Frank Herbert - The Green Brain

“Vierho?” he whispered.

“It had his appearance, I thought,” Chen-Lhu said. “You don’t suppose…”

“I suppose nothing!”

Ahh , Chen-Lhu thought. The bandeirante is beginning to break down .

“I hear something,” Rhin said. “It sounds like rapids.”

Joao straightened, listened. A faint roaring came to him. “Probably just wind in the trees,” he said. But even as he spoke he knew it was not the wind.

“It is rapids,” Chen-Lhu said. “See that cliff ahead?”

They stared downstream until gusts of wind pushed a black line up the river toward them and pulled a rain veil over the cliff. The downpour whipped around the pod, thudded onto the canopy. As quickly as it had come, the wind passed, and the current slid them forward through a hiss of rain. Presently even the rain faded, and the river with its slick appearance of secret turbulence stretched out like a tabletop display composed on a mirror.

The pod became for Chen-Lhu a toy miniature shrunken by witchery and lost in an immensity of flood.

Over it all stood the black face of the cliff, growing more and more solid with each second.

Chen-Lhu moved his head slowly from side to side, wondering how he knew what they must face beneath that cliff. He felt that he drifted in a moist pocket of air that drained his life from him. The air carried a smell of physical substance, the dank piling of life and death on the forest floor around the river. Rotting and festering odors came over him. Each carried its message: “ They are there ahead… waiting .”

“The pod… it won’t fly now, will it?” Chen-Lhu asked.

“I don’t think I can get that float off the river,” Joao said. He wiped perspiration from his forehead, closed his eyes and experienced the nightmare sensation of dreaming through the entire trip to this point. His eyes snapped open.

Stagnant silence settled over the cabin.

The roar of rapids grew louder, but there was still no view of the white water.

A flock of golden-beaked toucans lifted from a stand of palms at a downstream bend. They climbed in a frenzied cloud, filling the air with their dog-pack yelps. Then they were gone and the sound of the rapids remained. The cliff loomed above the palms just around the bend.

“We have five or six minutes of fuel… maybe,” Joao said. “I think we should go around that bend under power.”

“Agreed,” Chen-Lhu said. He fastened his safety harness.

Rhin heard the sound, buckled her own harness.

Joao found the cold buckles of his harness beside him, snapped them in place as he studied the dash. His hands began to tremble as he thought of the delicacy required in manipulating the throttle. I’ve done it twice, he told himself.

But there was no comfort in that. He knew he was at the edge of his energy… and his reason.

A curving ripple of current fanned away from the left shore where the river turned downstream. The water there began to glisten and sparkle. Joao looked up to see cracks of blue striking through the clouds. He took a deep breath, pressed the igniter, counted.

The warning light blinked out.

Joao eased the throttle ahead. The motors banged, then mounted to a steady roar. The pod began to pick up speed, danced through the ripple track. She was right-side heavy and a dull sloshing could be heard from the float there.

It’ll never lift , Joao thought. He felt feverish and only loosely connected to his senses.

The pod made its racketing, sluggish way around the bend… and there it stood, the lava wall, no more than a kilometer downstream. The river ran through the wall in a notch that rose like something split out by a giant axe. Sheer black heights of rock compressed the water at their base into a tumbling agony.

“Jeeeesus,” Joao whispered.

Rhin clutched his arm. “Turn back! You’ve got to turn back.”

“We can’t,” Joao said. “There’s no other way.”

Still, his hand hesitated on the throttle. Press forward on that knob and risk explosion? There was no alternative. He could see waves in the chasm now cresting over unseen rocks, shooting milk-and-amber mist upward.

With a convulsive movement, Joao slammed the throttle ahead. The roar of the rockets drowned out the water’s sound.

Joao prayed to the float: “Hold together… please… hold together.”

Abruptly, the pod lifted onto its steps, began skimming faster and faster. In that instant, Joao saw movement on both shores beside the chasm. Something lifted dripping and snake-like across the entrance to the gorge.

“Another net!” Rhin screamed.

Joao saw the net with a dreamlike detachment, knew he couldn’t avoid it. The pod skidded over a cross-eddy and onto a glossy black pool inhabited by that dripping barrier. He saw the dark pattern of net squares and, through them, water creased into steeper and steeper furrows that flashed outward and down into the chasm.

The pod slammed into the net, pulled it, stretching it, tearing it. Joao was thrown forward against his harness as the pod tipped down by the nose. He felt the back of the seat slam his ribs. There came a thunderous tearing-grinding-bubbling sound and a sudden giving away.

The motors stopped short—flooded out or unable to suck fuel. The roaring of the water filled the cabin.

Joao pulled himself up by the wheel, looked around. The pod floated almost level, turning. But his eyes interpreted the motion as the world turning around him—black wall, green line of jungle, white water.

The pod slid down a sloping current to the right, crunched against the first obsidian buttress above the torrent. A scraping, wrenching of metal competed with the chasm’s roar.

Rhin screamed something that was lost in the avalanche sound of water.

The pod bounced outward from the rock wall, whirled, pounded across two infolding steps of explosive current. Metal creaked and groaned. The spiral cone of a whirlpool sucked at the floats, shot them sideways into a lifting, tipping, pounding delirium of motion.

A vast pulsing-rumbling like ocean waves on rocks deafened Joao. He saw a glistening ledge of black rock, its face carved by the current, loom directly ahead. The pod smashed into it, recoiled. And Joao found himself torn from his harness, on the floor, tangled with Rhin. He grabbed the base of the wheel with his right hand.

Above him the canopy buckled. He watched in unbelieving shock as the canopy tipped forward and disappeared. He saw the left wing crumple upward against rock. The pod whipped around to the right, presenting a blurred arc of sky and another black wall.

A crazy rumbling from the shattered wing added to the din.

Joao thought: We aren’t going to make it. Nothing can survive this .

He felt Rhin with both arms around his waist clinging in terror, her voice in his left ear: “Please make it stop; please make it stop.”

Joao saw the pod’s nose lift, slam down, saw white water and spume boil past where the canopy had been. He saw a sprayrifle jerk out that opening into the river, and he wedged himself more tightly between the seats and the dash. His fingers ached where he clutched the wheel. A wrenching motion of the pod turned his head and he saw Chen-Lhu’s arms wrapped around the seat back directly above him.

Chen-Lhu felt the sound like a direct contact on his nerves magnified almost beyond endurance. It grated through him in an unchecked rhythm, dominated his world: a deafening cymbal dissonance gone wild in counterpoint, a rasping, crunching, maelstrom grating. He felt that he had become a seeing-hearing-feeling receptor without any other function.

Rhin pressed her face against Joao. Everything was the hot smell of Joao’s body and insane motion. She felt the pod lift… lift… lift and slam down, twisting, turning. Up. Down. Up. Down. Up. Down. It was like some crazy kind of sex. A staccato punching motion shook her as the pod shot down a washboard of rapids.