Against the Day (84 page)

Gaspereaux had a look. “Oh. Local sandfleas.
Always coming round to see what’s what whenever a new ship pulls in.”

   
“What
are you talking about? Whatever just went by was the size of a camel.”

Gaspereaux shrugged. “Down here they
are known as
chong pir
,
big
lice. Since the first Venetians arrived, these creatures, following a diet
exclusively of human blood, have grown over the generations larger, more
intelligent, one ventures to say more resourceful. Feeding upon the host is no
longer a matter as simple as mandibular assault but has evolved into a
conscious negotiation, if not indeed a virtual exchange of views—”

“People down here talk to giant
fleas?” inquired Darby with his accustomed directness.

“Indeed. Usually in a dialect of
ancient Uyghur, though, owing to the mouth structure unique to
Pulex
,
one finds certain difficulties with
phonology, notably the voiced interdental fricative—”

   
“Yes
. . .
oh, attendant? Over here? Time for
the hose again?”

“Nonetheless, lad, a useful phrase or
two might prove handy in the event of an encounter.”

Darby patted the skeleton rig beneath
his left lapel and moved his eyebrows up and down meaningfully.

“Afraid not,” Gaspereaux objected,
“that’d be pulicide. Covered down here by the same felony statutes that apply
up there to homicide.”

Nevertheless Darby kept his Browning
close by him as, with mixed feelings of anticipation and terror, the boys
buckled on their Hypops gear and set out on that evening’s recreational visit
to Nuovo Rialto. Moving through the sand took some getting used to, especially
the lengths of time needed to perform even the simplest of motor tasks, but
soon had resolved to a leisurely andante, with a ~siblance, owing to the
graininess of the medium, as much felt as heard.

Screaming came from different
directions, and blood could be observed in jagged threedimensional blobs,
usually in the vicinity of taverns and other low resorts.

Had it not been for an overheard
scrap of conversation, Chick would have been unaware of another motive, perhaps
the frigate’s real one, for which Shambhala might be serving only as a pretext.
In the Sandman Saloon, he

had fallen into conversation with Leonard and Lyle, a couple
of oil prospectors headed for their next likely field of endeavor.

“Yehp we was into it over here well
before the Swedes got in, been wildcattin’ all over
. . . .
”

“Sodom and Gomorrah will just be a
Sundayschool picnic in comparison to this place.”

   
“How’s
that?”

   
“Oh,
we’re headed for the Holy Land.”

   
“Or
unholy, if you consider the Scriptures.”

It seemed that one night in Baku, in
a waterfront
teke
or
hasheesh
den, as if by supernatural direction, a drifter from the States with nothing to
gamble but a pocket Bible had lost it to Lyle, in front of whose face the Good
Book had fallen open to Genesis 14:10 and the phrase “the Vale of Siddim was
full of slimepits.”

“Dead Sea area, ‘slimepit’ being King
James English for bituminous deposit,” Leonard explained.

“It was like a light come on. Fact,
we run to the door thinkin it was some kind of surprise gas burnoff outside.
No, it was the Lord inviting our attention down to those onetime honkytonk
cities of the plain which are fixin to be the next damn Spindletop, and you can
bet the farm on that.”

“Bigger’n that gusher up to Groznyi
they couldn’t figure how to cap,” Leonard declared.

“So what are you doing here instead
of there?” inquired the blunt Darby Suckling.

“Getting a stake together basically.
Lots of quick cash to be had out here, no lengthy routines nor forms to fill
out, if you get our drift.”

“There’s oil out here?” inquired
Chick, though unable to prevent from creeping into his voice a faint note of
disingenuousness.

The two wildcatters guffawed at
length and bought the boys another round of the local aryq before Lyle replied,
“Take a look down the hold of that frigate you come in on, tell us if you don’t
find some rods and tubing and calyx bits and all.”

“Hell, we ought to know that
prospector look by now, even with some of those boys’s faces already familiar
from Baku.”

Darby found this amusing, one more
bit of evidence proving how little adults could be trusted. “This whole
Shambhala story of theirs is just a pretext, then.”

“Oh the place is probably real,”
Leonard shrugged. “But I’d bet if your Captain sailed right into it, he might
say
ässalamu äläykum
on his way through, but he’d have his eye more
likely on that next anticline.”

“This
is distressing,” Randolph muttered. “Once again we are being used

to further someone’s hidden plans.”

Chick noticed the two oil gypsies
exchanging a look. “What does occur to us all of a sudden,” Lyle hitching his
chair closer to the table and lowering his voice, “for somebody on that frigate
is bound to be keeping logbooks of every bituminous possibility they come
across out in these strata—locations, depths, estimated
volumes—there’s no telling what some folks’d be willing to pay for
jealously guarded information like that.”

“Dismiss the thought,” protested
Lindsay from a certain
equine altitude,
“for it would make us no better
than common thieves.”

“If the price was high enough,
however,” mused Randolph, “it would surely make us extraordinary thieves.”

It had been a peculiar liberty
weekend in Nuovo Rialto. The ship happened to have tied up at a quay belonging
to an aryq shipper, along which many sailors were discovered each morning
semiparalyzed, having got no further in their pursuit of recreation, their
Hypops units humming on in Dormant mode. A number of the crew reported being
waylaid by sandfleas, the queues at sick bay each morning running down
passageways and ladders well into the Viscosity spaces. Some, apparently having
enjoyed the accostments, didn’t report them at all. The quarterdeck witnessed
scenes of vituperation, smuggling attempts failed and successful, romantic
melodrama as the more adventurous crew members discovered the complex allure of
VenetoUyghur women, who were a byword of emotional volatility throughout the
Subdesertine Service. When the time came at last to single up all lines, some 2
percent of the crew, about average as these things went, had announced plans to
stay behind and get married. Captain Toadflax took this with the equanimity of
a longtime trooper in the region, figuring he’d get most of them back when he
came through town again at the end of the cruise. “Marriage or undersand duty,”
shaking his head as at some cosmic sadness. “What a choice!”

As H.M.S.F.
Saksaul
merrily
droned along beneath the desert, one paleoVenetian oasis to the
next—Marco Querini, Terrenascondite, Pozzo San Vito—her crew
continued to pretend that prospecting for oil was the furthest thing from their
thoughts. Randolph before long was obsessed, recklessly so, by the
petrogeological logbooks Lyle and Leonard had mentioned, all closely held, as
far as he knew, along with the detailed mission documents, inside Captain
Toadflax’s cabin safe. In his increasingly unbalanced state, Randolph sought
Darby Suckling’s advice.

   
“As
Legal Officer,” Darby said, “I’m not sure how much loyalty we owe

them, especially when they’re keeping so much from us.
Myself, I’d favor the peterman option—ain’t the safe built Counterfly
can’t blow, see him.” Thus, although he was not, as later alleged, actually
planning to steal, or even unauthorizedly scrutinize, the documents, it was an
awkward moment when Q. Zane Toadflax entered his cabin one midwatch to find
Randolph gazing at the safe, with a number of dynamite sticks and detonators on
his person.

From then until the boys’ departure,
there were mastersatarms posted outside Toadflax’s cabin round the clock. When
at last they surfaced near the compound where
Inconvenience
was moored,
the farewells were notable for their economy.

The boys returned to the
Inconvenience
to find the pantries depleted, decks unattended to, and the Gurkhas all
vanished—
Called away on a matter of some urgency,
according to the
note left in Randolph’s cabin—leaving the security of the vessel entirely
to Pugnax. Though the sentiments of fawning gratitude exhibited now and then by
specimens of his race had been seldom observed in Pugnax, today he was clearly
overjoyed to see the boys again. “Rr rrrff rf rrr rrfff rr rrff rr rrr rrffrf
rf!” he exclaimed, which the boys understood to mean “I haven’t had two blessed
hours’ sleep since you fellows left!” Miles headed directly for the galley, and
before he knew it, Pugnax was lying before a sumptuous “spread ” which included
Consommé Imperial, Timbales de Suprêmes de Volailles, Gigot Grillé à la Sauce
Piquante, and aubergines à la Sauce Mousseline. The winecellar had been
nonetoodiscreetly ransacked by the Gurkhas, but Miles was able to locate a ’00
PouillyFuissé and a ’98 Graves which met Pugnax’s approval, and he fell to and,
presently, asleep.

That evening
as the
Inconvenience
soared
above the vast and
silent desert, Chick and Darby strolled the weather decks, gazing down at
circular wavefronts in the sand, revealed by the low angle of the setting sun,
flowing away to the limits of this unknown world. Miles joined them and was
soon off on one of his extratemporal excursions.

“Whatever is to happen,” he reported
upon his return, “will begin out here, with an engagement of cavalry on a scale
no one living has ever seen, and perhaps no one dead either, an inundation of
horse, spanning these horizons, their flanks struck an unearthly green,
stormlit, relentless, undwindling, arisen boiling from the very substance of
desert and steppe. And all that incarnation and slaughter will transpire in
silence, all across this great planetary killingfloor, absorbing wind, steel,
hooves upon and against earth,

massed clamor of horses, cries of
men. Millions of souls will arrive and depart. Perhaps news of it will take
years to reach anyone who might understand what it meant
. . . .
”

“I’m not so sure Darby and I haven’t
seen something like it already,” mused Chick, recalling their brief though
unpleasant experience in the “timechamber” of Dr. Zoot. But its meaning, even
as simple prophecy, was as obscure to them now as then.

Somewhere out past ~Oasi Benedetto
Querini, H.M.S.F.
Saksaul
came to grief. Survivors were few, accounts
sketchy and inconsistent. The first salvo came from nowhere, precisely aimed,
earsplitting, sending the bridge into a fearful cataplexy. Operators sat
dumbstruck before their viewing screens, trying to rescale the images before
them, switching in every combination of enhancement and filtering circuitry they
could think of in an effort to find their invisible attackers, who appeared to
be using a frequencyshifting device of some power and sophistication, able to
mask an entire undersand fighting vessel from all known viewing equipment.

The copy of the Sfinciuno Itinerary
which the Chums in their innocence had brought aboard had led H.M.S.F.
Saksaul
into ambush and disaster.

   
“Who
are they?”

“German or Austrian, would be likely,
though one mustn’t rule out the Standard Oil, or the Nobel brothers.
Gaspereaux, we are in a desperate state. The moment for which you came aboard
has arrived. Get to the shaftalley and put on the Hypops gear you find in the
locker there along with a canteen of water, the oasis maps, and some meat
lozenges. Make your way to the surface, get back to England at all cost. They
must be told in Whitehall that the balloon is up.”

   
“But
you’ll need all the men you can—”

   
“Go!
find someone in the F.O. intelligence section. It is our only hope!”

   
“Under
protest, Captain.”

“Complain to the Admiralty. If
 
I’m still alive, you can have me up on
charges.”

As days passed out here in this great
ambiguity of Time and Space, it would not be long at all before Gaspereaux was
back in London, endeavoring to reach the legendary Captain, now Inspector,
Sands, soon to be known to Whitehall—as well as to readers of the
Daily
Mail
—as “Sands of Inner Asia.”

Meanwhile, for days, weeks in some
places, the battles of the Taklamakan War were raging. The earth trembled. Now
and then a subdesertine craft would suddenly break the surface with no warning,
damaged mortally, its crew dead or dying
. .
.
petroleum deposits far underground were attacked, lakes of the stuff
would appear overnight and great pillars of fire would as

cend to the sky. From Kashgar to
Urumchi, the bazaars were full of weapons, breathing units, ship fittings,
hardware nobody could identify, full of strange gauges and prisms and
electrical wiring which later proved to be from Quaternionray weapons, which
all the Powers had deployed. These now fell into the hands of goatherders,
falconers, shamans, to be taken out into the emptiness, disassembled, studied,
converted to uses religious and practical, and eventually to change the history
of the WorldIsland beyond even the most unsound projections of those Powers who
imagined themselves somehow, at this late date, still competing for it.