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must hope that I haven’t given my
friend slow pox as well.
    Which brings me to the second reason this
may be my last homework assignment: If the plasmechanical material
itself is infected, there may be no way back to Saurius Prime.
    “They are hunting you now, Many Lights, and
I believe they mean to kill you.”
    However, staying may not be so easy,
either.
     
     
     
    Chapter Five
    Eli: Up River
    May 1804
     
    I’m in St. Louis, it’s raining, and I’m
being sent to a pirogue.
    “The boy should be with the dugout
crew! Let him row!”
    “Put him with the keel boat and he can help
us push our way up river!”
    Now I just have to figure out what a pirogue is . The keelboat, though, you can’t miss: it looks like a
barge, made of big wooden blocks — kinda squared off, right down to
the cabinets plopped down one end. Least, I think they’re cabinets
— all the men from Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery are
stuffing things into them.
    Woof! Rrraawwfff!
    And Seaman, Lewis’s big black shaggy
Newfoundland dog, is smelling as many of the supplies as he can.
That is, when he’s not adding his own: sometimes he shows up with a
couple squirrels in his mouth, which the men then fry up to
eat.
    Yuck. I wonder if there’s some real
food?
    “Try the pirogue, lad. The red one. You can
help me row.”
    I look, and recognize the grinning man in
the wet, smelly leather. He seems to have a lot more whiskers on
his face than last time, though it’s only been a day or two since
I’ve seen him.
    “Charles Floyd,” he says, sticking out his
hand. “I’m one of the sergeants. But you can just call me Kentuck.
That’s a nickname.”
    I shake his hand. Although his skin is wet,
I can feel the hard blisters on it. The shake is friendly. “You
ain’t from Kentucky, too, by any chance?”
    I can see, behind the whiskers and the grime
on his face, that he’s actually kinda young. I mean, he’s older
than me — he’s not a kid — but he’s one of those young grownups,
the kind who don’t have kids of their own yet, or who are still in
college, or in a band, or in a comedy show on one of the
vidnets.
    “No, I’m from—” I stop. I better not keep
saying “Valley of the Moon,” or they won’t let me go on this
expedition at all.
    Lewis and Clark’s expedition.
    Woof!
    I’m going with Lewis and Clark.
    Rrwwooof!
    “I’m from New Jersey.”
    “Well met, then. I am from
Pennsylvania.” I turn, and there’s another young grownup, but with
clothes a little fancier than Floyd’s — even though they’re getting
wet, like everyone else’s — and a clean-shaven face. “Patrick Gass,
at your service.”
    “Gassy’s gonna write about us. He’s keepin’
a journal,” Floyd says. “Told him I was gonna keep one, too. Just
to spite him.”
    Rrrraawwf!
    Seaman’s jumping around near Floyd, clearly
excited about something. Maybe there’s some leftover squirrel
meat?
    “’Scuse me a minute,” Floyd says. “Even in
the rain, he wants to play.” He takes a really scruffy round —
well, sort of round — leather ball from somewhere inside his
jacket, and throws it for Seaman, who scampers off, and goes
sniffing for it in the mud by the riverbank.
    Gass takes out a thick, compact leather book
with heavy paper bound in the middle. “Many of us are keeping
journals, including Captain Lewis. The difference between mine and
Kentuck’s is that mine will actually be readable.” He stuffs the
journal back into his coat, to keep it as dry as possible.
    I guess there’s no point telling them to
wait a couple hundred years, then they won’t have to write at all —
they can just talk out loud and have their thoughts recorded by a
combination of digits and liquid memory chips.
    “So are you joining us in the pirogue?”
    “Well, sure.” I look from Floyd — Kentuck —
back to Gassy. “Which one’s the pirogue?”
    Floyd points. It’s one of the canoes.
    At least, they’re canoe- shaped . But
each one seems