opportunity for the journalists' boat, and he would sit back down beside Brendan Surn and attempt to converse over the noise of the outboard motor.
'Great to see you again, Brendan!' he said, patting the older man's shoulder. 'It's been too long! About the only time I get to see you these days is at those damned science fiction cons!'
Lorien Williams raised an eyebrow. 'Don't you like cons?'
Mistral's smile wavered, and he glanced at Surn for his cue. 'Have you ever been to one?' he asked.
'Of course,' said Lorien. 'I've been to-'
'I mean, with Brendan. I've never seen you at a con with Brendan.'
Lorien shook her head. 'No. I haven't had that honor yet.'
Mistral snorted. 'Honor! Did he tell you about the time he took a manuscript-in-progress to a con so that he could read from it, and one of the fannish bastards stole it? That was in the days before copy machines, too. Or the time one hot little number sneaked into his room with a passkey, and he had to call hotel security? She was underage, of course.'
Brendan Surn smiled vaguely in Lorien's direction. 'Not all fans are bad, Bunzie.
'We didn't behave the way these punks do today,' growled Bunzie. 'They've gone a long way past water balloons. The only reason I go to cons these days is to see old friends. This reunion is perfect. Old friends, and no fans.'
Lorien Williams studied him thoughtfully while she waited for Brendan to rise to the defense of fandom, but the old man turned away, staring at a rusting oil barrel that lay half buried in the Watauga mud flat.
After an hour's journey upstream, they began to see more skeletal trees in the mire, and the remnants of stone walls loomed ahead of them on the port side. 'Yep,' said Dub the helmsman in response to the unspoken questions. 'That's Wall Hollow coming up on the left there. Not much of it left, is there? That stone building over there was the jail, and next to it was the Azalea Cafe. It was built out of river rocks cemented together. It has held up real well. Of course, most of the town was made of wood, and it's all gone. You can still see the roads, though.' He pointed at the patches of asphalt visible in the plain of red mud. 'That would have been Main Street.'
'It doesn't look like a town anymore,' said Marion, staring at the desolation.
'No, but it puts me in mind of a funny story,' said Dub, who seemed to be the least affected by the ruins. 'At the time the town was condemned by the TVA to make way for Breedlove Lake, there was a mayoral race going on in Wall Hollow, and strange as it may seem, the election was hotly contested. And one old boy said, 'I don't know what those politicians are getting so net up about. The next mayor of Wall Hollow will be a catfish.' '
The passengers laughed politely, and Angela asked him whether he had gone to the new Wall Hollow, the one that the TVA constructed on the other side of the lake for the refugees.
Dub rubbed his chin and steered for the deepest part of the river. 'No, ma'am,' he said after a bit. 'I moved on over to Labrot Cove, about five miles from here, where I had some kin. I didn't want to lose anything else to that lake there.' He shrugged. 'Of course, that was a good while ago. Over the years I have got used to it, and now I go fishing over in here without giving it another thought. Why, many's the time I've hauled in a big old channel cat, and said to myself, 'I believe I've done caught the mayor.' '
Erik Giles had been studying the asphalt lines in the mud, trying to get his bearings from the remnants of buildings left as clues. He pointed to a barren hillside in the distance. 'Keep going,' he said. 'Dugger's farm was just up that hollow. The river will take us most of the way.'
The trio of boats glided past the ruins of the old train depot and passed within the shadow of the old stone gristmill, a shell of a building still standing against the deluge of pent-up lake water. The only sound for several minutes was the click of camera shutters from the flat-bottomed tourist boat as the photojournalists recorded the occasion.
Once past the wreckage of the old river bridge, the Watauga snaked between smooth red hills that for years had been merely shallow places in the lake. Now they were mounds of rubble, ringed like redwoods with the concentric circles of ebbing waves. The river sank into a narrowing valley, past smooth stretches that must have been pasture land, and at times it flowed only a few feet below the level of the asphalt remnants of a country road.
The asphalt gave way to a stretch of pebbles, and then the road vanished altogether into mud the color of rust.
'This used to be a beautiful place,' said Erik Giles in a voice that was little more than a whisper. 'It was so green and peaceful. And we were such kids then. We thought 'happily ever after' was just a question of waiting long enough. We just didn't understand the randomness of our existence.' He laughed bitterly. 'Now, of course, we know better. Now, I'd say this is a pretty good metaphor for the way life is: it seems beautiful and endlessly deep while you're young, but little by little the water-the life-slips away, and you are left with nothing.'
'Do you know where you are yet?' the pilot of the lead craft asked Ruben Mistral.
Mistral shrugged. 'The moon?'
The boatman forced a smile. 'Best I can recall, Dugger's farm ought to be in the next quarter mile or so, and you'll be wanting to leave the boat there, I reckon, and do some walking around.'
'Yes,' said Mistral. 'It's just hard to get your bearings in this wasteland. Conyers, can you tell where we are?'
'I think so,' said the lawyer. 'See that outcrop of rocks up the hill there, just below the pine trees? I've stood on Dale's front porch many a time staring up at that thing. In the twilight-from a certain angle-it looks like an Indian. If the foundations of the farmhouse haven't sunk into the mud, we ought to see them right about now.'
A few moments later they rounded a bend, removing a looming sandhill from their line of sight. 'Look!' said Lorien Williams, pointing to a swampy plateau partway up the slope. 'Is that a chimney?'
It was. There was a gently sloping hollow between two bare hills, and within its basin a pool of lake water had settled, covering the foundations of Dale Dugger's farmhouse with its own riparian shroud. A two-pronged remnant of a locust tree rose out of the shallows, and twenty feet past it, a crumbling rock chimney protruded from the orange water.
'We found it,' said Mistral. 'Start looking for a place to dock.'
The three boatmen maneuvered their vessels toward an outcrop of boulders on the bank of the river. One at a time they were able to drift in close enough so that the passengers could climb out of the boats onto the rocks and make their way up the slope toward the site of Dugger's farm. Ruben Mistral, the first to disembark, repeated his landfall several times for the benefit of the cameramen, and then he created another photo opportunity by assisting Brendan Surn from the boat and pointing solemnly toward the ruined chimney. Together they scrambled up the rocky bank, picking their way along the driest parts of the lake bed, trailing a gaggle of camcorders and journalists in their wake.
The other members of the party were left to clamber up the river bank as best they could, without the encouragement of the media or the editors.
'This is certainly a grim occasion,' Marion whispered to Jay. 'I feel like a gatecrasher at a funeral.'
'Remember that we're here to see that Erik doesn't overdo it,' said Jay. 'Maybe you can cheer him up. He doesn't seem very happy.'
Marion looked about her. 'None of them do. Isn't it odd how things broke down so quickly into matters of status? Mistral stays mostly with Surn-the two pros, associating mainly with each other. And Conyers and his wife are talking to Erik-the sober ex-fans in coalition. That leaves Woodard and Angela, who were never anything but fans. But maybe I shouldn't mention this to you, Jay. After all, you're a dirty old pro.'
He sighed wearily. 'I just accidentally wrote an S-F novel, okay? I didn't mean to apply for citizenship in the Twilight Zone.'
'I don't think you can apply, Jay. I think fandom takes hostages.'
'Be careful where you step, George,' said Angela Arbroath, grabbing his elbow. 'That puddle may be deeper than you think.'
George Woodard, who hadn't even seen the mud hole he nearly plunged into, blinked out of his reverie and thanked her. 'I was just thinking about the time we stayed up all night listening to the plotting of
