off. But she collides with me and grabs my foot and uses her momentum to knock me off course. Now we’re both moving down, but also passing over the water to the opposite channel wall.
Only now do I see how fast the water is moving. It’s a weird taffy-streaming blur. I can make out currents, mostly parallel to the channel walls, but also whirlpools that rush past, relative to the girl and me, at about a hundred kilometers an hour.
I’ll die, but I don’t care. I’ll die wet. I’m philosophical about the entire gambit. It’s going to be a close thing either way. The girl knows more about this sort of flying than I do but seems to actually be risking her life for me.
Maybe it’s a game.
I start laughing. “We’re going swimming!” I shout.
The girl looks along the length of my leg and body—she’s still hanging on to my foot—in a kind of anxious pity. Her face seems so mature, so experienced—maybe I’m the child and she’s the grown-up.
The wind has pulled us toward the center. The water is right below us. I stretch out my hand. I’m totally insane—the smell of it is like a promise of heaven. My hand touches the stream, and instantly I’m in intense pain, hand wrenched, whole body spinning head over heels, the girl at my foot also swinging, scared—
But the dynamics of our new, combined shape pushes us outward. We strike the opposite sloping wall of the channel and carom back in a tangle, but farther from the channel, lifting over the water—and still, of course, moving briskly along the tube.
My hand feels like it’s broken, but I suck at the moisture left on my fingers—very little of it, actually. Hardly worth the effort.
“That isn’t how it’s done,” the girl says when she’s caught her breath.
“I could have made it,” I insist, and kick against the breeze, hoping to return to the channel.
“The water’s in a trough,” she says. “The trough is spinning free of the walls. That’s why the water stays in the trough. It’s going really, really fast. Look.”
She points across the channel to the three fellows on the other side. Picker is holding out a stick and honking above the roar and hiss as if relaying instructions. Blue-Black responds in high whistles.
He’s going to thrust the stick into the spinning stream.
“That’s Pushingar,” the girl says.
I have no idea where she’s getting her names, but they stick.
The others grab hold of Pushingar’s feet. The stick goes in and they all spin like tops but remain above the channel. And a few splashes are liberated by the stick, forming quivering, shimmering globules.
Where’s the third fellow, Scarlet-Brown?
He comes out of the shadows behind us, arms out, hooting in ecstasy. He’s kicked out over the channel, off the opposite wall, and is now rather expertly arrowing toward a fist-sized pearl of water pushing along through the air. He opens his mouth—it’s an impressive mouth, filled with broad yellow teeth, big canines, and even bigger incisors—and grabs a great big drink. He scoops the rest of the broken globule into his outstretched tunic.
“What’s his name?” I shout above the roar.
“Satmonk,” the girl says.
The other two intercept Satmonk, and they rebound, join hands, and float together, scooping and aiming drops and globules with hands and feet, moving their heads to Pushingar’s midriff, where he’s busy wringing out the tunic.
All drink greedily.
“That’s how it’s done,” the girl says. “But unless they give us a little shove, it’s going to take a few minutes to cross to where we can join them.”
“My fault,” I say, my lips and tongue just moist enough now to manage a few words.
“Can’t be helped,” the girl says. “Everything here is about waiting and seeing and being patient. Otherwise, someone else fills in your book. Or worse—the book gets lost.”
She points to the channel, the rushing taffy-silver currents, the swirling whirlpools.
“
She ignores me, floating just an arm’s length away. For a moment, her eyes become heavy-lidded and she’s lost in her own kind of self-induced calm.
Patient.
I’m really starting to like this child.
It turns out the three fellows—Picker, Pushingar, Satmonk—are happy to bound around some more over the spinning channel. In a few minutes, they’ve done the stick thing again—it’s fine sport, they’re hooting and whistling and honking—and more big beads of water wiggle past. I open my mouth and get wet—my whole head—but by some miracle, I also manage to drink deep without filling my lungs and drowning.
The water tastes funny—my lips and cheeks tingle. But it’s wet, it’s very cold, and after a few more collisions, my thirst is gone. I rub my face with my hands, trying to scrub away the filth—the factor blood that still clings to me. It’s no good. I’ll need a cloth.
And, of course, some clothes would be good. I’m still naked and even I don’t like it. Everyone else has clothes.
Knob-Crest, Picker, drifts beside me, hands behind his head, lounging in the middle of the stream of air. We still have to be careful. The currents can be unpredictable, especially where the surface of the stream whips up turbulence.
It’s the stream’s undulations that are grabbing at the air above the channel, dragging it along and creating the suction that pulled us into the tube and the wind that now rushes us along. The center can be tricky. The turbulence sometimes tries to knock us toward the rushing stream. But the three fellows and the girl are experienced, so here we are, close to the relative safety of the sloping channel wall.
Scarlet-Brown, Satmonk, pokes the girl. She opens her eyes. We’ve made something like progress. We can push against the flowing air, using the shapes of our bodies, the motions of our arms, to adjust and maintain position.
Picker looks me over with an expression I can’t even begin to read. He reaches up, covers his forehead-nose, and manages to say, in a nasal tenor, “How about food?”
I give him a big smile and hold up my thumb.
“No show teeth,” he says. “It’s rude.”
I draw my lips tight. “Hell, yes,” I say.
“Not hell. Ship. Big, sick Ship. Food soon.”
There’s another opening coming up. It might be on the opposite side of the conduit from where we dropped in. A chance to exit, and also to continue moving forward.
The look on the girl’s face tells me that getting out of the spinning channel is the hard part. She points to her two eyes, then to me, then to the others.
“Watch and learn—quick! Or you’ll go around again and again—and you’ll drown.”
Together, they start to carom along the channel walls, at angles to the slipstream… slowing, slowing, the exit is coming up, with its inviting trumpet mouth. I try to learn from watching them, manage to keep up, and then we all grab and leap in a great big tangle.
There’s one final maneuver I still don’t understand, a kind of whirl around the bell of the trumpet, and then we’re scrambling like children climbing a sandhill, against the breeze flowing from that side—
And we emerge into an even bigger space, away from the trumpet mouth, away from the channel and the rushing, wonderful, terrifying water.
“Great!” the girl shouts. “Sometimes it takes three or four tries.”
“How long have you been doing this?” I ask.
“Don’t know,” she says. “Across four rivers. But this is the farthest forward I’ve gone—and managed to take my book with me.”
I don’t know what she means about the book. I don’t know much of anything, really. I’m ignorant, useless, and I have no idea why this makeshift team is still pulling me along.
Suddenly, I’m scared again. I’m literally a fifth wheel.
Maybe I’m still food.
