The Dream Compass [Book 1 of The Merquan Chronicle] (7 page)

Loo bellowed three low-register hoots directed at the ceiling, and a rope ladder obediently fell from the hole above. She put the end of the ladder between her teeth, mounted the rungs, and as she climbed up she took the ladder with her.

There were murmurs from the other two llamas, nothing that Nora Londi understood.

“Where I come from the animals don’t talk—in English, anyway,” Londi said. “Maybe they’re not that smart.”

“Humans … talk.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Humans,” Diego said slowly, as if carefully selecting the words, “humans jabber, jabber, jabber. Other animals … less talk, more smart. You know, hooma … dogs?”

“I haven’t owned one for years,” Londi said, “but sure, I know what they are.”

“Many dogs … talk two tongues, hoom. Own dogs, not good.”

“What?”

“Own dogs, not good. Own llama, not good. Give llama a job, good. Own … not good.”

“Good god,” Londi muttered.

“Good god,” Diego responded. “Good food. Good morning. Would you like Indians in your ambulance?”

“You’re losing it, my friend.” Londi was growing more sure that the llama had been trained by rote, perhaps as a joke. Then again, maybe this was all a creation of the snake venom in her blood.

Diego tried again. “A thing to say, hooma … in morning. Good morning. Would you like Indians … would you like onions in your … omelet?”

“Oh. Ah, no thanks, sport.” Londi glanced around, but there was no food of any kind in the cell.

Diego lowered his head onto his paws and closed his eyes.

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Anton Takk could smell the rain from where he lay. A long, flimsy curtain covered a row of three windows against the far wall, and the muted light told him that night was falling. The only sounds were the steady dit-dit-dit against the glass and, from somewhere in the building, a lazy mechanical thunk, thunk, thunk that would continue for ten minutes, stop, and start again. A noisy well pump, he supposed.

Takk had thrown the quilt aside and lay naked under the single cool sheet, drifting in and out of daydream. A light flashed across the window, and Takk suddenly was fully awake. An engine growled in the parking lot—not a truck, Takk told himself, but something smaller, a jeep, or perhaps a passenger car if any could make it this far.

He pulled the sheet away and crept to the edge of the curtain, avoiding the dying light. A canvas-topped jeep was pulling to a stop beside Takk’s Supply truck. It was a Government jeep, but old and rusted enough to have been sold as surplus. Its headlights died, and two riders carrying bundles ran for the main house.

Someone would have to greet the first of the evening’s customers. Takk returned to the bed and walked across it on his knees to the sleeping figure on the other side. “Hey, Moberly,” he said, and he pushed at the shoulder. “Some new arrivals. Hey, I’d like to know who they are.”

There was a low groan and the figure rolled over. “I’m not Moberly,” came a man’s voice.

Takk sprang from the bed. He rapidly patted his hands over the dark surface of the dresser, knocking over an empty ale bottle, until he found the sheath of his hunting knife. He pulled a strap away from the handle and yanked out the blade.

“What are you doing here?”

“I am trying to sleep,” said the stranger.

“Donna move. I have a knife.”

“Yes,” said the voice in the dark. “It’s a beautiful instrument, carefully made—not a Government job at all. I was admiring it a while ago. You see, I am a friend.”

“No, not a friend,” said Takk, and he remembered the incident in his hotel room in New Chicago, where another man had claimed to be a friend.

Takk reached to the dresser again and found a striker match. He pulled the storm glass off of the dresser lamp and lit the wick. It was the torch juggler in his bed, the dark man with braided hair and thin mustache he had seen outside of the garage in New Chicago. Takk examined the door and, to his surprise, found its slide bolts still securely in place. Not only will I use room keys and bolts now, Takk told himself, but I’ll be sleeping with my knife.

“My name is Pec-Pec,” said the man, opening his large hands as if to prove them empty. The room began to smell of freshly ground coffee. “Did you know I’ve been following you? I get better at it all the time.”

“Yeah, I seen—a few times, at least,” he lied. “You’re a gypsie or something, right?”

Pec-Pec looked disappointed. “I am a magic man. I travel and perform—I would quite literally die if I stayed in one place. I am to keep an eye on you, and it is the perfect duty for me. I go everywhere.”

“Who says you must watch me, and why would a tourist such as me need watching?” Takk was pulling on his trousers while still gripping the knife. He tucked his wallet into the pants and zipped the fly closed. The pants hung loosely on his hips. These gut frights, he thought, are sucking my life away.

“Oh, just good people”—Pec-Pec waved a hand—”out there, everywhere you go, really. The Government would call them conspirators, and they would call themselves, well, the un-Government. They gave you money, I understand, a substantial sum. You would know more about them, I think, except that the little place you come from—” Pec-Pec shrugged.

“Well, ho! How many know this tale?”

Pec-Pec’s face furrowed with a frown. “Don’t shout at me! You are the one that sent the letter—three copies did you say?”

“How many know?”

“Dozens, maybe. I found just one copy—bought it at a flea market in South-of-the-Bend after it was read aloud at auction. A warehouser’s assistant had found it, was selling it as an amusement, a comedy. You can’t blame him for thinking it a fiction….”

“It’s all true—well, mostly, the nut of it is. Parts, anyway. If I had a way of helping Nora Londi, I would do that. I know where she is now—Blue Hole. Huh. No one returns.”

“But there is more, no?” Pec-Pec’s voice was growing scornful. “Perhaps there is a restless younger here, a lifetime log-camp boy who would like to see those sprawling sectors that the travelers tell of? And perhaps this younger thinks he is going to pound a Badger to settle a hard score, and he needs money to bolt with? Hoo, well. No one’s going to send money and maps for that, are they?”

Takk was reddening even more as he buttoned his shirt. “Why don’t you get your own damned room? I might have killed ya—or died of a heart banger. And where’s Moberly?”

“Moberly, dear Moberly, has been up for hours. She works alone, you know, and the travelers are starting to arrive. As for the other question—well, you don’t expect me to pay for my own room, do you? Not when I could share a bunk with my new companion. A companion who has come into sudden wealth!”

“Oh, ya, ‘new companion,’ is it? No, this I am doing alone. I do not need some … some traveling circus to draw attention to me. And I don’t have any money—nothing to kill for, anyway.”

Pec-Pec tossed the sheet aside and stood. He was fully dressed: denim trousers, boots, a blousy dark shirt run through with random red and gold threads. The magic man’s face was grim. “Anton Takk,” he said, “you could not have done a better job of drawing attention to yourself. I was not going to show myself to you at all, but now we have an emergency. You are about to be found, and there are more important things for you to do than die here.”

Takk pointed the knife at Pec-Pec’s flared nose. “I don’ want to do anything. I want to be where no one knows me, is all. Maybe with your ‘un-Governments’—where are they?”

“You will meet them, where we’re going, when we do what needs doing.”

“What’s this what needs doin’?”

Pec-Pec’s eyes widened. “Oh! Well, I don’t know yet.”

Takk sniffed. “I’ve known a few dark-fleshed men, up Camp Blade. Seen more in New Chicago. You ain’t like any of ‘em. You’re not a natural bowl of beans, are ya?”

Pec-Pec tapped at his lips pensively with two fingers. “How much of the truth can you stand?” he asked.

“The truth that’s, well, the truth—let’s have all of that.”

“Ah, all of the truth,” Pec-Pec said, settling back onto the bed. He leaned into a pillow and put his feet up. “Let’s see. Born in the Southlands, not far from the Big Ocean. Keep a home sometimes in the Out Islands, although I travel about mostly. I lend assist to the Rafers when I can, as your Government is not the most understanding…”

“Ho, the Rafers! Savages?”

“Umm. They wouldn’t think much of you either, I ‘spect.”

“But they file their teeth to a point, the better to eat babies, run ‘round naked—”

Pec-Pec was waving his hand in the air. “I see this will take more time than we have here. But I must say to you a little about the Rafers. You know of the firebombs what landed in the Big War. Well, the radiation fields burn so strong for the first several decades that hunnerds—hoo—thousands of Southlanders were cut away from the population to which you were born. People known as blacks, Indians, Cajuns. Even a race called Texans. Now they are all Rafers.

“They don’ gully your concept of ownership of territory. Huh. Their tribes prefer the distant lands, far from Government and its bangers—the plains, the Out Islands….”

Takk was frowning. He scratched under his beard. Resigned, he nailed the knife into the dresser top, but stayed within reach. “Stop. Ho, you jabber on. I’m thinking of here and now, an’ thass most of what I can care about. Here and now I … I … just … want … to disappear.”

“Ya, okay.” Pec-Pec was whispering now. “But not like your father disappeared. Not like that.”

Moberly had sounded equally worried about Government pursuers.

“I don’t suppose I can go back,” Takk said. The ale, from hours before, smacked sour in his mouth now. “Not after I pounded a Badger. Hah. I wouldn’t mind, I think, just staying here. Moberly—ach, I like her. But I don’t suppose I can do that either.”

“No,” Pec-Pec said. “I don’t suppose.”

Takk doused the lamp and went to the window. Now there was yet another Supply truck, smaller than his, parked by the barn. Far away in the house a man was singing. It sounded like a spiritual.

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“Damn lightning!”

Cred Faiging’s tongue still smoldered with that coppery taste of flash fear—a nearby lightning strike, perhaps a death blow to the aging oak on the hilltop. He threw a pair of needle-nosed pliers onto the workbench and backed away from the electrical contraption he was building. It was an instinctive motion, animalistic and (he admitted to himself) entirely too late had there been any real danger. It was absurd, too, considering the sophisticated web of lightning rods protecting the five acres of compound. No man understood the mysteries of electricity like Cred Faiging, and he was determined it would not get the better of him.

Kim pushed through the plywood spring-door to the workshop, her odor preceding her by several yards. Her denims hugged across bony hips and the holster and bandolier criss-crossing her shoulders clicked softly as she shuffled to the bench to study Faiging’s progress.

“Taking a break, yes?” she asked, oblivious of the new storm. “What’s it this time? Torturing more plant fibers with the electrodes?” Mounted on the bench was a footlong, tight coil of metal tubing valved to a freon cannister, a treasure he had bought for a few centimes from ignorant salvagers. Around the tubing wound a second coil, this one of electrical wire.

“No,” replied the sallow inventor. He swept back his thinning hair, feeling his nerves shake down to normal. He sighed. “No fibers today. I’ve about run dry of permutations until I get some new plant buggers. This construction … well, I was wondering about the effect of sharp changes of temperature on magnetic fields.”

Kim clucked and rolled a tobacco wad off her tongue into her left cheek. “Electromagnetism! Huh—dat legal this year?”

“Oh, bugger me,” Faiging said, joining her mocking tone. “Bugger me up the canal if I should ever invoke a force of nature declared ullegal or nonexistent!” He retrieved the pliers and dispensed with the jest. “You member the April contract, don’t you? A dozen sump pumps for some Southland project—a dozen electric motors, ordered up by the Government. Guess that makes ‘em legal—no?—legal till they’re ordered undone again. Legal, legal, legal.”

“Do ya idea that enough to keep the Inspectors packed away with their dynamite when they come round next? Ha. They’ll have yer balls for brekkie.”

“Huh. They need to keep my balls happy.”

“There are a five or dozen dispatches you haven’t opened even from last week,” Kim admonished.

“I don’t want to know yet. Let me finish.”

“And a couple of trekkers are waiting down ta the gate….”

“Poke ‘em.”

“Old one said to give the name Rosenthal Webb. A young one with him, soft ‘n’ nervous.”

Faiging wore a sour look. “Ya don’t gully the name Webb? A danger to talk to, if the Government hears of it. You’ve seen ‘em, here onceta year maybe—usually for the warm stuff. Bangers, wire, out-region maps. Old poker. Missing a few pointers on his right hand, did ya see? Is it him?” Faiging held up a hand to demonstrate. The tops of his fingers were folded in, hidden, leaving four nubs.

Kim was scratching, bored. “I juss box the gear for ‘em, I don’ take their measurements.”

“Well, let them in,” Faiging said, “before the lightning Q’s ‘em. The young ‘un wears a snap collar, or he stays outside. No talk.”

Faiging worried over a dubiously soldered connection until Webb pushed through the door. The revolutionary’s jumpsuit hung dirty and loose, like the skin of a boiled tomato. He wore a dark-colored backpack. His boots were muddy, hard leather, punctuated by canvas vents that were designed to lighten the weight and provide air to the feet.

Webb limped in, silently cursing the storm and its crippling humidity. “Gregory’s coming in behind me,” Webb said stonily, “and he ain’t wearing a poking snap collar.”

Faiging looked up.

“The snapper, thass too scary even for me,” Webb said. “But Gregory’s stripped clean. Kim agreed to that fast enough.”

The young man entered, muscle-hard but pink-skinned naked and embarrassed. Kim loped in after him, mercifully pretending not to notice, and handed a supply list to Faiging.