The Dream Vessel (5 page)

Jay-Jay pointed a fat, quivering finger toward the corroded building at the bottom of the clinic lawn. He shouted at his sister, “Git down ta red-legger cells and watch ’em. An’ I don’t care of they’s sick ta dying, nobody else’s making it ta hospital tonight. No one else’s out less Dr. Scaramouch himself says so, and he’ll be plenty piss-angry about the escape.”

Lily, a female rendition of her rotund brother, sagged her pudgy face into scowl, letting him know he didn’t need to use that tone of voice with her. She marched off to the holding cells, each side of her buttocks pumping up and down testily. “Ah didn’t let no red-legger out, nah,” she said into the night, as if to no one in particular.

Jay-Jay pushed angrily through the beaten-aluminum swing doors of the clinic. His breath was rapid and anxious now, growing into an audible whine. What a mess! A red-legger he had brought to the clinic had busted out. An orderly had run to Big Tom’s compound to get the search started, and Jay-Jay couldn’t find Dr. Scaramouch anywhere—not in his office at the other end of the hall, not in his private quarters adjacent to the office, not down drinking at Sanders’s Shebeen, as one would expect this late.

Jay-Jay jiggled down the chipped linoleum hallway straight under its three bare lightbulbs. He glanced into each green-painted patient room, most of them empty, thinking the doctor might have decided to make a rare midnight round. Wheezing louder, the jailer stopped at the end of the hall next to the office and leaned against the wall, his sweaty back cool against the cinder block. He pulled a hand down his hammy face and wiped the perspiration on his shirt sleeve.

The cellar door, just there to his right, jogged his memory. It was so rarely entered, by orderlies or jailers anyway, that it had grown almost invisible in its disuse. But he remembered the doctor’s odd hobby—the clicker box that makes pictures of things just as they are, better than the most meticulous brush painter. He recalled the doctor hunching behind his tripod up on the hillside of Crown Mountain, sour-smelling, wide-brimmed straw hat pulled low over his eyes, explaining in long-winded scientific terms how the photo box worked—the numerous lenses and celluloids and papers and chemicals imported, of course, from the inventor and manufacturer Cred Faiging.

Jay-Jay had shaken his head at the irony: Only during light of day is there proper sun to expose the photo film to take a picture; and only in the dark of night, in a sealed room, can the chemicals be employed to do their magic. And Dr. Scaramouch explained that he had set up such a dark room—a darkroom, he called it, running the words together and pronouncing it as if Jay-Jay should be familiar with such a thing—in the dirt-floor cellar of the hospital. He had boarded over the windows and caulked around them with shipyard resin just to ward off the moon and starlight. He even ran a water line down, for crissake.

Jay-Jay heaved himself off of the wall and tapped tentatively against the metal door. He called out, “Dr. Scaramouch!” and sensed immediately somehow that his voice had met no human ears.

He pushed, and the door fell open easily. The scant light fell down the wooden steps, illuminating another door at the bottom.

“Dr. Scaramouch!”

Again no answer.

Jay-Jay, extremely conscious of his weight now, put one foot onto the first step of the dubious stairway. It held rather steady, only a slight shiver. He grasped the handrail and paced delicately to the bottom, where he turned the doorknob and entered the black room. There was absolutely no light, save from the doorway, and of course that was the point of a darkroom, he told himself. Instinctively he felt for a light switch on the wall to his right but found only bare studs and cobwebs. He heard dripping water, and there was an acrid chemical scent to the air.

“Dr. Scaramouch?”

He stepped farther out onto the dirt floor—he could see nothing in front of him now—and paper crackled under his feet. A whispy something stroked at his face, and Jay-Jay squealed and wiped at his jaw, thinking of spiders, bats, who knows what. But when his nerves subsided and reason returned, he reached out for the string hanging from the ceiling and gave it a pull.

An amber-colored light blinked on amid the low rafters just above his head. And there at his feet lay the hulking Dr. Scaramouch twisted in the dirt, a stretch of electrical wire tight around his neck. His face was a dull blue, his eyes popped open, surprised. Paper and tipped chemical trays and four-inch-square celluloids were littered all about, the sign of a wild struggle. A twine strung with damp photographs had been yanked to the ground. Water dripped into a metal sink.

Jay-Jay fled up the trembling stairs to tell Big Tom’s men how the escaped red-legger had buggered Dr. Scaramouch.

They were a fresh set of cuffs, sturdy quarter-inch steel darkly burnished. Hefty. For the arms and legs, both. The newly uncrated cuffs were the sort that only a high-volume trader of red-leggers would have in stock.

The shackles were bolted to the dock piling with the three-quarter-inch shafts that the ship-making wood whits called “deathdicks.” Each bolt was topped with an octagonal nut, screwed into the wood with a whale wrench.

Quince was already sobbing the morning they clapped him in. Half a dozen of Captain Bull’s naked musclers pressed his legs and arms into the metal cradles, slid the cuff covers into place and drove another set of bolts through the lock holes. The low tide was swirling at Quince’s feet, and when he looked straight up, there was Big Tom leaning into his cane and staring down his beard at him from the dock. Quince shackled down in the rising water; Big Tom peering over his belly at the rebellious red-legger.

Big Tom coughed softly and spat, and the silvery bullet smacked into Quince’s chest and sped down through the curly hair. The slaver was well versed in the mechanisms of hope, and it was he who had demanded that the monster bolts be used to secure the cuffs to the piling. Shackles that had been merely locked by key gave the captive a glint of hope, albeit unwarranted. This would not do—the terror must be total and unabated, and only the thick bolts driven home permanantly by a muscley bargeman would produce the proper level of shrieking despair.

Big Tom wanted Quince to see death now, to see it cruelly and inevitably, hours before it actually would come.

He stepped back from the edge of the dock, and his three guards, snub blasters at their sides, moved in unison in the same direction. They were the ones who had found Quince in front of Jersey Saple’s ramshack. They were Big Tom’s men, islanders, as attested by their leather boots to guard against shell fragments, the dungarees, and the high-collared blouses that kept the mosquitoes at bay. They were easily distinguishable from the slave bargemen who populated the docks while they were waiting to ship off for the mainland. Such bargemen had an aversion for garments, and wore them only against the most extreme sun or cold. This day the bargemen found perfect for swaggering about the docks and beach with their own snub shotguns—naked save for the occasional belt or calf strap bearing a hand shooter or knife. There was a grand amusement to be had today, the dousing of a Rafer.

His back and legs were bruised now, battered against the piling by the wave action, and his eyes stung from the salt and sand. Quince had begun to regard the wave action as an insidious evil, smooth and unrelenting, a bully smacking him into the wooden pillar, whop…whop…whop.

Quince had provided quite an entertainment for the bargemen and guards throughout the day. But now, with the sun dying, Big Tom had ordered them all away. Quince understood the extent of that cruelty—he was to die without hope or human contact, helpless, alone, strangled by the inevitability of surging nature. The only perceptible trace of mankind was the occasional burst of guffaws from the island’s pub, upland a ways. The laughter provided no solace—he already was dead and forgotten, even in the minds of his tormentors.

The waves this evening were not breaking in the protected harbor. But they rose inexorably up the scribe’s face now, shushing through his hair. Quince had hoped, at the very least, that the deadly tide would wash the sting of spit and urine from his hair. But it did not. The indignity still burned, and he would die now in the red-shimmering waves at sunset.

Quince sucked in long breaths between the waves, packing oxygen into his blood as he had been taught since childhood. He had the rhythm against that evil flow—immersion, breath, immersion, breath. The panic set in when he began to miss between waves—occasionally, even at its nadir, the lolling sea buried him. Quince strained his lips toward the red, blackening sky, pulling fiercely at the bolted cuffs, wrists bleeding down there.

And finally there was no more air. His Rafer lungs would last him half an hour at most, and already his heart was thrashing a grim tattoo up his spine and into his head—a-wump, a-wump, a-wump.

Quince knew his religion—better than most. Had taught it to the hundreds of youngsters for whom faith comes easily; was fluent in the scriptures of the god Rutherford Cross and well versed in the deeds of Cross’s son Pec-Pec. He had always considered himself a religious man, with all of that knowledge framed out to perfection. But now, with the sea water gnawing at his bulging eyes, taunting his lips to open, Quince was surprised by a rush of calmness, a warmth and ease he could only attribute to his faith welling up in proportions he had never known.

Out in the darkening murk of shifting green water, Quince saw a large white body glide by. The scribe thought briefly, without fear, of the vile feeder beasts who owned the night waters, but as it passed again he saw it was not one of them. On the third pass he could see clearly the monster dragon fish, thick as five dock pilings, red, green and gold fins trailing yards behind. And mounted atop the glorious fish, precisely as described in the scriptures, was the dark-bearded Pec-Pec, the god-man son of Rutherford Cross. He wore a bemused expression as he wafted past on his sea-steed, unable to speak but clearly intending, My, how fortunate that I wandered by just in time.

Pec-Pec pulled the streaming dragon fish into a sharp turn and slowed to a hover by the manacled scribe. He thrupped his fingers across each of the bolts gripping Quince’s limbs to the dock, and the black little shafts spun and backed out of the piling wood obediently. The manacle covers fell away. Quince mounted the grand dragon fish behind Pec-Pec, and together they swept into the black ocean.

In the morning, Big Tom ordered that Quince’s body not be unshackled. Leave it there in the low tide muck. Let the fiddler crabs do their work.

Little Tom, naked and brain-numb, was staring at the ceiling of his cabin, entranced by whispy little ganja ghosts dancing across the woodwork. His nose was twitching, as if from some imagined rotten smell. He beckoned to Tym with a lazy roll of the wrist, legs open.

Tym obeyed. She stroked the back of her hand down his inner thigh to signal that she was there, and his penis grew even more upright. In the same motion she worked the broken tosser disk out of her palm, then sucked away the smear of blood, drawn by one of its tines, from the base of her forefinger.

She had meant this to be simple—pound the shard into Little Tom’s throat, then escape topside. The younger deserved the death. For the rape he intended. For the slaving. For the communities demolished.

She envisioned the moist plunge into his neck. Hitting bone halfway through. The gurgle. It would be over quickly, and she would be alone then in a slaver’s cabin with a warm rack of flesh. Was that enough?

Well, perhaps not. And without further thought she gently took his erect member into her hands, waited for the blissful smile to spill across his vacant face, and pressed the tosser disk’s deadly tines into it until they popped out the topside in four little geysers of blood.

Little Tom bolted up to a sitting position, paralyzed by a scream too big for his throat. And that was when the entire ship seemed to explode. The floor fell away from Tym’s feet and was suddenly behind her. Mirrors, maps, chart instruments, and drawing leads showered the cabin. Then came the real buster—like an earthquake—when the deep wooden gut of the Lucia burst under the shifting weight of her ballast bars.

Tym was airborne, then pounded against the cabin wall, then sliding down into the splintery rubble. An avalanche of black metal bars poured through the upturned flooring as if it were paper, and Tym watched as the stunned shipmaster was buried up to his chest in ballast.

Just as suddenly as the disaster had struck, the Lucia was silent again, shifting unsteadily now in her irrevocable capsize. The portholes, submerged, burst from the water pressure and twisting of side beams. It was that spray that awakened Tym to action, and she began pulling the heavy bars off of the semiconscious Little Tom. The slaver was bleeding slightly from the nose—probably some internal damage, Tym told herself. She squinted in the stinging sea spray and pulled frantically at the leaden bars, tossing them one at a time over her shoulder.

Little Tom smiled weakly, appreciative of the effort. He lifted a limp left arm in a pathetic attempt to help free himself. His smile faded when he saw what Tym had really been after: the trousers he had flung onto the bunk. When the wirey Rafer unearthed them she tore away the pocket containing his key ring and left the slaver to his fate. The sea was rising within the cabin in angry swirls, a veritable sewer of objects coveted by these Fungus People.

Tym’s shoulder began to beat a painful throb from the bashing she had taken, and she stopped knee-deep in the maelstrom to concentrate on shoving that agony aside—cope with it later.

She blinked and cleared her head, then scanned the vertical decking for the rents and gouges that would allow footholds as she clawed her way up to the shattered cabin door. Mmmm. It was possible.

Little Tom moaned and splashed his hand sadly in the rising water. “Waaaait. Unnh. Hey. Wait.” And the little Rafer he had tried to rape was gone.

In the blackness of the corridor, Tym did not have the patience to allow her eyes to adjust. She scrambled by memory—at the expense of numerous toe stubs and shin raps—down the long row of slave holds.

The wall of shackled humanity was now the floor, turned under her, and she decided the most expedient way to move down the line was to step from the edge of one slot divider to the next. As she passed over each frantic red-legger, Tym attempted encouraging words, but most often they were lost in the collective howl of doomed people. Under their seats, the water duct was shooshing with seawater, probably backing up from the aft drain hole. The slave hold would soon be submerged.

Tym counted her way over fifteen slots until she estimated that she was in the right place. Then she squinted into the blackness below her to see each occupant, sometimes offering a reassuring pat on the shoulder, sometimes having to struggle out of a panicky red-legger’s grasp. When she came to an empty hold, she knew it must be her own and, yes, the unconscious Fungus Man, the one with the remarkable skin-painting, was in the next one.

The air seemed flavored with fear now, made worse by the odor of the human waste being backed up the wash gully by the rush of seawater. Tym straddled the slot, and below her the young man lolled, oblivious. She pulled the pocket cloth away from Little Tom’s key ring and ran her forefinger across each key until she found one that seemed the right size for the ankle shackles. She thrust it into the slot and turned. No good. The next key was the same size, she tried again and was rewarded with a satisfying steel snap. The ankle cover slid away and she released his other leg with the same key.

The chorus of shouts and whimpers was becoming overwhelming even to Tym’s deafened ears. She hopped to the next hold, where she found a middle-aged red-legger, an overweight Rafer whom she did not recognize—a cook, or some other campman, certainly not a swimmer or hunter. She pressed the key into his eager hand.

She cupped her hands over his ear. “Unlock them all,” she shouted in the Rafer tongue. “The land people first, then the swimmers, then the scuba breathers.” She watched his rolling eyes and wondered if he could act responsibly on the distinction. When he sat forward and unlocked his own cuffs, Tym decided she would have to surrender the matter to him. One person could only do so much.

The unconscious Fungus Person, unaccountably honored with a Rafer skin painting, would be her responsibility. She placed a foot in the rising water on either side of his chest, positioned the base of each of her palms into his armpits and pushed until his back rose against the rough wood that had been the ceiling before the capsize. Tym was breathing heavily now, the air growing thin of oxygen.

She kneeled, placed her shoulder against the stranger’s abdomen, and heaved him up. When she was upright, she curled an arm around his right leg, letting the other dangle down her back, and began the awkward stagger, slot divider by slot divider, back toward the dim light of freedom.

The Lucia’s upturned bow point dipped beneath the choppy sea. It went much quicker than Tym had imagined it would. Suddenly, from her standpoint on the wide beach of Dunkin Island, there was nothing but the broad expanse of furiously shifting water under a depressing gray sky.

Tym was immobile as she watched from the beach, every arm and leg joint screaming with the pain of overexertion. Alternately, she tried to envision the scramble of slaves in the Lucia’s hold and she tried to forget. She could do no more. Her head lay on the rising and falling belly of the rescued Fungus Person, her legs lapped by the surge and ebb of the sea. Pictures of the horror flashed into her mind, and she drove them away again.

Surge and ebb. She smiled with satisfaction at her cruel use of the tosser disk; she sobered again at the realization of the tormented deaths happening just now, beyond the reach of her depleted body.

She stared up at the swirl of gray clouds. Again and again she replayed in her mind the scene with Little Tom. The violent capsize, bashing into the wall, the floor exploding and the avalanche of metal ballast bars. Tym pictured herself clawing the bars away, looking for the shackle key. The bars of battered metal she threw aside. And then she remembered the odd detail she had mentally filed away for calmer times: those bars.

She had supposed the ship’s ballast would be lead, an extremely heavy and common metal. Naturally. But these tons of metal bars had been tossed about, bashed through decking, in a way that no shipbuilder would imagine in the worst of nightmares. The bars were scarred and twisted and beaten, and underneath their dull black surface paint was the unmistakable glint of gold.