“The what?”
Joe gave a laugh. “Batture’s an ol’ Louisiana word, podnah. Means the floodplain, between the levee and the river.”
Nick looked down at the map, felt his jaw clench. “Can you give me some paper?” he asked. “I’d like to make some notes.”
“Hell, podnah, take the maps.” With a grand gesture, he tore three maps out of the spiralbound Army Corps of Engineers map set. He opened more long, flat drawers in his map chest, withdrew more maps.
“I can give you maps of the White and the Arkansas, too,” he said, “but they ain’t up to date. We ain’t gone up there in years.”
Nick looked at the captain. “Thank you,” he said.
Captain Joe grinned, clapped Nick on the shoulder. “You just say hey to your little girl from me,” he said, “and to her Gros-Papa, too.”
Jason watched Nick after he’d come back from talking to his daughter, and he saw Nick’s face glow with love and delight. In the evenings, he’d call his father and try to tell him that things on the boat were okay: that Nick wasn’t some deranged stranger who’d try to get everyone killed, that Captain Joe wasn’t the captain of the Titanic about to massacre them all.
He’d leave the radio vibrating with anger, and then he’d see Nick musing over a cup of coffee, his face still radiating love.
Then Jason would hate everybody, and find a place on the boat where he could be alone.
“You want to learn how to use that scope of yours?” Captain Joe asked after one evening’s episode of Doctor Who.
Captain Joe took the rewound tape out of the player, archived it carefully with the others.
“You know astronomy?” Jason asked.
The telescope had been stowed under Jason’s bunk since he’d been on the towboat. Sometimes, when he saw it, the anger boiled up in him and he thought about throwing it over the side. But somehow the scope hadn’t ever seemed worth the effort.
“What I learned,” Captain Joe said, “was celestial navigation. Useless on the river, but I didn’t know I was going to be spending my whole career being a truck driver on the Mississippi, I thought maybe I’d go to salt water one of these days. I never left the river, but once I got into the habit, I kept lookin’ up, y’know what I mean?”
Captain Joe switched off Beluthahatchie’s floodlights and took Jason and Nick aft of the stacks, where the boat’s remaining lights wouldn’t blind them. There he set up Jason’s telescope and pointed it upward at the brilliant swash of stars overhead. This was the best viewing, the captain declared, that he’d ever seen: the quake had wiped out light pollution for miles around, and the factories and automobiles that produced other forms of pollution were wrecked or unused.
“Here, podnah. Look at this.”
Jason put his eye to the scope. It took a moment for his eye to adjust to the faint light that had crossed millions of miles of space to reach him, and then awe filled him as the great globular cluster M13 in Hercules grew brighter in the Astroscan: a huge ball of stars, so closely packed together that they looked as if they had merged, with fine trails of stars sailing in all directions from the core.
“A million stars or more, M13,” Captain Joe said. “All concentrated in a ball.” A million stars, Jason’s mind echoed. In Los Angeles, a valley flooded with the light of a million streetlamps, he could go years without ever seeing so much as a single star. And now he was a looking at a million of them, all packed into the little eyepiece of Astroscan. He had no idea the universe held such bounty.
“How far away is it?” he asked.
“Globular clusters are all on the perimeter of our galaxy. Say maybe twenty-five thousand light-years.”
“So the light from those million stars took twenty-five thousand years to get here,” Nick mused from over Jason’s shoulder.
A million stars, Jason thought again. All in my eye at once.
Captain Joe showed them other globular clusters: M81, M82, M51. The Blackeye Galaxy, M64, beautifully defined spiral arms, all made of stars, spinning out from a blazing center, and curling across its center a long dark cloud, like a streak of chocolate swirled into whipped cream.
“Billions of stars there, podnah,” Captain Joe said. “Maybe even a trillion. That’s one with twelve zeroes after it.”
“And people?” Jason asked.
“Mos’ likely. Or maybe not people exactly, but intelligent life. Seems silly to think we’re the only ones, not when there’s so much potential for life in the universe, and so much room. A supernova will throw out everything you need for life—I’ll show you a supernova in a few minutes, here.” Jason wondered what his mother would have said if she’d looked through the telescope at the Blackeye Galaxy. She probably knew people who talked to the Blackeye Galaxy, who conversed with the people there like neighbors chatting across the back fence.
And all the aliens, according to his mother, believed just what his mother believed. Races throughout the universe embraced peace, drumming, reincarnation, astrology, pyramid power, and Atlantis. It was only the folks on earth who remained mostly unconvinced.
Surely in all those billions of stars, Jason thought, there was somebody who would disagree with his mother.
Captain Joe shifted the telescope, peered busily through the eyepiece. Then he laughed, clapped his hands together with a bang. “There we are!” he said. “I was wondering if I could catch the detail with this little scope, but we in luck tonight! Take a look at this, podnah.”
At first Jason saw only a small fuzzy blotch, but as his eye adjusted to the lens he saw that the blotch was hollow, a ghostly smoke-ring hovering in the darkness.
“That’s the Ring Nebula!” Captain Joe proclaimed. “I told you I’d show you a supernova, and there it is!”
“I thought a supernova would be brighter,” Jason said, his eye glued to the strange apparition.
“That’s supernova remnants, that cloud, not the supernova itself. What supernovas do is manufacture all the heavier elements, see—iron, oxygen, carbon—and they blast ’em all into space in a huge explosion. Our sun is made up of old supernovas, and so is earth and the other planets. We are made of old supernovas. All living things. If it weren’t for those big stars blowing up, no life would exist.”
“They blow up?” Jason said.
“Yeah. Give Nick a look, then lemme show you another one.”
Jason stepped back from the telescope. A chill threaded remorselessly through his soul. The problem with his mother’s philosophy, he thought, wasn’t that people, or even aliens, disagreed with her; it was that the whole universe disagreed. She had thought of the universe as being no more complex than her own backyard, and no less welcoming; but she was wrong. Stars blew up regardless of whether people built pyramids; earthquakes shook the earth whether or not they chanted and burnt incense; bodies rolled lifeless along the chill bottom of the Mississippi whether they practiced astrology or not. Existence was filled with wonder and terror and incomprehensible violence, from his mother’s backyard to the Blackeye Galaxy. Human comprehension was limited, and human life terribly fragile.