Julian May - The Many-Coloured Land

With a friendly wave, he went forward. The attendants from the mansion who had carried on Stein and their baggage now trooped ashore. Deckhands began scurrying about the vessel, preparing it for castoff. The passengers watched with mingled interest and unease.

The riverboat was similar in design to most of the others at the quayside, measuring about fourteen meters from its high, knife-sharp bow to its glutcally rounded stern. It was a distant cousin to the inflatable rafts and foldboats used by sportsmen and explorers on the whiter waters of the Galactic Milieu. The hull, stenciled on both sides with the name of the boat, Mojo, was a tough air-filled membrane with fat exterior corrugations and pillow-like fenders jutting out at regular intervals along the waterline. It looked as if it could be deflated and disassembled for shipment upstream via caravan. Tightly covered hatch openings fore and aft gave access to cargo holds, while the passenger accommodation was in an open area amidships that was arched over with a series of half-hoops. The dockworkers quickly covered this frame with panels of deeply tinted transparent film resembling decamole. When the last section of the bubbletop was sealed, an air blower began to operate inside the boat, providing ventilation for the occupants and rendering the waterproof canopy rigid.

Sukey turned to Elizabeth, who sat in the seat beside her. “I didn’t like the way the Captain talked. What are we getting into?”

“An interesting ride, at any rate, if the signs and portents add up. Bryan, do you know anything at all about the River Rhône?”

“It was all cut up with dams and locks and bypass channels in our time,” the anthropologist replied. “The gradient is probably a lot steeper here in the Pliocene, so there are bound to be rapids. When we approach the Avignon region about a hundred-fifty kloms south of here, we’ll be in an area that very likely has a deep gorge. In the twenty-second century it was stoppered by the Donzere-Mondragon Barrage, one of the largest dam projects in Europe. What we’ll find down there now… well, it can’t be too bad or they wouldn’t try to navigate it, would they?”

Aiken uttered a shaky laugh. “Good question. Well, ready or not, guys, we’re off to the races.”

A rather stout telescoping mast was rising up behind the passenger compartment. When it reached its full height of four meters, the top section opened to disgorge a boom with a roller sail, looking for all the world like an old-fashioned portable movie screen. The sail unfurled and gave a few tentative swiveling motions. Deckhands cast off the boat’s mooring warps, and vibration in the deck betokened the operation of a small auxiliary engine. The Mojo began threading in and out of the other shore traffic on its way to the mainstream, leading Bryan to deduce that it must utilize more than one rudder for maximum maneuverability.

They angled sharply away from the shore. As the current took them, the walled city of Roniah fell away astern with amazing swiftness. It was not easy to estimate their speed, since they were a good two hundred meters from either shore; but Bryan guessed that the sediment-laden flood was racing along at a minimum of twenty knots. What would happen when this great volume of water was compressed between high rock walls farther downstream challenged the imagination of the anthropologist. His speculations were of a decidedly queasy sort.

Raimo, in the seat next to him, had found his own brand of solace. He took a pull from his replenished silver flask and offered it to Bryan rather half-heartedly. “Tanu popskull. Hardly Hudson’s Bay standard, but not too bad.”

“Maybe later,” Bryan said, smiling Raimo grunted and took another swallow. The euphoria of his morning adventure had faded away, leaving the ex-forester brooding and ill at ease. Bryan tried to draw Raimo out with questions about the previous night’s revelry but received only the curtest replies.

“You hadda be there,” Raimo said, and lapsed into silence.

For nearly an hour they moved easily through a wide bluff-sided channel, the forested foothills of the Alps on their left hand and arid tablelands rising above the near-jungle of the humid bottoms on the right. Occasionally, Creyn pointed out the location of a plantation; but the threes were so thick that it was impossible to see any details of the settlements ashore. They glimpsed smaller boats plying the shallows and once they overhauled a long covered barge riding deep in the water, bare-masted and having only a small bubble over the midships steersman’s cockpit. The bargee greeted them with a toot from his airhorn, to which Skipper Highjohn responded with a syncopated blast of his own.

The river made a wide curve and the channel passed between a tall headland and a group of craggy islets. Small mechanical sounds announced the furling of their sail, the boom’s folding, and the withdrawal of the telescoping mast back into its housing. Far from losing speed, the boat moved along faster rounding the point. It seemed to Bryan that they must be making thirty knots or more. Simultaneously he became aware of a deep vibration transmitted by the water through the sealed hull of the boat, the inflated headrest of his seat, and the very bones of his skull. The vibration increased to an audible roar as the boat came charging around a sharp bend. The walls of a canyon rose on both sides.

Sukey screamed and Raimo yelped an obscenity.

Ahead of them the narrowing Rhône slanted downhill at a one-in-five gradient, the river lashed to a foaming frenzy by the rocks of its tilted bed. The boat seemed to dive into the rapids and a great avalanche of ochre water crashed over the canopy and temporarily engulfed them. Then Mojo broke free and came to the surface, planing along among monstrous standing waves and granite boulders, rolling so steeply that yellow water climbed halfway up the watertight bubble first on one side, then on the other. The noise was almost insupportable. Raimo’s mouth was wide open but his yells went unheard amidst the uproar of the cascading Rhône.

A dark mass loomed ahead. The boat heeled nearly sixty degrees to starboard as they went whipping around a tall rock pinnacle into a crooked slot between files of huge boulders. The air was so filled with flying spume that it seemed impossible that their skipper could see where he was going. Nevertheless the boat continued to zig and zag among the rocks with only an occasional bump against the pneumatic fenders.

A respite came in the form of a deep cut where the river flowed free. But the voice of Highjohn called, “One last time, folks!” and Bryan realized that they were rocketing through the defile toward a veritable fence of sharp crags, fanglike chunks of broken granite against which the yellow river waters crashed in overlapping curtains of spray. There seemed to be no way through. The stunned time-travelers gripped the arms of their seats and braced for the inevitable impact.

Mojo raced toward the tallest of the rocks, pitching violently. It crashed into the foam, but instead of hitting solid rock or sinking, it rose higher and higher on some unseen surge. There was a thrumming blow against the port side as they bounced off a rock face, completely drowned in the opaque pother. The boat seemed to roll a full 360 degrees and then wallow free to sail through the air. It landed with a bone-jarring impact, water closing again over the top of the canopy. Almost immediately it popped to the surface, floating in complete tranquility across a broad pool that spread between low walls. Behind them was the cut they had just traversed, spewing a horsetail cataract, like the outflow of a titanic drain, into the basin thirty meters below.

“You can unfasten your safety belts now, folks,” the skipper said. “That’ll be all the cheap thrills for this morning. After lunch, it really gets rough.”