Eclipses (v1.0), page 14
They had just slipped neatly into the third rapid of the day, successfully going alongside a big suck hole, only to find themselves headed right for another, just as large. As soon as Shelley saw the raft was too close to avoid the second hole, he pointed the bow right at the hairy white-water wave and pushed into it, shouting for her to paddle. The raft dropped through water and foam, stopping an instant while Beth felt herself continuing forward. She grabbed for a line just as the suck hole spit them on through into another wave that sloshed her over the side. She didn’t notice if the water was cold or warm or wet, only that it was all around and she was under. It wasn’t deep, so she scraped bottom, but she popped up quickly, sputtering and looking for the raft. It was right behind her, the taut lifeline still in her hand. Shelley had already pulled in the oars and stretched an arm out for her. She caught his hand. He heaved her back in and reached for the oars in a single, swift movement. She sat, clinging to the tube, and only then realized her paddle was gone. She sat in the stern, holding the rope, terrified that the lack of her paddle power would mean their demise.
They found the paddle below the rapids, hung up in tree branches, battered by its solo journey but still usable. Beth’s left leg was badly scraped and bruised, but it was nothing that wouldn’t heal in a few days. She hadn’t been in the water for more than thirty seconds, but that was long enough to make her hope that she never had to swim a rapid in her life vest. And when Shelley chose not to take his eyes off the river to help her bail, she didn’t even think bad thoughts, let alone complain aloud. He wasn’t the least bit paranoid. He had a healthy respect for the mighty Rift River, and she was grateful that she was in such good hands.
There were long, long stretches of easy water, too, and those were nearly boring. Sometimes Shelley sang, and she’d listen while lazing in the sun. But mostly Shelley just watched the river, his eyes as keen and alert as the hunting birds overhead, and then Beth’s thoughts turned to home.
Aram would just now be getting worried about her, for she had never been overdue before without getting word to him. When she did turn up safe, he would be relieved; then Beth’s problems would begin in earnest, for she would be home again and trying to find a way to keep herself from being thrust into old patterns. Initially, at least, he wouldn’t care if she decided to sit home and eat bonbons all day, as long as she was home and with him when he wanted to be with her. No, problems with Aram would come as she became engrossed in retraining. She knew herself well enough to realize that once she got caught up in it, she’d be so intent and rapt that Aram could not help but feel slighted. He might even be jealous. When he learned she didn’t want Maria’s subcontract, he’d feel the very foundation of their relationship was being undermined. He liked all details to stand in preordained order, each playing its part without interfering with others. Since she didn’t want him to become angry or despondent over the changes in her that were inevitable, she considered how to prevent them—not the changes, but the bad feeling Aram might have when the pattern was broken.
About the fifth day on the river, in a particularly peaceful stretch where lofty marsh trees rose to unclouded blue tranquility, Beth was reminded of the blue sari Aram had tried to give her so many years ago. The fabric had looked like the sky, transparent yet so opaque with light that the stars could not shine through, just as the silver border of the sari was visible only on exposed hems. She had tried it on and loved the flow of the sky around her body and the cloud-soft feel on her skin, but she had been threatened by the very rarity of the garment. Aram could afford it and she could not, not the garment or the promise it held of Aram’s disturbing influence on her. Being intimidated by a gown was ludicrous, she thought now. Aram was rich, but he was first a human being with the same needs for love and fulfillment as Beth. She hoped the sari was still around somewhere; if not, she would acquire another just like it—at his expense, if necessary—and wear it in his presence. It was going to be all right between her and Aram. When she couldn’t picture him as a part of her life, then she would surely face real problems, problems like Shelley had. But now, Aram was in her thoughts of daily life as he was always. No doubt her love for him had grown over the years, so she would find a way to do what she wanted to do without hurting him at all. How simple it was; no single right answer to her fears, just a recognition of the problem and the acceptance of a mind-set that they would find the answers. What could possibly stand in her way with this kind of determination?
Maria.
Beth couldn’t refuse the subcontract outright, for it didn’t have to demand all her time if it was done according to her own priorities. But if she simply accepted the lock combinations and the list of reminders, everyone, Aram included, would take for granted that nothing had changed. That wouldn’t do at all; she knew she was altogether too passive and had to do something startling or she’d find herself in the same old winter routine, trying to tackle the retraining in stolen moments.
Beth’s attention returned to the river. It was nearly sundown, and Shelley was looking for a place to beach the raft and make camp for the night. It had to be quick, because they could hear white water ahead, probably just beyond the tree-filled bend. There would be no moon to light the way if it turned out to be a long rapid, and Shelley was ever cautious. He rowed the raft to a sloping shoreline, and Beth hopped out with a line to tie it to a tree. These were not desert trees, she noticed, but a variation of the sturdy daisy-shrubs that grew along mountain streams, a group of symmetrical trunks topping in a crown of tough foliage. A pack of tree frogs squeaked with alarm and dived for hidey-holes above her, where they’d stay until their curiosity got the best of them.
Dinner did not come first after a day on the river with Shelley. Just as soon as the raft was secure, he was off along the shore to survey what he could of the next day’s river run in the last of the daylight. It was tedious and tiring because Shelley would walk as far as he had to in order to determine if a heap of water he’d spied was a runnable standing wave or the hiding place of a suck hole. Tired as she might be, Beth always went with him. She liked being prepared for the run as much as he did, and together they usually found a reasonable course from the shoreline, something that wasn’t always possible while in the midst of the river when things were happening so quickly. Besides, scouting trips were about the only time Shelley really talked to her, and though it was only to ask her opinion as to whether or not she was seeing the same faint outline of a rock under a sheaf of water that he was seeing, he was talking. Beth didn’t mind being alone with her thoughts for long periods of time; in fact, she often sought solitude at home. But the river was sensuous and heightened her awareness of the man she was near, and even though he wasn’t of like mind, it was nice to share some companionable moments.
Back in camp he would make sand diagrams of the rapid, placing twigs to indicate the current and stones where obstacles lay. Beth built the fire and cooked, always ravenously hungry by this time. The fifth night on the river was different only in that Shelley did not go back to the rapid for a second look after dinner. There was no moon, and the way had been thick with an undergrowth of treacherous, thomed briars. He sat by the campfire, staring into the flames. Beth left him there to go to the river’s edge and rinse out the dishes.
The night was warm; the river was taking them farther south into summer again. She was sticky from the scouting expedition and her clothes smelled smoky from cooking over the campfire. Leaving the utensils on shore, she waded out a little way, stripped and rinsed herself and her clothes. The water immediately refreshed her; it was cool but not icy like the reservoir by the mansion. She let the water support her and swirl sensuously along her skin. Aware of the current’s pull, light as it was here at the river’s edge, she sat up, her buttocks sinking to the stony bottom. She had been carried a few meters downstream, but not so far that she couldn’t see the camp. She was conscious of knowing she hoped she’d find Shelley looking out at the river, just to reassure himself that she was safe, or just looking. But he had turned and put his back to her.
Beth cursed under her breath. She saw his damn back all day long; it was a nice back: powerful sunburned shoulders pulling at the oars, shaggy locks of hair curling over his neck. When the boat angle was right and she sat on a side tube, she was treated to a profile as he stared out over the river. He had a straight, thin nose, and sometimes his nostrils flared like an animal sniffing the breeze, making her think he was some kind of wild creature. A hawk, to judge by his eyes, a bright-blue-eyed hawk, wary and alert to all danger. And, like an animal, Beth felt free to admire him, in the raft or in the mornings when he bathed. She didn’t turn her back; she liked what she saw.
She had been attracted this way before by handsome and virile men. But she had never been thrown into such intimate circumstances with a man who not only physically enticed her but whom she liked so much, too—all this while there were no external complications to trouble her.
She sighed. The river was Shelley’s lover just now, a mistress who tempted him with life and death, and Beth felt as outcast from his affection and devotion as she would have if she’d been accompanying him on a honeymoon with another woman.
At the shore Beth wrung out her clothes and spread them over a bush to dry during the night. She waded back to the raft, which was floating easily over smooth river stones that didn’t hurt her feet as long as she walked carefully. She took a long-tailed shirt out of Shelley’s clothes locker and put it on. It was her turn to use the sleeping bag, so she didn’t worry about covering her legs against biting night insects. Back on the bank she gathered up the dishes and took them to the kitchen box by the campfire.
Shelley looked up as she climbed into the downy folds of the sleeping bag, his eyes brilliant in the firelight but uneasy. He had to be tired after pulling on the heavy hardwood oars all day, but Beth knew he’d fuss over the diagram of the rapid for another hour, rearranging the twigs until he had memorized all the alternate routes past obstructions. Only after he was satisfied that he had prepared himself as much as was humanly possible could he set aside his perpetual disquiet long enough to sleep.
The ninth day on the river brought a change of scenery. They had run rapids through many lateral faults, at least one of which was so recent the rent in the rock shelf was shiny white with newly exposed crystal and dusted with powdered rock, and they had come out on a lake, equally new to judge by all the standing trees in the midst of it that the tree frogs had not yet abandoned. But now there was a horizontal fault that was so massive it split the western rift wall, and the river plunged into the canyon it created over Granite Falls, a place well marked on Shelley’s map and one that had not changed since the map was made. The roar was tremendous and sent their blood racing, and the chute over the falls was a rage of curling, boiling cascades. But oddly, although the granite canyon held one of the swiftest parts of the river and the slope of the rapid was as steep as the steepest, it proved one of the easiest to run once they were past the falls. The river was a straight ribbon of white water: no curves, no bends, a clean fault through tough young granite that was clear of the bottom rubble that made rapids treacherous. The constriction of the vertical walls increased the drag action against the banks to horrendous proportions, but, the walls being straight, there was a center path of smooth, swift water over which the raft flowed easily, kept out of the turbulent wakes along the banks by Shelley’s sure strokes with the oars.
One canyon gave way to another, some wide enough for the river to flow easily, some so narrow that Beth and Shelley barely had time to breathe between the waves of water that broke over the raft, let alone guide the raft between water heaps and exposed rocks. Good campsites were nothing more than narrow strips of sand that didn’t have water on them; no more green oases of the rift valley.
The canyon bottoms were furnaces where nothing grew along the banks, but the heat did not disturb her. The canyons were wide enough for the river to flow easily, and Beth, lulled by the rhapsody of agreeable rising and falling sounds of river movement, would slip into thoughts of home.
She was startled by the sound of Shelley’s voice and looked up to discover he’d pulled the raft into an emerald-green eddy. “What?” she said.
“Give me the bailing bucket,” he repeated.
It was at her feet, out of his reach, and she passed it forward to him. He dipped it into the river, then sloshed the cool contents over his head and shirt. He had taken his shirt off the day before to take advantage of what little breeze there was, but he was too sunburned, despite his tan, to do it again. Now he kept his clothes wet and his body just a little cooler during the drying process. Beth wet a handkerchief and tied it around her neck. The shock of cool water on her hot skin was pleasant.
“Did you enjoy your nap?” Shelley said, his tone indicating he was annoyed.
“I wasn’t napping, I was thinking,” Beth said.
“If you did a little more thinking about the river, you might get home safely.”
“Shelley, you’re unreasonable. You have my complete cooperation and undivided attention when we’re in the rapids, and when we’re not it’s ridiculous for me to keep watch for obstructions that you can see perfectly well for yourself,” she said, irritated once again that he was sloshing water into the boat that he had no intention of bailing himself. “Unless you’re tired and are willing to give up the oars so I’ll have something constructive to do … besides bail.”
He shook his head, as Beth knew he would. He’d never give up the oars. “I thought you were in a hurry to get home,” he said, perpetual frown in place and probably hurt as well, since she hadn’t snapped at him about the bailing since the first day.
“You’re mistaken. I don’t know what the devil I’m going to do once I get there, so why hurry?”
Now Shelley was completely confused; he knew she had made some decisions about what she was going to do before they ever got on the river. She had been eager to get home just the day before they started the trip, so eager that she would have walked barefooted if he hadn’t been there to offer a better way. “Are you afraid to try programming?”
She scoffed. “I can learn anything I damn well please, but that won’t change the people around me. When I change, they’re going to get hurt.”
“That’s not your problem.”
“It is when I have to suffer with them. No matter what I do with that winter subcontract of Maria’s, her feelings are going to be hurt. If I don’t take it, she’s going to feel rejected right along with the contract. If I do take it and insist on doing everything my way, she’s going to think we don’t need her anymore and she might not come back in the spring. Then Aram will be furious.”
“It always comes back to Aram, doesn’t it?” he said, and watched her expression change from anger to surprise. Then she shook her head, denying it emphatically.
“It’s just that I don’t have any right to upset his household. It’s run so smoothly for all these years, and I have to consider him and everyone else before I make a move.”
“Then take the contract and shut up about it,” Shelley said, his sympathy gone. There were rapids ahead, the sound of them just a hollow hint of what was to come.
“No,” she said, snatching the bailing bucket from him. She tried to scoop some of the water out of the bottom, but there wasn’t really enough to get in the bucket. “I’m going to get to Maria before she’s made her list of reminders, get the lock combinations and tell her that if she wants me to take the subcontract she’ll have to hand it over then and there. Then I’ll pick which subcontracts I want.”
It was her stubborn streak again, which Shelley had learned to recognize. She managed to get nearly every drop of water off the bottom of the boat and was smearing the remaining puddles so the sun would evaporate them quickly. Poor Maria might find herself blotted out just as thoroughly.
“I’m going to tell her it’s now or never,” Beth said, setting aside the bailing bucket with great satisfaction.
“Take a position and hold it—works every time,” Shelley said. Every time, he thought, even when you wish that somehow you could fail. Beth wasn’t setting herself up for failure, not as he had. Was he still arranging his own failure, he wondered, looking off to the thin white horizon line that indicated the upcoming rapid.
Beth followed Shelley’s faraway gaze, but she wasn’t certain whether he was looking at the distant rapid or soul-searching. Standing firm had worked for him, but it had cost him a lot, too.
“Shelley?”
He came back from wherever he was, focusing on Beth again.
“Shelley, what happened to that contract you took? I mean, when you ran to get away from the surrogate, did you—”
“Renege? Hell, no,” he said, eyes blazing with indignation. “I was stringing, instantly replaceable. I may have been crazy but I wasn’t stupid.”
“Just wondering,” Beth said. Reneging was a sensitive subject with most Serensunarians, and she knew it was bad form on her part even to suggest there was a question of contract breach. But she felt she was about to put her back to the wall, just as he had, and she still was worried that being so determined might lead to disaster. “Sorry,” she added.
He nodded curtly , a little ruffled but not alienated forever by her transgression.
“Shelley?”
She had to do that because he’d gone away again. This time he took his sweet time before looking at her again.
“Do you suppose we can get underway? I am in a hurry now.”
He smiled one of his rare smiles and complied with her request, stretching the oars out into the water beyond the narrow eddy so that the tips would catch the current. The river pulled them back into the flow and Beth was on her way home.
Chapter 14
Shelley saw an aqueduct siphoning off river water on the twenty-first day, and Beth begged him to stop and look for a nearby house or farm where she could use a commscreen to call Aram. He had assured her that soon they would come to settlements right on the riverbank and not have to look at all. She agreed to wait, but he knew she was anxious.
