“I assure you, Dr. Randall, you’re not being foolish.”
“Pardon me if I’m not convinced. Not yet. I—” He paused. “Elias, you look pale. Are you all right?”
“I need—”
“What?”
“Some air.”
“Well, I— Elias?”
Vale fled the room.
He fled the room because his god was rising and it was going to be bad, that was obvious, a full visitation, he felt it, and the manifestation had clogged his throat and soured his stomach.
He meant to retrace his steps to the door — Randall vainly calling after him — but Vale took a wrong turn and found himself in a lightless gallery where the bones of some great alien fish, some benthic Darwinian monster, had been suspended by cords from the ceiling.
Control yourself. He managed to stand still. Randall would have no patience with operatic gestures.
But he desperately wanted to be alone, at least for a moment. In time the disorientation would pass, the god would manipulate his arms and legs, and Vale himself would become a passive, semiconscious observer in the shell of his own body. The agony would retreat and eventually be forgotten. But now it was too imminent, too violent. He was still himself — vulnerable and afraid — and yet he was in a presence, surrounded by a virulently dangerous other Self.
He sank to the floor begging for oblivion; but the god was slow, the god was patient.
The inevitable questions ran through his tortured mind. Why me? Why am I elected for this duty, whatever it is? And to Vale’s surprise, this time the god offered replies: wordless certainties, to which Vale appended inadequate words.
Because you died, the phantom god responded.
This was chilling. I’m not dead, Vale protested.
Because you drowned in the Atlantic Ocean in 1917 when an American troop ship took a German torpedo.
The god’s voice sounded like Vale’s grandfather, the ponderous tone the old man had adopted when he harped about Bull Run. The god’s voice was made of memories. His memories, Elias Vale’s memories. But the words were wrong. This was nonsense. It was insanity.
You died the day I took you.
In an empty and ruined brick building by the Ohio River. How could both those things be true? A warehouse by a river, a violent death in the Atlantic?
He whispered, “I died?”
Wrenching silence, except for Randall’s timid footsteps in the dark beyond the bone-draped gallery.
“Then,” Vale asked, “is this — the Afterlife?”
He received no answer but a vision: the museum in flames, and then a blackened ruin, and stinking green gods walking like insectile conquerors among the toppled bricks and heatless ashes.
“Mr. Vale? Elias?”
He looked up at Randall and managed a rictus of a grin. “I’m sorry. I—”
“Are you ill?”
“Yes. A little.”
“Perhaps we should call off the, uh, meeting tonight.”
“No need.” Vale felt himself stand. He faced Randall. “Occupational hazard. I only need a breath of air. Couldn’t find the door.”
“You should have said something. Well, follow me.”
Out into the cold of the early evening. Out into a rainy, empty street. Out into the Void, Elias Vale thought. Somewhere deep inside himself, he felt an urge to scream.
Chapter Eleven
Keck and Tuckman couldn’t say what hazards might lie ahead. According to their instruments, the new Rheinfelden was at roughly the location of the old European cascade, but the approximation was crude, and the white-water rapids that used to run below the falls were either absent or buried under a deeper, slower Rhine. Sullivan saw this as more evidence for a Darwinian that had evolved somehow in parallel with the old Europe, in which the ancient tumble of a single rock might have changed the course of a river, at least within certain limits. Finch put it down to the absence of human intervention. “The old Rhine was fished, locked, navigated, and exploited for more than a thousand years. Naturally it came to follow a different course.” Whereas this Europe was untouched, Edenic.
Guilford reserved his opinion. Either explanation seemed plausible (or equally implausible). He knew only that he was tired: tired of distributing supplies among the crude saddlebags of Erasmus’ snakes; tired of manhandling the big Stone-Galloway boats, whose much touted “lightness” turned out to be a relative thing; tired of pacing the fur snakes and their load as they portaged the Rheinfelden in a miserable drizzle.
They came down at last to a pebble-sharp beach from which the boats could be safely launched. Supplies were divided equally between the waterproof fore-and-aft compartments of the boats and the saddlebags of the fur snakes. Erasmus would herd the animals to their summer pastures at the eastern extremity of Lake Constance and had agreed to meet the expedition there.
Launching the boats would have to wait for morning. There was only enough daylight left to pitch the tents, to nurse fresh aches, to pry open ration tins, and to watch the swollen river, green as a beetle’s back and wide as Boston Bay, as it hurried toward the falls.
Guilford did not wholly trust the boats.
Preston Finch had commissioned and named them: the Perspicacity, the Orinoco, the Camille (after Finch’s late wife), and the Ararat. The motors were prototypes, small but powerful, screws protected from rocks by the skags and the engine compartments from high water by a series of canvas shields. The boats would do well enough, Guilford thought, if the Rhine remained relatively placid as far as Lake Constance. But they would be worse than useless against white water. And their advantage in weight was offset by the need to pack jerricans of gasoline, a stiff load to portage and a waste of potentially useful space.
But the boats would be cached at the Bodensee and would function more than adequately on the return trip, stripped of motors and absent gasoline, with the river current to carry them. And they worked satisfactorily the first day out, though the noise of the engines was deafening and the stink of exhaust obnoxious. Guilford enjoyed being close to the water rather than riding above it — to be a part of the river, resisted by its flow and rocked by its eddies, a small thing in a large land. The rain passed, the day brightened, and the gorge walls were gaudy with vine-like growths and capped with gnarled pagoda trees. Surely we have outpaced Erasmus and his snakes, Guilford thought, and Erasmus might be the only other human being within a hundred square miles, barring a few vagrant Partisans. The land owns us now, Guilford thought. The land, the water, the air.
Camp where a nameless creek enters the Rhine. Pool of calm water, Keck fishing for thorn and blue maddies. Miniature sage-pine among the rocks, foliage almost turquoise, dwarfed by winds a rocky soil.
Postscriptum. The fish are abundant will make a palatable evening meal, though Diggs proclaims his martyrdom as he cleans them. Offal goes into the river — billyflies chase it downstream. (The billyflies will bite if provoked; we sleep under mosquito netting tonight. Other insects not especially common or venomous, although a crablike creature made off with one of Keck’s fish — nabbed it from a wetrock scuttled into the water with it! “Claws like a lobster,” Keck says cheerfully. “Count your toes, gentlemen!”)