The Dream Compass [Book 1 of The Merquan Chronicle] (18 page)

Her eyes fell to Loo’s forearms, which shone green in the machine’s light like some velvety fabric. Londi wanted to touch the dark skin. She wondered if Loo had ever borne a child.

Loo rapped the llama on the snout, apparently a signal for him to stop talking. Diego recoiled with a scraping of hooves but obeyed. Shoving the keyboard aside, Loo pulled down a bulb-shaped microphone on its bendable stand. She spoke into it, “Hoo-ooooma. Oonga-hoor…” And the writing continued to spill across the screen, faster than ever. She pointed the microphone at Diego, who added his own words. When the script continued, the llama snorted gleefully at his contribution.

Diego turned, noticing Londi for the first time. “Oh, hooma, hello.”

“Hello,” she replied. “Learning to fly the sky machine? Or fire the big Bullet?”

Loo hooted a protest, and Diego answered, “No. She showing … diary in machine memory. Hoom.”

“She’ll still skin ya when the time’s right.”

Loo snarled and whirled around in her chair, firing a stream of knife-edged words. Diego translated cautiously: “Dooma, oom. She saying you … built backwards, too large, too—hoom—not smart. Cow in a cattle pen….”

Londi was marching toward the passage to the outdoors, her face aflame, and didn’t hear the last of it. A succession of violent images paraded through her mind—a knife blade arcing through the air, a log chain whistling in a circle over her head, the crunch of a bone under her hands.

Her biceps tensed and eased with each memory.

She stopped at one of the thinker boxes and pounded its black metal hood. Loo and Diego had returned to their work and ignored the echoing crunch. An electrical cord ran from the back of the newly dented machine casing down to the floor, and Londi gave it a furious yank. It came free of the floor easily, the machine’s lights died, and Londi studied the pronged plug at the cord’s end. It looked like the bones of a severed wrist, she decided.

Outside, the sun was low in the west. Londi was surveying the cooling canyon spread before her when a peculiar, calming sensation crept through her body, slowly, from the base of her neck to her ankles, like the most powerful of barroom potions.

She glanced about the ledge and saw that she was alone. She loosed the leather tie holding her hair back and rubbed her scalp nervously with both hands. It was the feeling of swimming nude in a cold stream, and of being watched—maybe not exactly watched, but with someone, close, embracing, and even closer than that. Not carnal, but sexual nevertheless.

When panic rose in her chest, it subsided just as quickly, forcibly eased by this new presence. And then came the strangely accented voice in her head—in her head—resounding: I am a friend, Nora Londi, do not be afraid. Your memory is now mine, too. Through you, I have seen the big Bullet. Thank you. I have seen the Bullet. Now let us examine the village.

Londi stepped onto the rocky trail and carried Pec-Pec in her mind down the canyon wall.

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The crystals in the rock above the Monitor’s oval bed began to glow faintly. His meaty white hand groped the bedside table until he found the mirrored sunglasses, and when he slipped them on, a relieved sigh gurgled up his throat. Outside, he knew, dawn was spilling into the canyon and seeping ever so dimly down the yards of rock corridor around several turns and into his chamber to burn at his sensitive eyes.

Uhhh.

Again his hand thumped across the table until he found the flask. He uncapped it with the flick of a thumb and turned it up against his lips. The thick syrup of distilled cactus oozed down his tongue, sour and sugary at the same time. He sat up with a grunt.

The Monitor had not slept well. A vague unease had kept his mind churning, searching for answers to the unanswerable. And he was beginning to admit that it was time to move headquarters—a notion that nudged him even closer to depression.

But there were immediate matters, too. He strode stiffly to his desk and glared down at the printouts stacked on their open folder. The top dispatch was the source of his current distress:

Code: A10-08 Yachette

Destination: Monitor/Eyes only

Routing: SATline/Scramble

Origin: Pipbury Station wireless/Linex 64

Message: Two Inspection vehicles on Monitor assignment destroyed in pass near Fontana. Thirty-two dead. Appears work of revolutionaries.

The Monitor had tried for two hours the day before to raise Pipbury Station, but the bumpkins seemed to have left their wireless unattended. He gulped again from his flask. His legs were warming now, his nerves snapping to life.

Something was amiss here. The revolutionaries had not even attempted such an attack for a dozen years or more. They seemed to have sagged into some sorry inertia, running such pathetic little missions that they were hardly worth persuing anymore. But as soon as the Monitor tried to have Cred Faiging picked up, the Security team was massacred. Cred Faiging, the genius of invention. The mechanical genius. The electronic genius.

The Monitor flicked on his computer terminal and squinted behind his sunglasses until his eyes adjusted to the light. He pecked in the code, destination, routing, and origin necessary to communicate with New Chicago Central Wireless—they would be in the office by now.

Message: Trying to raise Pipbury Station. Please check status.

Message: Pipbury Station in sporadic operation for last two months. Shipment of new receiver caroms is pending approval of capital purchase request.

Message: Confirm Pipbury Station transmission to me at 17:00 yesterday your time, SATline/Scrambled routing, Code A10-08 “Yachette.”

Message: Logs show no such transmission relayed through New Chicago Central Wireless.”

No such transmission? All transmissions, scrambled or otherwise, were relayed through Central Wireless. Unless someone had discovered how to tap into the satellite.

So. Cred Faiging was playing games—that was the best guess. Cred Faiging was not going to cooperate.

Cred Faiging would be dealt with later today. Then he would begin arrangements to move headquarters. But now…

The Monitor punched two buttons, and a record of his communication with Central Wireless clattered out of the printer. Then he cleared the computer screen and called up a program titled “Warhead Delivery Systems Launch Sequence.”

He smiled, and a teardrop of saliva formed at the left corner of his mouth. There were only two parameter blanks left in the program, and he filled them in:

Diagnostic status: Override.

Launch timer: 1 hour.

An hour. Mmm. Time enough to hop down to the beach and watch the bullet soar.

He stored the program and imagined the wave of orders gushing into the Bullet—all the minutiae of trajectory, multiple warhead deployment, timing.

“Take that, Europe,” he murmured at the blank screen.

He heard a distant rumbling, and he turned an ear toward the door. Not his Bullet, certainly not this soon. The noise was rhythmic, oddly lyrical. It sounded like music.

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When Tha’Enton descended onto the beach he spat on his hands and rubbed them in the sand, hoping the sticky, browning bloodstains on his skin would scour away. One lookout on the north rim of the canyon would not be causing trouble when the sun came up this morning. But blood-sticky fingers would not do for a musician’s virtuoso performance.

Every motion seemed painfully, epically more difficult than it needed to be. His ankle throbbed, and his mind was blistered with the demands of honor.

The llama Pinta, who did not speak any tongue that the Defender was familiar with, had handled the excruciating climb down the cliff in expert silence. He admired the beast. But now she seemed restless, and the hundreds of ebony sticks suspended in the frame strapped to her back tinkled with her nervousness.

He laid a hand on the Pa as it wobbled over the llama’s shoulders, partly for support and partly to quiet the instrument. The Defender pointed gruffly to the black stretch of silent lake, and Pinta obediently began the mushy trek across the 100 yards of sand. It was a soothing walk, relatively, for the bearded warrior’s damaged ankle—quite a relief from the stony mountainside. It is only pain, he told himself, just a feeling, something like tasting a sour fruit. Tha’Enton found himself thinking of the sea of pillows blanketing one of the Tan-Tan tents, and the Pleasure-Givers, and the incense … and then he forced his mind away from the homeland.

A narrow strip of sky along the eastern horizon had turned turquoise. Instinctively, Tha’Enton searched the still-black dome above for the Orion constellation, and when he found the Hunter’s three-star belt, he murmured the Defender’s prayer, one line for each star:

“Honor the enemy with death,

Honor the weapon with a sure toss and a warm home,

Honor the body with bravery.”

The air whispered faintly of sea life, reminding him of the Southland marshes. At the edge of the wet sand, Tha’Enton set up the Pa. The lake edge rustled with minuscule wave action, and the Defender-Sounder decided that would be the First Sound, the foundation on which the coming musical composition would be built.

He had purposely descended the canyon wall just west of the cliff-side village. He positioned the Pa so that he faced east, the view taking in the cluster of mud and rock homes just above the sand, the cliff trails, the long finger of beach and the distant waterfall gushing into the turbine. Tha’Enton heaved his weight onto each of the Pa’s three legs until they were firmly planted in the hard undersand. Then he began the tedious task of unclamping each set of 718 bones so that they teetered freely on the quarter-sphere rack, ready to be twittered between the musician’s fingers.

That done, the musician untied his waist-skin and tucked it under one of Pinta’s backstraps. Naked and ready. His only adornments, ironically, were functions of fighting: the quiver over his shoulder, a knife strapped to each calf, and a burnished brass crotchplate. If his will not to draw blood was to be tested—tempted—then it should be a real test, he reasoned, with all of the tools of war at hand.

Either he would be warmed soon by the sun or he would be dead; whichever, he would have no need for skins. The Defender swatted Pinta on the rump and shoved her toward the cover of the boulders at the far side of the beach.

Of course, the music started with nature, the reproving click-click of the lake waves. The waterfall layered on a cool, seamless hoosh, and a family of desert toads somewhere was awakening to the growing light with cree-dit, cree-dit, cree-dit. Tha’Enton began his contribution with the most subtle of low tones, rattling imperceptibly the thickest, longest Pa sticks along the bottom row of the rack.

The symphony was ten minutes old before anyone seemed to notice. A man appeared on the sand with a toddler in tow. They approached cautiously, mouths agape. Both were naked, deeply and evenly tanned, and both had prodigious bellies that waddled as they crept forward. They were dark, yet their features were obviously those of the Fungus People, Tha’Enton decided.

He felt his chest ease with relief: Could these sorry specimens be the sort of beings running such a putrid and murderous Government? It takes no kind of warrior to pull the trigger of a gun, or to throw the hand bombs…. And then he banished the thought, for he had to concentrate on the music. All else would fall in place—it was the word of Pec-Pec, son of Rutherford Cross, and that was all he needed to know. Music was all that was required of Tha’Enton today, orchestrating a stunning musical piece, and he must not sway from that duty. He began to blend in a slightly higher toned row of bones.

The Fungus Man squatted on the beach, puzzled and enthralled, his scrotum a defeated balloon sagging onto the wet sand. His son mimicked the posture, ill equipped for the latter effect, and both gawked innocently, unaware of Tha’Enton’s working title: Song of Cataclysm.

The sky brightened and more villagers appeared out of the rising mist. The Sounder’s hands danced across the instrument, his Pa tones rose, and the rhythms grew confoundingly complex.

In the corner of Tha’Enton’s vision there appeared a tiny pair of wings far above at the canyon rim. Then another, and yet another, until the newly blue sky was aswarm with distant bird people, slowly circling, descending. In the morning light, Tha’Enton began to sweat.

A shrill cry echoed down from the milling flock, apparently the leader, sounding like an enraged bayou egret: Kaioonga, oom, kaim-oon. And the Sounder harumphed at such an addition to his orchestration. The falling swarm reminded him of being hit by a Flinger’s weighted hunting net, but again he dispensed of the thought quickly.

When the music rose to crashing waves of sound, with Tha’Enton flinging showers of sweat from his soggy braids and beard, a figure appeared at the mouth of a cave high up the canyon wall. The muscley, porcelain white body writhed in a spasm of exertion; seconds later arrived the sound of the snarling bellow he had heaved down the slope.

The villagers watching the performance gasped and gurgled in unison and fanned out frantically across the sand toward their homes, lest they draw the Monitor’s wrath. The bull monster started his tedious descent, an astonishing combination of sprints, frog leaps, and skittery slides down gravel banks.

A half hour later, just short of the beach, the Monitor halted on top of one of the adobe huts and appeared to be shuffling gear about and hollering down into the house. A large llama appeared through the hatchway, and then a large woman, both having a painful time adjusting to the light. The Monitor furiously lashed Nora Londi’s hands behind her back and shoved her off the mud hut. She hit the beach hard and awkwardly, belly first—”Hoo!”—and squirmed to free her face from the sand. Anticipating similar treatment, the llama Diego dived from the rooftop—a dangerous fall, but better done under one’s own control. He landed on the beach with a graceful running motion and a shock-absorbing bending at the knees.