The Rift

by Walter Jon Williams

  A few minutes later he was wishing Arlette a happy birthday.

  It was easy. A communications firm caught the towboat’s radio signal, shifted it over to the phone lines for two-way communication, and charged a small fee.

  “Cost my company about six bucks,” Captain Joe said. “I figure they can stand the freight.”

  “Daddy?” Arlette cried at Nick’s voice, and then, to someone else. “It’s Daddy! He’s on the phone!” A thousand-ton weight seemed to fall from Nick’s shoulders. He could feel his heart melting, turning to warm ooze within his chest. The breath came more easily to his lungs. He felt two inches taller.

  “Hello, baby,” he said.

  “Where are you? Are you okay?”

  “I’m okay, baby. I’ve been on a boat on the river with…” He looked at Jason. “With someone I met,” he finished, saving that explanation for later.

  “On the river?”

  “The Mississippi.”

  “But you were coming by car…”

  “Nick!” Manon’s voice, coming in loudly after the click of the extension picking up. “Nick, are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. A little sunburned, that’s all.”

  “Thank God!” Manon said.

  “He’s on the river,” Arlette explained to her mother. “On a boat.”

  “I’m on a towboat right now,” Nick said. “The captain let me use his radio. But we’ve been drifting on the river for a couple days.”

  “Are you with Viondi?” Manon asked.

  There was a moment of silence. “No,” Nick finally said. “Viondi didn’t make it.”

  “Oh, Nick,” Manon breathed.

  “I’m sorry, Daddy,” said Arlette.

  Nick licked his lips. “The car wrecked in the quake,” he said. “I got out by water. Somebody picked me up.” He looked at Jason again. The boy was trying not to look at him, to give him privacy. “We’ve been on the river, and we just now got picked up by a towboat.”

  “So you’re okay,” Arlette said.

  “Yes.” The sounds of the voices were bringing visions to Nick’s mind. The big clapboard house just outside of Toussaint, with its oaks and broad porch. Arlette by the phone in the kitchen, dressed in a checked cotton blouse and blue jeans worn white at the knees. Manon upstairs in the bedroom, pacing back and forth at the full length of the phone cord the way she did, with the lace curtains fluttering in the window behind.

  Fantasies. Nick couldn’t know whether they were real or not. But they felt real, very real indeed.

  “I’m sorry I missed your birthday yesterday,” he said.

  “It wasn’t much of a party. Not with the way—well, not the way things are here.”

  “But you’re okay? And Ed, and Gros-Papa, and…”

  “We’re all fine,” Arlette said. “The house came through the quake okay. But we’re on an island now. We don’t have electricity, but they managed to repair the phone exchange, at least for the houses in town.”

  “We have food from the store,” Manon said. “We have enough boats, we can get away if we want. But there doesn’t seem to be anyplace to go—”

  Arlette’s excited voice broke in. “Maybe you can sail here in your towboat!”

  “I’ll do that, baby,” Nick said, “if the captain will let me.” And his eyes sought Captain Joe, who stood beaming in a corner of the pilothouse with his hands in his pockets.

  “You tell your girl that I’ll do what I can,” he bellowed without knowing what had been asked of him.

  “Anybody who got a Gros-Papa is a fren’ o’ mine!”

  Nick talked to Arlette for a long while as the captain beamed and grinned. The words just seemed to float out of him. He was having a hard time not floating away himself.

  Eventually the words wound down, and he saw Captain Joe standing with a pensive expression on his face, and the man on watch staring neutrally out the window.

  “I should go, baby,” he said. “I think I’ve been using the captain’s radio long enough. I’ll call tomorrow if I can, okay?”

  He brought the call to an end. Captain Joe turned to Jason. “You want to make a call, son?” he asked. Jason gave a short little shake of the head. “No one to call,” he said, and left the pilothouse. Captain Joe gave Nick a look, brows raised. Nick only shrugged.

  “Let’s get us some chow, podnah,” Joe said.

  No word from the President. Jessica hadn’t been expecting any as yet: the decision to evacuate was a big one, and she hadn’t expected that it would be made overnight.

  Morning birdsong—helicopters—floated through the open sides of her command tent. She looked at the weather photos that Pat had just pulled from the Internet and frowned. The big high-pressure system had stalled right over the Midwest, and that meant continued warm and sunny weather over the disaster area. That was good.

  What was bad was what was happening behind the front. The clockwise rotation of the high-pressure zone was pulling up moisture from the Gulf of Mexico—you could see it, the swirl of cloud, there on the photos, a curve from the Gulf sweeping west, then east again over the Dakotas and Minnesota. Once the moisture was over the western plains or the Rocky Mountains, the air cooled and dropped the moisture as rain.

  Some of those areas had been getting rain every day for a week. Lots of water raining down into Mississippi and its tributaries, joining the ice melt pouring down from the Rockies. What this meant was that the floods weren’t going away any time soon. The rivers would stay full, and that would delay repair work on the levees and bridges, prevent people from returning to their homes, and hamper the evacuation.

  Well, Jessica thought. It was time to work out what she could do.

  The river below Vicksburg was still under her control, even though she’d lost everything north of it. But she could use the controlled part of the river to affect the flood to the north. When rivers flowed fast, it was for one of two reasons: either there was an enormous weight of water behind them, pushing the water down its channel at greater speed; or the path of the river was steeper. When a riverbed was steeper, gravity pulled the water along it at increased velocity. Jessica didn’t want to increase the volume of water, which would only increase flooding. But she could make the river steeper. She could release water through the Old River Control system in Louisiana. Old River Control was one of the Corps of Engineers’ most colossal and long-term projects. It was designed to keep the wandering Mississippi firmly in its place.

  Over its history, the big river shifted its path through most of the state of Louisiana, always seeking the steepest, shortest route to the sea. It settled into its present path around 900 A.D., around the time of a large earthquake on the New Madrid fault; and when human settlements were built in the years since, they tended to take the Mississippi’s route as given.

  By the mid-twentieth century, it had become clear that the Mississippi was ready to make a leap out of its bed and carve itself a new route to the sea. Most likely, it would bypass Baton Rouge and New Orleans and spill out into the Gulf in the vicinity of the modest town of Morgan City, well to the west of New Orleans. The salt ocean would pour upward into the river’s old bed, turning the New Orleans waterfront into a narrow, twisting bay that would soon fill with silt. Whole sections of Louisiana would be turned into unproductive salt marsh—all the fresh-water plants and animals dying in an unprecedented ecological catastrophe—and New Orleans, the nation’s largest port, would be stranded in the midst of the dying land, its economic raison d’etre gone and its drinking water turned to salt. The river’s weak point was in middle Louisiana, where the Mississippi, the Red River, and the Atchafalaya came within a few miles of one another. Old River Control was a giant engineering project built to straddle the three rivers, sending water east or west as the situation demanded. The Morganza Hoodway, with its 125 gates, could shift 600,000 cubic feet of Mississippi flood per second into the Red/Atchafalaya system, thus preserving southern Louisiana from flood. Or, if the Mississippi was
low, water could be shunted from the Red into the Father of Waters, which made certain that New Orleans remained a deep-water port. To take advantage of the water moving from one system to the other, the Murray hydroelectric plant had been prefabricated in New Orleans, at the Avondale Shipyards, and shipped north on barges to take its place in the Old River system, the largest structure ever to be floated on the Mississippi.

  What Jessica needed to do was shift a lot of water from the Mississippi into the Atchafalaya Basin. This would lower the level of the river in Louisiana and make its path steeper, thereby draining the flooded lands more quickly.

  She would dump as much water as she could while still retaining New Orleans and Baton Rouge as deep-water ports. If Morganza’s 125 gates weren’t enough—and she didn’t believe they’d all been open together at any point in their history—she could open the Bonnet Carre Spillway above New Orleans, which could shift two million gallons per second from the Mississippi into Lake Pontchartrain. That should do it, she thought with satisfaction.

  Get this river moving.

  They were fond of frying on the Beluthahatchie. Nick, sticking his head into the galley to ask for a glass of water, saw chicken, fish, potatoes, and okra all sizzling away. He took his glass of water and wandered off, stomach rumbling with hunger.

  He found Jason straddling the gunwale near the stern, where their boats had been tied up. He was listlessly watching the water as it streamed astern in the growing darkness. Swallows in search of insects skimmed just millimeters above the surface.

  “You okay?” Nick asked.

  Jason nodded.

  It was hard enough, Nick thought, being father to his own child. But it was clear enough, he reflected, that there was no one else here who was going to do the job. He put his glass down on the gunwale and looked at Jason.

  “Your father may be in China,” he said, softly as he could, “but I know he’s worried sick about you.” Jason turned away, gazed out at the far bank of the river, the last red light of the sun that touched the tops of the distant trees. “I don’t know how to reach him.”

  “He may be on his way back,” Nick said. “I would be, in his place.”

  “What could he do?” Jason asked. “I’m here on this boat. He’ll be in China, or California, or someplace else. But he won’t be here.”

  “Just relieve his mind, Jason. I know how I felt until I talked to Arlette just now, so I know how your father feels. He’s got to be in agony. Call where he works, call the American Red Cross and give them your name. They’ll get ahold of him—that’s what they do.” Jason looked down at his hands. “If I call,” he said, “I have to tell him that my mother’s dead.” Nick felt a lump in his throat. Nick put an arm around the boy, hugged him for a moment. Jason accepted the touch, but otherwise did not respond. “I’ll call first and tell him about your mom,” Nick offered, “if you don’t want to do it.”

  Jason shook his head. “That’s my job, I guess,” he said. He sighed. “I’ll probably just get his answering machine, anyway.”

  Nick dropped his arm, looked into Jason’s eyes. “When he plays that machine,” he said, “And finds out you’re alive, he’ll be the happiest man in the world. Believe me.”

  There was a sudden glare of light as Beluthahatchie’s lights came on. Not just the navigation lights, but floodlights as well, the superstructure clearly illuminated. The captain was making certain that his stranded vessel was visible to any other traffic on the river.

  Jason blinked in the strong light, started to say something, then fell silent. Swallows flitted over the water just beyond Beluthahatchie’s pool of light. Then Jason tried again.

  “When you were talking to your daughter,” he said, “you said somebody—I don’t remember the name—the person didn’t make it.” He looked at Nick. “Was that your wife?” Nick shook his head. “Viondi,” he said. “My best friend. He was…” His voice trailed away, and he tried again. “A cop shot him. Thought he was a looter, I guess, but all he was carrying was his own stuff from the car.” He touched the bandaged wound on his arm. “Man tried to shoot me, too, but I ran.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jason said.

  “Me too.”

  “I was kind of mad at you,” Jason said, “because you had a family, and I didn’t. But I guess you’ve lost somebody, too.”

  “Yes.”

  “And that’s why you didn’t want to go near the police the other day.” Nick’s nerves hummed to a memory of the terror that seized him then, had clamped down on his mind and made him steer the bass boat away from shore.

  “That’s right,” he said. “I was scared they’d shoot me then and there.” Darkness swallowed the far bank. Jason’s shadowed expression was hard to read. “We’ve been rescued,” he said. “So tell me—why do I feel so awful?”

  “Till now we were just trying to survive,” Nick said. “Now we have time to feel.” Strange, he thought, to think of emotion as a luxury.

  “Almost makes me want to go back on the river,” Jason said. “As long as I was on the river, I didn’t have to think about things. The river was, like, our fate. It wouldn’t let us go, but it kept us safe.”

  “We made it, Jason,” Nick said. “There’s no reason to feel bad about that.” Jason seemed unconvinced. “I guess,” he said.

  He gazed out onto the river. “I keep thinking I could have saved my mother,” he said. “If I’d known about that trolling motor, maybe I could have taken the boat through the flood and pulled her out of the house. If only I’d known a little more about how things worked.”

  “That’s not your fault, Jase. It wasn’t even your boat. You can’t be blamed for not knowing that motor was hidden under the deck.”

  “I suppose,” he said reluctantly.

  “We’re not to blame for being alive. It’s not our fault. And the people who didn’t make it, it’s not their fault, either. They’d be with us if they could.”

  Jason looked out at the dark river. “I know,” he said.

  Well, Nick thought, either this has made an impression or it hasn’t. No sense in beating a dead horse, no less a live one.

  “Hey,” he said. “Cook’s frying up a feast for us. I stay on this boat much longer, I’m going to gain fifteen pounds.”

  Jason gave him a wry look. “You’re telling me it’s time to eat, right?”

  “Only if you’re hungry. You want to stay out here and think for a while, that’s fine.” Jason hesitated for a moment, then threw his leg over the gunwale and dropped to the deck. “Might as well have dinner,” he said.

  Nick had underestimated dinner on the Beluthahatchie. In addition to all the fried food, there was potato salad, red beans and rice, corn bread, and icebox pie for dessert. Nick couldn’t understand why all the crew didn’t look like blimps.

  Nick and Jason told Captain Joe what they knew of the river north of their location. He was impressed that they’d survived the poison gas at Helena—he’d been worried that it was still there, clouds of the stuff hovering over the river like fog. The captain told them what he and his crew had heard on radio broadcasts. “Ain’t no harbors on this river no more,” he said. “All wrecked or closed. When I got the boss man on the radio, he told me to get this boat into the Ohio as soon as I can get her afloat. Nearest berth’s in Cincinnati.”

  “There are rapids between here and Cairo,” Jason said. “I went down them.”

  “Waterfalls, too,” Joe said, to Jason’s surprise. “But they ain’t so bad as they were. Old Man River, he gon’ wear down them rough spots. By the time we get afloat again, I figure them chutes are gonna be safe enough for Beluthahatchie. Maybe I’ll have to moor the tow somewhere where I can pick it up later—boss man says I can do that—but we’ll make Cincinnati okay, I guess.” He looked at his watch and gave a shout of joy. “It’s eight o’clock! Time for Dr. Who.” They watched in surprise as Captain Joe jumped up from the table and headed aft. Nick looked at the other crew.

  “Might as well join th
e captain,” one of them said. “He likes company when he watches TV.” They followed Captain Joe into a little crew lounge aft of the dining room, where they found the captain digging through a cabinet filled with a large collection of videotapes. “You like Dr. Who?” he asked.

  “Never seen it,” Nick said.

  “Well, podnah, you got yourself a treat in store. I watch Dr. Who every night at eight, unless I got business or a watch to stand.”

  Nick didn’t make much sense of the video—it seemed to be a middle episode of a series—but he enjoyed Captain Joe’s narration, a continuous discourse on the various actors who had played the Doctor over the years, the changes in the theme music, and footnotes on the various minor characters. He talked more than he watched the television, but Nick figured that Joe had seen the episode a hundred times anyway.

  As the closing credits ran, Jason rose from his chair. “Thanks for the show,” he said.

  “I hope you liked it.”

  “I was wondering,” Jason said, “can I ask you for a favor?”

  “I reckon you can ask.” The captain grinned.

  “I wonder if I could use your radio.” Jason hesitated. “I thought about someone I could call.”

  “I can do that,” Captain Joe said. “Just wait till the tape rewinds here, and I’ll take you up.” Nick decided not to go with Jason, to give the boy some privacy. He waited in the lounge, staring at the empty eye of the television. Jason returned after ten minutes or so, just stood in the doorway while his eyes brooded over the little lounge.

  “Everything go okay?” Nick asked.

  “I got the answering machine,” Jason said.

  “You said that you might.” Nick gestured at the TV set, the recorder. “You want to watch a tape or something?”

  Jason shook his head. “I’m going to take a shower, if I can.”

  The boy left. Nick let his head loll back on his chair, raised a hand to touch Arlette’s necklace in his breast pocket. One day soon he would give it to her. He knew that now.

  It was just possible, he supposed, that now he would actually manage to relax.