The Dream Compass [Book 1 of The Merquan Chronicle] (17 page)

If Takk found the conversation irritating, Pec-Pec had a distraction of his own. His eyes habitually wandered to a canyon in the western distance. Its walls were reddish rock, perhaps painted more red than usual by the falling sun. There was a scattering of scrubby trees, which grew thicker and larger at the rims of the canyon, and the narrow lake at its bottom was a sheet of blue glass. Pec-Pec was experiencing a new emotion: dread. He reached into his backpack, bunched several sunflower seeds into his fingers, and popped them into his mouth.

“Rosenthal Webb is over his fury now,” Takk murmured. “We spoke this morning. Even asked how my lip was healing.”

“Ah, yes.”

“He tells me,” said Takk, taking on an accusing tone, “that he gullies not this new land, but knowledge of it comes to him as if by magic. He says foreign ideas jump into his head out of nowhere—people to contact, direction of travel, that sort of thing. He says some new bugger has taken residence in his heart, a new kind of compass, one with no north or south. A dream compass vaning him across unknown territory.”

Pec-Pec looked up at him with wide-open eyes, inviting Takk to continue.

“I did not have to ask who this was—what person could possibly enter another man’s mind, suggest that he do things he might not normally…”

“Ah,” said the magic man. “Well. I am thinking that you deserve to know some of these things. Of course—you are not here merely by your own choice. Not you, or the others. You have been lured and dangled for things more important, yes. Yet this also is the world as it is, and you are playing your part in it, the only part you can possibly have. Stop and think: What man, really, can look down at his boots and say they are standing precisely where he wants them to be? Hmm?

“You worry about a few friends in trouble, you have small and private motives; I have a foreknowing—the purpose here is the undoing of a large evil. But we are making danger—there are no guarantees. Any of us could die.”

Webb appeared on the outcropping. He was bare chested, showing the silvery pink scars mottling his right forearm and chest. The gray revolutionary sullenly lifted field glasses to his eyes with both hands.

“Hoy, Webb,” Takk cried, “how does she look? Has Tha’Enton returned from the scout run?”

Webb lowered his glasses slowly. His eyes were rimmed in red, and his face, covered in ragged new beard, looked tired.

“Ya. The Rafer is back from running the canyon rims.” The old revolutionary somberly limped off of the outcropping, and when he returned he was hefting one of the cartons that had been stacked near the llama hitch. He threw the case to the ground, a rough handling that made Takk twitch.

The revolutionary tore the top open and pulled out a six-inch steel cylinder. “This is the charge,” he said. “The blaster seal—I keep those in a separate carton—ya fit over one end. Then”—he rapped on the side of the hand bomb—”any hard impact will set her off. Dynamite.”

“Couple hunnerd of those,” Takk said cheerfully, “would clear any canyon, ya?”

Webb was looking even older. “No. They’re useless.”

“What!” Takk was on his feet. “We hauled ‘em a week across the mountains!”

“And afore that,” Webb noted, “I hauled ‘em across the continent. But Tha’Enton has done a thorough scouting, and we have a problem. If the Monitor is in the canyon, there’s no way to tell where—not a structure to be seen, nothing to hit with a banger.”

“No buildings? It must be the wrong canyon,” Takk said. “Is the ‘dream compass’ a little off, ey?”

“It’s the right canyon. There’s a turbine, protected by a net, under a waterfall. She’s got to be turning electricity, which means humans are about down there somewhere.”

“We’ll blow the turbine then.”

“That might help, but it’d be a minor damage. And with that done, the bird people would hack us to spaghetti sauce. The birders, they’re the guards what can fly, half a hunnerd of ‘em round top of the canyon, the Rafer says.” Webb flipped the cylinder in his hand and caught it by the opposite end. “And with these pokers to attack with, well, ya’d have to score a direct hit on one of the fliers to do any good.”

“Fliers,” Takk said, “not humans, ya mean?”

“Yes. Humans. On wing.”

“Rifles would have worked nicely.”

“Mayhap. But then, how would I have known what we were walking into?”

Pec-Pec glared up at the two from the chessboard. “This banger talk makes my gut turn,” the magic man said. “Those bangers, all bangers, are a rot.” He waggled a finger toward the chessmen. “The game. Your move now, half an hour.”

Takk returned to his side of the board, folding his legs in front of him. “We go north now, I guess?”

Pec-Pec sighed and Webb about-faced and stalked off toward camp. “You still are determined to follow your penis to Blue Hole. But I tell you, I have a foreknowin’ that your Nora Londi is not there, she is down in that canyon where the fliers swarm.”

“But the fliers—ya didn’t foreknow them too good, did ya?”

“Hmmph. I will go down into the canyon myself tomorrow. Then we will see what next.”

Takk examined the chessboard anew in the dimming light, then looked up to meet Pec-Pec’s eyes. “I have just realized…” Takk said.

“Oh?”

“I can checkmate you in two moves,” the Northlander said, scratching under his beard.

“Oh, that. I was hoping you wouldn’t see.”

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Nothing.

The two Inspectors stood perplexed in the empty compound outside Cred Faiging’s lab house. They huffed short-lived little vapor clouds into the morning air and strode nervously into the clay yard.

There was supposed to be a battalion of Government men dispersed across the installation. Machine guns, grenades. The factories and lab surrounded. Garage No. 2, nearer the fence, stood silent and closed.

Kim pushed through the door and down the steps, Faiging lingering behind. “Sorry, fellas,” she said grinning. “Guess I messed up. I’d heard a noise in the back of one of yer trucks. Figured it to be a rat or somethin’, so I had the whole garage gassed with the trucks in ‘er. Best way to exterminate—most thorough.”

The shorter of the two Inspectors, the one with one continuous eyebrow, turned to confront her.

“You knew we were coming,” he said, his outrage welling up. “You expected us and killed thirty men!”

Kim was swinging her sawed-off shotgun at her right side. “An’ I guess you guys was really gonna serve us tea and cookies, right? Is that what the orders mean when they say ‘Eliminate all surplus personnel’? Dat mean pin bibs on us an’ serve tea?”

The taller Inspector adjusted his thick glasses, hands starting to tremble. “What … where did you ever hear … something like that?”

Faiging had his arms crossed, a hand in each armpit to keep them warm. In a short jab, he pointed to the lab roof and tucked the hand back in. Perched above them was an odd electrical structure, looking like a giant wire mesh teacup, several feet across.

“Satellite dish,” the inventor said, shivering now. He sounded like a child proud of an exquisite toy. “Had it for years. Printer hidden in the lab copies out any of the Monitor’s dispatches. You gully satellites?”

“They’ll figure it out,” said One-Eyebrow, gaping upward. “They’ll know what you’ve done.”

“Oh, I dunno,” Faiging said. “We can truck everything down the road a hunnerd miles, blow it up. Look like the revolutionaries done it. I’m making a new keyboard now, can send out some kinda message. I dunno yet. Somethin’.” He was backing up now.

Kim was still swinging the shotgun, and her brow pinched into an exasperated expression. “Both ya’lls flies are hanging open!”

When the two Inspectors looked down, she pulled off two rapid shots. She didn’t have to look into their eyes.

Faiging forced himself to look at the steaming wounds. His ears were ringing like high-pitched sirens. “Kim, you’re so dramatic.”

“We done it, Boss. You ain’t happy?”

“We bought a little time, is all.”

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It was this night we started the Plan, and this small army I have shouldered into the Great Mountains is bedding weary. But it feels quite balls-out, and I laugh now—hunkering on this ridgetop a short shot from the center of Government, our scouts say, and preparing attack. And writing, as I have done since childhood, but writing without fear.

Hak! I am a tourist in my own life. All past is a closed book thrown on the fire. Tomorrow, perhaps all we have of the future, I cannot write yet.

In the day, this is the brightest place ever seen—we are so much closer to the sun, I suppose, so up these rocks. It is a happy blindliness, making battle and death seem quite impossible.

A qualmy commander would turn back now, considering what an odd root bag our forces make. How the old man Rosenthal Webb limped out this far, I dunno. His sidekick Gregory is a bright enough muscler, and he calls the gray-head sometimes Old Man Windmill, which Gregory swears has nothing to do with farting. There’s a Rafer with us, out adark swinging in the trees now, I suppose. He develops a fondness for Webb’s mind, for Pec-Pec’s mind, and the flesh of all others—and I swear that I mean that not sexual.

Pec-Pec is quite a salamander. He tells an odd story on being the father of all Rafers, and his father being some kind of god to them. So you can see why he’s not one to try to gully to the bottom, lest you end up with a headache. I like to think of such mouthings as balderdash, but you cannot be sure with Pec-Pec. I have seen directly that the man takes license with reality, with physical things.

And speaking of odd things, I have further observations about the llamas, those beasts that we made hire of, the ones that can talk, in our tongue, clear as mountain sky. They haven’t a memory, I have noticed—they never gully much from days back. But they do think and talk. They do talk.

I say to one llama, Salvadore, “With so little memory, how do you know who you are one day to the next?”

And he stutters something like, “We live in packs. We talk around what we know … keep collective knowing floating among us. If one llama takes a roguish mind, the rest of us can conspire to take care what he hears—edit his memory—until his mind is right again.”

That, of course, is leaving out all of Salvadore’s hooms and grunts and spits. Took him an hour to get that much clear. But I put back to him, “What if once the single llama is right and the many are wrong?” And he replies, “That’s never happened—not that any of us can remember.”

And then it was that I decided to script some more, even not knowing what I would do with this. That’s what writing is, I say: a permanent memory. No wonder the Government, whatever that is, doesn’t like it.

Our band is a mite hang-faced at my decision to leave the hand bombs behind. But I insist they will not work here. We must draw out the enemy, lure him with our vulnerability. The bombs would only reach a soldier or two, not the beast we seek.

Even the half-witted Inspector feels the tension. We gagged him today to keep him from scream-singing into the canyons for the pleasure of the echoes.

For now, our task is reconnaissance. Pec-Pec says he is exploring the valley yonder in his mind-float, a buggabee that I will never understand. The Rafer Tha’Enton (if his ankle is not too swollen—I say there’s bad damage, and he ignores it) will continue to run the canyon rim to scout upper lookouts and defenses.

We are hoping that the stronghold has depended mostly on its remoteness for defense—which is a factor we have only been able to conquer with the muscle of llamas and Pec-Pec’s astounding mental reach, however it works, to steer us in the right direction. If there are legions defending the canyon, we will die. But if the Government has such forces in this wilderness, they might be of more regular use at the northward prison mine, Blue Hole, to be called down here only for some nasty bellyganger.

Well, we move in the next couple of days, and that’s good, because my boots are shredding and I could use a bath. That flat lake, I can feel it now.

—Commander Anton Takk

Okay, I could not sleep. I wrote another lie: I am really the commander of nothing, and I put it down here on the worry that Webb might read this someday and hammer my lip again.

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When Nora Londi entered the massive dim room housing the thinker boxes, Loo and the llama Diego were working at the semicircular console in the center. The cool dryness was beginning to gnaw at her bones. It may be good for the machines, she thought to herself, but this ain’t fit for humans—the Monitor, maybe, but not humans.

She folded her arms across her chest and waited for her eyes to adjust to the dark. She found the structure of the cavern and the labyrinth of rooms and passageways confounding. The Monitor claimed that the ancients had carved them out of the solid rock, but that was preposterous. Still, the interior seemed humanly deliberate sometimes, nothing like the haphazard river caves she knew from eastward. But the farther west you go, Londi thought, the less things make sense.

As she paced down a passageway, amid the humming thinker boxes and their odd acrid odor, Londi found her eyes drawn to the ceiling. It was dark, and the ceiling was high, but there appeared to be a gridwork of girders doming the room.

Loo’s fingers were clattering over a keyboard on the counter, and she and Diego were exchanging an incomprehensible babble in that language that was tailor-made for the tongueless little woman. The screen glowed green as script moved across it. Londi decided not to speak, wondering if these passive machines could really hurtle the giant Bullet into the air, wondering what the words on the screen meant. Londi could not remember having wanted to read before.

And she had never known quite this sense of helplessness and despair, for the Monitor had put it to her quite bluntly: She was to become one of his breeding machines, a star player in his human kennel, with proceedings to begin the next day. Booger, is that what the village down by the beach was? A breeding pen?