Thirty-Three: In The Stream Of Time

When you’re a farm boy growing up in the Tenisi hills and you think of riverboats going up and down the Misipi, one of the words that comes to mind is fast. There’s plenty of reason for that; riverboats are the fastest things people have in Meriga these days, barring a lake schooner or a big square-rigged merchant ship with a good wind helping out, and when you’ve walked along the banks of the Misipi and watched one riverboat after another show up out of the distance behind you, roll right on upstream past you, and vanish in the distance ahead, it’s hard to think of them as slow.

When you’re on board a plain working boat, though, it’s hard to keep that in mind, because you don’t spend much time racing along with the current. Certainly we didn’t do much of that on the way to Memfis. Every few hours through the day, some little town came into sight, the Jennel Mornay puffed up to the levee and sat there for a good long while as things got offloaded and a few people clattered down the landing stage, and then bales and barrels and sacks got hauled on board by the roustabouts to go downriver to Sanloo or Memfis. Once that was done, it was back out into the river, but that still meant that maybe one hour in three went into pulling up to the levee, pulling away from the levee, or sitting there with nobody but the roustabouts doing much of anything at all.

Come evening, whatever little town came next was where we stopped for the night. They say that riverboats used to travel by night a long time ago, but these days there’s too much danger from snags and sandbars. A good pilot might risk a night run when the moon’s full and there’s money to be made, but usually the risk’s not worth taking, and so come evening the boats tie up at the nearest town. The ship’s officers eat dinner in the main cabin with the passengers who can afford cabin fare, the crew eats down on the main deck with the passengers who can’t, and everybody but whoever’s on watch goes to sleep until first light tells the engineer it’s time to heat up the boiler again.

Thinking back on the trip down the river, it occurs to me that that’s one of maybe three times in my life that I haven’t had work to do for a good long time. The first time was during the few months between when my mother and I went to Shanuga after my father didn’t come back from the war, and when I got taken on as a ruinman’s prentice; the second was on the riverboat heading for Memfis; and the third time—well, that’s here and now, because even though I’m sitting in the biggest ruin that’s left in Meriga, there’s not that much for a ruinman to do just at the moment, other than turn the pages of old books about aliens, and wonder what Eleen and Tashel Ban are going to find next, and tell the story of how I got here in the pages of a notebook that nobody’s probably ever going to read.

I didn’t even have that much to do on the way downriver to Memfis, and Berry was mostly down on the main deck, making friends with the engineer and watching the steam engines run. I’d have done the same thing at his age, and might have done it even at mine if I didn’t have as much to think about as I did. Still, there it was; I had a lot of time to myself, and spent most of it standing on the walkway that ran along the outer edge of the cabin deck, thinking and watching the Ilanoy forests and fields roll by.

That was when I understood, deep down, just how small Meriga is nowadays compared to what it was back in the old world. By that I don’t mean just that it lost all the land it did to the Meycans and the Neeonjin and the coastal allegiancies and Nuwinga, or the half a continent or so between the Suri River and the Neeonjin country that nobody lives in any more because it’s all dust and sand. What I mean is that even the land that’s still inside Meriga’s borders these days fits Meriga the way my father’s overalls would have fit me when I was five years old. There’s just not that many people in Meriga, not compared to how many there used to be, and it shows.

I saw that over and over again as the banks of the river rolled past. We’d come to some town with a hundred buildings or so, the sort of lively market town you find all through Meriga where farmers bring their crops in for sale and buy what they need from the blacksmith, the leatherworker and the bulk goods store, and one glance from the walkway around the cabin deck showed the traces of the same town back in the old world, when it was ten or twenty or fifty times bigger. Sometimes, too, we’d pass long stretches of riverbank where there wasn’t a town at all any more, and there would be the marks of an old town, all overgrown with trees or sticking out here and there in the middle of a pasture.

The two big towns we passed on the way down to Memfis, Yoree and Sanloo, made the point even harder to miss. Yoree’s a town of decent size, and Sanloo’s one of the dozen biggest cities in Meriga, but if you look at either one from the river you can see that they’re both tiny next to what they used to be. The main ruins in both of them got stripped down to the ground a long time ago, since they’re the kind of riverside towns that are where they are for a reason. Still, if you know what to look for, and any ruinman does, the lines of the old streets and what’s left of the foundations of old buildings go as far as you can see upriver and down.

Now and then, too, we’d come to a place where the ancients tossed a bridge right across the river; there would be big cracked shafts of concrete rising up from the water, and what was left of ramps going up on either side. Sometimes, when the road that used to run to the bridge still gets some use, I could see a ferryman’s house on one side or the other and a square-bowed boat tied up next to it, or scooting across the river like a water bug with the ferryman sculling for all he was worth at the stern. Still, more often than not what was left of the bridge would just be sitting there in among the trees and the water reeds with nothing else anywhere in sight, cracked and streaked with long red lines of rust, and only there because it wasn’t yet worth a ruinman’s time to get out there with a raft, crack the concrete open, and haul what was left of the rebar to a metal merchant. If the people on the Jennel Mornay had been the only people left alive anywhere on Mam Gaia’s round belly, I don’t think what was left of those bridges or the empty places that used to be towns could have looked any more lonely.

So that’s what I was thinking about as one day turned into another and the Jennel Mornay’s big stern wheel churned the green water into foam. Finally one evening we got to the place where the Ilanoy flows into the Misipi. It was just after dinner, which was bean soup, brown bread, and the cheap yellow beer they make up and down the Misipi Valley, which I hadn’t yet gotten used to then, and we’d eaten it the way all the cabin passengers on the Jennel Mornay ate every meal they got, which was sitting at long iron benches on either side of a long iron table running down the middle of the main cabin, with the thrum of the steam engines down below making the plates and mugs rattle loud enough that talking wasn’t too easy.

About the time I finished my soup, the whistle sounded up above us, three times, long and slow. Slane was eating with us, as he usually did, and looked up suddenly. “When you finish that,” he said, “you might want to step outside. There’s something worth seeing.”

I’d figured out already that what Slane didn’t know about traveling on riverboats wasn’t worth worrying about, so I downed the last of my beer and got to my feet. “Which side?”

“Right hand side’s the best.”

I guessed what he was talking about by then, and went outside the way he’d said. Berry was right behind me, since some things are even more interesting than a steam engine. It was as nice an evening as you could ask for, with puffs of clouds scattered over the sky like loms grazing in a field. The Ilanoy was good and wide by then; the land to the left—to port, I ought to say, since it was on a boat—was the same sort of thing we’d been passing for days, bluffs with wetland trees and water reeds all along their feet, but the land to starboard was low, with trees rising up just high enough that I couldn’t see past them to whatever was on the other side of them. Then the land to starboard wasn’t there any more; the Jennel Mornay’s whistle sounded again, three more times, and all of a sudden we were out on the Misipi.

I’ve never seen another river half so big. It was wider than a lot of lakes, with brown water rolling up out of the southwest just at that point—it bends a lot, and when the Misipi decides to bend, there’s not much that can argue with it. The far bank was a low line of green in the middle distance at first, and then we pulled away from the Ilanoy bank toward the deep water more or less in the middle. There were two more riverboats paddling south toward Sanloo within sight of us, and four of them paddling north, maybe headed all the way up to Meeyaplis. One of them whistled back to us, but there was more than enough river for everybody, and pretty soon they were out of sight to the north and we were passing others, steaming upstream past us as we steamed down.

After a while Berry said his goodbyes and scampered back down to the main deck, and a couple of other people who’d come out when the whistle sounded went back inside. I walked forward to the front of the cabin deck, where I could see the whole river in front of me and both banks off in the middle distance, and just stood there taking it in. Sanloo was another day or so downriver, Slane had told me earlier, and Memfis a few days further beyond that; I knew I needed to start thinking about what would happen once we got to Memfis—dealing with the local ruinmen’s guild, trying to find the Walnut Ridge Telecommunications Facility, and if we were lucky, juggling all the details of running a dig, which I’d never done before by myself, much less with one of the most powerful jennels in Meriga looking over my shoulder and paying the bills—but that wasn’t what was on my mind just then. So I stood there at the rail and watched the river and the banks move past.

It was getting toward night before we got to the next town, which was Altan, over on the Ilanoy side. There were already lamps being lit there, so I could see it a good ways off, but the sky was still light enough that I could see something else: a line of concrete pilings like broken teeth, rising up out of the Misipi on either side. I blinked, looked again, and said some language hotter than I usually use; it hadn’t occurred to me that even the ancients would have put a bridge over a river that big.

“There were once dozens of those, as it happens,” Plummer’s voice said next to me.

I hadn’t heard him walk up, but somehow that didn’t surprise me. I glanced at him. “On the Misipi?”

“Exactly. All of them gone now, to be sure; the last were here and at Rocalan, and they were destroyed during the Third Civil War. A pity; I don’t imagine anything of the sort will ever be built again.”

“Does anyone even know any more how they were made?”

“There are books on the subject at Melumi and Sisnaddi, and a few other places.”

He was watching me with that same odd look, as though he was waiting for me to say something in particular, so I thought for a long moment before answering. There was more than that to make me pause, though, because Melumi’s got the Versty and Sisnaddi’s got the government archives, and I’d never heard about any other place with a collection of books worth noticing. He was, I suddenly guessed, trying to tell me something. What?

“If the books tell how it’s done,” I asked him, “why won’t a bridge like that ever be built again?”

Maybe it was the right thing to say. His voice went quiet, so that I had to strain to hear him. “Building a bridge is a simple thing for a nation that already has the factories, the machines, the steel, the fuel—especially the fuel. And it’s an obvious thing if there are tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of cars, and people who want to drive the cars from one side of a river to the other side and back again every day. If the factories and the machines are gone, and the steel has to be cut by hand out of old buildings by your colleagues, and the fuel and the cars and most of the people are gone as well, it’s neither obvious nor simple. A bridge like this would cost every mark the government—” He said the word the old-fashioned way, rather than saying it “gummint” the way everyone else does nowadays. “—takes in taxes over ten years, and do no more good for anyone than a ferryman and his boat.”

I thought about a conversation we’d had earlier, on the way to Proo. “Well, but don’t they spend plenty of money on canals?”

“True. That takes men with shovels and men with trowels, earth and stone and mortar, and all of those can be had for a very modest sum these days. You know the price of steel, I believe. How much would it cost to bridge the river here with steel beams?”

I did know the price of steel, and even trying to guess the cost made my head hurt. “Okay,” I said. “That makes sense. And I guess there are books in Melumi and Sisnaddi and those other places that tell how to build canals, too.”

“Among other things,” Plummer said.

Right then I was sure I knew what he was trying to tell me. My thoughts set off running in half a dozen directions at once, but I managed to get them settled enough not to blurt out something like an idiot. “Maybe you can tell me this,” I said finally. “If nobody’s ever going to build a bridge like that again, what’s the value of the books that tell how it’s done?”

Plummer didn’t say anything for a long time, then: “When I was a boy, which was rather a few years ago, there was a book for children I read often, about a boy who made a little boat and put it in the river, hoping that it would travel all the way down to the sea. Did you ever read that?”

I was surprised enough that I turned to face him. The lamps of Altan were spots of light mirrored in his eyeglasses. “I used to love that book!”

“Did you ever make a little boat like the one in the story, and put it in the river?”

“Yes. I used to wonder what happened to it.”

“One never knows.” He turned away, looking out into the gathering dark on the river. “Knowledge is much the same. It comes down the stream of time to us, and perhaps turns up on the bank, and we can put it back in the water and send it on its way, or leave it on the bank to rot. The difference, of course, is that there is no sea: just a river flowing out of sight, and perhaps the chance that somewhere further downstream the little boat will be of use to someone, for reasons we will doubtless never know.”

He looked back toward me, then, and I could just see his smile in the last of the light. “An interesting subject to think about. We’ll talk more another time.” With that, he turned and went back into the cabin. I stared after him, and waited a long moment before following.

I didn’t sleep well that night, because I knew what he was talking about. There were stories and rumors I’d heard since I was small about people, maybe in Meriga, maybe somewhere else, who had knowledge from the old world that nobody else had any more. Half the robot stories my father used to tell me, and more than half the ones the prentices used to tell each other in Gray Garman’s house, had somebody mixed up in them who had an old book he wasn’t supposed to have, or something like that, and of course one part of the reason that ruinmen live outside the city walls and get uneasy looks from good folk is that a lot of people wonder if we know more than we ought to.

Now of course I knew that the right thing to do was to go talk to a priestess as soon as I had the chance and tell her what Plummer had said to me, and of course I knew that I wasn’t going to do anything of the kind. You don’t become a ruinman and dream about Deesee and go searching for Star’s Reach if you think everything from the old world ought to stay buried forever, and no doubt Plummer knew that perfectly well. Still, between wondering what Plummer and his nameless friends might be offering me, and wondering what they might ask from me in return, I had a hard time getting to sleep, and when I finally did, damn if I didn’t have a dream about Deesee like the ones I had when I was a boy: the vast empty streets and the water’s surface shimmering overhead as I hurried to meet somebody whose name I didn’t know at the base of the Spire.

I woke up before the sun came round Mam Gaia’s belly to shine on us. Berry was sound asleep and I didn’t wake him; I washed up quietly and got dressed and went to see if Plummer was awake yet. I went to the door to his cabin, and found it just a little open; when I nudged it a bit further, I could see at once that the cabin was empty and the bed hadn’t been slept in.

I admit I laughed, at myself as much as anything, guessing that he’d slipped off the boat as soon as it docked in Altan; I’d have done the same thing in his place, I realized right away, just in case I’d misjudged the person I’d talked to. I wondered how long it would be until he showed up again.

The empty cabin didn’t have any answers for me. After a moment I went aft to the kitchen, where they were boiling up a big pot of soup for breakfast, and begged an early cup of chicory brew.