* * *
Lower down, the vegetation became denser, until Lan and Charlie were passing over broad coverings of grasses, dotted with patches of thorn bush and scrub. Although there was still nothing approaching trees, Keene was impressed by the speed with which nature could reinvigorate a new, reworked landscape in just a few years. It brought home more clearly and forcefully than words ever had the things Vicki had said about Earth’s biological and geological transformations happening much faster than conventional theories had once held. At one point they passed close to a group of animals browsing in a dell. They seemed horse-like but too squat and small, and with odd suggestions of bovine qualities, but Keene didn’t know enough to say if they were from a preexisting line or something new. Charlie had no idea either.
The flats bordering the river turned out to be an ill-defined fringe of mud banks, watery incursions, and stagnant reaches of reed-studded marsh. After splashing, sticking, and in some places sinking knee-deep or farther into rank-smelling slime, it became clear that further meaningful progress either out toward the true water’s edge or parallel to it was impractical. Yet they still hadn’t found any materials they judged suitable for the journey ahead. So they decided to use what they could find to lash the two air mattresses together as a temporary platform and use that to explore the shore further from the water side. Before starting, Keene produced a plastic bag from the assortment of utility items he had packed, wrapped their compads in it, and stowed the package deep inside his pack.
“What kind of reeds do you need for these Bolivian, Egyptian boats, anyway?” he asked Charlie as they splashed about, hacking boughs from bushes and collecting lengths of the thicker vines.
“I don’t know. I thought you were the engineer here.”
“I build MHD inductor channels and spacecraft reactors. There is a difference, Charlie.”
And then when they were partway through figuring out how to hitch together what they had, they realized that they had nothing to propel or steer with. Nothing in the vicinity offered any means of fashioning a pole long enough to push from the bottom. While Charlie finished frapping and tying, Keene searched around and experimented with various shapes cut from the waterside growths to make a couple of paddles. He settled on a Y fork with a crosspiece lashed across the open end, and then stitched a doubled patch of fabric cut from a parka over it, using a bradawl piercing tool and twine. But when he tried working the paddle in water, it was too flimsy and it bent. There was nothing for it but to find another forked piece the same shape and lash it along the first as a reinforcement. Then they had to do the same thing for the second one.
By now they were into the latter part of the afternoon. They tried floating their creation, first with Keene on his own, then with them both. The weight was too much to prevent the mattresses from bending and shipping water. The raft would suffice for pottering along the shore and its inlets to search for more materials, but neither of them would have trusted it out in the main current of the river, which they could see moving swiftly in places. It was clear that they would not be casting off on the river portion of the journey until the following day.
They drifted out among islands of root-clogged mud and overhanging branches draped with creepers and vines, pushing between floating mats of weed. In places the water was covered in green and yellow scum that released a stench of decomposition when they dipped their paddles, and flowed in over the depressed parts of the mattresses, plastering their clothing and the packs. The air became filled with gnats and mosquitoes that invaded eyes, ears, nostrils, every chink of clothing, and which no amount of slapping could deter. Keene felt his spirits sinking and the first real doubts taking shape that they might have made a serious error of judgment and overestimated their abilities. He kept them to himself; but Charlie’s silence and the grim set of his features betrayed that similar feelings were assailing him.