The Dream Compass [Book 1 of The Merquan Chronicle] (8 page)

The young man was anything but swaggering in his nudity. His shoulders hunched forward, bringing his arms into a frontward dangle that he hoped, futilely, might cover his crotch. “I’m … my name’s Gregory. You’re Mr. Faiging? The one what makes the generators and wenches … winches?” He blushed.

Faiging chuckled, amused that this was the sideman he had been so wary of. “I am Cred Faiging, yes,” he said politely. “And, well, I designed those things and many more. It’s the mountain grunts that actually make them now—out in the assembly houses. You could say that the trade we take from those frees me to play at more interesting pursuits.”

The old inventor-trader recognized the wide-eyed awe of a fan. He poked his pliers in the direction of the newly formed tubing on the bench. “Now, it sounds that you was brought up right—with Faiging machinery about ya, no?”

“Plumb right, Mister,” Gregory replied eagerly, and Webb winced that his assistant could be so easily toyed with. “I grew up on the saying ‘If it ain’t Faiging, don’t trust your life to it.’”

Faiging nodded reverently—he had heard the same hundreds of times and never tired of it. The inventor returned to his new experiment, snipping the questionable solder connection apart and starting it anew.

“Son, it’s juss the way of progress, thass all,” Faiging said, eyes on his project. “Since the dawn of man—” He stopped himself. “Well, since the Big War, anyway, it’s juss been the way of the world. Some rad-scarred salvager will find a rusted piece of ancient junk an’ haul it in and sell it to an inventor, scientist, repairman, artist—call us anything you want.”

Faiging waved his pliers grandly. “Thass the way the modern world was built. Reconstructed wire by wire, gear by gear—by myself and a handful of the like-minded.”

Webb was growing impatient. “I have a supply list, and a tanker van to fill,” he said.

Faiging did not look up. “Kim can take care of all that, as you know,” he mumbled. “Why is it for once you cannot take supply quietly and pass on to do your maiming? Ya must parade into the main shop so that all know Cred Faiging supplies the enemies of the Government? Every time it’s this way!”

Webb snorted. “You’re a trader,” he said, “a trader of all things and a player of all sides. And any customer you have is plumby enough to know that. Last I knew, you were no more a Government man than you were a fish peddler.”

“That may be, but on touchy matters the Monitor is not much for forgiving.”

“I’m headed out again,” Webb said seriously, “into a thick bollocks I don’t gully to the bottom. But on the edges of everything, is this odd bugger—a man you connected me with a year ago.”

Faiging nodded. “Pec-Pec, the magic man. Don’t hope to gully that one. You trade your nasty secrets with a bugger like that, now you’re part of his crazy world—a story writ by a madman.”

“Your machinery is solid,” Webb said, “and that I trust with my life, as they say. Your odd friends I don’t. I have to know more.”

Faiging paused with thought, then regarded the shivering young Gregory. He said to Kim, “The buster needs a covering. Bring ‘im a blanket—not his gear, gully, just a blanket. One of our blankets.” When Kim returned, Gregory settled onto a stool with the wool covering about him, more thankful to be able to cover his nakedness than to ward off the chill.

Faiging began with a slow but impatient air, as if addressing dull schoolchildren. “I want to make a test of something,” the inventor said, “and mayhap you will see my point. Now, Gregory, answer me this: Who is the Monitor?”

The young man glanced to Webb, his brow wrinkling. “Who? The Monitor?”

Faiging was steadfast in his patience. “Just say what you truly believe,” Faiging said flatly. “Tell me like I was just born—who is the Monitor, what does he do, where is he, and what does he look like?”

“Aww, nobody gots the whole of it, so what’s the point?”

The old man put a foot on the lowest rung of Gregory’s stool. “If you made your best guess, then,” Faiging pressed on. “If you had to say the likest thing, what would it be?”

“I’d say the obvious, what ain’t left to speculation….”

“Which is?”

“Which is…” Gregory sighed. “The Monitor runs the Government, which is based in New Chicago. The Monitor probably lives there himself, by reason, and things operate rather smoothly—you’re housed, get a roof and work and all—until one day you’re informed by some pig-poking Lunch Minister or some such that cod guts are a delicacy and will be eaten raw at midday until supplies run out….”

“The Monitor?”

“The Monitor,” Gregory repeated, willing to be led back to the subject, away from his tirade. “He is a large, old mutated man. Secretive. The schoolchild tale is that he has three heads, heads like a dog or a bull, and lives in a hole in the ground, afraid of the light. Grew up in a science library, or some such.”

Faiging held up a hand, signaling for Gregory to stop. He motioned to Webb, saying, “Your turn. The Monitor—whatever you truly believe.”

Webb’s eyes darted to the window. Despite the storm, he clearly wanted to leave and be on the road. “This is stupid,” Webb said. “So little is really known about the Monitor and what’s to be had is probably more myth than fact. But for my part, I don’t believe the Monitor’s in New Chicago—haven’t thought that for years—and he’s not an individual, but a consortium of bungholes holed up far from the city. Three separate, normal individuals maybe, thus the three-headed tale.”

Faiging leaned contentedly into his workbench. “Yes,” he said, “the point is that all those with the true gut-ball information are either in power or dead. The Monitor could be anything from a three-headed monster in New Chicago to a paranoid committee that relocates itself every few months in the countryside.”

“I was asking you about Pec-Pec,” said Webb.

“And I was illustrating just that,” replied Faiging. “No one knows anything about Pec-Pec just like no one knows anything about the Monitor. The Monitor runs a government that has precise rules, and those who do not obey die or disappear. Pec-Pec—he cannot be found either. He cannot be described accurately, and his existence is just a matter of faith. He is known as a gentleman, a statesman, a magician, and a thief. Probably there are four or five Pec-Pecs as well. The one I introduced you to, I just cannot be responsible for. Gully? If he leads you to disaster with one of his fantasies, don’t come bombing my compound in revenge. I just introduced you once. Now, I’ve tried to warn ya away.”

“We wouldn’t bomb you, Mr. Faiging,” Gregory said innocently. “The committee’s ordered a peaceful mission—no bangers. It wouldn’t have let us come, otherwise.”

Faiging’s smile twisted, and he held up the order sheet Kim had passed to him. “Then ya haven’t seen your boss’s supply list, have ya, boy?”

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There was not much about old Rutherford Cross that his neighbors agreed on. But this much no one would dispute: He owned eighty acres of land on the outskirts of Kingstree in the Sector that was called back then South Carolina. The earth was rich enough (although a might sandy), but he farmed only a small patch measuring eight rows by a hundred feet—corn, cabbage, rutabagas, string beans. He had no teeth—had never had any in anyone’s memory—and his leathery face resembled a collapsing jack-o-lantern. Not a trace of paint remained on his shack, which stood among towering oaks hung with Spanish moss in the center of his property. Most neighbors speculated that he owned so much land just so that no one would have any business coming near him.

Grammy Baker, who had never lived more than a couple of miles from Cross, swore that he had looked precisely the same when she was a little girl 70-odd years before. It was even gossiped that he was 250 years old and had come from Africa himself on a slave boat—a notion that the younger folks poo-pooed, of course.

Sam Weathers, who delivered dry goods to Cross’s house on the first of each month (unless it fell on a Sunday), had heard Cross say once that he was on his seventh wife—Lydia—and the courthouse records did show four legal marriages under his name, the first one being to Melissa Bailey in 1904.

Children? Strangely, nobody quite knew, but skeptics reckoned that there had been two Rutherford Crosses, father and son, and that the distinction between the two had blurred—thus accounting for his unnatural life span.

Cross was held in high esteem when it came to doctoring. He could set a broken bone, cure a fever, and had delivered dozens of babies with Lydia’s help. The Clinic doctors, the kind with framed diplomas on the wall, would get pretty hot about that. But mention such things as “voodoo” or “mojo” or “medicine bag” to Cross and he was as likely as anyone to roll his eyes and spit out a spiteful “Pshaw.”

The old gentleman also was known to have a substantial root cellar. Grammy Baker had once let on that Rutherford Cross had dug clear through the earth and had spent more time in China than Marco Polo. No one gave much credence to Grammy Baker.

It was in the year 2013 that Lydia got pregnant. She and Rutherford Cross stood solemnly on their front porch in the bone-chilling damp one night—her big-bellied, him permanently stooped. Their eyes took in the sky. It was turned a broiling red by those magnificent bombs that were slapping the landscape with nuclear fire.

“Lydia, you go on down ta root cellar an’ don’t come up,” Cross said. He settled into a rocking chair on the porch. “Me, I’m gonna rest these ol’ bones now.”

Lydia did go to the root cellar. She lived by lantern light and subsisted on smoked hams and shelf after shelf of canned vegetables set up by Cross himself. Above, a year-long wind storm was raging, and in the middle of what should have been a steamy summer Lydia delivered her own child. She named the boy Rutherford Cross but later found herself calling him Pec-Pec, baby talk for the youngster’s favorite food, pickles.

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A car horn honked outside and Seth Graham dropped the roasted chicken breast to his plate—”Damn!”—and went to the window, licking grease from his fingers. There were a jeep and a van below. A young fellow in a Government jumpsuit stood in the gravel waving a small clipboard at him in the rain.

Deedee Graham swallowed a spoonful of baked potato and said, “They can fend for themselves, can’t they Sethy? Can’t they see we’re shut down for the night?”

“Ya’d think so, Deedee. Ya’d think so. But if it’s an emergency…” Graham took the keys from a nail on the wall. He slipped his feet into his galoshes, not bothering to buckle them, pulled his slicker from the hanger on the door, and went out. The living quarters were raised on stilts well above the flood level of River 011, and the area below the house had been enclosed to form a garage. Graham wearily thumped down the wet wooden steps.

The man in the jumpsuit had curly blond hair plastered to his forehead. “Is this the East Saint Louis Fuel Depot?” he asked, shouting unnecessarily, as if Graham were deafened by the rain.

Graham turned to examine the two-foot-high lettering across the garage doors: E. ST. LOUIS FUEL DEPOT. He enjoyed the moment, in a way. “Reckon so,” he said.

“I’m looking for Seth Graham.”

“Well, you found him, an’ he’d like to get back to his dinner directly,” Graham said. “What can I do for ya?”

“My boss is in the jeep—Rosenthal Webb,” the younger man said. He shielded his face with the clipboard.

Graham’s eyebrows rose. “Can’t place the name. Sorry.”

“Well, we think we’ve got a cracked cylinder. Not much time to spare, either.”

“I’ll speak to your Mr. Webb,” Graham said, “but this is mighty peculiar. You folks are Supply drivers, aren’t you? We don’t handle any private business.”

Graham slogged over to the farther vehicle and opened its canvas and plastic door. A graying man sat in the driver’s seat. It was a weather-worn face bristling with silver beard stubble, and the skin under his chin was beginning to sag. The back compartment of the jeep, Graham noted, was piled high with equipment cases and outdoor gear. The aging man had his hands on the steering wheel, and the four fingers of his right hand were shorn in half.

“Lot of nerve,” Graham said.

“I didn’t plan this,” Webb responded.

“Well, why don’t you just steal a new pig-pokin’ jeep,” Graham said. He pulled at his mustache and looked up and down the dark highway. “Don’t say you don’t know how.”

“Can’t afford to risk the hoopla. I’ve got a long way to go and I need to go quietly.”

“Cracked cylinder? Well, hmmm, ya gotta lift the engine, pull off the heads, grind the valves, replace that cylinder…. Ya didn’t say ya was in a hurry did ya?”

“Matter of fact,” Webb said, grinning, “I’m in a hurry, too.”

Graham rubbed his forehead, ignoring the rivulets of rain trickling between his fingers. “You know how this depot has built up? There’s never fewer than thirty, forty Government types around. All day and night I drink and piss Government now. And you come roll in, devil-may-care. I was startin’ to think I’d never see you again. Now ya bring this boy around.” He jabbed a finger toward the van. “Now he’ll still be dropping by here twenty years after you die. Damn!”

Graham unlocked the double garage doors, waved both vehicles in, and disappeared into the blackness outside. It was a roomy garage, with two pits and two hydraulic lifts, designed to serve a high-traffic crossroads of Government supply routes. Five autos could be under repair at the same time. Webb eased his jeep under a block-and-tackle rig and killed the engine, then strode to the van.

“Where did he go, Gregory?”

“I don’t know. Kind of cranky, isn’t he?”

“He was born cranky.”

A pair of headlights appeared at the garage entrance, spotlighting the two men. Gregory fell flat against the driver’s seat and Webb moved to the shielded side of the van. The headlights crept in, and Webb saw that it was a late model Government jeep, with Graham at the wheel. He parked beside the other jeep, walked to the garage doors, and pulled them closed.

“Help yourself to the tools, fellas,” Graham said. “Just put ‘em back and put ‘em back clean.”