The Dream Vessel (14 page)

“Or you killed him.”

Big Tom stood quickly, even though his knee joints screamed pain. “No!”

“A blond man. Young. Named Gregory.”

“Greggie!” Big Tom hesitated, but decided the truth might for once serve him well. “He showed up on the island with a head wound, talking foolishness. Nay a body could unnerstand him. I swear on it, by the bellies of my wives.”

Pec-Pec frowned and waved his hand. “Sit. A man such as you could blow wind all day—such excuses. All of that is irrelevant, because the new Government wants you alive.”

“For a mission, uh?”

“They want a ship, large and strong such as only you could build. For crossing the Big Ocean, months or even years. They have decided to find out what has happened to the other lands.”

“Useless, wouldn’t ya ’spect? Radiated?”

“It can’t be all gone—look at our own mainland.”

Big Tom’s head began to hurt. “What proof do you have,” he asked slowly, “that the Monitor is dead?”

The Rafer held up his index finger. “If you like, Mr. Flesh Merchant, you may wait on Thomas Island for the next arrival of the tug boat. Aboard it will be a dozen irascible revolutionaries who will not be as patient with you as I. And trailing from the stern will be the body of your Captain Bull as trolling bait. Other than that, I have one thing I can show you.”

Pec-Pec sprang to his feet and disappeared into the hatch. He returned dragging a rubbery satchel shaped like an oriole’s nest. Grinning, Pec-Pec pulled the grab-handles apart and reached in. He pulled out a handful of blond hair sopping from a briney liquid. Hanging from the hair was the pickled head of a bull-faced man.

“He was wearing sunglasses,” Pec-Pec said, “but I lost ’em.”

Finally, Big Tom threw up.

Nigra.

Pec-Pec rarely heard the word—only among island Fungus People.

Stone-faced, Pec-Pec had gently lifted back the gauzy swath over Little Tom’s crotch. Around the hospital bed were Big Tom, still looking blue-green from his voyage and clutching a fresh bourbon-on-ice, the beefy attendant Lily, and Gregory, looking a little worried but mostly vacant. Gregory had seemed to recognize Pec-Pec, but cowered when he first saw the Rafer. It was as if Gregory felt he had done something wrong—failed his mission, perhaps.

Pec-Pec had pointed out the row of festering puncture wounds along Little Tom’s penis, saying, “Ah-ho. That’s the root of it. The bite of a Rafer tosser disk.”

And Big Tom had coughed, skeptical. “A tosser disk? Not in his willie.” But silently the merchant remembered the story that Bark had told—about the young Rafer woman forced into the master’s cabin of the Lucia. Sampling the merchandise. And smoking ganja while on command.

And then Lily harumphed her own doubt about the dark-skinned healer and waddled toward the door of the clinic room. To no one in particular she whined loudly, “Well, I’m glad we gots a doctor again—even if he is a nigra.”

Pec-Pec watched her wide churning buttocks disappear into the chipped-linoleum hallway. Nigra. He made two mental notes: Someday, make a study of isolated island lexicography; and someday, make a study of the effects of in-breeding among the Fungus People.

He unbuttoned the backpack he had placed on the wheeled surgeon’s table and began to empty its contents—pouches of fan-shaped mushrooms, acrid roots, shards of dried meat, and spices. Big Tom’s eyes widened: The pack seemed to hold more than physically possible.

“Please draw a warm bath, Big Man,” Pec-Pec murmured, taking advantage of his authority to give the island owner a new name. “And I must have a kettle of boiling water.”

Finally, Pec-Pec told Big Tom to cut the restraints, and the delerious Little Tom began to scratch feverishly at his crotch again. Big Tom and Gregory grabbed him by the wrists and ankles and dragged him naked down the hall to the tub room. The young seaman’s eyes were open, but his head lolled aimlessly and he stammered his way through a droning nonsense song as they shuffled down the linoleum: “La me treeeeee…in coffee leeeees….”

It was an ancient upright tub, the kind meant for muscle therapies. But being one of only three tubs on the island that was fed by running water, it was used most often for mere bathing. The steaming water thrumbled and swirled into the tub from a pair of jets. When they sat Little Tom on the submerged bench, he relaxed immediately and his singing subsided.

Pec-Pec entered the room sloshing a bowlful of his eclectic ingredients mixed with a couple of cups of boiled water. The green-black mixture produced the odor of dank mustard, fumes that brought tears to the eyes. Unceremoniously, Pec-Pec threw the entire bowl into Little Tom’s bath, and the soothing water turned the color of ink.

The Rafer studied his patient’s eyes one at a time, then grabbed him by the neck and dunked him under the water, holding him there firmly.

Big Tom sputtered, “He’s not got the mind for holding his breath! He’ll drown—let ’im up!”

Pec-Pec seemed surprised at the concern. “Hoo, this’ll cure him though, Big Man. If it doesn’t kill him.”

Large dollops of air were breaking the surface of the water. Gregory wrung his hands and whimpered. Pec-Pec held his patient fast under the black water, and his eyes locked grimly onto Big Tom’s.

“I been meaning to ask you,” Pec-Pec said in stony politeness. “You remember a man come through these parts back a few months? Man name of Quince?”

Big Tom did remember the name—the doused red-legger—but he pretended to think, a puzzled expression on his face, his eyes never wandering from the sight of his son bubbling under the watery murk. “Ah…no. Can’t recall.”

“You sure? All his friends show up on the mainland, say they don’t know where Quince gone to.” Little Tom’s head began to jerk involuntarily just under the surface. Pec-Pec continued, “I have to tell them that I found their friend Quince in a very bad way. That I have taken him to a place where I go, and they will not see him again. But he is happy, finally, and no more harm can come to him.”

Big Tom felt as if the steaming bath were searing his own face. This Pec-Pec—a lunatic. Or? He pointed to his son weakly. “Ummm….”

Pec-Pec squinted darkly and pulled the young man up. Little Tom coughed, spewing the rancid liquid. “Ah,” said Pec-Pec, seeming friendly again, “let him sit in there an hour—he will come around.”

Big Tom gently touched his son’s face. “His skin,” the merchant said. “It’s been stained, uh, rather dark.” Little Tom slumped against the wall of the tub, mouth agog, still barely conscious.

“Oh, that. It will wear away, I think. Maybe. Few months, a year.”

“A year! Wait….”

“But for now,” said Pec-Pec, smiling widely, “a nigra!”

Gregory slept with his head pillowed against his two hands folded together. Pec-Pec, sitting cross-legged on the foot of the bed, marveled at the childlike face, the lips pursed, his once-worried eyes finally at ease for the evening.

Pec-Pec cradled a fish bowl in his lap. Inside, a delicate dragon fish the size of his index finger swished lazily. He dipped in and took the fish in his palms gently, murmuring, “Dragon fish, will you come with me?”

He sucked the fish into his mouth, and the coppery taste seemed to spread instantly—down his throat, out to his ears and enveloping his eyes. Pec-Pec swallowed, and his vision dimmed. He leaned out of his body and hovered over Gregory’s face. The Rafer was now a spectre, just a point of consciousness in the air, no longer having any weight or size.

He felt himself buffeted by the ebb and flow of Gregory’s breath. After twirling for a moment around the angelic face, Pec-Pec rode a narrow torrent of wind into his left nostril.

Inside Gregory’s head, Pec-Pec’s apprehension grew. He had done this only once before—into the mind of a Government inspector—and the memory images he had found there so enraged the Rafer that he tore the man’s mind apart. It was not the act of a Healer.

This would be different, he hoped. Pec-Pec found a large book, a sopping wet volume made up of flimsy pages—Gregory’s collective memory. Most of the pages were horribly torn, as if a machete had hacked through the book twice. Dozens of scraps of paper swirled around the chamber, and Pec-Pec would have to return them to their proper spots in the book somehow.

He caught one shred of paper in his cupped hands, the way a man might snatch a butterfly, then flipped through the hundreds of pages until he found the one torn in precisely that shape. He fitted the page together, ran his fingers along the rend, and the page was whole again. The page had been blank, but slowly a picture appeared out of Gregory’s boyhood: a grassy hill topped by a spinning windmill.

Pec-Pec sighed as he surveyed the myriad scraps wafting about him. It reminded him of one of the paperweights the Fungus People make—the kind with the snow glittering about.

Hoo. This was going to take hours.

Sunreader dotscript

Portfolio 17

Page 9

Jersey Saple

Matters related to the arrival of Rutherford Cross Jr., a.k.a. Pec-Pec, on Thomas Island.

Might I break form long enough to pose a thought question? How can history be preserved with any credibility when its witnesses cannot agree even on the very day of its happening?

That complaint stated, I will recede again into my preferred journalistic anonymity to record as closely as can be determined by a gossipy blind man what has transpired this week on Thomas Island. It is an account pieced together from the varied testimony of docksmen, wood whits, a jailer, and one of Big Tom’s wives (whose name will not be recorded here).

Not the least of the unusual events was the actual arrival of Pec-Pec, known variously as a Rafer god, a thief, a magic-man, a charlotte, a rogue, and a revolutionary. All agree that his skimmer arrived under no visible power or piloting. Big Tom has stated to many that he boarded the ship; that it left port; and that he consulted with the lone habitant of the skimmer, Pec-Pec, for half of an hour. Numerous observers on the dock swear that the captain had stepped out of sight onto the skimmer’s deck for no more than ten seconds before he returned with vomit in his beard. (Cross reference to previous observations concerning Big Tom and a substance commonly known as “the powder,” as well as a rogue trader known by the name Delano and a produce man called Steinbrenner. Portfolio 3, Pages 2 and 7.)

The arrival of Pec-Pec signals a long-rumored economic upheaval for Thomas Island and the Out Islands—specifically, the announcement that the Government no longer will be requiring the round-up of red-leggers. It is a proclamation hailed by some as a new era of freedom and by others as a return to the anarchy of the Big Bang days of centuries past. Opinions on this matter reliably correlate to each observer’s dependence on the red-legger trade.

Accounts of two “healings” by Pec-Pec must also be considered somewhat dubious and hysterical. Little Tom has broken his fever and his delerium is receding, although he still seems haunted by the imagined smell of captive red-leggers. Odd what hallucinations the human mind chooses to torment its owner with.

Gregory, the half-wit house boy, is the other healing getting much talk. He does seem to have recovered his mental command and a sharpness of eye. But it is reasonable to suspect that both Little Tom and Gregory were healing quite naturally on their own before Pec-Pec arrived with his medicine show.

The ramifications of the cessation of the red-legger trade are intricate and not fully known. It has been talked about the island quite heavily—among those without any position to know—that Big Tom somehow lost a great deal of wealth in the sinking of the Lucia. Among those depending on his enterprises, the hope is that Big Tom will be in a position to secure a new Government contract.

And speaking of the Government, an odd crew of Government men arrived two days after Pec-Pec. They are a forthright but ornery lot who give Pec-Pec wide berth and explain themselves little. Except to say that they have been stationed in a temporary advisory capacity. Their only official act so far has been to search the timber supplies of the shipyard, apparently for evidence of hijacked materials.

They are grim, and it is said they are piloting Captain Bull’s tug. Their leader is named Fel Guinness.

Pec-Pec sat cushioned by a bank of moss on the wooded mountainside. Far below, his panel truck was barely visible. He had parked it where the sporadic macadam road had finally surrendered to pine saplings and underbrush. Then he had hiked the rest of the way up, to where a frame of ten-by-tens formed a black square on the shaded hillside, looking like the entrance to an ancient mine shaft.

He waited patiently. Just from his seat he spotted a dozen herbs he thought he might collect—later, if there was time. That rabbit tobacco, especially. It had been a long time since he had seen rabbit tobacco.

When a metal door finally opened, down in the darkness of the tunnel, it threw out a dim oval of light that exposed the wood frame for the fake front that it was. A sturdy figure stepped through the hatch and limped down to take a seat by the Rafer. He appeared to be much older than Pec-Pec—balding, gray—although Pec-Pec was his senior by several hundred years. The man from under the mountain sat and smacked his fingerless right hand at a leg of his green camouflage jump suit.

“Humph,” the grayhead said. “Ordered these from the Northlands, an’ they were too piss-plum dark for our vegetation. A hunnerd pair a camouflage suits, an’ I had to bleach down every one of ’em or they’d never work in these parts. Humph.”

“Ah, Rosenthal Webb. I am glad to see that you still find much to complain about. Your revolutionaries have won, but there is much left that is wrong with the world, no?”

Webb stood again, uneasy, and dusted off his rear end. “So. We’ll have us a ship?”

“Oh ya, Big Tom is quite convinced that the only thing that will keep him off the end of a trolling line is cooperating with this new Government. He will build you a ship to cross the big sea. I had to show him the Monitor’s head, but he’s a believer now. He insists on keeping the island, though, and we must ship to him advance money and the timbers.”

Webb wiped at his red eyes and grunted again. “There’ll not be much advance money, not till—um—not till the council is more attuned to the idea of an ocean ship. But I’ll get him the cut of the entire Northland if that’s what it takes. If I can keep the timber clippers from disappearing. The Monitor allowed juss seven made, and four are….” He shrugged.

Pec-Pec’s eyebrows rose with a mischievous idea. “Ha! Mayhap it’s revolutionaries such as yourself taking the clippers. Mayhap it’s time to tell all the sectors that the Government is new. There are rumors of this already even in the Out Islands.”

“Ya, rumors,” Webb said wearily. “Well, our people are almost in place in New Chicago—thass what the Revolutionary Council is waiting for. We’re finding some favorable manpower in the old mining prison, too. In Blue Hole. If all goes well we will announce it soon—if all of Merqua doesn’t already know.”

“Big Tom says he will have you a ship by spring. And one final condition he asks that I bring to you: He must make the voyage to find Europe. Captain the ship.”

“Ho. Well. That’s not decided yet. Ya see, I’m moving a little in advance of the council’s wishes—they don’ know the building’s ta start. Who do you think should go on the ocean ship?”

Pec-Pec looked sullen, staring at the tips of his black boots. He did not answer.

“Ey, Pec-Pec? Who should go?”

Pec-Pec began slowly, and Webb read anger and unease in the voice. “Rosenthal Webb, I must caution you against such a clustering of your Fungus People. History shows that this might not go well—these people brought together by fear for their lives and hate and money and—” Pec-Pec’s eyes seemed to flash red for a moment “—and, well, I have heard whispers of a Cantilou that has been drawn to the region. And these are conditions on which a Cantilou would thrive.”

Webb pressed his lips together. “Cantilou. The myth, pre-war, older even—”

“A Cantilou would have you think of him as myth,” Pec-Pec said. “That is his way. He can scratch soil into the brain to cover his tracks.”

“You mean this,” Webb said. “You actually would have me believe that this Cantilou beast is marauding in the islands?”

“No. It is the Cantilou that would have you not believe it.”

“Ah.”

“I would have you believe this, Rosenthal Webb: You know of the mountain feline which you call the wildcat. Yes?”

“Of course. Nasty animal.”

“Then understand this: What the wildcat is to you, the Cantilou is to me. By now you must have gathered something of my way of being—our lives are on different planes that merely intersect at this point. But the Cantilou is on my plane as well. His world, too, intersects at this point.”

“And how many of these Cantilous would there be?” Webb asked.

Pec-Pec shrugged. “Enough to meet demand. Always enough.”

Webb was silent for several moments.

“So, then,” Webb said. “You will not offer a suggestion as to who should cross the Big Ocean in the new vessel?”

The magic man sighed and nodded sadly, letting his beard touch his chest. “No, Rosenthal Webb. That is the last of it—I have persuaded this Big Tom to make a large ship for your new Government. But I do not want to be part of your new Government. You must decide these things, who should cross the Big Ocean.”

“But you instigated much of this yourself! You directed us all out west—to the canyon where the Monitor was hiding. And, you bit his head off!”

“No. The fish. The fish bit his head off.”

“Your little dragon fish. Ya.”

“Ya. Only he was made big for a moment.”

Webb rubbed again at his eyes, glanced at the grime on his fingertips, then thought better of the effort. “You’re a Rafer. You hate governments. You hate bangers. But all the while the continent is springing haywire like a dropped clock. You’re like your friend the inventor, Cred Faiging. He’ll stay in his compound, behind the wire. Said he traded with the old Government; he’ll trade with the new one. Juss leave ’im alone.”

Pec-Pec shrugged again. He leaned forward, picked a stalk of rabbit tobacco, and sniffed at it appreciatively. As he rolled it between thumb and forefinger it glowed and began to smoulder, and he sniffed it again.

“But, hoo, we’ve got pirates up and down the coast,” Webb continued. “Fel Guinness has hanged every Southland farm supervisor, criminal or not. And now the worst pig-pokin’ slaver in the Caribbean you’ve hired on to build me an ocean ship.”

“I directed you to him, suggested you have Gregory contact him, because he really was the only one among your people, Rosenthal. Besides, until spring—that is not too long. Do what you will with him then.”

“If I promise him he’ll captain the ship, I’ll have ta let ’im.”

Pec-Pec frowned. The day was dimming quickly, and that early evening known to the mountains was falling.

“Getting cool,” Webb said. “Let’s go inside.”

Pec-Pec glanced back at the open hatch. He had been inside once—the stuffy tunnels and ladders, the life support systems and generators run by the mountain-top windmills, the large meeting chamber where the decisions of the Revolution had been made for decades.

“No. Ha. Canna go in there, thank you. You should close ’er down, Rose. No need to live in there anymore.”

Webb scratched at his neck. He might let the old headquarters fall to rot one day, but it was a lifestyle hard to let go of.

“Well, g’night then,” he said. “And thanks.” Webb turned to go.

“You’re forgetting….”

“Ah…Gregory? How is he?”

“Should not travel yet. But that is juss as well. Said he wanted to stay in the islands for a while. Watch the ship go together, I dunno what else. Guinness has started his duty there now, and he will protect Gregory while he stands guard over Big Tom.”

Webb hawked and spat into the pine needles, then disappeared into the tunnel sadly.

Even in the dying light, Pec-Pec could see the red in the phlegm.