The river narrows as we approach the border with Laos. The faster flow slows us down and I grow my cloud to about half its limit so I can push on the boats to supplement the straining motors. Louise gives me some concerned looks when she sees how many bots I’m running, but I reassure her that I’m fine. I can hear the crashing of Khone Falls off in the distance up ahead.
As we get closer, I see a tiny dock on the side of the river leading to a narrow road. That’s our stop for unloading the gear. I get our boat moored, Mek pulls up in a big, old truck with a trailer. Since the dock is barely big enough to handle one boat at a time, and it’s definitely not designed for boats the size of our catamarans, it’s almost entirely botwork getting our stuff loaded into the trailer. Once the control boards for each boat are safely stashed in the truck, Marc shepherds the geologists onto the truck and trailer, while the other sibs in my class get to work. Between us, we make short work of ripping apart the cats and the speedboats into pieces small enough for our clouds to haul, then start flying towards the falls.
Looking down on the widest waterfall on Earth is awe-inspiring. Rough rocks with trees impossibly growing from them break up the rushing white water. The falls themselves are a huge curving expanse stretching for kilometers, an enormous wall of water thundering down. The churn of liquid at the bottom is broken only by the jagged boulders jutting through the foaming barrier. The roar of the water is deafening.
I look past the falls for the rendezvous point and see a break in the treeline along the shore that connects to what could only very charitably be termed a dirt road. I touch down on the bank with my load of boat materials in tow. I’m not sure how they’ll get the trailer with our stuff down a road this narrow, but Mek said she could, so I turn and start putting the fleet back together. I glance over and see Andrea almost keeping up with my building speed. I push a little harder and get my boat done first. I’m still the king of the bots. Glad I’m still getting good return value for my brain damage.
We don’t have the control boards here yet, so now there’s nothing to do but wait for the truck to catch up to us. Andrea points down the dirt track and floats a question mark in the air. I stretch out my cloud in that direction and feel something like a small market up the hill from us.
“Sure, why not?” I say.
We trudge up the hill on foot, not minding a chance to stretch our legs on a walk longer than the length of our boats. As the jungle opens up, I see a small town with an open air market at its center. Grass-roofed booths featuring knick-knacks and clothes cluster around a widened area in the road running through the village, a tourist trap clearly geared for foreigners here to see the falls.
“Check this out,” Evan calls, stepping up to one of the booths. The street vendor is making another customer some kind of ice cream desert on a freezing surface connected to a gas-powered generator. He mixes fruit into a creamy base and scrapes it across ice-cold metal until it forms into rolls that he puts in a cup. Whatever it is, it looks tasty. With the exertion of the flight, the build, and the walk, a cold treat would totally hit the spot.
“Were we smart enough to bring any local currency?” I ask him. “I have my credit card, but I don’t feel anything like a card reader anywhere in this place.”
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“No,” Evan shakes his head. “We were not that smart. Guess we have to wait for the truck.”
“But that looks so good,” Louise says, as she and Andrea join us in front of the booth. Andrea nods emphatically in agreement.
“They’ll be here in less than an hour,” I reassure her. “We can get all the ice cream we want then.”
I hear a rumble from down the road, but it’s from the opposite direction our truck should be coming from. A few tour vans pull up on the far end of the market. A bunch of what look like European tourists pile out.
Andrea claps her hands and perks up. She runs out onto the widened bit of road and builds a bowl with her bots on the ground. She starts up some music to get people looking her way and starts into a dance routine. She gets a few uninterested glances until she starts popping streaks of color into the air every time she moves, then she starts pulling the crowd her way. She jumps three meters into the air and lands with an explosion of blue and red. A visual symphony of shapes and colors swirls around her.
“Come on,” Evan says. “We can’t make her do all the work.”
He jogs over to join her and surrounds himself with streaming flows of colors, bold and bright. He’s not much of a dancer, but the audience seems to like it. I jump in and start to juggle a dozen balls of light. Juggling is pretty easy if you don’t have to worry about the balls obeying the laws of gravity, but I try my best to look like it’s a challenge.
Not to be left behind, Louise starts putting on our own display. She summons a giant paintbrush made of red light almost as tall as she is, and starts painting the air with what look like floating Japanese characters. I think she’s been getting in touch with her heritage since she found out about her mother. The tourists clap and cheer, and as Andrea lets the music die out, they throw money into the bowl. Most of it looks like local bills, but I recognize some American dollars and Euros too.
I glance around, looking for Chad. Where was he while we were busking for tips? I see him standing off on the far side of the market, and it looks like he’s been busy. The roofs of all the vending booths have all been quietly replaced with solar panels, and as I stretch out my senses, I feel a bunch of more panels on top of any building sturdy enough to hold one. With a glance, he disconnects the wires from the loud, gas-powered generator running the ice-cream booth and connects them to his new local power grid. He switches off the generator with a wave of his hand. The man running the booth exclaims something that sounds like a curse from the tone and turns to look at it. He scratches his head, looking back and forth from the generator to his freezing machine, trying to figure out how the lights are still on with the generator shut down.
I see Chad’s smile and remember why I liked him so much when he was in Africa. This kind of direct help is what he loves best, even when no one realizes what he’s just done. He’s a good guy.
We walk up to the front of his booth and dump the whole bowl of money on the counter. The proprietor’s eyes go wide. I’m not sure what the local currency is worth, but I guess from the guy’s reaction, the tourists must have liked our show. I point to the freezing griddle and pantomime eating. He nods vigorously and starts making us some ice cream rolls. Once we all have some, he says something in a language that none of us know and points to the money pile. Maybe he thinks it’s too much. I take a bite of mine. It’s not only cool looking, it’s delicious.
Down the road, I feel the truck with our gear and sibs at the edge of my range. They’ll be here soon, and they’ll definitely want in on this street food discovery. I wonder if we made enough money to treat everyone, or if the guides will have to pay for the rest.