, halfway between backward and down,» Theo replied.
Seth pointed his right arm in the direction Theo had specified. «Now imitate Ada’s—»
«Dahlia.»
«Dahlia?»
«Someone has to name her.»
«Imitate Dahlia, before they think I’m just stretching my arm out for no reason.»
Seth couldn’t hear anything, but he felt a strong enough vibration in his skull to be assured that Theo wasn’t holding back.
The Southites burbled, grunted, and squeaked, glancing at each other and swaying on their long, low limbs. Seth didn’t presume to read their emotions, but the one thing they weren’t was indifferent.
He moved his arm back to his side, then repeated the whole act three more times. The Southites became ever more animated, but they remained fixated on Seth himself. Had they failed to understand his message, or did they simply not care? He was at a loss as to what more he could do to rekindle their interest in their original goal.
Theo said, «I think Dahlia’s getting closer.» He sounded confused.
«That’s good, isn’t it?»
Two of the Southites turned and scuttled away across the deck, giving Seth a better sense of just how wide the boat was. They stood at the opposite side, facing out across the water, but Seth’s head was too low for him to see what they were looking at.
«It’s not Ada’s boat approaching,» Theo realized. «It’s something faster, more like this one.»
«So their friends had her all along?» Seth was relieved, but the job wasn’t done. «If spotting her was enough to have them scour the water and find us, they need to keep going until they have Andrei and Nicholas too.»
«How do we tell them that?» Theo wondered. «Three pairs, not just two?»
Seth pounded the deck, and tapped the side of his body. He pounded it again, and gestured toward Ada and Dahlia. Then he pounded it a third time, and swept his arm around vaguely.
The Southite who’d stayed with him seemed intrigued, but Seth’s mime didn’t spur it into any kind of action. Seth did it again, and a third time.
The Southite lost interest and moved away to join the other two, who were now shouting into the distance. Greeting their fellow sailors and describing their own find? After a while, Seth caught a glimpse of the second boat coming alongside, but between the crew of his own and the crew of the other, the forest of limbs defeated his attempts to see what state Ada and Dahlia were in. Finally, he called out at the top of his voice, “Ada! Are you all right?”
“Seth! I’m fine! What about Andrei and Nicholas?”
“I don’t know where they are. If there’s any way you can encourage these people to keep searching . . .”
The two boats were separating now. “I’ll try,” Ada replied, but her tone told Seth that she’d had no more luck communicating her wishes than he had.
The crew busied themselves with something near the rear of the boat, and it began to move. Seth tried propping himself up with his left arm, hoping to get a better view of both vessels and their surroundings, but as he slid his elbow over the deck and bent his arm, he realized that elevating his body this way would leave him precariously unstable—and that if he lost control, the price would be infinitely worse than the smack in the face that he’d somehow fo
oled himself into imagining was still possible.
He lowered himself back onto the deck, shaken. There was no safe way to tip over here. The Southites had eight almost-horizontal legs and a low, flat body; no impact or injury was going to unbalance them. But if his own body had been reconstructed with a vertical, axial torso that allowed him to walk around on two legs, he would have been in constant danger of falling toward the all-encompassing cone, with no prospect of ending up flat on the ground. The cruellest executioners in the ancient world had reputedly devised a form of torture in which the victim was trapped between two closely spaced walls, one facing east, the other west, and left there until they were too weak to remain standing. After days without food, water, or sleep, eventually they would topple in the only way possible, and the torque would tear their body apart. But here, there’d be no need to build the walls.
«Does it look like they’re still searching?» he asked Theo. It was difficult to judge from the crew’s posture how much attention they were paying to the water around them, but he hadn’t felt the boat change direction at all.
«There might be other boats,» Theo suggested hopefully.
Seth turned his head a little, and caught sight again of the string of distant lights. «So what are they? Cities?» Cities so numerous, and so profligate with their lamps, that they could lift the whole surrounding landscape out of the eternal night?
«Why would they all line up that way?» Theo asked.
«Maybe they’re on a river.» But Seth was beginning to doubt that the idea made sense at all. Before there had been cities and lamps, every animal would have needed to navigate in the dark. A Sider’s axial pings would be no use here, but there was no reason why the same kind of sense couldn’t work in ordinary directions instead. So if the ancestors of the Southites had flourished in a world without light, why would they possess eyes at all, and any wish to make lamps?
Theo said, «It’s the sun!»
«What?»
«Can’t you see it?»
Seth was bemused. «There’s an awful lot of rock between us and the sun right now. Or do you think it’s peeking over the edge of the world?»
