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taffy-silver currents, the swirling whirlpools.
“ Scarle ,” I say. “It means ‘red.’”
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. BIG IDEAS
    The chamber we’re in is huge. I can’t see a “top” inboard, and I