The Dream Vessel (4 page)

“Big Tom has left orders that he is not to be disturbed for the rest of the evening,” said Billister.

Farmington felt tired suddenly, now secure with the knowledge that he would not have to cajole Big Tom tonight—always a frightening duty. He swallowed hard, trying to rid himself of the souring taste of ale in his mouth. Perhaps another pint would help, he thought.

“May I just leave this, then?” Farmington tore a loose-leaf page out of his notebook, a sheet bearing a drawing of a cylindrical contraption with piping and tubes leading out of it. “It’s a flier on our latest catalogue entry, Mr. Faiging’s newest invention created particularly with these parts in mind—the islands, all this water. A man can breathe underwater with that.” Billister was holding the paper now, and Farmington tapped at the hand-drawn illustration, making the paper rattle.

Billister snorted.

“I’ve seen it work,” Farmington said defensively, “and once he thinks about it, I’m positive that Big Tom would find such a device indispensible. Mr. Faiging calls it a Sustained Underwater Breather—SUB for short. Please do give Big Tom the flier.” Farmington clapped his notebook shut and turned to descend the steps.

Billister studied the details of the drawing, the mouthpiece and gauges, the bulky tank. There was a word for the concept, and being something of a linguist he traced its origin back to the writings of Rutherford Cross: The ancients, before the Big War, had used such underwater tanks.

“Scuba,” said Billister, and Farmington stopped in the yard and turned.

“What?”

“That’s the Rafer word for it. Scuba.”

“Rafers can’t have…well, the SUBs have just been invented,” Farmington said, doubt and recrimination in his voice. “So surely Rafers’ve never used a device like this.”

“No. But that’s what we call it. Those of us that can breathe underwater—twenty, thirty minutes anyway—those Rafers that can do that, it is said they have scuba.”

The man looked near death.

The stranger sat, head lolling, oblivious. Three feet away, and Tym could barely touch him. They were both shackled at the ankles to a bench in the hold of a sea skimmer. The craft was at anchor now, but Tym guessed they would be underway again soon, judging from the dull thumps and muffled howls of the crew coming from somewhere above.

The light was not good—the slavers were not wasting much kerosene on prisoners—but Tym could see that her neighbor was a light-skinned man in his thirties. He had wavy blondish hair, matted with dried blood around a cruel gash above his right temple. She had seen this light skin many times—Fungus People, they were called by the Rafers—but this man clearly was paler than pale, quite sick. On the rare occasions that his eyes opened they were yellow and vacant.

What was most remarkable about him was the bit of skin-painting she could see curling up out of his shirt and over his shoulder. The Fungus People, as far as she knew, were not capable of much artistry, and certainly nothing like this. It was Rafer design. It was Rafer coloring. Skin paintings were for the telling of great deeds—but why would one be needled into the chest of a Fungus Person?

There was a divider panel between them, supporting their metal water cups in brackets on either side. The divider made it even more difficult to reach the sick one, although she could manage sometimes to put his cup to his lips. His tongue would respond instinctively, sweeping sluggishly from side to side, but most of the liquid would dribble down his chest.

His trousers were a mess, as he lacked the wherewithal to lift the bench seat and relieve himself in the trough running underneath. Four times a day, the trough ran awash with sea water, sloshing the human waste out the back of the skimmer. A cause for celebration. Up and down the hold in the dimness, those captives still feeling rambunctious would cheer the refreshing flood. Otherwise, there were long periods of painful silence, or moans, or a jabber of mixed languages—Rafer and unidentifiable tongues—as the perplexed and disoriented got the sad news from their more worldy fellow prisoners.

Far up at the aft hatch, the twin bolts clanked open and the door threw back, spilling a blinding glare onto the first dozen red-leggers. An unmistakable silhouette stomped through the oval of light: lean, bushy in the face, like the devil’s scarecrow. Bark.

It was not feed time, which prompted a nervous murmur along the corridor. Unscheduled visits never ended well.

Bark marched at a determined pace, knowing his duty. When he stopped, Tym supposed that the first mate had come for the sick one. He hung his lantern on a hook screwed into the opposite wall, then placed his hand gently against the cheek of the dying man. But that was all. He turned quickly to Tym, and his eyes were sad.

He carried a set of leg irons in the same hand with a knobbed truncheon—obviously neither of them needed for an unconcious man. He mumbled something low, in that tongue of the Fungus People, and then he clapped a shackle around each of Tym’s legs and let the chain between them clatter to the floor. Then he drew a key ring from his trousers and unlocked the fixed manacles that held her to the bench.

Tym uttered one of the few English phrases she knew, picked up from the Jesus People: “Oh, gawd….”

Bark responded in his gargly language. Seeing that she did not understand, he waved a large calloused hand back toward the open hatch. Tym obeyed, sensing death somehow. As if confirming her fear, the chain between her feet scraped morbidly up the floorboards.

Her fellow red-leggers tasted the fear. Moans fore and aft filled the hold. She passed down the row of shadowy faces, and some of them she knew—fellow island-hoppers taken in the same raid.

Ahead, someone was singing in Rafer—gawd, a dirge?—in a high crackly voice. Not all of the lyrics were intelligible, partly because of her damaged hearing, but as she neared she heard her own name in the piercing song:

“Tym, Tym, you must come to me,

I will slip you a weapon

To push into the belly of your murderer.”

Well, Tym thought to herself, that makes a lousy verse. But Bark won’t know that, will he? As she passed another divider panel, she found the crevassed face of old Crin-Claw, the huntress. So—they have taken even the best of our fighters, Tym thought, and she felt sadder still. There seemed to be little left of civilization, less and less reason not to die.

Tym let herself stumble over the leg iron chain and fell into the lap of the aging woman. Crin-Claw’s hands were quick. She pressed into Tym’s right palm a metal object, which wedged between the heel of her thumb and the base of her middle finger.

Bark was on her immediately, yanking her up by the armpit and shoving her ahead. Tym glanced down at the object the huntress had passed to her: half of a broken tosser disk. Ach. Useless as a throwing weapon. It did have four of its tines intact, however, one of them digging into her finger and drawing a droplet of blood. Fine, at least she would be less likely to drop it—but let’s hope there’s none of the Gila poison left on it. Maybe she should just bury the disk into Bark’s chest now and let the bangerbrook begin.

Tym stole a look over her shoulder and decided against it—Bark’s truncheon was aloft now, perhaps his suspicion aroused by that fake trip. Behind the first mate, Tym saw Crin-Claw’s face—the quivering lips, the sunken mouth, fade into the blackness.

Bark shouted, impatient, and Tym stepped through the hatch into the eye-searing white.

The young captain, the one they call Little Tom, had left her alone in the master’s cabin. He had waved his hands about, saying something about Bark, and then disappeared out the door.

The cabin was a stunning example of the functionless preoccupations of the Fungus People—gleaming brass, polished wood and porcelain everywhere. A fitting abode for a young skimmer rat like Little Tom, a vain pig-poker who apparently razored his beard away daily as he must have seen mainlanders do. Clearly it could not be because he was a swimmer—such a pathetic physique.

The portholes were open, allowing a brisk breeze into the room—it was rough weather out—but there remained the unmistakable scent of burned ganja. The red-eyed young captain must be half gullybonkers, she thought. I wonder if they’ve raided our ganja fields as well as our people.

Tym glanced again at the piece of tosser disk in her right hand and decided to leave it there. She would make quick work of Little Tom, run above and hit the water before any of the skimmer rats could react. The drop of blood at the base of her finger had grown to a tiny trickle now. The pain meant nothing, but the blood might give her away prematurely.

She stepped toward the basin, and the leg iron chain rattled across the new floor. Ach. How would that affect her swimming? She could swim with many times the weight, that would not be a problem, but she could part her ankles no more than two feet—not enough for a proper frog kick.

The water jug was a perfect white sphere with a bottle stem on top, affixed to the wall by a teeter hinge. When she reached for it, the floorboards at the door squeaked. She dropped her right hand to her side, crying “Oh, gawd,” and hoped that he hadn’t seen the tosser disk cupped there.

Little Tom laughed and swaggered in, eyes painful-looking, shirtless, drawstring trousers. He yanked the jug off its hinge and stared at her up and down—cutoff pants, T-shirt, the swimmer’s chop-cut hair. It was the way a man looked at a woman when his thinking was sexual.

Tym felt a sickness growing in her chest. She stumbled backward until she fell into the captain’s bunk, and she started again, afraid she might have dotted the sheets with blood. Tym had to cup her hand now, trying to keep the disk out of his sight, as a tiny pool of warm liquid gathered there.

Little Tom was speaking again, in gentle tones, if the Fungus People’s tongue can be thought of as gentle. He held the jug out to her, and Tym took it cautiously in her left hand. She splashed water onto the puddle of blood building around the tosser disk, and she threw the mixture at her mouth and swallowed. She splashed again and again, hoping any blood dribbling down was diluted sufficiently not to alarm him, hoping he would step closer—perhaps just two paces.

Tym pictured herself thrusting the metal shard into his throat before he had a chance to cry out. Between splashes of water, she sucked in deep breaths, feeding her body extra oxygen for a long underwater swim. Any moment now….

But Little Tom backed away, and Tym sighed—her first chance gone. The entire ship was groaning now with the stress of filling sails. Now would be the best time for the kill and escape, she told herself, with the crew above at its most distracted. Ach.

Little Tom pulled the cabin doors closed, then produced a key from his trousers and threw the bolt to lock them. The captain hop-skipped boyishly by her—too quickly for the slash—and fell back onto his bunk, legs dangling over the side.

Then came an abrupt movement that shocked Tym, even though she was nauseatingly aware of his intentions: Little Tom rolled his knees up to his chest and whisked off his pants in one fluttering motion. The stoned young shipmaster laid back lazily, staring into space, confidently waving her to him—he seemed to have done this before. His pale legs were parted, swinging easily along the side of the bunk. His penis was rising like a new mushroom.

Tym wondered if these people were always so artless with their sex. She breathed deeply three times and went to him.

Quince scrabbled through a jungle of bougainvillea, not daring to take the dirt-and-shell road that wound down the hillside from the medical buildings. He paused, kneeling in the blackness, listening for any human noises through the riot of creeking tree frogs. There were no signs of humanity, save for his own heavy breathing, sounding like rhythmic sobs.

START JERE He peeled off his hospital gown, a smock so tattered that it really covered little of the body. He mopped his brow with it, then rolled it and tucked it under his arm. Dark skin made a better night cover. Scratches be damned—it was better to have a few thorns in the fanny than to risk recapture. Red-leggers fared badly enough as it was; red-leggers who dared to break out before sale to the mainland, it was said, would suffer a cruel torture at the hands of the pig-poker-in-chief, Big Tom. His walled garden at the mainhouse was renowned for that.

When Quince hit the beach he rested again. The sand was still warm from the day’s sun-scorching, but the night sea breeze here in the open was a relief. His stomach was twisting—a wretched mixture of anxiety and the sourness of the blood he had swallowed to simulate sickness. He crouched in the shadows of the jungly shrubs at the beach’s edge and tried to decide his next move.

I am just a scribe, Quince thought to himself resolutely. I make stories, I write history, I teach. This is work for a warrior, a hunter. Perhaps Dirk was right. I will die on this island. He pictured his friend in that cell over the ridge of Crown Mountain—dull-minded Dirk, the steady laborer, determined to ship quietly to a farm worker’s life on the mainland. Who was right?

Just east up the beach, barely 300 yards away, were the shipyards and main docks. Tied up there, among Big Tom’s little skimmers, were the three barges and their tug lashed together, black against the glistening waves. Capture by Big Tom’s marauding beasts was a miserable enough experience. But it was said to be a pleasure cruise compared to the barge ride to the mainland. Those few red-leggers who escaped the mainland and returned to the Out Islands carried back nightmarish tales of this Captain Bull and his pig-poking enforcers with their billybangers and snub shotguns.

To the west the beach buildings were more sparse, decrepit little ramshacks dotting the west side of the harbor for miles. The choice of directions came easily, if for no other reason than Quince’s instinctive repulsion for the slave barges. West. He would find supplies in one of the shanties, then steal a boat and skim away.

Jersey Saple knew that someone was approaching his house from the beach path. It was as if an extra sense had awakened in him over his ten years of blindness. Especially in territory familiar to him—his house, the garden and outhouse area in back, or the boardwalk and twenty yards of scrubland out front running down to the beach—Saple could even identify the intruder before he had a chance to rap on the splintery door sometimes, if he knew him well.

This extra sense could be explained scientifically, he supposed, as the old blubberburst Dr. Scaramouch huffily insisted. Perhaps in his perpetual visual haze—dim light during the day and blackness at night—Saple had become attuned to infinitesimally small sounds, or vibrations, or odors, that never registered with sighted people.

Perhaps so. But Saple liked the charm of something more mystical—the idea that he had acquired a gift of vision somehow. The Jesus People, or even the Rafers, would say that it was God given in compensation for his unjust blinding. Ah, that was a much better story, Dr. Scaramouch, a much better story.

So it was that in the perfect stillness of his threadbare study, Saple “watched” the approach of this stranger from the beach. He was not only unable to identify this person—mmm, it is a man, he was sure now—but he quickly became convinced that they had never met. The man’s bearing, his way of carrying himself, his attitude, were absolutely foreign.

Oddly, the stranger seemed to be avoiding the boardwalk, risking the wrath of caugi cactus, hooker weed and shell fragments against his bare feet. Bare feet. Hmm, not only bare feet, but Saple was not sure that the intruder was wearing any clothing at all.

The stranger was lingering now at the front door, a simple ill fitting frame of silvery wood that served little purpose but to hold a swath of rusted metal screening over the entry—which kept out those bugs that weren’t particularly intent on getting inside anyway. The visitor’s hesitation did not last long. He simply pulled at the door handle and let himself in.

Saple’s curiosity advanced into a state of alarm. On Thomas Island, courtesy and legality were strictly observed, as the penalties for infractions (usually, as interpreted by Big Tom) were severe. A gouged tongue, perhaps, or a severed hand. Or, as Saple found out not long after arriving, blindness. For the first time since detecting the intruder, Saple moved—he pushed back against the rollers of his desk chair and came to an accurate stop at the floor cabinet behind him. He opened it.

The intruder was still in the tiny front room, where Saple had a hammock strung for sleeping and the walls were banked with disheveled shelves of books, folders of loose papers and odd bits of wood and twisted metal scavenged from the shore.

Now he is a burglar, Saple mused, and I can blow his belly out with nay a warning shot. The blind man’s hands were shaking under the weight of his snub shotgun, so he propped the short, ghastly barrel on his desk, nudged among his latest writings on alternative forms of government.

The weapon had washed up two days after a minor capsize in the harbor. Saple had broken a toe on it during an evening jaunt and spent the next day brushing and oiling the rust away. Now it would have its first firing, and Saple found himself hoping the charge would not blast out each end with equal force. A banger of such minimal craftsmanship could really be trusted only by a person standing far to the side of its barrel. It was a cool night out, but Saple could feel the sweat trickling into his beard.

He waited until the invader was well into the study, too far to escape back into the front room and out the door. There. Saple lit one of the striker matches that he kept around for the convenience of guests and held its tiny roar aloft in the blackness.

“Ho, there,” he said to the frozen figure before him, “sit down aback a you in the chair, and move slow or I’ll be painting that wall red at your expense.”

Quince’s nerves were screaming from the shock of surprise, but his tongue was wooden, mute. Behind a marred and littered desk he saw a middle-aged man, wild haired and scrawny, with one of those tiny torches in one hand and an ugly banger in the other. He was grumbling something, like the sound of barking dogs, in that tongue of the Fungus People.

Saple could taste the tension, but his order was not being obeyed. He ran his forefinger across the two triggers, one for each barrel. The problem could be resolved so quickly, safely: Blam. But a few more problems would be created. The mess. And an inquiry about the banger, a slaver’s weapon found but not returned. Could he prove it was not stolen?

Saple tried again. “Mayhap you know that I’m blind—these eyes are whiter than stones, I’m told. But you’ll be asking yerself why it is that I’m able to point this blaster right at your coconuts, huh?” He waved the gun toward the chair. “Sit there, or soon you’ll have to squat to pee.”

Quince understood the motion, at least, and sat, his nerves still howling. “There…there was no light on in the house,” the Rafer said in his own language. “I meant no harm. I needed…food, maybe clothes—yes, I had a mind to steal—but I would be gone then, quickly.”

The bushy face of the Fungus Person showed astonishment, then thought. And Quince got another surprise. This time, when the blind man spoke his words sounded smooth and warm, not like the barking dogs at all. The sense of them was halting, but understandable. It seemed so odd to see a Fungus Person speaking Rafer. Unnatural. Like watching a poorly operated marionette.

“You are Rafer,” the Fungus Person was saying, “and now I think I understand. There is only one Rafer on Thomas Island who is even close to a free man, and you are not him. That would mean you are a runner. You have broken out of the cells?”

“Yes…well, not quite,” Quince replied, deciding that the man with the gun was not going to be deceived. “From the infirmary. They had thought that I was vomiting blood—which I was, but not from hemorrhage. I had swallowed blood to feign such an illness.”

“And once in the hospital, they ignored you—thinking that you had the belly rot?” Saple held firm to the snub gun propped on the desk, trying to assess the danger. He touched the dwindling striker match to the wick of the desk candle.

“Oh, more than that,” Quince said, enjoying a chance to tell of his cleverness, even under the circumstances. “When I stopped breathing, I was taken for dead and wheeled to a cooler-room.”

Saple snorted. “You fooled the doctor—the big one, Scaramouch—with that? He knows of Rafer breathing, this scuba that some of you have. He has vowed to make a medical study of it.”

Quince looked puzzled. “It was just another of the jailers watching me in the hospital. He said that the doctor could not be found. He was distraught, actually—saying that this Big Tom of yours would be violently angry that another of us was dying. But there was no big doctor.”

“Then you are lucky to have gotten this far—to the sea, the boats. But now, as you must know, you will die if you are caught, even though Big Tom will not be able to profit from selling you to the mainland. An example to the others—that’s the thinking.”

“You are releasing me?”

Saple sighed and raised the snub gun, pointing its jagged maw at the ceiling. “Yes. I think so.”

“Why? This could bring you trouble, no?”

“It would bring me trouble only if I were found out,” Saple said, struggling to find the correct Rafer words. “But no matter. I am not faithful to Big Tom. He put my eyes out for articles that I wrote when I first arrived on the island, articles about his selling of red-leggers—Rafers, other runners from the mainland.”

“You, too, are a scribe? But who would read such articles if they are not allowed? Certainly not mainlanders, where the Government is buying humans for farm work.”

Saple sighed. How could he possibly explain it all?

“Well, yes, I have been many kinds of scribe in my life. Both for the Government and for—well, those who call themselves the Ungovernment. I came to Thomas Island as an itinerant Government bureaucrat, writing inspection reports mostly, for the Department of Transport out of New Chicago. It was quite dry material, really. I would much prefer writing poetry when—”

“A poet! I should have guessed!”

Saple grunted. “Well, during my travels I had developed a rather bifurcated career, you see. The Transport reports went to New Chicago, and the poetry circulated among less reputable audiences. I found that using a pseudonym, I could express frustration in my poetry that was never vented in my Government assignments. Then I began writing articles, too, about the conditions I had found during my travels. Not all mainlanders believe in the slaving, you know—or the Government at all. There are Revolutionaries—no one with much power, mind you—but it was them that I was writing the articles for. To be circulated among the Revolutionaries, to inspire them.”

“But one of these Revolutionaries betrayed you?”

Saple shrugged. “I think the Department of Inspection simply put two and two together, finally. I was assigned to Thomas Island when they did, and the inspectors sent notice to Big Tom—asked him to settle the matter. So Big Tom searched my possessions and found notes I had been gathering about his slaving company.”

“And still he did not kill you?”

“No, he just ever-so-mercifully burned my eyes out. Now, he allows me to dwell in this abandoned ramshack, and even looks the other way when his house boy smuggles provisions to me. Big Tom is an odd poker, a curious mixture sometimes of violence and beneficence. A mind doctor could spend his career on Big Tom.”

“How is it that you speak Rafer? Do all of these Revolutionaries speak our tongue somehow? We had thought it impossible for…excuse me, but your race is known as the Fungus People.”

The blind man laughed. “No. I learned it from Big Tom’s house boy. He taught me his language and I taught him mine, even how to write—which is something I can not manage in Rafer.”

Quince squirmed in his chair. “I should find a boat quickly,” he said. “Can you afford to give me food?”

“Not necessary. A mile west, near the point, you will find the skimmer of a fisherman named Murdoch. He keeps it well stocked for long hauls. But…oh, gawd….” Saple’s lids closed over his milky eyes. He sensed movement again down the yard, near the beach, and his heart shrank as he recognized the figures striding toward the house. He rolled back on the chair to the floor cabinet, shoved the banger inside and slid the door closed. “Go! Now!”

The last two words were shouted in the Fungus People’s tongue, but Quince read the panic quite accurately and sprinted out of the ramshack. Down the hill, silhouetted against the glowing beach, were three tall men with snub shotguns glinting in the moonlight. There was nowhere to run.